Transcript for:
Shakespeare and Sonnet Traditions

hi everybody so this week we're gonna start talking about shakespeare and his play twelfth night that's the play that we're going to read this semester all english 201b classes include a shakespeare play and my hope is that not too many of you have been exposed to 12th night so it'll be something new although if you have been it'll maybe be a little easier the second time around there's always something more to be gleaned but we're gonna uh read the read and watch the play twelfth night and this week i'm gonna give you some context by talking a bit about shakespeare himself and the time that he lived in and i want to also talk a little bit about the sonnets shakespeare's sonnets a sonnet is a certain type of poetry and shakespeare wrote sonnets and how he approached his sonnets has a lot to do with the play twelfth night so it provides a little more context and i want us to take a look at that so i know most of you know who shakespeare is and you know the basics and you've read shakespeare before and i'm sure some of you like it and some of you don't like it and some of you might be ambivalent but um just to review and i have some extra bullets here i should have gotten rid of those apologies but shakespeare was born somewhere around 1564 he died in 1616. he married anne hathaway who was an older woman so shakespeare was about 18 and anne hathaway was about 30 when he married her they had three children susannah and they had two twins hamnet and judith it's kind of interesting that his son hamnet died just a little while before he wrote the play hamlet shakespeare was a writer an actor and a theater owner and director in london there's a lot we don't know about him and the roles he played in the theater he was a businessman and that he was a theater owner and as well as being a writer and director but we do know that as an actor he played king lear that's one of the things that we know about his acting roles so one of the questions we might ask is why we keep reading shakespeare why do your english teachers keep making you read shakespeare well it's a good question and there are lots of other great things out there to read but some of the reasons that we keep reading him and as i've said all english 201a students at cuesta at least for now are required to read a shakespeare play but some of the things that make him valuable are one is complexity of character and before shakespeare we had very few examples in english literature of complex characters we have a little bit of it in chaucer's canterbury tales but other than that a lot of characters were used really to kind of for morality plays they were flat characters to represent a certain idea and plays and literature were meant to communicate a certain kind of morality or a certain kind of idea so what we start seeing in shakespeare is a real complexity in character and the beginnings of the representation of the modern individual there's also kind of a timelessness of themes in shakespeare's plays and we can see that from the many adaptations of shakespeare that we see and the way that he is modernized and we'll say more about that in a little bit and there's also a lot of interesting intricacy of language his play on words his his poetic verse and his meter um lots of different things to be interested in when it comes to his language now the language also makes it difficult and i and i understand how that can be a real barrier to getting into shakespeare and so in our shakespeare unit i'll offer some suggestions about how to maybe help get past those barriers one of them is is that we're going to be watching a production now they will be speaking shakespeare's lines so it can still be a little bit difficult but sometimes watching it can give us a little bit more context i want to say a little bit about life in london during shakespeare's time because we often think of shakespeare as being very sophisticated shakespeare's plays so you know shakespeare it's um sort of the higher level of culture but i think it's important for us to remember that shakespeare during his time was fairly low brow now he did write and perform plays for royalty and um upper-class people he would even go to have perform he would take place to be performed for the royalty but the globe theater which you can kind of see down here it's on the south side of the thames river right across london bridge the globe theater was not in a good part of town and the theatergoers included a lot of the underclasses of people the the seats the groundling seats the seats where people just stood on the floor in front of the stage were cheap people were often drinking beer uh it was considered to be a place of debauchery and sometimes immorality it's one of the reasons that the puritans at the time fought against the theaters they were considered problematic for a number of reasons both the debauchery the drinking the vulgarity and obscenity in the plays a lot of sexual references in the plays and the puritans often also just felt like that plays were a lie and i think we'll talk about that more in a few slides if not i'll circle back anyway so the globe theater is down here on the south side of the thames this is this is also where you have um the bear baiting pits where bears would fight dogs and other dog fighting and fighting and these other you know where the chicken the roosters would fight each other uh it was just you know and and a job as an actor was not considered a reputable kind of job and women were not allowed to act in the theater in part because of how the theater was viewed and of course many jobs weren't open to women at the time but so we think of shakespeare as being very sophisticated but that is not what shakespeare was about during his time and place his play it was his plays were for popular entertainment and just talking about london at the time was pretty dirty a little grimy um we have this quotation here but tread carefully for your illusions about the glorious age of elizabeth may dissipate in the tobacco fug of turn mill street the drizzle of pissing alley alley and the blood and of the bankside bear pits and so this is from the introduction of a book called the elizabethan underworld there was a lot of crime there was disease um repeating um experiences of devastating fire and there was a lot of poverty so we're going to be looking specifically at the play twelfth night which was written between 1601 and 1602 around the same time that hamlet was written and it actually shares a lot of themes with hamlet including themes of madness and themes of grief it was a play for the end of the christmas season that's what 12th night refers to um it's set on the 12th day of christmas which is either january 5th or january 6 depending on how you're counting it is a time of revelry and so twelfth night is a comedy but it does have some dark undertones as well it also contains a lot of issues of identity that capitalize on the nature and attitudes towards theater at the time so i mentioned that one of the problems that the puritans had with theater was that they felt like it was a lie so in this image right here this is an image from the globe theater production of 12th night one of the characters is olivia and olivia is a countess and so we see here we see her crown she's not a queen but she's a countess so but really of course this is an actor playing the role of a countess and so the puritans instead of just considering it fiction they felt like it was a lie um and you know they really the idea of fixed identity was not the same then as it is now and so the sense that you know when uh when a queen was coordinated a queen or king one of the things they did was they put on the um the royal clothes and they put on the crown and so when you have an actor who puts on the clothes and puts on the crown how is that different from the actual king or queen now today we have much more uh a sense of fixed identity although that could be sort of debated i suppose but whether we really do have fixed identity but we think of identity now as a more fixed thing that we are you know that i am the person that i am and i've always been this person and while i might change in some ways my identity um uh has some elements of consistency but the puritans didn't have as clear of a sense of that it's kind of like sometimes a little a little kid like i remember one time i was on an airplane with my kids and my daughter who was about four at the time spilled some apple juice and it went into her lap down the seat into the shoes of the woman behind us that's when we learned only water on airplanes for children but the apple juice got got all over her and she got wet and i didn't have any spare clothes for her in on the airplane which was uh failing on my part but i did have a pair of shorts that were her brothers and so when i wanted to get i wanted to get her to wear her brother's shorts because they would have fit and she started to cry and said i no i don't want them i don't want to be a boy and she really felt like that if she put on those shorts that that would make her a boy now this is not far afield from how the puritans saw what happened when actors put on costumes at least they questioned how that's different and how that affected identity now one of the other things that was true about the casting at the time of shakespeare as i mentioned women could not act in the theater so all of the actors were male so men would play female parts young men maybe teenagers would play young women and so not only do you have people pretending to be somebody they're not you have men dressing up as women so this was very hard for the for the puritans and we can see then the way this can create some interesting questions about identity and i'll say more about how this specifically applies to 12th night in a few minutes so let's look quickly at this summary so the main protagonist is viola or viola as the british usually say and viola has survived a shipwreck and she believes her twin brother who was also on the ship has perished she believes he has died in the shipwreck she's trying to figure out what to do now that the the ship has wrecked she thinks her brother is dead and so she talks to the captain of the wrecked ship about options in illyria this is where they have um landed washed ashore in the land of illyria and it's not where viola and her brother are from so she's trying to figure out what she's going to um what she'd like to do is it's kind of unclear why she can't just tell somebody this is who i am my shipwrecked can you help me get back home it's not really that clear in the play why she doesn't do that and we can kind of maybe think about the reasons that she doesn't but she talks to the captain of the wrecked ship about potential options in illyria and she first she wants to work for olivia the countess olivia but olivia is in mourning for the death of her brother her brother has died and she says i'm gonna mourn for seven years and i'm not gonna marry anyone i'm not gonna talk to somebody talk to people i am completely going to cloister myself wear a veil so because of that the captain tells her about that and so viola decides that what she'll do instead since she can't work for olivia as a kind of lady in waiting or servant person she will dress like a young man and it says in the play she's gonna dress like a eunuch but as the play proceeds it doesn't seem like she's really a unit eunuch shakespeare is sometimes inconsistent about his details and that seems like one of those inconsistencies but anyway she decides to dress like a young man so she can serve duke orsino now as she dresses up she looks just like her twin brother meanwhile she falls in love with arsino but the problem is is that he is in love with olivia or at least he thinks he is and he's trying to woo her so we have a love triangle here then viola's brother it turns out that viola's brother sebastian is alive and shows up in illyria now we as as we're watching the play we see that he's alive viola does not know that he's alive right away but we can imagine that as he shows up in illyria and he looks just like her there's a love triangle now it's a love um quadrangle confusion and hijinks ensue if you have ever seen she's the man with amanda bynes this is amanda bynes over here then you have seen an adaptation of 12th night not all the details are exactly the same but some of the character names are the same the name of the high school is illyria high school and some of the basic cross-dressing plot ideas are in place in she's the man so we are going to be watching i encourage you if you want to watch she's the man to give yourself some plot context again it's not exactly the same um but it might help orient you a little bit um but the specific production we're going to watch is a globe theater production of 12th night and it uses traditional casting which means it has an all-male cast now one of the things we get from this is that because you have an all you have an all-male cast so you have a male actor who plays viola but then viola is dressed as a man so you have a male actor who plays a female actor who pretends to be a man so there's a lot of interesting gender bending kind of things going on with this play i'm gonna pause here for just a second i have to have to shut it down to pause hang on one second okay sorry about that interruption okay so let's talk for a minute about about talk for a minute about the connection between the sonnets and twelfth night so a sonnet is a 14-line poem and it has a lot of historical baggage sonnets have been around for a long time and they so i want to talk a little bit about about their history so originally sonnets focused on intense unattainable love and i'll say more about that in a few minutes and then shakespeare wrote sonnets that challenged the kind of sonnets that came before him so sonnets have a long history of focusing on um poets who are in love with someone who who they can't have and shakespeare wrote sonnets that had to do with uh requited love love that was more realistic um and in the sonnets where they wrote about attainable love love that they couldn't have there would be all this exaggeration and hyperbole about how amazing the beloved lady was that the poet was in love with and shakespeare presents silence where love is more realistic love is more long-lasting it's not ex the ladies beauty is not exaggerating there's just a lot more realism now shakespeare's play twelfth night begins with duke orsino and his lament that includes tropes that were common in sonnets so we will we'll see the lines um at the end of this presentation we'll kind of will end with do the first lines of the play which are duke or seen as lament but we see that duke orsino in twelfth night is pursuing an unattainable lady and that lady is elizabeth she's told him no she's told him no over and over again but he's still saying he he loves so much and he's so in love and he's loved sick and no one can love more than him and and she's perfect and these are common tropes of the early sonnets they're tropes that shakespeare through his own sonnets have kind of ended or even criticized and so the fact that you have duke orsino who was one of these um who speaks about love in the way that the early sonnets did in a way that shakespeare has criticized or or kind of shut down in his own sonnets suggest some satire in how duke orsino is portrayed at the beginning and so because we know that shakespeare dealt so much with what real love is like and how it's different than false love and he dealt so much with that in his sonnets and of course in a lot of his plays one of the things one of the themes throughout twelfth night is we might consider is the difference between true love and this more hyperbolic love that's just full of cliches and tropes and maybe isn't as sincere so if we if we just um look at the sonnet tradition for a minute the father of the sonnet is petrarch he's an italian poet who lived in the 1300s and he wrote a very famous sonnet sequence to the unattainable laura he was in love with someone named laura he couldn't have her and he has over 100 sonnets where he just talks about how much he's suffering because he loves her and can't have her now this ties a little bit into the concept of neoplatonism and neoplatonism was a kind of christianized version of platonic philosophy and in you know plato talked about how everything pointed towards the good and the one and christians kind of took that and the good and the one became god and they used platonic ideas of beauty in the sonnet to suggest that so let's take petrarch as an example so you have petrarch who is in love with laura because she is unattainable that means he can't actually be with her that means that his passion and love for her will remain chaste and virginal now this is before the protestant reformation so all of the christian church is under rome um celibacy is considered ideal over marriage and so there's a real privileging of a chaste celibate life so all of these sonnets that are about an unattainable lady are considered to be a kind of idealized neoplatonic sort of love because it's about a love that will never be consummated it's about a lady that the poet will never actually be with so it's never going to be polluted by any kind of physical interaction and the other idea is that the attainable the unattainable lady that the poet should look at her as a representation of all the beauty that god can create and so from his love for her the poet can even move closer to god and that's also why it's important that all of the passion remains pure and is ever never actually consummated so so there's a lot there's a lot riding on this kind of unattainable lady idea and so petrarch's poetry was part of the italian uh renaissance in humanism a revival of classical learning with writers like plato so the structure of the sonnet is an octave followed by a cestet so you have the an octave is eight lines and i know in music we call it an octave but in poetry we call it an octave and that's the first eight lines and in petrarch's poems the first eight lines set up a problem and for petrarch the rhyme scheme was typically abba abba for those for that first octave then there's a turn and we get to the sestet which are the last last six lines because all sonnets are 14 lines and the last six lines attempt some kind of resolution and petrarchs cestets were usually had the rhyme scheme um the rhymes came continued as c-d-e-c-d-e and so we can even see here by the rhyme scheme where the turn happens in the poem if the first eight lines are abba abb a all those endings are very similar and then we switch to different rhyme sounds for the sestat just as we kind of switch to a different uh part of the poem it just reminds us how rhyme scheme can kind of represent what the poem is doing and sometimes it's valuable to check the rhyme scheme of a poem even before we read it and we can see maybe where different groupings and concepts might be happening now the english uh early in the early 1500s there were various english courtiers and diplomats who went to italy and heard the petrarchan sonnets and brought them home and translated them and then eventually other poets later in the 1500s like shakespeare uh started writing sonnets but the english sonnet had a slightly different rhyme scheme because it's harder to rhyme in english than it is in italian a lot of italian words end in similar ways and so the shakespearean sonnet tended to be aba tended to be instead of an octave and a cestrate it tended to be three quatrains and a quatrain is a stanza of four lines and it concluded with a couplet so it would be a b a b c d c d e f e f g g and you're going to see an example here in a minute and so in the english tradition the sonnet moved from the and that should say unattainable lady right there apologies the sonic move removed from the unattainable lady of petrarch to an attainable lady which is what shakespeare sonnets wrote about and then shakespeare also had sonnets that were to a man and then later poets like john dunn wrote sonnets to god so the sonnets go through quite a evolution central to the sonnets developed in the 1500s is the cult of elizabeth so queen elizabeth took the throne in i think it was 1558. she was called by her predecessor bloody mary she was called that bastard child the um of the and bolin because henry viii divorced his first wife catherine who was bloody mary's mother so that he could marry anne boleyn and elizabeth was anne boleyn's daughter amberlynn was french elizabeth became the ultimate protestant unattainable lady she was protestant instead of catholic and elizabeth never got married so she was considered to be the virgin queen she was kind of perfect to represent this kind of purified unattainable lady so people could write all kinds of poems to her she could inspire all kinds of literature and she was that perfect kind of pure unattainable lady whose beauty she was known to be beautiful so you could appreciate her beauty and it would get you closer to god obviously you were never actually going to be with her so that love would remain pure so she was a very popular muse for poets and she had the longest reign on the throne since the early since the time of the early 12th century so it'd been um three and four hundred years since someone had ruled as long as she did and then i think the longest one after that well i'm not sure but of course now the longest to reign has been elizabeth the ii so as i said petrarch sonnet was for the unattainable lady and those kind of sonnets were very popular in the court of england once they kind of got popular and spread over the pond people would pass around their own sonnets throughout the court super popular kind of like passing notes in high school back in the 80s but shakespeare really kind of challenged this unattainable lady in this perfect idea of beauty in poems like this one he writes my mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun coral is far more red than her lips red if snow be white why then her breasts are done done is kind of like brown or gray if hair b wires black wires grow on her head i have seen roses damasked red and white but no such roses i see in her cheeks and in some perfumes is there more delight than in the breath that from my mistress reeks i love to hear her speak yet well i know that music have a far more pleasing sound i grant i never saw a goddess go my mistress when she walks treads on the ground and yet by heaven i think my love is rare as any she belied with false compare now there are a few tropes that shakespeare takes on here one was poets would write about how red their beloved's lips were how alabaster white her skin and especially her breasts were part of that was because they wore um make white makeup that had lead in it totally ruined their skin um it mentions if hair b wire's black wires grow in her head so her hair is not perfect and silky it does mention that it is dark and shakespeare's sonnets are often referred to as being written to a the dark lady and we really don't know who they were who the who who that was who the dark lady was um that was who was the subject of his sonnets but there's a lot of references to her dark hair which is why she's called the dark lady some speculate that it is poet amelia lanier and that's this is the picture of amelia lanier here on the left but as i've said he also wrote love sonnets to a man and some people will say with shakespeare gay and ideas of sexuality weren't really the same as they are now um you know there were ways in which same-sex sex love was both accepted and not accepted for example in 1603 king james who was king james vi of scotland became became king james the first of england and king james was known to have male favorites who were male lovers this is the same king james who sponsored the bible that we know of his king james bible so he had he had male male favorites and male lovers but he also was married and had children so um you know in some ways it was different than it is now but in other ways it's more similar to now than maybe some of the eras in between in that there was kind of a fluidity to it and things weren't defined um um you know every era has its own every era and culture kind of has its own way of dealing with these elements um but so some people say was shakespeare gay well i don't know exactly but he wrote love sonnets to a dark lady and he wrote love sonnets to a lord um back to the tropes here so i mentioned her black wires you know people would say that my you know her cheeks are redder than any rose or she's got roses in her cheeks and he's like well not really not for my love people would say that you know their mistress's breath smells like perfume and he's like nope perfume smells way better than her breath um it was a common trope to say that their beloved's voice was like music and petrarch often talks about how the grass would crave the pressure of laura's feet and that she walked almost above the grass and that she was so amazing that the grass would just crave the touch of her feet and he says here you know his mistress just walks on the ground but in the end he basically says you know my love is as rare and as valuable as any of these kinds of loves that might come might come with these kinds of false comparisons and false analogies and these exaggerations so we see here he's kind of bringing things back down to earth and he's challenging these tropes that have been so common for nearly 100 years well in england for about a hundred years you know they were they've been around since for over 200 years from petrarch but they've been in england for about 100 years so and this is our last slide so twelfth night begins and it's interesting viola is really our protagonist in twelfth night but we begin in act one with de corsino it's interesting to think about maybe why that is and we begin with this if music be the food of love play on and and we usually see duke orsino is there and there are some musicians there you know he's in his castle and there are musicians there and he's asking them to keep playing um maybe they've just stopped playing and he asked them to play again and he and he's often you know duke orsino can be portrayed in a lot of ways as kind of serious kind of comical kind of absurd i would tend to play him if i was a director i might direct it to be a little bit absurd and over the top because i think shakespeare here is really playing on those tropes and duke orsino was caught up at kind of those tropes of the unattainable lady i liked this photo of this image of a duke orsino because he's just sick with love and um and just a little over the top but he says if music be the food of love play on give me excess of it that surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die so this idea that if you give me so much of something i'll get tired of it that strain again it had a dying fall oh it came over my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets stealing and giving odor enough no more which is not so sweet now as it was before and so here orsino says that's it okay that's enough stop playing it's not as sweet now so in some ways maybe it exactly what he wanted to happen happened he got so much of the music that then he got tired of it or maybe duke orsino is a little bit fickle and he kind of changes his mind a lot we shall see oh spirit of love how quick and fresh art thou that notwithstanding thy capacity receiveth as the sea not enters there of what validity and pitch so ever but falls into abatement and low price even in a minute so full of shapes is fancy that it alone is high fantastical so now that the last half of that is pretty challenging and um i think it's okay that we just kind of get the gist here for this just for the sake of this conversation that orsino is um being very dramatic about wanting to hear this music um he wants to be over his all-consuming love but is having trouble with that and this is where the play is going to start as i said he is in love with olivia and we're going to see him talking about his love for olivia and then pretty then we're gonna move in act two or in scene two of act one we're gonna meet viola in her sh as she's wrecked from her shipwreck and then we'll see both duke uh orsino and viola and the other characters come together next week as we really start reading the play i'll provide some more apparatus and resources to help you if you find the play difficult but this week i just wanted to provide some introduction and if you have any questions please let me know