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Macbeth impresses the audience/reader with an uncertain and unstable state. It is possible to describe the structure of the play as a series of situation exemplifying the conflict between Good and Evil, the story of the fall of a great man. It may even be described as a parable illustrating how man can be gulled by the forces of evil into accepting the appearance as the truth. But structures or themes abstracted from this play would not include the dominant impression left by the play. This impression is not simply the effect of its plot; the quality of the whole tragedy is conveyed by the poetry, which reinforces the situations and their representation on the stage. Poetry succeeds in producing the impression of an equivocal and ambiguous world, where what is seen appears to be different from what is. In fact, the riddling phrases in the very opening scene of the drama are capped with “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”, an image which indicates the moral topsy-turvy in the world of the play. This anticipates the dominant atmosphere of the play, where the entire moral universe tumbles upside down.

Moreover, the internal actions within the minds of the principal characters is most powerfully conveyed through imagery, it is through images and dreams that one penetrates into the deeper recess of the mind, as in Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking, in Macbeth’s soliloquy, with which the scene vii, Act I starts, and in the scene that follows the murderers of Duncan and Banquo. The intricate and closely-knit pattern of imagery gives the play its remarkable imaginative unity. It establishes the mood of the play, dominated by blood and darkness, and embodies its themes, giving them vivid and concrete expression: the blood coagulates on the murders’ hands, the darkness they summon enters their souls: “Hell is murky.”

The imagery of the play is also the source of much of the dramatic irony—irony that arises when a character is not aware of the real or full significance of his words. The audience sometimes recognizes it at the time, but sometimes it does not emerge until later, when it may also be made clear to the speaker as well. It is particularly common in Macbeth since the general theme of the play is the discovery of by Macbeth and Lady Macbeth of the real significance of their words, thoughts and actions. Individual words and images, often introduced casually, reverberate through the play, sometimes gaining more significance, sometimes changing it –as the meaning of the word ‘done’ is subtly changed to express their realization that they will never escape from their crimes. Lady Macbeth refers cynically to the ruthlessness her husband lacks as an ‘illness’, and the unintentional appropriateness of the term appears later in the actual psychological disorders that afflict them both. This metaphor is an apt expression of the principle that one’s actions are not internal to oneself. This is brought home in simple concrete terms by the association of illness with the two basic requirements for health, sleep and food. Duncan first introduces the metaphor of feasting when he describes the praise of Macbeth’s loyal service as a banquet to him. One major consequence of Macbeth’s treachery is represented symbolically by his isolation from the two actual banquets. This symbol pervades the play, often with ironic effect. Macbeth sees his crime metaphorically as a “poisoned chalice” and his fear that it will be commended to his own lips is realized when it is his act of drinking to Banquo’s health that prompts the entry of the ghost forcing him to confess his guilt. Even the witches’ “hell broth”, their ‘gruel’, is a satanic inversion of the potent symbol of the banquet. Similarly, the terrible images of infancy in Macbeth’s vision of pity and Lady Macbeth’s demonstration of her ruthlessness rise from the cauldron in the form of the Second and Third apparitions, which prove to be heralds of vengeance. The apparition of the crowned child has a tree in his hand, and when Birnam Wood is seen to be advancing in Dunsinane, nature itself seems to be rising against Macbeth. Poetic image and dramatic action are intertwined, giving the play its peculiarly dense imaginative texture.

The image of darkness pervading the play suggest that the light of normal day is forced to give way to the darkness of night or that the darkness has an abnormal obscurity to match the dire deeds committed in it. The images of sickness stress the undermining of the natural state of the human body, while images of outsized clothes suggest that Macbeth has usurped a role that is not natural to him. Such images convey the idea of the unnaturalness of Macbeth’s crime, that it is a convulsion of nature. All these images are facets of Shakespeare’s unifying insight into the nightmare world, which he explores on the stage in Macbeth.

In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Chaucer frequently uses the device of contrast as a major means of characterization. One of the most striking of these contrasts is that between the prominent women among the pilgrims – the prioress and wife of Bath. However, in spite of the fact that these two ladies belong to two different social spheres, they surprisingly share some common characteristics. The personality of the Prioress cannot be easily summed up. As Phyllis Hodgson says in his edition of the Prologue, “By silent omission, banter and the tactful veiling of ambivalence, Chaucer himself seems to remain detached and finely poised between affection and exposure”. The Prioress belongs to the withdrawn cloistered life of prayer and administration, vowed to poverty and chastity and indifferent to the vanities of the world. Strictly speaking, she should not have been on this pilgrimage at all, for there was an ecclesiastical edict forbidding nun from going on pilgrimage. In violation of ecclesiastical edicts the Prioress also keeps pet dogs and exposes her fair forehead which should have been veiled.

Chaucer pretends to be a naïve narrator unaware of these rules and reacts only to the Prioress’ physical charm, dainty manners and sensibility. His diction is enthusiastically landed with superlatives; ‘ful’ is repeated eight times and ‘ful semely’ three times. But in the background there is the devastating question, never in fact articulated: are these details really “semely’ for a Prioress? However attractive her smile may be, this should not have been the first thing about her to attract attention. The incongruity persists in the name which she had adopted. When she renounced the world, she adopted the name of romance heroine rather than of a saint or a virtue, as was customary her name, as Eglantine, means ‘sweet rose’. Her other characteristics ,-- such as her nasal singing , her French education , her dainty eating habits, her court manners and her longing to be regarded as a fine lady , are all incongruous in a Prioress. It has been pointed out by S.S. Hussey that the lines describing the Prioress’ table manners are almost taken bodily from a passage in the great medieval poem, Roman de la Rose. In the French poem the lines are spoken by Duenna, and Old woman vastly experienced in love. In fact, as Hussey accurately comments, Duenna is early in a line which includes the Wife of Bath and “the incongruity of this material being included in the description of a Prioress does much to convey Chaucer’s ironic blend of Nun and would be romantic heroine’.

When Chaucer comes to speak of the Prioress’ conscience, he raises expectation by the adjectives “charitable” and “pitous”. But now the fall from expectation is never greater for the Prioress’ pity is not for the hungry and bereaved, but for a trapped mouse or a chastened pet. Though she emulates the ways of a fine lady, her French is provincial, not the French of Paris. When, at the end of the portrait, Chaucer mentions the motto on the Prioress’ brooch, we strongly suspect that “Amor Vincit Omania” or “Love conquers all”, refers in her case to profane rather than sacred love.

If the Prioress, in the classic words of J. L. Lowes, illustrates “the delightfully imperfect submergence of the feminine in the ecclesiastical”, the Wife of Bath asserts her womanhood loudly and aggressively. The second woman pilgrim who is fully described in the Prologue belongs to the middleclass world of expanding trade and industry. Historians of 14^th century English society have shown that there was a great expansion of cloth-making and women shared in every branch of the work. In the occupation, therefore, the Wife of Bath is by no means remarkable. Her uniqueness lies in her personality. In her brazen red-stocking, her vast hat she is a glaring contrast to the genteel over-refined Prioress. The Wife of Bath, in fact, conforms to the standard of popular medieval life: noisy, assertive and robust. Her ruddy complexion, her deafness and her widely-spaced teeth give her an emphatic personality such as a few of the pilgrims can rival. She follows her inclinations, which are insatiable and unbridled and which have taken her through five marriages and three pilgrimages. As the opening sentence of the Prologue shows, a pilgrimage was often an excuse of indulging in a love of adventure and uninterrupted gossip and it is hard to see the Wife of Bath as devout. She is, in fact, an aggressive feminist determined to dominate.

As James Winny observes in his edition of the Prologue, the Wife of Bath’s impulses are as overwhelmingly physical as the hips which set her firmly on her horse or as the two-pound cover chiefs which she wears on Sundays. The references to her hips, legs and spurs—none of which the Prioress appears to possess—and the admission that the Wife is “gap-toothed” –all emphasizes the physical nature of the woman. She has a passion for sovereignty and is always a potential record-breaker, in the number of marriages and love affairs. She knows the art and also the remedies of love. She boasts of no fastidious manners and has few social pretensions. A raw spirit of life bears her forward and in this she is the antithesis of the dainty and refined Prioress.

Arnold essay On the Modern Elements in Literature was occasioned by an unusual event, his election to the Chair of Poetry in Oxford. Unusually still, he did not choose to eulogise any person or institution. According to George Watson, it was “a lecture against the modern element in literature, in which Arnold seeks alliance with the classical dons in his audience against the prevailing tide of middleclass romanticism.” In fact, Arnold was one of the great spokesmen of the Enlightenment, and that is why, what speaks about in these lines constitutes a view of history widespread in his day. It was put forward by Herder, Goethe and Novalis in Germany, by Saint Simonians in France and by Carlyle in England. In fact, he seeks a synthesis out of the past and present in the Hegelian mode. Added to this is Arnold’s concern with literature as a criticism of life.

Arnold begins the essay with an anecdote—illustrative of moral deliverance of man, from the vast body of Buddhist literature in order to come to his point of what he called “intellectual deliverance”. As an enlightened thinker himself Arnold was very much aware of the deeper significance of Buddhism. It is clear from way he starts the essay that he attached high significance to the Buddhist realization of the place and value of moral deliverance of man in the scheme of Buddhist philosophy. As a preacher and teacher Buddha, who was himself tested in various ways examined the worth of his disciple Poorna who wanted to preach the master’s words among people. When Buddha was satisfied, he declared the result with the following lesson: one seeking to deliver others from desire must deliver himself first, one seeking to console others in their sorrow must console himself by realising the philosophy of chatwari arya sattyani (four-fold eternal truths), and one on his way helping others reach at the truth about the reality of the world and life, must first arrive at that. For Arnold the lesson was important since he saw in this a deliverance from all the destructive attributes—pride, sloth, anger and selfishness, attributes which are detrimental to collective civilised social life of man.

Arnold wanted to emphasise the point of this kind of deliverance before the Oxford audience perhaps because he wanted to bring home his point that a teacher like a teacher must rise above all the prejudices which are peculiarly human. Just after making a point about moral deliverance of man through an anecdote, he comes to the central issue of his lecture, that is, the intellectual deliverance of man which, he feels, necessary for a modern period like his nineteenth century. He thinks that intellectual deliverance is a specific demand of all the ages regarded as modern.

Arnold thinks that along with moral deliverance, intellectual deliverance is necessary for man because, according to him, man’s true freedom lies in the enjoyment of both the kinds. He says that moral deliverance is demanded in all ages, but intellectual deliverance is not. Its necessity in the human civilisation is felt occasionally and rarely. He finds that it is the search for intellectual deliverance that determines whether an age can be called modern or not. On the basis of this also Arnold thinks that a people can be called modern or not. Then he comes to the central issue. According to him, intellectual deliverance is the demand of the age in which they live. He finds that people judge the validity of all the intellectual pursuits in accordance with their contribution the well-being of mankind. And the well-being depends on the intellectual deliverance of man.

After this Arnold explains why demand for intellectual deliverance arises in the present age. According to him, the need for intellectual deliverance arises because the present age faces a burden of history of a complex past and a complex present. He thinks specifically that it becomes an individual necessity because he/she has to deal with a vast body of facts of the present and past. Arnold emphasises that intellectual deliverance becomes possible only when the comprehension becomes possible. And the comprehension becomes possible when we can deduce the general truths about the things and facts all around us. Here Arnold speaks of a specific moment in the process of understanding, in which a particular higher state of the mind is achieved and a harmonious understanding of the things becomes possible. It is this state, Arnold thinks, in which we lose all the prejudices, impatience and irritation and the confused phenomena of the past and present become lucidly understandable. According to him, one who achieves that mental state, that is, one who finds out the true historical point of view of the times becomes the “intellectual deliverer” of the age.

However, Arnold thinks that comprehension of these becomes possible only when those are seen in relation to the past. It is here that the present age has to be compared and contrasted with other ages of human history. By quoting the some words of the Chancellor of Cambridge, Arnold tries to establish why this sort of comparing and contrasting becomes necessary. According to him, this is necessary because it will help us to rectify our mistakes and consolidate our position as civilised human beings.

Arnold marks out what people should aim at in achieving “intellectual deliverance” and explains his criteria of modernity of the present age. According to him, the intellectuals should concern themselves with two particular areas of study: one is significant culminating epoch and the other is a literature, which answered successfully all the issues of the past. He calls these types of an epoch and a literature modern in the sense that those arose out of the relationship with past. He finds that a great epoch may be without a representative literature. This happens when an age attains political and social maturity but does not take intellectual measure of all the development. In this case, he thinks, the epoch rather the literature of the age, should be the object of our study. Again, sometimes a great literature may be found in an intellectually and culturally inferior age. This happens because sometimes some thinkers may rise above the limited vision of the age and see more. In this case, the literature rather the epoch should be the object of our study. Now he stretches his argument little a bit and says that for the most representative interpretation of an age we must study the poetical literature of that age. According to him, since poetry demands greatest exertion of intellectual energy and faculties, it successfully records all the general facts about an age.

He finds that a great epoch may be without a representative literature. Again, sometimes a great literature may be found in an intellectually and culturally inferior age. That is why for our intellectual deliverance we should look for the co-existence and the simultaneous appearance of a great epoch and a great literature in an age. Here cites the example of the Greek culture at the time of Pericles as a great epoch and explains the outward characteristics that make it a great modern epoch. According to Arnold, one of the most characteristic outward features of a modern culture is the absence of violence in civil life. People do not move about in society with the constant fear of being attacked and with the constant alertness to defend his own life. Arnold thinks that with the disappearance of the threat to life society acquires confidence and people engage themselves in free social activities. This leads to the creation of tolerance in society, which, in turn, gives birth to the intellectual maturity of man. Once it is achieved man can observe facts with critical spirit, man can search for their laws and is able to judge by the rule of reason by rising above all the prejudices and caprices.

In order to make his points effectively clear, he compares and contrasts the age with the Elizabethan period. In the historical writings of Thucydides, he finds the evidence that the Athenians gave up the habit of wearing arms while moving in public life. On the other hand, during the Elizabethan period, he says, it was universal to move about with arms. Then Arnold points out another feature of modernity, namely the cultivation of refinement and rejection of the extravagance in dress. In Thucydides again, Arnold finds an evidence that the Athenians cultivated elegance and rejected extravagance. On the other hand, Arnold gathers from the description given in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Kenilworth how much the Elizabethans were obsessed with their taste for fanciful dress. Not only that, Arnold agrees with Pericles that they discovered sources of recreation for the spirit to counter in the balance of the labours of the body. Again, Arnold contrasts this with the Elizabethan taste for popular shows. Once again Arnold supports his argument by quoting Pericles. The point he wants to establish is that, with the disappearance of the threat to life the Greek society acquired confidence and the Greek people engaged themselves in free social activities. This led to the creation of tolerance in society, which, in turn, gave birth to their intellectual maturity.

In the historical writing of Thucydides, Arnold also finds an example of the supreme feature of a modern age, that is, the cultivation and manifestation of a critical spirit which led Thucydides to arrange analyse the facts about the Peloponnesian War rationally. Thucydides chose to write of the War because he thought of the event as the most instructive for mankind. According to him, the Peloponnesian War was more significant than the Trojan War. Arnold thinks that Thucydides’ estimate of the Trojan War is not perfect, but he is highly impressed by his critical spirit.

The tragic hero’s downfall, said Aristotle, in the Poetics, was brought upon not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgement. Aristotle’s theory is not the final word on tragedy, but it happens, can usefully point to what is going on in Othello. This tragic ‘flaw’ has sometimes been incorrectly interpreted in moral terms, and some critics have looked for some moral weakness in the tragic hero. For Othello, this has led to the commonplace assertion that Othello falls because he was too jealous—hence the arguments about whether he was naturally or racially prone to jealousy or easily made jealous. But this is to miss Aristotle’s points. Obviously Othello becomes jealous, but we can defectively avoid the argument about whether he was naturally jealous or not by looking for error of judgement rather than moral flaw. The same may be said about the debate concerning Othello’s ‘nobility’. Up to the beginning of this century there seems to have been general agreement among the best and the most influential Shakespeare critics that the description of Othello as ‘noble’, repeated several times in the play is an accurate assessment of his character. A.C. Bradley’s estimate of Othello’s character is an impressive and idealizing instance of this interpretation. His Othello is a truly admirable character, of heroic stature, exemplary, self-controlled and wonderful imagination. On the other hand, F.R. Leavis, in a violent reaction to this view, presents an Othello who has no real confidence in Desdemona, reacts with astonishing promptness to Iago’s insinuations and idealizes himself in the end on a heroic martyr. Such a reading really boils down to reducing the play to a tragedy of jealousy. Modern variants of this interpretation see the play as the tragedy of marriage based on the spouses’ complete ignorance of each other.

Othello’s downfall may be said to be a result of racial prejudice. That might accord with current responses and would not be inappropriate in Shakespeare’s times. But Othello’s colour can hardly be said to be an error of judgement on his part. His fall is not prompted by colour or racial attitudes though there can be little doubt that both intensify the conflict for him and for us. Nevertheless, Othello’s colour sets him virtually apart from all other characters on the stage and gives him a certain ambivalence. He is not Venetian and not typical of the activity by which Venice lives and thrives. Because they need him, the bse the Duke, on listening to the tale of Othello’s wooing murmurs, “I think this tale would win my daughter too”. Brabantio, Iago, Roderigo are perhaps more representative of Venetian attitude to black Othello, but we should not forget the more notice of the Duke.

Othello’s colour makes him an outsider in a community in which he has lately entered. But his sincerity and braveness are widely acknowledged, and even Iago does not question these traits of Othello’s character. If Moor was intended to jealous, the play would have been dangerously near to a comedy of the cuckolded husband. Such a reading is, of course, contradicted by the whole tone of the play. We feel that Othello’s love is as sincere as it is vulnerable, that he is corrupted into a state of pervasive and brutal jealousy. Yet the impression of genuine affection, integrity and dignity are not quite wiped out. The dramatist does not invite us to speculate on the psychological basis of Othello’s love and its corruptibility he is far more interested in the tragic experience of the man who believes himself to be a fundamentally deceived in his wholehearted love. Othello’s love, affection may well be founded on an insufficient knowledge of Desdemona, but it is above all even more so than Romeo’s love, or sincere, basically unselfish and humane feeling, an act of faith, trust and dedication. Iago’s intrigues deliberately destroy an ideal on which Othello has staked his entire existence.

The emphasis on Othello as an outsider helps us to appreciate the unique value of what stands for. His commitment to love is total, he takes his love as an ideal and when his faith in that love is shaken, his “occupation is gone”. This also suggests that to some extent the seeds of final tragic outcome are already presented in the tragic hero and his situation. Far from “cheering himself up” in his last soliloquy, as T.S. Eliot apparently thought, Othello is right in saying that he “loved not wisely but too well”. Othello’s world is serious, heroic masculine world of combat and high adventure. As he himself recognizes, he is not at home in the sophisticated society of Venice and he feels particularly insecure in his new domestic role of husband. Othello’s love for Desdemona is thus a precious passion but also precarious one.

There arises a sharp controversy among critics as to whether or not Jane Austen, while writing her novels, consciously had in mind certain serious moral concerns of her times; whether or not as a novelist she wanted to pose as a teacher for her society. The problem which baffles the critics is that her oeuvre turns out to be multi-dimension and can be interpreted in various ways. It is often felt that the stories in her novels are oriented towards the education of the heroine/s. The same is true of the novel, Sense and Sensibility, all the more so as it lays equal attention to the two heroines, Elinor and Marianne, and presumably the title points towards that. But it must be emphasized here that the greatness of Austen as a novelist does not depend on whether she moralizes or not; in fact, her major works are complete in themselves and aesthetically independent of any moral concern.

Deliberate or not, however, on her part, a moral design is discernible in the novel, Sense and Sensibility. The entire plot of the novel is intimately and perhaps essentially concerned with exploring the strength of ‘sense’ and the weakness of ‘sensibility’. The novel begins with the presentation of the Dashwood family, now consisting of only the female members who are on the verge of being displaced. Three unmarried daughters of Mrs. Dashwood—especially Elinor, Marianne, are helpless and vulnerable in a male dominated society where there are many immoral predators and unscrupulous dowry-seekers. The situation is more critical as the society is itself ruthlessly unsympathetic to women, who would, without a heavy dowry behind them, remain spinsters and serve wealthy families as governesses. In this kind of situation it is essential that the girls practise ‘sense’ and avoid the excesses of ‘sensibility’.

The plot centres round illustrating this antithesis. Marianne falls in love too easily without knowing fully the person, Willoughby and the affair results in heartbroken misery and prolonged suffering for her. On the other hand, Elinor feels attached to Edwadr Ferrars, but she proceeds sensibly, never allowing her emotions to dominate her rationality. It is not that she does not feel the pain when she finds that Edward Ferrars cannot reciprocate properly; but her suffering is lessened because of her capacity for judgement and for self-control.

But it should be inappropriate to interpret the novel wholly from the perspective of the two girls; in fact, the relative importance of “sense and sensibility” in the society is applicable to the other male and female characters as well. Characters like Willoughby, Robert Ferrars and Lucy how lack of strength and dignity of character. They are not only unscrupulous, but also inadvertently selfish. In fact, much of the irony in the novel arises out their inability to control their inherent faults of character and their misdeeds. Again, she has ridiculed certain persons in the novel so as to expose their absurdities, follies and defects. She has ridiculed Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Palmer for being too garrulous and for being addicted to excessive gossip and rumour-mongering. She has criticized Robert Ferrars for being a coxcomb, a snob and conceited fellow with an inflated ego. Again, Mrs. Ferrars has been criticized for her unusual attachment to money and status and punished for being so. On the other hand, John Dashwood has been criticised in the plot for his selfish nature and lack of warmth for others, and his wife, Mrs. Fanny Dashwood, for her callousness and spiteful narrow-minded nature. Clearly, the novelist aims at reforming the society, urging the reader indirectly to avoid selfishness, hypocrisy, greed and dishonesty.

The characters in the novel can be very easily divided in two group—the first one having the power of self-control, integrity of character and moral strength, and the other lacking those. Elinor, Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon possess those qualities which make them superior to others morally. It must be remembered here that Jane Austen was primarily concerned with the interiors of the society and that is why, the characters are presented very much from the psychological point of view, and psychology in her times was intimately associated with the moral principles which determine the well-being of the society.

John Donne’s life, more than any poet’s, illustrates how the Elizabethan and Jacobean views of the world, which was based medieval world view, came to collide with the Renaissance one provided by the Copernican science. The result was confusion and scepticism. The contemporary intellectuals searched for a moral pattern that governs the world. However, in many their cases, the intellectuals fell back on to the traditional religion for ontological support as the new science could not provide at one all the answers. The same happened with Donne, who after spending a rather fiery youth, became afraid of God’s wrath and looked for His grace. However, it is to be noted that despite old age, his habit of using metaphysical conceit remained with him. But it should be pointed out that in his religious poetry, he drew his images from the Bible.

Donne begins the poem in his characteristic conceited manner:

“Batter my heart, three person’d God; for You

As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seek to mend;”

The poet here prays to God for grace and he may have the fear of damnation. He compares his body to a fort, which has been captured by His enemy Satan. He invokes the “three person’d” God or Trinity—God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, to exert his triple power and rescue him from Satan. The poet emphasises the role played by each part of the Trinity in saving the penitent. As the heart is the gate to the body, he implores God the Father to break, not merely to knock, the Holy Ghost to blow rather than breathe and the Son to burn, not just shine. He feels his whole being contaminated and that is why seeks to be made refreshed almost in a process like exorcism,

“...to breake, blowe, burn and make me new”

He finds that Reason, which is God’s envoy and which should preserve his soul for God, has been imprisoned by the usurping enemy Satan in the same way that a town’s governor is imprisoned by an invader:

“Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captivated and proves weak or untrue”

It may also mean that his Reason has proved too weak in its post as God’s viceroy or that, like a traitor, it has allied itself to the enemy.

In the sestet of the sonnet John Donne, after imploring God to break into his heart, says in his prayer that he loves God and wishes to be loved. But he finds himself in the same situation in which a woman has been forcibly betrothed to another. That is why he asks God to take the role of a lover and free him. He knows the real security rests in the hand of God, and so invites Him to capture him. Again, he feels himself impure for remaining so long in contact with Satan. So he finds that paradoxically he can be made chaste again only when he is ravished by God:

Except You enthral me, never shall be free

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”

The explicit sexual image used by Donne may seem outrtageous, but readers who are familiar with the Biblical equation of the devotee to a beloved can easily understand that the image expresses the intensity of the urge for salvation.

Albert Camus in Le Mythe de Sisyphe summed up human existence on earth by drawing a parallel with the myth of Sisyphe. Sisyphe, cursed by Zeus, constantly fails despite his incessant attempts to keep the stone on the hill-top, whence they are sliding down. Though this is a typical existentialist approach to life and can never be applied to The Old Man and the Sea, the main outlines of the myth comprise an archetype which has been exploited by writers since the times of the Greek tragedians. The philosophical explanation for the crux of the matter is that man is compelled by necessity to struggle for existence—to launch himself/herself into some kind of action, which at some plane is transformed into an ambitious project. This innate human tendency to achieve the impossible does not care for the limit of human capacity, drawn by the universal laws of nature. This tendency ultimately leads to fall or defeat. Hemingway conceived of and wrote The Old Man and the Sea with this awareness of the tragic process, but he altered the conclusion into a moral victory, a victory which is realised on the highest spiritual level of thought, where the glory and indomitable courage of human soul shine supreme.

The story begins with a description of the hero, Santiago, from which the reader gets the impression of some sort of classic grandeur of tragic personality, an anticipation of the kind of situation the famous tragic protagonists like Oedipus, Prometheus or Lear find themselves in. Santiago is driven by circumstances to overcome the salao phase, and he tries to do this by going far out into the sea. All alone he hooks a marlin which turns out to be two feet longer than his skiff, therefore, too big and too strong to bring it to the shore. From this point of view the struggle begins and the reader finds that the stuggle of Santiago is in part seen in relation to the struggle of the fish. But Santiago never lets the fish take the upper hand; rather he says to it with love and respect, “I will kill you before the day ends.” These words come forth from a heroic heart, which does defy the limit of strength. However, from this new awareness of what he has to fight against, Santiago becomes aware of of what he inside him, the spirit of proving worth against a worthy adversary.

In this movement of the story, Hemingway presents a double vision of man through the character of Santiago. Hemingway’s belief was that there must be a resemblance in the nature of things, between Jesus Christ in his human aspect as the Son of Man and those countless and nameless thounsands in the history of Christendom who belong to the category of “good men” whatever the professed degree of theri Christian commitment. Santiago shows certain qualities of mind and heart—essential gallantry, the staying power, the ability to ignore pain—which are all closely associated with the character and personality of Jesus Christ. Again, the suffering, the gentleness and the wood, it is noted, “blend magically into an image of Christ on the Cross.”

Besides, Santiago gains appeap and sympathy of the reader by didn’t of certain tender and mellow human qualities like humility, natural piety and compassion. His humility is of that kind which can co-exist with pride. And when he finally outfights the marlin, his pride is gone for a long time—forced out through the openings in the sieve of his suffering. Moreover, he is a pious man and the piety appears unobtrusively in his constant accepted and questioning awareness of supernal power at once outside and potentially inside his personal struggle. This is why he is never out of touch with nature and her creatures and he is even more closely allied to God’s creation with his birds and fish than Saint Francis with his animals and birds. Here one is reminded of Coleridge’s ancient mariner who comes to share with Santiago a quality of compassion. But whereas Coleridge’s mariner must achieve it through an ordeal, Santiago owns it as a natural gift. In Coleridge’s poem, the broken circuit, the failure of spiritual electricity, leads immediately and sequentially to the ordeal, which is bu hunger and thirst, cold and heat like Santiago, but chiefly an ordeal by loneliness. This sense of solidarity—“no one is ever alone in the sea”—with the visible universe and the natural creation is another of the factors which ehlp to sustain Santiago through his long ordeal.

On the psychological level, Santiago may be said to prove the mystical theory thus put forward by Yeats in his Vision:

“There is for every man some one seen, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, and this...if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul.”

For, with all the symbolical elements, there are the presence of the great baseball player, Dimaggio, the lions on the beaches of Africa in his dreams and the boy, Manolin—all of which relate themselves to the spirit of heroism in a pleasant obsession in Santiago’s mind. Like many other ageing men, he finds something reassuring about the overplay of the past upon the present. Through the agency of the boy, Manolin, he tries to recapture in his imagination some strength and confidence of the past adolescence or beginning of the youth, which is compared to the stamina of a lion. That is why during the struggle with the marlin and the sharks, the refrain, “I wish I had the boy”, plays across his mind.

In the second movement of the story, with the arrival of the sharks begins a tragedy of deprivation. So after the decimation by the sharks, ther is nothing left of the great marlin except the skeleton, the bony head and the vertical tail. And Santiago’s experience becomes a form of martyrdom. Tried out through the ordeal of endurance, comparable to a crucifixion, he earns by virtue of his valiance a form of apotheosis. But his humility and simplicity do not allow any conscious entry to martyrdom. He says at one point:

“Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, not defeated.”

Santiago’s resolution is stiffened always by some such thought as this, and he acts in accordance with it.

Yet he is too human not to be troubled like Job in the Bible, by certain moral and metaphysical questions. “Perhaps”, he reflects, “it was a sin to kill the fish...even though I did it to keep me alive and feed other people.” But after a while he realises: “You killed him for pride”, to show that he was still El Champion. As in other tragic literatures the whole process consists in the readjustment of moral proportions. What begins as a balanced mixture of pride and love slowly alters through the catalysis of circumstances into love as the natural concomitant of true humility.

What seems finally to settle on is the notion that he had gone, as he often puts in, “too far out”. This concept of “too far out” connects the hamartia or tragic flaw that every tragic hero ultimately understands at the end. But Santiago takes his defeat with a stoical attitude and finally achieves a moral triumph, a triumph of having lasted without permanent impairment of his belief in the worth of what he has been doing. In this way the story becomes a universal paradigm of human life, a process which nevr stops at the point of failure rather re-starts with the another person, as with the presence of Manolin beside Santiago, in the same stream. The concluding sentences geometrises this generalization:

“He was sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.”

Shakespeare has conceived of and presented Lady Macbeth with extreme care of theatrical technique so that she can play every important part and contribute to the tragic process of the drama. Sometimes some critics tend to compare her activities with witchcraft and call her the “fourth Witch”. But none of these attempts has been successful, as she is very much a flesh and blood character, who exhibits enough of her humanity hidden within in the later scenes. The development of Lady Macbeth’s character acts as a parable with that of Macbeth, thus at once complementing and illuminating the action where necessary.

At the very first appearance of Lady Macbeth, reading a letter from her husband in Act I, scene v, the audience can notice from her facial expressions and eagerness that she is immediately possessed by the prospects of the prophecies. But as she knows the real nature of her husband, she rightly expresses her doubts about the mental strength of her husband, which is necessary to execute so horrible an act as murdering the king. She, however, goes too much in her estimate as she says that her husband’s nature is “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness”. As a perfect match, therefore, she feels it necessary to,

“Pour my thoughts in thine ear

And chastise with the valour of my tongue.” (Act I, scene v)

Up to this point of the action Lady Macbeth acts as a human being. But as soon as she is informed that the king is coming to her castle, she shows something of the witch-like characteristics in her reactions to the news and in her plotting against the king:

“…come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood;” (Act I, scene v)

What she is wants, is precisely a transformation from a natural human being into something unnatural being, an incarnation of evil, so that she can help her husband in his satanic undertaking. That she wants to devoid herself all the feminine, even maternal qualities—so natural to a woman—is evident from her invitation:

“Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers…” (Act I, scene v)

It is from this particular point of reference some critics mark her out as the fourth Witch.

Again, it must be noted that she not only speaks but acts in the satanic fashion when she advises her husband,

“…to beguile the time

Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,

Your hand, your tongue: look like th’ innocent flower,

But be the serpent under’t.” (Act I, scene v)

This is the narrow Elizabethan version of Machiavellianism, for, true Machiavellianism is directed towards capturing the throne or power at any cost, but of course, for the benefit and welfare of the people. Neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth acts with these aims, as the king Duncan was a saint-like figure to his people. This is why Macbeth is seen suffering from terrible mental agony, self-doubt and vacillations. When he is on the verge of breaking down, Lady Macbeth comes to his aid. She even strikes at the softest part of a man’s heart by calling his manhood into question. [She contrasts his weakness of mind with own mental strength, with which she can, she asserts, kill her own sucking baby:

“ I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you…” (Act I, scene vii)]

Thus she succeeds in dispersing the doubts from his mind and injecting satanic strength necessary for the plot. And when the “deed is done”, when the murder is committed, she instructs him,

“Go get some water

And wash this filthy witness.”

This is perhaps the greatest dramatic irony of any of Shakespeare’s tragedies. From her utterance it is inferred that she takes the matter too lightly—she was ignorant of the consequences arising out of the murder of a king, an act which was considered, according to the Elizabethan ethos, an act against God, a violation of the divine order of the Great Chain of Being created and maintained by God. With this the whole moral universe of the play tumbles down, and accordingly Lady Macbeth gets contracted into her own self.

The grave consequence of the deed is presented scene i, Act V, where the audience learn that Lady Macbeth has fallen victim to a strange kind of disease, that she has become a somnambulist. Here Shakespeare’s conception of her being afflicted with this disease is psychologically plausible. This is purely a psychiatric problem arising her sense of guilt for murdering a saint-like figure in King Duncan. The dramatic irony comes terribly true when she understands her sin and its consequence, guilt:

“Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

This is a disease, which is now known in psychiatry as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Lady Macbeth’s suffering is immense and there is no remedy or escape except death. And she dies a tragic death. In this she forecasts the same consequence for Macbeth, and her death weakens him considerably before his final battle. It is also in her tragic death she emerges as a flesh and blood character, a human being, and that is why she cannot be called the fourth Witch. Rather she is that part of the human nature, which aspires, plans, commits misdeeds, reaches the desired point and then terribly falls into the void echoing those words which Macbeth utters upon her death and which anticipates his own impending nemesis:

“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And is heard no more.”