Clarence's Loss Of Innocence

The passage excerpted from William Shakespeare’s King Richard III Act 1 Scene 4, Clarence had just woken from an odious nightmare, dazed and frightened, to describe his nightmare with the keeper. In his nightmare, he escaped the Tower with his brother Richard to Burgundy, but Clarence was pushed by his brother and fell into the sea. He drowns to the bottom of the sea, first suffering the physical pain on his body, then noticed the flamboyance wealth on the seafloor with dead man’s skeleton. Clarence realized the absurdness of human vanity under the layer of death and condemned by his conscience of his past greediness and materialism. The metaphorical dream was full of magnanimous amount of deep symbols to show the natural of human vanity motivated by greed and materialism.
Clarence’s dream commenced with he had fled from the London Tower, then he recalled the war of roses with Richard on the deck of
a boat headed to Burgundy, “There we looked toward England/And cited up a thousand heavy times/During the wars of york and lancaster/That had befall’n us.” (13-16) The bloodiness and the cruelties of the war arouse his self-revelation of guilt he had made through the civil war. The civil war is a representation of the greed of the humanity, the York and Lancaster’s rivalry for hundreds of years was motivated by the appetency towards power and wealth. Clarence realized that he was once vainglorious during the war, not satisfied with the role of “Duke of Clarence”, he even tried to overthrow his brother Edward IV. He uses a hyperbolic phrase “a thousand heavy times” to reflect the cruel of the war and refers to the infinite human greedy towards powers. In line 18, Gloucester had stumbled, and Clarence acted being a supportive brother to help him. However, Clarence had been framed by Richard and pushed down from the deck. Clarence’s fraternize action leads to his drowning, foreshadows later that Richard was trying to subside him to death. In the play Richard III, Clarence is described as a character with a faith in human goodness and natural supportive. His naive, simplicity personality juxtaposes to Richard’s circumvention and complex personality. The dream had profiled Richard is thirsty for the power and tries to achieve his goal by framing other people. In the true world, the poor Clarence was his first sacrifice under Richard’s greediness, as Clarence is an obstacle lay between the crown and Richard. The greed of human vanity motivates Richard’s behavior, as he was regardless of the brotherly love in front of the allure of the power. Being pushed by Richard, Clarence had fallen into the “tumbling billows of the main” (20) and suffering great physical pains. The apostrophe “O Lord” (21) gives expression to his despair towards death, embodies the fragile humanity exposed completely in front of death. Clarence uses two consistently parallelism anaphora sentences exclaimed his physical miseries, the first sentence is an auditory imagery to describe “What dreadful noise of water in mine ears” (22), the second sentence is a visual imagery refers to “What sights of ugly death within mine eyes”(23). The two parallelism sentences symbolize his later death when he was drawn into the barrel in the later of the play. Then Clarence described the “sights of ugly death” that he had seen. “Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks, /A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon” collocates earthly wealth in the next few lines. the wreckages and the dead man's bones, mostly reconstruct the ruins during the war of roses. Clarence was feared, the morality of human conscience and retribution within the civil war made him trembled, he was once in bondage of greediness and killing for his own vanity towards power. He saw that under the deep ocean, there were thousands of treasures laid on the bottom, the asyndetic list suggests the precious varieties and the amount of the treasures.
He used all the fancy adjectives to describe the value of glorious treasures, the ironic part is that all those unvalued treasures, were “All scattered in the bottom of the sea”. These three lines are highly ironic as the comparison between the valuable of the jewels and the places that they were ---- the bottom of the sea, no one will discover them, no one will ever own them. Human does need material for survival, but the over strong pursuit of material desire will make one becomes hysterical, and ultimately lost the spirit of sustenance and even life. In these lines, the concept of materialism was criticized and mocked. The materialism is the gospel of mammon, the human natural towards materialism was ever continuing. However, they are the wealth that the people were once greedy for, those materialists treated the wealth more important than their spiritual, and symbolize the useless of
wealth. The last five lines are the essential part of the passage, where Clarence mocks about the vanity of human in front of death. His ironic description to the wealth in the skull’s and those jewels replaced the eye where it was once there. The materialists sought for wealth and being greedy to get their vanity throughout their whole life, but once they are dead, the jewels will stay there and they cannot bring it with the death. Therefore Clarence mocked that once the death had fallen to those materialistics, the wealth cannot rescue them from death and wealth became useless in front of death. The use of hyperbaton “...and in the holes where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,” emphasizes the vanity of human greediness, as the people seeking wealth regardless of their life. The passage ends with two personification sentences, both mocks the vanity of human: the Kings and nobles were seeking wealth when they were alive, the greedy make them taking the risk or even vanished to the bottom of the deep sea to lost the life. The greedy motivates one’s vanity to find wealth, but one may not find the wealth before they had lost life for that. Also, suggest the portentous foreshadowing of the fall of royal privileges. Clarence had given a description of his dream and the dream is an epitome of the darkness of the human vanity: the sights he saw, the experiences he felt, are the reality of authentic humanities in the true world. The boat represented himself in the world, he had to control it carefully through the tempest or else the boat will submerge into the ocean. The passage was well written in a metaphoric way, one side suggests the response of human vanity under diverse conditions, the other way the dream was highly prophetic driven by the predominance of the supernatural. Clarence, who realizes his own vanity and greedy to seek the power were useless in front of death, however, he misinterpreted that the dream was not only warning him the nature of vanity, and also prophetic foreshadows his death under the predominance of supernatural that was going on.