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One of the inherited doctrines of mankind is that the Quran is quoted or borrowed from the Bible. The Bible says that the Hoopoe is detested and unclean and forbid eating the Hoopoe.
The Quran says that the Hoopoe is intelligent, smart, knows and worships his Creator, and communicated with King Solomon.
Leviticus 11
Unclean and Detested bird:
13 “These are the birds you are to detest and not eat because they are detestable: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, 14 the red kite, any kind of black kite, 15 any kind of raven, 16 the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, 17 the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, 18 the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, 19 the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.
Deuteronomy 14
Unclean Food:
11 You may eat any clean bird. 12 But these you may not eat: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, 13 the red kite, the black kite, any kind of falcon, 14 any kind of raven, 15 the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, 16 the little owl, the great owl, the white owl, 17 the desert owl, the osprey, the cormorant, 18 the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.
In the Bible dictionary it is said: “Although the hoopoe bird is only referred to once in the Bible, it is known to be a faithful companion of people all over the world”.
However, the dictionary does not tell that the hoopoe is detested according to Leviticus 11 and also, there is no verse in the Bible which says that is a faithful companion of people all over the world. I bet that the writers of the Bible dictionary have read the Noble Quran and put such an observation about the hoopoe as a faithful companion of people all over the world.
The story of the hoopoe with King Solomon illustrates how faithful, smart was the hoopoe.
Hoopoe in the Quran:
The Hoopoe is mentioned once in the Noble Quran, in Surah 27.
Prophet Solomon was a king whose armies consisted of troops made of men and Jinns and birds. It is possible that the birds were employed for communicating the messages, hunting and for other suitable services.
Detective and Messenger of Prophets
[20] And he took a muster of the Birds; and he said: “Why is it I see not the Hoopoe? Or is he among the absentees?
[21] “I will certainly punish him with a severe penalty, or execute him, unless he brings me a clear reason (for absence).”
[22] But he (the hoopoe) tarried not far: he (came up and) said: “I have compassed (territory) which thou hast not compassed, and I have come to thee from Saba with tidings true.
[23] “I found (there) a woman ruling over them and provided with every requisite; and she has a magnificent throne.
[24] “I found her and her people worshipping the sun besides Allah: Satan has made their deeds seem pleasing to their eyes, and has kept them away from the Path, so they receive no guidance,
[25] “(Kept them away from the Path) that they should not worship Allah, Who brings to light what is hidden in the heavens and the earth, and knows what ye hide and what ye reveal.
[26] “Allah! – there is no god but He! – Lord of the Throne supreme!”
[27] (Solomon) said: “Soon shall we see whether thou hast told the truth or lied!
28] “Go thou, with this letter of mine, and deliver it to them: then draw back from them, and (wait to) see what answer they return”…
[29] (The Queen) said: “Ye chiefs! here is – delivered to me – a letter worthy of respect.
[30] “It is from Solomon, and is (as follows): ‘In the name of Allah, Most Gracious Most Merciful:
[31] “`Be ye not arrogant against me, but come to me in submission (to the true Religion).”
The story of how Solomon and the Queen of Saba (Yemen) met: One day Solomon inspected his birds but did not find the Hoopoe. When the bird came back he said, “With truthful news I come to you from Saba, where I found a woman reigning over people and they worship the sun instead of Allah.
Solomon ordered the Hoopoe to return to her and give her a message calling her not to exalt herself above him (Solomon), but come to him in all submission. The Hoopoe did his job perfectly.
In the Qur’an (27:20) we read that Prophet Solomon reviewed his birds and found Hoopoe missing. His most movable arm was the birds, which were light on the wing and flew and saw everything like talented scouts. Prophet Solomon conveys his anger and his yearning to punish Hoopoe severely if he does not present himself before Prophet Solomon with a realistic explanation. Within a short time, the Hoopoe came back and said, “I have got knowledge of things which you have no idea about. I have brought sure information about Saba (Yemen now). There, I have seen a woman ruling over her people: she has been given all sorts of provisions, and she has a wonderful throne. I saw that she and her people prostrate themselves before the sun and worshiped the sun, instead of Allah.!”
Prophet Solomon said, “We shall just now see whether what you say is true, or that you are a liar. Take this letter of mine and cast it before them; then get aside and see what reaction they show.” Qur’an, 27: 27-28.
Here, ends the role of Hoopoe in the story.
In this story, the Noble Quran gives the Hoopoe some characters that need intense research to be elucidated by the scientists. The Hoopoe had the powers of observation, discrimination and expression that it should pass over a country and should come to know that it is the land of Saba, it has such and such a scheme of government, it is ruled by a certain woman, its faith is sun-worship, that it should have worshipped One Lord, Allah instead of having gone off track, and then on its return to Prophet Solomon it should so clearly make a report of all its observations before him.
In spite of great advances in science and technology, man cannot tell with absolute certainty what powers and abilities the different species of animals and their different individuals have got? Man has not so far been able to know through any certain means what different animals know and what they see and hear, and what they feel and think and understand, and know how the mind of each one of them works. Yet, whatever little observation has been made of the life of the different species of animals, it has revealed some of their wonderful abilities. Now, when Allah, Who is the Creator of these animals, tells us that He had taught the speech of the birds to one of His Prophets and blessed him with the ability to speak to them, and the Prophet’s taming and training had so enabled a Hoopoe that it could make certain observations in the foreign lands and could report them to the Prophet, then we should be prepared to revise our little knowledge about the animals in the light of Allah’s statement.
“… We raise to degrees (of wisdom) whom We please: but over all endued with knowledge is One, the All-Knowing.” Surah 12:76
Back to our main issue; one may ask this: Is the Quran quoted from the Bible? And which book precedes the sciences? The book which that the hoopoe is a detested bird or the book which precedes the sciences and says that the hoopoe has the powers of observation, discrimination and expression and it is one of the best detective and messenger?
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- Large variety of skills to upgrade and use in combat
- World is vast and beautiful
Cons
- Combat system is repetitive and easy to manipulate
- Far too many side quests, none of which are fun
- The countless choices have little impact on actual gameplay
- Buying houses, furniture, vegetables and getting jobs don’t belong in games
by Rabid Rabbit
Fable 2 is yet another over-rated game that focuses too much on side quests that simply aren’t fun and leaves the main campaign boring and repetitive. Similar to the distractions that made Metal Gear Solid 4, Spore and Grand Theft Auto IV boring games, Fable 2 gets distracted from providing meaningful and interesting gameplay. Far too much effort was placed on meaningless tasks that don’t materially affect gameplay, such as getting married, choices between good and evil and jobs to earn money. The main campaign involves traversing a large world and fighting a series of non-descript enemies that lack variety. The actual fighting mechanics quickly devolve into button mashing regardless of your preferred method of dispensing with your foes. The end result is a game that strays into many different gameplay elements but never makes any of them particularly fun. The developers simply forgot to make the game fun. Apparently they knew this was a problem when they released a statement asking people to have non-gamers try the game. Apparently it was made for people who don’t know what to demand from a game rather than traditional gamers who have more discerning tastes and demand higher forms of entertainment.
The crux of Fable 2 is choices. The main adventure is littered with a myriad of choices to help or harm people. If you choose to help people, then you are revered by citizens and gain their favor. If you choose the path of the dark side, then people will fear and despise you. It’s amazing that so much time was spent on this gameplay element, but it actually has very little impact on the actual game. The only material effect is how people react to you and evil characters’ complexions will deteriorate into a purple monster with horns. When you go into town, citizens will run in fear from evil heroes and may charge you higher prices for goods. You can reduce any price hikes by simply scaring them into lower prices though.
Any benefits from being a good person can be earned as an evil hero by scaring people or stealing from them as an evil person. There are just different means to the same ends. Without a material impact to your choices other than people calling you a murderer and running from you, it’s really hard to take these choices seriously. The entire system falls apart and becomes more of a nuisance than a unique aspect to tinker with.
The Fable 2 world is vast and includes a number of towns and people to interact with. You can choose to be a law-abiding citizen or you can just kill people for their goods, money and gifts. If you kill people or get caught stealing, then you should expect the police to quickly arrive to keep the peace. They will give you the choice to pay a fine, complete a community service task, or you can resist arrest. The community service is typically just a simple task to help someone or kill some bandits. If you resist arrest, then expect to be constantly chased by guards in town that you must fight.
This entire crime punishment system is extremely easy to circumvent. All you have to do is continually commit to community service tasks that you don’t ever complete. After choosing to complete one of these tasks, the guards will leave you alone and give you a few days to finish your work. If you don’t finish the task, you can simply request another task. The result is that you can do whatever you want in town without ever suffering any negative consequence. The only other noticeable effect is that your reputation follows you to every town you visit and people will fear you and call you a thief or a murderer. For a game so focused on choices, that seems like an easy choice to me: just steal and kill as much as you want without ever getting punished.
There are also a wide variety of choices for how you interact with people in town. You can choose to be nice by telling jokes or complimenting people to gain their favor or you can be mean by insulting them or giving rude gestures to lose their favor. There are also seductive gestures to attract people of the opposite sex. If you show enough interest in someone, then you can eventually propose to them by giving them a ring. After purchasing a house, you will be married to your fiancée. If you have unprotected sex (yes the game actually has condoms to prevent pregnancy and STD transmission), then you will likely have a child.
Like the rest of the game, the entire marriage and family system is extremely simple. The main result of a family is a budget drain on your income. If you keep your spouse happy, then you will get a gift from them when you arrive home from adventuring. You can also name your child. That’s about it. For a system that took so much work to incorporate into the game, you’d hope there would be more to it, such as training your spouse and kid to aid you in your adventures. Nope, there’s nothing like that in this game. If you like this boring gameplay and are a glutton for punishment, you are able to become a polygamist and have more than one family in the world. Like the rest of Fable 2, there isn’t much interesting depth here to keep you coming back for more of these Brady Bunch antics.
Towns offer a wide variety of things to do, but almost all of them either have no point or are extremely boring. You can get a job to make money, but why would you want to do that when you could be fighting monsters and playing the main campaign. We all have jobs, and we leave them to have fun playing games rather than to start another job inside a game. If you choose to take one of these jobs, you will enter a world of hurt involving extremely repetitive tasks that require no skill. As a blacksmith or wood cutter, you are simply timing button presses to a sliding scale. If you become a bar tender, you simply hold down a button to the end of a meter to pour a full glass of beer. None of these tasks ever change no matter how much you get promoted. Other jobs involve fetching people or items, such as the bounty hunter job.
You can also earn money by playing some games. These games mimic real-world games such as craps, card games and slots. A significant amount of effort went into differentiating these games from their real life counterparts. This becomes obvious when you watch the 5 minute tutorials that teach how to play the games. All of the games involve mere chance and require no skill on your part. Why would throwing dice be more interesting than actually playing the game’s main quest? It’s really absurd how much effort went into these games rather than making the main quest more interesting.
A number of possibilities are available in towns. You can choose to steal from merchants. When you attempt to steal, an icon appears to let you know if someone is watching you. If you are seen pilfering the store, then a guard will approach to punish you.
You can also choose to buy a wide variety of food and items with a myriad of different qualities. It’s really perplexing why people would care so much about different grades of meat, fish, pies, fruits and vegetables. There’s even tofu! The only way these different types of food impacts gameplay is that you will gain weight if you eat too many fatty foods, such as meat and pies. However, gaining weight doesn’t change your speed or the amount of damage you do in combat, so why should you care unless you are a narcissist?
You can also buy houses and shops. Then you can change your properties’ rent or the shop item’s selling prices to affect your profits. Other than additional profits, the only impact to raising prices is your alignment becomes more evil. If you decide to live in a house, you can go out and buy furniture, which increases the house’s value. Yes, you can actually choose to spend your free time looking at different grades of furniture in a video game. If that doesn’t put you to sleep, I don’t know what will.
The game also gives you a dog to accompany you through most of your tasks. His main purpose is to help you find buried treasures or hidden treasure that are off the main paths. He can also be trained to improve his treasure sniffing abilities to find more valuable loot than worthless things such as rancid tofu. If you knock an enemy down in a fight, your dog will also pounce on top of him to cause some additional damage.
With so many side quests and distractions, you’d think the game is a social interactions simulator and there weren’t any problems in the world. If you ever get out of town, you’ll realize there is the typical world coming to an end plotline along with an antagonist to stop. Your main objective is to gather three other heroes to combine forces and stop the world from becoming enslaved. The story unfolds through a series of tasks strewn across a large world with various enemies to defeat.
In order to progress through the story and gain new tasks, you must increase your renown throughout the world by helping people. The world of Fable 2 is large and these tasks are scattered across its many locales. To help ensure you don’t get lost trying to find your next task, the game includes a glowing trail for you to follow to your next objective. Once you have traveled to an area, you can choose to save time by letting the game transport you to your destination.
Combat is resolved by defeating enemies with melee fighting mechanics, shooting foes or employing magic. The associated skills of strength, skill and will increase as you use them in combat. Each downed enemy drops experience based on the ability type you use to defeat them. If you perform well in a fight by winning quickly or taking little damage, then you’ll be rewarded bonus experience. Then you can spend the experience to further hone these skills. Increasing some skills can provide new abilities such as sword counters and combos, but most upgrades simply cause more damage or increase your life meter rather than adding any depth.
Strength skills include causing more melee damage, reducing damage you take and increasing your life bar. Skill abilities revolve around improving shooting accuracy, damage and your ability to avoid enemy strikes. Will abilities include a variety of spells.
Direct damage spells hurt enemies with elements, such as fire, electricity, and blades. You can choose to cause more damage to a specific target or distribute your love through an area of effect spell. There are also indirect spells, such as raise dead to summon minions to aid your cause and charm spells to temporarily remove some foes from the fight by confusing them. The magic system is oddly unbalanced. Magic spells are cast without limit because you don’t spend mana points to cast spells. The result is you can just sit back and cast unlimited spells if you create a buffer against enemy attacks, such as summoning a horde of undead creatures with the raise dead spell.
While there are a variety of different abilities, fights generally devolve into simple button mashing. You’ll either madly press buttons to hack and slash with your melee weapons, shoot with your crossbow or gun or continually cast your spells. There’s very little depth in the actual encounters. Almost all enemies are dispatched with the same maneuvers regardless of how different they look. The only exceptions are the large trolls, which have specific weaknesses to target. Most of the campaign involves these repetitive fights, which makes it more of an effort in patience to endure the game’s monotonous encounters rather than having fun.
Most fights are rather easy, but even encounters that may offer a challenge are simple because there is no real consequence to losing a fight. If you run out of health, you are knocked out rather than dying. The only downside to getting KOed is that you will lose any ungathered experience. You can eat food or drink potions to increase your health, but there’s really no point in wasting your time buying the food and eating it. Just make sure to gather any experience if you are low on health and then you won’t lose anything by being knocked out. You’ll be revived to the same fight without having to walk back to the encounter and you won’t waste any money on healing items. So you can just mash buttons without paying attention to your health level because losing a fight has no negative consequence. These ridiculous gameplay elements further reduce the point of the fights and the campaign itself.
There is also the option of join a friend’s campaign in the game’s co-op mode. As with most games, playing the game with a friend can make it more fun. It’s pretty cool that the game is flexible enough that you and your friend don’t even have to be in the same place. You can choose to take on different tasks and not be in each other’s vicinity. While co-op mode generally add to the overall experience, it’s hard to say it makes a huge difference considering it doesn’t fix the game’s numerous other problems.
If you can endure the boring main quest to the end, you are rewarded with a horrid ending. I’m not talking about an ending movie. I won’t give anything away, but it’s important to note that there isn’t a final confrontation. After pouring hours into a boring campaign and exploring mundane side quests, Fable 2 simply continues to underwhelm with a slow boring end to the game that you have little control over. Well, at least the game’s boring features are consistent from its beginning to its ultimate ending.
The game’s vast world includes a wide variety of landscapes. From the dreary swamps to the lush hilly areas to the dark caves lit by torchlight, the world of Fable 2 is a beautiful place to explore. The only downside is that its ambitious long draw distances coupled with numerous enemies do create noticeable framerate hiccups throughout the quest.
Overall, Fable 2 promises a lot. It allows you to explore towns and make many choices. There are many side quests, jobs, businesses to buy and people to interact with, but none of these distractions are interesting. The main quest and its combat system have a wide variety of skills and enemies to fight but none really differentiate themselves from each other. The end result is a game that fails to entertain or involve you regardless of what you are doing in the game. It simply isn’t fun, no matter what you do or what choices you make in its elaborate world.
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One of the more fascinating things you can think about when you’re bored is why the spam is so different depending on where you have accounts. Perhaps I’m just lucky, but I get very little spam through my ISP. Mostly, it’s just to persuade me to buy viagra and other more obviously fake ways of producing sexual enhancement. I suppose the way I trawl the web to find stories to write about here sells my name as someone desperate to find a way of overcoming sexual inadequacy. But, when it comes to Gmail, my inbox is more evenly divided between viagra and gambling sites. And then come the yahoo accounts (I have several for different purposes). Almost without exception, I am flooded by the Nigerian scam mail. It seems the spammers target different user groups depending on the mail servers they use. A research team based at the University of California has been digging into the problem — it’s completely fascinating to see how some research teams spend their time. Anyway, this team decided to try estimating how much money the spammers made out of persuading people to buy viagra. Their guess? $3.5 million a year. How did they come up with this number? Well, like cunning hackers, they wormed their way into the Storm botnet. For the uninitiated among you, this is one of the control centers for all those hacked computers around the world. Storm lets you send out millions of e-mails. To monitor responses, they set up two websites of their own to promote. One offered to sell viagra. The other was designed to mimic infecting the users with trojans — the same little bits of code that allow spammers to hijack machines in the first place. Both were actually harmless but counted the traffic and downloaded benign bits of code. Now comes the exciting bit. They sent out almost 470 million e-mails. There were 350 million to promote the viagra site with 10,500 people responding and 28 people attempting to buy viagra in quantities worth more than US$100. So the low conversion rate did not mean low profits. By scaling up this hit rate, the research team arrived at their annual estimate for gross revenue. But it’s actually quite expensive to send out all this spam so the only way the operation pays is if the spammers also run the sites they promote. The infection site was more efficient, converting an average of 6,000 PCs a day to clones. OK, so now you know who to blame for some of that spam you have been receiving, you can all get your own back by e-mailing the research team which is based at the campuses at Berkeley and San Diego. The dog that didn’t bark during the night One of the very best throwaway lines from Sherlock Holmes comes in The Silver Blaze. Asked what is significant about the way in which the horse was stolen, he identifies the failure of the dog to bark as the most important clue. I have always liked the idea of the answer to mystery novels turning on some simple insight. Too often, an author gets so caught up in his or her own cleverness that plot becomes too complicated and characters less interesting as they do increasingly odd things just to fit in with the need to arrive at the solution. So it is, when people like me come to write about why to buy viagra. We beat out our brains trying to find something new and exciting to say when all the new and exciting things have already been said. Then we remember the simple rule. If in doubt, talk about an animal. By now almost everyone on the planet knows that viagra is the best thing since the invention of sliced bread when it comes to a cure for erectile dysfunction. As an aside, I should note that sliced bread is completely useless as a remedy for impotence. Anyway, what is slightly less well known is that viagra is also used under a different brand name for the treatment of pulmonary hypertension. This affects the main arteries and veins in the chest, through the lungs and leading to and from the heart. If blood pressure rises too high, it can cause dizziness and difficulty in breathing. Unchecked, it leads to the risk of heart failure, particularly during exertion. In treating erectile dysfunction, viagra works by dilating the arteries leading into the penis. The same qualities make it a vital way of relieving high blood pressure in the chest. So how do we draw all this together into the big reveal at the end of this little mystery? Well, for that, you have to travel with me to Highgate in London. Look around and ask for Bentley. He’s quite a local character. You see, he got problems with his pulmonary arteries and was prescribed viagra. Now, he’s back on his feet again, chasing rabbits and doing all the doggy things that Springer spaniels do when they are fit again. The local veterinarian was absolutely correct in his diagnosis. The failure to bark probably indicated an imminent heart attack. The use of viagra dilated the arteries and allowed the blood to flow more smoothly. He was “cured”. Unfortunately, Bentley was neutered when young so we are unable to report if his sexual prowess also improved. Other than that, take this story to heart. Even dogs sing the praises of viagra! Buy viagra online right now!
“A narrative or story is anything told or recounted; more narrowly, something told or recounted in the form of a causally-linked set of events; account; tale, the telling of a happening or connected series of happenings, whether true or fictitious” (Denning, 2006).
Your life is a narrative, counted and recounted from many different perspectives, and by diverse people. There are settings, themes, characters and plots – just like in any movie, book, historical account or legendary fable.
In this article we review the approach of Narrative Therapy and how it can be effectively used by counsellors to assist individuals improve their lives.
Fundamentals of Narrative Therapy
The Narrative The Drawing Anime & Cartoon Characters : How to Draw Flames
rapy is an approach to counselling that centres people as the experts in their own lives. This therapy intends to view problems as separate entities to people, assuming that the individual’s set of skills, experience and mindset will assist him/her reduce the influence of problems throughout life. This therapeutic approach intends to place the individual in both the protagonist and author roles: switching the view from a narrow perspective to a systemic and more flexible stance.
Systemic and flexible stance? Yes. The aim is to help clients realise what forces are influencing their lives and to focus on the positive aspects of the ‘play’. In many events of our lives, we tend to focus on particular things and ignore others. Analysing our lives as a play, or a system, helps us understand the different forces and roles that are influencing our behaviour. This in turn gives us flexibility to invoke the necessary changes for improvement.
“The products of our narrative schemes are ubiquitous in our lives: they fill our cultural and social environment. We create narrative descriptions for ourselves and for others about our own past actions, and we develop storied accounts that give sense to the behavior of others. We also use the narrative scheme to inform our decisions by constructing imaginative “what if” scenarios. On the receiving end, we are constantly confronted with stories during our conversations and encounters with the written and visual media. We are told fairy tales as children, and read and discuss stories at school.” (Polkinghorne, 1988)
Merging a familiar set of events (one’s life) to a familiar structure (a narrative story) is a useful strategy. The emotional, cognitive and spiritual perspectives of a person are usually combined in order to derive meaning to an event. In many instances, one or two perspectives will prevail over the other(s), and this will depend upon the particular scenario and the individual’s personality traits.
As an example, we can compare the perspective of two people who have different levels of emotional intelligence. According to Coleman (1998) “intellectual and emotional intelligence express the activity of different parts of the brain. The intellect is based solely on the workings of the neocortex, the more recently evolved layers at the top of the brain. The emotional centers are lower in the brain, in the more ancient subcortex.” Thus, individuals that are more ‘emotionally intelligent’ will draw different conclusions, and behave differently in certain situations.
This is only an example of possible disparities in perception and decision-making. It is the protagonist responding to the setting, the characters, the theme and plot.
Techniques and Objectives
“The techniques that narrative therapists use have to do with the telling of the story. They may examine the story and look for other ways to tell it differently or to understand it in other ways. In doing so, they find it helpful to put the problem outside of the individual, thus externalizing it. They look for unique outcomes: positive events that are in contrast to a problem-saturated story.” (Sharf, 2004)
Externalising the Problem
In Narrative Therapy the problem becomes the antagonist of the story. Certain behaviours are based on particular ‘unhealthy’ or ‘undesired’ characteristics – such as lack of patience, aggressiveness, etc. Thus, they are approached as not a part of the client but as an opposing force which needs to be ‘defeated’. An example would be a child that has a very bad temperament and tends to be aggressive to other kids at school and his parents. The child might feel guilty for his temperament and blame it on himself (“I don’t know… it is the way I am…”). The counsellor will work with him towards isolating that undesired trait (aggressiveness) and placing it as an external trait – not a characteristic of the individual.
This strategy helps clients re-construct their own stories in a way which will reduce the incidence of the problem in order to eliminate negative outcomes and reinforce personal development and achievement. The protagonist becomes the author and re-writes the story constructively.
Unique Outcomes
If a story is full of problems and negative events, the counsellor will attempt to identify the exceptional positive outcomes. When exploring unique positive outcomes in the story, the counsellor will assist the client in redeveloping the narrative with a focus on those unique outcomes. This assists the client in empowering him/herself by creating a notion that those unique outcomes can prevail over the problems. Think about this analogy: you are a novel writer. You were given a novel to review and publish the way you prefer. You have read it and found it generally poor, but there were some interesting ideas which you liked. You selected these ideas, and re-write the novel around them. You can make a flawed story become a bestseller.
Alternative Narratives
The focus of Narrative Therapy is to explore the strengths and positive aspects of an individual through his or her narrative. Therefore, the main objective of this therapeutic approach is to improve the person’s perspective internally (reflective) and externally (towards the world and others). Alternative narratives are a simple way to relate to this concept. This technique works in combination with unique outcomes. How? The individual will reconstruct a personal story using unique outcomes, therefore, focusing on the positive aspects of a previous story in order to achieve a desired outcome. This process is based on the premise that any person can continually and actively re-author their own life.
By creating alternative perspectives on a narrative (or event within the narrative) the counsellor is able to assist the client in bringing about a new narrative which will help combat the ‘problems’. This is similar to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as it aims to create a positive perspective of an event.
Boundaries of Narrative Therapy
Despite being a widely used approach, particularly when combined with other therapeutic approaches, Narrative Therapy has certain boundaries or limitations. In many occasions, diverse clients may expect the therapist to act as the expert, instead of having to ‘conduct’ the conversation themselves. For this reason, Narrative Therapy can be challenging when the individual is not articulate. Lack of confidence, intellectual capacity and other issues could also undermine the expression of the individual through a narrative.
Another common boundary of Narrative Therapy is the lack of recipe, agenda or formula. This approach is grounded in a philosophical framework, and sometimes can become a particularly subjective or widely interpretative process.
The Leading Role
The most important aspect of Narrative Therapy is to empower the client. Placing the client as an expert, and understanding his/her story instead of attempting to predict it, indicates the therapist’s mindset. The idea is to emphasise the therapeutic relationship, in particular the therapist’s attitudes. This standpoint encompasses many of the important aspects of good interpersonal communication, such as: demonstration of care, interest, respectful curiosity, openness, empathy, and fascination.
Once this collaborative relationship has been established, the counsellor and the client can move forward and work on how to improve the outcomes of the narrative:
“Once upon a time… there was an optimistic, content and productive person…”
References:
Coleman, D. (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. (1st Ed.). London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Denning, S. (2004). Steve Denning: The website for business and organizational storytelling. (www.stevedenning.com/What_story.html)
Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany N.Y.: State University of New York Press
Sharf, R. (2004). Theories of Psychotherapy & Counselling. (3rd Ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Thomson Learning.
The Application of Gender Roles within “Much Ado About Nothing” and
“The Taming of the Shrew”
In his works William Shakespeare exploits many different themes to uncover the message of the works, impress reader and make a narration more vivid and colorful, sophisticated and interesting. The treatment of gender roles plays an important role in the plays under analysis being an integral part of plot and characters development. In Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare attempts to portray a more positive and accepting view of how women should be regarded and treated.
Shakespeare constructs gender role according to characters functions in the play. “In Much Ado About Nothing”, most of the male characters is depicted as brave soldiers. Leonato, Claudio and Benedick. They are courageous and clever men. For all their concentration on mundane details, Shakespeare’s novels depicts survival, heroic adventures of social mobility in which individuals single-handedly confront and conquer a host of adverse circumstances. In “The Taming of the Shrew”, the major characters Petruccio and Lucentio are joined by friendship. Despite the apparent crudity of their narratives, Shakespeare’s novels are animated by a quality more usually identified with a more self-consciously sophisticated form of gender relations. In both plays, women characters are depicted loving and sympathetic, nevertheless very proud and ambitious.
In spite historical epoch and predetermined gender roles of woman as subordinate, Shakespeare underlines that gender role between women and men are not so important as considered to be.
“Now Kate, I am a husband for your turn,
For by this light, whereby I see thy beauty
Thy beauty that doth make me like thee well” (The Taming of the Shrew, p.272).
In contrast to men, the function of women is to be a good wife and mother. In “Much ado about nothing” he writes that: “They say the lady is fair. ‘Tis a truth, I can bear them witness. And virtuous’tis so, I cannot reprove it. And wise, but for loving me. By my troth, it is no addition to her witnor no great argument of her folly, for I will be horribly in love with her” (Much ado about nothing, p.204).
Gender roles are stable in the plays in spite of the changes in appearance of the characters. From the very beginning in “The Taming of the Shrew”, Shakespeare portrays changes in the statuses of the hero. Sly is dressed as a lord, and a pageboy dressed in women’s clothing: “Am I a lord and have I such a lady? Or do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now? I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak”. (The Taming of the Shrew, Induction, Scene 2, lines 28-30). In the other play, Claudio and Hero decide to play a game, and force Beatrice and Benedick to fall in love. Their changes in appearance are successful helping Beatrice and Benedick to stop arguing. In “Much ado about nothing” the main hero says “What should I do with himdress him in my apparel and make him my waiting gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him” (Much ado about nothing, p.28). Contradictions like these – and there are many other celebrated examples in the plays – have often been taken as evidence of a slap-dash approach to the gender roles. Yet the pattern of these contradictions, in which characters preach like moralists yet act like ruthless opportunists, goes to the heart of Shakespeare plays. In any case, these heroes preserve their identity as males and females. These changes in the appearance, do not influence the status of woman in the society and do not humiliate them. Judgements like these derive from the tendency to identify Shakespeare with the narrators of his plays.
Exploiting the ambiguities of female function, a subdued creature and a strong and loving person, Shakespeare portrays complex female characters from positive side. For instance, in “The Taming of the Shrew” ill-tempered Katherine is contrasted to her “lovely” and calm sister Bianca. ‘Katherine the Curst’ A title for a maid, of all titles the worst” (The Taming of the Shrew, Act 1, Sc. 2, Lines 130-131). Shakespeare portrays Bianca as: “‘Tis deeds must win the prize, and he of both hat can assure my daughter greatest dower
Shall have my Bianca’s love.” (The Taming of the Shrew, Act 2, Sc. 1, Lines 361-365).
In general, Shakespeare’s reputation contributed to the stereotype of the moral author.
Plays which conformed to social mores were more widely acceptable as serious literary plays. The strong gender roles system made a clear distinction between the aristocratic lady as a graceful accomplishment, and the woman who went against the nature of sex.
Although the terms of the relative judgement has sometimes altered, the temptation to draw comparisons between male and female. High morality of women is underlined throughout the plays. The morality of Shakespeare is based on a simple antithetical contrast; natural instinct versus social hypocrisy, goodness of heart versus cunning of head. Part of the satisfaction of the plays comes from the combination of the formal symmetry of role structure with the apparent freedom and randomness of some episodes. At the end of the play, Katherine declares, “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee, And for thy maintence commits his body To painful labor both by sea and land” (Act 5, Sc. 2, 162-180). Using this episode, Shakespeare contrasts female characters underlining that women are treated according to their behaviour and character, which has little to do with gender roles. “I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.” (Much ado about nothing, p. 224).
In both plays, women voices construct great psychological complexity. In its treatment of the contradictions between ‘virtue’ as reputation and virginity as an extension of moral integrity, Shakespeare highlights the social hypocrisies where the marriage market puts a price on maidenhood. Shakespeare urges the conventional solution of marrying the seducer, but Katherine follows the path of self-imposed martyrdom. The play depicts simplistic morality, based on eternal virtues and justice.
“I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace” (The Taming of the Shrew, Act 5, Sc. 2, Lines 361-365).
This quote provides a notable contrast to the male treatment of female characters. It was the development of the female characters. By creating an distance between the heroines and the heroes, Shakespeare uses this theme to make a social comment on women’s nobles focusing on their good and bad sides.
“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,-
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never” Much ado about nothing, p.101).
Shakespeare uses the narrative of a woman asking readers to decide what is good and what is bad. He shows an intelligent but naive men tricked out of a woman virtue (Bianca). In drawing attention to the dangers faced by the good- natured but ill-advised heroine contributes to the social debate on the status of women, using the play as an entertaining medium of discussion. This is the way to kill a wife with kindness (The Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Sc. 1, Lines 201).
Attempting to portray positive image of women, Shakespeare underlines that it is a man who helps women to survive. Women do not have a possibility to interfere into life of men, nevertheless they do so in the plays. Women decide what is good for them and choose the ways to “reach a man”. For instance, Bianca ask Lucentio to be her tutor. Also, Claudio impulsive vitality is made acceptable by the artful manipulations of the narrator’s tone.
Women’s life, their destiny defined and depended upon the men, and, particularly, upon the their marriage. Although men had an influence on women’s behavior and exaggerated them in many life situations: “”That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she brought me up, I likewise give her most humble thanks; but that I will have a recheat winded in my forehead, or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick, all women shall pardon me.” (Much ado about nothing, p. 221).
Shakespeare describes that female characters are strong, as physically so mentally, because their life status requires a masculine strength, but all female characters copes with it perfectly. Shakespeare uses mainly masculine adjectives to underline thier strength.
And do you tell me of a woman’s tongue,
That gives not half so great a blow to hear
As will a chestnut in a farmer’s fire? (The Taming of the Shrew, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 200-209).
The main characteristics outlined are not independent, separate qualities of women but are all mutually interrelated while having an inter-dependent essence in each case. They serve to summarise and unify all characteristics inherent to women. Their character features appear as a guideline or norm that helps women to judge what is or is not right or good in their life. Feeling and practicising care, seeking peace of mind, holding to truth and desiring justice are intrinsic aims. That is, the degree of realisation of positive values in thought and action depend on the nature of the accumulated tendencies of a person interacting with others.
“Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband” (The Taming of the Shrew, Act 5, Scene 2, lines 12-13).
With the help of Hero, Shakespeare points out the readers’ attention to virtues of conciseness, strong, clear imagery, symbolism, understatement, humor, and irony. These fluctuations reflect the tragic tension within males: Claudio is at once too ambitious to allow his conscience to stop behaving his way and too conscientious to be happy with himself. At the end, Shakespeare depicts Claudio as a man whose character lacks strength, because of ambition. Women attempt to prove that their are strong enough to live in a masculine world, but they reach this through men’s love:
“O Hero! What a Hero hadst thou been
For thee I’ll lock up all the gates of love,
And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang
To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm,
And never shall it more be gracious” (Much ado about nothing, p. 271).
Even if Shakespeare portrays women from a positive side gender roles in the plays are limited. Wmen’s life and their destiny will be defined and depended upon the men, and, particularly, upon the their marriage. Although men will have an influence on women’s behavior and exaggerate them in many life situations. To look deeply into the problem it is possible to say that women have fought to be independent and be equal to men, but they have no rights. On the one hand marriage connects with ideology and sees as the state intervention in marriage and a abuse of rights. Women are treated as wives and mothers primarily.
“Lord! I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face: I hath rather lie in the woolen” (Much ado about nothing, p. 211).
In any case, woman represented in the plays of Shakespeare do not suffers because their role as wives. This a positive moments in treatment women. The old-new conservative approach to marry a prosperous person (a man or a woman) comes to nothing when the love is taken into account. In contrast to epoch represented by Shakespeare, marriage means love and happiness. Nevertheless, the existence of institution of marriage, in which men played the dominant role and wielded control, determine the gender roles, and placed women at the mercy of their male counterparts. Katherine says:
“My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws” (The Taming of the Shrew, Act 5, Scene 2, lines 140-144).
Some day women attempt to put an end to the long-established meaning of women’s roles and became feminists who were ready to fight against men. Women could move beyond the constrictions of the ideology.
It is possible to conclude that both plays embody functional division of gender roles: women are wives and men are husbands. Nevertheless, Shakespeare goes far beyond this simplistic representation of genders portraying that women can perform men’s functions successfully. This style of writing revels in its own vivacity and wit, offering its readers a rich and varied interpretation of gender roles and gender relations together with literary sophistication. Gender roles are based on moral introspection and psychological insight dramatizing the dilemmas of individual social choice. Love as care does not refer to an emotion or a state of mind so much as to a human faculty of identification with others, sympathy with all beings. Female’s sympathy seeks many and various channels of realisation. It is developed through experience and gradual self-realisation. Women’ poetic nature helps the reader to understand that female characters have a natural charm so attractive to others.
With its tone, both plays are a brilliant indictment of a society in which gender roles has abnegated the natural ties of humanity and love.
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