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Comparing The Works Of Calvin Thomas And William Shakespeare

1532 Words7 Pages

Within this essay I aim to critically examine the question, “Who gets to be human?” By investigating the works of both Calvin Thomas and William Shakespeare, I aim to discuss a multitude of characteristics which deem humans, human. Within Calvin Thomas’s insightful book Ten Lessons in Theory, we gain an abundance of knowledge regarding the complexities and definable characteristics of human life. Primarily within the first five lessons of Calvin Thomas’s book, we learn how distinguishable characteristics are applied to key psychoanalytic theories. I aim to focus mainly on the pleasure principle and the reality principle, established by Sigmund Freud, distinguishable characteristics outlined throughout Calvin Thomas’s book regarding human …show more content…

Written by Sigmund Freud, these principles aim to sustain order within an individual’s mind from birth. These ideologies belong to the subconscious, they distinguish between youth and adulthood as we grow to learn and understand our awareness of the environment and our societal behaviour. According to Thomas, “none of us get to be human” (35) instead we must be “turned into a small human child” (35) as we exist and develop within the womb. Furthermore, this coincides with the reality principle as it is primarily associated with infants, Thomas argues the “infant of our species, congenitally inadequate to its own animality, requires careful assistance, orthopedic correction, extensive training, and prolonged cultivation if it is ever actually going to become a human being, a viable participant in extra-uterine human reality” (35). To demand means to be human, as stated above, a small child demands certain necessities throughout their infant life, whilst this links with the reality principle, it also is evident within William Shakespeare’s sonnets. We see this demand and obscure societal behaviour in a different form, we are demanded to see the dark ladies imperfections in sonnet one hundred and thirty, when deciding who gets to be human we must take into consideration the basic human functions, within Shakespearian time, conforming to societal norms was important, the beauty described in this sonnet also contains satirical qualities, as the dark ladies hair is describes as “black wires” (130, 4), ultimately this mocks natural human conceits. Sonnet one hundred and thirty rebels against patriarchal traditional conceits as it mocks the dark ladies appearance. We are thrown into a sonnet filled with negative annotations of beauty, Shakespeare states that he “never saw a goddess go” (130, 11). Within the seventeen hundreds this sonnet would have

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