Alright, so I'm throwing up a whole bunch of notes here, in hopes that at somepoint, some poor student who's stuck with Braunmueller for 142A will need them for their finals, as I've needed them for mine!
These notes are compiled from a number of sources, including Spark & Cliff notes, notes from lectures taken by two or three different students as well as some personal observation. I hope you find them helpful, and good luck in your studies!
Shakespeare Final Exam Study Guide
Factual Questions
Shakespeare was born just before April 16, 1564 in Stratford. He died on St. George’s day, which is April 23rd, 1616, and it’s commonly celebrated as his birthday because of an error in an early biography.
Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. During her reign, Shakespeare’s company was known as the “Lord Chamberlain’s men” but they became the King’s Men when power shifted to King James.
Time line:
1. 1517: beginning of Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther posted 95 Theses.
2. 1533: beginning of the English Reformation
3. 1533-1559: Bloody Mary and she is a Catholic and she victimized protestants.
4. 1559: Elizabeth Throne, Church of England official church.
5. 1564: Birth of Shakespeare.
6. 1558: Spanish Armada- Shakespeare may have begun writing in London.
7. 1603: Elizabeth Dies, King James I is on the throne.
8. 1605: 5th The November, Gunpowder plot. (Failed Plot)
9. 1607: Founding of Jamestown in United States in Virginia.
10. 1616: The death of Shakespeare
Religious Tension is significant and overwhelming over this period. There is major tension between the Protestants and the Catholics.
Pneumatology: the study of the spirit, ghosts or the holy spirit.
Francis Bacon: may have written some of Shakespeare’s plays, but it’s basically a thin theory that he did. Francis Bacon says, “Vengeance is a kind of vile justice, which is the more mans nature runs to the more off long to weed it out.”
The War of the Roses: The feud between Lancaster and York; each thought they were rightful heirs, essentially the subject of the historical plays, starts with Bullingbroke and ends in 1485.
Julius Caesar was performed at the opening of the Globe Theater.
The Globe theater came about because it was moved from North of the River in the theater called “The Theater.” You rented the land for the building, so you can own the building but you typically do not own the land.
Sooth is an old word for truth
Folios are larger folded books that are more expensive. Quarto on the other hand are cheaper. Folio is one page made into four.
When did the Elizabethan Period end and the Jacobean Period begin?
1603
What significant event occurred in 1588?
The Spanish Armada’s defeat.
What character remains under the influence of the fairy juice at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
Demetrius
Western comedies conventionally end with which three activities?
Feast/Marriage/Dance (not too sure…double check this one)
Which book would probably be more expensive in 1595 a folio or a quarto? Why?
A folio. It’s made of more paper which was expensive.
Who were the lord admiral’s men?
Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s rival; started by Edward Alleyn
How did Theseus and Hippolyta’s relationship begin?
He captured her in battle.
Pyramus and Thisby comes across as a parody of which other Shakespeare play?
Romeo and Juliet
Fill in the blank:
And grows to something of great…{Constancy
Orlando’s family name is ‘de boys’. What does it mean in English?
‘of the woods’
What is Northrop Frye’s term for the forest and garden locales in the plays we’ve read so far?
Green world
Define primogeniture…
The eldest son inheriting the father’s title, wealth, and lands.
In AYL which character says, ‘twas I. But ‘tis not I’.
Oliver
According to the Bedford companion, which pronoun was the more respectful and formal, thou or you?
You
What is the term for the erroneous word choices dogberry makes?
Malapropism
Late in the play, Beatrice says to Benedick, “_____ Claudio”.
Kill
What is the familial relationship between Hero and Beatrice?
They are cousins. Beatrice is the ward of Leonato
What character is described as being “but the sign and semblance of honor”?
Hero
Who is the highest ranking character in Ado?
Don Pedro
What is a volta?
It changes the direction of the sonnet—usually making or finalizing the statement. Starts with words like, But, However, etc.
Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, Ben Johnson, was famous for his comedies. He was branded on the thumb. Why.
Murder. Benefit of the Clergy.
Who was Richard II’s grandfather?
Edward III
What dramatic genre became especially popular on the English stage after 1588?
Histories.
Where is the deposition in Richard II imagined to take place?
Westminster/Parliament
Fill in the blank:
And tell sad stories of the death of _____ {Kings}
What is the significance of Hollinshed’s Chronicles for Shakespearean Scholarship?
It gives historical data to reference his plays. The histories he based his plays on.
Whose inheritance does Richard II seize?
Henry’s
In what way does Richard II have a chiastic plot structure?
Richard goes down. Henry goes up. They meet in the middle.
Who kills Hotspur in 1 Henry IV?
Hal
What is a report speech?
Telling of an action that has happened off stage.
Before her capture, Tamora was queen of the _______. {Goths}
Why doesn’t Worcester want Hotspur to know about the King’s offer of reconciliation?
He doesn’t want to constantly have to watch out for Henry’s anger. He’s going to be watched constantly as a rebel.
What is the play-within-the-play about in I Henry IV
King Henry and Hal’s ‘imagined’ conversation.
What language does Lady Mortimer speak?
Welsh
Rome is but a wilderness of ______.
Tigers
According to the original quarto’s stage directions, how is Titus dressed in the final scene of the play?
Like a cook.
What book does Lavinia present to her family members?
Ovid’s metamorphosis
Please identify the speaker and the addressee: “I do, I will”
Hal speaking to Falstaff
Henry IV
Characters: Henry (King), Falstaff, Hal, Hotspur (aka Thomas Percy), Mortimer/Lady Mortimer, Earl of Westmoreland, Lord Lancaster, Sir Walter Blunt, Henry Percy, Glyndwr, Earl of Douglas, York, highwaymen with names I won’t be able to remember)
Likely written 1596 or 97 but set in 1402 & 1403
Part of a historical series, written later than some of the other Henries (like VI). It is historically based, but Shakespeare has manipulated some facts (Mortimer an amalgamation of two people, Hotspur would have been older than Prince Harry). The play is a sequel to Richard II but for it’s good to know both plays to understand the characters.
Among Shakespeare’s most famous creations is Falstaff, Prince Harry’s fat, aged, and criminally degenerate mentor and friend. -Falstaff’s irreverent wit is legendary. He has many historical precedents: he owes much to archetypes like the figure of Vice from medieval morality plays and Gluttony from medieval pageants about the seven deadly sins. His character also draws on both the miles gloriosus figure, an arrogant soldier from classical Greek and Roman comedy, and the Lord of Misrule, the title given an -individual appointed to reign over folk festivities in medieval England. Ultimately, however, Falstaff is a Shakespearean creation, second among Shakespearean characters only to Hamlet as a subject of -critical interest.
Falstaff manipulates everything to his advantage, sucking up and turning coat. He denies the use of his sword to Hal when Hal wants to kill Hotspur. Falstaff & Hal have a mock play in which Falstaff pretends to be the king, Hal doesn’t like the way that Falstaff imitates the King and he realizes that he can be a good king. Hal would have been a shitty king had he not hung out with these terrible people.
“I do, I will” is Hal in the mock scene, the realization that he will ignore the wishes of people like Falstaff when he is king.
Falstaff: But to say I know more harm in him than in myself were to say more than I know. That he is old, the more the pity, his white hairs do witness it. But that he is, saving your reverence, a whoremaster, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked. If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned. If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord, banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, Banish not him thy Harry’s company, Banish not him thy Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.Prince: I do; I will.
The next play has the line where Hal publically ignores Falstaff “how the bells chime midnight”
The play mixes history and comedy innovatively, moving from lofty scenes involving kings and battles to base scenes involving ruffians drinking and engaging in robberies. Its great strengths include a remarkable richness and variety of texture, a fascinatingly ambiguous take on history and on political motivations, and a new kind of characterization, as found in the inimitable Falstaff.
Shakespeare’s so-called history plays are generally thought to constitute a distinct genre. They differ somewhat in tone, form, and focus from Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and romances. Many of Shakespeare’s other plays are set in the historical past and even treat similar themes, such as kingship and revolution—Julius Caesar and Hamlet, for instance. However, the eight works known as the history plays have several additional things in common: they form a linked series, they are set in late medieval England, and they deal with the rise and fall of the House of Lancaster (a period that later historians often referred to as the Wars of the Roses).
Shakespeare wrote his most important history plays in two tetralogies, or sequences of four plays apiece. The first series, written near the start of his career (roughly 1589–1593), consists of 1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, and Richard III, and covers the fall of the Lancaster dynasty—that is, events in English history between about 1422 and 1485.
An important question that preoccupies the characters in the history plays and that links these plays is whether the king of England is divinely appointed—that is, whether he is God’s “deputy anointed in his sight,” as John of Gaunt says in Richard II (I.ii.38). If such is the case, then the overthrow, deposition, or, worst of all, murder of a king is akin to blasphemy. In Shakespeare’s works, as in the classical Greek tragedies (such as Aeschylus’s Oresteia), such an act may cast a long shadow over the reign of the king who deposes or murders his predecessor, and even over his descendants. This shadow, which manifests itself in the form of literal ghosts in plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III, also looms over Richard II and its sequels. In the play that bears his name, -Richard II is haunted by a politically motivated murder—not that of an actual king but that of his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. After his eventual overthrow, the new king, Henry IV, is, in turn, haunted by his own responsibility for Richard’s overthrow and eventual murder. This shadow hangs over both the plays that bear Henry IV’s name. Only after Henry IV’s death does his own son, Henry V, symbolically prove himself worthy to wear the crown and rule as king of England.
The Nature of Honor : Though it is one of the principal themes of the play, the concept of honor is never given a consistent definition in 1 Henry IV. In fact, the very multiplicity of views on honor that Shakespeare explores suggests that, in the end, honor is merely a lofty reflection of an individual’s personality and conscience. In other words, honor seems to be defined less by an overarching set of guidelines and more by an individual’s personal values and goals. Thus runs the argument of Hotspur, a quick-tempered and military-minded young man. He feels that honor has to do with glory on the battlefield and with defending one’s reputation and good name against any perceived insult. For the troubled and contemplative King Henry IV, on the other hand, honor has to do with the well-being of the nation and the legitimacy of its ruler. One of the reasons Henry is troubled is that he perceives his own rebellion against Richard II, which won him the crown, to be a dishonorable act.
For the complex Prince Harry, honor seems to be associated with noble behavior, but for long stretches of time Harry is willing to sacrifice the appearance of honor for the sake of his own goals, confident that he can regain his honor at will. Harry’s conception of honor is so all-inclusive that he believes that, by killing Hotspur, Hotspur’s honor becomes his own. For the amoral rogue Falstaff, the whole idea of honor is nothing but hot air and wasted effort that does no one any good. All the major characters in the play are concerned with honor, but their opinions about the subject illuminate more about them than they do about the concept of honor.
The Legitimacy of Rulership: Because 1 Henry IV is set amid political instability and violent rebellion, the play is naturally concerned with the idea of rulership. It questions what makes a ruler legitimate, which qualities are desirable in a ruler, when it is acceptable to usurp a ruler’s authority, and what the consequences of rebelling against a ruler might be. The concept of legitimate rule is deeply connected in the play with the concept of rebellion: if a ruler is illegitimate, then it is acceptable to usurp his power, as Hotspur and the Percys attempt to do with King Henry. While the criteria that make a ruler legitimate differ—legitimate rule may be attributed to the will of the people or to the will of God—on some level the crack in Henry’s power results from his own fear that his rule is illegitimate, since he illegally usurped the crown from Richard II.
The consequences of failed rulership are explored in the scenes depicting the violence of lawlessness and rebellion sweeping England—the robbery in Act II, the battle in Act V, and so forth. The qualities that are desirable in a ruler are explored through the contrast inherent in the play’s major characters: the stern and aloof Henry, the unpredictable and intelligent Harry, and the decisive and hot-tempered Hotspur. Each man offers a very different style of rulership. In the end, Shakespeare seems to endorse Harry’s ability to think his way through a situation and to manipulate others without straying too far from the dictates of conscience. In any event, Harry emerges as Shakespeare’s most impressive English king two plays later, in Henry V.
Yea, there thou mak’st me sad and mak’st me sin In envy that my Lord Northumberland Should be the father to so blest a son— A son who is the theme of honour’s tongue, Amongst a grove the very straightest plant, Who is sweet Fortune’s minion and her pride— Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him See riot and dishonor stain the brow Of my young Harry. O, that it could be proved That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged In cradle clothes our children where they lay, And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet! (I.i.77–88)
These lines, which King Henry speaks in the first scene of the play, set the stage for the conflict between Prince Harry and Hotspur. Henry describes the fame and fortune of young Hotspur (the son of “my Lord Northumberland”), calling him “the theme of honour’s tongue”; in comparison, he says, Prince Harry (“my young Harry”) has been sullied by “riot and dishonour.” He then refers to an old English folk superstition—one of the many references to folk culture and magic in the play—about fairies who switched young children at birth. Henry wishes that a fairy had switched Harry and Hotspur at birth, so that Hotspur were really his son and Harry the son of Northumberland. This quote is important for a number of reasons. It foreshadows the rivalry of Harry and Hotspur, and it helps establish Henry’s careworn, worried condition. Furthermore, it lets the audience know that Harry is generally considered a disappointment, and, by presenting both Harry and Hotspur as potential son figures for Henry, it inaugurates the motif of doubles in the play.
Richard II
Written between 1595 & 1597; used by the Earl of Essex to make a point before his unsuccessful rebellion in 1601 versus Q. Elizabeth.
Characters: Richard, Henry Bolingbroke the Duke of bullshit, John Gaunt aka Duke of Lancaster, Duke of York, Aumerle, Duke of Norfolk, Bushy, Bagot, Green, Bishop of Carlisle, other people who aren’t important.
First play in the history questioning the validity of divine rule; a precursor to Hamlet in some ways. It’s stylized and different from the Henry plays in that it contains virtually no prose. It also features some metaphors that have become famous, such as the comparison of England to a garden, a reigning king to a lion or to the sun.
The play is set in 1398; tracing the fall of the last king of the house of Plantagenet, Richard II, who became king as a young man but spend money in a frivolous way. He chose poor counselors and became detached from the common people of his country. He’s into the latest Italian fashions, and he raises taxes to support unpopular wars in Ireland and elsewhere.
In a cash grab move, he decides to seize the estate of a recently deceased uncle of his and he also decides to rent out parcels of land belonging to particular noblemen. Everyone agrees that Richard has gone too far.
Henry Bolingbroke is a cousin of Richard’s who is well liked among the common people. Richard exiles him and then steals his inheritance.
To help you identify this play, it’s written mostly in couplets with a little slant rhyme thrown in.
However, this is primarily in the first part of act 1.
The concept of the royal body: King has two Bodies,There should be a distinction between the role of king, the meaning of sovereignty, therefore it creates two bodies.
One body is immoral, subject to decay. (Body of Natural) May or may not perform its job as king.
The other was immortal the body of politic. (Body of Monarchy) This is immortal. This body can do no wrong.
The play is as much about honor as it is about birthright. Words pertaining to birth are prolly as common as the word honor.
there’s some interesting fruit talk in here too, like the ripest fruit falls first, and later about bearing boughs…
Julius Caesar
First performed in 1599, it takes place in 44 BC. The first half of this play is a history, the second half is a revenge tragedy. Again, questions of rule, Caesar is killed because the other politicians fear dictatorship- at least that’s why Brutus is involved in the conspiracy.
Characters: Brutus, Antony, Cassius, Julius Caesar, Soothsayer, Calpurnia, Octavius, Casca, Portia, Flavius, Cicero, Decius, other people that seem extraneous
Shakespeare’s contemporaries, well versed in ancient Greek and Roman history, would very likely have detected parallels between Julius Caesar’s portrayal of the shift from republican to imperial Rome and the Elizabethan era’s trend toward consolidated monarchal power. In 1599, when the play was first performed, Queen Elizabeth I had sat on the throne for nearly forty years, enlarging her power at the expense of the aristocracy and the House of Commons. As she was then sixty-six years old, her reign seemed likely to end soon, yet she lacked any heirs (as did Julius Caesar). Many feared that her death would plunge England into the kind of chaos that had plagued England during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. In an age when censorship would have limited direct commentary on these worries, Shakespeare could nevertheless use the story of Caesar to comment on the political situation of his day.
Brutus’s rigid idealism is both his greatest virtue and his most deadly flaw. In the world of the play, where self-serving ambition seems to dominate all other motivations, Brutus lives up to Antony’s elegiac description of him as “the noblest of Romans.” However, his commitment to principle repeatedly leads him to make miscalculations: wanting to curtail violence, he ignores Cassius’s suggestion that the conspirators kill Antony as well as Caesar. In another moment of naïve idealism, he again ignores Cassius’s advice and allows Antony to speak a funeral oration over Caesar’s body. As a result, Brutus forfeits the authority of having the last word on the murder and thus allows Antony to incite the plebeians to riot against him and the other conspirators. Brutus later endangers his good relationship with Cassius by self-righteously condemning what he sees as dishonorable fund-raising tactics on Cassius’s part. In all of these episodes, Brutus acts out of a desire to limit the self-serving aspects of his actions; ironically, however, in each incident he dooms the very cause that he seeks to promote, thus serving no one at all.
Caesar’s conflation of his public image with his private self helps bring about his death, since he mistakenly believes that the immortal status granted to his public self somehow protects his mortal body. Still, in many ways, Caesar’s faith that he is eternal proves valid by the end of the play: by Act V, scene iii, Brutus is attributing his and Cassius’s misfortunes to Caesar’s power reaching from beyond the grave. Caesar’s aura seems to affect the general outcome of events in a mystic manner, while also inspiring Octavius and Antony and strengthening their determination. As Octavius ultimately assumes the title Caesar, Caesar’s permanence is indeed established in some respect
Julius Caesar raises many questions about the force of fate in life versus the capacity for free will. Cassius refuses to accept Caesar’s rising power and deems a belief in fate to be nothing more than a form of passivity or cowardice. He says to Brutus: “Men at sometime were masters of their fates. / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings” (I.ii.140–142). Cassius urges a return to a more noble, self-possessed attitude toward life, blaming his and Brutus’s submissive stance not on a predestined plan but on their failure to assert themselves. Thus Caesar declares: “It seems to me most strange that men should fear, / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come” (II.ii.35–37). In other words, Caesar recognizes that certain events lie beyond human control; to crouch in fear of them is to enter a paralysis equal to, if not worse than, death. It is to surrender any capacity for freedom and agency that one might actually possess. Indeed, perhaps to face death head-on, to die bravely and honorably,
Much of the play’s tragedy stems from the characters’ neglect of private feelings and loyalties in favor of what they believe to be the public good. Similarly, characters confuse their private selves with their public selves, hardening and dehumanizing themselves or transforming themselves into ruthless political machines. Brutus rebuffs his wife, Portia, when she pleads with him to confide in her; believing himself to be acting on the people’s will, he forges ahead with the murder of Caesar, despite their close friendship. Brutus puts aside his personal loyalties and shuns thoughts of Caesar the man, his friend; instead, he acts on what he believes to be the public’s wishes and kills Caesar the leader, the imminent dictator. Cassius can be seen as a man who has gone to the extreme in cultivating his public persona. Caesar, describing his distrust of Cassius, tells Antony that the problem with Cassius is his lack of a private life—his seeming refusal to acknowledge his own sensibilities or to nurture his own spirit. Such a man, Caesar fears, will let nothing interfere with his ambition. Indeed, Cassius lacks all sense of personal honor and shows himself to be a ruthless schemer.
Much of the play deals with the characters’ failures to interpret correctly the omens that they encounter. As Cicero says, “Men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (I.iii.34–35). Thus, the night preceding Caesar’s appearance at the Senate is full of portents, but no one reads them accurately: Cassius takes them to signify the danger that Caesar’s impending coronation would bring to the state, when, if anything, they warn of the destruction that Cassius himself threatens. There are calculated misreadings as well: Cassius manipulates Brutus into joining the conspiracy by means of forged letters, knowing that Brutus’s trusting nature will cause him to accept the letters as authentic pleas from the Roman people.
Julius Caesar gives detailed consideration to the relationship between rhetoric and power. The ability to make things happen by words alone is the most powerful type of authority. Early in the play, it is established that Caesar has this type of absolute authority: “When Caesar says ‘Do this,’ it is performed,” says Antony, who attaches a similar weight to Octavius’s words toward the end of the play (I.ii.12). Words also serve to move hearts and minds, as Act III evidences. Antony cleverly convinces the conspirators of his desire to side with them: “Let each man render me with his bloody hand” (III.i.185). Under the guise of a gesture of friendship, Antony actually marks the conspirators for vengeance. In the Forum, Brutus speaks to the crowd and appeals to its love of liberty in order to justify the killing of Caesar. He also makes ample reference to the honor in which he is generally esteemed so as to validate further his explanation of the deed. Antony likewise wins the crowd’s favor, using persuasive rhetoric to whip the masses into a frenzy so great that they don’t even realize the fickleness of their favor.
Throughout the play, omens and portents manifest themselves, each serving to crystallize the larger themes of fate and misinterpretation of signs. Until Caesar’s death, each time an omen or nightmare is reported, the audience is reminded of Caesar’s impending demise. The audience wonders whether these portents simply announce what is fated to occur or whether they serve as warnings for what might occur if the characters do not take active steps to change their behavior. Whether or not individuals can affect their destinies, characters repeatedly fail to interpret the omens correctly. In a larger sense, the omens in Julius Caesar thus imply the dangers of failing to perceive and analyze the details of one’s world
Cassius gives in when pressured to join the plot even though he doesn’t know that it’s the right thing to do,
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears” – Antony’s famous speech. Appeals to emotion and greed, says that Caesar’s spirit will pursue the conspirators, it’s written in iambic pentameter.
In his speech, Brutus uses prose and reason to argue for what he has done.
Caesars ghost follows Brutus on the eve of the battle of Phillipa.
Neither of the wives are able to prevent anything- Calpurnia has the dream that Caesar is going to die, but he ignores it. “Beware the ides of March” – Soothsayer.
Ideas about spirits and bodies- Brutus aligns with spirit, while Cassius aligns with ideas of the body, he’s the physicalized ideas of Caesar. Cassius is the pragmatic and practical one, he may be epileptic. He’s more intelligent from a military standpoint, yet he decides to give into Caesar.
Caesar becomes an inspirational idea.
Titus Andronicus
Characters: Titus, Marcus, Lucias, Saturninus, Bassianus, Demitirus, Chiron, Tamora, Aaron, Lavinia,
A revenge play, a tragedy- blood, guts and decapitation.
Wrote in collaboration with John Fletcher
Gruesomeness of the play, is supposed to be the influence in the play of the ancient Greece and Rome.
English tradition is that the violence is seen on stage instead of reported. There is
something exciting about violence in the flesh.
There is no real reason on why the tragic play was developed in such, one theory is one of us may have more horrific imagination if it is not shown.
If something is shown to the audience we know that it is fake.
It is considered of watching the act, guilty of the sinful ailment. The audience is tainted by the violence that is why it is not seen on the classical stage.
The Goths are not Roman.
The Goths are defeated barbarians
Aaron is the barbarian of the barbarian.
Shakespeare is showing the prestige of Roman empire is not much different from the Goths. As Titus says it is the “wilderness of tigers.”
Aaron is bringing down Goth culture just as the Goth is bringing down the Roman culture.
Elizabethan still believes the myth of their own origin as having been founded as Rome was as the refugees as the fall of Troy.
The relations this play has with Hamlet, King Leer, Othello, Macbeth
There is a deep association with the Greek or Roman that concerns the chastity of women's body. (Othello)
Macbeth, shows death and destruction for many people. Titus consumes offspring which is seen in act 5 and act 1 scene 1.
Connection to Hamlet is brother and a woman. Hamlet is trying to get revenge such as Titus' plot.
King Leer people are showing the insanity issue. The founding event of Leer and Titus are the same. They both make the same mistake, Titus does not take the throne by himself and Leer gives it up. This shows a diffusion in society.
There is a battle of virtues of soul and human values. The thing that all these characters have names of allegory. They all have abstract names. They are not representing individual human beings. 5.2.97
Rome vs The Woods
The violence of Rome is amplified in the woods. This is also a comic device of contrasting the city and the country.
2.2.1, This is like repeat of Midsummer Night's Dream. In reality, this is a tragic pastoral, Human prey is going to be hunted in this woods. Lavinia and her Husband are to be hunted in the woods.
2.3.10, “My lovely Aaron...” So far this sounds wonderful. 2.3.95, demonstrates the psychology of the woods. These passages describe the woods as opposites. These two speeches cannot describe the imaginary landscape. The woods are being used as the characters manifestation of the characters thoughts.
There is a show of the Garden of Eden. The snakes... The woods can be distorted for deceptive purpose, so that the audience can be identified allegorically and to also understand the woods do not exist it is what is made of them.
There is an understanding that the excuse of the woods is to hunt. There is an understanding that the woods can be good. These woods in Titus start out that way too. This hunt is destructive it is still based on love but it will be destructive.
Then we realize that these are not woods at all this is a landscape of the minds. These woods are made and remade by the characters who come to them. These woods in Titus are more likely transformed by who observes it. The woods are nothing in themselves they are material for allegoric psychology of individual psychology.
The woods show what goes on perhaps less visibly elsewhere in the play. The way and the which Shakespeare treats the woods are shown as the constant overlay there is a mimic of episode of like Virgil.
The woods are not the woods is not just the rape of Lavinia, the woods are also something else. This is a tactic of the play. Nothing is only what it seems. It either is something from another fiction, or maybe itself but made into something else.
The horror including the metamorphosis is the metatheatrical (All the world is a stage As You Like It). By using established from him comic device such as Lavinia's condition, part of this is showing off (Shakespeare). Audience that gets the indications understand that they are referring to metamorphosis and the metatheatrical situation (addressing the audience's attitude).
There is a struggle for emperor-ship and what to do about the Goths.
A variety of sons are killed. We have internal conflict amongst the royal Goths and Romans and the great general.
This is sort of like a history play, it manifest political conflict through family conflict and vice versa.
Family conflict continues all the way through. Family conflict is infra each other such as brother and brother and family and sons. It is much worse to kill the child than kill another adult. It violates or expectations of the parent would be more nurturing and protecting of the child which turns the horror meter up. Also killing children means killing society's future.
The reason Titus kills his children because of warrior honor and roman honor. This is to give the audience the aspect of the Roman history. This is to bring down the horror meter, the audience is a little bit insulated from the shock.
2.1.1, This could be slotted into Tamora this is Shakespeare channeling the young moor. This is highly rhetorical and boastful and triumphant. Aaron links political success with sexual success.
The rape is not an act of sexual desire it is punishment.
He begins by praising Tamora's intelligence, she got to the top because he is managing the show.
The second half of the speech is all about the sex life.
Machiavelli, Aaron demonstrates a distorted the Victorian view of Machiavelli. The conception of Aaron is Shakespeare is stating that he can do better than Marlowe.
5.1.98, Aaron is claiming to be a motive who cannot be analyzed. Society has no way of protecting a certain way of evil. This is a anti-Marlowe speech, that he forgets that Shakespeare is begging for his son's life. This is where Aaron is treating as anything but an annihilating machine. This explores the parent child relationship, This time tenderness in the unexpected core. 4.2.82
Hamlet
Prolly written 1600 or 1601
Characters: Hamlet, the Ghost, Claudius, Horatio, Ophelia, Gerturde, Polonius, Laertes, Fortinbras, Rosencrantz & Gildenstern, Osric, Marcellus & Bernardo,
A common theme through all of these plays is the questioning of the legitimacy of dictatorships and rule.
As was common practice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare borrowed for his plays ideas and stories from earlier literary works. He could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources, including a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus and a prose work by the French writer François de Belleforest, entitled Histoires Tragiques.
The raw material that Shakespeare appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of a Danish prince whose uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims the throne. The prince pretends to be feeble-minded to throw his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his uncle in revenge. Shakespeare changed the emphasis of this story entirely, making his Hamlet a philosophically-minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain. Shakespeare went far beyond making uncertainty a personal quirk of Hamlet’s, introducing a number of important ambiguities into the play that even the audience cannot resolve with certainty. For instance, whether Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shares in Claudius’s guilt; whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia even as he spurns her, in Act III; whether Ophelia’s death is suicide or accident; whether the ghost offers reliable knowledge, or seeks to deceive and tempt Hamlet; and, perhaps most importantly, whether Hamlet would be morally justified in taking revenge on his uncle. Shakespeare makes it clear that the stakes riding on some of these questions are enormous—the actions of these characters bring disaster upon an entire kingdom. At the play’s end it is not even clear whether justice has been achieved.
By modifying his source materials in this way, Shakespeare was able to take an unremarkable revenge story and make it resonate with the most fundamental themes and problems of the Renaissance. The Renaissance is a vast cultural phenomenon that began in fifteenth-century Italy with the recovery of classical Greek and Latin texts that had been lost to the Middle Ages. The scholars who enthusiastically rediscovered these classical texts were motivated by an educational and political ideal called (in Latin) humanitas—the idea that all of the capabilities and virtues peculiar to human beings should be studied and developed to their furthest extent. Renaissance humanism, as this movement is now called, generated a new interest in human experience, and also an enormous optimism about the potential scope of human understanding. Hamlet’s famous speech in Act II, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” (II.ii.293–297) is directly based upon one of the major texts of the Italian humanists, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. For the humanists, the purpose of cultivating reason was to lead to a better understanding of how to act, and their fondest hope was that the coordination of action and understanding would lead to great benefits for society as a whole.
The Impossibility of Certainty: What separates Hamlet from other revenge plays (and maybe from every play written before it) is that the action we expect to see, particularly from Hamlet himself, is continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certain knowledge about what he is doing. This play poses many questions that other plays would simply take for granted. Can we have certain knowledge about ghosts? Is the ghost what it appears to be, or is it really a misleading fiend? Does the ghost have reliable knowledge about its own death, or is the ghost itself deluded? Moving to more earthly matters: How can we know for certain the facts about a crime that has no witnesses? Can Hamlet know the state of Claudius’s soul by watching his behavior? If so, can he know the facts of what Claudius did by observing the state of his soul? Can Claudius (or the audience) know the state of Hamlet’s mind by observing his behavior and listening to his speech? Can we know whether our actions will have the consequences we want them to have? Can we know anything about the afterlife?
Directly related to the theme of certainty is the theme of action. How is it possible to take reasonable, effective, purposeful action? In Hamlet, the question of how to act is affected not only by rational considerations, such as the need for certainty, but also by emotional, ethical, and psychological factors. Hamlet himself appears to distrust the idea that it’s even possible to act in a controlled, purposeful way. When he does act, he prefers to do it blindly, recklessly, and violently. The other characters obviously think much less about “action” in the abstract than Hamlet does, and are therefore less troubled about the possibility of acting effectively. They simply act as they feel is appropriate. But in some sense they prove that Hamlet is right, because all of their actions miscarry. Claudius possesses himself of queen and crown through bold action, but his conscience torments him, and he is beset by threats to his authority (and, of course, he dies). Laertes resolves that nothing will distract him from acting out his revenge, but he is easily influenced and manipulated into serving Claudius’s ends, and his poisoned rapier is turned back upon himself.
In the aftermath of his father’s murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and over the course of the play he considers death from a great many perspectives. He ponders both the spiritual aftermath of death, embodied in the ghost, and the physical remainders of the dead, such as by Yorick’s skull and the decaying corpses in the cemetery. Throughout, the idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality, truth, and uncertainty in that death may bring the answers to Hamlet’s deepest questions, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine truth in an ambiguous world. And, since death is both the cause and the consequence of revenge, it is intimately tied to the theme of revenge and justice—Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet initiates Hamlet’s quest for revenge, and Claudius’s death is the end of that quest.
The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as well, as he repeatedly contemplates whether or not suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably painful world. Hamlet’s grief and misery is such that he frequently longs for death to end his suffering, but he fears that if he commits suicide, he will be consigned to eternal suffering in hell because of the Christian religion’s prohibition of suicide. In his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy (III.i), Hamlet philosophically concludes that no one would choose to endure the pain of life if he or she were not afraid of what will come after death, and that it is this fear which causes complex moral considerations to interfere with the capacity for action
Everything is connected in Hamlet, including the welfare of the royal family and the health of the state as a whole. The play’s early scenes explore the sense of anxiety and dread that surrounds the transfer of power from one ruler to the next. Throughout the play, characters draw explicit connections between the moral legitimacy of a ruler and the health of the nation. Denmark is frequently described as a physical body made ill by the moral corruption of Claudius and Gertrude, and many observers interpret the presence of the ghost as a supernatural omen indicating that “[s]omething is rotten in the state of Denmark” (I.iv.67). The dead King Hamlet is portrayed as a strong, forthright ruler under whose guard the state was in good health, while Claudius, a wicked politician, has corrupted and compromised Denmark to satisfy his own appetites. At the end of the play, the rise to power of the upright Fortinbras suggests that Denmark will be strengthened once again.
One facet of Hamlet’s exploration of the difficulty of attaining true knowledge is slipperiness of language. Words are used to communicate ideas, but they can also be used to distort the truth, manipulate other people, and serve as tools in corrupt quests for power. Claudius, the shrewd politician, is the most obvious example of a man who manipulates words to enhance his own power. The sinister uses of words are represented by images of ears and hearing, from Claudius’s murder of the king by pouring poison into his ear to Hamlet’s claim to Horatio that “I have words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb” (IV.vi.21). The poison poured in the king’s ear by Claudius is used by the ghost to symbolize the corrosive effect of Claudius’s dishonesty on the health of Denmark. Declaring that the story that he was killed by a snake is a lie, he says that “the whole ear of Denmark” is “Rankly abused. . . .” (I.v.36–38).
In Hamlet, physical objects are rarely used to represent thematic ideas. One important exception is Yorick’s skull, which Hamlet discovers in the graveyard in the first scene of Act V. As Hamlet speaks to the skull and about the skull of the king’s former jester, he fixates on death’s inevitability and the disintegration of the body. He urges the skull to “get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come”—no one can avoid death (V.i.178–179). He traces the skull’s mouth and says, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft,” indicating his fascination with the physical consequences of death (V.i.174–175). This latter idea is an important motif throughout the play, as Hamlet frequently makes comments referring to every human body’s eventual decay, noting that Polonius will be eaten by worms, that even kings are eaten by worms, and that dust from the decayed body of Alexander the Great might be used to stop a hole in a beer barrel.
As in the history plays, “Family, State and Time” are the major themes.
Focus on the royal family and the issue of succession. State health reflects the health of the royal family. Passage of time is a problem.
Why does Hamlet Senior appear in armor? The country is about to go to war, and the first act of the play centers around Horatio’s discovery that Norway is preparing for war. How is the play constructed to elaborate the theme of family state and time?
Family – Generational problems are private events with public effects
1. Hamlet Senior and his brother Claudius
2. Old Norway and his nephew Fortinbras (strength in arms). Fortinbras resolves the Norway problem by taking control of Norway.
3. Polonius, Laertes, and Ophelia
Hamlet as three plays
Printed in the first Quarto. Only two copies, one missing the first page, one missing the last. Nobody knows the circumstances under which Q1 was printed, although it’s believed it was unauthorized, created by actors for the troupe who remembered their own parts and filled in what the other characters said – a reported text. Could also have been shorthand, written down during the play. Q1 is close but not identical to Q2. Both Q2 and the Folio have the order of the text as we are familiar, while Q1 differs in order. In Q1 the Gertrude closet scene, she is less skeptical, immediately trusts Hamlet and she dies trusting him. Some modern productions use the Q2 language and the Q1 plot. Object lesson: do not always believe the text in front of your eyes. At times, the authority is “misty”
Ur: prefix meaning primitive, must have existed but no longer exists. There are ‘Ur’ speeches, which once existed but does not survive. What is Ur Hamlet? Hamlet’s story came from Holinshed. References to a ghost crying for revenge. Somewhere around 1596, people went to The Theater and saw a Hamlet play with a revenge-craving ghost. There is no direct evidence of this production, only reports from people who saw it. Thomas Kidoue wrote this play and “The Spanish Tragedy” – the granddaddy of Elizabethan revenge plays.
Revenge and Revenge Tragedies - features of the genre (Hamlet as template)
1. The Supernatural – provides knowledge of a secret past crime.
2. Death of the Play’s Hero. Avenger does not get out of the play. What happens when our hero becomes a villain? Actualizing his vengeful ambition makes him a sinner and a criminal. Ambiguous position for the audience. We champion a hero to commit a crime. The situation is morally ambivalent. Forces recognition of the consequences of crimes for honor. Many duels occurred at the time, a private resolution of problems. Dueling leads to vendetta, which annihilates society and can short-circuit the existence of the state.
3. Power structure, aristocracy and royalty
4. Avenger’s Internal conflict – introspective
5. Epistemology: how we know what we know. How do we know that Hamlet senior was murdered? How do we test the knowledge? Investigates Elizabethan pneumatology. We desire confession as direct confirmation. Why does Hamlet adopt a false personality? Freedom in misperception. How do we know when Hamlet is actually being bad as opposed to pretending to be bad? Sometimes he is insane, other times he pretends to be insane.
6. Romance – usually a fiancé or love foiled, sometimes the motivating cause for revenge
7. Revenge “is a kind of wild injustice; the more a man’s nature runs to it, the more ought law to weed the act.” – Francis Bacon. Proper justice is controlled. Wild justice must be weeded, torn up because it is no good, screws with order. Vengeance is the Lords.
Pneumatology
“I am bound to hear you speak” Protestants don’t believe in ghosts or Purgatory, Catholics say there are bad and good ghosts. Ghosts come back to ask for actions by the living to resolve their purgation. In this respect they are neutral, however the act they request is a crime.
The play opens with questions about identity and surroundings. People guard the castle while others approach it. Theme of Hamlet: Who goes there? The questions go the wrong way.
Lurking behind the first five scenes is an event we don’t know about. There’s a sequence of who sees the ghost and who talks to the ghost.
1. Guards see the ghost, it moves away from them.
2. Guards bring in Horatio (a scholar) to talk to the ghost. It must take a special knowledge to talk to the ghost. The ghost gestures to Horatio, however it does not speak
3. They bring Hamlet, and the ghost gestures to him and finally speaks to him.
Succession: strangers, family friend, family.
Waves of interrogators indicate ambiguity of the situation, and how true the knowledge gained is.
What about the ghost?
Scene 1.2.72- Seeming; you may think you know what’s going on, but those aren’t actions that a man might play. I have that within which exceeds show. Hamlet says he’s not acting, but he is. He’s an actor performing the part of Hamlet.
Two kinds of truth
1. Truth of performance
2. Performer reciting archaic and powerful speech, moving audience to tears with a falsehood in which nothing is true. An instance may be false, but the emotion will be true.
How do we gain knowledge of interiority? What can we know of the interior?
Playing
1.2.84
2.5.175 Antic
2.2 Players
2.2.459-60
2.2.490
Spying
Laertes to Ophelia, 1.3
Warns Ophelia to protect her virtue, exhibiting a misogynistic control over her sex life. Why does he warn her away?
1. Hamlet and Ophelia occupy different social classes. Hamlet is more than an aristocrat, he’s heir to the throne.
2. They each lack agency, Hamlet because of his high social status, Ophelia because of her sex.
3. Calls attention to Hamlet’s inability to make his own decisions.
Polonius to Laertes
Reflects the culture of suspicion and spying. To speak one’s mind is to make oneself vulnerable to a world that waits to take advantage of you. Any form of self-expression makes one vulnerable.
Reynaldo 2.1.70
Polonius suspects his son of misbehavior, and so he directs Reynaldo to bait with lies to get the truth.
He uses a hypothetical situation to get information, which is a problem because he creates possibilities that did not exist before. The method demands that there is a difference between appearances and behavior, which is what Hamlet relates to his mother previously.
2.2.254
Guildenstern and Rosenburg are called from Vitenburg, where Martin Luther posted his 95 theses. This was a Protestant hotbed, raising questions about what ghosts mean and freedom of thought. Luther protested the Church taking away individuals’ consciousness; Protestantism encouraged independent behavior.
G&R are charged to find out what’s up with Hamlet. After some dirty jokes, Hamlet suspects their motives: “Your modesties have not craft enough for color.” They blush when he asks them why they came.
Relates to the culture of suspicion: they’re spying for the inner man. But how would they know? How do you know what or who somebody really is?
Polonius works at a remove, using Reynaldo as a tool. Lawful, legal spy.
Hamlet puts us in a ambiguous position, and when he finally kills the king all of our moral values are offended and suddenly we condemn him.
Revenge culture never ends, one guy kills someone else there is someone else that kills the original killer. This annihilates society and there is no end to it.
Some characters in the play matters to the state and the entire society. So the characteristic tragedy will have high place characters. Vendetta (revenge), there is a psychological debate and the revenge of the culture.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Comedy, in the old sense of the word, all the action of the plot centers on the coming together of married couples. By this definition, all available single people will be married at the conclusion of the action.
Character List:
Puck: (aka Robin Goodfellow) a prankster fairy, acting on behalf of Oberon he anoints the eyes of the Athenian men with a magic love juice, as well as the eyes of the fairy queen, Titania. Puck’s mischevious spirit and zany antics lend to the overall tone of mischief throughout the play; he is the closest thing to a protagonist character that exists in it. He does most of what he does just for the hell of it, but overall he is good hearted. In contrast to the other supernatural beings in the play, Puck is not delicate or beautiful. He’s described as a hobgoblin, which has a less positive connotation.
Oberon: the king of the Fairies asks Puck to use the juice of a particular flower to anoint the eyes of his wife, Titania, thereby causing her to fall in love with the first thing she sees upon waking. This is part of a plot to encourage her to relinquish control of a certain Indian Prince to Oberon.
Titania: Falls in love with Bottom, though he has the head of an ass, because of the love juice. The motif of ridiculous contrast is at play here, as the Queen of the Fairies wants to copulate with a donkey.
Lysander: is of the mortal realm. His love for Hermia is forbidden as her father as promised her to Demitrious. Lysander’s undying love for Hermia is interrupted by Puck’s shenanigans; but restored in the end allowing for their marriage based on true love to take place.
Demetrius: Is engaged to Hermia at the opening of the action, despite the fact that Helena is in love with him. This becomes the major obstacle of the play, marrying off two sets of young people rather than the denial of the “true” love of Lysander and Hermia, Shakespeare invents Puck’s desire to create chaos among mortals to bring ultimately bring them together. The major “flaw” or untied end of this play is that Demetrius is still under the effects of the love potion at the play’s conclusion, that is, he is not in love with Helena of his own volition, but rather he is in love with her because of Puck’s tinkering.
Hermia: Does not want to marry Demetrius, but when the matter is brought before Thesus (the Duke and ruler of Athens) she is told she can marry him, become a nun or die. A law like this would not have been enforced, but this is how the law would have read. The idea that she can either consent to a sexual death, her father’s will or a physical death implies the notion of the danger of female sexuality. It also reflects the desire of governing bodies to control the “dangerous” sexuality of women. Hermia is also a close childhood friend of Helena’s.
Helena: Once betrothed to Demetrius, she continues to love him even after he spurns her for Hermia. Famously tells Demetrius that she will fawn over him like his “spaniel” and that the more he hates her the more she’ll want him. When both Athenian men are suddenly attracted to her, she becomes convinced that they are playing a cruel joke on her.
Egeus: Hermia’s father, he exists squarely outside of the dream world found within the forest. He follows the Shakespearian theme of meddling fathers who do not wish for their daughters to live as they please, instead choosing to dominate them. He’s a one-dimensional stock character.
Thesus: Engaged to Hippolyta, whom he defeated in battle. He is a figurehead of law and order, appearing only at the beginning of the play and the end; he exists outside of the realm of magic found in the forest.
Hippolyta: the Queen of the Amazons, defeated in battle, decides to marry Thesus likely for political reasons. Like her fiancé, she symbolizes order.
Nick Bottom: He’s a foolish and arrogant weaver who spouts advice and is extremely confident despite the fact that he frequently misuses words and makes silly mistakes. His head is turned into that of an ass by Puck; the fact that he does not realize he’s been altered reflects his arrogance. When Titania falls in love with him and sends her fairies to attend to him, he acts as if it’s his proper due, never thinking that any of it is out of the ordinary. This is because of his comically gigantic ego. He is chosen by his peers to play the part of Pyramus in the play being performed at the marriage ceremony of Hippolyta and Thesus; the play is an aspect of metadrama to help remind the audience that what they are observing is a farce. Bottom’s name and the fact that he is a weaver has an additional meaning, there is a condition known as Weaver’s Bottom in which the muscles of the ass separate and breakdown as a result of sitting on a hard surface for too long.
Other people in the play who serve no other purpose but to be in the metadrama: Peter Quince (does the prologue, tries to organize the whole thing but is pushed around by Bottom), Francis Flute (forced to play the female parts, a bellows-mender by trade), Robin Starveling (a tailor who plays the mother, and Moonshine), Tom Snout (a tinker, who plays both the father and the wall that divides the two lovers- follows that theme of the meddling dad!) and Snug (the joiner who fears that the roar of the lion will scare the women in the audience).
The fairies who follow Titania: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed
The difficulty of love, as noted by Lysander, who says “never did the course of love run smooth” is a theme within this play. This comes for the mortals with the numerical imbalance of two men who love one woman while another perfectly lovely woman sits idly by. An imbalance also arises when Oberon’s love for the young Indian price outweighs the love he has for his wife; yet another imbalance of love occurs when the graceful and beautiful Queen Titania falls in love with clumsy, stupid Bottom. The love potion becomes the symbol of the erratic and nonsensical ways of love.
The element of magic is utilized by Shakespeare to create an ending that typifies the goals of the comedy; additionally it adds a surreal element and a sense of chaos to the play.
Dreams are linked here to the bizarre and the other worldly; they are often used to explain away inexplicable circumstances. Shakespeare attempted to use the flow and feeling of a dream to create the play’s action, finally wrapping it up by saying that if anyone is offended by it they shouldn’t be, as it were merely a dream. The element of fantasy added by the frequent mention and use of the dream prevents the play from being a serious drama.
The entire play is organized around elements of contrast: every group of mortals has a double within the group of fairies, but in some instances the doubles are the opposites of one another. For example, the fairies dispatched by Titania are graceful and lovely, while the craftsmen are clumsy and course.
The Craftsmen Play is another point of contrast, an absurdly comedic undertaking that undercuts the serious note of the romantic entanglements of the young mortals. the theme of romantic confusion enhanced by the darkness of night is rehashed, as Pyramus mistakenly believes that Thisbe has been killed by the lion, just as the Athenian lovers experience intense misery because of the mix-ups caused by the fairies’ meddling. The craftsmen’s play is, therefore, a kind of symbol for A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself: a story involving powerful emotions that is made hilarious by its comical presentation.
“Through Athens I am thought as fair as she.But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so.He will not know what all but he do know.And as he errs, doting on Hermia’s eyes,So I, admiring of his qualities.Things base and vile, holding no quantity,Love can transpose to form and dignity.Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”
“Ay me, for aught that I could ever read,Could ever hear by tale or history,The course of true love never did run smooth...”
Both of the above are in reference to the erratic and bizarre nature of love, which cannot be controlled or harnessed by man. The first is Helena’s reflection early in the play of her love for Demetrius, who scorns her, while the second is Lysander’s lamenting that true love never comes easily.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
Puck makes this declaration in his amazement at the ludicrous behavior of the young Athenians (III.ii.115). This line is one of the most famous in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for its pithy humor, but it is also thematically important: first, because it captures the exaggerated silliness of the lovers’ behavior; second, because it marks the contrast between the human lovers, completely absorbed in their emotions, and the magical fairies, impish and never too serious.
“If we shadows have offended,Think but this, and all is mended:That you have but slumbered here,While these visions did appear;And this weak and idle theme,No more yielding but a dream,Gentles, do not reprehend.If you pardon, we will mend.”
Puck speaks these lines in an address to the audience near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, extending the theme of dreams beyond the world of the play and putting the reality of the audience’s experience into question (V.epilogue.1–8). As many of the characters (Bottom and Theseus among them) believe that the magical events of the play’s action were merely a dream, Puck tells the crowd that if the play has offended them, they too should remember it simply as a dream—“That you have but slumbered here, / While these visions did appear.” The speech offers a commentary on the dreamlike atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and casts the play as a magical dream in which the audience shares.
As You Like It:
Shakespeare took the basic plot from other works, this play is linked with 12th Night, the concept is to appeal the Elizabethan Females and thought to be a masterpiece of wit.
16th Century the eldest son received everything, this was known as the right of primogeniture. Under these laws, the younger sons get nothing, as the estate is passed intact into the hands of the older child. Often the 2nd son would be steered into a career in the church. The early action of the play is between two sets of heirs, Orlando and Oliver as well as Duke Senior and Duke Fredrick. There are Cain and Able situations between both, although Duke Fredrick firsts exiles his brother rather than killing him. “As You Like it” features the theme of Management, Violence within the Family, and Exile
Duke Fredrick usurped Duke Senior’s right to inherit while Oliver disobeys his father’s will and treats Orlando like a beast. Both eventually flee to the forest of Arden.
There is a homosexual implication between Rosalind and Celia; this may explain why Duke Fredrick banishes Rosalind.
There is also the theme of fortune, as expressed by Rosalind. Nature makes a fair creature while misfortune makes us fall into a fire. This sets us up with fortune and misfortune. Fortune is seen with a blindfold on (fortune is blind to merit). Fortune is responsible for the injustice of the world.
Rosalind and Celia wonder if it is appropriate if the young ladies should be able to see the wrestling. They ask Orlando to quit the wrestling match; however page 14 indicates that Orlando would want to try his “fortune.” Orlando is pictured as Hercules or David vs Goliath. Oliver's is motivated to kill Orlando when Orlando is victorious.
The Forest of Arden is where the characters retreat to in order to reverse their bad fortune. Duke Senior is seen as a type of Robin Hood figure who finds wisdom in the woods.
The Golden World is seen as paradise or the Garden of Eden.
Two types of primitiveness and the hard primitive life is going to be stoic like and adapt to the harsh conditions. The soft primitive life is seen as natural of men; they can plow the fields of sorrow and find comfort in nature.
Jaques is a genuine outsider. He remains outside the charmed circle. This character likes to moralizing and stays in the wilderness. Jaques possesses both qualities of the fool and the wit. The objective of the fool is to pierce through our pretensions of our presumptions, the fool is a privileged person and is a satirist and a critic. In the forest of Arden Touchstone is out of place.
Shakespeare takes the notion of theater to talk about the world, as Jaques speaks one of the most famous groups of lines in all of Shakespearian fetishism: “all the world’s a stage”
These lines imply that theater is more real than the world that it imitates. There are flaws in Jaques’ omission of any mention of the 7th planet, the sun, which makes the lines satirical.
Rowland De Bouis; another name for Rowland in French is Rowlend ?
Oliver and Orlando’s father is a Knight, a rank considerably lower than Duke. Additionally, the title of knight does not pass down to the eldest son, as the title of Duke would.
Their family lived in a fancy house in the countryside. The open conversation is about nature and nurture which takes place in the Orchard. An orchard is a place where nature has been manipulated to human advantage, it is an example of natural world and nurturing of humans.
Orlando argues that because he is the youngest does not mean he is less than his father.
Orlando and Oliver are names of traders that traded amongst the Muslim and French, this implied that they should have gotten along with one another.
Rosalind chose the name Ganymede, because it is the name of a changeling.
The character of Rosalind is much beloved in Shakespeare as a woman who is incisive and intelligent, and considering that she is played by a young man and does all this gender bending in between, her role brings up the issues of gender.
The importance of Rosalind being a girl which in turn acts as a man is how Shakespeare is attempting to portray that the forest one is not “forced” to be a form of which society has them to be. This can be considered Shakespeare’s answer to the question of nature versus nurture, when living outside of society Rosalind can easily live in the opposite gender.
Translate is an important word, which comes from Latin which means carry across. It also comes in up a Midsummer's Nights Dream , when Bottom is “translated” from human to animal. In this way, “translate” appears to also mean “transform.”
You leave the court role and you leave your gender role and such; however, you leave the forest you leave behind other roles. Rosalind's behavior in the woods is a translation. She is pretending to be herself so Orlando would woo her.
Orlando had an unsatisfactory way to woo women; to be the equal of Rosalind he’d need better ammo than those shitty poems. Rosalind as Ganymede invented an uncle described as an “inlander” (someone of the court) in order to explain her fine accent as well as her knowledge of courtly love. Rosalind wants a suitable mate, so she trains Orlando to be a suitable husband which is what she later creates. This is another version of the Fairy Juice.
Orlando has not falling in love with Rosalind he is falling in love with someone he is created to believe. He looks at her for a split second and loves her, then pretends that Ganymede is his beloved.
The whole play is pretense. The title implies that we can choose to like it, or not, and also it implies that things can turn out as we’d like them to. This is another comedy, remember, so the idea is to make marriages. This comedy also has elements of the pastoral in it, as sheppards and goat herds are in it.
The sudden love of Oliver and Celia is a fairytale element; like Orlando and Rosalind, they seem to fall deeply in love at the drop of a hat, and this love inspires Oliver to stop being an asshole to his brother. Apparently in lecture this was described as the cultural demands of marriage that allow him to transform. The noble act of Orlando saving his brother from a lion allow the transformation of Oliver as well. This is the most mysterious thing in the play, where Orlando’s better motives lead him to save his brother when the forest prepares to take revenge. Celia believes Orlando's actions unnatural for he did not let nature take its course.
Audrey and Touchstone, Audrey is a goat herder. Goats are symbols of beastly sexuality, and so she is associated with a beast that symbolizes lots of sex. A touchstone is a stone to test the purity of silver and gold, but it is also a reference to masturbation.
This pair is known to be in its simplest form of attraction and relationship, the beastly Audrey will control the chronic masturbator with her excessive sexuality.
The woman of this play are civilized and superior to the men.
Within the relationship of Phebe and Silvius is the symbolism of cuckolding. Both make bad choices, Phebe in her love of Ganymede and Silvius in his whooing of Phebe.
The point of the wrestling scene is to establish Orlando as the strongest sexual being. Orlando has the sexuality of Touchstone and Audrey but is he civilized?
Celia serves as a foil to Rosalind, but Celia falls out of the play is because she has no real purpose in the forest. She only goes for loyalty to Rosalind.
Rosalind dominates As You Like It. So fully realized is she in the complexity of her emotions, the subtlety of her thought, and the fullness of her character that no one else in the play matches up to her. Orlando is handsome, strong, and an affectionate, if unskilled, poet, yet still we feel that Rosalind settles for someone slightly less magnificent when she chooses him as her mate. Similarly, the observations of Touchstone and Jaques, who might shine more brightly in another play, seem rather dull whenever Rosalind takes the stage.
The endless appeal of watching Rosalind has much to do with her success as a knowledgeable and charming critic of herself and others. But unlike Jaques, who refuses to participate wholly in life but has much to say about the foolishness of those who surround him, Rosalind gives herself over fully to circumstance. She chastises Silvius for his irrational devotion to Phoebe, and she challenges Orlando’s thoughtless equation of Rosalind with a Platonic ideal, but still she comes undone by her lover’s inconsequential tardiness and faints at the sight of his blood. That Rosalind can play both sides of any field makes her identifiable to nearly everyone, and so, irresistible.
Rosalind is a particular favorite among feminist critics, who admire her ability to subvert the limitations that society imposes on her as a woman. With boldness and imagination, she disguises herself as a young man for the majority of the play in order to woo the man she loves and instruct him in how to be a more accomplished, attentive lover—a tutorship that would not be welcome from a woman. There is endless comic appeal in Rosalind’s lampooning of the conventions of both male and female behavior, but an Elizabethan audience might have felt a certain amount of anxiety regarding her behavior. After all, the structure of a male-dominated society depends upon both men and women acting in their assigned roles. Thus, in the end, Rosalind dispenses with the charade of her own character. Her emergence as an actor in the Epilogue assures that theatergoers, like the Ardenne foresters, are about to exit a somewhat enchanted realm and return to the familiar world they left behind. But because they leave having learned the same lessons from Rosalind, they do so with the same potential to make that world a less punishing place.
Orlando
According to his brother, Oliver, Orlando is of noble character, unschooled yet somehow learned, full of noble purposes, and loved by people of all ranks as if he had enchanted them (I.i.141–144). Although this description comes from the one character who hates Orlando and wishes him harm, it is an apt and generous picture of the hero of As You Like It. Orlando has a brave and generous spirit, though he does not possess Rosalind’s wit and insight. As his love tutorial shows, he relies on commonplace clichés in matters of love, declaring that without the fair Rosalind, he would die. He does have a decent wit, however, as he demonstrates when he argues with Jaques, suggesting that Jaques should seek out a fool who wanders about the forest: “He is drowned in the brook. Look but in, and you shall see him,” meaning that Jaques will see a fool in his own reflection (III.ii.262–263). But next to Rosalind, Orlando’s imagination burns a bit less bright. This upstaging is no fault of Orlando’s, given the fullness of Rosalind’s character; Shakespeare clearly intends his audience to delight in the match. Time and again, Orlando performs tasks that reveal his nobility and demonstrate why he is so well-loved: he travels with the ancient Adam and makes a fool out of himself to secure the old man food; he risks his life to save the brother who has plotted against him; he cannot help but violate the many trees of Ardenne with testaments of his love for Rosalind. In the beginning of the play, he laments that his brother has denied him the schooling deserved by a gentleman, but by the end, he has proven himself a gentleman without the formality of that education.
Jaques
Jaques delights in being sad—a disparate role in a play that so delights in happiness. Jaques believes that his melancholy makes him the perfect candidate to be Duke Senior’s fool. Such a position, he claims, will “Give me leave / To speak my mind,” and the criticism that flows forth will “Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world” (II.vii.58–60). Duke Senior is rightly cautious about installing Jaques as the fool, fearing that Jaques would do little more than excoriate the sins that Jaques himself has committed. Indeed, Jaques lacks the keenness of insight of Shakespeare’s most accomplished jesters: he is not as penetrating as Twelfth Night’s Feste or King Lear’s fool. In fact, he is more like an aspiring fool than a professional one. When Jaques philosophizes on the seven stages of human life, for instance, his musings strike us as banal. His “All the world’s a stage” speech is famous today, but the play itself casts doubt on the ideas expressed in this speech (II.vii.138). No sooner does Jaques insist that man spends the final stages of his life in “mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” than Orlando’s aged servant, Adam, enters, bearing with him his loyalty, his incomparable service, and his undiminished integrity (II.vii.164–165).
Jaques’s own faculties as a critic of the goings-on around him are considerably diminished in comparison to Rosalind, who understands so much more and conveys her understanding with superior grace and charm. Rosalind criticizes in order to transform the world—to make Orlando a more reasonable husband and Phoebe a less disdainful lover—whereas Jaques is content to stew in his own melancholy. It is appropriate that Jaques decides not to return to court. While the other characters merrily revel, Jaques determines that he will follow the reformed Duke Frederick into the monastery, where he believes the converts have much to teach him. Jaques’s refusal to resume life in the dukedom not only confirms our impression of his character, but also resonates with larger issues in the play. Here, the play makes good on the promise of its title: everyone gets just what he or she wants. It also betrays a small but inevitable crack in the community that dances through the forest. In a world as complex and full of so many competing forces as the one portrayed in As You Like It, the absolute best one can hope for is consensus, but never complete unanimity.
Where a Midsummer Night’s dream deals with the difficulty of love, As you Like it deals with the joys of love. Rosalind argues that love had never outright killed anybody. She refuses to be melodramatic and retarded like the characters in a Midsummer Night’s waste of my fucking time; instead, this play finds all new ways to be retarded.
The play also focuses on the malleability of human life, as referenced by the famous quoatation of all the world’s a stage, in which Jaques breaks down the life cycle, and in the shape shifting of Rosalind.
As a pastoral comedy the theme of the country versus the city runs throughout the play as well as questions of artifice.
Questions of gender identity and homoeroticism run throughout, as the whole Ganymede fiasco commences. This can be seen in the epilogue, which was a standard component of Elizabethan drama. One actor remains onstage after the play has ended to ask the audience for applause. As Rosalind herself notes, it is odd that she has been chosen to deliver the Epilogue, as that task is usually assigned to a male character. By the time she addresses the audience directly, Rosalind has discarded her Ganymede disguise. She is again a woman and has married a man. Although we may think the play of gender has come to an end with the fall of the curtain, we must remember that women were forbidden to perform onstage in Shakespeare’s England. Rosalind would have been played by a man, which further obscures the boundaries of gender. Rosalind emerges as a man who pretends to be a woman who pretends to be a man who pretends to be a woman to win the love of a man. When the actor solicits the approval of the men in the audience, he says, “If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me”— returning us to the dizzying intermingling of homosexual and heterosexual affections that govern life in the Forest of Arden (Epilogue, 14–16). The theater, like Arden, is an escape from reality where the wonderful, sometimes overwhelming complexities of human life can be witnessed, contemplated, enjoyed, and studied.
The slain deer in act four can also be seen as an image of cuckoldry, which is an important idea within the play.
Much Ado About Nothing:
Another comedy, in which the object of the action is the coupling of the play’s young characters.
Dogberry, Vergel and the Watch all have dialogue that utilizes malapropism; the incorrect use of a word that sounds like the correct word, usually done for comedic effect.
The higher the character intellect and social status the more advanced and elevated the language. The lower social status characters demonstrate their low intellect by speaking in a form less elevated, but they often spout wisdom and are revealing of the culture; in this way these characters of lower social status are tools for Shakespeare. Also, the lower social status characters are usually are satirical characters .
Don John wants to usurp Don Pedro, but Don John as the illegitimate offspring has no legal rights to anything. Thus his villainy is really just for shits and gigs.
The title refers to misunderstands on the way to the bedroom, or the difficulties of coming together as couples. Beatrice and Benedick, for example, can’t stop talking love enough to realize they’re meant for each other, but the audience realizes it immediately.
There are incidents in which people hear things that are factually false (Benedick says he loves you) but are emotionally true (he really does love her, he just hasn’t said it).
In attempting to avoid marriage, these two are rejecting their socialization. They would rather not wear the “yoke” of marriage than marry the wrong person, presumably. In many ways, Beatrice appears to be a bad candidate for marriage: she’s an orphan, she’s po (she can’t even afford another o-r) and she’s sharp witted.
The discussion of fashion and masks is a reflection that the interior world of these people is different from the created exterior world. Don Pedro mock proposes to Beatrice; she’d be a good wife in some respects but obviously she is not of his social stature. She replies that she’d need a whole new set of masks to be his wife IE she’s not the woman for him. At the time, they’re all in masks, the masquerade provides an outlet of sorts for the society.
The Sonnets:
2) Sonnet
1. 14 Lines, usually in pentameter (English)
2. Octave is 8 lines.
3. Sestet is 6 lines.
4. Volta usually occurs at line 8 that jumps subjects and shows dispute or what not, a sudden change.
5. Iambic Pentameter is the most common meter in the 16th century. Iambi is 10 syllables 5 feet. 5 stressed 5 unstressed.
6. Blank Verse: Is un-rhymed iambic pentameter.
7. There aesthetic that say the ear will pick up the iambic pentameter if 70% is irregular. The sense stress is fighting against the rhythmic stress. There is a conflict between the regularity the listener has been trained in the ear than what is spoken to him in a sonnet.
8. The poem needs to grab you with the sponde and it happens within the two or three feet of the poem or at the Volta.
9. A quatrain it means four lines and in in a Shakespearean sonnet is the building block of the poem. Shakespeare or Surreyan would use 3 quatrain which can be closed or open which can have the entire thought or example. Closed quatrain first two lines will not line. The third line will then rhyme with second line and the fourth line will rhyme with the first line. It closes off the line. Open quatrain will not allow the reader find out how the next quatrain open.
10. Feminine Rhyme: The last two syllables rhyme with the preceding rhyme.
11. Catalectic Rhyme: Losing one or more syllables especially in the final foot.
12. Acephalic Rhyme: is one that lost its head so its a 9 syllable line.
13. Alexandrine: 12 syllable line comes from Greek verse about Alexander the great.
14. The couplet is the last two lines that rhyme with each other, but any rhymes that rhyme with each other can be called a couplet.
15. Iambic Tetrameter: It has 5 and has 8 syllables.
16. Concatenated Rhyme: Chained together, so the rhymes chains the two quatrain together even if you expect it to be chained together.
17. Ordinary conversations, ordinary words will only get certain stress based on how the speaker is trying to act.
18. Spenserian: Wrote the amaratee, addressing his wonderful wife.
19. Sonnet Cycle: Form a rudimentary narrative. It has to do with something such as Spring and such.
20. Shakespeare's sonnets do not tell a story or explain a narrative. The first 17 sonnets are called the young man sonnet or the procreation sonnet. Then there are another section called the Dark Lady sonnet because the lady is brunette, she may be blind or two timing the speaker. She starts in the simple sense of brunette. Then there is another section called the rival poet section. George Chapman is the rival poet of Shakespeare.
21. George Chapman was a rival dramatist against Shakespeare, most people remember him for translate Homeric epics into English.
22. Dactylic hexameter: is meter of Latin poems.
23. Anapest: 3 syllable foot of unstressed, stressed, stressed.
24. Enjamb: Sense of running one verse to another.
25. Enstopped: does not run from one verse to another.
26. Verse: single line
2) Shakespeare Sonnets
1. We do not know when it was written. The sonnet that started in the beginning of the 16th century. English sonnets began in the beginning of the 16th century.
2. Shakespeare began writing his sonnets probably towards the beginning of 1598, there is one sonnet that talk about the Spanish Armada (1588).
3. Shakespeare was not in print in 1609.
4. The printer probably got a whole stack of little sheets of paper.
5. When talking about the sonnet is the speaker and the addressee.
6. The speaker is never Shakespeare. Shakespeare can talk about the addressee and the speaker in one sonnet.
3) Sonnet 116
1. Line 10, there is a repetition of similar sounds in line 10.
2. Shakespeare wants the sound of the half line. There is so many s sounds in this siliceous, the second half of line 10 combines sounds that are abrupt and continue.
3. In Shakespeare's day loved and proved rhymed.
4. Some sonnets seems to make an argument. Either humanity has never loved or I have never loved. The reader is being asked to accept a faith based emotion on faith.
5. Line 5-8 can be describing a lighthouse. There is a conflict which appears in the unknown and the external values.
4) Sonnet 130
1. Get 12 lines of negative description
2. Goes against conventional love poetry.
3. Other poets are fooling themselves and addressees.
4) Sonnet 73
1. Talks about the seized properties and destruction of abbeys and churches when Henry VIII took over. The choir is a specific part of the church.
2. Line 2 shows that scrambling the order that conveys the possibility that even if there is a few there is none. Counting leaves on a tree does not make it spring again. This is not a cut and dry season of the year, this is Shakespeare's way of introducing motion of the poem.
3. One moment theres a feeling of understanding and another feeling of aging, and there is a sad ambivalence in the speaker's voice.
4. There is references to death, the Elizabethans would have a closer encounter to death than we ever did.
5. The last line can show both subject and object, where it can be I am leaving you or you are leaving me.
6. Why don't you love me now. The couplet transforms the entire scene.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
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