Ultimately, they meet Saint Bernard de Clairvaux, whose poetic
VI. In the Circle of Limbo, Dante meets the Virtuous Pagans, a group of·
ancients like Socrates who were born before Christianity but had still
led virtuous lives. In !he crowning moment of his visit to Limbo, he
also meets the assembly of great poets.
A. In this assembly, Dante re-creates the canon of classical writers:
Homer, Ovid, Horace, Lucan, Virgil, and-by !heir invitation-
himself
B. Some see this inclusion of his own name as an extraordinary
arrogance on Dante's part, but the legacy of The Divine Comedy
has proven his claim.
VII. As Dante and Virgil descend deeper into the Inferno, !hey meet the
sinful poets. Dante actually punishes people who misused language h
condemning them to Hell.
A. These included influential Italian poets condemned for suicide a·
sodomy.
B. Dante and Virgil also encounter the lovers Paolo and Francesca,
who blame the Arthurian romances for instigating their adultery.
C. Ulysses also appears here, punished for having manipulated
language to the peril of his crew.
VIII. Dante used Mount Purgatory to show how poetry could be purged
spiritually in the same way that souls are refined through the
purgatorial experience.
A. The new arrivals in Purgatory sing a passage from the Old
Testament that Dante has interpreted as a spiritual allegory.
B. Here Dante and Virgil encounter Statius, a classical poet who had
secretly converted to Christianity, and Arnau! Daniel, a Proven9al
poet whom Dante honors as "the greater craftsman."
IX. When Beatrice finally guides Dante through Heaven, many of the
redeemed tum out to be poets as well.
A. They encounter a Christian troubadour named Folquet De
Marseille, who had sung love songs to the Virgin Mary instead of
an earthly love.
B. They also encounter great Christian scholars and writers who were
also poets, like Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Francis of
Assisi.
IA'Jflflst Th,,. Tf>l'l.{';hinP' C:nmni:1nv
hymn allows Dante to achieve an ecstatic glimpse of!he nature of
God.
re Divine Comedy can be seen as a sorting out of writers, a type of
.on formation.
Dante's effort at forming a canon worked. Several of the writers h
mentioned have been edited and translated simply because he
named them.
Dante's devotion to !he Romance-language tradition also
introduced exclusivity into canon formation. Germanic, Hebrew,
and Arabic poetry were ignored in Dante's work.
Dante's exclusivity also applied to religion. Only Christians or
virtuous pre-Christian writers were included in his list.
But by inserting himself, Dante also acknowledged canon
formation as a work in progress, and he expected future
generations to continue the process.
'-tbach, "Farinata and Cavalcante," in Mimesis.
;her, A Modern Reader's Guide to Dante's "The Dtvine Comedy."
1\lstions to Consider:
,jo,Most readers never get beyond !he Inferno as a "canon within the
'<;anon." Why not look at some later cantos featuring Dante's favorite
<Christian poets, such as Arnau! Daniel and Guido Guinizzelli in
· · Purgatorio (26), Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assisi i:r
·Paradiso (IO), and certainly Saint Bernard de Clairvaux in Paradiso
(33)?
Dante's "canon" is basically a Romance-language syllabus starting
with Latin writers and extending to works in Italian and French. Wh)
not use The Norton Anthology to explore o!her medieval poetry like t
German love minstrels, !he Hebrew and Arabic poets of Spain, and
especially the great Sufi poet Rumi-who died when Dante was
eight-currently the bestselling poet in America?
©2008 The Teaching Company.
 Lecture Sixteen
Boccaccio-Ancient Masters, Modern Rivals
Scope: Boccaccio lectured on The Divine Comedy. But how could any
Italian writer compete with Dante? He couldn't, so he did
something completely different, like his friend Petrarch, who wrot<
his epic Africa in Latin and imitated the Roman love poets in his
sonnets. In addition to searching for lost Greek manuscripts,
Boccaccio wrote vernacular epics that would inspire Chaucer and
Shakespeare. Set during the first outbreak of the bubonic plague i
1348, his Decameron describes how 10 young people flee Floren
for a safe haven at their country estates and, in the process,
introduce something long absent from the Western canon: fictiona
stories. Shifting from allegory to realism, his novellas look forwar'
to the modem novel.
Outline
I. As we saw with Dante, the Western canon is often created by one
literary genius recognizing other writers of genius who have gone
before.
A. The relationships between writers fall into three categories:
relationships with ancient writers, relationships with more recent
predecessors, and relationships with contemporaries.
B. We see these relationships forming even in the early world of the
Athenian playwrights. They were comfortable acknowledging
Homer, who had written in the distant past, but were highly
competitive with their contemporaries.
II. With Boccaccio, we see all three of these factors operating in the way
that he created his masterpiece, the Decameron.
A. He admired and imitated his classical forebears.
I. He adopted Cicero's style of writing in clean, elegant prose.
2. Boethius inspired the theme ofFortune that runs through both
the premise and the plots of the Decameron.
3. Ovid provided him with the example of wit, eloquence, and
sensual obsession.
72 ©2008 The Teaching Company.
B. The problem for Boccaccio lay with the literary figures that were
near contemporary to him-his rivals. These specifically included
the other great Florentine writers, Dante and Petrarch.
Harold Bloom has pointed out the need for younger writers to push
back against earlier generations. Dante had no previous Italian master
against whom to compete, but Boccaccio and Petrarch had to push back
against the enormous father figure of Dante.
A. Petrarch staged his Oedipal revolt by focusing on the original
classic texts of ancient Rome, a tradition with which Dante was not
deeply familiar.
Petrarch also wrote an epic, but instead of using the vernacular
language as Dante had done, he wrote in Latin-the serious
language of a great writer.
Most importantly, he experimented with lyric poetry and is famous
for having invented the sonnet form and the sonnet sequence.
:y the time Boccaccio came on the scene, he had two titanic Italian
writers against whom to revolt. He started with Dante.
A. Boccaccio first encountered the works of Dante as a student, which
means that Dante had already entered the educational canon within
a generation of his death.
Boccaccio was wrestling with Dante even at the end of his life; late
in his career, he wrote Expositions on the Comedy of Dante and
The Life of Dante. Both of these texts approached Dante and his
writing as sacred.
C. We see an interesting working out of Boccaccio's Oedipal revolt
against Dante in the Decameron.
I. Dante wrote in poetry; Boccaccio chose prose.
2. Dante gave us 100 cantos; Boccaccio gave us 100 stories.
3. Dante's work was spiritual and allegorical; Boccaccio's was
realistic and earthy.
Boccaccio's relationship with Petrarch was far more complicated, since
Petrarch was a contemporary, a friend, and a mentor.
A. As a mentor, Petrarch encouraged Boccaccio to follow his lead and
study the classics. Boccaccio one-upped him by studying Greek as
well as Latin.
©2008 The Teaching Company. 71
 B. Because he was not a rich man, Boccaccio had to make his own B. Because of the sense of closure in Dante's work, Boccaccio was
copies of the classic originals. This process of imitation helped him':: forced to reinvent the rules of the game and, in the process, create
learn his craft. · a new genre. This genre would be known even then as the novella,
C. Early biographies of Boccaccio give him a huge amount of credit and it would develop into the modem novel.
for the rediscovery and distribution of Greek texts in Europe.
D. Boccaccio continued to shadow-box with Petrarch in his decision
to write his classically inspired epics in Italian rather than Latin.
These epics would achieve wide readership and would influence :rbach, "Frate Alberto," in Mimesis.
Chaucer-and by extension Shakespeare.
antler, Boccaccio's Dante and the Shaping Force ofSatire.
VI. With Petrarch and Boccaccio, we also have a case of the big brother
•tta, The World at Play in Boccaccio's "Decameron. ··
fighting back. In his letters, we constantly find Petrarch chiding,
criticizing, and bad-mouthing his younger contemporary. estions to Consider:
A. When Petrarch received a copy of the Decameron 20 years after i 1 After Dante's allegorical "dark wood" at the beginning of the Inferno,
creation, he wrote a letter to Boccaccio claiming never to have ": Boccaccio's depiction of plague-stricken Florence marks a huge leap in
heard of it. terms ofliterary realism. What details of description would you add to
B. He continued with backhanded compliments throughout the rest o make more graphic his picture of the bubonic plague?
the letter and finished it by translating Boccaccio's last story into Boccaccio's company of 10 young folk includes 7 women but only 3
Latin as an example of how it should have been done. men. How does this "gender imbalance" influence the subjects of the
C. Lo and behold, it was Petrarch's Latin version of Boccaccio's tale storytelling? And how might the topics of discussion and contents of
that would become famous internationally. the tales have been different if the numbers were reversed and there
were seven men, but only three women?
Vll. The Decameron emerged in the canon as a kind of sleeper classic. It
did not receive much attention in Boccaccio's own lifetime or in the
two centuries that followed.
A. By the time its first printed edition was produced in 1552, the worl
had risen in the estimation ofreaders and critics.
B. What we see here, then, is a lag time between the composition of a
work and its recognition as a masterpiece. This would happen
again with Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
C. Getting attention isn't always the best thing. Two years after it was
printed, the Decameron ended up on the Catholic Church's Index
ofForbidden Books.
VIII. As I said before, Dante can be seen as the culmination of everything
that went before him. In a sense, he closed the book on the entire genre
of the epic. We can see this in other disciplines as well.
A. In music, Bach brought the fugue to its culmination, and Mahler
did the same for the symphony.

74 ©2008 The Teaching Company. ©2008 The Teachinl! Comnanv

 Lecture Seventeen
Chaucer-The Father of English Literature
Scope: Chaucer was the first Englishman to take Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio as models. He set out to create a national literature with
himself installed as its founding father. England's literary tradition
is configured as father-son genealogy also because the poet's son
Thomas undertook the job of canon formation. Like the Bible,
Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales becomes an anthology
comprising nearly all genres of medieval writing-classical epic,
saint's life, Greek myth, British history, Arthurian romance, and
bedroom farce-staking a claim as the starting point of English
literature. Chaucer's kinship with the new Lancastrian kings mean\
that his books benefited from royal sponsorship through the reigns:
of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
Outline
I. For 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has been known as the father of
English literature. Where does this idea come from, and what does it
mean that the English literary tradition is configured in this
genealogical succession?
II. We know much more about Chaucer as a person than we know about
any of our earlier writers, and even some of our later ones. -,,
A. We have almost 600 pages of life records concerning Chaucer. We)
even have an image of him from an early manuscript of The
Canterbury Tales.
B. From these records, we know that Chaucer saw military service
during the Normandy Campaign of 1360 and was captured and
ransomed.
III. The adversity that Chaucer suffered in France explains his animosity
toward the French and their cultural and literary weight upon the
English.
A. Since I 066, the F_rench had occupied England and had imposed
French as the language of government.
B. Although Chaucer may have spoken French more often than
English, he elected to compose his works exclusively in English.
76 ©2008 The Teaching Company.
Part of Chaucer's pushback from the French tradition was to find
inspiration in another culture: the Italian tradition of the 14th century.
A. We know from his life records that Chaucer traveled to Italy on
diplomatic missions more than once.
B. He might have actually had the opportunity to meet Petrarch and
Boccaccio while he was there in 1373.
C. Chaucer therefore became the first Englishman to be reading
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio long before the Renaissance. He
used elements from all three writers in his own works.
Chaucer never mentions Boccaccio anywhere in his writings, despite
the fact that Boccaccio was the single strongest and steadiest influence
upon him.
A. In Chaucer's adaptation of the story of Griselda, you can clearly
see that revolt against a father figure. Boccaccio was an extremely
powerful and domineering sort of predecessor, and Chaucer's
response is to erase him from the account altogether, though
Boccaccio served as an ultimate source.
B. Chaucer's response mirrors Boccaccio's own struggle with the
influence of Dante when writing the Decameron.
C. One legacy that Chaucer retained from Boccaccio is the naughty
story. This would become one of the most memorable things that
Chaucer transmitted from the Italian tradition.
As Boccaccio had done with Dante, Chaucer tried to one-up Boccaccio
throughout The Canterbury Tales.
A. Boccaccio had written in prose, but Chaucer decided to write his
tales in verse.
B. Chaucer has a larger cast of characters and projects a larger
number of tales in The Canterbury Tales than Boccaccio did in the
Decameron.
C. Chaucer also has a wider range of stories. His work is a real
compendium, an anthology of medieval genres, whereas Boccaccio
focused only on love stories.
D. Another remarkable achievement in Chaucer's rivalry with
Boccaccio is the diversity of the pilgrims themselves. Boccaccio
had a very homogenous group, young and aristocratic, while
Chaucer presents the whole spectrum of English middle-class
society at the time.
\0200R ThP. Ti>;$1rhina rnmn<in"
 E. The use of the pilgrimage by Chaucer is actually a political
experiment.
I. Current scholarship points to the pilgrimage as a principle of
unifying the national community.
2. Despite their diversity, Chaucer's pilgrims enter into a social
contract that anticipates I 7th-century political theory.
VII. Part of Chaucer's agenda, so to speak, in establishing his credentials as
the father of English literature was eliminating the competition.
A. First, this means eliminating predecessors. For instance, Chaucer
never mentions Anglo-Saxon literature, though he surely was
familiar with it. '\
B. It also means eliminating the contemporary competition, especiallyi.
on the London scene. , enormous personal and cultural pressure to write in French.
I. We know that the Gawain Poet was active in London at the
time. Chaucer actually mentions Gawain as a character but
never acknowledges the Gawain Poet.
2. Chaucer also never mentions William Langland, whose Piers
Plowman became the first national bestseller in the 1380s.
VIII. Another avenue Chaucer takes in establishing himself as a father
figure involves reaching forward in time to invite future writers to join
his enterprise.
A. There are missing parts in The Canterbury Tales, so that later
writers would feel the invitation to enter into this ongoing process
and become Chaucerian poets.
1. Early in the 15m century, Chaucer's great imitator John
Lydgate, a monk poet, wrote a continuation of"The Knight's
Tale."
2. King James I of Scotland and even William Shakespeare used
"The Knight's Tale" as inspiration for their own work.
B. Later writers and scholars also had a hand in the formation of the
Chaucerian canon, eliminating works by other Chaucerian authors
and sometimes even excluding works by Chaucer himself.
IX. The real magic of Chaucer's emergence as the father of English
literature is, as is often the case, a matter of luck.
A. For example, Chaucer's first major poem was an elegy on the
death of the Duchess of Lancaster, whose son eventually became
King Henry IV.
©2008 The Teachin12. Comoanv.
B. Chaucer's sister-in-law was also the stepmother of King Henry IV.
C. Chaucer's son Thomas became a diplomat and an important royal
administrator in the Lancastrian court. Thomas was the force
behind the creation of elegant manuscripts of his father's work.
D. Chaucer's sister-in-law later became the link of legitimacy for the
powerful Tudor dynasty. King Henry VIII personally supervised
the first collected works of Chaucer.
When Chaucer came on the scene, there was no English literature, only
the crushing influence of French literature. Chaucer clearly had
something in mind for creating a new literature in English only, and so
he cleared the ground.
A. He rejected French influence left and right, though he faced
B. He also refused to link himself to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. He
did not use the alliterative verse form like the Gawain Poet had
done.
C. Instead of French or Anglo-Saxon forms, Chaucer adapted the
Italian stanza form.
XI. In the Italian tradition, Chaucer also found a model for the patriarchal
literary succession, a succession that Chaucer, with a great deal of luck,
was able to establish in English literature.
A. Chaucer's emphasis on storytelling and dynamic characters was
passed down through Shakespeare and Dickens, among others.
B. Chaucer's humor not only endeared him to his readers; it also
became a halhnark of the English literary tradition.
Suggested Readings:
Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer.
Bowers, Chaucer and Langland.
Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio.
Questions to Consider:
I. English literature as a genealogy descending from Father Chaucer
seems strange only when compared to other national traditions. Can
you identify a father of French literature? A father of American
literature?
©2008 The Teaching Company. 7Q
2. Chaucer is primarily a humorist. As a result, his posterity in English
literature shows a strong comedic strain even in its great canonic
authors like Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Can you think of a major
English writer who is not witty, humorous, and fond of eccentricity?
Lecture Eighteen
"Man for All Seasons"-More and His Utopia
A good courtier improvises whatever role is needed, and Henry
VIII's most brilliant courtier was Sir Thomas More: lawyer,
scholar, chancellor of England, and Catholic martyr. His project of
self-invention carried over to literature, and More used the new
technology of the printing press to make himself an internationally
famous author. While European navigators like Amerigo Vespucci
were mapping the New World, European scholars were
rediscovering Greek classics like Plato's Republic. In friendly
competition with his friend Erasmus, More wrote his Utopia as a
blueprint for future political experiments and also as an example of
the "intellectual goofiness" that characterizes much educated
writing.

Outline
Sir Thomas More's Utopia needs to be set in the context of the early
European exploration of America.
A. It is a work very much about the discovery of a new civilization on
the other side of the world.
B. It anticipates England's own rise as a seafaring global power and
also looks forward to the eventual export of European books to
these new worlds.
Five years after Chaucer's death, the Mongol warlord Tamberlane died,
ending the long period of Mongol imperial domination of the East.
A. As the Persians, the Turks, and the Chinese began to wrangle for
power, they hardly noticed the little kingdoms in Europe.
B. When Sir Thomas More was born, European countries were still
very small, economically feeble, in some ways culturally deprived,
and hopelessly divided.
C. Although nobody in Damascus or Beijing felt threatened by
Europe at this time, this would soon change.

80 ©2008 The Teaching Company. ©2008 The Teachine: Comnanv

III. The rise of European sea power continued a long tradition in the West,
one that can be traced back to the earliest Mediterranean civilizations.
A. The Minoans and the Phoenicians were both important, ancient
seafaring populations.
B. From the Odyssey to Beowulf, tales of seafaring loom large in the
Western literary tradition.
IV. By the time Sir Thomas More was writing and publishing Utopia, the
Spanish and the Portuguese had fleets going as far as the Indies and the·
Americas.
A. More had been reading the accounts of Amerigo Vespucci, whose
letters gave us the phrase "New World" and whose first name gave
mapmakers the term "America."
B. There is a direct link between More and Vespucci: The narrator of
Utopia, Hythloday, claims to have traveled with Vespucci on his
last three voyages.
V. We're going to talk a little bit more about Sir Thomas More, who was
called by his friend Erasmus "a man for all seasons."
A. This epithet points to More's versatility, especially his ability to
straddle tragedy and comedy.
B. More's biography, written by his son-in-law William Roper, tells
the story of More's ability as a child to improvise roles in
Christmas plays, which prompted Cardinal Morton to send him to
Oxford to prepare for a career in law.
1. Many of our great writers, going back to Ovid, weren't really
trained in literature but rather in the law, where they learned
rhetoric, or persuasive speech.
2. Part of this training was the "legal fiction," where a situation
is imagined for the sake of argument. We will see More using
this method in Utopia.
C. More was able to apply the rhetorical skills gained at Oxford to
whatever propaganda purposes were requested by the king.
1. In The History ofRichard III, More used his lawyer-like skills
to do a hatchet job on the earlier monarch to legitimize the
Tudor claim of Henry VIII.
2. It was More's monstrous vision of Richard III that
Shakespeare used when writing his play.
82 ©2008 The Teaching Company.
D. There is also in this play of the imagination a true sort of
gamefulness that seems to have been a part of More's personality.
1. Humor and playfulness were at this point becoming part of the
English character.
2. More also found ancient philosophy, especially Plato,
congenial to this sense of playfulness.
• In Utopia itself, we find this sense of serious fun, or what I like to call
"intellectual goofmess."
A. The text was written in Latin so that it could have a European
readership. More was writing in the finest style of Latin prose,
Ciceronian Latin, yet he plays with it.
B. This intellectual humor can be seen in the Utopian citizenry: They
use gold io chain their slaves, they examine prospective spouses
naked before marrying, and they execute those who are caught
twice for adultery.
C. The narrator's name, Hythloday, can be interpreted in Greek as
"nonsense peddler," and indeed we get nothing but nonsense from
him.
D. The word utopia itselfis a kind of schoolboy purming. It is based
upon two Greek words: eutopia, meaning "a good place," and
outopia, meaning "no place at all." So Utopia is a very good place,
except that it doesn't exist.
'11. There is also built into Utopia a kind of friendly rivalry.
A. More was, in a sense, challenged to rise to the occasion by his
friend Erasmus, who was staying with More while writing his great
Praise ofFolly.
B. C. S. Lewis was able to recognize this aspect in Utopia, largely
because he and J. R.R. Tolkien were engaged in a similar rivalry.
:VIII. Sir Thomas More was living at the dawn of a progressive, Western,
modern world in which there was competition of every kind: economic
competition, competition in exploration, and competition in
technology, as epitomized by the printing press.
A. More was able to learn Greek and Latin at Oxford because the
printing press had made these texts available.
B. In writing Utopia in Latin, he was assuring himself a
transcontinental readership, as well as assimilating many of the
classics that he had read.
""'"11\J'\0 "t'L- 'Y"---'-'-- ,.-.,_
 C. The people of Utopia do not value most of the imports being
brought from Europe. However, they do value paper and the
classical volumes being offered to them, especially the Aldine
editions of the Greek writers.
I. This is indicative of an extraordinary moment in the
Renaissance: The Greek classics were available again in the
original language for the first time in 1,000 years.
2. The literary canon was beginning to materialize, featuring
authors like Thucydides and Herodotus.
3. This was thanks to a humanist in Italy named Aldus Manutius,
whose printing press created manageable editions of Greek
classics (known as the Aldine editions). We are also indebted
to him for italic type.
IX. It is sometimes said that the ideal society that More describes in Utopia
actually resembles a medieval monastery. More himself is reported to
have lived in a monastery. The famous Renaissance humanist remaine,
at core a medieval Catholic.
A. Throughout his life at court, More wore a hair shirt under his fine
silks and would practice self-flagellation with a knotted whip.
B. His Catholic identity led to his fall from political power, and he
became the persecuted philosopher suffering imprisonment.
During his incarceration, he wrote The Dialogue of Comfort-very
clearly modeled on Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy.
C. Toward the end, More's life became another recognizable genre:
the saint's life. He faced his execution as a Christian martyr
standing against the king, though Henry VIII knew better than to
let him speak on the scaffold.
X. The way that More rendered his life from beginning to end shows the
immense theatricality-of his mindset, and it makes his life story tailor-
made for dramatization.
A. This can be seen in Robert Bolt's 20'h·century play A Man for All
Seasons and even earlier in Sir Thomas More, a Renaissance play,
the manuscript of which contains one scene in Shakespeare's
handwriting.
B. More's life lends itself to dramatization because he had a sense of
courtroom drama, which we trace all the way back to the Greek
tradition.
84 ©2008 The Teaching Company.
XI. Sir Thomas More became Saint Thomas More 400 years after his
· death. It is an interesting case of a canonic writer also being canonized
as a saint.
A. We've seen this before: Augustine and Boethius were both
canonized as saints, and Boccaccio's The Life of Dante reads like a
saint's life. It's no wonder that there is an interesting interplay
between the literary canonization of an author and his elevation to
the ranks of sainthood.
B. Tolstoy achieved spiritual status as well. His ideas of nonviolence
and universal human rights influenced such figures as Gandhi and
Martin Luther King Jr.
1. Another interesting point: In Roper's biography of More, Utopia is
never mentioned. Again we see, as we did with Petrarch's sonnets, a
work whose arrival in the canon comes from nowhere, completely
unexpected.
1ggested Readings:
.ore, Utopia.
per, Life ofSir Thomas More.
egemer and Smith, eds., A Thomas More Source Book.
iUestions to Consider:
We wrongly equate canonic authors with high seriousness. Just as
Chaucer brought comedy into English literature, the rediscovery of
Plato encouraged Sir Thomas More to experiment with "serious play''
and philosophical silliness. Why not compare the intellectual
playfulness of Utopia with the clownish performance in the Apology of
Socrates?
The most outrageous fictions in Western literature are grounded in
historical fact. Where does More cross the line in Utopia? Or does he
crisscross back and forth, just as he alternates between absurd
speculations and serious suggestions for social reforms?
IA'll\liO T1..~ 'T'---t..:-- f'------·
 Lecture Nineteen
Ham/et-English Literature Goes Global
Scope: Shakespeare's Hamlet had its first recorded performance on an
English merchant ship off the coast of Africa in 1607. This fact
draws attention to the tragedy's seafaring plotline, featuring
Fortinbras, as well as the story's ultimate source in Viking history
Other Shakespearean plays like Tweljih Night testify to deep
anxiety over sea travel during the age of Atlantic exploration. T
First Folio was printed in 1623, seven years after the playwright's
death, in an effort to make Shakespeare into a literary author.
Because Puritans closed the theaters in 1642, Shakespeare's worl
were read as literature by admirers like Milton. Dr. Samuel
Johnson's 1765 edition confirmed Shakespeare as the great
National Poet, just when England was asserting its imperial powe
around the globe.
Outline
I. One novel angle for approaching the world's most famous play is top
it in the context of England's rise as a seagoing power during the
generations after Sir Thomas More and to look at the exportation of
Shakespeare's plays as the English language continues to go global.
II. Western civilization has always had an advantage when it comes to
taking to the waves.
A. In the ancient world, both Athenian and Roman navies proved
superior to their adversaries on the sea.
B. Bede's Ecclesiastical History describes three different seagoing
conquests of Britain: the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the
Christian missionaries.
III. In Shakespeare's day, there was tremendous excitement and activity in
terms of naval exploration and global travel.
A. Sir Francis Drake had voyaged around the world during the late
1570s.
B. Queen Elizabeth I had overseen the victory against the Spanish
Armada in 1588, which was a great boost to England's sense of its'
own ability to deploy a fleet.
86 ©2008 The Teaching Company.
C. Sir Walter Raleigh would explore South America, and other
places, and would sponsor the first English settlement in the New
World, the colony of Virginia.
. When we look at Hamlet, we discover that we have, for all of its veneer
ofRenaissance culture, a story that is rooted in Viking history.
A. The ultimate source of the characters in Hamlet is the 13"'-century
Latin chronicle The Deeds ofthe Danes by Saxo Grammaticus.
·. B. Although the Vikings were from a remote northern land, they
voyaged throughout the Mediterranean, reaching as far as
Jerusalem and Baghdad.
C. Eventually, the Vikings struck out across the Atlantic. In the 9th
century, they began settling in Iceland and in Britain itself, in the
northeast part of Britain called the Danelaw.
D. The Vikings also settled in France, in an area they called
Normandy. In effect, the Norman conquest of England in 1066 was
a continuation of the earlier Viking conquest and settlement.
Hamlet shares a remarkable, weird resemblance to the Old English epic
Beowulf
A. It is impossible to imagine that Shakespeare read or even knew of
Beowulf, yet Hamlet seems an unconscious reworking of the
original epic.
B. In Beowulf, the Danish royal household has been invaded by a
supernatural creature, Grendel. The king is unable to react to the
crisis, and an outside hero is needed. In the end, the hero becomes
a king.
C. In Hamlet, the Danish household has been invaded by a
supernatural creature, the Ghost. Hamlet is unable to react to the
crisis, and an outside hero, Fortinbras, enters. In the end,
Fortinbras is the one who takes dominion over Derunark.
'I. I mention F ortinbras so prominently here because there is a way of
looking at him as the real hero of the play Hamlet.
A. He is the active character, the planning one, the successful one,
what I sometimes call the "stealth protagonist."
©2008 The Teaching Comn~nv
 B. The true play that Shakespeare wrote is a triple revenge tragedy.
1. The main plotline involves the revenge of Hamlet upon
Claudius.
2. The second plotline involves Laertes's need to avenge his
father and sister.
3. But the plot that holds the story together is Fortinbras's need
to wreak vengeance upon Denmark for the death of his father.
C. Stage and movie productions often cut this part of the story, endi
instead with the death of Hamlet. It reminds us that the work that
survives in the canon is not always complete, as we saw with
Vergil's Aeneid.
D. Although everyone focuses on Hamlet's soliloquies, the play that
Shakespeare really wrote is held together by Fortinbras.
I. The impending invasion ofFortinbras provides the
circumstances for the initial encounter with the Ghost.
2. Fortinbras's presence throughout the play is a constant
reminder to Hamlet of his own paralysis and inaction.
3. Fortinbras also symbolizes what will become the secret to
European success in the world: the ability to mobilize a fleet
on the sea and defeat another country.
4. At the end of the play, Fortinbras emerges as a master
politician, able to control an unexpected situation and emerge
as the hero.
VII. F ortinbras signifies the ability of a country to invade successfully
across an ocean, and the Western canon itself will rely on this sort of
movement across water-the movement of books across water.
A. Literature almost always starts off as a local event, and then it
moves out.
B. People in Sicily wanted to import tragedies from Athens. Soon,
these scripts were appearing in the great Alexandrian library and ·
Rome.
C. In More's Utopia, the only thing that the people of Utopia want
from Europe, besides paper and the printing press, are the books
being printed in Venice.
D. Soon, Shakespeare's work became an export, along with the
English language.
88 ©2008 The Teaching Company.
VIII. Shakespeare's own rise within the theater is an interesting
phenomenon of canon formation.
A. There was already an active theater scene when Shakespeare began
writing, but Shakespeare would emerge as the one playwright who
would eventually become an export item.
B. Even in Shakespeare's personal canon, as an author, we have what
we call canons within canons.
I. Shakespeare wrote 38 plays that are available to us, but there
are only about 24 that are regularly studied and performed.
2. In a sense, we have lost Shakespeare-not that the texts have
been lost, but simply that they are not the plays that we teach,
perform, or read.
C. One of the fascinating facts of theater history is that the first
recorded performance of Hamlet took place in 1607 on board an
English merchant ship off the coast of Sierra Leone, Africa, and
was performed as thoughtless entertainment.
D. Shakespeare's plays were not always harmless amusements.
Shakespeare's company was paid to give a private performance of
Richard II to a group that was organizing a coup against Queen
Elizabeth I.
E. Many of Shakespeare's plays were about the dangers of sea travel.
They hooked into the anxieties of the audience at a time when
England was focusing on sea travel for commerce, discovery, and
colonization.
. Printing would eventually make Shakespeare more than a box-office
success.
A. There were pirated editions of Shakespeare's plays during his
lifetime, known as the '"quarto" editions.
B. The First Folio was printed a few years after Shakespeare's death
and was produced under the supervision of two of his theater
colleagues.
C. The second edition of Shakespeare's plays includes a dedicatory
poem by John Milton, entitled "Epitaph on the admirable
Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare." This signifies that Shakespeare
was no longer just an entertainer; he was an author.
©2008 The Teachin2 Comnanv. 00
 D. When the Puritans closed the theaters in I 642, the only way to >hnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," in The Norton Anthology of Theory and
know Shakespeare was to read him, making the printed versions al 1f,iticism.
the more important.
ieud, Interpretation of Dreams, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and
X. One of the great critics involved in canon formation during the 18" 'icism.
century was Dr. Samuel Johnson. or, "Hamlet in Africa 1607," in Travel Knowledge.
A. He wrote the great A Dictionary of the English Language and als
did a series called The lives of the Poets, in which he established 'stions to Consider:
canon of 52 English writers since the Renaissance. !fin 1607 off Africa the Englishmen performed Hamlet and then went
B. In between those two projects, he compiled his scholarly and to shoot an elephant, what does this say about the status of
authoritative eight-volume edition of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's tragedy as "high art"? Did the original audiences enjoy
,,Jhe final scene's bloodshed as much as--or more than-the great
XI. Shakespeare was now poised to move abroad with the English in the ···poetry?
work of empire, and in doing so he prompted Oedipal reactions from
.,.The canon is usually created backward. What elements in the Danish
authors abroad.
'·tragedy Hamlet prepared English readers to appreciate the Danish
A. Voltaire read Shakespeare in the original English and criticized · adventures of Beowulfand accept it into their literary tradition?
playwright for not observing the Aristotelian unities.
B. Goethe read Shakespeare, and when he wrote his masterpiece
Faust, he made it a great stage play that he imagined would
somehow go beyond where Shakespeare himself could ever dreai
to go.
C. When Freud published his great volume The Interpretation of
Dreams, the most famous part was his analysis of Hamlet as
suffering from an Oedipal complex himself.
XII. There is now a kind of author worship around Shakespeare that he
never would have experienced in his own life. It's what we call
Bardolatry.
A. This is not just due to the imposition of Shakespeare on colonized
lands. English-speaking cultures voluntarily import Shakespeare t•
enrich their own culture.
B. As we have seen, an author never really makes it until his works
become school texts. Shakespeare has this advantage in North
America, even on the high school level.

Suggested Readings:
Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Auerbach,"The Weary Prince," in Mimesis.
Greenblatt, Will in the World.

90 ©2008 The Teachin2 Comnanv.

 Lecture Twenty
Brave New Worlds-Shakespeare's The Tempest
Scope: Shakespeare's career extended into the period of English
colonization with the founding of the Virginia settlement in 1607
His valedictory comedy The Tempest imagines Europeans
discovering this "brave new world." Armed with books, Prosper<
colonizes his island, enslaves the population, and imposes his
language upon the natives. Under Prospero's colonial
administration, his island paradise looks more like a penal colon
European conflicts follow the settlers as Prospero's old political
enemies arrive, bringing alcohol to corrupt the islander Caliban.
The playwright draws on published accounts of the New World
and even imagines the long-term effects of imposing the English
language on a colonial population.
Outline
I. The Tempest was written toward the end of Shakespeare's career, ju:
at the time when the English themselves were beginning their
colonizing enterprises in the Americas. This play examines, in ways
that are truly prescient, what it means to take possession of, and to
administer, an overseas colony.
II. We can date The Tempest because it is based on source material abo
Virginia not available before 1610, and it was performed at court in %
1611. Shakespeare was dead five or six years later, and because of th
winding down, we like to see this as Shakespeare's last play.
A. However, Shakespeare went on to coauthor with John Fletcher a"
play entitled The Two Noble Kinsmen. This is inconvenient to o
concept of Shakespeare for two reasons.
1. We don't like the idea that a genius like Shakespeare would
ever stoop to collaborate.
2. It does not make a good story out of Shakespeare's career. W•
somehow think that the trajectory of an author's life ought to
tell its own story and have its own kind of Aristotelian
conclusion.
92 ©2008 The Teaching Company.
B. Because of this urge for conclusion, performances often place
Prospero's line "Our revels now are ended" at the end of the play,
when it really belongs in act 4.
·' This is also a unique play for Shakespeare because it has no direct
source.
Shakespeare, like so many great writers, did not borrow; he stole,
in terms of his plots.
Since The Tempest is not stolen from one source but compiled
from many, it is in some sense Shakespeare's most literate and
bookish play.
1. The route of the journey in the play is based on Aeneas's
travels in the Aeneid.
2. This route was also taken by Saint Augustine in his travels.
3. Ovid was also a natural source for this play, given its world of
magical transformation and illusion.
4. Shakespeare had also been reading accounts of voyages to the
New World, specifically the account ofa ship that endured a
tempest and was stranded in Bermuda.
he central character in this play is Prospero, one of Shakespeare's
'great inventions.
A. Prospero is on the one hand a sorcerer, complete with a staff of
power.
But he also fills many other roles. He is a duke, a scholar, an
educator, a colonial administrator of sorts, and in a more sinister
sense a prison warden.
Prospero' s power is magical, but his magic is invested in books.
This is why people like to see Prospero as a type for Shakespeare
himself.
Even the enslaved native Caliban can see that books are the source
of Prospero's power.
Prospero becomes what we like to call an internal playwright.
A. He manages the characters, moves the scenery, and gives people
motivation, much like a director or an author would.
B. He even does a play within a play, conjuring up illusionary actors
and then making them disappear.
©2008 The Teaching Company. Qq
 C. These illusions are charming, but there is also am1
that illusions of these kinds can become a form o
VI. As Prospero exercises his control over the characters
increasingly reminded that Shakespeare's island rese
colony.
A. This reminds us also that the Europeans woul<l
quarrels and struggles to the New World-the A1
elsewhere.
B. Part of the imposition of English rule on this isl
imposition of the English language itself. Colon\:
language to create local history, and Prospero sp:
telling people their own history-in English.
C. This imposition oflanguage, history, and moral[
most clearly in the character of Caliban.
1. Prospero makes up a history for Caliban that
enslaving and dispossessing him.
2. Prospero also punishes Caliban for attempti
daughter, though Caliban would not have h
Prospero's idea of sexual morality beforehani
D. Ariel and Caliban are the two "colonial subjects"•4;
Ariel as the indentured servant, working under th'
postponed hope of freedom, and Caliban as the
population who are forced to learn the language
E. With Caliban's eventual mastery of English, Sh
looking forward to the fact that the natives in fare . .
will eventually use English in beautiful ways, as /,~
works of postcolonial writers.
VII. Caliban exhibits the effects of colonial control in oth
as well.
A. Caliban dreams that riches will drop upon him, th
concept of riches before. He has internalized the E
system.
B. He is also tamed and managed by alcohol. This C·
sinister afterlife in the way that Europeans would i
to the Native American Indians.
94 ©2008 The Teaching Company.
·se of the play, Caliban is also plotting a slave revolt.
,()f slave revolt would remain on the minds of English
·,\ighout the colonial period.
fthe play, Prospero has a sense of paternalism toward
Rudyard Kipling would echo in "The White Man's
iftas what we now call a "postcolonial subject"-
andoned in his own native land, filled with foreign
lues, and struggling with a language not truly his own.
'erialism of the Europeans was cultural imperialism: the
1y oflanguage and history, but also a kind ofliteracy.
example of this in the story of an English colonial,
a famous African explorer who went to the Congo as
'Leopold II of Belgium to bring Western civilization to
.tin the form of books.
porters became sick on the journey, he had to jettison
books, engaging in what amounted to reverse canon
,figuring out what works civilization can do without.
Stanley ended up with the Bible, Shakespeare, and his
'notes. Faced with having to bum one of these at the
''llie natives, he chose to bum Shakespeare.
.I that he spared later enabled the colonization and brutal
·of the Congo's people.
author is subject to the fetishizing process more than
·
·e's First Folio has become a treasure not only in
.tin countries like the United States.
America want Shakespeare amounts to a funny sort of
:ed colonial imperialism.
Tempest.
g and the Poet: The Tempest, Whitehall, Winter 1613," in
King's Playwright.
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