Introduction

This paper deals with the subject of the destruction of the feminine in Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet,

Macbeth and King Lear the plays of contemporary playwrights who revived Shekespeare’s ideas and

themes in their plays, namely Hamletmachine (Heiner Mueller), Seven Lears (Howard Barker) and

Fortune and Men’s Eyes (John Herbert). The paper is based on Ted Hughes’ analysis of

Shakespeare’s plays in his study Shakespeare and The Goddess of Complete Being in which Hughes

reveals that Shakespeare’s opus investigates into and uncovers the systematic denial, rejection and

the destruction of the feminine within the culture. Shakespeare’s world in the plays reminds us of the

modern world which signalizes that he was well aware of the practices and ongoing processes of the

constant destruction and violation of the feminine in both women and men, the quality which enables

us to believe in love, exercise love, believe in justice and mercy and believe in natural order of things.

History has witnessed that mankind has so many times disrupted this natural order. This disrupted

order is best exemplified in Hamlet where children are taught to lie and not to love, brothers kill their

brothers, queens form political marriages, mothers do not protect their children and all are morally

blind. Shakespeare strips off this world and shows it a mirror in which this world could see its features

and nature. In his opinion this ‘mirror’ could be his plays in which those who want to question the

unnatural order, like Hamlet, can find a confirmation to their doubts whether this world is out of joint or

not.

In terms of Ted Hughes, modern man has undergone a complete dissociation of his personality

which turned him into a reason – governed, puritanical person. Such disintegration is the consequence

of the oppression of the established institutions of our culture such as education and the justice

system in order to destroy the feminine. However, as long as there is the model of Hamlet, Clarissa

and Mona which stands for the insistence on truth, love and clear conscience there will be a hope for

finding the way out of the disrupted world governed by those who want to kill humanity and the

potential of love.

Feminine in the disrupted world

1

Hamlet, Macbeth, Hamletmachine

‘The time is out of joint’

(Shakespeare, Hamlet)

Tis unnatural,

‘Even like the deed that’s done. On Tuesday last,

A falcon, towering in her pride of place,

Was by a mousing owl hawkt at and killed.’

(Shakespeare, Macbeth)

This paper has to begin with the name of Ted Hughes and his study Shakespeare and The

Goddess of Complete Being in which Hughes reveals that Shakespeare’s opus investigates into and

uncovers the systematic denial, rejection and the destruction of the feminine within the culture.

According to him, Shakespeare sensed something criminal in Western civilization first in the two

poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. In the first poem Adonis’ refusal of Venus to be a

hunter and not her lover, becomes the archetypal formula of masculine identity and patriarchal society

in the West. Once a lover, Adonis becomes Tarquin, a warrior, a modern cultural hero, the rejected

Venus becomes the raped Lucrece, the garden becomes the city sunk in war and destruction. These

two poems are accounts of the same still-evolving archaic myth of the Great Love and Mother

Goddess and her beloved son and lover who destroys her, the myth which represents ‘Western man’s

greatest image of a fundamental polarity in human existence.’1This ‘fundamental polarity’ Shakespeare

closely observed in his plays and found evidence that the psychological frame of mind from which the

rejection of the feminine first sprang existed in his culture and still exists. The mystery of the

fundamental polarity of human existence was imperfectly understood. History revealed a civilization

which was destructive because its psyche was out of joint, dislocated from creative being, estranged

from the supposed central goals of life seen in completeness, creativity, practice of love and thus

replaced by contrary attitudes. Because Adonis turned away from Venus and rejected total

unconditional love by choosing to be a killer and a hunter, we no longer live in the garden but in a city

or in a civilization of constant wars and conflicts which tames its subjects, especially women who are

1 Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, O promeni, Kulturološki eseji, p.158

2

considered dangerous for the system and are forced into obedience and brought under the control of

patriarchy. Life and the whole civilization are threatened by the patriarchs themselves whose ethical

and moral blindness and insensitivity to life need to be tamed into wisdom and the ability to see things

feelingly.

Thus, Shakespeare’s plays concentrate on the loss of complete being, on the transformation of

man–the-lover into the rational Puritan through which the bond with life is perverted. After the rejection

of nature, love, women our relatedness to life is reduced to aggression, rape, lust. The error of the

whole modern world including Shakespeare’s heroes lies in the failure that they (we) are unconscious

of this. The tragic error belongs exclusively to the psychology of the man (or women imitating men)

and Shakespeare’s tragedies are dramatic representations of the relationship of the rational ego to the

totality of natural, instinctual, biological life which appears to be female (the Goddess). The rational

ego splits the totality into the loved part that supports it and the loathed part that destabilizes it. By

suppressing the feminine part of their nature Shakespeare’s heroes fall but are constantly given a

chance for redemption through the growing awareness of the true nature of the feminine. They are

heroes because they do realize that in spite of the pressures of the ‘dislocated’ society what matters in

life is not wealth or rank but the completion through love. Moreover, Shakespeare forces them to

question and reexamine the meaning of their lives and their identities within the society and makes

them discover where they have erred.

Denmark is a prison

Hamlet concludes that his country is a prison. By this he means that Denmark is the country of

imprisoned thoughts feelings and minds. The relations within the country are those between the king

and the servile people ready to be commanded and to stay blind at the king’s lies and crimes whose

authority is never questioned. Such people are embodied in Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern whom

Hamlet compares to a sponge. He says 2

Rosenkrantz: Take you me for a sponge, my lord?

Hamlet: Ay, sir; that soaks up the king’s countenance,

his rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the

2Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, p.698 iv. ii 25-iii 30

3

king best service in the end:

Similarly, Polonius differs in no way from them when he sees clouds in shapes his prince, at the same

time a higher rank, interprets for him3

Polonius: By th’mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backt like a weasel.

In such a surrounding Hamlet finds himself after the death of his father and what he soon realizes is

that there is no genuine affection among the people who supposedly loved his father. Only a month

after the death of the king his mother, the queen, gets married again to his uncle, the new king. Hamlet

finds Gertrude remarried, pretending to mourn his father which she considers to be her duty. Hamlet’s

grief is genuine and is deepened by the fact that it is considered to be the ‘unmanly grief’ by his uncle

and mother. Hamlet is instructed that it is normal that people die, that the duty of the people is to

mourn those who died but within some limits. These explanations are the justifications of the king’s

and queen’s hastened marriage which Hamlet has to accept as a normal circumstance. Still, Hamlet

has already sensed that something is rotten in the country and cannot but conclude that

Frailty, thy name is

Woman!-

Would have mourn’d longer-married with my

Uncle,

My father’s brother; but no more like my father

Than I to Hercules

Soon the ghost of his father tells him that his father was poisoned by his uncle when Hamlet realizes

what means can be used in the ruthless game for the throne. He finds the natural order disrupted, it is

not a world in which a mother genuinely mourns and loves the deceased husband and in which there

is no killing for the sake of anything, especially not for political aims.

3 Ibid, p.694 iii. ii 393-iii 15

4

Hamlet’s perception of the world and the position of the people whom their conscience still refrains

from lies, killing and destruction are best seen in the following lines4

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised world, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin?

Hamlet’s conscience has not been destroyed and therefore he is still able to question the wrongs and

oppression of the system. His conscience ‘makes him a coward’ in the sense that he does not take

actions to kill his uncle and mother. He is tortured by the question ‘to be or not to be’, whether to

remain true to yourself or take on the prevailing ideology of killers and whores. In his questioning and

reexamination he finds a method to strip off his mother’s and uncle’s pretences of worry, kindness. To

‘catch the conscience of the king’ he decides to use a play in which a brother kills his own brother to

become a king because5

For any thing so overdone is from the purpose of

Playing, whose end, both at the first and now,

Was and is, to hold, as twere, the mirror up to

Nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her

Own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

The play touches the king since in Hamlet’s opinion he does not have a ‘free soul’ and he now has the

proof that his uncle is a treacherous villain. The king now sees Hamlet as a threat to his throne and

uses his instruments Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern whom he persuades to kill Hamlet. Claudius

promises Laertes, Polonius’ son, that he will not let Hamlet unpunished for the death of Polonius. He

4 Ibid, p.688 iii. i 68-ii 65 Ibid, p.689 iii. i 168-ii 27

5

even goes so far to say that Gertrude, who almost lives by Hamlet’s looks, will call Hamlet’s death an

accident. He says6

And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe;

But even his mother shall uncharged the practice,

And call it accident.

The love between Claudius and Gertrude and Gertrude and Hamlet is under question. Hamlet decides

to be more cruel and direct in relation to his mother Gertrude. He loves his mother but wants to7

Speak daggers to her, but use non;

My trongue and soul in this be hypocrites,-

How in my words soever she be shent,

To give them seals never, my soul, consent!

Also, Gertrude is to be set up a glass where she may see the inmost part of herself since she is not at

least ashamed of the act of marrying her husband’s brother for political purposes. Hamlet considers

this act to be sick since such an act

Blurs the grace and blush of modesty;

Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose

From the fair forehead of an innocent love,

And sets a blister there; makes marriage vows

As false as dicers’ oaths

Moreover, he asks her mother, after showing her pictures of both her husbands, what it was that made

her marry again a person without apparent qualities. She declares that he has made her turn her eyes

to her soul which is black but it is obvious that she cannot see the wrong done. Hamlet is aware of this

and advises her to at least repent for her shameful act of political whoring and assume virtue if she

has it not.

6Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, p.702 iv. vii 50-937 Ibid, p. i. iii78-122

6

Ophelia, on the other hand, differs from Gertrude in the sense that she is full of affection which is best

seen when Hamlet kills his father Polonius, which breaks her heart in the end. Ophelia is subjected to

her father’s and brother’s influences who instruct her what to do and what to feel. She is denied her

own thoughts and feelings, especially towards Hamlet. Polonius sees her daughter as completely

incapable of being independent and of thinking autonomously. When he realizes that Hamlet courts

her he advises her8

Affection! pooh!you speak like a green girl,

Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.

Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?

Do not believe his vows;for they are brokers,

Not of that dye which their investments show,

But mere implorators of unholy suits

Ophelia obeys her father and betrays her own self and her feelings. This is what angers Hamlet

because it is a kind of betrayal of him and their potential love which she regards, under the influence of

her father, to be a mere passion on Hamlet’s part and not a genuine affection. Hamlet advises her to

go to a nunnery and stay away from the rest of the world remaining as chaste as ice, as pure as snow.

He becomes indifferent towards her for her blind obedience and self betrayal which refrain her from

opposing the authorities and from passing judgment upon them. Moreover, his generalizations about

women and Ophelia show that women are full of pretences and incapable of love. In comparison with

Hamlet, Ophelia’s protest against the destructive world, in which she is instructed not to believe in love

and in which her father is killed, appears in the form of suicide. She does not survive her becoming

aware of existing moral inconsistencies and the destructive nature of the world. She is too weak and

escapes the world through death.

8 Ibid, p.676 i.iii 78-122

7

Heiner Mueller’s play Hamletmachine is set in Europe which is divided between the East and West

blocks in which the primary aim of Hamlet is to overthrow the conditions that make man abandoned,

enslaved and contemptible. Mueller puts him himself and Hamlet on the side of the East block

socialism, a revolutionary block of Stalin, Lenin, Mao whom he perceives as still possessing the

feminine (women in the play). This block is opposed to the West block which flows into the play

through the hailing of Coca Cola. His Hamlet is first a revolutionary and then a contra-revolutionary; he

sees himself both inside the palace and down in the street with revolutionaries; he wants to become a

woman but still sticks to the advantages of males. In the world of false polarities between the East and

West Hamlet(s) is (are) no longer possible. Hamlet gives up and leaves the revolution to others in the

future. The actor playing Hamlet says

I’m not Hamlet. I don’t take part any more. My words have nothing to tell me anymore. My thoughts suck the

blood out of the images. My drama doesn’t happen any more… The set is a monument. It presents a man who

made history, enlarged a hundred times. The petrification of a hope. His name is interchagable, the hope has not

been fulfilled.9

If Shakespeare’s Hamlet promised some hope that there would always be people ardent to strip naked

the destructive and morally inconsistent world and show it a mirror to see itself as it really is, this

Hamlet is utterly melancholic and in the end gives in because the opposition is useless in the world in

which you have to choose a side. He leaves no hope.

Also, Mueller shows what it has been done to women through victimization to which Ophelia and other

women have been subjected. It is Ophelia who is ready to change and not allow the feminine to be

killed and broken by patriarchy any longer. She remains dedicated to the struggle against enslavement

and debasement fiercely enduring through millennia of oppression. Having seen herself as obedient

and to her father loyal daughter Electra, Ophelia refuses to play the part of Electra any longer. Sitting

bound to a wheelchair at the bottom of the sea, she announces a possible healing in the future. Her

opposition is seen in the lines

9 Mueller, Heiner, Hamletmachine

8

I choke between my thighs the world I gave birth to. I bury it in my womb. Down with the happiness of submission.

Long live hate and contempt, rebellion and death. When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher

knives you’ll know the truth.10

Mueller’s Ophelia is a victim with a vengeance, ready to give up motherhood and save potential new-

born babies from destructive patriarchy. Fortunately, the way of opposition through self destruction is

seen only by Ophelia to be the only one way.

Women and mothers are protective towards children and want to save them from the destruction

which progressive and aggressive patriarchy brings with itself. Still, Shakespeare has showed that this

is not the rule. In order to satisfy political ambitions, gain men’s power and therefore become partners

in destruction, women easily give up their natural creativity and the creation of new lives at the same

time acquiring the unnatural patriarchal system of values. Gertrude fails to protect her son obeying

only her political role of the queen.

Shakespeare’s play Macbeth is a play 11

‘that dramatizes the moment when killing, internalized through various traditional practices, becomes so normal

and easy that it becomes second nature to men and women who are unable to resist the political lies that

sanction and promote it. It is a play about the inner defense against this perversion, about the struggle between

man’s first and second nature, about the choice that needs to be made between the derided milk of human

kindness and the glorified but barren crown.’

Unfortunately, Lady Macbeth tries to play political games in the man’s world by encouraging her

husband to murder. Instead of creatively fulfilling herself as a mother she rather chooses to become

implicated in dirty political games which include killing as well. Her wish is 12

Come you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;

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

10 Ibid.11Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, O promeni, Kulturološki eseji, p. 18312 Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, p.862 i. v 12-60

9

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,

Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

Th’effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall

She wants to kill her femininity by becoming cruel which would enable her to kill without any remorse.

This is basically of what her husband is fit to do-he is already a killer when he meets the witches who

only confront him with his nature and the future on which he has already embarked. Lady Macbeth

likes the idea of becoming the queen and is ready to support her husband even to the extent of killing

the king. She warns Macbeth that the lack of political ambition, fear and innate human kindness that

he has can stop him from fulfilling the predicted future. Macbeth consciously rationalizes the murder of

the king making it a normal thing. Still, having murdered the king his suppressed inner voice is heard

through fear and guilty conscience. His wife is there is to reproach him and bring him back on the way

of his personal destruction

My hands are of your colour; but I shame

To wear a heart so white.

…

A little water clears us of this deed.

They both have transgressed nature by killing; their hands are in blood which no water can wash. Still,

she believes they can be washed as well as one’s soul.

Macbeth’s ambition rises and he finds no problem in killing. He has killed his sleep and dreams

through which his inner voice can communicate with him and which, as John Crowe Ransom

maintains in his essay Poetry: A Note on Ontology, reproach us. On the other hand, Lady Macbeth is

subconsciously tormented by the fact that she committed a murder. She moonwalks, washes her

hands and talks to herself in sleep13

The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?

13 Ibid, p.880 v. i 28-73

10

What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more

O’that, my lord, no more o’that: you mar all with

This starting.

The doctor’s diagnosis is that14

Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds

Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds

To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets:

More needs she the divine than the physician:-God,

God forgive us all!

Macbeth has already gone far on the path of destruction and he has no inner mechanism that will tell

him he has gone astray and that there is no cure for his wife’s illness, at least not by plucking sorrow,

oblivion or cleansing the weighed bosom.

Lear

Prudentia: This acting. This intervening. This putting stops to things. Who obliges you,

Clarissa?

Clarissa: My conscience.

Prudentia: Put it to sleep, then. Strike it with a shovel. Like a senile dog, one swift and

clean blow kills it. I was spun by conscience like a top. And when it died I came to life.

The top ceased spinning. Look how you shiver. Look how manifestly you are inferior to me. Do I shiver? You are in the blindfold.

(Barker Howard, Seven Lears)

Barker’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good, is an

attempt to show what the system and its institutions do to children that have no motherly protection

and that are wrongly taught and instructed: instead of loving they are taught to hate, destroy and lie.

His view is that a child should develop itself on the basis of its innate sense of justice ‘the godlike

authority of the private soul’15and free questioning that leads to the recognition and love of the Good. If

14 Ibid, p.880 v. i 74-ii 3115 Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, Facta Universitatis, Charcoals or Diamonds? On destruction of moral and emotional intelligence( or soul murder) in Shakespeare’s works

11

a child does not develop in this way it is poisoned and dehumanized by the ideology and education of

the culture. His Lear in the pursuit of the good undergoes changes under the influence of these

instruments of society.

In his Introduction to Seven Lears, Barker reveals the background of Shakespeare’s King Lear. His

observation is that ‘mother is denied existence in the play’ and in the memory of its characters and that

this extinction is the result of the repression of the feminine principle by the whole society, including

Lear and his two daughters Goneril and Regan who hate everything this principle stands for. Barker

thinks that although this hatred is unjust it may have been necessary. This means that the society out

of necessity deliberately destructs those feminine qualities such as truth, love, compassion in order to

create a dehumanized army of leveled ‘money makers.’ In Seven Lears, first Lear, a boy, is very

different from his brothers who are only interested in playing games especially playing adults’ game of

building castles and destroying them. Young Lear is at this stage able to question his father’s rule and

ask questions about justice and goodness. He says: ’If people were good, punishment would be

unnecessary, therefore the function of all government must be – the definition of and subsequent

encouragement of goodness.’16 He thinks that people make goodness difficult by their immoral

behavior, making it impossible to achieve and perceiving it as a kind of victory after a long time of acts

of badness. When his brothers die, the king appoints a teacher to him, a bishop, to educate him

because he will be the future king.The bishop’s purpose in his education will be to kill through a long

process of deprivations of truth, books and love his inner sense of justice. Second Lear is not yet

indoctrinated but is presented as a completely soulless person having sex with Prudentia, a lawyer

whose femininity is ‘undiscovered’ and ’habitually absented’: a bad mother. Lear is not able to define

his feelings for Prudentia and they range from love to his readiness to kill her and take her daughter

instead. He receives encouragement for that from the bishop but decides not to do it which the bishop

understands as the failure of education meant to teach indifference, cruelty, injustice and designed to

kill conscience. Lear is presented as an emotional manipulator, a liar and Prudentia loves him only

because he will become the king. He himself does not find that he is fit to rule – he acts like a child, his

emotional responses go into extremes; at one time he is an actor on other occasions he is tormented

by his conscience when he hears the voices from the gaol reminding him of the injustices done. The

one that is supposed to correct him is Clarissa who is the embodiment of love, truth and femininity. In

her relationship with him Clarissa insists on truth, avoiding all flattery, and on love and feelings defying

mere sex as ‘dead iron on a mountain.’ Lear is a child split between his genuine self and the self that

he has to be as a king. This makes him completely incapable of ruling and being successful in wars,

which is expected of a king. His wife Clarissa is there to save him and criticize him because she cares

for him and sees goodness and decency that has been obstructed by the education he received from

the bishop. She approves of Bishop’s murder – his death is inevitable and is for the sake of children

whose humanity will not be killed through his teaching. Before he is killed, the bishop asks Kent

whether he is really the only one to be removed. Clarissa is aware of this and knows that she has to

kill her mother Prudentia who represents the justice system. Clarissa has to punish her mother for not

16 Barker, Howard, Seven Lears: The Pursuit of The Good, p. 2

12

realizing that pity and love can be ‘correction.’ Prudentia is loveless and cannot understand what urges

her daughter to seek for the correction of her husband.

By the end of the play Lear is astray from the path of finding his real self and the good but is still

able to realize that his wife and her love were able to cure him. Having discovered the gaol that

tormented Lear from his earliest childhood, Clarissa vanishes leaving him his three daughters Regan,

Goneril and Cordelia to instruct them and prepare for the world. There is no bishop, but now it is Lear

who teaches them. The gaol is silent and Lear’s children cannot be redeemed for they are like their

uncles wishing to build castles on the beach and fly kites that stand for every child whose humanity

and the right to be what it chooses is killed by the system.

Barker’s Seven Lears tries to answer the question whether it would be different if Goneril, Regan

and Cordelia had a mother and Lear a wife. In Shakespeare’s version Lear is presented as an

autocratic ruler whose life in the play is seen as a kind of ‘purgatorial pilgrimage in which arrogance,

moral blindness and inhumanity are stripped away, and a fundamental humanity is left.’17 Lear’s

daughters Goneril and Regan, influenced by the distorted human values, are seen as evil, inhuman

beasts regarding their behavior to the father. They use nice words to satisfy their father’s need to be

flattered (and not showed genuine affection) and take the land that he is willing to divide among the

three daughters. They are his daughters who use his own practices which they were taught to. The

only one that differs is Cordelia who is not prepared to use the language of her sisters. Love for the

father is something she naturally feels and she does not show the need to exaggerate it because it is

understood. Lear does not recognize this due to the fact that he has not developed this faculty of

nature in himself. His error is huge and is against nature which becomes wild and disrupted due to the

disrupted order in the society. He is punished for it by the death of all three daughters after having

realized the power of love, pity and forgiveness. There is no possibility of correction for him in the

sense of having another chance with his daughter Cordelia-he is severely punished and the very

knowledge that love brings a soul’s content and not a territory, gold or conquering is his only reward

for awakening.

Fortune and Men’s Eyes

John Herbert’s play is set in a reformatory, in a criminal world of its inmates who talking about their

parents bring in the facts from the outside world. In both the worlds there has been going on the same

destructive process of soul-murder seen as the degradation of the feminine. We find out about the

prison life both through the life of its inmates Rocky, Queenie, Smitty and Mona inside and outside.

They are all prisoners for being their parents’ children who have taken over their sins. The play

17Drama in the Twentieth Century, Comparative and Critical Essays, p.326

13

questions the validity of the law which first generates the criminal behaviour and then prosecutes it.

The play poses the questions what kind of values are legally protected and maintained what kind of

actions are truly offensive.

Rocky is a hardened criminal who likes his criminal background seen in his family. On the other

hand, Queenie is an orphan whom his mother, a prostitute, has abandoned. He follows his mother’s

steps and becomes a prostitute too. Smitty gets imprisoned for trying to help his mother escape from

his father whom he describes as18

…a respectable married man, a substantial citizen with his own business-the hardhearted bastard. Hard is a good

word for him.

Rocky and Queenie are both homosexuals, illegal in the outside world, while Mona is unjustly put in

the same category. Mona/Jan is seen as19

His nature seems almost more feminine than effeminate because it is not mannerism that calls attention to an

absence of masculinity so much as the sum of his appearance, lightness of movement and gentleness of action

and it was by the presence of effeminacy that he was degraded and persecuted.

Rocky and Queenie assume the only available sex roles of Old man and Old woman while Smitty

and Mona struggle to escape these stereotypes and remain human. Queenie was abused in the

outside world in which he tried to find the way out of foster homes and orphanages by starting to be

responsible for his life through renting body that is prostituting. In the reformatory, it is Mona who is

abused and debased throughout the play. He is referred to as ‘it’, he is threatened, beaten and

violated but not prostituted. Mona ‘likes her independence’ and discharges all the sick games and

power relationships of the world that do not have to be taken up but resisted and transcended. At one

point in the play when she is about to deliver ‘the quality of mercy’ speech from The merchant of

Venice, her performance is prohibited as subversive because, as Hamlet would say, it is possible to

catch the conscience of not only the king in it. The time of the performance coincides with the day of

Christmas when Smitty has to answer the question ‘to be or not to be’ that is to refuse to be re-formed

by the prison world, or to submit and survive but morally and emotionally die.

The prison world of the play is without women but it still depicts the way the feminine is treated-it

must not survive in both men and women except its degraded remnant, the whore. What happens to

Smitty is that he undergoes a process of brainwashing to be integrated into the respectable adult world

which wants him to become a woman-destroyer. The process is almost complete when Mona saves

18 Herbert, John, Fortune and Men’s Eyes p.9319 Ibid, p. 67

14

him by telling him that the relationship pattern of Old Man and Old Woman is deadly due to the fact

that it is indifference, easy convenience and not a deep emotional need.20

Now you’ve flexed your muscles and found power, I’m an easy convenience. Not a Queenie! Oh no; I’d never turn

on you. If I mattered, you’d be afraid of my feelings-not sure of them. You are offering me indifference. Well, I

don’t want it.

What saves them is Shakespeare’s sonnet XXIX in which love is remembered; by reading it Jan and

Smitty recognize what has happened to them and they remember who they really are and what they

carry in their hearts. This enables them to dispel the conception of the self they are forced to conform

to and enact in the world of violence directly opposed to mercy and justice.

Conclusion

20 Ibid, p.94

15

Ted Hughes notes that ’tragic error belongs exclusively to the psychology of the man’ therefore

men should try to correct it. The warriors embrace and merge with the lovers.21If in the prison cell of

Herbert’s play in which Smitty’s divided mind tries to understand itself, the kiss of understanding and

acceptance of the other resolves the inner war, heals and reintegrates what has been dissociated and

antagonized, then the outside world also has a chance of redemption and survival. Survival lies in the

Hamlet-like struggle or in art as seen in the examples of Mona and Clarissa who find shelter in texts

that have kept the evidence of the essence of human nature. Ransom puts out that ‘only our dreams

and our memories reproach us’ for in them things forgotten and suppressed ‘come live’ again. Lady

Macbeth could not after all simply wash a murder off her hands. She did not take into account that her

guilty conscience will come to her in dreams and reproach her for the unnatural, violent act.

21 Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, O promeni, Kulturološki eseji, p.123

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