“WE THAT ARE YOUNG SHALL NEVER SEE SO MUCH”: SHAKESPEAR’S KING LEAR

level: introductory, Duration: 5 weeks

King Lear is often experienced as the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies and the one that arouses the greatest pathos.  

Shakespeare intended King Lear to show forth the highest act of political life for a British monarch, the unification of the Kingdom, and the successful transition to a new ruler. We are shown that even the peak of practical or communal existence is open to tragedy. King Lear also has the most reference to nature and human nature in all of the plays, to provide the counterpoint to the tensions between convention and nature that operate in political life at its peak.

The disjunction between the conventional authority of the king and his natural love for his best daughter triggers Lear’s destruction of all the trappings of his own position and place.

SHAKESPEAR’S TEMPEST: A BRAVE NEW WORLD OF POETIC WISDOM

level: introductory, Duration: 5 weeks

This play is of even more than usual philosophical interest. Shakespeare seems to be responding directly to Plato’s request that a poet show that imitative art can be both pleasant and also “beneficial for the political community and for human life” (Republic 607c). The characters and actions of the play seem to show Shakespeare deliberately flouts every stricture against imitative poetry and its objects that Plato suggests in the Republic. However, the plot of the Tempest shows how Shakespeare justifies his art: he renders dramatic and interesting the apparently boring topic of the Republic; how a wise ruler would render due justice to everyone in his or her power. By bringing on the stage a wise ruler who commands through illusions, Shakespeare appears to reflect on his own role as artist and thinker.

OTHELLO

level: introductory, Duration: 5 weeks

Shakespeare’s great tragedy is now vivid and even controversial because of the presence of some of our current preoccupations, such as race, gender, class and “narrative” (i.e., lying). But Shakespeare gives these abstractions, and universal passions such as jealousy, “a local habitation and a name” (Midsummer Night’s Dream V.1). That is, he makes meaning by exhibiting these themes in vibrant characters in a precise social and political setting, in this case the Republic of Venice, which is Shakespeare’s model for the emerging modern commercial state. The noble Othello and heroic Desdemona are destroyed by the very things that make them excellent: their longings for virtue and nobility amid the apparent freedoms of the modern commercial republic.