If we ignore the first quote, we will get the second. History may be defined as what a culture considers worthy of recollection. Of course the operative word is WORTHY!! How do we define what is worthy?

Traditionally, what is worthy may be viewed from at least four perspectives:

1--THEOCENTRIC--Hamlet tells us "There is a Divinity that shapes our ends..."
We may not always know the plan, but it does exist.

2--HUMANISTIC--Protagoras noted that "Man is the measure of all things." We chart our own destiny.

3--NATURALISTIC--Rousseau said in the Emile that a natural education, that is one shaped by the proper environment, will produce moral individuals.

4--ECONOMIC--We may argue with Marx that the great revolutions of history are products of class struggle in which the 'have-nots' struggle to dispossess the 'haves' who naturally will fight to keep what they own.

Which is correct? All? None? Some synthesis? Who determines? In the words of Martha Nussbaum,

from: Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. pp. 28-29.

• Why does Plato have his persona Socrates use verbs of passion to express the most sublimely cognitive thoughts?. See: (Republic 490b.). Note that the classical concept of harmony and balance must work for all three elements; not just the top one. The macrocosmic correspondence likewise applies.

B. ASSIGNMENT: construct a definition of human nature from the classical perspective that has a gothic potential. Sources:

CLICK HERE FOR NEOCLASSICAL TEXTS AND COMMENTARY

See also: Abrams, M.A. The Mirror and the Lamp. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971.

II. THE RENAISSANCE / THE PRAGMATIC THEORY became popular in England in the literary criticism of the Renaissance. Read the following excerpts from Sidney's Defense of Poetry and note the debt to, and modification of Aristotle: Click here.

Shakespeare of course wrote during this period, and although he did not compose a formal treatise on what literature ought to do, his plays are replete with characters who know. What three plays seem to articulate his poetics...

One involves a ghost and advice to the players (III,ii):

Hamlet: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as live the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the cars of the groundlings, who (for the most part) are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipp'd for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.
Player: I warrant your honour.
Hamlet: Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show Virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

The second has a duke who talks of the imagination in Act V:

Theseus: More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear?

The Third involves another duke on an island (IV,i):

Prospero: You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort,
As if you were dismay'd; be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity.
If you be pleas'd, retire into my cell
And there repose; a turn or two I'll walk
To still my beating mind.

Along with the inductive/deductive analogies in Ulysses' order and degree speech in Troilus (cited on this page), these passages synthesize what Shakespeare thought of his craft: art is mimetic, it requires imaginative insight to teach and delight, and has the substance of dreams. Ironically the last bestows permanence as Sonnet XVIII suggests in the couplet:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

III. THE ROMANTIC PERIOD / THE EXPRESSIVE THEORY:

• The expressive theory defines the Romantic temperament. Rooted in paradox and the simultaneous rejection and acceptance of dialectical opposites., the romantics defined themselves by accepting no definitions at all. Confusing as that sounds, one must approach the romantic and gothic spirit by accepting all contradictions.
• In THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND, Richard Tarnas offers several very astute observations that suggest a gothic perspective:

  1. Speaking of the rise of modern psychological theories of human cognition, Tarnas speaks of psychoanalysis as revealing, "...the mechanisms of resistance, repression, and projection, and bring [ing] forth a host of other insights laying open the mind's character and internal dynamics. Freud thereby represented a brilliant culmination of the Enlightenment project, bringing even the human unconscious under the light of rational investigation." ("The Changing Image of the Human from Copernicus through Freud, p. 328)

  2, In the Chapter entitled, "Romanticism and its Fate," (p. 368) Tarnas continues: "...the Romantics' interest in human consciousness was fueled by a newly intense sense of self-awareness and a focus on the complex nature of the human self, and was comparatively unconstrained by the limits of the scientific perspective. Emotion and imagination, rather than reason and perception, were of prime importance. New concern arose not only with the exalted and noble but with the contraries and darkness in the human soul, with evil, death, the demonic, and the irrational. Generally ignored in the optimistic, clarified light of rational science, these themes now inspired the works of Blake and Novalis, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, Hawthorne and Melville, Poe and Baudelaire, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. With Romanticism, the modern eye was turned ever more inward to discern the shadows of existence. To explore the mysteries of interiority, of moods and motives, love and desire, fear and angst, inner conflicts and contradictions, memories and dreams, to experience extreme and incommunicable states of consciousness, to be inwardly grasped in epiphanic ecstasy, to plumb the depths of the human soul, to bring the unconscious into consciousness, to know the infinite--such were the imperatives of Romantic introspection.

The various Romantic writers have thus expressed paradoxes:

1. Rousseau: "Man is born free, but exists everywhere in chains, "(The Social Contract), but: "Put the child in his place and keep him there." (The Emile). One might also recall what Rousseau did with his own (illegitimate) children (see The Confessions)
2. Keats: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." (Ode on A Grecian Urn.)
3. Byron: "I have prayed / For madness as a blessing--'tis denied me." (from Manfred

• Certainly Shakespeare may be said to have invented what it means to be romantic. A good secondary source would be to read the introductory essays in Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy.( New York: Fawcett Press, n.d) .What is romantic drama?

Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Fawcett Press, n.d.