ScreenOnline

The OU’s online library offers students all kinds of resources. Here’s one that may be of special interest to those studying Shakespeare. “ScreenOnline” includes clips from (I think) every film in the BBC Shakespeare as well as from many other film and television productions.

There’s a link to the library on your studenthome page. You can reach ScreenOnline from the list of library databases. And if you put “Shakespeare” into the Screen Online search box you will find all that is available. Have fun!

Tutorial report

What was it about “King Lear” that struck students?

In summary, this is what Manchester’s AA306 group thought. First: what terrible families are on display! Every family that appears in the play is divided and dysfunctional. Of course, Lear’s behaviour towards his daughters is one part of this. Even at this early stage there is something obsessive about the way that he relates to them. This was one of the first indications that Lear was unbalanced, and his concern over the numbers of knights in his retinue was a second. There was a kind of insecurity apparent over both, it was felt.

When Lear became deeply distressed, it was said, he used remarkable language patterns: not only extravagant language but certain rigid formulations of speech. For another student, there was a progressive pathway to his madness: it grew more pronounced and yet it did so in marked stages. Students also asked why madness might have been a dramatic feature in demand, and they thought of other characters who have struggled for self-control: Lady Macbeth, Malvolio, Hamlet, and even Richard II.

For another student, for all the nihilism of Lear’s final state and for all the awfulness of his five ‘nevers’, there was an impressive humanity to be found in him during the play’s final scenes. And on this point, students linked him to Gloucester, whose blindness, physical and moral, was vital to the play. In their final generosity of spirit as much as in their earlier blindness, the two men were alike.

With the coming assignment in view, people also wanted to think about the play’s servants. Students tabulated all the servants to appear in “Lear” and those in “The Tempest”. But who is a servant? Certainly there are the unnamed servants of the blinding scene and also Goneril’s steward. Is the disguised Kent a kind of servant? The Fool? Even, in a kind of way, Lear’s daughters? And this reminded people of Prospero’s daughter, for The Tempest’s ousted duke was also a controlling father. And Caliban and Ariel are rather different kinds of servants to those in Lear.

What was decided was that students might be well advised — whatever view they took — to set out with clarity exactly who they were planning to treat as a servant.

. . .and Rob’s blog lives on

This blog will continue to be a resource for the Manchester AA306 Shakespeare group. Rob has passed it over to me. My name is Charles Cathcart and I will shortly be working with the group’s students. As soon as I have your details I will get in touch with you directly and introduce myself. In the meantime: good luck with your studies and I look forward to sharing Shakespeare’s plays and poems with you in the months ahead.

Tutorial report

We met on the hottest day of the year so far to discuss a play whose title is redolent of winter, but which is, as we agreed, a rather sunny comedy of errors.

I made a short presentation, unaided by technology this time, as someone had thoughtfully removed the technology (though the slides are attached below). I tried to make a few points about the nature of the play, linking my comments to the issues raised by Barber and Pequigney in their articles.

The play’s title, and its early history, suggests that the play celebrates the carnivalesque atmosphere associated with Twelfth Night and the sense of joyous excess associated with the pre-lent celebration of Candlemas, the day on which the play was probably first performed at the Inns of Court. Clearly too, the play examines notions of sexual identity through the well-established plot device of the woman disguised as a man. I emphasised that, since we should always keep the performance aspects of the text in mind, it was important to note the stage practice of the time, whereby boys played the female roles.  The complications that arise when Viola (a boy playing a woman playing a boy) inspires the love of both Olivia ( a boy playing a woman) and Orsino ( a man playing a man) are at the root of the play’s exploration of festive disequilibrium. I mentioned Catherine Belsey’s chapter in Drakakis’s Alternative Shakespeares, where she examines the changing perceptions of gender roles at the time and suggests that the play shows the disruption of “the system of differences on which sexual stereotyping depends.”

We examined concepts of masclinity and femininity in the play, and discussed some of the ambiguities- for example, Orsino seems to choose Viola / Cesario as his ambassador because of her female qualities (”All is semblative a woman’s part”, 1.4) Concepts of masculinity seem to be diverse in the play, from the testosterone-charged Sir Toby to the effete Aguecheek, with all points in between occupied by such figures as Feste, Orsino and Malvolio. Concepts of femininity, on the other hand, seemed quite conventional, perhaps best expressed in Viola’s soliloquy in 2.2  about “women’s waxen hearts”.

We then considered the two articles that you need to examine for the TMA. Some differences were immediately apparent- Barber’s is more general, and not as focused on a single issue as Pequigney’s is. Barber’s was written 40 years ago, and is part of a larger volume in which he explores the influence of folk customs, religious observances and other aspects of Elizabethan social life on the comedies; Pequigney is writing much later, and to a clearly stated critical agenda, which seeks to foreground issues of sexual identity.  We agreed that there is evidence of the readings being shaped by what the guidance note calls the “cultural prejudices” of the critics. I think it’s fair to say that Pequigney’s view was not received well. His insistence on the homo-erotic / homosexual nature of Sebastian and Antonio’s relationship was, we felt, grounded in a too-literal reading of the dialogue. In particular, expressions of love can connote a paternal relationship as well as a sexual one, and we felt Pequigney ignored this aspect.

You must, of course, make your own mind up, and ensure that, though you will be weighing the issues raised by the two critics, that your essay is fundamentally about the play. To that end, you might consider setting out your understanding of the central issues, before examining the approaches of the two critics. It’s a lot to cover in 2000 words, so, once again, my advice is to be ruthless with extraneous matter.

Those of you who have read your email will know that I am stepping down from my OU duties from tomorrow, so I will not be maintaining this blog any further. I will leave it as it is, available to you and any other passing strangers who might want to read it. Best wishes for your future exploration of the bard!

Rob

12th Night (Powerpoint slides)

12th Night.ppt (PDF of slides)

Twelfth Night (Handout)

Much ado about nothing?

In yesterday’s tutorial, Crystal mentioned an article written by a friend of hers that expresses a jaundiced view of Shakespeare. It’s here, and is worth a look. Sample:

In my experience, reading or watching Shakespeare is, by turns, baffling, tiring, frustrating and downright unpleasant. It does not, as those suffering from bardolatry repeatedly claim, offer unparalleled insight into universal human truths (most “universal” things, when scrutinised, turn out to be specific to a dominant class anyway). Don’t get me wrong, Shakespeare’s writing isn’t exactly torture – it doesn’t possess the sheer, purgatorial dullness of a Faerie Queene or a Finnegans Wake – but it is out of date, out of touch, and we read him, I’m convinced, out of habit.

Shakespeare’s Language

Here’s an interesting point of view on WS. I don’t agree, but I know what he means.

English of the late 1500s presents us with a tricky question: At what point do we concede that substantial comprehension across the centuries has become too much of a challenge to expect of anyone but specialists?

There is indeed just such a gap. Shakespeare lovers of all kinds miss much more of Shakespeare’s basic meanings than they tend to suspect. Way back in 1898, Mark H. Liddell made this point in the Atlantic, taking as an example Polonius’ farewell to Laertes in Hamlet. The speech is full of hidden deceptions, often leaving little more understanding of what Shakespeare said than we would of a Jamaican saying goodbye to his son in patois.

Meanwhile, Ian McKellen’s reading of the sonnets demonstrates how accessible these poems can be.

Happy birthday, Will!

Today’s the day, and if we were in Stratford, evidently, we’d all be dressing up.

Oxford wrote Shakespeare, says judge

We never seem to have these cases in Britain… 88 year old judge decides that WS wasn’t the bard after all:

Justice Stevens, who dropped out of graduate study in English to join the Navy in 1941, is an Oxfordian — that is, he believes the works ascribed to William Shakespeare actually were written by the 17th earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Several justices across the court’s ideological spectrum say he may be right.

This puts much of the court squarely outside mainstream academic opinion, which equates denial of Shakespeare’s authorship with the Flat Earth Society.

Yet more on the supposed tomb of Cleo

Rogueclassicism has this update. It’s all about the cleft in Antony’s chin apparently.

Tutorial Report

Our tutorial on Antony and Cleopatra focused mainly on the TMA question, so we spent quite a bit of time discussing Plutarch rather than Shakespeare. A presentation was followed by some general questions, which were meant to give some practice for the assignment. The presentation and the handout are available from the links below. Clearly, a feature of the TMA questions is that the setters are taking very seriously the idea of context; both the Macbeth assignment and the Antony and Cleopatra one are based on the idea of comparing Shakespeare’s version of a familiar historical story with someone else’s. In Macbeth, of course, it was Polanski’s version of Shakespeare. In the present case, it’s Shakespeare’s version of Plutarch. Or rather, Shakespeare’s version of North’s version of Jacques Amyot‘s French translation of Plutarch’s original. So there’s a sense in which Shakespeare’s version is another layer, almost working alongside the others like a palimpsest. The story of Cleopatra was well known in Shakespeare’s time, and not only through Plutarch, so the audience would presumably have been interested in what the bard made of this familiar tale.

The exercise that you are asked to undertake for TMA 03 is not dissimilar to the Polanski assignment, in that the object, fundamentally, is to compare and contrast the different versions. The TMA asks you to write about the different characterisations that are in the two texts. It’s important to emphasises that this doesn’t mean character- it means the ways that the authors present the two central protagonists. So, for example, the very opening scene of the play begins with an unflattering description of Antony, who is characterised as a man who has been emasculated by his love for Cleopatra, who in turn is labelled as little better than a prostitute. This description, in the conversation between Philo and Demetrius, must influence our view of the couple, who are then introduced. Shakespeare has thus placed them in a particular frame, as it were, planting a particular impression in the audience’s mind before they see “The triple pillar of the world transformed/ Into a strumpet’s fool” (I.i)

Plutarch presents his account of these events from the perspective of a historian, but it is worth noting that Plutarch felt Rome’s best days were as a republic, and he is not above making value-judgements on the imperial figures. His intent in his histories is neatly summed up in the passage reproduced on the handout, in which he suggests that the lives of these imperial figures constitute history in themselves. Shakespeare, on the other hand, we agreed, was more likely to be interested in presenting a dramatic narrative that portrayed the personal lives of his protagonists in an entertaining way- so there is more obviously an attempt at displaying the personal lives in Shakespeare than in Plutarch.

That difference in genre can be most clearly examined in Enobarbus’s famous speech, in which he describes Cleopatra on the barge. Again, the placing of the speech is interesting: it is immediately after we discover that Antony is to marry, for political reasons, Octavia. This set-piece speech by Enobarbus is very closely based on the Plutarch, and so a detailed account of this in the TMA would be a handy way to demonstrate the differing approaches of the two writers. Your analysis will need to cover the sort of matters you wrote about when analysing the language of Midsummer Night’s Dream in TMA 01. Certainly, some of the changes made by Shakespeare are suggestive, and tend towards establishing Cleopatra as a goddess-like figure (even, perhaps, eclipsing Venus)- which is why Agrippa’s earthy summation of her as “Royal wench” comes as a shock after Enobarbus’s sublimely poetic description. Again, that seems to be a deliberate juxtapositioning by Shakespeare. The guidance notes suggest that close reading needs to be at the heart of the assignment, so an account of Enobarbus’s speech, and one or two passages should form the core of your response. If you add some commentary on the differences in approach of the two authors, you will soon be approaching the magic 2000 – word mark. Good luck with it!

A+C Powerpoint

PDF of presentation

Handout

Image: Olivander