um let me get a sense if I may of how many of you have studied Shakespeare before how many may I even ask this how many of you have studied Shakespeare with me before okay uh um and uh how many of you are brand new at the adult level that is the the the you haven't studied Shakespeare in college or more recently than College how many of you for for you this is a new thing okay great uh Shakespeare is an equal opportunity author it is uh uh both easy and hard always to study Shakespeare it's hard for us and easy for you that is to say you keep finding new things I get to the bottom of a Shakespeare play or a Shakespeare passage or a phrase in Shakespeare that's what keeps me going in this it's this is my my index of what makes great literature I'm quite nervous about valuative words like great but it seems to me that one of the indices of greatness if we're going to have that or the high value that we put on literature is that as you return to it again and again it continues to give you things that you didn't see before uh this is also I should say one of the great values of literary criticism and literary analysis that it continues to open up New Paths and just as you think you have gotten really everything you possibly can out of a passage or a scene or a character or a kind of character a new approach and we'll discuss some of those during the course of the semester uh we may open up things that actually one has not seen because one's been looking through a lens of this kind and we want to look through a lens of this kind think of it as a set of filters that you might be putting in front of your eyes to show you the the the the image through green or through red or through indeed rose color um so we'll talk about Shakespeare's plays and we'll sh talk about approaches to the plays um and and when I say we this is not the Royal we uh this is the actual wi of those of us who are in this room um I have been teaching Shakespeare at Harvard for more years than I like to admit um I for many years taught uh lecture course in Sanders Theater uh which was a shakes two semester Shakespeare course uh sometimes people took the whole SE whole year of it and sometimes they took one semester of it uh and I wondered years ago how I was ever going to bring myself to stop teaching that course which was a very wonderful course for me to teach uh very exhilarating and kept showing me new things about Shakespeare and about the plays and then uh a publisher came to me and said how about writing a book about Shakespeare that does that thing that many people had been telling the publisher was wanted that is to say uh provides a chapter on every play and I did that and that's what this book Shakespeare after all is and once I published the book I felt I could no longer teach that course because what I would have said ex cathedra was now in the book so this course is deliberately called sh Shakespeare after all it could be called Shakespeare after Shakespeare after all I think um because it builds what I have to say in writing into the experience that I hope and that we ask that you bring to these sessions every week so that each week we ask you to read a play of Shakespeare and also my chapter on that play and I may in my remarks go over some of the things that I've said here I may not you should also understand that this like any piece of literary criticism or literary theory is interpretation it is my view of things it is I hope supported by evidence that I bring to bear on on on the arguments that I put forward but it is not the only truth and you may think that in some places I'm actually quite far from the truth or that I'm I'm actually making an argument that that with which you want to take issue or where you need me to explain further in order for me to persuade you of something so that I we will hope that in the discussion part of our time together you'll feel free to pose questions both about the plays and also about my interpretation of the plays or indeed about any other interpretation that you may have read or experienced or any production that you have seen uh because certainly every production is an interpretation every actor every director uh every audience finds something new in these plays uh there at the very this very moment I think at the the Brooklyn Academy of Music Ian McKellen is doing his King leer uh which got a lot of very interesting reviews you may have seen them in the New York Times and other major Publications this is a major Shakespearean actor who's he he was here many years ago on an American tour and he and I actually did a radio program together on MC Beth he was then appearing in MC Beth and we did a radio program together at WB discussing what it was like for him to perform MC Beth I wish I could do that with him about his King Lear uh but this is he he certainly uh has has been praised very much for bringing his experience as a lifelong actor as well as as a as a a lifelong person into this production of King Lear which is otherwise so far as I can tell I have not been able to get a ticket to it uh a relatively traditional production uh of the play uh that is to say it is sat on a heath he is wearing Rags it it is not transformed into some other time period or some other place uh though I GA the fool in that play in this this this version of the play is a a theatrical entertainer of some kind uh and is thought of as somebody who actually stages plays of his own uh closer to home a production that you will certainly be able to see and that I might well invite you to see uh is production by the uh the the actor Shakespeare project which is a theater a Shakespeare theater in town here which did last year a very brilliant Titus andronicus and is doing MC Beth in in October and they've asked me actually to to moderate the discussion about the production and in this case it's a relatively untraditional production again I've not seen any rehearsals of it yet but every character in the play is played by a woman so this is an all female MC Beth and uh it will interrogate issues of women and power and issues of gender as performance and a whole range of other things but Titus andronicus was done in what would have been Shakespeare's own the the kind of production of Shakespeare's own time that is say all the parts were played by men uh you may know that in Shakespeare's time uh in England no women appeared upon the public stage so that every female character in Shakespeare including those that we have come to rely upon as icons of Womanhood or femininity whether it's Juliet or lady McBeth or Cleopatra or cresa or Porsche that all of these characters are cast for and played by men in Shakespeare's day which is to say that gender uh is from the beginning within Shakespeare an invented and performed thing not a natural or merely imitative thing uh and what's fascinating about this to me is that so many of our own stereotypes about what women are like a Juliet a lady MCB Beth a Cleopatra uh come from these characters who were initially performed by played by and designed for male actors uh but the the actors shakespear project is turning the tables on this question and producing an entirely female MC Beth and the discussion which will be happening on think the production begins on October 18th and the discussion which I'm asked to moderate is on a Tuesday night October 30th and uh there will be people who are directors and and people who are Scholars of psychology and I I I'll once I get the list of who they are I'll be happy to share this with you but I we we absolutely encourage you to see as much Shakespeare as you can how many of you actually acted in Productions of Shakespeare recently fairly recently good um directed Productions of Shakespeare right uh used Shakespeare in classroom or other teaching situations like what uh what no in what kind of situation oh high school high school teaching okay right uh you because shakes the reason I ask is that Shakespeare these days is being used in Business Schools a great deal as kind of case studies for problem solving of one kind or another uh that the plays are so available as kind of the myths of our time stories that people are thought to be quite familiar with that they're often being used to exemplify hard choices or leadership issues or racial discrimination or some other Uh current day issue which is localized in a fictional situation in this case not a you know Jane went to the market and encountered farmer X but a story that would have to do with porsa going to the the the courtroom and encountering and Antonio and so so um the uh Shakespeare has moved into modern culture and into popular culture in this way uh so we would encourage you to experience your Shakespeare our Shakespeare you know the Germans used to say unzer Shakespeare the Shakespeare is a initially German writer uh you should you should make Shakespeare your own in fact the very beginning of this book of mine this Shakespeare after all uh Begins by claiming that we all create every age creates its own Shakespeare that Shakespeare is like a mirror or like a portrait whose eyes follow you around the room uh that people recognize themselves in Shakespearean characters and situations and phrases that we think through Shakespeare that we use the phrases that we encounter in these plays uh to express the situations of common life uh and that Shakespeare is already inside us whether you have ever studied Shakespeare formally or informally before you will come upon things there a famous story about a a probably apocryphal story about a woman who went to the theater and saw a production of Hamlet and walked out at the interval and said that it was all made of quotations and that's because supposedly she had encountered it as you know as sets of quotes beforehand but I think that you'll find uh even in the plays with which you may be less familiar that you're that's where that comes from uh uh the uh let me think what what would be a uh Lord uh I'm trying to think of a line from trius and cres that would function in this way and I had one on the top of my tongue I'll I'll think of one but anyway you you you'll find that there there are lines that that that function precisely in this way so this this this course is is is a completely self-contained one you need not have read the earlier play of Shakespeare in order to read these um I I teach the plays as early and late by preference rather than by genre rather than by teaching a course on the comedies and the histories or the tragedies or the romances because it's so interesting to me to see what the playwright and his company seem to have been doing and engaging at a given moment in time that Echoes from play to play uh at a given time period seemed to me absolutely as interesting as anything that we could say was determined by genre and I'll say some things in just a second about these these Shakespearean genres and the degree to which they do or don't actually function but but first if if you just have a look with me at the syllabus I just want to want to indicate to you something about what it is that we are doing and then I'll say something about about what what this actually contains um so today we're going to talk in general about Shakespeare about his times about the the the start Point really of these so-called later plays uh about uh in the second half of this time period we'll look some closely at a couple of passages in order to to come to grips with Shakespearean language and see how rich it is uh and then we plunge into uh Tois and CA and measure for measure again let me take a kind of census here how many of you have read or seen from and Cresta recently in The Last 5 Years great okay um measure for measure fantastic okay U aell Because by the time we get to aell we're getting to the plays that for a long time in the last century the 20th century were thought of as you know the great tragedies of Shakespeare uh a fellow King Le Hamlet McBeth Hamlet is written in 1599 1600 uh and does not fall into the later plays category we'll be talking about Hamlet from time to time uh but these other plays the the great tragedies so-called uh became the centerpiece of the study of Shakespeare really partly as a result of the famous Oxford lectures of the critic AC Bradley uh who thought of these as Shakespeare's mour tragedies and the Bradley plays so-called became for the 20th century the kind of measures of Shakespearean great and I just want to say as a kind of parenthesis around this that there have been times in the history the long history of Shakespearean reception when the comedies were thought of as as more important than the tragedies when the romances were which are the latest plays that we'll we come to in a moment and that will come at the end of our semester we thought of as the culmination of his work uh that the the the the different kinds of plays that Shakespeare writes have been valued by different time periods and different places at different at different levels so that that we should not automatically assume because we are ourselves The Heirs of the 20th century that these Great Central tragedies are the best the strongest the mature the the the culmination of his work on the other hand they are fabulous plays and uh they are certainly the work of a playwright working and and a and a a theatrical manager working at the height of his powers uh but I I I will want to try try to demonstrate to you week after week how remarkable each of these plays is on its own and in conversation with the others and with the times uh so so we're going to start um with with these plays that Mark really the Turning Point uh from really from the late 16th century to the early 17th century uh the moving into in historical terms the time when King James actually came to the throne replacing Queen Elizabeth in now uh again one can make too much of the break between the Elizabethan plays and the jackan plays uh but once upon a time again a course like this would have been called Elizabethan and jacoban Shakespeare or the plays by by authors who were not Shakespeare writing in the same period would have been called Elizabethan and jacoban drama uh and and this acknowledges the degree to which uh Shakespeare and his company wrote and performed Med in a patronage culture in a culture in which the Monarch and or a a set of leading nobles were very determinative in what was approved in what was was was performed what was disapproved um the this this is a moment when the Renaissance theater is coming into being uh the uh prior to the time of Shakespeare and his contemporaries whether it's Christopher Marlo in the 1600s or Ben Johnson in the early 1700s whether it's marsten or Middleton or Haywood uh but prior to this time uh the theater is very much more related to either the church or to morality uh the in in the north of England in particular there are what are called Miracle plays and morality plays being performed which are either depict scenes from The Bible uh and with a kind of theological function that is to say starting at the beginning of Genesis and moving through uh toward Revelation uh with the the idea now again remember that we're dealing in a culture in which not everybody can read this is not necessarily a literate culture so you see performed scenes from The Bible uh and this is one way that you understand how how uh this founding text functions and uh these performances indeed were personalized by the development among other things of certain kinds of theatrical types so that Mrs Noah uh became a kind of type of the nagging housewife and a type that's still recognizable in situation comedies today and that has its more sophisticated mature versions in a play let us say like The Comedy of Errors of Shakespeare in which there's a husband and a wife in which the wife keeps saying why aren't you home for dinner and and and much a leftover of this idea of the sort of the the man being being controlled by the wife and this this this thematic will show up let us say even in uh mcbath in slightly different way but but the so these types developed uh King Herod the the the king of the Jews who who orders the slaughter of the firstborn is thought of as a kind of ranting Tyrant when hamlet in his play cautions the players not to out Herod Herod not not to to uh to overact to throw their hands around to gesture too much and so forth he is making reference to this figure of Herod from the old uh Miracle plays which again were still in the memory of some of the populace um these plays continue to be performed together with the morality plays that is plays like every man plays that where where characters have symbolic names uh like Good Deeds or every man or the four wits or the the seven seven deadly sins uh and and characters like that too are carried over into the Shakespearean drama in for example uh the very famous figure called the vice VI I the embodiment of a certain um resistance to happiness resistance to to to personal success a trickster figure and a figure indeed of viciousness uh and the vice figure uh is mentioned explicitly in a play like Richard iiii it's mentioned in by Fall staff in Henry ivth part one these are both early plays and we'll see that in a play like aell there are in uh Yago some vestiges of this stock character of the vice who is both comic and uh uh antisocial often witty at the expense of others often confiding to the audience in a set of asides and that not only Yago but the figure of Edmund and King leer will carry some of those aspects too so there's a kind of residual cultural memory here it's not necessary necessarily the case that anyone in The Shakespearean audience has ever seen any of these Miracle or morality plays but they are the literary Heritage or one of the many literary heritages that are being carried through and we'll see that there are other heritages for example when we come to trus and cresa you'll see you'll see that the recovery of the ancient Greek and Roman texts uh makes a tremendous difference to how it is that Elizabethan and jacoban people and writers imagin themselves that they saw themselves as successor cultures we talk about the American Century this was in a way the Renaissance English Century that thought it was recovering and recapturing the glor stories of ancient Greece and Rome and so they measured themselves to a certain extent against these older cultures uh the in the in the late 1500s Sir Thomas North uh translates plutarch's parallel lives of the ancient Greeks and Romans and plutarch's lives was a book that that compared an ancient Greek hero with an ancient Roman hero these Pluto's lives in the North translation are one of the many sources for Shakespeare's plays and especially for his plays that that speak about ancient Greek Greece or ancient Rome uh but we have to also Imagine uh the the the writers and the audiences of Shakespeare's day as putting a third comparison figure next to the Greek and the Roman and that was the figure of their own time the figure of the Renaissance how is a Renaissance king or queen or Monarch or Duke comp comparable to br brus or to Mark Anthony uh or to timman of Athens uh and so so this comparative mode uh this mode that is both referential and comparative is one of the things that makes it useful to know something about the intellectual background and the theatrical background of these plays at the same time there's a radical difference between those plays and Shakespeare's plays in that The Shakespearean theater or I should say the early modern theater the theater of the Renaissance is a commercial theater being performed in a non-sacred place in a purpose-built place in a in theaters built to be theaters the first one that Shakespeare's company played in was called the theater uh and it was built in 1576 and its timers were torn down at the end of the 16th century to build the sh the the theater that you probably most associate with Shakespeare what's the name of that theater The Globe the Globe Theater uh and it is built out of in part the the the disassembled pieces of this earlier theater uh how many of you have any of you been to the globe the reconstructed globe in England on on the bank side of the temps uh very faithful reconstruction uh with the company getting increasingly good I've seen some good things and some not so such good things there but if you've been there you will know that the uh acting is is played in the out ofd doors there's no roof uh there and there's no electricity in 16th and 17th century England either so the uh plays are per performed in the afternoon uh and there it's a very Democratic kind of theater space uh in that the the below the stage stages on a little platform below the stage is an area in which people stand and do not sit and they're called the Groundlings they could bring their own stool but there's no place for provided for them to sit and then there are tears of seats around the sides in which for a little bit more money if you were a person with more to spend uh you could have a seat uh you could even if you were a person with good deal of money sit in a curtained off space and have a sexual diance while you were watching the plays uh I want you to think about this as being as much like a modern sporting event as like a sacred theatrical event because food is being sold uh Delian is of various kinds canoodling is going on uh Behind these these curtains uh people shout out and speak back to the actors uh it's it's a space in which the theater is truly interactive and it has there's no front curtain uh so that there is a uh a an intimacy a potential intimacy between the actor and the audience uh even though the Globe Theater we think could have held about two th000 people so we're not talking about a space like this talking about a space in which uh there could be lots and lots and lots of people uh people of different social stations women as well as men apprentices as well as kings and queens and and noblemen all sitting in this space that became a democratic space wrong place take care um and uh the the the when an actor comes out to speak in Soliloquy or you may think of it as monologue Soliloquy the single voice speaking uh he or she is speaking intimately to the audience in the theater uh and whether what's happening in that Soliloquy is confiding one's inner thoughts or confiding a plot or a plan uh that is to say whether it's Hamlet telling you that to be not to be that is the question where you think oh to be or not that is the question you know it's a universal question or whether it's Yago as you'll see coming out and saying I have it it is engendered hell and night will bring this monsterous plot to the world's light uh bring making you his confident making you guilty in the theater because you know what's going to go on that a fellow doesn't know and you were therefore ganging up on him together with Yago because you already know the plan and you because of the convention of the theater cannot warn AOW what's going on uh this device of the Soliloquy was a way of creating among other things a kind of psychological inside for a character shows you how the inner workings of somebody's mind would would function shows you their inner thoughts a figure like yo or a figure Like Richard III or any other quotes villain has got to have two faces has got to be able to make nice on stage while making very much not nice in his own mind or her own mind and sharing that not niceness with you so it creates an inside and an outside of a character and we'll see when we come to look at some passages that it's not only the Soliloquy but the language itself that creates thickness Dimension uh a roundness of these characters that these are not merely allegorical characters though they partake of allegory they are not merely symbolic characters though they have become for us deeply symbolic of ambition of self-doubt of true love of a whole variety of things because they're Shakespeare uh but these are characters who have what we think of as personality and personality here is if I can use a technical term here from from from literary study a back formation that is you develop a sense that somebody has a personality from the the contradictions that you sense within their personal from the resistances that they should I do this or should I do that uh if they have no self-doubt if they have no internal dialogue then it's much harder to see uh that they are not merely cardboard cutouts but almost every Shakespearean character from the lowest to the highest has this kind of Dimension has a a a hidden story as well as a present story and this will all be disclosed in language whether it's the language of the individual or the language of dialogue because of course we're dealing here with theater not with lyric poetry and not with novels so that uh every character could represent something that Shakespeare whoever that was uh thought or didn't think every utterance made by a character in these plays has its own validity there is no space and you'll see this very explicitly when we come to Tois and cresa which is a play very much built on dialogues between people somebody says let's go left the other one says let's go right and so forth and there's no way that you can say Shakespeare's on the side of those who are saying let's go right uh and he's against those who are saying let's go left these dialogues are meant to make you understand that there are many sides to these questions and whether the sides are moral or ethical or aesthetic or romantic or erotic or political uh the the the the dialogue is really what you get you never get we're never going to get to a point where say aha Shakespeare believes this uh we cannot know what Shakespeare believes and so one of the things that I want want you to sort of put a big mental X through uh as we we come to look at these plays and even as we come to talk today is the question of trying to read Shakespeare's mind what did Shakespeare think what did he have in mind when he did this I can tell you and and Mel and Larry can tell you and we can all guess and hypothesize about what would have been likely in the period it would have been unlikely that he' ever seen a bicycle or been in an airplane I mean there some things that we can say he probably wasn't thinking about because they would be anachronistic which doesn't mean that they wouldn't be we couldn't you know today have as Peter sers famously did a king leer uh at at Adam's house that were which was what was it Cadillac on the stage uh now we I think we can probably say fairly confidently that he wasn't thinking about that Shakespeare didn't have General Motors in mind uh but that that that something anachronistic can function extremely well within a Shakespearean play in fact the plays themselves are deeply anachronistic there's a striking clock in julus Caesar at a time when they were not striking clocks in ancient Rome and so forth and what in fact this business of anachronism does is to show you something about the modernity of Shakespeare again that Shakespeare is always in the present time as well as in an earlier time so no matter what the time period or the nature in which a play is set if it's ancient Greece ancient Rome um medieval England medieval Scotland uh it's set in that time period it is written and initially performed in Shakespeare's own time the late 16th or the early 17th century and it is being read by us and or performed or seen by us in the present day and don't ever erase the present day you cannot make yourself into an Elizabethan or jacoban person you cannot put yourself into a purifying time machine and go back and get rid of all your modernity you can learn a lot about earlier periods but you're still going to be thinking about them from from your perspective as a person of today and this is a plus rather than a minus the authentic Shakespeare is a moving Target the authentic Shakespeare is not only the Shakespeare of the early modern period but also the Shakespeare that you experience so on the one hand we want to to be cautious about about certain kinds of anachronisms on the other hand we want to allow interpretively the function of anachronism creatively here but we're not going to be able to read Shakespeare's mind we're not going to be able to uh it's not I should say that it's prob it's not not not profitable uh for us to try to speculate too much about whether he liked blondes or brunettes for example did the dark Lady of the sonnets represent his own personal taste or did he prefer you know Fair ladies or Fair gentlemen uh I mean these are interesting questions these are questions that belong to the world of speculation and biography uh but in fact Shakespeare's plays are full of both blondes and brunettes and their Chief function is to be notional opposites or alternatives to one another it's not about blondness and it's not about brunette in the plays at least it's about an interplay between tall and short or blonde and brunette or old and young or or or uh Greek or or Trojan it's it's it's about interplays and about dialogues and conversations so uh the The Shakespearean drama as we will be entering into it is a Shakespearean drama that has been evolved on the public stage in England for decades already that this is a moment of high theatrical ferment think about as an analogy about the early days of Hollywood for example the early days of film making when it was really exciting to be creating a new medium and seeing what it could do and changing what the medium could do adding sound to film adding plot to film uh adding fiction to film adding color to film so also for these early modern writers uh they had a medium the theater uh that they were able to make do lots of different things and part of it is the discovery of how to use language character costume the physical stage uh as a way of of stretching the medium making the medium the theater do something new and so there will always be something self-referential about these plays something meta theatrical iCal as we say theater about theater some some little moment in which people say oh this is just like being in a play or or uh as an actor said walking on the stage or MC Beth MC Beth says you know the uh like a poor player who strs shuts and Frets his hour upon the stage that that there'll always be some gesture some acknowledgment that this is a medium that it's talking about its own own possibilities whether it's talking about language or about character or about costume or about disguise or about impersonation there's always going to be this meta theatrical referential element within the plays this is not the the the reductio of the plays this is not the only thing that they are about but they are about the medium just as they are about the narrative and the characters and the language uh and so by the time sh Shakespeare I should say uh is is part of an acting and Theater Company He Is We we we know an actor as well as a theatrical manager he he belonged to a company that actually made more money than any other theater company but there are a lot of startups a lot of companies that are starting up in this period and they're all called things like the Lord Admirals men or the Lord Chamberlain's men or Lord Strange's men uh they're all called somebody or others men because of a statute uh promulgated under the time time of Queen Elizabeth against what are called masterless men in this culture that is marauding bands of people who were homeless and hungry and and and wandering about England uh and of whom the state was frightened that that they the so the idea that you didn't want mobs as use an anachronistic word but that you didn't want masterless men wandering about England got in the way of the the way theater was practiced in this period which is to say that these were traveling players very of often they moved especially in the summer months from great house to great house they performed uh not only in the in the state theaters but also in private homes and especially when there was plague in England which there was frequently especially in the warmer months uh if there was plague for too many days the theaters were s shut down by the state and in order for the players to make any money they had indeed to go traveling so traveling groups of male actors were masterless men unless they were in fact had a master and so if you had a patron of your company Lord strange as your Patron or the Lord Admiral as your Patron you were not Lord you were not masterless you belong to a acting company and you could be legitimate that's why this this this these so and so's men um functions here as a kind of of cover uh to allow these acting companies to function this is kind of early capitalism this is the beginning of you have a product or a service to s and Shakespeare's company which began as the Lord Chamberlain's company and then when King James came to the throne was adopted by the king who made made himself their Patron and became The Kingsmen in 16003 uh this was the most successful company of many successful companies in Shakespeare in in in early modern England uh and and the plays that they wrote and the plays that they performed uh were not it's not like cats it's it's not like something runs for 400 performances 10 is a good number of performances in this period so they're rehearsing they're learning a new play in the morning they're performing in the afternoon they're may be writing a play at night when they're not drinking uh they're they're uh they're and the plays are performed in Repertory the plays are performed not a solid run of one thing because again You' got an audience that's before television before radio uh there are very few books around actually this is a major entertainment this this is a kind of entertainment that along the banks of the temps function side by side with u be baiting and uh I mean it's Michael Vic you know it's it's it's it's uh it's all kinds of animal things there there's there there dogs there's fighting there's there's there's all kinds of displays it's a much more robust era than our own uh public hangings were among the most most popular popular events to be attended by audiences uh so that this is a kind of entertainment which has a major social function and a ma major kind of collective social function uh and just to give you an idea an apprentice's daily wage would be about the same amount of money as a ticket to the theater um so so they are writing and Performing and inventing and being rivalrous to one another and uh the theater flourishes under Queen Elizabeth who is very interested in it and then then and and the so the early plays uh very often uh have some glancing reference to her to uh it's full of of of empowered young women who become strong uh and then King James comes to the throne in 1603 and it's about this time it's actually a little earlier than that that we're going to start but it's about this time uh that our of plays begin uh and James was very different from Elizabeth James is the son of Mary Queen of Scots who was Elizabeth's great rival and whom Elizabeth had beheaded uh James was King of Scotland uh James the the six of Scotland uh and he was since Elizabeth is the Virgin Queen she does not have a husband she does not have any any any Heirs of her own body uh and she kept control of the state for a long time par because she did not have to share her power with a man and she did not have children who would succeed her uh and so James is her Heir and he inherits the throne from her in 16003 and the plays that we're going to be looking at are all plays or mostly plays that are produced uh under uh the under the time of James again one can overstress this when we come to MC Beth we'll talk about James's interest in witches and Witchcraft and the degree to which uh writing a play that was about witchcraft was certainly uh a gesture that would have been of great interest to the king and we we'll we I can talk to you when we come to measure for measure even about things that people have said about the the the Duke in measure for measure the the uh the Duke of Dork Corners as he's called um and and how he seemed to some of them to to some some some critics I should say uh to resemble King James in his pensent for uh spying from afar having intelligence brought to him of what was going on uh James was a very peculiar guy in lots of ways he was a scholar he was also very interested in the court mask in a certain kind of Court performance um he uh had very strong feelings about about certain political matters uh and certain historical matters and we'll talk all about these as we go through uh but the place that we're looking at are the plays that are roughly speaking the the second half of Shakespeare's career uh starting about 16003 and moving through to the Tempest uh which is uh the we think a play written in 1611 uh and performed in 1611 which we we is often misguidedly described as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage in fact he didn't say good by to this age in 1611 he wrote at least one other play completely on his own which we're not going to have time to look at Henry VII or all is true how many are familiar with Henry VII or all is true okay great uh he collaborated with other people on other plays at this point uh Shakespeare's born in 1564 he dies in 1616 and uh the first folio of his plays is published in 1623 which is to say he did not design it uh it is published as as a homage to him uh by two members of his acting company hemings and Condell uh and they publish it in folio form which is a great big I wish I'd brought one in a great big form uh which is normally used in this period for sermons and for learned information of various kinds not for plays which were thought of as trash thought of as as paperback books of their time as Sir Thomas bodley when he built his his his uh library at Oxford forbad play scripts to be put into the badan library because he they were he said baggage books they were trash uh they they they were low they were were were uh uh too funny and too dirty and not edifying and so forth um Shakespeare's plays aren't the first plays to be published in folio form Ben Johnson published his own plays in folio form in in 1612 and he had he was a great great uh classical scholar had the word operah meaning Works lettered on the spine of the of the of the folio and he took a lot of heat for publishing plays in the folio form it's as if uh you were to do you know an opera out of the South Park or something like that that you would be bringing together two things that would sometimes be thought of as not not cohering uh but the first folio uh is so to speak the first authorized Collective publication of Shakespeare's plays before that the plays are published in quto form and CTO is about this size it's a piece of paper folded to be about this size and so they are like little paperback paperbacks and some of them are authorized and some of them are not authorized and some of them have the playwright's name on the title page and some don't because the playright isn't really the most important person at this point the person who who who made money out of the CTO was the book seller not the the not the playwright not the company uh but the guy who actually produced the physical object uh the playright is I mean the the the copyright appears in English law uh in uh the beginning of the the uh 18th century 1710 the statute of an before that time authors don't really own their works in the way that we think of authors as having copyright rights it's a lot of borrowing back and forth a lot of creative borrowing but the first folio of Shakespeare's place is what divides the plays into these hypothetical sub areas of comedies histories and tragedies uh sometimes plays are sort of on the cusp between between one status and another trist and cres is one such play is it a comedy is it a history uh it's not quite clear on on the title page of one version it claims to be one thing on the title page of another version it claims to be something else these categories are categories that are invented and made to be played with in other words there's no uh there's no uh genre police out there saying uh here the rules of a comedy and if you disobey these rules then you know you fail as a comedy uh in fact what we'll see as we come to look at these plays is that all comedies have bits of history in them and bit bits of tragedy in them that all tragedies have bits of comedy and bit bit bits of history and so forth and often very very very self-consciously so and that they kind of push against these genres so that I mean what would be some things that you would hypothetically say would be true of a comedy yes happy ending happy ending what would that mean mean the community comes together okay good uh and yet I will be happy to prove to you that every single Shakespearean comedy does not do that that there's somebody left out some marriage that doesn't take place some for boing remark about you know what might happen in the future there's some thread some loose endings which makes them such good place where it doesn't all the pieces don't come together so perfectly they move in that Direction and yet there's something left over there's something left to go uh and the tragedies we'll see very often end with somebody often a person of high rank uh coming forward and saying now we've all come together we live through all this the the all this together and now we've learned our lesson and so forth and inevitably you can hear the Jaws music behind uh that there there's there are there's for boing in the very attempt to bring everything together uh it doesn't mean that uh that it's actually dark rather than light I mean that would be too simp simple to say as well but just that it's always nuanced at the end that as it's nuanced in the middle that these things are not perfectly happy or perfectly tragic uh that in fact the the playright is playing extremely knowledgeably with these impulses um the there's a Temptation in talking about these genres also to try to align them with uh ancient Greek structures a Shakespearean tragedies not very much like a Greek tragedy uh it has certain broad structural things that we could say it has in common it has recognition it has has uhu uh Discovery moments uh they but but but in fact they're they they had a notion of how it was that classical tragedy was written uh there was this idea that somehow a good play had unities attached to it if you go back and you look at Aristotle's U art poetry Poetics uh you'll see that he talks really about one play of unity of action that is say it shouldn't be uh disperate uh Shakespeare plays violate this notion of the unity of action all the time by having for example double plots anybody who knows King leer knows that there's the Gloucester plot and the King leer plot uh and uh that that that the two plots will come together that's what makes for an interesting Shakespearean structure but it's not quite the same as Unity of action Unity of the the Elizabethan jacap period thought that also there should be Unity of time and unity of place and you'll see that these plays violate that those those supposed precepts all the time that in the the late place that we're going to look at uh like the Tempest or syene or or Pericles uh there are great blocks of time in the middle of of of Winter's taale there's a block of 14 years between act three and act four this is not Unity of time um in um the the in paricles the action is set as the stage Direction says dispersedly in many Mediterranean countries so this is not Unity of place uh they they uh these plays again have have somewhere in the back of their their minds this idea about unities but they have them there in order to sort of push against them and in fact the the idea of these three unities was slightly a Renaissance misreading of Aristotle the idea the time place and action were the three unities action is really what Aristotle seems to speak about and action here for us would have to do again with whether whether there was something satisfactory or fitting for us in the ending of the play so I I meant to direct your attention to the syllabus and I'm going to now go back just through it uh just to to to say out loud that we're going to do trus and cresa and then measure for measure both plays that have sometimes been described there was a time in the gosh the early in the middle part of the last century the 20th century when these were described as problem plays or dark comedies uh the word the phrase problem plays and we'll talk about this more when we get to these plays was really borrowed from uh uh the middle plays of of of ibson or of Shaw plays that's that that that seem to be about social problems uh problems of of the culture whether it's water pollution or syphilis or women's rights or something like that this where this phrase problem play comes from and these plays really are about the measure measure you'll see is is a City Comedy it's about a corrupt society and how you can fix that it's got they're hores and pimps it's not uh kings and queens uh uh and so so these plays were sort of diagnosed as problem plays uh borrowing this epithet from the early 20th century dramatists they are problem plays after a fashion but this is a kind of madeup title and it's not one that's used very much anymore but they are deeply and interestingly problematic and their plays very much about sort of emergent characters and character types uh a fellow King Le MC Beth I don't really need to say anything about about why they're here Anthony and Cleopatra is in my view one of the most magnificent plays uh in the entire Shakespearean Canon I never like to play favorites here but I love this play uh and uh it's great fun and exciting and exhilarating to talk about uh the it is a quotes Roman play as well as a tragedy because it's said in ROM and in Egypt uh and corilanus is also a Roman play but where Anthony comes at sort of the end of the Empire uh coralus comes at the very beginning of Republican Rome or nent Rome uh it's a very different moment and uh you know the it's a long time period in Rome so we don't think of these as exactly the same time period even though they're both quotes Roman and then we come to this cluster of four plays pericle symbol the Winter's Tale and the Tempest that have been variously called romances or late plays or tragic comedies or a variety of other things uh all of these again uh labels that people have used to try to control them a little bit to give them a generic expectation that would allow for you to know how to read them or how to perform them when we come to talk about them I'll say some more about the genre of Romance the adventure the fantasy tale and so on but we'll we'll encounter an encapsulated romance much earlier uh when we get to AOW when we find that AOW has told the stories of his adventures as a hero in Uncharted territories fighting against Monsters and tribes and and and sea figures and so forth in such a way that he has Enchanted Desdemona and made her stop what she was doing and stand dumbfounded and listen to him and the story that a fellow tells even though there're his actual stories are really romance stories stories from a kind of romance genre um these were so the romance is a term that really begins at the end of the 19th century these plays become called romances uh and it's meant to kind kind of Praise their fairy tale aspect this is the great Victorian period in which fairy literature is interesting to people in which empire is also interesting to people and this idea of adventuring beyond the local late plays was meant to be on the one hand a very neutral kind of designation that would not give anything away these are late in Shakespeare's career but I think that we need also to think about them in the way in which people talk about late style these days say you know the late uh music of Beethoven or the the the the the the kind of work that is done or the or the late work of rembrand kind of work that is done by an accomplished artistic Master toward the end of a career when what you can see very often and we'll see this with these plays is a a mere if it were rbr a mere pin stroke a mere gesture you wouldn't have to paint the whole canvas thickly you could have a sketch would show you the whole figure behind it because the gesture is itself so accomplished we'll see that with Shakespeare that there are there are these characters are often sketched rather than fully formed because they're referenced to characters we met earlier in Shakespeare's plays um and uh the the last of these designations tragic comedy was was actually what these plays were often called In the period a mixture of tragedy and comedy uh and and this was thought of by some people as mingling kings and clowns to use Philip Sydney's terms as a kind of mixture that you shouldn't do but it's actually a highly desirable highly audience pleasing genre at the time that Shakespeare is writing them so these plays all a little bit match up to what it was that interested audiences we will now come and take a little break uh part we we're going to always take a break in the middle and this is partly again to think about the medium partly a break that is enforced for us by the fact that we have tapes Rolling and we come to the end of the tape but this is also time for you to take a little breath of air walk around if you like use the restroom come back in about 5 minutes and we'll Begin Again say just one or two it was asked a question which I a question I should have answered before it was asked about what books you what Shakespeare text you should use uh and my answer really is any good text with notes attached to it uh We've B we've ordered the Norton Shakespeare for you I'm a great fan of the Riverside Shakespeare the uh Bantam Shakespeare's are fine the signate individual volumes are fine the penguin volumes are fine please use however an addition that does have textual notes and and uh glossed notes notes that that explain what words mean and so forth don't use one don't use the old y Yale Shakespeare or or something that's got no notes you were going to need the notes you're going to need to have that information yesel Pelican's fine Pelican's absolutely fine some of you may prefer to have individual volumes rather than carry a big heavy single volume I don't care what addition you use use my Shakespeare's Shakespeare after all is keyed to that is say that when when I give aene and line numbers they refer specifically to the Norton but that was just because I had to refer to something and the reason that line numbers will vary from addition to addition is because Shakespeare writes in Pros as well as in verse and a line of Pros depends upon how wide the page is so you will find that there's a slight variation if you're using the Riverson or the Pelican and I say act 3 scene 2 line 42 it could be line 46 in your addition but you will find it easily and that's not not sufficient reason to buy the Norton rather than some other Edition I do however insist that you buy this um uh but but which what what Shakespeare Edition you use really is it doesn't matter to us uh one of the editions that has the most notes is the ardan uh which I do recommend if you want to invest in some interesting you know something that's edited very very fully uh but whatever you have is fine with us I'm now rather inelegantly going to take off these various microphones and give them to Mel so that she can explain the web component of the course which is one of his most exciting aspects and as Mel suggested very often we hear people because people become so involved with Shakespeare and it's so it does feel so familiar and so appealing uh that people will say well you know I get the feeling that or I was just wondering whether and utterances like that which are absolutely human and instinctive uh fall into the same category as why did Shakespeare do X there there there's no proof that can be evidenced from that so uh I get the feeling that is going to be answered by us by saying well what in the text do you think has given you that feeling and we're going to want you to go back to the language or the gestures of the plays in order to say well I see that I get the feeling that Hamlet is a stunted adolescent because he is spending so much time worrying about his mother uh rather than about anything else uh that's not a particularly good example because it's so General an example uh the the other thing I should say is that that it's not so much about what not do as the pleasures of what you can do with Shakespeare and the enormous pleasures of what you can do with Shakespeare are to encounter the plays as as intimately and specifically as possible so we uh thought we might start with some passages for the time that we have left and read through them and try to encourage a general discussion Larry does have the microphone and so um I I guess so Larry you got a microphone right so so can you be my other on the on the dialogues and be understood okay you want to be Cleopatra or you want to be dolabella his face would I should say that the the topic here is just give you set the scene for you a little bit uh the one of the fascinating things about atan Cleopatra as you'll see is these are two very Titanic figures uh which is going to subsume the other he is the embodiment of a certain romanness she the quintessence of Egypt in all its variations and the structural answer to who wins is that Anthony dies in act four and Cleopatra lives through Act five so here we have Act five act 5 scene 2 and uh Cleopatra is conversing with one of Antony's soldiers dolabella about her imagination of anony you you'll see when we come to the play that everybody has a fanty fantasy fantasy about Anthony everybody talks about Anthony in some extraordinarily symptomatic way but this is a particularly powerful one because it comes after his death and so automatically he's a grandis and she is taking pleasure I would say even kind of erotic pleasure in having a discussion with someone else who loved him about Anthony his face was as the heavens and therein stuck a sun and moon which kept their course and and lighted the little o the Earth most Sovereign creature his legs bestrid the ocean his reared arm crested the world his voice was property as all the tuned spheres and that to friends but when he meant to Quail and shake the orb he was as rattling Thunder for his Bounty there was no winter in an Autumn it was that grew the more by reaping his Delights were dolphin-like they showed his back above the element they lived in in his Livery walked crowns and crownit Realms and Island were plates dropped from his pocket Cleopatra think you there was or might be such a man as this I dreamt of you remember the next line gentle Madam no gentle Madam no this is your fantasy so let's look at this fabulous passage and I'm so glad that Mel did the plates thing because you silver plate is the sort of medial thing you've heard about you know uh plate in that sense but the idea that plates were coins uh is one very good example uh what what do You observe in this passage it doesn't have to be what is a word mean but what do You observe about the whoops the language of the passage seems very you you're going have to raise your hand and and get Larry I'm sorry this is quite cumbersome no no down here down here there will be two microphones in future just somewh of an arbitrary observation but it seems very nautical just right off the bat nautical yeah show us some nautical well the descriptive terms you know his legs bestro the ocean raised above the crested world let's see his Delights were dolphin-like they showed his back above the elements uh his uh Realms and Islands were his plates dropped from his pockets just seems very notic for some reason the Dolphins and the ocean I I will indeed associate with the sea and with its uh shakespare very often Associates the sea with both lifegiving forces and with storms that are threatening uh his legs bestrid the ocean what what kind of a figure is that I mean what if his legs best the ocean what does it say about him exactly so so we think about maybe the Colossus of Roads we in any case we think about an enormous figure because to bestride the ocean is to have to one foot on land on either side and what about the Dolphins L we're not quite finished what about the Dolphins his Delights were dolphin like oh it kind of jop poses from the uh the Colossal image uh brought about with his legs bestro the ocean now you have very delicate image of a dolphin you know purposing to the ocean so so you you're closer to the ocean here you return to the ocean Elemental figure rather than a menacing colossal figure and uh the the the the semicolon and again Shakespearean Punctuation is is is all imposed by editors so that the that you shouldn't in general make an argument about a dash or a period or something because these things will vary from from moment to moment uh punctuation in the Elizabeth and jacoban period was an evolving art and there were lots of theories about it but here the semicolon seems to suggest that they showed his back above the element they lived in is an explanation of what dolphin like meant there a kind of physical image what does element mean here it's yes is the water now uh element in this Peri you'll see that uh well I guess we're not reading 12th KN but it in in the in in the element could be air it could be water it could be the sky but it's it it does have to do with how many elements in general were they thought to be four elements air water fire and Earth and this is this old structure of very much older than Shakespeare of thinking of the world in these four parts uh comes back in play after play after play that that we'll see in the Tempest that there seems to be a s of split between the characters that are airy and fire likee and the characters that seem to be earthy and waterlike and so forth so so exactly we have a kind of microcosm of the world here in these the the the showing of The Elements In this passage what else there were there was hand behind you all right no more no this gentlemen here here well along the same lines and in a more General sense just the use of the heavens and as all the tune spheres and as rattling Thunder uh makes him sound Godlike or or attune to the heavens and things larger than the earth he he's he's mag hugely magnified he has become a creature much bigger than the ordinary human remember she's having a conversation with a human being and she's describing this apotheosis of Anthony where where every single thing his his arm crested the world his voice was property what does that mean propertied does it mean I don't know it has the properties of having the properties of yes exactly um and comes from the word proper meaning your own so it was propertied uh as all the tuned spheres now again here's the idea of The Music of the Spheres this is again an old notion about perfection that the the planets travel and they make music as they travel is a wonderful poem called Orchestra by a poet called John Davies that writes about this but because we're Fallen because we're mere mortals we can't hear that Music of the Spheres which is the sign of heavenly Perfection but Anthony somehow is that Music of the Spheres his voice was propertied as all the tuned spheres and that to friends it was it's the perfect sound all the way over here sorry sorry um it also seems it it seems like a not only Perfection but a kind of a tyrannical tyrannical Perfection it's it's you know she's evoking all these images of nature but they're not images of human nature the um the one thing that struck me was the and moon which kept their course and lighted the little o of the earth um you know not only is he not only is he um sort of shedding his light but he's also in he's also controlling why do you say tyranical though um well the his dominating I can see tyrannical say why well that that might just be uh me being a little hyp hyperbolic hyper well but Tyrant I mean even in this period a tyrant has a has a not only controlling but a kind of politically negative veilance to it and I I want to be clear whether whether you're suggesting that there's something inadvertently or deliberately negative about this figure um well when when he meant to Quail and shake the orb he was as rattling Thunder um suggests you know that he had he he had um one of his uh methods of you know keeping it it seems like she she saw him as a let's not do it seems like let's not do it seems like uh but go back no because we can do it a different way go back to the previous line when his voice was property is all the tuned spares who was he talking to two friends two friends so this other stuff the quailing and shaking the orb who's he talking to um to anyone he meant to intimidate sure the non friends whether they're enemies whether they're inferiors whether they're right we don't know what they are but they're they're not in the other the others than friends to Quail what does to Quail mean here sh sorry sh to to yes now it's not that he is quailing but he's making somebody else quail in this case this a kind of transferred epithet and shake the orb right and I I think the the shake the orb with the with the uh the Sun and Moon which kept their course and lighted the Earth and um you know for his Bounty there was no winter in it and Autumn TW that grew the more by reaping right let's just pause on that image for a second an Autumn T that grew the more by reaping what kind of an image is that what is what what's happening in that image yes there's season of death there's only season of autum the season of fruition or or when we Harvest say the first thing that you said because it wasn't captured on the table there's no season of death there's no season of death yes that that the Autumn this is very much like K's OD to Autumn and in fact I think K's OD to Autumn is very much influenced by Antony and Cleopatra the idea seasons of season of Mists and mellow fruitfulness uh is how that that poem Begins the idea that Autumn is infinitely fruitful but the Paradox built into this a bounty Ts that grew the more by reaping now we might ecologically say that we understand that that in fact you have to keep things moan in order to keep them growing and so forth but but the there's meant to be a kind of paradox here that somehow uh the more you pluck from the tree the more fruit grows on the tree the more you take the more he gives this is not the first time and we'll see this that that Shakespeare uses this very image he uses this same image for Romeo and Juliet as he does for Anthony and Cleopatra that the idea that love is infinite that Bounty precisely comes out of love and that that it cannot be measured by ordinary monetary or numerical or space or time limits it's about something else it's about Infinity in replication about Infinity in space about Infinity in generosity uh so so good so the the um the uh the Sun and Moon I think it's crucially important to sort of and think about this as a kind of cinematic moment in which they she start what was he like well he was like you know something Celestial and kind of zero in on the sun and moon and then you kind of come down this is goes back to what you're saying about the ocean then turning into the Dolphins where from way up here where you Sun see the Sun and the Moon you're in the the hood blimp or something you're not going to see those Dolphins it's only when you see the ocean then you can come down closer and closer and closer till you see the dolphins and you get to the plates in his pocket so you're all the way now down focused on him but what's in his pocket what's in the pocket of this colossal figure is it really plate it's Realms Realms and Islands were as plates uh dropped from his pocket so so you have simultaneously the figure of a man with coins in his pocket and the figure of a colossal figure with countries and Islands spilling out of his pockets because he owns so many of them he is a figure of the earth look back through this passage and see how many times the word as appears his face was as the heavens his voice with properties as all the tuned spheres uh the uh Realms and Islands were as plates dropped from his pocket so you have both comparison and metaphor here you're dealing both with the sense that she is always in control of generating these images and also with the overpowering beauty and intimidation of this huge figure itself um it's so it's a wonderful passage and it's wonderful passage because it performs what it describes it starts big and it gets small and it describes precisely both his magesty and also his accessibility and and at the same time she is talking to a realist she's talking to a Roman soldier and so he keeps trying to interrupt her as if she's having some kind of fug like fantasy that he thinks it's dangerous for her to carry on and have most Sovereign creature Cleopatra uh and and finally when she says to him think you there was or might be such a man that's like as as this I dreamt of gentle Madam know her answer you lie up to the hearing of the Gods so she just rejects his rationalization she rejects his idea that no man could be that big or have that much wealth or have Realms and Islands in his pockets uh you lie up to the hearing of the Gods she's going to make her own reality uh and that's that's what we see her do from this part in the play on to the end how are we doing for time we're just about I think out of time um let me rather than start another passage which I think we don't have time to do yes sir what's the reference what do we infer by the reference to the little o of the Earth yes ah thank you so much for for for because the look The O this is a great question O is a round figure it is at this point both the letter O and also the letter the number zero uh this is precisely the moment in European history when the zero comes from Arabic numbers into use in England and you'll see in King leer and all over the place there tremendous fascination with the power of zero with the cipher with the idea that a zero with a figure in front of it becomes 10 or 100 or a thousand but we're also dealing with what in uh Henry V uh he describes as the wooden o that is the theater the Globe Theater which we think had 16 or 18 sides which was as close as they could come to making something actually round here and the wooden o became a phrase to describe the theater space so the little o the Earth here is zero it is O it is zero was Al because Circle was also the figure for everything because it was perfect it was round it had no beginning and no ending so we have the perfect circle everything we have the zero which is nothing and we have the theater which is the place that mediates between everything and nothing and we have all of that in the O and that maybe is as good a place to stop as any uh we'll see you next week for trist and cres please bring your plays with you and please do come with questions because we are going to ask four questions and depend upon your questions thank you