Disputing the Canon
I was in the best of settings when I realized that Shakespeare was indeed great. My freshman year in high school, I had English class with an esteemed teacher, Mr. Broza—hailed as the Paul D. Schreiber High School Shakespeare aficionado, founder of Schreiber’s Annual Shakespeare Day, and, perhaps most heart-warming of all, a self-proclaimed Shakespeare lover whose posters of The Bard could be found as wallpaper in his small office. How lucky I thought I was. Indeed, if I wanted to appreciate Hamlet, I was in the right hands.
But how misled I actually was—at least, in Walker Percy’s eyes. In his essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” Percy recalls a scene from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter:
…the girl hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry about the scratches, and most of all worry about whether they are getting it, whether they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush? (521)
Percy here contrasts two different approaches to viewing art—the girl who informally and spontaneously encounters the work of art, out of context, as opposed to the “unhappy souls inside” who formally prepare themselves for a kind of pre-packaged listening experience. Percy wonders which is better—a question meant for the reader’s pondering. But his essay offers his answer: we can only truly see or hear a piece of art by “the decay of those facilities which were designed to help the sightseer” (514). Perhaps Percy is right—it might have been better if my experience with Hamlet had been an accide...
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...uch great heights to which I may leap, so many undiscovered territories awaiting my arrival.
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After years of loneliness and misery, Marcher realizes what he had been oblivious to and, ultimately, everything he had lost, most importantly, the love he had lost. “This horror of waking—this was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze” (1177). He could have escaped his fate of nothingness and loneliness, “The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived” (1176). Marcher’s punishment for being so selfish and self-absorbed was that “he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened” (1176). This was the story of a man whose ego was the “beast” in the “jungle” of
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In today’s world of genetically engineered hearts and genetically altered glowing rats, the story of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, seems as if it could be seen in the newspapers in our near future. The discoveries seen in modern science, as well as in the novel, often have controversy and negative consequences that follow them, the biggest of which being the responsibility the creator of life has to what has been created. Victor Frankenstein suffers from a variety of internal and external conflicts stemming from the creation of his monster, which in return also experiences similar problems. Shelley uses these tumultuous issues to portray the discrepancies between right and wrong, particularly through romanticism and the knowledge of science.
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Human beings have been shown to be the cruelest animals on the planet. While other animals will kill for defense or food, humans are the only ones that inflict unnecessary cruelty onto others like they do through experimentation. Fortunately, some people throughout the years have shown sympathy towards the various animals that are tested on day after day and work to stop the atrocities committed by man. Animal rights activists and their cause can be traced back to their origins in the antivivisection campaigns of the 1900s. Both individuals and groups of people work to abrogate the abuse of animals, usually through protests. The most prominent organization that advocates for animal rights is PETA or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who have fought many battles in the war against animal cruelty. Two of PETA’s victories were in their campaigns, where they worked with several other organizations, against Gillette and Colgate for their experimentation on and mistreatment of animals. Their victory against Gillette came with, “the multinational company announcing a moratorium in December 1996 on animal testing of its ...
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...World of Hamlet.” Yale Review. vol. 41 (1952) p. 502-23. Rpt. in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism. Rev. ed. Ed. Leonard F. Dean. New York: Oxford University P., 1967.