Shakespeare For All

Part 3 features close-readings from Professor Laurie Maguire of some of the play’s key speeches: Caliban’s extraordinarily lyrical description of the island; Prospero’s beautiful and disturbing evocation of theatre, and perhaps the world, coming to an end; and Prospero’s renunciation of his magic.

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With Professor Simon Palfrey, Part 2 looks closely at the play’s characters, and especially at the intelligence and swiftness of Juliet. You’ll see how the lovers apprehend new possibilities of human life, but also how their social world constrains their possibilities; and how the play might seem to offer the possibility of comedy, but how it’s destined for tragedy all along. And the tragedy doesn’t belong only to the young lovers who are thwarted by their parents — it belongs to the parents, too, and to every person who opens themselves to loss by opening themselves to love.

In Part 3, Professor Simon Palfrey offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll hear the play’s dark energies emerge through Mercutio’s speech about “Queen Mab”; see how Juliet discovers a new, eroticized vision of the world and of herself as she awaits her wedding night, and witness one of the most iconic scenes in literature, when Juliet on her balcony imagines the possibility of love transforming identity: “What’s in a name?”

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Children of families who are locked in a fatal feud, Romeo and Juliet risk community, identity, and life to pursue an all-consuming love. Today, Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous love stories in the world. But the play isn’t simply a celebration of love or an idealization of the lovers. This wild and dangerous play lays bare the link between desire and death, between love and loss. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet isn’t that their love is thwarted or impossible. The tragedy is love. In this course, you’ll learn the story of Romeo and Juliet, hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars, and see how Shakespeare brings its characters to life with the brightness and briefness of lightning.

In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Simon Palfrey, Professor of English at the University of Oxford. Professor Palfrey explains how this play is Shakespeare’s experimentation with new possibilities in drama and a masterpiece of his own poetic powers. You’ll learn how Shakespeare characterizes Romeo and Juliet and how their relationship is reflected in their particular forms of poetry. 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. 

In Part 3, Professor Stephen Greenblatt offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll get an in-depth look at the powerful relationship between Antonio and Bassanio, the climactic confrontation between Antonio and Shylock in the court, and the hard-edged poignancy of the play’s most famous speech: “Hath not a Jew eyes?”

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Part 2 discusses the play’s central characters, their profound bonds of intimacy and animosity, and the effect of money on those bonds. Professor Stephen Greenblatt explores the way that Shylock took hold of Shakespeare’s imagination and how Shakespeare transforms a stereotypically villainous figure into something much larger and more complex. You’ll also discover how Shylock’s fraught experience is echoed in other characters across the play, which looks frankly at the difficulties of friendship and love, even as it offers the traditional satisfactions of comedy.

The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s most gripping and challenging plays. Labeled as a comedy in Shakespeare’s First Folio, today it resonates as tragedy as well, thanks to its most unforgettable character: the Jewish moneylender Shylock. Shylock experiences humiliation and oppression at the hands of the Venetian Christians, particularly the merchant Antonio. But when Antonio must borrow money from Shylock to help his beloved friend Bassanio woo the wealthy Portia, Shylock finds his dearest enemy in his power — and we see what harvest hatred reaps. In this course, you’ll learn the story of The Merchant of Venice, hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars, and witness how this comedy plumbs the difficulty and discomfort that shadow our most hostile and our happiest relationships. 

In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Professor Greenblatt discusses the complicated historical context behind Shakespeare’s representation of Venice and of Shylock, and the role Shylock comes to play in Shakespeare’s comedy. 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. 

In Part 3, Professor Palfrey offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll witness the king and the beggar in the heart of a storm; the naked man and the blind man on the edge of a cliff; and the father and daughter on the cusp between life and death; and you’ll learn how Shakespeare takes us into strange, impossible new places via the words and bodies of his actors.

Speeches and Performers

Part 2 explores the way that Shakespeare revised the original Lear story and the way he revised his own play to create a uniquely wrenching form of tragedy. Professor Simon Palfrey also discusses the literary and generic traditions that inspired the play, showing how the central characters can be interpreted very differently depending on the literary lens through which we see them. Finally, we focus on the recurring concept of “nothing” in the play, watching how King Lear strips everything away from its characters to reveal what might lie at the bare foundation of human life.

Part 3 features close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches, with Professor Stephen Foley. Through Henry’s private soliloquy, we trace his moments of insight and blindness. In the Chorus’s inspiring invitation to the audience to recreate the Battle of Agincourt in their minds, and in Henry’s stirring speech to his own troops before the battle, we see how Shakespeare’s words shape history, and how history is reshaped in the act of being remembered.

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