4. SHAKESPEARE: COMEDIAS

 

Terminamos con The Tempest el tema 4, y pasamos al tema 5, las tragedias de Shakespeare, en los días que quedan de noviembre.

Las clases del Dr. García Landa terminan en noviembre, y en diciembre y enero los temas 6-8 estarán a cargo de otro profesor.

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Two lectures on Shakespeare's comedy (or 'tragicomedy', or 'romance') The Tempest:

- David Bevington on The Tempest.

 

- 400 Years later: Shakespeare's The Tempest  and Early America:

a video lecture on William Shakespeare's The Tempest

 

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NIVEL AVANZADO: 

Paul Cantor on The Tempest

David Bevington on The Tempest

 

Más sobre otras comedias de Shakespeare.

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Julie Taymor's film of The Tempest, with Helen Mirren as 'Prospera':

Y (por comparar adaptaciones e interpretaciones) una versión para televisión de 1960 (bastante recortada).

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Commentary of some passages in The Tempest: 

1.2  Caliban

2.1 Gonzalo's utopia

3.3 The vanishing banquet

4.1 The masque / Our revels now are ended:

 PROSPERO

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
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-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye 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 vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb'd 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.

 

 

 

5.1 Reconciliation and abandoning Rough magic

 

 

Prospero's farewell:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Seguimos con The Tempest,  amén de otras comedias.

- The Merchant of Venice (Shylock and the trial)

- A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act 5, Pyramus and Thisbe)

Una canción de The Tempest:



Marjorie Garber, a lecture on The Tempest




 
- An online edition of The Tempest (Shakespeare Online, MIT). With commentary of main issues, etc.


A tutorial summarizing The Tempest:

 

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NIVEL AVANZADO:

Paul Cantor on The Merchant of Venice (video lectures).

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Interludio: 

José Luis Esteban, gran cómico aragonés, nombrado Alumno Distinguido de nuestra Facultad.

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Trataremos las comedias de Shakespeare con un poco de teoría de la comedia, análisis de algunas escenas, y centrándonos luego más en The Tempest.

 

The TEMPEST  (Open Source Shakespeare) 

Comedy, dramatism and theatricality in Shakespeare:

- Foregrounding of performance

- Mechanism and complication

- The dialectics of scripted / unscripted action

- Complex use of sources and materials.

Theatricality in Twelfth Night. (Analysis of 1.5, 5.1).

 

 - The early comedies (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew).

 

Katherina's final monologue in The Taming of the Shrew.

 

 

 

Theories of humour:

Bergson, Le  rire.   Theory of automatism and liberation from automatism.

Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Humour as an escape from repression and authority.

Priestley: Emphasis on the observation of character and the incongruities it leads to.

(Social dramatism: incongruities of different social roles on the same individual).

Desire, sexuality and manners:  Comedy as the liberation from a suffocating system of manners and regulated desire.

Langer: Humour and laughter as the by-product of a system of conventions. Emphasis on the comedy as a work of art and an aesthetic artifact which invokes certain conventions and plays with them.

Examples from Twelfth Night  (E.g. Feste and the rioters vs. Malvolio's puritanism; courtship of Olivia and Viola).

 

 

 

 

Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Comedy as the mythos of spring.  Phases of comedy:

- Comedies of manners, which put emphasis on satire and the blocking characters.  (Ironic phase, Quixotic phase, New Comedy)

- Romantic comedies, emphasizing the scenes of discovery, liberation and reconciliation. (Romantic comedy, romances, collapse of comic worlds).

An order of harmony and stability is disrupted by blocking and ambitious characters, and then is restored with the liberation of desire and the punishment of social vices.

Aristotelian criticism (Tractatus Coislinianus) -Types of comic characters: eiron, alazon, bomolochos

Frye adds the agroikos or killjoy. 

- Kinds of comedies:  Old comedy, New comedy, Commedia dell' arte, romantic comedy, comedy of humours and comedy of manners....

Emphasis on different comic resources (Sypher):
obscenity, Bergsonian automatism, Farce and slapstick, Wit and verbal battles, comic characters (Falstaff, Mercutio... who may disrupt the logic of the plot), Comedy of ideas vs social folly, High comedy, empathy and wisdom.

Algo de cara a las comedias:

Después de las Historias de Shakespeare pasamos a las Comedias. Aquí unos temillas sobre la comedia teatral y su tradición. 

Y aquí un excurso sobre la comedia romántica en el cine. No es lo mismo, pero the fundamental things apply.


Unas notas sobre Much Ado About Nothing—and its afterlife.


Resumen y versión cinematográfica de TWELFTH NIGHT.