Class Notes March 8, 2011

Gretchen Minton Guest Speaker!!

• discussed level of mythology page 1664 Midsummer's Night Dream
• continuation of Julius Caesar
• looked at map/handout that Dr. Minton gave us
• Scene 1
• one of the greatest scenes in Shakespeare
• presence of rumor/report
• lots of messages
• common liar/gossiper line 60
• stuff said in Rome appears to be true
• Cleopatra & Antony never alone!!
• No soliloquy; no perceived transparency as there is in Hamlet
• Only C & A 's perspectives and actions through others perspectives
• play about perspectives
• everything is debatable
• Act 2 Scene 3 Line 198
• most famous part of A & C
• presented as truth
• but really just another perspective
• DOMITIUS ENOBARBUS
  I will tell you.
  The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
  Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
  The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
  The water which they beat to follow faster,
  As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
  It beggar'd all description: she did lie
  In her pavilion--cloth-of-gold of tissue--
  O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
  The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
  Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
  With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem
  To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
  And what they undid did.
  AGRIPPA
  O, rare for Antony!
  DOMITIUS ENOBARBUS
  Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
  So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes,
  And made their bends adornings: at the helm
  A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle
  Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands,
  That yarely frame the office. From the barge
  A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
  Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
  Her people out upon her; and Antony,
  Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone,
  Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
  Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
  And made a gap in nature
• Dichotomies
• Rome
• Order/Reason
• Democracy/Republic
• masculine
• statues
• cold, hard
• Anthony=Mars
• Egypt
• Passion
• Dictatorship
• feminine
• pillow
• soft, plushy
• Cleo=Venus
• metaphors
• of food/drink=consumption
• Plutarch
• Greek writer/philosopher
• tells of lives of noble Greeks & Romans
• A&C
• sets up and collapses dichotomies
• natural world
• constantly in danger of dissolving
• Create imaginative space Act 1 Scene 1 line 17
• new heaven, new earth.
• Revelations
• Identity
• Asks who am I with everything breaking down?
• It is what it is
• MARK ANTONY
  It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad
  as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is,
  and moves with its own organs: it lives by that
  which nourisheth it; and the elements once out of
  it, it transmigrates.
• Montaine
• French philosopher
• 16th century
• no fixed identity
• "becoming" used in the play alot
• evolving
• suitable
• both are the meaning in the play
• Antony
• identity
• constantly changing and being questioned
• It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
  Which some did die to look on (Act 1 Scene 4 Line 67)
• no longer young
• fighting the image reflected in the mirror
• nostalgia for past throughout play
• Act 3 Scene 13 Line 140
• look, thou say
  He makes me angry with him; for he seems
  Proud and disdainful, harping on what I am,
  Not what he knew I was
• Cleopatra
• identity
• embraces lack of identity
• Act 2 Scene 2 Line 216
• Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
  Her infinite variety: other women cloy
  The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
  Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
  Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
  Bless her when she is riggish
• she is always changing
• not on stage a lot which makes others want her more
• absence increase desire
• always play acting
• foregrounding drama
• hard to tell if people are genuine
• Is this a farce because no one has a set identity?
• bathos
• effect of anticlimax
• Act 1 Scene 2 Line 155
• If there were
  no more women but Fulvia, then had you indeed a cut,
  and the case to be lamented: this grief is crowned
  with consolation; your old smock brings forth a new
  petticoat: and indeed the tears live in an onion
  that should water this sorrow
• coming out of an anticlimax then builds back up to new climax
• crash down and build up
• rhetoric transparency
• History
• Act 3 Scene 13 Line 41
• And earns a place i' the story
• all concerned about story in future
• control
• monument
• Cleo want to control versions of herself for present & future