Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Within a year, Henry’s allies turn into his enemies. We see those who put him on the throne in Richard II now begin to plot against him in 1.3. Hotspur, who fancies himself a man of restless action but who is really driven by his own fevered imagination. In contrast, Falstaff, weighed down by his enormous body. Hotspur and Falstaff: mind and body. Poins and Hal disguise themselves and rob Falstaff...

It has been a year since the end of Richard II. Henry IV is king, but faces Scottish and Welsh rebels. Hotspur, son of Northumberland, refuses to ransom prisoners until Mortimer, his brother-in-law but also heir presumptive to the throne, is ransomed in return. Where is Hotspur’s counterpart, Prince Hal? In a tavern with Falstaff and his gang, planning robberies. Hal’s soliloquy that he is only pr...

The Queen sent into exile in France: the imagery of a “divorce.” York discovers that his son Aumerle is plotting again Henry and goes to Henry to denounce him as a traitor. His wife helplessly tries to intervene. A scene that degenerates from seriousness into farce, a pattern in the play. Richard’s lyrical soliloquy of himself as a microcosm, but one divided. His unexpectedly heroic death. In the...

Richard is deposed in a public trial, which Bolingbroke and Northumberland hope to turn into a Soviet-style mockery in which Richard confesses all his wrongs. Instead, he steals the show, and makes them look like bullies and himself like a martyr—like Christ as the Man of Sorrows. The scene was not printed until after the death of Elizabeth, who is reputed to have said, “Know ye not I am Richard I...

Richard, having made enormous, though eloquent, speeches of self-pity instead of bolstering the morale of what followers remain to him, holes up in Flint Castle. But when confronted by Bolingbroke and his fellow rebels, descends, slowly and ritualistically, from the walls, surrendering without the slightest resistance into the hands of his enemies. In the next scene, the Queen, speaking to a Garde...

The exiled Bolingbroke lands in England and gathers an army, claiming he has returned only to claim his legal rights as the heir of John of Gaunt. Old York, the last of the 7 sons of Edward III, helpless and feeble, switches his allegiance to Bolingbroke, the symbolic turning point of the play. Richard returns from Ireland and makes a bizarre, theatrical speech about how the earth itself will rise...

John of Gaunt is inspired on his deathbed with a famous speech about the glorious land of England—now fallen on hard times due to the corrupt Richard II. Richard comes in, and Gaunt tells Richard what a fool he is being, angering Richard. Gaunt dies offstage, and Richard immediately moves to take his estates, which should go to Gaunt’s son Bolingbroke, in order to fund wars in Ireland. This not on...

In a ritualized, formal scene, Bolingbroke opens the play by accusing Thomas Mowbray of having murdered Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Mowbray denies it, and a date for a trial by combat is set. Mowbray hints what is widely believed, that he was acting on the orders of Richard II himself. Gloucester’s widow seeks justice from John of Gaunt, but Gaunt says nothing can be done because the...

The place of the history play among the four genres that Shakespeare wrote in. Its origins as a native form of drama, unlike tragedy and comedy, derived from Classical literature. The historical background of the plot of Richard II, the first of Shakespeare’s double tetralogy dramatizing English history for well over a century before his time.

After the crisis of Act 4, with two sets of lovers estranged and good friends quarreling, a happy ending brought about by Hero’s symbolic death and rebirth. A ritual at her supposed tomb is followed by a wedding of Claudio to a masked woman, who turns out to be Hero. Much Ado is a play about the instability of the human condition, the revolution of opposites: merry and melancholy, love and hate, f...

Claudio, out of revenge, publicly shames Hero by accusing her of infidelity at her own wedding ceremony. All the men behave badly in reaction—except Benedick. Benedick and Beatrice finally confess their love for each other in a short but touching scene.

Their friends contrive through staged conversations intended to be overheard to bring Benedick and Beatrice together. Meanwhile, Don John and his henchmen also stage a false drama, attempting to make Hero seem unfaithful. Dogberry and the Watch, the lower class characters, overhear the plotting and actually arrest Don John’s henchmen, but they are not “noted” by their social superiors.

Don John the melancholic. “Merry” and “melancholy” as two of the play’s many opposites. His attempt to cause mischief by telling Claudio that, in the masked ball in the first part of Act 2, Don Pedro woos Hero for himself rather than for the sake of Claudio. Meanwhile, Beatrice wounds the disguised Benedick by telling him that no one respects Benedick because he is too “merry,” always joking and f...

A comedy of manners, a great deal of it in prose, about “noting,” i.e., taking note of. “Nothing” would have been pronounced “noting” in Shakespeare’s time. Rumors and misinformation spreading like wildfire and wreaking havoc with social life: Much Ado takes on new meaning in the age of social media. Two romances with two women: the lively, independent Beatrice and the patriarchally controlled Her...

The mystery of Hamlet’s seeming “conversion” in Act 5. Most of the cast wiped out in the final scene. Can the complexities of Hamlet be drawn together into a unified pattern? Three types of tragedy: (1) of social order; (2) of isolated, alienated consciousness; (3) of love and gender. Hamlet as an attempt to encompass all three.

The mixed mood of the famous graveyard scene, mixing seriousness and humor in violation of the neo-Classical unities. Hamlet and the gravedigger speaking of death as leveler of social distinctions. The skull of Yorick the jester, whom Hamlet knew as a child. The funeral of Ophelia. Hamlet and Laertes struggle in her grave. Hamlet’s new sense that “There’s a divinity shapes our ends.”

Act 4, Scenes 5 and 7, form a continuous series of dramatic interruptions of the Court. Ophelia’s mad scene, which is also her suicide, in fact consists of three entrances, although the last is by messenger only, announcing her death by drowning. The psychoanalytic complexities of Ophelia’s songs and speeches. Laertes also bursts in, ranting melodramatically about revenge in a way that out-Herods...

Gertrude feels guilt over her marriage to Claudius—but was she ignorant of the murder? The key word “nothing” begins to resonate through the play. Hamlet has hidden Polonius’s body. When confronted about it, his seemingly mad speeches revolve around the idea of metamorphosis—in the words of Ophelia, we know not what we may be. Ophelia’s mad scene.

Hamlet tells the Players not to overact, to suit the words to the action. Audience conversation before the play: Hamlet’s passive-aggressive sexual remarks to Ophelia. The Mousetrap play. Claudius leaves. His guilty soliloquy. Hamlet chooses not to kill him while he is praying. He goes instead to his mother’s bedroom to confront her.

The First Player, at Hamlet’s request, recites a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, the death of King Priam at the hands of the son of Achilles. Why is this in an already-long play? The most famous soliloquy in all of drama, “To be or not to be.” Why not suicide? Hamlet’s furious tirade when Ophelia tries to break up with him, following her father’s orders. Is this misogyny, justified because Ophelia i...

Everyone is acting. Polonius instructs his servant to act a part and spy on Laertes. Hamlet pretends to be mad to Ophelia. Polonius bursts into the Court, where Claudius has averted an attack by Fortinbras, and reads a love poem from Hamlet to Ophelia—a very bad poem. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, courtiers, attempt to draw Hamlet out. The arrival of the Players.

Horatio and two other friends tell Hamlet they have seen the ghost of his father. Polonius gives longwinded advice to his son Laertes, and a humiliating admonishment to his daughter Ophelia for believing Hamlet’s professions of love. Hamlet talks to the Ghost, who claims to be from Purgatory, and speaks of “murder most foul.”

The opening scene: darkness, paranoia, uncertain identity. Threats from without and within: invasion and the Ghost. Scene 2: The Court. Hamlet’s Biting One-Liners. Hamlet’s first soliloquy: rage and sexual disgust.

The fascinating background of Hamlet . Its enormous influence on 19th and early 20th century writers and critics due to its themes of alienation, isolated consciousness, and the ambiguity of reality. The origin of the basic plot in Danish legendary history. The vogue for the “revenge play” in Shakespeare’s time. The uniquely complex textual background of the play, which means that any modern editi...

The plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is over by the end of Act 4. Is Act 5 a mere crowd-pleaser? Or, rather, does it widen the play’s thematic perspective? Theseus’s skeptical speech about the imagination is clearly not the whole story. Among the many opposites reconciled by the play are reality and imagination, but Shakespeare leaves the transforming power as a mystery, something we cannot under...