Shakespeare's Tragedies [Audiobook]

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Shakespeare's Tragedies [Audiobook]
2007 | Course No. 2752 | 24 lectures | Duration: 11:59:56 | English: MP3, 96 kb/s, 2 channels | + PDF Guidebook | 495 MB
Publisher: The Teaching Company
Series: The Great Courses
Lecturer: Professor Clare R. Kinney, Ph.D. - University of Virginia
Genre: Literature


Shakespeare's contributions to stage and language are unequaled. In what Professor Clare R. Kinney calls the "power and audacity of his poetry and stagecraft," Shakespeare has left audiences breathless these past four centuries.



His artistry is as evident in moments of insensate rage, as when King Lear dares Nature to do her worst-

 

 

 

 

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples,
drowned the cocks!

 

 

 

 

 

as it is in moments of heartbreaking tenderness, as when Othello steals a few last kisses from the sleeping and innocent wife he is about to murder for the adultery he imagines-

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ah balmy breath, that doth almost persuade
Justice to break her sword! One more, one more. .

 

 

 

But beyond his astonishing feats of language and dramatic impact, Shakespeare also left us a legacy, crafted from his experiences and explorations, of suffering and transgression in his six great mature tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.



Questions and Dilemmas of Tragedy



Experienced students of Shakespeare, those new to his work, and those who may be returning after many years away, will all find it makes an optimal addition to their libraries of books and of other Teaching Company literature courses.



Professor Kinney's aim is to take you deep within each play. You'll observe Shakespeare's protagonists struggling to make choices in the face of competing social, moral, and psychological pressures and "clawing [from] their pain and horror," as she puts it, "a kind of insight."



Professor Kinney supplies a series of insights that teach a nuanced understanding of each play's meaning-a gift that will increase the dramatic impact of every Shakespearean tragedy you see on the stage or screen, or visualize as you read them, as well as enhance your ability to form insights on your own with each reading or performance.



As Professor Kinney works through the plays, you'll see how Shakespeare returns again and again to a set of themes that resonate through his work.



What can happen when the desires of an individual are at odds with the constraints or demands of the society around him? How do love, hatred, and ambition sever loyalties in what would today be called a "dysfunctional family"?



How is power used and felt, whether it be political and erotic power, the power of language and imagination, or even the power of theater itself, as in Hamlet's "play within the play," or in the kind of public theatrics required of, and rejected by, the title character of Coriolanus?



These are only some of the themes Professor Kinney explores in Shakespeare's Tragedies, a 24-lecture look at the astonishing body of work produced by Shakespeare from 1600-1608. It is a body of work made all the more astonishing by considering that it was not written to be the timeless dramatic art it has become, but as commercial theater in a competitive marketplace that placed excessive demands on its writers and performers.



While today's greatest hits run for months, perhaps even years, the theatrical world of Shakespeare's time was very different.



A Theatrical Reality Far Different from Today's



With theaters closed only on church holidays, in bad weather, or in time of plague, theater companies had to have enormous repertories, and a very long run lasted only 10 days. Professor Kinney talks about one theater company, for instance, whose records from the 1594-95 season have survived. The records show 38 plays performed-21 of them newly written-which indicates that a new play was added about every two weeks.



Yet even working under those conditions, Shakespeare was able to produce works that probed the human condition with extraordinary perception.



Moving from play to play, following Shakespeare's recurring themes, Professor Kinney also devotes particular focus to two themes that surface repeatedly in his tragedies.



The first of these issues, that of agency, concerns those who actually get to make choices about the roles they take in their own lives, acting freely, and confronting the consequences of their actions.



Is Macbeth, for example, acting on his own by murdering Duncan to ascend to the throne? Is he responding to half-suppressed forces of ambition that have been unleashed by Lady Macbeth? Or is he the witches' pawn, acting out the tragic script that they have set in motion? The play suggests all of these things, and learning to see and evaluate the evidence for diverse interpretations of a complex drama is one of the many intellectual pleasures offered by these lectures.



A second topic that echoes through these plays is that of transgression, when characters-especially women-make a choice that is perceived as violating a social or moral boundary.



When Desdemona marries the Moor, Othello, for example, she has crossed a racial barrier, committing what her father calls an "unnatural" act. And when she crosses the boundary that demands a wife's silence and submission, she transgresses yet again, daring to dispute her husband's allegations with a denial that earns her his wrathful epithet, "strumpet."



Women as Tragic Protagonists



Professor Kinney plays close attention to the roles of women in these tragedies, considering whether women can indeed be tragic protagonists-all but one of these plays are named after males. She addresses the significance of just who, in a play, gives the soliloquies that make the audience privy to their reflections on their feelings or actions.



But she also looks at the ways women can and do exercise power in the plays, as in the example of Coriolanus's mother, Volumnia, whose belief system has shaped her son's psyche and whose climactic re-enactment of the control she wields over him destroys him.



One of the extra delights of the course comes from the sheer pleasure of hearing Professor Kinney present it. British by birth, she is also an occasional actress, reading not only Shakespeare's lines with emotion and understanding, but also imbuing her own statements during the lectures with high dramatic impact.



Her background as a director of student scenes also stands her in excellent stead as she offers perceptive comments about the choices directors must make in intelligently staging these plays. She ensures that dramatic impact is maximized without diluting the compelling intellectual questions that make Shakespeare's plays so rich and that Professor Kinney's lectures so eloquently bring out.

 

 

• In Hamlet, Professor Kinney introduces you to the play's fascination with secrets and disclosure, explores its treatment of the morality of revenge, and examines the emotional violence Hamlet permits himself when the focus of his rage is female instead of male. She asks whether the "unfolding" (laying bare of identity) that one character demands of another in the very first moments of the play ever quite extends to the mysteries that lie at the heart of Hamlet himself.
• In Othello, you'll encounter the "motiveless malignity" of the villainous Iago's manipulations, the racial and gender barriers its characters violate, and the "poisoned sight" that brings down a character unable to negotiate the demands of his identities as both a warrior and a lover.
• In King Lear, you'll see the consequences of a rash choice unfold in one of Shakespeare's most harrowing tragedies, wondering, as generations of critics have, where-or whether-consolation can ever be found in its shattering events.
• In Macbeth, you'll journey through the darkest corridors of ambition, conscience, and self-knowledge, where a strong-willed woman shares with her husband the role of tragic protagonist. Lady Macbeth finds that reshaping her husband's "manliness" ironically splits their partnership apart.
• In Antony and Cleopatra, you'll meet two protagonists engulfed by the complexities of Rome's imperial history. One is torn between two aspects of his own identity, and the other is determined, even in the face of Rome's armies, to control the means of her death, and to choose the part of her conflicted lover's identity that will survive them.
• In Coriolanus, you'll meet a war-scarred aristocrat questing for heroic independence in the midst of a world of "politics as usual." Unable to compromise his principles and, as a result, alienated from his own community, he cannot understand what has doomed him.

As Professor Kinney notes, "Shakespeare's tragedies often unfold in geographically distant places, or are set in a far-off past-but they are often shaped and inflected by matters surprisingly close to home." That is no less true of the course itself. Shakespeare's Tragedies, in Professor Kinney's words, persists in asking "what kind of significance we, in the 21st century, might wrest out of Shakespeare's tragic spectacles."
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Edited July 28, 2022 by Bad Karma
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