Group Presentations

Everyone has done an amazing job with the group presentations so far and I've really enjoyed watching them.  The play that has interested me the most is Titus Andronicus.  Not only because it is so gory (which I'll have to admit is what got my attention initially) but because it seems like a dense labyrinth of intertwining stories, all dealing with revenge. It  made me wonder how it was received by audiences when it came out in the playhouses.  How did Elizabethan audiences like that the "bad guy" was a woman?  How did they respond to the violence?  Did they use red ribbons? I looked up a quick synopsis of the play on the Internet to be able to blog about it but it is definitely on my summer reading list. I'm just not the beach-read chick lit type I guess. 

To be fair, Titus drew first blood, killing Tamora's first son, but it is still horrifying to me what Demetrius and Chiron did to Levinia.  This takes the Shakespeare rape scene to a whole other dimension not unlike some horror movies I've seen. The poor girl doesn't even get to live after managing to identify her attackers with a stick and her stumps! Which leads me to wonder if maybe Shakespeare got into some kind of trouble or got bad reviews because he definitely toned down the violence in his later works.  This was his first tragedy, right? Maybe he wanted to make a splash to get noticed, or perhaps he was channeling the rapes of of Roman and Greek mythology that were brutal and animalistic.  Zeus was a pretty dirty guy.

 I'd like to talk about Aaron.  Who is this guy and why is he so evil? is he some kind of personification of minority oppression and frustration?  It confuses me that he sacrificed himself for the baby he had with Tamora considering everything he tells his captors about his evil plot and the fact that the only regret he has is that he didn't commit more evil in his life. By the way, I thought Craig did a great job with the speech Aaron gives before he gets buried. 

On a final side note, I love that the group brought up Sweeny Todd.  In the synopsis of the play I read it says that before Titus put Demetrius and Chiron in the meat pies, he slit their throats and let their blood drain into a basin.  JUST LIKE SWEENY. good job guys.

mind on my Shakespeare and Shakespeare on my mind

As You Like It Rap

All the world’s a stage

And we’re just players

My dad was exiled

‘cause Fredrick was a hater

Like Jacob and Esau

And the bowl of stew

Usurped his power

This story’s not new

I am not Rosalind

I am Ganymede

Went to Arden so Fredrick

Couldn’t mess with me

Took his girl Celia

But she knew the truth

Still had my back like

Naomi and Ruth

Wherever thou goeset

There I will go

But I made it up to her

By the end of the show

Met some boys back home

Orlando had no game

So I showed him how to love

But I used a different name

Ganymede was a

Pretty-faced boy

Taken to Olympus

To be Zeus’s toy

So it makes sense

That everyone wants me

O-l-i-v-e-r

And that wench named Audrey

Everyone got married

‘cause it’s a comedy

Took off my guise

And told them it was me

So What I can’t rap

I don’t give a S#*t

This is my paper

On As You Like It

Term Paper Ideas

I had a really hard time making the connections between Myth and Shakespeare this semester either out of ignorance on the subject or the astounding density of my skull, and I can see how this will continue to be a problem when I become a teacher and try to cover Shakespeare. I need to figure out how to make these myths related to Shakespeare relevant enough to hold the attention of my students while helping them make their own connections between the texts. good luck.

Why do kids hate Shakespeare? Is it the unfamiliar language or an inability to find the parallels to modern life that are only visible if you are familiar with the myths he is alluding to? What do need to know about mythology to get something out of Shakespeare? How do you teach these things alongside the plays?

My intention is to mold these questions into some kind of term paper that is not just about teaching but finds a balance between an inquiry in the best methods of how to teach Shakespeare and a discussion on what I have learned about mythology this semester that I will use when teaching Shakespeare.   

cheers.

Winter's Tale

So...was Hermione dead and brought back to life? or was she gone like her daughter and by the power of fairy-tales came back just in time for the happy ending? And why does she come back other than to fulfill the reunion special theme of the romances? I really don't think her husband learned his lesson.  The whole dwelling-near-the-churchyard thing seems more like an outward display of penance meant for the benefit of those judging him rather than the purification of his own soul that we've said comes only from suffering.  In the end, I really don't care because I'm so excited that the magician was a woman.  I love these strong female characters...maybe a term paper idea?

I'm liking these Romances and the way they mix the gory violence of tragedy with the happy endings of comedies.  I don't know if this is because they were written at the end of Shakespeare's career and are a part of the logical evolution of the play to the way we know the novel to be now, mixing a little suffering with the happy endings or if it is just coincidence.  But something tells me there are no coincidences with Shakespeare. Especially when you look at the intertextuality of the plays, making allusions to one another in line with the mythological allusions. 

Cymbeline, Mythology, and the Unwashed Masses

We asked the question of why plays like Cymbeline, and frankly, anything other than the holy trinity of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and The Tempest are not taught in schools, and I think it has to do with an unsubstantial foundation in Mythology despite the fact that reading more Shakespeare would remedy this problem.  Yes, Cymbeline is violent and overtly sexual and perverse, but what Shakespeare play isn't? I think it is because students (or teachers) lack the background knowledge or willingness to develop a background knowledge of the less popular plays due to how much you have to have read beforehand to get the inside-joke nature of these allusions.  I personally think that introducing a play as outrageous as Cybeline or Measure for Measure (which is pretty dang violent/sexual as well) to a classroom with the effort made to get the kids to understand what's going on would only make the kids (a few at least) more excited about the Bard. 

In regards to the last 4 plays, I feel like you almost need to read them first to understand some of the earlier ones.  There are several mythological allusions in Cymbeline that would help a reader better understand the archetypes that are in all of the other plays such as the goddess of love and the leo = lion stuff. 

I Will Give thee Bloody Teeth

The introduction to Antony & Cleopatra has a picture of Vivian Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara!) as Cleo so naturally I couldn't help but think of Scarlett (and Elizabeth Taylor) when reading Cleopatra's lines.  It seems as though the female characters are getting increasingly bold as we read these plays.  We saw a hint of it in Rosalind's wit but we haven't seen anything like Cleopatra's love games she plays on poor but not so innocent Antony:

"If you find him sad

Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report

That I am sudden sick." 

Even with the news of his wife's death she mocks Antony for his faithfulness but it only makes him want her more.  She is sexually explicit, pining for Antony and envying the horse he rides while away for "bearing the weight of Antony" and uses her beauty as a weapon to manipulate Antony and to get her way. My favorite line of hers is when Charmian has compared Antony to Caesar, and she basically tells him she's going to punch him in the mouth: 

"By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth,

If thou with Caesar paragon again

My man of men." 

She's cool, calm, sexy, but if you talk about her man she'll bust your teeth. 

Too bad Antony hasn't turned around yet on some grand staircase and told her "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." 

Shakespeare really had a firm understanding of manipulative women.  It makes perfect sense today to have these strong female actors playing the feisty Cleopatra, but how did the male actor play her at the time of its publication?  Did he overact like the mechanics in MSND to exaggerate the wiles of a woman, or did he understand like Shakespeare that coolness and subtlety are the tools of a woman's cruelty?

Cordelia and The Fool

After my initial fascination borne from a high school performance of the play, I have read King Lear a few time and each time I find something new or at least a new way of looking at the same words.  I am particularly interested in the characters of Cordelia and the Fool, as well as the suspicion I have heard mentioned that they are in fact the same actor, and who is Lear talking about when he says "my poor fool is hanged" anyway? 

Even though all of the good characters (King of France, The Fool, etc) of the play like her, it is hard to read her motives or to discern how good she is at all. The same can be said about the Fool.  With all of his riddles and songs it is nigh impossible to tell who he is directing his criticism towards or why he is saying it.   Did Cordelia refuse to flatter Lear out of honesty and to put herself apart from the obviously contrived praise of her sisters or is she truly unable to tell him she loves him.  You can't really blame her if this is the case as he is a kind of pompous guy anyway.  Maybe she's just keeping him down to earth the way the fool does.  Like Cordelia, the Fool does not flatter Lear but because he does it indirectly and uses doublespeak he is not faced with any serious wrath.  However, Cordelia remains loyal to the King even after he disowns her, reinforcing the idea that she is his only true ally, but is she doing this out of love for a father or out of being generally virtuous as the King of France sees her.Perhaps by using the same actor for both roles is a way to indicate that each character possesses similar traits and deficiencies.  Both characters see and speak the truth, and are punished for it despite their loyalty. 

Prelapsarian Myth/ Cowboys in the Green World

I was excited to hear the term "prelapsarian" in class today (even more so to hear the word 'cowboy') as it was one of the first things I learned about in another Lit class this semester, Regional/Western Lit.  In that context, the Western is all about returning to the purity and savagery of the unsettled West before it is destroyed by the industrialization and domesticity of the East (a symbolic Eden separate from the knowledge that followed the fall). The western hero knows that nature is the best teacher for how to be a man rather than "book learning." This got me thinking about the "green world" and how Shakespeare uses the woods/edenic scenery as a mode for restoration for his characters as well as a place of mystery (and danger if you are a maid traveling alone).  The woods in MSND caused all of the lover's problems but ended up solving them too, acting as a Puck-esque mischievous role in the story.  So far in As You Like It, the woods have served to reveal to Duke Senior that the pastoral (maybe Western?) life is what he prefers, reminding me of how the Western myth insists that nature is where one must return to be pure and to escape the wrongs he has been dealt or has committed outside of the woods. 

As far as other mythical references go, James mentioned Cain and Abel but I was thinking more of the story of Jacob and Esaul in which Rebecca tricks her husband Isaac into giving the wrong son the birthright. No, Duke Senior was not tricked out of his position, but you get the idea.  Celia reminds me of Ruth, in that she is a faithful friend who goes with Rosalind to her exile like Ruth followed Naomi: "And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, [or] to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people [shall be] my people, and thy God my God."

The moral of the story is that the story is all that matters.

Act five to me is an epilogue. It's a chance to catch up with characters you had forgotten about until that point because they vanished from the plot. Like the extra scenes that appear during the credits of a movie, the end of MSND continues the story of the mechanics where it left off, the preparations for the play.  This play within a play acted out by Bottom and his merry men acts as a foil with which the audience can reflect upon the inverse story of the four lovers and the role that magical interference and coincidence play in the making of their happy ending. 

But why go to all of that trouble to tie up loose ends when you could simply have someone from Theseus and Hippolyta's court come out and tell you that they all lived happily ever after?I think that Shakespeare saw this as a chance to address his audience (us) directly; especially with Puck's final monologue.  The moral of the story is that the story is all that matters.  If you take away all of the myth, the fairies, the magical love potions, the Athenian Law, you are left with the same drama that saturates modern reality television.  It is the obsession with Myth that makes Shakespeare's treatment of the story  so that it needs to be seen both in the form of MSND AND Pyramus and Thisbe so that we can understand that it is all the same story. It is all part of the same myth, it has just been given different details. 

And like Puck says, if you didn't like it, just pretend it is a dream, because chances are you will see the same story again in a different form. 

The Nature of Immortality

I am an teaching option English major and despite the fact that they are "cynical  vermin," I strongly believe that the influence that I have on my future High School students will have a considerable impact on not only their immediate lives but to the impact they themselves will have on the future as well and if I instill in them an appreciation for language, a love for the written word, and desire to learn that they can then pass on to their own students or children, in a way, I will never die.

I know that we are supposed to write a sonnet about this, and I will, but at a later date. I just wanted to write this down before I forget what I wanted to say. 

Pity Like a Newborn Babe and the "Linguistic Swoon"

 

  The complete passage from Macbeth reads: 

And pity, like a naked newborn babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

 Personally, I envisioned a newborn baby wrapped in cloth, riding a hurricane-like storm fueled by his tears that is being driven by flying angel-horse hybrid creatures whilst crying into a megaphone he has plugged into an amp, "HORRID DEED!"   In a panic (not wanting to let the class down after my previously breathtaking work in "God in his PJ's") I looked up the quote on Google images for inspiration and found this William Blake painting. While his work captures the obviously violent vibe of the wild horse-drawn natural disaster, there is a serenity in the faces of the newborn and the body below that suggests a softer side of regret and vulnerability, leaving you with mixed feelings as to who you should have pity for.  The passage itself creates a very vivid picture with its description of what it would look like if the horrid deed was told with the volume and intensity that Macbeth would have it recalled with.  In just five lines, Shakespeare has created a very clear scene in the reader's mind. 

 

I realize that we will cover Macbeth later, but I'd like to take this opportunity to talk very briefly about the sensual nature of the language in Shakespeare's plays and how they evoke powerful emotion while playing on all of our senses.  Today we talked about Midsummer Night's Dream and how it is one of the most "voluptuous" plays and how it is difficult to read it without falling into a "linguistic swoon." 

Lysander's lines on the risky and fleeting nature of love could just as easily have said something to the effect of "even if two people love each other, a whole bunch of things can go wrong and their time together can go by faster than they thought it would." Instead he says this:

  "Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,

War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,

Making it momentary as a sound,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,

Brief as the lightning in the collied night;

That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and Earth,

And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”

The jaws of darkness do devour it up.

So quick bright things come to confusion."

  As a reader or member of an audience watching the play acted out, we can feel the dread of looming sickness and death, hear the crack of lightning and see as it flashes across the sky and then vanish, and we understand just how fleeting and fragile love can be.  The words spoken in a Shakespeare play are in themselves an experience to be had both in the mind and body of the reader, perhaps giving them their longevity.  These are real people and real situations despite their mythical nature and they are made real by the sensual effect they have on those who come into contact with them.  

While on the subject of Mythology, am I the only one who feels like maybe they are no longer qualified to read Shakespeare after today's discussion of the entire other story that you would have had to have known to understand who the people in MSND even are? I knew that these plays were steeped in myth but it never occurred to me that they would overstep the bounds of archetypal themes into the realm of entire mythological back-stories. 

School of Night

After hearing Dr. Sexson's introduction of Sir Walter Raleigh with his pearls and his "princely perfume," I got it into my head that the School of Night was not unlike some of the more pretentious and annoying customers I encountered in my years as a Starbucks barista:  a collection of men in dark clothing that sat around sipping espresso drinks and discussing just how enlightened and generally awesome they are.  After reading Frederick Turner's article I found that that while they were stylish in their melancholy and punk-rock in their atheism, these men actually had something interesting to say. 

It is hard to believe that Marlowe and his sardonic wit when discussing religion could have existed in a time when the monarch played the dual role of the head of the church and atheism was the same as treason. I read Dr. Faustus in another class but I didn't read it as it is explained in Turner's article.  While I imagined the absence of God as being comforting to one so self-important as Faustus, Turner explains that it is in fact terrifying but subsequently frees a  "free thinker" such as the members of The School of Night to philosophize a meaning for life without an omnipotent mediator: "Having no God to mediate the ferocity of its aspiration, the mind must contemplate and prey upon itself, until the veils of habit, tradition, and expectation  are torn away and the soul confronts the essential zero at its core."


I am having trouble reconciling the idea of the School of Night consisting of scientists and atheists with the return of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism.  Hermeticism as I understand it is a belief in an all-encompassing God as well as the notion that every being in the universe is connected while Neoplatonism is a mixture of Christianity and a new understanding of Plato.  Perhaps the men of the School of Night's ideas of men as the brothers of the gods sparked an interest in knowing and understanding what Neoplatonism calls thinking closer to the mind of God than of man such as astrology and alchemy. 

We shall see.

"Checking the Brownies"

I'm a little embarrassed after today's comments on Sylvia Plath and lets call them her "eccentricities," but before today's class I had the full intention of talking about The Bell Jar and my thoughts on the idea of a "secular scripture."  

When I think of a sacred text, I think of something a person can carry with them as an artifact, a little piece of an idea that they can turn to for guidance.   They can see parts of themselves in its contents, and therefore  take from it a sense of comfort from the advice and solace they find in the words.  Other than the Bible, I suppose my sacred text is The Bell Jar.    Just as Job teaches me to be patient and Esther teaches me to be strong, Esther Greenwood teaches me to not let the anxiety of having to be everything to everyone at once overwhelm me.  Although I won't be "checking the brownies" anytime soon, I am genuinely aware of the feeling of being in a bell jar. 

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell."

What does this have to do with Shakespeare, you ask? I'm not sure.  Perhaps people look to Shakespeare as a narrative compass or an outline to which they can compare their own ideas.   Maybe secular scripture is something that can be read over and over and never get old. Longevity.  That's how I feel about The Bell Jar, as morbid as that sounds. 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead

I know a little more than I'd like to about Shakespeare as a man (thank you Gretchen Minton) but one thing that strikes me about his work is that if you've read it, you've pretty much read everything that's been written after him or you can at least put the pieces together enough to understand it. Shakespeare is is like The Beatles: everything that has been produced after him is either inspired by his work or a shameless knock-off.  I realize that much of what he wrote was based on biblical storytelling and ancient mythology, but it is still amazing that in the midst of something as catastrophic as the plague someone could come up with such witty and sardonic stories that have lasted as long as his have. 

Another thing that I know and am fascinated by about Shakespeare is the versatility with which someone can interpret the text or make their own.  During my graveyard shift-induced Netflix binge over the Winter break I stumbled upon a movie called "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead."  Basically, a young man is sucked into directing Hamlet for a small company of players who are subsequently revealed as being vampires who are part of a feud against prince Hamlet who was actually a real guy who cured his own vampirism by drinking from the holy grail that, as it turns out, was in Denmark the whole time.  I loved Tom Stoppard's play that this movie quotes and pokes fun at, and I love that no matter how much time passes there will always be another way to put a new spin on a canonized work by our buddy, Bill. 

I know that no matter how much I think I know about Shakespeare, there is always something more to be found and m really looking forward to digging it up with this class.