Descriptions

Seminars beginning July 7, 8, or 9  (Try One Week for Free)

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I - Wednesdays 2:00 pm EST 7/16-10/1

And so the man who wears the hollow crown, haunted by the unseen ghost of a cousin he cannot forget, now forgets the one who put it on his head, according to the son of the man who put it there.  And the roustabout son of the man whose crowned mortal temples rather like a dam trap the rain of troubles inside, flooding the circumference instead of fencing it out to keep the high ground dry, plans to forget those who play his foil so that he can show himself in time (soon) to come “like bright metal on sullen ground.”  O Richard, burnished in death, tarnished in life!  O Henry, the fourth king of that name to wear the crown, only to learn that the king’s king, Death, holds his court within!  O Kate, perturbed Lady Percy, out of whose “faint-slumber(ed)” husband Hotspur’s mouth have come “murmur(ed) tales of iron wars” (2.3.47).  Alas, poor fat Jack Falstaff, king of appetites!  Where be your gibes, your gambols, and your lisps?  (wrong play! Hamlet, 5.1.179)  O to be a king!  O to be shut of it!  Henry IV, Part 1. 

Text: any standard edition (e.g., Arden, Riverside, Folger, Signet, Pelican, Yale, Oxford) with act, scene, line numbers 

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream - Tues & Fri 9:00 am EST 7/8-8/15

Is the dream you woke up with the one you dreamt, or is it, in midsummer, the one the errant fly buzzes into your ear -- or more sinister, the one the stealthy mosquito fevers into your blood in its thievish nocturnal visitation?  Is it a memory (“I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,” 4.1.111), an optical illusion (“a bush supposed a bear,” 5.1.22), a lover’s fantasy (an illicit swap set straight), young love devoured by parental prohibition (Pyramus and Thisby, Romeo and Juliet, Antigone and Haemon, Khosrow and Shirin)?  Does the dream have a bottom, whether or not it’s Bottom’s Dream?  A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes you want to wake up with a dream, which we’ll do.

Text: any standard edition (e.g., Arden, Riverside, Folger, Signet, Pelican, Yale, Oxford) with act, scene, line numbers 

Euclid, Optics - Mon & Thurs 1:00 pm EST July 7-August 11, 2025

“Nothing that is seen is seen at once in its entirety.”  How then do we comprehend wholes?  Or don’t we?  Does the dim light of reason supply what the dimmer light of the eye cannot apprehend?  Do we make a cognitive collage of what is presented to our bodily vision?  Why did the most famous mathematician of antiquity turn his gaze toward seeing?  And why is the first of the five dozen demonstrations in this remarkable inquiry a demonstration of a negative?  How does one know what one cannot see?  Without knowing the order of textual composition, can one say that the Optics is the text with which the Elements was pregnant, epistemologically if not chronologically?  Who, as Edna St. Vincent Millay observed in Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare, has done more to shine a light on the “shaft of light anatomized that into his vision shone?”  Nor is that all.  If in the Elements motion is intimated, in the Optics it is expressly considered – and the observer, subject to the index of time, implicated.  

Shorter Seminars beginning July 7 or 8  (Try One Week for Free)

Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass - Mon & Fri 11:00 am-12:30 pm EST 7/7-7/25 (6 sessions)

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”  So said Abraham Lincoln in one of his characteristically concise private musings, probably in the 1850’s.  A generation earlier, in Baltimore, a black boy overheard his master telling his mistress to stop teaching the boy his letters, urging on her that were the boy to learn to read, “it would forever unfit him to be a slave” (Narrative, ch. 6).  The boy understood straightaway that by this saying the master meant to go on being a master and meant for him to go on being a slave.  The boy was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, later to become Frederick Douglass after choosing his new name, replete with the double s, from what he was reading at the time of his escape from bondage, Lady of the Lake.  The boy had grasped the power of the law of contradiction – that being free could not include being a slave or vice versa; that the power of learning to read would make him unfit for the very condition of slavery in which he presently found himself; that he and his master wanted diametrically opposite things for his life; that his master’s words on this subject were reliably convertible, by way of simple negation, to a guide for himself.  Has the moral consequence of this law, simultaneously with its meaning, ever dawned with more salvific clarity on a human soul so young?  This moment in the life of young Fred couldn’t have occurred much more than, if so many as, fifteen years after the words “land of the free” and “home of the brave” had been written into the “Star-Spangled Banner” a few miles downstream from Baltimore Harbor, a stone’s throw from where the boy overheard his master, by a prominent lawyer named Key -- like Douglass, a Maryland native, but unlike Douglass, a graduate of the state’s oldest college not many miles down the bay from Baltimore.  Key’s pen, undoubtedly put into his hand as a small boy, wrote the famous words into what became the national anthem of the United States.  Douglass’s pen, which was meant to have been kept from him, wrote Frederick Douglass into literary existence, as Phyllis Wheatley’s had done for her in Boston during the age of the Revolution.  With the stroke of this pen, he raised the ante on the question, not of the black prodigy whose exception could be used to prove an ugly and false rule, but on whether the law of contradiction applied to the place of the liberal arts in a “land of the free” where millions found themselves in chattel bondage.  In this human-bond-forming account of his bound and bond-freed life, he also poses a kind of question about the master class: inasmuch as the faces of master and slave are the two sides of the coin Slavery, can the master, other than fantastically, expect his face to be found on either of the sides of the coin Freedom?       

Meeting Dates, Days, Time: 3 weeks, July 7-July 24, Monday and Thursday, 11AM-12:30PM ET

Text: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (ISBN of Dover edition: 9780486284996, $4.50; or any edition of the full 1845 text)

The Bill of Rights - Tues & Sun 11:00 am-12:30 pm EST 7/8-8/10 (10 sessions)

Is the Bill of Rights the fulfilment of the Constitution into which it was incorporated in a body as the first addition made to the charter more than four years, in December of 1791, after the original was written, or is it a mere add-on?  If we read the Bill of Rights back through the Constitution, especially the Preamble, and even back through the Declaration of Independence, what do we see?  Or in adopting such an angle of vision, do we only delude ourselves, confusing retrospection with intention, thinking we only understand the parents from the offspring, which in this instance might not even be an offspring but at most an adopted child?  Opinions had varied on the need for a charter of rights, America’s great charter -- its magna charta, shall we call it?  Hamilton didn’t see the point.  If you state the rights, won’t you implicitly exclude all rights not enumerated?  Jefferson was alarmed by the omission.  But unlike in ’76, Jefferson was in Paris, not Philadelphia, during the convention of ’87, and Hamilton was back and forth between  New York and Philadelphia that summer before in mid-September the signers signed the Constitution without a bill of rights.  It was from the productive pen of Madison that the Bill came, as the Constitution largely had.  He proposed a set of amendments and shepherded them through the House; the Senate passed twelve; the states ratified ten.  What might we see if we take them one at a time in order, referring to the whole Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as organic framework?  But wait, won’t that already assume the answer to the question above, and risk taking for granted that the Bill of Rights is something more than it is?  Not exactly, for the simple reason that it was incorporated – made a part of the body – of the Constitution.  This may be grafting, rather than begetting, but either way, it is the only instance of the adoption of a mass of amendments, becoming flesh of the flesh.       

Meeting Dates, Days, Time: 5 weeks, Tuesday and Sunday, July 8-August 10, 11AM-12:30PM ET

Text: pocket Constitution and Declaration (ISBN: 9780160950483), available for $2 from the US Government Printing Office, Constitution of the United States | U.S. Government Bookstore

Latin Summer Session: Vergil - Mondays, 7:00-9:00 pm ET 7/7-8/11 (6 sessions)

Do you ever wonder how poets keep getting better even after they’re dead?  How do they do that?  Not to say, despite glib assertions to the contrary, that death is always a good career move for a poet.  Take Vergil, for instance: that unplanned, ill-advised ferry ride across the Adriatic nearly got The Aeneid killed along with its author.  Fortunately the big shot who persuaded the poet to change his plans and ended up conveying him to his demise had the good sense to save the poem at least.  In the two years we have spent crawling and toddling across the poet’s page, like a baby across a rug finding countless things to interest (and to worry her dear father!), we have at last arrived with the poem’s  reluctant hero at the image, on an otherwise unknown foreign wall, of the war that set him and his traveling companions adrift on a sea of tears – brutal, pitiless, unrelenting – where only on great and rare occasion mentem mortalia tangunt.  The poem and the poet, which we will keep taking as steadily as we may, always in hope of being joined by fellow voyagers, keep getting better. 

Meeting Dates, Days, Time: 6 weeks, July 7-August 11, Monday, 7-9 PM ET

Text: Pharr’s Aeneid (ISBN: 9780865164215)

Short Seminars Descriptions. Other shorter seminars begin in August and September.