Drama is philosophy acted out. Aristotle asked why tragedy gives pleasure and answered catharsis; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw in it the collision of two rights; Friedrich Nietzsche saw the union of Apollo’s form and Dionysus’s ecstasy. This room gathers every play and theatrical scene in the library.
Works
8
Antigone
Sophocles’ tragedy of the young woman who buries her brother against the king’s decree — the founding drama of conscience against the state, which Hegel read as the collision of two rights.
Oedipus the King
Sophocles’ tragedy of the king who hunts down the murderer of his predecessor — and discovers that he himself killed his father and married his mother. Aristotle’s model of the perfect tragedy.
The Little Clay Cart
Śūdraka’s Sanskrit comedy of love, crime and revolution — a poor Brahmin merchant, a generous courtesan, a burglar with a theory of house-breaking, a vicious royal brother-in-law and a popular uprising — the most realistic and modern-feeling play of ancient India.
The Recognition of Śakuntalā
Kālidāsa’s seven-act masterpiece — a king and a hermit girl fall in love in a forest, a curse erases his memory, a lost ring restores it, and the lovers are reunited in heaven. The most celebrated play in Sanskrit, which astonished Goethe and Europe.
Hamlet
Shakespeare’s longest play — a prince ordered by his father’s ghost to avenge a murder thinks, doubts, delays, feigns madness, and dies in the act.
King Lear
An old king divides his kingdom between the daughters who flatter him and banishes the one who loves him — and is stripped of everything on a heath in a storm.
Macbeth
Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy — a brave soldier, prompted by witches and his wife, murders his king and wades so deep in blood that life becomes “a tale told by an idiot”.
Faust
Goethe’s two-part dramatic poem of the scholar who wagers his soul with Mephistopheles that no moment of pleasure will ever satisfy him — the defining myth of modern restless striving.
Characters
5Cordelia
Lear’s youngest daughter, who will not flatter, is disinherited, returns to rescue him, forgives him with “No cause, no cause” — and is hanged.
Edmund
Gloucester’s illegitimate son — the brilliant, charming, self-made villain of King Lear, who worships Nature as amoral force and scorns “the plague of custom”.
Hamlet
Prince of Denmark — scholar, wit, mourner, avenger who cannot avenge — the most quoted and most interpreted character in literature.
King Lear
The proud old king who divides his kingdom by a love test, banishes the daughter who loves him, and is stripped of everything until he learns, too late, what love and suffering are.
Lear's Fool
The king’s jester, who tells Lear the truth in riddles, songs and jokes — and vanishes from the play after the storm.
Great Scenes
8The Blinding of Gloucester
Betrayed by Edmund, Gloucester is tied to a chair and blinded by Cornwall while Regan watches — and learns in the same instant that Edgar was innocent.
The Death of Cordelia
Lear enters carrying his hanged daughter, howling, searching for her breath with a mirror and a feather — “Never, never, never, never, never.”
The Dover Cliff
Edgar leads his blind father to a “cliff” that isn’t there, lets him leap, and convinces him he has survived by a miracle — curing his despair with a theatrical trick.
Lear Wakes: "No Cause, No Cause"
Lear wakes from madness to find Cordelia beside him, thinks he is in hell, begs her forgiveness — and she answers with two words that undo the whole tragedy.
The Storm on the Heath
Shut out by his daughters, Lear rages at the storm, prays for the poor, and meets “unaccommodated man” in the naked Poor Tom.
To Be, or Not to Be
Hamlet’s soliloquy weighing life against death — the most famous speech in English, and a compressed treatise on suicide, fear and the paralysis of thought.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Macbeth, told that his wife is dead, delivers the bleakest speech in Shakespeare — life is a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
Alas, Poor Yorick
In the graveyard, Hamlet is handed the skull of the jester who carried him on his back as a child — and sees where all flesh, wit and glory end.
Coming to the Library
11 pages being writtenVoices
quotations from this traditionTo be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio — a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty… the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow… the readiness is all.
The rest is silence.