ALL GREAT MEN, HAVE SOME OR THE OTHER TIME, FALLEN PRAY TO AMBITIOUSNESS, BECAUSE THEY FAIL TO DRAW ALINE BETWEEN BEING AMBITIOUS AND OVER AMBITIOUS. CVBHUVANESWARI SHOWS US HOW.

'A mbition should be made of sterner stuff,'said Shakespeare in 'Julius Caesar'. The context is Marc Antonys famous funeral speech for Caesar, whom Brutus has treacherously murdered. Brutus speaks justifying their murder of Caesar, for, according to him, Caesar had become ambitious. 'As he was ambitious I slew him. There is death for his ambition.'In Antonys speech that immediately follows, he uses the very theme of ambition and turns the table against the latter. 'The noble Brutus has told you Caesar was ambitious…/ when that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept… ambition should be made of sterner stuff… I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse / yet Brutus says he was ambitious.'The benign Caesar cannot be sternly ambitious.

Ambition as an attribute and its role in a mans life is debated in literary works. Aristotle listed ambition one among the twelve virtues; the two vices he listed as opposed to ambition were excess of ambition and lack of ambition.

The Renaissance intellectuals and writers were much concerned about the issue of ambition.

What is the Limit? Three great works written during the Renaissance in England, Marlowes 'Dr. Faustus', Shakespeares 'Macbeth'and Miltons 'Paradise Lost'have ambition as their central theme. The three protagonists are chasing unnatural dreams, wanting to realise certain ambitions humanly impossible, involve risk or are against natural laws. Dr Faustus desires to all possible knowledge, but the method he chooses violates all moral codes; he chooses black magic as his via media, prohibited by church. In the end he loses his soul to devil and is to live in hell perpetually damned. He had denied god, god disowns him; devil ultimately claims him.

Macbeths ambition is an undesirable, misplaced, ruthless ambition, violating all norms of morality.

Prompted by an equally ambitious wife, he murders an old king in sleep, who was his benefactor and a guest, whom it was his duty to protect with his life. To safeguard his position, he turns a murderer, eliminates friends, their wives, and their children. Lonely and alienated, he is killed in a mutiny.

Satans is a gripping tragedy of a great, angelic being losing himself, losing everything because of his ambition. He wants to become god, failing which, he chooses gods favourites as target of attack.

They lose Paradise; Satan himself is punished by god to live perennially as a serpent.

Did a nemesis strike these heroes because they were going against the natural law of order aiming too high? Did they disturb the position each organism occupied in the great chain of being? All the three were too ambitious to climb too many ladders at a stretch in the placement of the hierarchy of species, and fall was but natural for, it was too risky and involved great danger. Macbeth, a lord, wanted to become a king. Faustus, a mortal dreams to become a demigod; violates mans limitation and travels in the universe. Satan, an angel, wants to become god, an impossibility, for there can be only one true god. Natural laws will not permit it What strikes the reader is the degeneration or reverse growth process of these protagonists.

Macbeth is a great warrior and a lord. In the beginning, he is not exactly happy to hatch the plan to murder Duncan. He says he has only his 'vaulting ambition'that will make him jump too high and fall on the other side. Their physical as well as moral degeneration is in proportion to the loftiness of their ambition; the height they aim at.

Faustus, a true hero and the most learned scholar of Wittenberg university, desires to rise above the species by becoming a demigod, but in the process of realising his ambition, degenerates and takes permanent seat in hell among damned souls. His fall is exactly in proportion to the position he aspired for. He who wanted to become a demigod, in the end, wishes for a total disintegration of body and soul. What an end to the man who aspired to become a deity! In Satans story, the poet has well delineated the degeneration of the protagonist through a corresponding, symbolic, physical degeneration. At the beginning he is the brightest angel, second only to god, a great warrior, a caring leader, magnanimous, capable of admiring beauty. His fall and degeneration are well portrayed, and quite systematic.

As the Archangel Lucifer, he is the brightest of the angels, but when he wakes up from the burning lake, he has lost his physical glory.

The next descend is into an organism, much inferior, that can't even stand up on its four legs, but a crawling, dust- feeding, hissing creature, with no voice to command others, no hands to fight a war. Still the thinking, feeling, agonising Lucifer is imprisoned in the serpents body. Satan is full of agony and remorse when he has to enter the serpent. 'Foul descent! I who… contended to… sit... the highest with… gods…'/ 'Am now constrained into a beast.'His fall, he is aware, is proportionate to the height of the seat and power he aimed at.

'I… who to the Deity aspired.'The ambition and revenge scheme seems to eliminate Satans basic qualities one by one.

He becomes envious, spiteful, deceptive, destructive. He becomes prophetic 'destruction wide may range'. Satan chooses evil as his associate, 'Evil, be thou my good.'Yet these heroes are loveable, for, even in their fall, they retain stoic dignity. We shudder at their fate, aware of the height they fell from.

If the Cathartic theory works, we may be shaken by the possibility of our own fall if our ambition is not proportionate to natural laws and moral order.

These stories thus become allegories on ambition, that is every mans story. Unbridled ambitions unpleasant consequences are brought before the reader so aptly, precisely and effectively by none other than Satan himself. 'What will not ambition and revenge descend to?'( cvbhuvaneswari@ yahoo. in)