Shakespeare's world - a recording

 In class we have begun thinking about Shakespeare by listening to an episode of the BBC's excellent radio series, "Shakespeare's Restless World", which takes an object found from the time, and brings out its significance socially, politically, and in terms of Shakespeare's plays. This episode, called 'City life, urban strife', takes a woolen cap worn by the lower echelons of society. There was even a parliamentary statute which stipulated that males over the age of six had to wear a wool cap on Sundays and holidays!

The programme also considers how the very many apprentices of the day would wear one, and often get into trouble in town and go wild particularly on Shrove Tuesday just before the rigours of Lent set in. In fact, disorderly behaviour was commonplace, and the crowds could easily become a 'mob' and a serious threat to power structures at the time. 

Listen to the episode by clicking on the link below. And prepare a fully summary of its main ideas:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nYeRynW04vN-B8uLpuYfWm-KGeFrvzoh/view?usp=sharing

The Tempest

In these tempest-tossed times, what better way to begin the new year than with a dynamic interpretation of Shakespeare's late play The Tempest. Here is Valentin Gerlier in the Lincoln Centre in London, giving us insights into the ways Shakespeare's incredible dramas work, how they unfold and affect us so deeply. He considers A Midsummer Night's Dream too, as an example of how Shakespeare uses the world of the Imagination as a transformative phenomenon in an otherwise rational, legalistic world (as Valentin describes the world of Athens in A Dream, before the moonlit magical world of the forest and the fairies gets to work). 

Click on the link below and listen, and no worries if you have not yet read the plays. The talk opens up all sorts of things, and will make you want to see or read them, again or for the first time:

Autumn and the poets

I love autumn. People often find it depressing, and it is true that Nature loses the glorious colours of spring and summer, the skies cloud over and temperatures drop. Or at least they used to, at quite distinct moments of the year. For some time now we notice the seasons disturbed, and on a beautiful autumn day like today it is good at last to feel the ‘right’ seasonal weather at the ‘right’ time. Autumn has always been a favourite season for the poets, especially the Romantics, who of course associate it with loss, with death or just absence. There is a gentle melancholy to it, more so than winter, which is less subtle in this respect, in its stark bareness. But the association of autumn with loss and melancholy of course predates the Romantics; Shakespeare saw in it, as he saw in all seasons, a mirror of the human soul and its endless shifting moods.

In Sonnet 97, the speaker expresses his sense of loss during his absence from his beloved, and he does this through the seasons. Although the time of absence was summer, it felt like winter. And when autumn came, without his beloved, the riches of autumn came to ripeness for nothing :

And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,

Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,

Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:

Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me

But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;

Shakespeare sees the natural world as dynamic, inhabited by spirit, animated in the original sense of having a soul; autumn is ‘big with rich increase’, pregnant, yet a pregnant widow because the ‘lord’, the beloved, is no longer there to welcome the ‘issue’, the offspring. It is beautiful to consider the autumn ‘bearing the wanton burthen (burden) of the prime’ ; nature is almost over-abundant in its generosity, it is ‘wanton’ - meaning here without restraint, and it carries the burden, like a pregnant mother, in an act of giving its ‘child’ to the world. This sense of nature as ‘spiritful’ and animated differs greatly from our modern view, based largely on the scientific reduction of nature to a series of discrete separate objects to be observed from "the outside", mere parts of a mechanism whose sole purpose is regarded as a closed circuit of material self-perpetuation. And not as bearer of meaning. 

Here is the whole sonnet:

Sir Philip Sidney sonnet

Here is a poem by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), a leading poet of the English Renaissance, a long-gone time when composing a sonnet was a gauge of the authentic, accomplished individual, a real person. He combines elegance, wit and feeling. 'Wit' in these instances is not being clever, but a faculty of the mind which finds its true place, in service of the heart. This comes from a long sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs, called Astrophil and Stella - Astrophil the star lover, Stella his star:

Because I oft, in dark abstracted guise,

Seem most alone in greatest company,

With dearth of words, or answers quite awry,

To them that would make speech of speech arise,

They deem, and of that doom the rumour flies,

That poison foul of bubbling pride doth lie

So in my swelling breast, that only I

Fawn on myself, and others do dispise.

Yet pride, I think, doth not my soul possess,

Which looks too oft in his unflatt'ring glass;

But one worse fault, ambition, I confess,

That makes me oft my best friends overpass;

Unseen, unheard, while thought to highest place

Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace.