Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Part 2 mirrors Part 1 but has a harsh, almost naturalistic realism that is quite different and modern-seeming. It takes place immediately after the first part, and a personified Rumour spreads fake news about the outcome of the Battle of Shrewsbury. Northumberland throws away his crutches and decides he isn’t sick anymore, now that the battle is over. Falstaff encounters the incorruptible Lord Chief Justice but succeeds yet again in exploiting Mistress Quickly, who loves him maternally and will do anything for him.

The king offers clemency, but Worster and Vernon lie to Hotspur and Douglas and say the king showed “no mercy.” Walter Blunt is killed by Douglas. Falstaff’s famous soliloquy about honor. Hal saves his father’s life, then fights and kills Hotspur. He thinks Falstaff is dead, but Falstaff is “counterfeiting” death and “rises” once Hal leaves. The rebels lose and are captured.

The intense and moving confrontation of father and son, Henry IV and Hal, in which the king says that Hal is not only a failure but, for all he knows, possibly a betrayer. But Hal placates him. In Act 4, Falstaff has allowed the good men to buy their way out and instead conscripted troop of pathetic failures. On the eve of the decisive battle, one by one all the rebels send word that they are backing out, finally leaving only Hotspur and Douglas. Most shockingly, Northumberland abandons his own son.

The double tetralogy of history plays as the “Henriad,” a quasi-epic. Yet the surprising amount of humor in the play, subverting epic high seriousness. Hotspur and the Welsh Owen Glendower argue while trying to carve up a map of England. Hotspur deflates Glendower’s pretensions as a mighty magician. Hotspur and Kate: an attractive marriage, full of bantering, poignant because we know that Hotspur will die.

Plays relevant to our time, because they explore the social chaos that ensures when the rule of law is overthrown by various kinds of people with interests of their own. Henry’s allies have turned against him, the lower-class characters in the tavern are out of control. There is nothing to constrain aristocracy who do not like to be constrained, or who are psychologically disconnected from reality. There is nothing to constrain lower-class characters from anarchistic behavior.

Within a year, Henry’s allies turn into his enemies. We see those who put him on the throne in Richard II now begin to plot against him in 1.3. Hotspur, who fancies himself a man of restless action but who is really driven by his own fevered imagination. In contrast, Falstaff, weighed down by his enormous body. Hotspur and Falstaff: mind and body. Poins and Hal disguise themselves and rob Falstaff and the rest of the gang after they have robbed the king’s men—Hal is helping to rob his own father. A glorious joke.

It has been a year since the end of Richard II. Henry IV is king, but faces Scottish and Welsh rebels. Hotspur, son of Northumberland, refuses to ransom prisoners until Mortimer, his brother-in-law but also heir presumptive to the throne, is ransomed in return. Where is Hotspur’s counterpart, Prince Hal? In a tavern with Falstaff and his gang, planning robberies. Hal’s soliloquy that he is only pretending to be a ne’er-do-well. Falstaff: one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic creations, but introduced in a history play. He is not historical: why is he here?

The Queen sent into exile in France: the imagery of a “divorce.” York discovers that his son Aumerle is plotting again Henry and goes to Henry to denounce him as a traitor. His wife helplessly tries to intervene. A scene that degenerates from seriousness into farce, a pattern in the play. Richard’s lyrical soliloquy of himself as a microcosm, but one divided. His unexpectedly heroic death. In the final scene, Henry learns that his former allies are now rising up against him. In a key line, repeated verbatim, the word is set against the word.

Richard is deposed in a public trial, which Bolingbroke and Northumberland hope to turn into a Soviet-style mockery in which Richard confesses all his wrongs. Instead, he steals the show, and makes them look like bullies and himself like a martyr—like Christ as the Man of Sorrows. The scene was not printed until after the death of Elizabeth, who is reputed to have said, “Know ye not I am Richard II?”

Richard, having made enormous, though eloquent, speeches of self-pity instead of bolstering the morale of what followers remain to him, holes up in Flint Castle. But when confronted by Bolingbroke and his fellow rebels, descends, slowly and ritualistically, from the walls, surrendering without the slightest resistance into the hands of his enemies. In the next scene, the Queen, speaking to a Gardener, speaks of her husband’s fate as a second fall of Man.

The exiled Bolingbroke lands in England and gathers an army, claiming he has returned only to claim his legal rights as the heir of John of Gaunt. Old York, the last of the 7 sons of Edward III, helpless and feeble, switches his allegiance to Bolingbroke, the symbolic turning point of the play. Richard returns from Ireland and makes a bizarre, theatrical speech about how the earth itself will rise up and angels descend to aid him because he is God’s anointed king.

John of Gaunt is inspired on his deathbed with a famous speech about the glorious land of England—now fallen on hard times due to the corrupt Richard II. Richard comes in, and Gaunt tells Richard what a fool he is being, angering Richard. Gaunt dies offstage, and Richard immediately moves to take his estates, which should go to Gaunt’s son Bolingbroke, in order to fund wars in Ireland. This not only gives Bolingbroke yet more reason for rebellion but creates sympathy for his cause. Richard puts old, feeble York, the last of the fabled 7 sons, in charge of England while he is in Ireland.

In a ritualized, formal scene, Bolingbroke opens the play by accusing Thomas Mowbray of having murdered Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Mowbray denies it, and a date for a trial by combat is set. Mowbray hints what is widely believed, that he was acting on the orders of Richard II himself. Gloucester’s widow seeks justice from John of Gaunt, but Gaunt says nothing can be done because the king, who is clearly guilty, is nonetheless “God’s anointed.”

The place of the history play among the four genres that Shakespeare wrote in. Its origins as a native form of drama, unlike tragedy and comedy, derived from Classical literature. The historical background of the plot of Richard II, the first of Shakespeare’s double tetralogy dramatizing English history for well over a century before his time.

After the crisis of Act 4, with two sets of lovers estranged and good friends quarreling, a happy ending brought about by Hero’s symbolic death and rebirth. A ritual at her supposed tomb is followed by a wedding of Claudio to a masked woman, who turns out to be Hero. Much Ado is a play about the instability of the human condition, the revolution of opposites: merry and melancholy, love and hate, friendship and enmity, youth and age. peace and war. The hope is that such instability can be good as well: it means we can change, that we can undergo “conversion.”

Claudio, out of revenge, publicly shames Hero by accusing her of infidelity at her own wedding ceremony. All the men behave badly in reaction—except Benedick. Benedick and Beatrice finally confess their love for each other in a short but touching scene.

Their friends contrive through staged conversations intended to be overheard to bring Benedick and Beatrice together. Meanwhile, Don John and his henchmen also stage a false drama, attempting to make Hero seem unfaithful. Dogberry and the Watch, the lower class characters, overhear the plotting and actually arrest Don John’s henchmen, but they are not “noted” by their social superiors.

Don John the melancholic. “Merry” and “melancholy” as two of the play’s many opposites. His attempt to cause mischief by telling Claudio that, in the masked ball in the first part of Act 2, Don Pedro woos Hero for himself rather than for the sake of Claudio. Meanwhile, Beatrice wounds the disguised Benedick by telling him that no one respects Benedick because he is too “merry,” always joking and frivolous. Much ado about “noting,” i.e., about taking note of: a comedy of gossip, rumor, deliberate lies spread both innocently and malevolently, a play with a new relevance in the age of social media.

A comedy of manners, a great deal of it in prose, about “noting,” i.e., taking note of. “Nothing” would have been pronounced “noting” in Shakespeare’s time. Rumors and misinformation spreading like wildfire and wreaking havoc with social life: Much Ado takes on new meaning in the age of social media. Two romances with two women: the lively, independent Beatrice and the patriarchally controlled Hero.

The mystery of Hamlet’s seeming “conversion” in Act 5. Most of the cast wiped out in the final scene. Can the complexities of Hamlet be drawn together into a unified pattern? Three types of tragedy: (1) of social order; (2) of isolated, alienated consciousness; (3) of love and gender. Hamlet as an attempt to encompass all three.

The mixed mood of the famous graveyard scene, mixing seriousness and humor in violation of the neo-Classical unities. Hamlet and the gravedigger speaking of death as leveler of social distinctions. The skull of Yorick the jester, whom Hamlet knew as a child. The funeral of Ophelia. Hamlet and Laertes struggle in her grave. Hamlet’s new sense that “There’s a divinity shapes our ends.”

Act 4, Scenes 5 and 7, form a continuous series of dramatic interruptions of the Court. Ophelia’s mad scene, which is also her suicide, in fact consists of three entrances, although the last is by messenger only, announcing her death by drowning. The psychoanalytic complexities of Ophelia’s songs and speeches. Laertes also bursts in, ranting melodramatically about revenge in a way that out-Herods Herod. The court is interrupted yet one more time as Horatio delivers Hamlet’s letter to Claudius announcing his return after having been captured by pirates (!). Meanwhile, Laertes and Claudius plot Hamlet’s death.

Gertrude feels guilt over her marriage to Claudius—but was she ignorant of the murder? The key word “nothing” begins to resonate through the play. Hamlet has hidden Polonius’s body. When confronted about it, his seemingly mad speeches revolve around the idea of metamorphosis—in the words of Ophelia, we know not what we may be. Ophelia’s mad scene.

Hamlet tells the Players not to overact, to suit the words to the action. Audience conversation before the play: Hamlet’s passive-aggressive sexual remarks to Ophelia. The Mousetrap play. Claudius leaves. His guilty soliloquy. Hamlet chooses not to kill him while he is praying. He goes instead to his mother’s bedroom to confront her.

The First Player, at Hamlet’s request, recites a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, the death of King Priam at the hands of the son of Achilles. Why is this in an already-long play? The most famous soliloquy in all of drama, “To be or not to be.” Why not suicide? Hamlet’s furious tirade when Ophelia tries to break up with him, following her father’s orders. Is this misogyny, justified because Ophelia is indeed spying on him for his enemy, or both?

Everyone is acting. Polonius instructs his servant to act a part and spy on Laertes. Hamlet pretends to be mad to Ophelia. Polonius bursts into the Court, where Claudius has averted an attack by Fortinbras, and reads a love poem from Hamlet to Ophelia—a very bad poem. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, courtiers, attempt to draw Hamlet out. The arrival of the Players.

Horatio and two other friends tell Hamlet they have seen the ghost of his father. Polonius gives longwinded advice to his son Laertes, and a humiliating admonishment to his daughter Ophelia for believing Hamlet’s professions of love. Hamlet talks to the Ghost, who claims to be from Purgatory, and speaks of “murder most foul.”

The opening scene: darkness, paranoia, uncertain identity. Threats from without and within: invasion and the Ghost. Scene 2: The Court. Hamlet’s Biting One-Liners. Hamlet’s first soliloquy: rage and sexual disgust.

The fascinating background of Hamlet. Its enormous influence on 19th and early 20th century writers and critics due to its themes of alienation, isolated consciousness, and the ambiguity of reality. The origin of the basic plot in Danish legendary history. The vogue for the “revenge play” in Shakespeare’s time. The uniquely complex textual background of the play, which means that any modern edition you read may differ from other editions.

The plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is over by the end of Act 4. Is Act 5 a mere crowd-pleaser? Or, rather, does it widen the play’s thematic perspective? Theseus’s skeptical speech about the imagination is clearly not the whole story. Among the many opposites reconciled by the play are reality and imagination, but Shakespeare leaves the transforming power as a mystery, something we cannot understand, something language cannot even speak of. In the words of Bottom’s speech, it is a bottomless dream.

The action of the play is over by the end of Act 4, culminating in two speeches. One is the renowned speech of Theseus on the imagination—of which he is completely skeptical. The other is Bottom’s soliloquy about having had a “bottomless dream,” which echoes I Corinthians 2:9. The sense of a mysterious power that has shaped the ends of all the characters, including the fairies, a power that works by recreating conflicting opposites into a two-in-one.

The riotous farce in the middle of the play, courtesy of Puck and the “love juice.” Titania infatuated with Bottom, who has the head of an ass. The male lovers keep changing who they are in love with, resulting in complete confusion. Yet behind all this there is a strange order reflected in imagery of opposites that are yet identified with each other and interchanging.

In the “green world” comedies of Shakespeare, the action moves from ordinary society out into a wood in which all sorts of transformations happen. The uncertain dating of the play’s action, though “midsummer” is the summer solstice (June 21). Women’s friendship, a theme that Shakespeare is exceptional in regarding as important. The theme of metamorphosis and influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Male-female power struggles occur in all four of the play’s sub-plots, even in the comic relief of the “rude mechanicals,” who are preparing a dramatic version of the story of the star-crossed lovers Pyramis and Thisbe out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The lunar imagery of conflicting opposites: love versus irrational social law; madness versus reason; feminine versus masculine; stable identity versus metamorphosis. The fairies: originally the Faery, out of Celtic mythology, itself emerging out of the feminine imagery of the “Goddess cultures.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a “festive comedy,” i.e. associated with seasonal festivals, from Shakespeare’s “lyrical period.” Three interlinked plays all dating from around 1595: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The contrapuntal plotting of the comedies. Here, four interlinked sub-plots, three of which represent social class distinctions: the ruling class (Theseus and Hippolyta), the well-born elite (the lovers), the working class (the “rude mechanicals,” and the fairies.

What we know for sure about Shakespeare, contrasted with the numerous speculations and conspiracy theories. The four genres of Shakespearean drama: comedies, tragedies, history plays, romances. The theory of comedy, and comedy’s poor reputation in the critical tradition.

Comic relief: Samson has mysteriously recovered his high spirits and his martial vigor, and challenges the giant Harapha to single combat. The cowardly Harapha refuses. What has changed Samson? He has resisted temptation and cast off an inward passivity. As a result, obeying another inward “motion,” Samson agrees to go perform for the Philistines, and brings the arena down upon the Philistines, killing himself along with them in the process. Two versions of Christianity, both valid. In one, God is transcendent, in the other, immanent, an inward “motion,” an Inner Light. Milton inclines to the latter, and in doing so is the forefather of the Romantic theory of the imagination.

Dalila comes to visit Samson in an attempt at reconciliation. Samson furiously rejects her attempt, abetted by a misogynistic Chorus whose Ode should not be identified as Milton’s own opinion of women. Dalila’s betrayal cannot be justified, but is it possible to view her in part sympathetically, as a woman caught in a power game, trapped in a no-win situation?

In Act 1 Samson defends himself to the Chorus: in twice marrying Philistian women, he was following inward “motions” from God. But in Act 2, speaking to his father, Manoa, he takes full responsibility for allowing those women to manipulate and betray him. His mood by the end of the second act is hopeless and near suicidal, and the Chorus, so confident in the first act that God’s ways were justifiable, is severely shaken and finds God’s ways baffling and disturbing.

Written at the age of 21 while on Christmas break from Cambridge, the Nativity Ode almost amounts to what Milton later called a “brief epic.” Its theme is “our great redemption from above,” the descent of a miraculous power down the vertical axis of being to our fallen world, redeeming in a moment of new Creation. But that moment of redemption is paradoxical—“now,” but “not yet.” And yet now—as there is a “paradise within,” there is a miraculous birth possible at every moment if we look with the inward eye of the spirit, which is to say the imagination.

Samson justifies his marriages to two Philistian women as commanded by God. Samson’s God is always an internal “motion,” never a projected supernatural figure. Echoing Paradise Lost, the Chorus says that God’s ways are justifiable—but not by reason. The case for a Trickster God, when reason and realism lead only to hopelessness and despair.

An emotionally intense drama of the mind, in which the blind and enslaved Samson confronts the failures of his life and questions the ways of God. Modeled on Classical tragedy, yet also with a hidden 5-act Shakespearean structure. Samson, originally a folktale Trickster rehabilitated into one of the Old Testament judges, is an unlikely-seeming choice for tragic hero. Samson’s opening soliloquy: the theme of despair. Despair at the self-caused ruin of Samson’s own life, including blindness. The play begins in literal and emotional darkness.

The third earthly kingdom, Athens, is the temptation of humanism and humanistic culture as a substitute for the spiritual vision of the Bible. The 3rd temptation, to stand on the pinnacle of the Temple, is the temptation to exercise one’s own will and draw upon one’s own power rather than trusting to the will of God. As with all the temptations in Paradise Regained, it is a temptation for all human beings, and the outcome is never assured. God intervenes and sustains Jesus here, but the second time Jesus is raised to a height, during the Crucifixion, it was God’s will that he go through with it and die a human death. Yet both outcomes regain paradise, though in the paradoxical sense, central to Christianity, that redemption has occurred but is also “not yet.” It is at once timeless and in time.

The suspense of Paradise Regained lies in the fact that Jesus is fully human and vulnerable.  The temptations are the temptations that every one of us faces in this world. The ultimate argument of Satan is that to survive in the world you must make a deal with the devil. You must compromise, and can only choose which temptation you will give in to—which will thereafter become your prison. The poem offers a hope that Satan is lying, that there is a way to win through. Jesus rejects, often with dry wit, the temptations of military power (Parthia), imperialism disguised as “higher civilization” (Rome), and Classical humanism as an end in itself (Athens).

Paradise Regained is a profound analysis of human nature, whether or not one is committed to its religious point of view. The enormously expanded second temptation comprises temptations of desire (2a) based on physical appetite rather than need: sex, food as sensuous luxury, riches. These are succeeded by the temptations of ambition (2b): glory and various forms of earthly kingdom, beginning with Parthia, the military kingdom, the kingdom of war, seen as necessary. The suggested need to “buy protection” from such a powerful empire.

In Milton’s interpretation, the first temptation is that of survival, of physical need. In the 2ndbook, he enormously expands the 2nd temptation into a full range of the temptations of desire, beginning with those desires that have a basis in physical appetite: sex, food, and riches. Jesus’s refusal is not mere ascetic refusal of pleasure. If he accepts Satan’s offers, he is then in Satan’s debt and Satan’s power. He also implicitly would accept the value system and lifestyle implied when such things become one’s first priority.

Milton’s Jesus is fully human and vulnerable: there are real stakes in the temptations. But that makes his temptations a model for us. Milton expands the temptations to include the full range of possible human temptation, beginning on the most basic level of physical survival, symbolized by the temptation to turn stones into bread—both for personal survival, but also to feed the hungry. “Man does not live by bread alone” sounds elitist, but is not. Jesus will go on to feed the hungry, but whatever you make your primary value becomes your God.

While not as famous as Paradise Lost, Milton’s Paradise Regained is not only comparable in artistic quality but continues the expansion of perspective that began in the last two books of Paradise Lost, from tragic fall to divine comedy. Milton’s theory of the “brief epic,” a form that has no Classical model. Paradise Regained is a recreation of the Temptation in the wilderness of Christ by Satan. It is the contest of the hero battling a serpent or monster—but deliteralized. This contest is a debate, a duel of words, the true Word against the lying words of Satan.

The expansion of vision from tragedy to spiritual comedy. Numerical symbolism of the 12 books. From law to gospel, the letter to the spirit, type to antitype: the vision of Biblical history as one of progressive internalization. The internalization of paradise for Adam and Eve—and also for us.

Michael takes Adam to a high mountain and gives him a panoramic view of both space and time. The continuing aftermath of the Fall. Death: the murder of Abel by Cain. Sickness: the vision of the Lazar House. The mysterious episode of the sons of God mating with the daughters of men. The coming of war, and God’s eventual decision to wipe out all but a saving remnant in the Deluge, the end of the first cycle of history.