英文摘要 |
Among Shakespeare's royal tragedies, King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth are renowned for madness and death. Juxtaposing tragic characters' extreme emotions with corresponding scenes is to pave the way for or foreshadow a tragic ending-death. Edmund Burke defined two aesthetic categories-beauty and sublimity, the latter is derived from pain and fear, which are the extreme emotions expressed by tragic characters. Grounded on Burke's aesthetic explanation of sublimity, this study hypothesizes that these three tragedies may show a fusion of sublime feelings and sublime settings, foreshadowing dismal denouements. As some of main characters struggle with their extreme feelings, they appear in sublime scenes in which dark nights, cliffs, mountains, storms, and boundless sea may match their devastated minds. This study draws on Burke's definitions of natural elements and human emotions and Sigmund Freud's views of the human psyche to scrutinize the juxtaposition of tragic characters' sublime feelings and sublime settings. In King Lear, Edgar, disguised as a beggar, leads his grief-stricken father, Gloucester, to a moonlit cliff at Dover. Lear, seriously affected by his elder daughters' betrayal, feels emotional pain, and hence roams alone at night in a thunderstorm. Hamlet, obsessed by a deep feeling of sadness for the death of his father, visualizes the ghost in night scenes in Hamlet. Ophelia becomes distracted, singing a mourning song as a lament for her father's death, at night in Hamlet. As one of the darkest plays, Macbeth begins with thunder and lightning that welcome three witches. The sublime and terror-striking villain, Macbeth, kills Duncan and orders the murders of Banquo and Lady Macduff and her children. Horror-stricken, Lady Macbeth experiences visual hallucinations in nighttime scenes. To sum up, this article exemplifies the aesthetic effects in which the tragic characters' sublime feelings merge into the sublime settings in these three tragedies based on the homogeneity and compatibility. |