Essay on "Compare and Contrast Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams"

Essay 5 pages (1923 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Blanche's breakdown over the course of the play is marked by obviously performative behavior, until she is eventually dressed in a costume -- "crumpled white satin evening gown and a pair of scuffed silver slippers," "rhinestone tiara" -- and openly play-acting alone while drunk (122). Stanley attacks Blanche in ways that compare her not only to an actor, but specifically to a Shakespearean actress: "You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light bulb with a paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you're the queen of the Nile!" (123-4). For Hamlet, mental difficulty may be a performance, an "antic disposition" that is "put on," but the involvement of actual professional actors causes Hamlet to spring into a relentless self-analysis, wondering how the actor could summon tears and activity "but in a fiction, in a dream of passion ... and all for nothing" while Hamlet is paralyzed by inactivity while having real motives instead of imaginary fictional ones. Hamlet then hopes to turn the idea of seeing actors perform into a method of action, by forcing Claudius to watch his own actions played out onstage, claiming this will give him reason to kill Claudius if he admits his own guilt by reacting. But of course when Claudius does react, Hamlet does not kill him. In both cases, however, we realize that the complications of the character's psychology end up being turned into something self-referential by the dramatist. For Blanche du Bois to dress up in a rhinestone tiara while talking to herself, or for Hamlet to playact at madness or be astonished at the real emotions expressed by an actor over fictional situations, show us characters in a play suddenly acting like characters in a play. In both cases, a depth is added to the portrait of a protagonist's troubled psychology by reminding us that passionate emotions over something that may be imagined or hallucinated -- like a father's ghost that nobody else can see, or a haunting tune that nobody else can hear -- are exactly what actors and audiences undergo. As a result, the madness does not seem alienating to the audience -- it seems like something closer to the experience of theater than we normally permit ourselves to admit.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. MIT Shakespeare Project. Online. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html

Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet, 1951. Print. READ MORE

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