Cleopatra's character. Antony and Cleopatra as, essentially, the one life-affirming tragedy: the tragedy that does what comedies do. "Strong as death is love." Versions of the verb "to bear." Jokes at Mardian's expense. Apostrophes to Antony. How they are together in separation. What I didn't quite say is that Rome and Alexandria are established as social spaces, while Antony is between them and so gone during the period of his transition from one to the other,. More uses of the word where : Whe...
Mar 27, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 154
We continue our close reading, especially of the clash of mood or tone between characters in scenes 2 and 3, in the way Shakespeare is representing people trying to set the dominant mood of the scene: Antony and Enobarbus, and then Antony and Cleopatra. Some attention to the extremely subtle foreshadowing and creation of perspective in those scenes. Similarities and differences between Antony's relation to Enobarbus and his relation to Cleopatra.
Mar 22, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 153
Since we're now online, and since it is Antony and Cleopatra , we're going to go through the play scene by scene. Here we looked at the clash of tonalities between the soothsayer and Cleopatra's women, in 2.1, and also the way Antony treats the messengers from Rome.
Mar 19, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 152
First class on Zoom. I recorded the class as though in class but I was sitting at my computer. That means there's more me and less them, alas. Anyhow: we talked about being Mark Antony (cf. Being John Malkovich ) and the odd phrase "an Antony." Comparing that to the king's two bodies. And we talked about time frames again: how Octavian is always the age he is at the beginning, and Antony and Cleopatra always the ages they are at the end.
Mar 14, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 151
After a 15 minute discussion of Covid-19 (not recorded here) we talk about the actual ages of various characters, and the ages that Shakespeare wanted them to be: not only in A & C but in Richard II , 1 Henry IV and the romances: the idea that you can go from the start of adulthood (Octavius) to the maturity that makes you fit for tragedy and old enough to have lived long enough (Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra) within 16-18 years or so. Shakespeare's highly skillful stage setting in scene 1. ...
Mar 11, 2020•51 min•Ep. 150
We finally really begin Antony and Cleopatra , discussing Plutarch's interest in character, and Shakespeare's, and what makes a tragic character interesting since we know what the plot will be. Aristotle on pity and terror again: usually the protagonist or main is someone innocent or at worst someone like ourselves: not so in Macbeth . After which we start analyzing the opening scene, with comparisons to Lear and to Hamlet as well (on the quantification of love). Many corny jokes....
Mar 08, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 149
A class where we finally talk about the whole soliloquy, with which I am obsessed, in which Macbeth calls or Seyton and considers how his way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf." We get there by means of Sonnet 12, but that means talking about the sonnets: first the nature of sonnet sequences from Petrarch through Wyatt to Sidney and Shakespeare, then of course (via Wyatt) about Tottel's miscellany, and then a discussion of Sonnet 73 and its echoes of Macbeth's soliloquy, and ultim...
Mar 04, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 148
A class which turned out to be a lot on verse drama, and how and why it works, partly based on Evelyn Tribble's ideas about "fluent forgetting" (which I mentioned before) in her book Cognition in the Globe . Lots of stuff on proto-Indo-European and on how poetic lines work: "loose onsets, strict endings." How Shakespeare makes us focus on particular words but also justifies that focus. Hint: rhyme. We finally get to talking about 5.3, and to Shakespeare's bad Dad pun on Macbeth's refusal to "sha...
Feb 29, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 147
A class which first is about Protestantism and Catholicism in Shakespeare, and the idea in Protestantism that theological issues take on a psychological air. That is, they are interiorized. Then a digressive account of time in Shakespeare (and many others, including Ashbery and Kafka), with the idea being that as you get older -- as the Macbeths get older -- time is interiorized.
Feb 25, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 146
A class on doubling, literal and metaphorical, e.g. Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff, Hecate, etc. The meaning of doubling. The conglomeration and dissolution of social groups. Simmel (of course!) on spatial relations as both the condition and the symbol of human relations. The quickness of friends (in anticipation of Antony and Cleopatra ). Miscellaneous digressions, not all my fault.
Feb 18, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 145
We start with Coleridge's insight (followed by Bloom) that Macbeth confuses his own pangs of conscience with imaginative fear. Then some discussion of remorse vs. repentance as analogous to that confusion. A couple of jokes, and then a close reading of the line "Which of you have done this" when Macbeth sees Banquo.
Feb 12, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 144
A class I actually liked some of: on daemonization (Lionel Abel's term in his article "Daemons true and false") and character. How the most practical matters of representing character on stage (what we hear about Macbeth vs. what we see) give insight into the deepest existential-psychological. This is me essentially trying to turn aspects of Macbeth into L'attente l'oubli . With digressions and a digression on digressions.
Feb 07, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 143
A student brings up Banquo and tries to relate the line of kings to the edge of doom to Dante's Inferno. Which leads to a discussion of Banquo and the more general tension in Shakespeare between friendship and love, solved in the comedies but always part of the loss in the tragedies. Considerations of this issue in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear , and of course Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra .
Feb 05, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 142
Mainly about witches: Reginald Scott's skepticism, James's motivated belief in them, the King's touch, the relation of witches to the soothsayer in A&C (vs. the one in JC), and some attention (again, as in other courses) to Dan Decker's Anatomy of a Screenplay and the insights it affords into Shakespeare's construction of scenes: the way soothsayers and messengers are similar and the way they differ. At the end a brief consideration of what De Quincey means by sympathy.
Feb 01, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 141
Elements in Macbeth that were more or less likely to come from elsewhere. Who played whom. Robert Armin (and Will Kemp). Johnson on whether the reference to Antony and Cleopatra (Macbeth's genius overmatched by Banquo's as Antony's is by Caesar) is an interpolation. De Quincey on the knocking at the gate, and the effect that the juxtaposition of scenes has.
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 140
Holinshed, Knocking at the gate, Banquo, self-fulfilling prophecies, as psychological and causal, subjectivity: who in the story is the story for? Who is real in the story?
Jan 25, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 139
Coleridge on puns in Shakespeare. Aristotelean unities and how Shakespeare violates them. Doctor Johnson's bad conjectural emendation. The great line he wishes to emend: "Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."
Jan 22, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 138
Why editors change the originals -- canonical words and lines, as we now know them. Theobald on Autumn/Antonie. Theobald on "this bank and shoal of time"
Jan 19, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 137
Introductory class in this course on Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra . Punning and equivocation.
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 135
A long class, chiefly on Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Kahn . I think I realized some things about the latter worth realizing. (N.B. I repeat a mistake I made earlier: the apparently supernatural episode that isn't isn't in "Michael," as I misremembered, but in "Peter Bell.")
May 11, 2019•2 hr 27 min•Ep. 134
We complete our discussion of the Prelude by looking at the Snowdon scene in Book XIII, with a lot of comparison to the unfortunate and enfeebling revisions Wordsworth made in Book XIV of the 1850 version. One student reads Oppen's "The Forms of Love" as a kind of pendant to the Snowdon scene. I notice a bunch of things that I don't think I ever did before a connection to King Lear for example, and something about Wordsworth's prosody in the 1805 version....
May 04, 2019•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 133
A little about Hurston's "Gilded Six Bits," and a lot about management of desire. Newcomb's proposed as something to think about at the end.
May 02, 2019•57 min•Ep. 132
The structure of The Prelude . The amazing way, in Wordsworth, that we get to now in the absence of some connection to then . The way then is always retrospective. The spots of time.
May 01, 2019•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 131
Relationship between loss aversion, preference, and anxiety. The two envelope game. Is happiness a preference, or is it another name for the existence of preferences? A Serious Man and Suspicion .
Apr 30, 2019•49 min•Ep. 130
A kind of culmination of the material on maguffins, loss aversion, and the management of longing. The sunk costs of antes. The symbolic value of the last cigarette before you quit. That last cigarette being a kind of maguffin which allows for making it satisfy both the desire to smoke and the desire to quit.
Apr 19, 2019•49 min•Ep. 129
A lot of stuff on rhyming, on emic and etic understanding, on phonemes, before we finally get back to Wordsworth, in particular Simplon Pass and what follows: the strange melancholy mansion they stay in; then the Winander Boy: all about estrangement from nature, and being at home in that estrangement, at home in homelessness.
Apr 18, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 128
Narrating gambling. Getting the benefits of the breaks. Kinds of gambling narratives: present tense as you're playing and presenting yourself to the other agonists, and past tense: stories of loss.
Apr 17, 2019•45 min•Ep. 127
Powerful anticlimaxes. How being estranged from childhood, and then recognizing that childhood is already the beginning of estrangement, is to achieve the destiny of being at home in homelessness. [Wild turkey flies into a window across the quad and freaks us all out, one way or another.] Mention of Frankenstein. Some of Book VI of The Prelude .
Apr 16, 2019•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 126
A class -- since no one is keeping up with the reading, to put it mildly -- on the effect that endings have on our desires for narrative. The way endings turn all preferences into short term ones, whereas with the whole novel, movie, epic, series to go, long term preferences will tend to clash more with short term ones. This is (though I don't mention him in the class) one of the ways that convergence works, e.g. in Dan Decker's Anatomy of the Screenplay.
Apr 15, 2019•52 min•Ep. 125
Money offer on the table when we came in! Loss aversion -- it depends how you present things, as Thaler et al show. Medical versions. A brief introduction to Bayesianism and why MD's need to learn some Bayesean analysis. Brandeis's plan to sell its art collection and the "endowment effect." Wins above replacement.
Apr 12, 2019•52 min•Ep. 124
