APUNTES DE CLASE:
09/25/07
-
Tragedy: tragic ending, tanatos ( death ),
the hero suffers and he/she has to pay for his/her mistakes, the hero has to
face of and understand death.
-
Comedy: happy ending, eros ( life ), pleasure,
happiness, conciliation that only can happen if there is any conflict. Initial
conflict makes possible the conciliation. The conflict usually takes place
because the daughter of one of the characters does not want to get married with
the man her father has chosen for her. The development of the play is to find a
resolution that has to be happy, to that conflict. Comedies in front of
tragedies show the happiness of living and their aim, as in the Greek comedies,
is the reproduction of the human being, represented through the marriage.
The maximum number of actors to
represent Shakespeare plays was fifteen, but sometimes it could be four, six or
even only one actor representing several characters. But his plays are made to
be fifteen actors. The first basic element in his plays is the text, depending
on the way they speak, we can know who is talking. The stage can vary, but it
is not relevant. The important thing in Shakespeare plays is what characters
say and how they say it and the conflicts we see in the play. This is the
important thing, the rest can be adapt to the age when the play is represented
and to each society. His attitude in
front of life is almost modern, although in his age it was unthinkable.
Shakespeare as the inventor of the contemporary man ( Harold Blumb ). What
Shakespeare brings up in his plays became reality only after the Second World
War. He wrote 36 plays, 19 were published in-folio, called first folio. But his
plays were also in-quarto, they were illegal copies made by people who went to
watch his plays and take notes of the text and then they published it without
the permission and the supervision of the author or the company. For this
reason, when Shakespeare died, his company published in-folio his first 19
plays.
09/27/07
MUCH
Shakespeare
is creating expectation trough the name Claudio,
who we do not know. He gives information about him, he is like a lamb but at
the same time as a lion, but we do not know him yet. Claudio can battle as a
lion even when he seems a little lamb. Shakespeare presents Claudio with a
metaphor. In the film, we do not know that Claudio is from
Montanto
means “mi tonto”, this is the name with which Beatrice refers to Benedict.
Beatrice is attacking Benedict of Padua. Hero ( eros ): she represents purity,
virginity and innocence. Shakespeare gives them names contrary to what they
actually are because people love to be trick. People, at that time, were used
to be and behave as they were. At that time, only man could make a play so
people need something to make their brains adapt to see a man playing a role of
a woman in a play, as we can see in the film “Shakespeare in love”. The whole
play is focused on accept that men play
the role of women. How important the role of women is in his comedies. In his
tragedies the most important characters are men, just the contrary. One is
feminine, erotic and pro-life and the other is male, sad and death.
Friendly
relation between Pedro, Leonardo and Claudio. Leonardo has money because he can
maintain an army for a month and wants to marry his only daughter (Hero) with a
rich man ( Claudio ).
10/04/07
First act:
The
song Beatrice sings says that women cannot trust men. She is providing the
audience information that we will see through the play: how relations between
men and women are. Women cannot trust men because they always run away.
Shakespeare loves women more than they love themselves because he understands
them and how they think and operate. In his age, was very difficult to think
what they were going to do when they were old because they do not had anybody
that took care of them such as public hospitals, public schools, etc.
At
that age, theatre had to be closed to control plagues that existed before, and
sometimes they were closed for several months. And travelling to one city to
another was very dangerous because you could find killers, robbers, etc. For this
reason, Shakespeare sets his plays in exotics countries where people sing and
they are interested just in singing, in art not in plagues or virus.
Benedict
takes for granted that Beatrice is in love with him because he loves her, and
when they start to go out together, he just run away. Because of this, she
hates men and sings that song about men. In a subplot, we find his brother that
is a traitor, a villain, who represents the devil. That figure appears in a lot
of plays of that age and was a human representation of the devil. They believed
in devil and the only way of facing the devil and overcome him is through
comedy. Beatrice is yet trying to get him and make him realise how idiot he is.
For Benedict, Beatrice is the most beautiful woman ( she is like spring ) not
Hero, who is like winter. Beatrice is the first day of May and Hero is the last
day of December.
Second act:
Shakespeare
uses names to describe characters, how they are indeed and how they behave.
Kings always speak in verse, they just speak in prose when they become mad. Bad
characters (the devil), speak in prose. Shakespeare started writing in prose,
then started to introduce verse and, in the end of his career, he only wrote in
verse.
Hero
has no voice to choose who she wants to marry with, Beatrice is the only who
says her that she has to choose and not accept his father’s authority. Hero
never speaks, is his father, Beatrice, the King, etc. who talk for her. The
first time Hero speaks is when they all decide to make Beatrice and Benedict
become husband and wife. They do this because they have not other thing to do
until Monday, when Hero and Claudio will marry.
Woo
means premarital sex. In Elizabethan times the only way to have sex was getting
married. If a girl accept without being married, the man cannot marry with her.
The man cannot or do not want to marry her. Shakespeare wants to show that the
appearances can trick us. If you do not hear the dialogue, if you just look,
you can misunderstand the situation. Claudio trust more on what the traitor
says to him than in what he is watching.
Don
Pedro is an intelligent King who likes music, arts, and for this Shakespeare
introduces into the play music. For British people, this is impossible, a king
can not be delicate or educate, he can not be human. Shakespeare wanted a king
that could be less cruel to make a better world, he wanted to create a dream
inside the theatre.
10/18/07
A
group of fools normally appears in Shakespeare plays to educate people for the
use of the words making funny to audience to enjoy it. The majority of the
audience is poor people and that was what the audience wanted, they wanted to
have fun. Out of his 36 plays, 29 of them are among the most represented plays
in the world. His Company wanted to survive and they lived thanks to
representation so they tried to do what people wanted.
In
this play there are three ends:
·
Hero
and Claudio.
·
Beatrice
and Benedict.
·
John,
the traitor, appears to be punished.
Happy end:
One
of the important things of the happy end is music: dance and singing. Comedy is
part of life, is a celebration of life. When you die, you reborn; but in
tragedies, when you die you die and that is the end. In comedies, when you die,
it has a symbolical meaning ( phoenix ). Reborn = Renaissance.
The
attitude of the author is that we can discover that there are more things that
we do not know: new races, new places, etc. What you see is not right, is the
evil who is making you to see it. The
devil manipulates your perception, your senses and it may cost you your life,
you will be punished for that. Overhearing evil conversations can help you, but
overhearing can also hurt, kill or punish you.
Shakespeare
is the greatest revolutionary of the theatre at his time. He introduces that
there is no way to distinguishes white and black, that reality is more complex
than just white and black. He always compensates writing comedies with writing
tragedies and put elements of the tragedy in the comedy and vice versa. There
is the possibility of reborn. Shakespeare wanted to know why we act in one way
or another.
10/25/07
Renaissance was famous
because it introduces music in their plays, but Shakespeare made it before. The
audience spend all night at the Globe Theatre, the plays were three or four
hour plays and they included play, music, eat, drink and sex. For this reason
puritans did not like theatre.
Love
at first sight is very used by Shakespeare. That is a trick of the comedy,
seeing at the other person eyes you can fall in love with her/him. And end up
with marriage and having children that is the purpose of marriage. And also
money, you will be richer or poorer. Women wanted to be rich widow marrying
with old men. At that time, men actually did not think, was the Queen who said
who you are, a woman decided. She broke all the mental skins, she did not get
married. The problem was that she did not give a prince.
LOVELY
LOST:
The
king decides to spend three years studying and convince the others to do the
same, to forget women and sex. All characters are aristocratic, for this reason
is very important for establish the decorum of the age, Shakespeare says how
they (people) should talk. He invents a way to speak that is typical from the
Elizabethan time, typical from theatre. Actors use verse to perform in a
rhythmic way and you can understand what they are saying because language is
structured. The function of the verse is being a poetical speech very close to
a natural speech, very poetic but also a very natural body language. He plays
with the voice, you say something and complements it with your body, what you
see is not what they are saying, he tries to get harmony. Harmony = life; Chaos
= death. What Elizabethans wanted was harmony, a balanced world establishing
order. All his comedies start with chaos and finish with harmony; tragedies
start with harmony and finish with chaos.
Queen
Elizabeth broke the established way of thinking, besides she was a woman. One
of the few supporters of the Queen was Shakespeare, but officially nobody knew
that. He represented an establishment of the time, but that establishment was
not the “correct” one. He was catholic and England Protestant, besides he was
criticizing his society but he has the favour of the Queen. Shakespeare showed
the defects and deficiencies of the society but because of that, surprisingly,
he was very successful.
Actors
dressed and behave as the people of the court they were representing, so
everybody could know who they were referring to. Shakespeare invented
characters from foreign countries but representing his society because he
wanted people to understand what was happening by references to his time. He wanted
people to recognize what was happening. He made coincide the plot and the
subplot.
11/06/07
THE
COMEDY OF ERRORS:
Shakespeare wrote this play when he
was twenty-five or twenty-seven and it is full of errors. He used the simplest
strategy to make people laugh: audience knew more than the characters. He also
doubles the identity: the main characters are twins and their servants are
twins too. That creates confusion and errors.
Idgion
is the father and his twins have both the same name. The story takes place in
To
get confused you have to speak fast, to act fast and that is what Shakespeare
did here. Soliloquies: are monologues addressed to the audience. One of the
most important of the play is the one the main character makes in the first
scene: the twins are as two drops of water and who makes the monologue says
that he is one drop that are looking for his brother, a drop on a ocean. Here,
he is conscious of the difficulty of finding his brother. The servant is the
servant of the other twin. At the beginning of the play each servant is with
his owner, but then they start to mix between them. Mystery and witchcraft are
two aspects very important too. The twin is talking to his servant, he is
hearing, seeing and touching him but the servant is not his servant. He thinks
it is something estrange, something supernatural, diabolic. Efasis is a place
of sin.
Brilliant
language, one of the best dialogues, it is very logical. This is the best usage
of language.
11/08/07
Comedy
is endless as life; Tragedy anticipates death with suicide. We have to
empathize with the main character, for this reason in a tragedy there is only
one main character. It has to be an enormous catastrophe in comedies to can
overcome problems to make the main character able to proof him/herself that
he/she can overcome problems and go on as life always does. The representation
and preservation of life is the most important thing for comedy. We do not want
to kill ourselves till extinction, we are more intelligent to not do it.
Shakespeare
treats the subject of fame. As the protagonists, he went through the street and
everybody knew him and wanted to shake his hand and hello him but he did not
know anybody. At the time he wrote this play, he was famous because it was his
third play, he was very famous for the first two. Lady Macbeth and Queen
Elizabeth had the same problem: they could not have children. Shakespeare was
inspired by his age.
Main problems in the play:
11/13/07
There
is an hypothesis that says that Shakespeare never existed and there were four
possible substitutes for him. Shakespeare was educated but he had to leave
school because he had to work to survive. Some people said he did not was
educated. Love’s Labour’s Lost is
thought to be his first comedy, but we do not know it. But it is possible that
the first thing he wrote was Henry VI
and Titus Andronicus and that his
first comedy was The comedy of errors.
11/20/07
TWELFTH
NIGHT:
When
a woman is unsex then she becomes a man. Sebastian is the twin of Cesario/Viola.
Antonio is very interested in everything Sebastian does. All Shakespeare plays
are complex structured. Love at first sight again: Olivia falls in love with
Cesario at first sight although she is a woman, but Olivia does not know it.
Malvolio
means “el mal querido”, he is the only character Shakespeare seems to hate in
all his plays. Malvolio is his only puritan character, the only reference to
Puritanism Shakespeare made. Shakespeare is mocking, laughing of Puritanism, he
cannot understand Puritanism, he criticizes Puritanism. His plays are based on
life, on eros, on sexuality, on reproduction. This is totally the contrary to
Puritanism, which is based on the Bible and on “divine” rules what provokes a
constant crash with reality because the Bible is too limited so they have to
make a personal reading and learning of it to improve themselves, be superior
and create their rules. But Shakespeare knew we can not be perfect because we
are human. For this reason, Puritanism crashed with all the other religions and
had to go to E.U.A.
11/22/07
Feste
is a very important character not only in this play but also in other
Shakespeare company plays. Shakespeare describes the character through Viola,
what a fool is through Viola. He also uses a drunk character to create funny
scenes. Shakespeare names are very unstable so in one copy one character is
called Viola and in other is Olivia, but it does not matter to the public, the
important thing of names is that they are foreign, they are exotic. We do not
know how a character is, we just know it through the descriptions the other
characters or him/herself make about him/her. But Cesario does not talk about
himself, we have to look the character through the other characters’ eyes. And
at the end is what the character thinks about himself. Characters give
information about themselves and about their lives, like a profile of the
police.
This
play integrates a song as well. Singing and play at the same time but in two
different places, two ways of understanding music, two perspectives. One
established, high-class people (educated people) and another is to enjoy, when
three characters, three men are drunk and they belong to the low-class. They
are chaos (the worst word of that time), people who love sex and live life. It
is a contradiction. Cesario can sing it in a high tone (woman tone) and in a
low tone (men tone). Shakespeare is saying that men and women are equal, that the
song can be sung by both men and women. The dilemma about if Cesario belongs to
one world (high-class) or to another (low-class).
Uncertainty
is what makes life interesting. It is unknown, that chaos makes life
interesting. Twenty kisses in the song means all the kisses “give all the
kisses forever”. Shakespeare thought that beautiful people had to reproduce,
have to have a copy of themselves because he/she is very beautiful. The only
guarantee of having a plenty life is to reproduce and be in love with somebody.
Malvolio is a bad character because he does not love anybody. He just want to
marry to get a better social position, he wants to get married with Olivia
because she is the boss of her house and he wants to be the boss.
“Art
takes your breath away and it is contagious” so characters change from one way
to behave to another completely different just by being expose to it.
Shakespeare change us through art, through his play, through Malvolio who is
the antagonist, the chaos because he is bad but at the end he is punished and
all the characters treat him badly and at the end Shakespeare makes us to feel
sorry about him. This only happen in this play and that makes it unique. When
Malvolio read the letter we can identify with the other three characters that
are overhearing him because we are also overhearing very personal emotions of
Malvolio. He is completely obsessed sexually with Olivia. Even he is so
virtuous, he is a man.
11/27/O7
Shakespeare uses the make up to show
that the appearances can trick us, that only with changes their clothes,
characters change radically and they become another person. He also uses love
at the first sight with Olivia and Sebastian/Cesario. But Orsino want to marry
Olivia and he feels very sad when she get married with Sebastian. The problem
is that Olivia does not know that she is married with Sebastian, not with
Cesario.
This
play has three happy endings:
1.- Olivia- Sebastian.
2.-
Viola- Orsino.
3.-
Toby- Maria.
Here we can see that the important
thing are weddings, not who wins and who looses, at the end what comes, what is
important are weddings. There is always someone who looses. Human nature
includes not achieving your desires, depression, revenge, etc. At that time,
social structure were rigid so you could not claim the social stages, so Malvolio
could not marry Olivia. He had to be punished for having or showing sexual
desires for Olivia, he was excluded from society. In that society, people who
were not witches but expresses sexual desires were declared mad. People that
were not conscious of being a murderer, witches, etc. were declared mad.
Dreams: you are the only that know your dreams, but if you show them, if you
show your sexual desires you are mad and you have to be punished.
12/13/07
THE
TAMING OF THE SHREW:
Here,
marriage is a business, a market. Girls’ ambitions were to marry well, to
improve their lives. The father shows his preference for Bianca, who is a very
obedient daughter. Choices girl had at that time were:
If girls decided to be
educated (reading and writing) they were breaking with the moral tradition of
that age. They wanted to be more prepared to love relationships. Here we find
again love at the first sight: Bianca and the young boy. Papers on the floor
(apuntes): they have finished the course and they are celebrating it. Italian
background and setting. Relation between Caterina and Petruquio. She behave as
a wild animal, they behave as cat (woman) and dog (man). They are in tension
between each other and this like to the audience. Traditionally, women have to
be obedient and procreate, they are just to serve men. The audience pays a
ticket to dream that they can be rich. Actually, men were under control of
women (Queen) so they can dream they are who control women. The dream of these
men was to tam a woman, they go to the theatre to enjoy themselves. At the end,
the father accepts Petruquio and Petruquio accept the father and Caterina find
a way to can get on well with Petruquio. Bianca get married. Happy ending.
Act 5, scene 1: very important speech of Caterine. It was
shocking for Puritans. “Put their hands (women) under their (men) feet”, a
lesson to woman to be obedient. Shakespeare distances this speech from the
audience first because the whole play is a dream and then because who is
speaking is a woman. Comedies are as serious as tragedies because they talk
about a community while tragedies talk about the individual. Comedies are not
jokes. Comedies use the happy ending to make feel people happy but it does not
mean they cannot threat serious subjects as relationships between people,
between men and women.
In this play Shakespeare is questioning marriage because it is
not clear in social terms how a marriage has to looks like. The speech is a
manifest of a woman of that time that is asking women to be obedient but also
is questioning important subjects. Men had problems on obey the sovereign of
the country because she was a woman who was not married and are not providing a
heir for the throne. Caterine is strong enough to tam Queen Elizabeth. Shrew
was a word used to refer to women who had not children and the shrew of that
time was the Queen. The Queen was the main character of several of Shakespeare
plays but disturbed. She is an intelligent, smart, powerful woman, a queen but
without being a king. They represented the Queen but covert. The Queen was a
reference for most of Shakespeare female characters.
The speech shows men that they have to deal with women
differently, in a different way. The play is a reflect of how they deal and
behave with the other sex. The comedy is giving a solution, in comedies they
always find a solution to solve the problem while in tragedies they do not find
a solution, they just kill the character who has the problem. Other speeches we
find in the play:
·
About
education.
·
About
university setting.
·
About
society.
·
About
learning processes, how human learn. Educational process, how to shrew.
Men need women to
perpetuate the human race. Petruquio is inferior, he is in the background.