Let us remember, (shall we?), that Shakespeare was entertaining the same type of crowd that pretty much tunes into Oprah on the TV today. I don't think that everyone alive today is necessarily an emotional "drama queen" along with her mate and friends.

I am guessing many of his archetypal character descend directly down from the old Greek plays, where they also were trying to please the crowds, (AKA the man on the street).

Not all literature needs to include character development, although it certainly adds a richness if done right, and not (God help us) over done. Some literature can simply tell a darn good story. In other words, the events themselves can take center stage.

Dickens was one of the greatest of all story tellers, absolutely lurid and fantastic in his imagination and writing, and produced some of the most memorable characters in all literature. But the problem is that the characters don't change in the slightest through his books, they're cardboard cutouts, they repeat themselves, they don't grow. Even the title character of his masterwork David Copperfield doesn't really change, he just passes through as things change around him.

Wow, I have the complete opposite opinion about this, for a couple reasons. (In summary, I believe there IS a problem with sci fi, but it's the opposite of what you describe as the problem).

First, having read the entire complete works of shakespeare over the last 3 or 4 months, what's abundantly clear to me is that 400 years ago, during the life of Shakespeare, people's obsessions, loves, hates, inclinations, hesitations, and basic 'human nature' were no different at all than they are right now. Go back farther -- look at the story of Job from the Bible -- this is a character than anyone in today's world, 2500 or 3000 years later, can instantly identify with. So why should this not be the same 500 or 1000 years from now?

Second, I was once reading a review of a sci fi novel in the NY Times Book Review, and the reviewer made an extremely poignant comment about sci fi. The reviewer said that fundamentally the problem with science fiction is that it's about the premise and not about the characters. This is probably even more true for fantasy novels, because the archetypes are better established.

In my opinion the best sci fi novels expound on human nature -- they put complex humans into situations in which their psychology, their motivations, and their personalities propel the action. Ender's Game is a great example of this. On the other hand, a novel like Dune, like Lord of the Rings, is impressive and lurid because of the highly ornate and imaginative setting and exceptional language, but these works suffer because the characters are types. They're stuck in their molds, they hardly change.

Is it plausible or implausible that humans should have changed in the future?

Doesn't matter -- the book is being written for us and our current understanding of humans. As they say, ghost stories aren't written for ghosts...

Perhaps this is a point he was trying to make-- people, many times, don't truly grow and change, but they wander through life in stagnation. Maybe this is a less hopeful way of viewing individuals, but more realistic. I sometimes think that stories with characters that all grow and change dramatically throughout the story are more fantastical than realistic...

I sometimes think that stories with characters that all grow and change dramatically throughout the story are more fantastical than realistic...

I think it does the same thing as Aristotle talked about in poetics, that as subjects for drama we seek the rich and the powerful because we find their lives more interesting..We crave the pathos of distance....

Well we expect as much from the future, that it will make humanity powerful in comparison... The fact is that we could already be in the future if we could learn again to manage society with justice so we could have peace...It is the rich and powerful that we find so interesting that are holding us back, in a psychological childhood for humanity...

Look at the Illiad, and much of Greek Drama... I like the Orestia, but the whole bunch of them move like puppets on a string...

Many of the characters in Shakespeare's plays were obviously mentally ill, and totally self-involved; take Othello and Hamlet for instance. If they were one of your personal friends, you would probably say to them, "Oh, get off it."

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Stephen King is already being taught in serious university lit classes. In 100 years It is likely that He, Dan brown etc... will be considered classic lit and people like Coelho etc... may have become a tiny footnote.

Aedes;100583 wrote:

No one ever said it has to be dramatic. Overdoing it is melodrama. But it's a higher level of plot development if things happen because of decisions characters make, not because of some deus ex machina or an act of god. And characters need to have thought processes, they need to think, consider, evolve, be conflicted, even be irrational or self-contradictory.

Think of some of the best characters that are like this. Hamlet; Alyosha Karamazov; Levin (from Anna Karenina).

Ahab from Moby Dick is a great character. He doesn't change at all, but what makes him great is that he's tortured, he's irrational, and he knows it. He's willing to bring the entire universe down with him.

From my understanding, the types of anti heroes are thus: Those who do what they do not knowing what they do -who accept the consequences... Those who do what they do knowing what they do, and then try to avoid the consequences, and those who are not really human, but are god like: Achilles, and Promaethius... When Achilles was warned that his death would follow hus revenge, he said: Prepare me for my death... Ahab was no less than these...It make one wonder which leg got chewed off...

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Then how can you explain Les Miserables, one of the most popular novels ever written, which is specifically about the most wretched impoverished people and criminals? How do you explain many of Dostoyevsky's characters? How do you explain nearly all of Charles Dickens' works? How do you explain Mark Twain's works? There are no rich and powerful, or at least very little. Huck Finn, Raskolnikov, Jean Valjean, Oliver Twist, these are not rich and powerful heroes.

I do not hope to explain exceptions... As the people have grown more powerful drama has become more democratic... Look at the art of the French during the revolution... One went easily from classical scenes of the Romans to dead letters in a bath tub... On the whole, the poor are a subject of comedy, and the rich are a subject of tragedy... Look at the formal art of Shakespeare...There were no low borns except the occasianal dwarf...If the artist in more democratic times believes all wisdom resides with the people is it so strange when the occasional one believes all evil resides there ???...

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The rich and the powerful are simply a distillation of the rest of us. With science fiction people mainly are writing grand epics, and for this reason many of the characters are powerful plot-moving heroes, the futuristic Paris and Achilles and Priam and Agammemnon... But it needn't be so.

Yup. Greek drama and epics are truly wonderful, but no character from that era is haunted like MacBeth, is self-destructive like Lear, has the pathos and hurt of Othello, seethes like Hamlet, or broods like Richard III

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Hamlet was not mentally ill at all. He intentionally fakes being mentally ill in front of everyone. Ophelia was mentally ill, but definitely not Hamlet. Othello wasn't mentally ill either, he was gullible and manipulated. Lady MacBeth was mentally ill, MacBeth himself went mad, Lear was maybe mad but he was predominantly stodgy and incorrigible. In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of a major tragic character in Shakespeare who was truly mad. Romeo and Juliet were stupid impetuous adolescents. The characters from the histories were Machiavellian and treacherous at their worst, heroic at their best.

Not true... The rich are rich because they wish to set themselves apart...

Othello shows to what extent men depend upon women for their honor

Romeo and Juliet show a transitional stage of Western civilization, when law was taking over, and the defense of honor was forbidden...

when money mad Shylock demanded his pound of flesh, no one of that time doubted which pound was refered to...

Aedes;100728 wrote:

So you're redefining "rich" to suit your argument, then. We're interested in the "rich" and "powerful", where "rich" can apply to Fantine who has to sell her hair and teeth and then dies of tuberculosis, and powerful can apply to Oliver Twist who is imprisoned in an orphanage for asking for food. So long as "rich and powerful" are meaningful terms, your argument just doesn't stand. If any main character in any story is by definition rich and powerful, then you've deprived the terms of any meaning whatsoever.

The reason we focus on them is that we all think we are noble, honorable people removed by fate from real choice in our lives...But choice often brings down the great...

Hmm, I must have missed that theme all four times I've read the play. Seemed to me that Othello and Desdemona were madly in love, but Iago convinced Othello that Desdemona was unfaithful. The character of Othello, just as the character of Timon of Athens, of Lear, and of Coriolanus, show us rashness.

Certainly, rashness, but also the extent to which honor was the economy of the past...People want to be rich because wealth is the equivalent of honor, but where money is dear honor is cheap... But not in the past... Even today in many parts of the world no man considered to be without honor would be abroad...Perhaps ten years back a man killed all his daughters and a step daughter because the step daughter left her husband who put her to work in a cement plant... As his wife looked on clutching he son, the father grabbed his daughters one by one and cut their throats... His step daughter had threatened his honor which may have been his sole wealth, an essential element of his making any income... Where people are poor, they more than any others must be able to trust their neighbors, and neighbors must be honorable to be trusted...Yet; no man has to dishonor another to have honor... With money it is the opposite, that one man's gain is another's loss... We want security, but to have it at all we must take securiity from others, and people used to living that way, without security can be dangerous, living by their wits, violent...So they are not like us... They do not know the meaning of enough... Greed is a disease for individual and society alike...Listen... I do not need to defend the position...It has been a long time since I read it in Aristotle, and I am certain he was speaking of tragedy... We like to see people fall from high places until we realize that is us, how we see ourselves, no worse really, but one step removed..

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Romeo and Juliet, quite plainly, is a play about the self-destructiveness of melodramatic, impetuous adolescents. Even the elder Capulets and Montagues are willing to bridge the feud between families for the sake of the youngsters. Juliet is 13 years old in the play, it's mentioned several times, her nurse keeps trying to make the romance work, Romeo's father chides him for how fleeting love is to someone his age, then Romeo has to go lash out and kill Tybalt and screw everything up, then the two of them hatch some completely unrealistic plan to elope and they die in the process. It's not about honor, it's about teenage angst.

You should try to look a scenery as well as scene...Feud societies were quite common, and the peace was very often made with a wedding...As one of my old, and few college proffesors said: The difference between tragedy and comedy is a funeral and a wedding...Seen from the pespective of society, society is united by te exclusion of te criminal...Seen from the perspective of the individual, nothing could be worse...Athens used to take the bodies of its crimminals, and literally throw them out of the country, over the nearest border...Look at what was happening historically in Romeo and Juliet... The state was making a preogative of justice... Before the church took over society in the twelth century, when Jesus did not show up for the millenium, it also reintroduce the code of Justinian, and that required Greek philosophy to make understandable... At that point in time we have the beginning of the social contract, where weapons were surrendered, and no man could defend his honor with violence...People gave peace for the promise of justice...Obviously, defenses of honor still occured for a long time, with sword play... Cardinal Richelieu had one notorious dueler executed for fighting another successful duel right under his nose after he had forbidden the act...What could he do under the circumstances??? Well In Romeo and Juliet we see two families unablle to make peace in the traditional way, with a marriage, and the state representative is unable to compel peace from either side, and within the milieu the love story is played out...
Are you sure? As Shylock says:

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Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Shylock compares flesh to flesh to illustrate the injustice he has felt. The flesh he demands is literal, but it's in exchange for metaphorical flesh he's already yielded (and ultimately yields in his daughter and in his religion).[/
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Pretty sure, Shylock made antonio swear in front of a notary, and it is unlikely that he would take less than a pledge such as he would himself give... And he referes to it as a pound of flesh as pleases him, and does it not please all??? And taken from a man??? And nearest the merchants heart, and what is nearer or dearer...Remember; Shylock had no love of Antonio, who spat at him and cursed him... What pound would you not surrender to keep your junk intact??? And what would you with a rusty knife most love to cut off of your enemies???

I must point out that such maimings as we have attempted in A Merchant of Venice were not uncommon as punishments, or to pay off an unpaid debt...Nietzsche makes much of this, but it was very recent in Europe...Before that time, it was the reverse, that feuding people demanded blood money for injuries as small as a lost finger... It was the injury that formerly caused the debt...

Certainly, rashness, but also the extent to which honor was the economy of the past...

I do not need to defend the position...It has been a long time since I read it in Aristotle, and I am certain he was speaking of tragedy...

Pretty sure, Shylock made antonio swear in front of a notary, and it is unlikely that he would take less than a pledge such as he would himself give... And he referes to it as a pound of flesh as pleases him, and does it not please all??? And taken from a man??? And nearest the merchants heart, and what is nearer or dearer...Remember; Shylock had no love of Antonio, who spat at him and cursed him... What pound would you not surrender to keep your junk intact??? And what would you with a rusty knife most love to cut off of your enemies???

Aedes,

We have Hamlet talking to his dead father, and totally obsessing, not to mention the blood bath that takes place. If this same stuff were on the nightly news in our times, people would shake their heads and really wonder about this Hamlet guy. I think they might at least bring him in for observation before simply declaring a homocidal criminal.

Othello was utterly gullible it is true. He was gullible to the point of foolishness. To be that gullible, the groundwork has to be laid out in your mind beforehand and just waiting for a trigger to set it off. He was a danger to himself and others, the very definition of insane.

Youth is always impetuous, so Romeo and Juliet were as well. (Sameold/sameold) What made this a problem with a terrible outcome, were the adults in this story. Their feuding had gotten way out of hand. Perhaps this is why in the end, it was they who were held responsible. It was said outright, that the death of these young lovers was a punishment on both their houses.

S9

Fido,

Different milieu, or honor, whatever you choose to call it; it is just the EGO thinly disguised. Anyone that has lost control of his ego is in for trouble, one way or the other.

It isn't just the sharks that fall into blood lust. They say that that this 'feeling of ultimate power,' or the power to take another man's life, is addicting to some (weak minded?) individuals.

Man is a social animal. I believe that is one of the things that keeps our feet on the ground, or rather keeps us from flying off into a self made madness of one sort or another. It is our ability to consider the other guy, and in this way gain some perspective.

When we become too self-obsessed, (AKA obsessed with our own thoughts and feelings and thereby disregard the thoughts and feelings of others), these tenuous threads, that keep us sane, begin to ravel and even break altogether.

I think that the whole idea of civilization was based upon cooperation, and in this fashion was meant to keep us from, all too easily, slipping into our more base and/or animal nature.

All of our present day wars, like the wars of old, are simply an extension of this foolishness, or a matrix of excuses, which we have built around our own individual and our group Egos that have gone off course.

We honor our soldiers who follow orders without question, and throw our conscientious objectors in jail. Go figure! This all goes back to our belief that there is a solution to be had with the sword, "might is right," and (lets face it) our stepping into violence/vengeance because it feels so dog-gone good and freeing.

(Impulse, like children, longs to be free.)

So many swords: so where (I ask you) is this solution we are all talking about, and mindlessly believing in?

This simply proves to me, in vivid Technocolor/blood RED, that humanity is still in its infancy.

S9

Nietzsche was brilliant. But instead of keeping some people too dumb to understand him, we should educate everyone so that everyone can read him, understand him, and make the reasonable decision to reject his philosophy.