Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth, Part I
Wednesdays, 2:00-3:30 pm ET | April 15-July 1
The King is dead! Long live the King... Fifty years of conflict, blood, treachery: the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years’ War, and the problem of hereditary succession with a line doubtfully descended from a usurpation only twenty-five years past and you have mayhem, mendacity, and enough moral murk to turn glory into miasma. The Henry VI plays give us a rich crop of character -- Joan of Arc (Henry VI, Part 1), Cade’s Rebellion (Henry VI, Part 2), and the reign of King Edward IV (Henry VI, Part 3) -- which we will explore over the next three quarters. If you've read the other Henries (and Richards) but haven't quite found time to tackle Henry VI, now is a rare opportunity to read it with other Shakespeare super-fans.
Reading load: several pages/week
Seminar Leader: Eric Stull holds degrees in Liberal Arts, Eastern Classics, Greek and Latin. He has taught high-school history and English, and writing and literature in nine colleges and universities for the past 20 years.
Text: any standard edition (e.g., Arden, Riverside, Folger, Signet, Pelican, Yale, Oxford) with act, scene, line numbers
Description:
The King is dead! Long live the King -- “in infant bands crowned!” Huh? Only yesterday was the hero of Agincourt dubbed “the mirror of all Christian kings” and now, well shy of forty years wasted, he’s gone, leaving a baby son to take up the crown. What follows? Fifty years of conflict, blood, treachery, trouble: the Wars of the Roses, the first half of which overlap with the last decades of the Hundred Years’ War, blossom in every sort of brutality. Mix the ever-present problem of hereditary succession with a line doubtfully descended from a usurpation only twenty-five years past and an entire cross-Channel kingdom recently appropriated by the hero-king, and you have mayhem, mendacity, and enough moral murk to turn glory into miasma. But was conquest’s glory itself overblown? It is frivolously tempting to think that Shakespeare wrote the Henriad plays about what was chronologically former (which begin with a Richard and are followed by two Henrys in three parts: Richard II; Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2; Henry V) after writing the Henriad plays about what was chronologically latter (which begin with the three parts of one Henry and end with a Richard: Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3; Richard III) to cheer himself up after the horrors depicted in the last-named plays. Yet, however that may be, the Henry VI plays give us a rich dramatic crop of character to harvest: Joan of Arc (Henry VI, Part 1), Cade’s Rebellion (Henry VI, Part 2), the ascension of the Yorkists and the reign of King Edward IV (Henry VI, Part 3), the widow-maker-wed widow Lady Anne (Richard III), the child princes in the Tower (Richard III), and a whole cast of memorables: the king’s uncles from Henry V (Exeter, Bedford, Gloucester), the (curiously drawn) Maid of Orleans, Queen Margaret, Talbot, Clifford (and son), Somerset, a Bastard, Lady (then Queen) Elizabeth Grey, fiends, a witch, a patricide, a filicide. As always, even in telling a messy tale nauseatingly rife with the human badness so characteristic of civil strife, the poet holds up the mirror to ourselves and makes us look through the prism of his pentameters, somehow plangent even in their bellicosity:
Plantagenet: Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset?
Somerset: Hath not thy rose a thorn, Plantagenet?
Plantagenet: Ay, sharp and piercing to maintain his truth, Whiles thy consuming canker eats his falsehood.
Somerset: Well, I’ll find friends to wear my bleeding roses,
That shall maintain what I have said is true
Where false
Plantagenet dare not be seen.
Henry VI, Part 1, 2.4.68-74
With any luck, looking in our customary way, at our leisurely pace, we will come to see what we regard.
Shakespeare, Reading the Sonnets Aloud (6 sessions)
Mondays, 3:20-4:50 PM Eastern, May 4 – June 15
Let us read Shakespeare's poetry out loud, as he intended it! This seminar invites participants to bear witness to Shakespeare’s sonnets, both as observers of the unfolding event and participants who enact and uncover the experience of the speaker. By performing variant recitations that the texts allow, we enter more deeply into the bard's work, and we hear the different meanings that only the human voice can convey. Although not an acting class per se (our common aim is not to train the next Dench or Olivier), we will familiarize ourselves with the rules of iambic pentameter and classical acting along with brief sojourns into XX century acting theory, including a few fundamentals about meter, enjambment, elision, overfull lines, French endings, etc. Particular attention will be paid to the aesthetic of “fire and ice,” simultaneously inhabiting the poem with both emotional connection and detachment. We will start at the beginning by paying close attention to scansion. By thinking and feeling the line in performance, we turn our minds and hearts toward the universal preoccupations of the Bard and, ultimately, toward each other.
If Shakespeare truly succeeded in finding language that puts us back into sympathy with our nature, then we already have what we need by virtue of our experiences. Indeed, this seminar is for non-actors. No instrument approaches the human voice. But the voice is not merely an instrument: In ancient Greek logos/logoi means both speech and thought. Speech reveals thought, and reasoning animal and speaking animal are almost synonymous. Let us practice this, and see what we discover, and have fun together, as we examine and turn over love sonnets in the month of May.
Perhaps it is time we return to the classical, common practice of usually reading aloud. Indeed, the best teachers of writing, as at Oxbridge, require their students to read their writing aloud, only upon hearing the human voice read can we spot infelicities in our prose.
Text: Vendler, Helen, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997, 696 pp. ISBN 978-0674637122 (pb).
Reading load: 1-2 pages/week
Seminar Leader: Tim Pabon and Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga. Tim is a seasoned, classically trained stage actor and voice actor, having worked with the Folger Shakespeare in DC, and also the Renaissance Spanish repertory. Reynaldo is an alumnus of St. John’s College, Annapolis, and past president of the large Northern California Alumni Chapter, and has led seminars for Symposium since it was founded 20 years ago, and a lover of language and therefore of our Bard. For more on Tim see his website here