Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [445]
This is equally true when we consent to watch a play or read a novel. We agree to treat a human confection as real for the purposes of enjoyment and edification. When the literal truth is not the point but the formulation of the truth is an expression of confidence in our ultimate significance, we seem to be able to understand other people’s issues more clearly. In attending a play, we assume a certain number of things are true in order to watch the performance. Watching others leads directly to realizations about ourselves and our world, even if the writer creates a world quite different from our own. Our self-consciousness gives us the ability to appreciate our own lives as performances in which we are also the audience, even if we assume we are sharing our thoughts with God.
Shakespeare was enamored with his own powers as a poet and performer in his youthful conceit as a poet:
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee. (Sonnet 18)
The poet gives life to his beloved, making death itself envious of the immortalizing power of his verse. We cannot all be poets nor do many of us wish to brag so unmercifully. Nor can Shakespeare really grant his beloved immortality with his verse. But is not culture a kind of drama in which we play ourselves and give ourselves lines and then judge ourselves as the audience? So perhaps that is how, in the end, we must treat our religious values-as a script for the performance of a life-that is, as very important and meaningful lines to us because they are beautiful, true, and enduring in their own way, even if they are fiction. They point to what we feel are the transcendent values in our lives. Indeed, what we have seen is that our culture and religion itself tends to express itself in Scripture, which is a literature treated with transcendent importance.
We all know that history as well as religion tells lies but we can safely believe fiction because it makes only symbolic claims to truth, while we perhaps wrongly expect more from history and religion. Religion, by allowing us to believe our ecstatic experiences, allows us also to believe our own, most intimate dreams. As Gertrude exclaims when Hamlet begins talking to his invisible father: “This is the very coinage of your brain. This bodiless creation ecstasy is very cunning in” (Act 3, Scene 3, lines 136-7). That statement works on many levels at once. There is no one on stage with them but we know that what Hamlet sees is real. In art, we can handle the ambiguity that the invisible ghost is real to Hamlet and to us though invisible and false to another character. We know he has been seen and verified at the beginning of the play, though he might seem a delusion to his mother Gertrude. We can also appreciate that, really, there are no ghosts, so to us the entire presentation is a fiction, even if Hamlet’s original audience thought otherwise. Such realizations, even when we do not spell them out explicitly, allow us to range through several different levels of significance simultaneously. Surely part of Shakespeare’s genius is that he seems to be speaking to those different levels of signficance at the same time.
In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare has given us a love story ending in death, somewhat like his more famous play, Romeo and Juliet. In both plays each lover gets to make a dying speech after the other’s death, which is a very neat piece of plotting. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the plot device that allows each to give a stirring speech over the body of the other is a miraculous drug that produces the symptoms of death. Everyone likes Romeo and Juliet because of its poetry and its story of young, tragic love. Fewer know the solaces which Antony and Cleopatra offers, with its story of mature love’s martyrdom, all confused with imperial and dynastic