Signet Essay Contest Winner 2017: Coggin Galbreath
Coggin Galbreath
There is a central tenet at the core of all dramatic literature, and particularly Shakespeare: it is the simple and powerful concept that things today are not the way they were yesterday. If we imagine that characters have lives leading up to the moment of the play, and lives proceeding afterwards into the future, then what we see in a play is a disruption: a moment when things are different than they were before. We would not go to see a play about an ordinary day in the life of Macbeth, nor about what King Lear ate for breakfast. We would not read a novel about Dagny Taggart’s day at the office. Humans are drawn to those moments of disruption, those sudden, cataclysmic shifts.
In The Tempest, Shakespeare uses a natural disaster to launch the plot into motion. This device, the Great Disruption, remains popular in our stories today, and it is interesting to realize that, though we seem obsessed with this construct in storytelling, it is not really the disruption itself which we want to hear about. We do not want to watch bombs exploding for the length of an entire film; we want to see what happens to the survivors. We could not care less about scabbed zombies crawling across the globe; we care about their effect on whatever remains of humanity. We would never sit for over two hours watching a shipwreck—but to see the survivors putting their lives back together on a desert island? There’s a play humanity could watch for four hundred years.
There is a reason storytellers resort time and time again to the Great Disruption. It is not used as a crutch, but as a catalyst. Recall the supreme prerequisite for playwrights: today is different. We must, above all else, enter into the lives of the characters at a moment when their paths have veered suddenly from the expected and the routine.
The Great Disruption does this so well for a number of reasons. For one, the Great Disruption is also the Great Equalizer. Consider the victims of this tempest: a king, a duke, a prince, a lord, a jester, and a drunken butler, all tossed onto an island with a sorcerer and his daughter, a spirit, and a monster. The Great Disruption is like a petri dish which one can observe though the microscope of storytelling; it creates unusual scenarios which allow for interactions which would never take place in the ordinary world, and reveal something about the characters. It places characters into situations where they can be sure of nothing, where they are influenced by that nagging sense of unreality which Prospero calls the “subtleties o’th’ isle, that will not let you / Believe things certain”. The force of the storm levels everyone involved, so that they can reemerge from the wreckage in their rightful places. They must be turned upside down, the greatest and the least mixed together as equals in their powerlessness against disaster, in order for them to land on their feet. “Howsoe’er you have been jostled from your senses,” Prospero says, “know for certain / That I am Prospero, and that very duke / Which was thrust forth from Milan, who most strangely / Upon this shore where you were wreck’d, was landed / To be lord on’t”. This is the redemptive power of disruption: that chaos is required before rightful order can be restored.
Additionally, disruption sparks clarification. Disaster has a way of simplifying things to their essential natures, and along with the physical “jostling” comes psychological insight; as we observe characters in their moment of disruption, we often find that, in the shock of the event, internal motivations are brought to the forefront in unusual ways. Human beings behave differently in the wake of disaster, when they “suffer a sea-change,” as Ariel says: a profound shift that can only be caused by a force as vast as the sea itself. The sudden insecurity and loss of control drives them to drop pretenses and behave more truly as themselves—yet another reason why the disruption makes for an ideal dramatic construct. It is especially effective at revealing guilt, as when Ariel tells Antonio, Sebastian, and Alonso that “the powers delaying, not forgetting, have / Incens’d the seas and shores, yea all the creatures / Against your peace”. The three of them begin to believe, as a guilty conscience eventually will, that their bad fortune is somehow connected with their misdeeds, to the point that Alonso says of the storm, “the billows spoke and told me of it, / The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, / That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc’d / The name of Prosper”. Disasters like the tempest leave no room for complacency. Faced with the end of their lives, characters are forced to reexamine things they may have ignored for years, but which, “like poison given to work a great time after,” they cannot ultimately escape.
The Great Disruption, when all is said and done, is a force for simplification. It equalizes its victims in their common vulnerability, and condemns them alike for their crimes, forcing their hands into action. The reason we turn time and time again to this plot device is that, in the midst of its chaos, it allows for remarkable clarity. In the face of a Great Disruption, there can be no trivial concerns. The only things which matter anymore are the most vitally important—and that is what makes a good story, and a good play. We are thrown into a day which is different than the one before, freed from yesterday’s worries, left to face only the most crucially significant crisis of the moment. We find ourselves in a “brave new world,” blessed with the gift of destruction: the rare opportunity of beginning with leveled earth, and rebuilding our life as it was intended.
