Shakespeare Course TAU

Shakespeare
Lesson 1 – 08.03.15
Shakespeare's Authorship and the Canon

The way to engage with Shakespeare is to watch or hear a play before reading it.
Who or what is Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Shakespeare is not only a person but turned into a cultural global phenomenon and
therefore the question is "who or what".
The authorship question

There was a man called William Shakespeare. He was born into a low class family,
received basic education, was a theater man. He lived at London from 1580's and
forwards. He signed his name on the plays.
What is it about Shakespeare that seems to endure time and capture people's
imagination throughout the glob?
Shakespeare was not considered high class in his own time.
It was People whom fascinated him, human subjectivity and human interior.
Anecdotal Shakespeare
“ Yes, trust them [players] not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our
feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as
well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you [university wits]; and, being
an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a
country” Robert Greene, Groatsworth of Wit (1592)
"And though hadst samll Latin, and less Greek, from thence to honour thee, I would
not seek for names; but call forth thundering Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles to
us, Pacuvius, Accius, him of Corodva dead, to life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
and shake a stage… He was not of an age, but for all time" Ben Jonson’s “To the
Memory of my beloved, the author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left
us”
Recommended biographies and historical studies of Shakespeare

 Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador, 1997, 2008(
 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare (Pimlico, 2004)
 Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (Vintage, 2006)
 James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Faber and
Faber, 2005)
In what sense was Shakespeare an author

 The canon includes 36/8/9 plays, the sonnets, and several long narrative
poems
 External evidence: the 1623 folio
 Internal evidence: style and quality, stylometrics
 Historical and circumstantial evidence: conditions of writing and print
publication
Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

 The question of collaboration
From stage to print
 Performance always predated publication, sometimes by several years
 Behind every performance there was a manuscript, also known as a
‘promptbook’, or ‘playbook’. No such manuscript survives for any of
Shakespeare’s canonical plays
 Behind a playbook there could be any number of manuscripts, including the
author’s rough draft, revisions, and alternate versions
Quotes about Shakespeare

‘I do not think that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he
perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?’
‘I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him’
‘I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare's admirers. I think the trouble is that,

in western culture at least, he stands alone, & so, one can only place him by placing
him wrongly’
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Lesson 2 – 11.03.15
Shakespeare Language: rhetoric, poetry and the human

We will focus on Shakespeare's language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about Shakespeare:

‘I do not think that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he
perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?’
This saying about Shakespeare is a tautology (‫ –)חזרה שלא לצורך על רעיון‬because the
very meaning of the word poet is someone who creates with language.
One of the biggest questions about Shakespeare is what Shakespeare is more: a

poet or a playwright. You can either teach Shakespeare as literature or theater, this
is a false distinction created by the 19th century Victorians.
For Elizabethans, theater was verbal, it was poetry. They went to the theater to hear
plays. Action was transferred in the speech. Shakespeare's characterization, his
understanding of character, of action and of drama is poetic, is rhetorical. He
developed his theater from a tradition of rhetorical declarative drama. This form
flourished in the second half of the 16th century in London. But Shakespeare was
unique even in this tradition. Early Shakespeare wrote always in rhyme. The more
that he developed, the speeches were written in blank verse. That's a part of
Shakespeare development of characterization.
Marlowe developed a theater that had outrageous villains character, bombastic long
speeches and dramatic moments.
Where Marlowe ends in 1593 with his murder, Shakespeare begins. For two years
Shakespeare and Marlowe were close rivals. First Shakespeare imitated Marlowe,
afterwards Marlowe imitated him. The death of Marlowe released Shakespeare's
talent and allowed him to challenge the limits of Marlowe's theater. Those limits were
rhetorical, language and poetry.
Language, syntax and grammar
How to approach Shakespeare's language when we listen read and watch the plays.
Shakespeare's language seems to be remote and inaccessible for a modern reader.
The difficulty in Shakespeare's language is not the words but the way he puts them
together, because its poetry. It has nothing to do with historical remoteness.
Since English at that time was a free language, it was also seen for the many cultural
elites as barbarian and vulgar. The elites considered Latin as high language.
Latin was the language of the great poets of the roman era.
English was rather poor language in terms of its vocabulary.
One of the challenges for a poet like Shakespeare is that many new words had to be
invented. As a result Shakespeare invented and created new words. It is estimated
that he is credited for inventing up to 5000 new words.
Shakespeare created new words by taking a verb or an adjective and attach them to
a noun or vice versa. Additionally, he created compound words. Shakespeare's plays
were the first time these new words appeared in print.

For example: birthplace: he took the words birth and place and attched them
together. At Shakespeare's age the censorship forbade to curse on stage.
Blasphemy was forbidden as well. Shakespeare had to invent new curses for his
characters.
Reasons for the remoteness of Shakespeare's English

1. Words which became obsolete - are not in use any more. For these words we
need to use annotated edition.
2. Words that have stayed in the language but their meaning have changed: For
example weeds means clothes, clown means an innocent child.
3. Words that were loaded in meaning in Shakespeare's time: For example the
word fool can mean innocent and very wise, could mean a small child. The
word brave was used as a verb, to brave meant to be rude.
The most important unit of meaning in Shakespeare's language is the single word,
not the whole sentence. Today we are used to understand everything we read
syntactically, understand the meaning from the whole sentence, and not word by
word. In Shakespeare everything works in smaller units of meaning. Every word
packs a world of meaning, the same case of poetry. This is why we have to be very
alert and listen carefully.
Shakespeare was obsessed with puns, words games. This is where the humor of his
comedy is. Shakespeare's comedies are not funny in the modern sense of the word.
They can have funny moments, but the comedy is almost always verbal. Games of
words, puns, like fireworks moving crosses speeches, those are the hardest for
modern readers to follow is they don't know the slang, the added meaning packed
into words and so. In many cases a single word in the same speech can change the
entire meaning of the speech, or add an entire dimension to the character speaking.
For example: the word sun/son. He creates a pun with the word sun that can be
interpreted as the sun or son, and has a Christian connotation to the son of God.
When you hear the word on the stage you can't know how it is written.
Examples
'Now is the winter of out discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York'
(Richard III) Can mean the sun of the summer or the son of York, the duke of York.
The pun alerts the audience to the speaker's wit, to the fact that you need to watch
out from this character because he's always equivocates (‫)נוקט בלשון דו משמעית‬.
Richard III is a villain, a kind of guy that always says something but can mean
something else, deceive his victims in double meaning of language. Richard III is the
most notorious character Shakespeare ever created, but Richard III never actually
kills anyone. He uses his rhetorical crafts to get his victims murdered.
'Claudius: How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

Hamlet: Not so my Lord I am too much in the sun' (Hamlet, 1.2.66-7)
Hamlet is too much in the sun to being in the shadow or he is too much the son of his
father, too much in the role of being his father's son.
'I have wedded her, not bedded her; and sworn to make the 'not' eternal'
"knot" or "not"

'Well, your imprisoned shall not be long: I will deliver you, or else lie for you'
(Richard III) If you miss this pun you miss the entire meaning of this line. Richard is a
villain. He wants to become king and conspires against his brother. He arranges for
his brother to get arrested for a crime and a potential treason. When his brother goes
to tower Richard pretends to be horrified. He comes to his brother and reassures him
with this sentence. In the sentence there is a tragic irony.
Richard is using the phrase "I will lie for you" which can mean:
1. I will take the responsibility instead of you
2. I will lie
'And now I will unclasp (‫ )לפתוח‬a secret book,

And to your quick-conceiving discontents
I'll read you matter deep and dangerous' (I Henry IV).
The meaning is that one person says to another that he will tell him a few secrets.
The metaphor is of open or closed book.
Discontent – in modern English it means 'unhappy', but content is also ‫תוכן‬.
The metaphor suggests that this sentence is not only about happiness but about
substance, being substantial in one's own life, having content.
Another reason way Shakespeare is inaccessible for us is that Elizabethans had no

sense of psychological realism. It was all about the rhetoric and not about seeing
situations that can be psychological realistic.
For example: Richard III killed Ann's father-in-law and husband. Nevertheless, he
seduces her to marrying him over the corps of her father in law the king. The
seduction scene is rhetorically but makes no psychological sense. The Elizabethans
didn’t have that sense of realism. It's a verbal seduction.
Shakespeare's ability to poetically create images that resonates so many nuances

and associations is his greatness. It helps Shakespeare mold and create complex
characters with rich inner world. Characters in Shakespeare exist as a function of the
language they speak. In his speeches there is very limited action, the action manifest
itself through the words.
For example: Henry IV, the king is suffering from insomnia because of a guilty
conscience. In a long monologue he invites the audience to look into his tormented
mind. The imagery helps to enhance the king's inner turmoil.
"How many thousands of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep...
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"
BBC the hollow crown adapting 4 plays of Shakespeare

General concepts, themes that repeat in Shakespeare's plays
These are some of the main thematic concern that reappears in Shakespeare's play,
certain imaginative preoccupations, things that Shakespeare always seems to be
interested in thinking about the world and people in the world.
Shakespeare always recycles ideas and concepts but never repeats them. He treats
the same concepts differently. He Change his mind and position, was probably a
person of moods.
Perspectivism was the main concerns that always seemed to be on Shakespeare's

mind when he wrote his plays. The Renaissance period was a period in which there
was a radial destabilization of the medieval concepts of the world and man's place in
it, a radical shift in the way the individual self was perceived. It occurred for variety of
reasons: the protestant reformation, rise of nation-state, capitalism, rise of the
bourgeois class, the discovery of America and more. These caused a change in
perspective, looking at the world from an anthropocentric point of view, where man is
at the center of the creation, and at the center of multiple faceted points of view. This
was not an idea unique to Shakespeare, its presented in Renaissance humanism in
general, one of the most direct results of something like the protestant reformation
that completely destabilized notion of authority, repositioning the individual at the
center of this contested authority. It led into a widespread sense of skepticism.
Shakespeare's plays explore perspectivism from a human point of view on a wide

scale. Shakespeare never takes a monolithic position. He often explores ideas,
ideologies, faith, and beliefs through individual perspectives. He often plays with
Shakespearean perspectivism, he explores in one play multiple and often opposed
perspectives. He does that by mirroring characters or situations. Often He'll write one
character in one area voicing an idea which will be echoed by a character in the
opposite world to him. For example: In I Henry IV, he mirrors high characters
(aristocrats) and low characters (the criminals). What is it for a king to say that there
is no justice in the world because everything is relative, and what it is like for a
prostitute to say the same sentence. They don't mean the same thing. Once they are
echoed, interact with one another, they create effects. These effects are one of
deepening complexity, not of flattening out by ideology.
In general Shakespeare always uses perspectivism to humanize complicate

emblematic universal concepts. Every time that Shakespeare takes an abstract and
general idea, like ideas about love, relationship, political truth, philosophical truth, he
immediately particularizes it into the lives of immediate human beings. Shakespeare
never preaches to his audience. He never takes an ideological stand, never takes a
position. He takes ideas and gives them to characters. Because the characters are
flawed, complex and multifaceted human characters, the ideas they bear become
equally complex. He was interested about people and the ideas they had. Not about
ideas themselves. For example he never had anything to say about love, but had
many things to say about lovers.

Emblem is an image that has a verbal sentence attached to it, usually an allegorical
saying. Emblem books were popular in Elizabethan period. Emblems work both on
language and image. Shakespeare is a very imagistic poet. He often evokes images
and concepts. Many of the famous emblems of the period have been worked into the
plays as images and metaphors.
Jacques monologue from "As you like it"
"All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…"
The monologue begins with a very common philosophical existential idea in the
period, moves towards a universalization of an emblem: Man as an actor in the
theater and the world as a stage. There were many emblems of what was known as
the "teatro mundi", the world as a stage. Shakespeare takes the universal
emblematic power of the image and introduces perspective into it by humanizing the
emblem and making it very specific with human details.
Another general and well known idea he introduce is that a man's life is divided into 7
ages. In this case as in the "world as a stage", Shakespeare takes this idea and
humanizes it. What make this speech powerful are the human realistic details. The
pathos here is because we are forced to think about life very painfully because of the
details.
Shakespeare was an actor and always looked at the world through the main
metaphor of "the world as a stage". It was a common metaphor in the philosophy of
the period, but for Shakespeare that was never a philosophy, but organically true for
human life. How does Shakespeare manage to be universal and interesting? Usually
for something to become universal it has to be emblematic and reductive, but
Shakespeare manages to be universal without ever once losing the colorful
immediacy of the particular. That is his unique power.

Lesson 3 – 15.03.15
General concepts, themes that repeat in Shakespeare's plays
Another main theme that keeps coming up in Shakespeare's plays is the notion of
identity and the self, the question of who we are in relation to the world around us, in
relation to other human beings, and what does it mean to be a human being if it's not
based on relationships. Identity in Shakespeare's time was one of those
Renaissance topics which were subject to intense renegotiation in this period. Once
the medieval certainties were put into question individuals had to renegotiate and
struggle with the question of who they are and how to define their own sense of
identity.
Italian Renaissance Neo-Platonism which is mostly Roman-Catholic there was a

tendency to think of man as a microcosms, man is at the center of God's creation,
man is the epitome (‫ עיקר‬,‫ )תמצית‬of that creation. According to that belief, man has
reason and rationality, man's reason is his god given spark, which makes him a
noble being. Moreover, man has absolute free will. Free will is crucial because this is
what God gave man as a gift. Man exploited that gift and caused the fall, but that gift
has remained as a part of man's rationality. Therefore it depended on man to choose
whether to embrace his rational side, study philosophy and become one with the
angles, or surrender to lust and become one of the animals.
Luther, Calvin and the Protestants said that man has no free will, he has forfeited his
free will when he lost it after the fall. Man is a worthless miserable creature of sin. He
can do nothing out of his own free will that will result in anything but more corruption,
accept through the grace of God. There is an unconditional irresistible grace of God.
Man is the center of the creation but he is in the center of a corrupted sinful creation.
Elizabethan found it very hard to find the middle between these two extremes.
Between the middle of these two perspectives is an area of deep anxiety of not
knowing, which led to skepticism. The model for Shakespeare was the French
philosopher Monten who was very important for Shakespeare particularly in his
articulation of a skepticism that says: "All I know is that I don't know". One can
believe in God but can believe that he is very limited in his ability to know. There is a
kind of separation between faith and reason.
"The Comedy of Errors"
This is a very early Shakespeare play, an adaptation of one of Plautus's Roman

comedies. In this play Shakespeare introduces and plays with the notion of identity
and self. There is a game on mistaken identities. In the middle of the play there is a
lyrical moment where Antipholus of Syracuse (The twin brother of Antipholus of
Ephesus), carries a monologue after he comes to a strange city and finds out that
there is a person who looks like him.
"I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself."
A common image that repeats in Shakespeare is of identity as a liquid, related to

water, melting, flowing, never fixed. The idea is that one has to loose himself in order
to find himself. Even today, our identity is defined by the way we relate to others
around us. Out identity is defined by where we were born, our gender, who are
parents were, the society in which we are born, how much money do we have, what
other people think of us, the way other people position us in a certain network of
ideas and so on. For example: I'm a woman, a Jew, etc…
Many of Shakespeare's plays explore the notion of identity that collapse, breaks
down, precisely when these social markers which define identity: gender, social
position, parentage, economical situation collapse or become subject to radical
destabilization through perspective. For example: In Shakespeare's comedies there
is a notion of women dressing up as men to find themselves in a situation of true
love. In "The taming of the Shrew" Kate is said to be a shrew by all the men around
her, because she refuses to obey her father's will. Is Kate a shrew because of the
way she behaves or because she is said by others to be a shrew? The comedy is her
wonderful complex relationship she develops with the one man who plays her game
at her level, to her, not to anyone around her.
"Richard II"
Richard II is one of Shakespeare's earliest and purest tragedies. The tragedy of

Richard II as a king is that his identity is imposed. He finds that he is playing the role
of a king rather than being a king. He doesn't even know what his true identity is.
One of the biggest tragedies for Richard in the play is when power is taken away
from him, when the crown Is taken away from him, and he is left with nothing, his
identity is stripped away from him and he doesn't know what he is now. In one of the
great painful moments he says:
"O that I were a mockery king of snow,

Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water-drops!
Good king, great king, and yet not greatly good,
An if my word be sterling yet in England,
Let it command a mirror hither straight,
That it may show me what a face I have,
Since it is bankrupt of his majesty"
The notion of identity as fluid is transferred both in the phrase king of snow and in the
line To melt myself away in water-drops. There is a pun on sun-son.
Richard goes through a frightening moment where he tries to understand who or
what he is, completely disconnected from social conventions.
"King Lear"
King Lear is stripped from his honor, name, title, ways of living by his two ungrateful
daughters.
Doth any here know me? This is not Lear:
Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied--Ha! waking? 'tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?

One can say that Shakespeare's plays are Christian plays, which inhabit a Christian
world. To what extant was Shakespeare a Christian believer is unknowable an
irrelevant, but it's undeniable that Shakespeare knew the bible very well. On the one
hand there are many references to the bible, particularly to Paul epistles in their
protestant way, and on the other hand there are a lot of imagery that would suggest
Catholic leanings. There are Christian thematics that keeps coming up in the plays:
 Teleology - the notion of origins - providence (‫)השגחה עליונה‬, fate, free will,
cause and effect.
 Soteriology - The theology of salvation - the idea that Jesus died on the
cross in order to redeem human beings. Redemption, salvation, charity, love,
forgiveness
 Eschatology – Theology of the end, the apocalypse - Damnation,
disintegration, nihilism, death, eternity.
The reason why Shakespeare's treatment of these notions is always agreed with
people in different cultures is that Shakespeare deals with these matters no as a
Christian, but as a humanist, philosopher, existentialist. He takes concepts that might
be Christian in origins and often develops them in a nonspecifically religious context.
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Was Shakespeare more a theater person or a poet?

We said that that is an illegitimate question because he was both at the same time.
Poetry for him was the way he did theater, and theater was the cause and venue that
allowed him to do poetry on the stage.
The writing of the sonnets

There were periods in which because of a plague that used to ravage London every
few years, the theaters closed. The authorities decided to close the theater to not
allow the plague to spread. Shakespeare during those times had to earn a living, so
he wrote poetry for patrons, just like all the university wits of London at the time.
It seems that Shakespeare begin to work on the sonnets in the mid 1590's. They
were dedicated to one of his patrons.
In order to become a great poet at the time, the genre to master was the sonnet. The
way to do so was to write a sequence of sonnets and circulate them in manuscript,
not in print. That is probably what Shakespeare did, but because of his fame as
playwright, some of his sonnet got leaked, published without his permission.
Shakespeare was deeply upset by that, and forced to publish his sonnets in a book
called "Shakespeare's Sonnets" at the beginning of the 17th century.
The sonnets are complex, difficult, witty, and appear to be one area of his writing
where he was at his most personal, but even when he was personal, the sonnets are
very hard to pin down biographically. The sonnets never enjoyed the vogue that his
plays did, they were not widely read. By the time that they were published the taste
for poetry had changed, the metaphysical style of Donne became popular. The
sonnet tradition was dying out. By the Victorian period during which there was a great
revival of them, there were still deep discomfort about the sonnets because it was felt
that they were too sexual, misogynistic and homosexual.
In this course we will look at the sonnets as a way into the plays. Many of the
concern that we outlined appears in the sonnets: perspectivism, universalism,
individual point of view, identity, gender confusion and imagery.

The basic facts
 Shakespeare wrote a total of 156-157 sonnets.
 The first 126 sonnets are known as the sequence of "the beautiful youth",
address to a beautiful man who is much younger then the speaker. The
inference (‫ )מסקנה‬that these sonnets are all addressed to a man is a result of
the narrative sequence when you put them together. Many of the sonnets in this
sequence are gendered obscure. The inference that the addressee is male is a
result of reading the sonnets in a sequence that tells a story. The sonnets tell a
story of an ongoing complex relationship.
 From sonnet 127 to the end is the sequence known as "the dark lady", the
sonnets addressed to a woman who clearly has dark hair. The lady is not the
conventional white blond paragon (‫ )מופת‬of Christian Petrarchan beauty, the
lady is sexually available, sexually active, a flesh and blood person with whom
the speaker has a very up and down complex sometimes violent but passionate
relationship. Many of the sonnets that weave the sequence together seems to
suggest that it is actually a love triangle. There are sonnets addressed to the
young man where the speaker is accusing the young man on going off with the
dark lady.
 The sonnets seem to be very visceral and particular in their human intensity, but
yet abstract in the sense that they don't seem to be talking about a specific
person, but about a situation.
 Sonnets are by definition dramatic forms of poetry, poems in 14 lines, which by
definition are argumentative. They take a situation, a thought, idea or argument,
and dramatize it. They capture moments of life.
 The structure of a Shakespeare sonnets is deeply permeable, technically 14
line, usually split into an octet, a volta and a sextet, with a rhymed couplet at the
end turning the argument. Sometimes he uses this technique and sometime
not. Shakespeare anew in this tradition a different rhyme scheme in each
quartet. This is a way to suggest that each quartet has a different idea.

Sonnet number 1
This sonnet doesn't have an octet sextet division, no volta. This sonnet is clearly
addressed to a man.
"From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender (‫ לא מנוסה‬,‫ נאיבי‬,‫ )צעיר‬heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl (‫)להיות קמצן או כינוי חיבה‬,
mak'st waste in niggarding (‫)קמצנות‬
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee"
The genre of the sonnet is the genre of advice: the speaker, the wiser older man, is
giving the younger man advice, what to do with his life, not to waste it. He says that
it's not enough to be beautiful because beauty fades; if he wants to preserve his
beauty he needs to have children that will look like him.
The Elizabethan believed that the woman had no part to play in the reproduction
process, that they were only the receptors; a common metaphor was that a woman is
wax in which the man imprints his seal.
The tone of the speaker seems to be upset, frustrated, because clearly the young
man is not listening to his advice. The drama of the poem occurs in the speaker's
mind. There is no dialog here. It's a spilling of the speaker's frustration on the page,
addressing as in a letter words of advice to someone who he hopes will listen to
them, but he knows he will not. Many believe that it is likely that Shakespeare wrote
sonnet number 1 last or at the end and placed it at the beginning, as a way of
introducing the whole sonnet sequence.
The sonnet works around the notion of abundance, on the one hand energies which
create, and on the other hand energies which retracts from creativity, reduce it to
starvation, famine, waste. This is a sonnet the in microcosms already encapsulate all
of the themes that Shakespeare always comes back to:
1. Movements of increase and decrease – although in this sonnet, increase rhymes
with decease. It is much more powerful then decrease. Either the movement of
increasing or nothing, utter nihilation,
2. Ripening and dying
3. Beauty and immortality
4. Memory vs. Oblivion (‫)שכחה‬
5. Movements of expansion vs. contraction
6. Inner world, the eyes which are the windows of the soul. The eyes of the spirit vs.
outward, the show, what you are to the world and what you are to yourself.
7. Self-consumption vs. dispersal

First quartet
"From fairest creatures we desire increase"

Shakespeare starts with the biblical injunction to procreate – ‫פרו ורבו‬.
It's the injunction of the human race to procreate, but this is not what he says. He
revises the concept and talking about the general tendency, people want to procreate
from beautiful people. The line is not necessarily biological, it's conceptual: increase
here is not just physical, but also artistic and aesthetic.
"That thereby beauty's rose might never die,"
Beauty's rose is mostly feminine in the courtly love tradition; it’s a way of male
discourse to talk about feminine beauty. Shakespeare ascribes categories of
feminine beauty to a male addressee.
"But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender (‫ לא מנוסה‬,‫ נאיבי‬,‫ )צעיר‬heir might bear his memory"
This line introduces the notion of children and inheritance, death, memory and
legacy.
The first quartet begins with a biblical platitude that already moves towards the
general and the aesthetic. Shakespeare is connecting artistic procreativity with
biological procreativity. He writes the sonnets, the young man should have children.
This is an idea that will reoccurred in many of the sonnets to follow, like in sonnet 18.
The first quartet introduces an abstract philosophical proposition. We will see in many
of the sonnets the way Shakespeare changes tones between philosophical, anger,
personal, reflective and so on between even quartet.
Second quartet
While the first quartet begins with a general platitude (‫" )אמירה שטחית‬this is how the
world is", the second quartet perspective shifts to the personal.
"But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes"

The word "But" is very strong. The "But" of line 5 echoes the "but" of line 3 and
suggests the negative of the logical proposition, now becomes a negative admonition
(‫)תוכחה‬. Everything hinges on the word contracted. It’s a pun of double meaning.
The speaker is saying two things:
1. Contract as in marriage contract: You are too selfish, obsessed with self-love,
instead of getting married to a woman and having children you are married to
yourself.
2. Contract as in Contraction ‫צמצום‬: By being married to yourself you are contracted
to thy own eye, this is a notion that will repeat in many of the sonnets, the notion of
distillation, distilling ideas or concepts into essences. He says to the young man thwt
everything about him is distilled to his bright eyes. The eyes are burning with an inner
fire which make them sparkle and beautiful to the speaker.
"Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel"
There is a tension here between organic imagery of flowers, eyes, gaze and looking,
and inorganic imagery of inner burning. The metaphor that comes up by inner
burning is a candle. The metaphor of the candle was emblematic, commonplace,
recurs in numerous theological philosophical Christian context. This is an image that
often recurs in Shakespeare for the soul, image of mortality. In the sonnet, the image
of the candle symbols the egotistical self-love which makes the young man so
beautiful as that which precisely consumes him.
"Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel"
When he says that the young man is cruel to himself he actually means that he is
cruel to the speaker, he projects the notion of cruelty.

Third quartet
"Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament, And only herald to the gaudy spring "
Here he introduce for the first time the word "world", bringing this again to an
emblematic universal perspective. This image about the spring and flower occurs in
many of the sonnets. The speaker is saying to the youth that he is so beautiful that
he carry the hope for spring in his steps. The intensification of the false motion, of
hyperbole (‫)הפרזה‬, is meant to intensify the siriousness but also a Tongue-in-cheek
(humorously or not seriously intended) aspect of the final quartet of the sonnet.
Within thine own bud buriest thy content"
Here again is the pun on the word "content": 1.Satisfaction , 2.Substance
The speaker is saying to the youth that he buries his chance of being happy, but also
the essence of who he is. This is a bud that is not going to become a flower. There is
a threat of mortality and death here.
"And, tender churl (‫)להיות קמצן או כינוי חיבה‬, mak'st waste in niggarding (‫")קמצנות‬
Waste is spending and also total decimation (‫)קטל‬.
The couplet
Always look in a Shakespeare couplet for the two words that tie the couplet together,
usually it's the two words that repeat in both lines.
"Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee"
Glutton is a Christian imagery of the seven deadly sins, returning the sonnet to
theological discourse about what's right in the eyes of God.
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee – You will be destroyed by the grave, the
grave that waits for you, that is going to destroy all of us, and you yourself.
The word which repeats in the couplet is "world":
1. The first "world" is universal, church's perspective, the world as is should be, God
intended.
2. The second "world" is within apostrophe and possession to eat the world's due,
what the world deserves to have. The world without you in it. That kind of world is a
lesser world, of poverty.

Lesson 4 – 18.03.15
Sonnet 20
Footnote: The sonnet is very famous and much analyzed. It was used in the 19th
century as a proof that Shakespeare was a heterosexual, as an effort to align
Shakespeare with the Victorian morals.
Sonnet 20 is a joke. It deals with the question of gender and sexuality, a theme that
comes up a lot in Shakespeare's plays.
Although the sonnet is cleanly addressed to a man, it contains a famous grammatical
play (‫)משחק דקדוקי‬. Even when English language requires the speaker to commit to
the addressee's gender, Shakespeare write the famous phrase "master-mistress"
and doesn't commit to the gender. That's part of the sonnet's joke.
"Master-Mistress" - This is not just an equivocation (‫ )ביטוי דו משמעי‬about gender; he
is not only saying to the addressee "you are both a man and a woman of my
fantasies in one". It's also a play on the word "master" – loyalty, fidelity and control.
Master Mistress also means active-passive: who is in control, who is being
controlled, who is the master and who is the mistress in this relationship.
The sonnet is a light hearted thought process of the speaker. It begins by giving
compliments, praising the addressee of the sonnet for his beauty, and at the end
turning it around to talk about what it is about their relationship that remains
impossible. The sonnet is very vulgar.

First quartet
"A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;"
The speaker is trying to rationalize his attraction to another man.
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted

This line relates to the idea of hue as makeup. The speaker says to the young man
that his face is like a women's face, painted by nature, as oppose to women who
have to put on makeup to become beautiful. This relates to the renaissance notion
that women are exterior and fickle, but also to a Renaissance anxiety about the
falseness of external appearance. That's why Elizabethan society had strictly
regulated sumptuary laws (dress codes). Therefore the use of the word "painted" is
very important.
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion

1. Referring to the addressee in a multiple gendered way
2. Suggesting that what being contested (‫ )להאבק על‬is the power in the relationship:
There are both men and both women? Which one of them is the woman and which is
the man? Who is in control? Presumably, if the addressee is more like a woman then
a man, then the speaker would be in the position to assert himself over him. But this
is not really the case, because the addressee is not a woman, just a man that looks
more beautiful than a woman.
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women's fashion
Fashion – custom, tradition.

The speaker gives the addressee a feminine quality, gentle heart, but says that the
addressee's heart is loyal, constant, and not false, unlike women's heart.

Second quartet
"An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth."
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling

In the courtly love and Petrarchan tradition, women were said to have bright sparkling
eyes, because they reflect back the passion of the man, the gazer. Unlike women's
eyes that wonder everywhere, the addressee's eyes are depicted as fixed. The
structure of "more than…" and "less than…" appears here.
The question of who's being loyal to who comes up here. If the young man was truly
loyal to the speaker, If the love was requited (‫)לגמול‬, there was no need to write the
sonnet from the first place. Everything here is on the level of wishful thinking, an
hypothesis on the speaker's mind. The speaker is projecting on to the addressee the
value he wants to see reflected back at him.
Gilding the object the object whereupon it gazeth

Cover with thin layer of gold, take things that are not valuable and give them value by
looking at them.
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling

The most important word in the sonnet is "hues".
The combination of the letters "H E W S" recur frequently in each line of the poem in
different combinations. It can mean: 1. Color, shade - in modern English 2. Makeup
3. Face 4. Expression aspect of a face 5. External appearance in general
In here we see a cardinal preoccupation of Shakespeare –

How to judge the truth of people's substance based on their appearance.
For the first time, following changes in the society (the reformation, political,
Machiavelli) the Elizabethans where living in a society where the fear of being
deceived by people's false exteriors, the notion that people are not what they seem,
that there is no true core self, that everything is a role and a performance was
terrifying. Questions like where is truth or stability located, what is the notion of
stability started to arise. The line means: "you appear like a man, you control not only
your own subjective appearance, but you control also the way other people see you"
This is a very powerful moment where the speaker says to the addressee that he is a
player, has the ability to appear beautiful to everyone who looks at him. Something
about the addressee makes everybody fall in love with him, men and women. It's not
about who he is, but what he appears to other. That is a frightening moment for the
speaker. The speaker tries to tease out a very serious epistemological crisis for the
speaker.

Third quartet
"And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing"
The volta in this quartet turn everything into a joke, but it feels like someone that is
trying to laugh away an uncomfortable truth. Up till now the speaker said dark things
about the reality of human relationships and human knowledge. Here the speaker
concede (‫ )לוותר על‬the notion of the addressee's loyalty, the addressee is "true" to
everyone and therefore not exclusive to the speaker.
The joke is a mythological one: Nature, the creator of genesis of mankind, is a

woman, effeminized noun.
And for a woman wert thou first created
The addressee was first created as a woman.
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting
Nature fell in love with him because of his beauty. She wanted to have him.
And by addition me of thee defeated, by adding one thing to my purpose nothing
Nature added the addressee a penis and by that defeated the speaker.
This is the joke.
Couplet
"But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure"
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure

Prick – means prick and also to mark a sign, to choose someone by writing it down.
1. Nature chose you, elected you for women's pleasure.
2. Nature gave you a prick to pleasure women.
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure

You platonic love will be mine, and you "love's use" (sexual intercourse) will be
women's. The speaker and the addressee are not having an intimate relationship.
The speaker would like to, but he can’t, not because he physically can't, but because
the addressee is not interested, he is busy with all of his other lovers.
When you read the sonnets in sequence you get that the speaker is an older man,
losing his hair, conscious of his looks, not what he used to be. The speaker's claim
on the addressee's attention is very tenuous (‫)קלוש‬. The state of unrequited love (
‫ )אהבה שלא זוכה לגמול‬is what is constant between the Petrarchan tradition and this
sonnet.
Shakespeare is not really endorsing platonic relationships or takes the ontology's he

suggesting seriously. The question of unrequited love here is the key. There is irony
here that operates on several levels. Whenever you detect irony, you should always
ask yourself what the irony is directed at.

Sonnet 23
Mediums: the tension between writing and reading, seeing and hearing, the stage
and real life. All of these ideas combines into dramatizing the speaker's unbearable
feeling of unrequited, one sided erotic relationship with a lover that scorn him.
There are several typos in the printed edition of this sonnet.
The speaker says in the sonnet that he can’t express what he feels in words to the
addresse, when he is present.
First quartet
"As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart"
The opening quartet creates an opposition: Either by not saying anything to say Or
by having too much to say. It portrays another impasse (‫ )מבוי סתום‬for the speaker.
He has a problem communicating himself to his beloved. The analogy is either the
speaker is in emotional distress, the emotion is so powerful he can’t find the words to
say, or the opposite, the sense that he is so paralyzed by feeling inadequate that
there is nothing to say.
As an unperfect actor on the stage,

Who with his fear is put besides his part
Like an imperfect actor who forgets his lines due to stage fright.
Due to fear of performance he forgets his part.
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,

Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart
Like a wild creature with fierce emotions that are so powerful that they frighten even
himself.
Second quartet
"So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharg'd with burden of mine own love's might."
The second quartet pays off on the analogy "as… so…"
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say

The perfect ceremony of love's rite
The speaker forget what he has to say because of fear of trust.
Rite – a pun with rite (ceremony) and write.
Trust – the speaker trust in his own abilities: to speak his mind correctly, not to
betray too much of his feelings
Third quarter
O let my looks/books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.

The first printed edition had "books" written. For years it’s being read as books until in
the 18th century an editor decided that it limited the richness of the sonnet and that it
was a compositor's error, so he changed it to "looks". "Looks" - reading the emotion
of the speaker in his looks, his appearance. "Books" - read the speaker's message
in his poems and plays. This interpretation suggests that the speaker and the
addressee communicate through writing. "That tongue" – because it's not "this" but
"that" it means it's not his own tongue. Someone else is already speaking. There are
other people competing with the speaker on the addressee's attention, who are
better than him expressing their thought and feelings.
The couplet
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit."
The couplet tie is the word "love"
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:

The speaker is asking the beloved to read in his face his love for him.
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit

The sonnet ends on a witty twist, like "here is a piece of worldly wisdom".
There is a play on "with" – having something in your hand, vs. "wit" having something
in your mind. In the original printed version the "H" from the word "with" has
mistakenly moved to the word "wit".
"Hear with eyes": 1. To read 2. Elizabethan theater is declaimer (‫ )דיקלום‬theater,

action is verbal, but there is a strong visual dimension as well. The visual component
always depends on the language. Because most people in the theater couldn't really
hear what the actor is saying, Often in Shakespeare the directing of the action is
coded into the speeches, there's already physical gestures or a prop that's being
suggested, visual image that is set up in the speech. For example: Hamlet is holding
a dagger.

Sonnet 54
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.
The idea repeats about how to retain the truth of someone's essence or substance.
There is a metaphor about the act of distillation.
Compositors error: my verse distills / by verse distills
canker-bloom had negative association in Shakespeare's time: It meant false flowers,

a red flower that looks like rose, full of thorns but has no scent.
The word "canker" means deep rotting.
The central conceit relates to perfume making and distilling: the speaker says that
the reason people love the rose is not his looks but his scent, his essence. A flower
that only looks nice but has no smell is worthless. Perfume is the main conceit of the
poem: distilling the essence of the rose.

Lesson 5 – 25.03.15
Sonnet 116
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which 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 cheeks
Within 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 proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
This is a very famous popular sonnet.

The main concept is of true love, loyalty, fidelity, marriage
On the surface it’s the ultimate description of true love.
The speaker is defining what true love is. It's a speculative definition sonnet.
The sonnet is also about the platonic idea of love, the transcendental idea of love.
Shakespeare introduces perspectivism into a monolithic (‫ )עשוי כמקשה אחת‬ideological
structure: There is the Platonism, Neo-Platonism, the church idea about what love is.
On the other hand there is the human perspective which complicates it with the
visceral reality of human experience. The sonnet is like a dramatic monologue. The
speaker responds to another person counter arguments about love. The second
reading might We can read the sonnet twice:
1. each quatrain agrees and follows the same argument of the previous quatrain. In
this reading the notion is that love is everlasting.
2. each quatrain is different. This reading teases the negative connotations. What's
being denied or repressed in the implied argument of the other speaker
The sonnet navigates between evoking on the one hand the sense of fear, existential
reality, uncertainty, and the anxiety of stating the ideal. The person who most suffers
from life, who most fears real love is the person who states the ideal. This person
doesn't want to be hurt by knowing what true love really is so he escapes to the ideal.
.
First quatrain
Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
The ideal is that real love (true love) is fixed, unchanged.
Second quatrain
"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"
O, no! - A powerful rhetorical exclamation

That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark
There is the metaphor of the human chaos like a ship tossed at sea, a metaphor of
the north start and a metaphor of the lighthouse.
The north start and the lighthouse are fixed points which allow a person to navigate
home during a storm.
Whose worth's (the start's) unknown, although his height be taken

This line suggests that although a start can be measured thanks to technological
developments, we can't know it's worth and values.There is a hidden metaphor for
the notion of courtly love – in the Petrarchan tradition the woman is idealized as a
star. The courtly love tradition worked well in poetry and philosophy, but it doesn't
have anything to do with real life.
Third quatrain
"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's(‫ )חרמש הזמן‬compass come;
But bears it out even to the edge of doom"
The sickle of time is cutting down the rosy cheeks and lips. Time kills the outer
appearance

But bears it out even to the edge of doom
edge of doom The end of days , judgment day where time will end.
By theological metaphysical definition, love cannot last after the edge of doom. The
argument is exaggerated. The common belief in the period was that in judgment day,
when the souls will go back to the bodies, all the memories of a person will be wiped
clean. After judgment day no person will remember anything from his previous life,
including the people he loved. The marriage right of the church says: "Till death do
us part", love and marriage is a physical union that should last in this life, not in the
next life.
Couplet
"If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved"
There is a contradiction. On the one hand, the logical condition says that since the
speaker wrote sonnets therefore the speaker must be right. His sonnets are proof
that the he is right and love is eternal. On the other hand, in the speaker's earlier
sonnets he writes about the opposite, how time takes away everything and so on.

Sonnet 129
"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell"
This sonnet is the sister sonnet of sonnet 116. While sonnet 116 was about love, this
sonnet is about sex. The sonnet is very violent. The male speaker is giving voice to
his love-hate relationship with the woman and his inherit disgust about enjoying the
sexual action. The sonnet is the exact opposite of 116 in the way it operates logically.
With each quatrain the speaker is conceding lass of the puritanical stands and more
of the pleasure stands.
First quatrain
"The expense of spirit (ejaculation) in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured ‫שקרי‬, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude (‫ חייתי‬,‫)פרימיטיבי‬, cruel, not to trust;"
The expense of spirit (ejaculation) in a waste of shame Is lust in action

The speaker refers to the woman's part of the body as a "waste of shame", because
the man and woman are not married.
and till action lust Is perjured ‫שקרי‬, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude (‫ חייתי‬,‫)פרימיטיבי‬, cruel, not to trust
And until the sexual act lust is described with very powerful negative words.
These words are suitable for a preacher, a puritan who warns people from having
sex unmarried and for pleasure. The Elizabethan believed that sex is physically
dangerous and that a man loses life every time he ejaculates. Also in the Elizabethan
society, bastards were a big social problem. Bastard children had no legal rights or
status; they could not inherit property or their father's name. The opening quatrain is
spoken like it's a play. The sonnet begins with the Christian argument about what sex
is. Sex is bad: it kills the body and the soul, and therefore not to be trusted.
Second quatrain
"Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad".
This quatrain focuses not on the general case but on the particular, the individual.

It paints the reality: sex is hunted and constantly looked for. Inside this reality comes
a psychological truth: sex is hunted past reason, once you had it, it also drives you
mad. Sex is meant to drive us insane.
Third quatrain
"Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream."
All the negative connotation of sex from the previous quatrains disappears. In this
quatrain a positive connotations appear for the first time.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so
The person is mad while he looks for sex, mad while he does it,
extreme a neutral adjective
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream
The speaker describes his feelings before the sexual act and after it.
A bliss For the first time the speaker acknowledge the pleasure of the sexual act.
a joy proposed It's a joy looking forward for it.
a very woe can be read "woe before" or "woe after", it's ambiguous.
behind a dream after the sexual act there is a dream. A dream is neutral, can mean
also something wished for.
The couplet
"All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun (avoid) the heaven that leads men to this hell"
All this the world well knows everyone know the facts that he stated in the sonnet:
What the preacher and church have to say and the fact that everyone is doing it and
enjoying it yet none knows well To shun the heaven
No one knows how to avoid the heaven –the description of the sexual act as
"heaven" is much powerful than the "bliss" he called it in the third quatrain.
There is an interchange between the words "heaven" and "hell", and by doing so
these words are emptied from any metaphysical significance. The speaker discarded
the structure of metaphysical Christian certainty where hell is a place of punishment
and heaven is a place of reward. This means that there is no one truth. The "here
and now" become most important.
Lesson 6 – 30.03.15
Sonnet 146
"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

... ... ...(feeding) these rebel powers that thee array ‫להלביש‬
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth (hunger),
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?

Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then"
This sonnet is the only religious poem that Shakespeare ever wrote, come in the
"dark lady" section in the sonnet sequence but got nothing to do with the thematic
concerns of the dark lady like sex love or relationships. This sonnet led many to
believe that Shakespeare was influenced by the poems of John Donne. The sonnet
contains a textual corruption - its missing the first part of the second line.The speaker
is addressing his own soul in second person dialog. This sonnet goes back to the
same motif that runs through other sonnets of Shakespeare: the inherit anxiety about
falseness of external appearance. Shakespeare in this sonnet relocates his dealings
with this subject to a familiar Christian religious discourse (‫)דיון‬: Protecting the soul
which is immortal from the corruptions of the body. The sonnet is addressing a
problem: the soul and the body are in dis-alignment. The notion that the soul is
trapped in the body is a neo-platonic idea that developed later within Christianity after
St. Augustine. It was a popular during the renaissance. The notion was that the soul
is divine and is always trying to ascend rationally back to god but it can't, as a
consequence of the sin and the fall, the soul is trapped in a body that is doom to die.
The body was seemed to be corrupt – the center of appetites. For example: the 7
deadly sins moved between the earthly sins of the flesh like lust to the sins of the
soul like pride.
First Quatrain
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

... ... ...(feeding) these rebel powers that thee array ‫להלביש‬
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth (hunger),
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
The speaker is addressing is inner self, his soul. He is thinking about his outer
extravagance.
feeding these rebel powers that thee array ‫להלביש‬
The whole sonnet s governed by the imagery of eating as oppose to starving,
A metaphor of the body as a cloth that wrap up the soul - The body is described here
as a garment, clothing.
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth (hunger)
pine - waste away and die, hunger, dying out of the thing you've been deprived off.
Goes back to the narcissi myth
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay

The soul as a house – the house looks beautiful on the outside but is rotten on the
inside. There is no spiritual substance. The soul was identified as the human will and
so he blames the soul for investing in its physical existence.
There is a paradox – the more that you feed on earthly things, the more you starve
from the things you really need, spiritual substance.
Second Quatrain
Why so large cost, having so short a lease ‫חוזה שכירות‬
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,

Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
The imagery is of selling, money, contracts, trade and business

The speaker is asking why a person invests so much money on a house (body)
which is temporary. The worms are going to eat both the body and the soul buried
with the body
Third Quatrain
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate (increase) thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross (filth);
Within be fed, without be rich no more
If the soul wants to increase in its sustenance the body has to suffer.
The imagery is strangely not metaphysical; it requires a degree of metaphorical
allowance. He talks about the religious argument in terms of money, buying and
selling.
The couplet
So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then
If the soul achieve that success of being fed within and poor on the outside, So shall
thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, So you will become immortal, relinquish death.
And yet, the imagery is still of feeding.
dying – an ongoing verb, a process. As long as you are dying you are not dead.
Dying also means sex.
If the person will behave according to the Christian norm of being poor on the outside
and rich on the inside, there will no longer be the experience of fearing death.
The sonnet evokes a typical Christian message, but the energy and the drama are all
about active words of eating, selling and living. This is similar to sonnet 116, just as
116 says on the level of the idea what love is it dramatizes the human reality of not
being sure about the constancy of love. Everything which we value as positive in this
world would be a negative in the next world. For example: wealth in this world would
be poverty in the next world and vice versa, life in this world: eating, sex, emotions
would be denied in the next world.
For Christians the more you try to insist on living the more you are dying inside.

Introduction to Shakespeare plays
The plays were meant to be watched in the theater and not read.
Shakespeare was a man of the theater: he grew up in a traveling troop of actors; he
was an actor himself and turned his hand to writing in the style of the university
graduates. The Elizabethan theater developed out of a long history of medieval
theater.
The development of early English theater

 The medieval "mystery" or "miracle" plays (10th-16th) popular dramatic
enactments, usually in redacted ‫ חוק‬visual and emblematic form, of key scenes
from the Bible, especially from the New Testament accounts of the mission,
death and resurrection of Jesus. They were not performed by professional actors
but by the members of local gilds who put up these performances during lent,
Easter and Christmas. They would erect a wooden stage in the town center and
acted scenes from the New Testament. Were encouraged by the church to
reinforce the Christian message.
 The "morality" plays (14th-16th) written allegorical plays meant to instruct and
illiterate audience in the basic doctrines of the Church using personified virtues
and vices in which a typical "everyman" character is tempted by the devil but is
saved by a good angel. These plays were acted by professional players who
usually worked for the church. The performances were mainly educational tools
to educate the illiterate masses about the Christian message of how to avoid
temptation and sin, and protect one's soul. A lot of elements from these plays
survived into Shakespeare's drama, particularly the instance of the vice figure.
Vice was always seen as the embodiment of all sin, and was usually the clown
character or a demonic creature, later on with anti-Semitists representations as
being money grabbing and evil. The vice character was also known for its
rhetorical sophistication, he would trick people by playing word games. This
filtered into early Shakespeare, a character like Richard III is a developed vice
character.
 Popular pageants, interludes and clowning
 Elizabethan theater – John Burbage was a travelling actor and carpenter
builder. He and his sons were all travelling actors who built their own stage during
their wanderings. As London was growing and more people were flowing into it,
Burbage realized the business opportunity of having a permanent built theater.
He built the first theater in the 1570's outside the walls of the city of London (a
dubious area), outside of the reach of the law, because actors were forbidden
from entering the city. He needed a new kind of plays because the old morality
plays were too short. London at that time was flooded with unemployed university
graduates who wrote plays based on classical stories. Burbage hired those
graduates to write to the stage. By the late 1580's Marlowe took the stage by
storm. Many new theaters opened due to the success of Burbage's theater. The
royal administration of Elizabeth soon realized that the theaters were a powerful
tool of controlling the population, "bread and entertainment". They started to
invest in the theater.
The stage and it's dimensions

The stage was either square or round, divided into three spaces: two doors at the
back, a gallery with a balcony above and a trapped door at the bottom.
The trapped door could be a grave or hell; the gallery was Juliet's balcony or the
capital in Julius Caesar.
Shakespeare plays with the space below middle and low.

Asides – Shakespeare used asides that broke the theatric illusion as a way of
introducing the notion of duplicity of appearance, deception, bringing in the audience
into the ethical complicity ‫שותפות לפשע‬
Costumes
The setting at the back was often minimalistic. The costumes were whatever they
had, it wasn't about the historical suggestion or realism but about setting out the
scene so the audience would recognize the characters: who is the queen, the king
the soldiers and so on.
Genre
There was in that period a classical understanding of genre based on the Latin works
of the romans. Norms of genre can guide us through Shakespeare's. The audience
come with generic expectations to a play based on its genre, an assumption about
what they are about to watch. Shakespeare surprised the audience expectations.
Shakespeare didn't care about genre. He used it, played within it conventions but
never felt bound by genre. For example in comedy: Shakespeare begins to explore
comedy from the Romans. In terms of plot there's no difference between
Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, the most significant distinction is the ending.
This caused the development of the tragic-comedy genre.

Lesson 7 – 12.04.15
The genre of history plays
The genre of history plays is a unique genre of the Elizabethan theater, developed
out of a commercial necessity and desire to stage plays that would be popular, and
drew an audience every time. Many of the early theaters tried to get patronage from
various members of the court in order to support them and allow the theaters to run.
These patronages would have solved the question of legality of the theater. Very
quickly the crown and court realized the potential of theater, essential medium
through which they could control the message and shape public opinion. The crown
was interested in staging relatively recent events from England's history on stage in
order to promote Tudor's propaganda. That doesn't mean that all the playwrights
were simply instruments of the crown.
The first popular history plays were a trilogy of Shakespeare's plays depicting the
reign of Henry VI. It was during the reign of Henry VI that England plunged into a
bloody civil war known as "the war of the roses" between the houses of York and
Lancaster. For the Tudors this was a direct consequence of the legitimacy of their
reign since Henry Tudor (Henry VII) won the war and defeated Richard III, united the
houses of Lancaster and York by marring King Edward IV's daughter. Tudors were
Lancastrians. The house of York always had a more legitimate claim to the throne.
They wanted to reaffirm the power of the state on the stage. The first Henry VI plays
portrayed the calamity of the civil war in order to emphasize that the only way to
avoid a civil war was to have a powerful monarch. This is also the beginning if early
modern politics: The feudal world started regressing, and the idea of the nation state
started to arise. The sense of Englishness (English nationalism) was united by the
crown. These plays tried to enforce the sense of Englishness.
English monarchy was a contractual monarchy and not an absolute monarchy. The
English crown rule not only by divine rights but over baronial agreement. The king
cannot make decisions such a levying an army of tax without consulting the
parliament.
In reality there was a growing tension:

1. Europe in the 15th-16th century was rearranging itself politically into major
power blocks - The emperor Charles V ruled an empire that expended from Spain to
most of France and Germany and parts of Italy. The Ottoman Empire ruled in India,
the Middle East, parts of North Africa and parts of Eastern Europe. After the
Reformation north Europe was always at war with various Catholic states. English
tried to reassert itself in the new world as a colonial empire.
2. The feudal system was still in place but increasingly became defunct (‫)מת‬.
European rulers and monarchs moved towards absolutism - After all the turmoil
of the civil wars, Elizabeth wanted to assert power. In order to do that she used the
rhetoric of absolutism, of the chain of being. She presented herself and a daughter of
her father (the King) and as a Queen by divine right anointed by God. The rhetoric of
the chain of being was still in use by the crown and state to assert central power,
power that cannot be questioned. In reality the ideas of the chain of being were not
relevant any more. People lived in an instable world; social mobility was possible and

the reformation created various possibilities for religious belief. In practice, the more
the state insisted on the monolithic idea of central power, the more they contrast with
the political reality which Machiavelli describe in his book "The Prince", a reality of
realpolitik (‫)שלטון הכוח‬, small politics, relativism and skepticism, control, manipulation
and power, greed. The more people became aware of that, the greater the tension in
the stories they wrote about their own history.
A speech from one of Shakespeare's plays demonstrates that tension - This is a

glorious speech Odysseus carries about the chain of being. The speech as a self-
contained unit is perfect in the idea it communicates and yet, the speaker is not
trustworthy. Odysseus speaks this at a moment of extreme doubt about rule and
authority. He is standing under the ruins of a battle and saying these words. The
image of the reality makes these words hollow. It shows the desperateness of
Odysseus.
Richard II
The first king that insisted on projecting the persona of a king was Richard II. He also
started the rhetoric about a king who is anointed and divine, who has two bodies: a
physical body and a political body (the body of the state). Shakespeare wrote the
tragedy of Richard II before the play Henry IV. Richard II was a terrible king
according to the Elizabethans. Elizabethans wanted to project this idea in order to
justify their claim to the throne by the rebellion of Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV)
against Richard II. Henry IV overthrew Richard in the name of Richard's betrayal in
the magna-carta's claims. The Tudors trace their lineage From Henry IV line. In order
to justify the Tudor's claim it was always important to show that Richard II was such a
bad king that it was legitimate to depose him. On the other hand Elizabeth herself
promoted a rhetoric that said that no one can depose a king, because the king is
sacred. This raised an important question - at what time if at all is it legitimate to
depose a king that was anointed and ruled by divine right. His was a very complex
question for the Elizabethans, dealt with very gently on stage; censorship didn't allow
to deal with this question easily. For example is the play of Richard II where on the
one hand it was important for Tudor propaganda to show this story on the stage. On
the other hand, the way Shakespeare dealt with the play, turning Richard's passion
was so problematic, that while Elizabeth lived she never allowed for the full play to be
staged. They never showed the actual moment where Richard is deposed, they
thought it would be too dangerous and might give people ideas.
Renaissance thinking about history
We have to try and understand how humanists thought about history, about historical
thinking, how they wrote history, understood it, interpreted it, what was the
ideological significance of the historical narratives to the present. All of these were
crucial questions Shakespeare was fascinated with and explored in his history plays.
In the Middle Ages history didn’t exist as a field of study. The notion of time and
causality was providential (‫ – )של השגחה עליונה‬God ruled history and history itself was
an expression of God's providence. The medieval outlook, like the chain of being
concept, was that if you study historical events all you did is to study God's will in the
world. The first instinct about it was to study big events, big patterns, if at all. Their
view of time was theological and biblical.
History as a field of study revived in the wake of the humanist's revival of liberal arts.
Humanists reinvented the study of history alongside classical learning. The way that
humanists approached towards studying history was very different then today.

Humanists revived the historical writings of the Roman historiographers and studied
them. [Machiavelli's book "The prince" is actually an exercise in moral pragmatic historical
reading, In his writing, every rule he gives is supported by examples from Roman or
contemporary history.] History was no more about big events and stories about divine
providential power. Increasingly History's focus became on the individuals, moving
historical event. History was studied for its moral exemplar. They studied the rise and
fall of great man, and presented that to the readers as a lesson about how to behave,
rule and so on. It was imaginative.
The historical account of Richard III by Thomas Moore sounds like a character sketch
for drama, but was presented as a character study of morality. This text was one of
the main sources of Shakespeare in writing Richard III.
The history book called "The mirror for Magistrates" mirror- a moral reflection,
instructing rulers at the time about how to rule well, by studying from the mistakes of
those who ruled badly. The book is in the emblem tradition, a series of allegorical and
moral emblematic poems that depict the reign of each of the major bad kings of the
English and European past. This book was presented for Queen Elizabeth as a gift. It
became a major source for Shakespeare's plays.
This was Tudor history, an account of the character of Richard II.
The historical focus was about the historical character.
Shakespeare was drawn to these questions:

1. Are historical events shaped by the men who drive events or are the men shaped
by the events that drive them?
2. What is a relationship between personal virtues or vices and historical causality?
3. What is the real connection between someone's moral weaknesses and their
ability to rule?
4. Is civil war, which is a calamity, the inevitable consequence of following baser
drives and baser need, or is it necessary, in some cases, in order clear the nation
from its political corruption?
Shakespeare's history plays
Shakespeare doesn't write his plays in the chronological order. Shakespeare seems
to move backwards. Shakespeare begins his interest in history with the most recent
history, the reign of Henry VI. In these plays Shakespeare is mostly concerned with
big historical questions: causation and group politics. The plays ask big questions like
how civil war starts, what drives it. The question of causation is important in those
early plays – what is the real cause for a certain historical event. Shakespeare right
from the start understands that historical causality is made up.
Richard III – Shakespeare focuses on individual psychology, on motivation and on
the ethics of historical persons. This is the single play, other than Hamlet, which is
character driven. He is the only character in the play, the other characters are flat. It's
Shakespeare's first historical character study. It deals with the individual perspective
as oppose to the cosmic perspective.
Richard II – Shakespeare's purest tragedy. It takes the character study to its ultimate
level. It's a play about introspection (‫)בחינה עצמית‬, role play and the parameters of
moral motive. Shakespeare explores in this play Richard's inability to reconcile his
idea of himself with the reality around him which leads to tragedy. Many of the ideas
that are important for Henry IV play appears in this play: In Richard II Henry IV
appears as a powerful rebel, economical in his language, moves with a force of
history behind him. He represents historical inevitability. His lines are very short, he
speaks to the point, while Richard speaks and fills the stage with poetry, as if he is
grasping for identity, trying to make sense of the political world collapsing around

him. Henry speaks in this play about his son Hal, expressing his worry that his son is
not a heroic chivalric knight. The play ends with the murder of Richard II, by a
command of Henry
I Henry IV
The opening of the play
Shakespeare sets up the entire complexity of the play in the beginning of it.
The play begins with the image of a King holding council, Henry's speech about
crusades.
Lines 1-20 – The first part of the speech talks about how finally there is peace and
no civil wars. On the other hand, Henry himself caused the civil war when he
dethroned Richard II. Finally everything is safe, and now he talks about his intention
to go on a crusade.
Lines 5-10 – Highly pathos words to emphasize the horror of civil war
Line 9-13 "Those opposed eyes…" the imagery is interesting: eyes, an organic human
physicality and meteors, stars crashing. This emphasizes the notion of the chain of
being: civil war is unnatural and if you cause that civil unrest it's like upsetting the
cosmic balance, meteors come crashing down to earth. The words are very poetic
and lofty. "intestine shock" – civil war reinforces the metaphor of the state as a body.
"butchery" – a harsh word.
For Henry, the crusade is an act of penance, to mend his own private war for his own
special benefit, atonement for killing Richard II. The whole speech sets us on edge
by suggesting that the reign of Henry IV is unstable, built on bloodshed and war.
Henry's other problem is his son Hal. Hal was a riotous youth, hanged out with
thieves, robbed people, got drunk and so on. Shakespeare changed the age of
Hotspur and made him and Hall the same age.
The first scene suggest that a play Henry IV is about another contested monarchy,
about power and about struggling for sense of identity in a political and historical
context. It suggests that the main theme of the play is about honor, courage and guilt.
The play is not a tragedy; it is structured more like a comedy and has an happy
ending. No one dies except the rebels.
Central themes in the play
Chivalric honor vs. Machiavellian pragmatism – Shakespeare explores the failing

and decaying values of chivalry. Chivalry was still being used politically in the
Elizabethan period to advance values of honor and courage. But by this time the
medieval knight was obsolete, and so are many of his values. Hotspur is an
anachronism (‫)טעות בזמן‬, because he represents an ethos of chivalric values of
honor, courage and loyalty. He is hotheaded, angry, chivalric man of action, a man
of pure passion and energy, a man of black and white, right and wrong. He keeps
calling Henry the forgetful king who forgot the people who put him there. At the end
the king offers him penance, but his uncle, the older Machiavellian politician, decides
not to tell him because he knows Hotspur will agree. It's a moment where you feel
sorry for Hotspur; he too is a victim of politics.

Feudal autocracy vs. national centralization and the value of 'commodity' as
opposed to 'virtue' – Henry IV is very neatly structured theatrically and thematically.
There are three major worlds in the play: the tavern, the court and the rebels in the
north. Between the world of the Tavern and the world of the court Shakespeare is
showing us an entire country in microcosm. He shows us the complex relationship
between belief and fact, idealism and pragmatism, those who lead their life according
to the stated message of the chain of being and the world of tavern. The world of the
tavern is dominated by money, everything up to sale. In the world of the court
everything is also for sale but they pretend that its conducted under certain rules of
feudal autocracy. The mirroring of the two worlds is not one way, the world od the
court equally mirrors that of the tavern. The question of honor fellowship and virtue
radiate on the relationships of the tavern- what is honor between thieves.
Individual merit vs. the bond of fellowship – Fellowship, what unites and binds
people together into a society, is a question that the rebel face – is it about Hotspur
or about the bonds of fellowship of the rebels? Equally in the king's court – is the king
is a ruler by divine rights, is the king neglectful of the bonds of fellowships? Equally in
the tavern – how much is Hal really a part of that fellowship? Is he really their friend?
Transcended idealism and inner light (the sun) vs. lovely mutability and
borrowed light (the moon) – This raises the question of divine right vs. the right of
conquest and usurpation (‫)תפיסת שלטון שלא כדין‬. While in this period people
understood that the universe was heliocentric, nevertheless, the Ptolemaic
understanding of the cosmos (that the earth is the center and the sun revolves
around it) was still holding bits of their imagination. One of the residues (‫ )משקעים‬of
Ptolemaic cosmology was a general belief that the earth is governed by the moon.
The moon was seen as feminine. In Petrarch's sonnet the women are compared to
the moon while men are compared to the sun which is fixed and permanent.
Everything which was under the moon was seen as mutable and impermanent.
Everything above the moon was seen as fixed. Political discourse of absolutism
always talks about the leader as the sun. The king uses the sun imagery to
emphasize his permanent rule. In the play sun and moon imagery is constantly being
evoked by different characters. Falstaff and thieves belong to the moon. Is monarchy
s subject of transcendent idealism or a subject to the moon and pragmatism?
Perception, performance, rumor and the politics of public identity – Under the
moon everything that counts and rules is perception, performance, rumor, the politic
of public identity. If the world is only about perception and everything is a
performance, if other people's notion of you is elusive as rumor and identity is about
rumor (what other people think about you), then a much bigger question opens: who
is prince Hal? The play shows us historical progression from riotous youth to heroic
chivalric conquering king, a Cinderella story that Shakespeare is trying to trace. Hal
develops during the course of the play.

Lesson 8 – 15.04.15
I Henry IV
The play's structure

It seems like the play is structured in a binary way that mirror each other:
1. Fathers and sons: the king and prince Hal, Falstaff and Hal, Hotspur and his father
2. The sun and moon imagery
3. The world of the tavern and the world of the court
However, this is not the full picture of how we should look at this play.
Prince Hal
From Shakespeare's concern, the story of Henry V (Hal) is on the surface a happy
one: it ends like a kind of comedy, culminates in a happy marriage between Henry V
and the princess of France, Henry ends the strife of civil war of his father and units
the English against a common enemy – the French. The problem with this story of
Henry V is that he died very young, and he is the only good king who didn't live long
enough to mess it up. He is a good king who is bracketed with ruins reigns of bad
kings, because the big civil war happened during the reign of his son, Henry VI.
Henry VI came to the throne at the age of 8 months and was a puppet and useless.
The story of Henry V is tainted by the future and the past. The story of prince Hal
rising to the occasion and becoming the warrior king he would be is something that
fascinated Shakespeare when he wrote Henry IV. When we focus on Hal's character
and transformation – that's transformation is transformed by Shakespeare into a
theatrical transformation, a performance. The mirroring structure of the play is
therefore meant theatrically and dramatically to shed light on the character of Hal.
Usual paradigm
When the play is usually being taught students are told that the play has a simple
triangular structure: Hal is in the center and in either side of him there are two kinds
of ways of looking at the world that he needs to negotiate:
1. Falstaff who represents the cynical skeptic relativist pragmatic money driven reality
of the Renaissance
2. Hotspur who represents medieval chivalry honor and virtue.
Hal has to discard Falstaff's way and embrace the ethos of Hotspur, and once he
completes this transformation he becomes that great glorious king. That is not how
we should read the play.
There are several problems with this paradigm:

1. Falstaff is not equal to Hotspur in terms of their weight on the play – Literally and
metaphorically Falstaff is a giant, he completely over takes the play.
2. Shakespeare makes Hotspur and Hal the same age In doing that, the paradigm is
different: the two characters that are being weighted at the balance are Hotspur and
Hal, they are the ones that are almost equal standing: they are the same age, both
the sons of royal fathers, both have investments in the high political game of the
nobles. The difference between Hal and Hotspur is worked out through the
relationship with Falstaff. Hal is playing a political game while Hotspur is not.
Hotspur is preforming the role of who he thinks he is.

Falstaff's character
Falstaff is an agent of the audience, voices the audience's skepticism, doubts.
Falstaff was such a popular character that the Elizabethan demanded more and
more of him. Falstaff is the most intelligent character in the play.
Shakespeare wrote another comedy surrounding Falstaff. He was so popular and
well known character that noble man started to accuse one another of being Falstaff.
The character is not historical. The idea was to create a character of hypocrite
puritan who is a cowardly knight. Initially Shakespeare gave him a different name:
Oldcastle – the name of an actual character from the history books who was
identified as a questionable knight. The problem was that the real Oldcastle had
descendants who complained about the way Shakespeare used their name.
In reality, Falstaff is a combination of a number of dramatic conventions

1. Allegorical vice from the early morality plays. He represents vice, the temptation
to sin. As typical vice character he is always shown drinking.
2. Miles gloriosus – Type of character from Roman comedy (Plautus, Terentius).
The Miles gloriosus was a character of the bragged soldier, a cowardly soldier who
brags but at the first sight of danger runs away
3. Lord of Misrule – in England, the Lord of Misrule was an officer appointed by lot
at Christmas to preside (‫ )לשבת בראש‬over the Feast of Fools. The Lord of Misrule
was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas
revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying, in the pagan tradition
of Saturnalia. It was one day where the servants became masters, and vice versa.
The servant becomes the king. Lord of Misrule entered the drama very quickly. The
idea was to allow a cultural group venting (‫ )לפרוק‬out of cultural tensions.
The scene where Falstaff pretends to be the king is a typical Lord of Misrule moment.
Lord of Misrule is a way which allowed people to talk about things that normally they
wouldn't dear to talk about, in a safe environment. Even to depose a king is
legitimate under those circumstances, and in that scene Falstaff says: "depose me?!"
which is not simply a joke considering that Henry IV deposed Richard II. That
suggests to us that in the world of the tavern, even the crown is a commodity which is
subject to theft. If in reality the values of the tavern contaminate the values of the
court, then there is no legitimate way of stilling the crown, and Falstaff's philosophy
wins the day. For example after Hall exposes Falstaff lies, Falstaff says "is the truth is
not the truth?" this echoes to the world of the court. In the world of political power that
point is not to tell the truth, and to pretend that everyone is playing the same game.
4. Wit and punning energy
The merging of all these traditions leads to the character of Shake-speare – Fal-staff.
The more Shakespeare wrote lines for Falstaff the more the character grew. Falstaff
brings something out of the characters he interacts with which enliven them,
sharpens their intellectual and wit. That tells us a lot about what Hall's investment in
Falstaff is.

Hal's character
Hal's transformation is a bit more complex than simply discarding the world of
Falstaff and entering the world of Hotspur. Hal never becomes Hotspur, but becomes
something else. The question is what does Hal becomes, what is the defining
character of this boy turned hero king, and the answer lies in very question of acting
and performance. A central conceit in Shakespeare is the idea that the world is a
king of theater. In Richard II play, Richard II, the king deposed by Hal's father, in the
play is shown to be someone who overacts the role of the king long after there is any
justification for it politically. Even after they take the crown away from him, he still
plays at being king. At the end of Richard II we hear about his humiliation where he is
paraded through the streets of London. York in the play discusses Richard's exist
from the stage of political history as the existing of a really bad actor. This indicates
to the political theater, of performance of royalty rather than owning royalty. Richard
is a bad actor because everyone can tell that he is acting, no one believes him. Hal is
not like Richard but not like his father either. The question is who is he like? What
kind of actor is Hal?
Act 1 scene 2 line 202-224 Hal's speech "I know you all"
This tavern scene mirrors the first scene at court.
Hal alone on stage, the audience is eavesdropping his thoughts. It's a soliloquy (
‫)מונולוג‬. "I know you all" - Hal refers to the thieves of the tavern. "I will imitate the sun"
– a pun on sun/son, he plays the role of the son of his father, or act like the sun. The
operative image is the sun.
From the speech we can see how everything is calculated in Hal's world: he knows
he is going to be king, uses the guys at the tavern, knows very well the value of
perception, and understands where Richard II failed. Uniting the crown as he will do
later requires people to believe that he is what he will become to be. Hal is a
Machiavellian; he is saying that he will wait to the perfect moment, like the sun, to
come from behind the clouds and shine. A key word in the speech is "imitate": Hal
says "I will imitate the sun", not "I will be the sun". He sticks to the realm of simile (
‫)דימוי‬. "I will imitate the sun" means he will perform, Hal is an actor.
This raises the question of what is the value philosophically of identity. Hal is very
aware that this is how the political game is played. This speech should be contrasted
with the speech that his father gives him later, when he rebukes him before the
transformation. His father tells him the opposite that the problem with Richard was
that he was too liberal with his presence, people saw him all the time and there was
no air of majesty about him. The trick about majesty is not to be seen often, not to
mingle yourself with the commoners, and when they will see you it will be like seeing
the sun. They both use the same metaphor in completely opposite ways. Henry IV is
using it in the rhetoric of the divine right of a king to rule. Hal is using it as a
Machiavellian.
Another important word in the speech is "Foil" a baser metal that allows a brighter
metal to shine. Hal wants people to remember his old wild behavior, in order that his
transformation will glitter over his past, like covering a base metal with a thin layer of
gold. This kind of metal craft will show better than erasing his wild past. The
emphasis is on perception, show and what others think about him. Hals is aware of
the importance of foiling other people's perception of him. Falstaff and Hotspur offer
a foil for Hal's character. On the other hand, Falstaff is not just a foil, he really loves
Hal. Falstaff is like a father figure for Hal. Hal loves Falstaff, but he knows that when
he will become a king, he will have to sacrifice this relationship.

Hal doesn't simply discard Falstaff and becomes Hotspur. Hal takes from Falstaff
what he needs to learn about the way the world really works, takes from Hotspur
what he needs to reclaim from the old values of chivalric loyalty honor and
performance, and combines them into a pragmatic Machiavellian preformed chivalric
heroism, which comes across as grounded (not disconnected from reality the way
Hotspur is), grounded in the reality that the world is a kind of theater, that politics is
theater, that royal power is earned and not inherited, that you have to work very hard
for it. This is part of the complex trajectory (‫ )מסלול‬of the play. The Tudors the idea
was to suggest that Henry Tudor who will become Henry VII is a kind of Henry V.
Hotspur's speech Act 1 scene 3 line 30

It is interesting to see Hal's speech in comparison to Hotspur's speech.
Hotspur is the other foil to Hal's character. This speech is important because of its
many meta-theatrical ironies, because what it tells us about Hotspur's character and
about history and historical anachronism. In this speech two elements clashes:
1. Hotspur which represents historical anachronism of the chivalric values of the
feudal system
2. The parody of the Elizabethan courtier, in a post feudal early modern society.
About the background events that lead to the scene

Hotspur and his father are northern barons; Hotspur defeated Douglas the leader of
the scots and took many of the scots as prisoners. In Medieval rules of war, when
two armies clashed, all the commoners were murdered and the nobles were taken as
prisoners and were ransomed for money. According to this tradition, the knight who
defeated the knight that yielded should get the right first right of hostage. On the
other hand, in the feudal monarchy system a strong king would always assert that he
will have the first right to whatever prisoners. This is the problem here - Hotspur
being this chivalric meteor one man battle machine took so many prisoners and he is
refusing to give them to the king. To the king this is a direct attack on his sovereignty
and authority. Since Hotspur fought in the name of his king he should give at least
some of them to the king. Hotspur is stubborn and insist not on playing political but
on playing by the rules of heroic chivalry and decides he not going to give the
prisoners. In this scene he is summoned to court to answer this. The scene is
interesting because Hotspur begins by trying to defend his action, gives excuses.
The speech is famous because the caricature of the corrupt, decadent, effeminate
courtier is a caricature of the Tudor Elizabethan courtier. In the Elizabethan time they
fought behind cannons, chivalry has become a sport, not something substantial. The
courtier is described as Perfumed. This goes back to sonnet 54. Shakespeare is
interested with the notion of perfume, makeup, covering the truth. The truth is organic
smell, the smell of virtue, of sweating men. This speech tells us a lot about who
Hotspur is. It suggests to the audience that there is a great gap of perception
between the court which is very much a Tudor court, and the reality of the battle filed.
It raises another idea that war and the battle field is always a Medieval place, there is
no charm is war, nothing humorous about it. There are two realities clashing in on the
world of vanity of the courtier:
1. Falstaff's world of commercial economic skepticism,
2. The reality of war, civil war, the price of war, young people dying. The question of
what's the price of human life takes us back to the question of what price of anything
we put value on in a society, which then raises the question of value in general.
Henry IV examines the question on value.
Act 2 scene 4 Hal and Falstaff's relationship

The scene shows us the investment of Hal and Falstaff in one another and in their
relationship. It begins with the jokes about exposing Falstaff lies, continues with the
arriving of the news about the war and rebellion and culminates with the role game.
The role game is a meta-theatrical moment in the scene. The mirror that is held to
the audience is completely inverted. When an audience is watching a play within a
play it makes them aware of them being an audience, that the spectacle mirrors
them.
Page 99-101 lines 461-475: When Hal describes Falstaff to him (he pretended to be
his father) in terms that with each phrase become less funny, nastier and hurtful,
everyone is laughing at the beginning but the laughter is starting to ebb away. We
can see that Hal means the words that he says and not only joking.
Page 101 line 479-480: A very vicious lines of Hal that takes us back to the morality
tradition. Hal describes Falstaff as the vice character from the morality plays without
a hint of humor. Hal describes him as a Satan, a devil, someone who misleads youth,
who has misled him.
Lines 484-497: Falstaff recovers with a great speech of deep humanity and life,
defending himself against Hal's allegations. The price of losing Falstaff within Hal's
transformation is not a price Hal or the world can afford, to turn your back on Falstaff
is to turn your back on a certain kind of vivacity and a way of embracing life as it is
and excepting it the way it is. There's a certain kind of truth to Falstaff that Hal will
have to discard.
"I do, I will" Hal answer is cold terrifying, "I do banish you and I will banish you".
Falstaff hears it.

Lesson 9 – 19.04.15
I Henry IV
The question of history and its representation

Shakespeare was interested with the metaphor of the theater. In this play
Shakespeare is not simply exploring the theatrical existential metaphor where life is
theater. He is interested in exploring history as a type of theater: Shakespeare
anticipates modern historian in raising complex questions about what is history as a
discipline? how do we understand it? Read it? Manipulate it? Write it?
Theater requires an active participation and interpretation from the audience.
Shakespeare's theater was rounded, and allowed multiple points of view and
perspectives from the audience. History in Shakespeare plays is presented on the
stage. A history play is telling an historical narrative on the stage. The audience
knows that this is a performance. Elizabethan theater from the start tends to be Meta-
theatrical, conscious of its own medium. Elizabethan playwrights constantly remind
the audience that they are watching a play, making the audience think about the
ethical requirements that is required from them. Richard II talks about his own reign
in terms of theatrical performance. York in the end of that play says that Richard was
a bad actor leaving the stage. This raises the question of what is the spectacle that
the audience is watching. Shakespeare suggests to his audience that history, like
any other kind of human narrative, is something that is negotiated, reread and
interpreted. It's a communal act of interpretation. If it's true, so are all the values
which a society associates with its historical narratives. Historical narratives are
coopted ideologically into political regimes. That was also true in the Tudor period.
How you read the history of the war of the roses was a matter of grave political
concern for the Tudor authorities.
Hal's Character
Act 1 scene 2 line 202-224 Hal's speech "I know you all"
When Hal is speaking two things are happening at once:
1. The speech is a play on historical self-consciousness - Hal in a moment of strange
meta-dramatic confusion gives us an impression that he is very much aware that he
is an historical character playing a role in a pre-determined historical narrative. That's
because the Elizabethans knows the end of the story, that he will become the great
King Henry V. Because the audience expects this, the speech is a way of reminding
the audience not to worry; while Hal seem like a riotous youth he's got everything
under control and he will end up being the hero they expect him to become.
This interpretation takes us back to Johnson's comment that the speech is a plot
advice, meant to alleviate audience anxiety.
2. The speech presents Hal as a Machiavellian, where everything is calculated
We need to understand this speech in the balance between these two readings.
Shakespeare wants to make the audience aware that this is an act of historical
rewriting, and to be nervous about it. He wants to make the audience think about
political ambition and its meaning. The play is a study of the character of ambition.
Hal is a Renaissance politician who understands the value of perception, of
perspectivism and of the impression that people have on him. Hal understands that

this is not a black and white world where it's either innocence or villainy. The world is
of shades of grey. Hal is an ambivalent character: he knows where he needs to get
historically, but at the same time he understands that certain values and ways of
doing things have to be negotiated and discarded at the same time. He needs to take
something from the world of Hotspur and make it his own, and take something from
the world of Falstaff and make it his own. He needs to create a viable political
synthesis of these two worlds. The death of Hotspur is another lament for chivalry.
Act 3 scene 2 Line 41- 93 Hal's confrontation with the King

The king is very upset in this speech. He breaks down and cries at the end. He says
that everyone gets to see Hal except him. The facade of the king breaks and there is
a moment of father-son tenderness. This scene mirrors Hal's speech in act 1 scene
2. The sun metaphor: The key word that differentiates between the two uses is Hal's
use "imitate: Hal in his speech says that he will imitate the sun, and when he will step
out of the clouds he will shine brighter.The king uses the same metaphor to suggest
the opposite political advice: The sun here is a metaphor for the royal majesty of the
divine right of a king. The king says that majesty has to be mysterious; a king cannot
be an ordinary man. A king is an idea. You can kill a man, but you cannot kill an idea.
Henry says to his son that Richard II was a bad king because he abused the idea of
being a king. He took the sanctity of majesty and polluted it with common sight of
people.
Henry says in other words that Richard II tempted him to dethrone him; he dethroned
him because he knew it was possible. Henry suffers from terrible guilt of the sin of
deposing an anointed king. He tries to rationalize his sin to himself.
In Richard II Henry Bolingbroke never actually says that he wants to depose Richard.
There is a sense that Henry Bolingbroke is moving with the force of history into the
empty political spaces vacated to him by the bad king. The more ground the king
loses the more Henry takes what the king gives. When the king finally has nothing
what remains is to take the crown.
Hal doesn't argue with his father, he behaves like the dutiful son and says: "I shall
hereafter... be more myself" (line 100) – This is an ironic statement from a
Machiavellian. There is no core identity to Hal. The notion of him being himself is a
question of performing a role. Hal means that he will play the role of the dutiful son
(imitates the son).
The speech of Hal renders (‫ )להפוך‬the King's speech rather hollow. It sounds like
political advice, but we know that the king is the one who is out of touch.
Hal has to correct two mistakes:
1. The mistakes of Richard II
2. The mistakes of his father who deposed Richard II, this is the crucial mistake –
once you depose a king the myth that the monarchy is sacred and untouchable has
been shattered. Henry IV deposed one king but claims the same trappings of divine
majesty as the king that he deposed. The rebels (the barons) already know how to
depose the king.
Hal realizes that something has to be changed in the way people understands
majesty and political power. Henry IV dies a miserable death, never getting to his
moment of redemption, to his crusade. The redemption is worked out through Henry
V. It's not a messianic redemption but a political one. The reign of Henry V will not
end well; it will end with the civil war of the war of the roses.

Falstaff's character
Act 4 scene 1 Line 103 The rebels are getting prepared for war
This scene seals Hal's transformation. The rebels are talking among themselves
getting prepared for the battle. Hotspur asks about Hal: "Where is his son, the nimble-
footed madcap Prince of Wales" (lines 99-100). Hotspur doesn't feel threatened by Hal;
But Vernon shatters Hotspur's hopes by telling him about Hal's transformation.
"All furnished, all in arms" The speech of Vernon presents Hal after his transformation
using poetic language describing gracefulness imagery and superhuman qualities,
before we as an audience see him. It prepares the audience for the encounter of Hal
as Henry V. The speech uses extreme hyperbole (‫ )הגזמה‬in order to cash in on the
audience's heroic fantasies about who Henry V is.
"No more, no more! Worse than the sun in March…" Hotspur's answer uses again the
sun metaphor: The Elizabethans believed that too much sunlight in March causes
illnesses. For Hotspur the news of Hal means bad news, but he is not a coward.
Act 4 scene 2 Falstaff speech of recruiting the baggers

This scene (at the tavern) comes right after the scene of the rebels. It presents a
different perspective. The scene is funny, but reminds us the Falstaff is not like the
other tavern people, he is much cleverer and has much more profound intelligent.
Falstaff is a knight, once he was a worrier but life has done its work on him. Falstaff
knows that a war is about to come.
Falstaff and Bardolph are standing armed on the stage with a group of ragtag
soldiers that Falstaff recruited. In many productions, while the soldiers standing
starving, Falstaff sits and eats. Falstaff asks Bardolph to bring him sack. After
Bardolph exists there is a comic soliloquy where Falstaff is talking directly to the
audience.
Line 11 – 49 Falstaff's speech: The speech is a comic soliloquy where Falstaff is

talking directly to the audience. It portrays rural England going to war.
"I press me none" (lines 14-22) Falstaff says that he goes to recruit those who he
knows will pay the most to avoid fighting, people who are not nobility or royalty, but
have something to lose and would rather live then die on the battle field on a war
that's nothing to them. "and they have bought out their services" (line 22-23) they paid
him bribes not to be drafted ‫להתגייס‬.
Falstaff gives us in this speech social commentary about a society that pretends to
operate according to certain values but in fact is falling to pieces because its values
cannot sustain neither the economics nor the politics
"and now my whole charge…" (lines 22-32) Falstaff is describing his soldiers like
corpses. He paints a complex picture of English society of Shakespeare's time. "such
as indeed were never soldiers, but discarded unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger
brothers, revolted tapsters and ostlers trade-fallen" he is cataloging the various ranks of
society, of people who are under the feudal system have no longer any kind of
reason investment in their society: discarded unjust serving-men servants who were
thrown out of service, condemned to a life of crime and early death (criminals were
executed). revolted ‫ מורד‬tapsters‫ מוזג משקאות‬Ostlers ‫ סייס‬trade-fallen images of rebellion,
of low people fired from their work.
Falstaff calls these people "the cankers of a calm world and a long peace" the corruption
of a world in which there is too much peace. Too much peace according to Falstaff
brings social unrest, and war is needed. Falstaff acknowledges that war is a form of
human social Darwinism. "I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies"
The people Falstaff recruits are "dead people", dead socially.

"Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they'll fill a pit as well as
better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men." while shocking, these lines are deeply
profound. They talk about war: war doesn't distinct between the noble and poor. The
only kind of value is to live. mortal men We are all mortal. There is a social comment
here: Falstaff is saying that these men are already dead. They are the cankers of life,
and in that case, what's the difference if they'll die now or die a month later on the
streets. Falstaff doesn’t play the hypocritical game by saying that they will die on a
justified cause. He knows that war doesn’t mean anything either. At least he'll
survive.
Act 5 scene 1 Falstaff's speech "what is honor"

The king and Hal are standing against the rebels. Falstaff and Hal have a moment
alone before the battle is about to start. Hal is dressed like the knight he is, ready to
fight. Falstaff is afraid of the battle and says to Hal: "Hal, if thou see me down in the
battle and bestride me, so; 'tis a point of friendship" (Line 121), He asks Hal to protect
him. Hal replays with a usual fat man joke. And at the end "Say thy prayers, and
farewell". That's a powerful Farwell.
Falstaff says: "I would 'twere bed-time, Hal, and all well" very childish innocence
moment. Hal replays with the usual Christian reply: "Why, thou owest God a death". Hal
exits but Falstaff shouts to him "'Tis not due yet; I would be loath to pay him before his
day" meaning he will not want to pay God before the time God's determine as if God
is a loaner.
Falsatff's speech:
Falstaff's speech is structured like syllogism ‫היקש‬. It pretends to mock logic. It is
Falstaff's great existential reasoning.
"Honor pricks me on" Douglas in the scene before said the same phrase. The rebels
don't have a chance to win, but they go to fight in the name of honor. The rebels live
in a world in which you have no life but through your honor and reputation, your
name is everything.
"Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks me on" Falstaff moves on to go into the battle field
and stops. Then he says his speech: "Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come
on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a
wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in
that word honour? What is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o'
Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. 'Tis insensible ‫לא נפתס בחושים‬, then. Yea,
to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it.
Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon‫ בד שעוטפים איתו את המת‬: and so ends my
catechism"
detraction will not suffer it – a philosophical complex idea, taken from nominalist
philosophical theory. It's a common idea in the Renaissance that nature abhors ‫מתעב‬
and cannot stand a vacuum. Nature always tends to fill those vacuums. The world of
the living cannot suffer detraction. Falstaff means that since honor is a meaningless
word, the world of the living cannot suffer it and honor cannot exist. Honor is an idea,
a concept people use to arrange and live their lives according to, and make sense for
their life. Shakespeare wants to expose and explore the tension between the fact that
honor is artificial and insubstantial and the fact that people live according to it. People
live according to these ideas in order to give meaning and sense to their lives.

Lesson 10 – 26.04.15
Much ado was written right after the two part of Henry IV. There is a connection
through Falstaff and it's has to do with wit.
Much ado is the most perfect romantic comedy Shakespeare ever wrote.
General introduction to comedy
Comedies and tragedies were conceptually separated at Shakespeare's time as two

distinct genres. Comedies were thought to be the opposite of tragedies.
Sidney as a theoretical thinker and aristocrat complains about the lack of generic
decorum in the plays of his period. According to that decorum:
- Tragedies should deal only with noble people, heroic people, aristocrats and kings,
and use high lofty language.
- Comedies (following Roman comedies tradition) should be domestic, deal with
ordinary people, ordinary plots, and use low language.
Philip Sidney complains about the custom of thrusting a clown to each play, rather it
is a comedy or a tragedy. In his eyes these sorts of plays are not real tragedies or
real comedies. The justification to these views assumes that there is nothing inspiring
behind the life or ordinary people, and in order to evoke the tragic you need to
portray royal characters. Sidney coins a new term: tragic-comedy, which becomes a
famous genre in the Elizabethan time. Much ado is in fact a tragic-comedy
Ben Johnson was a comedies playwright and a contemporary of Shakespeare. He is

a classicist and works closely with the Roman models for comedies. Johnson started
the genre of "city comedies" that are set in London and looks to London and its
characters. Johnsons says he will write: "deeds, and language, such as men do use; And
persons, such as Comedy would choose, When she would show an image of the times, And
sport with human follies, not with crimes -- Except, we make 'em such by loving still Our
popular errors, when we know they're ill. I mean such errors, as you'll all confess By
laughing at them, they deserve no less; Which when you heartily do, there's hope left, then,
You, that have so graced monsters (unnatural), may like men."
In this quote Johnson says that he'll domestic comedies about stereotypes of
London, people whom the English will recognize on stage.
Shakespeare had a different perspective on comedy then his contemporaries.

He is interested in psychological realism. Johnson is interested in social realism.
Shakespeare's views on this matter are expressed and ridiculed in Hamlet, with
Polonius's line about the inconsequence of genre:
"The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical- comical-historical-pastoral, scene
individable, or poem unlimited"
There is a kind of irony and cynical approach towards genre. Shakespeare is very
aware of genre but never behaves according to generic rules. He takes generic
conventions and expectation and uses them in complex ways to manipulate and
manage audience response and reaction. He always pushes the boundaries of genre
and tries to redefines them.
Theory of comedy
"Laughing at" aspect of comedy:

Social commentary and observation are manifested into Satire and farce genres
which belong to this category. There is an aggressive self-assertion and sense of
empowerment – working towards social cohesion ‫אחדות‬, which comes through
exclusion ‫ הרחקה‬of that which you are laughing at, and reformed re-inclusion of the
'other'. "Laughing at" is the vicious human tendency to "gang up" on someone, laugh
at them, and then the group feels better about themselves. When a comedy like
Satire works like that the aim is to heal society.
That's the way "awkward comedies" works: they take human vices, exaggerate them
and present them on stage. The audience is laughing an uneasy laughter because
they recognize themselves on the stage, and laughter becomes a form of catharsis.
Comedies always assume the audiences presence and participation.
"Laughing with" aspect of comedy:

Festive and romantic comedy genres belong to this category. It plays with the
elements of the Saturnalia and the carnivalesque (the 'Lord of misrule'). This kind of
comedies work on different aspects: Identification and sympathy, inversion of roles –
working towards social cohesion through the communality of the 'self'. This type of
comedy tends to emphasize individuality. Shakespeare usually writes from the
"laughing with" perspective, but increasingly works in, as a commentary, the darker
threads of satire that comes with "laughing at". Falstaff belongs to both categories.
Elements of Shakespearean comedy
Comedies in Shakespeare's time were defined by a happy ending, ending with

marriage. In Shakespeare's other comedies, the marriages at the end are never
believable. Shakespeare treats these endings very cynically. The couplings seem
artificial and arbitrary. Much ado is the most heterosexual of his romantic comedies.
It's the only comedy of Shakespeare that makes the impression (with Beatrice and
Benedick) that the marriage will really work and last. Marriage in the Elizabethan
period was a business contractual affair. No one in that society married out of love. It
was a fantasy to fall in love and get married. Men and women usually never met one
another before they married. The higher you were on the social scale the more
rigorous the rules became. Marriage was one of the ways in which the economy at
the time arranged itself. Women, daughters were political economic value. Even
servants were married off by the head of the household. No man could marry until he
had income.
1. Romantic entanglements and question of sexual identity – not really relevant

for "much ado about nothing". More relevant to the comedies in which there is a
gendered role play (women dress up as men). This idea fascinates Shakespeare and
he explores it in many of his comedies: From what place do we love erotically
another person? Is our erotic attraction gendered or un gendered? do we love
someone because of heterosexual conditioning. or because who they are,
irrespective of their gender?
2. Error, mistaken identity and disguise – this notion is used in all of the comedies,
not only Shakespeare's. Comedy works on a notion of errors, mistaking people's
identity or intentions, misreading of social situation etc. Romantic comedy generates
a lot of energy on focusing on the miscommunication at the basis on erotic attraction.
this idea is not really relevant to much ado.
3. Escapism, fantasy and magic – this idea is not relevant to much ado.
4. Wit and verbal comedy – the main thing of much ado's comic thrust.

5. Clowning – the "wise" fool, the very ancient idea that natural fools are very wise.
The notion that a fool is the wisest character is a comic convention Shakespeare
exploits more in his tragedies. In much ado Dogberry is the clown fool character.
Much ado about nothing

The important use and thematic concern is the idea of 'Wit'. From the very first lines
we know that the play is going to be governed around wit. The word "wit" recurs in
the play 25 times. "Wit" keeps repeating in much ado, we hear the word and see it
demonstrated.
The idea of wit
It's clear that Benedick and Beatrice love each other from the beginning of the play,
but they never found a way to act on it or say it. Everyone around them knows that
they are in love. The thing that stops them from expressing their love is their wit. The
two of them declares they don't want to get marriage. Benedick says that he will die a
bachelor. Beatrice says that she doesn’t want a man without a beard (too young for
her), but also doesn't want a man with a beard (too old). There is a sense in which
her sexual awareness of herself is ill-matched, the only way that she can find
expression to her sexual identity is by venting it in these games of wit, highly
erotically charged battles of wit she has with Benedick. The Elizabethans were very
sensitive to language and rhetoric. They would have been alert that when Benedick
and Beatrice are battling each other with a game of words, they were actually making
love. Beatrice is in a special category: her uncle calls her "curst" a woman who talks
too much that she can't be married off. This relates to the idea that the woman has to
be silent and obey the husband. Shakespeare's plays are full with the intelligent
women; this is his way to explore individuality, interiority that is being threatened.
Beatrice knows that the only way in which she can keep her own sense of self intact
is by not marry, otherwise she'll become someone else's property. In the Elizabethan
society, husbands had absolute governs and legal authority over their wives body.
There was a social paradox that Shakespeare explored in his plays:
On the one hand women were considered attractive valuable marriage propositions if
they had skills of charm such as: reading, writing, holding a conversation, music etc.
Women had the tools of rhetoric and learning.
On the other hand married women were expected to be silent, obedient to their
husband etc.
The meanings of the word "wit" in the 16th century
1. The seat of consciousness or thought, another word for the mind: sometimes
connoting one of the mind's functions, for example memory or attention [obsolete ,‫מיושן‬
‫]שאינו בשימוש‬. For example: saying to a student who doesn't listen to the lecturer that
he is "witless" (not paying attention).
2. The faculty of thinking and reasoning in general: a word that means the mental
capacity, understanding, intellect and reason.
3. Any one of certain particular faculties of perception, classified as outer

(outward) or bodily, and inner (inward) or ghostly (internal, from the soul), and
commonly reckoned as five of each kind. For example: the five wits are the five
senses. Wits can be sight, smell, taste, cognition; thinking and rationalizing are wit
exercising.

4. The understanding or mental faculties in respect of their condition: chiefly
'right mind', 'reason', 'senses', sanity. For example: To be "out of your wits" Is to be
mad. To say to someone "you reason past wit" could either mean "you are reasoning
in an unreasoning way" or "you are reasoning irrationally" or "you are reasoning past
my ability to understand what you're saying".
5. Good or great mental capacity; intellectual ability; genius, talent, cleverness;

mental quickness or sharpness, acumen. [This definition is not obsolete but archaic].
6. Wisdom, good judgment, discretion, prudence [obsolete]
7. Quickness of intellect or liveliness of fancy, with capacity of apt expression;

talent for saying brilliant or sparkling things, especially in an amusing way. This is the
definition that Shakespeare and we first encounter, what Benedick and Beatrice do.
This definition is linked with the capacity to talk cleverly and be funny. This is also
Falstaff's wit.
Leonato:"You must not, sir, mistake my niece. There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior
Benedick and her: they never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them"
Quickness of intellect, skirmish is a military metaphor of soldier fight. Instead of
fighting with weapons they fight with words and rhetoric. Since "wit" is also a word for
the soul, it can be interpreted as a battle of will, or a battle between their intellectual
abilities.
Beatrice: "In our last conflict four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man
governed with one: so that if he have wit enough to keep himself warm, let him bear it for a
difference between himself and his horse; for it is all the wealth that he hath left, to be known
a reasonable creature" Beatrice is using her own wit, and uses twice the word "wit" in
very different ways: "five wits" – wit as one of the senses. "the whole man governed with
one" – ‫מגע‬. "so that if he have wit enough" – wisdom, good judgment.
Beatrice says that Benedick is pure animal. Horses were sexual metaphors in the
Renaissance.

Lesson 11 – 29.04.15
The tension between Beatrice and Benedick takes place rhetorically.

Ursula talks about Beatrice: "O, do not do your cousin such a wrong. She cannot be so
much without true judgment--Having so swift and excellent a wit as she is prized to have—as
to refuse so rare a gentleman as Signior Benedick"
Initially she means sparky sarcasm quick facility with language. Once she raises the
question of true judgment wit is expended immediately to suggest the ability to judge
correctly, to use rational faculty and so on. The entire comedy operates on reverse
psychology. This is an exercise on how to get two people who actually love each
other to act on loving each other by having them outgrow a mood of over wittiness.
Wit is what is stopping Benedick and Beatrice from realizing their romantic attraction.
Benedick is looking for the perfect woman. In the scene where Benedick "overhears"
the other characters speaking about Beatrice being in love with him, they actually try
to make him realize that Beatrice is the woman of his dreams. Afterwards the wit is
turned inside and there's a process of self-persuasion.
Beatrice: "Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for
his single one: marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may
well say I have lost it." From this speech we learn that there is a history between
Benedick and Beatrice, they tried courting one another before but it ended badly.
There is another conceit operating in this play in it is the tradition of courtly

love, it's language and poetry.
At the end Benedick sits to write a bad sonnet. Shakespeare mocks the effected
posture of the lover who vends ‫ מוכר‬his love informer literary conventions, writing
poetry.Shakespeare develops his own language, dramatic prose and poetry, which
increasingly move away from the rhetorical to the natural. This reflects the process of
falling in love. The falling in love of Beatrice and Benedick will require a discarding, a
change in the language that they use. That becomes possible once their
understanding of communication itself ceases to be one directional. The moment
they realize that their words and wits have an addressee is the moment in which wit
becomes redundant and then they talk like real lovers. For example: the scene at the
church.
The title: "Much ado about what?"
Shakespeare and his contemporaries never invested much thought in their titles.
Titles had to be simple, to describe the play to the audience. Shakespeare is famous
for giving his comedies silly titles. "Much ado about nothing" – What is the "nothing"?
Is love nothing? Or is wit nothing? That's one of the main issues the play is
concerned.
Nothing/noting
In original English pronunciation of the 16th century "nothing" and "noting" were
pronounced the same way. This means that there is a pun in the play: "much ado
about nothing" and "much ado about the practice of noting".
Noting: seeing things correctly, seeing the details, reading between the lines.
Most of the mistakes that generate the comedy are driven by characters misnotings,
misreading other characters and the social situations.

1. Mistaken perceptions, misunderstanding, and the comedy of human
miscommunication are some of the main themes this play engages with.
For example: Dogberry's Malapropisms are major clowning device which anchors
this on the level of the low characters, the clown.
Malapropisms: A low character misuses language in a funny way. In this way the
audience feels better about themselves, superior then the low characters.
Dogberry: "I hear as good exclamation on your worship as of any man in the city" He
means to say "acclamation ‫ "מריע‬and says the opposite, "acclamation ‫"מקלל‬. He
means to give the Duke praise but offends him. On the other hand we have to
remember that Dogberry is the one who unwittingly allow the comic resolution at the
end of the play. Without him the play would have ended as a tragedy.
2. Transposing ‫ לשנות סדר‬the values of same-sex friendship (either between

men or women) and camaraderie ‫ ידידות‬to heterosexual love:
This theme was a major tension for the Elizabethan audience. In the play there is a
realm of men and a realm of women: The men: are all friends of one another, all of
them (except Don John) are soldiers and have brotherly camaraderie of soldiers.
They fought together, lived together, "brothers before women". They are all single.
Claudio and Benedick are best friends. Their duke, Don Pedro, is part of their
society. They speak about being a bachelor, not getting married.
The women: are all friends with one another. Hero and Beatrice are best friends, they
grew up together, shared a room, and loyal to one another.
Men and women didn't interact socially freely during the 16th century. Men spent time
with men and women with women. There was a discourse ‫שיחה‬,‫ דיאלוג‬of male
friendship which was homo erotic. This goes back to ancient Greece and Rome.
During the humanist revival of classical literature it revived in this period.
This theme appears in the play and registered in language. The language of
camaraderie has to be regulated in order to allow for heterosexual unions. For the
16th century it was a major conceptual challenge: how do you move from one world to
another and become a marriageable prospect.
The play engages a lot with the language of ideals

1. On the side of romantic love: worshiping an idea, not an actual person or hating
and idea and not the actual person.
2. The strength of vows "I'll never marry".
The language of the play moves from naturalizing relationships in a society in which
relationships are very difficult because of:
- Social economic pressures
- Conceptual understanding of what the genders are and their relationships
- Over cleverness – young men and women who are so entrenched in their own
ability to move from that world to the other that their trapped in a prison of their own
wittiness. Breaking that is also some of the issues of this play.
3. Wit which causes verbal alienation and the language of romantic fidelity
4. The tragic comic structure of erotic attraction.
Play analysis
Act 1 Scene 1 - The first interaction between Beatrice and Benedick

Technically Beatrice "wins" in this battle of wit, because she always has a continuer.
She turns his words around and throws it back at him.
Beatrice and Benedick are not communicating but flirting. There is an erotic tension
in their speech. Everything that they say to one another is a form of reversed
psychology. They say one thing but something else beneath the surface.
Beatrice: "I know you of old" It's clear that there is history between them. This is not
the first time they meet.
Beatrice: "I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you"
'Mark' is a synonym of 'note', to see and take note. This is a form of reversed
psychology. When she says "nobody marks you" it's inverted because she is marking
him. She actually says: 'pay attention, I'm the one who's marking you, I am nobody to
you'. Beatrice: "Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as
Signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence."
To die was a euphemism for orgasm and sex in the 16th century. It's a very erotically
charged exchange of wit. The reference to food and meat is very erotic. She is
saying to him 'I am fed by your presence, physically attracted to you, so it's
impossible for me to die (have sexual climax) because I don't have you'.
Benedick tries his best to keep up with her. He pretends not to be interested.
Benedick: "Then is courtesy a turncoat (traitor). But it is certain I am loved of all ladies,
only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly,
I love none."
I am loved of all ladies is a reply for her nobody marks you
I love none echoes and picks up her nobody.
He says to her: 'all the ladies love me, excepted you' which sounds like 'accepted
you'. He is basically saying: 'none of the ladies love me except you'.
This speech is written with a clever rhetoric that betrays an erotic psychological
reality. Beatrice and Benedick are entangled in their own sense of wit, simply being
clever for the sake of being clever. Wit comes across as a defense mechanism. The
question is 'what are they defending themselves from?' What is this 'much ado'
about?
Beatrice: "I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I had rather hear
my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me."
This picks up with an Elizabethan concept-
Language and the theory of the humors ‫נוזלים‬: In ancient times many physicians
based their medical practices on their theory of bodily humors or fluids. Hippocrates
(460-377) made analogies between these humors and the four elements of nature.
Everything in the world is made up of four basic elements: fire, air, water, and earth.
Man as a microcosm contains all the four elements. Medicine regarded health as
depending upon the balance of four humors in the body. All the various medical
conditions, particularly psychological ones, were thought to be an imbalance in
certain humors.
I am of your humour for that Beatrice suffers from the same malady as him, the same
state of melancholy.
I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me This line is not
casual. Swearing, taking and giving of vows, is central to the tradition of the ideals of
fidelity and courtly love. Beatrice doesn't want any man to swear to her that he loves
her and talk like a lover to her. She wants a man to actually love her, be her lover.
She wants that to happen within marriage. Because marriage was usually political
economic contract, Beatrice lives with a real fear at that marriage will be the thing
that will kill a chance of having real love. The result is that she is a shrew, a woman
who refuses to marry. Women didn't have many rights and were often controlled by
the men in their life. Even so, women had a right to refuse to marry. Beatrice is giving
voice to the anxiety of many young people in the period, and the way the culture is
set against their natural inclinations. The church and society tried to regulate falling in
love and physical attraction. The result of unregulated natural relationships between

people was bastards, children who were born out of marriage. These bastards had
miserable life, grew as orphans, on the streets, abused. That’s way the presence of a
bastard in this play, Don John, is crucial. Don John becomes the villain who reminds
the audience of the problem of bastardy, what happens when these kind of erotic and
romantic relationships are not regulated. The result is resentment. Critics say that
Don John is one of Shakespeare's weakest villains, not interesting, just a plot device.
Don John's nature is discontent – lacks meaning, substance in his self, and an
outsider. As an outsider he becomes an enemy to marriage. The last words of the
play deals with Don John, devise a punishment for him.
Act 1 Scene 1 - The interaction between Claudio and Benedick
This is the conversation between Claudio, the younger man, who falls in love with
what he sees, and Benedick, the older man, who is cynical and witty. The words that
recur in this speech are mark and noting: what you see as oppose to what you get.
This takes us back to courtly love:
Claudio: "Benedick, didst thou note the daughter of Signior Leonato? Is she not a modest
young lady?" Modesty is a virtue and yet he is talking about her beauty.
Benedick: "I noted her not but I looked at her" That's an interesting distinction. Benedick
implies that he sees he but there is nothing special about her. Actually Benedick is
only noting one woman, Beatrice. Later he compares between the two women.
Benedick: "Do you question me, as an honest man should do, for my simple true judgment;
or would you have me speak after my custom, as being a professed tyrant to their sex?"
Benedick is confessing that he can speak in two minds, that everything is a
performance. He can speak what he really thinks, as Claudio's best friend, or speak
as the character he pretends to play, the one who hates women.
Claudio: "No; I pray thee speak in sober judgment" Claudio is asking of him to speak
plainly, without using his wit.
Benedick: "Why, i' faith, methinks she's too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise
and too little for a great praise: only this commendation I can afford her, that were she other
than she is, she were unhandsome; and being no other but as she is, I do not like her"
Benedick's answer is full of sarcasm and wit, return to a position of comparison. Like
in sonnet 130 with its inversion on the Petrarchan conceits about feminine beauty,
here again we see the language of Petrarchan praised blazon, the famous
convention of courtly love, being ridiculed and turned into a joke of relativity of sight.
"methinks she's too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise and too little for a great
praise" Benedick says to Claudio that what he sees is an ideal, he have created an
ideal in his mind that doesn't exist. In reality, if Claudio will actually look at Hero he'll
see that she's a real woman. Benedick pretends to objectivity but he is not objective.
Benedick says that in reality, love conditions out eyes to see in a certain way.
Benedick: "Would you buy her, that you inquire after her?"
Claudio: "Can the world buy such a jewel" Claudio answers with a typical Petrarchan
metaphor, the woman as a jewel, and with the Petrarchan clichés about the fact that
love is transcendental and has no price.
Benedick: "Yea, and a case to put it into" Benedick is talking about love as it is, the
economy of marriage, the dowry. The reply is an attempt to disabuse Claudio from
his Petrarchan idealism.
Benedick: "But speak you this with a sad brow? or do you play the flouting Jack, to tell us
Cupid is a good hare-finder and Vulcan a rare carpenter?" Benedick says women are not
faithful the way men are faithful to one another.
Claudio: "In mine eye she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on."
Benedick: "I can see yet without spectacles and I see no such matter: there's her cousin, an
she were not possessed with a fury, exceeds her as much in beauty as the first of May doth the
last of December." On the level of subjectivity Claudio says that he finds Hero

beautiful. Benedick doesn't agree with him and says that he finds Beatrice to be more
beautiful.
Benedick: "But I hope you have no intent to turn husband, have you?" For Benedick
Claudio's intentions to marry are a threat on the camaraderie of men.
Act 2 scene 1 Beatrice talking to her uncle

In this scene Beatrice mirrors Benedick sentiments, repeating from her feminine
friendship point of view why she doesn't want to get married.
Leonato:" So, by being too curst, God will send you no horns" She has too much wit and it
rejects men.
Beatrice: "Just, if he send me no husband; for the which blessing I am at him upon my knees
every morning and evening. Lord, I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face: I
had rather lie in the woolen."
Leonato: "You may light on a husband that hath no beard."
Beatrice: "What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting-
gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less
than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I
am not for him..."
The point here is age, younger men don’t have beards, and older men have beards.
She doesn’t want to marry an old man. She needs a real man, her age with no beard.
The point is that what she wants is Benedick.
The first cracks in the male camaraderie are experienced when Don John tried to
convince Claudio that Don Pedro is wooing for himself. There is a short soliloquy of
Claudio.
Claudio: "Friendship is constant in all other things save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore, all hearts in love use their own tongues; Let every eye negotiate for itself And trust
no agent; for beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melteth into blood. This is an
accident of hourly proof, which I mistrusted not. Farewell, therefore, Hero!" Claudio states
a major subject of this play: In the matters of love, everything is subjective, all hearts
speak for themselves. The idea of messenger in love, using another to woo for you,
is metaphorically the same as using redundant poetry to do the work for you. It was
common amongst aristocrats to send poems to the beloved. Most men couldn't write
poetry so they would get other men to write it for them. They would woo using
another man's words. This is part of what he is saying, there is an entire culture of
romantic surrogacy ‫פונדקאות‬.

Lesson 12 – 03.05.15
Much ado about nothing
The second part of the play

The play is divided into two parts. The plot of Hero Claudio and Don John becomes
the main theme of the second part.
Don John with Boraccio his Machiavellian evil servant arranges that Claudio will
believe that Hero has cheated on him, and no longer a virgin. According to the laws
of marriage in that period a woman had to be a virgin, a maiden.
If Hero has been unfaithful it's a double betrayal: of Claudio and of her father who
had married her off as a maiden. This reflects the currency of feminine sexuality
which is used and negotiated by the various men.
Act 3 scene 2 John Don traps Claudio

Don John tells Claudio and Don Pedro that Hero is unfaithful and that he will show a
man entering her chamber.
In dramatic terms, this scene is a turning point in which the play becomes dark, the
language changes, the characters stop being funny and become serious.
The language is very extreme. Critics had criticized the change of characters
(Claudio comes across as excessive ‫ מוגזם‬even in Renaissance time).
The scene is interesting for the way male psychology works, in terms of the play's
mild philosophical reflection on noting, misnoting belief and truth.
For example: it doesn't take much to convince Claudio that Hero betrayed him. The
idea is planted in his mind.
Don John uses a rhetorical technique to convince Claudio: he magnifies the
importance of his words by belittling them. It's another example in the play for the use
of reverse psychology.
Don John: "I came hither to tell you; and, circumstances shortened, for she has been too
long a talking of, the lady is disloyal"
Claudio: "Who, Hero?"
Don John: "Even she; Leonato's Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero"
Hero and Leander / Christopher Marlowe

The name "Hero" was very famous during that period, due to the Greek myth Hero
and Leander and to Christopher Marlowe's poem that retells that myth. Leander is
mentioned later when Benedick is trying to write his bad poem.
The story of Hero and Lander is another pattern for the Romeo and Juliet story: They
are two young lovers that come from opposite side of the Hellespont and their love is
forbidden. Leander fell in love with Hero and would swim every night across the
Hellespont to be with her. Hero would light a lamp at the top of her tower to guide his
way. Succumbing to Leander's soft words Hero allowed him to make love to her. One
stormy winter night, the waves tossed Leander in the sea and the breezes blew out
Hero's light; Leander lost his way and was drowned. When Hero saw his dead body,
she threw herself over the edge of the tower to her death to be with him.

Therefore, 'Hero' is classical mythological synonym to fidelity on to death. It also
suggests true love in despite of what your parents might say. Shakespeare is playing
with these expectations.
Don John: "The word (disloyal) is too good to paint out her wickedness; I could say she were
worse: think you of a worse title, and I will fit her to it. Wonder not till further warrant: go
but with me to-night, you shall see her chamber-window entered, even the night before her
wedding-day: if you love her then, to-morrow wed her; but it would better fit your honour to
change your mind"
Don John is using the trick of "don't believe me, seeing is believing", but as we know
from the Shakespeare's world, seeing is never believing., seeing is the sense which
is most liable for deception, it's unreliable. Hearing is also unreliable because it
exposes you to rhetorical manipulation.
The mood darkens, the audience watch how the play turns into tragedy. This is the
tragic comic structure of the play taking a turn.
We as the audience expect that Claudio will defend Hero until he actually sees her
crime with his own eyes. Claudio is trapped in Don John's trap.
Claudio: "If I see anything to-night why I should not marry her to-morrow in the
congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her"
Claudio turns very quickly against Hero, and declares that if he'll see Hero betrayal
he will publicly humiliate and shame her.
Claudio vs. Hero and Leander / Christopher Marlowe

From a literary point of view Shakespeare is weaving around the characters of
Claudio and Hero the way he manages the story. This goes back to Marlowe's Hero
and Leander poem. The poem became really famous, everybody read it.
The famous line from the poem is: "who love not that love not at first sight".
Marlowe reflects materialistic, atheistic distraction from the notion of spiritual love.
Marlowe in this poem demonstrates flesh, erotic instant attraction. Claudio is a man
of instant attraction; he has no inner world. He's just passion and emotion. He is very
easily manipulated through sight and opinion. Claudio is a caricature of the literary
tradition that Shakespeare is seeking here to complicate. He is caricature of Leander.
Leander too fall with Hero just by looking at her, pure physicality. In Marlowe's poem
Hero and Leander don't die at the end. He never gets to the tragedy bit.
Shakespeare critics and complicates the simplistic tradition of innocent love at first
sight. It's works for myth but not in the real world. Romeo and Juliet was written
before Much Ado.
This language suggests that there is darkness to the heart of these men. The men
are driven by society's conventions, literary conventions, anything but what is natural
to their own selves. Identity is being conditioned by traditions: literary, patriarchal and
economic. None of them are following an inner truth.Benedick and Beatrice are trying
to follow their own truth, but they too are held back by their own commitment to being
witty.

Act 3 Scene 3 Dogberry and the members of the watch
Dogberry gives the members of the watch instructions of how to patrol the town.
After the previous scene which darkened the mood of the play, Shakespeare brings
this scene which introduces us to Dogberry. Dogberry is a natural fool. He doesn't
know that he is fool. The audience laughs at him and with him. There is a childlike
innocent in him which lightens the mood. Shakespeare releases tragic tension by
keeping the audience's mind of the comedy, by introducing these characters.
Dogberry's instructions for his men revolve around jokes.

Dogberry: "If you meet a thief, you may suspect him, by virtue of your office, to be no true
man; and, for such kind of men, the less you meddle or make with them, why the more is for
your honesty"
Watchman: "If we know him to be a thief, shall we not lay hands on him?"
Dogberry: "Truly, by your office, you may; but I think they that touch pitch will be defiled:
the most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is to let him show himself what he is
and steal out of your company"
Dogberry's idea of battling crime is to not let it corrupting ethos effect the world as he
sees it: "if you see a thief, don't arrest him, let him go". Dogberry's silliness
introduces a childlike innocence or charm that immediately counteracts Don John's
cynicism.
Verges: "You have been always called a merciful man, partner"
Dogberry: "Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any
honesty in him"
Dogberry is not being cynical. The word "honesty" is subverted ‫ לערער‬here, thieves
were regularly hanged.
There is a certain kind of natural intuitive innocent wisdom to Dogberry. Dogberry's

humorless (from his point of view) innocence is what stops the play from becoming
tragedy. He will be the one who will accidently resolve the tragic tension and allow for
the play to become a comedy.
Shakespeare is trying to comment again on the tragic comic structure of erotic

attraction in general. If you take genre of plays as existential reflections on the state
of man in various situations in his life, then for Shakespeare there is nothing
inherently comic or tragic about human life in its ordinary patterns of attraction,
marriage, pro creation, erotic attraction and love. Love is the engine that drives
everything else. It is both comic and tragic at the same time. The outcome of one's
life as either tragic or comic is as random as the mystery of the accidental solving of
the crime by Dogberry.
For Dogberry, both the loving and the slander are of equal superficial hold on his
rather limited intellectual capacity.

Act 4 Scene 1 the church scene, the wedding
At the wedding Claudio publicly denounce Hero as a lewd woman, shaming her and
her father. Hero faints. The Friar believes in her innocence and convinces Leonato to
announce that she has died. Benedick and Beatrice stay alone and admit of their
love. Beatrice asks Benedick to kill Claudio and he reluctantly agrees to challenge
him to a duel.
Claudio: "Sweet prince, you learn me noble thankfulness. There, Leonato, take her back
again: Give not this rotten orange to your friend; She's but the sign and semblance of her
honour. Behold how like a maid she blushes here! O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal! Comes not that blood as modest evidence To witness
simple virtue? Would you not swear, All you that see her, that she were a maid, By these
exterior shows? But she is none: She knows the heat of a luxurious bed; Her blush is
guiltiness, not modesty"
Claudio moves from two different extremes:

1. Loving using Petrarchan language - Being completely in love with Hero, calling
her a jewel, using idealistic Petrarchan excessive language to describe his love.
Already then Benedick warned him and tried to open his eyes to reality.
2. Resenting using extreme language - The language goes to the other extreme
from the Petrarchan tradition. Claudio shames Hero publicly and uses extremely
violent language. "rotten orange"
The whole speech is about looking. Claudio calls everyone to look at Hero and see
how her looks are deceiving. According to the theory of the humors, blushing (blood
element) signified both modesty and overheated sexuality.
There is an irony, Claudio, a man who was easily deceived by looks, says these
words. Claudio becomes a paradigm for what Shakespeare is trying to say about the
way we rely on our senses when we meddle in the affairs of love.
Claudio is a young man who is a product of the society: He is conditioned to think of
women and of being in love in a certain way. He loves like a person in literature not
like a real person. He doesn’t understand his own emotions, they are generated by
convention. That's why Claudio is an opposite paradigm to Benedick. Benedick is
complex, has a rich interior, he's struggling with understanding his real emotions.
Claudio: "O Hero, what a Hero hadst thou been, if half thy outward graces had been placed
about thy thoughts and counsels of thy heart! But fare thee well, most foul, most fair!
farewell, thou pure impiety and impious purity! For thee I'll lock up all the gates of love, and
on my eyelids shall conjecture hang, to turn all beauty into thoughts of harm, and never shall
it more be gracious."
Everything about Claudio is excessive and extreme. He says the he'll never love or
trust a woman again. The language is the one of traditional slighted lovers in pastoral
poetry, drama, rhetoric and so. Claudio is a caricature of these excessive modes.
Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedick are always together until this moment of the play.
In this scene, the male camaraderie breaks Pedro and Claudio leave the church and
Benedick stays. This is the crucial moment where Benedick breaks with his male
camaraderie and makes a choice to stay with Beatrice because she is very
distressed. He moves from the world of the men to the world of romantic realization.
Shakespeare gives the words of true wisdom to the catholic friar. The Friar words are
important to our understanding of the deeper meaning of the play.
Friar: "Marry, this well carried shall on her behalf change slander to remorse; that is some
good: But not for that dream I on this strange course, but on this travail look for greater

birth. She dying, as it must so be maintain'd, upon the instant that she was accused, shall be
lamented, pitied and excused of every hearer: for it so falls out that what we have we prize
not to the worth whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost, why, then we rack the value,
then we find the virtue that possession would not show us whiles it was ours. So will it fare
with Claudio: When he shall hear she died upon his words, the idea of her life shall sweetly
creep into his study of imagination, and every lovely organ of her life shall come apparell'd
in more precious habit, more moving-delicate and full of life, into the eye and prospect of his
soul, than when she lived indeed; then shall he mourn, if ever love had interest in his liver,
and wish he had not so accused her, no, though he thought his accusation true. Let this be so,
and doubt not but success will fashion the event in better shape than I can lay it down in
likelihood. But if all aim but this be levell'd false, The supposition of the lady's death Will
quench the wonder of her infamy: And if it sort not well, you may conceal her, As best befits
her wounded reputation, In some reclusive and religious life, Out of all eyes, tongues, minds
and injuries"
"travail look for greater birth" The image here is one of birth, pregnancy and life.
"for it so falls out that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it, but being
lack'd and lost, why, then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not
show us whiles it was ours" Shakespeare with his great wisdom and understanding in
human nature tells us that human beings tend to know what they have lost only after
they have lost it, especially men. The theme of "being too late in love" will become a
major tragic theme underlines Hamlet relationship with Ophelia. Shakespeare
understood the human propensity ‫ נטייה‬for tragedy: our inability to pursue what we
really want and will make us a happy because of our inability to see what is in front of
our eyes
"When he (Claudio) shall hear she died upon his words" - Words can kill
"the idea of her life shall sweetly creep into his study of imagination, and every lovely organ
of her life shall come apparell'd in more precious habit, more moving-delicate and full of life,
into the eye and prospect of his soul, than when she lived indeed" The Friar talks about how
humans shape their own personal realities in their own imaginations. He says that
Claudio's problem was that he was conditioned by other people's suggestions and
conventions. It's only after Hero will be taken away from him, like courtly love, at that
moment of absence he'll build up the idea of her life. She'll become much more
beautiful in his imagination at the moment of loss.
After the mock Christian resurrection at the end, when she will be brought again to
life, the relief would be a cure for his Petrarchan madness. In order to help Claudio in
his impossibility in realizing love as a realistic organic thing between people you have
to go to these extremes.
Benedick and Beatrice in the church is the first time that Benedick and Beatrice stay
alone on the stage. The language changes, no more games of wit, except a bit on
Beatrice's side, but Benedick is cured. Benedick talks straight up like ordinary
person. He tries to reason with her an unreasonable passion because she is very
upset. This scene is very important because that’s the moment where you see that
Benedick is cured from his prison of wit, and he's truly in love with her and will do
anything for her. At the moment when she asks him to kill Claudio for her as proof of
her love is a crucial moment in their relationship.
Beatrice: "Sweet Hero! She is wronged, she is slandered, she is undone" Hero is undone by
words, by men abusing her by saying wrong things about her.
Beatrice social comment about manhood and gallantry

Beatrice: "Princes and counties! Surely, a princely testimony, a goodly count, Count
Comfect; a sweet gallant, surely! O that I were a man for his sake! or that I had any friend
would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into courtesies, valour into

compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too: he is now as valiant
as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will
die a woman with grieving."
Beatrice says that real manhood disappeared and turned into wittiness of tongue.
Beatrice in this speech is making a social comment about a theme that was relevant
to Shakespeare period: What is true chivalry? There is a connection between this
speech and Hotspur's speech in Henry IV. Shakespeare's age was an age where
chivalry of the Hotspur kind is dead. There are not more knights moving around in
armor saving ladies from dragons. Already in Spenser's Fearie Queene these were
turned into allegorical myths. The new gallant man of Shakespeare's time was a man
of words, fashion. Just as described in Hotspur's speech, the parody of the
Elizabethan courtier. Beatrice is making a cultural comment: the men of her time are
all like the Elizabethan courtier; dress well, talk like Hercules but all empty inside, It's
rhetoric, language. Part of the dramatic tension of Much Ado is that the characters
are trapped in society conventions which prohibit translating their real emotion into
actions: a proper marriage for them.
Beatrice is trying to have Benedick react to her own needs. What matters to her is
the commitment for abandoning one world to her world.
Benedick: "Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?"
Benedick answer is fascinating: he doesn't simply say that he'll kill Claudio.
This is the moment where Shakespeare touches the most moving realistic romantic
moment between them. Benedick says to Beatrice that if she truly believes that
Claudio wronged Hero, he will make her truth his truth. That is what she really
wanted to hear.
Benedick: "Enough, I am engaged; I will challenge him. I will kiss your hand, and so I leave
you. By this hand, Claudio shall render me a dear account. As you hear of me, so think of me.
Go, comfort your cousin: I must say she is dead: and so, farewell."
Because it's a comedy, before the actual duel Dogberry and his team solve the
crime. If it was a tragedy they would have had the duel, kill one another and then the
crime would have being solved. Shakespeare always raises the tragic tension and
immediately solves it with comic devices in Much Ado.

Act 5 scene 2 Benedick and Beatrice interaction
Benedick tries to write a love poem, a sonnet to Beatrice. Beatrice and Benedick
have a romantic witty conversation. Ursula brings the news that Hero's innocence
has been proved.
Benedick and Beatrice use their wit now to express their mutual admiration and love.
The jokes are there to establish a new common ground.
Beatrice: "In spite of your heart, I think; alas, poor heart! If you spite it for my sake, I will
spite it for yours; for I will never love that which my friend hates"
That's a key moment in the play, she calls Benedick "her friend". That’s the moment
of the transplanting ‫ להעביר‬of the language of friendship. They are friends in their
erotic relationship.
Benedick: "Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably"
Beatrice: "It appears not in this confession: there's not one wise man among twenty that will
praise himself."
Benedick: "An old, an old instance, Beatrice, that lived in the lime of good neighbours. If a
man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument
‫ אנדרטה‬than the bell rings and the widow weeps."
Beatrice: "And how long is that, think you?"
Benedick: "Question: why, an hour in clamour and a quarter in rheum: therefore is it most
expedient for the wise, if Don Worm (death), his conscience, find no impediment to the
contrary, to be the trumpet of his own virtues, as I am to myself. So much for praising myself,
who, I myself will bear witness, is praiseworthy: and now tell me, how doth your cousin?"
They talk about death, and ask how can you live in monuments ‫ אנדרטאות‬which here
refers to poems as well as tombstones, to courtly love which turns love into a
monument. They actually say that they don't want to have monuments; they want to
have each other. The scene begins with Benedick's efforts to write a poem.
Beatrice: "Very ill"
Bebedick: "And how do you?"
Beatrice: "Very ill too"
Benedick: "Serve God, love me and mend. There will I leave you too, for here comes one in
haste." He's talking about himself and her.

Lesson 13 – 06.05.15
General introduction to tragedy
Tragedies always end with death, that's the basic element of the genre. Every
protagonist in the play will die. Usually there are one or two survivors, minor
characters who come back to restore the order, giving a scene of closer to the
audience. The characters in the story, whether it is the villain or his victim, all will die.
Tragedy, from the time Greeks developed the genre, is fundamentally about death.
They are not about killing. Horror films are about the anxieties that are to do with the
human body, with violence, with repressed sexual anxieties. Representation of
violence is not necessarily tragic. There's a lot of violence in Jacobian drama, and
Shakespeare's drama, for example: Titus Andronicus is one of the most violent plays
that were ever written: rape, murder, cannibalism which takes place on stage.
Why do we enjoy tragedy?

1. Tragedy talks about the individual and not the society, not the community. In
that aspect it differs from comedies. Tragedy is about the suffering subject, about the
existential reality of one individual. In relation to the society some tragedies can be
political, but in the end there is always a single suffering protagonist in tragedy, tragic
hero. That's why tragedy tends to be more universal then comedy. Comedy is bound
to the cultural tradition which created it. There's a certain kind of cultural universalism
to tragic, because human suffering is something that every one of us can relate to.
2. Tragedy presents sacrifice - In tragedy we are watching a single tragic character

who takes on himself the anxiety, fears, sufferings, and then dies, realizing us and
making us feel better. The responsibility, goes through horrible things and die at the
end. Relates to Christianity, Christ is scarified to release us from our sins.
3. Tragedy is a theatrical experience with works on representation: it works

because we know it isn't real. That's where horror and tragedy separate: The
Romans used to stage tragedies, would have slaves perform them and really dying at
the end. It was not a representation, but the "real thing".
Tragedies operate by creating a safe zone which operates on two illusions:
- What you see seems real but you know it isn't
- You are invited to peek; a very important principle of tragedy is voyeurism ‫מציצנות‬.
This s different from comedies: in comedies actors often turn to the audience and try
to involve the audience in the performance In tragedy it will never happen. The tragic
protagonist never acknowledges the audience's presence. The audience peeks into
the characters inner thoughts, acts of violence and hidden anxieties. The audience
goes through a process while watching a tragedy: Feeling slightly guilty for looking at
something we are not meant to look at, at the same time being raised up with
emotions of our own anxieties and fears, and at the end seeing someone else paying
the ultimate price.

Aristotle theory about mimesis and tragedy
Aristotle though about the tragedies as texts, part of a received Greek Hellenic
culture. Aristotle tries to theorize and define tragedies is the 'Poetics':
"Tragedy, then, is an imitation (representation through art, mimetic performance) of

an action which is serious (not comic) and (as having magnitude ‫ )גודל‬complete (not
episodic), in sweetened language (elevated poetic discourse), each kind of
sweetening being introduced separately in the parts of the work, of persons
performing actions and not through report [in a dramatic, not in a narrative form] (not
like reading a story, the experience of watching it is what's important), through pity
and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions" (Poetics 1449b 22-8)
The term catharsis is a metaphor Aristotle takes from medicine, it means purging.
Aristotle means that tragedy causes us to feel pity, fear and then purges it. The
problem here is that this suggests that it is a passive experience, but tragedy is much
more an active experience.
The ideal tragic plot:
hamartia (tragic mistake)  [anagnorisis (change from ignorance to knowledge) 

peripeteia (reversal of fortune)]  catastrophe (disaster)  catharsis.
'Hamartia'=mistake - is the first mistake the tragic hero commits which propels ‫מניע‬
him down a road of calamity. Hamartia is never moral but a mistake.
For example: Oedipus sleeping with his mother and killing his father is a mistake
committed in ignorance. If we insist in Hamlet on a tragic mistake it is the moment
where Hamlet kills Polonius.
'Anagnorisis' – The epiphany, the moment in which the tragic hero learns and
understands his mistake and the consequences of it
'Peripeteia' – the fall from greatness
This structure doesn't work for Shakespeare's play:

- Shakespeare never read Aristotle's poetics. He didn't know Greek tragedies. The
classical tragedies Shakespeare knew were the Roman tragedies of Seneca which
are different from Greek tragedies.
- Catharsis works differently in Shakespeare's plays
- Shakespeare approach to tragedy was intuitive. He developed it based on early
medieval precedents roman tragedy
Analysis of Hamlet's character is irrelevant. It is not what makes the play what it is.

Elements of Shakespearean tragedy: 'The death game'
A. D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?) - another theory about how tragedy
operates on us:
All tragedies are about death. There is nothing to say about it because we know
nothing about it. It is that thing which waits for us. It stands opposite to everything
that we understand as humans as 'alive'. It is the one thing we are most afraid of.
Human existence is shaped by the sense of our finitude, our mortality, that fact that
we are here on borrowed time.
Plato (through the character of Socrates) says that the only aim of philosophy is to
learn how to die well. Tragedy confronts us with our deepest anxieties about death,
not being, nihilism. Hamlet opens up these questions for us in a visceral personal
way. Therefore catharsis is not simply the question of raising emotions and fear. It's a
kind of active 'death game', in which we try to act out what it is to die. It allows people
to experience what it is like to die without actually dying. It releases some of these
tensions and anxieties that we carry with us.
This is why tragedies require these following thematic plot requirements:
1. Complexity and depth of singular character (male, aristocratic, poetic) –

tragic characters don't speak in prose, they speak in poetry.
2. Questions of tragic causality and questions of moral agency, guilt and

sympathy – 'moral agency' not to be confused with 'morality', but more to do with
'ethics'. Morality in the Jewish-Christian sense is the 10 commandments, the
absolute laws of the 'do' and 'don't', which are then entered into a calculus ‫ חישוב‬of
justice, reward and punishment in an absolute sense. In the moral world we speak of
'good' and 'evil', but the world is not really black and white like that.
Classical ethics is the philosophy of knowing 'good' and 'bad', knowing what is the
right thing to do in any given circumstance. The object of human ethics is human
happiness. Questions of causality- Why things happen when they happen? Are
things predetermined? is there such a thing as 'fate'? Are we fated to do the things
that we do? 'Fate' can be psychological – to what extent are we fated to repeat on
our mistakes? Sympathy – the question of identification, to what extent we as the
audience sympathize with the suffering of the protagonist?
3. Providence and the problem of evil

Providence - is God's plans for the world. In Hamlet the question of providence is
central, for example: in Hamlet's final speech
The 'problem of evil' - is a famous problem for all monotheistic faiths, faiths which are
not dualistic, there isn't powers of 'good' and 'bad', but only one God. God is
perceived as good. God created the world perfect. How do we explain the presence
of evil in the perfect world the God created? The famous answer is that the world
was perfect and we ruined it with the fall from Heaven. Philosophically it means that
evil doesn't exist, it's an empty space.
This question is not so relevant to Hamlet.
4. Ghosts, portents and the supernatural –Shakespeare was in governed by the

supernatural: ghosts, witches, omens. The supernatural is important in
Shakespeare's plays particularly in Hamlet and Macbeth. It is both a popular tradition
where people believed in ghosts, but also a literary tradition. Ghosts come from
literature: the plays of Seneca and the morality plays.

5. Influence: The morality play and the Senecan tragedy –
Seneca was the tutor of Nero, was the author nine tragedies. They were never meant
to be performed, but meant to be recited, they were highly rhetorical. The most
famous of them, the most influential in the Renaissance was a tragedy called
Thyestes – a story of two brothers murdering one another and scarifying one
another's children in cannibalism. That play has a famous ghost in it which becomes
a literary convention in revenge tragedies, having a ghost demanding the revenge. .
Development of Shakespearean tragedy
Apprentice and middle tragedies

 Richard III (the medieval 'Vice' figure) –simplified character study of 'vice', a
villain, based on the medieval 'vice' character from the morality play.
Shakespeare endows ‫ מעניק‬him depth character and wit. Richard is all about
wit and malice.
 Titus Andronicus (parody of Marlowe and Seneca)
 Richard II (tragedy of the fallen prince)
 Romeo and Juliet (tragedy of innocent love) – short, fast play, in which the
time moves very quickly. This relates to our discussion about mortality.
 Julius Caesar (the tragedy of political individuals)
The high 'human' tragedies

Each of these plays focuses on a big element of human subjectivity
 Hamlet (the thinking man's tragedy) – Hamlet contains elements from all of
these plays: Richard II retrospection, Brutus's doubts about action all of those
issues merge in Hamlet.
 Othello (domestic tragedy – marriage and jealousy)
 King Lear (domestic tragedy – parents and children)
 Macbeth (The villain's tragedy)
Late 'revision' tragedies

 Antony and Cleopatra (tragedy of adult love)
 Coriolanus (tragedy of political communities)

Hamlet
Ur-Hamlet
Hamlet superficially is a revenge tragedy, a popular subgenre of tragedy.
The story of Hamlet is very old, it wasn't new for the Elizabethans. We know that
there were many Hamlet plays before Shakespeare wrote his. None of them has
survived but we know that they existed. There was a Hamlet play which scholars call
the 'Ur-Hamlet', was probably an early version of a Senecan revenge tragedy based
on the very famous story of a Norwegian Danish prince which existed in a number of
prose sources which were widely read in the period. The story is a revenge plot in
which a son (prince) is called upon to revenge his father's death by his uncle. In the
original story the prince fakes madness and while other people think he's mad he
goes around the court gathering evidence to prove that his uncle is the murderer.
The meaning of the name 'Hamleth' in Norse dialect from which it comes means
'fool', 'idiot' or 'madman', and probably part of the idea of pretending to be mad.
The first Ur-Hamlet play was probably basic and primitive, with long rhetorical
speeches. In 1600 Shakespeare needed to write a new play for the repertoire of Lord
Chamberlin Men actor's company. Shakespeare probably decided to rewrite this
popular play, do a remake. Shakespeare gives the Elizabethans the revenge play
they came to watch, but at the same time doesn't give it to them. It is not clear to the
audience what they are seeing and hearing when they are watching Hamlet, is it
really a revenge play? This dissonance is important to how we initially approach
Hamlet.
At the end of the play everyone are dead, the Norwegian king Fortinbras comes in as
a conqueror to restore order. One of the survivors is Horatio a witness who was there
throughout the entire play. Fortinbras asks Horatio to tell him what happened. At the
end of the play we have a character in line with the audience asking another
character in the play "what was this play about?" "What did we just see?" Horatio's
answers: "so shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, of accidental judgments
(killing Plonius), casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, and, in this
upshot (‫)בקיצור‬, purposes mistook fall'n on the inventor's heads"
This is Horatio's summary to what the play is about, but we as an audience hearing
this summary doesn't feel that it is true to our experience. The story of Hamlet is not
about what Horatio's describes.
Act 1 Scene 1 the guards

The guards in the middle of the night at the platform are waiting with Horatio for the
ghost to appear.
The play begins with a question: "Who's there?"

There is a guard standing on the middle of the night surrounded by darkness, by fog,
by doubt, uncertainty, fear, he sees someone approaching, he is terrified and shouts
into the empty darkness "who's there?". Hamlet is a play that is conducted under a
question that is never answered; you never really know who's there. Is the ghost
real? Hamlet is conducted under a series of open-end and terrifying existential
questions. The opening scene set out an atmosphere of radical epistemological
doubt of the inability to know with certainty the truth about anything. It continues to
resonate through the dialog: we learn about the preparation for war – they don't know
what that is about. We hear about the ghost – they don’t know what that is about,
what it signifies. Hamlet is not a play that gives us answers.

The last word in the play is "shoot", a command. The play ends with Hamlet being
given a soldier's funeral: he is carried out by soldiers and there is a command to
shoot the canon in honor of a soldier's death. How ironic to give Hamlet the funeral of
a soldier and a man of action, when he is the one character who cannot ever act.
When he finally decides to act at the end of the play is only because he finally gives
up, resign himself to tragic dramatic causality.
Act 1 scene 2 Hamlet's dialog with his mother

The "after wedding" celebrations in the court.
From the first minute we see Hamlet we understand that he refuses to join in the
celebrations. He stands in the corner, dressed in black, still in mourning.
Everyone else is dressed for a wedding party. His mother attacks him and says:
Gertrude: "Why seems it so particular with thee?" She actually asks "why do you insist
on pretending to mourn? Why are you wearing black, moping around depressed?"
Hamlet replies to her
Hamlet: "Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good
mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath, no, nor
the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected 'havior of the visage, together with all forms,
moods, shapes of grief, Tthat can denote me truly: these indeed seem, for they are actions that
a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These (my cloths, tears, what
I perform) but the trapping and the suits of woe."
It's like hearing a great powerful engine of existential philosophy starting up, you
know that something grand is going to take place in regard to what we are about to
see: Hamlet says to the audience that none of this is about "seeming", none of this is
about what you can see with your eyes. Identity, meaning, substance, none of those
things are performable. He says basically that you cannot ever perform in theater
what he really feels. He uses a theatrical metaphor: "for they are actions that a man
might play". I have that within which passeth show Hamlet is a play where the real
drama, the real tragedy passes show, cannot be shown theatrically, cannot be shown
in action, it's not measurable in action. The only way he will be able to show
something of it is through the poetic discourse the language of his inner self.
We have to approach Hamlet as two plays

1. A revenge tragedy with a revenge plot that has a certain kind of causality, action
and tragic ending.
2. At the same time we are looking and mostly listening to another play, a play of the
subjective inner abyss ‫ תהום‬of a man who is so committed to thinking that he
cannot act. Because he cannot act he cannot take part in the story, cannot take part
in the lay he is forced to play by fate, condition, society, literary convention and
history.
King Claudius's speech – everything with Claudius is imbalanced: one eye happy
one eye sad, mourning his brother - taking his wife.

Lesson 14 – 10.05.15
Hamlet
Hamlet soliloquys represents his ongoing dialog with himself about that which
prevents him from taking an action because he loses himself in though. These
soliloquys are indifferent to the plot; we can position them anywhere in the play. "To
be or not to be" especially is a speech that is not directly linked to the play's plot.
'memento mori' & 'death game'

This speech is related to what we said last class about tragedy and Hamlet's 'death
game' (tragedies are a kind of active 'death game', in which we try to act out what it is
to die). Hamlet and the skull became the famous symbol of the play. Hamlet in act 5
scene 1, holds the skull of Yorik, the court jester whom he liked as a child.
The skull was always in the English Renaissance a symbol of 'memento mori', a
reminder of death. They were called "death head". Skulls were often worked into the
lintel of doors, were kept on desks and in various positions in the house as
decorative items, worked into art cloths and jewelry as a reminder. The skull is a
Christian symbol that we are all here on borrowed time.
The skull operates differently in the play; Something about the way hamlet's poetry of
death works, his inability to act, to participate in the revenge plot that he is
commanded to participate in by the ghost (a catholic ghost trapped in purgatory),
unable to find rest, the ancestral memory demanding action in the name of honour,
something about all of these paralyzes Hamlet.
When the ghost tells to Hamlet how he was murdered, in Act 1 scene 5, Hamlet's first
reaction is: "Haste me to know't (what has happened, the murder), that I, with wings as swift
as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge.
Right there we know we have a problem. The note says that this is a proverbial, like
"sweeft as thought", but Hamlet doesn't say "though" he says "meditation".
Meditation is not swift, it is when you sit down and meditate for hours. That's an
oxymoron. "wings as swift as meditation" in other words he says "Let me think about
this for a while". Something prevents Hamlet right from the start to participate, to tune
into the world of action, seeming and performance, around him.
We need to tie this back to Shakespeare's preoccupation which we've seen with the
history plays and with Much Ado – the notion of performance, the existential
metaphor that views everything as theater, all human beings as actors playing a role
in a predetermined plot. Add to this the added problem of Epistemological certainty,
this is a world in which appearance are always deceiving, things are always not what
there seem to be, people are not who they are on the outside as oppose to the
inside.
Shakespeare in Hamlet reaches a critical point where for him the notion of an inner
self, inscrutable ‫שאין להבינו‬, mysterious but nevertheless powerfully driving our
causality and outer motive, is in crisis because it cannot tune into the outer world in
which the human being is trapped. Hamlet is not a simple case of "I don’t know rather
or not my uncle really murdered my father". This is not the case in which Hamlet
delays his action in order to collect more evidence. Although Hamlet worries that

perhaps the ghost is the devil, sent to tempt him into an action that will damn him,
murder, and Hamlet says that he need more proof, but we should not believe what
Hamlet says. Hamlet is not a reliable guy, he deceives everyone in his life, including
himself. These are excuses, rationalizations, Hamlet cannot act, and the reason why
he cannot cat is a great mystery. We should not try a spend time to find out why he
cannot act. The fact is that he's can't, and because of it he is trapped, becomes a
relatable existential expression of general human anxiety. The moment we try to
reduce Hamlet's inability to act into a kind of answer that has plausible causality, we
are emptying the play of its infinite possible meanings. Motive is redundant because
later on Hamlet finds the proof that he needs, he overhears Claudio's confession.
Nevertheless, He doesn't do anything; he gives another excuse of not wanting to kill
Claudio while he prays. Even when Hamlet finally decides to act it is not really a
decision, more of a meta-theatrical capitulation ‫ כניעה‬to the play's causality. It's
almost as if Hamlet says at the end to Horatio "you know what? Let's just stop, the
play has to end, everybody is going to die anyway".
The moment Hamlet is introduced to us he's in a state of deep depression. The

definition of madness is in the play. The clinical definitions are irrelevant. Madness as
Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood it was to be in a state of ecstasy, in
a state of outer bodily experience, not in tune to the world, unable to participate in its
rhythms, rules, conventions and so on. Hamlet cannot stop the great engine of his
thoughts. He is spinning forever in an infinite abyss without a bottom. The abyss is
his consciousness, it becomes a trap. He later says "Denmark's a prison", but
Denmark is a metonymy to the king and to himself.
Act 3 scene 1 Hamlet's "to be or not to be"
The poetics of 'memento mori' (reminder of death) in Hamlet's speech "To be or not
to be": The speech is the most famous soliloquy of Hamlet.
Hamlet: "To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by
opposing end them? to die: to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache
and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be
wish'd. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; for in that sleep of
death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil‫ קפיץ‬, must give us
pause: there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life; for who would bear the whips
and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely‫ גסות‬, The pangs‫ייסורים‬
of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence‫ עזות המצח‬of office (those in office) and the
spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with
a bare bodkin? who would fardels ‫ חבילות‬bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that
the dread of something after death, the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller
returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we
know not of? thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of
resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and
moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action"
The speech is not about suicide. It's true that Hamlet says in his first soliloquy in act
1: "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.. or that the Everlasting had not fix'd his canon
'gainst self-slaughter!" which means "if only I could commit suicide", but we should
never believe what Hamlet says. Just because someone says they want to commit
suicide doesn’t mean that they will or really want it. The first wish Hamlet express in
that soliloquy is not to die but to disappear, to melt away. That's a much more
complex wish.

"To be, or not to be: that is the question" just as we had in the beginning of the play, we
start with a metaphysical existential universal unanswerable question. He is not
asking "should I commit suicide or not?" The entire syntax of the speech is in general
abstraction; there is no use of the first person pronoun. He is not talking about
himself; he is raising a general universal question.
The backdrop ‫ רקע‬to this is a certain stoic, philosophical pre-Christian obsession and
valorization of suicide as the ultimate act of honour a stoic sage ‫ מלומד‬could do,
when living honorably was no longer an option.
The question is: "to be or not to be". The next few lines qualify the question, these
are the options: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings‫ קליעות‬and arrows of
outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?"
The options:
1. To 'Be' "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune": that option would be to
'be', to live and exist while suffering silently, passively, as a stoic or a Christian what
God throws at you. This option means to act passively.
2. Not to 'be' "take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them" If we read
the syntax very carefully we see that he talks about ending the troubles, take action
in order not to suffer quietly but to try and change it. This option means to be active in
the world.
What's interesting is the way Hamlet acquits ‫ להוציא זכאי‬being with passivity and not
being with action. That is what's fascinating about the opening of the speech.
He continues to the consequence: "to die" but you are going to die either way, we are
all going to die whether we take action or not.
"to die: to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand
natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd" The language
here is very religious, mockingly . Consummation is a Latin word for technical word
for the final ending of an action.
"To die, to sleep" In the Renaissance they thought that sleeping was a kind of death.
They were terrified of sleep, thinking that every time you went to sleep, potentially
you will not make up. This idea goes back to Homer and ancient literature, the idea
that sleep is a mirror image of death, a representation of death in our life.
There is here in Hamlet's speech a wish to get to a pre-Christian reality where there
isn't another world after, a place of quite solitude. Later in the play Hamlet says
"I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams" Hamlet expresses the stoic fantasy, to be a stoic sage shut up in his
own subjective universe, not to let the world affect him. The dreams are the problem.
All this retreat into subjectivity is no use if your subjectivity is diseased, if your own
inner world is haunted by ghosts. Hamlet is not a man of action but a scholar.
"for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil
‫ קפיץ‬, must give us pause: there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life " The fear of
the dreams of what would happen when you, or what would happen when you die, is
that which must give us pause. Hamlet is always pausing, in a state of pause.
Shakespeare refers to the body as a coil ‫קפיץ‬. Coil was also a metonymic metaphor
to describe battle or confusion. shuffled off – like a snake that shuffle of his skin, and
the sound of shuffling feet in old age.
"for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
contumely‫ גסות‬, The pangs‫ ייסורים‬of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence‫ עזות המצח‬of
office (those in office) and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes when he himself
might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?"
Now comes the famous part of the speech in which Hamlet lists a picture of the
contempt of the world and the way the world conduct itself to destroy us and make
our life unbearable. He gives a catalog of disasters. The catalog is very literary,

captures various points in the genres of comedy, tragedy and the literary
representation in Shakespeare's time of human suffering. The list of disasters:
1. The pangs‫ ייסורים‬of despised love Unrequited love – This coming from Hamlet who is
tormenting Ophelia.
2. the law's delay - the fact that the law works too slow, that there is never justice to
crime, this from a revenger who is precisely delaying.
3. "the insolence‫ עזות המצח‬of office" Bribe, using of authority – people in high position of
power behaving shamelessly.
"when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin (dagger)?" The dagger is a
symbol of a stoic act of suicide. Quietus ‫הסדר סופי של חוב‬
Hamlet says "Who will suffer all this trouble when he can settle his own debt by killing
himself with his own knife". He doesn't say "should I do it" by says it in general.
"who would fardels ‫ חבילות‬bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of
something after death, the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns,
puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know
not of?" The word "Puzzle" in the 16th century meant complete epistemological
disorientation. "puzzles the will" means leaving us in a complete state of inability to
know anything. Our fear of death makes us live our life in a way in which every
moment of our life we always choose the ills that we know then take risks to go to ill
that we don’t know. So many people are terrified from their future because they are
trapped in their past, they never do anything in the present. This is a profound
psychological insight, not a general reflection about committing suicide.
"thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied
o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard
their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action" Hamlet says that our will and ability
to make decisions and act is like standing water instead of flowing, and when it
stands it is covered with a layer of thought. In other words: because Hamlet thinks
on the event, he cannot act, his thoughts prevents him from taking an action. The
metaphoric image Hamlet evokes is an image of a stagnant body of water, covered
at the top with a thin layer of scum. "native hue of resolution" – the decision to act.
Hamlet's inability to act is cowardice, Hamlet is a coward. He can't bring himself to
tell Ophelia that he loves her. Because Hamlet doesn’t speak in first person, but in
general, the play is not a revenge tragedy anymore but an existential rhapsody,
exploiting for the dramatic effect the structure of a revenge plot which requires a
delay of action. Shakespeare looks at the revenge plot structure and says that the
delay is artificial and theatrical; if it's so artificial, why not turn that into the whole
existential metaphor? Hamlet is unable to act, he doesn't choose not to act.
The play's tension between thinking and acting becomes itself a poetic "memento
mori". You don’t need the skull to think about death anymore. Hamlet's poetry of
inaction and of meditation, is a mode of "being" which in the world of action can only
be translated as "not being". This is a paradox. "Not to be" is to be active according
to Hamlet's speech. Hamlet tells us that the real world, the world inhabited by
Fortinbras or Laertes, the world of action, is not the world of "being".
Act 1 scene 3 Polonius and Laertes
Laertes is about to leave to Paris when Polonius gives him general advice about how
to conduct himself. This scene mirrors the relationship between Hamlet and the
father figures in his life.
It presents another "father-son" relationship: Polonius and Laertes.
Polonius's rhetoric is based on antithesis ‫אנתטיתזה‬, "do one thing but not the other".
The sentences are equally weight. That is almost the poetic diction of words of
council and of advice. Polonius's speech and advice to Laertes mirrors Hamlet's

answer to his mother "I have that within which passeth show". This is exactly the
following scene.
Polonius is the knowledgeable court advisor, the politician; He is a man, for whom
action is determined by acting, putting on a god performance. Polonius gives Laertes
fatherly good advice of someone who understands the ways of the world: how to
conduct yourself in a world governed by appearance, where reputation is everything,
what you look and project to the world is what counts, not what you feel inside.
Polonius: "Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act" – "don't
tell anyone what you think, and never act according to unproportioned thought",
Everything has to be in harmony, thought and action.
Polonius: "Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man" He tells him to dress nicely but not in
exaggerated way. The appearance is what matters.
Polonius: "This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day,
thou canst not then be false to any man" The speech talks about the theme of
core identity and self, where do we locate it. The speech creates a great dissonance:
What you look like, what you present to the world, that's your identity, there is no
'core self'. Laertes's sense of self is always in relation to the world around him: to his
father and sister. There is no Laertes. He is either the son of Polonius, or the
aristocrat, or the university student, or the wronged son or the wronged brother. In no
moment he stops and asks himself "who am I?". "to thine ownself be true" that is a
hollow phrase coming from Polonius, Laertes doesn't have a sense of self.
Act 2 scene 2 "What is man?" Hamlet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Hamlet meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern whom he quickly identifies as

Claudius's spies. This is the next phase in Hamlet's thinking and inability to act.
Hamlet decides "to put an antic disposition on" and to play the madman. For Hamlet
the line between performance and acting and being is nonexistent, so we can never
know if he's really mad or pretend to be mad. It is clear that his pretense is driven by
an actual real inability and real sense of being watched paranoia.
When Hamlet sees Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his former university friend invited
by Claudius to the court to spy on Hamlet, he identifies the real cause of their
visitation right away. Hamlet decides to play with them. At the end the truth comes
out. This prompts out of Hamlet the famous "what is man" speech.
"I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the
king and queen moult no feather" Hamlet understands that the King have called for
them in order to find out why he is behaving like a madman. Hamlet gives them his
accounts about his behavior.
"I have of late—but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises;
and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air (sky), look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other
thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a
man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man
delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so"
This is Hamlet's general universal reflection about humanity. This speech goes right
to the heart of Renaissance concept of man:
Hamlet is setting up the two opposed extremes of understanding man's place in the
universe during that period:
Neo Platonic vision on man: He begins by outline the optimistic neo platonic vision of
humanity as full of potential and divinity, as the epitome of God's creation; Man has
free will and rational faculties which are the spark of God's creation in him, and this

what makes him better than all the other animals. Free will is the most important
quality of man.
Against that was another tradition of Calvinism: Calvinism was the predominant belief
system in Shakespeare's England. According to Calvinism man have no free will, he
is a sinful creature, contaminated by original sin and unable to do anything good out
of his free will without the grace of God. "quintessence of dust" quintessence ‫התגלמות‬
‫ עיקר; היסוד החמישי בפילוסופיה‬,‫; תמצית‬-‫ ה‬quintessence goes back to sonnet 54 and it's
metaphor of distillation. Hamlet basically says that the very essence of man is dust,
nothing more.
Hamlet expresses his inability to decide between these two extremes. "And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?" In this speech we here for the first time the use of the
first person "me". That's what's so important about this speech. For Hamlet, man is
nothing but someone who is trapped in its own reminder of death.
The play within a play

The most important part (plot wise) in Hamlet, is the play within the play. Hamlet
above all is a meta-theatrical play, a play that talks about theater. It takes the
existential metaphor from As you like it of "all the world is a stage" and it deepens it
into existential metaphor about action and performance. There are only to things that
are called 'the thing' in Hamlet: the ghost, the play "the play's the thing" in the end of
the Hecuba speech. Everything about Hamlet is about the play, the play is the thing,
playing a role, theater which mimetically triggers and traps the guilty. Theater is not
passive, Hamlet understand that it calls on the audience to be emotionally and
psychologically active. It gives Hamlet and idea: to use theater to motivate action
within himself (that's what will give him the proof he needs).
Hamlet soliloquy "Hecuba speech"

"dream of passion". Hamlet can't understand how can an actor who feels nothing for
Hecuba, cries weeps and perform extreme emotions, while he himself cannot induce
even false action in himself. He turns the metaphor of acting and performance
inwards, how can an actor do what he can't, which is to act.

Lesson 15 – 13.05.15
Hamlet
Hamlet is about the impasse that Hamlet finds himself in when he is compelled to act
in a situation in which external causality forces him to tune in the world, but his
response is to think. Thinking is what precisely paralyzes him. He's trapped by the
structure of his own subjectivity. Unlike someone like Laertes, Hamlet is aware of his
own subjectivity, explores an unknown world, the world of the subject.
Hecuba speech
Hamlet cannot understand how can an actor who feels nothing for Hecuba, in a
dream of passion, cry with such passion Dream of passion is the passion that the
actor pretends to have. In Hamlet's mind it's synonymous with the state of sleeping
and dreaming. Hamlet has bad dream from which he cannot escape. There is a very
interesting essay and comment about the art of acting. Shakespeare was an actor,
grew up as an actor and the theater was for him the key to understand to world. Why
do certain people behave in a certain ways and in certain situations? How we justify
our actions and rationalize them? how often in or daily lives we find ourselves
performing a role that is wither assigned to us or that we are born into? How can an
actor who feels nothing for Hecuba cry with such passion? One of the famous acting
methods, the 'cognitive method' of acting, says that in order to be convincing as an
actor you need to recall something of your own life that mirrors that event, connect to
it, and act through that emotion.
Actor were considers just above baggers, dangerous socially. It's the idea of where
do you locate emotional sincerity; if an actor takes his own personal private emotions
and perform them on stage every time, there is a degree to which that moment that
actor is prostitutes his emotions. Hamlet says "like a whore, unpack my heart with
words". The Hecuba speech is, among other things, a theoretical discussion about
the ethics of acting, not just theater acting but human acting. This drives Hamlet
insane: the actor, in a dream of passion, drawing from his own conscious passion,
can pretend to care so much, while he who has all the reasons subjectively cannot
act. Hamlet talks at the end of his speech about the effect that actors have on the
audience, catharsis. When a guilty person watches a play the exchange between
actor and spectator can cause guilt. This leads Hamlet to say "the play is the thing" - a
'thing' has to be concrete that you can point to and touch, not just conceptual. The
ghost and the play are being called "the thing", both of them are not concrete. Hamlet
doesn't inhabit the world of "things", the only way he can get to them is by enducing
action from within through theater.

The other character with whom Hamlet interacts
We talked about Hamlet as two parallel plays:

1. The revenge tragedy that Hamlet is forced to act in, wants to act im
2. Hamlet's own inner monologue, play of subjectivity
Every now and again Hamlet comes out from his own inner prison, and tries to tune
into the world around him in different ways, tries to motivate the plot, advance it, and
understand his role and position within it. Part of it revolves the people who are
closest to him, the way that they affect him and his role in this unfolding tragedy.
We will focus on Ophelia, Gertrude his mother and Horatio. It allows us to see how
Hamlet's tragedy effects not only on him but on others around him.
Act 3 scene 1 Ophelia

Polonius and the Kings send Ophelia to Hamlet. "Get thee to a nunnery" speech.
We know from the beginning of the play that Ophelia and Hamlet are lovers.
Shakespeare explores the impossibilities of courtship: Hamlet is writing to Ophelia
bad love sonnets. All of this suggests something that we've seen in Much ado, there
is two state in Renaissance literature tradition of being in love:
1. Being in love with the idea of being in love: behaving like a love in literature and
romances, the idea of courtly love. But courtly love is not real love, it was used
politically in Elizabethan times to express male courtier's ambition within a court
dominated by inaccessible remote virgin queen
2. The state of real love, being in love with a real person
Ophelia is driven to madness and despair, part of it is because the man she loves
kills her father, and the part is because she is treated as an ideal in the courtly love
tradition and not as a real woman. To be unattainable and remote, a nun or a virgin,
is to marry yourself to God. Hamlet cannot act as a lover. He can court her and write
her poems, but can't do anything about it. Hamlet is the of courtly lover in essence,
only after Ophelia dies he finally admits that he loves her to the world.
Get thee to a nunnery

As soon as we had "to be or not to be" soliloquy Hamlet sees Ophelia, and the
language he uses with her is brutal and violent.
"Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent
honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne
me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should
such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe
none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where's your father?"
Hamlet lists a catalog of his sins, and says "with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in" even when
hamlet lists his sins, he basically says that he is sinful in his thoughts and
imagination, but don't have to time to act upon them. Hamlet is not a person who
acts. Even his sinning is in a world of subjectivity.
"Get thee to a nunnery" is obscene and violent, because "nunnery" in Shakespeare's
time meant also brothels. There were no monasteries and nunneries in England after
Henry VIII abolished them all. "Get thee to a nunnery" can equally mean:
1. Go to a nunnery and relinquish this world of sin
2. "I know what you really are, you are not constant, you are like a whore go to a
brothel"

Ophelia's speech
"O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue,
sword; The expectancy and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down! And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows, now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; That unmatch'd form and feature of blown
youth Blasted with ecstasy (madness): O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what
I see!"
Ophelia's speech shows us that there is a psychological structure to all of the

characters of in the play: no character is able to have a dialog with the other
character. Each character reflects a subjective mirror to the other. That mirroring
causes damage.
"O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown " – She describes Hamlet's madness. "noble
mind" appears in the "to be or not to be" speech "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind".
Hamlet raises the question of what is nobler in the mind to do, and she sees it as an
objective collapse of his sanity, the fact he talks like that.
Ophelia describes Hamlet using blazon, one of the hallmarks of courtly love tradition,
being used to describe the woman, not the man. A woman is broken down into her
body parts, into symbolic elements. She mirror, reflect back on Hamlet a view of
Hamlet as not a person, but as "The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's", roles that he
perform, "eye, tongue, sword". That blazon is an idealization of Hamlet. She is in love
with an idea that doesn't exist. That man in her imagination was "the glass of fashion
and the mould of form", the paragon the most perfect man that ever lived. She is
vocalizing the tragedy which causes him to be violent towards her. It’s a dialog of two
lovers where there is zero communication and zero sexual relations, and all there is
are broken down ideals and imaginary fantasies.
Act 3 scene 2 Horatio

This is Hamlet's famous encomium, speech of praise, of his best friend Horatio.
Hamlet projects onto him ideal which he would like to had in himself.
Horatio is Hamlet' best friend from university, a scholar, a man who knows the world
through books.
"Dost thou hear? Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice and could of men distinguish,
her election hath seal'd thee for herself; for thou hast been as one, in suffering all, that suffers
nothing, a man that fortune's buffets and rewards hast ta'en with equal thanks: and blest are
those whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, that they are not a pipe for
fortune's finger to sound what stop she please. Give me that man that is not passion's slave,
and I will wear him in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, as I do thee"
Hamlet wants to tell Horatio his plan on discovering the guilt of Claudius, but in
between his confidence come this strange encomium.
Hamlet says that since the day he met Horatio he always wanted to be like him. He
values Horatio's stoicism, Horatio is a stoic philosopher. Stoicism – Roman ethical
philosophy of Apathea, getting yourself to a state of rational detachment from the
world around you in terms of emotion and not in terms of actions.
Hamlet says to him "if only I can be a stoic like you , a man that is not passion's
slave". He keeps quoting the ideal of stoicism as something that can be a solution for
him, "if I could only not care, not feel, not worry".
The dialog with Horatio mirrors that with Ophelia in one way: stoic philosophy is also
a form of idealization which you can't achieve. The notion of idealism is exactly to
take an idea and elevate it above the principle of life.

Horatio is a scholar, locked in an ivory tower, doesn't live life but thinks about it, a
theoretician. The difference between reality and theory is very big. The challenge is
when life confronts you, that's where it becomes difficult. Hamlet is trying to escape
into to calm escapism of abstract notions. Life has intruded violently onto Hamlet's
life and demanded him to act.
Act 3 scene 4 - the queen

Hamlet in an oedipal mode, sexually assaults his mother verbally in her bed
chamber. From a psychoanalytical reading of Hamlet, it seems clear that Hamlet
cannot act because in terms of the oedipal complex, the uncle has taken his place.
When Hamlet confronts his mother and says "this was your husband, this is your
husband", he uses basically the same words. The two brothers are identical, look the
same. The comparison between the two is imagined. He creates differentiation as
part of his own assault. Gertrude knows exactly what happened and also suffers from
guilt. Gertrude: "Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul; and there I see such black and
grained spots as will not leave their tinct". Gertrude reflects back to Hamlet his own
image. When Hamlet is talking about the two men he is talking about himself.
Hamlet: "This was your husband. Look you now, what follows: Here is your husband; like a
mildew'd ear, blasting his wholesome brother"
Another important theme in Hamlet: The ghost tells Hamlet at the first time that he
was killed by a poison in his ear while he was resting in his garden, and then he tells
as a metaphor he was stung by a serpent. This is a clear allegory to the Garden of
Eden. This is a metaphorical discussion of rhetoric, of language, since Satan was
believed to have seduced Eve in language. The metaphor of poison in someone ear
and killing them is a concreate metaphor of speaking lies to them, poising them with
bad language. "like a mildew'd ear, blasting his wholesome brother" The metaphor is
from Joseph interpretation of pharaoh dreams, a blighted ear of corn. The audience
hears the word "ear", and ear that has being blighted by corruption. It picks up the
murder. Hamlet: "Have you eyes? Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, and batten
on this moor? Ha! have you eyes?" a speech that is about talking and listening is
reverted to looking. We know already that looking and sight are deceiving. The
Elizabethans went to hear plays no to see them. Hamlet: "what judgment
Would step from this to this?" "this" and "this" are identical, the father and uncle are
interchangeable. Hamlet here is betraying himself, his venting his own inability to act
through the inability to distinguish between the father and uncle in respect to the
mother. Rhetorically there isn't a distinction.
The queen cannot bear to hear the words because it exposes her own guilt.
She says to him Gertrude: "O, speak to me no more; These words, like daggers, enter in
mine ears; No more, sweet Hamlet!" His raping her through the ears, that's a specific
Renaisance understanding of the power of rhetoric as concrete, organic.
Act 5 scene 2 the grave digging scene

The scene moves around the idea of 'memento mori', the skull as an object which is
a reminder of mortality and death. The clowns are mocking the skulls using them to
remind the audience in a cynical way that in the grave everyone's equal. It raises the
question of who is going to be buried there. The scene begins with a clown thinking
about action, and using a philosophical reasoning to talk about suicide whether it is
willed or not. They can all laugh around the skull because they are impersonal, but as
soon as Hamlet recognizes the skull death stops to be this abstract notion. It
captures another part of Hamlet's tragedy, death have come to intrude into his life in
a violent and aggressive way, and made a demand of action.

Horatio tries to persuade Hamlet to escape the palace. Hamlet finally surrenders,
resigns himself to action, to providence, to causality, to fate, to the play that he's in,
and surrenders to action.
Hamlet: "Not a whit, we defy augury (to tell the future): [because] there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow (god's hand is behind it). If it (death) be now, 'tis not to
come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all:
since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?"
"The readiness is all" – if death will come anyhow, if we as human beings are trapped
in causality, running after time, there comes a moment when you tune out of the
world so much that none of it matters anymore.
"let be" a clear answer to the "to be or not to be" question, surrendering yourself to
death and causality.

Lesson 16 – 17.05.15
Introduction to Macbeth
After writing Hamlet Shakespeare unleashes a torrent ‫ זרם‬of remarkable exploration
of the human psychic in a tragic context. During those years he wrote Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Macbeth ends Shakespeare's journey into the
undiscovered country of human consciousness.
Othello: Othello is like an inverse proposition of Hamlet, like an inverted mirror

image. Othello is a man of pure action and pure passion, a soldier. In Othello we
witness the unbearable tragedy of a man of action, honour and integrity being acted
upon from the outside in by an evil and intelligent man, and by his two daughters.
Othello lacks Hamlet's intelligence.
King Lear: In King Lear the only intelligent character is the fool, a professional fool.
Shakespeare takes a man, strips him to his bare core, leaves him damaged and
ruined. The most important word in King Lear is "nothing". In his moment of
madness, King Lear, an old man, fallen, abused by his two daughters, strips his
cloths in the stole when he sees Edgar in the mud, points at him and says "thou are
the thing" - this is what humanity looks like when you strip it out of everything.
King Lear is apocalyptic tragedy. It ends with the image of a broken insane old man
holding his dead daughter, broken and crying. One of the characters says: "is this the
promised end?": "is this what's waiting for us? Is this how things end?" that's a
famous meta-theatrical saying: "is this the end that this play promised us when we
started watching it? Is this the end of tragedy?"
Nietzsche attacked the "slavish morality of Christianity" which he thought cause only
misery in the world. This was part of Nietzsche's theory of the "superman".
Nietzsche says that the idea that tragic drama is moralistic and teaches us how to be
a better person morally is an error. Morality has nothing to do with Elizabethan
tragedies. There is a moral Christian frame, within which the tragedy is conceived,
but for Nietzsche Christianity and morality are against life, they are about death;
Christianity focuses our imagination on a better life hereafter (an important word in
Macbeth), in another time. Nietzsche says that any reading that tries to moralize
Shakespeare is wrong.
Macbeth
Shakespeare takes the empty heath ‫ שדה בור‬of Lear's madness and fills it up with
mist and fog, deeps pools of blood, and presents a nightmare landscape. In this
landscape things are not and never can be as what they seem. This relates to the
notion of how appearances can be deceiving. Hamlet is a young intelligent man who
is bounded in his own thought stoic prison. When the ghost appears to him his first
instinct is to doubt and question.
Witches: "Fair is foul and foul is fair"

1. Things are not as what they seem to be
2. Every category that we use to arrange our world, especially morally, is disrupted
by illusion.

Reality and imagination, interiority that bleeds into exteriority
In Macbeth there is an inability to know the difference between the reality and the
imagination. It describes a world in which reality and imagination bleed into one
another. The distinction between inner core self, and outer reality breaks down. This
is not a play about thought; this is a play about the unbridled ‫ בלתי מרוסן‬violent
powers of the imagination, and it's related to ambition, politics and power.
Macbeth in a sense is the villain's tragedy, the one who finds himself compelled to
murder. It's an exploration of crime and punishment, of guilt, ambition and power,
and of one's deepest fantasies becoming real.
Macbeth's proleptic imagination (Act 1 Scene 3)

Macbeth is in two states of imaginary mind:
1. Either he is before the act of murder, where he has nightmares about what it will
be like, when it will occur, the guilt it might cause
2. Or he is after the act, and the act already haunts him
This is the power of this play exploration of the imagination.
First Witch: "All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis!"

Second Witch: "All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!"
Third Witch: "All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!"
The witches prophesize Macbeth that he will become king. They don't tell him when
or how.
We understand Macbeth's reaction from Banquo's speech:

Banquo: "Good sir, why do you start; and seem to fear things that do sound so fair?"
"sound so fair"- "fair is foul and foul is fair".
As soon as Macbeth hears the prophecy he starts ‫מזדעזע‬, fears, because the thought
about becoming a king has being on his mind for a while. Maybe he suppressed
these thoughts, but the witches raise something he always deeply wanted. Macbeth
initial reaction is "let's wait and see". Then in the next scene Duncan announces that
his son will be the heir. Macbeth again is startled, thinking "how can that be, if the
witches prophecy is true?" Macbeth is thinking, but unlike Hamlet, it's a thought that
runs ahead of the action and causes action. Macbeth is a tragic victim of his own
proleptic ‫ מקדים‬imagination. 'Prolepsis' is anticipating something that hasn't
happened yet. Macbeth's imagination is always two steps ahead of the reality on
which in live. He imaginatively precedes the action and then the action becomes a
way of fulfilling the truth of the imagination or the prophecy. Macbeth's aside to the
audience when he is thinking about the witches prophecy, after he hears the first
confirmation that he will be the than of Cawdor:
Macbeth: "This supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good."

Categories of good and evil dissolve in Macbeth's imagination. We had this already
in Hamlet, in a dialog he had with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Hamlet says: "there
is no good or bad, but thinking makes it so". That saying is a direct quotation of the
philosopher Monten who wrote an essay that claims that the value we have on good
and evil depends on our opinion on it. In the context of Monten's skepticism, good
and bad are not good and evil. Good and bad is ‫רע לי טוב לי‬. The opinion whether
something is good or bad for us is subjective. What is good for one person can be
bad for another. In English we have a distinction between 'bad' which is a relative
term, and 'evil' which is inheritably metaphysical evil. Both words were
interchangeable in Shakespeare's time, when Hamlet says: "there is no good or bad,
but thinking makes it so" he also subjecting morality to relativism. But Hamlet is

trapped in his own thoughts. Macbeth extends this notion violently into the world of
pragmatic cause and effect.
Macbeth: "This supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill (bad for him), why
hath it given me earnest of success commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good,
why do I yield to that suggestion whose horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated
heart knock at my ribs against the use of nature? Present fears are less than horrible
imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, shakes so my single state of
man that function (the ability to act) is smothered in surmise (speculations) and nothing is
but what is not."
Macbeth asks how can the prophecy be bad for him if it already came true and he is
the than of Cawdor. On the other hand he asks how it can be good for him if it makes
him see horrible images in his mind.
"Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but
fantastical" Macbeth is in the state of in between imagination and reality. Macbeth just
hears the prophecy and his imagination starts running. In his mind he already killed
the king. This thought of killing the king fills him with horror. "nothing is but what is not"
the only thing that is, is what isn't there. Proleptic imagination is a central concept in
Macbeth. Macbeth will need his wife to push him to act. She doesn't have a name,
she only bears his name. The question of is Macbeth driven to murder by his wife is
not that simple. Macbeth needs the extra hand of his wife to compel him and clarify
his own position.
The witches in Macbeth
Hamlet in his first soliloquy says "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt" meaning "if
only I could disappear, melt into air". The metaphor of human identity as liquid,
melting is very important to Shakespeare.
On the other hand, Banquo says after the witches appear and disappear: "The earth
hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them. Whither are they vanished?" As if the
earth is bubbling and out of the earth come out these creatures, apparitions.
Macbeth answers: "Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted, as breath into the wind.
Would they had stayed!" his answers almost echoes Hamlet's words: the witches had
melted away. There is a mesmerizing ‫ מהפנט‬poetic effect about the witches.
The play opens with the witches. Many productions change this.
Act 1 Scene 1 - the witches
First witch: "When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?"
Second witch: "When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won."
Third witch: "That will be ere the set of sun."
First witch: "Where the place?"
Second witch: "Upon the heath."
Third witch: "There to meet with Macbeth."
…. All: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air."
The witches "words sounds like a nursery rhyme. Nursery rhymes are deeply
connected in history to witchcraft. Many later critics claimed that this scene was not
written by Shakespeare and that it was not suitable for the opening of the play.
Coleridge was the first to claim that the scene is perfect, because this is a play about
the nightmarish powers of the imagination, and the witches at the beginning set the
tone for the play's atmosphere of imaginative power and ambiguity. Macbeth is also a
precise psychoanalytically study of psychosis, when you cannot know where the
difference between the imaginary the symbolic and the real lies. This is not someone
who is been driven to insanity by things that haven't happened, this is the tragedy of

someone who causes his own nightmares to happen, acting out his deepest
fantasies despite his better judgment.
Death + time + nature = supernatural
Nature - Nature is a central word in Macbeth
The first understanding of the noun 'nature' and adjective 'natural' is descriptive
‫תיאורי‬, used to describe the world as we understand it. Everything that is beyond that
order is considered to be "supernatural". If we encounter a phenomenon that we
cannot understand and place in the current order, like witches or a ghost, we say it's
supernatural. Shakespeare often uses the adjective 'unnatural' (unnatural acts,
woman, murder). We also use "nature" to talk about certain taboos: incest, patricide,
matricide, are considered unnatural behavior. In other words 'nature' or 'natural' can
refer to morality or to certain values. In which case it is not a descriptive term but a
prescriptive ‫ קובע כללים‬term, tells you how to behave. Every act that deviates from
social norms we consider also as unnatural, goes against the prescriptive moral
codes.
Macbeth: "my seated heart knock at my ribs against the use of nature" the word 'nature'
here is ambiguous, both unnatural physically for his heart to beat so fast, and
unnatural ethical and morally for his heart to beat so fast because of the thought
attached to it.
Time – Another concept that repeats in the play
Macbeth is obsessed with time and constantly thinks about now, later, the future and
hereafter. Time is an artificial imaginary concept that we as human beings have
created to make our lives bearable. Without concepts of time our notion of our own
sense of finitude becomes harder to negotiate. We are all trapped in a diachronic
concept of time, moving from being born to dying. If you take notions of time and
connect them with the ambiguous notion of what is natural, and then allow time to
collapse (imaginary concepts of time stop to be meaningful for you because death
has become a imaginative reality), then you get the supernatural.
The witches are outside all of those categories: They are outside time: the
prophecies they give Macbeth are outside time, they know the future. They tell
Macbeth he shell be king 'hereafter'. 'Hereafter' has a powerful Christian resonance,
it means after the end of time, in the apocalypse. There is something apocalyptic
about the witches. Three witches: goes back to the idea of the three fates from
ancient Greek mythology. The three fates are much more powerful the all the other
gods. They weave time for mortals. One of them spins the weave, the second
measure it and the last cuts it. The witches are unreal, but at the same time
existential menacing. They inhabit that zone imaginatively where they are outside
time and nature, and on the side of death. The result is frightening "the earth hath
bubbles". The play is Jacobean, Scottish and alludes to the court of James who was
Scottish. Shakespeare chooses a ancient mythic story of Scottish history. King
James was obsessed with witch hunting. Shakespeare is tapping into contemporary
anxieties and imaginations about witches.
Blood - the most important imagery in the play
The word 'blood' repeats in the play like a frightening nursery rhyme. It recurs in this
play more times than in any other play by Shakespeare. 'blood' is the operative word
of the play. Blood is something that is on the inside of us and should stay on the

inside. Metaphorically, this is a play in which the inside bleeds into the outside. There
is no distinction in the play between inner self, core identity and outer man of action,
this isn't a play about the causality of action. In Shakespeare's time it was also the
age were they just started to dissect human bodies. The anatomy of human bodies
was considered forbidden by the Catholic Church. It was considered a forbidden
thing to dissect bodies. Only after the reformation, free from the threats of the
inquisition, doctors using Arab manuals started to practice autopsy and anatomy as a
way to studying the human body for medicinal purposes. The medicine was still
based on the theory of humors, which treated sicknesses by bleeding, because the
blood is where the soul and spirit of man is. Human body itself, the inside of it,
became another undiscovered land that had to be explored. Autopsies in the mid-17th
century were conducted in public theater, this was a kind of theater for people would
come and watch surgeons demonstrate how the human body looks like.Lady
Macbeth bears a famous soliloquy, when she needs to become a murderer; she
commits herself to the act of murder. She is pure Machiavellian ambition, she knows
where she needs to get, as soon as she reads the letter. It doesn’t matter to her that
the witches are real, it's enough that her husband has the thought. Now her ambition
to become queen overpowers her and she's planning to make sure that her husband
will act. She invokes devils and says, almost talking like a witch:
Lady Macbeth: "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me
from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up th’ access
and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor
keep peace between th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall
(sour wine, poison), you murd’ring ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait
on nature’s mischief. come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my
keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry
“Hold, hold!” This is a frightening speech.
"unsex me" – usually pointing to her womb, and asks for the devils to "unwoman" her.
This is a Petrarchan idea that governs this, a patriarchal one, that women cannot be
murders. A woman is the creator of life, gives life, God made her a vessel of life and
therefore she cannot be a vessel death. If a woman becomes a murder she is no
longer a woman.
Macbeth: "What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune’s
ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous
seas incarnadine, making the green one red."
These are powerful poetic lines which capture the notion of infinity, moving in all
direction, infinite amounts of blood that never ends. The "ocean of blood" is not an
hyperbole when it comes to Macbeth.
Macbeth: "It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood. Stones have been known to
move, and trees to speak. Augurs and understood relations have by maggot pies and choughs
and rooks brought forth the secret’st man of blood"
"secret’st man of blood" – who Macbeth is.
The processes of interpretation

Cavell says that Macbeth is not just a dramatic exercise in nihilism or skepticism. It's
about the processes of interpretation. The moment that Macbeth receives the
prophecy and interprets it proleptically, by already having an answer to the question
that was never asked. If you try and understand human understanding, where
understanding is always having an intellectually adequate answer to the question
being asked, in Macbeth there is no adequacy, no correspondence between simple
questions of "should I?", "did I?", "would I?", "did it happen?" with the way that
Macbeth already proleptically understands well beyond the question that was asked.
This is what he calls "the melodramatic responsiveness", the melodrama of
Macbeth's inner torments.

Macbeth begins where Hamlet ends (the fall of the sparrow, the readiness is all).
Macbeth is ready, but the question is "for what?"
Macbeth: "If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly. If th’
assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with his surcease success, that but
this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here (a time word), but here, upon this bank and
editorial emendation shoal editorial emendation of time, we’d jump the life to come. But in
these cases we still have judgment here, that we but teach bloody instructions, which, being
taught, return to plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice commends th’ ingredience of
our poisoned chalice to our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman
and his subject, strong both against the deed; then, as his host, who should against his
murderer shut the door, not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan hath borne his
faculties so meek, hath been so clear in his great office, that his virtues will plead like angels,
trumpet-tongued, against the deep damnation of his taking-off; And pity, like a naked
newborn babe striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed"
"If th’ assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with his surcease (ending
of it) success" if the assassination could already reveal the consequence of how it will
end, and catch with the ending of it success. "If it would work"
"but here, upon this bank and editorial emendation shoal editorial emendation of time" the
liminal space between eternity and the moment.
"We still have judgment here that we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught,
return to plague th’ inventor" There's a bit of conscience in Macbeth which he
struggling with. He is aware that we do these things but they always come back to
plague the inventor. We ourselves are our own victims.
All this is not an argument for not acting, but an argument for doing it quickly.
"we’d jump the life to come" Macbeth is always jumping ahead is his imagination to
an hypothetical time drawing from that fear the motive to act, and acting and finding
himself a victim. It's like somebody living his own self fulfilled nightmare.

Lesson 17 – 20.05.15
Macbeth
Macbeth is a play governed by ambiguities, inability to distinguish between

categories: inside vs. outside, night vs. day, imaginary vs. reality (dagger), foul vs.
fair, good vs. bad. After the murder several characters comment on the fact that they
can't distinguish between night and day. Most of the scenes take place in liminal
moments: dawn, dusk, few hours before the sun rises. Macbeth's thoughts are 80%
imagination 20% rational thinking. His thoughts are always two steps ahead of the
action it imagines. This is a destabilizing state of mind to be in. There are moments in
the play where Macbeth sounds almost like Hamlet, wondering whether he should
act, whether he should murder Duncan. In the speech where he wonders whether he
should kill Duncan he raises all the laws he is about to break, which would make his
act damnable: not only that Macbeth is the thane (taken a sacred vow of loyalty) and
Duncan is his King, Duncan is also his guest. He is going to murder him breaking
ancient feudal laws of hospitality. He is also going to murder him in his sleep. The
notion that sleep is but a picture of death repeats often in the play. An interesting
question in the play is what happens (in term of epistemology- understanding the
world through language) when our ability to read metaphors collapses. In Macbeth,
metaphors are being literalized.
When Lady Macbeth says: Lady Macbeth: "when in swinish sleep their drenched natures
lie as in a death" she thinks of sleep as a picture of death literally, not metaphorically.
She says that if Duncan is asleep, the murder is nothing because he is "dead".
After the murder, Macbeth believes that he murdered sleep, literally: Macbeth:
"Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep', the innocent
sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's
bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast"
The play explores also the question of interpretation, how it can go wrong, and how
misinterpretation can lead to chaos and disrupt our lives, our own sense of self.
When the witches tell Macbeth "thou shalt be king hereafter‫"! בעתיד‬, everything depend
on the interpretation of the word "hereafter", which is ambiguous.
Macbeth: "To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself" As soon as Macbeth
understands what he did (murdered Duncan), he cannot understand anymore who he
is. Macbeth's mind is always caught in two modes: Proleptic hypothetic future and
simultaneously trapped in tan imaginary past. He doesn't have a grip of the moment,
and that's why he is struggling with time words. He's always gripping for precise time
words to pin down the moment of action.
Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth's speech in which she rejects her motherhood suggests that there is
deep latent ‫ סמוי‬background to these characters, depth to the action that is never
spoken of. It seems clear that Lady Macbeth used to be once a mother, she know
what it's like. We don't know if it was with Macbeth, where the child is, if he was
Macbeth's, but there is a sense where she has a past. The past exists as a kind of
strange latent memory. There's only one moment in the play in which Lady Macbeth
calls Macbeth "husband". That word recurs only once in the play. It comes in the

moment where she explains why she can't kill Duncan: Lady Macbeth: "Had he not
resembled my father as he slept, I had done't" Enter Macbeth "My husband!" In that line
she collapses husband and father.
They are like too sides of the same character. Lady Macbeth lacks her own name;
known by association to the man she's married to. Lady Macbeth is like Macbeth's
dark side, they mirror one another. They are close and devoted to one another. They
are intimately symbiotic within their relationship and act as one. Characters in
Shakespeare's drama often try to behave like stereotype, but Shakespeare
complicates the stereotype and then it collapses. In Lady Macbeth's speech of
"unsex me here" she is trying to become a stereotype, she want to become the
stereotypical murderer of Senecan revenge tragedy. It was a Roman classical
convention murderous women like wild animals ("cruel like the tiger").
Act 1 scene 5 – the moment we are introduced to Lady Macbeth
We are introduced to Lady Macbeth while she is reading a letter. This is very
significant. Everything in this play, theatrically, is designed by Shakespeare to give us
the suggestion of prolepsis – things anticipating the action that they nightmarishly
foretell. In dramatic plot terms, Macbeth send word in advance of his coming. He
could have waited. He decides to send a letter ahead of his arrival to prepare her for
what is about to come. Lady Macbeth is interpreting on stage Macbeth's letter. As a
part of that interpretation she reads into thing, extrapolates ‫ לשער‬meaning, and in the
process of doing so, she sheds for the audience important light on her husband's
character. She talks to Macbeth is second person but he is absent.
Lady Macbeth: "Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be what thou art promised: yet do I
fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way: thou
wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it: what thou
wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, and yet wouldst wrongly win:
thou'ldst have, great Glamis, that which cries 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it; And that
which rather thou dost fear to do than wishest should be undone.' Hie thee hither, that I may
pour my spirits in thine ear; And chastise with the valour of my tongue all that impedes thee
from the golden round, which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem to have thee crown'd
withal."
"Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be what thou art promised"
Lady Macbeth doesn't have any doubts about the truth of the prophecy. She knows
Macbeth shell be what he was promised.
"yet do I fear thy nature" Here is another important reference to the theme of nature in
the play, what is natural. According to Lady Macbeth, Macbeth's nature is "too full o'
the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way" Lady Macbeth interchanges in her
mind "shalt be" – abstract promise in the future, with the Machiavellian necessity "to
catch the nearest way", to make it now.
Lady Macbeth's time concepts are confused: she wants future to be now.
"thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it" In
her mind, Macbeth has the will to be great and ambition, but lacks the illness. She is
characterizing the sort of nature you have to have to become a murderer.
"Hie thee hither, that I may pour my spirits in thine ear" Lady Macbeth is going to talk to
Macbeth and rhetorically seduce him. The language is the language of witchcraft,
devils and demons. There is a lot of supernatural imagery.

After that speech a messenger enters and reveals her the opportunity, that Duncan is
going to stay the night at their castle. As soon as she hears that she knows what she
has to do.
Lady Macbeth: "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts (thoughts about murder),
unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my
blood. Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious ‫שגורם לנקיפות מצפון‬
visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between th’ effect and it. Come to
my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall (sour wine, poison), you murd’ring ministers,
wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature’s mischief. come, thick night, and
pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor
heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry “Hold, hold!”
The speech is full of pauses, as if she is struggling.
The use of the adjective 'mortal' as synonymous to 'murderous' was common in
Shakespeare's time.
"unsex me here" An ambiguous adverb. It can mean:
- Now, at this point of time
- In this place
- Her body
- Her womb
"Make thick my blood" The belief of the time suggested that blood that is thick runs
slowly and cools down passion or emotion.
"that no compunctious ‫ שגורם לנקיפות מצפון‬visitings of nature shake my fell purpose" here
'nature' in in the prescriptive moral understanding. She asks that she will not have
moments of conscience, thinking about her actions.
"nor keep peace between th’ effect and it" she doesn't name the murder, she points to it
using the word "it". Generally in the play many times the characters don't name
things but point to them using words: 'it', 'that', 'there', 'here'.
Macbeth enters and Lady Macbeth greats him with his two titles, his old title and new
one. She says to him: Lady Macbeth: "Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Greater than both,
by the all-hail hereafter! Thy letters have transported me beyond this ignorant present, and I
feel now the future in the instant" What's different between what she says and what the
witches say is that she added the words "all-hail", a way of greeting a king. She's
circumventing time.
The dialog between them is dominated by time imagery.

Macbeth: "My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night."
Lady Macbeth: "And when goes hence?"
Macbeth: "To-morrow, as he purposes." (Tomorrow is an important word in the play)
Lady Macbeth: "O, never shall sun that morrow see! Your face, my thane, is as a book
where men may read strange matters. To beguile the time, look like the time; bear welcome in
your eye, your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't. He
that's coming must be provided for: and you shall put this night's great business into my
dispatch; Which shall to all our nights and days to come give solely sovereign sway and
masterdom."
Lady Macbeth began the scene by reading a letter, and now refers to Macbeth's face
as a text that can be read. She tells Macbeth that he is not capable of doing the
deed; he is too much at one with who he is that people can read in his face what he
is. "To beguile the time, look like the time" "beguile" means to bewitch, to trick. Here it
means literally "let the king spend the time until we kill him by making him feel at
home". But "beguile time" also means cheating time. Everything that they plotting is
moving around a certain kind of time dissonance. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are
trapped in a moment. That moment is imaginary for them, because it's bound in a
future reality which they are trying to realize, and once they go over and "jump the life

to come" as Macbeth says, they find themselves in a nightmare. In other words, they
are so united at the beginning, but after the murder they break apart, they both
descend into madness and guilt in different ways. Macbeth starts to operate on his
own. He murders Banko without her involvement.
Act 1 scene 7 Macbeth's soliloquy

Macbeth contemplates the reasons why it is a terrible thing to kill the king. Lady
Macbeth mocks his fears and offers a plan of Duncan's murder. These are the hours
leading up to the assassination. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are hosting Duncan and
his son for dinner. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are playing the hosts. Actors are
moving across the stage to imply preparations for dinner. Macbeth enters alone in a
soliloquy. Lady Macbeth intervenes in Macbeth's imaginary world, she's a part of that
world as they both work themselves out to commit the murder.
In plain language Macbeth says "if he's going to murder Duncan, let him do it now".
He can't bear the waiting. He says that if only he could have the guaranties that once
the act completed it succeed, then he will do it.
Macbeth: "If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly. If th’
assassination could trammel up (catch something in a net while hunting) the consequence and
catch with his surcease ‫ להפסיק‬success, that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all
here, but here, upon this bank and editorial emendation shoal editorial emendation of time,
we’d jump the life to come. But in these cases we still have judgment here, that we but teach
bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague th’ inventor. This even-handed
justice commends th’ ingredience of our poisoned chalice to our own lips. He’s here in
double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, strong both against the deed; then, as
his host, who should against his murderer shut the door, not bear the knife myself. Besides,
this Duncan hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been so clear in his great office, that his
virtues will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against the deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked newborn babe striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin horsed upon the
sightless couriers of the air, shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, that tears shall drown
the wind. I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which
o'erleaps itself and falls on the other."
"If th’ assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with his surcease ‫להפסיק‬
success" "surcease success" The words bleed into one another
surcease A legal injunction stopping a certain action or guarantying it at court.
Macbeth's imagination again is running ahead of himself. In the wishful thinking of
wanting the act to succeed, his language betrays his own fears about entanglement
‫הסתבכות‬.
"that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here, but here" The repetition of the
phrase "here, but (if only) here"is very important. It echos Lady Macbeth's "unsex me
here", an ambiguous indicator of time and space. Macbeth says "if only here,now, in
this present moment". As soon as he says "at this present moment" the image
expends cosmically to all universal time "upon this bank and editorial emendation shoal
editorial emendation of time, we’d jump the life to come"
"But in these cases we still have judgment here, that we but teach bloody instructions, which,
being taught, return to plague th’ inventor" This is a moment where he sounds a little bit
like Hamlet.
He is articulating his own problems: "First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, strong
both against the deed; then, as his host…"

"I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps
itself and falls on the other" his ambition is so hyperbolic that it causes him to over-
jump the horse and he falls on the other side. He jumps so far beyond the object of
what he's aiming for that he is bound to crash and burn.
He is trapped in his own sense of ambiguity. It sounds a bit like Hamlet but is not:
This isn't someone finding motivation to act and say that he can’t act, this is someone
who is saying "I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent‫" תכלית‬: spur is what you use
to make the horse move. In this metaphor his intentions metaphorically becomes a
horse and he is raiding it, and lacks the spur to make the horse move faster.
He lacks the spur but has vaulting ambition which will allow him to jump into the
saddle, but it's too much, the ambition makes him jump over it. This is a complex
mixed metaphor. The speech comes moments before the murder, when the waiting
is driving him mad. He has doubts and guilt before the act is done. Macbeth' like
Hamlet, is paralyzed, but then at that crucial moment enters Lady Macbeth. Macbeth
wants to delay the action:
Macbeth: "We will proceed no further in this business: He hath honour'd me of late; and I
have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people, which would be worn now in their
newest gloss, not cast aside so soon"
Lady Macbeth startles him back, rebukes him back to the nightmarish moment.
Lady Macbeth: "Was the hope drunk wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since? And
wakes it now, to look so green and pale at what it did so freely? From this time such I account
thy love. Art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valour as thou art in desire?
Wouldst thou have that which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, and live a coward in thine
own esteem, letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,' like the poor cat i' the adage?"
Macbeth:"Prithee, peace: I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none."
Macbeth means the precise definition of a man of honour, the social code that define
the notion of 'virtue'; The values by which a man becomes a man. Macbeth means
that he dear do everything that is expected of a man. Her replay plays on that
metaphor.
Lady Macbeth: "What beast was't, then, that made you break this enterprise to me? When
you durst do it, then you were a man; And, to be more than what you were, you would be so
much more the man. Nor time nor place did then adhere, and yet you would make both: They
have made themselves, and that their fitness now does unmake you. I have given suck, and
know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face,
have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, and dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as
you have done to this" Milk is another imagery that repeats in the play. Milk is referred
in contrast to blood. Women were considered in that period as nurturing, giving life,
and therefore as ones that cannot take life. In order to portray Lady Macbeth as a
cold blooded killer, he is contrasting her will all of the motherly instincts.
Against the flat stereotypical cliché of the woman's propensity to kindness as oppose
to the man's propensity to violence, Shakespeare mix the metaphors and
stereotypes. Lady Macbeth is a complex character because she exists in the
hereafter of Macbeth's imagination: he projects it on to her and she acts it out. It
becomes her fantasy and her nightmare. She mirrors back to him his own nightmares
and desires.
Lady Macbeth refers to sleep that mirrors death in this speech.

Lady Macbeth: But screw your courage to the sticking-place, And we'll not fail. When
Duncan is asleep-- Whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey Soundly invite him--his
two chamberlains Will I with wine and wassail so convince That memory, the warder of the

brain, Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason A limbeck only: when in swinish sleep Their
drenched natures lie as in a death, What cannot you and I perform upon The unguarded
Duncan? what not put upon His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt Of our great quell
(murder)?"
Act 2 scene 1
Macbeth sees a glory dagger leading him to Duncan's room. He bears the famous
soliloquy. Moments before he is about the handle a real dagger, he sees a
hallucination of a dagger; he's not sure whether it is real or not.
Macbeth: "Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me
clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to
feeling as to sight? or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the
heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable as this which now I draw. Thou
marshall'st me the way that I was going; and such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are
made the fools o' the other senses, or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, and on thy blade
and dudgeon gouts of blood, which was not so before. There's no such thing: It is the bloody
business which informs thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and
wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and
wither'd murder, alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, whose howl's his watch, thus with his
stealthy pace. With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design moves like a ghost. Thou
sure and firm-set earth, hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear thy very stones prate
of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it. Whiles
I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives."
"I have thee not, and yet I see thee still" this is the whole drama of the first half of the
play, he doesn't have what he wants (being king), but he can see it.
"Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest… There's no such
thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes" Macbeth realizes that he
hallucinates, that the dagger isn't real. But as soon as he says "there's no such thing"
he realizes that this is the reality in which he exists, a reality of magic, supernatural
soliciting and murder.
"Now o'er the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd
sleep" Macbeth says that he is in a nightmare, and the nightmare is real.
"witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, alarum'd by his sentinel,
the wolf, whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace." The lines grow longer, and
are full of metaphors of witchcraft in literature. The wolf is a metaphor for murder.
"With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost" Tarquin is an
image of a man raping another man's wife.
He is grasping for reality, trying to anchor the experience in physical reality.
"Thou sure and firm-set earth, hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear thy very
stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits
with it." Macbeth stops being frightened of the nightmares; by the end of the speech
he becomes the nightmare, the ghost and horror of the time.
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after the murder are trapped in their own bloody
moment, and constantly punctuated by the outside by bells ringing, owls screeching
and knockings at the door. Time and the outer world intrude into their reality, driving
them insane.

Lesson 18 – 27.05.15
Macbeth
Act 2 scene 2 - Macbeth murders Duncan
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth confront their deed, confront the blood that covers their
hands and extended into the play's obsession with the imaginative quality of blood.
The scene is punctuation with heavy knocking on the door. We heard the word
"knock" before, when Macbeth hears the witches prophecy for the first time he says
"Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs" there is
an isomorphic ‫ דומה בצורתו‬in-out metaphoric blurring of distinction between inner and
outer; the inner thumping of the heart is externalized in the heavy knocking on the
door. The knocking on the door is very powerful dramatically because it raptures,
breaks into the Macbeths inner world of bloody nightmare. It roots them in the
present moment. Later on we'll hear in the play how the clock strikes and how Lady
Macbeth keeps time. Time is a central metaphor in the play; the play is Macbeth's
imaginative struggle against the tyranny of time. Time in Macbeth is not Christian
time, not redemptive time. Macbeth loses himself in his deed. The witches call it. "A
deed without a name", a deed that cannot be written down, that cannot be contained in
memorial time. It also means a deed that hasn’t happened yet. Macbeth is always
chasing the deed in his imagination he is about to do next. Time in Macbeth is
nihilistic, devouring, a time that fleeting mortality. The knocking on the door is
immediately followed by the porter's scene
Act 2 scene 3 - The porter's scene + The discovery of the murder
This is a clown scene. Shakespeare always reserved scenes for clowns even in the
tragedies. You wonder where in this dismal nightmarish play about guilt and murder,
nihilistic all-consuming existential breakdown of man's imaginary concepts of time;
how in a play like this can you introduce humor?
The clown is the porter, the keeper of the gate. He is drunk. The banter, the humor
and slang is cynical and dark, leading into the dialog with Lennox and Macduff, who
are knocking at the door. Its dawn, we are in that in-between state between night and
day, the porter being drunk is in an in between state of sobriety and being out of his
wits.
The porter bears a soliloquy punctuated by the knocking:

Porter: "Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old
turning the key". [Knocking within]
"Knock, knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged
himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you'll
sweat for't." [Knocking within]
"Knock, knock! Who's there, in the other devil's name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that
could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's
sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator" [Knocking within]
"Knock, knock, knock! Who's there? Faith, here's an English tailor come hither, for stealing
out of a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may roast your goose." [Knocking within]
"Knock, knock; never at quiet! What are you? But this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-
porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire." [Knocking within]

"Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter"
Everything the clown says is significate. He tries to speculate about who it is at the
door. The scene is one of enormous importance.
"roast your goose" "goose" means a tailor's iron, what they used to iron cloths with. It's
punning on craft jokes
"the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire" a phrase used by Hamlet when he talks to
Ophelia, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
"remember the porter" probably spoken as an aside to the audience
Johnson though this scene didn’t belong to the play, Coleridge thought it was
beneath Shakespeare's dignity and could not have been written by Shakespeare.
"Equivocator" ‫ משתמש בלשון דו משמעית‬,‫ נוכל‬this adjective is very significant and will
recur again towards the end of the play. An "Equivocator" was an early Jacobian
slang for Jesuit priest. What he is saying basically is "what kind of devil is knocking at
the door? A Catholic Jesuit priest", the devil equivocates with language. When you
equivocate one thing with another you weight everything on the same scale. This is
what the Jesuits uses to do; when they were arrested in protestant England, they
would try ti deny the charges against them without falsifying their faith, and answered
any question they were asked by equivocating. What's important is the idea of the
diabolic possibility of language to equivocate meaning to the point where the
distinction between metaphor and reality dissolves. It's the collapse of Macbeth's own
ability to interpret language or events metaphorically. The more that Macbeth is
drawn imaginatively to the world of the witches the less he is able to construe
‫ להבין‬meaning from metaphors. It is exactly where his failure to understand the last
three prophecies will be. He will try and reed the literally, whereas the witches meant
them metaphorically. The witches are equivocators in their prophecies. This is what
Macbeth fails to grasp. That feeds the play's wider comment about the various
imaginary existential trappings we as human beings invest in to give our world
balance, meaning, shape. What we invest in to insure our own sanity. Our sanity
depends on certain things being constant. Those things are consensual imaginary.
What happens to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, whose sanity breaks down in the
second half of the play, is that once you cannot distinguish between the imaginary
and the real, psychosis erupts and everything collapses. The ability to understand, to
create meaning, to impose meaning on acts on deeds, collapses. If you translate to
the Machiavellian political gain, this drama of passion and ambition, of madness and
guilt that the two main characters share, the gain seems very small in relation to the
way they invest in it. This is not simply a political play about ambition. The ambition
for the crown becomes itself a complex darker metaphor for something else that's
driving them, and whatever is driving them is unnamable..
The porter's speech

We will try and understand how metaphor is used in the porter's speech. Imagistically
and symbolically the porter's imagery tends toward an older medieval tradition of
morality drama, morality plays. The parade of the various professions: farmer, tailor,
equivocator (Jesuit priest), lawyer, suggests "the parade of humanity" or "the parade
of vanities" in morality drama. Here it's amplified by a reference that Macbeth's castle
is hell. Once Lenox and Macduff enter they are entering a house of slaughter which
is possessed by powerful spirits. For Jacobian audience this was very frightening
territory: devils, witches, Satan and demons were believed to be real in a consensual
sense as something that represents the supernatural and the other side. The castle,
the stage becomes a liminal space between reality as we know it and reality as it is
colored by our worst fears and fantasies.
"a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty" The farmer who is knocking at
the door is already dead, the ghost of a farmer that hanged himself, someone who
counted on a famine so that prices of his goods would rise, but because it was plenty

he was bankrupt. That line equivocates also between the honest farmer who tills his
land just to feed himself, and the dishonest farmer who invests his money and buys
Goods in times of prosperity to sell at high price in times of famine. The image is
partly allegorical moral and partly fed with local details.
The porter, Macduff and Lenox
Macduff: "Was it so late, friend, ere you went to bed, that you do lie so late?"
Porter: "Faith sir, we were carousing till the second cock: and drink, sir, is a great provoker
of three things"
Macduff: "What three things does drink especially provoke?"
Porter: "Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and
unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on,
and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand
to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him."
This speech about lechery echoes back all the action we've seen so far: How the
Macbeths has turned this castle into a hell on earth. The porter who is drank, is the
guardian of the door between these two realms. When he turns to the audience and
says "remember the porter" the porter becomes one with the audience. The audience
is put in the position of the porters, those who are standing at that liminal threshold.
The jokes about lechery and being drunk – Drunkenness promotes desire but takes
away the performance. It reflects the relationship between Lady Macbeth and
Macbeth: Macbeth is impotent without the drive of his wife in the first part of the play.
That's why the language between the two is very sexual. Macbeth in the beginning is
all imaginary proleptic idea without the will to act. His first instinct is "maybe I should
just wait? Maybe the prophecy will fulfil itself?" His wife pushes him forward. She
gives him a speech about being a man "When you durst do it, then you were a man".
This also relates to the dagger scene, the dagger as a phallic symbol of manhood,
but Macbeth is unable to complete the act of murder, and Lady Macbeth has to go
and do it. After the deed is done the relationship between them changes: Lady
Macbeth can no longer do. She fulfilled her role; the act has been done, and from
now Macbeth on becomes a monster driven by the act he committed which fuels his
fantasies for more acts.
The discovery of the murder
This is expressed in an interesting moment to raise something we can address as the

power of irony, tragic irony: Macbeth is the most ironic from all of Shakespeare's
tragedies. It is not irony as a rhetorical device, but a dramatic irony, to which the
model always is Oedipus: In Oedipus the irony is that Oedipus tries to solve a crime
and find out the truth in which he himself is the guilty one but he doesn't know. That's
the tragic irony. The tragic irony in Macbeth is that Macbeth always says far much
more then he means to, that he always betrays much more then he understands,
when he speaks he is already ironically anticipates the events to come, that he both
imagines but fears.
An example of tragic irony: is a brief speech that he gives when the murder is
discovered in this scene: Macbeth's first reaction – he has to pretend the master of
the house who is shocked to discover that his royal guest has been murdered. He
has to put on a Machiavellian performance. He has to have some kind of reaction of
shock that have to be performed. Macbeth is not prince Hal; he is not very good in
pretending to be one thing and not the other. Macbeth is so enwrapped in his own
hereafter, that even when he tries to be in the moment, and to speak the right words
he says: Macbeth: "Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time;

for, from this instant, there's nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is
dead; The wine of life (blood) is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of"
The wine of life (blood) is drawn This takes us back to the drunkenness of the porter
and connects the images of wine and blood as something that is intoxicating. It
reminds us that the Macbeth's are drunk on blood. Macbeth wants to say something
that will be politically expedient ‫ תועלתני‬but he comes up with this very Hamlet like
expression of disappear about the world. The audience listening to this knows that
Macbeth ironically talks about his own sense of guilt. Dramatic irony is created when
the audience's knowledge differs from those of the characters. "Had I but died an hour
before this chance, I had lived a blessed time" a powerful expression of regret.
Act 3 scene 1
This is Macbeth's long soliloquy in which he justifies his desire and need to kill
Banquo and his son. Macbeth is already king, he is in the "hereafter".He walks on the
stage wearing the crown and says:
Macbeth: "To be thus is nothing; but to be safely thus.--Our fears in Banquo stick deep; and
in his royalty of nature reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares; and, to that
dauntless temper of his mind, he hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour to act in safety.
There is none but he whose being I do fear: and, under him, my Genius is rebuked; as, it is
said, Mark Antony's was by Caesar. He (Banquo) chid the sisters when first they put the name
of king upon me, and bade them speak to him: then prophet-like they hail'd him father to a
line of kings: upon my head they placed a fruitless crown, and put a barren sceptre in my
gripe, thence to be wrench'd with an unlineal hand, no son of mine succeeding. If 't be so, for
Banquo's issue have I filed my mind; for them the gracious Duncan have I murder'd; put
rancours in the vessel of my peace only for them; and mine eternal jewel (soul) given to the
common enemy of man (Satan), to make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings! rather than so,
come fate into the list. and champion me to the utterance!"
Macbeth is already trapped in his own fantasies. In Macbeth's haunted imagination

Banquo grows into a terrible threat. It raises again the question of motif –For
Macbeth, getting the crown is not enough. Safety is now to be found in the promise of
Succession. Now it's about how he wants to keep the crown in his family for
generations to come. He knows that it's not going to happen. He knows that
whatever the witches says comes true. Banquo is the sort of man who has all the
qualities to seek safety. Safety for Banquo is in political terms, and in order for
Banquo to be safe he has to become Macbeth's enemy.
"rather than so, come fate into the list. and champion me to the utterance!" Macbeth
challenges fate for a duel, he defies fate, wants to fight it. He wants to have a fight
with fate to the bitter end. He wants to defy the witches by killing Banquo and his son.
This is a speech which moves us to sympathy, because we see a man who tries to
fight against forces he can't understand or defeat. In the context of the play's
extended comment on the imaginary tyranny of time on our lives, it's fascinating:
Macbeth is a man who is obsessed with time concepts, now in this no-man land,
liminal grave area that doesn’t have time shape attached to it, a strange "now" that is
merging into the "hereafter". The witches, functioning as the three fates, are those
who peer into time, see beyond time. This speech shows us how Macbeth obsessed
with succession. In the first 26 sonnets the speaker advises the young man to marry
and procreate, that's the only way that he is going to live forever. This is where the
fear of mortality comes from, something has to remain. That's a terrifying though for
Macbeth – nothing will remain. All that he is done is done for nothing; the crown is
nothing. It is always a stepping stone for something else which is never named. Once
he understands that’s being withheld, he asks "this is why I did this? I did all that for
Banquo?" That's the historical time consequence of the action: he cleared the way for
Banquo's line of kings, and he is going to go to hell for that.

Macbeth is a creature of his own imagination. His imagination always moves forward,
imagining things that haven't happened yet. Once he imagines those things he is
already doing them in his mind. For him there is not "now". There is the "now" of the
knocking on the door where we can understand that there's a real time, beat, the
clock ticking, the world that goes on. In the middle of that there is just Macbeth'
standing there on the bank and shoal of time, nowhere, in between, waiting to
trammel the act, the consequences. Even after he kills Duncan, he is always after
something else: after Duncan it is Banquo, after that Macduff. There is always
another consequence he wants to trammel in his act, but he never gets there.
Act 3 scene 4 - the ghost of Banquo at the banquet
When the ghost of Banquo appears during the formal banquet, Macbeth looks at it
and talks to it. That is a moment in which the past comes haunting the present. No
one else sees the ghost, just he and the audience. People around him think he is
going mad. Macbeth's first comment is
Macbeth: "If thou canst nod, speak too. If charnel-houses and our graves must send those
that we bury back, our monuments shall be the maws of kites" He says: "if this is the
reality, where that which you kill comes back to haunt you, where there is no proper
demarcation ‫ תחימה‬of life and death, then history itself, the way we record it, cannot
function". If the dead come back, so the notion of leaving a monument: "our
monuments" - those monuments that we use to memorialize the dead for the living,
loose their function. They will become organic and decay and being fed on birds of
prey. The idea of leaving something behind depends on there being a clear
succession and separation
This speech comes in relation to the notion of that which should be inside bleeding to
the outside world, and the notions of reality- lived time vs. imaginary- eternal time:
Macbeth: "Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time, ere human statute purged the
gentle weal; Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd too terrible for the ear: the
times have been, that, when the brains were out, the man would die and there an end; but now
they rise again, with twenty mortal murders on their crowns, and push us from our stools: this
is more strange than such a murder is"
Act 4 scene 1 – Macbeth revisits the witches
Macbeth revisits the witches because he wants more answers. In fact what he gets
are more riddles, more prophesies about the end. He will not be able to understand
those prophecies. He is shown the endless successions of Banquo's heirs.
In this scene the word "start" repeats in a crucial moment. This was his first reaction
when the witches gave him his first prophecy.
When the witches tell him about Birnam wood, he says:

Macbeth: "That will never be Who can impress the forest, bid the tree Unfix his earth-bound
root? Sweet bodements! good! Rebellion's head, rise never till the wood Of Birnam rise, and
our high-placed Macbeth Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath To time and mortal
custom. Yet my heart Throbs to know one thing: tell me, if your art Can tell so much: shall
Banquo's issue ever Reign in this kingdom?"
He thinks it is impossible for the woods to move. That is a dramatic irony, we know
as a audience that the prophecy will come true. The prophecy is an equivocation.
Macbeth loses his ability to understand that something that is said to him is figurative.

Act 5 scene 5 – Macbeth's final soliloquy
sends to kill Lady Macduff and her family. There is a powerful scene where Macduff
is being told about his family massacre. Lady Macbeth's sanity deteriorates: she can’t
wash away the guilt and she is lost. The soldiers with bits of Birnam wood on their
helmets are closing in on the castle. Macbeth finds out that all the prophecies are
coming true. Messengers keeps coming in and gives Macbeth the bad news. He
hears a screaming of a woman. Macbeth bears a soliloquy (his shortest but most
famous soliloquy)
Macbeth: "I have almost forgot the taste of fears; The time has been, my senses would have
cool'd to hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as
life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors; direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts
cannot once start me."
"the time has been, my senses would have cool'd to hear a night-shriek" There was a time
when everything used to cause him to start.
"thoughts cannot once start me" He says "now at the end, after I have done all these
things, nothing can frighten me anymore". It goes back right to the beginning, when
the witches suggest t him that he can become king hereafter, and he starts. He
started then, and he starts now but he denies it. This is a frightening moment in
which Macbeth is in a time dissonance with his own existence: he is always in the
"before" and in the "hereafter".
Macbeth: "Wherefore was that cry?"

Seyton: "The queen, my lord, is dead"
Macbeth: "She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the
last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty
death. out, out, brief candle! life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets
his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth grieves for her death. He loved her.
"She should have died hereafter" This takes us to the first prophecy, the future, "she
should have died sometime in the future"
"there would have been a time for such a word" It's unclear whether the "word" is
"hereafter" or "died". This whole speech is about time
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the
last syllable of recorded time He begins with hereafter -> tomorrows -> day -> syllable
of recorded time
"out, out, brief candle!" The metaphor that views life or the soul as a candle was
common at that time.
"life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and
then is heard no more" This goes back to Shakespeare's arch metaphor of the world as
theater.
"it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing The pace of the
speech slows down, and you end with this horrible annihilating quiet of nothing which
is a half line. It ends in the middle of the line. Shakespeare evokes the images of the
candle, of walking shadow.
The Christian and Jewish theology of reward and punishment in an afterlife drains
organic life here from any possible value or significance. Macbeth is someone who
has been denied the comfort in believing in the afterlife. We are going through this
play with Macbeth, as part of him, experience it with him.
In King Lear is a play which resonates with the word "nothing". But the "nothing" of
King Lear is at least apocalyptic in its universal sense. In King Lear the "nothing" is
almost biblical. At the end of King Lear the heath is blasted and emptied, there's a

naked man, swimming, crying like a wounded animal in the mud, Lear is naked mad
insane and that's it: this is what we look like when you take away from us our
comforts, out sense of identity, our dignity and sanity, what's left is a very weak
wounded insane animal.
In Macbeth it's much more frightening because the "nothing" is tied to language, to
symbols, to metaphors, to meaning, to the functions of the mind. While King Lear is
going through a long process of degradation, where his daughters strip away from
him things that give him sense of identity, in Macbeth this process is inside, is
internal, that's what makes it much more terrifying. It's driven by blood (literally and
figuratively) and by nightmares.

Lesson 19 – 31.05.15
Introduction to Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure is Christian theological play containing black jokes.

The genre of the play is not clear. It's not really a comedy. It is a black comedy.
The play is based on a known story. The story is set in Vienna, a lawless place; vice
is running in the streets. The duke mismanaged the place but decides on a course of
action to remedy this: to go on a long vacation and nominating the strict Angelo and
his substitute. Angelo is a kind of a religious puritan, moral censor, a man of strict
moral values who lives according to the principles of black and white. The duke
pretends to be a friar and watched Angelo. This is a play in which the primary
premise is that the strict Angelo falls in lust with a nun because she is virtuous. He
offers Isabelle the devil's bargain to spear her brother. The play uses the motif of the
bed trick, where someone is forced to sleep with someone thinking him to be
someone else. This is mirrored by the switching of the heads. At the end all is
resolved with the Duck offers Isabelle the nun marriage. The clowns of the play are
Lucio whose name means "light", he is the light in this dark play, and he is the wit.
Another clown is Pompey. Barnadine one of the most important characters, he is the
glue that conceptually binds many of the ideas. He is so drunk he can't be executed.
The theme that repeats in the play is the idea of substitution. Things are always
being substituted for other things: The Duke substitute himself for Angelo, Angelo
asks Isabelle to substitute her chastity to her brother's life, Isabelle and Marianna are
substituted in the bed, the heads are substituted. All of the things are substituted all
to allow for a final exit from the equation of "measure for measure". The play is
related to "The merchant of Venice"
Christian theology background
The two important texts for the Christians are the "Sermon on the Mount" and Paul's
epistle to the Romans. "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a
stone at her." This sentence demonstrates the hypocrisy of the law.
Christianity develops in two stages:

- Thinking about Christianity within Jewish laws: the stage of Jesus's teachings
and his Jewish disciples
- Separating Christianity from Judaism, the mission of Paul: Paul, ‫שאול‬, invented
Christianity in the way we know it. He was a convert, started his life as a Jewish
executor of Christians for the Sanhedrin. Eventually he saw a vision of Jesus and
converted completely to Christianity. He insisted on separating Christianity
theologically and conceptually from the Jewish law and to spread it to all people,
especially the gentile.
Jews define their existence through the commandments, the laws. The actual
performing of the law is what gives Jews spiritual meaning to their existence.
Paul turns on the idea of hypocrisy and says that the problem with the Jews is that
they worship the law according to the letter, not the spirit; they do the ‫ מצוות‬without
thinking about them, or about their spiritual content. According to Paul, Christians
cannot just live in the letter, Christian have to make their covenant ‫ אמנה‬with God in
their hearts, in the life of the spirit, not the life of the flesh. Paul suggests to a
complete internalization of the Jewish law. According to Paul, Jesus, by the act of

sacrifice, redeemed man from the bondage of the law, from the sin which is imputed
in the law. The law exists because there is sin. Christianity tries to move beyond that,
to a spiritual understanding of the law as a spiritual covenant between man and God.
"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to
fulfill… You have heard that it has been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I
say unto you, That you resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite you on your right cheek, turn
to him the other also.… Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you, and persecute you… Judge not, that ye
be not judged… and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." The
sermon of the mount, the gospel of Mathew That's where the play's name comes
from: measure for measure. Jesus takes "‫ "ואהבתך לרעך כמוך‬and radicalizes it. He
says: "Don't love your friend. Love your enemy".The dialectic between the letter and
the spirit is one of the most important principles in Paul's theology. The moral law:
the Ten Commandments say: do not commit adultery. It focuses on the literal act of
committing it. Jesus says that it's not enough not to do something physically, but you
should not do it in your mind. According to Jesus commandments of ‫ בין אדם לאדם‬is
not enough. He focuses on commandments of ‫בין אדם למקום‬. Christ dies on the cross
in order to deliver humanity from the bondage of the law, which is sin. He says that
we should serve in the newness of the spirit. Christian charity opposes the harshness
of the Jewish law. The Jews always substitutes one thing with another, in the letter,
not the spirit. They suffer because they are bound as slaves to laws of "eye for an
eye, tooth for a tooth" and therefore incapable of understanding the spiritual
redemption that releases them from their bondage.
"Judge not, that ye be not judged… and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to
you again" Any Christian who lapses into mode of judgment will get his just deserves,
measure for measure, because they missed the spiritual corrective required.
Christian societies developed so they looked for various solutions for the issue of
laws: They separated earthly law and divine law, the city of God and the city of man.
The earthly laws should be guided by the spirit in order to regulate society, and take
the principle of mercy and charity. Shakespeare asks a complex question – how far,
in terms of legal reasoning and managing a society, can you take mercy before the
society collapses. When the law is too relaxed it causes more damage than good.
In the exchange between Angelo and Isabelle, she throws at him Christian
arguments about mercy. Angelo asks something very sensible: "do you ask me to
forgive the criminal, or the crime?" He says to her that forgiving the crime is abstract;
he can forgive the crime as much as he wants in theory. But if he'll forgive the
criminal, he asks what about all the unborn victims to the crime, all the unnamed
innocence who will suffer. Extramarital sex in Shakespeare's time led to the birth of
bastards, people who existed outside the law, had no rights and became criminals
and a social problem. Angelo is voicing a serious problem about enforcing the law
within the Christian dispensation ‫היתר‬. Shakespeare let all points of views come at us
on different directions, even though Angelo is being evil and corrupt; he is voicing
interesting legal arguments. The play is a blasphemous play and it raises questions
which Christianity find very unconfutable.
Sense and substitution
Substitution
Isabelle: "Alas, alas! Why, all the souls that were were forfeit ‫ כופרים‬once; And he (Christ)
that might the vantage best have took found out the remedy"

Isabelle is trying to convince Angelo that we are all sinners, but there was once a
Christian remedy: Christ by substituting himself, sacrificing himself, find out the
remedy.
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, measure for measure" - substituting
something under something else The notion of balance is central to the Jewish law.
This is related to the notion of sacrifice and atonement, the idea of Jesus dying on
the cross. Jesus is the lamb of Passover; he is the sacrifice, died for humanities sins.
His blood washes away our sins. The two terms Christian use when they think about
Jesus on the cross are:
1. Redemption – 'Redenptio' is Latin is the practice of rebuying a slave in order to
release him. This is what Jesus does. He redeem us.
2. Atonement – ‫כפרה‬, the sacrifice. You kill something to expiate ‫ לכפר‬something
else.
The idea of atonement is that of substitution: Jesus is substituting his body for
humanity sins. The idea of substitution is at the core of Christian understanding of
redemption. It repeats also in the last supper, where Jesus substitutes his body for
bread and blood for wine. In the play, in which so many things are substituted,
Christians watching this cannot but think of the central metaphor of Christ sacrifice,
and the question of what was it all for.
Sense
The word 'sense' repeats and in the play:
1. Faculty of perception or sensation, hence also rationality – phrases like "he
have no sense in his mind"="he have no reason", "he is out of his sense"
2. Actual perception of feeling - the 5 senses
3. Meaning, signification – ‫ מובן‬, the sense of a phrase, a sense of a say, what you
understand.
Lucio: "a man whose blood is very snow-broth; one who never feels the wanton stings and
motions of the sense (physical, lust), But doth rebate and blunt his natural edge with profits of
the mind, study and fast. He--to give fear to use and liberty, which have for long run by the
hideous law, As mice by lions--hath pick'd out an act, under whose heavy sense (‫ פרשנות‬,‫)מובן‬
your brother's life falls into forfeit (the original sin all humanity share)"
Lucio is describing here Angelo to Isabelle.
"never feels the wanton stings and motions of the sense" Lucio describes Angelo as a man
who rejects sense in its physical meaning, he is not attracted to women, lives in his
mind. "pick'd out an act, under whose heavy sense" "heavy sense" because Angelo is
being excessive in its interpretation.
Angelo: "She speaks, and 'tis such sense, that my sense breeds with it"
Angelo say this sentence after he realizes he is attracted to Isabelle. Angelo is
basically saying: "When Isabelle speaks, she makes sense, I can understand what
she's saying, and the more she's right, my sense (all three meanings collapse
together: rational understanding, understanding of what she means, physical arousal)
breeds with it". This is the moment where the Christian neatness which is required to
separate spirit from letter collapses in Angelo's hypocrisy. His hypocrisy is not
represented as a caricature, it presented as a moment of psychological confusion.
Angelo realizes that he is unable to fulfil his role as the puritan judge.
Angelo: "Can it be that modesty may more betray our sense than woman's lightness?"
Angelo can't understand why he has carnal thoughts about Isabelle, the more
modest she is. The more she insists about her purity and chastity, the more he is
attracted to her.

Substitution in the play is a theatrical device, a thematic plot device and a rhetorical
device of substitution sense in the play. In the world of Vienna in the play, nothing is
of what it seems or appears. The only thing that can restore order is a radical act of
self-sacrifice which will involve an act of mercy, where Angelo (the devil) will offer
himself to redeem the others from the state of chaos. This is a complex theological
play that offers many perspectives on human society, how we regulate our society,
how we regulate sexuality, how we understand the law. It is a play about the social
contract, what happened to a community when it is in ambiance with these ideas.
The play is neither a comedy nor a tragedy. The scholars categorize this play as a
'problem play'.
Measure for Measure
Characters
Claudio and Isabelle- Between the brother and the sister there is a hidden sexual
tension. Isabelle is running away from something. She is too eager to become a nun.
Escalus – the wise judge, represents merciful justice, he is like a foil
Angelo - The most consistent character in the play is Angelo. For Christian it is very
disturbing that the character who most behaves like the devil in the play, behave
most like Christ at the end (Angelo asks at the end to be executed, measure for
measure).
The Duke – he abdicates power in a bizarre social exercise as is he can't take
responsibility about what's going on in Vienna, he sets up Angelo to take the fault. He
is a strange Machiavellian character disguised as a monk.
All the scenes in the play start "in media res" in the middle of the event.
[From Wikipedia: In medias res - A story which begins in medias res ("in the middle of a
thing") opens in the midst of action. Oftentimes exposition is bypassed and filled in gradually,
either through dialogue, flashbacks or description of past events. For example, Hamlet begins
after the death of Hamlet's father. Characters make reference to King Hamlet's death without
the plot's first establishment of said fact. Since the play focuses on Hamlet and the revenge
itself more so than the motivation, Shakespeare utilizes in medias res to bypass superfluous
exposition]
Act 1 Scene 1
The scene begins "in media res" (in the middle of the plot). The duke announces his
plan first to Escalus and then to Angelo. Shakespeare is using his tactics of
perspectives: Scenes at the court mirror scenes of the brothel, and they are meant to
mirror ideas of the law and rule.Escalus is the wise judge, a balancing character in
the play. Everyone knows that the Duke should have given power to Escalus to rule
instead him. But the duke is interested in the radical social exercise, appointing the
younger more strict puritan Angelo. That is meant to make him (the Duke) look
better.
The Duke tells Angelo about his plans. He selected Angelo to take his office. He
chose Angelo based on his reputation of being virtuously moral.
Duke: "Angelo, There is a kind of character (a letter, inscription) in thy life, that to the
observer doth thy history fully unfold. Thyself and thy belongings are not thine own so proper
as to waste thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee. Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike as if we
had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd but to fine issues, nor nature never lends the
smallest scruple of her excellence But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines herself the glory
of a creditor, both thanks and use. But I do bend my speech To one that can my part in him

advertise; Hold therefore, Angelo:-- In our remove be thou at full ourself; Mortality and
mercy in Vienna Live in thy tongue and heart: old Escalus, Though first in question, is thy
secondary. Take thy commission."
"Angelo, There is a kind of character (a letter, inscription) in thy life, that to the observer
doth thy history fully unfold." The duke talks about Angelo' reputation, the way he
appears at outward behavior.
"Thyself and thy belongings are not thine own so proper as to waste thyself upon thy virtues,
they on thee." Angelo is not a man who runs after gold and property; he is only
interested in virtue.
"Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike as if we had them not." The Duke tells Angelo:
"although I know you are a virtuous man, virtue cloistered in it, not going out into the
world doing something to change it for better, is worthless. Heaven gave you good
fortunes to light the darkness for others, not to be virtuous in yourself".
"Spirits are not finely touch'd but to fine issues, nor nature never lends the smallest scruple of
her excellence But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines herself the glory of a creditor, both
thanks and use." Nature doesn't give you good qualities without asking something in
return. The language switches here to legal language, the language of owing
something, credit lawn and interest: The word "spirits" appears here, suggesting
spiritual life, not bound to the flesh. There is an anti-monastic ‫ לא נזירי‬tone to what he
says. It is important protestant humanism notion: everybody can be locked away in a
monastery and love God. The world is a difficult place, full of temptation and sin and
it required you to engage not only with the spirit, but also with the letter, the flesh.
The operative metaphor throughout the play is of spirit and letter.
This is his way to say to Angelo: "we all know that privately at home you are a
virtuous man, but it is time to put that to the test".
Angelo's first reaction is:

Angelo: "Now, good my lord, let there be some more test made of my metal, before so noble
and so great a figure be stamp'd upon it." This introduces us with a metaphor of
stamping a coin. He asks the duke to be tested. It sounds like false modesty. There
is a hidden irony in this sentence. Angelo probably knows that he isn't worthy. He
knows that he has a dark secret. As soon as he's appointed he is going to be trapped
in the necessity of hypocrisy. In this moment we hear that Angelo is really
unprepared for the test. The test is: what happens when you take absolute moral
Christian ideals, and try to make them work in the real world, where real people liv
according to real drives and desires. The result is a certain kind of conceptual
ideological crisis, and at the worst full social crisis. In the balance hangs the brother
and the sister, twin brothers, his life, against her honour.

Lesson 20 – 31.05.15
The title of the play "measure for measure" is a phrase which belongs to an
economy, economical equation of crime and punishment which seeks to regulate
sexual intercourse outside of marriage which results in the birth of illegitimate
children. But it's more than that. One of the key words in the play is "sense" with
which Shakespeare loads its various double meaning to create the tension, the
parodic irony around which this play and its confusion with spiritual religious moral
categories and earthly sexual or ethical categories is enacted dramatically. To such a
degree that in act 2 scene 2, the puritan Angelo, who is a man of moral principles,
becomes aroused by the nun's purity. That kind of paradox where the distinction
between the supposedly spiritual and the earthly fleshly gets confused, in the
economy of this play's exploration of measure for measure, one thing equals another,
everything weighted in a kind of scale of balance. This is a Christian play and
therefore a blasphemous, goes against the grain of orthodox Christianity. The play
challenges some of the basic assumptions of the Christian theory behind the practice
of the law in Christian societies.
Act 1 Scene 1
Angelo's response: "let there be more test made of my metal"
In this moment we hear that Angelo is really unprepared for the test. The test is: what
happens when you take absolute moral Christian ideals, and try to make them work
in the real world, where real people liv according to real drives and desires. The
result is a certain kind of conceptual ideological crisis, and at the worst full social
crisis. In the balance hangs the brother and the sister, twin brothers, his life, against
her honour, his actual physical life against a concept, honour. This reminds us
Falstaff's speech about honour in I Henry IV. Here it's slightly different: The sister is
an apprentice nun. She is so eager of becoming a nun that we have to ask ourselves
what is she running away from? What is the sexual desire that she finds so
abhorring (her word) that she tries so desperately to avoid? The word that she keeps
using is "shame": "your life against my shame" she tells her brother. What is worth
more to whom? This is the economy, which is the "measure for measure". This is
what is being weighted in the scale in this play. The scale always tends in this play to
tip to the favor of life and not in the favor of the idea.
In the play, the idea proves itself to be uncompromising to the degree that it
threatens to kill life. Examples:
- Angelo will push the moral idea of the law so far that he will want to forfeit a man's
life for it.
- Isabelle would rather see her brother die than make sacrifice of her sanctity, she
protecting an idea of purity.

The first half of the play
We will look closely at three characters: Angelo, Isabelle (and the tension between
them) and Lucio.
Angelo and Isabelle are both moral ideologues. They end up tripping one another
into a sexual exchange.
Lucio is the character that binds the comic energy of this play. His name means
"light". Lucio doesn’t have any of Falstaff's wit or great intelligence, but he's close.
Lucio is one of Falstaff's minions of the moon; he is a creature of the tavern, a bit of
rouge, a man of town, slept around with prostitutes. While Pompey is the actual
clown character, Lucio is the soul of the play's humor. Every time that he has a scene
with one of the other character, his skeptic cynical wit acts as a foil to the moral
simplicity, the high flown language of the character with whom he interacts.
This is clearly seen in his interactions with Isabelle, in the scene where Isabelle talks
to Angelo, Lucio's dramatic theatrical function in that scene is crucial in creating a
sense of comic.
Act 1 Scene 2 introduction to Lucio

This scene follows the scene which sets the plot. Shakespeare uses the same tactics
he often uses of mirroring a scene of high governance at court with a scene of low
humor of the tavern. The world of the tavern and the brothel mirrors, becomes part of
the equation of the "measure for measure" with the world of the law, of rule. The
scene is set in Vienna, in a public place (a pub, tavern). Lucio is sitting at the tavern,
drinking, playing dice, probably card and money on the table. He is hanging out with
persons who are described as "gentleman". We know that these are not Falstaff's
thieves. These gentlemen are degenerate university graduates in their early 20's with
lots of money to spend and nothing much to do. Their language immediately ironizes
and subverts the discussion about the law we had in the scene prior with the duke
and Angelo.
Lucio: "If the duke with the other dukes come not to composition with the King of Hungary,
why then all the dukes fall upon the king."
This sentence should not mean anything to us, it's a way of Shakespeare to ease us
into a conversation, a bunch of guys sitting at a pub talking about current affairs,
suggesting that there is a war and a greater European political context going on.
They are sitting and talking about politics. Then the jokes begin. Lucio says:
Lucio: "Thou concludest like the sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the Ten
Commandments, but scraped one out of the table."
Second Gentleman: " 'Thou shalt not steal'? "
Lucio: "Ay, that he razed"
First Gentleman: "Why, 'twas a commandment to command the captain and
all the rest from their functions: they put forth to steal. There's not a soldier of us all, that, in
the thanksgiving before meat, do relish the petition well that prays for peace."
They are talking about politics, and about the lack of actual will behind the actual
political decisions. They haven't yet heard the news of Angelo being pointed.
Lucio says to the others: "we would like to make peace with Hungary, but we don't
want to be ruled by the Hungarian king." It's like want a cake and eat it.
Lucio's analogy is one to do with the law – you talk like a hypocritical pirate, who
goes out to sea to rob people, carrying the Ten Commandments, and conveniently
erases one of the commandment that interferes with what he wants, "thou shall not
steal".

The other guys rationalize his joke, and say that "thou shall not steal" is a
commandment that will prevent the captain and the pirates from doing their "job",
stealing, because they are thieves.
"There's not a soldier of us all, that, in the thanksgiving before meat, do relish the petition
well that prays for peace" We learn that these guys are soldiers. He says that all
soldiers actually don't want to fight. They pray for peace. Soldiers always disobey the
commandment of "thou shall not kill". The talk about the soldiers raises a real tension
between the church commandment of "thou shall not kill" and the function of being a
soldier and trained to kill. In a very short dialog of humor between these guys, sitting
in the tavern, we have the concept of the moral law (The Ten Commandments) being
showed to be impractical when applied to the reality of the world as man live in it.
Shakespeare is sheading here a spotlight on the huge gap between the moral ideals
on which Christianity is founded on, and the practice of its earthly governance of its
church. In this play, this idea becomes a matter for macabre comedy, black comedy.
It becomes a macabre joke playing with death, body parts and sexuality. This is a
speech about the commerce of human desire. This is what the play is exploring
comically. The two mirrored scenes: In Act 1 scene 1 The Duke and Angelo are
talking about the law and its function. In Act 1 Scene 2 the rouges sitting in the tavern
and echoing back these lofty ideas ironically.
Entered Mrs. Overdone, the madam of the brothel and brings in the news.
Lucio: "Behold, behold. where Madam Mitigation (‫הקלה‬,‫ )המתקה של עונש‬comes! I have
purchased as many diseases under her roof as come to"
Lucio calls the woman who runs the brothel "Madam Mitigation" because she
mitigates unbridled male needs and desires. Mitigation is also a legal term for
mitigating punishment ‫להקל בעונש‬. We can say "to commit a crime under mitigating
circumstances" ‫נסיבות מקלות‬. She is madam mitigation, her presence in the society
allows for the equivocation ‫ ביטוי דו משמעי‬of the law, because she exists in a loophole
of the law. Brothels are not legal, but they exist. Society has come to tolerate their
existence. She is a business woman; she is not controlled by other man. Pompey is
her employee. In the 17th century, that was the only profession in which a woman
could thrive independently. She has economic autonomy.
Mistress Overdone: "Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat (disease), what
with the gallows and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk."
She talks like a business woman who sees her financial empire collapses. She is
running out of customers because of the war, soldiers are fighting and dying. She is
running out of customers because of the "sweat", disease, because of the gallows
that execute people. Next Pompey brings the news that Angelo have decided to
close all the brothels in the city. Mistress Overdone's reaction is:
Mistress Overdone: "Why, here's a change indeed in the commonwealth!
What shall become of me?" To which Pompey the clown answers:
Pompey: "Come; fear you not: good counsellors lack no clients: though you change your
place, you need not change your trade; I'll be your tapster still. Courage! there will be pity
taken on you: you that have worn your eyes almost out in the service, you
will be considered." Don't worry, it's the oldest business in the town and nobody will be
able to stop it. It's capitalist enterprise principle of supply and demand.
Lucio and the tavern introduce us to a world where everything is commerce,

everything is to be negotiated for a price, they are no lofty ideals, everything is
cynical, everything is relative to its price value and to whether there is someone to
but what it is you offering. In the early 17th century this is the start of the capitalist
structure of English economy.

This economy presents on the one side the law: the duke and his neglect, him
wanting to reinforce the rigor of the absolute law by substituting the puritan for
himself as a social exercise. And on the other side the reality of the society on which
this exercise is to be perpetrated. So far what we have seen are characters that
represent an ethos of the common world, the society. But In scene 4 we are
introduced for the first time to Isabelle.
Act 1 scene 4 - Introduces us to Isabelle
What's fascinating about the dramatic pace and structure of this play is that as soon
as we are introduced to Isabelle, all the large social tensions that are mapped out in
the previous scenes, are localized in her subjective life, in her subjective experience
and literally in her physical body. This brings us back to an arch metaphor that
Shakespeare is always interested in: man as an individual microcosmic reflection of
the world in which in which he lives. We meet Isabelle in a nunnery. This is a closed
off space where these women live a sheltered life within this corrupt city of Vienna.
The women swear vows which allows them either to see a man and not to talk to
him, or to talk to a man but not to see him. This idea implying that temptation is
overwhelming when sight and sound are combined. The men are protected from the
women over sexual power of their presence.
All the scenes start "in media res" in the middle of the dialog between the nun and
Isabelle. Isabelle begins:
Isabella: "And have you nuns no farther privileges?"
Privileges here are what the nuns allowed to do within the parameters of what is not
allowed to do.
Francisca: "Are not these large enough?"
Isabella: "Yes, truly; I speak not as desiring more; But rather wishing a more strict restraint
Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare."
That line starts to ring alarm bells. The language here is the language of economy, of
excess ‫הפרזה‬. Isabelle wants more restrictions, she feels she's too weak to regulate
her own excess ‫ מופרז‬desire, she wants other people to regulate it for her. She enters
a nunnery and wants he nuns to impose strict laws on her. Something about her is
already excessive to begin with. Her fantasies focus on restriction.
She is not fantasizing about being led loose into her excessive desire which we later
find out is incestuous ‫כרוך בגילוי עריות‬. She clearly has incestuous desires towards her
brother. Because that is forbidden and a social taboo, and she is aware that she is
sexually over determined, when she walks around man starts having sexual
thoughts, so in her mind, she is a problem for herself and for others. Her language is
always the language of excess. She always wants more. Because she speaks like a
nun, she speaks on the opposite side of the equation, what she wants more of now is
restrictions. She transferred herself symbolically and metaphorically to the other side
of the Christian economy, she's rejecting life, the flesh, the body, and wants more of
what is promised on the other side, What is promised on the other side is life
everlasting behind death, a certain kind of infinity and purity. These are achieved in
Christianity by having less of the world of the flesh. She relinquish the physical
world.
Lucio comes and tells Isabelle the bad news that her brother is going to be executed
for getting a woman he's technically married to pregnant.
Francisca: "It is a man's voice. Gentle Isabella, Turn you the key, and know his business of
him; You may, I may not; you are yet unsworn. When you have vow'd, you must not speak

with men But in the presence of the prioress: Then, if you speak, you must not show your face,
Or, if you show your face, you must not speak. He calls again; I pray you, answer him."
The nun retires.
Isabelle is still in an in-between space, she still inhabits both worlds. She opens the
door and stands in this liminal threshold between the space of the nunnery, of
everlasting life, and the other space of short life sex and real death. She speaks to
Lucio who represents the other world.
Isabella: "Peace and prosperity! Who is't that calls"
Lucio: "Hail, virgin, if you be, as those cheek-roses proclaim you are no less! Can you so
stead me As bring me to the sight of Isabella, A novice of this place and the fair sister To her
unhappy brother Claudio? "
"Hail virgin" is a mockery on the catholic prayer "Hail Mary full of grace". Mary is the
one virgin who had a child and stayed a virgin.
"Hail, virgin, if you be" This means he is not sure if she is actually a nun or a virgin.
Most nuns were not virgins; they were fallen women who were rejected by the world.
"as those cheek-roses proclaim you are no less!" He runs into the Petrarchan language of
courtly love and uses the clichés of the red cheeks as roses. This is a joke, red
cheeks imply that either she blushes because of modesty or because she is sexually
aroused, sexually over determined.Later in the scene with Angelo, she throws at him
heavy Christian theology of mercy, in trying to persuade him not to execute her
brother. She talks like someone fully committed to be a nun. The more she protests
her honour the more her language becomes sexualized. [From Wikipedia: "The lady
doth protest too much, methinks" is a quotation from Hamlet by William
Shakespeare. It has been used as a figure of speech, in various phrasings, to
indicate that a person's overly frequent ‫ תכוף‬or vehement ‫ עז‬attempts to convince
others of something have ironically helped to convince others that the opposite is
true, by making the person look insincere and defensive]
Lucio tells Isabelle that her brother will ne executed for getting Juliet pregnant, and
revels that Angelo is replacing the Duke.
Lucio: "This is the point. The duke is very strangely gone from hence; Bore many gentlemen,
myself being one, In hand and hope of action: but we do learn By those that know the very
nerves of state, his givings-out were of an infinite distance from his true-meant design. Upon
his place, and with full line of his authority, governs Lord Angelo; a man whose blood is very
snow-broth; one who never feels the wanton stings and motions of the sense, but doth rebate
and blunt his natural edge with profits of the mind, study and fast."
Angelo tells Isabelle that the judge appointed to this task is an extreme moralist.
Angelo does not have the common sense of casuistic law, but he is a strict moralist
that tries to push the law to its extreme. Angelo's excess of the law is equal to
Isabelle's excess of rejecting the world and its temptations. They exist in the same
place.
Casuistic law - Modern law is practiced on the principle of cases. We do not apply the
law in all cases the same. Judges in courts apply the law based on the
circumstances of the case. The law tells them what are the minimum and maximum
punishments, and within that the judge decides. This wasn't the case In the 16th
century. In England of the 16th century there were two separate court systems.
- The civil courts which mostly dealt with cases to do with money and lawns.
- The crown courts which dealt with crimes against the crown, political crimes like
treason.
- The ecclesiastical court (the courts of the church) which dealt with most of the other
crimes like: adultery, bastardy, rape, sexual crimes, moral crimes.

The legal system of the 16th century was very complicated. The ecclesiastical courts
always tried to pretends that they practice absolute morality. In order to safeguard
the health of the society, more and more church theologians started to argue for
casuistry, what we do today, to judge things by cases and not according to absolute
moral principle. They offered to use the absolute moral principle as a guide, but to
apply it according to the case. That is represented in the play by the character of
Escalus. Escalus later judges the clowns and gives everyone his right sensible judge.
Act 2 scene 2 Isabelle and Angelo
This is one of the most important scenes that stand at the heart of the play, where
Isabelle comes to plead for her brother's life before the strict Angelo. Angelo falls in
lust with Isabelle.
The operative line in this scene is: Angelo: "Most dangerous is that temptation that doth
goad us on to sin in loving virtue"
Angelo and Isabelle both speak the same language from opposing ends of the same
ideal of uncompromising Christian values, except that Angelo speaks from the
position of the judge who refuses to compromise, and Isabelle speaks from the
position of the plaintiff ‫ תובע‬who wants to insist on the ultimate Christian principle of
charity and showing mercy. They raise interesting debates about the meaning of the
law in a functioning society. You can see that the more that this exchange goes on,
the more Angelo is sexually entranced by Isabelle's power of language. The scene is
a triangular scene: Lucio is also present. He is standing at the back and can see with
us the audience what is happening to Angelo. Lucio encourages Isabelle to bate
Angelo. This theatrically is a device of comedy, Lucio breaks the mimetic boundary of
the theater, and he occupies the audience's position. He becomes the orchestrator of
the audience. Through his eyes the audience sees both Angelo and Isabelle the way
they don't realize themselves what is happening. We see it as comic.
Isabelle and Angelo's arguments

ISABELLA: "Too late? why, no; I, that do speak a word…."
………….
ANGELO: ]Aside] "Amen: For I am that way going to temptation, Where prayers cross…"
Isabelle: "No ceremony that to great ones 'longs, not the king's crown, nor the deputed
sword, the marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe, become them with one half so good a
grace as mercy does. If he had been as you and you as he, you would have slipt like him; but
he, like you, would not have been so stern."
Isabelle throws at Angelo the Christian saying of "he that is without sin let him cast
the first stone". She tells him: "before you judge so severely another man, first you
must look into your heart and see what sin you find there". Isabelle cites Christian
scriptures in very moving poetry. She opposes the harshness of the legal law, the
letter of the law against the Christian economy of mercy, of turning the other cheek,
of looking at your own sense of sin before judging others. The gospel of Mathew:
"Judge not, that ye be not judged… and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to
you again". Isabelle gives Angelo a Christian sermon. Her devotion and energy, the
intensity of her belief moves Angelo erotically.
Angelo's counter arguments start with "Pray you, be gone." = "go away". When she
pushes him further he says: "it's not me, it's the law" Angelo: "Your brother is a forfeit
of the law" For Christians that phrase is triggering, it's almost like saying to her: "you

brother is a Jew". This is how this play relates back to the merchant of Venice. The
meaning of "forfeit of the law" in simple legal terms is condemned because the law
condemns him to death.
That's why she immediately throws at him the Christian meaning: Isabella: "Alas, alas!
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once (until Christ redeemed us) And He (God) that
might the vantage best have took found out the remedy (the crucifixion). How would you be, if
He, which is the top of judgment, should but judge you as you are? O, think on that; and
mercy then will breathe within your lips, like man new made." She uses the Pauline
language of being born again with Christ. She is accusing him of being dead to the
spirit of Christ in his literal insistence on the law. Christ fulfilled the law and released
us from that bond.
He answers that it is not he who condemn her brother but the law: Angelo: "It is the
law, not I condemn your brother: Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, it should be thus
with him".
Isabelle bags and pleads: "To-morrow! O, that's sudden! Spare him, spare him! He's not
prepared for death. Even for our kitchens we kill the fowl of season: shall we serve heaven
with less respect than we do minister to our gross selves? Good, good my lord, bethink you;
who is it that hath died for this offence? There's many have committed it."
She uses a metaphor deliberately breaking down imagery of flesh and eating talking
about preparing a meal for heaven.
That makes him mad. Angelo is a hypocrite because we know that in his past there is
exactly the same crime such as Claudio.
Angelo: "The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept: Those many had not dared to do
that evil, if the first that did the edict infringe had answer'd for his deed: now 'tis awake takes
note of what is done; and, like a prophet, looks in a glass, that shows what future evils, either
new, or by remissness new-conceived, and so in progress to be hatch'd and born, are now to
have no successive degrees, but, ere they live, to end."
Isabella: "Yet show some pity."
Angelo: "I show it most (pity) of all when I show justice; for then I pity those I do not know,
which a dismiss'd offence would after gall; and do him right that, answering one foul wrong,
lives not to act another. Be satisfied; your brother dies to-morrow; be content."
There is a real tension between Christianity practiced as theology and Christianity

practiced as an ethical code of conduct in the real world. Isabelle is not responsible
for anyone else other than herself. She is not a governor. She is trying to plead for
her brother's life in the name of Christian values of pity and mercy. Angelo comes
from the position of the governor who is responsible for everyone's lives in the city.
He says something very important: "I show it most (pity) of all when I show justice": the
right execution of justice in a lawless society protects the unborn victims of crime that
haven't happened yet. He implies here to the problem of bastardy. Bastardy was an
enormous drain on the economy, and a social problem in early modern England.
Isabelle comes speaking from the position of the universal Christian ideal of mercy,
but Angelo only hears a private plea. She is not arguing for mercy for all of the other
people, but only for her brother. He as a judge is asking: "why this case I should
show mercy, but not in other cases?" He is much more practical. From a legal point
of view he has a point – the law can't decide to be merciful in some cases and harsh
in others. He tells her that he is responsible for everyone and she is only responsible
for herself and her brother. Shakespeare tries to show to his audience that the
Christian universal values are only practical in private cases. If you try and apply it in
a fallen Christian society, a society driven by economy, not by values, then that
becomes untenable. This is the source of the comic tragic tension of the play.

We started with the ambiguity of the word "sense". Angelo: "She speaks, and 'tis such
sense, that my sense breeds with it" He says: "my understanding of what she is saying is
breeding (having sex) to conceive another reality in my own apatite".
The equivocation of the word 'sense' and 'desire':

'Sense' means both physical sense (5 senses) and understanding. We tend to
separate the two: ideas are ideas and senses are the senses. The word 'Desire'
repeats in this play too and it is always erotic. Desire is always excessive because it
moves towards that which you lack. The equivocation of the word 'sense' introduces
equivocation into 'desire', meaning just as 'sense' collapses (it's no longer either
conceptual or physical) desire is neither one nor the other it is always both. As soon
as Angelo experience words of Christian morality spoken to him, from a place of
ardent desire of this woman, she speaks from a place of passion that inflames in him
the desire.nThe desire starts from a conceptual place
Angelo: "we are both saints, I want to be a paragon of the moral law"
Isabelle: "I'm going to be a nun, I'm going to be the epitome of Christian mercy and
pity" Angelo and Isabelle excessively desire to renounce. The comedy of this is that
the more they push towards the renunciation of the flesh, the more the flesh is
aroused. This is the anti-Christian joke and irony of this play. It shows the underline
hypocrisy of the erotic economy of "measure for measure" in Christian belief. The
image for "Measure for Measure" is economical ‫ כלכלי‬phrase for two parts of the
scale: one thing for another thing, substitution, payment, paying something for
something. The question is do you pay something which is the actual value or an
inflated value. The play dramatizes comically a society in which sex desire and lofty
ideal are economized. Isabelle's virtue causes Angelo's sexual arousal. The play
dramatization of Christian concepts as oppose to earthly concepts is confused. So is
the conventional Christian belief that the Christians have progressed from the Jewish
dispensation ‫מתן‬,‫ התר‬law to a spiritual dispensation of the moral law as it is escribed
in the heart of the believers.

Lesson 21 – 10.06.15
The second half of the play
Before the comical unconvincing ending of the play (all the couples are married) we
have a moment of dark tragedy where Claudio is going to be executed.
Act 2 scene 4: Isabelle comes to here Angelo's offer

The scene begins with Angelo's soliloquy about his planned action, his capitulation
‫ כניעה‬to his own sense of sin. Angelo decides to give in to his base desires and to
present Isabelle with his diabolical offer. The language and imagery is interesting in
that scene: the language of sex, temptation sin and corruption gets mixed up with the
language of morality, Christian virtue and te law. Angelo's language bleeds into
Isabelle's answer. When Isabelle resists and recoils ‫ נסיגה‬in horror from Angelo's
offer, she uses highly sexual language.
The dialog between Angelo and Isabelle

Isabella: "I am come to know your pleasure"
Isabelle means "I come to know what you want" but the use of the word 'pleasure' is
highly ironic from the audience point of view, 'pleasure' is a sexual word.
Angelo: [Aside] "That you might know it, would much better please me than to demand what
'tis" [To Isabelle] "Your brother cannot live"
Angelo says to the audience: "if only you knew what my pleasure is"
"Your brother cannot live" He doesn't say "your brother will die", but uses a negative to
say "he cannot live". This is an interesting construction. It gives us a formula of
negating life equals death on the side of the Christian law.
Isabella: "Even so. Heaven keep your honour!"

She accepts the verdict.
Angelo: "Yet may he live awhile; and, it may be as long as you or I yet he must die."
Angelo is playing games with Isabelle. He says: "what I meant to say is that we'll all
die at the end, he will die eventually, I didn't say it will be tomorrow". Angelo, who
previously spoke the language of death, now speaks the language of life.
Isabella: "Under your sentence?"

Angelo: "Yea"
Isabella: "When, I beseech you? that in his reprieve, ‫ דחייה‬longer or shorter, he may be so
fitted that his soul sicken not"
Angelo: "Ha! fie, these filthy vices! It were as good to pardon him that hath from nature
stolen a man already made, as to remit their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image in
stamps that are forbid: 'tis all as easy falsely to take away a life true made as to put metal in
restrained means To make a false one."
He is talking to himself. We are back to the imagery of coining metals. Here the
imagery serves to Angelo express his own sense of horror at his own hypocrisy.
Isabelle doesn't understand him. She says:

Isabella: "'Tis set down so in heaven, but not in earth."

She tells him "this idea that judges should be innocence and no man should
condemn another man if he himself errors in the same sins, is relevant heaven but
not in earth, I know that the world isn't like that."
She cancels her own argument from the previous conversation between them, which
she was uses to convince him to spare her brother.
Angelo: "Say you so? then I shall pose you quickly. Which had you rather, that the most just
law now took your brother's life; or, to redeem him, give up your body to such sweet
uncleanness as she that he hath stain'd?"
He offers her a perversion ‫ עיוות‬of the idea of "measure for measure": Her brother
can die under the strict law or they can do a "measure for measure": just as he ruined
the maidenhead of another girl, it you'll ruin your maidenhead he can live.
She still doesn't get what he's saying:

Isabella: "Sir, believe this, I had rather give my body than my soul. That's a Christian
answer. He is trapping her."
Angelo is trapping Isabelle because Isabelle's answer is very sensible Christian
answer. For Christians who believes in the life in the "hereafter", the body is nothing.
Only the soul matters.
Angelo: "I talk not of your soul: our compell'd sins stand more for number than for accompt."
He's telling her not to worry about her soul because if she is forced to commit a sin, it
stands as credit, not as sin. It's not really true for Christianity. In many cultures
women who were raped were accused for adultery. This argument of "don't worry if
I'll rape you you'll be fine" in term of moral theology is hypocritical. She doesn't
understand him.
Angelo: "Nay, I'll not warrant that; for I can speak against the thing I say. Answer to this: I,
now the voice of the recorded law, pronounce a sentence on your brother's life: Might there
not be a charity in sin to save this brother's life?"
He's trapping her in the language of relativist causes, he doesn't speak as the strict
Angelo but as an Angelo who is trained in the language of relative law of cases. He is
talking about her potential sin. In other words he introduces "If you'll sleep with me,
will it not be under mitigating circumstances, given it was under force and that you
did it to save another person's life?" This is the language of life, not of death.
Isabella: "Please you to do't, I'll take it as a peril to my soul, it is no sin at all, but charity"
Angelo trapped Isabelle. She is innocently agreeing with the premise of what he's
saying.
He turns it on her:
Angelo: "Pleased you to do't at peril ‫ סכנה‬of your soul, were equal poise of sin and charity."
She's really confused and trying to work through his theological reasoning
Isabella: "That I do beg his life, if it be sin, Heaven let me bear it! you granting of my suit (to
spear her brother), If that be sin, I'll make it my morn prayer To have it added to the faults of
mine, and nothing of your answer." She says that she will take the penance for his sin if
he will spare her brother.
Isabelle is not getting the hint so Angelo has to start and become more literal
Angelo: "Nay, but hear me. Your sense pursues not mine: Either you are ignorant, or seem so
craftily; and that's not good." He doesn't buy her innocence. He says: "either you
pretending not to know what I'm talking about or you just ignorant"
Isabella: "Let me be ignorant, and in nothing good, but graciously to know I am no better."

Angelo: "Thus wisdom wishes to appear most bright when it doth tax itself; as these black
masks proclaim an enshield beauty ten times louder than beauty could, display'd. But mark
me; to be received plain, I'll speak more gross: Your brother is to die… And his offence is so,
as it appears, accountant to the law upon that pain… Admit no other way to save his life,-- As
I subscribe not that, nor any other, but in the loss of question,--that you, his sister, finding
yourself desired of such a person, whose credit with the judge, or own great place, could fetch
your brother from the manacles of the all-building law; and that there were no earthly mean
to save him, but that either you must lay down the treasures of your body To this supposed, or
else to let him suffer; What would you do?"
Now she understands what he asks:

Isabella: "As much for my poor brother as myself: That is, were I under the terms of death,
the impression of keen whips (stripes of blood) I'ld wear as rubies, and strip myself to
death, as to a bed (bed of death) that longing (desire) have been sick for, (before) ere I'ld
yield my body up to shame."
Isabelle is so horrified, and she rejects an offer of sex by some of the most sexually
charged lines in the play. She wants to be whipped, go naked into her bed of death.
Isabelle's mind is running riot with sexual fantasies of martyrdom. There was a long
tradition in medieval art of memorializing the grotesque death of the Christian saints,
many of them women, by showing in pictures the saint holding the instruments of
their own death or torture. These saint paintings are psycho sexualizing lurid
expression of body violence in western art.
Her desire to be on the other side that dejects life of is so erotically charged, that her
becomes highly sexualized. In her mind it is possible to yield her body to violent
sexual assault and it is not shame, if it is to die like a martyr.
She talks like a proper Christian, says the right lines, but as soon as he confronts her
with the impossible paradox of this temptation it sends her own rhetoric into overdrive
‫הילוך גבוה‬.
Angelo: "Then must your brother die"

Isabella: "And 'twere the cheaper way: Better it were a brother died at once, Than that a
sister, by redeeming him, Should die for ever." She says: "what you are asking me is to
kill my soul and the soul is forever"
Angelo: "Were not you then as cruel as the sentence that you have slander'd so?"
Isabella: "Ignomy in ransom and free pardon are of two houses: lawful mercy is nothing kin
to foul redemption" Redemption is a powerful Christian word, it's what Christ does on
the cross, but this play deals not with redemption, but with foul redemption. That's
where the play's Christian blasphemies and confusions generate a kind of farce or
satire, within the tragic confines of what the Christian moral law is insufficient to.
Angelo: "You seem'd of late to make the law a tyrant; and rather proved the sliding of your
brother a merriment than a vice"
Isabella: "O, pardon me, my lord; it oft falls out, to have what we would have, we speak not
what we mean: I something do excuse the thing I hate, for his advantage that I dearly love"
She thinks that maybe he didn't mean what he said.
It all concludes when he says to her in a Christin inversion of the context of speech:
Angelo: "We are all frail"
People only use the expression "I'm only human" to excuse their faults. This is a
Christian argument. The play deals with the underline practical hypocrisy in the
application of abstract Christian theological notions of transcending the mosaic
Jewish law of "an eye of an eye", into a spiritual exchange which commutes ‫מחליף‬
the flesh and transcends it. In reality, the world in which we live in is the world, in
which we do not see spiritual things; it is governed by organic livings, desires,
appetites, economic needs and so on. In that world, the more you insist on the

Christian paradigm of inverting earthly values for spiritual ones, the less coherent the
actual societal functions become. The play doesn't reject the ideas of Christianity. It
tries to explore the hypocrisy of people like puritans.
Act 3 scene 1: The Duke's speech & Isabelle and Claudio's conversation
This is the most important scene in the play; it offers a tragic core to the play.
The scene is divided into two parts:
The first part – the Duke disguised as a monk comes to Claudio and prepares him
for death. He takes his confession under false charges.
The second part – Isabelle and Claudio's conversation
Claudio thinks there is not hope. He accepts his fate. The speech takes a man's
despair and turns it into biblical equanimity ‫שלווה‬, acceptant of death. As soon as he
has the slightest hint or hope of life, all of that biblical equanimity disappears and he
just wants to live.
The first part – the Duke's speech about death

The Duke substituted his power with Angelo, now disguised, hears Isabelle talk and
becomes sexually aroused. He will arrange two organic non-Christian acts of
substitution:
1. A game of heads between the prisoner's head and Claudio's head
2. A bed trick, substituting Marianna and Isabelle.
The Duke allows the charade to playout while he manipulates things in the
background in order to allow Angelo, Isabelle and Claudio to over extend ‫ למתוח‬their
own position. This scene is interesting to compare to Hamlet's "to be or not to be" –
Hamlet is so much about death, the fear of death, death is relation to acting and not
acting, and thinking, and thinking as a kind of death.
The scene begins with Claudio:

Claudio: "I've hope to live, and am prepared to die"
The Duke tells Claudio "forget about hope; accept death and this is why".
This speech, almost stitched up from half biblical quotations, book of proverbs, book
of ecclesiastic ‫קהלת‬, and other Christian proverbial sayings.
In the midst of it are very interesting images. The language is spoken coldly. The
speech is perfectly measured and symmetrical.
Duke Vincentio: "Be absolute for death; either death or life shall thereby be the sweeter.
Reason thus with life (think rationally about how pointless living is): If I do lose thee (life), I
do lose a thing That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, servile to all the skyey
influences, that dost this habitation, where thou keep'st, hourly afflict: merely, thou art
death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun and yet runn'st toward him still.
Thou (life) art not noble; for all the accommodations that thou bear'st are nursed by
baseness. Thou'rt by no means valiant; for thou dost fear the soft and tender fork of a poor
worm. Thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st thy death,
which is no more. Thou art not thyself; for thou exist'st on many a thousand grains that issue
out of dust. Happy thou art not; for what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get, and what thou
hast, forget'st. Thou art not certain; for thy complexion shifts to strange effects, after the
moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor; for, like an ass whose back with ingots ‫ מטילי זהב‬bows,
thou bear's thy heavy riches but a journey, and death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none; for
thine own bowels (offsprings), which do call thee sire, the mere effusion of thy proper (own)
loins (‫)יוצאי חלצייך‬, do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum (‫)מקללים את המחלות‬, for ending
thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age, but, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms of

palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich, thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor
beauty, to make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this that bears the name of life? Yet in this
life lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear, that makes these odds all even."
"Reason thus with life" play a logical game of reasoning about life, think rationally
about how pointless living is. He is talking to life in second person.
"thou art death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun and yet runn'st toward him
still" You are constantly running away from death, and yet as human mortal beings
all you do is run to him.
"Thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st thy death, which is no
more " It echoes some of the ideas of Hamlet's speech. Sleep is a kind of death. You
suffer every day, all you can do at the end of the day is want to sleep, what's the
difference between wanting to sleep and wanting to die? They are the same thing.
"Thou art not thyself; for thou exist'st on many a thousand grains that issue out of dust" Life
is sustained by organic body which is nothing but a quintessence of dust, as Hamlet
says.
"Happy thou art not; for what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get, and what thou hast,
forget'st" Life is not happy; you always want something you don't have.
"Friend hast thou none; for thine own bowels (offsprings), which do call thee sire, the mere
effusion of thy proper (own) loins (‫)יוצאי חלצייך‬, do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum (
‫)מקללים את המחלות‬, for ending thee no sooner" Your children hate you and wish you dead.
"Thou hast nor youth nor age, but, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both; for
all thy blessed youth becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms of palsied eld; and when thou
art old and rich, thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty, to make thy riches
pleasant." Philosophical poetic sayings, when you are young you don't have any
money, you always out for the money of the older people, when you are old you are
too old to enjoy the money you have, it's a 'lose-lose' situation.
"an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both" A bizarre metaphor which says that living is
like eating a heavy meal, having your blood pressers drop, and falling asleep. He is
actually saying that this is the only way to bear existence, which connects us directly
to the important character of Barnadine, a prisoner who is always drunk and because
of it can't be executed. According to the metaphor, this is a permanent stay of
execution, of death because he is never sober. It's almost like saying that the only
way to survive life is to be drunk or stoned, not sober.
"What's yet in this that bears the name of life?" Why even call this horrible existence
"life"?
"Yet in this life lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear, that makes these odds all
even" It's absurd that we fear death. In Christianity, you are being promised an
everlasting life of joy and bliss by the throne of God.
Shakespeare doesn't give the Duke this speech just so he can cynically dismiss it.
Shakespeare allows perspectivism, all different opinions and points of view.
The Christian point of this speech only works if you believe in the Christian promise
that subvert this vision, but it you were a Pagan and this life is all you have, you will
think on another way of looking at this experience of life.
Claudio: "I humbly thank you. To sue to live, I find I seek to die; and, seeking death, find life:
let it come on." He accepts in a Christian way the Duke's arguments. The Duke wants
to over extend the exercise.
The second part - the conversation between Claudio and Isabelle
Isabelle rejects Claudio with an over sexualized language. She uses the word
"incest". When the turn happens, Claudio rephrases the speech of the duke to prove
the opposite. He says that he will suffer everything the Duke said was horrible, rather

than face the unknown. This reflects Hamlet's part of "to be or not to be" in which he
talks about "the undiscovered country". According to Hamlet, misery, penury
subjection, all this is a paradise compared to the uncertain horrors that await us.
Claudio describes a vision of the afterlife like a vision of hell. There is no certainty
about Claudio's going to heaven. This is tapping into Protestant anxieties, who
always live with a perpetual fear of the conviction of sin, never knowing if you are one
of the pre-destined to salvation.
Isabella: "…Darest thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension…"
How we think of death is most in imagination.
Isabella: "And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, in corporal sufferance finds a pang as
great as when a giant dies." The idea is that death is the great equalizer, in death there
is no rich or poor, small or big, death is indifferent, its total. A beetle dies just like a
giant dies. In the grave we are all equal. This is the Christian teachings that Jesus
teach about the kingdom of heaven.
Claudio: "Why give you me this shame? Think you I can a resolution fetch from flowery
tenderness? If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in mine arms."
He is also talking in a strange sexual erotic language of death. He is talking about
embracing death like a bride. He is hugging his sister and that's like hugging death,
because this is what she stands for, this is what she wants him to do.
Isabella: "There spake my brother; there my father's grave did utter forth a voice. Yes, thou
must die: Thou art too noble to conserve a life in base appliances. This outward-sainted
deputy, whose settled visage and deliberate word nips youth i' the head and follies doth
emmew as falcon doth the fowl, is yet a devil his filth within being cast, he would appear A
pond as deep as hell."
"Thou art too noble to conserve a life in base appliances" – it's like a stoic message,
who want to live in such a horrible existence?
She is confident he is her father's son, and tells him the story
Claudio: "Death is a fearful thing."
Isabella: "And shamed life a hateful."
Claudio replay echoes Hamlet:
Claudio: " Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit to bathe in
fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the
viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be
worse than worst of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling: 'tis too
horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and
imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death."
Claudio: "Sweet sister, let me live: What sin you do to save a brother's life, nature dispenses
with the deed so far that it becomes a virtue."
Claudio is also now a casuist, a legal claim for mitigating circumstances.
An over sexually charged answer:

Isabella: "O you beast! O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out
of my vice? Is't not a kind of incest, to take life from thine own sister's shame? What should I
think? Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair! For such a warped slip of wilderness
ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance! Die, perish! Might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed: I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death, No
word to save thee."
"Is't not a kind of incest, to take life from thine own sister's shame?" She says "is it not like
incest to breed life out of my sexual shame?" but she plants the word incest. She
blames her brother for generating ‫להוליד‬,‫ לחולל‬life on her. This is a grotesque
Freudian metaphor.
"Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair! For such a warped slip of wilderness ne'er
issued from his blood" She says: "The only way I can justify the fact that you're talking

like that is, is that you are not really my brother. Heaven defend my mother because
it means that she might have committed adultery". Isabelle talked before about
Claudio as her father's son. Now she claims he is not his son.
The Duke hears everything and gets sexually aroused as well by Isabelle's passion.
At the end, the Duke will marry Isabelle, and she never speaks, she is silent at the
end. She doesn't even gives her consent to marry him.
Act 5 scene 1
The second half of the play is all comic games of substitution, where the metaphor of
the cross becomes grotesquely blasphemed. Mariana comes forward, the past of
Angelo is revealed, Angelo is exposed, Lucio is exposed, The Duke allows the
charade go as far as it can go before he reveals himself to restore order and redeem
everyone.
One of the interesting moments in the play is Angelo's reaction when he is

discovered. Angelo: "O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, to think I can
be undiscernible, when I perceive your grace, like power divine, hath look'd upon my passes.
Then, good prince, no longer session hold upon my shame, but let my trial be mine own
confession: Immediate sentence then and sequent death Is all the grace I beg."
The first part of the speech sounds like a prayer to God. He confuses the word "lord"
as God and the "lord" as the Duke. He talks to the Duke as if he is talking to God. He
asks for the right punishment under the law. He puts his head down on the block and
says "kill me". It's grotesque that the most Christ like act of sacrifice is offered by the
devil. That's one of the play's darkest blasphemes point of humor.
Duke Vincentio: "For this new-married man approaching here, Whose salt imagination yet
hath wrong'd Your well defended honour, you must pardon For Mariana's sake: but as he
adjudged your brother,-- Being criminal, in double violation Of sacred chastity and of
promise-breach Thereon dependent, for your brother's life, The very mercy of the law cries
out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, 'An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!'
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and measure still for
measure. Then, Angelo, thy fault's thus manifested; Which, though thou wouldst deny, denies
thee vantage. We do condemn thee to the very block where Claudio stoop'd to death, and with
like haste. Away with him! " Superficially the play ends on a sobering Christian note of
redemption because against the final execution of the law of an "eye for an eye",
there will be an act of Christian mercy extended to everyone including Angelo. The
sentence of death is going to be commuted ‫ מוחלף‬to the sentence of marriage.
Act 4 scene 3
Pompey is the clown character. Pompey becomes a prison guard and executioner.
He goes around the prison looking at the prisoners and recognizing them as his
clients from the brothel. The Duke needs someone's head to do the game of the
severed heads. Pompey is going to Barnadine's cell to execute him, but he is drunk.
He tries to convince him to die because he needs his head. Barnadine refuses. Just
like in Hamlet, a prisoner pirate dies and they use his head at the end. One of the
reasons why the ending is complicated is Barnadine. Barnadine is the most important
character in the play. He barely says anything. He is a prisoner in Claudio's prison.
He is a perpetual drunk.

Lesson 22 – 14.06.15
Introduction to 'The Winter's Tale'

The winter tale is one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, it's a late play. It's nothing
like any other play we read for this course."The winter's tale" is based on a popular
Elizabethan romance narrative called "Pandosto". Shakespeare doesn't make up the
story; he takes a very famous popular story and translates it to the stage.
Dramatically, it’s a very strange play. Generically it's indefinable, it has a comedic
structure, but it doesn't behave like a comedy.
The play is divided into a few parts:
1. The first part of the play- is very dark, typical for early Shakespeare exploration
of deep psychology and consciousness mostly focusing on Leontes's madness and
jealousy over the assumed infidelity of his wife Hermione. The climax of this darker
part, the "winter" part of the tale, is that Leontes puts his wife on trial, calls for an
Oracle from Delphi to tell him whether or not his wife is guilty, the oracle tells him that
she's innocent. Leontes refuses to accept that and give orders that the child, a girl,
will to be abandoned on a mountain. His wife is taken away. terrible news arrive
about the death of his son from the grief of the treatment of his mother. The prince, a
young boy, dies because of Leontes's behavior.
2. Time - Father Time comes in a mask and tells us that 16 years have passed.
The use of time is very unusual, time passing by. Shakespeare resolves this by
having an allegorical figure of time which tells the audience that 16 years have
passed.
3. The second part of the play - the second part switches to the restoration of life.
The abandoned girl who is named Perdita="that which is lost" was raised as a
shepherd's daughter. Perdita and Florizel, the son of Polixenes King of Bohemia falls
in love. Act 4 dominated by allegorical pastoral flower festival. Autolycus is the
clown figure who goes around disguised, selling things, banter ‫ מתלוצץ‬with the
shepherds. We have one of the most famous stage directions in drama: "Exit,
pursued by a bear" Antigonus is killed by a bear. At the end all restored, they all go
back to Sicily. Perdita is discovered to be a princess. Leontes, who has for 16 years
led a life of repents and grief over the assumed death of his wife and real death of his
son, goes with everyone to see a statue of Hermione that miraculously "comes to
life". They discover that Hermione was alive all these years, hiding in Paulina's
house, waiting for this moment. Everyone is happy and married off. At the end we are
left with one dark tone - there is one dead boy in the story. In a strange sexual
inappropriate moment Leontes sees Florizel's young bride, his daughter and thinks
"maybe I can have a go", but then Paulina rebukes him.
It's a story that begins in winter and then moves to summer. The pastoral scene is a
misplaced pastoral scene because it's a summer scene and not a spring one. There
is a reflection on time, the changing of the years, cycles. Winter is the beginning of
life, a beginning of a new cycle. It's called "the winter's tale" because the famous
phrase in the play is "what is lost have been found" and "from death there will be life".
The play is about "art itself is nature" (act 4) "Art in nature" is the philosophy
behind the play. That is the meta-theatrical comment that Shakespeare makes in "the

winter's tale" about his own art, about how art represent, affect us, allows us to
imagine things that are not real and by doing so allows us to become better people.
For Sober pious Christians it's a very Christian play: a play in which a man is
redeems from his sins, in which there is a mock act of resurrection, coming back to
life. The Christian language of redemption, resurrection and reconciliation appears
very clearly in the last scene. We have to remind ourselves that there is not a real
resurrection, what happened was not a real miracle. We had a similar moment in
"Much Ado" with Hero. It's alluding to the famous myth of the story of Pygmalion, the
idea of a statue that comes to life.
Leontes is a kind of Macbeth and Othello mixed together. He is a jealous insane man
whose mind like Macbeth's is totally wrapped up in imagination. Like Othello he is
jealous. He doesn't become "normal", but the point is that his wife forgives him for
the death of their child. He is responsible for killing their son indirectly. That's a heavy
burden for a man.
The biographical theatrical context
The winter's tale was not written for The Globe Theater, but for an exclusive theater
for exclusive audience. It was a much smaller theater with smaller audiences.
Because it wasn't a round open theater, it was opportunity to explore new devices,
elaborated scenery, special effects, lighting and sound effects. By the end of his
career Shakespeare was a wealthy man, made a lot of money for owning and
running the Globe. All the biographical evidence we have suggests that by the
second decade of the 17th century he retired to Stratford, his hometown. He stopped
acting and mostly wrote new plays for his own acting company. The last play that
Shakespeare writes as a single author is "The Tempest". It was written a year after
"The winter's tale". After that he stops writing plays alone and starts collaboration
with Fletcher, a younger playwright, writing plays with him. In his last phase he
seems to turn to something else. With Macbeth and the Roman tragedies that
followed it he was done with tragedy. He could not ever go back to comedy either, as
we so with Measure for Measure. All the late plays exhibit other characteristics and
are therefore being labeled as "Romances". If they do have a generic binding
characteristic, is that they do seem to be interested in the literary tradition, matters
and subjects of romance literature.
The romance tradition
In the late plays, particularly in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare returns to earlier
Elizabethan traditions, literary subjects of his childhood. A lot of these plays deal with
question of childhood, nostalgia, old age, fathers and children, but not in the context
that we've seen so far. We had plays like King Lear about fathers and children, but
here Shakespeare deals with the subject in a more heeling temper of redemption,
reunion, forgiveness, reconciliation and movement towards ultimate harmony. This is
true to The Winter's Tale. The play constantly evokes the sense of the miraculous:
the miracle of Perdita being found, the reconciliation between Leontes, his daughter
and wife, his wife's awaking from the dead. Romance is a literary mode of
exaggeration where the moral laws by which our lives are regulated are exaggerated
to the point that to our modern eye it feels as a folk tale, a myth, a romantic story.
Nevertheless, we relate to the story because the moral or ethical values which are
being interrogated are valuable to us, related to our lives, excepts that in our life we
do not see them because our lives is governed by relativism and skepticism. If the

real world is a one where the only principle that wins is an economic principle of loss
and gain, of political exchanges, even human relationships are subject to these
amoral relativist laws, at some point we begin to feel that we lose something vital in
how we understand our relationships with other people. One of the things that the
return to the romance allows is quieting down the skepticism; in the nostalgic
escapist mode of the romance narrative, you can reaffirm shared human values as
vital principles that connect and bind us to one another. In romance survives that
system of what we would like to idealize and often elevate in the story becomes a
form of a magical pattern which in actuality could not survive a test of reality. In The
Winter's Tale nostalgia and idealism clashes with human psychological reality to
create complex dramatic tension, particularly as far as the character of Leontes is
concerned. In romance, things like Perdita's survival, her and the prince falling in
love, all those coincidences have to happen. They give a sense of the supernatural
that seems to guide the character's lives, a sense of providence. It's interesting to
think about providence here because the characters are clearly Pagans and not
Christians.
The end of the play, the moment in which Hermione comes to life is an important
moment – Shakespeare show us that all it takes to redeem a man from his madness
and suffering is a warm body, a physical contact with the person he lost. No magic
had happened here. No statue actually came to life. The statue is a mythic metaphor
which is imposed as a part of the dramatic climax of the play, to play with our
romantic expectations of the genre. Shakespeare sets us up to expect a miracle, it is
presented as a miracle, Paulina even talks about a "white magic", calls it a "lawful
magic", but no actual miracle happens. At the end we are left with a metaphor for the
magic of theater itself, for what the theatrical experience allows us to share when we
go to the theater and see this play. When Paulina reveals Hermione, and we know
that the only magic that we've seen is one of acting, of performance, since Hermione
pretended to be a statue, that makes the audience is a sober meta-theatrical moment
appreciate the magic of theater which allows us as audience to feel rejuvenated., that
we too are somehow refreshed from our cynicism. Shakespeare shows us that love
can be totally ungendered and unconditioned, that people can be absolutely forgiving
without being moral Christians, that you can separate theology from human
relationships. Perdita as a character has no cynicism in her. She is like a cure to
cynicism. Thematically this is a play about forgiveness.
The romance elements in prose fiction
The romance is a medieval prose genre starting from the early French Chanson. It is
very different from epic classical poetry, though it began as a form of travelling
troubadour singers that improvised on the classical epics, especially on the Aeneid of
Vergil. They translated many of the Aeneid values to the medieval chivalric feudal
culture. The romance consists of endless episodic digressive tales of chivalric quests
of knights saving ladies from dragons. These stories were closely allied with allegory,
emblem and Christian allegorical moral subjects.
Some of their typical characteristics of the romance prose in fiction:

 Unrealistic fiction or fantasy involving magic and the supernatural, often
located in imaginary lands – For example: Camelot
 Mythic and folkloristic elements, a world dominated by chance, fate and
'happy' accidents – Foe example: Perdita falling in love with the prince
 Expansive rather than episodic plot, endlessly digressive ‫– סוטה‬
romances have an arch plot but it quickly becomes irrelevant. They have a

beginning, an end, but their middle is long and expensive. It was away to give
their audience a form of entertainment that was meant to last for weeks.
 Nobleness of character (characters of high birth), includes folklore
motifs of the noble child, the identity quest, separated or exchanged
siblings
How does Shakespeare translate this to his drama – Romance elements in drama
 Tragicomic elements working towards recognition, resolution and
harmony – romance is neither tragic nor comic, it's both
 Masquing ‫ מחזה קצר‬and meta-theatrical doubling – Masques were very
popular theatrical entertainments that included less text and more dance and
music, lavish costumes. They were written by a playwright in collaboration
with a musician. It's the beginning opera. Masques tended to be allegorical
and were performed by members of the aristocracy in their own household as
part of various important occasions within the family life. Masques were very
popular at court. Shakespeare included more and more elements from
masques in his plays: songs and dances (act 4 in "The winter's tale").
Incorporating masques in a play creates a play within a play, alerting the
audience that they are watching a performance. The issue of performance
becomes crucial – the more the audience is aware of the fact that they are
actively participating in a mimetic representation of theater, the more that act
of recognition allows the audience to enjoy cathartically the play's resolution.
 Allegorical idealization, the use of magic and the marvelous – there is no
real magic in "The winter's tale", but there is a use of the marvelous.
Marvelous here means the miraculous.

The pastoral tradition
In a way' The Winter's Tale' is a pastoral play. 'As you like it' is a pastoral comedy.
1) The classical pastoral tradition and its English permutation (Theocritus,

Virgil, Mantuan, Ronsard, Spenser)
Pastoral poetry begins in Hellenic Sicily, that's the reason why "The winter's tale" is
set in Sicily. Theocritus was the first Greek poet to write pastoral poetry. In many
pastoral poems, a shepherd walks alone in a field, singing a song on his pipes,
meats another shepherd and the two of them do a contest of songs. In the pastoral
poem different shepherds sing their own song. Pastoral poets like Theocritus were
city dwellers and not shepherds themselves. Pastoral poetry is a genre that confronts
us with its strange artificiality because it was written by sophisticated civilized urban
poets who lives in the city but idealized the simple life of the shepherds which stands
in contrast to the difficult life in the city. City life is full of stress, tensions and rivalries.
Virgil wrote the Eclogues, shepherd songs. Shakespeare probably read those
because they were taught in grammar schools. Virgil models his pastoral poetry on
Theocritus, writing it in Latin and developing it into another mode of exploration. In
the Renaissance Mantuan was a Christian pastoralist who revived the genre in Italy,
Ronsard in France and Spenser in England. Spenser wrote the shepherd's calendar
–a cycle of 12 eclogues, each for the month of the calendar of the year, modeled on
Vergil eclogues. Spenser's first eclogue begins in the month of January, in winter.
Pastoral poetry is not allegory. It is poems about shepherds, usually venting the grief
about unrequited love for another male or a woman. Usually in pastoral poetry there
are complex love triangles where one shepherd falls in love with a girl from the city
and abandons his male lover. The male lover cries for his male shepherd who left
him. The male shepherd cried for the city girl who doesn't want him.
2) Art versus nature
Pastoral poetry raises the question of art versus nature - city life which is manmade
and artificial versus the life of simple shepherds who live in tune with nature around
them. Pastoral poetry also raises something essential to the Renaissance which is
the paradox of artless art called Sprezzatura, graceless grace. Sprezzatura is
appearing to be an expert at a thing without showing that you learned it; showing
your skills in a way which seem like it comes natural. The way for art to excel is for
art to hide itself. When we see art we think it's vulgar. We appreciate it when it's
hidden. For a genre of poetry which is concerned with nature, pastoral poetry is one
of the most artificial poetry there is. It constantly points to its own existence at one
representative remove from the ideal object it represents. Pastoral poems, by their
very definition as poems, because they were written by a poet and because they
point to themselves as crafted poems, are by definition at one removed from the ideal
setting which they represent or mimetically show, since that ideal setting is already
lost at the moment of the poem's creation. It can only be ever recuperated by the
readers as an imaginative act through an act of reading, by enjoying the art.
In order to appreciate the ideal that is being celebrated in the pastoral world, we need
to appreciate the art that goes into recreating that ideal in poetry. We are reading
very refined esthetic poetry written by sophisticated poets who are living in the world
to which the pastoral ideal is a foil a lost innocence. Pastoral poetry is set in the
mythic land of Arcadia. Arcadia by the 16th century was a synonym for a lost
paradise, a place which where there is perpetual springs and where things grow from
themselves. In the Christian consciousness Arcadia becomes a pre fallen place,
before sin, before sexual awareness. Here there is the doubleness about how you

read Pastoral: all the shepherds that are falling in love with one another are not
homosexual, not heterosexual, gender doesn't matter there. There is a certain kind of
innocent sexual attraction that moves on. Because people who read these poems are
adults living in the real world, we cannot come at the pastoral except by this
dissonance, by having to always feel that our loss of innocence hates the pastoral
ideal.
3) Nostalgia, innocence, memory and the timeless

Because of all the things we said above, Pastoral often lends itself to nostalgia, to
nostalgic memories of innocence, to the idea of memory in poetry and to the notion of
the timeless. In Vergil's 8th eclogue one of the shepherds has a nostalgic memory
about his first childhood love.
4) The pastoral elegy: lament, loss and death

the pastoral is one artificial removed from the ideal which it represents. It is a genre
which increasingly lends itself to lament, characters crying, lamenting about things
that they have lost. It becomes a place in poetry in which to inscribe (without ever
pointing to it) the presence of death within the timeless. The presence of death is a
famous moment of pastoral poetry.
In the famous painting "Et in Arcadia ego", meaning "I too am in Arcadia", we see a
couple of shepherds standing by a tombstone, pointing to it, as if they are tracng
something written on the tombstone, as if they don't know what that tombstone
means. "I too am in Arcadia" is death speaking. Death represents the limits of the
pastoral. The limits of the pastoral become the limits of the aestheticized life – the life
which we try to live through art and in art as a mode of aesthetics.
The pastoral in The Winter's Tale
Act 4 of The Winter's Tale which is the heart of the plays structure of renewal is a
pastoral feast. It is presented as a celebration for the queen of flowers, but it's held in
summer and not in spring. Perdita performance her role as the queen of this pastoral
festival, in which she and Florizel disguised as simple shepherd, will marry. This
beautiful scene of pastoral innocence is tainted by the presence of Florizel's father,
Polixenes, the king, who is there to stop the marriage. Polixenes introduces into this
scene the city, modern perspective of patriarchal rule, manmade rules, conventions,
traditions, that will not allow the innocent lovers to marry.

Perdita in her pure innocence confronts Polixenes and has an argument with him
about flowers and art. As part of the ritual of this Masque like pastoral dance she is
Flora, the queen of flowers, and she wants to give flowers to all the lovers to
celebrate their union. Normally this would have been done in spring, not summer.
She says: Perdita: "I would I had some flowers o' the spring that might become your time of
day; and yours, and yours, that wear upon your virgin branches yet your maidenheads
growing: O Proserpina, for the flowers now (in summer), that frighted thou let'st fall from
dis's (the God of death) waggon! daffodils, that come before the swallow dares, and take the
winds of March with beauty; violets dim, but sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes or
Cytherea's (Venus) breath; pale primroses that die unmarried, ere they can behold bight
Phoebus in his strength--a malady most incident to maids; bold oxlips and the crown
imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack, to make you
garlands of"
"become your time of day; and yours, and yours" She gives each young lover a flower.
"Proserpina" The daughter of Demeter the goddess of the earth, she was kidnapped
by the God of the underworld Hades. That's the ancient myth used to explain the
cycle of the seasons. Before that there was an eternal spring, but when Hades
kidnapped Proserpina, the world became a perpetual winter because Demeter was in
grief for losing her daughter. Then a bargain was struck, Proserpina was allowed to
visit her mother once a year and that's spring. Proserpina represents the cycles of life
and nature but also the potential threat of abduction and death. Pastoral imagery is
woven into this speech. Perdita says that she doesn't have flowers, just a type of
summer flowers. All the flowers that she should have had for the occasion are dead.
The only way that she can point to them is through poetry. She says "If only I had
them I would have given them to you". Each flower of spring is represented with a
mythological moral allegorical attribute. The flowers are literary emblems and not real
flowers. Perdita in her pastoral innocence is pointing to the very act of art that allows
you to talk about that which is absent. We appreciate art because we know that it is
art, it is a representation of something else. Perdita uses pastoral poetic language to
talk about flowers she doesn’t have in her hand. All she has is poetry. Poetry in the
Renaissance was often spoken of as flowers. This connects to the scene of flowers
in Hamlet. When Ophelia is collecting flowers she is collecting Hamlet's rhetoric and
poetry. They are returned to him as tokens of her broken mind.

Lesson 23 – 17.06.15
The first part of the play – the winter part
This is the tragic part of the tragic comedy that "The Winter's Tale" is. It revolves
around Leontes jealousy and madness. From the very beginning this is linked to the
pastoral as well. Because the pastoral mode raises the question of what is real and
natural as oppose to art, the question of how we represent what is real or natural for
the sake of pleasure and entertainment, the roots of Leontes's malice (a word that is
being used in the play), the way it affects Leontes's mind, the way that he imagines
things, is a pastoral mode of this meta-theatrical play (a play about theater). From
the very beginning we see a function of a man looking at reality around him, the
reality of his wife conversing with his best friend and how in his imagination this is
translated into something other than what it is, as a form of sickness, but it's already
connected to the pastoral.
Act 1 scene 1
The pastoral is related to the notions of loss, innocence and memory. This is crucial
for the opening scene, since the opening scene and act is structured around memory
and nostalgia, remembering the childhood of these two men when they first became
friends. The story will eventually lead to a catastrophe that will inscribe death in this
winter time of the pastoral, the death of the young Prince Mamillius. The opening
scene is very important; Shakespeare packs most of the important tensions of the
play into the opening scene. We have two gentlemen entering the stage (court). We
overhear a conversation in motion. It's a friendly chat. Camillo is the counselor of
Leontes and Archidamus is the counselor of Polixenes the King of Bohemia. Both of
them are scholars, humanists. Both have taken vows of loyalty in service, they are
committed to serve their masters faithfully. Camillo's faith will be tested later when
Leontes asks him to murder his best friend for him. Camillo will manage to avoid it by
using equivocal language, he says: "I'll dispatch ‫ להרוג‬/‫לשלוח‬him". If you are aware of
the language, the effect of this dialog is that it raises the level of anxiety. The
audience is looking at this two good friends, and on the surface it seems like there is
nothing wrong, but slowly the imagery in the dialog suggests that something could be
wrong.
Archidamus: "If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on the like occasion whereon
my services are now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our
Bohemia and your Sicilia."
Archidamus says that there is a great difference between their two countries, Sicily
and Bohemia. Bohemia in Shakespeare's mind means northern European culture,
colder weather. Sicily is in the south of Italy, the home of the pastoral poetry.
Camillo: "I think, this coming summer, the King of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the
visitation which he justly owes him."
Camillo's response maps this difference into a seasonal difference. He says that
when it's winter in Bohemia and it is too clod there, Polixenes will visit Sicily, and
when there is summer in Sicily and it is too hot, Leontes will visit Bohemia. This
plants the idea of seasons, the idea of difference between the two countries. The

difference is the difference of seasons between summer and winter. There is no
mentioning of spring in this play. The play takes place either in summer or in winter.
Archidamus: "Verily, I speak it in the freedom of my knowledge: we cannot with such

magnificence--in so rare--I know not what to say. We will give you sleepy drinks , that your
senses, unintelligent of our insufficience, may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse
us." Behind the polite friendly banter, Shakespeare plants metaphor and ideas that
will enable us to understand the core images of rest of the play. "We will give you
sleepy drinks" this is a strange metaphor. Literally it means "we will get you drunk so
you will not know that we are not as lavish hosts as you are", but the metaphor is
very strange. Later on Leontes will ask to get Polixenes poisoned by a drink. When
Leontes will talk about his own imaginary badness he will refer to it as to looking in a
glass and seeing a spider.
Camillo: "You pay a great deal too dear for what's given freely."
This is also an important concept. This phrase will resonate ironically later on in the
play - Leontes has everything that he needs or wants, he has a loving wife, a son
(heir), a best friend, a child on the way - all freely given. Why would he feel the need
to pay such a heavy price for this? Ironically the price that he will pay would be
initially loss of all of that.
This is the crucial speech:

Camillo: "Sicilia (Leontes) cannot show himself over-kind to Bohemia (Polixenes). They were
trained together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection,
which cannot choose but branch now. Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities
made separation of their society, their encounters, though not personal, have been royally
attorneyed with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies; that they have seemed to be
together, though absent, shook hands, as over a vast, and embraced, as it were, from the ends
of opposed winds. The heavens continue their loves!"
"they were trained together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an
affection, which cannot choose but branch now" We are told something about past
history of these two men. We get child memories filtered by a third person observer
who knows the history. "cannot choose but" this structure introduces a hind of
negativity. "branch now" He is talking about their friendship using an organic
metaphor that suggests nature, growth. Camillo says that when Leontes and
Polixenes were children, their powerful friendship was planted and sprouted roots.
As they grew up and became men that have responsibilities (political to their
countries) they started like a tree to branch out, to separate. This phrase already
plants in our minds the metaphor of planting and growth. What looks dead in winter
will come alive again in spring and summer.
"that they have seemed to be together, though absent, shook hands, as over a vast, and
embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds" As soon as he says this he plants
the idea of a vast abyss, a vast difference between them, of opposition, he is already
saying too much.
"The heavens continue their loves!" That is wishful thinking.
Archidamus: "I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it. You have an
unspeakable comfort of your young prince Mamillius: it is a gentleman of the greatest
promise that ever came into my note."
He plants the word "malice", this is like the gun in the first act that will fire in the third
act. They plant the malice which will reveal itself very quickly.

Then they turn to talk about the heir, the prince who will be the tragic victim of this
malice.
Shakespeare sets the scene psychologically for his audience, he puts his audience in
the right emotional state for watching what is about to unfold. This dialog suggests
that things are not going to be as well as they seem.
Gender and sexuality in the 17th century

Male friendship literature was at its core homoerotic in its rhetorical code, used
homoerotic language. It doesn't mean that all men who are friends had actual sexual
intercourse. Middle class and upwards, men were raised together, never seeing a
woman. Men were best friends with men, and it was obvious that a woman can't be a
good friend. They didn't meet a woman until they grew up and wedded. Male
friendship language was often expressed in language which is homoerotically
charged. It doesn't necessarily mean that there was physical contact between them.
Men spoke of other men in that language. Men sexual intercourse was considered a
sin in the eyes of the church at that period, so men didn't go out openly having sexual
relationship with other man. There was a difference between what you did behind
doors and how you conducted yourself openly. The language of diplomacy for
example could be sexually charged without actually imputing ‫ לייחס‬to the sender the
sin of sodomy. Pastoral poetry because it engages with sexuality from pre sinful
innocence, often tends to be homoerotic. Two shepherds singing to one another. It's
a homoerotic unrequited love. The point about sexuality in the pastoral is that it's not
gendered. This is what we today don't understand about early modern concepts of
sexuality. Sexuality could be explored and discussed in ungendered terms in
Shakespeare's time. This is what Shakespeare does in the sonnets. It's about who
you love and not about their gender. The idea that males can be best friends only
with each other and that women only interferes later and separate then is an ancient
classical idea, developed within patriarchal societies. What is really Leontes jealous
about? Is he upset because his wife in his mind is cheating on him with his best
friend? Or is he upset because in his mind his best friend is cheating on him with his
wife? The thing that triggers this moment of madness is that he tries to get his friend
to stay, he fails, but his wife succeeds. This is directly related to the pastoral.
Act 1 Scene 2
This scene introduces Polixenes who immediately gives us the time frame.
Polixenes: "Nine changes of the watery star hath been the shepherd's note since we have left
our throne without a burthen: time as long again would be find up, my brother, with our
thanks; And yet we should, for perpetuity, go hence in debt: and therefore, like a cipher, yet
standing in rich place, I multiply with one 'We thank you' many thousands moe that go before
it."
"Nine changes of the watery star hath been the shepherd's note" Polixenes introduces the
time frame (nine months have past) but in an interesting way, he introduces the
shepherd as a guardian of the cycle of time, a recorder of time, an idea taken from
pastoral poetry. This is a kind of meta-poetic prolepsis ‫ראיית הנולד‬. Spenser's poem is
called "The shepherd's colander"
"since we have left our throne without a burthen" This evokes the idea of pregnancy,
Hermione's pregnancy, which connects to the idea of nine months. The ideas of birth
and the cycles of the year are also being planted in our mind.
Leontes: "Tongue-tied, our queen? speak you."

Leontes fails in convincing Polixenes in staying and asks his wife to do so.

Leontes stands to the side while Hermione and Polixenes talk alone
Hermione: "… Come, I'll question you of my lord's tricks and yours when you were boys:
You were pretty lordings then?" The issue of their past shared childhood memories
comes up again. "You were pretty lordings then" a Jacobian code for being
homoerotically attracted to one another. "pretty lordings" This is almost a direct
quotation from Marlowe who was openly homosexual. She means this sentence as a
joke, a friendly banter.
Polixenes: "We were, fair queen, two lads that thought there was no more behind but such a
day to-morrow as to-day, and to be boy eternal."
He is betraying too much information.
Hermione: "Was not my lord the verier wag o' the two?"
She asks if Leontes was more wild then he
Polixenes: "We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' the sun, and bleat ‫ לפעות‬the one at the
other: what we changed was innocence for innocence; we knew not the doctrine of ill-doing,
nor dream'd that any did. Had we pursued that life, and our weak spirits ne'er been higher
rear'd with stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven boldly 'not guilty;' the imposition
clear'd hereditary ‫ הורשה‬ours."This speech is pastoral poetry in motion. He describes in
terms of pastoral elegy the memory of past childhood. Polixenes says in response to
her accusation of them being wild, that they were innocent. The imagery is one of
pure childhood innocence. It is figured in emblematic, almost allegorical language of
pastoral poetry. "twinn'd lambs" The lamb is the image of innocence, an object of the
shepherds, and also has Christian symbolic meanings Christ is the lamb of God. He
describes them using pastoral image of white lambs skipping in the meadow bleating
with one another in the sun. Jacobian audience heats behind this speech a heavy
homoerotic innuendo ‫רמיזה‬. "what we changed was innocence for innocence" Like in the
pastoral realm, they were totally untouched by art, pure innocent in their nature.
"we knew not the doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd that any did" They didn't know what it
is to sin or what it is to be bad. "Had we pursued that life, and our weak spirits ne'er been
higher rear'd with stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven boldly 'not guilty; the
imposition clear'd hereditary ‫ הורשה‬ours.'" Polixenes says that if they have stayed in that
state of innocence and haven't grown up to become adults, they wouldn't have been
guilty of original sin. This saying expresses a radical idea for Shakespeare's time.
According to protestant Christianity, we all inherit the original sins. Therefore, we are
all sinners since birth, and children are not innocent. The audience of the period
would not have believed Polixenes's saying. This is a form of poetic pastoral
hyperbole.
The key in Shakespeare is always to listen to the woman. Shakespeare's women

always have the most intelligent lines, and they are the ones that are most important,
particularly when a man is speaking and a woman is answering, like Beatrice and
Benedick. Hermione: "By this we gather you have tripp'd since."
That's the line that sinks the pastoral innocence of Polixenes. After he told her that
when they were boys they were perfectly innocent, she understands that he refers to
the notion that now they are sinners. She's constantly brings him back to reality with
her humor.
Polixenes: "O my most sacred lady! Temptations have since then been born to's; for In those
unfledged days was my wife a girl; Your precious self had then not cross'd the eyes of my
young play-fellow." This is the biggest Freudian slip so far – she didn't talk about
sexual sin, she talked about sin in general. He immediately thinks about his sin in

sexual terms, that their sin was to get married to women. He says to her "our sexual
awakening was with women. That meant marriage and loss of innocence".
Hermione: "Grace to boot! Of this make no conclusion, lest you say your queen and I are
devils: yet go on; The offences we have made you do we'll answer, If you first sinn'd with us
and that with us you did continue fault and that you slipp'd not with any but with us."
She is offended. She says "at least they sinned only with us and not with other
woman"
Leontes: "Is he won yet?"

Hermione: "He'll stay my lord."
Leontes: "At my request he would not. Hermione, my dearest, thou never spokest
to better purpose."
Leontes's answer almost mirror's Polixenes's speech. That's sends him mad.
Leontes looks at his boy and has doubts about is he really his son: "If she have
cheated on me once with Polixenes, what if she have cheated on me before, what if
my son is really Polixenes's son?"
The child, who represents childhood innocence, is trapped in a scene where these
grown up men will victimize him, because they are unable to negotiate loss of
innocence as an act of memory. In this scene the grown up man looks at the child
who is a copy of him, and tries to see himself through the child again. It is a twisted
scene because he tries to see through the child the other man. In this moment the
pastoral dream is becoming a nightmare. The child who is perfectly innocent is a
victim to these ideas. The death of him is the tragedy of the play. The dialog with
Mamillius, which is basically a soliloquy, is very important.
Leontes: "Thou want'st a rough pash and the shoots that I have, to be full like me: yet they
say we are almost as like as eggs; women say so, that will say anything but were they false as
o'er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters, false as dice are to be wish'd by one that fixes no bourn
'twixt his and mine, yet were it true to say this boy were like me. Come, sir page, look on me
with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear'st! my collop! Can thy dam?--may't be?--
affection! thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?-- With what's unreal thou coactive art, And
fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost,
and that beyond commission, and I find it, and that to the infection of my brains and
hardening of my brows."
"Thou want'st a rough pash and the shoots that I have, to be full like me" You lack
The beard and horns that I have to be like me.
"yet they say we are almost as like as eggs; women say so, that will say anything but were
they false as o'er-dyed blacks…" Women say that we look alike, but women can't be
trusted.
"Come, sir page, look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear'st! my collop!"
He uses terms of endearment, he is looks at the child that he loves and through him
goes insane by thinking about the rupture between Polixenes's love and his. What
came between them is a woman.
"Affection! (emotion, imaginative one) thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make
possible things not so held, communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?-- With what's
unreal thou coactive ‫זמנית עם משהו אחר‬-‫ קורה בו‬art, and fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
thou mayst co-join with something and that beyond commission, and I find it, and that to the

infection of my brains and hardening of my brows (horns, his wife is cheating on him)" This
part sounds like it could have been taken out of Macbeth. Affection was believed to
be an imaginative faculty, it means imaginative emotion. He addresses "Affection" is
an apostrophe ‫פניה ישירה‬. This is a very interesting confession, he almost admits that
this isn't real but he can't control himself. He says that affection that is not rational
(imaginative emotional response to reality) stabs the center (core human identity).
"Thou dost make possible things not so held, communicatest with dreams" Imagination
communicates with dreams, feeds dreams. He asks a philosophical question: "how
can this be?", That’s how it works: "With what's unreal thou coactive ‫זמנית עם משהו‬-‫קורה בו‬
‫ אחר‬art, and fellow'st nothing" He admits that there's nothing real about this "then 'tis
very credent thou mayst co-join with something" but what it does is conjoin with
something. It takes something real and in the imagination it grows like a tree into
something other than what it is. "and that beyond commission" That is more than I
bargained for, more than I've asked for. "and I find it" Meaning, "and that's how it is",
‫ככה זה‬. "and that to the infection of my brains" He is going mad "and hardening of my
brows" In his mind he is being cuckolded. For him his wife has cheated on him, and is
son is not really his son. He admits that he is insane, explains why he is insane, hoe
does his insanity works, but admits also that he can't control it.
The other characters see him and he doesn’t look well. Leontes's dismissed
Polixenes and Hermione and says "nothing is the matter". This speech is much
debated by scholars. Leontes: "No, in good earnest. How sometimes nature will betray its
folly, its tenderness, and make itself a pastime to harder bosoms! Looking on the lines of my
boy's face, methoughts I did recoil twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd, in my
green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled, lest it should bite its master, and so prove, as
ornaments oft do, too dangerous: How like, methought, I then was to this kernel (boy), Tthis
squash, this gentleman. Mine honest friend, will you take eggs‫ משהו שלא שווה‬for money?"
"Looking on the lines of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil twenty-three year" Leontes
looks at his son and goes years 23 back. "and saw myself unbreech'd" he sees himself
not wearing trousers "in my green velvet coat" Presumably what he wear when he was
his son's age, "my dagger muzzled, lest it should bite its master, and so prove, as ornaments
oft do, too dangerous" This line is important, he says literally that he wore a real
dagger when he was a boy but it was muzzled, locked, he couldn't take it out, so he
won't hurt himself with it. Dagger is clearly a phallic symbol. That becomes much
more powerful once you realize that is Shakespeare's time there wasn't such a
practice, children never wore real daggers. In Leontes's imagination he says that
when he was a boy his penis was muzzled (before he was sexually active), "lest it
should bite its master" lead him to sin. The whole language is about sexual innocence
being projected on the boy back onto the adult relationships. "will you take egg s ‫משהו‬
‫ שלא שווה‬for money?" We had the idea of paying a price at the beginning. Leontes
tries to persuade his counsel Camillo to see things the way he does. He reveals to
him his fears and suspicions. Camillo horrified by the suggestion that Hermione could
be cheating on the king says:
Camillo: "I would not be a stander-by to hear my sovereign mistress clouded so, without my
present vengeance taken: 'shrew my heart, you never spoke what did become you less than
this; which to reiterate were sin as deep as that, though true."
Leontes's answer is one of the famous speeches of the psychology of irrational

jealousy. It takes us back to the idea of taking something asn imaginative, turning it
into nothing.
Leontes: "Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? Kissing with
inside lip? Stopping the career of laughing with a sigh?--a note infallible of breaking
honesty--horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift? hours,

minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, that
would unseen be wicked? is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing;
the covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing; my wife is nothing; nor nothing have these
nothings, if this be nothing." This speech is a form of nihilism, an imaginary break down
of Leontes. His jealousy is nihilistic, he cannot trust her, he cannot trust anything. It
relates to Macbeth: tormented proleptic imagination tragedy ending in nihilism,
Macbeth's final speech "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". That's a very
powerful word Shakespeare carries over from King Lear, Macbeth and here.
Camillo answers:
Camillo: "Good my lord, be cured of this diseased opinion, and betimes; for 'tis most
dangerous" That doesn't help; Leontes is already too far gone.
Act 2 scene 1
We'll see the different stages of the way Shakespeare develops Leontes's break
down. The scene begins with a tender domestic scene between Hermione, her son,
and the ladies of waiting which the title of the play is planted and referenced.
Mamillius: "A sad tale's best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins"
Leontes, Antigonus and other lords enter. Leontes carries a speech:

Leontes: "How blest am I In my just censure, in my true opinion! Alack, for lesser
knowledge! how accursed in being so blest! There may be in the cup a spider steep'd, and one
may drink, depart, and yet partake no venom, for his knowledge is not infected: but if one
present the abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known how he hath drunk, he cracks his
gorge, his sides, with violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. Camillo was his help in
this, his pander: There is a plot against my life, my crown; All's true that is mistrusted: that
false villain whom I employ'd was pre-employ'd by him: He has discover'd my design, and I
remain a pinch'd thing; yea, a very trick for them to play at will. How came the posterns so
easily open?"
"how accursed in being so blest" He curses that fact that he knows what no one else
knows – that his wife is cheating on him. Here again comes the image of drinking
cup, this resonating the idea of "sleepy drinks" Shakespeare planted in act 1 scene 1.
"There may be in the cup a spider steep'd, and one may drink, depart, and yet partake no
venom, for his knowledge is not infected" This is a very powerful philosophical idea. He
is talking about the psychological state – if you drinks from a cup that have a spider
in it but don't see the spider, you don't know that there was a spider. "but if one present
the abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known how he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his
sides, with violent hefts (‫ ")מקיא‬Once you see the spider it's over, you puke. In other
words: what you don't know can't hurt you. "I have drunk, and seen the spider" The
problem of Leontes is that he is the one producing the knowledge. It's not an
objective knowledge, no one gave him proof the Hermione is cheating on him, he's
doing it all in his mind. This presented emblematically in this play as a form of
pastoral crisis, and it is related to the other half of the play where it all will be
resolved: To imaginatively look at the world and exaggerate it is exactly what art
does. When pastoral poets, who are themselves sophisticated city dwellers, write
poems which idealize the loss innocence of imaginary shepherds life, they already
using art to exaggerate and raises an ideal, a state of innocence that only exist in
their imagination as something lost. Arcadia is the mythic paradise that shepherds
inhabit. In the literary tradition it becomes a magical place of lost paradise, pre city,
pre society, pre culture, pre sin, the state of man in nature. The real Arcadia in
Greece is a small poor place, with shepherds who doesn’t look innocent or happy.
The ideal of Arcadia is imaginary. It doesn’t exist. When Theocritus wrote his first
pastoral poems, he satirized and critiqued modern urban society for its sins, evil
ways and hectic life. He critiqued the fact that people have lost touch with what was

once pure in their childhood innocence. The shepherd seems like a simple man who
has no worries, his worries are primordial: getting the sheep home, taking them out,
feeding them and protecting them from the wolf. The shepherd is always alone with
his flock and he sings. This is an ancient tradition, but it suggests that art, imaginative
use of figures, rhetoric, metaphors, creating a work of art is a way to encode
something that is lost, not something that exists. Art always points to itself as being a
mark of absence within our lives. Shakespeare examines in this play philosophical
concepts about art, because he is interested in his own art, in what theater and
poetry can achieve. The first part of the play is therefore an exploration of where all
of this can go wrong – where the imagination, like a disease, can make the world that
we inhabit seems to us like a nightmare. On the first part of the play, the winter's part,
we get the hefty ‫ כבד‬price that you pay for art, for living in art. It's very similar to
Macbeth. The two plays have conceptual connections, except that Macbeth is
focused on drawing out completely the tragic potential of that situation. Here
Shakespeare reintroduces this idea into the structure of romance, to show us that art
can also heal, not just destroy. The destruction is subjective, it is all in one man's
mind.
"Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing" turning something into nothing or
nothing into something is a theory of mimetic art. Mimesis – representative. Mimatic
art – to represent reality in art.
Leontes: "How came the posterns so easily open?"

First Lord: "By his great authority; which often hath no less prevail'd than so on your
command" Leontes asks how the doors were so easily opened. The first Lord answers
that Camillo had all the keys. The idea of sexual violation as a form of breech of a
city, is a central idea in Shakespeare narrative poems. In The rape of Lucrece,
Lucrece's body is often referred to as a city that is being violated. When the rapist is
creeping to her bad chamber, the rape is never described, instead its reflected to
metaphoric descriptions of doors, keys, locks being broken. The idea is that he steals
into her chamber and steals into her chamber. This interesting double metaphor of a
physical object which becomes a metaphor for the person's body and soul is very
famous.
Why do we consume art? What do we expect mimetic art to do for us? Some people
always love the happy endings; some prefer the grotesque perverse endings. In the
Poetics Aristotle writes that mimetic art (drama, theater, narrative mimetic art) always
deals with what was, what is and what ought to be. We can understand "was" and
"is", but what is "ought to be"? The Roman humanist tradition was to understand
"ought to be" in moral terms: "art can show you the world as it should be morally, can
make it look a better place than it is". This is the idealization. The humanists claim
that if you idealize in literature the world which we know is bad, by showing how the
world can be a better place, you can inspire people to be better people. Aristotle
never meant "ought to be" in terms of morality; he means it in terms of causality – if
in reality the chances of something happening are one to a million, in tragedy there
will always happen. If in reality there is a probability of something happening, in
tragedy it will happen, because tragedy is a form of idealizing probability. It's about
telling a story in the most effective way. For the sake of telling a story, you take
various causal connections that are in the real world and you idealize them for the
sake of the story. For example: in Sex and the city when the characters raise their
hand and calls for taxi the taxi always arrives, because what's important is telling the
story. In reality it isn't like that. In out play: What is the chance of Florizel falling in
love with Perdita? That relates to what we said about the romance genre – it
heightens the connections. The first half of the play shows us the way that process of
exaggeration, of taking the world and making it into something other than it is, can

become a nightmare and destructive for that individual. In this play's happy ending,
art is finally redeemed by life. That is Shakespeare's real massage.

Lesson 24 – 21.06.15
The first part of the play focuses on the destructive mode of poetic suggestion. It
focuses on the intensely psychic imagination of one man's self-induced nightmare
which ends up destroying those around him, Leontes's jealousy. We said that this
was offering a kind of comment on art, at least the role the imagination plays in the
formation ‫ התהוות‬of art and its representations.
The two and a half acts of the play focus on the breakdown of Leontes's world, as he
imagines drinking from a cup of poison that has a spider in it. This culminates in the
trail scene of Hermione where he condemns her to die. That scene introduces the
character of Paulina. Her name is not incidentally a play on the name "Paul". Paulina
confronts Leontes. Paulina shows Leontes the baby and tries with the sight of
innocence to disarm Leontes from his madness.
In Camillo and Archidamus's conversation in act 1 scene 1 Camillo says about the
prince: "I very well agree with you in the hopes of him: it is a gallant child; one that indeed
physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh: they that went on crutches ere he was born desire
yet their life to see him a man." Old men want to stay alive to see the boy grow up to be
a great man. There is something about the children's innocence that infuses life in
others. Paulina accuses Leontes of his sins. She is a powerful character in the play,
in many ways a channeling an enlightened Pauline Christianity about mercy and
Christian redemptive sentimentalism. When Paulina tells Leontes that Hermione is
dead, she is preforming (lying). She puts on such an act, that Leontes is devastated.
At the end she relents, she pulls back and realizes that he is destroyed. Then she
bags his forgiveness: "Sir, royal sir, forgive a foolish woman". The question is whether
he will be able to forgive himself. Following her speech, Leontes relents ‫מגלה רחמים‬
and agrees to commute ‫ להחליף‬the child's sentence by ordering her husband,
Antigonus, to abandon the child to the fate. This is the plot catalyst that will serve as
the play's turning point to ultimate revival resurrection and redemption.
The second part of the play – the summer part

Today we will start from the scene where Antigonus lands on the coast of Bohemia
and leaves the baby before being eaten by a bear. Antigonus's speech is important, it
is a pivot moment in the play, where the entire comic-tragic structure of the play
pivots, and we move from winter, 16 years will pass, to summer, towards a happy
resolution at the end. The question is: what redeems what? What is the function of
art? Can art (here theatrical art, performance) be redemptive? This is what
Shakespeare was ultimately in his late creation was interested in. The play flirts with
Christian theological notions of Christian redemption, forgiveness and resurrection,
but it is not a Christian play. There are so many levels of performance in the play. For
example:
1. Perdita who is named in that scene by Antigonus "she that is lost" relates to the
oracle that says "the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found"
2. In the sheep shearing scene, act 4 scene 4, Perdita performs the role of the
maiden of the feast / Flora, queen of flowers / the May queen; but she can't be the
May queen because it's in July, and it is part of what the whole scene is about – the
spring which has gone the narrowing time of the year when everything dries up in
summer in preparation for the new cycle.
3. The ultimate performance - Hermione pretending to be a statue. When you realize
that no art was involved, that there was no statue, the only representation was a

theatrical one, and one which required a diluted meditation of time (16 years). What
you are confronted with at the end is that life is redeems by life, not by art, life within
theater, performed life. This brings us back to Shakespeare's central metaphor of the
world as theater and our existence as a performance.
Act 3 scene 3
Perdita the baby is abandoned on the wild beaches of Bohemia by Antigonus.

Antigonus bears a soliloquy which partly meant to advance the plot. He is talking to
the baby:
Antigonus: "Come, poor babe: I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o' the dead may
walk again: if such thing be, thy mother appear'd to me last night, for ne'er was dream so like
a waking. To me comes a creature, sometimes her head on one side, some another; I never
saw a vessel of like sorrow, so fill'd and so becoming: in pure white robes, like very sanctity,
she did approach my cabin where I lay; thrice bow'd before me, and gasping to begin some
speech, her eyes became two spouts: the fury spent, anon did this break-from her: 'Good
Antigonus, since fate, against thy better disposition, hath made thy person for the thrower-out
of my poor babe, according to thine oath, places remote enough are in Bohemia, there weep
and leave it crying; and, for the babe is counted lost for ever, Perdita, I prithee, call't….. The
storm begins; poor wretch, that for thy mother's fault art thus exposed to loss and what may
follow! Weep I cannot, but my heart bleeds; and most accursed am I to be by oath enjoin'd to
this. Farewell! The day frowns more and more: thou'rt like to have A lullaby too rough: I
never saw The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the
chase: I am gone for ever."
"thy mother appear'd to me last night, for ne'er was dream so like a waking" Antigonus
reports a dream he had, what he thinks is a visitation from the ghost of Hermione
because he is convinced Hermione is dead. Unlike in Hamlet and in Macbeth, we
have a visitation from a ghost who's not really a ghost. Hermione is not dead; Perdita
is not really lost forever. There is truth to the dream: he is about to be eaten by a
bear and he will not be reunites with his wife Paulina.
"The storm begins; poor wretch.. The day frowns more and more: thou'rt like to have A
lullaby too rough: I never saw The heavens so dim by day " As he is about to leave the
child a storm begins. There is an interesting moment of Pathetic Fallacy: his inner
state of turmoil begins to reflect in the sky, the storm outside is growing. He exists.
This is immediately followed by the shepherd who finds the baby.
In emblematic and pastoral terms we have here is a shift in setting, back to a

resetting of everything to the ancient pastoral moment. Antigonus, who is a
counselor, comes from a civilized court. He lays down the child, he is being
destroyed and the ship he came on also is about to be destroyed. There is a storm
at sea and a storm on land. The clown (shepherd's son) will later say: "I have seen two
such sights, by sea and by land!" There is death in land and death in sea.
The scenes of the shepherd are all clown scenes. His son is identified as the clown.
The shepherd who is the ultimate symbol of the pastoral comes in. The first thing that
he says is a comment about age, stage of man and state of innocence.
Shepherd: "I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth
would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches ‫ להתרועע‬with
child, wronging the ancientry ‫זקנים‬, stealing, fighting--Hark you now! Would any but these
boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scared away two
of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master: if any where I have
them, 'tis by the seaside, browsing of ivy. Good luck, an't be thy will what have we here!

Mercy on 's, a barne a very pretty barne! A boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one; a very
pretty one: sure, some 'scape: though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman
in the 'scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work: they
were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here. I'll take it up for pity: yet I'll tarry till
my son come; he hallooed but even now. Whoa, ho, hoa!"
"I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep
out the rest" The shepherd goes against teenagers.
"Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?" In
the background we hear hunting horns, it's the young people who are chasing the
bear. He asks who else but young teenagers would hunt in such weather.
When his son (the clown) comes in he reports a terrible sight that he saw, and
describes the storm. There were no special effects, and everything depended on
poetic description.
Clown: "Now, now: I have not winked since I saw these sights: the men are not yet cold
under water, nor the bear half dined on the gentleman: he's at it now."
Clown: "I have seen two such sights, by sea and by land! but I am not to say it is a sea, for it
is now the sky: betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin's point."
Clown: "I would you did but see how it (the sea) chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the
shore! but that's not the point. O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! sometimes to see 'em,
and not to see 'em; now the ship boring the moon with her main-mast, and anon swallowed
with yest and froth, as you'ld thrust a cork into a hogshead. And then for the land-service, to
see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone; how he cried to me for help…to see how the sea
flap-dragoned it"
The shepherd tells his son Shepherd: "Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here,
boy. Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn" The shepherd
talks about the cycle of life.
The storm is described like a state of chaos in which you cannot distinguish between
sea and land, land and sky. In Greek mythology of creation, the Greek cosmos came
into being with the first goddess - Eros, the energy of attraction and creation. Eros
impregnated the chaos, out of the chaos came Gaia (the earth), and the first thing
that happened in an act of sexual intercourse in which Gaia and Uranus (the sky)
were separated. Gaia and Uranus procreated and generated the other Gods. The
word "cosmos" in Greek means "order". Order is something that functions erotically.
In this pre-setting of time, in that pastoral mood in which we have a shepherd and an
allegorical representation of time, the pastoral pre-sets time to a time before time.
The shepherd is kind of re-setting of the pastoral and it's potential of art. What the
pastoral shepherd is saying is that kids after the age of 10 become dangerous adults.
It is similar to the opening speech between Polixenes and Hermione, where he tells
her how he and Leontes were children and exchanged innocence for innocence. In
this primordial time there is no distinction between sea, earth and sky. All there is, is
an erotic potential, in an Ovidian sense. The play is based on Ovid's
metamorphoses. Shakespeare uses a lot of Ovidian myths, ideas and concepts in his
reworking of theatrical idea of redemption through art. The shepherd is kind of re-
setting of the pastoral and its potential of art, but as soon as money comes into the
equation the pastoral world is shattered. The pastoral mode is like a play within a
play. Perdita is not placed in the basket like Moses (there is a reference here to the
biblical story as well); but left in it with money and a birth certificate, documents that
tell that she is a noble child. When the good simple shepherd finds the money he

takes it and becomes the richest shepherd. There is a small hint about what
happens when you introduce money into the pastoral. You produce economy. In the
sheep shearing scene, the shepherd has become the big boss of other shepherds; all
the other shepherds are coming to his festival to do the sheep shearing. This is a
comment on modern day practices of agriculture in Shakespeare's time.
Shakespeare was from Stratford which was the heart of the wool trade, most of the
rich people in Stratford made money by prospecting wool. The pastoral means erotic
(creative) potential to become anything, matter that can be rearranged into order. 16
years on, when money entered the equation, what we have is a wool industry. The
pastoral tableau with the flowers is a mimetic representation at one removed from the
pastoral ideal, because it's not taking place in spring but in summer, they turn the
sheep into commodity, into wool. What we get here is not a couple of shepherds
shearing their own sheep, the implication is that this is a market event in which one of
the central character is the thief Autolycus who steals linen;
Autolycus is in the business of sheep, wool, linen. There is a reference that he is the
son of mercury the god of thieves. Autolycus lights up the pastoral scene of the
second half of the play, with comic cynicism banter and humor. In act 4 scene 3 the
shepherd's son is going to town to buy spices for the feast and Autolycus pickpocket
him. Autolycus is like a Fallstafian presence in the Pastoral world. Autolycus liven up
the second part of the play with Shakespeare's skepticism and perspectivism, brining
in the wit of Falstaff to the idealism of the pastoral.
Act 4 scene 4
16 years later it is a fallen pastoral world, a pastoral world which turned into
economical market. Against that, Perdita's performance as a displaced May queen
becomes very interesting. In her speech she says that she wants to give each person
a flower suiting to his age. She gives them Rosemary and Rue "Reverend sirs, for you
there's rosemary and rue". Then they tell her they are not that old and she give them
Marigolds "The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun and with him rises weeping: these are
flowers of middle summer, and I think they are given to men of middle age" Then she sees
all the young people who come to the feast, especially her beloved Florizel, and says
"I would I had some flowers o' the spring that might become your time of day" But she don't
have Spring flowers because it's already summer. The only thing she can do is
replace them with a beautiful rhetorical speech, rhetorical flowers, and flowers of
poetry, which mimetically replace the flowers that are absent. There is a
philosophical discussion between her and Polixenes about art and nature. Perdita
was never going to be a shepherd's daughter because of the money and birth
certificate that were founded with her. From the moment it starts we know that she
only pretending to be a shepherd's daughter even if she doesn’t know who she really
is. In Shakespeare's time there was an assumption that there was an inherit virtue in
nobility, that a child born to noble parents will be by default beautiful and inclined
towards virtuous behavior. The audience of Shakespeare's time expected that
Perdita has innate nobility to her which outshines her performance as a shepherdess.
Camillo says to Polixenes when they are talking about this: "I have heard, sir, of such a
man, who hath a daughter of most rare note: the report of her is extended more than can be
thought to begin from such a cottage.".
The scene begins with a dialog between the in love Florizel and Perdita.
Florizel: "These your unusual weeds (cloths) to each part of you Do give a life: no
shepherdess, but Flora Peering in April's front. This your sheep-shearing Is as a meeting of
the petty gods, And you the queen on't."

Florizel sees Perdita dressed in what he calls "unusual weeds (cloths)". That tells us
that she is dressed up in a costume of the queen of May, a traditional costume of the
queen of the pastoral feast. He calls her Flora, the queen of flowers from Ovid's
Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis here is a kind of performance.
Perdita: "Sir, my gracious lord, to chide at your extremes it not becomes me: O, pardon, that
I name them! Your high self, the gracious mark o' the land, you have obscured with a swain's
wearing, and me, poor lowly maid, most goddess-like prank'd up: but that our feasts In every
mess have folly and the feeders digest it with a custom, I should blush to see you so attired,
sworn, I think, to show myself a glass"
Perdita rejects the hyperbole, rejects the disguise. She says that there is something
socially unnatural about the performance that the disguise are forcing them to
perform. He, a nobleman, dressed like a shepherd, and she, a shepherdess, dressed
like a goddess. The irony is the pastoral realm is an equalizing point for both of them,
and it hides the social discriminations. Perdita is charm, grace and natural innocence.
Perdita: "Now Jove afford you cause! to me the difference forges dread; your greatness hath
not been used to fear. Even now I tremble to think your father, by some accident, should pass
this way as you did: O, the Fates! how would he look, to see his work so noble vilely bound
up? What would he say? Or how should I, in these my borrow'd flaunts, behold the sternness
of his presence?" She talks about how uncomfortable she feels being attired (dressed)
like a goddess in her humble position.
Florizel: "Apprehend Nothing but jollity. The gods themselves, humbling their deities to love,
have taken the shapes of beasts upon them: Jupiter Became a bull, and bellow'd ‫ ;שאג‬the
green Neptune A ram, and bleated ‫ ;פעה‬and the fire-robed god, golden Apollo, a poor humble
swain, as I seem now. Their transformations were never for a piece of beauty rarer, nor in a
way so chaste, since my desires run not before mine honour, nor my lusts burn hotter than my
faith" The answer of Florizel is borrowed from Ovid's poems in the Metamorphosis.
This passage domesticates, naturalizes and pastoralizes Ovid's erotic stories of rape.
What Florizel is describing are the various famous stories where various Gods take
on the shape of animals to rape women. This is not love, but violence, desire in its
most violent expression. Florizel says that the Gods tool the habit of innocent animals
for a lesser innocent act, and says that they chased after woman who was not as half
as beautiful as Perdita, and the God's transformation is not as half as more powerful
than his own. Florizel takes away the rape element by saying "nor in a way so chaste,
since my desires run not before mine honour, nor my lusts burn hotter than my faith" "I'm not
about to rape you but to wait until I'm married to you". There is a reworking of Ovidian
erotic into something supposedly chased, normalized within the parameters of
performance and disguise. In other words, she thinks her borrowed cloths is a form of
social transgression ‫עברה‬. He tries to tell her that her borrowed cloths are a natural
expression of her inner virtues with which he is in love.The Metamorphosis explores
the destructive and creative powers of Eros, erotic attraction, which can destroy just
as much as it can create. Florizel is using those myths in a way to subvert their raw
sexuality by channeling them toward what he imagines is a kind of a level playing
field where he can marry the woman he's in love with. Perdita alerts him to the social
realty, and that his father will never agree for such a marriage. The audience
watching this knows that she isn't just a shepherdess, she is just as noble as he is.
Their ultimate union at the end will be the ultimate redemption of the earlier rapture
between their fathers. It takes place in the pastoral setting at one mimetic removed
from the pastoral ideal, it takes place in summer, using disguises and it's a
commodification through art of the pastoral.
There is an important dialog between Polixenes and Perdita about art and nature.

The images in the speech are about gardening and flowers. Perdita starts:
Perdita: "Sir, the year growing ancient, not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth of
trembling winter, the fairest flowers o' the season are our carnations and streak'd gillyvors,
which some call nature's bastards: of that kind our rustic garden's barren; and I care not to
get slips of them"
"Sir, the year growing ancient" this is the key, the year is becoming older. The speech
is full with proverbial comments, assessments and popular folkloristics flower lore
‫ חכמה‬,‫ תורה‬of Shakespeare's time. Gillyvors are July flowers, like carnations, flowers
that blossom in the summer. There is no explanation other than proverbial folkloristic
ideas as to why they were considered nature's bastard, except that the notion of
bastardy is that they were late flowers, were not born in spring. The word "bastard"
immediately relates to her being thought of as a bastard by her father. But Polixenes
doesn't understand this. She says "I don't want to grow these flowers, I'd rather my
garden be barren than to have these bastard flowers".
Polixenes thinks that this is very strange. He says:

Polixenes: "Wherefore, gentle maiden, do you neglect them?"
He asks her why does she neglect them, and this becomes an allegory, an extended
metaphor about breeding of children and breeding of human character.
Perdita: "for I have heard it said there is an art which in their piedness (‫מלא כתמי צבע‬,‫)מנומר‬
shares with great creating nature" She says that these flowers are so patched with
colour that there is something about them that backs insincerity, and therefore shares
with great creating nature. There is something dishonest about these flowers, it's as if
in the way they decorate themselves they compete with nature herself who is the
only one who gets to decorate natural things.
Polixenes: "Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean but nature makes that mean:
so, over that art which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes. You see, sweet
maid, we marry a gentler scion to the wildest stock, and make conceive a bark of baser kind
by bud of nobler race: this is an art which does mend nature, change it rather, but the art
itself is nature." Polixenes says that they are flowers, nature made them. He tries to
approach it like a philosopher "Say there be" Say there was a difference. He comes
from the image of gardening splicing and breeding. He refers to the two concepts of
nature, as we talked about them in Macbeth: In the moral sense and in the
descriptive sense. In Polixenes's eyes, everything that human beings do is natural,
because it's true to human nature. At which point does the world "nature" stops being
natural? That's what they are talking about. For example: for us human beings,
eating, sleeping and breeding is natural. Building tools and wearing cloths is natural.
But is culture natural? Building buildings? fast cars? plastic factories? are they
natural?
Her answer to him: she conceits

Perdita: "So it is"
Polixenes: "Then make your garden rich in gillyvors, And do not call them bastards."
Then she still says "no":

Perdita: "I'll not put the dibble in earth to set one slip of them; no more than were I painted I
would wish this youth should say 'twere well and only therefore desire to breed by me. Here's
flowers for you; hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram; the marigold, that goes to bed wi'
the sun and with him rises weeping: these are flowers of middle summer, and I think they are
given to men of middle age."
"I would wish this youth should say 'twere well and only therefore desire to breed by me" She
is talking about Florizel's disguise.

She says that art is nature, but there comes a point where art is art and it's no longer
natural, at which point we use the word artificial. Perdita resists Polixenes's argument
where art and nature becomes indistinguishable, she insists on the distinction. There
is a degree in human enterprise which is natural and there is a degree that later on
will become artificial. Putting on makeup, painting, putting on disguise, being an
actor, putting a costume - that is not in itself natural, that is art, which imitates nature.
Those are two different concepts. Now we can say more accurately with Aristotle's
poetics, as he says in the beginning of the poetics: the fact that people enjoy art is
natural, that is a natural human propensity, but art itself is not nature, it's a mimetic
representation of nature, whether it idealize it, beautifies it, or present it in any kind of
form for us to enjoy it.
When she starts handing out the flowers, then finally she hands out the flowers of
spring that she doesn’t have:
Perdita: "I would I had some flowers o' the spring that might become your time of day; and
yours, and yours, That wear upon your virgin branches yet your maidenheads growing: O
Proserpina, for the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall from Dis's waggon! daffodils,
that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty; violets dim, but
sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses that die unmarried,
ere they can behold bight Phoebus in his strength--a malady most incident to maids; bold
oxlips and the crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, the flower-de-luce being one! O, these I
lack, to make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, to strew him o'er and o'er!"
She doesn't have the spring flowers, so she describes them poetically, referring to
Ovid, the poet of artistic change over art. She recreates the flowers from mythological
references.
Florizel: "What, like a corse?"

He is not being funny. He refers to a poetic tradition of pastoral elegy; in pastoral
elegy when someone dies you create flowers of poetry, which are then being
metaphorically put on his grave. He means like in a pastoral poem when he is dead
and she laments him by placing imaginary flowers on his grave. This is a literary
tradition. She's evoking in poetry imaginative flowers in a beautiful speech which is
artificial crafted.
Perdita: "No, like a bank (of a river) for love to lie and play on; Not like a corse; or if, not to
be buried, but quick (be alive) and in mine arms."
She gives him imaginative flowers as a marriage bad, as the absent space which she
wants for them to live and love one another, not a place of death.
Act 5 scene 2
From that point on there is a series of happy accidents and resolutions, they all go
back to Sicilia, the home of pastoral poetry, where Perdita Florizel and Polixenes are
all reconciled to Leontes, their marriage is announced, Camillo is restored, Autolycus
is reformed, and the scene is set for the final grand reveal in Paulina's house, the
mocked statue.
The myth of Pygmalion - Pygmalion was a sculpture, a man who hated women. After
being betrayed by the villainy of women in the world he decided to create a perfect
woman out of ivory. He created a statue of the deal woman. He projects on her other
virtues like loyalty and constancy. He prays to Venus, and she rewards him by
turning the statue into a real woman. This myth is in the background in the play, with
the story about the statue that comes to life. If in Ovid the comment is on art, art vs.

life, what we idealize and project through art and what is the price we pay when what
we fantasized about becomes real, here it's totally inverted.
The gentlemen are having a conversation which is mostly plot advancement, trying to
fill in the background of what have happened so far. The third gentleman is telling
them the story.
Third Gentleman: "Wrecked the same instant of their master's death and in the view of the
shepherd: so that all the instruments which aided to expose the child were even then lost
when it was found. But O, the noble combat that 'twixt joy and sorrow was fought in Paulina!
She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another elevated that the oracle was
fulfilled: she lifted the princess from the earth, and so locks her in embracing, as if she would
pin her to her heart that she might no more be in danger of losing"
He tells us about the happy reunion between Paulina and Perdita.
First Gentleman: "The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes; for
by such was it acted."
Third Gentleman: "One of the prettiest touches of all and that which angled for mine eyes,
caught the water though not the fish, was when, at the relation of the queen's death, with the
manner how she came to't bravely confessed and lamented by the king, how attentiveness
wounded his daughter; till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did, with an 'Alas,' I would
fain say, bleed tears, for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed
colour; some swooned, all sorrowed: if all the world could have seen 't, the woe had been
universal." He uses the idea that even people who were like marble would have being
moved to tears by the sight of Perdita being found, and then thinking that she wa
found in loss, that her mother died.
This is just an exposition, but in it he introduces the plot device of the statue
Third Gentleman: " the princess hearing of her mother's statue, which is in the keeping of
Paulina,--a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master,
Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile
Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape ‫ לחקות‬: he so near to Hermione hath done
Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer: thither with all
greediness of affection are they gone, and there they intend to sup." Julio Romano was a
real famous Italian sculpture and painter in Shakespeare's time. He was known for
his abilities to mimetically create representation in sculpture that looks fantastically
real.
The third gentleman says that the sculpture has created a statue, which if he (the
artist) was eternal like his artwork, he could put such breath into his work that he
would beguile nature. The scene prepares us by wanting us to expect that the statue
is a case in which art excels nature. No miracle takes place, no statue was ever
commissioned, no art has being performed. Nature hasn't being imitated, other than
in performance. Paulina draws the curtain and reveals the statue:
Paulina: "As she lived peerless,So her dead likeness, I do well believe, excels whatever yet
you look'd upon Or hand of man hath done; therefore I keep it Lonely, apart. But here it is:
prepare to see the life as lively mock'd as ever still sleep mock'd death: behold, and say 'tis
well." These lines pick up the lines of Leontes, when he says that his fantasy is
mocked with art.
Leontes: "The fixture of her eye has motion in't, as we are mock'd with art." We are
mocked with art; art constantly deceives us. In the tragic first part of the play we
could see the tragic consequences of self-delusion, where Leontes says: "Affection!

(emotion, imaginative one) thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not
so held " This is exactly how mimetic art works.
Here drawing attention to art. Leontes cannot believe his eyes. His sense of
beguilement is directed towards the imaginary art that he think that took place:
Leontes: "Her natural posture! Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed thou art
Hermione; or rather, thou art she in thy not chiding, for she was as tender as infancy and
grace. But yet, Paulina, Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing so aged as this seems."
Paulina: "So much the more our carver's excellence; Which lets go by some sixteen years and
makes her as she lived now."
Polixenes: "Masterly done: The very life seems warm upon her lip"
Leontes: "The fixture of her eye has motion in't, as we are mock'd with art."
Hermione starts to move and then Leontes says:

Leontes: "O, she's warm! If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating" We asked
before is eating natural. Making statues is less natural, unless the human enjoyment
of art is natural. The answer to Leontes is that it's not magic, she is warm, it is lawful
as eating. Leontes forgets himself, from his art induced suffering, not by art, but by
life, warm bodied life.
Shakespeare, at the end of his career, Shakespeare reaches a summation of his art:
our lives are small lives, organic, warm, living, suffering, loving, surrounded by sleep,
by dreams. Life can only achieve it's true potential through various acts of the
imagination. This is where living becomes a form of art, and it's close to what
Shakespeare understood to be the art of theater.
In the balance between art and nature, what wins in this play is the redemptive power
of theatrical art, performance; but performance which is an imaginative act of living
well. Socrates says that the aim of philosophy is to train you how to die well.
Shakespeare is in the business of teaching us how to live well.

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Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

Reasons for the remoteness of Shakespeare's English

'Claudius: How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

'And now I will unclasp (‫ )לפתוח‬a secret book,

Another reason way Shakespeare is inaccessible for us is that Elizabethans had no

Shakespeare's ability to poetically create images that resonates so many nuances

BBC the hollow crown adapting 4 plays of Shakespeare

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

Perspectivism was the main concerns that always seemed to be on Shakespeare's

Shakespeare's plays explore perspectivism from a human point of view on a wide

In general Shakespeare always uses perspectivism to humanize complicate

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

Jacques monologue from "As you like it"

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

General concepts, themes that repeat in Shakespeare's plays

Italian Renaissance Neo-Platonism which is mostly Roman-Catholic there was a

"The Comedy of Errors"

This is a very early Shakespeare play, an adaptation of one of Plautus's Roman

"I to the world am like a drop of water

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

A common image that repeats in Shakespeare is of identity as a liquid, related to

Richard II is one of Shakespeare's earliest and purest tragedies. The tragedy of

"O that I were a mockery king of snow,

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

Was Shakespeare more a theater person or a poet?

The writing of the sonnets

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

"From fairest creatures we desire increase,

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

"From fairest creatures we desire increase"

"But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes"

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

The speaker is trying to rationalize his attraction to another man.

A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion

A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted

Fashion – custom, tradition.

Corinne Ben Yaacov – Shakespeare – 2015

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling

Gilding the object the object whereupon it gazeth

A man in hue, all hues in his controlling

In here we see a cardinal preoccupation of Shakespeare –