not easily ‘‘pursued’’—Shakespeare simultane-
ously harkens back to the Platonic and Neopla-
tonic ideas of wooing of the soul by rhetorical
means, and heralds modern first-person writing
and its quest to portray the multiplicity of per-
sonal reality. Self-contradicting characterization
elicits splintered identification in the reader; this
response generates interest and reader involve-
ment, causing ‘‘narrative’’ responses (‘‘What hap-
pens next? I wonder what will happen to him?
Will he be all right?’’) rather than only lyrical ones
(‘‘How true—it could be me saying this’’). Shake-
speare’s divided character promotes reader
involvement and fosters perception of his sequence
as an integral work.
Source:Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers, ‘‘Three Themes
in One, Which Wondrous Scope Affords: Ambiguous
Speaker and Storytelling in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets,’’’ in
Criticism, Vol. 49, No. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 285–305.
Richard Barbieri
In the following essay, Barbieri discusses Shake-
speare’s seven ages of man and refers to examples
from other literary works to illustrate the ages.
Jaques’ ‘‘seven ages’’ speech from Shake-
speare’sAs You Like Itis one of the dozen texts
assigned for memorization by teachers who want
their students to graduate with at least a little of
the Bard in their souls. Never mind that it is
immediately contradicted by the appearance of
hearty old Adam, who bears no resemblance to
any of these gloomy ages and stages, this passage
has entered the literary tradition as the paradigm
of our three score and ten.
How well do modem men, both authors and
characters, match this satirical survey of male
ambition and folly?
An initial problem is that, as E.M. Forster
noted, though birth and death are equally
momentous, the latter attracts far more atten-
tion from writers than the former. Our birth is
indeed, as Wordsworth put it, ‘‘a sleep and a
forgetting,’’ now termed by psychologists as
‘‘infantile amnesia.’’ Nevertheless, more than a
few writers have attempted to capture the mewl-
ing infant, from the opening words of Joyce’sA
Portrait of the Artist as A Young Manto Gunter
Grass’s nightmare vision of Nazism through
the eyes of the permanently juvenile Oskar in
The Tin Drum.But no author has ever traveled
farther back in ontogeny than John Barth in
‘‘Night-Sea Journey’’ (in his short story collec-
tion,Lost in the Fun-house). Barth’s narrator, a
Schopenhauerian spermatozoon equipped with
foreknowledge of all that preceded, and all that
will follow his cohort’s brief argosy, urges his
successors to ‘‘foreswear night-sea journeys!
Make no more!’’
Once we have traversed the way up and the
way down, and stepped into the river of child-
hood, there is no end of schoolboy tales, most of
them falling into two forms: the family deformed
and deforming or the classroom cruel and con-
straining. An original account of childhood,
however, appears in J. R. Moehringer’sThe Ten-
der Bar,one of the most successful recent male
memoirs. Moehringer, whose father fled his
Long Island family to live as an itinerant disc
jockey, finds himself growing up in the company
of women—‘‘my mother, grandmother, aunt,
and five female cousins.’’ Where would such an
only child find ‘‘mentors, heroes, role models’’?
Since, as he tells us, ‘‘My hometown was famous
for two things—lacrosse and liquor,’’ the choices
were few, and lacrosse never figures in the book
after this line. Neither does the schoolroom.
Instead, taken under the wing of his book-
making uncle, J. R. begins joining the bar hab-
itue ́s at the beach for drying-out afternoons long
before he can legally enter the tender bar. Moeh-
ringer tells us how, over the course of 20 years,
‘‘the bar saved me. It restored my faith when I
was a boy, tended me as a teenager, and when I
was a young man the bar embraced me... until
one night the bar turned me away, and in that
final abandonment the bar saved my life.’’
Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
presents the lover in a novel form: adolescent,
precocious Kafka Tamura, seeking his mother
and fleeing his father, takes refuge in, of all
places, a library, where he finds Miss Saeki, the
librarian, who also has hidden from the world, in
her case because of the death of a fiance ́e many
years ago. Meeting the two other Kafkas in the
story, a painting and a song by the librarianSHAKESPEARE’S FINAL STAGE IS A PARADOX:A STATE OF LIVING DEATH, HARDER TO CAPTURE
THAN DEATH ITSELF, ‘SANS TEETH, SANS EYES, SANS
TASTE, SANS EVERYTHING.’ ’’
Seven Ages of Man