Appreciating Shakespeare with Doctor Rap

Series II, Podcast M: Macbeth

A short discussion followed by 9 key lines and 13 specific notes to help in your reading.
Note: Biblical quotations are from the Geneva Bible

Questions? Email [email protected]

Series II, Podcast L: King Lear

Note: Biblical quotations are from the Geneva Bible
Questions? Email [email protected]

Series I, Chapter 10: What Kind of Thing Is It? Categories of Plays
Session 2: Histories, Romances, Satire

Histories
Romances
One Satire
False Category: Problem Plays

Notes: The Halliday quotation is from F.E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), p. 350. The Boas reference is to F. S. Boas, Shakespeare and His Predecessors (London: John Murray, Third Impression 1910), pp. 384–408, accessed at https://archive.org/details/shakespearehispr00boasuoft/page/n5. The Thompson quotation is from “Notes on Shakespeare” in Gideon Rappaport, ed., Dusk and Dawn: Poems and Prose of Philip Thompson (San Diego: One Mind Good Press, 2005), p. 224.

Questions? Email [email protected]

Series I, Chapter 10: What Kind of Thing Is It? Categories of Plays
Session1:  Tragedies and Comedies

Revenge Tragedies
De Casibus Tragedies
Domestic Tragedies
Comic Relief

Notes: The quotation from Morton Bloomfield is from a from a lecture series entitled “Medieval and Renaissance Tragedy and Notions of Tragedy” delivered at Brandeis University, Spring, 1978. The Doran quotation is from Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), p. 148.

Questions? Email [email protected]

Series II, Podcast K: Othello

Psychomachia
Demonic Iago, Angelic Desdemona
Repentance vs. Suicide
3 Key Lines
6 Specific Notes

Notes:
The quotation of Thomas Mann is from Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, tr. John E. Woods (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library, 2005), p. 669. For the Donald Duck psychomachia see “Donald’s Better Self” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald%27s_Better_Self and “Donald’s Decision” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald%27s_Decision.  Both Thompson quotations are from “Notes on Shakespeare” in Philip Thompson, Dusk and Dawn: Poems and Prose of Philip Thompson, ed. Gideon Rappaport (San Diego: One Mind Good Press, 2005), p. 220.

Questions? Email [email protected]

Series II, Podcast J:  Hamlet

What the play is not.
Revenge Play
Who is and who isn't mad?
Moral-Spiritual Drama
Two-Letter Climax
Readiness

Questions? Email [email protected]

Series I, Chapter 9: Is This What Shakespeare Actually Wrote? Shakespeare's Texts

Manuscripts
Early Printed Editions: Good and Bad Quartos, Folio
Later Editions
Modern Editions


Notes: Facsimile edition of the Quartos: Michael J.B. Allen and Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1981). Facsimile edition of the Folio: Charlton Hinman, The Norton Facsimile:  The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York:  Paul Hamlyn, 1968).

Questions? Email: [email protected]

Series II, Podcast I: Julius Caesar

Shakespeare inherits both pro- and anti-Caesar traditions
The body of Caesar vs. the spirit of Caesar

Notes: The Sayers quotation is from notes on the major images in Canto XXXIV in Dorothy Sayers, tr., The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, Cantica I, Hell (London:  Penguin, 1949), p. 289. On the anti-Caesar position, see William Blisset, “Caesar and Satan,” Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1957), pp. 221-232, accessed 11/1/18 at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707625?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

Questions? Email [email protected]

Series II, Podcast H: Romeo and Juliet

Oxymoron
Love and Death

Questions? Email [email protected]

 

Series I, Chapter 8: Whose Interpretation Is Right? Principles of Interpreting Shakespeare

Text and Subtext
Context
Critic's Assumptions
Directors' Mirrors

Questions? Email [email protected]