History of Theatre:

Greeks to the 19th Century

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

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-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Everyman

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Everyman

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Everyman

Main character: Everyman

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Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: Life

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Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: LifeEveryman’s Destination: Death

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: LifeEveryman’s Destination: DeathEveryman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions . . .

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: LifeEveryman’s Destination: DeathEveryman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions, Good Deeds

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: LifeEveryman’s Destination: DeathEveryman’s Companions: Worldly Possessions, Good DeedsWho can complete the journey of Everyman?

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of the World

Observational ScienceGalileo (1564-1642)

William Harvey (1578-1657)

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Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

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-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

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-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of the World

Observational SciencePainting (Invention of

Perspective)Theatre (subservience to

Aristotle’s Poetics)

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Jean-Baptiste Moliere

(1622-1673) Tartuffe The Imaginary

Invalid The Miser The Misanthrope

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Comic Theatre as

Satire

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Christopher Marlowe

(1564-1593) Edward II Doctor Faustus Tamburlaine the

Great The Jew of Malta

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

The “Other” Shakespeare?

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

The Globe Theatre: Then

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Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

The Globe Theatre: Now

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Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

And the Aristotelian “Unities”

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Medieval-to-Renaissance

Medieval-to-Renaissance

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Macbeth Much Ado About Nothing

King Lear

Romeo and Juliet

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Othello

Hamlet

Twelfth Night

The Tempest

Julius Caesar

Henry IV

As You Like It

“The Shakespeare Code” (3.2)

The Doctor's London

The Globe

“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

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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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

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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 SoliloquyTo be, or not to be, that is the question:Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to sufferThe Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,And by opposing end them: to die, to sleepNo more; and by a sleep, to say we endThe Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocksThat Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummationDevoutly 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 respectThat makes Calamity of so long life:

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Hamlet | Talking Points: To Be or Not to Be SoliloquyFor 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 SpurnsThat patient merit of the unworthy takes,When he himself might his Quietus makeWith 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 bournNo 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 SoliloquyThus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,And thus the Native hue of ResolutionIs 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

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Hamlet (Michael Almereyda, 2000)

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Realism

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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

Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Realism

The Invention of Theatrical Realism: Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

“The illusion I wished to create was that of reality.”

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

Realism

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Drama [Lavery]

IMDB Page

A Doll’s House (1879)

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