amimetobios

We start with Coleridge's insight (followed by Bloom) that Macbeth confuses his own pangs of conscience with imaginative fear.  Then some discussion of remorse vs. repentance as analogous to that confusion.  A couple of jokes, and then a close reading of the line "Which of you have done this" when Macbeth sees Banquo.

A class I actually liked some of: on daemonization (Lionel Abel's term in his article "Daemons true and false") and character.  How the most practical matters of representing character on stage (what we hear about Macbeth vs. what we see) give insight into the deepest existential-psychological.  This is me essentially trying to turn aspects of Macbeth into L'attente l'oubli. With digressions and a digression on digressions.

A student brings up Banquo and tries to relate the line of kings to the edge of doom to Dante's Inferno.  Which leads to a discussion of Banquo and the more general tension in Shakespeare between friendship and love, solved in the comedies but always part of the loss in the tragedies.  Considerations of this issue in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, and of course Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

Mainly about witches: Reginald Scott's skepticism, James's motivated belief in them, the King's touch, the relation of witches to the soothsayer in A&C (vs. the one in JC), and some attention (again, as in other courses) to Dan Decker's Anatomy of a Screenplay and the insights it affords into Shakespeare's construction of scenes: the way soothsayers and messengers are similar and the way they differ.  At the end a brief consideration of what De Quincey means by sympathy.

Elements in Macbeth that were more or less likely to come from elsewhere.  Who played whom.  Robert Armin (and Will Kemp).  Johnson on whether the reference to Antony and Cleopatra (Macbeth's genius overmatched by Banquo's as Antony's is by Caesar) is an interpolation.  De Quincey on the knocking at the gate, and the effect that the juxtaposition of scenes has.

Holinshed, Knocking at the gate, Banquo, self-fulfilling prophecies, as psychological and causal, subjectivity: who in the story is the story for?  Who is real in the story?

Coleridge on puns in Shakespeare.  Aristotelean unities and how Shakespeare violates them.  Doctor Johnson's bad conjectural emendation.  The great line he wishes to emend: "Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."

Why editors change the originals -- canonical words and lines, as we now know them. Theobald on Autumn/Antonie.  Theobald on "this bank and shoal of time"

Introductory class in this course on Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.  Punning and equivocation.

A long class, chiefly on Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Kahn.  I think I realized some things about the latter worth realizing.  (N.B. I repeat a mistake I made earlier: the apparently supernatural episode that isn't isn't in "Michael," as I misremembered, but in "Peter Bell.")