Word: heroic
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...would like to approach Antony and Cleopatra as a heroic drama written within a particular tradition, in order to encourage thought about the theme of honor, and to urge attendance at the Loeb production. Perhaps all of this will show how it is more than a "theme," but the deepest of all deep claims on trembling men, which by now must include most...
...attempts to dissolve this self in allegiance to something greater. He scorns the esteem of men, for the honor which only the gods can confide. He will have honor from Zeus. His vision is the expression of his inner gloriousness. The Hiad presents us with two central heroic requirements: towering ardor of will, and a vision of immensity. The former loves the world, the latter seeks to scorn it. The ardor of will (not simply pride) demands action; the vision involves adoration of something transcendental. The gods, which were both transcendental and a figuring forth of man's own greatness...
...Renaissance preferred Odysseus, the archetypically educated, reasonable man. Here was amplitude of mind rather than the highest pitch of heroic intensity. The Renaissance was obsessed with the Odyssey's apparent lesson that magnitude of mind ensured mortal serenity. They preferred the radiance of learning to the blaze of heroic will. As we shall see, Enobarbus's opposition of will and reason is in many ways the Renaissance equivalent of Achilles and Odysseus. The resourceful Odysseus and brilliant Achilles are tragic archetypes for order and perturbation, longevity and death...
...peaceful order of the community accompanies the reconciliation of male will with female fruition. Aeschylus introduces the distrust of violence. Eventually, the gods will dissolve sufficiently so that the power of action gives way to that of moral perception. Battlefield gives place to City. The great transformation of the heroic from the Hiad to the Orestcia to the Elizabethan Renaissance, was from Fate to Law to Reason...
...possible. They don't speak to each other, but keep trying to lurch into Shakespeare's execrable Titus Andronicus oratory. Too many speeches are self-contained. The wonderful music of speech, and the counterpoint of the scenes themselves, should be woven into breathing movements of lyrie felicity and heroic urgency. The company tends to interrupt speech with gesture, but this is a small problem indeed. I wished, above all, for the quiet felicity which allows the poetry to be released in human similitude...