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