Shakespeare Beginnings

I am noticing something new about Shakespeare. In terms of play making, he hides catalysts. In Hamlet, the Ghost is the clear catalyst to get the story started, but Hamlet's melancholy, rebellious state has well begun when the curtain opens. The cause is shrouded... and while there are plenty of factors for Hamlet's internal state (the death of his father, the remarriage of Gertrude to his Uncle blah blah) not one cause completely encapsulates the effect. Hamlet's cause remains off stage, unrepresented.

In Winter's Tale, Leontes's jealousy loses him his family and best friend. But what caused the jealousy? It was disproportionately engaged after Hermione convinced Polixenes to stay longer on Leontes's behalf. Like a switch turned on, Leontes turns completely away from his former character of restraint and reasonableness and into a paranoid hater. In my book on playwriting by Lajos Egri, this sort of "jump" in conflict is bad writing: "between winter and summer come autumn and spring.... there are steps which lead from one to the other. Every step must be taken" (Egri 155). Leontes's steps are compressed-- and as unnatural as time moving backward: he is spring, then winter. (The overall play structure, however, moves nicely from winter in the first half (I-III) to spring in the second (IV and V)). The catalyst is on stage this time in Act I, but something is missing... hidden from the audience.

I think Shakespeare was an early Logician. To supremely capture humans, as he does, one must acknowledge cause and effect,but also flout it. There are certainly a ton of cases where Shakespeare builds steady action-- but there is a signature, jarring effect. I would illustrate with more examples but its summer time and no one reads this blog anyway. The highest degree of conflict comes from pattern breaking, disruptions, unpredictability. Steve Martin, before he became and comedian and a playwright said this of his undergrad program of study: "I majored in philosophy. Something about non-sequiters appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff [stand up routines]"... (from Wikipedia).