Harold Bloom Lectures on Shakespeare's Major Tragedies

This will be a sequence of 14 talks on Shakespeare's seven major tragedies Romeo and Juliet Julius Caesar Hamlet othell King Le mbth and Anthony and Cleopatra my Prime purpose in these 14 talks is to emphasize Shakespeare's unrivaled greatness in creating utterly Persuasive human beings people whom we all feel somehow existed in nature even though Shakespeare brings them into being we find that so astonishing that it is almost difficult to give it crat therefore though I am dealing with seven very complex structures two of them in particular Hamlet and King Le May well be the most

complex literary Works uh ever created and they may well call for both such astonishing intellectual apprehension in relation to them and overwhelming in need for an emotional response to such shattering intensity of human suffering nevertheless I wish even with Hamlet and Lear as with all the other of the seven major tragedies that I will Discuss I want to focus on human beings and in each case on the major personalities the major characters of each drama thus with Romeo and Juliet most certainly with Juliet with juliia Caesar when needs to spend almost equal time on Brutus

and on Julia Caesar because there is a hidden relationship between the two that I think is at the heart of the play with such extra ordinary figures as Hamlet as othell and his Nemesis Iago with King Lear with the overwhelming intensity of McBeth and Lady McBeth and with the extraordinary personalities of Anthony and Cleopatra one is dealing with mixtures of good and evil not figures of absolute virtue like Juliet and that is where I think both the difficulty and the power of Shakespeare most deeply reside I think for me Shakespeare's greatest distinction aside from what

I Have elsewhere called his invention of the human that is to say so representing human personality as to affect all of our personalities the most remarkable of all Shakespeare's achievements is that he is the only dramatist that we have in the entire history of Western drama who is equally excellent at comedy and at tragedy but he was more naturally you might say a comic dramatist than he was a tragic one some of the earliest of the comedies The comedy of errors and The Taming of the Shrew are already Shakespeare upon his Heights in tragedy he

begins with Titus andronicus which I can only Rescue by asserting that to me it seems a sendup it seems a satire upon such blood and gore pieces as those by George Peele Thomas kid and Christopher Marlo it is with Romeo and Juliet his second tragedy that Shakespeare truly discovers himself and here I want to emphasize as I will throughout this discussion the Extraordinary greatness of Juliet herself Aristotle in his Poetics discoursing upon tragedy not upon comedy had said that there were six elements including plot and character which were of the greatest importance for the tragic

dramatist Shakespeare tended in general to be terribly uninterested in plot he would steal a plot wherever he could find one and that is what he is doing in Romeo and Juliet and indeed in all of the major Tragedies but in Romeo and Juliet he is inventing character in a new kind of way and in the character and person ality of Juliet in particular he is giving us what to this day is the most persuasive and impressive representation that we have of a young woman in love or indeed of any woman in love with a man

and I want therefore to begin with the extraordinary scene in which Juliet's greatness is first fully revealed to us I am in act two of the play and I am in scene to and Romeo who is very young of course Juliet is very young also she is not quite 14 years old but emotionally speaking humanly speaking she has developed in Consciousness and in total range of human capacity far beyond uh Romeo though he's a very promising young man indeed perhaps no more than two years years older than she is they have fallen In love with

one another they are declaring their love she is on the balcony this is the famous balcony scene he is down below their love is a prohibited love because their respective Noble houses in Verona are ferociously and murderously opposed to one another Romeo is protesting lady bya blessed Moon I vow that tips with silver all these Fruit Tree Tops and and sensing that his language is still too conventional and is not authentically Expressing what it is that he feels she replies magnificently oh swear not by the Moon the inconstant Moon that monthly changes in her circled

orb lest the thigh love prove likewise variable and Romeo being at this point a rather baffled young man says what shall I swear by and she replies most beautifully do not swear at all or if thou Wilt swear by thy gracious self which is the god of my idolatry and I'll believe thee and the Poor fellow still not understanding the kind of direct and original expression of his heart that she desires starts in again if my heart's dear love and she interrupts him with this extraordinary speech and then a wonderful dialogue takes place between them

which I wish to discuss with you Juliet resignedly says well do not swear although I joy in thee I have no joy of this contract tonight it is too rash too unadvised too sudden too like the lightening which Duff Ceased to be ear one can say it lightens sweet good night this Bud of Love by Summer's ripening breath may prove aous flower when next we meet good night good night as sweet Repose and rest come to thy heart as that within my breast and he is completely confused he says oh wilt thou leave me so

unsatisfied and she replies and now she is rather puzzled what satisfaction can thou have tonight and He says the exchange of thy Love's faithful vow for mine and again most exquisitly and maturely she says I gave thee mine before thou D request it and yet I would it were to give again and he misunderstands her completely and cries out in anguish wouldst thou withdraw it for what purpose love and magnificently she replies and these are my favorite lines in the play and I think Shakespeare himself must have been quite overwhelmed at what he had suddenly

Created she says but to be frank and give it thee again and yet I wish but for the thing I have my bounty is as boundless as the sea that's a most extraordinary line my bounty is as boundless as the sea my love as deep the more I give to thee the more I have for both are infinite I hear Some Noise Within dear love and she says good night to him but consider how extraordinary those lines are nii once said and we will find Hamlet exemplifying this and I indeed most of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists

exemplify this nii once wrote and he was thinking of Hamlet that for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts there is always a kind of satire there's always a kind of Torment there's always a kind of falsity in the act of speaking that certainly would be true of Hamlet who never quite says what he means or quite means what he says but it is totally Untrue of Juliet what she is finding words for is something absolutely alive in her heart and I want to repeat those lines one more time my

bounty is as boundless as the sea my love as deep the more I give to thee the more I have for both are infinite Shelly writing very much under the influence of this in his epicyon cries out true love in this differs from gold and clay for to divide is not to take away and he is emulating and Echoing uh Juliet she has declared her extraordinary greatness and yet also in a very deep sense she has told us what her tragedy is to be about it is not as Aristotle said a tragic flaw which is

going to mark this great tragic heroine but far from it her tragedy is indeed her greatness as a human being her tragedy is the totality of her love the fact that she loves without reservation and you can see throughout the play how Romeo in spite of the fact that they Have so little time to spend together is learning from her and is trying to raise himself up to the level of her love I once made the observation that what Shakespeare shows us is that in a sense all women must marry down because I think that

Shakespeare truly believes in the natural superiority of women particularly where the whole question of the significant human emotion of love and selflessness attendant upon it are concerned uh one way of seeing how Beautifully he has learned is to look at the other of the two really great scenes between them the orade or Dawn song that they in effect chant together you might almost say sing together it is so extraordinarily lyrical after they have been secretly married and they have spent the single night of love together that ever they are to enjoy this is act three

the beginning of scene five Romeo and Juliet are at the window looking out on the Dawn and Juliet is desperate to Prolong their time Romeo who has been schooled by her in reality and who knows that it is death for him to stay and be discovered there by his enemies her parents and her kin nevertheless is trying this time to bring her to reality Juliet says wil thou be gone it is not yet near day it was the nighting Gale and not the lock that pierced the fearful Hollow of thine ear nightly she seeings on

yond pomegranate tree believe me love it was the Nightingale and Romeo With a kind of tragic intensity of Truth says it was the lock the herald of the mour no nightingale look love what envious streaks doace the severing clouds in y East and then lines of astonishing Beauty night's candles are burnt out and yond stands tiptoe on the Misty mountaintops I must be gone and live or stay and die that extraordinary moment shows not so much a reversal of Greatnesses on their apart but shows indeed how he has begun to be transformed by her EXT

extraordinary influence upon him which is in the end a lesson in love and nothing but a lesson in love but I mustn't in my remarks concentrate only upon these two figures though I will come back to them at the close there are two other extraordinary characters in Romeo and Juliet merio the best friend of Romeo who is an extraordinarily witty But foulmouthed fellow he can scarcely open his mouth except to utter some sexual innuendo or obscenity and the nurse who has raised Juliet but who turns out to be someone who cannot be trusted and who

in the end seems to be as unstable as Mario they are great comic figures but there is a very curious Edge to them and I do not think finally that we get to like either of them very much but they both provide very great parts And the moment of Mario's death is an extraordinary indication of Shakespeare's skill in the play Romeo has come between merio and one of the Kinsmen of Juliet desperately trying to prevent a fight between them and in the course of it Mario has received his death wound delivered under Romeo's arm by

tibalt and Romeo speaks to marusho I'm in act 3 scene one and says to him courage man the hurt cannot be much and Mario Answers magnificently in pros and it's hilarious it is courageous but at the the same time it brings forth that tradition of theatrical history which says that Shakespeare kills off Mario so early because otherwise Mario would kill the play by capturing all the male interest from Romeo Mario says no is not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door but is enough T serve ask for me tomorrow and

you shall find me a grave man I am pepid I warrant for this World a plague of both your houses and with that you have The Disappearance from the play of this very great figure whose I think function in the play is to show what Romeo is getting away from a kind of lightness in erotic matters of which he has been cured permanently by falling deeply and with utter conviction in love with Juliet who represents a higher order of existence than he has ever known before this time and indeed I Believe she represents that for

the audience also and I want to say something more about her greatness well before I close but I want at this point to contrast the two of them in their reaction to the wedding which is about to take place this is at the very end of the second act Fri Lawrence is about to marry them listen to the difference between them Romeo says Ah Juliet if the measure of thy Joy be heaped like mine and that thy skill be more to Blas on it Then sweeten with thy breath this neighbor air and let Rich music's

tongue unfold the imagined happiness that both receive in either by this dear encounter he is utterly intoxicated still by what is happening to him and is being caught up into a world which simply departs this Earth Juliet a deeper nature and more powerful y attuned to reality indeed more attuned to reality than surely almost all Among Us says conceit more rich in matter than in words brags Of his substance not of hament they are but Beggars that can Count Their worth She is again finding another way of saying my bounty is as boundless as the

sea my love as deep and she goes on to say again magnificently but my true love is grown to such excess I cannot sum up some of half my wealth she is saying that language like the ornate language in which he has just delivered his wonderful Declaration of happiness is not adequate to Convey the full reality of what is leing upon the two a reality in which they share but again he is neither mature enough humanly nor Adept enough emotionally to fully meet her greatness I want to pass now to moments that take us towards

the close of the play and I want to involve very much the figure of the nurse and the rather extraordinary brutality that that she manifests this is something I think that is frequently misunderstood when people read this play Or see a good production of it or indeed listen to most critical discussions of it because the nurse is after all a very Vivid figure rather like ch's wife of bath um very passionate like Mario himself uh very given to sexual innuendos and intensities but something about her is ultimately Hollow when the nurse tells Juliet that she

must forget Romeo and take the county Paris who has been set up by her parents to be her husband Juliet reacts angrily what devil this is speaking to the nurse whom she has loved since she was a child and who has loved her Julia says what devil art thou that dust torment me thus this torture should be roared in dismal Hell hath Romeo slain himself say thou but I and that bear V ey shall poison more than any deaf darting eye I am not I if there be such an eye or of those eyes Shut

that makes the answer I the nurse lies and says I saw the wound he is dead Juliet cries out oh break oh break my heart and then suddenly she realizes that the nurse is getting things mixed up and that it is tyal who is dead slain by Romeo in Vengeance for his having killed merio and Juliet comes to understand this and finally Romeo is banished and the nurse says there's no trust no faith no honesty in men it doesn't Matter which man after all you married or pgid or for sworn or na or dislers and

Juliet says blistered be thy tongue for such a wish the nurse says will you speak well of him that killed your cousin and Juliet replies shall I speak ill of him that is my husband and when the nurse finally says to her that this is simply the way things are and you will have to accept this then Juliet says thou has comforted me wondrous well and totally dismisses the nurse but I Want now to return to what I think is the heart of this drama which is indeed the heart of Juliet herself in all of

the western tradition of literature that leads up to Shakespeare there is no comparable portrait of a young woman really a young girl as I say she is just going on 14 but she is extraordinarily mature of what it means to be a young woman or indeed any young person deeply and authentically in love and in Shakespeare's Way of showing the constant generosity of Juliet's nature in his technique for unveiling the ultimate secrets of the human heart he teaches us I think a wisdom that no one has surpassed throughout Western tradition the great modern philosopher ludvic

wienstein once coined an extraordinary aphorism I will translate it from the German love is not a feeling love unlike pain is put to the Test one does not say that was not a true pain because it passed away so quickly that's so subtle that I want to repeat it a second time and while he did not mean it to have direct application to Juliet it is one of the best characterizations I know of the authenticity and the permanence of her love for Romeo her love is not a feeling her love unlike pain is put to

the test none of us would say after a really intense pain was over that was not a True pain because it passed away so quickly but that defines the difference between love in the high sense of Juliet and a mere pain a mere negative effect of any sort now there is a question that has always fascinated me which is what precedent did Shakespeare have for Juliet and the answer is that he has no precedent there is no figure in Western literature or in anything he could ever have read that would have taught him how to

create this amazing representation of A warm generous overflowing or but selfless personality giving herself away absolutely and completely in love for a young man and doing it permanently and knowing indeed that it is permanent and is going to be permanent and I want to use Romeo and Juliet now very much as an introduction to this whole course of talks that I shall be giving on the seven major tragedies in one sense as the first of the seven major tragedies In one sense it is necessarily the least Shakespeare is learning his art as he goes and

yet with Juliet he has taken a kind of Quantum Leap and given us something not only unprecedented but not surpassed ever since and that I think takes one very deep into the tragic world as Shakespeare conceives it all of us know that we can say of a particular person he or she has an extremely Pleasant personality but I do not trust His or her character all of us also know that we can say of other persons she or he has a remarkable moral character but I am not at all pleased by his or her personality

before Shakespeare character and what we would Now call personality are very different entities Shakespeare and I believe he does this in Juliet before he does it anywhere else with anyone else and I believe that in doing so he teaches Himself as well as all the rest of us something extraord ordinary which we could not have learned without him though I want to be very clear about this I wrote a huge book on Shakespeare a commentary on all of his plays including all of the tragedies called Shakespeare the invention of the human and there were many

protests of people saying well you can't literally mean that Shakespeare invented the human there were human beings before Shakespeare there was great literature from Homer through Virgil to Dante on to ch's Canterbury Tales well before Shakespeare in one sense do you mean that Shakespeare invented the human and I think it has a very clear sense and I think that Juliet gives me a wonderful illustration of it and teaches me a great deal about how to sharpen and make more precise my own critical metaphor if one wants to call it that of Shakespeare's invention of the

human It is not that Shakespeare brings something into the world that was never there before him it is that Shakespeare so handles reality finds different ways and modes and means of getting on all sides of reality at once as he does with the reality of the character and personality of Juliet that he enables us to see things that were always there but that we never would have been able to see without him there have doubtless been young Women in reality in nature in human life in human history in all ages since the world began as

magnificent as Juliet as generous as absolutely capable of falling completely and permanently in love with the right person and intuitively knowing exactly who that right person is this must always have existed in reality and perhaps Shakespeare himself who was a keen Observer of humankind because who else could have written the plays let Alone the seven major tragedies perhaps Shakespeare had met such a person though we do not know that that was the case or if it was the case we certainly do not know who that person was but because Shakespeare wrote the role or part

of Juliet if you wish to call it that though I think we cannot ever speak about the great Shakespearean roles simply as parts or scripts for an actor because to an amazing extent they have usurped reality itself it fascinates me That I have had students from all over the world and have myself attended performances of Shakespeare all over the world that I have taught Shakespeare in many many different countries on several continents I have sat with audiences watching Productions of Shakespeare in many many languages and quite frequently the bulk of the audience have been people

who were not actually literate in their very own languages who could not read It and yet I have seen them swept up again and again by Shakespearean Tragedy by Shakespearean comedy by Shakespearean Romance by Shakespearean history or tragic comedy because they are firmly persuaded that Shakespeare has put themselves their families their neighbors those they have fallen in love with those they might fall in love with has put them there on the stage this is such a miracle that there is nothing comparable to it in the history of Literature if you consider the authors since Shakespeare

and they're all of them deeply influenced by Shakespeare perhaps in English only Jane Austin and Charles Dickens have successfully y created a number of vivid intense and permanent human beings as Shakespeare has but it is the rarest of gifts and it comes I think from what I want to emphasize in the concluding minutes of this brief talk on Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare's art is certainly an Art of language of an enormous control over the resources of language indeed Shakespeare can be said to have reinvented the English language he has the largest vocabulary that we know

of of any author who has ever written of that vocabulary he invented fully 1,800 words himself and 1,200 of those words are still in common usage in England and the United States or wherever English is spoken in the world today and of course English Has now replaced French as the international lingua franka you go to Indonesia or you go to Denmark and you are not asked to speak French you are asked to speak English so certainly Shakespeare's enormous control of language his ability to reinvent language is an enormous element in his art but there are

two elements that I think are even more more important and even more powerful and in this he goes beyond anything that Aristotle Prescribed for the tragic dramatist one element most certainly is the creation of Personality added to the representation of character and I do not believe we can find that before Shakespeare personality in our sense though he does not use the word is a Shakespearean invention but finally and I want to emphasize this as I close there is the entire question of cognitive Power of capacity for thinking Shakespeare thinks more originally and more inventively than

any writer before him or since in any language I am able to read he's unique among the world's authors in that regard and in giving us Juliet he has not only found a way of integrating a superb personality with a deep and immensely moving character he has not only found Language of absolute eloquence and memorability for her to speak but most of all he has thought his way into her mind so that in a very deep sense we can say he is Juliet the great romantic critic William Haslet once said of Hamlet it is we

who are Hamlet I would say that in some sense though we cannot live up to Juliet in some sense there is something in every One of us female and male that is Juliet this ends lecture one Shakespeare the seven major tragedies lecture two juliia Caesar I want to begin now the second lecture of this course on Shakespeare's remarkable political tragedy Julia Caesar this is a beautiful example of a well-made play indeed when I myself was young it was the standard way in which in junior high schools and high schools you began the Study of Shakespeare

it is a beautifully clear drama with four major characters the tragic protagonist Marcus Brutus and in some sense though the play has to be called juliaa because he is the greatest personage in it in terms of rank and ultimately L at least formally of character it is the tragedy of Marcus Brutus and the other two principal characters are kaas casassus who first brings Brutus into the plot to Kill Caesar and Mark Anthony who survives to help destroy the conspirators and who will eventually be the hero of Shakespeare's last great tragedy which we will look at

in the final two lectures of this course Anthony and Cleopatra the greatest Shakespeare critic whom I know of is also the greatest Western literary critic still in my judgment the 18th century Dr Samuel Johnson and in his prefaces to Shakespeare he confessed to a certain reservation about Julius Caesar he said it was a cold play and indeed there is something stoic and slightly chilly about it we are not given any completely sympathetic character I think that Shakespeare wants all of us to fall in love with Juliet but no one could fall in love with Julius

Caesar himself with Marcus Brutus as Shakespeare portrays him or with Mark Anthony at least Mark Anthony at this this stage of his career Or with uh cassus but that's highly deliberate on Shakespeare's part because he wants to put the emphasis elsewhere and indeed this is one of the most enigmatic and powerfully subtly worked out of his plays his source and it's his total source is the standard English translation of the ancient rer Plutarch available in his day the lives of the eminent Greeks and Romans the so-called parallel lives he Is using um Thomas no's English

translation which interestingly enough had been made from a French version of Plutarch it fascinates me and I think it has by no means been sufficiently emphasized by Shakespeare Scholars and critics and I've never seen it really conveyed in any production of julus Caesar that I have attended but I hope that I yet will be able to confront such a stage presentation Plutarch says and he follows the ancient Roman historian Suoni in this that all of Rome including Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus fully believed that Marcus Brutus was the natural son of Julius Caesar Shakespeare spe

does not give you any explicit reference whatsoever to that in the entire play and yet it haunts the play in a very complex kind of a way it raises the very fascinating question of the elliptical element in Shakespeare particularly fascinating because Shakespeare is the richest of all Writers and I I would like to explain at just this point in this course of lectures what I mean by this contrast between the richness of Shakespeare the sense you get that he is putting everything in and the elliptical quality the sense that he is reserving something or leaving

something deliberately out on purpose indeed so as to provoke thought and speculation on your part we do not know and Hamlet does not know at what point the relationship Between Claudius and gerud Hamlet's mother whose first husband was Hamlet's father King Hamlet how far back that relationship goes there is a possibility that Hamlet who does not much resemble his father the Warrior King Hamlet though he does not much resemble Claudius either somewhere buried in his extraordinary and comprehensive Consciousness must be the uncomfortable possibility that he could well be the natural child of Claudius depending on

how far back this relationship goes a relationship which he specifically at the opening of the play refers to as adulterous but Shakespeare does not seek to develop this and yet that celebrated reluctance or delay on Hamlet's part in killing Claudius may have a hidden Source in this elliptical element the great Modern Irish novelist James Joyce Was once asked the desert island question that is to say if you were thrown off on a desert island and could have one book only what would you choose and Joyce replied and I believe this is verbatim he said I

should like to answer Dante but I would have to take the Englishman because he is richer and that's a wonderful use of the word richer in regard to Shakespeare but throughout this course of lectures I will keep pointing to extraordinarily Elliptical elements in the play and the elliptical element in this play to which I will certainly make some reference is the question of what is the full relationship between Julia Caesar and Marcus Brutus and that indeed raises the question of what are brutus' motives in not only joining but then in leading the conspiracy and in

Striking the particular blow against Julius Caesar with a dagger which some Traditions according to plutar say was actually struck in what was called the privates that is to say in the genitals making it a kind of edol attack indeed but I want to begin with a great Soliloquy of bruden I am in act 2 scene one of the play Brutus is alone I'm starting with line 10 and he is meditating on the whole question of what is to be done about Julia Caesar who seems to be embarked upon a systematic campaign to no longer Just

be the military dictator of Rome but to actually become its emperor and here is Brutus musing to himself in a very remarkable and revelatory Soliloquy it must be by his death and for my part I know no personal cause to spurn at him but for the general and we wonder what that denial this is my commentary is concealing then he goes on about Caesar he would be crowned how that that might change his nature there's the question it is the bright day that brings forth The adder that is to say the poisonous snake and that

craves warry walking crown him that and then I grant we put a sting in him that is to say we make him a potentially poisonous snake that at his will he may do danger with the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power and then because Marcus Brutus is an immensely honest person though immensely self-involved and I think with very Little sense of the reality of selves other than his own he States the truth and to speak truth of Caesar I have not known when his affection swayed more than his reason that is

to say he has never abused power he has never let his emotions carry him away he has always exercised reason restraint and judgment with his power but is a common proof Brutus goes on to say that loneliness is Young Ambitions ladder where to the climber upward turns his face but when He once attains the utmost round he then unto the ladder turns his back looks in the clouds scorning the base degrees by which he did Ascend and then Brutus says and he clearly has not yet convinced himself so Caesar May note that may then lest

he may prevent it is necessary to cut off his life and then Brutus says something absolutely startling that I think needs very close reading he says and since the quarrel that is to say the reason for Our Rebellion against him will bear no color for the thing he is that is to say color is being used in the special sense of something which indeed is a kind of excuse a reason a kind of metaphor for why he should be done away with since the quara will bear no color for the thing he is and then

three shocking words fashion it thus but that means let me construct it in the following fashion let me pass a conscious fiction upon Myself that what he is augmented would run to these and these extremities and therefore think him as a Serpent's egg which hatched would as His Kind grow mischievous and kill him in the shell now before he can become a fully poisonous serpent it is an extraordinary speech that begins with total honesty in and towards the self and then becomes a conscious fiction a kind of metaphor that one tells oneself one will treat

as being The absolute truth and it does indicate the Fatal flaw in brutus's nature his capacity to deceive himself because he so firmly believes in the absoluteness of his own virtue and does not for a moment consider that he could have hidden motives rather than simply the salvation of Rome from a monarchy that otherwise would be imposed upon it what those hidden motives may be May well have some relationship to his very complex existence in regard to Julius Caesar if Julius Caesar indeed is as all believed him to be brutus's natural father but I want

to take this further in just this very scene after Lucius the servant comes into Brutus and says that there are men waiting to speak to you cus and the other conspirators Brutus says all right you can go about and show them in but first he speaks to himself another extraordinary Soliloquy and one that fascinates me and That I want to emphasize is a kind of prolapsus or prophecy on shakespear's own part because if you know the drama of Mag Beth as surely so many of you do or will since I'll be spending two lectures upon

it it is impossible not to hear the voice of MC Beth prophesied here in the voice of Brutus the young boy Lucius goes out to fetch the others and Brutus says to himself since Cassius first did wet me against Caesar I have not slept between the acting of a Dreadful thing and the first motion all the interim is like a fantasma or a hideous dream the genius and The Mortal Instruments are then in councel and the state of man like to a little kingdom suffers then the nature of an Insurrection it is as we will

see when I come to my two lectures on MC Beth and ex exact prophecy of a particular speech of Mag Beth and it's astonishing that Shakespeare gives you this intimation in advance but I think I can explain why This is and why Shakespeare does this perhaps without fully consciously realizing himself what is in his mind when MC Beth murders King Duncan who is his Kinsman he is murdering a very good king and a very good man who is in fact a guest in his own house and who has a fatherly kind of relationship to him

and to his wife lady MC Beth indeed lady McBeth herself says when she puts the daggers ready for MC bef to use she says I would have done it myself had He not resembled my father when asleep in his bed that there should be a kind of edal motive of the son slaying the father in McBeth in relation to dunen does not surprise us but it may surprise Shakespeare himself about his hidden element in his own play that this prophecy of MC bef's mode of discourse should emerge at just this point there is a kind

of deep ambivalence which is being manifested and as Freud teaches us it is the special Mark of what he calls The edius complex that there should be an immense ambivalence of mingled love and hatred towards the father on the part of the son but now we come to the whole question of the Spirit of Caesar and for that I think we have to look at Caesar at his best and his worst and I want to turn this lecture away from Marcus Brutus for a while and consider the title character of the play Julius Caesar we

are seeing Julius Caesar not In his full greatness but in his clear decline he is beginning to be a little inconsistent the not in letting his passion govern his reason as bruus tries to Fashion it and he is a strange mixture of bravado and real courage of wisdom and self deception I am now in act two scene to Julius Caesar is being begged by his wife caleria being begged by his servants and retainers not to go forth To the Senate that day and Caesar cries out the gods do this in shame of cowardice Caesar should

be a beast without a heart if he should stay at home today for fear no Caesar shall not and notice that he speaks of himself in the third person which is clearly a kind of weakness on his part but that in itself raises another question which is part of the elliptical or hidden element in this play which fascinates me and which I think should greatly interest uh All of you how is it that Caesar who is already an absolute dictator in Rome how is it that it is so easy for the conspirators to kill him

Marcus antthony Marcus Antonius Mark Anthony is taken off the scen but why are there no pretorian guards about Caesar you can say partly that it is sheer bravado that without a bodyguard he goes into the midst of the conspirators but I think there is a deeper and darker implication there is some sense that on some Primordial level perhaps unconscious or partly unconscious he desires martyrdom because he understands with his deep intellect that if he is cut down by the conspirators he will be Avenged and indeed his great nephew and deir Octavian will become at the

close of the last tragedy we will consider Anthony and Cleopatra the Emperor Augustus and fully found the Roman Empire and each new emperor in turn shall be called Caesar it will become the name for Emperor and to this day it maintains itself the Roman Caesar became the Russian Zar simply a Slavic modification of the term Caesar and caesarism and the spirit of Caesar has been prevalent in the world ever since Julius Caesar so another of the Hidden elements or elliptical elements in this play is whether or not Caesar does not see himself as a willing

sacrifice to his own greatness so that he will become a kind of God through this Assassination and the Empire will be firmly founded in his name and he will live immortally in Caesar after Caesar but when returns now to his complex nature as we meet him in the play he says he will go forth danger knows full well that Cesar is more more dangerous than he which has its charm but also its immense foolishness we are two lions lited in one day and I the Elder and more terrible and Caesar shall go forth now that

is not impressive that shows Him simultaneously at his best and at his worst and now one sees him in an exchange with Brutus which I find very fascinating indeed before the rest of the conspirators come there is Brutus I in act 2 scene 2 a passage which immensely fascinates me at about line 110 Caesar sees Brutus and says to him what Brutus are you steered so early too and then he says hello to the others and then you get the only exchange that Takes place until the actual murder when finally Caesar will cry out at

two brute that is to say you two Brutus then CES a die if you my nearest and dearest indeed my natural son have turned against me and struck me down you get this curious reserved he says to Brutus what is it a clock and Brutus says to him very gently sees is his struck in eight and cesa very formally with a kind of beautiful gravity replies I thank you for your Pains and courtesy it is too large a statement obviously to make too dignified too full of overtones for the occasion and so we come to

the actual scene of the assassination and in doing so we have a very striking scene indeed something which went beyond anything that Shakespeare had composed up to this time in terms sheer dramatic intensity act 3 scene 1 the conspirators are gathered around him Mark Anthony has been sent Off there are no guards as I said casassus speaks to him and begs Caesar that someone shall be recalled from Exile and Caesar replies and what is really his finest moment I could be well moved if I were as you if I could pray to move prayers would

move me but I am constant as the northern star of whose true fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament the skies are painted with unnumbered Sparks they are all fire and everyone doth Shine but there's but one in all doth hold his place so in the world and Jesus says I am that Northern Star I will remain constant and they beg him and implore him and Cesar in line 75 says does not Brutus himself who is so dear to me bootless kneel is he not kneeling to no purpose whatsoever since I

will not yield on this and they all cry out speak hands for me and they all stab Caesar and the final blow is given and as I say according to Pluto in the Privates and Caesar cries out and thou my son and you to indeed Brutus Then Fall Caesar and he is over throne and the great murder is accomplished the great catastrophe and you get a moment of extraordinary theater as Brutus leads the conspirators in dipping their hands in the blood of Caesar a moment that they know is Gory but so as to say we

fully accept our guilt and we do this for the sake of Liberty and then Begins The program of the rest of the play which I want to outline uh in a kind of Cavalcade of what is most crucial in it every time there is a disagreement between the two generals on the rebel side the Assassins those who have cut Caesar down Brutus and cassus cassus is is invariably right Brutus is invariably wrong his judgment is Dreadful thus cius has initially said Before the actual murder of Caesar let us murder Mark Anthony also because he is

too devoted to Caesar and will Revenge himself upon us Brutus says no our course will seem too bloody casassus he says Let Him Live he is harmless he but a limb of Caesar when Caesar is gone he is no danger and then comes a further disagreement Brutus goes to the Forum to speak to the citizens of Rome to justify the murder of Caesar and Mark Anthony says allow me to say a few words after You not against you and cassus and the other conspirators but simply a kind of Elegy aium for Caesar and cassia says

do not do this in effect his eloquence may be too dangerous and Brutus again shrugs it off this pattern will go on throughout the rest of the play Whenever cassia says let us not do battle with Octavius and Anthony and their armies at this point or another Brutus with invariable bad judgment says no we will do it my way and it leads Finally to the defeat and overthrow and subsequent suicide of Cass and finally to the suicide of Brutus I want to turn to that suicide and then consider the entire question of the personalities of

the four principal characters in the play Brutus is a superb stoic a figure of enormous dignity and Enterprise a man almost wholly admirable except for an EXT extraordinary blindness towards himself And his own motivations as I have remarked before including that hidden motivation of the deep ambivalence of the kind of love that he bears for what does seemed to be his actual father Julius Caesar when Brutus is about to commit suicide he says I Rejoice that on my entire life I I met no man but he was true to me it does not seem to

occur to him that all the people who vowed to be true to him kept their trough but he was Not true to Julius Caesar and betrayed him casassus is more honest he makes very clear throughout that he fiercly resents the natural superiority of Caesar he is one of those people who can never bear to have anyone in authority over them who really seems to be naturally Beyond them in terms of gifts and endowments Mark Anthony is a loving and loyal follower of Caesar as the young Octavius his Heir and great nephew is as well but

Mark Anthony does not Seem to really come to himself until his great funeral oration in which almost prophesying Iago and the special arts of Iago in the great tragedy oel Mark Anthony starts a spirit of Mischief abroad and incites the entire mob to Rise Against The conspirators and go forth to murder anyone who stands in favor of the terrible death that has been brought to Caesar sh Shakespeare practices a kind of alienation effect beral bre in the Modern theater speaks of the alienation effect of trying to separate the audience emotionally from everything that is happening

on stage but as he himself uh realized Shakespeare was there before him as he is there before everyone as a dramatist and indeed in every mode of literary art it is not possible for us to sympathize with Brutus because Brutus does not allow himself to fully understand his own motives we cannot Fully sympathize with Caesar both because there is this strange suicidal element in him and also because when you start worshiping and venerating yourself in the third person then clearly a kind of dehumanizing effect is going on however great your courage remains we certainly cannot

sympathize very much with casassus though we can admire the lean of his intellect and the way his great design Works itself out by playing upon Brutus but even with Mark Anthony where after all he does seem a kind of free spirit and someone who has a kind of tremendous capacity for emotional life we are shown him in the act of sitting down with Octavius and preparing a purge which goes far Beyond any Purge of the Romans suggested by Brutus and Casius in which the great philosopher and writer Cicero is going to perish in which relatives

both of Mark Anthony and of Octavius are going to perish they are Coldblooded in the extreme so we are alienated from then Shakespeare quite clearly is trying for a very complex effect and one of the most remarkable aspects of this drama is that throughout the earlier 20th century it was played as a left-wing drama sometimes indeed by Communists in enhancement of their politics it was played as a fascist drama it caused riots from both extremes Shakespeare himself politically I think is disen engaged as he is always religiously disengaged we do not know where Shakespeare stands

in relationship to the four major characters in Julius Caesar or to The crucial action of the play which is the assassination of Caesar he certainly does not believe that it was a stroke or action in order to achieve Liberty and yet he does not wholly stand for the spirit of caesarism either he stands Apart and he seems to want us to stand apart also but he has created a drama of astonishing and Perpetual political relevance as deeply involved in our awareness of what is going on now in 2005 in the United States and the rest

of the world as it was four centuries ago when first it was composed Shakespeare the seven major tragedies lecture three Hamlet part One this is the first of three lectures on Shakespeare's most famous tragedy and indeed most famous play indeed I would go fur and say the most famous literary work ever composed the tragical history of Hamlet Prince of Denmark the first lecture we'll basically talk about the nature and the importance both of the play and of the protagonist or hero Prince Hamlet and we'll talk about the First Act of the play and take us

through the first scene of act two and I May say something about all of seven of the soliloquies that he speaks the second of the three lectures will concern the extraordinary sequence that goes from act 2 scene two through act 3 scene 2 and that is an amazing series of what I've learned to call plays within plays within plays and the third and final one will go from act three scene three down to the very end of the drama I want to begin by talking about the uniqueness of Hamlet in all of Literature all of

Western literature and by now since English has become the lingua franka of the entire world replacing uh French in some sense the unique work the most famous literary work in the entire world uh today and I have no reason to believe we have no reason to believe that it will not always be the most famous it is the central work of Western literature we all of us surmise when we know the play and when we know Shakespeare's work in General that there is a unique relationship between Shakespeare himself and the play though as I say

this is surmise we can never work it out in exact terms the play was probably begun in 15 1999 when Shakespeare was about 35 years old it was finished and first acted in 1600 when he was 36 it was revised in 16001 the year when he turned 37 he died 15 years later in 1616 on just about his 52nd birthday there is a Very subtle family background to Shakespeare's tragedy of Hamlet Shakespeare had only one son hamnet h m and and in those days they when Elizabethan spelling was by no means regular Shakespeare himself on

different documents spells his own last name Shakespeare six or seven ways there would have been very little difference between hamnet and Hamlet the boy died at the age of 11 3 years before the play was written the year of the play's Revision Shakespeare's father died and that the play has some intimate relationship to Shakespeare's own loss of both a son and a father is a kind of General speculation in which all of us share but I want to talk about what it is that makes this as individual and unique a play as it is is

above everything else it is the extraordinary intelligence of its hero Hamlet he is quite simply by Universal agreement the most brilliant mind Represented in the entire history of literature it is not too much to say in fact that he is there in the Renaissance four centuries ago a new kind of man as much a new kind of man as King David is in the Hebrew Bible in the second book of Samuel or perhaps as Jesus of Nazareth is in the gospel of Mark Hamlet is an absolute individual he is a total original he does not

resemble any figures who come either before or after Him in Shakespeare's work but his in fluence and the influence of the play has been so enormous that it is quite customary to find characters who are to one degree or another imitations of Hamlet throughout Western literature and indeed by now in eastern literature as well the traditional way or a traditional way of talking about this play and this character is to say that he is a man who could not make up his mind to do what the ghost of his father Had ordered him to do

which is to Revenge his father's murder at the hands of his uncle Claudius who not only has usurped the throne as Hamlet says popped in between the election of a new king and my hopes but has married Hamlet's mother Queen gertrud and indeed it is a dark element in the play that while ger Sur does not know that Claudius has murdered her first husband neither we nor Hamlet know how far back her sexual relationship with Claudius goes which creates I think a special problem for Hamlet's Consciousness because he does not like Claudius and there is

an outside possibility always which he's not willing to express that he could fact be the son of Claudius something that I may come on to again uh later but I want to talk first about what kind of a play this is and what kind of a hero this is there are a number of supremely intelligent individuals who have been Represented in literature since Shakespeare wrote Hamlet there at the turn into the 17th century just a little more than four centuries ago but no one has succeeded in creating a character whose Consciousness is as extraordinarily capacious

as hamlets a character who seems to be aware of everything a character whose self-awareness in fact is so intense that it becomes a kind of theatricality since he is at every Point Aware that in some sense strangely enough he is acting in a play and a play that he doesn't particularly seem to care for indeed one of the odd Impressions about this play which has been recorded through the centuries again and again by readers audiences and critics is that Hamlet somehow seems to us a kind of real person who has been popped into the midst

of a play in which no one else is quite real as though he is a human being surrounded by puppets Some of them extraordinary figures indeed like his beloved ofilia but who nevertheless do not have what you might want to call the reality quotient that Hamlet himself has there are of course enormous problems for Shakespeare as there would be for any other writer in giving you a character as supremely intelligent as Hamlet is he is for one thing as people of great intelligence frequently are something of an ironist he quite Frequently means one thing and

says another or says something and means something else and that helps the general sense of uniqueness that he gives us but there are other elements here as well that need to be considered at the start this is Shakespeare's longest play by far it is 4,000 lines long and is almost never put on completely on the modern stage of those 4,000 lines 38500 lines are spoken by Hamlet himself Which means that it is the longest single speaking part that any actor can ever attempt in any of the world's dramas whatsoever and that is also of course

a kind of Burden for us but a kind of Liberation as well because we always want to hear more than we actually do hear from him his range of interest is so extraordinary the quality of his intelligence is so piercing his immense wisdom seems to be perpetually exfoliating so that we finally want to Hear him on every subject Under the Sun and though the play is already far too long for ordinary stage presentation at 4,000 lines something in us always wishes Hamet to say even more than he is saying now the range of reactions on

the part of readers and critics to this play has always been very extraordinary the English romantic critic Samuel Taylor corid said that this was the tragedy of a man who thought too much the great German philosopher friederick Nicha Replied no that is wrong Hamlet's problem is not that he thinks too much but that he thinks much too well and he thinks his way through to the truth and all you can do in relation to the truth is die of it according to n while I prefer n to cage on this I would myself go a

little further I think that Hamlet is not so much what nii calls a dianic man that is to say kind of archaic ecstatic sort of a person but as I said earlier a new kind of man one who in a Sense incarnates the truth in himself as the King David of second Samuel seems to Incarnate truth in himself as the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark is taken as incarnating truth in himself so Hamlet seems to be the truth and comes to recognize that he is the truth and if you are the truth as he

finally seems to decide then only Annihilation self annihilation is appropriate for you a terrible and nihilistic conclusion but I think there is a strong nihilistic Element in this great drama there is a tradition from Aristotle on that the tragic hero has to manifest what was called a hamara in the Greek ha m a r t a by Aristotle a kind of tragic flaw but I believe that h has no tragic flaw and that Aristotle is inappropriate here as he is elsewhere in Shakespeare Hamlet is not always a very kind human being he is absolutely not

a loving human being I think even though audiences come to love him intensely the Reader Comes to Love Him intensely most critics have reached a point where they identify with him the great romantic critic William Haslet said it is we who are Hamlet which I think is not altogether the case because none of us are as intelligent after all as Hamlet is but also none of us I think is quite as cold as Hamlet is Sigman Freud thought that both the character Hamlet and the drama of Hamlet was an exemplification of what he called the

Edus complex that is to say he took that Hamlet's relationship to the dead King Hamlet his father whose ghost shows up at the beginning of the play and shows up later on in the play as Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude that Hamlet's relationship to him was marked by extreme ambivalence that is to say simultaneous love and hatred for the same personage but I think that is wrong and that the fian reading of this play is in the end a profoundly mistaken One we learn in the play before it's over as we will see in the

third lecture of this group of three lectures on Hamlet we learned that Hamlet until he was 7 years old had one constant friend companion the person who actually nurtured him and that was yorck y o r i CK the king's Jester it's a very strange scene in the graveyard and we will be spending some time on it in the third lecture it may be the most famous scene not only in Hamlet but in all the World's literature it's also very surprising because it raises one of the many ambiguities and elliptical elements in this play Hamlet

at the beginning of the play is a student who has come back from the University of Wittenberg a Protestant University in Germany to the Royal Court of Elenor in Denmark because his father has suddenly and mysteriously died and his mother has remarried his brother Claudius who has become king in the Elder Hamlet's Place Hamlet like his school Chums Rosen CR and Gilden Stern who show up a little or another school friend heso who becomes the Deep friend of Hamlet in this drama Hamlet is a student in Shakespeare's day people were University students at ages several

years younger than they are today the Hamlet of the opening of this play cannot really be more than at most 19 years of age but you are told very clearly in the graveyard scene that it is now 23 years Since York died the king's Jester died and that Hamlet was 7 years old at that time that means that Hamlet is 30 years old in the Fifth Act of the play but in no way can the transpired time that takes you from the opening scenes of the play through the Fifth Act and the graveyard scene and

the tragic events that take place afterwards at Elenor in no way can the time lapse of the play be more than about 6 weeks at the most so we are given a hero who somehow ages 11 Years in just 6 weeks or so you can say that Shakespeare was being deliberately careless his friend the great rival dramatist Ben Johnson was always outraged by what he took to be Shakespeare's extreme Liberties and carelessness in terms of plot but I think that this is Shakespearean deliberation he wants a hamlet who is still essentially a student though A

very wise student at the opening of the work but then he wants a hamlet who is Indeed moving on full maturity at the close of the work and he does not care if he involves himself in a contradiction indeed shakespare might well have said even more than what W Whitman do I contradict myself very well then I contradict myself I am large I contain multitudes Walt Whitman said no one is a larger form of feeling thought and visualization than William Shakespeare and he is larger even than Walt Whitman And contained endless multitudes there are more

than aund major characters in shakes spe's plays who are remarkably different from one another they speak in distinct and absolute voices of their own and there are almost a thousand minor characters who are also whenever he wishes to sharply differentiated as well let me come back now to the whole question of Hamlet's intelligence and to the nature of this play play is in many ways baffling not Just because we cannot quite get the age of the prince straight not just because we are never told and we must surmise for ourselves how Hamlet got to be

the rather audacious striking brilliant but in the end intensely theatrical young man and one who profoundly distrusts all emotions including his own TS Elliot a major poet and critic of the 20 Century who did not like the play Hamlet once said of it That it is certainly an aesthetic failure it is a very celebrated misjudgment on Elliot's part but a very useful one because it always causes me to say in response that if Hamlet is an aesthetic failure then there is no such thing as any literary work ever which has been an aesthetic success but

one knows what it is that is bothering Al iot Elliot felt that there is some emotion in excess of what is going on in the play Constantly being manifested in Hamlet but that has to do with hidden elements in Hamlet some of which I hope to uncover in the course of these three lectures but I want to pass on now to a few other rather crucial things that one wishes you to know about this poem Hamlet and and Shakespeare share a tremendous distrust of motives Hamlet does not trust the motivation of anyone else in the

play and he distrusts his own motives they Also sheare that intense theatricality that I talked about earlier we know from stage tradition that Shakespeare himself acted the part of the ghost of Hamlet's father in this play because of a long theatrical tradition in which more often than not the character actor who plays the ghost also plays the first actor the first player or player King there is every reason to believe that Shakespeare doubled in that part also a literary critic whom I greatly Respect of the earlier 20th century Harold goded in a book called the

meaning of Shakespeare said of Hamlet quite brilliantly that Hamlet is his own fall staff I would add to that my own judgment that Hamlet is his own eago by which I do not mean that Hamlet is evil but he certainly does evil before the play is over he is responsible for eight violent deaths including his own one way or another he is responsible and that being the case one Understands why he prevents his friend Horatio from committing suicide at the close of the plague when Horatio knows that Hamlet is dying and does not want to

survive him he pulls the poison cup away from Horatio and says oh what a wounded name I will bear if you do not stay here and draw thy breath in pain to tell my story he has every reason to fear a wounded name his actions have been at times bloody and apparently inexplicable but that Takes me even further into the element in the play which is perhaps most extraordinary four centuries and more after it was first written and put on at the Globe Theater Shakespeare's theater in London Hamlet Remains the most experimental stage drama ever

written it tests the absolute limits both of theatricality and of Consciousness no one not pandelo not Samuel Becket not Bert Breck not the theater of the Absurd people including uh enesco and artto uh No one in the 20th century or now in the 21st is able to get Beyond Hamlet it is the most alarming kind of a play whether we read it or we watch a good performance of it and it's increasingly difficult I think to find a good performance of it because everything about it is unexpected nothing in it is predictable and I turn

therefore to a very crucial question which is how did Hamlet first become Hamlet how did he Become the extraordinary individual whom we meet who is so deeply ambivalent who questions everything who manifests an extraordinary degree of irony and who of all of Shakespeare's characters seems to be the most Adept at overhearing himself of being able to listen to himself as though he were some person other than himself and on the basis of what he hears go through a process of extraordinary change he is I think a changeling from the start in a sense Selfed nurtured

by York but a kind of ACTA dramatist from the beginning and I suppose that's why Shakespeare appears at his side as the first player and as the paternal ghost so as to make clear to the audience that Hamlet is not a self-representation on his part indeed I would go a little further I remember saying to you before repeating William has this great remark that it is we who are Hamlet I would say that no it is not we who are Hamlet it is we who are hor IO Horatio is the figure who mediates Hamlet for

us who makes Hamlet accessible for us Horatio represents the audience without uh Horatio we would have no way directly into the character and personality of Hamlet because as I say he simply seems to exist in a sphere very much apart from us I Now to turn to a very different element in Hamlet as a character and as a personality he has a wild ironic humor which is Manifest at the most amazing Times when he is getting the other figures who are on stage with him in the second scene of the play where the ghost first

appears he is getting them to swear that they will not reveal to anyone what they have heard and seen and the ghost from underneath the stage keep saying swear and there is Hamlet referring to the ghost as a mole as this fellow in the celer he mixes his Melancholia with this Wild ironic humor and it manifests also his tendency to give you the most amazing range of diction that is to say of word choice in all of literature the vocabulary of Hamlet is enormous and indeed a great many words in it are words that he

had in fact invented for himself that Melancholia is of course what he is famous for but the Melancholia I think is not grief at the death of his father let Alone the enormous shock at the remarriage of his mother so quickly and to Claudius of all people but that he had always been except for York an unloved child we should all notice that the ghost never speaks of the love that he bears for his son he says if ever thou D thy father love and when he shows up again later in the play it is

out of concern for gertrud and not out of concern for Hamlet and indeed there is not much Evidence that Gertrude who was a kind of sexual magnet has also ever paid much attention to her son so from the beginning we are dealing with as I said someone who has fathered and in a sense even mothered himself who has in an extraordinary way invented himself which takes me to the moment that I have been leading up to now for some time which is the first entrance of the players after Hamlet has been confronting Rosen crun and

Gilden Stern for the first time in The play they have been called from Wittenberg to spy upon him for Claudius and for ponus his Chamberlain Hamlet from the start is very well aware that there's something very wrong indeed with their presence and he shows from the beginning in relation to them a great deal of weariness when they speak to him of why he is unhappy he says to them that you must teach Me tell me whether you were sent for or no Rosen Cranson Gilden Stern who of course in the 20th century were picked up

by Tom stoer in His Brilliant Samuel Becket likee play Rosen Cranson golden Stern are dead they are aware that they are in grave difficulties from the start with Hamlet I want to read after they admit that they were sent for Hamlet who has understood this from the start tells them I have of late but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth for gone all Custom of exercises and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that goodly frame the Earth seems to me a sterile Promontory this most excellent canopy the air look you this

Brave or hanging firmament this majestical roof Fred with golden fire why it appear nothing to me but a foul and pestilent Congregation of vapors and then with extraordinary ambivalence about the entire human situation Hamlet cries out what piece of work is a man how Noble in Reason how infinite in faculties in and moving how Express and admirable in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a god the beauty of the world the Paragon of animals and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust man Delights not me nor woman neither though by

your smiling you seem to say so and Rosen cr's protest my Lord there was no such stuff in my thoughts and ham said why did you laugh then when I said man Delights not me Rosen cr's replies if You Delight not in man what poor entertainment as it were the players shall receive from you that is to say the actors always called players in those days are coming and that will take us into the next section of this play but before I go on to what will be featured in the second lecture I want to

sum up part of what it is that makes Hamlet as fascinating and inescapable and unique as he most Certainly is he carries with him an intense consciousness of death there is no character in all of literature even though he is presumably no more than 19 years old at the start of the play and so young a man ought not to carry the thought of mortality in him at any and every moment even though his father had has just died and what he rapidly learns are more than suspicious circumstances but Hamlet's Consciousness Is so enormous that

it comprehends the whole question of human mortality in that speech that he gives to Rosen CR and Guildenstern that I've just quoted to you there is an overwhelming sense that our condition as human beings is extraordinarily divided against itself we are an infinite piece of work we are in some ways like Mortal gods and yet we are mortal and we know that we are going to die that Consciousness of death on Hamlet's part makes him as an old friend of mine the great English critic George Wilson Knight once said to me and then wrote Hamlet

is de's ambassador to us he conveys to us the embassy of death I will go on now to the arrival of the players in my second lecture after listening to lecture three a student posed this question to Professor Bloom why do we like Hamlet so much when His sentiments are so depressing let's listen to the professor's response I think that the question is a very good one indeed how is it that Hamlet can be as endlessly Lively as he is when he is dea's ambassador to us why does he not walk around in a state

of such Perpetual Melancholy that we scarcely would find his company tolerable though in fact we find it Endlessly fascinating and the answer is I think again the question of his Consciousness if Shakespeare himself more than any other writer makes us aware of things moods ideas Sensations that are all around us and within us at every point but which we would never notice if Shakespeare had not alerted us to them Hamlet more than any figure in Shakespeare participates in Shakespeare's peculiar power in that Regard no matter how acutely ious of mortality he is he is equally

conscious perhaps even more conscious of what an extraordinary and wonderful thing it is to be alive and how much there is to notice how much there is to experience Above All Else how much there is to Think Through This Ends lecture three Shakespeare the seven major tragedies lecture 4 Hamlet part two we know that the play Hamlet was First acted at the Globe Theater during the year 1600 but clearly it was for Shakespeare a highly volatile kind of a text and in 16001 he expanded its ironic commentary on the war of the theaters which he

was having with his friendly rival Ben Johnson yet even the poet's war is only a little bit of that extraordinary melstrom that you get in the sequence that goes from act 2 scene 2 line 315 through act 3 scene 2 line 288 for almost a thousand lines or a full quarter of this play Shakespeare cuts a gap into his representation of reality or his imitation of an action the globe's audience on those afternoons in 1601 evidently were sophisticated enough to accept an ought that capriciously abandons the illusions of stage representation and then picks them up

again whenever it feels like more or less with a kind of free Will the entrance of the players is a rather extraordinary moment in the play but in general what we have are a series of plays within plays within plays if we no longer are given an imitation of an action then we sit there in the theater and we have constant reminders that we are in a theater and that all is theatricality not only do we see the poets war of 1600 to 1601 in which Shakespeare joins his Friends maren and Decker in their battle

against Ben Johnson and the child actors whom he was directing at the black frers uh theater but we are given non-existent plays we have Hamlet once the players arrive speaks to them and says but what are you doing here anyway because they are clearly Shakespeare's own actors from The Globe which must have been a very interesting problem for the audience that was sitting there in the Globe he says why why are you here in Elenor and not in effect in London and they reply well it's because according to Rosen CR there are these little young

Hawks these Eerie of children these little AOS who are taking all of the business away and Hamlet says well he finds it very difficult to believe but Gilden says well there has been much throwing about of brains in this kind of warfare Hamlet shrugs it off and he Greets the players when they comes in and says you are welcome Masters welcome all and then says to them I wish you to repeat a play he says to the player King who is almost certainly the actor Will Shakespeare himself he says I heard thee speak me a

speech once but it was never acted or if it was not above once for the play I remember please not the million Chas caviar to the general which is of course the origin of that phrase for us Shakespeare jokingly and it is an In joke that many in the audience would have appreciated May well be referring to his own play trois and cresa which had had perhaps one performance and it was not at the globe this play it has no title but it might be called the slaughter of pram king of Troy and the lament

of hecuba his queen and the mother of his 50 dead sons and his daughter Cassandra this play which is non-existent is a satire upon Christopher Marlo Thomas kid Thomas Nash other contemporaries of Shakespeare and he says to to the actor Will Shakespeare the first player or player King here is the speech and he starts to quot it and of course this is the actor Richard Burbage the chief actor of Shakespeare's company the leading man who is playing uh Hamlet and has the distinction of having inaugurated the role of Hamlet and all the other great roles

in mature Shakespeare and he talks about how pus the son of Achilles Avenge the death of Achilles who had been slain by an arrow in his heel the only place where he was mortal and vulnerable fired by Paris the son of Priam who had stolen Helen away and made her Helen of Troy and precipitated the Great War which ends with the Trojan Horse and the burning and Sack and Slaughter of the Trojans and you get a magnificently ridiculous Passage spoken by Hamlet ending with the hellish purus old grandsire Priam seeks and then says so preed

you and then the player king or William Shakespeare himself as actor recites the rather ghastly kind of a scene in this deliberately very bad kind of a verse as to how poor Priam is all chopped up by the son of Achilles and then the mobled or muffled Queen hecuba comes to lament him the death of pream and in the course of Acting this moment in the course of giving the speech of hecuba the actor Shakespeare the player King as he will be his face gets all red and blubbery and he starts to weep and Hamlet

says we will hear a play tomorrow we will play the murder of gonzago which is another non-existent play but Hamlet says I will revise it I will give you he says to the player King new lines to speak he says 12 or 16 lines but evidently there are many more Than that and he said you will play this and as you learn later he will retitle the murder of gonzago the mouse trap because he means it to be the trap in which he catches his enemy clus but when he is left alone when Rosen CR

and Gilden Stern and the players go off stage suddenly we are back in the play of Hamlet and Hamlet speaks a major Soliloquy a soliloquy in which he cries out oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I is it not monstrous that this player here but an AFF fiction in a dream of passion could force his soul so to his own conceit that from her working all his Visage wand tears in his eyes distraction in his aspect a broken voice and his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit and all for nothing for

hecuba what's hecuba to him or he to her that he should weep for her and as he goes on in it Hamlet condemns himself and says that he is someone who should Not be crying out like this that I the son of a dear father murdered prompted to my Revenge by Heaven and Hell must like a unpack my heart with words and fall a cursing like a very drab a skolion and then he says no the play is the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king I will put on the murder of gonzago

as the mous trp but I want us to pause on that remarkable moment when Hamlet Speaks of what is involved in unpacking Your Heart with words like a lying who says I love you when she does not love you nii very much onto the influence of Hamlet made of this the extraordinary principle that I think is a wonderful interpretation of what Hamlet and indeed Shakespeare finally is up to nii said that for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts there's always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking I

want To repeat that because it is I think so important to Hamlet's personality and nature and to shakespare even though it is formulated by nii following this particular Soliloquy of hamlets what we are being told quite extraordinarily is that we are in a very bad situation whenever we try to directly express our present sensation our present emotion our present feeling that when we try to say to someone I love you in some sense we are lying Because if you can find words for it then it is already dead in your heart and there's always nii

adds a kind of contempt in the act of speaking certainly that is Manifest throughout Hamlet again and again he does show a kind of contempt for the act of speaking and having uttered this extraordinary Soliloquy we now go on on with Hamlet to the actual presentation of the play but before it commences in act 3 scene 1 we come to the most famous moment in the Play and one on which I want to proceed very slowly indeed the most famous speech in all of literature not just literature written in English is the great Soliloquy to

be or not to be Hamlet knowing that he is proceeding to have the murder of gonzago act as a mous trap knowing that it will undoubtedly confirm that with the ghost has said to him is true knowing that then he who is far too comprehensive in Consciousness after all It doesn't take a hamlet it doesn't take the most supremely intelligent and highly conscious of individuals to pick up a sword and hack somebody down it is a very minor action to assign to a very major Consciousness indeed so he is brooding on this and he Broods

on it in a speech that I think we usually misunderstand partly because it has become hacked and trit we feel with repetition indeed in one recent performance of hamlets in New York City A couple of years back that I walked out on the direct had instructed the star playing Hamlet that since the audience was entirely tired of the to be or not to be speech started in the wings and don't come out onto the stage until the speech is half over which so outraged me that I left the theater at just that point deciding that

this was simply out of the question question by the way is a very good word because that is how Hamlet begins to be or not to be That is the question in all of Shakespeare there is no play that uses the word question in all its forms questionable questioning question as often as Prince Hamlet does throughout hamlets the word occurs in different forms 17 different times in one play and indeed Hamlet does question everything and when he begins by saying to be or not to be that is the question he does not mean whether or

not he is to avenge his father and he certainly does not Mean that he is contemplating suicide though the way in which he speaks will shortly make it sound as though he is thinking about the possibility of selfs Slaughter he is dealing with something very different it is a tradition in literature from Shakespeare until the present day that the poet or writer at every Point feels a necessity to assert the power of his or her mind over what might be called The Sea of death the World of ordinary reality the world of mortality the world

of what Freud in fact calls the reality principle Shakespeare's metaphor for that Hamlet's metaphor for that is a of troubles to be or not to be that is the question whether is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune or to take arms against the Sea of troubles and by opposing end them but think exactly of what he has just Said he cannot literally mean what he is saying if you take arms against ocean if you fight with the sea you have no chance of Victory whatsoever and since in them

is equivocal there Hamlet goes on to say to die to sleep no more and by asleep to say we end the heartache and the Thousand natural shocks that flesh is ear to is a consummation devoutly to be wished but by a consummation by a finality he does not mean anything like the final cry consumat EST it is Finished of Jesus from the cross he means something very different indeed he means that even if we might wish for this he's being ironic in saying this is devoutly to be wished for because he said we do not

know to die to sleep to sleep per chance to dream I there's the rub for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this Mortal coil must give us pause and finally he takes you to The Dread of something after death the fact that we Just do not know one way or the other whether there is Annihilation or there is consciousness because memorably and magnificently Hamlet describes death as the Undiscovered Country from whose born no traveler returns and this he says puzzles the will and makes us rather bear the

ills we have than fly to others that we know not of and then something which is also frequently misunderstood he says thus conscience does make cowards of us all but though he uses the Word conscience in Shakespeare the word conscience means Consciousness as you and I now employ it it is consciousness itself that makes cowards of us all and he says any resolution that we cared to make is necessarily sickled or with a pale cast of thought and listen very carefully to the metaphor here and Enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their

currents turn arai and lose the name of action there is that sea of trouble again pitching Itself with its currents turning one way or another the speech ultimately has conceded that there is no power of hamlets or indeed implicitly of Shakespeare's mind or of any human mind or of any poet over a sea of troubles you cannot by opposing outward reality seek to end it in any particular kind of a respect but we now have the breaking in again of that element in this thousand line sequence of act 2 scene 2 to act 3 scene

2 of the players and I Turn now to act 3 scene 2 a long and very powerful scene which culminates this extraordinary you might call it second quarter of the play Hamlet enters with three of the players and this is the actor Richard Berber speaking but if ever I think you hear William Shakespeare's own voice in one of the plays it is here here is Shakespeare who has only just replaced the madap comic the chief clown of the company will Kemp with a Remarkable uh actor Robert Armen a r m i n famous for his

wonderful sweet singing voice who will play the part of the gravedigger in Hamlet he will play the porter in the knocking at the gate scene in MC Beth he will play the full in King Le he will play festy the clown who a marvelous singer in 12 night here is Burbage as Hamlet speaking with Shakespeare's own voice which fascinates me because he is telling the players in Effect not to be like will Kemp speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you trippingly on the tongue but if you mouth it as many

of your players do I had as the town crier spoke my lines no do not s the air too much with your hand thus but use all gently for on the very Toran Tempest and as I may say Whirlwind of your passion you must acquire and beget a Temperance that may give it smoothness oh it offends me to the soul to hear a rustu perg ped fellow Tear of passion to tatters to very rags to split the ears of the Groundlings who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable able dumb shows and

noise I would have such a fellow whipped pray you avoid it and the first player and this is very humorous of course for those watching this at the globe who is Shakespeare himself says I warrant your honor I agree and then Hamlet goes on with the voice of Shakespeare again to speak about the purpose of playing which He says is to hold the mirror up to Nature and in particularly he says that clowns are to play very very carefully indeed and then we will go on to as the play does to the most extraordinary moment

in it which breaks the continuity and which calls into question the whole issue of stage representation that is to say what is it that we are watching when we sit there in the audience and watch ham or when we read the play out loud or Silently to ourselves or to one another Hamlet sits there with ofilia ponus Claudius Gertrude and the other people in the court and the murder of gonzago is played in front of them it is very badly written indeed and remember this is not supposed to be written by Hamlet this part but

again it is a kind of parody of a a marlovian kidan kind of a play uh it's very worst moment comes when the player Queen who clearly represents Gertrude says the Second time I kill my husband dead when second husband kisses me in bed and then comes a passage that undoubtedly Hamlet himself wrote and had interpolated in the play it f Fates me because as much as the great soliloquies it gives us a clue to the meaning of this extraordinarily complex and endlessly fascinating play the play King says to The queen I do believe you

think what now you speak but what we do determine of we break purpose is but the slave to memory a violent birth but poor validity which now the fruit unripe sticks on the tree but fall unshaken when they mellow be that is to say every time we purpose doing something or meaning something and of course we are coming back again to unpacking Your Heart with words and being unable to speak anything unless it Is already dead in your hearts anything that we purpose to do is a poor validity because it will will be forgotten very

quickly most necessary it is that we forget to pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt what to ourselves in passion we propose the passion ending doth the purpose lose the violence of either grief or Joy their own enactors with themselves destroy and then goes on to say but orderly to end where I begun our Wills and Fates do so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown our thoughts are ours there ends none of our own clearly I would insist lines written by Hamlet himself telling us that we will one thing fate brings about another

our devices our plans are always upset our thoughts may be ours but the ends of our thoughts the purposes to which they lead are completely alienated from us King increasingly upset by what he is Watching King Claudius says to Hamlet what you call the play and Hamlet replies the mous Trap marry how tropically that is to say how metaphorically this play is the image of a murder done in Vienna Zago is the Duke's name his wife Batista you shall see Anon is a navish piece of work but what of that your majesty and we that

have free Souls it touches us not and then we are shown precisely what the ghost had told Hamlet that his brother Claudius had come and poured poison in his ear while he was sleeping Hamlet observes this and C out a poisons him in the garden for his estate his name is gonzago the story is extant and written in very Choice Italian as of course it is not you shall see and on how the murderer gets the love of Gonzo's wife but suddenly it is too much for Claudius he leaps to his feet and cries out

desperately give me some light away and ponus cries out as All the cordius do lights lights lights and everyone except Hamlet and Horatio including the players runoff stage Hamlet is left alone with Horatio Rosen CR and Gilden Stern enter as Hamlet exalts and cries out for some music and Rosen CR and Gilden Stern come and say the king is marvelously distempered he is furious the queen your mother have sent me to you and hamlet in speaking to Rosen CR and Gilden Stern says here are the players who have entered again Playing recorders small woodwind instruments

that of course we still employ and Hamlet offers it to Rosen CR and Gilden Stern and says play for me and Gilden Stern says believe me I cannot Hamlet says I do beseech you Gilton says I know no t of it my Lord and now we have hler that his most formidable he says it is as easy as lying it is as easy as lying govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb give it breath with Your mouth and it will discourse most eloquent music look you these are the stops poor Gilden turn says but

these cannot I command to any utterance of Harmony I have not the skill and Hamlet really Furious but with tremendous eloquence and really challenging us the audience also cries out why look you now how unworthy a thing you make of me you would play upon me you would seem to know my stops you would pluck out the heart of my mystery you would sound me From my lowest note to the top of my compass and there's much music excellent voice in this little organ yet cannot you make it speak so blood do you think I

am easier to be played on than a pipe call me what instrument you will though you fret me you cannot play upon me and with that Hamlet I think has directly challenged not only Rosen CR and Gilden Stern and Claudius and ponus through them but he has challenging us the audience Shakespeare is challenging Us he is warning us that to pluck out the heart of Hamlet's mystery is almost impossible and yet we have no choice it is what the play is asking us to do notice that stage representation has begun again again the play is

an imitation of an action it is no longer a series of plays within plays within plays and therefore we are coming on now to a very violent scene this is act 3 scene 3 and I want to commence it by reminding you of a Word Shuffle or shuffling which is one of the really extraordinary instances of Shakespeare's delicacy and Brilliance as a dramatist in the to be or not to be Soliloquy Hamlet speaks of when we have shuffled off this Mortal coil Hamlet will now in act 3 scene 3 come upon on his uncle down

on his knees and praying asking forgiveness for the murder of his brother Hamlet stands above him unseen by Claudius with a drawn sword and listens to Claudius and Claus says of what is up above in Heaven Is Not So above there is no shuffling there the action lies in his true nature meaning God's true nature later in the play when Claudius is conniving with Le eres the son of the slain ponus and brother of poor ofilia whom Hamlet's brutality will have driven mad and to suicide and a death for which Hamlet is as highly culpable

as he is for the death of ponus as they plot together they speak of an exchange of Rapers an exchange of swords and Claudius says to leres with a little shuffling you can exchange the swords so we have the profound difference between shuffling in the sense of lying in the sense of imposture as the word is understood by Claudius and the very different use of shuffling off our mortal coil as though almost casually one is willing to cast Life Away in Hamlet Hamlet stands above the praying Claudius and he will not do It and the

reason that he gives us is that he will not cut down a man while he is praying but I think that that is only a kind of masking for something else something which is far more profound the prince's thoughts are bloody but he is not yet ready to act only a moment later when ofilia has been as it were loose to him by Polonius who is behind the curtain does Hamlet strike through the curtain and kill Polonius and simply shrugs it off he simply says Thou wretched rash intruding full farewell I took thee for thy

better I thought I was thrusting through the curtain and killing your master Claudius and when he is done in the extraordinary scene in which he is denouncing his mother so fiercely that the ghost re-enters in order to keep him from doing any violence to his mother though I think Hamlet is not on the verge of killing her though she is certainly very frightened indeed at his Fury at his Apparent Madness because fascinatingly he can see the ghost but she cannot which raises another of the deep ambiguities of this play When the ghost first appears in

the First Act of the play He Is seen by Horatio by marcelus by Bernardo the soldiers and also by his son Prince Hamlet when he makes his second and last appearance in this closet scene in The Familiar cabinet as it were or room of the queen where Hamlet has gone to abraid Her he is visible only to Hamlet and not at all to Gertrude it has raised for many the immemorial question of Hamlet's Madness which I would like to dismiss Hamlet himself disposes of the question when he says I am but mad North Northwest you

will recall Alfred Hitchcock's stealing of that for his for the TI of His Marvelous film North by Northwest I am but mad North Northwest when the wind blows from the south I can tell a hawk from a hand saw and indeed He is never mad he puts on as he says an antic disposition but that is to fall Claudius and Polonius and be able to carry out his designs even though he is by no means certain as to what his designs are are going to be and so we are taken to that point in the

play which will shortly bring me to the conclusion here at the opening now of Act 4 in scene two when Hamlet comes on and is forced to reveal where he has taken The body of Polonius of which he has said unceremoniously and with no contrition I will lug the guts into the neighbor room he is told now that he is being sent off to England this is in Act 4 scene 3 and the King says to him it would be good indeed Hamlet says good that I'm going to England King said so is it if

thou newest our purposes Hamlet who is supremely intelligent says I see a cherub that sees them he is going to be escorted to England by Rosen CR and Gilden Stern whether or not they know the sealed instructions that are going to be in the envelope that they are to present to the king of England we do not know but those sealed instructions as we rapidly discover are that Hamlet is to be executed immediately by the king of England upon arrival claudus says that the population loves him so greatly here in Denmark that we dare not

do this ourselves but he is too dangerous to be allowed to live and with that I want to Conclude the second lecture because we have now worked our way through that central part of the play in which Shakespeare has been most wildly experimental after listening to lecture 4 a student posed this question to Professor Bloom was Shakespeare's use of a play within a play a common dramatic technique of the time let's listen to the professor's response I find the question again Absolutely gerine uh to my purposes and very relevant indeed Shakespeare has been extraordinarily audacious

he has broken into the continuity of his play and forced the audience to sit there with no illusion whatsoever that they are seeing an actual reality being Act out in front of them but have indeed gazed upon plays within plays within plays like a series of Chinese boxes one inside the other or of Russian babushkas one doll inside another and then Shakespeare as if to evidence his extraordinary power over the audience has now suddenly switched back and gives you the representation or imitation of an action and I think it is his mastery and Hamlet's Mastery

it is the extraordinary intensity and ambition and powerfully worded exercise both of Shakespeare's inventive faculty and of Hamlet's vocabulary and Mastery of language which succeeds in so seducing us as audience as readership as Viewership that are able to accept being switched from unreality Back to Reality again so readily this ends lecture 4 remember to visit this course's web page at www.modlar.com where you'll find additional information about the lectures you just heard Shakespeare the seven major tragedies lecture 5 Hamlet part three this is the third and final lecture on Hamlets there is one more great Soliloquy

it comes in Act 4 after Hamlet sees the army of foren bra the prince of Norway march across the stage and Broods on the insanity of the fact that thousands of men are going to die for a very small bit of ground he then goes off indeed to England but of course never reaches England which is one of the extraordinary ways in which Shakespeare surprises you in this play indeed one of My favorite remarks ever about Hamlet and about Shakespeare in general was made by the great actor director Orson Wells who once said uh if

only Hamlet had reached England he would have evaded execution he would have grown old and he would have become saan fala which is a very Charming kind of a uh supposition instead he does go off on the ship to England but Pirates come along and as you will hear in the course of The entrance of the Pirates Hamlet thinking very quickly indeed takes advantage of the occasion but before we get to that I want to speak about the extraordinary difference in hamlets in Act five of the play before act four is over poor orilia has

gone absolutely mad and drowns herself The Fifth Act therefore opens in the graveyard and the gravedigger is speaking to another clown and what they Are doing is they are digging a grave for ofilia and as they work away quite suddenly Hamlet and Horatio enter we have been told previously that Hamlet having taken advantage of the pirate attack to go below ship and unseal the letter which orders his execution had used his art of penmanship and the Royal Signet ring that used to belong to his father to reeal the letter of instructions and has Simply changed

the instruction to be that Rosen CR and Gilden Stern ought to be executed immediately upon reaching England hamle then boards the pirate ship he is taken for a ransom back to Denmark and he has now been reunited with Horatio he enters the graveyard and watches the gravedigger throw up skull after skull Hamlet looks at one skull and says that skull had a tongue in it and could sing once how the Nave jws It To The Ground as if it were Cain's Jawbone that did the first murder this might be the Pate of a politician which

this ass now or offices one that would circumvent God might it not horo very cautiously says it might my Lord Hamlet goes on to say or of accordia which could say good tomorrow Sweet Lord how Dost thou Sweet Lord this might be my Lord such a one That Praise My Lord such a one's horse when a meant to beg it might it not and Horatio again not quite seeing the points say I my Lord and Hamlet goes on why in so and now my lady worms chopas and knocked about the mazid with a sexon spade

here's fine Revolution and we had the trick to see it did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at lockets with them mine ache to think on it it is one of his most profound and frightening Reflections upon mortality And raises the question of what kind of man has come back from the sea there is a new quietude in Hamlet in act 5 he no longer Frets about his dead father he no longer seems to want to make any resolution whatsoever to do anything about Claudius he seems to adopt a kind of

wise passivity a deep kind of quietism which really is a sort of disinterestedness as if to say I will Let events unfold as they will unfold but even as he begins to meditate in this kind of a mode he reaches a particular moment in his dialogue with the Grave Digger when something extraordinary happens the gravedigger throws up a skull and says who do you think it was Hamlet says nay I know not and we have I think the most famous moment in all of Western literature Grave Digger says a pestilence on him for a mad

Rogue a Poured a flagen of rhines that is to say of wine on my head once the same skull sir was yor skull the King's jesta and Hamlet is absolutely incredulous he says this and the grav Digger says in that Hamlet holds the skull stars at it brings it very close to his face and gives an extraordinary speech this is after all the fellow who died when he was 7 years old 23 years before this is the person who in a court Which neglected The Little Prince was always his playfellow always available to him how

many times are we to believe that King Hamlet ever carried the little Hamlet on his back but we can guess none whatsoever Hamlet speaks to her IO alas poor yurik I knew him heso a fellow of infinite Gest of most excellent fancy he hath bore me on his back a thousand times and now how abhor in my imagination it is because this is a Skull my Gorge Rises at it and then something which really hurts one one wonders how often in his life Hamlet has kissed either G shud or ofilia and I suspect not many

times at all here hung those lips I have kissed I know not how of and then speaking directly to the forever absent uich where be your jibes now your gambles your songs your flashes of mert that were want to set the table on a roar not one now to mock your own grinning quite chopfallen now get you to My ladies chamber and tell her let her paint an inch thick to this favor she must come make her laugh at that and then speaking again to Horatio pry Horatio tell me one thing and Horatio ever the

faithful straight man says what's that my Lord and Hamlet speaking of the most famous individual in history short of Jesus of Nazareth dust thou think Alexander meaning Alexander the Great Dost thou think Alexander looked of this Fashion in the earth ratio says in so and Hamlet says and smelt so and suddenly feels rosion and says PA and he puts the skull down Horatio says Ino my Lord and Hamlet replies very powerfully to what base uses we may return heso why may not imagination traced the noble dust of Alexander to a find it stopping a bung

Hall and Horatio who is very upset says twer to consider too curiously that is to say with too much Precision in a matter one shouldn't have Precision and to consider so Hamlet says no faith not a jot but to follow him thither with modesty enough and likelihood to lead it Alexander died Alexander was buried Alexander R returned to dust the dust is Earth of Earth we make LOM and why of that Loom where to he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel and suddenly ham breaks into a mad little rhyme that he makes

up for himself because he is a poet and a dramatist himself imperious Caesar mentioning the other great hero of the ancient world dead and turned to Clay might stop a hole to keep the wind away oh that that Earth which the world in awe should patch a wall to expel the Winter's floor and with that recognition that mortality is everything and human life in opposition to it seems fairly slight indeed incomes the funeral of ofilia Hamlet observes it Le eres leaps into the grave so as to hold his sister once more in his arms and

Hamlet Suddenly appears and says what is he whose grief be such an emphasis whose phrase of Sorrow conjures the wanding stars and makes them stand like Wonder wounded hearers a magnificent phrase which fascinates me because that in the end as Shakespeare knows is what he is doing to his audience he is making us into here is wounded by Wonder Wonder wounded hearers and then with great pride telling the king he is back and to look out for it Hamlet cries out this is I Hamlet the Dane Le eres starts to Grapple with him screaming the

devil take thy soul and Hamlet with perfect self-control says Thou prayest not well I prey take thy fingers from my throat for though I am not splenitive and Rush yet have I in me something dangerous which let thy wiseness fear hold off thy hand which is a warning on Hamlet's part that he is indeed a very dangerous person a most extraordinarily dangerous person and so the rest of the scene Plays itself out and I come now to those scenes which will gradually bring us to the climax of the play and to the kind of person

that Hamlet has become we passed to act 5 scene 2 there are Hamlet and Horatio and they enter together Hamlet says so much for this sir now shall you see the other you do remember all the circumstance that is to say the pirate interception at Sea and Horatio says remember it my Lord as if in effect how could I forget it and then Hamlet Very beautifully something that I must say haunts me every night since here I am soon to be 75 years old and as old people among those who are listening to me will

know as you get old it becomes harder and harder to sleep Hamlet says sir in my heart there was a kind of fighting that would not let me sleep MTH thought I lay worse than the mutineers in the bilbow rashly and praised be rashness for it let us know our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do Paul and that should learn us there's a Divinity that shapes our ends rough Hue them how we will Horatio replies that is most certain because he is thinking piously about the Christian Divinity but Hamlet has not

said what God this is there's a Divinity that shapes our ends Ru you them how we will we do the basic carering work but there is a Divinity who I think is Nemesis or fate and not God the father or Christ because I Believe that Hamlet has moved into a state of almost total nihilism so Hamlet describes how he changed the letter sent Rosen CR and Gilden Stern to their death Horatio whistling says of Claus it must be shortly known to him from England what is the issue of the business there and Hamlet replies magnificently

it will be short the interim is mine and a man's life's no more than to say one it is again one of those Extraordinary reminders of mortality I think of it almost every day Hamlet saying and a man's life's no more than to say one since in any one moment we may any of us suddenly depart an emissary oark is sent to invite Hamlet to the duel which is supposedly going to be a mock duel between himself and Le eres to be fought as a match with beding odds in front of the king and there

is no notion on Hamlet's part that the sword will be Poisoned and that there will also be a poison glass of wine Horatio says to Hamlet you will lose my Lord leres is a better swordsman after all than you are Hamlet says I do not think so since he Le eres went into France I have been in continual practice I shall win at the odds but as with so much that Hamlet says there is at least a double meaning the odds are against him he is in a court dominated by Claudius but nevertheless he says

I Shall win at the odds and then comes an extraordinary line of Pros I can never get out of my head Hamlet speaking to heratio says Thou wouldst not think how ill alls here about my heart but it is no matter Horatio says n good my Lord it it is an important matter this is something that you must Listen to If your mind dislike anything obey it I will forall this and Hamlet magnificently replies not a Wit we defy orary there is special Providence in the fall of a sparrow if it be now is not

to come if it be not to come it will be now if it be not now yet it will come the Readiness is all since no man of ought he leaves knows ought what is it to leave but times let be let me explicate that extraordinary Pros speech on Hamlet's part and he is as eloquent in Pros as he is in verse he is of course in the gospel of Matthew on the fall of a sparrow but when he says If it be out is not to come in every case it means the moment of

death he says if it be now it is not to come if it be not to come it will be now if it be not now yet it will come it will come sooner or later after all and then he says magnificently the Readiness is all now Shakespeare knew the king King James Bible but before he knew the King James Bible he knew and used the Geneva Bible in the King James Bible when Simon Peter falls Asleep on watch Jesus says of him the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak the same passage appears

in William tindale's Geneva Bible which Shakespeare has very much in mind here the spirit is ready but the flesh is weak so the Readiness is all simply means the willingness is all and then even more powerfully since no one Among Us of everything or everyone that he's going to leave behind actually really does know anything extraordinary Statement total skepticism we do not know anyone we do not understand anyone we do not understand anything what is it to leave but times why should it matter whether we leave at one time or another let be and that

let be will become a great refrain which beats on and off in the rest of Hamlet's brief existence he will keep saying let it be let be everyone enters the duel takes place but as it takes place there is A series of Miss Adventures Gertrude drinking to hamlets Fortune drinks from The Poisoned cup of wine the king Cries Out ger do not drink the queen says I will my Lord I pray you pardon me she drinks the king says in an aside it is the poison cup it is too late Hamet says I dare not

drink yet Madam by and by the the queen says come let me wipe thy face poor Le eres who's completely outmatched says to Claudius my Lord I'll hit him Now with a poisoned Rapier and the King says I do not think it ladies and Hamlet go into the third pass and Lees wounds Hamlet Hamlet who suddenly understands that something is very wrong indeed and it's fascinating that Shakespeare in his the stage Direction reintroduces the word scuffling then in scuffling Hamlet sees that they change rapers and cries out nay come again and wounds Le eres the

queen Falls dead and as she dies she cries out no no The drink the drink oh my dear Hamlet the drink the drink I am poisoned and Le eres confesses everything that has happened and says the king the kings to blame and Hamlet cries out in Fury the point and Venom to then Venom to thy work and he wounds clorius and the King Cries Out desperately oh yet defend me friends I am but hurt but Hamlet grabs him and cries out here thou incestuous murderous damn andain drink off this poison and then very powerfully and

Ironically is thy Union here meaning your marriage with my mother follow my mother and the King twice poisoned dies Le eres dies also and then we have an extraordinary sequence of the slow slow death of Hamlet which goes on for more than 60 lines after Hamlet says I am dead Horatio and I want to take them very slowly and I want to explicate exactly what is happening and what Hamlet is saying and perhaps what is even more important what Hamlet is not Saying he cries out I am dead heso and then dismissing any notion we

might have that he was madly in love with his mother which was you know after all the Freudian notion he simply shrugs her off and cries out wretched Queen ad do and then speaks directly to us in the audience or the readership you that look pale and tremble at this chance that all but mutes or audience to this act had I but time and then speaking of the sergeant who was sent by a court to Bring you in as this Fel Sergeant death is strict in his arrest oh I could tell you but let it

be Horatio I am dead and yet he is not dead and there is something that he could tell us and for 55 lines more we desperately want him to tell us more but it is Shakespeare's great that he will not let Hamlet tell us everything we want Hamlet to tell us that is to say we want Hamlet to explain himself to us we want him to tell us what it is that he knows we want him to Explain to us what it is to have been Hamlet to have that extraordinary exalted State of Consciousness he

goes on saying heso I am dead thou livest report me and my cause a right to the unsatisfied Horatio in a moment that always stuns me and which is sometimes omitted on stage Cries Out never believe it I am more an antique Roman than a Dane and indeed his name Horatio is a Latin or antique Roman name he cries out here has yet some liquor left and Hamlet Has to Grapple with him and knock the poison cup out of his hand as thou art a man give me the cup Let Go by Heaven I'll have

it oh God Horatio what a wounded name and he deserves to have a wounded name what a wounded name things standing thus unknown shall I leave behind me and then in lines of surpassing beauty if thou D ever hold me in thy heart absent thee from Felicity a while and in this harsh World draw your breath in pain to tell my story and Foram Bross with his army coming from Poland are coming on to the stage in a moment and Hamlet Cries Out out oh I die Horatio the potent poison quite or crows my spirit

I cannot live to hear the news from England which will be that Rosen cran and golden Stern have been executed but I do prophesy the election of the new king lights on for and Bross and indeed adds he has my dying voice so tell him with the occurrence more and less which have solicited with all of These terrible things which have happened and suddenly Hamlet realizes is that he cannot say another word and magnificently he cries out the rest is silence the last thing we ever hear him say which is the most extraordinary thing to

say it means that on the one hand the remainder anything more that is going to happen to me is not going to be Consciousness but is going to be Annihilation is going to be total Silence and Hamlet who has spoken as I've said 00 lines out of the 4,000 of this vast play is the least silent character even in all of Shakespeare but it means something else also it means that the silence that I'm now entering will be a profound rest for me which I very badly need that I am exhausted of Consciousness and exhausted

of event and Horatio rising to the occasion cries out now cracks a noble Halt and famously good night sweet prince and then Something which is frequently misunderstood also cries out and flights of Angels Sing thee to thy rest we have no reason to believe that flights of angels are going to sing Hamlet anywhere and Shakespeare does not let the play end like that he ends the play with surpassing irony and I want to talk about that irony for and Bross who like the senior Hamlet is is nothing but a killing machine nothing but a great

bully Boy comes onto the stage sees all Of the dead and cries out that Hamlet deserves a military funeral let four captains he proclaims bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage up above in the high part of the stage for he was likely had he been put on had he become king to have proved most Royal that is to say he would have been a warrior king like his father or my father or like I for and bras who now will take his place and for his passage the soldiers music and the right of

War speak loudly for him take Up the bodies such a sight as this becomes the field meaning the battlefield but here shows much a miss and then the amazing last line go bid the soldiers shoot that is to say fire a volley commemorating Hamlet as a military hero we are confir in perhaps the most powerful irony of this endlessly ironic play Hamlet is not a soldier Hamlet is an intellectual he is a poet dramatist he is a Revenger who has refused to take Overt revenge and has allowed events to overtake him because in some deep

sense he is protesting the mission of Revenge as such as being below his extraordinary and elevated Consciousness it is as though he has been saying throughout the play and I think Shakespeare is acknowledging it here at the close that Shakespeare has put him Hamlet into the wrong play that he deserved a vast cosmological kind of a play like King Lear or MC death one in Which the powers of darkness and of light seem to struggle with one another one in which the great issues of man's fate are properly taken up and argued in an almost

Celestial kind of a fashion but Shakespeare deliberately has not provided him with that and Shakespeare I think is implicitly confessing that by this extraordinary close to the play for me the most amazing disclosure that Hamlet makes in his Closing moments is that while he has much still to tell us presumably about who he was and what he had come to understand about the Human Condition nevertheless his deep anxiety is that he will leave a wounded name behind him it is a Justified anxiety he is after all instrumental in eight deaths including his own as I've

said before but it also shows that in spite of his Nihilism in spite of his refusal to feel any confidence or any trust in language in God in his own sense of being in his own in there is still a remainder there is something left behind there is a deep concern for us in the audience if he is not capable of loving a single human being as such nevertheless his feelings as he dies are Essentially benign and worthy of so extraordinarily capacious a person after listening to lecture 5 a student posed this question to Professor

Bloom could Hamlet be considered a villain let's listen to the professor's response again I find the question exactly relevant to my discourse it would be possible to say that like MC Beth Hamlet has been a kind of combination of Hero and villain but no one in the audience believes that and most critics however sophisticated they are learn to not believe that also if Shakespeare himself can lavish such affection upon Hamlet can use the full resources of his art to represent this extraordinary person then we can assume that we are meant to feel as warmly towards

Hamlet who in a sense is Shakespeare's son as Shakespeare himself Does no he is the tragic hero above all others in Shakespeare but he is a tragic hero of a new kind precisely because as I've said earlier he is a new kind of man he is someone who lives in what could be called the theater of mind he has radically internalized all of reality and he reflects therefore one of the greatest aspects of Shakespeare's own genius which is to give us a much more radical and comprehensive sense of what it means to reveal the internal

truths about the human condition than had ever been achieved before or has ever been achieved since this ends lecture five Shakespeare the seven major tragedies lecture six aell part one this is the first of two lectures on the great tragedy of Othell while it is very much the tragedy of othell the African commander of mercenaries for Venice it is really iago's play Iago is its controlling intelligence and in a sense rather like Hamlet though he resembles Hamlet and no other regard Iago plots the entire drama as it goes along he is the only figure who

gets anything started and he would get entirely his own way if he had not Overlooked the goodness of his wife Amelia but I want to start us off with the whole question question which has puzzled criticism audiences the readership ever since AO was first played at the globe what is the motive for iago's vengeance against oel the best way I know of explaining what otherwise would seem like motiveless malignancy as Samuel Taylor kidge called it is what John Milton has his Satan Proclaim in Paradise Lost that he suffers from a sense of injured Merit and

indeed just as Satan has been passed over in Paradise Lost for Christ and Rebels against God on that basis so Iago has been passed over for promotion in favor of Casio and something in him is as deeply rebellious and affronted by this as ever Satan who in sense can be called his disciple was to be indeed the influence of Iago upon Milton Satan is Extraordinary and dieago indeed has been the very type of the villain ever since in the world's literature what does it mean after all to be passed over for a promotion that you

feel you more than deserve let us put it in the context of the play from the beginning Iago is the third in command of Othello's mercenary Army I call it a mercenary Army because technically that's what they are they are not venetians though they fight for Venice and are headed by a great African general oel but the second in command the lieutenant has L been wounded or killed and before the play opens othell to the terrible shock of Iago has passed over his third in command his enin or flag officer or ancient as they called

it in those days Iago in favor of one Michael Casio who is a kind of staff officer not a battle tested V like Iago if you are the ancient or the Flag officer particularly in a mercenary Army then you are pledged to die rather than let the colors of your general your captain General othell be taken oelo is not at all aware of the extent to which he has alienated Iago he perpetually goes on calling Iago honest Iago though we realize Iago is anything but that and I want to pick this up at the very

beginning of the play in act one scene one when Iago is talking to Rodrigo whom he is perpetually Soliciting for money because Rod Rigo is furious that othell has married Des deona for whom Rodrigo had expressed a considerable interest and desire and here is aago explaining why he still follows the more were I the more I would not be Iago in following him I follow but myself Heaven is my judge not I for love and duty but seeming so for my own peculiar end for when my outward action does demonstrate the native act and figure

of my heart in comp ment extern Is not long after but I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for doves to Peck at I am not what I am Ponder with me that extraordinary sentence I am not what I am anyone in Shakespeare's audience since they had a far better knowledge of the New Testament than most of us do would have instantly recognized that it is set against St Paul's statement by the grace of God I am what I am Iago says I am not what I am and his negation Is extraordinary he is

one of the great nihilists in literature surpassing hamlet in that regard and here's something more than that he has been passed over by oel though Shakespeare leaves this implicit and never makes it overt because he is always at War indeed he wants to set everyone and everything on fire he does not distinguish between the camp of War and the camp of Peace since he has no diplomacy in him no skill and is dangerous therefore in Peace time othell with great wisdom undoubtedly decided that this is someone you rely on on the battlefield but you do

not put him second in command since if aell were to be wounded in battle or killed you would have this highly irresponsible and dangerous person in charge we see him at the very beginning of the play after saying I am not what I am we see him fermenting a street brawl which is broken up by othell and in a single massive mono cabic line we are Shown exactly what an extraordinary figure oelo is you might indeed say that his is the fastest sword in all of the world because he simply shows up on the scene

and says keep up your bright swords for the do will Rust him meaning that if everybody does not immediately put the swords back in their scabbards I will chop them up immediately and the morning duw the next Dawn will Rust what is lying there on the ground now it's that extraordinary Authority that othell Has that immense sense of his own dignity that long tested attribute of command and of knowing that he is the proper person to command that again and again will strike us throughout the play as being at once his great strength and his

great weakness he simply will not know how to deal with Iago and indeed Iago in some sense scarcely will know how to deal with Iago because what Iago who is a great improviser keeps discovering is his own amazing genius For for setting up an elaborate plot which will destroy oel Des Demona wound Casio kill Amelia and finally condemn Iago to death by torture the question of motivation again arises and the question is why indeed Iago takes so extraordinary a view I think you have to look at it in terms of his Devastation though Shakespeare is

wise enough again to leave this holy implicit Iago has worshiped the god of War and his captain general oel just as Satan has worshiped God in Paradise Lost when Iago is passed over he suddenly feels completely undone he is rended impotent he feels indeed that his whole life has come to nothing he is wiped out completely in terms of any sense of being whatsoever he feels he has no dignity and no self regard and that there's scarcely any reason for going on and so he turns upon his war God othell and looks for a way

to return that God To a kind of original chaos he does not immediately arrive at this kind of a view but he is working towards it gradually Point by point until we reach his first Soliloquy at the very end of act one which I want to look at very carefully because Iago soliloquies are very unlike those of Hamlet they are not the soliloquies of a master of cont ious there is a tremendous internalization of the self a tremendous new kind of Inwardness which does make Hamlet as I said in my talks on Hamlet a new

kind of human being Iago is a macharian figure he is a villain but he is a highly original villain and here he is in his first soliloquy trying to discover what it is that he will do to get his kind of Vengeance the more a free and open Nature too that thinks men honest that but seem to be so and will as tenderly be led by the nose as asses are I have It it is engendered hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world light now when he says that he has it

in spite of that great outcry of Triumph he has only the broad or general kind of conception of what it is that he is moving towards it is when we come to his second Soliloquy that we see that he is beginning to have a much clearer idea of what indeed he is up to I'm now in act 2 scene one here is the AO that Casio love her I do well believe it that she loves Him is apt and of great credits neither of these statements are of course true andago knows them the more how

be it that I Endure him not is of a constant Noble loving nature and I dare think he'll prove to Desdemona a most dear husband now I do love her too which is again not true not out of absolute lust though per Adventure I stand accountant for as great to sin but partly led to diet my revenge for that I do suspect the Lust For more have leaped into my Seat presumably with Amo that this also he knows is a Lie the fact that the ago is willing to lie even to himself is of the

highest Fascination it is one of his curious attributes that he really has no emotions no affective life that's with an a of any kind so that he first invents or makes up a emotions such as jealousy and then he pretends to feel them and so he cries out if this poor trash of Venice speaking of rodorigo whom I trash for his quick hunting stand The pudding on I'll have our Michael Casio on the hip abuse him to the mo in the rank gar for I fear Casio with my night cap to make the more thank

me love me and reward me for making him egregiously an and practicing upon his peace and quiet even to Madness and Iago pauses and says is here but yet confused I still haven't worked it out as fully as I would like to work it out naver's plain face is never seen till used at the very end of Act two Shakespeare picks this up in the third Soliloquy and this is one of the most extraordinary moments and all of Shakespeare because of the mounting triumphalism of this great chant on ao's PO and what's he then that

says I play the villain when this advice is free I give and honest probable to thinking and indeed the course to win the more again for is most easy the inclining Des Demona to subdue in any honest suit she's framed as fruitful As the free elements and then for her to win the more were it to renounce his baptism all seals and symbols of redeemed sin his soul is so infected to her love that she may make unmake do what she list even as her appetite shall play the god with his weak function and having

said this he again cries out how am I then a villain to counsel Casio to this parallel course directly to is good and suddenly he screams Divinity of hell when Devils will their blackest sins put On they do suggest at first with Heavenly shows as I do now for while this honest fall Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes and she for him plead strongly to the more I'll pour this pestilence into his ear that she repeals him for her body's lust and by how much she strives to do him good she shall undo her credit

with the more so will I turn her virtue into pitch and out of her own goodness make the net that shall enesh them all that Extraordinary vision of a web or a net that his peculiar kind of rhetorical magic will set up in order to and sneer all of these figures is the very heart of iago's Enterprise but now I must change this note to another kind of an element the marriage between desona and the Moore othell is a remarkable one she is probably no older than Juliet she is 14 or 15 years of age

she has no prior experience of men and if rodigo is an instance of what Venice affords to her In the way of young men quite clearly she ought to do better than that she is someone who has a great deal of Juliet's nature in her and indeed Shakespeare I think is renewing his sense of Juliet in Dez deona here is an extraordinary person wonderfully capable of a Selfless Love oel a visitor in her father's house a figure with a fabulous past Who Rose from an outcast Prince of Africa to a Boy Soldier and has fought

his way into the esteem of all of Europe as a great Mercenary Captain has won her heart without meaning to by telling her his extraordinary EXP exploits and she is romantically carried away by this and as othell says she does the wooing she says Ah if only I could find a man like this and so rather reluctantly othell allows himself to be wooed and the two of them have indeed made a marriage but Othello is a man in late middle age we are told in the course of the play that it is 9 months since

he has been in military Action of any sort he is really not himself and he fears marriage indeed we have no reason to believe that he knows very much about women at all and I come now to what may well seem the most controversial part of my interpretation of this extraordinary tragic drama Shakespeare is endlessly subtle his art as I keep telling you is elliptical he scarcely allows even a single night he scarcely allows even a single hour in which the Marriage between Desdemona and othell could ever have been consummated and that I think is

one of the reasons why it is so relatively easy for Iago to seduce othell Into The Madness of sexual jealousy sexual jealousy is an extraordinary impulse perhaps more even in human males than in human females if we are to take Shakespeare as Authority here and in the Winter's Tale and to some extent in much to do about nothing Shakespeare shows himself to be the maor theorist of sexual jealousy that the world was ever to see before the Advent of Sigman Freud and Marcel PR and I think it's questionable whether they ever match his full insights

as I understand Shakespeare on this there is a very distinct element in any sexual Jealousy on the part of a male in the feel of being abandoned of Being cuckolded there is an authentic sense of One's Own mortality in The Shakespearean analysis and I don't know that anyone has been able to get Beyond him in this human sexual jealousy reduces ultimately to the fear that there will not be enough time and enough space for oneself and that necessarily is to put us into the whole area of the fear of our common mortality if indeed othell

from the beginning is as Reluctant to marry as he has shown himself to be if he has a kind of implicit fear of being cuckolded if indeed as he says he would not have exchanged his unhoused free condition a man who has lived his life in military camps and on campaigns but that he loved the fair Dez Demona then there is something about the nature of his love for her which is precarious almost from the start but I want now to work into the third Act of the play and to take us Into the fourth

Soliloquy of Iago which is his most extraordinary he has gotten his wife Amelia to steal the handkerchief which was a special relic of Othello's mother he has picked up this napkin as he says he says to Amelia go leave me I will in casio's lodging lose this napkin and let him find it Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmation Strong as proofs of holy RIT and then with magnificent in sus he says laughingly this may do something the more already changes with my poison dangerous conceits are in their Nature's poisons which at the

first are scarce found to distaste but with a little act upon the blood burn like the mines of sulfur and then with tremendous Pride he cries out I did say so and at just this point oel already driven mad with jealousy by the insinuations of Iago Stumbles onto the scene and triumphantly in a moment which always recalls to me an extraordinary statement earlier in the play Ono's part for I am nothing if not critical I think you hear the birth of aesthetic sensibility for the first time in European literature that is to say he is

not only his own dramatist as Hamlet was Iago he is his own dramatic critic and in lines which enormously influen John Keats and the other Romantic Poets you hear eago Practically cring a kind of Melody of triumph which almost has an overtone of nostalgia or regret as oel stumbles in look where he comes not poppy nor mandora nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owned yesterday that is all gone that is forever and I want to pause on that and to talk for a while

about iago's relationship to O fell he is increasingly aware of what he is doing as I've tried to Demonstrate by carefully following the track of these false soliloquies he begins only with a very general idea of what he hopes to accomplish but as he goes along he sees better and better how he can totally ruin oel but he has not as yet actually reached a point where he thinks he wants othell to murder Des Demona that in a curious way is forced upon Him by Othello's own reaction in the speech that I have just delivered

for him he Has been as a kind of esthetician of evil been admiring his own Creation in this ruined oel othell comes on crying out incoherently haa false to me to me and ago says as though he is humoring his General why how now General no more of that and aell screamingly Furious out of his mind aant beg gone thou Hast set me on the rack I swear is better to be much abused than but to know a little and the ago plays innocent and says how now my Lord and oel screams at him what

s had I of her stolen hours of lust that is to say why did you make me conscious of it I saw it not thought it not it harmed not me I slept the next night well was free and merry I found not casio's kisses on her lips he that is robbed not wanting what is stolen let him not know it and he's not robbed at all and Diago very shrewdly says I am sorry to hear this he is feeling his way he's trying to discover what it is that is coming And othell who after

all is an extremely powerful and dangerous figure a man who keeps his tremendous power of violence well in check by his habit of command and by the use of reason is now thoroughly deranged and screams out very powerfully and frighteningly I had been happy if the general Camp pioneers and all had tasted her sweet body so I had nothing known and then comes a speech which Ernest Hemingway admired enormously oh now forever farewell the Tranquil mind farewell content farewell The plumed Troop and the big Wars that makes ambition virtue oh farewell farewell the Ning Steed

and the shrill Trump the spirit stiring drum the earpiercing F the Royal banner and all quality Pride pump and Circumstance of Glorious war and oh ye mortal engines whose wide throats The Immortal J's great clamor counterfeit farewell o fellow's occupation s gone an amazing speech one which not only shows a Profound Nostalgia for the sense of command that he now believes he has lost entirely but also shows an amazing inability to comprehend the audacity and outrageousness of the fiction that has been imposed upon Him by Iago and and yet there is the danger Iago still

feeling his way says is it possible my Lord and oel gets him by the throat and screams at him villain be sure thou prove my love a be sure of it give Me the ocular proof or by the worth of man's Eternal Soul thou Hast been better have been born a dog than answer my way wrath and the Aro who is frightened and does not quite know where this is going Cries Out desperately is it come to this and oel make me to see it or at the least so prove it that the probation bear

no hinge nor Loop to hang a doubt on or woe upon thy life and the ago continues rather desperately my Noble Lord but oel interrupts him if thou DST Slander and torture me never pray more abandon all remorse on Horror's head Horrors accumulate do Deeds to make Heaven weep or Earth amazed for nothing can thou to damnation add greater than that and Diago desperately playing for Time shouts oh Grace Oh Heaven defend me are you a man have you a saw or sense God by you take mine office oh wretched fo that livest to make

thine honesty a vice oh monstrous World take Note take note oh world to be direct and honest is not safe I thank you for this profit and from hence I'll love no friend since love breeds such offense and othell is stopped by this and the psychological plotting of the ups and downs of this is masterful on Shakespeare's part and is a new departure for him aell in great du says nay stay thou should be honest and the ago replies I should be wise for honesty is A fall and loses that it works for and othell

now a Consciousness in utter torment absolutely suffering a hideous kind of death in life Cries Out desperately by the world I think my wife be honest and think she is not I think that thou art just and think Thou Art not I'll have some proof my name that was as fresh as Diane's Visage is now begrimed and black as mine own face if there be cords or knives poison or fire or suffocating streams I'll not endure It what I was satisfied and his desperation is extraordinary no one in literature before Shakespeare has been able to

convey such absolute wrath and hideous torment and doubt and the ago gets very calm and very Sly I see sir you are eaten up with passion I do repent me that I put it to you you would be satisfied oel angrily would nay I will and theago not so desperate now but very shrewdly and may but how how satisfied My Lord would you the supervisor grossly gape on behold her topped that is to say see the actual act taking place between Casio and Desdemona and oelo screaming with Fury and Madness death and Damnation oh and

here is Iago making it even fiercer it were a tedious difficulty I think to bring him to that Prospect damn him then if ever mortal eyes did see them bolster more than their own what then how then what shall I say where satisfaction it is Impossible you should see this were they as Prime as goats as hot as monkeys as salt as wolves in Pride and fools as gross as ignorance made drunk but yet I say if imputation and strong circumstances which lead directly to the door of truth will give you s satisfaction you may

have it othell very suspiciously give me a living reason that she is disloyal Iago shrugs it off saying simply I do not like the office and then tries to manufacture evidence And othell now entirely to convinced screams oh monstrous monstrous and The Scene goes on between them and othell gets more and more Furious he is totally totally torn away and finally othell kneels and Iago says pray be content and you get a brilliantly staged scene on iago's part oelo screaming oh blood Iago blood Iago says patience I say your mind perhaps may change oel cries

out in reply now byond marble heaven in the due Reverence of a sacred vow I hear engage my words and the ago brilliantly says do not rise yet he is now being the stage manager and director as well as the plotter and playright and he kneels side by side it's a marvelous dramatic coup on Shakespeare's part he kneels side by side with oel on stage and cries out witness you ever Burning Lights above you elements that clip his roundabout witness that here Iago doth give up the Excellency of his wit hand heart to Wrong O's

service they rise together oel says I greet thy love and goes on as they stand side by side to cry out now art thou my lieutenant and theago magnificently replies a devil now having gotten othell in his power I am your own forever we have looked at the Magic in the web we have looked at the great scheme of Iago as it has gradually formulated itself what we have seen is something that will culminate in the fourth and fifth acts of the play and we Will go on to that next after listening to six a

student posed this question to Professor Bloom how can a fellow be a hero when he's so easily duped by a Yago let's listen to the professor's response I find the question exact and very much one that I want to address there has been a great fashion in the 20th century literary criticism written about oel to deprecate othell it was particularly strong in Fr Lis and and the poet critic TS Elliot insisting that someone who could fall so easily a victim to Iago is hardly someone who can be regarded as a tragic hero but that is

to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of this play and the nature of Othello's nobility it is not a false front his greatness but nevertheless it exists in a very narrow confine it is based upon a very traditional view of military honor of a sense indeed of what could be called the Purity of arms within the limits of that vision othell is an extraordinary personage with immense dignity what gives him tragic dignity in his yielding to the horrible implications of Iago is that he is moved by exactly the element in his Nature which is strongest but a

last most narrow his enormous sense of military vert virtue his enormous sense of the authority of having the power of command and then there is that other element which I think clinches my view that no consummation has as yet taken place in the marriage and indeed he could after all settle the entire thing now by simply taking his wife to bed as she very must wishes to be taken and discovering whether or not she is Virgin And he would that she is Virgin but he chooses not to do so in this second lecture on othell

I am very aware that I will be talking about what most theater goers and most readers of Shakespeare find extraordinary painful material that is to say we are moving towards the ghastly murder of Desdemona by her Husband that is even more Dreadful than the terrifying moment at the very close of King Leah when the Great King enters with his hanged daughter Cordelia in his arms his heart forever broken and our hearts to a considerable extent broken also you learn a great deal about Shakespeare sometimes by following out his own revisions of his work though these

are sometimes very difficult to Trace but we have been able to establish that in reworking othell he left the part of Iago absolutely alone it was as though he had gotten it perfectly the first time around he made some modific ations with the character and personality of othell and Desdemona but his principle revisions had to do with showing us more of the nature of Amelia who was going to be the agency at the cost of her own life of the undoing of her Dreadful husband Iago But I want to take us now into the very

opening of the fourth act here Iago will you think so othell think so Iago Iago what to kiss in private o fellow bewildered an unauthorized kiss or to be naked with her friend to bed an hour or more not meaning any harm naked aedo and not mean home it is hypocrisy against the devil they that mean virtuously and yet do so the devil their virtue tempts and they tempt Heaven theago says so they do nothing to a venal slip oel Replies what then Yago why then is hers my Lord and being here she may I

think bestow It On Any Man and othell desperately she is protectress of her honor too may she give thato her honor is an Essence that's not seen they have it very of that have it not but for the handkerchief and poor othell Cries Out by heaven I would most gladly have forgot it thou set though it comes all my memory as do the Raven or the infected house booding to all he had My handkerchief I what of that Iago says that's not so good now says poor roell Iago what if I had said I had

seen him do you wrong or heard him say as naves be such abroad who having by their own importunate suit or voluntary dotage of some mistress convinced or supplied them cannot choose but they must blab oel says hath he said anything Iago he hath my Lord but be you well assured no more than he'll unwear what hath he said faith that he did I I I I know not what He did but what lie with her with her on her what you will and othell goes completely wild lie with her lie on her we say

lie on her when they Bell her lie with her Z that's fome handkerchief confessions handkerchief to confess and be hanged for his labor first to be hanged and then to confess I tremble at it nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction it is not words that shake me thus pish noses ears and lips is it Possible confess handkerchief oh devil and he falls down he actually faints in the turbulence of all this and the AO Cries Out work on my medicine in work thus credulous fools are caught and many worthy

and chaste Dames even thus all Guiltless meet reproach what ho my Lord my Lord and still it goes on this terrible kind of breaking down of othell until we actually have the extraordinary dialogue between Desdemona and Amelia which closes say Act 4 and which for the First time one begins to see that something begins to stir in desz Demona the two of them are very close to one another Amelia is her body servant but also her close friend Amelia says how goes it now he looks gentler than he did Des deona says desperately he says

he will return incontinent he had commanded me to go to bed and bade me to dismiss me and Amelia very suspiciously and rightly says dismiss me it was his bidding therefore good Amelia give me my Nightly wearing an Ado we must not now displease him and Amelia angrily cries out I would you had never seen him desona so would not I my love does so approve him that even his stubbornness his checks and frowns pretty unpin me have grace and favor in them and Amelia again says I have taken the wedding Sheets still unstained and

put them on the bed I have laid those sheets you bade me on the bed poor desona says alls one good faith how foolish are our minds If I do die before thee pretty shroud me in one of those same sheets and Amelia authentically shocked says come come you talk and Des deona in one of the most deeply pathetic moments in all of Shakespeare says my mother had a maid called barbery she was in love and he she L proved mad and did forsake her she had a song of Willow an old thing CH was

but it expressed her fortune and she died singing it that song tonight will not go from my mind I have much to do But to go hang my head all at one side and seeing it like poor Barber pry dispatch and towards the end of this last scene together amiria says by this heavenly light I might as well do it in the dark as get you ready for bed and desona said what thou do such a thing for all the world meaning betray your husband Amilia said the world is a huge thing it is a

great price for a small Vice and desona authentically shocked says good trough I think thou wouldst Not but Amilia who's had more than enough of eago who by my interpretation has proved impotent ever since he feels he has been rejected and passed over by oel Amelia says by my troth I think I should and undo it when I had done it Mary I would not do such a thing for a joyant ring that is to say commit adultery or for measures of lawn nor for gowns or pedots nor any such exhibition but for the whole

world oh it's pity who would not make her husband a cockold to Make him a monarch I should Venture Purgatory for it and poor Desdemona says bashr me if I would do such a wrong for the whole world and Amelia the voice of realism says why the wrong is but a wrong in the world and having the world for your labor is a wrong in your own world and you might quickly make it right and desmona says stubbornly I do not think there is any such woman and Amelia a feminist long before the fact as

it were says passionately and it's a Very great speech in the play and Shakespeare has revised us into it Amelia says yes a dozen and as many to the Vantage as would store the world they played for but I do think it is their husband's faults if wives do fall say that they slack their duties and pour our Treasures into foreign laps or else break out in peevish jealousies throwing restraint upon us or say they strike us or scant our former having in despite why we have Gs and though we Have some Grace yet have

we some Revenge let husbands know their wives have sense like them they see and smell and have their pallets both for sweet and sour as husbands have what is it that they do when they change us for others is it sport I think it is and doth affection breed it I think it doth is it Frailty that thus s it is so too and have not we affections desires for sport and Frailty as men have then let them use us well else let them know the ills we do the Ills instruct us so and poor

deson says good night good night God me such usage send not to pick bad from bad but by bad men and that ends the fourth act and sets her up as victim in that passionate speech of Amelia we have the press to what is to come when knowing that desona is a kind of Saint and in every way more virtuous and finer in texture than herself she discovers that first desd deona has been slain for no reason at All and then what is left of her reputation is being hideously maligned on every side and though

she knows it will cost her her life she and she alone is in possession of the information that will undo her husband Diago's extraordinarily subtle and deaf plot it fascinates me that Shakespeare should have given Iago who otherwise is extraordinarily armored against every possibility this one Frailty he has taken Amelia for granted he is in fact so in incredibly shocked when she reveals the truth particularly because she knows and he knows that he will instantly give her the death wound as he does that it puts Iago into one of the most extraordinary conditions in all

of Shakespeare one in which he chooses total silence at the end but we will come on to that I turn now to the Fifth Act of the play which as I've said Before May well be the most painful in all of Shakespeare one comes to oel in particular in that moment when he enters in scene two the bed chamber where Des deona is asleep and here one needs to go very very carefully and gently othell comes in and with a immense dignity and power and yet of course immense weakness and confusion cries out it is

the cause it is the cause my Soul let me not name it to you you chase Stars it is the cause yet I'll not shed her blood just as he has in fact never shed her blood she is still virgin and he knows it and I think the audience is surely beginning to suspect it and he goes on to say nor scar that wher skin of hers than snow and smooth as Monumental Alabaster yet she must die else she'll betray more men and then an extraordinary line which reverberates in All the rest of Western literature

put out the light and then put out the light if I quench thee thou flaming minister I can again thy former light restore should I Repent me but once put out thine thou cunning pattern of excelling nature I know not where is that Promethean heat that can thy light reloom when I have plucked the rose I cannot give it vital growth again it must needs wither I'll smell it on the tree and he kisses his Sleeping bride a baly breath that doth almost persuade Justice herself to break her sword once more be thus when thou

art dead and I will kill thee and love thee after once more and this the last so sweet was near so fatal I must weep but they are cruel tears this sorrow is Heavenly it strikes when it does love she wakes and poor Desdemona cries out who's there o fell I desona will you come to bed my Lord have you prayed tonight desona I my Lord If you bethink yourself of any crime unreconciled as yet to heaven and Grace solicit for it straight alas my Lord what may you mean by that well do it and

be brief I will walk by I would not kill thy unprepared Spirit no heaven for offend I would not kill thy soul talk you of killing I I do then heaven have mercy on me amen with all my heart if you say so I hope you will not kill me H and yet I fear you for you are fatal then when your eyes roll so why I should Fear I know not since guiltiness I know not but yet I feel I fear think on thy sins they are loves I bear to you you and for

that thou dest and she says piously that death's unnatural that kills for loving alas why nor you so your NE lip some bloody passion shakes your very frame these are poor tents but yet I hope I hope they do not point on me and he is getting very desperately confused and cries out peace and be still and she says I will so what's the Matter that handkerchief which I so loved and gave thee thou gavest to Casio no by my life and soul send for the man and ask him sweet sa take heed take heed

of perjury thou art on thy deathbed and she replies very beautifully I but not yet to die and he says yes presently therefore confess thee freely thy sin for to deny each Artica with oath cannot remove nor choke the strong conceit that I do Gran with all Thou Art to die then Lord have mercy on me I say amen and Have you Mercy too I never did offend you in my life never loved Casio but with such General warranty of Heaven as I might love I never gave him token by Heaven I saw my handkerchief

in his hand oh PID woman thou D Stone thy heart and makest me call what I intended to a murder which I thought a sacrifice I saw the handkerchief he found it then I never gave it him send for him hither and let him confess the truth he has confessed what my Lord that he hath used Thee how unlawfully I he will not say so no his mouth is stopped honesty Iago hath Tain order for it my fear interprets then what is he dead and oel viciously had all his hairs been lives my great Revenge

had stomach for IM all and poor desona alas he is betrayed and I undone oh strumpet weepest thou for him to my face oh banish me my Lord but kill me not down strumpet kill me tomorrow let me live tonight nay and you strive but half an hour but while I say One prayer is too late and he stifles her he smothers her and she cries out oh lord lord lord and she is not quite dead though she is very close to it and Amelia cries without my Lord my Lord what home my Lord my

Lord and othell cries out what voice is this not dead not yet quite dead I that am cruel am yet merciful I would not have thee linger in thy pain so so Amelia comes in she breaks into the room and with her dying breath Desdemona cries out a Guiltless death I die Amelia passionately oh who has done this deed Des Demona nobody I myself farewell commend me to my kind Lord oh farewell and she is dead oel says why and she's he's utterly confused how should she be murdered Amelia who knows very well says alas

who knows othell desperately says you heard her say herself it was not I she said so Amelia replies I must needs report a truth and O fell burst forth in absolute Fury she's like a liar gone to burning hell it was I that killed her oh the more Angel she Amelia says and you the blacker devil and othell who is desperate and screaming cries out she turned to Folly and she was a Amelia replies thou dust B her and thou art a devil a fellow cries out she was false as water to which the reply

is thou as rash as fire to say that she was false oh she was Heavenly true and oel who is now totally out of control again Casio did top her ask thy husband else oh I would damn beneath all depth in hell but that I did proceed upon just ground to this extremity thy husband knew it all but his deep doubts are breaking out in that Amelia my husband thy husband that she was false to wedlock I with Casio nay had she been true If Heaven would make me such another world of one entire and

perfect crystalite I'll not have sold her for it my husband I which was he that told me First an honest man he is and hates the Slime that sticks on filthy Deeds my husband what needs this iteration woman I say thy husband and Amelia Cries Out desperately oh mistress villain hath made mocks with love my husband say that she was false he woman I say thy husband does understand the word my friend thy husband honest honest theago Amelia replies if he say so may his pernicious Soul rot half a grain a day he lies to

the heart she was too fond of her most Filthy bargain ha do thy worst this deed of thine is no more worthy Heaven than thou was worthy her and othell quite desperately says peace you are best but Amilia will not stop thou Hast not half the power to do me harm as I have to be hurt oh G oh ad as ignorant as dirt thou Hast done a deed I cannot for thy sword I'll make thee known though I lost 20 lives help help oh help the more has killed my mistress murder murder and everyone

dashes in including Iago and They cry out how now General Amelia cries oh are you kamag you have done well that men must lay their murders on your neck and they all cry out what is the matter and amiria speaking to Iago says disprove this villain if thou beest a man he says Thou TST him that his wife was false I know thou did not Thou Art not such a villain speak for my heart is full and the ago now desperate I told him what I thought and told no more than what he found himself

was apt and true But did you ever tell him she was false I did you told a lie an odious Dam lie upon my soul lie a wicked lie she false with Casio did you say with Casio andago knowing how uncertain the ground is cries out with Casio mistress go to charm your tongue I will not charm my tongue I am bound to speak my mistress here lies murdered in her bed and they all cry out oh heavens forend and your reports have set the murder on and The Wretched othell Cries Out nay steer not

Masters it is true in indeed and they all cry out oh monstrous act and Amelia utterly beside herself with Fury and with a woman's righteous wrath villainy villain villainy I think upon it I think I smell it of villainy I thought so then I'll kill myself for grief oh villainy villainy and the AO quite desperately and menacing her what are you mad I charge thee get you home and she replies Good gentlemen let me have leave to speak is proper I obey him but not now Pan ago I will near go home and oel who's

going now totally mad falls on the bed screaming out oh oh oh and Amelia furiously says nay lay thee down and raw for thou Hast killed the sweetest innocent that ear did lift up I The Scene goes on and on and finally Iago says be wise and get you home and she says I will not and he offers to stab Amelia and she cries out oh thou D more that handkerchief thou speaks on I found by fortune and did give my husband For often with a solemn earnestness more than indeed belonged to such a trifle

he begged of me to steal it and theago beside himself screams villainous she gave it Casio noas I found it and I did give it my husband and he screams filth thou liest by Heaven I do not I do not gentlemen oh murderous coxcomb what should such a fool do with so good a woman and othell screams out precious villain and runs at Iago tries to stab him but in the meantime Iago has stabbed Amelia the dying Amelia even as theago runs off cries out I I I oh lay me by my mistress's side and

another character says he's gone meaning Iago but his wife's killed and another says is a notorious villain take you this weapon which I have here recovered from the more come guard the door without let him not pass but kill him rather after that same villain for Des a damet slave and after they go out poor O fell the great swordsman Desperately says I am not Valiant neither but every puny whipster gets my sword but why should honor outlive honesty let it all go Amelia who is dying and dying with an extraordinary sense that she has

done the right thing giving up her life to clear desdemona's good name what did thy song bod lady Hawk can thou hear me I will play the Swan and die in music and she sings Willow Willow Willow more she was Chased she loved the cruel more so come my soul to Bliss as I speak true so speaking as I think I die I die a heroic death and perhaps indeed you you might say in terms of our contemporary and Justified feminism the most judicious death in all of Shakespeare and poor othell cries out I have

another weapon in this chamber it is a sword of Spain the ice Brook's temper oh here it is Uncle I must come Forth and they say no if thou attempt it will cost thee dear thou Hast no weapon and perforce must suffer oel says look in upon me then and speak to me or naked as I am I will assault they and they come in and say what is the matter and he says behold I have a weapon a better never did itself sustain Upon A Soldier's thigh I have seen the day that with this

little arm and this good sword I have made my way through more impediments than 20 times your stop But oh vain boast who can control his fate it is not so now Be not Afraid though you do see me weaponed here is my Journey's End here is my butt and very seark of my utmost sail do you go back dismayed is a lost fear man but a rush against Othello's breast and he retires where should othell go now how Dost thou look now oh ill starred wench pale as thy smok when we shall meet at

count this look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven and Fiends will snatch at it cold cold my girl even like Thy Chastity notice that remark he is answering our question of whether or not he had ever consummated the marriage cold cold my girl even like Thy Chastity oh cursed slave whip me you Devils from the possession of this heavenly sight blow me about in winds roast me in sulfa Wash Me In steep down Gulfs of Liquid Fire oh Des Demona Des Demona dead oh oh oh and they come in and they bring with

them the wounded Casio andago a prisoner and othell looks down at the feet of Iago and says I look down towards his feet but that's a feeble if that thou beest a devil I cannot kill thee and he wounds Iago and they take his sword from him Iago cries out I bleed sir but not killed Al says I am not sorry neither I'll have thee live for in my sense his happiness to die and they say to oel what should be said to the since after all he is their great General to whom all of

Venice is Indebted and he says why anything an honorable murderer if you will for not did I in hate but all in honor and obviously he is still not thinking very carefully indeed and when Casio says to him dear General I did never give you cause poor othell says I do believe it and I ask you pardon and then suddenly not understanding at all he says will you I pray demand that Demi devil why he hath thus and sneered my soul and body and what I find the most striking moment In this play and one

of the greatest moments in all of Shakespeare Iago says demand me nothing what you know you know from this time forth I never will speak word and though they say that they will torture him and he will die under torture he will die totally mute he will never again speak a word because of the incredible shock his sense of self- betrayal his sense that he had made a magic web and Yet had completely neglected the one figure who could undo him omilia a fellow rather desperately says well thou dust best and they say to him

we are taking you back to the Venetian State come bring him away and othell utters a great deaf speech and I want to spend some time upon it now because I think it is generally badly misunderstood TS Elliot actually said that in this speech Othello is merely trying to cheer himself up and I find that a hopelessly Inadequate interpretation othell knows that Caso is no replacement for him he knows that under tight control no doubt his military skills his prowess his habit of command are invaluable to Venice and though Shakespeare in his elliptical way does

not let oel say this out loud deep within him othell understands that they may just use him as a kind of killing machine and a machine of command to be loosed at their commands mechanical Whenever they need him and that is not the exist that he wants and so he stops them and says soft you a word or two I have done the state some service and they know it no more of that I pray you in your letters when you shall these unlucky Deeds relate speak of them as they are nothing extenuate nor set

down ought in Malice then must you speak of one that loved not wisely but too well of one not easily jealous but being wrought Perplexed in the extrem of one whose hand like the Bas judan threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe of one whose subdued eyes allbe it unused to The Melting mood drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinal gum set you down this and say Ides that an Aleppo once where a malignant and a turban Turk beat a Venetian and troduced the state I took by the throat the

circumcised dog and smote him thus and with that outcry he stabs himself to Death notice what this is this is not a Roman suicide this is an act of high desperation but of tragic intensity rather than survive in a diminished guise and with the eternal torment of knowing that he has been led by iago's treacheries and Persuasions to destroy his holy innocent and blameless wife he passes a judgment upon himself that he fears that Venice will not pass because He still could be very useful to them he condemns himself to to execution and he executes

himself and in doing so he recovers a certain quality of tragic dignity in this final speech he is certainly not trying to cheer himself up he is trying to face the terrible reality that he has helped create this is the first of three lectures on Shakespeare's immense tragedy of King Le the first lecture After a brief introduction we'll work through the first three acts the second lecture will be on act four and the third lecture on Act five and of course as before each lecture will be followed by the asking of a question and the

answering of that question I should say before I begin that this is the most demanding play that sh SHP ever wrote its emotional demands upon its audience and readership are Unparalleled just as the intellectual demands of the tragedy of Hamlet are beyond measure We Begin then with the 80-year-old King Le at once the embodiment of all the infirmities of being 80 years old and possessing total Royal Authority and also an eternal image of fatherhood Lear loves his third daughter Cordelia above all other human beings and yet he is violently over expressionistic in his excessive need

For Love from her in particular He suggests in many ways the Yahweh that is to say the Jehovah of the earliest stator of Genesis Exodus us and numbers like that God Leah is impulsive given to sudden Furies he is Wayward but sublimely impressive and though at the opening of the play Lear formly abdicates in fact he cannot bear to surrender his kingship I want to begin in the text with act one scene one an extraordinary exchange Between Lear and cordel which is the true beginning of the tragedy Lear says to Cordelia what can you say

to draw a third meaning a third part of the Kingdom more opulent than your sisters speak and Cordelia replies nothing my Lord and Lear says nothing and Cordelia repeats nothing and he speaks with great mounting Fury nothing will come of of nothing speak again and we proceed to a very Jehovah likee loss of temper as he Exiles her in enormous Fury the Earl of Kent the most faithful perhaps of all his noblemen tries to step in between as he puts at the dragon and his wrath but nevertheless is himself exiled as Cordelia is and Reagan

and gono between them divide the kingdom they are of course the creatures later in the work described as monsters of the deep they are the most extraordinarily evil women in all of Shakespeare as Cordelia is one of the Most quietly loving and impressive as to why she had nothing to say it is simply because she has a certain recalcitrance he has been demanding excessive love from her all her life and while she truly loves him as he loves her nevertheless she doesn't want to Simply have to declare it upon demand there are four immensely fascinating

figures in this great drama one is King Lear himself another is his fool his jester an uncanny and Extraordinary personage and finally there are the half Brothers the legitimate one Edgar who eventually at the end of the play succeed his Godfather Lear in the kingdom and the bastard half brother Edmund both sons of the highly placed Earl of gla Edmund is an ice cold strategist he will remind you in many ways of of Iago but with this enormous difference first he is a strategist of evil rather than a great improvisor and tactician as he ago

was But the second is and this is an immense Advantage for him he is ice cold he has less feeling than any other figure in Shakespeare just as Lear has more emotion Iago you will remember actually felt emotions after he first invented them as tactics Edmund amazingly is free of all affect whatsoever and it has always fascinated me about this play that like so many of Shakespear's works at their greatest it is so elliptical in particular respects thus though Leah and Edmund share the stage among others for the first long scene and the final last

scene of the entire drama they never address a single word to one another it is almost as though Shakespeare is telling us implicitly that total emotion and absolute lack of emotion literally cannot speak to one another here then is Edmund crying out that nature is his Goddess in this extraordinary speech and defending bastardy and speaking about the fact that since he was brought up as it were out of true lust he cries out fine word legitimate well my legitimate if this letter speed and he means his invention of a supposed plot on poor Edgar's part

against GLA Edmund the base shall top the legitimate and he cries out I grow I Prosper now Gods stand up for bastards We've already been introduced to a curious aspect of this play which is also at first highly elliptical both the evil figures in it Edmund Cornwall gal Reagan are perpetually calling upon Nature by which they mean human nature at its very worst Lear constantly and Cordelia and Kent and Edgar and and gla speak of true nature meaning true human nature and mean by it something very different Indeed a question that eventually I'm going to

come to is related to this which is why is it that for the first two and a half Acts or so the first half of this play Shakespeare does make it so difficult for us to immediately like Lear you have to keep reminding yourself of what is absolutely crucial which is that every evil figure in the play gono Reagan Cornwall Oswald ultimately Edmund indifferent as he otherwise is are against Lear Lear is greatly loved and Loving by all of the figures in the play who clearly from the start are on the side of Decent Behavior

Edgar is framed he is gullible but he is as recalcitrant as Cordelia he does not know when and how to speak up and I want to come now to a very important matter the Earl of Kent banished but wishing to stay near his King whom he loves and reveres and in whom he finds the great image of legitimate Authority disguises himself as his servant keys and is as such Readmitted to Leah's presence but Edgar rather extraordinarily goes to the very bottom of the social scale and Beyond in Shakespeare's Day St Mary of Bethlehem or Bedlam

which is why we get the name now and its special connotations was the London mad house and as it released its long-term Mad Men they became bedlamites and they wandered around singing beggy songs and they were usually known as Tom of bedum and it is the disguise of Tom Of bedum a Wandering madman that Edgar takes on clearly I would think there is a self-punishing element in this it is an act of abnegation in which he wishes to punish himself for having been as gullible as he proved to be and I want to take us

now to the very different figure where I've have introduced Lear Edgar and Edmund the fascinating figure of the fo who also loves Lear but is furious with him since he forms a kind of community of love with Lear and Cordelia it is interesting that the fool and Cordelia are never on stage together in the play the fo vanishes very mysteriously from the play and we are never told his fate when Lear in the Fifth Act endes with the SL L Body the corpse of his daughter Cordelia he cries out in anguish and my poor fo

is hanged almost as though he is confusing for a moment in his own Madness the identities of the fall and Cilia another highly deliberate Act of symbolism on Shakespeare's part it's very important to pay great attention to the fall because he is unlike all the other clowns gers and falls in Shakespeare indeed in Shakespeare and particular in King Le and in MC Beth the Play Written just after it as we will see the word fall takes on a special meaning in Shakespeare it had originally meant someone you were in a sense foolish about someone you

were fond of a Child a beloved but it begins to mean victim in this play and in that sense it gives a very special meaning to many things that we will find that the fo is saying he is first introduced to us when Lear demands him and the fall enters in act 1 scene 4 at about line 95 and says to Le sir you would best take my coxcomb why fo Ken says why for taking one part one's part that's out of favor nay and thou canst not smile as the wind sits thou catch cold

shortly there take my Cockcomb and then speaking of the king why this fellow has banished two on his daughters and did the third a blessing against his will if thou follow him thou must needs wear my coxcomb how now uncle would I had two coxcombs and two daughters and Leia rather desperately says why my boy and Leah rather desperately says to him take heed sah the whip the fool says no he said truth's dog must to kennel he must be Whipped out when the lady's Brack May stand by the fire and stink and as things

go on the fo says to Lear can you make no use of nothing nle and Leah says why no boy nothing can be made out of nothing which is of course a marvelous repetition of that dialogue where after Cordelia says nothing Lear says nothing will come of nothing speak again so here nothing can be made out of nothing the fall is immensely bitter and indeed the fall in some sense wants to Drive Lear mad and actually is the large a single element in driving Lear mad by pointing out to him how absurdly he has behaved

Leah cries to him and you lie sah will have you whipped and he replies I Marvel what can thou and thy daughters are thou have me Whipped for speaking truth th have me Whipped for lying and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace I had rather be any kind of thing than a four and yet I would not be thee unle thou Hast paired thy wh both sides And left nothing in the middle and gonal enters and there is an extraordinary scene between gal the fall and Cordelia which is followed by Leah's enormous cursing

of Gano again very Jehovah likee when Gano says she is going to cut off part of his hund Knights which pretty much takes us to the end of the First Act and the rather desperate dialogue that takes place between Lear and the fall as the ACT comes to a close where indeed Lear Cries Out Desperately oh Lear Lear Lear beat at this gate that let thy Folly in 50 of his followers have been dismissed by gunal the fo is saying nle Lear nle stop and take the fall with thee and runs off together with Lear

and then says to Lear as the ACT closes if thou W my full Uncle I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time and Leah says how is that thou should not have been old till thou Hast been wise and Leah Cries Out desperately oh let me not be mad not mad Sweet Heaven Keep in Temper I would not be mad and from this moment on throughout act two and into act three we see the mounting Madness of the great king act two however switches to the other plot as this is a play with

a double plot one is that of Lear and his daughters the other is Edmund Edgar and their father gler who is treated so horribly by uh the Duke of Cornwall who will put out his eyes but first after Edgar fleas he enters again as Tom of Bleem in act two and makes the kind of entrance that is I think totally Unforgettable he cries out my face I'll Grime with filth blanket my loins elf all my hair in knots and with presented nakedness outface the winds and persecutions of the sky the country gives me proof and

precedent of bedlam beggar who with roaring voices striking their numbed and mortified bare arms pins wooden Pricks Nails sprigs of Rosemary and with this horrible object From low Farms poor pelting Villages sheep coats and Mills sometimes with lunatic bands sometimes with prayers enforce their charity poor chly God poor Tom that's something yet Edgar I nothing am and with that we move further on into the downward fall of Edgar who will eventually be royal but must first go through this terrible disguise it is fascinating to me that the two figures who undergo greatest change throughout are

edga and Lear Edmund changes only at The very end but too late Charles Lamb remarkably who felt and I think there is something to his belief something to his feeling that in the end the play was too great to be actable pointed in particular to The Majestic quality of an old man Lear who actually can cry out to the heavens that they too are old and should therefore take his part oh heavens lar cries out if you do love old men if your sweet sway allow obedience if you yourselves are old make It your cause

tend down and take my part lear's point is a point which is immensely strong there is a kind of overwhelming pathos an overwhelming mode of feeling that we begin to hear particularly from act 2 scene 4 on in the character of King Lair when Reagan and gal together cry out why do you need even a single night to follow you he replies with perhaps the first of his truly great speeches in the play Oh Reason Not the need our basest Beggars Are in the poorest things Superfluous allow not nature more than nature needs man's life

is cheap as beasts and then speaking to Reagan thou art a lady if only to go warm were gorgeous why nature and needs not what thou gorgest we which scarcely keeps thee warm but for True need you Heavens give me that patience patience I need you see me here you Gods a poor old man as full of grief as age wretched and both if it be you that stirs these Daughters Hearts against their father for me not so much to bear a tamely touch me with Noble anger and then he cries out to them desperately

knowing how ineffectual he is since he has no power having given it away know you unnatural hags I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall and he stops because he doesn't know what he can say and he cries out even more desperately I will do such things what they are yet I know not but they shall Be the Terrors of the earth you'll think I'll weep no I'll not weep I have full cause of weeping and then in a marvelous stage Direction a storm is heard approaching at a distance it

is the storm to which the king will be so desperately exposed in act three when he is locked out by his daughters when you have the vision and it would become stronger and stronger as we go on now in act three of the old man out there on the heath then You reach a kind of intensity of expression which simply surpasses anything that I know anywhere else in Shakespeare and Lear in a sense is a kind of unplayable part because I have never seen an actor even a distinguished actor like sorence Olivier who could fully

deliver the enormous intensities of these tremendous outcries of Lear upon the heath as the storm rages blow winds and crack your cheeks rage blow you cataracts and hurricanoes spout till You have drenched our Steeples drown the you sulfurous and thought executing fires vau corers of O cleaving Thunderbolts sing my white head and thou all shaking thunder strike flat the thick rund of the world crack Nature's molds old German spill at once that makes in grateful man and still he cries out to the heavens more and more ferociously it reaches an extraordinary kind of a climax

as one goes deeper into this uh amazing scene out of the heath The second scene of act three he cries out let the great gods that keep this Dreadful putter or our heads find out their enemies now tremble thou wretch that Hast within thee undivulged crimes unwhipped of Justice hide thee thou bloody hand thou PID and thou simula of virtue that art incestuous kaiti to Pieces Shake That under covert and convenient seeming has practiced on man's life close pent up guilts RVE your concealing countenance and cry these Dreadful Summoners Grace and then in great anguish

and most memorably he cries forth I am a man more sinned against than sinning and we are moving to a very great climax of his presence on the heath he says to fo and notice that he always calls the fo my boy and in fact we do not know how old the fo is he is obviously younger than Lear because Lear is 80 years old but he could be almost any age he is not likely to be a child He is not likely to be young he seems to have known Cordelia all her life and

she presumably is in her early to mid 20s being the youngest daughter it is also important to notice at this point that no Queen Leah is present in this play she has died before the play begins there's only one mention to her when at one point confronting the horror of gal and Reagan Lear wonders indeed if his Queen played him false though that is merely part of his Madness and here also He speaks to the fall my wits begin to turn come on my boy how dust my boy art cold showing for the first time

in the play an enormous ability to get away from his own sufferings and start brooding on the sufferings of the poor fall and we move now to one of the most terrifying moments in any Shakespeare iian play I can only think as being parallel to it what you perhaps have heard already Which is the murder the smothering of the poor innocent Desdemona by her furiously enraged Captain husband othell Gloucester comes on with his son Edmund with lights desperately saying I like not this unnatural dealing I would rescue the poor King Edmund pretends to agree with

him but after gluster Goes Forth to try to find the king and bring him to shelter Edmund says aha I shall immediately myself Report this to the Duke of Cornwall Reagan's husband that which my father loses no less than all the younger Rises when the doth fall and we find ourselves now as we move towards the conclusion of act three first the scene on the heath before a hav Lear speaking to Kint and to the fall Cries Out thou thinks is much that this contentious storm invades us to the skin so it is to thee

but where the greater Mady is fixed the Lesser is scarce felt thou should sh a bear but if thy flight lay towards the Roaring sea thou should meet the bear in the mouth when the mind's free the body's delicate this Tempest in my mind do from my senses take all feeling else save what beats there filal ingratitude is it not as this mouth should tear this hand for lifting food to it but I will will punish home no I will weep no more in such a night to shut me out I will endure and after

he Is told by Kent to please enter the hav he cries out in boy go first to the poor fool you houseless poverty NE the in I'll pray and then I sleep and he makes certainly the most amazing transformation now quite sane and not mad and he will vary between the two right down to the end of the play he prays for all of the homeless and poverty stricken there in his Britain and this is ancient Britain many centuries before Christ indeed as I will Explain later probably set at what Shakespeare took to be the

time of King Solomon in Israel because Lear deeply resembles the portrait drawn of the a Solomon not Solomon in all his glory in the books of kings and of Chronicles and the song of songs but the wise desperate old Solomon of the wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha or of the eclesiastes or calth in the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament proper and so we have Leah now brooding on the fate of those who Are are locked out there from any shelter out there in the storm as he has been poor naked wretches whereso you

are that by the pelting of this piess storm how shall your houseless heads and unfed sides your looped and windowed raggedness defend you from Seasons such as these and he wakes up now to everything that he has failed to do as a king which is to take care of the poor and wretched oh I have t too little care of this take physic pump expose thyself To fear what wretches feel that thou mayest shake the superlux to them and show the heavens more just and then you get the great ju to position Edgar disguised as

the mad man comes in crying out the foul fiend follows me hum go to thy bed and warm thee and L perfectly mad again cries to this poor bedlamite did thou give all to thy daughters and ought Thou come to this and Edgar brilliantly replies in Disguise who gives anything to Poor Tom whom the foul Fiend have led Through Fire and through Flames through Ford and Whirlpool or bog and Quagmire and desperately requests charity and Ln his Madness cries out thinking this is another case of another King Lear what has his daughters brought him to

this pass could thou save nothing would thou give him all and the fo rather desperately trying to be funny says nay he reserved a blanket else we had all been shamed and Leah cries out again now all the plagues that in the Pendulous Air Hang faded or men's faults light on thy daughters and Kent desperately trying to restore sanity he hath no daughters sir and Leah greatly in reply death traitor nothing could have subdued nature to such a loness but his unkind daughters is it the fashion that disgarded fathers should have so thus little Mercy

on their flesh and the fool desperately says this cold night will turn us all to fools and Mad Men Edgar introduces supposedly his past as A depre rved servant cast out and magnificently Leah responds out there in the midst of the storm thou W better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies and then with a magnificent definition of man reduced to the lowest common denominator is man no more than this consider him well thou owest the worm no silk the Beast no hide the Sheep no wool the

cat no perfume ha here has three on Us more sophisticated Thou Art the thing itself unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bear forked animal as Thou Art and the old King starts tearing off his clothes and cries out off off you lendingsuite.co one moves to the terrifying climax of the third act which is the awful blinding of gla by the Duke of Cornwall Reagan's husband as we move into it you have first an extraordinary outcry from La as we flash back to Lair he cries out Then let them anatomize Reagan see what

breathes about her heart is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts and finally allows himself to be led in and then we go on to a great statement of Edgar which I think in many ways is a kind of formula summarizing this play he child it as I fathered Edgar speaking in his proper person says of his Godfather that is to say he has so behaved towards Cordelia as gler whom I continue to love Has behaved towards me Our Fate therefore is Akin the scene of the blinding is almost too terrible to

describe poor gler is tied to a chair his eyes are plucked out by Cornwall a servant does his best to prevent this and in a quick dull gives Cornwall what will be his death wound Reagan stabs the servant from behind and the poor desperate gler is thrust out onto the heath and the poor blind glaster Suddenly learns the terrible truth about Edmund and Edgar that Edgar has been horribly slandered by Edmund and that he is now too late for the poor blind old man to do anything about that with this essentially when it comes to

the end of this first lecture but I want to come now to The crucial question why does Shakespeare make Lear so difficult for us to really like or care for in the first two acts of the play and to some extent indeed in the early parts of the Third act and I think the answer has to be this he's practicing what bre was to learn from Shakespeare and call the alienation effect he knows that once we begin to identify with Lear and by about halfway through the third act we are fully identifying ourselves with Lear

the horror of what we're enduring will be almost too great in terms of the extraordinary affect the overwhelming emotion that we will feel at the Sufferings of the Mad Old King who has been deprived of everything ultimately by his own foolishness and misjudgment but also by the wickedness of his two Elder daughters we will see from this point on in the play we have seen some of it already the humanization of Lear and yet in a sense all that will be happening is that it will be made external what the good characters in the play

have always understood as being the true nature of King lir loving compassionate always intending to do good but so desperately full of the necessity of being excessively loved in return that it has misled him again and again by to some extent alienating Us in the first two acts from Lair Shakespeare strengthens us so that when the full horror of what is happening to the Old King breaks upon us and we fully identify with him we are able to Bear it More strongly than otherwise we would this is the second of the three lectures on the

tragedy of King Le it concerns itself entirely with the extraordinary fourth Act of the play and in particular with what I think is the greatest sequence perhaps in all of Shakespeare certainly the greatest sequence in the play the confrontation between the insane Old King Lear and the blinded gler whose eyes have been ripped from their sockets but I begin with Edgar disguised as Tom of bedim who enters at the opening of Act 4 and who summarizes his situation by the way the word content c o n t m n d here does not mean condemned

but means to be hated to be despised so here is Edgar speaking yet better thus and known to be contemned than still contemned and flattered to be worst the lowest and most ejected thing of Fortune stands still in Esperance that is to say hope lives not in fear The lamentable change is from the best the worst returns to laughter welcome thou thou unsubstantial a that I embrace the wretch that thou Hast blown unto the worst owes nothing to thy blast and at this moment the terrible pathos is enacted of the blinded gluster being led in

by an old man and Edgar cries out but who comes here my father poorly LED World world oh world but that th strange mutations make us hate thee life would not yield to age and poor GLA cries out not knowing and not seeing in any case who this bedlamite is oh dear son Edgar the food of thy abused father's wrath might I but live to to see thee in my touch I'd say I had eyes again Edgar takes his father who says that he wishes to throw himself from a high Cliff and decides that the

only way to cure this suicidal Mania on the part of his father is to emulate the scene claiming that he has leaped off a cliff though he has not done so and we proceed to the encounter between Edgar leading his father and Lear most extraordinary moment perhaps in the play and also I sometimes think in all of Shakespeare Edgar is leading his father on after the attempted Suicide as gluster thinks edar in an aside says why I do trifle thus with his despair is done to cure it and then poor GLA Falls supposedly off a

cliff Edgar dropping the Tom of bedum Disguise but taking up that of a poor peasant comes to tell his father you has life has been preserved by the gods bear free and patient thoughts then in an extraordinary stage entrance Lear comes on to the Scene absolutely mad and crowned with wild flowers with wild flowers fested all over him and Edgar who is after all his godson and who regards him as the great image of authority really is being Godlike cries out but who comes here and then speaking of his eyesight as the safer son the

safer sense says the safer sense will near accommodate his master thus and Lear perfectly mad extraordinarily so cries out no they Cannot touch me for coining that is to say for counterfeiting I am the king himself and Edgar and one of those extraordinary intrusions since this is after all as I've said a pagan play set nine centuries before Christ but intended for a Christian audience Edgar cries out oh thou side piercing sight and anyone in that audience at the globe would have remembered that the Roman Centurion wounds Jesus on the Cross with his Lance responding

to oou side piercing sight but referring back to his supposedly being seized for coining that is to say counterfeiting Cries Out Nature's above art in that respect there's your press money that is to say he thinks that he is impressing this poor peasant being impersonated by Edgar as a soldier for his Army and then he seems to be surveying his troops that fellow handles His bow like a crow keeper and then in contempt draw me a clothier's yard and then in sheer Madness look look a mouse peace peace and then he puns on peace this

piece of toasted cheese will do it and then becomes the King again and cries out there's my Gauntlet throwing down his Royal glove I'll prove it on a giant bring up the brown bills that is to say my warriors with their lances a well flown bird in the clout in the clout and then suddenly wondering who Edgar is wants the password from him to make sure he is not one of the enemy give the word and magnificently un shakes Bear's part and this must have pierced through the sides of the audience indeed as it Pierces

through mine Edgar cries out sweet maam maam was a drug a herb then and now which was given for what we would Now call schizophrenia and indeed some of our modern drugs that are used to treat Schizophrenia are artificially produced versions of maam and after hearing this sweet mod the remedy for madness Le says pass and gler speaking out of his total blindness says I know that voice realizing that in spite of the extraordinary recitation on the part of this voice it must be the king himself Lear in a moment of mad wit almost unsurpassed

in Shakespeare STS at the white bearded isas old GLA and cries Out ha gal with a white beard they flattered me like a dog that is to say while I was still King before I had abdicated and told me I had the white haars in my beard here the black ones were there that is to say they taught me that I was the image of authority when truly I was not to say I and no to everything that I said I and no to was no good Divinity it was not proper treatment of me as

a king and a mortal God to agree with me about everything When the rain came to wet me once he means when I was out on the Heath with the full and the Tom of bedle that Edgar was impersonating when the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter when the Thunder would not peace at my bidding there I found him there I smelt them out go too they are not men or their words they told me I was everything I am not it is a lie I am not AG

proof that is to say I have caught a Dreadful cold out in that storm they told me that I was everything in myself and I have learned that I was nothing in myself and as we absorb this as audience gler Muses on The Voice and gluster says the trick of that voice I do well remember is it not the king and Lear Roars in reply feeling indeed that he has never abdicated I every inch a King and he resumes his role before the play opens as a judge who sits upon all of his subjects when

I do stare see how the subject Quakes I pardon that man's life what was thy cause adultery Thou shalt not die die for adultery no the rain goes to it and the small gilded fly does let you in my sight that is to say why condemn a man to death for adultery when all of nature Is constantly engaged in it and then very cruy and powerfully but also I think sardonically in that kind of self- satire that he is now given to in his enormous bitterness in that extraord inary Fusion of mind and Madness that

he now represents he cries out let culation Thrive for auster's bastard son was kinder to his father than were my daughters got between the lawful sheets Another terrible irony because GLA can hear this and know that it is not true since he was betrayed by Edmund the bastard Edgar must be Beyond suffering as he listens to that and Lear taking off with tremendous passion to it luxury pel Mel that is to say breed breed culate and breed for I lack soldiers I need as many men for my Wars as I can get and suddenly and

that extraordinary Misogyny which is not Shakespeare and is not truly lear's own and comes from his Fury at Gano and Reagan he cries out behold Yan simpering Dame whose face between her Forks presses snow that is to say age is coming upon her that minces virtue and does shake the head to hear of pleasure's name she is completely corrupt by implication the fitun or the soilid horse goes to it with a more riotous appetite and then another enormous and astonishing Outburst in the classical World centaurs were beasts with the head and trunk of men and

the legs and carriage of horses but they were never female suddenly Lear sees them as being female and he says all women are like this down from the waist they are Centaur though women all above and then playing upon what everyone in the audience would recognize as the Elizabethan jackbean Term for the vagina in popular parlance which is Hell clearly misogynistic and not likely to be welcomed by women in our time he cries out but to the girdle do the gods inherit beneath is all the fiends there's hell and then going on and on in

real revulsion against female sexuality there's Darkness there is the sulfurous pit burning scalding stench consumption but before we can even become deeply offended by what in his madness he is saying he himself is Offended at himself his better Instinct returns and he cries out f f f that is to say Let Me cast this from this p p I'm disgusted with myself in effect and then speaking to Edgar who had given the password sweet maam he treats Edgar as though he is as he says an apothecary what we would call a druggist and he needs

civit he says sweetness a kind of sugar give me an ounce of civit good Apothecary to Sweeten my imagination there's money for thee holding out his hand with some coins realizing that he needs to sweeten his imagination that his imagination has turned holy rancid is an extraordinary moment for him and then something much more beautiful and bitter even follows gluster realizing that this is indeed the king loyally cries out oh let me kiss that hand and Leah in enormous shagrin replies let me wipe it first it smells of mortality that is to Say it is

a human hand and therefore unclean and gluster in total despair bringing in the apocalyptic end of the world theme that is going to be featured in this extraordinary drama from now until the close cries out oh ruined peace of Nature and perhaps he is punning upon peace but he means primarily that Lear is a great ruined piece of nature oh ruined peace of nature this great world shall sow in just the same way we're out to not and Then desperately and pathetically he says to Lear Dost thou know me since after all you can see

and Lear with amazing cruelty we would have to think except he is reverting to Madness says I remember Thine Eyes well enough he is after all staring at sockets bloody sockets from which the eyes have been ripped Dost thou squinny at me are you squinting at me and then thinking of all the legends of cupid as being blind and as squinting and therefore so many Mismatches are made in the world that is to say that so many people fall in love with the wrong persons nor do thy worst blind Cupid Al not love and then

hands a sheet of paper to GLA read thou this challenge mark But the Penning of it and gla with ultimate pathos were all thy letters sons and he may perhaps be puning on Sons but primarily he means s u NS were all thy letters Sons I could not see one and Edgar beside himself with grief this is After all his own father blind and his own Godfather quite mad in a great aside says that if someone were to tell this to me I would not believe it I would not take this from report it is

and my heart breaks at it and L says imperiously to GLA read and gla says what with the case of eyes and punning on case almost emulating the now absent fool who has so mysteriously disappeared Leah Cries Out Oho are you there with me No eyes in your head nor no money in your purse your eyes are in a heavy case that is to say they're in a bad way you purse in a light yet you see how this world goes and gla again with a pathos which is almost beyond our capacity to absorb gluster

replies I see it feelingly that is to say I now can see things only by touching them with my hands and Lear Place upon that aren't mad a man may see how this world goes with no eyes look with thine Ears see how Yan Justice rails upon Yan simple Thief hark in thine ear change places and handy dandy which is the Justice which is the thief meaning that as Leah now recognizes not only in his Madness but in the transcendental wisdom that has come with his Madness and his suffering in the storm and his feeling

for a kind of justice that he never knew before says what is the difference after All between the thief and the Justice except that one has power over the other and then with enormous bitterness and this took immense audacity on Shakespeare's part because his Royal Patron King James the first is sitting there in the front row at the first production Lear asked gler thou Hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar gler replies I sir and Lear cries out and the creature run from the Cur there thou mightest behold the great image of Authority

a dogs obeyed in office a passage I can never get out of my head particularly when someone is in office for whom I do not have high regard and gler says I sir and Lear goes on and the creature run from the Cur there thou mightest behold the great image of authority a dogs obeyed in office and suddenly Lear is off completely in another of his fantasmagorias or visions he sees A courta appointed and church appointed Beetle b a dle e who is whipping a back thou Rascal Beetle hold thy bloody hand why Dost thou

lash that strip thine own back thou hotly lust to use her in that kind for which thou whips her and he moves out into society and condemns everything that goes on there the user hangs the K through tatted clothes great vices do appear robes and furred gowns hide all plate sin with gold and the strong Lance Of Justice hurtless breaks omit in rags of pygmy's straw does pierce it that is to say gold buys justice as true in Shakespeare's day as it is now and desperately trying to extend General forgiveness to all his kingdom Leah

Cries Out none does offend none I say none I'll a him that is to say I will Empower them I will enable them I will pardon them take that of me my friend who have the power to seal the accuser's lips and then another passage I can Never get out of my head every time I turn on television and see a politician speaking get the glass eyes and like a scurvy politician seem to see the things thou Dost not and suddenly as though his boots had too much for him Leah start screaming in his Madness

now now now now pull off my boots harder harder so and Edgar who is consumed by suffering cries out and aside oh matter and impertinent mixed reason in Madness which is a Beautiful formula for what we are hearing in Lear and now when comes to the Grand climax of this and in a sense the climax of the play even though we are only in Act 4 because I sometimes think that this is the greatest and most extraordinary use in Shakespeare of a Biblical illusion Le begins magnificently with absolute sanity by crying out to GLA if

thou Wilt weep my fortunes take My eyes I know thee well enough thy name is GLA thou must be patient and explains why we must be patient and at that point I think everyone in Shakespeare's audience would have understood an illusion that now comes very hard to us I'm quoting from the authorized version the King James Bible this is the apocryphal work which nevertheless was accepted by Protestants in Shakespeare's day the wisdom of Solomon Chapter 7 the first six verses and it establishes the Deep identity between Solomon the wise and Lear in his madness here

is Solomon summing up his career remember that like Lear he is four score years and more I myself am also mortal and a man like all other and am come of him that is to say Adam that was first made of the Earth because Adam's very name Adama is a pun upon the red clay from which he is formed by yahwah by God and Solomon goes on in my mother's womb was I fashioned to be flesh in 10 months I was brought Together into blood of the seed of man and by the pleasure that cometh

with sleep and then the passage which we are about to hear Lear directly paraphrase and improve upon and when I was born I received the common air and fell upon the Earth which is of like nature crying and Weeping at the first as all other do I was nourished in swaddling clothes and with cares for there is no King that had any other beginning of birth all men have one entrance on un to life and a Like going out and here is Lear directly paraphrasing and as I say improving upon that if thou Willl weep

my fortunes take my eyes I know thee well enough thy name is GLA thou must be patient and then directly echoing the wisdom of Solomon we came crying hither thou knowest the first time that we smell the air we W and cry that is to say whale a little baby upon entering enters smells the outside air and whales and cries and then taking off his Crown Lear assumes the office of a preacher and says I will preach to thee on this text Mark me and gla who doesn't understand and feels only that the king is

totally mad Cries Out ack ack the day and then a passage which I think transcends any other in Shakespeare even in Hamlet or elsewhere in this play even in Mac Beth which is very much my personal favorite Lear and the the tremendous cognitive music of this the verbal Harmony of this has I believe not Been matched by any Poet by any writer in any language I'm able to read Lear cries out when we are are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fols extraordinary line and a half first of all

the theatrical metaphor is in itself amazing Leah after all has no experience of the stage Falls here as elsewhere in Shakespeare and in particular in King Le and MC Beth fools means many Things children dear ones ones of whom one is Fond Court jce like thee for nevertheless Lear loves so deeply and who loves Lear and loves cordelio who loves the full in return and to whose identity in some dark sense Cordelia when dead will merge in lear's Mad mind when he enters as we will see and hear in the next lecture in the fifth

and Final Act in the closing Moments of this vast drama with with Cordelia in his arms and cries out and my poor fo is hanged meaning Cordelia when we are born the reason that we cry the reason why that we whail and cry when we hit the outer air when we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of Falls that is to say we Inuit it even as newborn infants that we are entering upon a world in which we are going to Eventually be victimized to the point where we may

well become murdered and thus end forever in a very terrible kind of a fashion I want to conclude this second lecture now with the extraordinary scene that ends act for which is the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia he comes up from his Madness to the sound of healing music there is Cordelia waiting for him and he cries Out do not laugh at me for as I am a man I think this lady to be my child Cordelia and Cordelia weeping with Joy cries out and so I am I am and Leah says be your tears

wet yes faith I pray weep not and then remembering how badly he has treated her he says you have some cause they they have not and she says no cause no cause and Lear Cries Out further and says to her her you must bear with me pray you now forget and forgive I am old And foolish and in that moment and it is only momentary alas because after he enters later with the dead Cordelia in his arms that Joy of reunion will be lost to him forever but this is the triumphal moment in the play

the moment of rejoicing the moment of reunion of father and beloved daughter fully forgiving one another and there is nothing quite like it elsewhere in Shakespeare though he Tries for the effect in the late romances very much in Pericles and then even more strongly in a much more magnificent play the Winter's Tale But I want to for a few remaining moments talk about why the fourth Act of King Lear and in particular that extraordinary exchange between the blinded Gloucester and the off again on again Mad Old King why it has the enormous poetic and dramatic

Force an impact upon us that it Does in one sense it is all gratuitous you could eliminate this extraordinary scene between GLA and Lear with Edgar serving as a Desiring chorus and the action of the play and even the characterization of the play would in no way be altered but you would lose I think the greatest eloquence in all of King Lair and Therefore in all of Shakespeare's seven major tragedies and indeed in all of Shakespeare's giant art you would lose a magnificent Fusion of Sublimity and pathos of a Grace beyond the reach of art

on the one side or hand and on the other of a suffering a felt pathos an enormous Assault upon our deepest affections unparalleled in the history of literature and with some recognition of the Majesty of what Shakespeare has thus achieved I end this second of my three lectures on the tragedy of King Le question is what it is that has transformed Edgar in the course of the play from a Gul ball very innocent young Man who so easily can fall prey To His Brilliant half brother the bastard Edmund's plot and hardly knows how to react

to it to the determined guardian of his poor blind father he defends his father against Oswald when wal tries to chop him down by cudgeling the horrible Oswald to death He has become so extraordinarily transmogrified that after having intercepted gal's letter to Edmund he is able to give it to Albany and set up the final door in which as a nameless Knight dressed in black armor as an Avenger against whom Edmund does not stand any chance whatsoever he sweeps in and delivers Edmund's death Wound if I had to sum up how it is that Edgar

changes I would say by a long painful process of self-knowledge an enormous purgatorial suffering which finally at Great personal cost nevertheless makes him a heroic champion who after the death of Lear will be able to take over the Kingdom after Albany and Kent abdicate and as the audience knows he will spend his brief Reign heroic fighting the Wolves who have overrun England in the internum after lear's abdication the subsequent War and the death of Le this is the third lecture on the tragedy of King Lear dealing with the fifth and Final Act of the play

an act which takes a great deal Of power from the very terrible situation that is unfolding we open with Edmund who is involved with both sisters and who quite clearly sees himself as being a kind of extraordinary mixture of danani and amaki and who is directly deposed with Edgar who has come upon the scene giving Albany a letter which has been intercepted by him from Gano orban's wife to Edmund which makes very clear Indeed that Edmund is a traitor and is plotting against the life of Albany in his own drive for power and for becoming

King here is Edmund in act 5 scene 1 kie saying to both these sisters have I sworn my love each jealous of the other as the stung are of the adder which of them shall I take both one or neither I've joked about that sometimes in teaching the play saying that it is as though a prin Prince were to say to Himself shall I really go out on a double date with gonal and Reagan that is to say with two Monsters of the deep neither can be enjoyed if both remain alive to take the Widow

Reagan exasperates makes mad her sister gal and hardly shall I carry out my side her husband being alive now then we'll use his continence that is to say ores for the battle which being done let her who would be rid of him devise his Speedy taking off let Goroll do it as for the mercy which he Albany intends to Lear into Cordelia the battle done and they within our power shall never see his pardon for my state stands on me to defend not to debate the battle takes place and and Edgar sees that Lear and

Cordelia have lost and he dashes back to reclaim Gloster who still does not know his identity and cries away old man give me thy hand away King Leath lost he and his daughter taken give me thy hand come on and gluster in Total despar says no further sir a man May rot even here and Edgar with his magnificent recalcitrance and gathering strength of spirit and mind cries out what in ill thoughts again and then gives you one of the great passages in all of Shakespeare men must endure their going hence even as they coming hither

ripeness is all come on and he leads gluster away the scene shifts in scene 3 to the British camp near DOA Edmund enters with Lear and Cordelia prisoners guarded by soldiers and officers and Edmund says some officers take them away again he does not speak directly to L good guard until their greater Pleasures first be known that ought to censure them Cordelia very movingly cries out we are not the first first who with best meaning have incurred the worst for the oppressed King I am cast down myself could else out frown false fortunes frown shall

we not see these daughters And these sisters that is to say shall we not together confront our captors gal and Reagan and Lear in the Ecstasy of being reunited with Cordelia and in total sanity and feeling that indeed his daughter has forgiven him as she has Leah cries out no no no no come let's away to prison we too alone will sing like birds in the cage when thou DST ask me blessing I'll kneel Down and ask of thee forgiveness so we live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butter

flies and here poor Rogues talk of court news and we talk with them too who loses and who wins who's in who's out and take upon us the mystery of things as if we were God's spies and will wear out in a walled prison packs and sects of great ones that EB and Flow by the Moon and after Edmund says simply take them away Lear comes forth with a remarkable sequence of Old Testament Illusions upon such sacrifices my Cordelia the gods themselves throw incense have I caught thee he that Parts us shall bring a brand

from heaven and fire us hence like foxes it is an illusion to a stratagy of Samson in the Book of Judges when he sets fire to the tals of a number of Foxes and turns them loose amid the wheat fields of the Philistines wipe Thine Eyes the good years shall devour them flesh and fell here they shall make us weep which goes instead to a dream of pharaoh which Joseph interprets we see him starve first with great Pride and Glory come and Le and Cordelia go out together guarded and that is the last time that

we will see Cordelia alive Edmund summons a captain and says go follow Them to prison one step I have advanced thee if thou dust as this instructs thee he paper commanding their death thou dust make thy way to Noble fortunes know thou this that men are as the time is to be tender minded does not become a sword thy great employment will not be a question either say thou do it or Thrive by other means means I'll do it my Lord about it and write happy when thou Hast done mock I say instantly and carry

it so as I have Set it down and this will lead to the horror of Leah entering with the slain Cordia in his arms ory comes on the scene after they are LED away and the confrontation breaks out between Albany on the one side Edmund and Reagan and gal on the other Albany says to Edmund because he now knows the truth about Edmund from Edgar's notee sir by your patience I hold you but a subject of this war not as a brother and Reagan angrily replies that's as we list to Grace him me thinks our

pleasure might have been demanded here you had spoke so far he led our powers bore the commission of my place and person the which immediacy may well stand up and call itself your brother and gono in Furious jealousy not so hot in his own Grace he doth exalt himself more than your addition and Reagan cries out in my rights by me invested he compares the best and Aly says with tremendous bitterness that were the most if he Should husband you to which the horrible Reagan replies just is do of prove prophets and gal in desperation

screams hala hala that eye that told you so looked but a squint and Reagan who has already been poisoned by goroll though we only now learn it says lady I am not well else I should answer from a full flowing stomach General take thou my soldiers prisoners patrimony dispose of them of me the walls are thine with witness the world that I create thee Here my Lord and Master and goral cries mean you to enjoy him and allany in real Fury the let alone lies not in your Good Will and Edmund in great pride nor

in thine Lord and ory Cries Out half-blooded fellow that is to say bastard yes Reagan screams to Edmund Let the Drum strike and prove my title thine and she is dying Al he says stay yet he reason Edmund I arrest thee on Capital treason and in thy attaint this gilded Serpent and he points to ganol who is After all his wife and speaking to his sister-in-law Reagan for your claim Fair sister I bar it in the interest of my wife with terrible irony to she is subcontracted to this Lord and I her husband contradict your

bains if you will marry make your loves to me my lady is bespoke and Goro screams out and interlude but Albany is intent on the battle Thou Art armed GLA let the trumpet sound if none appear to prove upon thy person thy heus manifest and Many treasons there is my pledge and he throws down a glove I'll take it on thy heart if I taste bread Thou Art in nothing less than I have here proclaimed thee and Reagan dying of the poison cries out sick oh sick and gorol in a Cru aside if not our

near trust medicine Edmund in Fury cries out there's my exchange throwing down a glove what in the world he is that names me traitor villain like he lies call by the trumpet he that dares approach on him on you who Not I will maintain my truth and honor firmly and we are coming to one of the great and dazzling moments in Shakespeare we have watched the long long progression of Edgar's change from a gullible young man to a bedlamite to a poor peasant to someone who directly intervenes in the plot when he saves his father

by striking down the rasal Oswald who would murder the blinded gluster and now he will come in Black armor as a nameless Knight As an avenging Fury to strike down his treacherous half brother The Herald sounds the trumpet If any man of quality or degree within the lists of the army will maintain upon Edmund suppos Earl of gler that he is a manifold traitor let him appear by the third sound of the trumpet he is bold in his defense sound and three trumpets are sounded and with a Trumpeter walking in front of him comes Edgar

as a black knight Albany speaks ask him his Purposes why he appears upon this call of the trumpet and Edgar replies very powerfully no my name is lost therefore I stand here as a nameless Knight by treasons tooth bear G and Canker bit yet am I Noble as the adversary I come to cope and Albany though he knows very well the answer to this Albany says which is that adversary and Edgar cries out what's he that speaks for Edmund Earl of gla and Edmund proudly says himself what sayest thou to him and here is the

extraordinary reply of Edgar clearly an absolutely changed person though by a terrible irony it is Edmund who has as it were created his avenging Doom in edga draw thy sword that if my speech offend a noble heart thy may do thee Justice here is mine behold it is the privilege of mine honors my Oath and my profession I protest M of thy strength Place Youth and Eminence despite thy Victor sword and fire new fortunes thy Valor and thy heart thou art a traitor false to thy Gods thy brother and thy father conspiring against this High

illustrious Prince and for the extremist upward of thy head to The Descent and dust below thy foot a most towed spotted traitor say thou know this sword this arm and my best Spirits are bent to Prove upon thy heart whereto I speak thou Li psychologically it's an extraordinary situation Edmund does not know who this is he need not by the laws of Knighthood duel with a nameless person who for all he knows could be a professional assassin but he has throughout the play been motivated by a deep resentment against his only half Noble origin and

he now Falls victim to that it's a Strange parallel here which has not previously occurred to me but it fascinates me just as Iago never calculates that Amelia who knows everything will risk her own life and she does and dies for it by betraying him Iago to the truth so Edmund so magnificent a cognitive strategist who can outthink everyone else in the play put together Edmund has that one blind spot which is the need for Demonstrating his own innate nobility in wisdom I should ask thy name but since thy outside looks so fair and warlike

and that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes what safe and nicely I might well delay by ro of Knighthood I disdain and SP turn back do I toss these treasons to thy head with the hell hated lie overwhelm thy heart which for they yet glance by and Scarcely bruise this sword of mine shall give them instant way where they shall rest forever trumpets speak and to the sound of trumpets they fight and as we would expect Edmund has no chance whatsoever this is a destined Avenger Edmund Falls with what will prove to be his

death wound alony who wants the full truth before Edmund dies cries out save him save him and gal desperately cries out to gler this is practice gler that is to Say this is a plot against you by the law of War thou was not bound to answer an unknown opposite Thou Art not vanquished but coused and begal and orany in absolute Fury cries out to his wife shut your mouth Dame or if this paper shall I stopple it hold sir thou worse than any name read thine own evil and then plucking it back from her

no tearing lady I perceive you know it and gal with desperate Pride say if I do the laws are mine not thine who can arraign Me for it and ory in great contempt most monstrous o knowest thou this paper and Gano in absolute desperation ask me not what I know and she leaves the stage in orany realizing that she may very well be on the verge of suicide says go after her she's desperate govern her and from here to the end of the play one wants to look very carefully at the extraordinary change that takes

place in Edmund perhaps the least likely person in all of Shakespeare to ever have made a Change towards the good indeed there is a dying eloquence in Edmund as he slowly dies on stage and then is carried off stage and we do not see him die anymore than we will see M Beth die Edmund speaks what you have charged me with that have I done and more much more the time will bring it out and I must say this is something that carries more suspense with it than anything even in Alfred Hitchcock's films because what

that half line the Time will bring it out most certainly refers to is the order he has given to murder Lear and Cordelia his past and so am I but still not having made up his mind he looks at this unknown Knight but what art thou that Hast this fortune on me if Thou Art Noble I do forgive thee and Edgar fully revealing himself for the first time in the play since he adopted the disguise of Tom of bedum let's exchange charity I am no less in blood than Thou Art Edmund if more the More

thou Hast wronged me my name is Edgar and thy Father's son and then an extraordinary passage burningly eloquent endlessly memorable but showing the high price that Edgar's transformation forces him to pay the god s are just and of our Pleasant vices make instruments to plague us the dark and vicious place where the he got CA him his eyes that dark and vicious Place does not refer to A room in which the adultery took place where the basted Edmund was conceived it refers again to what Jac is called by the populace the hell h of the

vagina and that Edgar should describe the vagina as the dark and vicious Place shows us that there is a horror of sexuality which is the price that he is paying Edmund with tremendous power says hesitantly because he is dying thou Hast spoken right is is true the wheel is come full circle I am here Now that is The Wheel of Fortune but it also refers back to an earlier passage in the play where Lear and his Madness speaks of being bound upon a wheel of fire Edgar now tells us the story of his reconciliation with

GLA when he revealed himself to GLA and cries out oh Our Lives sweetness that we the pain of death would hourly die rather than die at once never o fault revealed myself unto him until Some half hour passed when I was armed not sure though hoping of this good success I asked his Blessing and From First to Last told him my pilgrimage but his floored heart alack too weak the conflict to support tricks to two extremes of passion joy and grief burst smilingly we will see at the very end of the play Lear also torn

between immense grief knowing that his daughter is dead and a momentary Madness of believing that he actually sees her Resurrected one question that always occurs to me in reading the play watching it and teaching it is why did Shakespeare not actually represent this great scene of the mutual recognition and the reconciliation of Edgar and Paul gler on the stage rather than simply make it a recital or narrative on Edgar's part I think it is because this Final Act and this extraordinary final scene are already so turbulent and immensely rich with significant emotion That it would

simply expose the audience to too much pressure Edmund hearing of the death of his father is beginning to undergo an extraordinary change and says this speech of yours hath moved me and shall pance do good but speak you on you look as you had something more to say and Albin he says if there be more more wful hold it in in for I almost ready to dissolve hearing of this but Edgar goes On this would have seemed a period to such as love not sorrow but another to amplify too much would make much more and

goes on to talk about his reconciliation with Kent also in Disguise now someone runs on to stage with a bloody knife crying out help help oh help and this is the knife with which which Gano has just stabbed herself to the heart and Edmund hearing that Goro with her dying breath has confessed that she poisoned Reagan to her death Magnificently and ironically says I was contracted to them both all three now marry in an instant the bodies of the Queens are brought onto the stage and we come to a moment in Shakespeare that I think

cannot be overpraised it cannot be overpraised because in it we see the extraordinary process in which Shakespeare is the great Pioneer in which a major character overhears something that he says almost Indeed as though someone else had said it as you or I under Shakespeare's influence sometimes perform a sudden start because we feel that we are overhearing someone else when in fact we are overhearing ourselves Edmund stares at the bodies of the Dead Queens gal and Reagan and UTS four amazing words yet Edmund was beloved a great shock to him that even though it was

these two months of the deep who loved him nevertheless he was Beloved and then haltingly says since after all he is dying the one the other poison for my sake and after slew herself and Ally impatiently says even so cover their faces but Edmund desperately panting for life I pent for Life some good I mean to do despite of my own nature he will not acknowledge that his nature is beginning to change he says instead some good I mean to do despite of my own nature quickly send be brief in it to The castle for

my RIT is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia they send in time and Albany desperately cries out run run oh run and Ed get equally desperately to whom my Lord who has the office send thy token of reprieve and the dying Edmund says well thought on take my sword giveth the captain and the officer runs out with Edmund's sword and Edmund says he hath commission from thy wife gal and me to hang Cordelia in the prison and to lay the blame upon her own despair that Sheid herself and Albany cries out the gods

defend her bear him hence a while Edmund is carried off stage which fascinates me Edmund will not know as he dies whether or not he saved Cordelia and Lear or whether he is responsible for their murders and Shakespeare wants us to try to think ourselves into that extraordinary changing Consciousness as it dies because it scarcely will know Who or what it is as it dies any more than we any longer can recognize Edmund he is carried off to die off stage and the most colossal moment perhaps in all of Shakespeare is now upon us something

which really goes beyond the resources even of a great actor's voice and I am certainly not that to carry Le enters with a triple howl he is carrying his slain daughter in his arms how how how oh ye are men of stones had I your tongue's eyes I'd used them so that Heaven's Vault should crack she's gone forever I know which one is dead I know when one is dead and when one lives she's dead as Earth lend me a Looking Glass if that her breath will mist or stain the stone why then she lives

but Kent Edgar and Aly who are to be the only three survivors of this play Cry Out simultaneously Ken cries is this the promised end and and Edgar cries out or image of that horror and Albany Cries Out fall and cease and these are all apocalyptic outcries they pressage the end of a world Lear desperately says this feather stirs she lives if it be so it is a chance which does redeem all Sorrows that ever I have felt and Leah realizing that she's dead cries out now she's gone forever Cordelia Cordelia stay a little ha

what is it thou sayest her voice was ever soft gentle and low an excellent thing in woman I killed the slave that Was a hanging thee and the officer says it true my lords he did and suddenly the others on stage Kent Aly and Edgar desperately speak to him trying to explain who they are but Leah says I so I think and Aly says he knows not what he says and vain is it that we present us to him an officer enters to say Edmund is dead my Lord and Albany says that's but a trifle

here and Edgar he addresses Edgar and Kent and talks about how they were in effect Sheer power and suddenly he cries out oh see see and what we see is Lear Lear cries out and my poor fool is hanged meaning at once Cordelia and my fool no no no life why should a dog a horse a rat have life and thou no breath at all Thou come no more never never never never never and then desperately trying to speak pray you undo this button thank you sir and suddenly he cries out do you see this

and I think that's simultaneous with Aly saying oh see see he suddenly Cries out look on her look her lips look there look there and he thinks he sees in his delusion in his Madness the lips move and the joy is too great for his heart and he dies of a sudden heart attack po Edgar who cannot acknowledge that his Godfather is joining his father in death cries out he faints my Lord my Lord but Ken says break heart I pry break and Edgar desperately says look up my Lord but Ken says Vex not his

ghost oh let him pass he hates him that would Upon the rack of this tough World stretch him out longer and poor Edgar says he is gone indeed Ken says most memorably the Wonder is he hath endured so long he but usurped his life and orany full of grief and guilt feeling that he has his own culpability in the tragedy says friends of my soul speaking to Kent and Edgar he says I abdicate you Twain rule in this realm and the g State sustain But Ken says no I have a journey sir shortly to Go

my master calls me I must not say no if Le is dead I will go off to serve him in the afterworld whatever it is and the final four lines of the play are spoken magnificently by Edgar and the audience would know what we at first do not know that actually Edgar came to the throne several Reigns after the death of his Godfather and he spent his entire enire brief life as Monarch fighting the wolves that had overrun all of England he speaks these immense last lines of The play every other Tragedy by Shakespeare ends

with a clear sense that the continuity of the Kingdom will go on but Edgar ends in despair the weight of this sad time we must obey speak what we feel not what we ought to say the oldest hath borne most we that are young shall never see so much nor live so long and everyone exits from the stage with lear's body in a death march after listening to lecture 10 a student posed this question to Professor Bloom why does Edmund change at the very end of the play Let's listen to the professor's response the answer

to that question takes me very deep into the heart of what might be called the ultimate mystery of Shakespeare he reinvented the Human by showing us that all of us are capable of Sudden Change when we acquire the perspective upon Ourselves that is provided by self overhearing you get outside of yourself you gaze in upon yourself and quite suddenly even if you are not a different man or woman you see the possibility of it Edmund when he hears himself say yet Edmund was beloved for the first time in this extraordinary drama acquires a capacity for

feeling and though he still says this is against my nature which is after all a profoundly Evil one nevertheless he says some good I mean to do despite of my own nature it may well be the most profound insight ever to be experienced in all of Shakespeare this ends lecture 10 remember to visit this course's website at www.moderncashprepaid.com and will send you a free copy a shipping charge will apply this is the first of two lectures on the tragedy of MC Beth the first lecture will concern acts one and two of the tragedy and the

second lecture will cover Acts 3 4 and five but I want to start with a kind of introduction theater people always tell me that MC Beth traditionally is the unluckiest of all Shak spe's plays particularly for actors who all too frequently find they literally break a leg in performing it though Hamlet and King Leah are the most eminent of Shakespearean tragedies I've had an Immense emotional attachment to the drama of MC Beth since I was a little child one that is surpassed only by my devotion to the two Henry IV plays both dominated by my

own Alter Ego the great comic wit sajan fste the particular fascination of MC Beth is its ruthless economy it is just half the length of the play of Hamlet and the hallucinatory intensity of this Scottish drama which causes us to identify our own imaginations with MC bef's Fantasmagorical indeed Shakespeare compels us to all but totally identify ourselves with with Mac Beth despite his incredibly bloody career which gets bloodier constantly Lady Macbeth is taken off stage after act 3 scene 4 and returns only briefly in her Madness at the start of Act five thus MC Beth

is left holy at the center of our attention Shakespeare declines to individualize Duncan Banquo McDuff and Malcolm let alone the minor Character who all tend to blend together in a common greyness since MC Beth speaks fully a third of the drama lines nearly 700 lines out of the 2000 he is more Central than any other tragic protagonist except Hamlet who speaks 38s of his play 1500 lines out of 4,000 as we have heard King Leah divides the audience's fascination between Leah and the fall and the half Brothers Edgar and Edmund but Hamlet and McBeth Center

Our attention I would venture that Shakespeare represented the capaciousness and Brilliance of his own intellect in Hamlet's mind and the pronatural intensity of his own imagination in MC beths which is the most proleptic in all of literature by proleptic spelled p r o l e p t i c our dictionaries mean so anticipating an event anticipating any event so strongly that the event seems to have happened already before it actually takes place We all of us have some traces of this fantasmagorical it Second Sight but the warrior MC Beth is totally dominated by it he

barely is conscious of an ambition a desire or a wish before he sees himself on the other side or shore already having performed the bloody crime that equivocally fulfills his ambition I think MC Beth terrifies us just as much as his play does because that element in our own imaginations is so frightening fantasy makes us seem Murderers thieves usurpers and rapists until we come out of our momentary fit of what I have called prolapses I want to take us now into the actual text of act one which is dominated on the One Hand by MC

beffs and banquo's common victory over the trador McDonald and also by the weird sisters the famous three witches and I want to begin with a wounded Captain who has come out of the battle to tell King Duncan about how MC Beth has destroyed the merciless MC Dunwell called and the passage is perhaps the most violent of its kind in its bloodiness in all of Shakespeare for brave MC Beth well he deserves that name disdaining Fortune with his brandish steel which smoked with bloody execution like valor's minion cved out his passage till he faced the slave

which near shook hands nor B farewell to him till he unseamed him from the Nave to the chops and fixed his head Upon Our battlements that is to say literally MC Beth with One tremendous stroke of his sword has cut McDonald open and later one of the Nobles in the same scene act one scene 2 is explaining to K Duncan about another tremendous victory of MCB Beth and Banquo in which MC Beth is described as balon's bridegroom room which may since she is the goddess of war that means that MC Beth is being called the

god Mars himself a great killing machine a great engine of war in every possible Respect it is this extraordinary personage a man of ordinary intellect but fantastic power of imagination and tremendous potential for killing who suddenly finds himself in the third scene of act one confronting the three weird sisters the three norns or Fates the three witches and the first hails him by his proper title TH or Earl of glomus the second as th of cordor cordor being a recent traitor to King Duncan III Cries Out All Hail McBeth that shalt Be king Hereafter and

it sends mbth into a kind of Second Sight or trance and McBeth wants to know more and the witches vanish after prophesying that MC Beth will be king but that the children of Bano will eventually be Kings and mbth says after Bano tells him you shall be king MB says andth of cordor too when it not so to the self-same tune in words who's here and suddenly it is proclaimed that Indeed he is precisely that that he has become the thing of cordor and he sees in that the truth of the prophecy and you hear

an extraordinary aside the first of his tremendous soliloquies in this play this is in act one scene three two truths are told as happy prologues to the swelling Act of the Imperial theme and he comes out of his trans-like stage for a moment to speak to the others and say I thank you gentlemen and then he speaks aside again this Supernatural soliciting cannot be ill cannot be good if ill why hath it given me Earnest of success commencing in a truth I am Fain of cordor if good why do I yield to that suggestion whose

horrid image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs against the use of Nature and at this point the prolic element becomes extremely strong in him present fears are less than horrible imaginings my thought whose murder and He means the murder I contemplate of Duncan my thought whose murder yet is but fantastical Shak so my single state of man that function is smothered in surise and nothing is but what is not Banquo speaking for the others gazes upon McBeth in his state of Second Sight and says look how our partners

wrapped but one wants to examine the lines that I've just read aloud to you the single state of man means the uned or singular Or isolated state of man when MC bef says that function is smothered in surise function means intellect and its conscious workings surise means the prophetic or prpic imagination the fantastic assumption that is overtaking him until finally he says and nothing is but what is not on the one hand we find ourselves perpetually fascinated because I repeat in all of us there is some element of wish fulfillment or desire which makes a

Cheer in uh MC bef's peculiar mode of imagination on the other Shakespeare very shrewdly from the very beginning makes everyone else in the drama except lady mbth whom he will move accessories we know that Shakespeare when he wants to can take an extremely minor character who speaks only three or four lines I think of barnardine in measure for measure and gives that character a voice of his or her own so that they are forever memorable but he Declines to do that in this play he focuses only upon MC Beth and to a certain extent until

she is removed lady MC Beth and I think he has a very deep and dark design upon us he wishes to push us into the Heart of Darkness he wants us to make an extraordinary journey into the interior so that we find ourselves alone with MC Beth and the person we watch there on stage is in some sense ourselves so that we cannot Exclude our ourselves from what is happening to him or his desires or his imagination I want to take up this theme next in act 1 scene 4 in the lines that cluster about

line 50 when Duncan after honoring mbth and Bano nevertheless proclaims that his oldest son Malcolm is now going to become the prince of Cumberland and thus the acknowledged heir to the Scottish Throne as he hears this which he takes to be a threat to his own ambition MC Beth again speaks in a wrapped aside the prince of caland that is a step on which I must fall down or else or leap for in my way it lies Stars hide your fires let not light see my black and deep desires the eye wink at the hand

yet let that be which the ear fears when it is done to see one reason the passage so fascinates me is that it reminds one that this is unique among Shakespeare's dramas with the partial exception of A Midsummer Night's Dream both of these works of high fantasy take place mostly at night upon a darkened stage and that also has to do with the darkness of MC bef's own nature and the increasing darkness of our own under his influence in act 1 scene 5 lady MC Beth makes her first entry and quite fascinatingly we at first

do not hear her own voice she reads to us out loud a letter she has just received from her husband by the way let me comment on the marriage Because it is an extremely subtle and delicate and complex matter I frequently tell my students at Yale when we are studying MC Beth together that the happiest marriage in all of Shakespeare is that of MC Beth and Lady McBeth at which they scowl at me because they think I am trying to be in some sense humorous with them but in fact it is not humor on my

part only perhaps a certain degree of irony there is a furious passionate attachment between MC Beth And Lady MC Beth but it has some very curious and special features the chronicle material of the history of Scotland upon which Shakespeare bases the drama of MC Beth tells us that lady McBeth a very high Noble woman and a cousin of King Duncan was originally married to another great nobleman by whom she had a son both her first husband and her son are murdered MC Beth then woo her and wins her reluctant consent she being a woman of

great power And complexity because he promises her that he sheares her immense Ambitions but they are childless for all of their Mutual happiness they have no child and they begin to believe they are not going to have a child and if you read the passages between them very very closely I may note one or two as we go along I think there is an implication that MC bef's Violently prophetic imagination has created sexual difficulties for them by in a sense overpreparing the event by anticipating too strongly he as it were arrives too quickly and so

a proper sexual relationship does not seem to have been worked out between them that may seem a very subtle and delicate kind of a matter but as we have seen in oel it is very far from being un Shakespearean after she reads aloud the Letter from her husband which basically talks about the weird sisters and their prophecy she says you shall be what you are promised yet do I Fear Thy nature and here comes that very famous line amazingly ironic when you consider that this is the bloodiest villain MC Beth in all of Shakespeare yet

do I Fear Thy nature it is too full of the milk of hum kindness to catch the nearest way thou wouldst be great or not without ambition but Without the illness should attend it what thou wouldst highly that would thou Hol would not false and yet would wrongly win thou have great glamest that which cries thus thou must do if thou have it and that which rather thou dust fear to do than wishes should be undone in short what she's saying is McBeth is deeply divided against himself that he has too much good nature to

properly sustain his ambition so she cries out hi thee hither that I may pour my spirit in Thine ear and chastise with the Valor of my tongue all that impedes thee from the golden round which fate and metaphysical Aid do seem to have the crowned with all there again is one of those fascinating elliptical Shakespearean touches whenever you have the image of spirits or liquid of any kind being poured in the ear in Shakespeare it is very difficult not to remember that Claudius poisoned the Sena Hamlet King Hamlet Prince Hamlet's father by pouring While the

his older brother was asleep by pouring poison in his ear and there's I think a hint there indeed of what is coming the news is given to Lady MC Beth that Duncan is coming the king to stay at her castle and she makes another extraordinary speech come you spirits that tend on Mortal thought and then I have seen this very powerfully played on the stage by many actresses and wise directors have them grip themselves in their centes as they Cry out as she cries out unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the

toe top full of direst Cruelty make thick my blood stop up the access and passage to remorse that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between the effect and Ill of it come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall you murdering ministers whatever in your sightless substance you wait on naturous Mischief Cal thick night and pull thee in the dunnest Smoke Of hell that my Keen knife not see the wound it makes no Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry hold hold and at just

that moment after this extraordinary outcry MC Beth enters and she cries to him great glomus worthy cord greater than both by the all hail Hereafter and then she too has become proleptic or hallucinatory thy letters have transported me beyond the ignorant present and I feel now the future in an Instant and when MC Biff says my dearest love Duncan comes here tonight lady MC Beth says and when goes hence and McBeth answers in puzzlement tomorrow as he purposes and Lady MC Beth cries oh never shall son that marrow see and mbth who feels hesitant says

we will speak further that hesitation is an extraordinary hesitation and it will lead to perhaps the greatest of the earliest soliloquies that he comes to in the play as he Hesitates he speaks at the opening of scene 7 of act 1 an extraordinary meditation which in some ways even though he has not got the intellect of Hamlet does remind one of certain moments in Hamlet's mode of discourse if it were done when is done then sure well it were done quickly if the assassination could tremble up the consequence and catch with his cers success that

but this blow might be the be all and the end all here but here Upon this bank and Shaw of time we jump the life to come but in these cases we still have judgment here that we but teach bloody instructions and as he meditates upon Duncan suddenly another phenomenon which is recurrent in McBeth as Shakespeare represents him for us a great voice greater than his own a voice of hallucinatory intensity almost as though Angels Andor Devils were speaking breaks through him he cries out besides this Duncan hath borne his faculties so Meek have been

so clear in his great office that his virtues will plead like Angels Trumpet tonged against the Deep damnation of his day taking off and then suddenly this enormous voice breaks through him and pity like a naked newborn babe striding the blast or Heaven's cherubin HED upon the sightless corers of the air shall blow the horror deed in every eye that tears shall drown the wind I have no spur to prick the Sides of my intent but only vating ambition which or leaps itself and falls on the other but before he can say on the other

bank as it of Time Lady McBeth enters and says what news and McBeth says to her we will proceed no further in this business and she is furious with him absolutely Furious he says I dare do all that may become a man who dares do more is none and then she bitterly and there is I think an insinuation here of his complex Sexual difficulty with her what Beast was it then that made you break this Enterprise to me when you Durst do it then you were a man and to be more than what you were

you would be so much more the man nor time nor place did then adhere and yet you would make both they have made themselves and that their Fitness now does unmake you and then she recalls she is after all a high Noble woman she has not been anyone's wet nurse as it were suckling another's Child she's thinking back to her son who was slain by her first marriage I have given suck and knows how tend it is to love the babe that milks me I would while it was smiling in my face have plucked my

nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out had I so sworn as you have to this and McBeth says in great anxiety if we should fail and she says we fail but screw your courage to the sticking place which is of course phallic in its implications and clearly Has to do with what she feels is his sexual failure and will not fail she says it will make a man of you when Duncan is asleep we will take his two chamberlains we will get them drunk what cannot you and I perform upon the unguarded

Duncan notice that at that point she is talking about herself as being if necessary a fellow assassin and at the very end of Act One MC Beth is overcome by her and he indeed Cries Out bring forth men children only if indeed They are going to have any children for thy undaunted metal should compose nothing but males will not be received when we have marked with blood those sleepy two of his own chamber and use their very daggers that they have done it and lady mcf says Who Dares receive it other as she will make

our griefs and clamor Roar upon his death and MC Beth is persuaded and we enter now on the quite horrifying second act of this uh drama beginning Necessarily with the moment of great turbulence but also with a hallucinatory soliloquy which surpasses what we have heard before here is MC Beth he is on his way in act 2 scene one at about line 33 to actually perform the murder and suddenly in front of him he sees a purely Visionary or fantastic dagger is this a dagger which I see before me the handle towards my hand and

he does not doubt his own Visions come Let me Clutch thee but of course his hand goes right through it it is a hallucination I have thee not and yet I see thee still art thou not fatal vision sensible to feeling as to sight or art thou but a dagger of the Mind a false creation proceeding from the heat oppressed brain I see thee yet in form as palpable as this which now I draw marvelous symbolic stroke of stage business on Shakespeare's part MC Beth draws his own dagger as he continues to Stare at the

Visionary dagger thou Marshal me the way that I was going and such an instrument I was to use my eyes I made the fools meaning victims of the other senses or else worth all the rest I see thee still and on thy blade and dudgeon that is to say the handle gouts of blood drops of blood which was not so before what an extraordinary imagination he has first he is actually seeing a vision that you or I presumably would not see with his terrible kind of Clarity but secondly the vision changes and the Visionary dagger

becomes bloody there's no such thing it is the bloody business which informs thus to mine eyes now all the one half World nature seems dead and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep and suddenly in a moment that must have startled Shakespeare's audience many of whom had read his remarkable narrative poem the rape of lucis in which Tarkin goes off to rape lucis thus with his stealy Pace McBeth Goes on to say with tarwin's ravishing strides fascinating that he has the vision of a potential rapist as though in stabbing phallically as it were his cousin King

Duncan to death he is also accomplishing a ravishment towards his design Moves Like a Ghost thou sure and firm set Earth hear not my steps which way they walk for fear thy very Stones pray of my whereabout and he cries out just as a Bell starts to ring in another marvelous Piece of stage business I go and it is done the Bell invites me hear it not Duncan for it is a l that summons thee to heaven or to hell lady McBeth having gotten thee chamberlains or Grooms of Duncan drunk awaits at the opening of

scene two act two word that MC Beth has done the deed she says hark I lay the a dagger is ready he could not miss him and then says something which is meant to shock us had he Duncan not resembled my father As he slept I had done it my husband there is M Beth saying I have done the deed this th not hear a noise and Lady MC bef says these Deeds must not be thought after these ways if it is done so it will make us mad but mag Beth Cries Out magnificently meth

thought I heard a voice cry MC Beth does murder sleep the innocent sleep and then very beautifully sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care the death of each day's life saw labor Bath balb of hurt Minds great nature second cause Chief narasha in life's feast and Lady McBeth interrupts him and says why are you still carrying these bloody daggers and he says I I'm I'm afraid to look at what I've done and she says infirm of purpose which is again a sexual innuendo give me the daggers the sleeping and the dead are but

as pictures to the eye childhood that fears a painted devil if he do bleed I'll Guild the faces of the Grooms with all For it must seem their guilt and with that a great knocking begins at the gate lady mbth and you hear the knocks going on on stage constantly lady McBeth enters again and says my hands are of your color but I shame to wear a heart so white I hear a knocking at the South entry and then says bitterly to him then you are constancy have left you unattended which is another sexual innuendo

and poor mbth Cries Out wake Duncan with thy knocking I would thou Couldst and then we come to the remarkable scene the only comic scene in this one extraordinary drama which otherwise excludes all comedy as indeed othell excludes or comedy but the fall keeps King Le from excluding it it's a very uncanny comedy indeed in Lear the great scene of the knocking at the gate in which the clown of the company undoubtedly Robert Armen a m comes up to the gate and says knock knock knock who's here and tells a series of violent Jokes about

it but the crucial one is this as he says to McDuff and Lennox as they come in and McDuff of course ultimately will be MC Beth's Nemesis in this play what three things they say to him does drink especially provoke because the Porter of the gate is dead drunk which is why he's been so slow in answering he says marry sir nose painting sleep and uran leery sir it provokes and unprovoked it provokes the desire but takes away the performance And then goes on to use the extraordinary word equivocates equivocates him in a sleep and

we will hear that term equivocate again and again in this play and I will go into the reason for that a little later on except that very quickly what is undoubtedly involved in it is that a famous trial of a Jesuit who supposedly had conspired against the life of King James father Garnett was taking place and in it rather than answer the Questions of the Court he took up what the Jesuits had taught one another was virtuous and permissible which was to give equivocal answers in such a situation MC Beth enters to cry out had

I but died an hour before this chance I had lived a blessed time for from this instant there's nothing serious in mortality he says that as a cover but something very deeper and darker is going on something which is building up in vano who comes to understand that the ACT ual murder has been performed by MC Beth and Lady McBeth when this is clearly established in banquo's mind quite clearly MC Beth feels he will have to deal with that and as we will see he does but I want now to conclude this lecture on the

first two acts of M Beth and therefore the first of these two lectures with the extraordinary scene 4 which closes it where one of the noble Men one of the minor characters enters with an otherwise unidentified old man and they speak of the extraordinary portense that accompanied the murder of King Duncan the old man says is unnatural even like the deed that's done on Tuesday last the Falcon towering in her pride of place was by a mousing how hawked at and killed and Ross replies and Duncan's horses a thing most strange and certain butus and

Swift the minions of their race turned wild in nature Broke their stalls flung out contending against obedience as they would make war with Mankind and the old man says is said they eat each other and Ross replies they did so to the amazement of mine eyes that looked upon it the emphasis is that with the terror able murder of King Duncan the course of Nature has been violently altered and we in the audience or the readership are being instructed that very strange things lie ahead of us in the remainder Of this play but as I

conclude this first lecture I want to emphasize again the ruthless economy of this drama it is amazing how in rather less [Music] than S or 800 lines Shakespeare has managed to take us so deeply into what I've called following Joseph Conrad the hard of darkness in McBeth after listening to lecture 11 a student posed this question to Professor Bloom why do we sympathize with a Villain Like MC Beth let's listen to the professor's response we sympathize In Spite of Ourselves with a great deal in MC bef's nature we cannot deny a kind of complicit identity

with him even though obviously we would like to resist it that identity is founded upon a vividness that each of us has in her or his his own imagination it is true that unless we become mentally ill Most of us never hallucinate yet it is also true that quite frequently in the course of Our Lives we so anticipate an event we so want to see a desire realized that afterwards we're not quite sure whether something has actually happened or not and certainly I now at the age of 75 as I look back at my increasingly

long life I'm no longer altogether certain whether certain things did happen to me Or whether I strongly desired them to happen and I think I am not absolutely different from other people in old age so the emphasis on the hallucinatory nature of the imagination has primarily two functions one is to emphasize how extraordinary an imagination it is in fact I would go so far as to say that just as Hamlet's mind Hamlet's intellect is Shakespeare's own intellect so Shakespeare has assigned his very own imagination to MC Beth and The other part of the answer the

other major point is this drama does depend upon our increasing inability not to identify ourselves with MC Beth and the more that special aspect of his imagination is emphasized the more we participate in him and with him this ends lecture 11 Shakespeare the seven major tragedies lecture 12 MC Beth part two I will now commence the second of my Two lectures on the tragedy of M Beth as we will see act three sentence itself upon the murder of Banquo act four will Center itself upon the massacre of Lady McDuff and her children after McDuff has

fled to England to join the King's son Malcolm Duncan's son Prince of Cumberland and act five will take us from Lady MC Beth's Madness and her sleepwalking through the Nemesis of the English and the rebellious Scots closing in upon the Tyrant MC Beth until his Final Duel with McDuff after which he is slain but I want to commence now in act three with an extraordinary exchange between lady McBeth and McBeth McBeth says Duncan is in his grave after life's fitful fever he sleeps well treason has done his worst nor steel nor poison malice domestic foreign

Levy nothing can touch him Further and Lady mbth tries to get his mind off this and says come we are about to entertain our guests this is our new status as royalty what lady MC Beth does not know is that MC Beth has sent murderers to kill Banquo and his son fance they succeed Banquo is murdered but his son fance gets away something very crucial for this play because it has been prophesied by the weird sisters that the the descendants of Banquo will Become the kings of Scotland and it's important also to remember that in

the audience indeed at the center of the audience is King James I first the first of the steuart Kings of England who succeeded the son of Mary Queen of Scots who had succeeded Elizabeth the after her death he had been James 6th of Scotland the culmination of a long line of Stuart monarchs ultimately descended from Banquo as MC Beth invokes the night we suddenly see a fascinating transposition going on between the previously ferocious lady MC Beth and her until now recalcitrant husband when it came to deans of horror he has Ed the murder of Banquo

and brought it on and has not told her about it at all there shall be done he says a deed of dreadful note she said what's to be done and he replies with an extraordinary speech which reminds us Indeed that most of this play almost all of it in fact takes place at night be innocent of the knowledge dearest Chuck till thou applaud the deed and then suddenly with a great voice breaking in upon him again though now it is diabolic rather than Angelic he invokes the night come sealing night scoff up the tender eye

of pitiful day and with thy bloody and invisible hand cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which keeps me pale that Bond B o n d is actually a metaphor for the Sun s n the Sun by day day light thickens and the crow makes Wing to the rookie wood good things of Day begin to drop and drow whil night's Black agents to their praise do Rouse thou marst at my words but hold thee still things bad begun make strong themselves by ill so pry go with me a crucial line things bad begun make

themselves Strong by ill by doing still Worse things and that of course is the quandre in which he finds himself in this play when he is informed that fance has escaped he is mortified and shocked he says then comes my FIT again but he is assured that banko at least is dead even if fance has gotten away then suddenly at dinner the ghost of Bano appears a ghost however visible only to MC Beth so we do not know whether this is actually a ghost or whether this is that hallucinatory imagination making Itself quite literal again

when he sees that he becomes absolutely Furious and they now begin to Motif which will become stronger and stronger throughout Acts 3 4 and 5 of this play MC Beth is in fact an outrageous personality no one could be more consistently outrageous than MC Beth is but increasingly he feels more outraged himself than outrageous he begins to have the horrible Sensation that outrages are Being visited upon him because all his expectations are continually unfounded he goes from one event to the next from one Massacre or murder that he's brought about to the one that he

feels will culminated and nothing culminates it and everything goes wrong indeed he becomes increasingly like as he will eventually speak of a poor player upon the stage a poor actor upon the stage he becomes the Equivalent of a bad actor who is always missing her or his cues thus when he stares at the ghost of Banquo he is deeply outraged and he expresses the outrage in an amazing formulation blood hath been shed ear now in the olden time ear human statute purged the gentle wheel I and since too murders have been performed to too terrible

for the ear and then this would be comic if it were not so Frightening the time has been that when the brains were out the man would die and there an end and then in real outrage but now they rise again with 20 mortal murders on their crowns and push us from our stools this is more strange than such a murder is and the banquet breaks up in general disorder with Lady mbth crying for everyone to go with her very famous outcry and I don't want to be comic about this but there is something weirdly

comic about it she Cries out stand not upon the order of your going but go at once occasionally when one dismisses diness one invokes that but of course as a complex sort of a joke but we pass now to act four which is an act in which mcduff's family is massacred and act also in which the entry of MC Beth Into the Night World of the three witches and in particular hecy their goddess becomes stronger and stronger when they confront MC Beth they assure him of two things that none that is of woman born will

be able to harm you to slay you or or wound you and that you are safe in your kingdom until Burnham Wood The Forest of Burnham comes to dunen his High Castle or fortification which is up on the hill and he says if that is the case then indeed I am safe and there is nothing that I need fear after he goes even further hoping to kill McDuff and discovers that McDuff has fled to England he has Lady McDuff and all her children butchered and upon discovering that McDuff is fled to England he cries out

time thou anticipates my dread exploits and turns to child murder instead the flighty purpose never is overtook unless the deed Go With It From This Moment the very first thingss of my heart heart shall be the first thingss of my hand that is to say as soon as I feel an Impulse an emotional impulse I Will act on it and even now to Crown my thoughts with act be thought and done the castle of magdu I will surprise seize upon F give to the edge of the sword his wife his babes and all Unfortunate Souls

that trace him in his line down indeed to the very servants no boasting like a fool this deed I'll do before this purpose cool and clearly he is reaching his own kind of edge of Madness but it is very different from her Madness which opens the Extraordinary Fifth Act to which we come now and in which we have to work our way I think very slowly and carefully because it is one of the most complex and beautiful structures in all of Shakespeare it opens with Lady Macbeth sleepwalking and that should in itself remind us of

the transposition that has taken place she's so absolutely Resolute and bloody minded has become increasingly fearful and contrite and has turned mad and has been out of the Play for all of Act 4 and now once we see her Sleepwalk she will be out of Act five until we are told eventually of her death undoubtedly through suicide she utters a very famous Pros speech but terrifyingly eloquent in act 5 scene 1 as she sleepwalks she cries out and she still has the blood on her hands that she had washed off the blood of the that

was she smeared on the faces of the Grooms the blood of the slain Duncan out damned spot out I say One two why then is time to do it hell is murky her mind is gone F my Lord f a soldier and a fear what need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to aomt that is to say none can question us yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him which is one of the most frightening sentences in this terrifying play and Lady MC

Beth goes on speaking of Lady McDuff and McDuff the th of f had a wife where is she now what will these hands near be Clean no more of that my Lord no more of that you Mar all this with starting as though she has MC Beth present with her on the scene though he is not there at all Beth is told that he is going to be dethroned he is informed of his wife's madness he says to the doctor can you not physic to a mind diseased and the doctor says no he cannot do

it there is MC Beth at dunen at a room in his high castle in act 5 Scene Three and he is absolutely defiant He could not be a greater contrast to his wife who is so terribly oppressed by the bloodiness of everything that has happened and he cries out Bring me no more reports let them fly all to burnam Wood removed to dunen I cannot faint with fear what's the boy Malcolm was he not born of woman the spirits that know all Mortal consequence have pronounced me thus fear not McBeth no man that's born of

woman shall shall air have power upon thee Then fly false THS that is to say his nobl men are leaving him and mingle with the English epicures the mind I sway by and the heart I bear shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear and then another servant comes in and he shouts at him the devil damn thee black thou creamface loon where got thou that goose look and the servant trembling says there is 10 th000 and M Beth interrupts him geese villain the servant says soldiers sir and he says go prick thy Face

and overread thy fear th L livid boy what solders patch what solders way face the English Force so please you mbf says take thy face hence throwing the servant out and calls out to his Lieutenant Satan I am sick at heart when I behold Satan I say this push will cheer me ever or deceit me now and then utters a most extraordinary speech indeed the burning eloquence that MC Beth evidences in his fall is surely another part of his enormous appeal to Us I have lived long enough my way of life is fallen into the

sea the yellow leaf and that which should accompany old age as honor love obedience true of friends I must not look to have but in their stead curses not loud but deep mouth honor breath which the poor heart would Fain deny and dare not Satan and he calls to Satan SE y t o n but it's very curious Indeed that this evil subordinate should have a name that puns on Satan s a t a an and says what news more Satan says all is confirmed my Lord which was reported there are 10,000 English troops I'll

fight till from my bones My Flesh be hacked give me my armor Satan says is not needed yet and MC says I'll put it on send out more horses Scar the country round hang those that talk of fear give me mine honor and give me mine honor and indeed With it my armor and then he cries out again Satan send out the tains fly from me bring it after me I will not be afraid of death and Bane till Burnham Wood come to dunain but then to his immense shock it indeed does come because in

a very skillful move indeed on Shakespeare's part of stage bus the English Army and the Scottish Rebels approaching cut down branches the wood of Burham let every Soldier youw him down a bow and bear it Before him thereby shall we Shadow the numbers of our host and make Discovery in report of us that is to say we will be camouflaged we will be a kind of moving forest and we are moving now to the great Visionary climax of this play where I repeat one must slow down most extraordinarily we are in dunain within the Castle

McBeth enters with Satan his subordinate and armed men and cries hang out our banners on the outward walls the Cry is still they come our Castle strength will laugh a Siege to scorn here let them lie till famine and the Egg eat them up were they not forced with those that should be ours we might have met them dear for that is to say if they were not reinforced by the Scots who should be with me beard to beard and beat them backward home and suddenly there is a cry within of women crying out and

they're crying out in anguish though we don't know that as yet Because they have discovered that lady McBeth has committed suicide he cries out what is that noise a cry within of women and Satan says it is the Cry of women my good Lord and McBeth says something quite remarkable that he is suddenly afraid I have almost forgot the taste of fears the time has been my senses would have cool to hear a night shriek and my fell of here would at a dismal treti Rouse and stir as life were in it I have spped

full with Horrors darness familiar to my slaughterous thoughts cannot one star me and when Satan re-enters wherefore was that cry and this extraordinary exchange the queen my Lord is dead and then undoubtedly MC bef's most famous speech and I think indeed the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare except perhaps for hamlets to be or not to be Soliloquy a speech that has always Been much argued about by critics and directors MC Beth says she should have died Hereafter there would have been a time for such a word now clearly the antecedent the word being

referred to by the word word there would have been a time for such a word is the word Hereafter but so upset that the greatest of all Shakespearean and indeed of all literary critics Dr Samuel Johnson get by this that he insisted no this did not Make sense that the text had been misread and that MC Beth was saying there would have been a time for such a world when it was proved to Dr Johnson that this could not be the case then Johnson still insisted that the antecedent was not Hereafter but simply meant word

in the sense of intelligence or information but for once the great critic was wrong time which has been MC Beth's true Antagonist throughout this play time which increasingly is outraging him and driving him further to depredations in his Fury time has now reversed itself on him she should have died Hereafter not now there would have been a time for such a word as Hereafter but now there is no Hereafter and then an extraordin arily famous line not being Scottish and not being an actor I cannot render it as I have heard it rendered so brilliantly

by the Magnificent Scottish actor Sean McKellen each time I have seen Sean in the pot he has taken this line and by Rolling the RS in the Scottish mode he makes the line indeed creep in a petty Pace forever tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this Petty Pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time and all our yesterdays have lighted FS the way to Dusty death where fools means as it means in the Drama of King Le victims out out brief kandall and then a marvelous use of a theatrical metaphor

as magnificent in its way as king Leah crying out we cry when we are come to this great stage of fools Shakespeare perpetually uses for a stage player or actor the term Shadow he says the best in this kind are but Shadows here MC bef says life's but a walking shadow a poor player that is To say a poor actor that struts and Frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more and then returning to life it life is a tale told by an idiot full of Sound and Fury signifying nothing since

William fauler took the title of one of his great novels the sound and the Fury from that passage it rings a special Bell I think in our intellects suddenly mbth is informed that indeed Burnham Wood has come to dunen and He becomes absolutely outraged I pull in resolution and begin to doubt the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth that is to say the equivocal nature of the prophecies that HEC and the weird sisters have made to me fear not till Burnham Wood do come to dunain and now a wood comes toward dunen arm

arm and out if this which he a vouches does appear there is nor flying hence nor taring here and then the great voice Speaks in him I G to be a weary of the Sun and wish the estate of the world were now undone Ring the Alarm Bell blow when come rack at least we'll die with harness on our back these apocalyptic longings on the part of MC Beth lead to even greater senses of having been outraged on his part until suddenly in the midst of the battle as MC Beth is heroically but horribly fighting

suddenly MC du enters and cries Out Tyrant show thy face if thou beest slain and with no stroke of mine my wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still and McBeth cries out why should I play the Roman fall and die on my own sword while I see lives the gashes do better upon them McDuff re-enters turn hellhound turn and McBeth refuses to fight at first of all men else I have avoid thee but get thee back my soul is too much charged with blood of thine already mcdu says I have no words my Voice

is in my sword thou bloody of villain then terms can give thee out and they fight and McBeth cries thou losest labor as easy May thou the entrenching ear with thy Keen sword impress as make me bleed let fall thy blade un vulnerable crests I bear a Charmed Life which must not yield to one of woman born and McDuff shouts at him despair thy charm and let the angel whom thou still Hast served meaning the Fallen Angel tell Thee McDuff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped that is to say what we call a cesarian

and m Beth is utterly outraged and terrified a curse should be that tongue that tells me so for it hath cowed my better a part of man and be these juggling fiends no more believed that paulter with us in a double sense that keep the Word of Promise to our ear and break it to our hope I'll not fight with thee and McDuff says then yield Thee coward and we will exhibit you we'll have thee as oura monsters are painted upon a pole and under it here may you see the Tyrant like a circus exhibit

as it were and MC Beth and the very last thing he says cries out I will not yield to kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet and to be baited with the rabble's curse though Burnham would become to dunain and thou opposed being of no woman born yet I will try the last before my body I throw my Warlocke shield lay on McDuff and damn be him that first cries hold enough and they go out together fighting and then McDuff ENT his carrying the head which he has cut off of MC Beth in his hand

it fascinates me and should interest you I think that Shakespeare does not actually show you MC Beth at the moment of his death I think that is because our identity with him has been so overwhelmingly established that it would be almost too much of a shock for us to See it McDuff holds up the head and cries out the time is free and that essentially ends this extraordinary drama in which the oppressive sense of time has finally amounted to a dread burden from which at last we are liberated this is beyond any question I think

the most fearsome of all Shakespeare's tragedies one that one can never get out of one's head once one has seen it Properly performed or one has read it with real understanding for oneself I leave it and conclude this lecture with the realization of how deeply implicated I myself as well as I think you have been in the fate of MC Beth in the end the extraordinary thing about this play is that we are forced into intimate sympathy with someone whom we know is almost a mass murderer the next two lectures which Will conclude this series

of 14 will both be on the extraordinary play Anthony and Cleopatra which Shakespeare composed directly after he had finished MC Beth after listening to lecture 12 a student posed this question to Professor Bloom why does McBeth feel more and more outraged as the play goes on let's listen to the professor's response again I find the question absolutely relevant to what is at the Dire heart of this frightening tragedy all of MC Beth's expect ations are confounded in the course of the play all of his crimes only steep him deeper and deeper in blood he has

a prophetic or proleptic imagination of hallucinatory intensity yet again and again what is prophesied to him by the powers of Darkness the three witches and hecy turns out to be equivocal turns out to be something which possesses a double sense And feeling more and more betrayed in terms of the promises that have been made to him feeling in fact more and more betrayed as I think he is not intellectually capable of understanding but Shakespeare and we are more and more betrayed by his own imagination and its power MC Beth goes deeper and deeper into a

sense that he somehow is the victim of outrage that he is absolutely outraged but I would like to add Something as a kind of final note to this amazing play any representation which is successful in a play in a motion picture in a painting of outrage is extraordinarily compelling for us it provokes our sympathy and I think that Shakespeare is playing upon that also to force into a close identity with the dread figure of MC Beth all of us ultimately face an Outrage we cannot avoid the final outrage is the fact of human mortality that

each of us in his her own Consciousness however much we try to evade it each of us knows that he or she eventually must die and that is an outrage for Consciousness to conf conf front part of the power of M Beth as a play is to force us to confront that private outrage that someday we must sustain this ends lecture 12 Shakespeare The seven major tragedies lecture 13 Anthony and Cleopatra part one this is the first of two lectures on Anthony and Cleopatra which is the seventh and final of the seven Great tragedies I

will devote the first lecture to the first four acts of the play which culminate in the death of Anthony and then I will devote the entire second lecture to the Magnificent Fifth Act which is Cleopatra's superbly staged apotheosis of her own suicide I'd like to begin though by brooding on shakespear's really astonishing creativity of all the Wonders that I know about shakespare the most amazing is that in 14 consecutive months nonstop he wrote King leer MC Beth and then Anthony and Cleopatra Hamlet othell Lear and MC Beth are all tragedies of blood Anthony and Cleopatra

is something radically new and is a play that no one has been able to match it swings out and away from domestic tragedies of blood into a vast political and historical conspectus in involving the whole world and the struggle between Anthony and Cleopatra lovers and political allies on the one side against Octavius Caesar Grand Nephew of Julius Caesar who by the end of the play is the Emperor Augustus the first of the crowned Emperors of Rome want to make one other remark before I begin more than ever before Shakespeare in Anthony and Cleopatra hands over

the whole problem of perspectivism to the audience and to his readers by perspectivism I mean what attitude are we to assume towards the Protagonists towards the apparent hero and heroine of this great work towards Anthony and Cleopatra in trus and cresa Shakespeare has trois remark at one point what's ought but as it's valued and that is indeed The crucial question for The Spectators and readers of this great play what perspective are we to adopt upon Anthony and Cleopatra are they finally both heroic and authentically in love with one another or was there's only a political

Alliance Involving mutual betrayals and are they something less than they present themselves as being and that their followers take them as being and it's therefore appropriate that I go into the text now in act 2 scene 2 at about line 190 where Shakespeare bases himself very specifically upon a passage in plutarch's lives where Cleopatra first appears to Anthony when they meet here is Ena barbas the Faithful Lieutenant of Anthony and himself a man of very considerable and rugged character describing the Advent I will tell you the bar she sat in like a burnish Throne burned

on the water the poop was beaten gold purple the sails and so perfumed that the winds were Lovick with them the OES was silver which to the tone of flutes kept stroke and made the water which they beat to follow faster as Amorous of their Strokes for her own person it beggared all description she did lie in her Pavilion cloth of gold of tissue or picturing that Venus where we see the fancy outwork nature that is to say she is a Venus in which the imagination goes beyond mere nature of any kind whatsoever and she

is after all not exactly in first youth she is going on 40 historically speaking and Anthony himself is a man in his middle to late 50s and when someone remarks to enab barbas that she is frequently out of breath as she hops along in the street and says now Anthony must leave her utterly and enab barbas magnificently replies never he will not and then the greatest tribute ever paid I think to the beauty of any woman and and the Mystery of any woman anywhere in the world's literature inab barbas says age cannot wither her nor

accustom stale her infinite variety Other women cloy the appetites they feed but she makes hungry where most she satisfies the play throughout its first four acts will give us many manifestations of what is beautiful mysterious intriguing endlessly seductive and very shrewd politically about Cleopatra but it will Trace in Anthony something very different a pattern of decline as his faded defeat by Augustus Caesar to be becomes clearer and clearer It is a defeat that he meets with enormous dignity but again and again we find him bungling making very serious mistakes in judgment utterly baffled when Cleopatra

first sells him out and yet there is an enormous dignity as I've said in this Decline and I want to pick that up now and the extraordinary moment in Acts 3 scene 13 where Anthony Speaks and says come let's have one other Gody night that is to say before a final battle call to me all our sad captains fill our bowls once more let's mock the midnight Bell and of course he is never more here heroic never more impressive as he gradually comes to accept the imminence and reality of his defeats and yet in that

dignity with which he greets his sad captains there is a very dark element also thus in Act 4 scene 2 he says well my Good Fellows wait on me tonight scant not my cups and make as much of me as when mine Empire was your fellow too and suffered my command and Cleopatra who is bewildered by this says in an aside to enobarus what does he mean and enobarus very disapprovingly says to make his followers weep and again you hear this great premonitory dying music on Antony's part T me tonight maybe it is the period

of your duty that is to say after that I will be here no longer happily you shall not see me more or if a mangled Shadow per chance tomorrow you'll serve another Master meaning indeed Augustus Caesar I look on you as one that takes his leave most honest friends I turn you not away but like a master married to your good service stay till death tend me tonight two hours I asked no more and the gods Yield you for it that immense Dignity of his decline will continue and as it does I think as an

audience and as a readership we value him more and more as he becomes more and more humanized and as he shows the enormous generosity of his Spirit thus when enob barbus decides this cannot go on and abandons Anthony Anthony sends all of enobarus treasure after him that breaks the heart of Enobarbus and eventually he just lies down in a ditch and allows himself to die that he can Inspire both loyalty and in the case of enab babus a disloyalty which breaks and kills inabus is an extraordinary sign of the kind of personage that anony is

but I sometimes think that the best moment of seeing this is an extraordinary change that Shakespeare makes by and large he does follow Plutarch but in Plutarch Anthony is the particular descendant and devote of the god bacus or dionis Shakespeare changes that in act four Scene Three when it is perfectly clear that Anthony is going toward was his inevitable death by Suicide music is heard beneath the stage when several of his loyal soldiers are on stage but Anthony and Cleopatra are not and they wonder what it is that they Are hearing the first Soldier says

Hark and the other says music in the air under the Earth it signs well does it not no peace I say what should this mean and then the extraordinary meaning assigned to this cognitive music say the god Hercules whom Anthony loved now leaves him Anthony has been the Herculean hero and that is now going to depart from him forever And in some sense that dying music an amazing aesthetic and dramatic effect goes on all through the first four acts of the play to climax of course in the act in which we now find ourselves but

I want to interrupt this for a moment to point out what I've always felt is the most extraordinary even lipsis or deliberate handing over of something essential in the play to our Perspectivism to our judgment as audience and readership I had read this play for many years and taught it for many years until I suddenly realized that Shakespeare does not once give us a scene showing you the domestic life of Anthony and Cleopatra when they are not surrounded by their loyal followers and worshippers we never see them alone together except for one particular Moment practically

in the wings and it lasts only a second or two where he is furious with her for her treachery and she flees from him the enormous fascination of this deliberately left out matter is that Shakespeare wishes us to use our own imaginations to conceive what could this extraordinary Emperor and Empress of the East who have Had children together and though they betray one another nevertheless always go back to one another in the end and who to raise a point that I all spend more and more time on both in this lecture and then the next

finally do seem to have been authentically in love with one another though the full force of this does not seem to strike Cleopatra until he dies in her arms at different times I can imagine very different ways in which Anthony and Cleopatra behave when they're alone together I doubt they spend much time plotting or talking about Octavius who will be Augustus their sworn enemy and ultimately their undur as lovers no doubt a great part of their activity necessarily is erotic and yet after all since they are Both of them quite mature in the end what

passes between them whatever the degree of sexual intimacy must be considerable has to be conversation to try to Envision what that conversation would be like Shakespeare wishes to leave entirely in our hands after the god Hercules has abandoned Anthony there is a kind of last glorious Moment that Anthony and Cleopatra achieved together on stage surrounded by all of her and his followers he has just come come back from a highly successful last ditch though by no means decisive battle against the legions of Augustus and she greets him magnificently this is in Act 4 scene 8

by crying out Lord of lords oh infinite virtue and virtue does not mean virtue In our sense that is to say being honest or kind or charitable but has something of the older meaning of virtue which we still Preserve in the word verile the Latin sense of what it is to be a man oh infinite virtue comes thou smiling from the world's great snare uncaught and clearly she had never expected to see Him again unlike Augustus who might be called the first CEO or Field Marshal or combination of the two and who carefully avoids going

into battle himself Antony Champion as he is Herculean hero as he is always battles at the very Forefront of his men and he cries out my Nightingale we have beat them to the beds what girl though gray do something mingle with our younger Brown that is to say though I am indeed getting on into Late middle age yet have we a brain that nourishes our nerves and can get goal for goal of Youth that is to say and I think sometimes that Yates in His Brilliant late verse play the death of cahan Kahan being the

Irish the CTIC Hercules as it were perhaps remembering Shakespeare's Anthony at this moment kulin says to his beloved time makes younger but not Better men here then is that last moment of real Triumph that last Glory it is followed by her betrayal when by pre-arrangement with the envoys undoubtedly of Octavius her Fleet dashes away leaving Anthony to be defeated and we get a great scene of the loss of identity on the part of the Herculean Anthony and it's a scene that I want to really Center on one of the extraordinary elements in this play by

the way is not only its vast scope but the extraordinary profusion of scenes this is scene 14 of Act 4 as it opens Anthony speaks to his Freed Man and chief Chamberlain his servant who Bears the name AOS Cupid or love and Anthony knows and Eros suspects that it is time for Anthony in the Roman Mana to commit suicide so he does not run any risk of being taken by Octavius to be exhibited in a Roman triumph which is indeed as we will see in the next lecture why Cleopatra stages her own magnificent suicide there

is an Eloquence in scene [Music] 14 so subtle that it marks one of the many new departures in Shakespeare that this play exemplifies Anthony speaks and he's clearly very baffled he says Eros thou yet beholdest me which means as you ster at me are you still seeing Anthony am I still myself and AOS who is very Confused replies I Noble Lord and then Anthony for one rather remarkable meditation sounds almost like Hamlet and I think this is deliberate on Shakespeare's part Anthony is looking up since they are Outdoors at the clouds gathering at evening for

what will be after all his last Evening and he meditates sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish a vapor sometime like a beer or lion a towered citadel a pendant Rock a forked mountain or blue Promontory with trees upon it that that nod unto the world and mock our eyes with air that is to say we see things in the heavens that are not really there because the cloud formations suggest them and then speaking again to AOS he Says Thou Hast seen these signs they are black Vespers pageants that is to say as evening comes

on with its Darkness these are the pageants presented and AOS who is still baffled simply says again I my Lord but Anthony goes on and sounds more than ever like Hamlet that which is now a Horse even with a thought the rack dis liims and makes it indistinct as water is in water and AOS who still does not understand and is just being a kind of yes man says it does my Lord but then Anthony who is indeed suffering from a tremendous sense of lost identity very movingly says my good Nave Eros now the thy

Captain Is even such a body here I am Anthony yet cannot hold this visible shape my Nave I made these wars for Egypt and the queen whose heart I thought I had for she had mine which whilst it was mine had annexed unto it a million more now lost she Aros has packed cards with Caesar and fals played my glory unto an enemy's Triumph nay weep not gentle Aros there is left us ourselves to end ourselves Cleopatra has fled to a monument from which she will not come down and since she is a master of

duplicity she sends one of her chamberlains Marian to tell Anthony that she has killed herself Anthony responding to this says dead then and her Chamberlain says dead and then Magnificently exploiting the name of AOS Anthony says get my armor off me in effect unarm Aros the long day task is done and we must sleep off pluck off the Sevenfold Shield of Ajax cannot keep the battery from my heart oh cleave my sides heart once be stronger than thy content and crack thy frail Case Pace Arrow a paace no more a soldier bruised pieces go you

have been nobly born and then needing to be alone for a moment as he Grieves for Cleopatra and for his own lost identity he says to AOS from me a while Aros exits and then Anthony says I will orake thee Cleopatra and weep for my pardon so it must be for now all length is torture since the torch is out lie down and Stray no farther now all labor Mars what it does and he calls on AOS to come back and says to AOS s since Cleopatra died and of course she hasn't died nevertheless he

has no reason to believe that she hasn't since Cleopatra died I have lived in such dishonor that the gods detest my baseness I that with my sword quarth the world and or green Neptunes back with ships made cities condemn myself to lack the courage of a woman less noble mind Than she which by her death our it tells I am conqueror of myself and he says therefore to AOS you have long pledged that should the occasion rise you would strike me dead and AOS will not do it Anthony says Eros what thou bewi in great

Rome and see thy Master thus with pleached arms bending down his corable neck his face subdued to penetrative shame whilst the Wheeled seat of fortunate Caesar drawn before him Branded his baseness that ensued Aros said I would not see it Anthony says therefore you must do this Anthony turns away from him AOS says my sword is drawn AOS nobly says my dear Master my captain and my Emperor let me say before I strike this bloody stroke farewell Anthony says with great nobility to said man and farewell Aros Cries Out farewell great Chief shall I strike

now now AOS and AOS kills him Himself why there then thus I do escape the sorrow of Antony's death and humiliated by this believing Cleopatra dead and having seen Aros die rather than do it Anthony who has botched everything throughout this play now botches his own suicide come then and Eros thy Master dies thy scholar to do thus and he falls upon his own sword I learned of thee but he has only wounded himself to a slow dying how not dead not dead the guard ho Oh dispatch me the guard comes in with the other

guards and they are shocked at what they see Anthony says I have done my work ill friends so make an end of what I have begun but they break into apocalyptic and magnificent language since they regard him as a God the first cries out the star is fallen and the next and time is at his period allas and woe and they all refuse to give him the death wound only Then does Cleopatra send to him and he is carried in Scene 15 to her monument and we get the extraordinary scene together I am at the

ninth line of Act 4 scene 15 Anthony is brought in carried in and Cleopatra who is and we will be talking about this a great deal in the second lecture the most theatrical personage in all of Shakespeare surpassing even Hamlet in that regard that indeed is why I think she is the most difficult role ever created by Shakespeare or anyone else for an actress to play because how do you impersonate how do you act the part of someone who herself always seems to be acting a part so that you can never quite be certain when

it is pure self-dramatization or not here she cries out oh Sun burn the great sphere thou movest in darkling Stand the veing shore of the world and she urges her friends and followers including her two handmaidens and friends charman and Iris to help draw him up let's draw him hither because she still fears to come down from the monument Anthony Cries Out peace that is to say cease this lamenting not seizes Vala hath or Throne Anthony but anon's have triumphed on itself Cleo weeping Cleopatra weeping but at such a moment I don't mind Calling her

Cleo because when he's begin to get very fond of her indeed duplicitous and magnificent as she is she weeps so it should be that none but Anthony should conquer Anthony but wo is so and then with a dying music So extravagantly Glorious that Anthony himself in a sense is taken by it as Shakespeare is because this great line will be repeated again Anthony says addressing her as Egypt I am dying Egypt dying only I hear importune death a While until of many thousand kisses the poor L I lay upon thy lips but Cleopatra will not

come down they heave Anthony Aloft to her and she cries out and welcome welcome die when thou Hast lived Quicken with kissing had my lips that power thus would I wear them out and he repeats again that magnificent line I am dying Egypt dying give me some wine and let me speak a little and then a moment strangely hilarious and I think the hilarity is deliberate on Shakespeare's Part Anthony and Cleopatra like most personages in Shakespeare and I think like most of us here in life never really listen to what another is saying and here

after he says give me some wine and let me speak a little she cries out no let me speak and let me rail so high that the false huswife Fortune break her wheel provoked by my offense which is just FY and rant and he says one word sweet queen and then he tries to give her good advice And as usual gives her bad advice he says Trust butut proculus of those about Caesar in fact proculus will lie to her and say she will not be led in Triumph and Della will tell her the truth but

then this wonderful dying music again Anthony says the miserable change now at my end lament nor sorrow at but please your thoughts in feeding them with those my former Fortune wherein I lived the greatest Prince of the world the noblest and do now not basely die not Cowardly put off my helmet to my countrymen a Roman by a Roman Valiant and vanquished now my spirit is going I can no more and he dies and she utters a lament which I frequently feel is the greatest instance of what you could call the high Sublime in English

oh with it is the Garland of the war the soldiers pole is Fallen young boys and girls are Level now with men the odds is gone and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting Moon and she authentically Faints she is not play acting and when her women Rouse her again she ends the fourth act by saying magnificently not an empress anymore cuz they're saying Empress Empress no no more she says but e a woman and commanded by such poor passion as the maid that milks and does the meanest chores it were for me to

throw my scepter at the injurious Gods to tell them that this world did equal theirs till they had stolen Al Jewel that is to Say Anthony alls but not patient is sish and impatience does become a dog that's mad then is it sin to run rush into the secret house of death a death dare come to us and she says to Iris and charian we'll bury him and then what's Brave what's Noble let's do it after the high Roman fashion and make death proud to take us and with that they go out and this extraordinary

fourth act in this Sublime play and with a preparation for the ACT which will be entirely her Own when Anthony is off the scene if in some sense the whole of these glorious first four acts are a kind of scaffolding for her to ascend to her tremendous glory and apotheosis in the Fifth Act that in itself would enormously more than justify them but of course they are something more than that they are an extraordinary image of the teeming life of the whole ancient world at the moment of the most extraordinary Change over in it as

the Roman Empire truly begins after listening to lecture 13 a student posed this question to Professor Bloom why does Anthony lose his sense of identity let's listen to the professor response the question for this lecture is why does Anthony lose his sense of identity seems to me an excellent question indeed the inevitable the right question for the first four acts of this Play to some extent he has been in Decline for some time but that I think is not the determinant factor in his loss of identity to some extent it is undoubtedly the betrayals by

Cleopatra his over involvement with them the truth that at least until now he has been more deeply in love with her then she with him though there have been backslidings on his part as when he marries Octavia the sister of Octavius In an attempt to make peace and an alliance though it does not last most fundamentally he has been so much a kind of mortal God that the Godlike aspects do depart when the god Hercules leaves him and he indeed becomes a mortal and understands implicitly what it is to be mortal and yet has regarded

himself as the Herculean hero really all his Life so that now indeed he cannot recognize himself any longer his loss of identity has been gradual but when it has fully come upon him then it is shattering and total this ends lecture 13 Shakespeare of the seven major tragedies lecture 14 Anthony and Cleopatra part two this is the second of the two lectures on Anthony and Cleopatra and we'll deal entirely with the Fifth Act Of the play which doesn't just climax with but in a sense triumphs with the suicide of Cleopatra it is also the 14th

and final lecture of this series on Shakespeare's seven major tragedies and I think it is accurate to say that we have come an amazing distance in terms of the development of Shakespeare's tragic art from Juliet to Cleopatra Act five begins with the news of Antony's death being brought to Octavius and Octavius though he has to desire the death nevertheless is absolutely shocked and startled he cries out the breaking of so great a thing should make a great crack the round World should have shook Lions into civil streets and citizens to their dens the death of

Anthony is not a single Doom in the name lay a moity of the world that is to say a considerable part of the world and in shock not in grief but simply at as the recognition of one great man though a very different kind of great man the first CEO as I sometimes like sardonically to say and the last Herculean hero nevertheless Octavius is startled he says my mate in Empire friend and companion in the front of war the arm of mine own body and the Heart where mine his thoughts did Kindle that our Stars

unreconcilable should divide our equalness to this and then he stops knowing that he must get on to the next order of business which is that he wishes to lead Cleopatra in a magnificent procession of Triumph in Rome Which will be to his immemorial glory but therefore to her enormous shame we meet Cleopatra again in the second scene of act two where proculus whom Anthony had wrongly advised her to trust comes to lie to her and Cleopatra says Anthony did tell me of you bade me trust you but I do not greatly care to be deceived

that have no use for trusting And as always she is much shrewder than her slain lover and husband as indeed he must now be called proculus lies to her and insists that she will not be led in Triumph and yet even as this happens he gives a signal and Roman soldiers come behind her and sees her she pulls out her dagger but they take it from her she is disarmed and she says I I will starve myself I will eat no meat I'll not drink Sir this mortal house all ruin and then Della enters proculus

goes off and then in a dialogue between Della and Cleopatra she moves Della though he has fought on the side of Octavius by her amazing and accurate Praise of Anthony she says I dreamt there there was an emperor Anthony oh such another sleep that I might see but such another man dalab Bella who is trying to get her to Face Reality seeks to interrupt her but she goes on his face was as the heavens and therein stuck a sun and moon which kept their course and lighted the little o the Earth and alella again tries

to get her to pay attention but she goes on tremendously his legs bestrid the ocean his reared arm crested the world his voice was proped as all the tuned spheres and that to friends but when he meant to Quail and shake the orb he was As rattling Thunder for his Bounty there there was no winter in it and Autumn was that grew the more by reaping his Delights were dolphin-like they showed his back above the element they lived in in his Livery walked crowns and crowns Realms and Islands were as plates dropped from his pocket

and Della almost desperately Cries Out Cleopatra and she's called back to herself and says think you there was or might be Such a man as this I dreamt of and he says sadly gentle Madam no and she cries out and it's one of those passages in Shakespeare that never leave my memory and heart you lie up to the hearing of the Gods but if there be or ever were one such it's past the size of dreaming nature wants stuff to VI strange forms with fancy yet to imagine and Anthony were Nature's peace meaning n Nature's

Masterpiece against fancy not Imaginative at all but reality condemning Shadows quite but dalab Bella desperately is trying to tell her the truth she says to dalab Bella know you what Caesar means to do with me he says I am loaf to tell you what I would you know nay pray you sir and dalab Bella reluctantly but necessarily though he Octavius be honorable Cleopatra he'll lead me then in Triumph and Della says Madam he will I Know it and in comes Augustus Caesar the former Octavius to Li to her and to tell her that she and

her children by Anthony and indeed by Julia Caesar she has had quite a career pompy sees his rival having first come to Egypt with a conquering Army she became pompy's lover then she became the lover of Julia Caesar and finally as we have seen the lover of Anthony when Octavius withdraws supposedly having her promise that she will in no way harm herself Shakespeare begins to speed up the climactic action and glory of the play left alone with Shian and Iris Cleopatra says to them speaking of Octavius he words me girls he words me that I

should not be Noble to myself that is to say he is trying to deceive Me but hark the Sharman and she's Whispering something to charman and we know implicitly she is sending for the asps asps the serpents of the Nile that bite you and you die swiftly and without pain Iris in the meantime the gentler of her two attendance desperately says magnificently again finish good lady the bright day is done and we are for the dark Cleopatra speaking to Sharman hi the again I have spoke already and it is Provided go put it to the

haste and Sharman says Madam I will dalab Bella comes to tell her again and then goes off and then Cleopatra begins her quite gorgeous farewell she speaks to Iris and says what thinks thou thou an Egyptian puppet shall be shown in Rome as well as I and then speaking of the Romans mechanic slaves with greasy aprons rules and hammers shall uplift us To the view in their thick breaths rank of gross diet shall we be en clouded and forced to drink their Vapor Iris cries out the gods forbid and Cleopatra goes on in an extraordinary

passage which I treasure for many reasons one that it shows Shakespeare's own increasing discomfort with the laws of England which require him to use Boy actors to play the parts of women Cleopatra says nay is most certain Iris they will catch at us like strumpets and scold rhymers ballot us out of tune the quick comedians EXT temporarily will stage us and present our alexandrian Rebels Anthony shall be brought drunken forth and I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness in the posture of a and Iris desperately cries out oh the good Gods Cleopatra says

nay that's certain Iris says I'll never see it for I'm sure my nails are stronger than mine eyes and Cleopatra rightly says why that's the way to full their preparation and to conquer their most absurd intense Shaman re-enters having summoned the supposed fig seller who underneath the figs in his basket has the Fatal serpents the asps now charman show me my women like a queen she sends them off to get her most extraordinary costume go fetch my best attires and she thinks back to that Magnificent moment that I described in the last lecture quoting in

a barbas the barge she sat in like a burnish Throne burned on the water that was at cindus go fetch my best attires I am again for sidos to meet Mark Anthony that is to say I will meet him in the next world now Noble charman will dispatch indeed and when thou Hast done this chore I'll give thee leave to play till doomsday Bring our crown and all and now a great scene in which the clown of shakespear's company undoubtedly The Marvelous actor Robert Armen who had played the fall in King leer and the porter

in the knocking at the gate in McBeth I sometimes think this is the most remarkable dialogue in all of Shakespeare a guard comes in to say here is a rural fellow that will not be denied your highness's presence he Brings you figs and Cleopatra says let him come in and she mut es out loud what poor an instrument may do a noble deed he brings me liberty my resolutions placed and I have nothing of woman in Me Now from head to foot I am marble constant now the fleeting moon no planet is of mine if

in a sense she is denying her own Humanity or her status as a human in another sense a deeper sense I think she is moving Us by affirming it the Guardsman re-enters with the clown and says this is the man and Cleopatra sends the guard away avoid and leave him and then speaks directly to the clown who is one of the most fascinating minor figures in all of Shakespeare on and I want to take their dialogue very slowly and carefully and interpolate my comments Cleopatra speaks to the clown and says hast thou the pretty worm

of nyas there that kills and pains Not but she is playing upon another meaning of worm which is not only the serpent but the fallos and the clown replies with a mode of speech entirely his own truly I have him but I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him that is to say as he gazes on her beauty he realizes that he doesn't wish Her to destroy herself and says of the ASP for his biting is Immortal which is a wonderful kind of joke those that do die of it do

seldom or never recover and Cleopatra who necessarily is very interested indeed and who seems to want to prolong the moment though not as long as it will turn out the clown wishes to prolong it She says rememberest Thou any that have died on it and he that is a remarkable Pros speech with meanings on many levels he says very many men and women too and then he tries to make a kind of justest out of it though a Gest with a warning because it is becoming increasingly clear that he does doesn't want her to destroy

herself I heard of one of Them no longer than yesterday a very honest woman but something given to lie and he's punning of course upon lying down for sexual purposes as a woman should not do but in the way of honesty how she died of the biting of it what pain she felt clearly a sexual innuendo truly she makes a very good report of the worm and then speaking in general as man in regard to womankind but he that will Believe all that they say shall never be saved by half that they do but this

is most fiable that is to say what should be believed the worms an odd worm and suddenly Cleopatra wants to get on with it and tries to dismiss him get the hence farewell and he with some bitterness but also with sorrow sets down his basket and says to her I wish You all joy of the worm which is a bitter remark and impatiently she says farewell but he doesn't want to go as yet he Wars her you must think this look you that the worm will do his kind that is to say the kindness to

yourself that you want but in kind he will kill you and she's very impatient now and she says I I farewell but he turns very fascinating to us because he will not not Go he says look you the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people for indeed there is no goodness in the worm and she still impatient says take thou no care it shall be heeded and he realizes that she is not agreeing with him and he says very good give it nothing I pray you for it is not

worth the feeding and then a moment that can hardly be overpraised a moment unlike any other Even in Shakespeare and I think which makes us love Cleopatra because suddenly she is a little child again she says will it eat me and the clown I suppose partly encouraged by this says You must not think I am so simple but I know the Devil Himself will not eat a woman I know that a woman is a dish for the gods if the devil dress her Not but truly these same horon Devils do the gods great harm in

their women for in every 10 that they make the Devils Mar five which is a way of saying you are so wonderfully made you are such an extraordinary very kind of a being that you really should not throw your life away with what at your instructions I have brought to you but now she absolutely dismisses him well get thee gone farewell and the clown now in real Bitterness does exit but I think with great sorrow and says yes for sooth I wish you Joy of the worm it is a scene that transcends any other scene

of its kind in Shakespeare it goes beyond the knocking at the gate it goes beyond I suppose it's only real rifle has to be the graveyard scene in Hamlet where the grav digger played undoubtedly by the same great comic actor Robert Armen actually matches the wit and wisdom the dark wisdom of Hamlet in their colloquy but this is now very different from Hamlet Shakespeare allows Cleopatra a dying music that in Grandeur and Glory surpasses that of her now beloved Anthony she says to Charan and Iris who Come in with a robe a crown and all

the Royal Jewels give me my robe put on my crown I have Immortal longings in me now no more the juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip and then quickly she says yeah yeah good Iris quick my thinks I hear Anthony call I see him Rouse himself to praise my Noble act I hear him mock the luck of Caesar which the gods give men to excuse their after wrath and then magnificently Husband I come now to that name my courage prove my title I am Fire and Air my other elements I give to base

a life so have you done come then and take the last warmth of my lips she kisses Shaman and Iris a long farewell and iris's heart gives out and she dies and she says if thou and nature can so gently path The Stroke of death is as a love his pinch which hurts and is desired dust thou lie still if thus thou vanishes then tells the world it is not Worth leave taking and Cleopatra says this proves me base if she first meet the cured Anthony that is to say there in the afterlife who make

demand of her and spend that kiss which is my heaven to have and she speaks to the Mortal wretch the as which she applies to her breast and says poor venomous fo be angry and dispatch and charm in one of those marvelous apocalyptic moments in Shakespeare cries out oh Eastern Star but Cleopatra is Already in a kind of death hallucination or trance as the poison enters into her and she feels that the ASP is one of her babies whom she is nursing at her breast peace peace Dost thou not see my baby at my breast

that sucks the nurse asleep and shamian cries out oh break oh break and Cleopatra CRS as sweet as balm as soft as air as gentle oh Anthony now I will take thee too as though she is having Anthony take suck from her breast she Applies another ASA to home and she cries out what should I stay and she dies and Jan says in this vile world so fear thee well and then follows her in suicide and then we have the closing moment of the play Augustus Caesar Octavius enters with his men and stares at her

and cries out oh Noble weakness if they had swallowed poison would appear by external swelling and then magn magnificently but she Looks like sleep as she would catch another Anthony in her strong toil of Grace as if to say she is in no way disfigured she is as beautiful as ever and with that and a exit of Augustus and his Legions this extraordinary suicide to call it that but it doesn't somehow seem like a suicide it seems indeed a kind of immortal Ascent as much an apotheosis as the death of Hamlet though this is all

together a different person I'm always fascinated that the great Edwardian critic of Shakespeare who is deeply influenced me ac Bradley says that the four characters in all of Shakespeare most endless to meditation are F staff Iago Hamlet and Cleopatra I myself I think would want to add Le and MC Beth to make six but one understands what Bradly meant this subtle and magnificent Consciousness this extraordinary woman glorious if histrionic invariably witty surpassingly magnificently seductive of the audience as much as of Anthony is never more extraordinary than in the moment of her self emulation and something

Glorious forever passes out of Shakespearean tragedy with her death I have reached the conclusion of this course of 14 lectures I cannot meet the members of my audience of my course of my class but in spirit I would like to believe that I have been in the act of meeting you as in sense in the course of a semester I meet my own students I might Myself have been teaching Shakespeare for some 35 continuous years of my Now 50 years on the AL faculty and I intend to go on until death but I feel that

having to extemporize these lectures to an unseen audience has allowed me to achieve insights into Shakespeare's great tragedies that I have not experienced before and so in that Sense even if I never meet any but a few of you I am grateful to you thank you and farewell e e e e