To Be or Not to Be?

So to finish off this wonderful semester of Shakespeare, I want to leave you all with a version of a "To be or not to be" speech.

Hamlet: To be, or not to be--that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--

No more--and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--

To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprise of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,

The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remembered."­

Sympathy for Caliban?

Caliban from "The Tempest" hardly seems like a character worth sympathizing for, I know. He's spiteful, ungrateful, and not one of the most gentlemanly fellows of Shakespeare. However I've been moved to show a little bit of compassion for the guy. 

Caliban was stranded on the island with his mother, Sycorax, long before Prospero came to inhabit the island. Granted Sycorax likely didn't make a good mother, Prospero did kill her and took the control of the island from Caliban. After which, Caliban becomes nothing more than a servant. It's almost ironic when you compare what Prospero has done on the island to what the people he is revengeful for did to him. It's a little bit more understanding why Caliban is a little bitter toward Prospero. Perhaps Caliban did take it a step too far in his attempt to rape Miranda though. Still could you consider Caliban's attempted rape an act more out against Prospero? Perhaps an act that came to being from karma for Prospero's ill treatment toward Caliban?

Phrases from Shakespeare

If I remember correctly from the beginning of the semester, there was a mention that we use a lot of Shakespearian phrases without knowledge of it. And it just so happens I came across a few phrases I at least never realized were from the works of Shakespeare:

- "All that glitters is no gold" (The Merchant of Venice)

- "Better foot before" [best foot forward] (King John)

- "Break the ice" (The Taming of the Shrew)

- "Come what come may"[come what may] (Macbeth)

- "Dead as a doornail" (2 Henry VI)

- "Forever and a day" (As You Like It)

- "Give the devil his due" (I Henry IV)

- "Jealousy is a green-eyed monster" (Othello)

- "Heart of gold" (Henry V)

- "A rose by any other name would smell so sweet" (Romeo and Juliet)

- "As good luck would have it" (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

- "Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble" (Macbeth)

- "Fight fire with fire" (King John)

There are many, many more, but it's amazing to see just how much of Shakespeare's phrases are still used today and even more amusing to think that some people may not even know that they are quoting Shakespeare.

Phrases from Shakespeare can be found here.

Some Sonnets

Sonnet 15 recognizes the decline in beauty of objects over time. The poet is aware of this ever changing life we all live, and he cherishes the present beauty of the objects around him. It’s one of the sonnets introducing the concept of how give this mortal beauty can be given an everlasting life through his words.

Sonnet 18, one of my favorites, exalts a youth’s beauty through a comparison to a summer’s day. The poet comments on the simplicity of summer and how the season will decline. However, the poet once again immortalizes the beauty of the youth, telling him/her that his/her beauty will not fade like the summer, so long as his poem survives the years the youth’s beauty will forever be preserved for all to see.

Sonnet 30 focuses on the value of memory. There is a heavy sense of depression for the death or separation from the youth the poet admired so dearly. However this loss is healed through the memories the poet has of the youth, which he also gives immortality through the poem.

Sonnet 55, surprise surprise is another poem solely focusing on the power of words to bestow an everlasting life through all the ages of man. The poet compares the immortal foundation of verse to artwork and monuments, both of which will crumble beneath the forces of nature and war. The power of the poets verse is the only chance he has of giving his youth an immortal life until judgment day when no man is left standing.

Sonnet 60 is concerned with time. The poet acknowledges that time is unfair. Time gives life, but simultaneously delivers death. No matter how much someone desires or attempts to keep their beauty, it will eventually fade into wrinkles. The poet once again makes a promise to try and restore and preserve this beauty through his poem.

Sonnet 65 once again revolves around how nothing can withstand time. Nature will have its way and there is no overpowering it. The poet questions how beauty could possibly overcome the decay of time. His only hope is to preserve his love through the miracle of his pen and ink.

Sonnet 130, another one of my favorites, expresses an interest in negative comparisons. At one point I thought the poet may be simply mocking the competition there is to develop the most elegant and beautiful goddess-like comparisons possible, but now I tend to lean toward the idea this is possibly more than mocking. There is a sense of confidence in the poet for his love and he has no need to misrepresent his love through outlandish comparisons.

What's Wrong With Helena?!

As it’s already been stated repeatedly, “All’s Well That End’s Well” is admittedly the most well-liked play of all of Shakespeare. While I think this play can be undervalued most of the time, I can somewhat understand why people don’t have a tendency to enjoy this play. As Harold Bloom states it, “The initial question of “All’s Well That End’s Well” is: How can Helena be so massively wrong?” (348) The question loomed over my head the entire time I read this play.

Bertram is of noble blood and surpasses Helena’s social rank, but he’s an immature, stingy, spoiled, dishonorable monster of a man. Helena on the other hand is his opposite, a woman deserving to be loved and prized as a wife and yet still remains infatuated with Bertram despite his horrid qualities. She’s stubborn never ceasing to win over the affection Bertram refuses her until she meets his two conditions:

“When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of they body that I am father to, then call me husband, but in such a “then” I write a “never.” (Act III, Scene 2, 56-59)

It’s surprising Helena even puts up with Bertram’s disdainful behavior toward her. She’s so stubborn or so set on gaining Bertram’s affections she eventually finds a way to pull the ‘bed trick’ on him and succeeds. It’s hard to grasp the idea that such a horrid man, in the end “is dismissed to happiness” as Dr. Johnson is quoted in Harold Bloom. 

Objectifying to Rape

A theme I noticed in Shakespeare’s poem “The Rape of Lucrece” was the objectification of women. Lucrece is an object of possession as described by her husband, Collatine. Lucrece is nothing more than a possession to boost his ego among his comrades. It is in his bragging of Lucrece as a work of art, a divine beauty, the most chaste and ideal wife of all women, that sparks the lust within Tarquin. It is this lust that drives Tarquin to believe that he must have this woman if he is to satisfy the hunger within him.

A similar theme is echoed in Cymbeline. Posthumus uses Imogen as a boastful tool to be superior to his friends. And just as Collatine was responsible for the rape of Lucrece, Posthumus drives Iachimo to take on the role of Tarquin. Though, unlike Tarquin, Iachimo never actually steals away Imogen’s chastity only takes the evidence he needs to convince Posthumus he has nothing to brag about anymore.

All You Need Is Love

If I recall from such a long time ago, we were asked to blog about what we need in life. I remember reading someone else’s blog about this topic and sadly I can’t remember whom it was, but I do remember him/her saying that love is not a necessity of life. I’d certainly like to think this is false. Sure to keep breathing one would definitely need food, water, and shelter and that is it, but I think in order for any person to desire to stay alive, love is needed. For humans, it’s simple to say we are social beings and constantly want to be around others, but I think there is more to it than that. We need meaning in life and love gives us just that. Shakespeare’s plays easily display this necessity of life. Can you think of a play where love is not involved? Where love is not desired? And I’m not just talking about love between a man and a woman. It could also be the love of a daughter or the people, ect.

       

We could say we don’t need love to live, but if you think about it, if we don’t have a person to love, we fill the void with something else. This is a little off topic Shakespeare wise, but if you take for example the movie Cast Away, when Chuck is left stranded on the island alone his affection shifts to a volleyball he names Wilson. He’s infatuated with the ball despite this inanimate object can show no affection back. Wilson gives Chuck meaning to life, someone else to care about outside of himself, a reason to stay alive. So back to Shakespeare it would seem the characters that fail to attain love, or lose the love in their life end up dead such is the obvious case of Romeo and Juliet and many others among Shakespeare’s work.

King Lear and the Bible

In my readings of “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human”, I found myself particularly interested in Harold Bloom’s comparison of King Lear to King Solomon. Bloom mentions that he has read many critical analysis that set a relationship up between King Lear and Job, but Bloom doesn’t by it anymore. He instead think Shakespeare thought more about the story of King Solomon toward the end of his days and his reign. Bloom gives this passage as textual evidence Shakespeare may have associated Lear with Solomon:

“I myself am also mortal and a man like all other, and am come of him that was first made of the earth.

And in my mothers womb was I facioned to be flesh in ten moneths: I was broght together into blood of the sede of man, and by the pleasure that cometh with slepe.

And when I was borne, I received the commune aire, and fel upon the earth, which is of like nature, crying & weeping at the first as all other do.

I was nourished in swaddling clothes, and with cares. For there is no King that had anie other beginning of birth. All men then have one entrance unto life, and a like going out.”

– Geneva Bible, Wisdom of Solomon 7:1-6

This passage of the Geneva Bible, Bloom says is alluded to by Lear in his speech to Gloucester in act IV scene 6:

“Lear: If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes;

I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester;

Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air

We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark.

Gloucester: Alack, alack the day!

Lear: When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools.”

Similar to Solomon, Bloom makes the point that after Lear his kingdom was divided. Bloom states that James himself may have seen “in the aged Lear the aged Solomon, each in their eighties, each needing and wanting love, and each worthy of love.”

“Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” by Harold Bloom pg. 477-478

Puck the Mischievous Imp

After reading “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” I wasn’t entirely sure what to think of Puck. Were his pranks playfully mischievous or were they simply sinister? His mischief was both deliberate and a comic mistake at some points. Take for example Puck transforming Bottom’s head into that of an ass. He hardly seemed to have a reason for it outside of simply entertaining himself. Where as casting the love spell on Lysander for Hermia was unintentional though he was nonetheless still amused by it.

Another fascinating thought I read in Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" is the meaning of Puck’s name. “The word puck or pook originally meant a demon out for mischief or a wicked man, and Robin Goodfellow was once a popular name for the Devil” (151). Which is almost ironic in consideration of the relationship between faeries and angels.

The word faerie is derived from the latin word fata meaning fate. Faeries similar to angels occupied a realm between Heave and Earth, some cultures even think of faeries as fallen angels. In these culture beliefs there were ‘blessed’ faeries of the Seelie Court, and the Unseelie faeries. The difference between the two being that the ‘blessed’ faeries mainly do good in the world, and only pull pranks on those who deserve them. The Unseelie faeries, however, are rather sinister tormenting and harming humans. (http://mrianasoriginalfiction.houseofbetazed.com/MythologyInShakespeare.html)

I suppose in the end though, that Puck is only a playful imp not meaning any actual harm to befall the humans like that of an Unseelie faerie. Though his tricks can be wicked and harsh, throughout the play there is a dominant comic, fun-loving personality in his pranks.

Northrup Frye's "The Green World"

Around the beginning of the semester when we read “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Sexson mentioned Northrup Frye’s concept of a Green World. I took the liberty to further explore this aspect of Shakespeare.

Fry comments “the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the Green World, goes into a metamorphosis there…and returns to the normal world.” (85). As in MSND the character’s facing a problem, such as the lover’s Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius, end up resolving their conflicts in this Green World typically represented as a forest.

The Green World is known to be a world of magic causing transformations and discoveries. However, in this realm time is almost non-existent with the real world being left behind pushing character’s outside of their element. With this lack of a presence of the demands and life of the real world, characters are free from constraints able to gain new perspectives and further their personal growth. 

Test Questions

1. What is obsessive question does Prospero keep asking Ariel?
- Time
2. How many times does Prospero use the word "now"?
- 79 times. Why?
3. What game are Miranda and Ferdinand playing when the curtain is drawn?
-chess
4. What chore does Ferdinand Caliban have on the island?
- carrying wood
5. Shakespeare is interested in creating a sacramental sense of reality. What are the three things people do most in their lives?
- To see, To speak, To do.
6. How is Antony like Pospero?
- Conquer the feminine
7. Which persona did your instructor not associate with Prospero?
- hobbit
8. What can Caliban's mother's name be associated with?
- the boar
9. What was Cleopatra's greatest desire? In Antony and Cleopatra what is curious between all the scense with the two?
- They are never on the stage alone. She wants to be remembered.
10. What is the best way to free someone from pain?
11. What's the consuming myth of Pericles (all four of the last plays)?
-Persephone and Dimeter
12. Why is the handkerchief in Othello important? What does it remind you of?
- The shape of the mole on Imogen, the cowslip
13. Answer everything is the echo.
14. Who is the most important female magician in the last four plays?
-Winter's Tale - Paulina.
15. What does Paulina use to awaken Hermione?
-She plays music.
16. What poem does the MSU motto come from?
- Mountains and mines. "No worst, there is none" by Gerard Hopkins
17. What killed Cleopatra?
- Asp
18. What or whom always show up in romance? Particular element that appears.
- Pirates
19. Which word is used the most in "Winter's Tale"?
- Issue
20. What mythological reference is Antony making on the reference of the shirt of Nessus?
- The Shirt of Flame, Hercules
21. Why does Alonso believe he will not die in the wreck?
- Gonzalo mentioned the mariner did not have the drowning mark, therefore they couldn't drown.
22. What is the most famous stage direction?
- Exit pursued by bear from "Winter's Tale"
23. What does Imogen change her name to?
- Fidel meaning faithful
24. Who echoes Leontes fate to be outside of the churchyard? Mamillius talks about a man who dwells around a churchyard? Who is the character in the play?
- Leontes
25. What three words did Northrup Frye use to prepare you for King Lear?
Nature, Nothing, Fool
26. Who offends King Lear the most with her answer?
- Cordelia
27. What is Lady Gaga's bathtub full of?
- Bath of cottage cheese
28. If you will weep my fortune you can_______. From King Lear?
- take my eyes
29. Recognition scene most protractive?
- in Pericles between father and daughter, husband and wife, and mother and daughter
30. What seest thou else in the dark ____ and ____ of time?
-backward and abysm
31. What play has a Scooby Doo ending?
- Cymbeline
32. What happens to Guiderius just before he is revealed as Cymbeline's son?
- He is exiled.
33. What are the three goddesses revealed at the end of the Winter's Tale?
Paulina the old crone, Hermione the mother, and Perdita the maiden
34. What is the riddle in Pericles?
- has to do with incest.

4/5 & 4/7 - Class Notes

"Tempest"

- The storm wasn't real, imagined

• shift focus to mechanism that creates illusions

- Based on ancient religious mystery of Eleusinian 

• draw from scriptures that are open to all
• transforms lives by showing, saying, doing something
• sacrament of marriage
• everything is meant to be instead of random and uninspired

- Miranda = wonder

- The elements

• fire, air = Ariel
• water, earth = Caliban

- Prospero 

• The mage, magician, sorcerer, alchemist
• Operates in real time, always asking about time
• Bottom wanting to play all the roles in the play
• Prospero knows all stories

- What did Gonzalo put in the boat? Books. 

- Memorize Prospero's line: "What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?"

• meaning: what else do you remember?

- What does Prospero seek?

• Forgiveness and redemption rather than revenge

- Caliban's mother, Sycorax:

• female magic allegory

- What is the echo or pattern in Shakespeare?

• Prospero is going to put on a wedding and talks to perspective son-in-law about lust. Uses the same words Marina did in Pericles "break not the virgin knot". 
• interest in virginity and chastity
• Venus and Cupid are excluded of the blessing of the sacrament of marriage.
• Iris speaks about Venus and Cupid. "Be not afraid. I met her Deity cutting the clouds towards Paphos and her son dove-drawn with her." What is the echo? 
• In the poem of Venus and Adonis.  "Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen means to immure herself and not be seen."  

- Anamnesis: remembering from previous reincarnations 

• Lost without memories, you are your memories

-Stage direction: "Enter certain reapers" - associated with harvest

-Stage direction: "A strange, hollow, and confused noise" 

• Prospero forgot about Caliban's plot against his life.

- Most sublime moment in Shakespeare: 

• Prospero: "These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great glove itself, yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
• It's all a dream, it's all a puppet show

- Trinculo and Stephano distracted by clothes, but Caliban wants Prospero's books.

- Gonzalo: "set it down with gold on lasting pillars" 

• echo of Othello

- Prospero draws the curtain and Alonso sees his son Ferdinand whom he thought was dead. 

- Play within a play:

• the whole play
• the masque

- How to set Prospero free from the play?

• Do you believe? If you do clap your hands. (Peter Pan)

3/22, 3/29, & 3/31 - Class Notes

- 4 last plays Cymbeline, Winters Tale, Pericles, and the Tempest

• Shakespeare made a wrong turn after Antony and Cleopatra?
• Leaves behind comedies, history, and tragedies for what?
• Experimenting and exploiting genres

- Romance: typical adventure beginning at birth, captured by pirates, separation of people leads to eventual reunion

• Fools transformed in romances

- What can the imagination accomplish?

- "Cymbeline"

• Evil queen step-mother
• myth of the flower

- "Pericles" 

• Seems longer, more expansion, more going on
• Helicanus the fool
• Consuming myth - Persephone, Hades, and Dimeter
• line 189 "remade me though I made you" Pericles to Marina.

-"Tempest"

• Shakespeare's mystery play
• myth of mother and daughter

-Women knowing and not telling, men telling and not knowing

- Repetition of patience

-"Winter's Tale"

• People talking about revelations vs being there
• distance hinder or help understanding 
• Who dwelt by the church yard? 
• Echoes to Leontes

- What do Imogen, Marina, Perdita, and Miranda have in common?

• May reveal nature of four last plays

3/8 & 3/10 - Class Notes

- Antony and Cleopatra

- Scene 1 is central to the play

- First word "nay," argument is already propensity of Antony's actions

- Rumors constantly going around: the woman lier

- Antony and Cleopatra never alone together, missing soliloquies

- Other peoples perspectives/interpretations

• No point of view not questioned or up for debate

- Act II scene 2

• Description of how Antony and Cleopatra met
• Presented as truth
• Presence of rumor and perspective

- Roman: cold, hard, masculine, white, fixed personality and ideals, stoic

- Egypt: soft, fluffy, feminine, eating, black, fluid, desire, voluptuous

- Octavia vs Cleopatra

• Ideal wife with blonde hair and blue eyes
• Cleopatra with dark skin more passionate

- Antony and Cleopatra = Mars and Venus

• Venus married to Volcan
• Mess of love and war together

- Identity

• Who am I? Who are people?
• "It is what it is" description of crocodile from Antony
• Antony's identity threatened
• Cleopatra embraces lack of identity, infinite variety

- Fight against wrinkles, nostalgia for the past

- Cleopatra: me person and media person

• How am I doing?
• Needs audience
• Puts on a play or a show - Tell Antony I'm dead.

- To become gods must work on everything: what is said, what is seen, what is done

- Self creators or culture creates personality

- Lie that leads to the truth

3/1 - Class Notes

- King Lear

• The ailing king:
• James G. Frazer - conflict between kings of golden bough, old challenge young
• King Lear - egotist, restricted consciousness
• What do you do with the old?
• What happens when ego is divided?
• Edmund - demythologized = villian

- How much depends on nothing? - Fredrick Turner

- What does it mean to be natural? 

• "Nature" to Edmund = survival of the fittest

- "It is never the worst as long as you can say it is the worst."

- Function of the fool?

• Teach Lear who he is? 

- Albany = not good or bad, acts as a sponge

- Flyting: exchange of terms of abuse

- Patience

• Job, King Lear, Brothers Karamazov

 

King Lear and the Fool

This is a clip of the 1971 film version of King Lear Act I Scene 4 where the Fool asks King Lear what use he can make of nothing.

Flyting - The Poetic Joust

Flyting on the ball field:

Fun fact from Wikipedia: Flyting is a poetic genre. The word flyting has been adopted from a fifteenth and sixteenth century custom of Scots. Bards or poets would apparently "engage in public verbal contests of high-flying, extravagant abuse" (wikipedia) most likely spoken in verse.

Test Questions

1. Is there a play that is going to be weighted heavier on the test?

- No.

2. About which play does Northrup Frye say that critics have been making faces because it upsets the normal conventions of comedy?
- "Alls Well That Ends Well"

3. A great reckoning in a little room may be a reference to?
- Christopher Marlowe

4. These are counselors that ________.
- Feelingly persuade me what I am.

5. What name does Rosalind take for her male role?
- Ganymede

6. What kind of speech acts are committed in the seven stages of life?
- the baby: mewling, the schoolboy: whining, the lover: sighing, the soldier: in strange oaths, the justice: through wise saws, the pantaloon: manly voice to child-like or whistling, the final scene: second childishness and mere oblivion, or silence

7. What does miles gloriosus mean?
- The braggart soldier

8. Which character in All's Well is an example of miles gloriosus?
- Parolles

9. Who does Puck address in his final speech?
-A wide variety of audiences

10. What profession does Jacques want to pursue? What is he going to do at the end of the play?
- Join Duke Frederick and become a holy man

11. Why is the clown, Lavache in "As You Like It" getting married?
- The devil drive, lust

12. What is the term used for an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation?
- Deus exmachina

13. What two levels are stressed in this class for understanding Shakespeare?
- Mythological and historical

14. What does T.S. Elliot say about Shakespeare?
- We can only be wrong about him in a new way.

15. According to Borges' essay, who is Shakespeare?
- He is everything and nothing.

16. According to Frederick Turner, the human mind has the power to encompass what?
- The entire universe

17. What god descends from the sky in the end of "As You Like It"? or Who is the deus exmachina in "As You Like It"?
- Hymen

18. What is neologism?
- Create your own neologism. Coin your own word, can't exist in the dictionary and must give your own definition

19. What term did Keats use to refer to an artisit ridding himself of everything?
- Negative Capability

20. Orlando is to Rosalind as Touchstone is to who?
- Audrey the country wench

21. The metaphor of turning lead into gold refers to what?
-Turning water into wine.

22. What does Touchstone mean when he talks about time?
- Rot and Ripen

23. What is a hieros gamos?
- Sacred marriage (relationship to Bottom visiting Titania)

24. What is the meaning to the word "wood" in AMSND?
- The outskirts of town.

25. The first fourteen or fifteen sonnets had to do with what theme?
- Gaining immortality through babies

26. Sonnets eighteen and nineteen, the theme changes to?
- Gaining immortality through mind babies

27. What does Hughes say is Shakespeare's consuming myth?
- Venus and Adonis

28. What is the term Northrup Frye gives to the mythological significance of the Forest of Arden?
- The green world

29. We are their _____ and ______.
- Parents and originals

Words To Know


- Paranomasia: word play with humorous or rhetorical effect
- Sigil/Seal: inscribed/painted symbol considered to have magical power
- Displaced Myth: all literature is traced to mythological backgrounds
- Senex: wise old man
- Metempsychosis: transmigration of the death of a soul of a human into another body
- Masque: amateur dramatic entertainment
- Green World: tendency for dramatist to use woods for sanctuary from a city

Readings to Be Familiar With


- Turner's "School of Night"
- Northrop Frye's "Argument of Comedy"
- Borge's "Everything and Nothing"

2/22 - Class Notes

- Paronomasia: word play with humorous or rhetorical effect

- "Original" always use with quotes

- The double language 

- Achilles heel

• Mythologically: Achilles dipped in waters of immortality by the heel, 
• depictions of arrow in the heel 
• Realistically: Tendon that when torn you can no longer walk

- Sigil - inscribed/painted symbol considered to have magical power, archaic: a seal

if you ponder images move up levels

tempest prospero - what else seest thou...

- Captious and intenible sieve - ordinary every day thing, so enormous it won't be able to be filtered out, mythological bag

• Captious - finding fault with
• Capacious - having a lot of space

- Plausive - that which produces superior fruit

- What do we talk about when we talk about love?

- Letter riddle pg. 586 - "When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of they body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a 'then' I write a 'never.'"

• Helena becomes the magician, or the choreographer in order to make find the solution
• The bed trick

- Parolles most fantastically dressed of Shakespearean characters.

- Practical joke on Parolles

• Figure out what happens to him. What changes he undergoes. 

- Theme of death and resurrection

- Julian of Norwich

• "All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well."

2/15 & 2/17 - Class Notes

Homework


- Memorize "These are counselors that feelingly persuade me what I am."
- Put most interesting thing in the first sentence
- Read pg. 130-180 for those who have the Ted Hughes book

Notes

- Educate by sophisticating the immagination

- More myths in "As You Like it"

• Cane and Abel, Jacob and Isaac 
• Parable of the prodigal son
• Orlando wrestling with Charles similar to David and Goliath

- Hero has to perform unfamiliar or magical task in order to rescue the damsel in distress.

- Hymen descending improbable

- Touchstone represents the city, Corin the rustic

- 3 Levels of time

• Objective - Jacques sense of time
• Subjective - moveable time, moving with time, moving in time
• Natrual - seasons, perpetual spring ambiance, the forest of Arden

- Cynical lovers opposite of romantic lovers

- "As You Like It" couples

• Orlando and Rosalind
• Oliver and Celia
• Touchstone and Audrey
• Silvius and Pheobe

- Differences between "As You Like It" and "Midsummer Night's Dream"

• Are the mythological folk still there?
• When is myth obvious or removed?

- What do you have when myth is removed? 

• Jacques' speech pg. 419
• Pain is what makes you feel alive
• Seven ages, each speaks differently
• Mewling baby
• Whining schoolboy
• Sighing lover
• Soldier of oaths
• Justice of wise saws and modern instances
• Manly voice of the lean and slippered pantaloon back to the whining schoolboy
• Lastly the second childishness and mere oblivion

- Miles gloriosus: the boastful soldier

- Theme of the dying king in the Holy Grail and "Alls Well That Ends Well"

• King can't produce, land can't produce
• Hero finds what heals the king
• Find holy grail (the bowl or the chalice) or the lance
• Symbols of man and woman, but have to ask the right question

- Progressively less mythological from "Midsummer's Night Dream" to "As You Like It" to "Alls Well"

• All literature is displaced myth - Frye

- Alls Well

• Helena is the hero
• Wedding is at the beginning and goes downhill from there
• Mother Goddess, triple form: Maiden, Mother, and Crone
• Countess - the mother with no husband and son leaving
• Lafew french translation - under fire, the alchemical fire
• Parolles translation - words

- Hughes Shakespearean formula

• Two nouns linked by two adjectives directed onto a third noun that startles reader into odd metaphorical life
• Line 57 pg. 573 - "One the catastrophe and heel of pastime"
• Line 198 pg. 576 - "Yet in this captious and intenible seive"

Orlando the Herculean Christ

While poking around with many different mythological and biblical references in "As You Like It", I happened to stumble upon an article written by Richard Knowles. His article explored the allusions of Orlando being a Herculean and Christ-like figure. Let's start from the beginning shall we?

Act I Scene 1, Orlando associates himself with stalled ox, horses and dunghills. While Orlando is clearly expressing his worthlessness due to a lack of education, there just may be a subtle tie to Hercules fifth task of cleansing of the Augean Stables. It may be stretching it just a little, but how about some more solid evidence.

Act I Scene 2, just before the wrestling match there is a direct reference marking the beginning of the pattern of allusions. Rosalind wishes for Orlando to win the match saying, "Now Hercules be they speed, young man!" The defeat of Charles can be seen as Hercules' defeat of the giant Antaeus. Further developing the allusion is a reference embedded in Charles' mocking before the match. "Come, where is this young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth?" Antaeus was known to be son of the earth. The victory over Antaeus symbolized the victory of the rational over the earthly appetite thus portraying Orlando as rational and virtuous.

Act V Scene 1, the allusion continues in Oliver's tale to Rosalind and Celia. Orlando wrestling the lioness and the snake are similar to Hercules' fighting the Nemean Lion, the Hydra, and the snakes sent from Hera. What's more interesting is that the Nemean Lion stands for pride or wrath and the Hydra and snakes for envy.
So allegorically speaking, in defeating the lioness and the snake, Orlando overcame the envy and the wrath in his brother's heart.

Act V also incorporates a more Christ-like figure for Orlando. Although tempted twice to leave his brother, Orlando saves Oliver from the lioness and the snake and in a way from eternal death. After the defeat, Orlando goes into a cave wounded and faints symbolic of the grave of Jesus. Upon waking, Orlando sends out a bloody 'napkin' which could be a reference to the burial garments of Jesus. The wound and the bloody 'napkin' can also symbolize the redemption of Oliver by the sacrificial blood of his brother. As if that isn't enough, after the whole ordeal, Oliver instantly falls in love with Celia whose name happens to mean heaven. Then there's the ending where Duke Senior basically regains 'The Promise Land' and Hymen, the god of marriage, grants heavenly rewards to Orlando and Oliver.

2/8 & 2/10 - Class Notes

Homework


Blog:

• In what way does mythology operate in "As You Like It"?
• Google the "Green World" and report findings

Notes

- Important in presentations:

1. Discord and concord (harmony) - Hippolyta speech pg. 277
2. Play within a play - shows creation of illusions, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"
3. Walls - boundaries of levels (gods, aristocrats, ordinary, rude mechanics), membranes leak into one another

- Watched 3 different films of MSND

• Moved through a wall when rude mechanics played a serious role

- Comedy

• Ends with a dance, wedding, feast, or all three
• In traditional comedy, everyone gets on the stage at the end to show unity
• Celebrates continuity of social realm

- Puck: Lord of Misrule

- Our class is a comedy: 

• Bringing together, reconciliation, harmonious
• Everyone accepts everyone
• Individual disappears into collectivity
• Comedy comes from comos. 
• Forgives and accepts

- What are Shakespeare's poems all about?

• It's about itself.

- Play within a play prologue pg. 280

• Quince not really there, but instead representations  

- Top ten quotes: pg. 279, Theseus

• Thinks of himself as realist.
• Discover in context, Theseus is not sympathetic to imagination creating or what is not there.
• Lover, lunatic, and poet are all in the same bag. 
• Poet is linked with madness. Myth to history and combining them.
• There's no substance, but Theseus finds a local habitation to put them in.
• Should quote Hippolyta's following statements.

- As You Like It

• Cane and Abel - rebellious brothers, Oliver and Orlando
• Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden - Oliver's Orchard, The Forest of Arden, Adam the character
• Prelapsarian - the time before the Fall of Man; innocent and unspoiled
• Punishments for eating the fruit:
• Man has to work for a living
• Woman has pain in childbirth
• Serpent must crawl on its belly
• Venus and Adonis - Rosalind and Orlando
• Ganymede - once a handsome young boy carried off by Zeus to become the the cupbearer for the gods 
• Rosalind - the magician character, manipulates with imagination
• Starts in the green world
• Mother Earth - The Forest of Arden 
• Pastoral, Orchard
• Declining ages - Ovid's Metamorphoses 
• Golden Age, Silver, Bronze, Iron, progressively getting worse 
• Past is better than the present
• Country life is superior to the corruption in city life.
• Relate to the land
• Notion of time, cities governed by time. Jacques pg. 418
• All of life is a theatrical event. pg. 419
• Duke Senior: Life is more sweet, more free, no penalty pg. 413

2/1 & 2/3 Class Notes

Homework


- Read Northrop Frye, The Argument of Comedy

Notes


- The Green World:

• Tendency for dramatists to use woods for sanctuary from a city 
• Consumed by nature or renewed by denizens of it.

- Winter's Tale

• Famous exit pursued by a bear

- Agents of metamorphosis: bear, horse, lion, boar

- Brother Battle

• Cain and Abel (Rational vs Irrational)

- Act I

• Edges of the woods
• hints of Theseus' affairs
• Hippolyta a war prize

- Displaced Myth: all literature traced to a mythological backgrounds

- Comedy 

• Senex always gives in
• Spirit of comedy the spirit of youth
• A symbolism of coming together

- Bottom's speech pg. 278: parody of St. Paul's 1st letter to the Corinthians

1/25 & 1/27 - Class Notes

- Metempsychosis:

• transmigration as death of soul of a human to another body
• no such thing as death, only change

- "Venus and Adonis" - Ted Hughes:

• Ancient mesopotamia story of Anana visiting her sister in the underworld, falling in love with Demus, takes the place of her sister in the underworld, and dies annually. (Opposite of Persephone and Hades)
• Venus drives Persephone mad and becomes the boar and kills Adonis. 
• The complete goddess in two - Adonis blowing off Venus activates her sister to kill Adonis.

- Masque: amateur dramatic entertainment, ex. The Tempest

- Tarquin: ultimate villain, the boar that commits the atrocious act 

- Macbeth pg. 1627: 

• Shakespeare reference to John 13 when Jesus knows of Judas' betrayal
• Kill quickly

- "Rape of Lucrece" is inverse of "Venus and Adonis"

• The guy is wrong in both. 
• Adonis by rejecting Venus' love, the offering of everything.
• Tarquin by raping the chaste. 

- Chasity: Goddess Diana

• While Diana is bathing, Actaeon peaks. Diana lets him look and flicks water onto his head growing two horns. The hunter then becomes hunted. Actaeon's dogs do not recognize him, think of his as game, and attack him.

-"The first thing we do, kill all the lawyers" 

• Largely misread quote. Should kill all the books. The english teachers are the first to go in a revolution.

-Sonnets

• Started because Shakespeare was commissioned to persuade a young man to have children.

-The Muse

• Woman comes down with wings sits on your shoulder and imagines things
• Have some mind babies - focus on immortality in sonnets

-View Midsummer Night's Dream as a jigsaw piece

• Put all the pieces together and spell Shakespeare. Every play is the same version. Everyone is an anagram of everyone else. 
• Romeo and Juliet is the opposite to MSND

-Darkness outside of the puzzle is the myth 

-The Wood

• place of trouble, insanity, lunacy, imagination, possessed by the moon
• wooed

-Four levels of myth

1. Titania and Oberon (Puck & Fairy Folk)
2. Hippolyta and Theseus
3. Four Lovers
4. Mechanicals

1/18 & 1/20 - Class Notes

Homework

Readings:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream

Blog:

• Read everyone's blog
• Responses on the School of Night
• Sonnet in the next 10 days or so

Notes
- 4 areas of foundation for literature:

1. The Bible - While it is not of literary excellence, the Bible has remained an important and sacred text over thousands of years.
2. Shakespeare
3. Classic Mythology - not Roman, but Greek
4. Everything else - Secular scripture or popular literature. Basically anything that isn't the Bible.

- The School of Night

• Moving from the middle ages to the brave new world of science.
• Alchemy/Pseudosciences: Neoplatonism, kabbalah, tarot cards, hermetic mysticism
• Shakespeare reference pg. 233 - "King: Oh paradox! Black is the badge of hell, the hue of dungeons, and the school of night, and beauty's crest becomes the heavens well."

-John Keats: Negative Capability

-Consuming Myths

• Shakespeare - Venus and Adonis
• T.S. Elliot - St. Sebastian
• Michelangelo - Pieta

-  We've read sections of:

• Cymbeline - the successful seducer (pg. 657)
• Antony and Cleopatra - dead lover, "You lie up to the hearing of the gods." (pg. 1697)
• Love's Labor's Lost - the true academic project: The meaning of life is not read in books, but in the eyes of women (pg. 235)

-Images of the boar appearing throughout Shakespeare

-Who was Shakespeare?

• Borges' "Everything and Nothing"

-  We are unconscious of the degree of Shakespeare's influence

• Wallace Stevens - A Postcard From The Volcano

"Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill; 

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt 

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls, 

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white, 
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun."

My Shakespeare Experience

My exposure to Shakespeare is minimal, to say the least. The Shakespeare experience began in ninth grade with Romeo and Juliet. After which, it ever so slowly expanded year by year with the tragedies of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Of course, there was a smattering of William Shakespeare’s personal history and a few of his sonnets here and there…Nonetheless, I never explored knowledge outside of that that was needed for an exam on plots and characters. I feel I might as well be starting with a clean slate seeing as how the works of Shakespeare will now be accompanied with a new and more enlightening perspective.

1/13 - Class Assignments

Homework

•  Choose a work of secondary criticism by Feburary 1^st
• Shakespeare and the Godess of Complete Begin - Ted Hughes
• Northrop Fry on Shakespeare or Fools of Time - Northrop Fry
• Shakespeare's Festive Comedies - CL Barber
• Sexual Personae - Camile Paglia
• Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human - H. Bloom
• Shakespeare Our Contemporary or The Bottom Translation - Jan Knot
• Shakespeare After All - Majorie Garber
• Shakespeare and Ovid or The Genius of Shakespeare - Jonathan Bate

Readings:

• Turner's School of Night 
• "Venus and Adonis"
• "The Rape of Lucrece"
• Sonnets 15, 18, 30, 55, 60, 65, 73, 129, and 130

Blog:

• Experience with Shakespeare
• The Common Place
• Change blog titles to begin with your name