The quickness of emotion, whether: jealousy, forgiveness, admiration or love, perhaps emphasises the the irrational state of the human mind/heart. Insightful lecture...thank you.
Great lecture as all are. But I do find one thing notably lacking, a discussion of two powerful women, Hermione and Paulina. Neither Portia nor Calphurnia are like these two. When Paulina confronts Leontes with his child, she takes no back seat to anyone. Leontes urges Antigonus to rein in his wife. Antigonus knows that's not possible. And when Hermione convinces Polixenes to stay a week longer, and when she protests her innocence, she reveals a wit and strength of character unlike any other. When she accepts imprisonment, it only serves to ennobles her character. These two women are to be loved.
I love this series. Re the comments on why jealousy was such a fixation of S -- and jealousy this extreme -- I would suggest that back in those days: a) S was particularly aware of the potential for violence to stem from jealousy, seeing it all around him in chaotic London; and b) the grandiosity of kings, who had absolute power over the bodies of all their subjects, meant that they could both act out their jealousies with great impunity, and punish any perceived disloyalty with psychopathic rigor (think Henry VIII). So it's not too hard to see the cause. That said, there is a psychotic psychopathy here that is the unparalleled/nonpareil example of jealousy in all of S, which is saying something.
43:33 "..the wife, even though he doesn't know that she's still alive" Well that's debatable, especially when looking at the play through a contemporary Shakespearean lens. The magic of the Hermione-statue coming alive at the end of the play, reflective of Ovid's Metamorphoses, is that the audience gets to believe with wonder that the mimesis of theatre is real, thus being subjected to a metamorphosis of their own. The theory of Hermione being alive all along doesn't hold the same theatrical value, at least to me.
Hupsibasse the play consistently supports that she never died...i think her posing as a statue to surprise the audience is wonderfully theatrical. The act of her coming from death to life still lies in the poetry so your sense of wonder is not wholly wrong... but it would be toooo theatrically contrived for even this play her like Jesus... Not to mention by that allusion blasphemous. So Shakespeare places "realistic" explanation. However as I said for everyone it's still a rebirth poetically and theatrically
Ovid tells us that Pygmalion did not dare ask Venus that his statue should come alive, but only that he might have a girl "like" his statue. Venus, however, who, being a goddess, spoke only the language of myth, metaphor, and metamorphosis, ignored this and brought the statue to life. Shakespeare is clearly of Venus' mind in such matters.
I agree. The idea of her hiding for 16 years seems to cheapen it for me. I found the final scene so touching because she had been dead, really dead. It is a miracle, an undeserved second chance, not a plot or a trick.
No, Professor Garber, you don't get to aver Hermione is "alive" for those sixteen years.Certainly not to tell the student she was wrong to sense magic. It is a magical play that turns, not on a trick played on a man by two women. Hermione exists for sixteen years in the merciful, magical, alchemical place of Shakespeare's creation in which Time can do its work and a hideously bereaved mother can come to a place of acceptance and forgiveness and even joy. The Shakespeares are bereaved parents; so are Leontes and Hermione. Their sons are dead.
I am an English major but I never had a decent teacher like this. Prof Garber is lost on the big ideas like innocence and experience or romance and humours (this play requires some talk about the humor of jealousy) but she does know the play well and she manages to reshuffle many of the important ideas and images to help to build the literary picture. Such a welcome break from the biographical, or post-whatever or identity politics. It is not clear that she has much absorbed the great essays on this play by Northrop Frye (in *Fables of Identity* and *A Natural Perspective*) but I doubt that in the end she much understands him. Why is it so hard to have decent teaching like Garber in literature? The bullshit I put up with in the 1970s would never fly in mathematics (my other major). I feel severely ripped off.
The video misses that act IV.iv modulates to summer imagery from spring. It is true that sheep are sheared in early spring by shepherds. But by poets, since nothing grows in winter, the fertility of spring has to be given time to develop into its credences in summer. The modulations happen with the argument from Puttenham of the cultivated and wild flowers esp the line "these are flowers of middle summer," and "I would I had some flowers of the spring." The sudden change in season from spring to summer is part of the mouldy tale of presentation not explanation. Like the introduction of a musical motif. Same goes for the unaccountable flips of Leontes and Polixenes. This is a fairy world.
Once again we see rationalizations of what an objective observer would see as bad plotting, unexplained motivations, strange interruptions and additions, and contrived endings. Shakespeare might have had a way with words but as a dramatist he's overrated. Why is Leontes so immediately suspicious of a lifelong friend? Why does he go from being a good host to maniacal, baby-killing jealousy in the space of five minutes? Does Hermione die or not? If Leontes was told that she's dead, why does Pauline hide the truth for 16 years? Would we have forgiven these head-scratchers with any other playwright? The Prof. is a good, expert lecturer but it's hard to find actually critical Shakespeare criticism, at least in college lectures.
The professor surely does not believe in the resurrection. But Paulina says that she is convinced of Hermione's death "who is lost, too." (II,ii, 231). Instead, it is all a masterful staging of illusion over 16 years. I suppose that Prof Garber has also given up on Santa Claus. Must make the romances tough reading.
"Boys eternal" doesn't this mean "boys will be boys" and very sexist in today's culture? What we as a modern audience bring to this is what matters most now, even if we know the 17th century meanings (which is important), it is a very scary, almost predatory nature that Shakespeare is talking about and what we bring to it as an audience today.
