Tuesday, January 29, 2008
The Comparison
Hi again! During last class, Dr. Edwin asks of us to compare how a few writers perceive live in their respective works. There are four works to compare which are “As You Like It” and “Macbeth” by the ever so popular William Shakespeare, “Four Ages of Man” by William Butler Yeats and “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles. Shakespeare in both “As You Like It” and “Macbeth” perceived life as a play with human as players on a huge stage. In “As You like It”, he split human age into seven stages. At first the infant then the whining school-boy, the lover, a soldier, the justice, the lean and slipper’d pantaloon and lastly, second childishness and mere oblivion. Shakespeare made it seems that there is a certain pattern of growing up that all of us humans experiences. It’s sort of a cycle because we start of being an innocent infant and goes back to having what he refers to as “second childishness” or senile in my own word. In “Macbeth”, he refers to life as a candle. The life span of candle is not that long, and he connects it with the life span of human to make a comparison. He also said that the candle is not that important and it signifies nothing. To me, he is actually saying that there is no particular point or direction to which the person whom he called “actor” is going and life of the “actor” is pretty much meaningless as everything must be done according to the so called “script”. William Butler Yeats, in his poem “Four Ages of Man” perceives life as a struggle. He, like Shakespeare also divided human age but he divided it into just four stages of struggle. The first one is the struggle going outside of our mother’s womb. The second struggle is a struggle with heart, innocence and peace going stronger or weaker. After that comes the struggle of the mind where he no longer feels too deeply emotional and become more matured. The last struggle would be the struggle with God where he is at the brink of death and of course in the end God will win. In “Oedipus the King”, Sophocles wrote that Oedipus had solved the riddle of the Sphinx and win the land of Thebes. The riddle talks about three ages of man. Sophocles said that when we are a toddler we are on four feet, and then when we are a kid, teenager, and adult we are on two, and lastly when we are really old and walk with a stick, we are actually walking on three feet. That is how Sophocles views life; as three very different stage.
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