shakespeare the dramatist - moving ideas a mash up of old and new

Transcription

FABIOLA SALERNO
MOVING IDEAS
A Mash up of Old and New Worlds
Proprietà letteraria riservata
© by Pellegrini Editore - Cosenza - Italy
Versione e-book scaricabile al seguente link: www.movingideas.it/1.pdf
Stampato in Italia nel mese di aprile 2009 da Pellegrini Editore
Via De Rada, 67/C - 87100 Cosenza
Tel. (0984) 795065 - Fax (0984) 792672
Sito internet: www.pellegrinieditore.it
E-mail: [email protected]
I diritti di traduzione, memorizzazione elettronica, riproduzione e adattamento totale o parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo (compresi i microfilm e le copie fotostatiche) sono riservati per tutti i Paesi.
To my past, present and future students
Clearly the mind is always altering its focus,
and bringing the world into different perspectives
Virginia Woolf
PRESENTAZIONE
È un libro di Letteratura Inglese raccontata. Pur rispettando l’ordine cronologico della storia
della letteratura inglese, il lavoro è orientato e adattato in base ai processi di apprendimento e in relazione ai tempi che cambiano. Il titolo e il sottotitolo ne sintetizzano l’intento: una raccolta di idee
aperte, intercambiabili, che attingono informazioni da materiali di studio classici e moderni.
I vari linguaggi usati – dal letterario al cinematografico all’artistico al tecnologico – si rincorrono ininterrottamente in una continua ricerca di chiavi di letture diverse da utilizzare per arrivare al
proprio vissuto e al proprio essere.
La pluralità dei contenuti proposti si pone come obiettivo primario un apprendimento accessibile a tutti e favorito da ciò che ci ha insegnato Gardner con la sua teoria delle intelligenze multiple: c’è
anche il piacere di parlare di un certo tipo di musica, di un certo tipo di arte e di cinema, in definitiva
di un certo tipo di cultura non immediato ma duraturo nel tempo che regala emozioni da conservare
gelosamente. Si vuole trasmettere l’amore per certi autori o, come dice Borges, per certe pagine, o
meglio ancora, per certe frasi […]. Ci si innamora di una frase, poi di una pagina, poi dell’autore.
È un gioco di mediazione di significati sviluppati trasversalmente attraverso i tre principi cardini della riformulazione comunicativa di Jakobson: si va quindi dalla traduzione interlinguistica a
quella intralinguistica e intersemiotica a seconda delle associazioni di idee di quel momento determinate dal proprio background culturale.
Si passa frequentemente da un testo continuo a un testo non continuo e viceversa, e questo sia
per migliorare la comprensione di lettura caldeggiata dagli esperti OCSE-PISA, che per supportare
attività di produzione scritta. Non solo, quindi, comprendere e utilizzare testi scritti, ma anche, come
recita la definizione di reading literacy, riflettere «sui loro contenuti al fine di raggiungere i propri
obiettivi, sviluppare le proprie conoscenze e potenzialità e svolgere un ruolo attivo nella società».
Ci sono più attività a carattere contenutistico che strutturale perché, come dicono i miei studenti, la Letteratura non è Matematica, con i suoi teoremi da applicare, ma è libertà. Non ci sono quindi
analisi guidate, che portano dove chi fa le domande vuole, poiché l’auspicio di questo libro è quello
di non avere risultati standardizzati: la pluralità delle risposte corrisponde ad una ricchezza culturale
a cui ognuno di noi dovrebbe tendere.
La tecnologia è presente ma solo per quello che realmente è: una delle tante forme di trasmissione di conoscenza. Se funziona, la tecnologia non si percepisce ed è la conoscenza, la sostanza
quindi, a ridiventare protagonista. Non c’è sostituzione alcuna del libro col computer, perché è assolutamente ferma la convinzione che una sana lettura è indispensabile e insostituibile per qualsiasi
tipo di crescita e di formazione, ma c’è consapevolezza del linguaggio multimediale come realtà del
tempo che stiamo vivendo. È infatti attraverso il nostro presente che si può capire il passato: come
dice Gérard Lenclud, «Non sono i padri a generare i figli ma i figli che generano i propri padri. Non
è il passato a produrre il presente, ma il presente che modella il suo passato».
www.movingideas.it è il sito che affianca il libro: oltre a raccogliere documenti di supporto e
file in audio e video in continuo aggiornamento, intende condividere i momenti di riflessione e creatività che le esperienze didattiche del testo suggeriranno a tutti quelli che lo leggeranno e vorranno
usarlo.
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CONTENTS
TELLING THE ORIGINS
p.
11
• HERE THEY ARE!
»
13
• HOW ABOUT THE LANGUAGE?
»
21
• THE LITERATURE OF THE TIME
»
23
»
27
• WAS EVERYTHING DARK?
»
29
• GEOFFREY CHAUCER
»
32
• ENTERTAINMENT DURING THE MIDDLE AGES
»
36
• THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
»
43
TELLING THE RENAISSANCE
»
51
• THE TUDOR PERIOD
»
53
»
54
• THE CULTURAL REBIRTH
»
59
• SHAKESPEARE THE DRAMATIST
»
63
Shakespeare through Art
»
63
Shakespeare through Music
»
73
Shakespeare at the Cinema
»
81
Shakespeare in Italy
»
89
Master Shakespeare
»
98
TELLING THE MIDDLE AGES
Who Were They?
9
• WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1564-1616
p.
103
»
104
• SHAKESPEARE THE SONNETEER
»
105
• CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 1564-1593
»
108
• JOHN DONNE 1572-1631
»
113
»
117
• AFTER JAMES I STUART
»
119
• THE CULTURAL BACKGROUND
»
120
• JOHN MILTON 1608-1674
»
122
»
128
»
130
»
134
Who’s Who?
WHAT HAPPENED UP TO THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
Is Paradise Lost original or isn’t?
• THE RESTORATION DRAMA
CONCLUSION
10
Telling the Origins
1
Telling the Origins
Here they are!
A plane and a telescope at our disposal can become
our best adventure companions for an incredible but real
voyage back in time.
If we had the opportunity to fly over certain zones of Great
Britain and Ireland, we could see the places where the first
inhabitants of these wonderful islands really lived: numerous
and substantial marks of their ancient presence still exist
today, and it seems as if the old populations wanted that
these marks could continue the enchanting task of telling
their story to anyone who shows the desire to listen to it.
So, starting our journey from Italy and reaching Great
Britain from the south, with no intention of conquest as our
Romans had, but with a great pleasure to know more, let’s
focalize our attention on the zone around Dorchester, and
let’s admire Maiden Castle.
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It’s not a castle, as the name would seem to say: it’s the largest and
most famous Iberian fortress in Britain, once a centre of religious, political
and economic power whose construction began around 3000 BC. What can
still be seen today is a hilltop of nearly 47 acres as high as 80 feet: ditches
and banks around it form a set of concentric rings which were obstacles to
any attacking forces. Iberians felt safe inside their territory and little by little
Maiden Castle became a flourishing town with large huts made of stone and
wood, with granaries, stores and other buildings connected among them by
gravel paths.
The dark-haired inhabitants spent their time working metal and pottery,
making helpful utensils for mead and beer, and practicing agriculture.
Besides, they were able to produce golden ornaments which accompanied
them in their graves: in fact they were buried in mounds, usually with a
cup next to their bodies. Excavations carried out in the 20th century by the
English archeologist Robert Wheeler uncovered the bodies of 38 Iron Age
warriors. They are supposed to have been buried by their Roman winners: the
evidence of a Roman attack is given by the discovery of a Roman spearhead
embedded in one of the men’s spine which we can still see nowadays in the
Dorchester Museum.
It is also believed that the Iberians built Stonehenge, the temple of «rare
blue stones», as John Fowles, a British writer of the XX century, defined
it. So, let’s carry on with our journey and move to the right, over Salisbury
Plain, where the greatest spectacle of engineering of the time is waiting for
us.
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Stonehenge is a group of huge stone slabs placed in a concentric circle.
How it was built is still a mystery: probably the stones were taken from a
site in western Wales; probably they were dragged on rollers and sledges
and then loaded onto rafts; probably they were carried by water along the
south coast of Wales and up the rivers Avon, Frome and, at the end, Wylye;
probably a lot of people worked to lift each stone weighing up to five tons.
“God knows what their use was” wrote the British diarist Samuel Pepys. A
lot of theories have been emerging: it could have been built as a religious
and ritual site or as an astrologic observatory. Thousands of people come
during the summer and winter solstice when some of the stones align with
the sun’s rays at sunrise and at sunset. Other theories are based on the
hypothesis of a primitive tribunal or of a market-place: probably, who knows,
Stonehenge had all these functions throughout the years since it was ‘active’
for at least 17 centuries. In 2002 archaeologists unearthed the remains of
a Bronze Age archer and, in 2003, about half a mile from the archer, they
found the remains of four adults and two children: they are believed to have
lived around 2300 BC and they may have been involved in building the
monument.
Stonehenge could have also been the temple of the Druids, the Celts’
priests, the new conquering tribes of Britain from north-west Germany.
The Celts subdued the Iberians and settled both in Britain and in Ireland.
So, let’s follow the chronological order of the historical events and let our
plane reach the archaeological Irish site of Tara, one of the most famous of
the Celtic royal residences where tribal rites were performed.
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What appears in the south-east of Ireland is the sacred hilltop of 6000
years ago, famous because it was the seat of the High Kings of Ireland.
Inside its oval shape, among ditches and banks, we can find a standing
stone, the Stone of Destiny or the Coronation Stone, where the High Kings
were crowned. According to the legend, the would-be king had to touch
the stone: if, at his touch, the stone shrieked to the point of being heard
all over Ireland, he was appointed as new king. The Celts both in Ireland
and England lived in clans and there was no discrimination between the
sexes: the women sometimes ruled large tribes and fought their battles from
their chariots. The most famous of them was Boadicea who had become
queen of her tribe after her husband’s death and sacrificed her life during
the Roman conquest. A very strong personality, even more extraordinary
because remember: we are talking about the 1st century A.D.!
This trip back in time proceeds by meeting the people who were the
following conquerors of Britain, the Romans. Well, not the Romans guided
by Julius Caesar – they failed their conquest twice: the first time in 55 BC
and the second time the following year – but the Romans under Emperor
Claudius conquered Britain in 43-47 A.D. They tried to conquer Caledonia,
too, the modern Scotland, but this time they didn’t succeed.
If we look towards the North of the island, we can find evidence of their
conquest in the zone which today is called Hadrian’s Wall Country where
there are long stretches of this wall that the Romans used as a boundary and
for military defense between those countries which later became England
and Scotland.
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Telling the Origins
Hadrian’s Wall, long 118 km, was built following the orders of Emperor
Hadrian in 122 AD and it is still nowadays of great historical importance. It was
included in the Unesco’s World Heritage List in 1987 because the technology
used to build it is evidence of a significant stage in human history. Life must
often have been difficult for the Roman soldiers, but the camps along the
wall provided for the spiritual and physical well-being of their inhabitants with
temples, granaries, hospitals, and baths. The Romans brought to Britain
their ideas of administration and civilization. They organized three different
kinds of towns: the coloniae, formed by Romans; the municipia, where
the inhabitants where given Roman citizenship; the civitates, the old Celtic
tribal capitals. They surely made the fortune of London by concentrating in
that area their great roads and by organizing a considerable commerce with
the Continent thanks to the navigability of the river Thames, so fundamental
in the economic history of the city. The British Roman Period ended when
the Roman Empire began to collapse and Emperor Honorious, in 409, was
called from Britain to defend Rome. So the Romano-British or, as we can
say, the Romanized Celts, were left alone to fight against the Germanic
tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, who reached England at the
beginning of the 5th century. These invasions left significant traces, even
more important than the future Norman conquest did.
Can we have a tangible proof of this new British phase? Of course we
can! Let’s direct our plane towards the east coast, over Suffolk, and let’s get
ready to admire Sutton Hoo, a cemeterial site of the 6th and early 7th centuries
overlooking Woodbridge from the Eastern Bank of the River Deben.
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In 1939 excavations brought to light the richest tomb ever discovered in
Britain: an Anglo-Saxon ship containing the treasure of Redwald, the King
of East Anglia. What survived in small pieces was reconstructed only after
years of meticulous work in the British Museum Laboratory. As there are
no authentic chronicles of the Saxon Conquest, this discovery has been of
primary importance to historians because it illuminated a period of English
history which is still nowadays a mixture of myth and historical facts. The
runic alphabet they had was not suitable to write annals and record their
history, it served only for a name on a sword or on a stone.
The Anglo-Saxons pushed most Britons into the mountains in the west,
in Weallas, or Wales, that is ‘the land of foreigners’ as they called it; others
were compelled to run to the north of the country. They gave the larger part
of Britain its new name, England, ‘the land of the Angles’, and divided it into
seven kingdoms, the Heptarchy: East Angles, East Saxons, South Saxons,
Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, and West Saxons. The last three became the
largest and the most powerful kingdoms by the middle of 7th century. They
were devoted to a Germanic religion which advanced while Christianity lost
its territories and retreated to Wales, part of Scotland and Ireland.
Christianity regained its former importance when the Roman monk
Augustine, who later became the first Archibishop of Canterbury, and the
Celtic monks, who left their monasteries, divulgated Christian teachings. This
meant the return of learning to the island, and the beginning of a political
and legal civilization based on the arts of reading and writing in the Latin
alphabet.
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As the journey described so far could be very expensive to realize, let’s
‘travel’ using Google Earth, a software which displays satellite images of
the Earth’s surface. This way we can discover a lot of other archaeological
evidences of these very ancient times of which the more we know about,
the more they become essential to understand the development of British
culture. Take notes of your discoveries and share them with your class.
Go to Google Images this time and download as many photos as you
can. Use them to create an album keeping in mind the chronological order
which these ancient and charming monuments were built in.
Experience a webquest: if you want to know more (I hope you do!), visit
the websites I suggest and surf. Build a simple table of information or some
electronic slides or use whatever multimedia device you know to work out
what you find. It could be an individual or a cooperative work, it depends
on how many people would like to work with you and how many hours of
your time you would like to spend on this. You’ll see: you will be involved in
this challenge which surely will improve your ability in distinguishing what
is interesting for you and what is not. The websites are:
Maiden Castle:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Castle,_Dorset
• http://www.historic-uk.com/DestinationsUK/MaidenCastle.htm
• http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.15733
Stonehenge:
• http://www.stonehenge.co.uk/
• http://www.britannia.com/history/h7.html
• http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/stonehenge-decoded3372/Overview
Hill of Tara:
• http://www.megalithicireland.com/Hill%20of%20Tara.htm
• http://www.knowth.com/tara.htm
• http://www.heritageireland.ie/en/MidlandsEastCoast/HillofTara/
Hadrian’s Wall:
• http://www.hadrians-wall.org/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/hadrian_gallery.shtml
• http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/430
Sutton Hoo:
• http://www.archaeology.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=vi
ew&id=26&Itemid=30
• http://csis.pace.edu/grendel/projs4a/sutton.htm
• http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/families_and_children/online_
tours/sutton_hoo/sutton_hoo.aspx
Great Britain continued to be a land of conquest: between the 8th
and the 9th centuries, king Alfred the Great of Wessex had to face the
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Telling the Origins
Vikings, tribes from Norway and Denmark. They soon occupied much
of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia but Alfred defeated them with
determination and courage. After his death, the Danes prevailed over the
country and their king Canute became king of England in 1016. But the
Anglo-Saxons didn’t surrender and reconquered the throne of England in
1042 with Edward the Confessor and then with his successor, Harold
II, who was the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Harold II’s reign lasted less
than one year because of another conquest, from Normandy this time,
whose duke William, called the Conqueror, won the Battle of Hasting in
1066 becoming king of England.
There is a tapestry, the Bayeux Tapestry, which describes some of
the facts relating to this last conquest in a series of scenes. It is a wool
embroidery made in eight natural colours on cloth of raw flax 70 metres
long and 50 centimetres high. The Tapestry could have had the function
of propaganda to celebrate the Norman victory and has an inestimable
documentary value because it gives information on clothing, castles,
ships and the living conditions of those times. Someone thinks it was
Matilda, William’s wife, who created it with the help of her court ladies;
others assert it was commissioned by William’s half brother Odo, Bishop
of Bayeux Cathedral, where the Tapestry was found and is still kept.
If you go to http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaB-NNyM8o you can
enjoy an animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry which starts halfway
through the original work at the first appearance of Halley’s Comet and
concludes at the Battle of Hasting.
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On the websites www.bayeuxtapestry.org.uk/ and http://hastings1066.
com/baythumb.shtml you can see the tapestry divided in sections with
the captions in Latin which explain the meaning of what is represented on
it. Translate every sentence in English: what would you like to add to the
original description?
Finish your immersion into the Norman world by enjoying yourself:
create a tapestry of your own with the help of the instructions which the
website www.adgame-wonderland.de/type/bayeux.php suggests: think
about a new story to set in our modern times whose characters are the
men of the days of long ago.
How about the language?
How did the people speak in the land which gave origin to the most
widely used language in the world?
English is the result of the linguistic contributions collected during the
numerous invasions and mass migrations over the centuries. We have
to consider Celtic, spoken by the early inhabitants of the island, Latin,
introduced by the Roman conquerors, the dialects of the Germanic and
Scandinavian tribes and the language from Norman France. Within
this variegated mixture of different tongues, historians distinguish three
main periods and three different stages in the development of English:
• 449-1100
¶ Old English or Anglo-Saxon;
• 1100-1500
¶ Middle English;
• 1500 to the present ¶ Modern English.
OLD ENGLISH WAS
CHARACTERIZED BY:
¸ Inflections;
¸ Cases for nouns and adjectives
(the modern Saxon genitive is an
inheritance of this period);
¸ The an ending for infinitives (e.g.
gongan, the modern to go);
¸ Spelling and pronunciation
completely different from modern
English;
¸ The runic alphabet which they used
until the conversion to Christianity.
Middle ENGLISH RECORDED
THESE VARIATIONS:
¸ Words changed their accent which
tended to shift to the first syllable
and the final vowels began to
converge in one vowel, the e;
¸ Old English inflections were
replaced by prepositions and
adjectives began to be no longer
inflected;
¸ The plural of nouns was marked by
the (e)s ending;
¸ The definite article took a single
form;
¸ The infinitive began to develop as
the to modern form.
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The Norman conquest brought great changes in vocabulary (in several
fields: food, religion, law, government and military life) but also a linguistic
division among people: French was the language of the upper classes,
Latin remained the language of religion and learning while English survived
as the common speech. Thanks to the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, Middle
English emerged as a literary language and by the middle of the 15th
century the new form of English was spoken by all classes as a national
language.
MODERN ENGLISH WAS MARKED BY:
¸ Changes in pronunciation - the final e, which was often
pronounced in the time of Chaucer, became silent in the
Shakespearian period;
¸ The spread of education and the study of the classics new words from Greek and Latin, from Italian, Spanish and
French were introduced.
From 1700 we can talk of a language which expressed the order
and the stability of its people. Dictionaries and grammar books began
to appear. Just because language is the mirror of the society to whom
it gives voice, English vocabulary became richer and richer while the
British Empire grew in power and trading exchanges with the colonies
became more frequent. Scientific and technological lexicon as well as
travel and communication lexicon developed following the progress in
these respective fields of use.
One of the most characteristic elements of the new language which
contributed to the worldwide use of Modern English was the functional
shift, that is the interchangeability of various parts of speech - a noun
can be an adjective or an adverb or a verb: everything becomes simpler,
doesn’t it?
Find examples of the functional shift on your monolingual dictionary and
write down all the information you get on your workbook. Here are some
suggestions: mean, fine, well. How many sentences can you produce with
them?
If the word in general fascinates you, consult the linguistic atlas in the
University Library nearest to you and start a linguistic trip around the
words which affected you the most.
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The literature of the time
And now let’s concentrate on the following word:
BEOWULF
What is it? Have you ever heard of it? Probably most of you will say: «It
is a videogame!». This is a good answer: the videogame Beowulf has been
circulating for a couple of years but, trust me, Beowulf is the hero of an epic
poem of Anglo-Saxon times. Don’t be surprised by that! The games you
play with nowadays are very often influenced by past historical periods.
Jumps in time have always had a particular taste and, in the videogame
era, thousands of years of history can run through your fingers thanks to
a joystick. Beowulf was a young legendary Scandinavian hero who fought
two gigantic monsters, Grendel and his mother, in order to bring happiness
to Hrothgar’s kingdom in Denmark. The poem is about 3200 lines long and
it was written down after a period of oral transmission. At the end of the
story Beowulf is an old king mortally wounded in a battle against a firebreathing dragon who was trying to destroy his country. In the videogame
the sequence of events has been translated in a sequence of tasks to be
worked out with very good step by step problem solving abilities. It’s your
habitat: you like to identify yourself with the main character and face the
obstacles. Add to this the charm of motion pictures and that’s why you
are always glued to a screen. Surely the code of images is more direct
than the code of words but you must never stop enjoying the magic of the
written words and the musicality they communicate.
So, study carefully the passage below taken from the modern translation
of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. You
can listen to the poet himself reading some passages of this poem on the
url http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/audio.htm.
[…]
Mighty and canny
Hygelac’s kinsman was keenly watching
For the first move the monster would make.
Nor did the creature keep him waiting
But struck suddenly and started in;
He grabbed and mauled a man on his bench,
Bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood
And gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body
Utterly lifeless, eaten up
Hand and foot. Venturing closer,
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His talon was raised to attack Beowulf
Where he lay on the bed, he was bearing in
With open claw when the alert hero’s
Comeback and armlock forestalled him utterly.
The captain of evil discovered himself
In a handgrip harder than anything
He had ever encountered in any man
On the face of the earth. Every bone in his body
Quailed and recoiled, but he could not escape.
[…]
The story goes
That as the pair struggled, mead-benches were smashed
And sprung off the floor, gold fittings and all.
Before then, no Shielding elder would believe
There was any power or person upon earth
Capable of wrecking their horn-rigged hall
Unless the burning embrace of a fire
Engulf it in flame. Then an extraordinary
Wail arose, and bewildering fear
Came over the Danes. Everyone felt it
Who heard that cry as it echoed off the wall,
A God-cursed scream and strain of catastrophe,
The howl of the loser, the lament of the hell-serf
Keening his wound. He was overhelmed,
Manacled tight by the man who of all men
Was foremost and strongest in the days of this life.
It seems the description of a scene of the videogame you are familiar
with, doesn’t it? Choose some of its words and expressions and write a
commentary that fits well to one of your favourite scenes. Record yourself
and check your pronunciation!
Beowulf is also a film made by Robert Zemeckis in 2007. He used
a very innovative technique for his work, the 3D motion capture: he
directed real actors whose bodies were scattered with sensors and then
he employed their movements as traces for digital processing. Surely the
technological devices underline an enormous distance between our time
and Anglo-Saxon times, but the desire to defeat Evil so Good can reign,
has always existed and, unfortunately, it has not always been fulfilled.
What’s Good and Evil in your personal life? What’s Good and Evil in the
society of today? Which differences and similarities can you find between
the eternal struggle described in the passage you have just read and the
one we go on living in our daily reality?
Who wrote Beowulf? Nobody knows. The only copy of it is contained in
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the Nowell Codex, the forth manuscript of Anglo-Saxon literature which
dates back to the XV century and is kept in the British Library in London.
Other three manuscripts preserve what has survived of Old English
literature: the Junius (or the Caedmon) manuscript, an illustrated poetic
anthology whose compilation began in about 1000 AD and is now in the
Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford; the Exeter Book, which took
its name from the homonymous cathedral where it arrived in 1072 as a gift
from its first bishop; the Vercelli Book, a mix of poetry and prose probably
copied in the late X century and stored in the Cathedral of Vercelli, in the
North of Italy.
25
Telling the Middle Ages
2
Was everything dark?
It was in the Sixteenth and in the Seventeenth centuries that scholars
coined the words medium ævum: they were convinced that civilization
reached an incomparable level of social and artistic perfection only thanks
to the Greeks and the Romans. The concept of the Middle Ages was born
in opposition to that of the golden age. They had to deny whatever was in
the middle just to link their times to that ancient world: it is for this reason
that the medieval centuries were branded as centuries of barbarism,
ignorance and absolutism. The Medieval men, actually, didn’t perceive
the break with the ancient world at all, and no one has ever considered
illiterate the period when Dante and Chaucer lived!
In the history of English Literature some consider the Middle Ages
the period of time which goes from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the 5th
century till the Tudors’ ascent to the throne of England in the late 15th
century; others point to the Norman conquest as the beginning of the
Middle Ages and they label this first period as the Dark Ages. George
Macaulay Trevelyan, one of the greatest British historians of the 20th
century, wondered in his History of England «Which is the true Middle
Ages, the barbarism or the civilization? We may answer – ‘both’. The one
was developed out of the other and the two continued side by side». We
mustn’t forget that cathedrals and universities were built during the Middle
Ages, that the feudal system was thought to give order to the society,
commerce grew considerably and coins began to circulate. It was during
this period that the middle class, both urban and rural, started to develop
a consciousness of its own and the whole of England began to emerge
like a distinct nation.
Courtly love, chivalry, loyalty, sacrifice, hardship and patriotism are the
ideals that characterized those years and that still today represent models
that make us think. Even the world of rock music of our very recent 1970s
looked back to this period with admiration: I’m thinking of the British group
Genesis and their Dancing with the Moonlit Knight, a song belonging
to the 1973 album Selling England by the Pound.
Let’s listen to it with our eyes shut so that its musicality, the notes and
Peter Gabriel’s voice, will carry us away: the beginning ‘a cappella’ is really
involving. The second time you listen, fill in the spaces in the text and try
to appreciate this song with its distinguishable medieval atmosphere:
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“Can you tell me where my country __________?”
Said the unifaun to his __________ love’s eyes.
“It lies with me!” __________ the Queen of Maybe
- For her merchandise, he __________ in his prize.
“Paper late!” cried a __________ in the crowd.
“Old man dies!” The __________ he left was signed ‘Old Father Thames’
- It seems __________ drowned;
Selling England by the pound.
Citizens of __________ & Glory,
Time goes by - it’s ‘the time of your __________’
Easy __________, sit you down.
Chewing through your Wimpey __________,
They eat __________ a sound;
Digesting England by the pound.
Young man says ‘you are what you eat’ - __________ well.
Old man says ‘you are what you wear’ - __________ well.
You know __________ you are, you don’t give a damn;
Bursting your belt that is __________ homemade sham.
The Captain leads his dance right on __________ the night
- Join __________ dance...
Follow on! Till the Grail sun __________ in the mould.
Follow on! Till the __________ is cold.
Dancing __________ with the moonlit knight,
Knights of the Green Shield stamp and __________.
There’s a fat old lady __________ the saloon;
Laying out the credit cards she __________ Fortune.
The deck is uneven __________ from the start;
All of their __________ are playing apart.
The Captain leads his dance right on __________ the night
- Join __________ dance...
Follow on! A Round Table-talking down we __________.
You’re the __________!
Off we go with. - You __________ the hobbyhorse,
I’ll play the __________.
We’ll tease __________ bull
Ringing round & loud, loud & round.
Follow on! With a twist of the __________we go.
Follow on! Till the __________ is cold.
Dancing __________ with the moonlit knight,
Knights of the Green Shield stamp and __________.
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Could you tell which words have a medieval flavor and why?
Not all the words in the song are easy to understand but here are some
notes that the journalist and photographer Armando Gallo, author of
books on Genesis, wrote to reveal the numerous puns hidden in the text:
Unifaun: gioco di parole che sta a rappresentare la vecchia Inghilterra
storica. Da Uniform = uniforme militare, unicorn = unicorno, faun = cerbiatto
o anche fauna in generale.
Queen of Maybe: da Queen of May = Regina di maggio che nell’antica
Inghilterra rappresentava l’inizio della buona stagione e l’augurio di un
buon raccolto. Qui è la regina di Maybe = forse. Oggi la regina di maggio
in Inghilterra è usata solo per reclamizzare prodotti, e questa “Regina del
Forse” rappresenta l’Inghilterra moderna.
Citizens of Hope and Glory: è il popolo inglese. Dall’inno Land of
hope and glory.
Wimpey: doppio significato tra wimpey = famosa società edilizia inglese
e wimpy = famosi ristoranti d’hamburger. La pronuncia è la stessa.
Grail: è il calice di Gesù Cristo nell’ultima cena che secondo la
leggenda venne portato in Inghilterra alla corte di Re Artù. Rappresenta
lo splendore del periodo.
Knights of the Green Shield: Anche in questa frase viene usato un
doppio significato. Oggi in Inghilterra i Green Shield stamps sono bollinipunti premio equivalenti ai nostri punti Star o Mira Lanza.
Laying out the credit cards she plays Fortune: L’indovina d’oggi non
usa più carte da gioco, ma carte di credito per saper dire la fortuna.
You play the hobbyhorse, I’ll play the fool: Il cavallo a dondolo e il
pazzo sono i personaggi della Morris dance, tradizionali danze inglesi.
The text has bitter meanings: it is put in evidence the contrast between
a past rich in moral values towards which the authors would like to tend,
and a present full of materialistic ideals from which to go away. The future
is full of doubts and uncertainties, it is the reign, exactly, of the Queen of
Maybe.
Considering what you already know thanks to what you studied in
History and other Literatures, what idea do you have about the Middles
Ages? Write a brief report of about 200 words.
Regarding the Grail quoted in the song, would you like to know
something about King Arthur, the leader of the Knights of the Round
Table? Rewinding the tape of literary history, there are a lot of books
which tell about him: e.g. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
by Mark Twain of 1889, which is a parody of the technological progress
of the 19th century set in the fantastic chivalrous world; Idylls of the King
by Alfred Tennyson of 1859 in which Arthur is the supreme model of
heroism and rectitude; and The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser of
1590, in which Arthur appears as the embodiment of all the chivalrous
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virtues. It belongs to our times the theory according to which the name
Arthur derives from the Roman name Artorius who was a Breton military
leader who fought bravely during the wars against the Saxon invaders
around 500. The round table, with a diameter of 5.5 meters, kept in the
Winchester castle and considered for centuries Arthur and his knights’
round table, was built for Henry III or Edward I: in 1976, in fact, the carbon14 test confirmed that its wood came from XIII century trees. Without
any doubts the inhabitants of Wales, Cornwall and Britain tried to idealize
Arthur’s figure as the king par excellence, but the real creator of the legend
of king Arthur was Geoffrey of Monmouth who, between 1135 and 1139
wrote Historia Regum Britanniae with the intention of providing the British
with a national hero like Charlemagne to increase the greatness of the
rising Britain. Monmouth’s Historia has given us data and circumstances
to be handed down and has inspired most of the stories which we know
today not only in literary forms but also in films as Knights of the Round
Table 1953 directed by Richard Thorpe and the recent King Arthur by
Antoine Fuqua 2004; in painting as Gustave Doré’s illustrations 1868
and Prince Arthur and the Faerie Queen 1778 by Johann Heinrich
Füssli, and in comic strips as Martin Mystère created by Alfredo
Castelli and the various King Arthurs drawn by Disney: everyone agrees
that Arthur was not only the personification of a conqueror but, above all,
the personification of a civilizer, a champion of bravery, justice, courtesy,
in a word an example to follow for the future generations.
Let’s learn now how to find and process data. The aim of the following
lab activity is to organize a table where you will insert three types of data
referring to King Arthur: the ones which are certain; the ones which are
uncertain but based on reasonable theories; and those ones which belong
only to legend. One hour of lab research could be sufficient to gather a
good number of data from internet; another hour, in class or at home, could
be useful to work out the information you found. Would you like to work
out the data in a more creative way? Tell the history of the half-mythical
King Arthur and his knights through the images you will find in internet:
pictures, film-shots or musical-shots inspired by him, book covers, comic
pages, anything which represents what you think is important for your
tale: are you ready to start this photo story?
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
As we said, this is also the period of Geoffrey Chaucer and his
Canterbury Tales, which can be considered a picture gallery of his time.
Detailed descriptions of feudal, religious and townspeople are offered by
the poet from different points of view: sometimes he emphasizes what
the pilgrims wear, sometimes what they do or think. Chaucer tells about a
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pilgrimage, a purifying trip towards salvation from London to Canterbury:
the first town is linked to wordly pleasure, the second one is linked to the
holy figure of Thomas Becket, the man who paid with his life his refusal to
comply to King Henry II’s projects to control the Church.
The pilgrimage of the Canterbury Tales begins…
When in April the sweet showers fall
And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all
The veins are bathed in liquor of such power
As brings about the engendering of the flower,
When also Zephyrus with his sweet breath
Exhales an air in every grove and heath
Upon the tender shoots, and the young sun
His half-course in the sign of the Ram has run,
And the small fowl are making melody
That sleep away the night with open eye
(So nature pricks them and their heart engages)
Then people long to go on pilgrimages
And palmers long to seek the stranger strands
Of far-off saints, hallowed in sundry lands,
And specially, from every shire’s end
Of England, down to Canterbury they wend
To seek the holy blissful martyr, quick
To give his help to them when they were sick.
(Modern English Version edited by N.Coghill)
Close your books and form groups of four: listen to the dictation of the
lines you have just read and write. Then re-group with different partners and
check what you wrote adding the information you missed from your new
partners. Then listen once more and check again with a new group: did you
get all the lines you have on your textbook? Try again from your first group.
Neither the peasants nor the upper aristocracy are represented in this
poem, which is allegoric and realistic at the same time: the peasants had
no money to spend in travelling, the aristocracy wasn’t interested in sharing
its time with other social classes. Chaucer imagined to gather 30 people
at the Tabard Inn in London. The host of the inn, Harry Bailley, suggests
that every pilgrim should tell two stories while going to Canterbury, and
two coming back. He says that there will be a prize for the best story as
well as a penalty for anyone who gives up. It’s a nice idea, isn’t it?
Why don’t we imagine to do the same thing at school? Everyone of
you surely has a request to make to the headmaster! So, create on it a
story to tell going from our class to the headmaster’s office (it’s a very
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hard pilgrimage!) and another story while coming back to class: the nicest
story will win, but it also has to convince the headmaster to accept the
requests you made!
Canterbury Tales remained unfinished, only 24 tales were written, and
Canterbury was not reached, but Chaucer’s best points go beyond his
pre-arranged plan:
• He was a nationalist and he contributed in making England a united
nation: he gave it a national language, the language he used to write
his work, Middle English, which was the language understood by
the people, by those who needed to approach learning and culture,
till now only the heritage of nobles and churchmen. When he died,
in 1400, he was buried in Westminster Abbey in what has been
called “Poets’ Corner” since then.
• He was a person who experienced what today we call a plurilingual
reality: his belonging to a wealthy middle-class family allowed him to
know French and Italian and to study Latin. He lived in close contact
with the royal family who gave him diplomatic missions, and thanks
to that he could travel in France and in Italy and have the possibility
to study Dante’s, Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s works, as well as to
enrich his Latin culture.
• He was undoubtedly also a European man. He planned his Canterbury
Tales thinking about the many people he had met during his life and
put in evidence the individualization of every person within a group
identification. Here we can find the concept of the defence of one’s
own personality inside a community and, at the same time, of the
diversity considered as a richness to share; there is, definitely, the
European Union motto, «united in diversity», proclaimed officially
by the European Parliament on 4th May 2000. To the medievalist
Jacques Le Goff the Middle Ages were a decisive period for the
birth, the childhood and the youth of Europe, even if the men of those
centuries didn’t have the aim nor the thought of building a united
Europe.
• Chaucer was also a feminist: he mixed female and male characters
to underline the new importance women were assuming within the
growing middle classes. Let’s read The Wife of Bath from Canterbury
Tales in the translation in Modern English by David Wright.
There was a business woman, from near Bath,
But, more’s the pity, she was a bit deaf;
So skilled a clothmaker, that she outdistanced
Even the weavers of Ypres and Ghent.
In the whole parish there was not a woman
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Who dared precede her at the almsgiving,
And if there did, so furious was she,
That she was put out of all charity.
Her headkerchiefs were of the finest weave,
Ten pounds and more they weighed, I do believe,
Those that she wore on Sundays on her head.
Her stockings were of finest scarlet red,
Very tightly laced; shoes pliable and new.
Bold was her face, and handsome; florid too.
She had been respectable all her life,
And five times married, that’s to say in church,
Not counting other loves she’d had in youth,
Of whom, just now, there is no need to speak.
And she had thrice been to Jerusalem;
Had wandered over many a foreign stream;
And she had been at Rome, and at Boulogne,
St James of Compostella, and Cologne;
She knew all about wandering – and straying:
For she was gap-toothed, if you take my meaning.
Comfortably on an ambling horse she sat,
Well-wimpled, wearing on her head a hat
That might have been a shield in size and shape;
A riding-skirt round her enormous hips,
Also a pair of sharp spurs on her feet.
In company, how she could laugh and joke!
No doubt she knew of all the cures for love,
For at that game she was a past mistress.
Classify in Venn’s diagram of the following page the words of the text
in the four semantic fields CLOTHES – BODY – RELIGION – LAITY. Did
you find only words with specific lexical features or do they also have any
shared features?
Consider the whole diagram and work out a short written or oral
paragraph to highlight the differences and the similarities between a
Medieval woman and a woman of our times.
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CLOTHES
RELIGION
LAITY
BODY
The influence from the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio on
Canterbury Tales is clear not only in the structure but also in the content.
The Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini dedicated two of his films to
these two poems: Il Decameron in 1970 and I racconti di Canterbury in
1971. Catch in the net images, videos and parts from Chaucer’s and
Boccaccio’s works and put them together according to the idea you like
to concentrate on.
Entertainment during the Middle Ages
There was no radio, no television, neither cinemas nor internet, but
surely the people of the Middle Ages knew how to enjoy themselves.
One form of entertainment of the time was to recite ballads, popular
narrative poems which were acted or sung in alehouses and at fairs,
often accompanied by instruments. The language was simple and this
allowed to concentrate on the plot; in every stanza the same words were
repeated to help the memorization of the text. Some artists during the
centuries have put to music old texts and had big successes of audience.
Think about, for example, Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel, an
American group of 1970s: cinema lovers will remember their ballad as
part of the soundtrack of the film The Graduate of 1967 by Mike Nichols.
Let’s read it.
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Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary & thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Without no seams nor needlework
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
Tell her to find me an acre of land
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Tell her to reap it in a sickle of leather
And to gather it all in a bunch of heather
She once was a true love of mine
Canticle
On the side of a hill in the deep forest green
Tracing a sparrow on snow-crested ground
Blankets and bedclothes a child of the mountains
Sleeps unaware of the clarion call
On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves
Washed is the ground with so many tears
A soldier cleans and polishes a gun
War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions
Generals order their soldiers to kill
And to fight for a cause they’ve long ago forgotten.
It belongs to the album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme of
1966. Now have a look at one of the versions which can be found in the
numerous collections of popular music sung by the English folk-singer
and pioneer of the recovered popular traditions Martin Carthy.
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
For once she was a true love of mine
Have her make me a cambric shirt
Without no seam nor fine needle work
And then she’ll be a true love of mine
Tell her to weave it in a sycamore wood lane
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And gather it all with a basket of flowers
Have her wash it in yonder dry well
where water ne’er sprung nor drop of rain fell
Have her find me an acre of land
Between the sea foam and over the sand
Plow the land with the horn of a lamb
Then sow some seeds from north of the dam
Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather
And gather it all in a bunch of heather
If she tells me she can’t, I’ll reply
Let me know that at least she will try
Love imposes impossible tasks
Though not more than any heart asks
And I must know she’s a true love of mine
Dear, when thou has finished thy task
Come to me, my hand for to ask
For thou then art a true love of mine
As you can notice, there is a part in Simon & Garfunkel’s version,
Canticle, completely different in content from the medieval ballad. The
images of the war in Vietnam in 1960s replace the ones of Scarborough
Fair in Yorkshire which lasted 45 days a year, from the middle of August to
the end of September. What they have in common is a message to trust to
a traveller or a merchant or a minister of peace with the hope it will arrive
to destination.
Why don’t ministers of peace always succeed? Do you know someone
who fought or is fighting for peace in the world? Tell the class.
Another form of entertainment of the time was the theatre. In England,
as in ancient Greece, the theatre represented the primary need to observe
and depict humanity. So, not only a way to give and get pleasure but also
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an important and thoughtful means to help the understanding of man and
the world around him.
The first form of theatre took place in church, which, at that time, was
the only place where most people met. During the religious functions,
some passages from the Gospel were explained with the comments of
the priests who began to speak in vernacular and no longer in Latin in
order to be understood by everyone.
But very soon churches became very small places for the development
of the holy representations: the audience was increasing more and more
and there were limitations in subject matter too. The theatre acquired its
own autonomy little by little: profane subjects found their space on the
stages built in the courtyard of the churches and, later, with the introduction
of the celebration of Corpus Domini, the courtyard too was considered
unsuitable to host such solemn and magnificent events. The passage to
the square was consequent: here the performance was assigned to well
known actors, no longer clergymen, and the theatrical machine becomes
rich with trapdoors, pitfalls, cranes and smoke to simulate resurrections,
falls in Hell, flying angels and infernal caves. Everything was planned on
a paper, even the position of the audience and the arrangement of the
scenery, as you can see from the manuscript “The Castle of Perseverance”
kept in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
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After 1300, the “men of theatre” were those people who, united in trade
guilds, organized the performances and thought about the building and
the furnishing of the scenes. They were generally paid for their services,
though they were not still regarded as professional actors.
Find the etymology of these words: theatre, drama, to play, profane,
actor. Do you think that theatre has kept his magic with the passing of
time or not?
During the 13th, the 14th and the 15th centuries, the Mystery or Miracle
cycles, generally called Miracle Plays, came into being. They were
grouped into four cycles by the names of the towns where they were
probably performed: Chester, York, Coventry and Wakefield. Very often,
in fact, movable stage wagons called pageants were used to bring
the theatrical representations to as many people as they could. These
pageants were drawn by horses that stopped at appointed places in the
town – market places, next to the town halls, or the bishops’ residences
– to perform the play.
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As you can see from the picture above, they were made up of had two
floors: in the lower room the actor dressed, hidden by curtains, and in
the higher room, open on all four sides, they played. People used to stop
in front of a pageant to watch an episode they wanted to see, and since
each pageant was a fraction of the complete story, the audience used
to move from one pageant to another, they passed from one ‘page’ to
another, as the Latin origin of the word reminds us.
The Morality Plays were the next development in drama: the method
of staging was the same as in the Miracle Plays, but clearly the characters
were not taken from the Bible. They can be defined religious drama, too, but
whereas Miracles were concerned with biblical events, the Morality Plays
focused on the conflict between good and evil. It aimed not at teaching the
Holy Scriptures but in improving people’s moral conduct. They were pure
abstractions of human vices and virtues and represented the first step
towards a psychological interpretation of character.
One of the most popular Morality Plays is Everyman, believed a
translation of the Flemish play Elckerlijk, first printed in 1495 which
had also been translated into the German Jedermann. The subject and
the themes it proposes are universal: it is the story of ‘Everyman’ and it
develops a progressive sense of abandonment and solitude during the
journey of redemption which he is invited to by Death on God’s order.
In his vain research for a travel mate, Everyman meets in turn his old
friends. He finds himself in the dramatic situation of the man left alone at
the mercy of events. It is at this point that Everyman’s catharsis develops:
he reflects upon the mistakes made in the past, due to a life devoted to
excesses and earthly pleasures, far from the Christian teachings. At the
end Everyman will find only two of the old forgotten friends of past times,
Knowledge and Good Deeds, who will be the friends that accompany him
during the journey not to eternal damnation but to his redemption.
Everyman. O Jesus, help! All hath forsaken me.
Good Deeds. Nay, Everyman; I will bide with thee,
I will not forsake thee indeed;
Thou shalt find me a good friend at need.
Everyman. Gramercy, Good Deeds! Now may I true friends see.
They have forsaken me, every one;
I loved them better than my Good Deeds alone.
knowledge, will ye forsake me also?
Knowledge. Yea, Everyman, when ye to Death shall go;
But not yet, for no manner of danger.
Everyman. Granmercy, Knowledge, with all my heart.
Knowledge. Nay, yet I will not from hence depart
Till I see where ye shall become.
Everyman. Methink, alas, that I must be gone
To make my reckoning and my debts pay,
For I see my time is nigh spent away.
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Take example, all ye that this do hear or see,
How they that I loved best do forsake me,
Except my Good Deeds that bideth truly.
Good Deeds. All earthly things is but vanity:
Beauty, Strenght, and Discretion do man forsake,
Foolish friends, and kinsmen, that fair spake.
All fleeth save Good Deeds, and that am I.
Everyman. Have mercy on me, God most mighty;
And stand by me, thou mother and maid, holy Mary.
Good Deeds. Fear not; I will speak for thee.
Everyman. Here I cry, God mercy.
Good Deeds. Short our end, and minish our pain;
Let us go and never come again.
Everyman. Into thy hands, Lord, my soul I commend;
Receive it, Lord, that it be not lost.
As thou me boughtest, so me defend,
And save me from the fiend’s boast,
That I may appear with that blessed host
That shall be saved at the day of doom.
In manus tua, of mights most
For ever, commendo spiritum meum.
(He sinks into his grave)
(in Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. by A.C.Cawley)
Do you notice any differences between the medieval vices and virtues
and the ones of the times you are living? Do vices and virtues have
subjective or objective meanings? Make a list of what you mean by vices
and virtues and share your opinions with the class.
Everyman’s anguishes have never been solved and still today we feel
them with the same intensity and the same suffering. That is: modern
man succeeded in going on the moon and in creating a virtual parallel
world, he invented what could be invented to shorten times and distances
but he hasn’t sorted out his existential problems and he hasn’t found any
answers to his most urgent doubts.
In 2006 the American writer Philip Roth wrote the novel Everyman
clearly inspired by the medieval play. The book is about a man who became
rich in advertisement and now is about to die. The body is abandoning
him, and even his dear ones are not near him, but the most heart-breaking
feeling which grips him every day more and more is the regret for his
mistakes: death comes nearer and he can’t do anything about it, he cannot
change. The protagonist’s name is never said, it could be ‘anyman’, every
single man who is looking for something that can give a meaning to a
temporary existence, who desperately is trying to reformulate his life.
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Read Roth’s book and write a back cover to convince readers to buy
and read it: what kind of reasons will you give to try to convince a teenager
like you to read Philip Roth’s novel?
The Historical Context
The distinctive mark of Norman England is feudalism. Trevelyan’s
words give us a clear idea of what it was: «It implies a fixed and legal
subordination of certain classes of society to certain others, to obtain
civilized order at the expense of barbaric anarchy».
The Norman kings organized, in fact, a strongly centralized state:
the force of the royal government was the loyalty of their warriors who
were repaid with lands and public offices and became disciplined vassals
controlled by the sovereign. Considering the ethnic-cultural aspect, the
reign was sharply divided between a small dominant Norman class and
the Anglo-Saxon majority of the subdued population. The relationship
of vassalage between the conquering warriors, responsible for the local
government, and the king, was the link that secured unity. The efficiency of
the administrative centralization realized by the Anglo-Norman monarchy
is testified by the compilation, in 1086, of the Domesday Book, a systematic
census of the population and of the economic resources of every village,
which provided the king a detailed picture of every possible fiscal revenue.
The book was drawn up in Latin, rich in Anglo-Saxon words and it is
one of the most important documents of the time for a historical, social,
economic and political understanding of the period.
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Did you know that Southern Italy was invaded by the Normans, too?
The map on the previous page illustrates all the Norman territories of the
XII century.
The Norman Richard the Guiscard was duke of Apulia and Calabria
and he controlled almost the whole of Southern Italy and part of Sicily.
His son, Richard II, united all the Norman domains of this area and was
crowned king of Sicily in 1130.
It could be interesting to gather information on this matter to trace
the links between Richard the Guiscard and William the Conqueror and
reconstruct their family trees. Thanks to Google, it will be possible to consult
the numerous official websites dedicated to Norman studies. Reflect on
the data you find: can you see any features we have in common? Your
work could be the beginning of something more demanding, for example
a European twinning or a partnership, virtual or real, between our land
and the England which, like us, lived the Norman experience.
Why, in your opinion, is the South of Italy poor and the English South
rich?
Surely Britain, before any other European State, began to develop a
nationhood based on laws and institutions. The Plantagenets, the new
dynasty descending from Matilda, William’s grandaughter and Geoffrey
Plantagenet’s wife from Anjou, reigned for over two centuries. Henry II,
their son, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine and
Count of Anjou, restored order, brought stability and improved military
organization and administration of justice: barons could pay shieldmoney instead of the military service due, so the king could pay welltrained mercenaries for his military expeditions. The knights, this way,
began to change into the figure of the later English country gentlemen.
In order to have full control on his people, Henry sent his royal judges
to all corners of England, where they applied the Common Law of the
Land, a system of law based on custom, comparisons, previous cases
and previous decisions, the basis of the modern English legal system. He
also introduced the Trial by Jury, whose members were witnesses of the
act even if they had no power of issuing a verdict: this way the king began
to put an end to the barbarous judgements characterized by physical and
inhuman tortures.
Think about it: a King who, in 1179, tried to stop barbarities of men
upon men and someone who, in 2006, allowed them in Guantanamo Jail.
Consult what prisoners have always denounced, the documents of the
Geneva Convention and the role of the ONU in these sad pages in the
history of mankind. Read, too, online articles which deal with this subject
and share the materials you get with your classmates.
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Henry II, through the Constitutions of Clarendon stated that
clergymen should first be tried in the king’s Court and then judged by
the Church Court. But Thomas Becket, the Archibishop of Canterbury,
former Chancellor and Henry II’s friend, opposed the king and, after an
exile of seven years, was murdered in his own Cathedral in 1170.
The Constitutions of Clarendon were abrogated and the Church made
Thomas a martyr and saint: pilgrims from all over England and Europe
visited his shrine in Canterbury Cathedral, as Chaucer told us in his
Canterbury Tales.
Henry II died and his first son, Richard I the Lion Heart, joined the
Third Crusade and left his brother John the government of the country. But
John Lackland lost almost all his French territories during the wars which
the barons and the people were obliged to finance through the payment
of very high taxes. In 1215 he was obliged to sign the Magna Carta, or
Great Charter of Liberties, recognizing some fundamental principles of
freedom for his people. This document, among other things, established:
12. No ‘scutage’ or
‘aid’ may be levied
in our kingdom
without its general
consent […]
39. No free man shall be
taken, or imprisoned, or
disseized, or outlawed,
or exiled, or in any way
harmed – nor will we
go upon or send upon
him – save by the lawful
judgment of his peers or
by the law of the land.
40. To none will
we sell, to none
deny or delay,
right or justice.
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The Charter placed the king and all future sovereigns under the law
and marked the first long step towards the constitutional monarchy of
later times.
Explore the British Library website: on the url http://www.bl.uk/treasures/
magnacarta/shockwave/magna_carta_broadband.html you can also find
an interesting timeline which shows the influence of the Magna Carta on
the British legislation through the centuries.
Rudyard Kipling, the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote a poem
commemorating the signing of the Magna Carta in Runnymede, Surrey,
on 15th June 1215:
What Say the Reeds at Runnymede?
At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
What say the reeds at Runnymede?
The lissom reeds that give and take,
That bend so far, but never break,
They keep the sleepy Thames awake
With tales of John at Runnymede.
Oh, hear the reeds at Runnymede:
‘You musn’t sell, delay, deny,
A freeman’s right or liberty.
It wakes the stubborn Englishry,
We saw ‘em roused at Runnymede!
When through our ranks the Barons came,
With little thought of praise or blame,
But resolute to play the game,
They lumbered up to Runnymede;
And there they launched in solid line
The first attack on Right Divine,
The curt uncompromising “Sign!’
They settled John at Runnymede.
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgment found
And passed upon him by his peers.
Forget not, after all these years,
The Charter signed at Runnymede.’
And still when mob or Monarch lays
Too rude a hand on English ways,
The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,
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Across the reeds at Runnymede.
And Thames, that knows the moods of kings,
And crowds and priests and suchlike things,
Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings
Their warning down from Runnymede!
Study the poem carefully: what historical elements can you find? Was
the <Right Divine> mentioned in line 18 seriously attacked by the Magna
Carta? Support what you say.
When John’s son, Henry III, became king, he was only nine, that’s
why England was governed by a group of barons. In 1258 Simon de
Montfort, Earl of Leicester, started a baronial revolt to create a structure
of permanent control over the king’s policy and in 1265 he summoned
a parliament, till then made up exclusively of nobles and high clergy,
formed by barons, knights and two representatives from each town. The
following king, Edward I, Henry III’s son, took into account the new rising
national consciousness and organized the Model Parliament. It included
representatives of the barons, the clergy, two knights from each county
and two citizens from each town: the first seeds of the two future Houses
of Parliament, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, were
there. The power of words was tracing its path in the history of humanity
but the difficulties to be knocked down were still many.
The fact that Edward II, a king who cared only for himself and his
own amusements, married Isabel, the daughter of Philip the Fair, King of
France, authorized his son, Edward III, the new English king, to claim the
French crown and this marked the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War.
Moreover, England experienced a terrible plague, the Black Death: the
fleas living on black rats which infested the ships trading with Europe and
the unhealthy living conditions both for the rich and for the poor wiped out
more than a third of the population.
These were also the years of a declared anticlerical feeling, a clear
attack to the wealth and corruption of the higher clergy. John Wycliff, the
leader of this movement known as Lollardy, demanded social reforms, but
the movement was later suppressed, and many supporters were put to
death. In spite of that, its ideas survived and in the XVI century it merged
into Protestantism.
When Edward III’s grandson, Richard II, became king, he was only
ten. The first Parliament of his reign imposed the poll tax on every
person, no matter the income, to pay the debts deriving from the war with
France. Considering also the consequences of the Black Death upon the
economy, the feudal pressure, the ecclesiastic wealth, the worldliness and
the abuse of power, we can understand why a peasants’ Revolt exploded
in 1381. Richard II was forced to abdicate and his cousin Henry, Duke of
Lancaster, became king as Henry IV. In the meanwile the 100 Years’ War
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between England and France went on: the following king, Henry V, an
ambitious and patriotic soldier-king led England to victory at Agincourt in
1415, but in 1453, under Henry VI, the French with Joan of Arc forced the
English to withdraw to Calais, the only English possession left in France.
Things didn’t go better at home: an internal bloody struggle started
between the rival families of Lancaster and York. This civil war is known
as the Wars of the Roses because of the emblems the families had: a red
rose the House of Lancaster and a white one the House of York. It was a
dynastic war and we can understand its brutal logic through Richard III’s
words by Al Pacino in his film or docu-drama, as he called it, Looking
for Richard of 1996:
What happened is, we’ve just been
through a civil war...
...called the War of the Roses...
...in which the Lancasters
and the Yorks clashed.
Two rival families,
and the Yorks won.
They beat the Lancasters, and they’re
now in power. Richard is a York.
My brother Edward is the king now.
And my brother Clarence...
...is not the king,
and me, I’m not the king.
I wanna be the king. It’s that simple.
The film deals with this piece of history following William Shakespeare’s
Richard III, the greatest playwright of the English Renaissance. It gives
us a complete enough picture of how much the greed for power has a very
devastating effect.
The real Richard, duke of Gloucester, made himself king as Richard III
in 1483, but he was disliked both by the Lancastrians and by the Yorkists,
so his reign lasted only till 1485, when Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond
and the leader of the Lancastrians, defeated him at the Battle Bosworth.
Shakespeare made his Richard III pronounce these words just before he
died:
Slave! I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain to-day, instead of him.
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
(W. Shakespeare, Richard III, Act V, Scene IV)
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Compare the part of the filmscript and Shakespeare’s words above:
they describe two different moments of Richard’s life. Do you notice any
difference? Do you think Richard changed his attitude at the end of his
days? Before answering, read the script that I once wrote for a school
play: you can find it on http://www.fabiolasalerno.net/primo_sito_00001d.
htm.
Henry VII thus was the first king of the Tudor dynasty. He married the
Yorkist heiress Elizabeth so the terrible rivalry between the York and the
Lancaster houses finished: a new and rich English era started.
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Telling the Renaissance
3
THE TUDOR PERIOD
It is the beginning of the modern age, in fact there is a series of
social, spiritual and material changes: the emancipation of the peasants;
the spread of commercial activities; the growth of the middle class; the
national pride for the victories during the Hundred Years’ War; the press,
thanks to which clergymen no longer were the only men of learning; the
use of the English language; the Renaissance, with the new analyses
and new possible points of view on religious and universal matters; the
opportunities of the new commercial sea routes and the discovery of the
New World. But not everything was so positive.
The separation between England and continental Europe was
becoming deeper: France and Spain were allied with the Catholic Roman
Church, and were stronger; in England the Tudor dynasty was allied with
its Parliament and they certainly didn’t want to be weaker. But let’s see
how the most famous Tudors behaved: maybe we can understand why
some things happened and some others didn’t.
HENRY VII
(1485-1509)
MARGARET
ARTHUR
HENRY VIII
1509-1547
MARY
JAMES V
EDWARD VI
(1547-1553)
FRANCES
BRADON
MARY
STUART
MARY I
(1553-1558)
JANE GREY
(only 9 days)
JAMES VI
later
JAMES I
OF ENGLAND
(1603-1625)
ELIZABETH I
(1558-1603)
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Who Were They?
HENRY VII
(1485-1509)
He had a university education and was a business man. He was an
able diplomat, too, and, to improve the position of England in Europe,
he started a policy of alliances: his eldest son, Arthur, married Catherine
of Aragon, the daughter of the king of Spain, and his daughter Margaret
married James IV of Scotland. After his death, his last daughter Mary
married Louis XII, king of France.
MARGARET
She married James IV of Scotland and became Queen of Scotland.
After her husband’s death she led the Anglophile faction against the
Francophile one in Scotland.
ARTHUR
Catherine of Aragon and Arthur were married when they were 15,
but their union was organized when they were even younger: Henry VII
wanted to secure the Catholic Monarchs’ support against French power
as early as he could. Unfortunately Arthur died very soon and Catherine
had to marry her husband’s brother to become Queen of England.
HENRY VIII
1509-1547
He became king of England when he was 18. He was a scholar, a poet, a
musician and a sportsman and his court was revitalized by his strong temper.
He married six times and had problems with the Roman Church since his
first marriage. In fact he had to obtain a special dispensation from the Pope
to marry his brother’s widow Catherine of Aragon. But she gave him only a
daughter and he wanted a male heir, too. Besides, he had fallen in love with
Anne Boleyn, a lady-in-waiting of the Queen. He wanted to take advantage
of the fact that his marriage was illegal according to the Canon Law: as there
had been need for a special dispensation from the Pope to marry Catherine,
he asked the Pope to declare it void. Pope Clement VII couldn’t say “Yes”:
he was allied with Charles V of Spain, Catherine’s nephew and the real
master of the Europe of the time, so he refused categorically. Henry VIII
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didn’t accept the Pope’s authority and decided to solve the question using
the English Parliament and Clergy: they declared the king “Only Supreme
Head on Earth of the Church of England” with the 1534 Act of Supremacy.
England had already lived an anticlerical atmosphere since the 12th
century, beginning with the contrast between Henry II and Thomas
Becket, going on with Wycliffe and the Lollards, arriving at Martin Luther’s
doctrines, the monk who was leading the Protestant Reformation in
Germany, and the French theologian John Calvin. It was a time when
Henry VIII defended the Pope against Luther and was honoured with the
title Defensor Fidei, but later his personal problems became preminent.
Catholic monasteries and lands were confiscated and a new translation
of the Bible was authorized: Henry VIII’s new Anglican Church was
independent but it remained faithful to Roman Catholic dogma.
Henry VIII ordered Anne Boleyn’s execution and married Jane Seymour
who gave him the so desired male heir, Edward, but she, unfortunately, died
at childbirth. Henry VIII had other three wives: he divorced from Anne de
Cleves because she was ugly, Catherine Howard was executed because
of a love affair, and Catherine Parr took care of him until his death.
MARY
Very soon she was widowed by the king of France Louis XII and
married the English Charles Brandon. By her brother Henry VIII’s will,
the throne had to pass to English descendants and not to foreigners, so
Mary’s descendants were welcomed but Margaret’s weren’t. Obviously
not only because Mary was Henry VIII’s favourite sister: he didn’t want a
Scottish monarch to reign on England!
FRANCES
BRADON
She was Mary’s daughter and had three girls, Jane, Catherine and
Mary, who were the direct heirs to the throne of England.
JANE GREY
(only 9 days)
She was Frances Brandon’s only daughter to become Queen of England
when she was 17, but for 9 days only: she was dethroned by Mary, Henry
VIII’s daughter, who was declared the legitimate sovereign of England.
Jane was kept imprisoned in the Tower of London and beheaded after 8
months.
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JAMES V
He was Margaret’s son and ascended the throne of Scotland when he
was only 1. When he began to understand, he soon realized that his reign
was always threatened by the English troops of his uncle Henry VIII. He
obtained protection from France and his second French marriage brought
him a daughter, the future Mary I, Queen of Scotland.
EDWARD VI
(1547-1553)
Henry VIII’s son, he was only 9 when he ascended to the throne of
England, that’s why his uncle Edward Seymour was appointed Protector.
During his reign the Book of Common Prayer was published, so the
English language could be used for the Church Services instead of Latin.
Unfortunately he didn’t reign for a long time because he fell ill and died.
MARY I
(1553-1558)
Henry VIII’s first daughter, she became Queen of England with a
popular support after the 9 days of Jane Grey’s reign. She had Catholic
blood in her veins from her mother’s side, Catherine of Aragon, that’s
why her half brother Edward VI didn’t want her as his heir to the throne
of the Protestant England. But she never accepted the break with Rome
so she imposed the Catholic religion in England with all the power she
had: she restored the Latin Mass, she persuaded Parliament to repeal
the existing Protestant religious laws and more than 300 Protestants were
burnt alive, that’s why she was called “Bloody Mary”. The persecution
of the Protestants lasted for over four years: many of them went away
from England, many others stayed to defend their position. A book, Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs, published 5 years after Mary’s death, emphasized the
sufferings of the Protestants and helped popular opinion to know what the
situation really was.
Mary married Philip II, heir to the throne of Spain, against the wishes of
Parliament which didn’t want to submit England to Spain. He was almost
always absorbed with his European affairs while Mary remained on the
island. When she died, England was what it didn’t want to be: religiously
divided and completely dependent on Spain.
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ELIZABETH I
(1558-1603)
Her mother was Anne Boleyn and she ascended the throne when
she was 25. She could speak French, Latin and Italian and she wanted
to avoid the excesses of religious fanaticism: fortunately she thought that
every individual should be master of his own soul. She re-established the
Anglican Church naming herself Governor of the Church of England with
the second Act of Supremacy and, with the Act of Uniformity, she stated
that only Cranmer’s Prayer Book was to be used by the English people.
She surrounded herself by a Privy Council of 20 noblemen and officials who
helped her to rule England. She never married. As she said, «the Queen
was married to her people» and in fact she travelled around the country to
have closer contacts with her subjects but we must not forget that she was
also an incomparable diplomat! England was becoming a commercial and
sea power: explorations and oversea trade expanded, but not always thanks
to legal economic abilities! The sea-dogs Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake,
in fact, contributed to the success of English economy, with the Queen who
secretly encouraged their acts of piracy against the Spanish ships: she had
a share in the profits of the colonial and commercial wealth of the time!
Very soon Elizabeth realized that Spain was her main enemy and not
only from a commercial point of view: Philip of Spain, her sister Mary’s
husband, claimed the throne, and also her cousin Mary, James V’s daughter,
Queen of Scotland and great friend of French and Spanish Catholics,
claimed the throne. Moreover she sent soldiers to the Netherlands to help
the Dutch who were fighting against the Spanish troops. Inevitably in 1588
the war against Spain started in the English Channel, and the Spanish
Invincible Armada was defeated more by the stormy winds than by the
English strength. Anyway England reached its glory and national unity
and preserved her so desired independence.
When Elizabeth died, because she had no heirs, the Tudor line died
with her.
MARY
STUART
She was Elizabeth’s eternal rival. Mary I, Queen of Catholic Scotland,
was the wife of Francis II, king of France, for a very short time because of his
sudden death. She left Scotland to live in France but when she was widowed
and went back to her land, she found that a lot of things had changed:
Scotland followed the Calvinist John Knox’s ideas and became frustrated
by Catholic corruption and inefficiency; furthermore it didn’t endure the
arrogance of the French anymore, who ruled Scotland in Mary’s absence.
She married Lord Darnley, a Tudor, who was mysteriously murdered and,
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after a very short time, she married the Scottish Earl of Bothwell who was
suspected of Darnley’s murder. The Pope, Spain, France and Scottish opinion
were against her: she was taken prisoner and deposed in favour of her son
James. She escaped and asked Elizabeth for help who accepted to give
her refuge for 19 years. Even if she continuously plotted against Elizabeth
and the House of Commons asked for her execution, Elizabeth refused, and
not only because she was her cousin: Elizabeth knew that Mary’s execution
would provoke a war with Spain – which, as we know, took place very soon
– and England didn’t have the means to face it. Anyway, after the discovery
of an nth plot, in 1587 Elizabeth signed her execution.
JAMES VI
later
JAMES I
OF ENGLAND
(1603-1625)
The Stuart period on the English throne began with Mary Stuart and
Lord Darnley’s son, James VI of Scotland. He became king of England as
James I but the two countries remained separate, with distinct Parliaments,
until 1707. Differently from his mother, James was a Protestant. He was
a learned man, he wrote treatises in English and Latin, but neverthless
he believed in witchcraft. At the beginning he was welcomed with relief,
because England finally lived no wars for his accession to the throne, but
later the situation changed when he manifested his theories on the divine
right of kings: he believed, to be the representative of God on earth as a
monarch. He summoned Parliament only to ask for money and to increase
his revenues, and sometimes he levied taxes without consulting it. He
disappointed both the Puritans, an extreme wing of the Protestants, who
wanted reforms in their doctrine, and the Catholics, who expected a king
who professed Catholic religion as he was Mary Stuart’s son. The Catholics
plotted to get rid of him: they planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament
during the official opening of the 1605 session, on November the 5th, but
the Gunpowder Plot was discovered in time and all the conspirators were
condemned to death. This event has become an anniversary to celebrate:
in England children burn figures of Guy Fawkes, one of the conspirators,
on bonfires and carrying “guys” through the streets.
The anti-Catholic laws became severer and in 1620, to escape
persecution, a group of Puritans, known as the Pilgrim Fathers, sailed on
the Mayflower and the Speedwell. Only the Speedwell arrived in Holland:
some went on to America and founded New Plymouth, the first of the
future thirteen North American colonies.
James made peace with Spain and this made him more and more
unpopular even if this new relationship laid the foundations for the future
overseas commercial relations.
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Change History for a while: what could have happened if every member
of the Tudor dynasty hadn’t done what he/she did? Have a try: What if Henry
VII didn’t plan his family’s marriages? What if Religions were only personal
matters and not political ones? What if executions were abolished? Take
notes of your answers and your friends’ and go on with your “What if…?”.
Transfer the Tudor family tree on your computer with the help of
CmapTools or some other software with the same functions: what
information can you drag in? Click on every member and share your ideas
with your class in an exciting exchange of information.
A Man for all Season by Fred Zinnemann is a 1966 film set in XVI
century England and centered on the figure of Thomas More. Watch it: it’s
a way to enter in the intriguing atmosphere of Henry VIII’s court and also, I
hope, the first step which will take you to the reading of Utopia by Thomas
More. Do you think Utopia is a totally unattainable place? Tell your opinion
to your class.
THE CULTURAL REBIRTH
This is what the word ”Renaissance”, the cultural movement of the
time, means: a rebirth of interest in classical culture, the possibility to
interpret Man and Nature from a more concrete point of view, the desire
to know the unknown. Literary art was meditative, but also it described
everyday situations and characters.
In England the Renaissance developed later than in Europe because
of the Reformation: the new doctrine was against any form of imagination,
it considered books only to be instructive rather than entertaining.
The main form of Renaissance literary art was the drama which greatly
developed for mainly two reasons: first because drama is the art of conflicts,
and this historical period was full of them; second because it addressed
a public, most of it illiterate, already accustomed to gather together and
listen - remember the interest medieval people showed for the Miracle
and Morality Plays. Actors could act in permanent theatres now but, as
this were judged immoral, the respectable society felt contempt for them
and theatres were built outside the walls of the City of London, over the
Thames, as you can see in a map of 17th century on the following page:
the theatres are the two octagonal buildings at the bottom.
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It was James Burbage, an actor and an impresario, to build The Theatre,
the first regular public theatre at Shoreditch in 1576. From then till the end
of the century, the regular theatrical companies in London were eight and
when Shakespeare died, in 1616, they were about twenty. There were not
only public theatres but also private ones, and if you think that Londoners
were about 200.000, you can imagine the extraordinary popularity of the
drama: every perfomance was sold out!
The octagonal or the “wooden O” shape and the apron stage which
stretched to the center of the yard, favoured a communion of emotions
between the actors and the audience. Acoustics was very poor and the
actors were compelled to shout their lines and exaggerate their theatrical
gestures. The Lords’ rooms, the galleries at the back of the stages above
the tiring rooms, were the most expensive: even if they didn’t provide a
direct view of the actors, the Lords were able to hear every word of the
play and appreciate them better. The structure influenced considerably
the setting of Elizabethan plays: for example, the upper stage inspired the
famous balcony scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
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After a careful lexical research, write the labels for all the parts of the
Elizabethan theatre in the picture above.
Literary playwrights borrowed freely from popular sources, from Italian
plays and Latin authors. The invention of printing made European stories
easier to find and the theatre drew inspiration from them as the cinema
does in our times. The discovery of America stimulated the passion for
travels and the pleasure to tell the adventures. There was also a proud
national consciousness which was increasing more and more and the
proof is the flourishing of plays about English History. This way the
theatrical repertory became enormous: it was the expression of the
intense work of playwrights, cultured people who had followed regular
studies, some of them at Universities, even if they began their careers
as figurants.
The Elizabethan theatre didn’t follow Seneca’s three unities: its scenes
were multiple, with plots and subplots which run into each other. It was,
above all, a theatre of words performed in daylight which wasn’t disturbed
by any scenery, curtains or footlights. Women couldn’t act: boys performed
female roles. The audience was heterogeneous: the groundlings, people
who paid only one penny because too poor to pay more and sit on one
of the three levels of galleries, saw the performances getting drunk,
sometimes quarreling, sometimes beating each other. But they were
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always there and followed the stories with a participation which no other
historical period knew.
The Globe, a theatre always associated with Shakespeare’s name, had
a very unhappy story: it was built for the first time in 1599, rebuilt in 1614
and in 1997 a new reconstruction was realized. Can you trace its history
from the beginning? The web will be the best source for your research.
Select the information you get in as personal way as you can.
Did you know Italy has its Globe too? It’s in Villa Borghese, in Rome. It
was an idea by Gigi Proietti, a famous Italian actor, who dedicated a poem
to it as in the website www.globetheatreroma.com. Here it is:
LETTERA DAR GLOBBE
Ammazza sì che avevamo combinato.
potemo dì ch’er sogno s’è avverato
e fra le fronne e l’arberi è gia nato
un posto che, vedrai, sarà invidiato
(c’è sempre chi apre bocca e je dà fiato…).
Però chi der teatro è innamorato
qui se potrà gustà tutto er “creato”
de li granni poeti der passato.
E st’arberi Borghesi so’ contenti
e pare che parlottino fra loro
e nun fanno mancà li comprimenti.
«Sto Globbe è veramente ‘bbello, eppoi
nun ce disturberà» dicheno in coro
«perché, in fonno, è de legno come noi».
The language is Italian or, better, it’s in Roman dialect. Can you help our
English friends to understand it? Write your English version and compare
it with your classmates. Did you find any difficulties?
The theatre of the English Renaissance had a lot of problems: the
mistrust of Christian civilization towards profane themes; the religious
conflicts; the actors’ irregular lives; the audience’s disorderliness; the
plague. There was a great passion for the theatre but a lot of restrictive
measures were made by the authorities. It is in such a cultural climate that
William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe lived and worked.
After James I’s reign, in 1642 Puritan England, drama was condemned
and theatres were closed.
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SHAKESPEARE THE DRAMATIST
«How do I tell thee? Let me count the way». Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
a poetess of XIX century, will forgive us if we borrow a line from her
wonderful poem to introduce William Shakespeare: how do we tell him?
Infinite ways are possible and one is more involving than the other. So,
let’s start!
• Shakespeare through Art
Let’s listen with the same interest like Ferdinand, the character from
“The Tempest” who John Everett Millais represented in his 1849 picture,
and let’s follow the magic of Shakespeare’s art and fantasy, his feelings
and passions.
Shakespeare’s literary works inspired an extensive iconographic and
symbolic tradition. Towards the end of XVIII century and, above all during
the Romantic period, a lot of painters represented his subjects facing a
new universe: they considered Shakespeare the greatest genius in the
literary arts and benefited from his language full of visual power.
Millais drew his inspiration from these lines:
FERDINAND: Where should this music be? I’th’ air or th’ earth?
It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon
Some god o’th’ island. Sitting on a bank,
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Weeping again the King my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence I have followed it
Or it hath drawn me rather. But ‘tis gone.
No, it begins again.
(Act I Scene 2)
They are taken from The Tempest, a play which belongs to Shakespeare’s
last period. A shipwreck is mentioned: there was Alonso, King of Naples,
his son Ferdinand, Antonio, Duke of Milan, and their court on the ship.
The island which Ferdinand talks about is an enchanted island where
Prospero, a magician, lives with his daughter Miranda. The tempest was
raised by Prospero because, as he explains to Miranda, he was the rightful
Duke of Milan but was deposed twelve years earlier and put with her on
a boat on order of his brother Antonio. They reached what is now their
island, once the refuge of the witch Sycorax: on the island they found only
Caliban, Sycorax’s son, an ugly creature, and Ariel, a gentle spirit of the
air. In the text above, Ferdinand cries his father’s death, he believes that
all the people on his ship died, but it isn’t true.
In this 1735 picture by William Hogarth we can see the moment when
Ferdinand sees Caliban, Prospero, and Miranda for the first time:
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PROSPERO: (to Miranda) The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,
And say what thou seest yon.
MIRANDA: What is’t? A spirit?
Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir,
It carries a brave form. But ‘tis a spirit.
PROSPERO: No, wench, it eats and sleeps, and hath such senses
As we have, such. This gallant which thou seest
Was in the wreck, and but he’s something stained
With grief, that’s beauty’s canker, thou mightst call him
A goodly person. He hath lost his fellows,
And strays about to find ‘em.
MIRANDA: I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble.
PROSPERO: (aside) It goes on, I see, as my soul prompts it.
(To Ariel) Spirit, fine spirit, I’ll free thee
Within two days for this.
FERDINAND: (aside) Most sure the goddess
On whom these airs attend. (To Miranda) Vouchsafe my prayer
May know if you remain upon this island,
And that you will some good instruction give
How I may bear me here. My prime request,
Which I do last pronounce, is – O you wonder –
If you be maid or no?
MIRANDA: No wonder, sir, but certainly a maid.
(Act I Scene 2)
Clearly Miranda had never seen a human before, except her old father,
and everything was happening because (or thanks) to the magic of
Prospero’s enchantment and Ariel, the spirit that Sycorax had imprisoned
in the trunk of a tree. He will gain his freedom granting the above mentioned
favours to Prospero.
In the picture, on the right, we can see Caliban, «a freckled whelp,
hag-born – not honoured with a human shape», as Prospero defines him:
do you see him well integrated with the scene above? Get your idea from
what Shakespeare told us about him (reading all The Tempest is really
involving even in Italian) and make a portrait of him.
All ends in peace and reconciliation: Miranda and Ferdinand get married,
Prospero forgives his brother and returns to Milan to take possession of
his lost dukedom. Caliban is left alone on the island and Ariel is released,
free to wander as he wishes.
As all Shakespeare’s works, The Tempest, too, treasures infinite
meanings: we like to consider The Tempest as Shakespeare’s farewell
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play, the farewell of the artist to his theatre and to the dreams it gave to
him and to all of us.
PROSPERO: […] Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.
Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
If you be pleased, retire into my cell,
And there repose. A turn or two I’ll walk
To still my beating mind.
(Act IV Scene 1)
How can you graphically represent the lines above? Don’t worry if you
aren’t very good at drawing, what matters is that you free your imagination
and colour your understanding.
The Tempest could also be considered as the comedy of tolerance, after
many plays full of hates and grudges. It is permeated with benevolence:
Prospero was treated in an unworthy way by his brother but he didn’t look
for revenge, he only asked his repentance. Shakespeare took leave of the
theatre telling us to stop killing each other in the name of a religion or an
ideal.
The 1806 watercolour of the next page by William Blake illustrates
the episode of Richard III, the real protagonist of the Wars of the Roses,
when, at the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, the ghosts of many of his
victims appear to him. Shakespeare may have written this History not
only to talk about the horrible incidents of the Wars of the Two Roses,
but also to highlight the turning point that England would have lived from
then on with the glorious Tudor king Henry VII who claimed his right to the
throne.
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The painting, characterized by an almost absolute monochrome,
represents Richard III in his tent surrounded by nine ghosts: the first on
the left is Henry VI and it is easy to identify lady Anne on the right, Richard
III’s dead wife. Between the king’s legs we can see Edward IV’s little sons.
Shakespeare tells of eleven ghosts who appear one by one and angrily
address Richard III with strong words. Blake’s Richard tries to push away
all the ghosts together with a sword.
When Richard III wakes up with a start he says:
Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!
Have mercy, Jesu! – Soft, I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me?
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why?
Lest I revenge. Myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
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That I myself have done unto myself?
O no, alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie: I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. – Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
and every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the high’st degree!
Murder, stern murder, in the dir’st degree!
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, ‘Guilty, guilty!’
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they? – Since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself.
Methought the souls of all that I had murdered
Came to my tent, and every one did threat
Tomorrow’s vengeance on the head of Richard.
(Act V Scene 5)
This soliloquy can be read as a dialogue between Richard and his
conscience: even if he is a villain who has always thought of his own
self, there is a part of him that doesn’t accept his behavior. Distinguish
Richard’s words from the words of his conscience. In your opinion, can
different personalities coexist in one man?
Shakespeare introduced Richard’s complex personality since the
first lines of his tragedy. He is absolutely aware to be «rudely stamped»,
«curtailed of this fair proportion», «deformed, unfinished, sent before my
time into his breathing world scarce half made up», and the only thing that
his anger can do is «to spy my shadow in the sun and descant on my own
deformity».
Now we’ll talk about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As the title suggests,
it is a dream: most of the action take place in the moonlight and the
characters continuously fall asleep, dream and act under spells. They love,
too, but in an unpredictable, inconstant way and lead us to reflect on one
of the infinite aspects in which love shows us: the result of enchantment
rather than the effect of deep passions and affections. It is a round play:
it begins and finishes in Athens but it develops in a wood where all the
characters – humans, spirits and fairies – live their stories consciously but
also unconsciously.
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In this 1794 picture by Johann Heinrich Füssli, Titania and Bottom
are in love. The picture is clearly inspired by the first scene of the 4th Act
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Let’s mark two horizontal lines dividing the picture in three parts so
that the main characters are at the centre: background, middleground
and foreground. Let’s describe what we see in each of them: “In the
middleground Bottom is sitting on a «flow’ry bed» and Titania put «muskroses» on his head and caresses his cheeks.” Now continue by yourself:
Shakespeare’s words below will help you.
TITANIA: (to Bottom) Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.
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BOTTOM: Where’s Peaseblossom?
PEASEBLOSSOM: Ready.
BOTTOM: Scratch my head, Peaseblossom. Where’s Monsieur Cobweb?
COBWEB: Ready.
BOTTOM: Monsieur Cobweb, good monsieur, get you your weapons in
your hand and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle;
and, good monsieur, bring me the honeybag. Do not fret yourself too much
in the action, monsieur; and, good monsieur, have a care the honeybag
break not. I would be loath to have you overflowen with a honeybag, signor.
(Exit Cobweb) Where’s Monsieur Mustardseed?
MUSTARDSEED: Ready.
BOTTOM: Give me your neaf, Monsieur Mustardseed. Pray you, leave
your courtesy, good monsieur
MUSTARDSEED: What’s your will?
BOTTOM: Nothing, good monsieur, but to help Cavaliery Peaseblossom
to scratch. I must to the barber’s, monsieur, for methinks I am marvellous
hairy about the face; and I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle
me I must scratch.
TITANIA: What, wilt thou hear some music, my sweet love?
BOTTOM: I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and
the bones. (Rural music)
TITANIA: Or say, sweetlove, what thou desir’st to eat.
BOTTOM: Truly, a peck of provender. I could munch your good dry oats.
Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay. God hay, sweet hay, hath
no fellow.
TITANIA: I have a venturous fairy that shall seek
The squirrel’s hoard, and fetch thee off new nuts.
BOTTOM: I had rather have a handful or two of dried peas. But I pray
you, let none of your people stir me. I have an exposition of sleep come
upon me.
TITANIA: Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.
Fairies, be gone, and be all ways away. (Exeunt Fairies)
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O how I love thee, how I dote on thee! (They sleep)
Let’s talk about another tragedy now: King Lear. It is a family tragedy,
this time: there’s a reign to be divided among three daughters in proportion
to their filial love they show their father. I think individual ambition, lust for
power and grim ingratitude are the true main characters of this sorrowful
story.
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Compare these two pictures: the two lifeless bodies in both the
representations immediately catch our attention. The first picture is the
1788 King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia by James
Barry; the second one is the 1524 Compianto sul Cristo morto by Antonio
Allegri called Correggio.
The two painters gave visibility to the human soul who suffers with
despair. What other similarities can you catch? What differences can you
underline?
Barry was inspired by the following lines:
LEAR: Howl, howl,howl howl! O, you are men of stones.
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth.
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(He lays her down)
Lend me a looking-glass.
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.
(Act V Scene 3)
Lear’s grief is endless and breaks his heart: he will die of pain. His
character is violent and fragile at the same time, it marks the senselessness
of life, full of contradictions and negative values. It is a play which tells about
despair that leads to folly and is full of touching moments. Memorable is
the moment when Cordelia meets the old Lear who had found repair in
the French camp after having spent a night outside in the middle of a
horrible storm because of his two oldest daughter’s inclemency.
CORDELIA: O my dear father, restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made!
KENT: Kind and dear princess!
CORDELIA: Had you not been their father, these white flakes
Did challenge pity of them. Was this a face
To be opposed against the warring winds?
Mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, should have stood
That night against my fire. And wast thou fain, poor father,
To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn
In short and musty straw? Alack, alack,
‘Tis wonder that thy life and wits at once
Had not concluded all! (To the Gentleman) He wakes. Speak to him.
GENTLEMAN: Madam, do you; ‘tis fittest.
CORDELIA: (to Lear) How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?
LEAR: You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.
CORDELIA: Sir, do you know me?
LEAR: You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?
CORDELIA: (to the Gentleman) Still, still far wide!
GENTLEMAN: He’s scarce awake. Let him alone a while.
LEAR: Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?
I am mightily abused. I should ev’n die with pity
To see another thus. I know not what to say.
I will not swear these are my hands. Let’s see:
I feel this pin prick. Would I were assured
Of my condition.
CORDELIA: (kneeling) O look upon me, sir,
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And hold your hands in benediction o’er me.
You must not kneel.
LEAR: Pray do not mock.
I am a very foolish, fond old man,
Fourscore and upward,
Not an hour more nor less; and to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks I should know you, and know this man;
Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is; and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child, Cordelia.
CORDELIA: And so I am, I am.
LEAR: Be your tears wet?
Yes, faith. I pray, weep not.
If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
I know you do not love me; for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
You have some cause; they have not.
CORDELIA: No cause, no cause.
LEAR: Am I in France?
KENT: In your own kingdom, sir.
LEAR: Do not abuse me.
GENTLEMAN: Be comforted, good madam. The great rage
You see is killed in him. Desire him to go in.
Trouble him no more till further settling.
CORDELIA: (to Lear) Will’t please your highness walk?
LEAR: You must bear with me. Pray you now, forget
And forgive. I am old and foolish.
(Act IV Scene 6)
Learn by heart this passage and perform it in your classroom with all
the feeling you can.
• Shakespeare through Music
Shakespeare had a good knowledge of music and his great love for it
emerges from all his works. He reserved disdainful words to «the man that
hath no music in himself», as he wrote in the last act of The Merchant of
Venice, and also recommended: «Let no such man be trusted». Even if the
main theme of The Merchant of Venice regards money matters between
the Christian Antonio e the Jewish Shylock, there are a lot of subthemes,
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among which a romantic love story between Jessica and Lorenzo. Read
the following lines:
LORENZO: […] How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. (They sit)
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (Enter Musicians)
(To the Musicians) Come, ho, and wake Diana with a hymn.
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear,
And draw her home with music. (The Musicians play)
JESSICA: I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
LORENZO: The reason is your spirits are attentive,
For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts;
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music. Therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods,
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
(Act V, Scene 1)
1. How does Lorenzo try to convince Jessica to listen to music?
2. There are three mythological figures in this passage, Diana, Orpheus
and Erebus: even if you don’t know them, you can understand
something through Shakespeare’s words above. Are they positive
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or negative towards music? Which are the words which helped you
more and why?
3. Do you agree with the definition Shakespeare gives of a person
“that hath no music in himself”?
4. What is the music or the musical instrument which affects you?
5. What is the song which you would use if you had to convince your
lover to sit and listen? Give reason for your choice.
Europe shared Shakespeare’s passion and in the centuries following
his death translated in musical notes most of his works: among the
others, we can remember the German Mendelssohn with his Ouverture
for Midsummer Night’s Dream composed in 1826 when he was only 17;
the Italian Rossini, with his Otello, performed for the first time in 1816
in Naples, and Bellini, whose I Capuleti e i Montecchi was performed at
the Venetian La Fenice in 1830; in 1839 the French Berlioz composed,
towards the end of his life, Béatrice et Bénédict, taken from Much Ado
About Nothing; in 1858 the Hungarian Liszt wrote the symphonic poem
Hamlet; the Russian Čajkovskij, in 1869, composed the Ouverture Romeo
and Juliet and later, in 1934, another Russian composer, Prokofiev,
began to work on this tragedy. The Austrian Mozart, too, was interested
in Shakespearean works and an idea of elaborating The Tempest came
to his mind but, unfortunately, he didn’t realize it because of his early
death.
Giuseppe Verdi composed his last work, Falstaff, inspired by three
Shakespearean plays: The History of Henry the Fourth, The Second Part
of Henry the Fourth and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Queen Elizabeth I
liked the character Falstaff so much when she saw him in The History
of Henry IV that she asked Shakespeare to create a Falstaff in love in
a funny comedy, that’s why The Merry Wives of Windsor was written in
only two weeks, between the two historical plays. Who was Falstaff? The
“true and perfect image of life”, as Harold Bloom, a contemporary literary
critic, defined him; we love him for all his faults, because, Bloom again, he
“teaches us not to moralize”. The two parts of Henry IV are an account of
the history of England from 1399 to 1413, the period of Henry IV’s reign
and his son, the future Henry V. Sir John Falstaff, young Harry’s gross
fellow of adventures, is the third protagonist who reaches his highest fame
in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a comedy full of love stories and romantic
intrigues. He has also a strong sense of friendship, as we can infer from
this funny situation told in The Marry Wives:
FORD: And did he search for you, and could not find you?
SIR JOHN: You shall hear. As God would have it, comes in one Mistress
Page, gives intelligence of Ford’s approach, and, by her invention and
Ford’s wife’s distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket.
FORD: A buck-basket?
SIR JOHN: By the Lord, a buck-basket! – rammed me in with foul shirts
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and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins, that, Master Brooke,
there was the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended
nostril.
FORD: And how long lay you there?
SIR JOHN: Nay, you shall hear, Master Brooke, what I have suffered to
bring this woman to evil, for your good. Being thus crammed in the basket,
a couple of Ford’s knaves, his hinds, were called forth by their mistress, to
carry me, in the name of foul clothes, to Datchet Lane. They took me on
their shoulders, met the jealous knave their master in the door, who asked
them once or twice what they had in their basket. I quaked for fear lest
the lunatic knave would have searched it, but fate, ordaining he should be
a cuckold, held his hand. Well, on went he for a search, and away went I
for foul clothes. But mark the sequel, Master Brooke. I suffered the pangs
of three several deaths. First, an intolerable fright, to be detected with a
jealous rotten bell-wether. Next, to be compassed like a good bilbo in the
circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head. And then, to be stopped
in, like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own
grease. Think of that – a man of my kidney – think of that – that am as
subject to heat as butter, a man of continual dissolution and thaw. It was
a miracle to scape suffocation. And in the height of this bath, when I was
more than half stewed in grease like a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the
Thames and cooled, glowing-hot, in that surge, like a horseshoe. Think of
that – hissing hot – think of that, Master Brooke!
FORD: In good sadness, sir, I am sorry that for my sake you have suffered
all this. My suit then is desperate. You’ll undertake her no more?
SIR JOHN: Master Brooke, I will be thrown into Etna as I have been into
Thames ere I will leave her thus. […]
(Act III, Scene 5)
1. 2. 3. 4. What are the fears which torment Falstaff?
What would he do out of friendship?
Have you ever suffered such a grotesque situation in friendship?
What would you do for your best friend?
Verdi focused on the protagonist and on his jokes. Memorable is the
final of the opera: «Tutto nel mondo è burla, l’uom è nato burlone». If
you read the entire libretto, you’ll notice that we didn’t lose, during the
transition from the theatre to the opera, the “gusto” of the theatre and of
the language, the festival of Shakespearean texts.
Search on www.youtube.com Falstaff’s final by Verdi and describe the
scene in your own words.
The strong friendship between Falstaff and Prince Harry breaks when
the Prince is crowned King Henry V. Falstaff is sincerely happy for the
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friend who has lived the pleasures of life with, but the king wants to put
an end to his dissolute past to completely devote himself to England: the
reason of State wins and Falstaff can do nothing but accept and suffer.
SIR JOHN: God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!
PISTOL: The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
SIR JOHN: God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING HARRY: My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE (to Sir John):
Have you your wits? Know you what ‘tis you speak?
SIR JOHN: My king, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart!
KING HARRY: I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane;
But being awake, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace.
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.
Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turned away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evils;
And as we hear you do reform yourself,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. (To Lord Chief Justice) Be it your charge, my
lord,
To see performed the tenor of our word. (To his train) Set on!
(2 Henry IV, Act V, Scene 5)
Whose side are you on: Falstaff’s or Henry V’s? How much historical
truth can you find in the Shakespearean character of the King? Do a
research and compare.
Shakespeare also talks of Falstaff in Henry V. He is not on the stage but
we know from his former page that «he’s very ill» and from Pistol’s wife that
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«the king has killed his heart». Here is the farewell which Shakespeare
chose for him:
PISTOL: […] Boy, bristle thy courage up. For Falstaff he is dead, and we
must earn therefore.
BARDOLPH: Would I were with him, wheresome’er he is, either in heaven
or in hell.
HOSTESS (PISTOL’S WIFE): Nay, sure he’s not in hell. He’s in Arthur’s
bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom. A made a finer end, and went
away an it had been any christom child. A parted ev’n just between twelve
and one, ev’n at the turning o’th’ tide – for alter I saw him fumble with the
sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there
was but one way. For his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a babbled of
green field. ‘How now, Sir John?’ quoth I. ‘What, man! Be o’ good cheer.’
So a cried out, ‘God, God, God’, three or four times. Now I, to comfort him,
bid him a should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble
himself with any such thoughts yet. So a bade me lay more clothes on his
feet. I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as
any stone. Then I felt to his knees, and so up’ard and up’ard, and all was
as cold as any stone.
(Act II, Scene 3)
Have you got any other idea? How would you represent Falstaff’s exit?
Write your own little act and perform it in class.
Jazz, too, was touched by the magic in Shakespeare’s stories: Duke
Ellington, a legend of the past century, composed Such Sweet Thunder,
a jazz suite full of Shakespearean atmospheres even in the title: «I never
heard so musical a discord, such sweet thunder» said Hippolyta, Queen
of the Amazons in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act IV, Scene 1). The
suite’s twelve sections include eleven instrumental portraits of characters
from Shakespeare, followed by a final piece evoking Shakespeare
himself: we find Othello and Desdemona in the blues of the first track;
the tragic destiny of Julius Caesar in the second one; the hopeless love
between Romeo and Juliet in The Star-Crossed Lovers; the wicked nature
of Lady Mac; a combination of Iago and the three macbethian witches
in Telecasters; the famous shrew in Sonnet for Sister Kate; the romantic
adventures in the joyful swing Up and Down, Up and Down; Hamlet in
Madness in Great Ones.
Choose some of the passages of the plays interpreted by Ellington
and read them using his musical sections as soundtracks. Record your
readings: it could be useful both to improve your English pronunciation
and to live again and again the emotions that the combination readingmusic always gives.
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And let’s finish listening to a 1980 song: Romeo and Juliet by Dire
Straits, a British rock band. The reference to Romeo and Juliet by
Shakespeare is evident both in the title and also in the subject: here, too,
we find the story of an impossible love which declares itself “underneath
the window”.
Listen to the song and note on your book the last words of every line:
A lovestruck Romeo sings a streetsus __________
Laying everybody low with me a lovesong that he __________
Finds a convenient streetlight steps out of the __________
Says something like you and me babe how about __________?
Juliet says hey it’s Romeo you nearly gimme a heart __________
He’s underneath the window she’s singing hey la my boyfriend’s ______
You shouldn’t come around here singing up at people like __________
Anyway what you gonna do about __________?
Juliet the dice were loaded from the __________
And I bet and you exploded in my __________
And I forget the movie __________
When you wanna realise it was just that the time was wrong _________?
Come up on different streets they both were streets of __________
Both dirty both mean yes and the dream was just the __________
And I dreamed your dream for you and your dream is __________
How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your _________?
Where you can fall for chains of silver you can fall for chains of _______
You can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they __________
You promised me everything you promised me think and __________
Now you just says oh Romeo yeah you know I used to have a scene with
_________
Juliet when we made love you used to __________
You said I love you like the stars above I’ll love you till I __________
There’s a place for us you know the movie __________
When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong _________?
I can’t do the talk like they talk on __________
And I can’t do a love song like the way it’s meant to __________
I can’t do everything but I’d do anything for __________
I can’t do anything except be in love with __________
And all I do is miss you and the way we used to __________
All do is keep the beat and bad __________
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All I do is kiss you through the bars of a __________
Julie I’d do the stars with you any __________
1. Is there a rhyme scheme in this song?
2. ‘Gimme’, ‘gonna’, ‘wanna’ are British/American English reductions.
What do they stand for? Do you know any other words like these
ones?
Now let’s read the scene by Shakespeare:
ROMEO: (coming forward) He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious.
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off. (Enter Juliet aloft)
It is my lady, O, it is my love.
O that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.
I am too bold. ‘Tis not to me she speaks.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp; her eye in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!
JULIET: Ay me.
ROMEO: (aside) She speaks.
O, speak again, bright angel; for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white upturned wond’ring eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-passing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
JULIET: (not knowing Romeo hears her)
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O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name,
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
ROMEO: (aside) Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
JULIET: ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s a Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for thy name – which is no part of thee –
Take all myself.
ROMEO: (to Juliet) I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love and I’ll be new baptized.
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
JULIET: What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night,
So stumblest on my counsel?
ROMEO: By a name
I Know not know how to tell thee who I am.
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself
Because it is an enemy to thee.
Had I it written, I would tear the word.
(Act II Scene 1)
1. Identify the words in the passage that are no longer in use and
match them with the ones used today.
2. Compare the two scenes: which traits do you consider modern and
which old? Which are similar? Why?
3. What love stories of your times would you define “impossible”? Tell
one!
• Shakespeare at the Cinema
Shakespeare has provided an infinity of ideas, facts, stage sets,
characters, stories and conflicts for the cinema since its inventions. He
was a great creator of heroes and antiheroes, of titanic and, at the same
time, fragile figures, a great representer of human life in its multiple
individual and social aspects. Yesterday like today he has told us the
«sound and fury» of every human experience and he has made us think,
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ask questions, sometimes tragic questions, to which not always we are
able to find adequate answers.
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, Act V Scene 5)
Inside the magic box full of “walking shadows”, that is inside the cinema,
Shakespeare has his place of honour: we have the first movie adaptation,
King John, in 1899. It is a silent movie in 4 scenes directed by William
Kennedy and Laurie Dickson with Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Thanks
to youtube or google video, we can see the only one-minute fragment
survived which shows King John signing the Magna Carta. This action is
never mentioned in the Shakespearean play: at that time they didn’t want
to show monarchy’s weakness and couldn’t consider the positive effects
that it had on the freedom of the people.
The whole history of twentieth-century cinema has developed
Shakespearean stories. Hamlet, for instance, has had a lot of film versions,
even with women in the role of Hamlet: in 1900 we had Sarah Bernhard
directed by Clemente Maurice and in 1933 a very young Katherine
Hepburn, directed by Lowell Sherman in Morning Glory, recited Hamlet’s
memorable soliloquy and won her first Oscar. Let’s read from the play:
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 heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to – ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. 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
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,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
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When he himself might his quietus make
with a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered 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 enterprise of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
(Act III Scene 1)
Compare the cinema transpositions of the soliloquy by two very famous
Shakespeare actors, Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh - you can
easily find them on internet. Olivier’s black-and-white Hamlet dates back
1948, and won 5 Academy Awards. Branagh’s colour Hamlet was shot in
1996 on a setting of the first decades of 1900. Olivier does the soliloquy
with extreme close-ups and fadings; sometimes the voice is over. Branagh,
instead, is in front of a mirror in long shots; he speaks faster. Which one
do you prefer? Why? Give a detailed description of the two versions and
of the feelings they gave you.
Why is Hamlet so tormented? Why doesn’t he want to live any longer?
Why does he want to die? Because «something is rotten in the state
of Denmark»: his father, the king of Denmark, is dead and his mother
has married her brother-in-law, Claudius, only two months later: «The
funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table». What’s
more, Hamlet is obsessed by his father’s ghost who tells him he has been
murdered by Claudius and wants revenge. The «we» of line 6 makes us
think that his personal meditation is elevated to the level of the universal:
Hamlet’s existential preoccupations with all his dilemmas and his searching
to know more are the same as those of today.
How can Hamlet bear the pain of his condition? What should he do
and what shouldn’t he do? Read the monologue again: can you find any
answers to these questions, or do you think that Hamlet’s doubts have no
solutions?
Another play which inspired many film directors was Macbeth. We like
to point out three of them:
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• Orson Welles, who directed Macbeth in 1948;
• Akira Kurosawa, who directed Kumonosu-Jo (Throne of Blood)
in 1957;
• Roman Polanski, who directed Macbeth in 1971.
What does Macbeth talk about? It is a play about ambition and remorse,
it is the tragedy of a man who begins his story as a heroic and brave
character and ends up as a cynical murderer because of his thirst for
power. He is not alone in planning death: his weak personality is dominated
by his wife, Lady Macbeth, and all the play is a psychological analysis of
how a criminal mind develops. Let’s read how Lady Macbeth convinces
her husband, hesitant at first, to fulfill her plans:
MACBETH: We will proceed no further in this business.
He hath honoured 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 as soon.
LADY MACBETH: Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dressed 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’th’adage?
MACBETH: Prithee, peace.
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
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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.
[…]
MACBETH: If we should fail?
LADY MACBETH: We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking-place
And we’ll not fail […]
MACBETH: I am settled, and bend up
Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.
Away, and mock the time with fairest show.
False face must hide what the false heart doth know
(Act I scene 7)
Night is also very present in the play, night which does not convey an
idea of peace and rest but it is connected with lack of sleep and madness,
respectively Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s punishments.
At the end Macbeth is destroyed: he realizes he doesn’t feel any kind of
emotions anymore; he knows he is no longer master of his life:
MACBETH: I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been my sense would have cooled
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 supped full with horrors.
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.
(Act V Scene 5)
It is worth-while to see the three movies mentioned above:
• Welles’s Macbeth goes deep down into the cruel brutality of the
human soul. The fog, which envelops the images, emphasizes the
anguish of the story;
• Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood is not only a transposition of the
Shakespearean Macbeth, but also a translation from the English
theatre to Japanese Nõ theatre;
• Polanski’s Macbeth is lost in the horrors of darkness and highlights
the torments of a bad destiny.
Form 4 groups and spend an afternoon together with Macbeth: one
group will read the play (don’t worry, it is the shortest Shakespearean play
and, if you find it difficult, feel free to read it in Italian!) and the three groups
will see one of the different films each (see them in Italian or with subtitles:
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it could help you to avoid any linguistic frustrations!). Take notes while
viewing and, after, select the images you like to paste them on electronic
slides: they will help you to face an oral discussion (rigorously in English,
this time!) with your classmates. Share your opinions about the films and
compare the different points of view – Shakespeare’s and the three film
directors’ – in telling the same story.
How can a man who pronounced the above quoted words «I dare do
all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none» be involved in
such brutal crimes?
Now we are going to relax talking about Richard Burton and Liz Taylor
in the film The Taming of the Shrew directed by Franco Zeffirelli. It tells
the story of Petruccio, who wants to marry a rich woman just to fill up the
emptiness of his pockets, and Katherine, who no way wants to marry.
The film, like the play, is full of funny quarrels which the couple of actors
played very well also thanks to their quarrelsome relationship in their real
life. Their first meeting is an explosion of witty remarks and comic spites:
watch it on you tube - http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=ASKZLGwAdcw
- and then follow the Shakespearean text:
PETRUCCIO: […] I’ll attend her here,
And woo her with some spirit when she comes.
Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.
Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly washed with dew.
Say she be mute and will not speak a word,
Then I’ll commend her volubility,
And say she uttereth piercing eloquence.
If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks
As though she bid me stay by her a week.
If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day
When I shall ask the banns, and when be married.
But here she comes, and now, Petruccio, speak. (Enter Katherine).
Good morrow, Kate, for that’s your name, I hear.
KATHERINE: Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing.
They call me Katherine that do talk of me.
PETRUCCIO: You lie, in faith, for you are called plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst,
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate Hall, mu super-dainty Kate For dainties are all cates, and therefore ‘Kate’ Take this of me, Kate of my consolation:
Hearing thy mildness praised in every town,
Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded -
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Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.
KATHERINE: Moved? In good time. Let him that moved you hither
Re-move you hence. I knew you at the first
You were a movable.
PETRUCCIO: Why, what’s a movable?
KATHERINE: A joint-stool.
PETRUCCIO: Thou hast hit it. Come, sit on me.
KATHERINE: Asses are made to bear, and so are you.
PETRUCCIO: Women are made to bear, and so are you.
KATHERINE: No such jade as you, if me you mean.
PETRUCCIO: Alas, good Kate, I will not burden thee,
For knowing thee to be but young and light.
KATHERINE: Too light for such a swain as you to catch,
And yet as heavy as my weight should be.
(Act II Scene 1)
Read the lines above many times and when you get familiar with them,
dub the video you watched: it will be a good way to practice the timing of
your English speaking ability.
This comedy is one of the first Shakespearean works and its characters
are inside the framework of a play which other actors wait to see: it is
the play within the play technique, used very often by Shakespeare.
It is an entertaining comedy but it also offers hints to reflect on: here
Shakespeare shows his sensitivity towards the women of his time, very
often obliged to marriages decided by their parents. At the end Katherine,
tamed, reproaches her sister and gives us a picture of the condition of
women of that time:
KATHERINE: […]
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience,
Too little payment for so great a debt,
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband,
And when she is forward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel,
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And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
(Act V Scene 2)
Fortunately the condition of women is different in our times: what else
must we still do to reach complete equal dignity between the sexes?
Build up a paragraph about that and discuss your opinions with all your
classmates.
Work on the text above: how would you have liked Katherine to speak?
Rewrite her part.
A film of our times with Shakespearean themes which mixes authentic
facts and cinema fiction is Shakespeare in Love. It won 7 Oscars and 3
Golden Globes, among which the best original screenplay by Marc Norman
and Tom Stoppard, the latter also wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are Dead, a play which reflects upon the two minor characters from
Hamlet.
Focus on the dance scene at De Lesseps’s house – http://it.youtube.
com/watch?v=UKhsbpDHfSo – when Master Shakespeare saw Viola as a
woman for the first time. Watch it without audio: what could the characters
be saying? Divide the page of your notebook in two columns and listen to
the dialogues three times without watching. While listening, write on the
left column all the words you catch. At the end draw the scenes on the
right column and compare your work with your classmates’: did you forget
anything?
Here is what Romeo said when he saw Juliet for the first time in her
house:
ROMEO (to a servingman):
What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?
SERVINGMAN: I know not, sir.
ROMEO: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
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So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.
(Act I Scene 5)
It is a description of love at first sight, the love which makes us know
«true beauty». What is «true beauty» for you? Tell the class.
Enjoy the entire film and then take notes about the scene which has
struck you more. Make a survey in your class: which scene wins?
• Shakespeare in Italy
Some scholars say Shakespeare never left England, others believe he
might have travelled to Italy during the plague years when the theatres
in London were closed; he might have learnt a lot from his wide readings
and from the hours he spent at Oliphant, the inn on the Thames where he
could have met the Italian travellers and merchants who stopped there. A
well-know theory wants Shakespeare born in Italy as Michelangelo Florio
Crollalanza – Shake + Spare – who was obliged to run away from his
Messina for his father’s Calvinist ideas. A retired Sicilian academic, Martino
Iuvara, is absolutely convinced about that: he highlights the differences
between official history and factual reality and wonders why England has
never let people consult the library Shakespeare left in heritage. What we
know for sure is that 15 of his 37 plays have an Italian background and
that he loved Italy very much.
In Romeo and Juliet, when Friar Laurence said to the loved Romeo
that yes, he was banished from Verona for killing Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, but
he could be serene «for the world is broad and wide», Romeo answered:
There is no world without Verona walls
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banished is banished from the world,
And world’s exile is death. Then ‘banished’
Is death mistermed. Calling death ‘banished’
Thou cutt’st my head off with a golden axe,
And smil’st upon the stroke that murders me.
(Act III Scene 3)
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Venice is another of the Italian towns loved by Shakespeare: it is
scene of the dispute between the Christian merchant Antonio and
Jew usurer Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The former asks
latter some money to help his friend Bassanio who wants to marry
rich heiress Portia.
the
the
the
the
And it is just among the Venetian streets of the Ghetto and Rialto that
the two main characters demonstrate their kind of relationship, made up
of hate and lack of esteem, as when Shylock, referring to Antonio, says:.
[…] He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my
losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains,
cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason? – I am
Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If
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you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison
us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like
you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach
me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
(Act III Scene 1)
The news of today makes us reflect upon the fact that History doesn’t
teach us anything: we still witness horrible wars fought in the name of a
God that wouldn’t have liked such wickedness. Why, in your opinion, do a
lot of human injustices continue to exist among men?
Do a research among the most popular religions in the world and trace
differences and similarities among them. How many religious conflicts are
there still? Why is it so difficult to find a solution? What could we do to
stop them?
Can you imagine a video for a TV program to bring peace in the world?
Do it!
It is very difficult to find «the way to Master Jew’s», above all because
his servant, Lancelot, doesn’t help us:
Turn up on your right hand at the next turning, but at the next turning of all
on your left, marry at the very next turning, turn of no hand but turn down
indirectly to the Jew’s house.
(Act II Scene 2)
These narrow Venetian streets are also the stage for the first act of
Othello, the Moor of Venice. At that time Venice was already a commercial
and financial centre for local and foreign affairs, a cosmopolitan town
where it was very easy to find foreigners. Shylock and Othello belong to
the cultural minorities who lived along the banks of the lagoon, people
who symbolize an idea of otherness. Here Iago arranges his plot to have
Cassio, Othello’s Lieutenant, dismissed.
[…] I follow him to serve my turn upon him.
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly followed. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
Wears out his time much like his master’s ass
For naught but provender, and when he’s old, cashiered.
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Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And, throwing but shows of service on their lords,
Do well thrive by ‘em, and when they have lined their coats,
Do themselves homage. These fellows have some soul,
And such a one do I profess myself – for, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor I would not be Iago.
In following him I follow but myself.
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so for my peculiar end.
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, ‘tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.
(Act I Scene 1)
«Were I the Moor I would not be Iago», and then, « I am not what I
am»: these lines sound like a justification for his thoughts. Do you think
that we are what we are because of or thanks to the context we live in?
That is: does our context influence our daily behaviour?
«We cannot all be masters»: do you agree with that? What makes you
a master? What a slave?
In the Shakespearean Italy there’s Florence, too: he told in his own way
a tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron, Giletta di Narbona, in the play All’s Well
That Ends Well. It is a comedy based on an exchange of favours: Helen,
a physician’s daughter, will take care of the King of France if he introduces
her to Bertram, the Count of Roussillon. She is profoundly in love with him
but her love is not returned. Bertram, in fact, prefers to go to fight in the
Italian war between Florence and Siena, as we can understand from the
first scene of the comedy:
KING: The Florentines and Sienese are by th’ears,
Have fought with equal fortune, and continue
A braving war.
FIRST LORD DUMAINE: So ‘tis reported, sir.
KING: Nay, ‘tis most credible: we here receive it
A certainty vouched from our cousin Austria,
With caution that the Florentine will move us
For speedy aid – wherein our dearest friend
Prejudicates the business, and would seem
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To have us make denial.
FIRST LORD DUMAINE: His love and wisdom
Approved so to your majesty may plead
For amplest credence.
KING: He hath armed our answer,
And Florence is denied before he comes.
Yet for our gentlemen that mean to see
The Tuscan service, freely have they leave
To stand on either part.
SECOND LORD DUMAINE: It well may serve
A nursery to our gentry, who are sick
For breathing and exploit
(Act I Scene 2)
And Bertram leaves for Italy. In a situation like this, it is not difficult for
us to imagine Helen looking for Bertram everywhere in Florence.
Her patient and endless love wins Bertram’s reluctance and at the end
she is very happy:
HELEN: […] But with that word the time will bring on summer,
When briers shall have leaves as well as thorns
And be as sweet as sharp. We must away,
Our wagon is prepared, and time revives us.
All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown.
Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.
(Act IV Scene 4)
Have you ever lived an unrequited love? Could you have had the same
sweet resistance as Helen?
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Read Shakespeare’s comedy and Boccaccio’s tale and define the
differences between them.
Rome, the Rome of 44 B.C., the most suitable place to talk about Julius
Caesar, couldn’t be missed in this Italian tour: on the Ides of March he
was stabbed to death by a group of conspirators, including Brutus. The
Roman Forum still echoes of Brutus’s and Antony’s voices who speak to
the crowd after the murder.
Brutus wants to justify his deed, and manages to win the mob’s
approval:
Be patient till the last.
Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my cause, and be silent
that you may hear. Believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine
honour, that you may believe. Censure me in your wisdom, and awake your
senses, that you may the better judge. If there be any in this assembly, any
dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less
than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is
my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had
you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were
dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him. As he was
fortunate, I rejoice at it. As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was
ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love, joy for his fortune, honour
for his valour, and death for his ambition. Who is here so base that would
be a bondman? If any, speak, for him have I offended. Who is here so rude
that would not be a Roman? If any, speak, for him have I offended. Who
is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak, for him have I
offended. I pause for a reply.
ALL THE PLEBEIANS: None, Brutus, none.
BRUTUS: Then none have I offended. I have done no more to Caesar than
you shall do to Brutus. The question of his death is enrolled in the Capitol,
his glory not extenuated wherein he was worthy, nor his offences enforced
for which he suffered death.
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The mob is with him. All the plebeians agree with all his words because
they are convinced that everything he said was right. It’s Antony’s turn
now, Caesar’s trusted friend. He is there to pronounce a funeral oration
but his discourse has more than one meaning:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest –
For Brutus is an honourable man,
So are they all, all honourable men Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me.
But Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.
Ambitions should be made of sterner stuff.
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And sure he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause.
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!
(He weeps) Bear with me.
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
FIRST PLEBEIAN: Methinks there is much reason in his sayings.
FOURTH PLEBEIAN: If thou consider rightly of the matter,
Caesar has had great wrong.
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Antony’s eloquence and the sight of Caesar’s body stir the mob to
mutiny and the conspirators are compelled to flee from Rome.
The lines above show Brutus’s and Antony’s different personalities:
which one do you prefer? Why? Can you list and compare the main
aspects of both of them?
The mob is another main character of this tragedy: changeableness is
the key word of their sayings. After applauding Brutus for killing Caesar,
they want to find another Caesar in Brutus and, later, they are manipulated
by Antony’s eloquence. Why did it happen, in your opinion?
Choose one adjective to describe Brutus, another one to describe
Antony and a third one to define the mob. Do you think that these qualities
also exist inside the political situation of our time?
In Sicily, with The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare returns to the theme
of jealousy already treated in Othello. Here the new Othello is Leontes,
king of Sicily, who is strongly convinced that Perdita is not his proper
daughter. But the faithful Hermione, differently from Desdemona, survives
her husband’s irrational fury. It is a tragi-comedy, or a tragedy with a happy
end, with most of its parts in a Mediterranean setting:
The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet;
Fertile the isle, the temple much surpassing
The common praise it bears.
(Act III Scene 1)
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Or with Sicily inside everyone’s heart:
I shall re-view Sicilia, for whose sight
I have a woman’s longing.
(Act IV Scene 4)
Was it Shakespeare himself speaking? Did he long to see his Sicily
again? Who knows…
Have you got a place where you would like to go back to? Is it real or
imaginary?
After leaving Messina, Crollalanza went with his family to Veneto,
where he studied and might have lived in Otello’s Palace, a Venetian
nobleman who, burnt with jealousy had killed his wife Desdemona. He
went to England after the suicide of his young lover Giulietta and there he
assumed a new identity.
In The Winter’s Tale there’s also an interesting opinion of an old
shepherd about young people like you:
I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth
would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting
wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, 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.
(Act III Scene 3)
As you can see, it’s really a commonplace to say: “The young people
of today are really impossible”. During the Shakespearean time, they said
the same thing too. What do you think about that? Are young people only
«boiled-brains»? What should they do instead of «sleep out the rest»?
And now let’s think about a tourist guide. Divide yourself in 5 groups
and distribute the tasks this way:
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VERONA
ROMEO
AND
JULIET
VENICE
THE
MARCHANT
OF
VENICE /
OTELLO
FLORENCE
ALL’S WELL
THAT ENDS
WELL
SHAKESPEARE
IN ITALY
ROME
JULIUS
CAESAR
SICILY
THE
WINTER’S
TALE
Here are the steps each group must follow:
1. Read the play and discuss the contents;
2. Re-read again and underline the parts useful for your aim;
3. Have a map of the town and trace a tourist route following the
Shakespearean directions you found;
4. Personalize your work adding all the elements you need.
5. Use Cmaptools and fill in the e-map with all the files you work out.
• Master Shakespeare
Shakespeare was first of all a man of the theatre, before being a poet
and a historian. In any of his plays, the main character is the theatre
itself and the only thing he cared was the stage result. He subverted the
classical theatrical rules of the unity of action, place and time – that is one
action in one place within a maximum of 24 hours – with the magic of his
words. He didn’t write any essay about how the theatre had to be for him,
but we can find all his theatrical conceptions in his plays.
Read the Prologue from Henry V: here Shakespeare relies on the
audience’s imagination to build an ideal theatre: his words live on the
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stage and let the audience “see” what it is and what it will be.
CHORUS: O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention:
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels.
Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all
The flat unraised spirits that hath dared
On this unworthing scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cock-pit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O pardon: since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,
Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth;
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning th’accomplishment of many years
Into an hourglass – for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history,
Who Prologue-like your humble patience pray
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s alter ego when he organizes the play The
Mousetrap. Actually it is The Murder of Gonzago, but Hamlet answers
to Claudius’s inquiry metaphorically, since he intends to «catch the
conscience of the king». So, in a magnificent example of a play within the
play technique, he gives some advice to the actors:
HAMLET: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you –
trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do,
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I had as lief the town-crier had spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent,
tempest, and as I may say the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire
and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to
the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters,
to very rags, to split the ears of the groudlings, who for the most part are
capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. […]
Be not too tame, neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the
action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance:
that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was
and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own
feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his
form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make
the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of
the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.
O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that
highly, not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christians
nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor no man, have so strutted and bellowed
that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men, and not
made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. […]
And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for
them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some
quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some
necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous,
and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
(Act III Scene 2)
The Prologue from Romeo and Juliet shows us how he summarizes
what he will tell in 5 acts and again asks the audience’s collaboration:
CHORUS: Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents’ rage Which but their children’s end, naught could remove Is now the two-hour’s traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
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In As you like it we can find the impressive metaphor of the theatre,
what the theatre was for Shakespeare and for all the people who love it:
JAQUES: All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then, a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big, manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange, eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
(Act II Scene 7)
Study carefully the four passages above and “piece out Shakespeare’s
imperfections”: do a little Shakespearean theatrical handbook, asking and
answering some questions like the following:
What was the theatre for Shakespeare?
What was the function of the Chorus?
How did the audience have to prepare for attending a theatrical
performance?
How should the actor be?
What should he do, what shouldn’t he do?
Build up a bilingual Shakespearean theatre glossary with the words
you find in the four passages above.
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And now… let’s take the tube!
Which line do you prefer? Which station do you get in? Where would
you like to get out? Pay attention! You could lose your way but don’t worry:
it’s not the true underground, it’s a “Shakesperean” underground thought
out by the designer Kit Grover and the Cambridge academic Hester LeesJeffries who realized it for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Really cool,
isn’t it? Personalize your trip by tube inside the Shakespearean world and
give reason for your choices. Use the map as the base for a game and
recite or tell a piece of Shakespeare every time you stop, every time you
cast the dice.
«The rest is not silence», I should say!!! Differently from what
Hamlet said at the end of his project of destruction, we, in our project of
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construction, we say that what remains of all the Shakespearean universe
is immense and more interesting than the part we have told so far. We have
followed a logical thread of our own, a thread which has put together our
associations of ideas of one moment and, if we wanted to face the theme
“Shakespeare” again, surely we would realize other paths. We hope we
have instilled a drop of curiosity which will drive you towards deeper and
more personalized readings.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
1564-1616
What else can we add to what we have just learnt about him through
his plays? Enough is known today to say that Shakespeare didn’t have
a public life and he was loved and celebrated both as a person and as
a playwright. He had enemies, too: it seems that a contemporary writer,
Robert Green, defined him in his 1592 booklet:
“An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart
wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a
blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac
totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey”.
But this didn’t influence Shakespeare at all: he used to read a lot and he
elaborated his readings in what we appreciate to be the masterpieces of
his England. His sources of inspiration were Plauto, Holinshed, Geoffrey
of Monmouth, Chaucer, Greene himself, and the Italians Boccaccio,
Ariosto and Tasso.
Stratford on Avon was his birthplace and London was his workplace.
He produced two texts a year, on the average, and this was no doubt very
hard work: it was practically impossible to have time to do other things
and obtain visibility in other fields different from the theatre!
Let’s read what Virginia Woolf wrote about him in her book 1900 “A
Room of our Own”:
«Shakespeare himself went, very probably – his mother was an
heiress – to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin – Ovid,
Virgil, and Horace – and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it
is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and
had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the
neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That
escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed,
a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door.
Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and
lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody,
practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and
even getting access to the palace of the queen.»
He became a shareholder of the theatrical company of which he was a
member, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men from the name of the noble protector
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who helped them economically. Thanks to Shakespeare, the company
became so popular that, after Elizabeth I’s death, the new monarch James
I adopted it under the name of The King’s Men and Shakespeare became
administrator, playwright and actor of that company. He didn’t care to
give his works to print; the plays were the company’s property and, if
they were published, other rival companies could use his scripts. Heming
and Condell, two of his friends and members of his theatrical company,
gathered his plays and published them in the First Folio of 1623, seven
years after his death. We will never finish to thank them for the literary
treasure they left us.
Who’s Who?
2.
1.
3.
4.
5.
6.
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The exhibition «Searching for Shakespeare» of a few years ago at
the National Portrait Gallery of London, a famous museum of portraits,
displayed numerous portraits of William Shakespeare: the six above have
been the most analyzed from the scholars in the attempt to give a face to
the celebrated playwright.
1. The first one, the Chandos Portrait, is the only candidate to
represent Shakespeare’s true appearance;
2. The second one, the Droeshout Engraving, is maybe Shakespeare’s
most celebrated image: it appeared on the title-page of the first
printed edition of Shakespearean plays, the so-called First Folio;
3. The third one, the Grafton Portrait, is a youthful portrait of the Bard:
he was 24, as we can see from the indication on the top left;
4. The fourth one, the Sanders Portrait, represents a young man but it
was painted in 1603 and Shakespeare was about 40 at that time;
5. The fifth one, the Soest Portrait, is supposed to portray an actor
very similar to Shakespeare, not Shakespeare himself;
6. The sixth one, the Janssen Portrait, was painted after Shakespeare’s
death and the man in the portrait didn’t have a wide forehead as
Shakespeare had, that’s why the man was made balder.
The web is full of sites dedicated to Shakespeare. Visit the ones I
suggest:
• http://www.william-shakespeare.info/
• http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/
• http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/index.html
and follow your curiosity. Organize an oral account to show your thread
about Shakespeare. Remember: you’ll have 20 minutes to talk, so, be
prepared to be fluent!
SHAKESPEARE THE SONNETEER
He wrote 154 sonnets and all together make up an autobiographical
representation of his feelings, full of meditations. The first 126 sonnets
are dedicated to a «fair youth», the remaining 28 to a «dark lady», but
the things are not so defined and there are a lot of doubts about their
chronological order. The relationship of the two characters seems to be
summarized in sonnet 144 which highlights the clear contrast:
144
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still,
The better angel is a man right fair:
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.
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To win me soon to hell my female evil,
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,
But being both from me both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
The woman is accused of seducing the man: the latter is the Guardian
Angel, who brings comfort and hope, the former is the Devil, who brings
despair and discouragement. Both are «spirits» who «suggest» to act.
Time is another character: here, it is not a theme, it is the active antagonist
and Shakespeare opposes the eternity of his lines to defeat Him.
18
Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The question at the beginning and the progressive declaration of the
strength of poetry is very impressive. But Time’s destructive work can also
be defeated by man’s procreative capacity:
12
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white:
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
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Which erst from heat did canopy the herd
And Summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard:
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow,
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed to brave him, when he takes thee hence.
The natural images of the first two quatrains are used to talk about
the transience of the human condition in the third quatrain and to give an
optimistic answer to the passing of Time in the final couplet.
There is an audio CD, When Love Speaks, launched in 2003 at the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which collects about 50 sonnets recited
and sung by artists of great emotional capacity. You can listen to them on
The Rolling Stone Magazine website http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/
rufuswainwright/albums/album/209663/when_love_speaks: the titles
given to the sonnets correspond to the first lines of each sonnet.
A lot of other artists have given their voice to these magnificent words:
listen to David Gilmour, one of Pink Floyd’s members, in a personal version
of Sonnet 18 on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Osse7w9fs&featu
re=related and, after enjoying it, see the video again and describe its
images: is your idea of summer the same as the one the video conveys?
Who or what do you compare to a Summer’s Day?
Shakespearean sonnets also celebrate another kind of love, different
from the conventions of the time:
130
My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the Sun,
Coral is far more red, than her lips’ red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:
I have seen Roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such Roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Than in the breath that from my Mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That Music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My Mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she beli’d with false compare.
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What’s Beauty for you? When you look for Beauty, what would you like
to find? Where do you think it could be?
Practice reading the 4 sonnets above – 144, 18, 12, 130 – and organize
a reading competition to record and save: who will be the best reader?
The sonnet came to England from Italy. It was experimented by Dante
first and then Petrarca, whose Canzoniere became a model for all the
poets of the European Renaissance. It is the poetic form that manages
to express great passions creating eternal beauty. Sir Thomas Wyatt
introduced the Petrarchan sonnet in England faithfully keeping the form
of 14 lines grouped in 1 octave, which introduced the subject, and 1
sestet, which gave the solution of the problem or some personal thoughts.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, developed the model which was used by
Shakespeare: three quatrains and the turning point in the final couplet,
usually introduced by the words yet, and, so, but etc.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 1564-1593
Differently from Shakespeare, he did not have a quiet temper. He took a
degree at Cambridge University but, it is said, only after the Queen’s Council
intervention because it seems he worked for Her Majesty Elizabeth I.
He died in a brawl when he was only 29 but his literary production is
very rich for the little time he lived: we remember the most famous,
Tamburlaine the Great; Doctor Faustus; The Jew of Malta and Dido,
Queen of Carthage, which give evidence of his humanistic studies and
his personal and innovative elaborations. His plays make us understand
that those times represent a boundary between what had been the
theatre till then and what would become from then on. The didactic aim
vanished: his characters weren’t personifications of vices and virtues but
were enriched by human passions. The lust for power, the limits of man,
the desire to overcome the restrictions that the Church imposed: these
are the most recurrent themes of his production. He didn’t necessarily
deny the existence of God: he refused churches and orthodox beliefs.
If in the Middle Ages God seemed revengeful and the eternal salvation
was possible only after death, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus doesn’t believe
in predestination and in life after death, and rebels against restrictive
institutions. The discovery of America contributed to emphasize this mood:
it meant freedom, new horizons for knowledge and Faustus embodied the
philosophical dimension of the geographical discoveries inspired by the
New World. Faustus wants to be the creator of his own destiny, but not
only Icarus lives inside Faustus, with his thirst for unlimited knowledge:
also Prometheus, with his sense of solitude, because he realizes that the
power he has always looked for is impossible to reach.
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Georg Faustus, a German magician and an astrologer, really existed:
he lived in the 16th century and went around Europe making swindles
and tricks. When he died, legend owned his story, making hypotheses
of his direct involvement with the Devil. Several writers considered this
story with interest: Goethe and Mann among others. Marlowe created
his Faustus as a scholar and a theologian, a man tired of the science of
his time because unable to give answers. That’s why he turned to magic:
he sells his soul to the Devil for 24 years of pleasures and supernatural
knowledge. During these years, the Devil Mephistopheles serves him but,
at the end, he has to bring Faustus’s soul to Hell.
Read the last hour Doctor Faustus lives in Marlowe’s play. It’s a
monologue which expresses all his despair: he realizes that his 24 years
of unlimited knowledge are going to finish. Only an hour to live and then
he has to pay the price of his agreement with Mephistopheles. It is a
moment of great intensity, Faustus is talking to himself:
(The clock strikes eleven)
FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come.
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day. Or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day.
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi.
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
Oh, I’ll leap up to my God: who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.
One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer!
Where is it now? ‘Tis gone:
And see where God stretchth out his arm,
And bends his ireful brows.
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.
No, no. Then will I headlong run into the earth.
Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbor me.
You stars that reigned at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist
Into the entrails of yon laboring cloud,
That when you vomit forth into the air
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My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven.
(The watch strikes)
Ah! Half the hour is past,
‘Twill all be past anon.
Oh God, if thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet, for Christ’s sake whose blood hath ransomed me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain.
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be saved.
Oh, no end is limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Into some brutish beast.
All beasts are happy, for when they die
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements,
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.
Cursed be the parents that engendered me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,
That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven.
(The clock strikes twelve)
Oh, it strikes, it strikes! Now body turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell.
(Thunder and lightning)
Oh, soul, be changed into little water drops
And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found.
(Thunder. Enter the Devils)
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me.
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.
Ugly hell, gape not, come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books. Ah Mephistopheles!
(Exeunt with him)
Faustus asks for help to all the elements of the Universe to avoid
Hell. He hopes Time would stop or pass slower: O lente, lente, currite
noctis equi. But time seems to be faster when you wish it were slower.
So we can say that the perception of time is subjective, it is related to the
circumstances we are living.
What do you think about that? What is the moment when Time passes
slower or faster in your opinion? Can you tell when you would have liked
to stop Time and why?
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Can you imagine Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey, Louie and all the Disney
family struggling with the myth of Faustus? Luciano Bottaro, the famous
cartoonist from Rapallo, realized it in 1958 and then in 2000. His Dottor
Paperus, in a perfect disneyan atmosphere, tries to invent the Serum of
Lasting Peace but his work is obstacled by Evil Strengths (the Beagle
Boys) who ask Mephistopheles for help.
Look at the 6 cartoons below and write in the balloons and in the
captions what you think the characters are saying. You can change the
order if you want.
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Have a look at some bookshops: you may find Bottaro’s Doctor
Paperus and I think it is worth-while reading it and having fun. Then
choose the pages you like best and translate them in English. If you are
good at drawing, why don’t you translate the monologue of Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus you have just read in a comic strip? You can do it also
through the numerous creative softwares existing on the web!
Could Marlowe have competed with Shakespeare if he had lived
longer? We will never know that. They were born in the same year and
when Marlowe died he was already famous and Shakespeare wasn’t.
But what they both understood is that the exploration of the human soul
is really fascinating, first of all because of its unpredictability. Marlowe,
as Shakespeare did later, transferred his contradictions but also his
convinctions in his works: the result is the strenght that they have conveyed
ever since.
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JOHN DONNE
1572-1631
The theme of Death tormented Doctor Faustus and not only him!
As we know, this was a period of deep changes and religious conflicts.
People needed answers but the instability that a new monarch created by
trying to impose his or her religious beliefs, increased the uncertainties
of their lives and the fears for their afterlives: the poet John Donne totally
absorbed the contradictions of his time. Memorable is his Sonnet X, one
of the Holy Sonnets belonging to the Divine Poems collection:
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
Death is faced directly here. As you can notice, the atmosphere
is dramatic: there is a sort of dialogue between the poet and his mute
interlocutor. The second last line highlights the poet’s Christian conception:
death is merely the beginning of the eternal life, there is consolation in the
Christian faith.
What’s your relationship with Death? Are you obsessed by it?
Some painters of ‘800, like Blake and Turner, represented Death on a
“Pale Horse”, as their works in the next page suggest.
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And in some modern comics, like Dylan Dog, it is a skeleton with a black
cloak on.
How do you imagine Death? Share your idea with your classmates.
John Donne opened a new world to poetry. He moved in two apparently
opposite fields: sentimental and love poems on one side, religious and holy
poems on the other side. He explained human experiences with elements
of Philosophy and laid the foundations of Metaphysical poetry, a poetry
which reflected the intellectual and spiritual crisis of the time, the moment
of transition from the Renaissance to the Modern Age. This poetry was a
mixture of passion and thought, feeling and reasoning expressed through
a figurative language, and it tried to explain the universe and the role of
man inside it. Here’s one of Donne’s love poems, The Prohibition:
Take heed of loving me ;
At least remember, I forbade it thee ;
Not that I shall repair my unthrifty waste
Of breath and blood, upon thy sighs and tears,
By being to thee then what to me thou wast ;
But so great joy our life at once outwears.
Then, lest thy love by my death frustrate be,
If thou love me, take heed of loving me.
Take heed of hating me,
Or too much triumph in the victory ;
Not that I shall be mine own officer,
And hate with hate again retaliate ;
But thou wilt lose the style of conqueror,
If I, thy conquest, perish by thy hate.
Then, lest my being nothing lessen thee,
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If thou hate me, take heed of hating me.
Yet love and hate me too;
So these extremes shall ne’er their office do ;
Love me, that I may die the gentler way ;
Hate me, because thy love’s too great for me ;
Or let these two, themselves, not me, decay ;
So shall I live thy stage, not triumph be.
Lest thou thy love and hate, and me undo,
O let me live, yet love and hate me too.
The reference to the Carme 85 by the Latin poet Catullo is clear:
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Translate this very famous Latin couplet in English. Do you think Donne
and Catullo share the same vision of love? Is it possible to forbid or impose
love in your opinion?
The greatest admirer of Donne and the other Metaphysical poets was
the 1948 Nobel Prize T.S.Eliot. He admired their spirit of revolt and felt
nearer to them for their desire of modernization.
In Dead Poets Society, a 1989 film by Peter Weir, the protagonists,
Professor Keating and his students, live a sense of rebellion which could
be compared to that of the Metaphysicals. The film, in fact, is a hymn to
poetry which has changed the world - Thoreau’s, Shelley’s, Whitman’s
among the others. Professor Keating teaches a nonconformist attitude
to his students, pushing them to think by themselves and build their own
identities. Even the concepts of time passing and the brevity of life – the
Horatian Carpe Diem, that is Seize the Day – were used as an invitation
to live as intensily as possible.
Watch the film and enjoy it. Then watch it again and listen carefully to
the poems quoted. Read them on the webpage http://www.antiromantic.
com/poetry.asp and explain which poem best approaches your meaning
of life.
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What happened up to the
Glorious Revolution
4
What happened up to the Glorious Revolution
After James I Stuart
The Stuart period wasn’t a quiet period: the firm and accepted
conviction of Charles I Stuart to be king on the divine right, kept away
a possible cooperation with Parliament: he always asked for money
both for his home and foreign policies and very little he gave back to
his people. As a consequence, the monarchy weakened and in 1628 the
king was forced to sign the Petition of Rights, a new step towards the
modern English constitutional monarchy. Furthermore, he married the
Catholic Henriette Marie, the daughter of the French king Henry IV, and
appointed, as Archibishop of Canterbury, William Laud, a declared enemy
of the Puritans. A context like this favoured the explosion of the 1642 civil
war. England was divided between Royalists and Parliamentarians: the
first group, the Conservatives or the Cavaliers, was formed by lords, the
gentry and the Church of England; the second group, the Roundheads,
was made up of Londoners, the working forces of the ports and the navy,
small landowners, artisans and Puritans. Shortly, Parliament required a
more balance of power but the monarchy refused the idea and everything
ended up with the execution of the king in 1649. It was Oliver Cromwell,
an MP, Member of Parliament, to take control of London so England
experienced the Commonwealth, a republic with only one House in
Parliament, the House of Commons. In 1653 Cromwell was appointed
Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland and for the 5 years he
ruled, till his death, he demonstrated to be a capable leader. But his son
Richard wasn’t successful as his father was, so he resigned just after a
year, when General George Monk summoned a new Parliament and reestablished the two Houses. In 1660, Monk invited Charles II to come back
from France where he was on exile: the Restoration of the Monarchy was
greeted with relief by most of the English who had felt really oppressed by
the strict Puritan rules.
But things were very far from a solution. The merry monarch Charles
II wasn’t admired at all: his court was considered absolutely immoral. The
two disasters happened during his reign – the plague of 1665 and the fire
of the following year – were interpreted as a punishment by the Puritans.
In 1673 Parliament forced the king to accept the Test Act: it served to
prevent Catholics from having any public office. It is of this period the
division of Parliament between Whigs and Tories, the former were the
descendants of Parliamentarians who didn’t believe in the absolute power
neither of the Church nor of the State and wanted religious tolerance; the
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latter were the descendants of the Royalists: they supported the Church
of England, the Crown, the landed gentry and were convinced that the
king ruled thanks to his divine right. But a new difficult matter was taking
shape in the court of the new king James II, Charles’s brother: because
of his strong Catholicism, he lost the support of the Tories. Moreover, he
had two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne, from his first wife, but
the son he had from his Catholic second wife, increased the fear of a
Catholic dynasty on the throne of England. William of Orange, James’s
son-in-law, was strongly worried about the friendship between James II
and the Catholic Louis XIV: both against Protestant Holland, William’s
country. However William entered London with the help of Parliament
and in 1689 he and his wife Mary became William III and Mary II of
England: their revolutionary action favoured by Parliament was known
as the Glorious Revolution, so called both because there was no
bloodshed and because the monarch wasn’t chosen by inheritance. The
cooperation between Crown and Parliament was reinforced, and their
respective power was determined by the 1689 Bill of Rights. In 1689 the
Toleration Act forbade any kind of religious persecution but still a Catholic
couldn’t ascend the throne as established by the 1701 Act of Settlement.
In the meanwhile James II, with the help of the French, had the control of
Ireland but the Protestants of Ulster resisted with the help of William III so
James was defeated in the battle of Boyne in 1690. Catholics in Ireland
were oppressed endlessly, even the export of Irish cattle and clothes were
forbidden so Ireland suffered an absurd economic ruin.
The power of the king diminished more and more and the power of the
Whigs and Tories increased in Parliament: the king could choose his/her
ministers among the majority, and this laid the foundations of modern
government. William III’s reign traced the passage from a despotic
monarchy practised by the Stuarts to the Parliamentary system followed
by the Hanoverians.
Soon after Queen Anne ascended the throne and with the 1707 Act of
Union, England and Scotland were united with the same right to vote.
Work with colours. Use the text above to do a summary: cut out details
and repetitions and keep the elements you consider necessary for the
comprehension of the text. Remember! Your final summary must have the
same meaning as the original text!
The cultural background
In a land where the Bible was the most translated and interpreted book
– James I himself ordered a new version of the Bible known as King
James Bible – it is easily understood that Religion dominated both public
and private life. But what kind of Religion did the XVII-century England
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believe in? It was very hard to distinguish a Religion which put the sacred
to explain human existence and a Religion that was the pretext to obtain
power on earth. Most of the great scientists of the period were men of
faith and the new rationalistic spirit of the time was seen as a means to
better understand the universe created by God.
Philosophy, too, tried to understand how things were. Thomas
Hobbes, who mostly lived in the first part of the XVII century, carved
his convictions into the shape of the Leviathan, as you can see from
the frontispiece of his essay: a giant crowned figure clutching a sword
and a crosier who represented respectively earthly power and spiritual
power. The figure, composed of hundreds of people facing inwards, is
a representation of the union of the two powers in the sovereign who
controls the state: the pictures on the right and on the left symbolize the
two powers respectively.
Hobbes defended absolutism because he thought there were no
alternative solutions. He said that men, for their nature, were in a state
of endless rivalry, with suffering and conflicts among them. As this state
was in contrast with the men’s desire for peace, they weren’t spontaneous
and lived under pressure, that’s why he thought that humanity needed a
sovereign who would impose peace with unlimited power.
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John Locke, who lived in the second part of the XVII century, focused on
the importance of experience and reason as the only source of knowledge. In
his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he denied the existence
of the inborn ideas and stated that ideas generate from the sensations of
the external world or from the internal perceptions which the human mind
records and works out by putting them in relation to each other.
The new scientific thinking encouraged self-confidence and a belief
in human progress and, at the same time, emancipated the minds from
fears and superstitions. A scientific method developed, that is a careful
observation of reality and a systematic collection of data. No more
imagination to explain things but researches were carried out by great
scientists, among whom Isaac Newton who led to a more rational way of
looking at life: the Enlightenment was at its peak.
Work with colours again. Use synonyms and paraphrases to rewrite the
text above on your exercise book. Remember: the final text must preserve
the same meaning as the original text!
John Milton
1608-1674
Surely he is the most representative writer of the period he lived in:
a fervent Puritan, he was Secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State and
supported him with his writings till the end. He was favorable to Charles
I’s execution and when the monarchy was restored, he was imprisoned
for a short time. He lived the rest of his life in poverty and in obscurity, too,
owing to blindness which struck him at the age of 44. Anyway this was the
most creative period of his life and the sonnet he dedicated to his problem
well summarizes it:
On his Blindness
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent, which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my maker, and present
My true account, lest he, returning, chide.
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask; but Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait’.
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The sonnet follows the Petrarchan model: the octave highlights the
poet’s complaint for his situation and the sestet shows his resignation. It’s
a sonnet with a question satisfied by an answer: can you indicate them?
What is the strength which helps the poet to go on? What is the strength
which helps you to go on when you are in trouble?
Milton got his love for culture, music and arts thanks to his father. He
travelled a lot on the Continent: he was in Naples in 1638 when the rumors
of the impending civil war reached him and compelled him to go back
home to support the revolutionary party against royal despotism. Later he
became strongly disappointed and embittered by the destructions of his
political ideals; furthermore he was abandoned by his wife and this sad
experience brought him to write some pamphlets on divorce.
In 1667 he wrote Paradise Lost, a poem in 12 Books whose central
story is built around the Genesis, the 1st Book of the Bible. He felt like Adam
and Eve after their expulsion from Paradise, but also like Satan, a rebel
fighting against the absolute power of God. It is a poetic representation of
man’s original sin and also a heroic poem. Telling the story of man’s fall
was, for Milton,
[…] sad task, yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall, or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d,
Or Neptune’s ire, or Juno’s […]
(from Book IX)
The first lines of the poem remind us of the classical masterpieces,
with the invocation to the Muse:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death unto the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain that blissful seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of chaos […]
(from Book 1)
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The story begins with Satan and the rebel angels who were hurled into
Hell because of their defeat in the war in Heaven. After their initial sense
of discouragement, they try to recover from the defeat. Let’s read what
Satan said:
“Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,”
Said then the lost Archangel, “this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n? - this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is Sovereign can dispose and bid
What shall be right: farthest from him is best
Whom reason hath equall’d, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell, happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells! Hail horrors! hail
Infernal world! and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.
But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,
Th’ associates and co-partners of our loss,
Lie thus astonished on th’oblivious pool,
And call them not to share with us their part
In this unhappy mansion, or once more
With rallied arms to try what may be yet
Regain’d in Heav’n, or what more lost in Hell?”
(From Book 1)
Milton’s Satan, just like Marlowe’s Faustus, are rebels. Both fail, because
no one succeeds in satisfying his ambition, but while Faustus repents at
the end, Satan feels well in Hell because he can however reign, and that’s
the most important thing for him: he will never submit. To him, the power
of the mind is the strongest because it can modify the outside world and
«make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven».
What do you think about it? In which way is the power of our mind able
to modify the meaning of the things surrounding us? How can our Hell
change in Heaven and vice versa?
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Pink Floyd thought differently in 1975 when they wrote Wish you
were here: they dedicated this song and the whole concept album to their
friend Syd Barrett, a member of the band who wasn’t able to «tell Heaven
from Hell», as the song says, because he followed the way of drugs, the
Hell of a lot of young people, and didn’t pursue the right way of music with
the band anymore.
Don’t read the text you’ll find below but write down on your notebook
as many words as you can while listening to the song: it helps you to keep
your concentration high and to practice your ability in understanding. Now
read the text and check yourself:
Wish You Were Here
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air from a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year.
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
How many words did you catch? Why didn’t you catch all the words?
Which words were impossible to understand because you didn’t know
them at all and which ones because you didn’t recognize their sounds?
Now let’s go back to our theme: circle in two different colours the words
belonging respectively to «Heaven» and «Hell» according to the Pink
Floyd text. Do you agree with them? What’s the “Heaven” you want to
reach and what’s the “Hell” you want to escape from? Tell the class.
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Paradise Lost ends with the angel Michael who accompanies Adam
and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and shows them the future of human
race.
[…]
In either hand the hast’ning Angel caught
Our ling’ring parents, and to th’ eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected Plain; - then disappear’d.
They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Wav’d over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces throng’d and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
(from Book XII)
We can see how, at the end, Adam – but it’s Milton who’s speaking –
abandons the great ambitions of public life to turn towards an interior paradise.
And Milton had already lost his ancient conviction of a new restored England
as the new paradise on earth. Like him, Adam and Eve were ready to face
a new life of sacrifice and
efforts. Milton’s aim was
to show not only what
caused man’s fall, but also
the consequences which
it had upon the world,
with better opportunities
than would have been
possible without the fall.
Here on your right is
one of the infinite artistic
masterpieces
which
have been inspired by
the expulsion of Adam
and Eve from Paradise:
it belongs to a set of
water colour illustrations
by William Blake, the
poet and artist of the
English
Romanticism
who greatly appreciated
Milton.
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Go on http://www.paradiselost.org/4-stories-pictures.html: you will find
an exhaustive list of illustrations for Paradise Lost by world fame artists.
Have a look at the pictures referring to “Adam and Eve are expelled from
the Garden of Eden”: which one do you prefer and why? Print it and
describe it to the class.
Before Milton, Dante Alighieri gave us his own conception of Hell in
his Divina Commedia. Let’s compare the two versions:
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Milton’s hell is below Chaos which dominates it; Dante’s hell is below
Jerusalem, the holy town, and it is well defined and organized.
What other differences and similarities can you find? Write down a
short paragraph: you can find on internet Gustave Doré’s illustrations for
Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost which could complete your work.
Is Paradise Lost original or isn’t?
In his book Old Calabria, the writer Norman Douglas dedicated the
chapter XXI to Milton: the title is Milton in Calabria. He went to Cosenza in
the first years of XX century «for set purpose, and bristling with energy»
as he wrote: he was looking for Adamo Caduto, a sacred tragedy by the
Francescan monk Serafino della Salandra printed in Cosenza in 1647,
which is believed to be the most important source of inspiration for Milton’s
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Paradise Lost. I read this book during my university years and it resulted
as a research in the research: I had never heard about this book before
and it was really involving for me to read and to look for what Douglas was
looking for! Douglas succeeded: the book is still at the Library of Cosenza
and Milton might have read it in Naples by chance. Definitely Douglas said
that Paradise Lost couldn’t exist without Adamo Caduto. Let’s read what
Douglas quoted:
Salandra’s central theme is the Universe shattered by the disobedience
of the First Man, the origin of our unhappiness and sins. The same with
Milton.
Salandra’s chief personages are God and his Angels; the first man and
woman; the serpent; Satan and his angels. The same with Milton.
Satan, at the opening of his poem (the prologue), set forth his argument,
and dwells upon the Creative Omnipotence and his works. The same with
Milton.
Salandra then describes the council of the rebel angels, their fall from
heaven into a desert and sulphurous region, their discourses. Man is
enviously spoken of, and his fall by means of stratagem decided upon;
it is resolved to reunite in council in Pandemonium or the Abyss, where
measures may be adopted to the end that man may become the enemy of
God and the prey of Hell. The same with Milton.
Salandra personifies Sin and Death, the latter being the child of the former.
The same with Milton.
Salandra describes Omnipotence foreseeing the effects of the temptation
and fall of man, and preparing his redemption. The same with Milton.
Salandra depicts the site of Paradise and the happy life there. The same
with Milton.
Salandra sets forth the miraculous creation of the universe and of man,
and the virtues of the forbidden fruit. The same with Milton.
Salandra reports the conversation between Eve and the Serpent; the
eating of the forbidden fruit and the despair of our first parents. The same
with Milton.
Salandra describes the joy of Death at the discomfiture of Eve; the rejoicings
in hell; the grief of Adam; the flight of our first parents, their shame and
repentance. The same with Milton.
Salandra anticipates the intercession of the Redeemer, and the overthrow
of Sin and Death; he dwells upon the wonders of the Creation, the
murder of Abel by his brother Cain, and other human ills; the vices of the
Antediluvians, due to the fall of Adam; the infernal gift of war. The same
with Milton.
Salandra describes the passion of Jesus Christ, and the comforts which
Adam and Eve receive from the angel who announces the coming of the
Messiah; lastly their departure from the earthly paradise. The same with
Milton.
(From Old Calabria, Chapter XXI. Milton in Calabria)
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Use Douglas’s words to tell the story, it doesn’t matter if it is Adamo
Caduto’s story or Paradise Lost’s story.
THE RESTORATION DRAMA
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132
P la
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4
Pull the strings of the eight spirals, rewrite them in the traditional way
and put them in order by following the chronological historical order.
Pretend to live in the XVII century Italy and write 2 letters to two
imaginary English friends of yours, one Catholic and one Puritan. What
would you like to tell them about the theatre of that time? Was it better to
close or open them? Why? Exchange the letters with your classmates.
The theatre is the physical simulation of a mental space. There’s always
been the need to “translate” physically the cultural information we absorb.
Do you agree with this definition? How would you like to “translate” the
historical-cultural period we are living now?
133
Conclusion
And now focus on the following points carefully:
• Do you like to discover the relationship between signifier and
signified when you work on a text? It means that your linguistic
intelligence is at work;
• Do you usually make connections between the pieces of information
you get and establish priorities when you study? Surely your logicalmathematical intelligence is dominant;
• Do you usually want your ideas to stay in a world full of tunes, rhythms
and sounds? No doubt your musical intelligence is prevailing;
• Do you need to use your body to express your thoughts and moods?
In this case your bodily kinesthetic intelligence is at work;
• Do you perceive the space around you and do you like when you
“see” it mentally during your work? It means that your spatial
intelligence is dominant;
• Are you interested in what other people say and in your ability to
have good relationships with them? Surely your interpersonal
intelligence is prevailing;
• Do you want to exercise your meta-cognitive skills and be aware
of your own feelings and whishes? No doubt your intrapersonal
intelligence is at work;
• Do you feel in harmony with nature and its elements, rather than
in our so called civilized society? In this case your naturalistic
intelligence is dominant;
• Do you believe that there’s something or someone beyond our
earthly life and base your works on this idea? It means that your
spiritual intelligence is prevailing.
Intelligences work mutually, as in 1983 the theorist Howard Gardner
said, and if we satisfy them during our daily work we will be able to develop
our interests in a wider range and learn without frustrations. So: which
intelligences have been more dominant than others in the various tasks
this book has suggested you? Which one or which ones best represent
your way of being?
134
RINGRAZIAMENTI
I miei ringraziamenti più spontanei vanno a tutti quelli che in vari modi mi
hanno aiutato e supportato, a quelli che gentilmente hanno dato uno sguardo
al mio manoscritto regalandomi preziosi feedback e suggerimenti.
Grazie al mio editore e al suo team per aver dato forma ad un mio sogno.
Ringrazio di cuore i miei mentori di tutta una vita dai quali ho veramente
imparato tanto.
Un ringraziamento sincero va a tutti quelli che leggeranno questo mio libro
e lo useranno arricchendolo con le loro interpretazioni e le loro personalità.
È stata un’esperienza di apprendimento per me. Grazie ancora.
135
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shakespeare the dramatist - moving ideas a mash up of old and new

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