CMDSIP - Notes (Academic year 2007-2008)

NOTES (Academic year 2007-2008)

They come back to Messina from the war to relax there because they have won the battle. Everything is happy. We hear the name ‘Claudio’à it creates expectation because we do not know who he is, and it makes us curious.

He is giving us information about who Claudio is: innocent, looks like a lamb (= innocence, young, not bad person). Lion vs. Lamb (lionà dangerous but also powerful).

Messenger says: ‘like a lamb fighting like a lion’ à he wants to express in words how powerful he is (transformation of a lamb into a lion; he uses a lot of metaphors).

In the filmà we cannot know that Claudio’s family is from Messina (because it is irrelevant from Branagh’s point of view but not from Shakespeare’s).

The director puts on stage what he thinks it is necessary for the audience to understand Shakespeare’s plays. So, this is his interpretation.

Shakespeare is telling us that Hero is Leonato’s daughter, he is presenting the characters, telling us who is whoà setting the scene = introducing the characers (who is who and how they are related).

Beatrice says ‘montanto’à play of words, in Spanish similar to ‘mi tonto’.

If Beatrice insults Benedick is because she is in love with him and if Claudio is so great, he is supposed to marry a ‘Hero’ (=EROS), so she is the hottest girl in the play. She is going to be the one who is going to make the play interesting.

* Read the contrary of what they say. People loved to be tricked, to be fooled (that is how the Renaissance worked).

‘Decoro’ à you have to act as you are (if you are a scientist you should dress, speak, and think like a scientist…).

When they went to see a performance, all that ‘decoro’ was inverted, destroyed, nothing was how it appeared. There were no women on stage (Shakespearian stage).

So, thinking in terms of decoro, this was illegal, ‘a woman was not a woman’, so people loved to see that (Shakespeare in Love).

Twelfth Night is an interesting play just if you take into account that women’s role were played by men.

The change of sexes in Shakespeare’s plays is fundamental. He was fed up with the idea that women’s role had to be played by men. We have two worlds:

Most important characters of comedies are always women; it is an erotic world while tragedies are only conflicts for men.

Next sceneà we are going to see the main characters. They have to feed the army and this would involve lots of money. But for Don Pedro this is not a problem. He wants to have his daughter, Hero, married.

Joke: ‘this is your daughter?’ – ‘Her mother told me so’. End of the jokeà the knight, Leonato, tells him that they are very similar, so it is her daughter.

Leonato, who is rich enough, is going to pay food and everything for an entire army, so that mean that whoever knight marries her is going to inherit all that money.

Beatrice hates Benedick’s gutsà she is always on guard about what Benedick says or does. If you say ‘nobody is listening to you’, at least you are listening soà LADY’S DISDAIN.

He tells her: ‘no te muerdas la lengua que vas a morir envenenada’. ‘disdain’ = despecho (in Elizabethan’s times). She is refusing, rejecting him.

Benedick tells her that he was in love with her but that now he has a hard hearth because he has suffered, something happened in the past. He said that many women love him but he loves none.

Don Leonato giving the welcome to all the army, whose leader is Don Pedro of Aragon. Pedro is represented by a black character because he is exotic. He means for Shakespeare and for Shakespeare’s audience the idea that he was Spanish, so exotic, different from the British and Messina was Italy, for the English it was the paradise, the classics, something so remote, civilized that it has nothing to do with England (Rome and Greece). That is the trick Shakespeare plays on his audience: what happens in Italy cannot happen in Britain (because both countries are very different). It can only happen if it is somewhere else, somewhere far from home. If people saw themselves represented, they could be offended so they saw people from other countries and times, because it is impossible that those things happen in England.

When you go to the theatre you want to see things that are different and whatever you see on stage is acceptable because it is different. It is a simple conventionà Everything that happens outside our reality, conventions, id doesn’t follow our rules. Spain and Italy are similar to them, so they confused Aragon with Italy, so Pedro can be black.

During his lifetimeà 1594: First Quarto. They were private editions (because Shakespeare did not participate in them). The play was popular and the people who pirate the play wrote down what they listened. They were sold at the printer’s house. William Shakespeare did not get any money, so when he died his company decided to make the Folio to earn money (copyright did not exist yet). It was the first time in history that people could choose either to go to the theatre (it was cheap) or read it. Sometimes 3.000 people were into the Globe.

Shakespeare was a rich man, fugitive from the Law and had to run away. He married an 8-year-older woman, she was pregnant (he ran away from Stratford to London when he became a playwright).

Structure of the plays: 5 acts and stage directions always in cursive and characters always in cursive too and sometimes abbreviated.

Comedy of Errors: It is set in a Greek environment, background. That was an excuse to criticise his contemporary society by being in another countryà see something different from their reality).

In Shakespeare time there were public executions, you could be executed for every reason, so if your personal life hanged on a string, what could be act on stage if the audience were thinking when they were going to die? So, as the first actors were men dressed as women, so most of the humour elements had to do between the relation between men and womenà sex (it always was interesting). So, the comedies are about sex.

How can you talk about sex in a society where it was forbidden? With poetry; it was attracted to see how the conventions were broken. So, Shakespeare made his comedies breaking the rules of the time.

Why are Puritans enemies of public theatre and want to close them down? Because people could think about the rules if the Laws are not obeyedà CHAOS (and that is what Shakespeare was providing, Chaos, breaking the rules). And you follow the classical unities by ending the comedies with a happy ending so that everything was allowed. Also, transform it into a dream à what you are seeing is not real (all comedies take place in unreal settings). A country that has nothing to do with Elizabethan Theatre: like a dream or a different country or a remote time (like King Lear: thousand years ago), because ‘it cannot happen today, because today is totally different’ (ironyà that is what they thought, that those people were not like them).

Much Ado About Nothing: First songà men are deceivers ever (we should not trust them). Beatrice is providing some information that we only will have if we listen to the song. The key to the whole play is the SONG = inconsistency between the relationship of men and women. Men are accused of being immature, childish. Beatrice and Benedick had been together before and he ran away so, we cannot trust men.

Shakespeare knows more about women than women know about men. Without the purpose of marriage there is no relation between men and women. Because there is the inheritance (nowadays nobody cares about the future because we have public hospitals, retirement, etc…) but in Elizabethan’s time it was something they were worried about.

Before, in London there were 2000 million people and now there are 10,000 million (that is important too). During Shakespeare’s time, theatres were close three times: the first time was when Shakespeare arrived in London. They were closed for 16 months. People tried to go out from the play. They were going from city to city in wagons and performed in pubs. To be on the road was dangerous (thieves, murderers,…).

Beatrice had a bad opinion of Benedick because he ran away but when Hero tells her that he is in love with her, she forgets everything and falls in love with him too (happy ending = comedy). It could have been a tragedy too because instead of that she could have ended dead because of the suffering caused by him.

In Shakespeare’s times they believed in the Devil’s existence: 24-hour devil who was there to screw you up, to make people unhappy and sad and to make this disappear comedies were the alternative, to separate people of all those fears.

Beatriceà ‘I know you of old’ = she knows him and she’s mad with him, she wants him to know how idiot he is.

John is bad, he’s playing a villain. He is a traitor, he wanted to be the Prince and his brother is, Leonato forgives him because his brother does.

Claudio, Benedick and Pedroà Benedick says that Hero is not beautiful, he says Beatrice is the most beautiful. Beatrice = spring / Hero= winter.

Scene 2: Shakespeare introduces the subplot. The dialogue between Claudio and Benedick is to introduce the dialogue between Claudio and Pedro and draw the plan à Pedro will disguise himself as Claudio to get Hero for him (believe of superiority to Pedro = he has king-like characteristics, the highest authority, people believe kings were so because God wanted so, ‘In God we trust’).

What people were seeing on stage was Pedro, who was the King and who is able to achieve anything. He says ‘I’ll get you this girl (which means, I’ll sleep with her) and as I’m the King I’ll tell her she has to marry you and she will want and her father too. Leonato will consent because it is a great honour for him his daughter marrying a military of Pedro.

Borachioà similar to ‘borracho’. He has to be drunk all the time, because that is the way to perform it.

Beatrice and Benedick speak in verse, they use neologisms, not reality, is poetry (they know their lines by heart). It is not so easy to understand because it is artificial (poetry). Shakespeare always tried to put many things to like a great amount of audience.

Borachio and the other evils speak in prose because they are villains (King Lear switches to prose when he is mad), to understand the difference between the King and villains, secondary characters also speak in prose.

(Act 1: explains what is going to happen). In Elizabethans’ time women were told by their fathers who they had to marry and they had to be obedient. So, Leaonato says: ‘If the Prince wants to marry you, you will say yes’. (at this time in history Kings could do that, marry whoever they wanted and people had to obey, girls did not have any other option). Hero has no option: does she like Claudio or the Prince? She doesn’t have an opinion.

The word WOO is the key. What we see here is talking to each other and negotiating. In Elizabethans’ times ‘wooeing’ was having sex and if she accepts having sex they did not want her. They had to marry to have sex.

Here, Hero, as Pedro is the King, she has to accept to have sex. But Shakespeare what does is Claudio being jealous of the King and, actually, Claudio has to be proud because the King is making him the favour of sleeping with his wife, is he retarded or what?

We do not hear Hero speak, people is always translating her words (Beatrice, Leonato,...).

John is the villain, planning something against Claudio. Here is when Claudio becomes jealous, when he thinks the King is going to sleep with her. John hates Claudio being so popular with the king.

Shakespeare is proving that ‘las apariencias engañan’à ‘don’t trust your senses, your eyes, your ears,’… because what he does is not what he is saying.

When John is talking to Claudio is important because he is a villain. Claudio believes more what he hears than what he sees; he has more confidence in John, the villain, than in what he seesà CONFLICT (he watches something that does not coincide with what he hears).

Act 2, scene 1à it ends with the plan of getting Beatrice and Benedick married. First time we see Hero talking (but just agreeing with the others). The purpose of this fooling is to confirm the love of Hero and Claudio and plan to reconcile Beatrice and Benedick just to be entertained. The King says he wants to be a ‘God of Love’ (like Cupid).

Act 2, scene 2à song (we heard it at the beginning of the movie but it is not at the beginning of the play). It’s integrated into the performance: setting the scene, ‘this is Messina, values the Renaissance was bringing to England’, a King interested in music will be laughed at, but here he likes it, good music and poetry.

Contrast between a King-murderer, killer, fights vs. a King who likes music, etc…à a real king, soldier does not behave in that way, but Shakespeare says that people who are fighters (the ones who have power and control everybody) will become more human by listening to music, poetry,…they’ll be more civilised and the whole world will be different, changeà SHAKESPEARE’S HYPOTHESIS.

Here, this killers and murderous are allowed being themselves, because with music and poetry, these people can stop being murderers and become more human and more civilised. He’s telling the audience: ‘Allow yourselves to dream, to be more tolerant, open (Renaissance)’, we can see other in a more complex ways, not just as villains or good. ‘You can be a King, a woman, a man, a knight if you want to, here in the Globe we can behave differently’. He is using all the prejudices the audience has, all the values and he plays with that by presenting this with different values (the opposite).

Shakespeare never cared about the publications of his plays (because the First Folio was published in 1623 and he died in 1616). Quarto, 1600 (like a paperback edition today).

He was the richest man of Stratford-Upon-Avon due to his representations. After having run away to London and won money he came back to Stratford-Upon-Avon as a very rich man.

The play that made him win more money was Titus Andronicus (violence, cannibalism, faith, vengeance,…) and this doesn0t like people anymore.

People would attend public executions as an entertainment so they liked all these things because it gives the audience all the sensations they wanted to see on stage.

Main thingà JUSTICE. Behaving correctly wasn’t a guarantee not to be killed, so it was difficult for them to accept this concept: society and life was very unjust. During Shakespeare’s lifetime theatre was closed three times (Peste: 30 deaths a day).

(Childbirth death: there was no hygiene, it was a rough time). People died because of flu, teeth infections.

So, how come did many people survive? To understand Elizabethan time we have to go into dirt, it stinks, it is a world of illiterate people (not write or read). The aristocracy looked down to people who wrote because they didn’t need to do it, they had people to do that for them.

Quarto: people attending performances and writing down the text. Printer is publisher and also the library where you bought the book (editor, publisher and librarian the same person). Today the author receives a 10% of the money (copyright).

Fools, jesters à are there to break the rhythm of the tragedy, to entertain the tragedy.

The company to win money had to do what the audience wanted. And what did they like? How many successful different plays can you offer to the audience? Shakespeare 29 of his plays à the most represented everywhere in the world. They’re still making money. The same amount as they were making in Shakespeare’s time.

He lived in Stratford-upon-Avon because he wanted to be out of the city, he wanted to enjoy his life.

The End à Happy end a musical piece (in comedies. In tragedies the important people are dead at the end of play) Comedy moves as the cycle of life: born-live-reborn. Tragedy à Life ends with death (tragic aspects of life). The way to be reborn is by Eve Phoenix. So Hero can be reborn because she has been consumed by the fire, slander of Sir John (he’s associated with evil) Everything he does is to hurt people à ENVIOUS.

Evil à in comedies, beaten to death because good came out, is reborn (being in the cycle of life).

In Elizabethan’s world they thought world was flat. It was with the discovery of America when they began to think it was round. We’re in a period of time with changes à Renaissance = rebirth. The attitude of the artist was now discovering a new world. They discovered there are different races: Indians (Christopher Colombus brought them), who aren’t Catholics, were they savages?

In Elizabethan’s times it doesn’t matter if you are in love or not because it’s the father who negotiates who you marry. So, Hero who falls in love with Claudio that’s luck, because usually it isn’t like that. It’s important to keep in mind that Hero isn’t asked if she wants to marry Claudio or not. She’s lucky because she actually is.

The Devil does evil by deceiving our senses à we’re seeing Hero having sex with Borachio, but she actually isn’t. Three eye-witnesses prove that he’s the killer, so devil changes your perceptions, manipulates your changes.

He also uses the device of overhearing testimonies to unbreak evil. By overhearing Conrad and Borachio, Hero is innocent. So overhearing evil testimonies might reveal the truth.

Everything you see is not real (Hero and Beatrice are man actors, not actresses), so the audience is all the time deceived.

Shakespeare is the greatest revolutionary in theatre. Change of sexes, roles à part of the humour.

Constant struggle between good and evil à everything is seen in black and white. Life is too complex to reduce everything to good and bad. That’s too boring and Shakespeare wants to be as close to reality as possible. Shakespeare is a modernist.

Hero has to die à part of life, because there’s possibility of rebirth, always cycle of love, life. That’s the myth. Then, some people tend more to EROS (comedy) or to TANATOS (tragedy).

- A character analysis and what does this character represents in the play and relation with other characters. If one character wouldn’t be in the play, what would happen to the plot? How important is the character for the overall play. What does he think?....

2^nd topic àCompare two comedies and concentrate on a topic to compare both comedies.

Romeo and Juliet à The one which has been performed more times, but in Spain is Hamlet. Comedies are very little represented in Spain.

* What the concordance does it helps us in the character analysis à Which words or concepts does he/she uses frequently?.

The Renaissance was important for including music into the theatrical plays. In Elizabethan’s times people didn’t go just to see a play, the way was completely different. You had to go to the other side of the river and you had to be there for 6 – 7 hours. Theatre meant à fun, music, drink, sex, so they spent the whole time inside. The Globe Theatre dinking, wooing… it was a whole illegal world of vice and sin, that is why Puritans hated it. They were used to see comedies. We are going to see how they reacted when they first saw Romeo and Juliet. Harold Pinter loves Shakespeare and has directed his plays.

“Shakespeare in love” is fictitious, made by Harold Pinter. But it’s the closest to reality at that time.

We’ll see lots of references to contemporary sources. There isn’t a lot of music, in Elizabethan’s times there was more.

“Love at first sight” à it’s not a romantic invention, it’s Shakespearean. It’s a trick of the comedy. The meeting of the two eyes it’s the first sexual encounter and we end up married, in bed and creating other generations of ourselves.

There are also economic calculations: do we marry to become richer or poorer? They don’t care if you’re in love or not, they care for the money. Women were obliged by their fathers. Women want to be rich widows, and men don’t think. They have no brain, they just act. It was Queen Elizabeth who decided everything. Shakespeare wanted to be nice to the Queen (and she was not married, she is not going to have a heir to become the king).

In a comedy we always have to interpret things with a sexual tone in a subtle way Shakespeare is always sexual in all his comedies, it is erotic.

Beginning à the king decides to be a bachelor and dedicates his life to study and he convinces his colleagues to be the same and forget about love. But what happens? These girls come around and they fall in love. Type of comedy in which the expression, verse is important (high social class). Way of establishing the decoro of the time à say things in a proper way (iambic pentameter verse). Rime is not necessary. In this play actors use the rhythm of the verse to act; it helps the actor to memorise the text easier and, also that being a poetical meter it is close to natural speech. (You can translate your words into body language). A world in which the perception of the words goes to the senses. They’re in heaven when harmony is achieved à re-establish order (what they hate is chaos), everything should be in its proper place, function.

Comedies à All plays start in chaos and towards the end, order is re-established. In the tragedies is the other way round à from an order (everyone is hat he/she is) we go towards chaos.

Queen Elizabeth was a breaker of the law. She had lots of enemies and few supporters, one of them à Shakespeare. Strong relation developed between Queen Elizabeth – Shakespeare. Officially nobody knew of that relation, and then on the other hand everybody knew that you had to have the favour of famous people to be an actor. Shakespeare had the greatest support and coverage of the major authorities because he did the plays Elizabeth liked. Shakespeare represented the establishment of a Queen who refused having children and being married à anti-Christ (enemy of the Spaniards and the Catholic Church, not catholic beliefs).

Shakespeare’s father was Catholic and he had to live hidden because Anglicans were against Catholics. Shakespeare was the Queen’s favourite but he was all the time criticising his own society. Curious to see a person being the voice of this time but also being the head of his times. People liked being called stupid, retarded, being said “stop killing each other, you’re destroying yourselves…” (Historical plays). They were about contemporary issues. So, everybody in the audience knew who was who (although the actors had different names), they could relate those fake characters to real people.

That’s why some plays are set in Spain à to distance the audience from what he was putting on stage. He also change the time à far remote in history. But they were always referred to present times, to contemporary matters.

The sub-plot (always comedies use them) à “slap-stick” (black and white): clowns, jesters of Elizabeth’s world have developed into “slap-sticks”. He makes the two plots coincide at the end, the cross. It is the sub-plot, the humour in the “slap-stick” it is essential for the comedy itself.

The audience has to know more than the characters on stage. They don’t have the information we have as an audience.

Doubling of identities à twin brothers. The double identities of the twin brothers are minored in the double identities of the servants (twin servants). All the twins are confusing each other and the other one.

We’re in Syracuse (in Greece), thousands of years back in history. Both twins are called Antiphodus (same name) and the servant twins are called both Dromeo.

The characters do not know that they are at the same place à they are travelling around the world looking for his brother and son (the father) not knowing that they’re at the same island.

Whole day till sunset to collect 1000 marks (like a trillion of €) à You want a comedy to be fast rhythm. (To create passion, jealousy you have to take your time but in a comedy, the faster things happen the more confusing it will be).

“Like a drop of water to another drop” (he is looking a drop of water in the ocean, how can he do so?)

Dromeo is the clown, the one who makes us laugh. He is Dromeo of Ephesus but the other Antiphodus.

They are so smart that they outsmart the person they are talking to. Clowns make us laugh because they prove to be smarter than we are.

It is not normal that you cannot trust your own senses à he is seeing Dromeo but he is not the Dromeo he used to be.

(In tragedies the main character anticipates his/her own death. In a comedy there is no suicide. There is sex, love…)

Comedies never end, they are endless. They are based in pro-life (there’s a cycle).

Comedies à not only the sex is important but also the social relations between people.

Attitude of Shakespeare in his comedies à the human race has to reproduce in order to have a future.

Lady McBeth did not have children as well as Elizabeth¡ (So politics were on stage).

The first happy ending has to take place in the third act or if not a tragedy (Much Ado about Nothing Hero has to die in act 3)

Antiphilus has been cuckolded by his wife with his twin brother. The shoe through the window means that she has lost her virginity (although it isn’t true).

à scene 2 à balanced out by the other twin brother à Lousiana and Antiphidus of Siracuse fall in love at first sight. So the twins will marry two sisters.

(Titus Andronicus the most successful Shakespeare plays in Shakespeare’s times).

The moment you change your identity and you become the foreigner, the foreigner is the enemy.

From the shipwreck Viola becomes Cesareo à the sexes are arbitrary. You may look like a woman but as a matter of fact you are a man (also, no women on stage).

The transformation was also helpful because women were hard to represent (there were no girls).

Blending of sexes in the Renaissance. Sexuality and sexual ambiguity was very modern. So, homosexuals were developing the possibility of survival without being killed by sodomitic practices. Sodomy was persecuted.

Through the comedies we can see how Shakespeare was open-minded, very free and very modern.

Fool, jester, clown à entertain their masters who paid for their food. Fools (at court) advisers to the King à the only who was allowed to tell the truth to the King, the smartest person, they can say what everybody thinks but nobody dares to say.

Conflict à Olivia has fallen in love with Cesareo (but the audience know it is Viola and Viola is in love with Olsino and Viola has to woo Olivia in behalf of Orsino).

Falling in love à when you look at the eyes of the other you know he/she is your other half who complements you two like this form a round character.

(All countries are at war with each other and others who arrived to other countries are the enemy).

Shakespeare’s company said to the faithful to the Folio, but the second version is for the cinema, so the text is summarised for the essentials and the rest of it can be summarised with the images.

The cinema version is for everyone but the BBC is like the theatrical performance. BBC à for television. 2 nd. Version à for cinema.

Viola = Cesareo. TV. Version à the whole setting is reduced (camera) and in theatre it is even more reduced.

Asides à internal monologue (thoughts of the character) (the other characters don not hear it)

Eunuch à unsex being, not a man or a woman. When a woman is unsexed then she becomes a man.

Sebastian à Cesareo’s/Viola’s twin brother. He wants to go to Orsino’s castle and try to become a servant to Orsino.

Shakespeare => complexly structured plays (every single piece has to fall to every single part in the right moment)

There’s a token ring à an artefact to develop the possibility of confussion or reconciliation. Also à representation of marriage.

Malvolio = Malquerido, malamado. Shakespeare’s only character in all of his plays that he really seems not to like at all à he puts everything he dislikes into this character. Malvolio was a puritan (puritan’s closed theatres for 60 years)

We have, in Spain, the Inquisition. Shakespeare is mocking the Puritans, he can’t stand them. He never dares to create another character to laugh at Puritanism, because it was very dangerous. (Puritans repressed Shakespeare after his death).

Shakespeare shares the Renaissance approach à improve by experience, by loving, by acting and Puritans live by learning the Bible by heart and by following God’s rules. The Bible is too limited, it doesn’t cover situations people have in real life. So, Puritans are always clashing with reality (disconnecting of real world of real world problems). They stick strictly to daily routines (everything is pre-established).

Shakespeare defines the role of the fool by Viola’s poem. Viola has become Cesareo.

Order vs. Chaos => Chaos was the worst thing in Elizabethan world, people loved order.

Festic sings: “What is love? … => present happiness is present laughter => We want to enjoy our present life, don not look for the future, because we don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, that is what makes life interesting, this chaos, we don not know what is going to happen. Renaissance obsession.

Shakespeare à beauty has to be reproduced. Positive aspect about life à it reproduces.

“Art takes your breath away and is contagious => Characters transformation by the exposure of developed art.

Shakespeare at the end makes us feel sorry for Malvolio’s character à That is unique. Protagonist à Festic vs. Antagonist à Malvolio. They move to a subplot of the comedy.

Subplot à Malvolio has to be fooled with something and in this case is with the letter Maria has written.

Malvolio has sexual desire towards Olivia but he has to repress that as a Puritan he is.

Shakespeare’s subtext à even though Malvolio wants to be virtuous he’s a man and he has his needs (sexual desire)

Disguises in Shakespeare => To be safe in an enemy territory. (When he moved to London he could be “disguised”, nobody knew him and he “disguised” himself as an actor).

(Doubling characters). (You split one character into two ones). Viola and Cesario => 1

At the end what counts is the love relationship between the protagonists. Here we have got 3 weddings. There is always someone who looses in Shakespeare’s comedies. This is much more serious.

Why is Malvolio who looses the most? He wants to become Olivia’s husband à to marry about your status is impossible and he wants to do that (climb the social ladder). So the ambition Malvolio shows is à against religious beliefs (he’s Puritan)[i]

Those people who were irresponsible for their heretic were declared mad. Madness wasn’t considered to be a disease but they thought there were attracted to evil. So, the role of mad people always reaches you about the capacity of tolerance. To break the rules openly à convention of theatre. As long as it happens on stage it isn’t dangerous. It’s like a dream. If you think something evil that’s also a sin but if you dream and you no tell anybody it is not. Shakespeare shows what people dream through acting. People accept to see things on stage that could be a dream.

- Establish differences and similarities between 2 plays (compare some element, topic, issue). Moral issues, authority (talk about characters, sex, politics, background, …)

Difficulty à finding and developing a good topic of comparisons and good sources (if you cannot find something to back you up your opinion is just your opinion). We have got to develop also our own point of view. Something very concrete (the easier the better)

Look at the relation between Katherina and Bianca. Katherina is not as good as she looks, as obedient as her father thinks she is.

The Taming of the Shrew is not only of the wife, Katherina (surface of play) but also Petruchio is tamed as Katherina is. The process is the important thing. How it affects both of them. Both people who get into a relation, that point will affect both of them.

The spectator is going to see the Taming of the Shrew (the process). How Shakespeare is framing the “Taming of the Shrew” into a play-within-the play structure.

Introduction of the play à done by the father: he has got two daughters: the younger one cannot be married before the older one.

He shows public preference for Bianca herself telling her to be out of the market because he has to marry Katherine first.

Difference between practising by herself (educate herself/hiring a private tutor for the ladies to make them a more attractive married objects (just rich people).

Taming of the Shrew à Not also relation between man and women but also about how women are educated for the future.

*Papers on the floor à end of academic year and the students who are there to throw away all their notes, papers, etc…

In the film we are looking at the relation between Bianca and Petruchio. The whole play has been altered. He presents the correct characteristics but not chronologically.

Katherine is presented as a wild animal à They are behaving as a cat (Catarina) and dog (Petruchio). Perfect scheme of opposites.

Conflict between Petruchio and Katherine but also the way of interpreting society. Difference between Baptiste (the father) à society in which power and wealth is very important. So when people see a comedy they like to dream they’re rich.

Men want to dream they can control their wives because in reality women controlled men.

The whole play is a dream à dreams of every man: that men can tame women and that’s impossible. It’s only possible if it’s a dream. Reality is rough. Rude and impossible to live so you go to the theatre and dream about things you cannot have.

Catarina’s speech: Why is it scandalous for feminists? What is her message? “Put their hands under their feet” (too many things to be truth and it’s said by a woman) What is Shakespeare doing? This speech is a dream so men dream for a woman who says those things: that then husband is their Lord, etc…

Comedies use their happy ending to make people laugh at the end but they deal with very serious issues between men and women.

This speech by Katherineà a manifest of a woman in Shakespeare’s time but at the same time she questions things at that time in-questionable. The sovereign she talks about could be the Queen, who men didn’t accept for being a woman and even more she wasn’t married and could not provide inheritance.

People could identify Katherine with the Queen à to tame Queen Elizabeth who was a Shrew.

Shakespeare would make the main characters of his comedies women, brilliant, good language and very realistic aptitude towards life and sex, so that men could dream about them.

The relation between Katherine and Petruchio help other men to deal with women an see and understand reality.

Shakespeare wants to reflect like a mirror the society in which he and the people are living.

In tragedies what happens is that there’s no solution to overcome the problem whereas in the comedies Shakespeare always finds one.

Petruchio tames Katherine as if she were an animal à important thing of this play.

(*Petruchio is not poor and broke, he is just ambitious and wants money, want to marry a rich woman).

People either reject this play as a very misogynist play or the contrary => monologue Katherine plays at the end, you can read it as if Shakespeare defends women and saying the exact opposite of what he’s saying is true. (irony).

Shakespeare puts domestic violence, sexual relations between men and women on stage, to talk about it.

Toque realista à reivindicar la naturaleza de lo humilde, natural (escena cuando rechaza el traje que le han echo a Katherine).

Beso à símbolo del acto sexual (intercambio de fluidos). En el franquismo el beso es la señal/símbolo de que se había consumado el acto sexual por eso se quita de las películas y la misa.

El poder de Petruchio à hasta que ella no se somete a él, no se ha consumado el matrimonio.

Viuda à mujer de 30 años o así en la flor de la vida porque se casaban muy jóvenes con hombres más mayores, impuestos por su padre y que se mueren antes que ellas y les dejan toda la fortuna.

Love at 1st. Sight à Petruchio –Katherine the important point is the reading each person does of the play.

Capacity of change à Possibility of becoming something else, not as it was: “your were poor and you die poor”.

Watching a play is one of the few resources to understand what was going on life.

Obsession of being somebody else => very modern and contemporary. Shakespeare sees the potential of being what you want to be.

Concept that we can be what we want to be. It does not depend on the clothes we are wearing.

The fact that Shakespeare thinks about the idea of marrying somebody you love is totally revolutionary because at these times fathers chose their daughter’s husbands.

Because of the main issue is “dreaming” it has helped to be acted in a lot of genres apart from theatre.

It became popular again in 19^th. C. à contrast to reality: the subconscious eye. Moral issues of a society related with text.

Elizabethan Theatre à used “dream” to act about things that weren’t allowed in reality. Idea that you’re not thinking it but dreaming protects you from sin.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream à Does not carry incest relation but the closest you get to it à cannibalism => Bottom and Titania. Because she’s a fairy queen she can have sexual relation with a donkey. Each of the three different strings, plots we’ll come together at the end.

Every single individual of the audience was exposed to visions which they could understand.

Only the theatrical world could represent things that didn’t happen on reality: all with visions, dreams, …

Frontier between reality and dream world was not clear cut or differentiated as it is today.

We know from the very beginning that with the threat of “death” the comedy will end with “life”.

Nobody asked their daughters who they wanted to marry before but Shakespeare is imposing love to order, what the father represents.

The father is the authority and he has the obligation of selecting a husband she has to marry.

Shakespeare is telling the audience that dreams are lies. All we see on stage are visions and shadows => lies. What we see in dreams sin sinning à things we don’t do in reality.

“Good night unto you all” => why? Does he want us to sleep again? Puck succeeds in making everything go wrong because he makes everybody fall asleep.

The drop of magic which Puck uses in the acts are strategies Oberon tells him to do so that he gets Titania.

in the last one he’s talking about shadows, visions, but in the first he’s saying the opposite: “we’re fairies, we follow darkness like a dream”, so he’s part of the nightmares people have. So, we have a dream which has positive things but also nightmares (repression, torture, domination). So we’ll see protagonists and antagonists.

Double existence of reality => positive aspect of life versus the horrible part which we can’t control.

The best thing is not to dream; at least if they’re nightmares, otherwise you’d have to e in slumbered kind (happiness).

Beginning à moon: if we’re dreaming is because we are asleep at night. 4 days à pace of the play. How many nights? 3 (3 acts of the Greek theatre => problem – conflict/crisis – Catharsis (climax)

Happy end => does not necessarily happen at the end of play in Shakespeare so he breaks the classic rules in that sense.

Play in Greece that has nothing to do with England. Very strong religious accusation à if you have bewitched a child you’re a representation of Satan and you want to take advantage of her and that can cause you death.

If the daughter refuses to marry the man her father has chosen in only because she’s been bewitched = seduced.

Shakespeare ideal: that men bewitched girls with poetry. (Rimes and love-tokens).

If you do it by moonlight is not because you want to marry my daughter but you want to bewitch and seduce her.

That Athenian law does not exist. Shakespeare made it up. Death is the simplest way to solve the problem.

Theseus is a generous authority. He wants to hear both parts: “What say you, Hermia?”

If Shakespeare allows women to answer is because he is very generous (people started calling him “feminist” because of that but he’s not, he’s a modernist).

Hermia is not only disobedience in front of her father but also in front of authority. She interrupts him when he says: “so is Lysander”

Here the half verse is complemented with the next half of the next character. (Shakespeare liked to do that a lot). So the interruption has the speed at the same time because both have to say things together, therefore it is even more highlited how Hermia interrupts.

Hermia asks for forgiveness, she says she has not been bewitched. “I don’t know how I make myself to express my own feelings towards Lysander”.

Shakespeare was thinking in very modern terms. As Harold Bloom says “he was the inventor of the contemporary man”.

The fact that the plays were performed also helped to induce the audiences to dream about things that they hadn’t dreamt had they not been in these performances.

Conflict à very superficial. Like an irrelevant excuse to start a play. Hermia is not obeying her father.

(Hermia en vez de enfadarse con Lysander se enfada con Helena por haberle quitado a Lysander)

2) 2^nd narrativeà forest: Play-within-the play. First time with Hamlet when we see Shakespeare giving instructions: how theatre should be performed and directed.

(Bottom wants to be every single character. The same happens with Shakespeare, he wants to be every single person). Re-read the sub-plot in this way. Shakespeare puts humour in the play within the play à he’s laughing at the whole theatrical experience. Whole dream tremendously sexually loaded in the way they speak, so Shakespeare had to say those things as if it was a dream.

He makes Hermia run after Lysander. Hermia’s nightmare is a nightmare à the opposite of what they desire happens => you can’t see your desires being satisfied = nightmare

Play-within-the play in which Shakespeare is thinking about the difficulties of performing theatre.

Theatrical performances must be also contextualised in the historical moment in which they’re being represented.

Myrth = merry and tragical => Shakespeare plays with paradoxes, with contradictions. Out of chaos the play will take place and order will be restablished.

Bottom’s dream à to be the perfect actor in the perfect play and that can just take place in a play.

A Midsummer Night’s Dreamà The most popular and altered text of Shakespeare. Somehow it is the play which has inspired other authors the most because it is loaded with positive attitudes towards what is life.

What Bottom success in doing à to develop an idea of complete perception of any artistic thing he’s doing.

[i] He cannot show his sexual desires, he commits a sin for which he has to be punished à in front of Venus he shows desire. Madness is the worst there can happen to you.

Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Tania Jiménez Díaz
tajidiaz@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press