The skeletal remains of
England’s King Richard III were found beneath a parking lot in the midlands
city of Leicester, where once a monastery of the greyfriars stood before it was
destroyed in the English Reformation.
The 16th-Century
bard William Shakespeare devoted an entire play to the doomed king, one of four
plays devoted to the War of the Roses. In
it, the playwright creates perhaps the greatest villain in the history of the
stage.
Great art arises from deep
pain. Whatever the medium – be it in
sight or sound, words or texture – deep-felt human emotion gives rise to great
art. Deep calls on deep, and the human heart
responds to the emotion it encounters in great art.
The skeleton found beneath
the parking lot reveals a serious case of scoliosis, a curved spine, but Shakespeare
revealed that the twisted form of Richard III went far deeper than his bones. He
makes the man’s physical deformity the embodiment of his moral deformity. While the set of plays in which he is cast
unfolds, we are introduced to Richard with the words of one character
describing him as “a foul, undigested lump, as crooked in manners as in shape.”
When Richard comes onto the
world’s stage in Shakespeare’s retelling, the audience is masterfully led
beyond the physical deformity. We are
invited into the private realm of his feelings, his thoughts, his motivations. We are taken in to his heart. We are led to
feel as he feels – deeply, passionately, madly – and as we feel his pain we are
led to pity the man so cruelly treated by nature and fate.
Richard turns toward the
audience in a soliloquy and opens his heart:
“Love forswore me in my
mother’s womb,
And she did corrupt frail
nature with some bribe
To shrink mine arm up like a
withered shrub,
To make an envious mountain
on my back —
Where sits a deformity to
mock my body —
To make my legs of an unequal
size,
To disproportion me in every
part.
Am I then a man to be
beloved?
O, monstrous fault, to harbor
such a thought!
Then, since this Earth
affords no joy to me
But to command, to check, to
overbear such
As are better person than
myself,
I’ll make my heaven to dream
upon the crown,
And while I live, to account
this world but hell,
Until my mis-shapen trunk
that bears this head
Be round impaled with a
glorious crown.”
From deep pain, great art has
arisen. Richard has concluded that he is
unlovable, and so his only recourse against the unfairness of his life is to
achieve power and greatness. “I cannot
be loved,” he seems to say, “and so I shall gain respect in power.” At that
point, the audience wants to cheer him on to success, wants to see him realize
his dreams, wants this lonely and misshapen man to be happy.
At this point Shakespeare can
say, “Gotcha!” The master has led us to leave
reason behind and follow Richard with pure emotion as passionate as his own
aching heart.
The audience now has empathy
with this pitiable man, and as in subsequent scenes as we are led through his achievement
of his goals, we want to cheer him on.
We can almost overlook the cruelty by which he rises to the throne of
England by the murder of all who stand in his way. He deserves something better than what fate
has given him, and his crass disregard for right and wrong has no meaning in
his path to fulfillment. Moral judgments are suspended; right and wrong are
turned upside-down because we so want this lonely man to find happiness in his
dream of power.
“Gotcha.”
Although Shakespeare casts
his play as a tragedy, the real tragedy is that this type of moral manipulation
goes on everyday around us.
Watch for it in the secular
news and in secular entertainment. Whether on radio, television, internet, or
in print, the same gambit is used constantly to lead us beyond the point of
moral judgment and into accepting what – with clear reason and unclouded
emotion – we would always recognize as wrong.
A story is told. In the story we meet a person with deep
emotions: fright, confusion, self-doubt, hurt, anger, loneliness. We are
invited by the retelling of the story to pity the person, and when our own
emotions are captured in the dragnet of the story’s sentimentality – gotcha! –
only then are we confronted with the real crux of the story: something which,
with unclouded reason, we would otherwise recognize as a moral wrong. Over and
over again this pattern is repeated, in news and in sit-coms, in films and in
human interest stories. With the skill of the great bard long ago, the story
opens us to deep emotion and then asks us to suspend moral judgment in favor of
pity.
But right is right and wrong
is wrong, sin is sin, and what is disordered remains disordered even if we so desperately
want the subject of our pity to find happiness. The goal of this trap is for us
to conclude that the only absolute is the right to happiness, and any means are
acceptable to attain it. What we would
recognize as wrong or sinful or evil in any other setting becomes something we
can overlook when we fall into this trap.
Gotcha!
There is a cruel reality
which every generation has had to face: life is sometimes unfair and there are
things that happen in life that we can’t always understand or explain. This reality
points us in hope toward a goal beyond this world, and by realizing that some
aches cannot be healed and some thirsts cannot be slaked in this life, we allow
a more penetrating reality to remain always in our purview: we were created for
infinity, for Heaven, for life with God, and nothing less will suffice.
From deep pain arises great
art. Even more so, from deep pain arises
great faith.
February 9, 2013
