Online media for this item is not available.
Description
This is the final programme in the series. The programme revisits some of the key critical approaches to understanding Shakespeare - especially new historicism and cultural materialism. It includes
... interview material collected at the World Congress on Shakespeare in Los Angeles in 1996.
| 12 | 00:00:47,000 | 00:00:49,000 | Jerry Brotton: So of course what that leads to is that… |
| 10 | 00:00:47,000 | 00:00:50,000 | they're the characters who have the most dignity in the play - more than Theseus. |
| 10 | 00:00:48,000 | 00:00:52,000 | then immediately there is a political tension in the play. |
| 13 | 00:00:49,000 | 00:00:52,000 | Jerry Brotton: ..you can take a theoretical argument around feminism, and say… |
| 11 | 00:00:50,000 | 00:00:53,000 | Terence Hawkes: We need to take into account say in reading King Lear, the fact that… |
| 11 | 00:00:51,000 | 00:00:55,000 | Those are characters who actually have some sense of who they are, and indeed... |
| 11 | 00:00:52,000 | 00:00:58,000 | If we think of Cleopatra as black , then black and white, we have… |
| 14 | 00:00:53,000 | 00:00:56,000 | Jerry Brotton: ..how does that help us think about, say, Lady Macbeth? |
| 12 | 00:00:56,000 | 00:01:01,000 | ..it's precisely and typical of Shakespeare that he gives one character in the play, |
| 15 | 00:00:57,000 | 00:01:00,000 | Jerry Brotton: How does it make us think about a character like Cleopatra? |
| 12 | 00:00:58,000 | 00:01:02,000 | ..a racial tension in the play; we 've got a gender tension in the play. |
| 12 | 00:00:58,000 | 00:01:02,000 | ..it was written at the time of the gunpowder plot in Shakespeare's Britain, |
| 16 | 00:01:01,000 | 00:01:03,000 | Jerry Brotton: So theory in that way can be something that can be… |
| 13 | 00:01:01,000 | 00:01:07,000 | not Theseus, not the upper class lovers, a glimpse of the fairy queen, |
| 17 | 00:01:03,000 | 00:01:06,000 | Jerry Brotton: ..quite abstract, but then can also be something very enabling. |
| 13 | 00:01:03,000 | 00:01:05,000 | We have a political tension between Rome and Egypt, |
| 13 | 00:01:03,000 | 00:01:09,000 | but that we are reading it now, say at a time when our own union, the United Kingdom, |
| 14 | 00:01:06,000 | 00:01:10,000 | and of course this is cast in the framework of a tragedy. |
| 18 | 00:01:07,000 | 00:01:10,000 | Terence Hawkes: I can remember as an undergraduate and as a schoolboy... |
| 14 | 00:01:08,000 | 00:01:12,000 | he gives one human character and that's Bottom, at the lowest of the low, |
| 19 | 00:01:10,000 | 00:01:15,000 | ..writing essays on Macbeth as the embodiment of evil, as if evil was… |
| 14 | 00:01:10,000 | 00:01:15,000 | is facing similar possibilities of splitting up. There are nationalist movements… |
| 15 | 00:01:11,000 | 00:01:16,000 | Ania Loomba: A feminist perspective for me in Anthony and Cleopatra actually involved... |
| 15 | 00:01:13,000 | 00:01:17,000 | the vision of the fairy queen and that's not an accident in Shakespeare, that's because… |
| 20 | 00:01:15,000 | 00:01:21,000 | ..a free-floating quality like smog or smoke, floating in the air, and that occasionally… |
| 15 | 00:01:15,000 | 00:01:22,000 | ..in Scotland, in Wales and notoriously in Ireland that are presenting our society with… |
| 16 | 00:01:16,000 | 00:01:23,000 | ..looking at Cleopatra as - constructed as a prototype of the Orient, this… |
| 16 | 00:01:17,000 | 00:01:21,000 | ..Shakespeare's playing this fantastically peculiar double game of simultaneously… |
| 21 | 00:01:21,000 | 00:01:25,000 | ..attached itself to poor unsuspecting human beings. |
| 17 | 00:01:21,000 | 00:01:26,000 | ..asking us to ridicule these characters and then catching us up short in the ridicule and… |
| 16 | 00:01:22,000 | 00:01:27,000 | ..a similar chasm, a similar possibility of break up that Shakespeare's society was… |
| 17 | 00:01:25,000 | 00:01:32,000 | ..lascivious wanton unruly woman, but then this stereotype - why was Shakespeare… |
| 22 | 00:01:26,000 | 00:01:31,000 | I don't believe that evil is like that, I believe that evil is generated by a society for… |
| 18 | 00:01:27,000 | 00:01:30,000 | ..insisting that they have something which in fact the… |
| 17 | 00:01:28,000 | 00:01:32,000 | ..presented with, and that's where cultural materialism has something to add that… |
| 23 | 00:01:31,000 | 00:01:37,000 | ..political or social purposes, and so a materialist reading of the play would say... |
| 19 | 00:01:31,000 | 00:01:36,000 | ..rest of the fancy people in the play don't have even a touch of. |
| 18 | 00:01:32,000 | 00:01:35,000 | ..it insists always that we return to the present. |
| 18 | 00:01:33,000 | 00:01:37,000 | ..constructing it or why did it have any meaning for people in Shakespeare's time, |
| 19 | 00:01:36,000 | 00:01:40,000 | Kiernan Ryan: What you do if you' re a culture materialist is you look for the gaps... |
| 19 | 00:01:37,000 | 00:01:42,000 | and it had meaning not simply because people were going to the East, because… |
| 24 | 00:01:38,000 | 00:01:41,000 | ..what is at stake in Macbeth in political terms? |
| 20 | 00:01:40,000 | 00:01:45,000 | ..and silences and contradictions , the little involuntary gestures of the play so to speak, |
| 25 | 00:01:42,000 | 00:01:47,000 | Stephen Greenblatt: When I was trained as a literary critic it was as a new critic, |
| 20 | 00:01:42,000 | 00:01:48,000 | ..there was colonial travel, because people had certain ideas about women overseas, |
| 21 | 00:01:46,000 | 00:01:50,000 | in which the play gives away its guilty collusion with patriarchy or with hierarchy… |
| 26 | 00:01:47,000 | 00:01:52,000 | which was very good training I hope, but it meant absolutely treating the work of art… |
| 21 | 00:01:48,000 | 00:01:51,000 | or women and men overseas - but also because there was Elizabeth ruling on the throne, |
| 22 | 00:01:51,000 | 00:01:57,000 | ..or with the throne in the case of King Lear say, and that the best one can do… |
| 27 | 00:01:52,000 | 00:01:57,000 | ..as if it were a still object completely framed and isolated from the rest of the world, |
Available online
