The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [394]
`What a piece of work is a man'
It is precisely the seeming ambiguity of Oedipus Tyrannos and Hamlet which puts them in a dimension of their own; for they tease out the central riddle at the heart of human existence with a depth and subtlety unmatched by any other stories in world literature.
Oedipus is the man who seems to have everything. He is a wise, respected king, surrounded with a loving wife and children. Yet suddenly a crisis arises in his kingdom and he discovers that he really knows nothing about himself at all, and that unwittingly he has become the worst sinner in the world. Hamlet is the prince who seems to have everything: intelligence, wit, unusual gifts, a girl who loves him and whom he loves; everything necessary for him to succeed to manhood and kingship. Yet suddenly a crisis arises in the kingdom, and in the very act of achieving that goal he finds he has irretrievably become a sinner doomed to die.
Was this all that Sophocles and Shakespeare could see in human nature? That there is ultimately nothing higher in human life than to enjoy the empty, selfdeceiving exercise of egotism, followed by death? Hamlet himself may have suggested so, in that wonderful, chilling passage where he exclaims:
`What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.'
Yet what in the end does all this amount to, he concludes, but a worthless 'quintessence of dust'?
Similarly in Antigone, Sophocles's Chorus exclaims how the greatest wonder on earth is man:
`master of ageless Earth ... lord of all things living ... the use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain he learnt; found out the ways of living together in cities ... there is nothing beyond his power. His subtlety meeteth all chance, all danger conquereth, for every ill he found its remedy.'
Yet the one thing for which he has no remedy is death. And of all the subtleties of his nature, none is more wondrous, notes the Chorus, than how it can draw him `either to good or evil ways.
As it happens, both Sophocles and Shakespeare were eventually able to show us this problem being ultimately resolved. In Sophocles's valedictory play, Oedipus at Colon us, we see how his hero, having had his ego utterly crushed, first developed that inner vision which allowed him to see the world straight and whole, and is eventually able to be received back into a state of one-ness with the universe, like no other mortal man,
For the same sense of final resolution in Shakespeare we also have to wait for his last play, The Tempest. In crucial respects Prospero is like a light version of the Ghost in Hamlet. Like `Old Hamlet, he has been treacherously dispossessed from his kingdom by a dark, usurping brother. But instead of then turning dark himself, to seek bloody vengeance, he has been through a long process of inner growth and transformation, until he is finally ready to confront his shadow, win him to repentance for his crime and then to forgive him. Thus can the play end on a trumphant note of love and reconciliation, symbolised above all by the union of the young Prince Ferdinand and his Miranda: the very union Prince Hamlet and his Ophelia were so grievously unable to achieve. All Prospero's striving is at an end. The last vestige of his egotism is gone. He has redeemed his inner kingdom, and become whole. Like the wise old Oedipus, he has become one with the universe.
The moment has come at last to step outside this self-contained world of storytelling, and to see how the ways in which we tell stories relate to what we call `real life'.
`The largest crowds are drawn by the storytellers. It is around them that the people throng most densely and stay longest ... their words come from further off