Shakespeare For All

Part 2 discusses the play’s most significant images, of sickness and death, of medicine, and grace. It asks how these themes are reflected in the complicated relationship between Helen and Bertram, focusing particularly on the deceptive plot that Helen uses to secure him in the “dark house” that becomes a place of mystery and renewal. The episode goes on to discuss the role of darkness in comedy more generally - do tragic events undermine comedy, or make it more meaningful? It concludes by asking how the play’s “mingled” character reflects a Shakespearean perspective on the character of human life: how time reveals and reshapes the meaning of our actions, and in that way, can help us recover.

All’s Well That Ends Well reverses the usual fairy-tale trope and depicts a young woman on a quest to win a man. Helen, an extraordinary character with elements of the modern professional and the medieval saint, sets out to secure Bertram, a nobleman, for her husband. But the fairy tale plot is further reversed when Helen appears to win Bertram, only to have him flee from her. Helen embarks on a second quest to win him for a second time, with a plot that deceives Bertram but may also help cure him. This ambiguous but moving comedy asks how marriage is made real, how we can heal from our mistakes, and what it means to end well. In this course, you’ll learn the story and context of All’s Well That Ends Well, explore its questions around cure and care, and discover how this play reflects Shakespeare’s search for a dramatic form that captures the complex, “mingled” form of the good and ill in human life. 

In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Julia Lupton, Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. This episode introduces the historical, religious, and literary contexts that shape this play, which combines modern, progressive political dimensions, elements of myth and folklore, and spiritual notions of grace. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean. 

Part 3 features close-readings of three key speeches from Berowne, the most reflective of the lords. Taken from the beginning, middle, and end of the play, these speeches chart his imperfect but growing awareness of ideals beyond the “fame” that comes from study.

Speeches and Performers:

Part 2 discusses both the play’s humor and its serious engagement with Renaissance culture, especially the humanist-style program of education that the lords pursue. This Renaissance model inspired many of the educational programs we continue today, but as the episode discusses, the play questions what goals lie behind the Renaissance ideal: does it pursue sympathy, knowledge, or power? The episode also charts the male characters’ moral failures and growth, and how the play treats marriage more seriously than many comedies do by refusing to end with marriage.

Love’s Labours Lost is one of Shakespeare’s funniest comedies and at the same time one of his most morally serious. The King of Navarre and three of his lords vow to spend three rigorous years studying and fasting – and isolating themselves from women. But no sooner are the vows made than four noblewomen of France turn up and tempt the men to break their vows. The comedy combines rhetorical fireworks and farcical stage-action – not to mention numerous reluctant revelations of love – that keep us laughing and prime us for a classic romantic-comedy ending. But a surprise twist in the final scene upends our expectations and drives home the play’s serious questions: what is the purpose of education? And how does one earn another’s love? In this course, you’ll learn the story of Love’s Labours Lost, see how it engages with key cultural issues of Shakespeare’s day, and ends as thoughtfully as it does unconventionally. 

In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature at Harvard University. Many critics claim that Love’s Labours Lost is too difficult for modern readers to understand and enjoy, but here you’ll be guided on how to approach this play and on the kind of pleasures it offers. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean. 

Part 3 features close-readings of four key speeches and scenes that set out the play’s central dilemma, as they speak for a cooperative political community and the elite warrior ideal that Coriolanus is meant to embody.

Speeches and Performers:

Part 2 begins with a discussion of those political questions – who should have power in a political community? Is power a right or a reward? – and how they are reflected in the play’s imagery. It goes on to explore the paradoxes within the values of Rome and how Coriolanus reveals and struggles with those paradoxes. It concludes by examining the surprising choices that Coriolanus makes at the play’s end to ask whether those choices reflect Coriolanus’s attachment to his inherited Roman values, or an ability to change – to metamorphose.

The culmination of Shakespeare’s career writing Roman history plays and plays of war, Coriolanus is a searing, relentless story about what happens when a culture gets what it wants. Coriolanus is the elite soldier who’s been shaped by his mother and by his Roman culture to value military service, valor, and honor above all else. But when he’s rejected by the people he’s defended – and scorned – Coriolanus turns his Roman valor against Rome. In this course, you’ll learn the story and context of Coriolanus, explore the perennial political questions the play raises, and grapple with the fierce, implacable character of Coriolanus himself, to ask if this “unswayable” man ever changes, and how.  

In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Philip Lorenz, Professor of English at Cornell University. You’ll learn key context behind the play, from the source story of the historical Coriolanus to events in Shakespeare’s own day, that will clarify the political questions that the play works to highlight. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean. 

Part 2 begins with the dark patterns of imagery in the play to examine the play’s close proximity to tragedy. It goes on, however, to discuss how the lead characters of Isabella and the Duke function as political protestors or activists undertaking a quest for social reform. This episode culminates in an analysis of how the play adopts a “transcendental perspective,” one that steps outside the human political realm in order to perceive new solutions to its problems, and how that transcendental perspective is enacted in the play’s stunning final scene, which devises new, more life-giving ways of meting out mercy and justice and of redressing crimes “measure for measure.”

Part 3 features actors’ renditions of two key scenes from the play between Isabella and Angelo, the seemingly virtuous but hypocritical governor, with commentary that tracks how the characters commit themselves in these scenes to integrity or evil. 

Speeches and Performers: