The students reviewed the plots of the plays discussed in class in order to go beyond the actual story and delve deeper into the context, meaning and relevance of the scenarios presented by English playwright William Shakespeare.
Main Points Discussed
The Merchant of Venice
The profound antisemitic connotation of The Merchant of Venice is seen in the way Jews are portrait.
Shylock plays the stereotypical greedy Jew, who is spat upon by his Christian enemies, and constantly insulted by them.
His daughter runs away with a Christian and abandons her Jewish heritage.
After being outsmarted by the gentiles, Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity— at which point, he simply disappears from the play, never to be heard of again.
Midsummer Night's Dream
The profound antisemitic connotation of The Merchant of Venice is seen in the way Jews are portrait.
Shylock plays the stereotypical greedy Jew, who is spat upon by his Christian enemies, and constantly insulted by them.
His daughter runs away with a Christian and abandons her Jewish heritage.
After being outsmarted by the gentiles, Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity— at which point, he simply disappears from the play, never to be heard of again.
Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream fits into four acts all of the material that would normally
occupy a five-act play; the main story, climax, and even a period of falling
action are capped by a happy turn of events that would seem to mark the play’s
end.
Shakespeare includes a fifth act. Since
he has already resolved the tensions of the main plot, he treats Act V as a
joyful comic epilogue.
Except for a short closing scene, the act is committed
wholly to the craftsmen’s performance of Pyramus and Thisbe.
In wrapping up the conflict before the last act, Shakespeare affords himself
the opportunity to give the audience one act of pure, uncomplicated comedy.
He
offers a play-within-a-play whose comical rendition caps the cheerful mood of
the Athenians watching the play.
Taming of the Shrew
Disguise in The Taming of the Shrew enables
characters to temporarily change their social positions.
By donning a disguise,
Lucentio transforms himself in the eyes of everyone around him from a young
gentleman into a scholar, and Tranio transforms himself from a servant into an
aristocrat.
Clothing facilitates this effect because outward appearance
controls the perceptions of others: because Tranio appears to be a gentleman,
people treat him as a gentleman. However, as Petruchio says,
no matter what a person wears, his inner self will eventually shine
through—Lucentio, for instance, may appear to be a tutor, but as soon as the
courtship with Bianca develops, he must revert to himself again.
Additionally,
one cannot escape one’s past simply by changing one’s clothes.
People are bound
together in intricate webs and, interwoven as such, cannot escape their
identity.
The webs tend to reveal true selves regardless of attire or intent—a
point that Shakespeare illustrates when Vincentio encounters Tranio in
disguise.
The Tempest
“Toward the History of Caliban” and “Our Symbol, in relation to Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Roberto Fernandez Retamar traces the dialectics of the Caliban versus Ariel—both as symbols of barbaric versus civilized America—and their conflicting links with Prospero, the character who represents the colonizer.
Tracing the evolution of the Caliban’s symbolism, Retamar argues that even as European colonizers have sought to degrade America by assigning it the negative identity of the Caliban, American culture must be derived from its Caliban [cannibalistic] characteristics, which basically means resistance to European colonizing views of the American subject.
Source:
Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America / Roberto Fernández. Retamarhttps://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/THEARCHIVE/FullRecord/tabid/88/doc/1056617/language/en-US/Default.aspx
“Toward the History of Caliban” and “Our Symbol, in relation to Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Roberto Fernandez Retamar traces the dialectics of the Caliban versus Ariel—both as symbols of barbaric versus civilized America—and their conflicting links with Prospero, the character who represents the colonizer.
Tracing the evolution of the Caliban’s symbolism, Retamar argues that even as European colonizers have sought to degrade America by assigning it the negative identity of the Caliban, American culture must be derived from its Caliban [cannibalistic] characteristics, which basically means resistance to European colonizing views of the American subject.
Source:
Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America / Roberto Fernández. Retamarhttps://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/THEARCHIVE/FullRecord/tabid/88/doc/1056617/language/en-US/Default.aspx
Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, the holiday after which the play is named, was celebrated as a festival
in which everything was turned topsy-turvy, with traditional social roles and
behavior temporarily suspended. Are things similarly turned upside down in
Illyria?
Normal situations are turned upside down in
Illyria in several ways:
First, there is the prevalence of disguise and the
ambiguity of gender roles. The central character in this regard is the
protagonist, Viola.
After she arrives on Illyrian shores, she takes on the
disguise of a young man, thus at once concealing her identity and reversing her
normal gender role.
This reversal leads to a most confusing love life, in which
she winds up loving a man and being loved by a woman who do not realize that
she is a woman.
Meanwhile, the play also depicts attempts to alter the established
systems of class and authority. Malvolio, for instance, dreams of marrying
Olivia and gaining authority over his social superiors, such as Sir Toby.
The
servants, whom Malvolio does command, get authority over Malvolio himself by
being able to lock him in the dark room as a madman.
Meanwhile, Malvolio’s
antagonist, Maria, succeeds where he fails by managing to marry Sir Toby and
thereby rising from her common birth to a noble rank. Indeed, Malvolio’s
difficulties seem to stem from his unwillingness to be abnormal enough. He
dreams of escaping the rigid class system that makes him a servant, but
otherwise he is a paragon of respectability and proper behavior.
These
qualities, in the topsy-turvy world of the play, cause his downfall, because
they earn him the enmity of Sir Toby and Maria.
Finally, all these events take
place within a setting in which madness and anarchy are everywhere—Sir Toby’s
drunkenness and disruptive behavior, Malvolio’s supposed insanity, Feste’s
clowning, and the general perplexity caused by the doubling of Viola and Sebastian.
All in all, the play is permeated with a sense of joyful confusion, in which
nothing can be taken for granted. Thus, as expressed by Veronica in class, Twelfth Night is about self-deception
The Winter's Tale
The abrupt shift in mood
after Time announces the passage of sixteen years, and the action shifts to
Bohemia.
Winter comes to an end, and spring enters, bringing with it the
promise of rebirth—and as the seasons change, so the story shifts away from
tragedy and into the realm of fairy tale and romantic comedy.
The imagery of
Act IV is dominated by the flowers that Perdita wears and dispenses as hostess
of the sheep shearing, and the mood of the act is found in the cheerful songs of
Autolycus.
This spirit is eventually brought back to Sicilia, where Act V
undoes much of what seemed so tragic in Act III—Perdita is restored to her
rightful home, Hermione is restored to life, and even Paulina is given a new
husband.
The Winter's Tale, then, ends
the way all winters end—by giving its characters the promise of forgiveness and
a fresh start.
As Christian Zevallos suggested, fate restored Leontes' and Polixenes' fridneship, and brought Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and Paulina together.
Shakespeare provides us with
plenty of clues that Henry is self-consciously performing the part of the good
king, but he doesn’t necessarily give us the sense that Henry is in fact bad.
Henry V, explores the idea
that the qualities that make one a great king are not necessarily morally
admirable ones—what makes a good king is not what makes a good person.
Henry is
willing to kill his former friends coldly and slaughter thousands of French
people in the heat of battle to satisfy the demands of his throne; he must put
his personal feelings second to the requirements of rulership and achieve the
result he desires at any cost.
Henry’s act of placing responsibility for the
war on others helps him to achieve his goals, as it burdens others with the
moral pressure of stopping the war.
This behavior may make Henry seem
unlikable, but it also makes him a great leader and leads directly to the
triumph at Agincourt in Act IV.
Ultimately, the answer to the question may be
that there are no good kings—just effective ones.
Most of the characters in
the play agree that Richard is a bad leader, and we can see why: he mismanages
his country's budget, is out of touch with the common people, creates friction
among his relatives, and leaves the country at exactly the wrong moment.
On the
other hand, Bolingbroke succeeds in returning from exile, building good foreign
relations, obtaining the loyalty of Richard's noblemen, and winning the love of
the common folk.
He is also a plain-spoken man of action, in comparison to
Richard's poetic virtuosity and ineffectiveness in practical matters.
We see
them explicitly contrasted in several scenes: for example, when York recounts
the ride into the city of London, during which the people cheered Bolingbroke
but dumped dust and rubbish on Richard's head (V.ii.4-40).
It is, of course,
ironic that the two are first cousins.
The conspirators manage to kill
Caesar, the physically infirm man, who is deaf in one ear, probably epileptic,
and aging; indeed, it may be Caesar’s delusions about his own immortality as a
man that allow the conspirators to catch him off guard and bring about his
death.
In many ways, however, Caesar’s faith in his permanence proves valid:
the conspirators fail to destroy Caesar’s public image, and Antony's words to the crowd serve to burnish
Caesar’s image.
Additionally, the conspirators fail to annihilate the idea that
Caesar incarnated: that of a single supreme leader of Rome.
Death does not diminish Caesar’s influence on matters or his
presence in the minds of those who loved him.
Caesar seems to speak from the
grave when Antony reads his will, stirring the people to rebellion. Cassius and
Brutus attribute their deaths to Caesar when they fall in battle.
Perhaps most
important, Antony begins to call Octavius “Caesar” when Octavius starts to
display an undeniable authority in military strategizing.
This appellation has
a double significance: it reveals both Octavius’s future as the bearer of
Caesar’s personal legacy and the metamorphosis of Caesar the man into Caesar
the institution.
Even with his death, Caesar has initiated a line of Roman
emperors, ending the era of Brutus’s beloved republic
The attraction between Romeo and Juliet is immediate and
overwhelming, and neither of the young lovers comments on or pretends to
understand its cause.
Each mentions the other’s beauty, but it seems that
destiny, rather than any particular character trait, has drawn them together.
Their love for one another is so undeniable that neither they nor the audience
feels the need to question or explain it.
As Alessandro D'Avina would say, the heart in not controllable....
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