Transcript 1 - David Lavery

History of
Theatre:
Greeks to the
th
19 Century
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Theatre in the
Middle Ages
 The Legacy of Plato (428-347)
 Plato’s Socrates Dialogues
 The Republic as a “utopia.”
 “The Allegory of the Cave”
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
Everyman
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
Everyman
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
Everyman
Main character: Everyman
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
Everyman
Main character: Everyman
Everyman’s Journey: Life
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
Everyman
Main character: Everyman
Everyman’s Journey: Life
Everyman’s Destination: Death
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
Everyman
Main character: Everyman
Everyman’s Journey: Life
Everyman’s Destination: Death
Everyman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions . . .
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
Everyman
Main character: Everyman
Everyman’s Journey: Life
Everyman’s Destination: Death
Everyman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions, Good Deeds
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
Everyman
Main character: Everyman
Everyman’s Journey: Life
Everyman’s Destination: Death
Everyman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions, Good Deeds
Who can complete the journey of Everyman?
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
The Renaissance
The Rediscovery of the
World
Observational Science
Galileo (1564-1642)
William Harvey (1578-1657)
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
The Renaissance
The Rediscovery
of the World
Observational
Science
Painting (Invention
of Perspective)
Giotto, The Presentation of the Virgin
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
The Renaissance
The Rediscovery of
the World
Observational
Science
Painting (Invention
of Perspective)
Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
The Renaissance
The Rediscovery of the World
Observational Science
Painting (Invention of
Perspective)
Theatre (subservience to
Aristotle’s Poetics)
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
JeanBaptiste
Moliere
(1622-1673)
Comic
Theatre as
Satire
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
 Tartuffe
 The Imaginary
Invalid
 The Miser
 The Misanthrope
Medieval-toRenaissance
Christopher
Marlowe
(1564-1593)
 Edward II
 Doctor Faustus
 Tamburlaine the
Great
 The Jew of Malta
The “Other”
Shakespeare?
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
The Globe
Theatre: Then
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
The Globe
Theatre: Now
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Medieval-toRenaissance
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
And the Aristotelian “Unities”
Medieval-toRenaissance
The Tempest
As You Like It
Henry IV
Othello
Hamlet
Macbeth
Much Ado About
Nothing
King Lear
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s
Dream
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Julius Caesar
Twelfth Night
Medieval-toRenaissance
“The
Shakespeare
Code” (3.2)
The Doctor's London
The Globe
The Doctor: Come on! We
can all have a good flirt
later!
William Shakespeare: Is that
a promise, Doctor?
The Doctor: Oooh, 57
academics just punched the
air!
“The
Shakespeare
Code” (3.2)
The Doctor's London
The Globe
“The
Shakespeare
Code” (3.2)
The Doctor's London
The Globe
“The
Shakespeare
Code” (3.2)
The Doctor's London
The Globe
Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges
There was no one in him: behind his face (even
the poor paintings of the epoch show it to be
unlike any other) and behind his words (which
were copious, fantastic, and agitated) there was
nothing but a bit of cold, a dream not dreamed by
anyone. At first he thought that everyone was like
himself. But the dismay shown by a comrade to
whom he mentioned the vacuity revealed his
error to him and made him realize forever that an
individual should not differ from the species. At
one time it occurred to him that he might find a
remedy for his difficulty in books, and so he
learned the “small Latin and less Greek,” of
which a contemporary spoke.
ENGL 2030: Experience of
Literature—Drama
[Lavery]
Later, he considered he might find what he sought in
carrying out one of the elemental rites of humanity,
and so he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway in
the long siesta hour of an afternoon in June. In his
twenties he went to London. Instinctively, he had
already trained himself in the habit of pretending he
was someone, so it would not be discovered that he
was no one. In London, he found the profession to
which he had been predestined, that of actor:
someone who, on a stage, plays at being someone
else, before a concourse of people who pretend to
take him for that other one. His histrionic work taught
him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had
ever known. And yet, once the last line of verse had
been acclaimed and the last dead man dragged off
stage, he tasted the hateful taste of unreality. He
would leave off being Ferrex or Tamburlaine and
become no one again.
ENGL 2030: Experience of
Literature—Drama
[Lavery]
Thus beset, he took to imagining other heroes and
other tragic tales. And so, while his body complied
with its bodily destiny in London bawdyhouses and
taverns, the soul inhabiting that body was Caesar
unheeding the augur’s warnings, and Juliet
detesting the lark, and Macbeth talking on the
heath with the witches who are also the Fates. No
one was ever so many men as that man: like the
Egyptian Proteus he was able to exhaust all the
possibilities of being. From time to time he left, in
some obscure corner of his work, a confession he
was sure would never be deciphered: Richard
states that in his one person he plays many parts,
and Iago curiously says “I am not what I am.” The
fundamental oneness of existing, dreaming, and
acting inspired in him several famous passages.
ENGL 2030: Experience of
Literature—Drama
[Lavery]
He persisted in this directed hallucination for
twenty years. But one morning he was
overcome by a surfeit and horror of being all
those kings who die by the sword and all those
unfortunate lovers who converge, diverge, and
melodiously expire. That same day he settled
on the sale of his theater. Before a week was
out he had gone back to his native village,
where he recuperated the trees and the river of
his boyhood, without relating them at all to
trees and rivers–illustrious with mythological
allusion and Latin phrase–which his Muse had
celebrated. He had to be someone; he became
a retired impresario who has made his fortune
and who is interested in making loans, in
lawsuits, and in petty usury.
ENGL 2030: Experience of
Literature—Drama
[Lavery]
It was in character, then, in this character that
he dictated the arid last will and testament we
know, from which he deliberately excluded any
note of pathos or trace of literature. Friends
from London used to visit him in his retreat, and
for them he would once more play the part of
the poet.
History adds that before or after his death he
found himself facing God and said: I, who have
been so many men in vain, want to be one
man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the
voice of God replied: I dreamed the world the
way you dreamed your work my Shakespeare;
one of the forms of my dream was you, who,
like me, are many and no one.
ENGL 2030: Experience of
Literature—Drama
[Lavery]
Hamlet | Major
Characters:
 Hamlet: Prince of Denmark
 Claudius: King of Denmark
and Hamlet’s Uncle
 Gertrude: Hamlet’s Mother,
Queen
 Polonius: Lord
Chamberlain
 Ophelia: Daughter of
Polonius
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
 Horatio: Hamet’s Friend
 Laertes: Polonius’ Son
 Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern (Courtiers)
Hamlet | Talking Points:
 Is Hamlet mad? Is the ghost of Hamlet’s father real?
 Why has Hamlet long been the most prestigious role in all of
theatre?
 Is Hamlet Shakespeare’s greatest play? The T. S. Eliot claim.
 Its dark humor.
 Its contemporaneousness (and the film).
 The play within a play.
 Its poetry: the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy.
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Hamlet | Talking Points: To Be or
Not to Be Soliloquy
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Hamlet | Talking Points: To Be or
Not to Be Soliloquy
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely,
The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Hamlet | Talking Points: To Be or
Not to Be Soliloquy
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,
And thus the Native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action.
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Hamlet | Talking Points:
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Hamlet (Michael Almereyda, 2000)
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Realism
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Realism
An attempt to make art and literature
resemble life. Realist painters and writers
take their subjects from the world around
them (instead of from idealized subjects,
such as figures in mythology or folklore) and
try to represent them in a lifelike manner.
The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy,
Third Edition
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Realism
Aristotle [384-322 BC], The Poetics
(again)
art is mimesis: imitation, from
which we get the words
“imitation,” “mime,” etc.
The source of the idea that art
functions as a mirror held up to
life.
But it will be the middle of the
19th century before “realism”
becomes a dominant art form
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Realism
J. M. W. Turner, Snowstorm (1842)
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Realism
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers (1849)
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Realism
Realism
Stephen Crane, Maggie:
A Girl of the Streets
(1893)
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
The Invention of Theatrical Realism:
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
“The illusion I
wished to create
was that of reality.”
Realism
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
A Doll’s House (1879)
IMDB Page
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Ghosts (1881): The
main character goes
mad as the result of
syphilis.
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
An Enemy of the
People (1882):
Explores political
corruption.
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
The Wild Duck (1884): An
iconoclast goes about
destroying everyone’s “life
lies.”
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Hedda Gabler (1890):
The title character
smokes on stage.
ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—
Drama [Lavery]
Realism