[Download] "Speaking Process (Critical Essay)" by Shakespeare Studies " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Speaking Process (Critical Essay)
- Author : Shakespeare Studies
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 105 KB
Description
IDENTIFICATION OF ETHICAL ACTION may be an inescapable "human" compulsion, evident at least in part, as we all know, in Hamlet's "to be, or not to be," (3.1.56). (1) But the act of speaking the ethical into being, as early modern humanists understood only too well, is in itself no guarantee of the ethical. Human speaking just as easily may be duplicitous, manipulative, in its effects also deadly. Moreover, it remains flail. The tradition that, as Erica Fudge points out, maintained that "speaking is the site of the human" (65) and that placed the "animal" as "the thing which the human is constantly setting itself against," (2) acknowledges simultaneously and by implication that "human-hess" is "a quality which must be learned and can be lost" (65). Humans, according to early modern humanists, have to learn to speak, and so, become "human". Even so, the "human," as Thomas Adams sermonized in the first half of the seventeenth century, remains dangerously proximate to the "animal," in the case of wrongful action, particularly, to "mysticall wolues; rauenous beasts in the formes of men.... The wicked haue many resemblances to wolues." (3) Indeed skepticism about the possibility of establishing any distinction between the "human"--and the human power of speech-and the "non-human," reaches a point of particular intensity in the late twentieth century in, for example Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain, performed at the National Theater in London, 1980, when, just after he has been raped by Roman soldiers the Druid priest speaks of survival in a manner that infers rejection of speech as means to the ethical, the "human," and the humane: