Shakespeare's Pathos and Attention to Detail

Shakespeare's Pathos (cont).

From Shakespeare's Pathos by J. F. Pyre. In Shakespeare Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin.

Shakespeare skillfully associates his pathos with the leisurely pursuits and the most sensitive opera tions of the mind: such occupations as reading, listening to music, meditation, friendly converse; such intuitive operations as are involved in shy and random reminiscence, recapitulation, or comparison, or in half-conscious or vaguely relevant planning, premonition and presentiment.

These moods fall in moments of reunion or leave-taking, of happiness after sorrow or safety after peril, of momentary release from labor or pain, in the lulls of grief or conflict, which, in tragedy, are but the suspensive pause before the blow, a momentary hush of the unexpended storm "from whose solid atmosphere, black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst" in the final cataclysm.

For the accentuation of these moods, Shakespeare frequently employs certain incidental accessories upon which he securely relies for the pathetic modulation of the scene. One of these accessories, already hinted at, is music, not extraneous, usually, but motived by the action and an organic part of it. The boy, Lucius, touches the lute while Brutus watches in his tent on the eve of Philippi; Ophelia's mad snatches, Desdemona's "Willow" song, the music which the Doctor prescribes for the awakening of Lear, Fidele's dirge in Cymbeline, and numerous minor instances are to the same purpose. Flowers, also, are accessories of pathetic suggestion. Nothing in the mad scenes of Ophelia, when portrayed on the stage, is more conducive to tears than her business with the flowers:

Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself
She turns to favour and to prettiness.

Other flower passages in the plays have been frequently commented on, because of their exquisite poetry. Such are Perdita's "I would I had some flowers o' the spring", etc., and Arviragus's less famous or at least less frequently quoted, but hardly less beautiful

With fairest flowers

Whilst summer lasts and I live here, Fidele,
I'll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack
The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azured harebell, like thy veins, no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweet' ned not thy breath.

How to cite this article:
Pyre, J. F. Shakespeare's Pathos. In Shakespeare Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1916. Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2011. (date when you accessed the information) < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/shakespearepathos4.html >.

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