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" Apocalyptic Expectation and Recognition in Shakespeare's Early Jacobean Plays "
Humphries, Mary Edith
Mack, Michael
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1113635
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2371195202
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| Main Entry
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Humphries, Mary Edith
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Mack, Michael
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| Title & Author
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Apocalyptic Expectation and Recognition in Shakespeare's Early Jacobean Plays\ Humphries, Mary EdithMack, Michael
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| College
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The Catholic University of America
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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215
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| Abstract
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Scholars have long noted the prevalence of references to the apocalypse in Shakespeare’s plays from the early Jacobean period, but there are few sustained studies centered on the topic. In this work I will offer an extended treatment of Shakespeare’s use of the apocalypse in Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. This work attends to the historical understanding of the apocalypse available to Shakespeare as I seek to gain a fuller appreciation of how the material functions thematically and formally within the plays. These apocalyptic elements give weight and form to the expectations that direct the audience’s attention to the end to come, and then, undermine that expectation with an experience of recognition that mirrors the apocalyptic end. In Measure for Measure, the long, much-anticipated final scene upends judgment based merely on what is due, leading through the tribulating experience of self-knowledge to the challenge to extend and accept mercy, thereby making all things new. In Macbeth, the “vaulting ambition” that leads Macbeth to “jump the life to come” leaves him in a “restless ecstasy” that is hell on earth (1.7.27, 1.4.7, 3.2.24). In King Lear, patterns of “nothing” create an expectation of an apocalyptic unfolding of the ultimate abyss, or at least the “image of that horror” (5.3.262). Containing the most allusions to the Book of Revelation of any of his plays, Antony and Cleopatra translates the whole goal of the Aeneid, the future Golden Age of Rome, using only pre-Christian mythical elements, to portend the Golden Age of the Christian vision: “new heavens, new earth” (1.1.18). Allusions from the Book of Revelation cue the audience to recognize the beginnings of their own epoch prefigured in the seeking for more than Octavius’ Rome can offer, an age that Shakespeare’s audience knows did not last, as divinely foretold by Jupiter, sine fine dedi (Aeneid 1.279). In these plays, Shakespeare confronts the often complacent providentialism of his contemporaries with images of the true beauty and the horror of the Christian apocalypse, creating four of the most compelling artistic enactments of “the promised end” (King Lear 5.3.251).
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Antony and Cleopatra
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Apocalypse
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King Lear
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Macbeth
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Measure for Measure
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Shakespeare
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