THE RENAISSANCE (I): WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE GREAT NONCONFORMIST - CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ELIZABETHAN AGE

age of travelling, adventure, discovery, colonial expansion, initiative, prosperity, power, ambition, plotting, physical love

cult of life, belief in mans possibilities, exuberance of mind, frenzied passions, violence, demonism, duality body/mind, extravagance, desire to taste everything

interest in science, geography ( the South), humanism, magic, form, image, words, lyric tone ( blank verse )

influence of Plato, Aristotle (live and die in Aristotles work Dr. Faustus ), Neo-Platonism, Erasmus, Montaigne

themes: how to succeed in life, how to master love, how to deal with death; explores mans inability to live content in this world; rhetoric of wonder and curiosity; introduces the fantastic; new relationship with God and destiny; salvation / damnation

texts: cheap editions, sometimes no authors mentioned, published without permission, editors interfere, alternative variants, rewritings, no real experience of the text, flexibility

Chain of Being: microcosm vs. macrocosm

stones being

plants - being and growing

animals - being, growing, sense

man- being, growing, sense, reason

angels - pure reason

God - pure actuality

humours:

blood = air, hot and moist, spring

choler = fire, hot and dry, summer

melancholy = earth, cold and dry, autumn

i phlegm = water, cold and moist, winter

John Lyly, Thomas Nash, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe

romantic comedy: Lyly, Endymion, Galathea

the revenge tragedy: Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

chronicle plays: Peele, Edward I, Greene, James IV, Marlowe, Edward II

fall of princes tragedy: Marlowe ( 1564-1593 ) Tamburlaine the Great, Dr. Faustus

text A 1604, text B 1616

origin: ancient Jewish legend, German folk books

practices of magic, misappropriation of magic to political ends, sin, love, authority, damnation, liberation

medieval sinner, Renaissance metaphysical adventurer modelled on ancient Christian rebels - Simon the Magus, Cyprian of Antioch - and Renaissance scientists - Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno

temptation of knowledge ( medicine, logic, engineering, optics, chemistry ) and occult secrets, intense curiosity, extravagant taste of profit , power and pleasure ( O what a world of profit and delight / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence), humanist, free-thinker

suspending normal rules in magic

omnia in unum - the essence common to all things in nature from stone to God (Paracelsus, Hermes Trismegistus )

discovery of the subconsciousness, eros - vinculum vinculorum - an energy controlling the macrocosm and microcosm ( Giordano Bruno )

Lucifer, Mephistopheles: modern Renaissance characters

Thomas Healy the Marlowe effect , Peter Conrad: a play about the prostitution of fantasy , imperialism of greed ;

intertext from Marlowe to Chamisso, Lenau, Heine, Goethe, Byron, Valry, Thomas Mann, Victor Eftimiu

DR: FAUSTUS

Scene 1

Faustus: Divinity, adieu!

These necromantic books are heavenly,

Lines, circles, scenes, letters and characters:

Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.

Oh, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,

Is promised to the studious artisan!

All things that move between the quiet poles

Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings

Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds.

But his dominion that exceeds in this

Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man:

A sound magician is a demi-god.

Here, tire my brains to get a deity.

Scene 14.

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 op 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, rent not my heart for naming of my Christ!

Yet will I call him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer!

Where is it now? >Tis gone:

And see where God stretcheth 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 harbour 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 labouring cloud,

Than when you vomit forth into the air

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 soul.

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

Unto 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, Mephostophilis!

Exeunt with him.

born on 23 April, 1564

in 1582 marries Anne Hathaway, b. 1556

three children: Susanna (1583 - 1649 ), Hamnet ( 1585-1596 ) and Judith ( 1585-1662 )

leaves for London in 1585

1592 actor and playwright at the Globe Robert Greene: an upstart Crow, in his own conceit the only shake-scene in the country

1595 The Lord Chamberlains Men

1598 mentioned as an actor in one of Ben Jonsons plays

1599 a shareholder at the Globe

1601, 1602, 1604, 1613 buys land and houses in Stratford

1611 returns to Stratford as a rich man

dies in 1616

Anne dies in 1623

dating: external sources, internal sources, style

37 plays, 18 in Quarto form

1623 First Folio

1591:Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Loves Labours Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew

1594: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Merchant of Venice

Henry IV Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida

1601: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Alls Well that Ends Well, Othello

1606: Timon of Athens, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus

1609: Pericles

1611: Cymbeline, The Winters Tale, The Tempest

Shakespeare and John Fletcher ( c. 1613 )

The History of Cardenio ( lost

Henry VIII or All is True - the firing of a cannon burned the Globe in 1613, July 4

The Two Noble Kinsmen ( pr

Sir Thomas More

originality: borrowed subjects, but original treatment of the plot. Examples:

OTHELLO: Giambattista Cinthio ( Gli Ecatommiti-The Hundred Tales ) 1565, tr. French 1584

ROMEO AND JULIET: Bandello, Arthur Brooke ( The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet)

MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM: Ovid, Chaucer, Reginald Scot   (Discovery of Witchcraft )

realism

themes: public world of affairs, wars and politics vs. private world of love and family; Eros vs. Thanatos; sense of integration vs. sense of fragmentation; thought vs. action; men vs. women

plot: inner crisis, cumulative and supernatural elements

characters: prodigality of output, impartiality, vital force, development, women, generation gap

language: artificial, complex, allegorical, poetic, comic/tragic, verse / prose, songs

objectivity. Notice the different opinions on life expressed by the following characters and think whether you can find out which one is Shakespeares:

Hamlet (Hamlet): There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than there are dreamt of in your philosophy. (I.5.166-167)

Prospero (The Tempest): We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. (IV.1.156-158)

Jacques (As You Like It):   All the worlds a stage,

And all the men and women merely players. ( II.7. 139-140)

Macbeth (Macbeth): Life is 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 ! V. 5. 24-28)

Theatres: The Theatre , outside the City, James Burbage, 1576-7; The Blackfriars, The Swan, The Rose; The Globe - the Lord Chamberlains Men, Richard Burbage, 1599, 3,000 spectators, burnt down in 1613, reconstructed, pulled down in 1644, rebuilt in 1992.

Indications given by Hamlet to actors: 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, I had as lief the towncrier 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 groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. // Pray you, avoid it. ( Hamlet, III, 2, 1-15).

Plays and concordances available at https://www.opensourceshakespeare.com/search/search-results.php