Shakespeare. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.

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Shakespeare

Transcript of Shakespeare. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.

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Shakespeare Shakespeare

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Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary

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Theatre in the Middle Ages

The Legacy of Plato (428-347)

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Everyman

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Everyman

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Everyman

Main character: Everyman

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Everyman

Main character: EverymanEveryman’s Journey: Life

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Everyman

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

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Everyman

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

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Everyman

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

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Everyman

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

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The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of the World

Observational Science

Galileo (1564-1642)

William Harvey (1578-1657)

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The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of

the World

Observational SciencePainting (Invention of Perspective)

Giotto, The Presentation of the Virgin

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The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of

the World

Observational SciencePainting (Invention of Perspective)

Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa

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The Renaissance

The Rediscovery of

the World

Observational SciencePainting (Invention of Perspective)Theatre

Jean-Baptiste Moliere (1622-1673)

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The Globe Theatre: Then

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The Globe Theatre: Now

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Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and

Nothing”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and

Nothing”

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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 than 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.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

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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.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

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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. 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.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

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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. 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.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

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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. 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.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

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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.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

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Men of Genius are great as certain etherial Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect—but they have not any individuality, any determined Character. . . . I am certain of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth . . . The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth. . . . Several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainty, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. . . . What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. . . .

John Keats

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A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no identity—he is continually inform[ing[ and filling some other body. . . . It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children.John Keats (from various letters of 1817 & 1818)

John Keats

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xxxxxxxx

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Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998): winner of seven Academy Awards, including “Best Picture”

Trailer

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“Small Latin and less Greek”

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Did Shakespeare write his plays?

Ignatius Donnelly, former governor of Minnesota and primary source of the Someone Else Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays theory

Sir Francis Bacon

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Shakespeare Timeline

1100 AD: Norman Invasion of the British Isles, resulting in the birth of the English language, a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate

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Shakespeare Timeline

1100 AD: Norman Invasion of the British Isles, resulting in the birth of the English language, a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate1450: The Gutenberg Bible published and the print era begins

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Shakespeare Timeline

1100 AD: Norman Invasion of the British Isles, resulting in the birth of the English language, a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate1450: The Gutenberg Bible published and the print era begins1558-1603 Queen Elizabeth on the throne of England

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Shakespeare Timeline

1100 AD: Norman Invasion of the British Isles, resulting in the birth of the English language, a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate1450: The Gutenberg Bible published and the print era begins1558-1603 Queen Elizabeth on the throne of England1564 Shakespeare is born

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Shakespeare Timeline

1100 AD: Norman Invasion of the British Isles, resulting in the birth of the English language, a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate1450: The Gutenberg Bible published and the print era begins1558-1603 Queen Elizabeth on the throne of England1564 Shakespeare is born1590-1613: Shakespeare active on the London stage as actor, director, playwright

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Shakespeare Timeline

1100 AD: Norman Invasion of the British Isles, resulting in the birth of the English language, a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate1450: The Gutenberg Bible published and the print era begins1558-1603 Queen Elizabeth on the throne of England1564 Shakespeare is born1590-1613: Shakespeare active on the London stage as actor, director, playwright1616: Shakespeare dies

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Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove:O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,That looks on tempests and is never shaken;It is the star to every wandering bark,Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeksWithin his bending sickle’s compass come;Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error, and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

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Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date.Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed;And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips' red;If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.I have seen roses damasked, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks;And in some perfumes is there more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound;I grant I never saw a goddess go;My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

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Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.In me thou see'st the twilight of such dayAs after sunset fadeth in the west;Which by and by black night doth take away,Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,As the deathbed whereon it must expire,Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

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The Great Chain of Being

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The Great Chain of

Being

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The Great Chain of Being

A mindset or weltanschauung (as the Germans call it): a way of looking at the world taken to be common senseThe GCOB and the Copernican Revolutionmicrocosm/macrocosmThe Cosmos is a hierarchy

The MineralThe VegetativeThe AnimalThe Human

Order must be maintained no matter what