Episode 263: “Much Ado About Nothing” by William Shakespeare, Acts 4 & 5

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 263 Summary

Episode Title: “Much Ado About Nothing” by William Shakespeare, Acts 4 & 5
Release Date: February 11, 2025
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks
Guest: Cindy Rollins

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I. Introduction

In Episode 263 of The Literary Life Podcast, hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, alongside lifelong reader Cindy Rollins, delve deep into William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, focusing specifically on Acts 4 and 5. This episode continues their comprehensive series on the play, aiming to uncover intricate themes, character dynamics, and Shakespearean techniques that elevate the work beyond a mere romantic comedy.

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II. Literary Tradition and Influential Figures

The episode begins with a discussion on Owen Barfield, a lesser-known member of the Inklings, and his profound influence on literary giants C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Angelina emphasizes, “[Owen Barfield] was such a tremendous influence on both of them” (02:54), highlighting his role in shaping Lewis's transition from materialism to acknowledging a spiritual realm. This conversation underscores the podcast's commitment to exploring the intellectual traditions that inform great literary works.

Upcoming Events Highlighted:

• Webinar Announcement: Living Page: Learning to Read the Language of Nature scheduled for March 19th, exploring the connection between nature and storytelling.
• Mini Classes: Jen Rogers' Words of Power class on the Inklings, available on HouseOfHumaneLetters.com.

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III. Critical Perspectives on "Much Ado About Nothing"

Angelina and Thomas examine critical opinions from historical figures:

1. William Hazlett: From The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (10:01), Hazlett praises the play’s blend of the ludicrous with the tender, though he mistakenly refers to Hero as a “heroine,” a misstep Angelina corrects.

2. George Bernard Shaw: Shaw’s critique labels Shakespeare as lacking true understanding of comedy, stating, “Shakespeare had no idea of comedy, period” (12:42). The hosts juxtapose Shaw’s perspective with C.S. Lewis’s admiration for Shakespeare, noting Shaw’s bias against theater and its conventions.

Angelina underscores the importance of recognizing these critiques to appreciate the depth and resilience of Shakespeare's work, despite varying interpretations.

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IV. In-depth Analysis of Acts 4 and 5

a. Structure and Themes

The hosts explore the unique structure of Acts 4 and 5, noting that Act 4 in Shakespearean plays is traditionally challenging to write due to its position between the climax and resolution. However, in Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare maintains tension seamlessly:

• Act 4 Efficiency: “the latter acts don't feel like an anti climax” (23:55), praising Shakespeare's ability to sustain conflict without dragging the narrative.

W.H. Auden is cited, noting that even less engaging passages in the play serve to flesh out themes or advance the plot, ensuring no element feels extraneous.

b. Character Dynamics

The conversation delves into the transformation of characters, particularly Claudio and Benedick:

• Claudio's Blindness: Angelica explains Claudio’s impaired judgment due to slander, highlighting his impetuous nature and inability to perceive reality accurately.

• Benedick and Beatrice's Evolution: Initially anti-romantic, both characters undergo a shift toward ultra-romanticism, culminating in their heartfelt yet snarky declarations of love. Angelina and Thomas read a poignant exchange from Act 5, capturing the blend of genuine emotion and witty banter that defines their relationship.

Notable Quote:

Thomas Banks [41:49]: "How about I do love nothing in the world so well as you."

c. Irony and Symbolism

The hosts discuss the use of irony and symbolic characters:

• Don John as Allegory: Don John represents slander and deceit, embodying the destructive power of falsehoods within the community.

• Dogberry’s Role: Positioned as the "upside-down fool," Dogberry inadvertently unravels the convoluted plot through his misunderstandings, symbolizing how unconventional characters bring truth to light.

Angelina draws parallels between Dogberry and Christ-like figures who use apparent foolishness to restore order, emphasizing the theme that truth often emerges from unexpected sources.

Notable Quote:

Angelina Stanford [51:53]: “There is a reason why in Shakespeare's plays it is always the fool who sets things right.”

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V. Comparative Literature Insights

Angelina and Thomas draw insightful connections between Much Ado About Nothing and other literary works:

• "Romeo and Juliet": Both plays feature the theme of slander and mistaken identities leading to potential tragedy.

• "Pride and Prejudice": The episode highlights similarities in character dynamics, such as the initial resistance to romantic ideals and eventual realizations of true affection.

• Ovid's "Metamorphoses": References to transformation allude to the rapid character changes and revelations within Shakespeare's play.

Notable Quote:

Thomas Banks [55:36]: “Ovidian image because the story of Europa and Jove is in Ovid's Metamorphoses.”

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VI. Restoration of Order and Conclusion

In Act 5, Shakespeare masterfully restores order through the revelation of truth and the undoing of deceptions:

• Public Confessions: Characters like Don John’s henchmen confess their misdeeds, facilitating the restoration of community harmony.

• Hero’s Resurrection: Although initially shamed and believed dead, Hero is revealed to be alive, symbolizing the triumph of truth over slander.

• Double Wedding: The play concludes with not only the union of Beatrice and Benedick but also the reunion of Claudio and Hero, reinforcing the restoration of order and communal bonds.

Angelina emphasizes that the play’s conclusion exemplifies Shakespeare’s ability to intertwine personal resolutions with broader societal restoration, embodying the essence of comedy.

Notable Quote:

Thomas Banks [74:47]: “Come, let us play music. Prince, you're sad. Get a wife. Get the wife.”

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VII. Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Angelina Stanford [02:54]: “Barfield was such a tremendous influence on both of them.”

• Thomas Banks [10:01]: “Perhaps that middle point of comedy was never more nicely hit.”

• Thomas Banks [12:42]: “Shakespeare had no idea of comedy, period.”

• Thomas Banks [41:49]: “How about I do love nothing in the world so well as you.”

• Angelina Stanford [51:53]: “There is a reason why in Shakespeare's plays it is always the fool who sets things right.”

• Thomas Banks [55:36]: “Ovidian image because the story of Europa and Jove is in Ovid's Metamorphoses.”

• Thomas Banks [74:47]: “Come, let us play music. Prince, you're sad. Get a wife. Get the wife.”

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VIII. Final Thoughts

Angelina concludes the episode by urging listeners to view Shakespeare's works through the lens of divine reality and the universal struggle between order and disorder. She emphasizes the importance of looking beyond surface-level interpretations to grasp the profound truths embedded within the narratives.

Key Takeaway:
Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing serves as a microcosm of the larger battle between truth and deception, illustrating how personal and communal harmony can be restored through honesty, wit, and the unraveling of falsehoods.

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This episode offers a rich, multifaceted exploration of Much Ado About Nothing, blending literary analysis with broader philosophical and theological insights. Whether you're a seasoned Shakespearean scholar or a casual literature enthusiast, the hosts provide valuable perspectives that enhance the understanding of this timeless comedy.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I'm with the man who is most definitely not Dogberry.

[Thomas Banks]

No, no.

[Angelina Stanford]

The very articulate and mysterious Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

I know I applied for the Neighborhood Watch, but they turned down my application.

[Angelina Stanford]

We are here to finish our series on William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Today we're going to talk about Acts 4 and Act 5, and when we're done, we'll take a step back and see if we can look at the whole story as a whole, take a look at the shape of it and see what we learn from looking at it as a whole. So, yeah, we've got a lot of fun things to talk about. Before we get to that, though, a quick reminder. Yesterday was the first class of Jen Rogers Words of Power, her mini class on the Inklings. And we learned about Owen Barfield. And it's fabulous. And if you thought, oh, no, I forgot to sign up for that, it's not too late because this class will be once a week for the next few weeks. Everything's recorded. So you can go over to our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com click on the Mini Class tab and can join us for a fabulous, fabulous class. If you have an interest in the Inklings or the theory of language and the imagination and what those guys were trying to do, this will, this will wet your whistle.

[Thomas Banks]

I have a feeling that this will be the most attention Owen Barfield has ever received. Well, since his death. Maybe not even, maybe even during his life as well.

[Angelina Stanford]

We are trying to remedy that. He has a. He has a lot, a lot to offer. And honestly, I don't think you can really understand Lewis and Tolkien if you don't understand Barfield because he was such a tremendous influence on both of them.

[Thomas Banks]

Lewis somewhere describes him as. It sounds like kind of a dig, but I don't think he meant it that way, as kind of an anti self. The person in your life who has read the same books as you have read, listened to the same music, has had something of the same education, but they look at them, they value them differently than you do. And in a way that sort of calls some of your own principles into question perhaps and makes you think about them. He was the guy who made Lewis reappraise a lot of his. No, that is, I think that's a valuable thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's very true. Really sharpened his thoughts, you know, in particular, how was it? Plenty to talk about this, but you know, in particular when Lewis met Barfield, Lewis was a materialist. He, he did not believe in a spiritual realm or divine or anything like that. He just thought, you know, the natural world is all there is.

[Thomas Banks]

We are here, this is now, and when we're dead there is no now.

[Angelina Stanford]

Pretty much, you got it. And Owen Barfield was not. And so great war, quote unquote, the great war between them was years and years of wrangling over this because they, they did agree on so much about language and words and the imagination and symbol. But Owen Barfield just kept coming back to, well, these things have meaning because they connect to a divine reality. And that was always the stopping point for Lewis, like, nope, nope, can't go there, can't go there. And then of course what ends up happening is Lewis's materialism crumbles. I mean, it's through all these conversations with Owen Barfield that he abandons his materialism. He didn't, he didn't become a Christian at that moment, but it was kind of step one in his faith journey was to say, okay, there's a divine realm, there's a supernatural realm, a spiritual realm. There, there is more than what we see with the naked eye. That is real and true. So it was a very important, very, very important friendship.

[Thomas Banks]

As a cultural figure, I think Owen Barfield also represents something we don't have anymore. The non academic intellectual whose contributions to, you know, books, to literature or you know, philology are kind of an outgrowth of hobbies he pursues passionately. Because he wasn't a professor, he was a solicitor, he was a lawyer.

[Angelina Stanford]

And this is throwback to a much older time.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, like kind of a last in a tradition.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. The private scholar, Thomas Jefferson. Samuel Johnson.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a figure that has kind of gone extinct sadly.

[Angelina Stanford]

One of the things about Owen Barfeld, it always just feels like, you know, a punch to the gut is to realize that he died in 1991. And so you put that in the context of Lewis dying in, what, 63?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Lewis was a 65.

[Angelina Stanford]

So when you think about that, that's when it's really like, oh, my gosh, we could have had so much more of Louis, just, you know, three more.

[Thomas Banks]

Decades if he had taken better care of himself.

[Angelina Stanford]

He had taken better care of himself. Well, you know, he also. He got shot in the car.

[Thomas Banks]

Was it Barfield's daughter who was kind of the inspiration for Lucy?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, that's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. I think. I think I'd heard that somewhere.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Lucy Barfield. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Something else to announce, though, since we had our digression about Owen Barfield, which somewhere. The Owen Barfield enthusiasts are very excited that we had a digression about Owen Barfield. Um, but this is hot off the presses. We just announced this, a brand new webinar coming in March, March 19th. And I think you guys are going to be just as excited about this as I am. This webinar is called the Living Page. Learning to Read the Language of Nature. That's right. You heard that, right? Here's the description. Why has nature been called the first book? And what does it mean to say that we must know nature to know stories? These are the questions we will be exploring in this webinar. It may be said that book of nature is the common tongue between us and an older age, and we must recover our eyes to see it. Indeed, the understanding of the natural world that undergirds poets from Virgil to Wordsworth, cannot be wholly lost to us as long as we walk upon the same earth and live under the same sun which they beheld every day. Together, we will be guided one step further towards understanding why centuries have called nature herself the font of image and symbol. I'm very excited about this. My students know, because I talk about this all the time, that George McDonnell said there are two ways to nurture a child's imagination. One is through stories, and the other is through nature. So we're going to get a lot closer to being able to answer the question, why and why is spending time in nature so important for the development and the formation of our imagination? So I'm looking forward to that. So that is going to be a webinar where I will be there hosting it. But most of the material will be presented by Ms. Ella Hornstra, who is a House of Humane Letters fellow and also a certified permaculturalist. So she comes to us with some specialty here about Nature and patterns in nature and nature symbolism. And I cannot wait for you all to learn from her.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm thinking in our circle of acquaintances and scholars, she's kind of the one person who could do this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, no, I totally agree. Like, I, I don't want to. I don't want to steal her thunder, but she's amazing. She's amazing. The stuff she has taught me. We'll. We'll be talking about some symbol in literature, and she'll say, ah, well, this connects to this natural pattern. And I'll just sit there with my mouth open like, okay, yes. No, I'm struck all the time that if I understood nature better, I would understand stories even. Even better. So that is. That's very exciting. And that is coming up and, you know, speaking. I'll. I'll give an example of what I'm talking about. About if we understood nature, maybe we could understand literature better. So we hadn't said on the last episode, does dogberry mean anything? So one of our students, Jonathan Jeko, another great lover of nature, messaged me to say, it does mean something, that Dogberry is a rowan tree.

[Thomas Banks]

Ah, well, if his name had been Rowan, that wouldn't have been. That wouldn't have quite worked because dogberry sounds unpleasant and low. Clownish.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, and a rowan tree is kind of high. But a rowan tree is very connected in all kinds of Celtic lore and has a lot of significance. And it's actually a rowan tree. It's actually connected to a Christ image. So we'll have to see. Is Dogberry a Christ image in the story?

[Thomas Banks]

I'm not seeing it.

[Angelina Stanford]

We'll have to see. Hang on. But another example. Okay, so we were also talking about the gulling scenes. G U, L, L to gull. So like Gulliver to trick or Gullible to be tricked. So turns out that a gull is a bird that swallows anything.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, that is true.

[Angelina Stanford]

So again, if we knew nature better, we would. We would get these. We would get these references. All right, well, do we have some commonplace quotes, Mr. Banks?

[Thomas Banks]

We do indeed. I have. I have two of them. Both of them.

[Angelina Stanford]

You cheat or Go ahead.

[Thomas Banks]

Yep, both of them dealing with this play directly. One of them is from William Hazlett, the Romantic era essayist and criticism. This is from his book the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. And he's talking about the stature of A Much Ado About Nothing and its place in Shakespeare's wider oeuvre. He writes, quote, these were happy materials for Shakespeare to work on. And he has Made happy use of them. Perhaps that middle point of comedy was never more nicely hit, in which the ludicrous blends with the tender, and our follies, turning round against themselves in support of our affections, retain nothing but their humanity. Yeah, that's. That's one of those critical passages I can't really add to or correct in any way. I should say also that Hazlett, in the same essay, commits a. This egregious howler where he says, hero is one of Shakespeare's finest heroines and the outstanding figure in this play.

[Angelina Stanford]

Wait, is that.

[Thomas Banks]

What was that for me? I don't know. Yeah, this is. He says this. That she's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Few things that Shakespearean scholars like agree on that. There's a consensus, but there's a hundred.

[Thomas Banks]

Percent consensus that she and Claudia were dull and flat and basic.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Beatrice and Benedict are the real stars.

[Thomas Banks]

And he says great things about. He makes actually some sharp observations about the kind of dialogue, you know, the witty banter between her and Benedick. But, yeah, Hazlett is one of those critics who is ingenious rather than careful. And his brilliant moments, he stands out and he says something that you have felt perhaps watching a particular play but could not articulate yourself. But he also, again, he was a rushed journalist who wrote really fast, and you get the impression he didn't necessarily edit his own thoughts very carefully. So, yeah, he has his mistakes.

[Angelina Stanford]

I feel like I'm so guilty of that myself. Oh, no, no, I'll be kinder to him.

[Thomas Banks]

Genius can afford to be careless, I guess. But the other commonplace. Sorry, I've gone on a tangent already, but this is from George Bernard Shaw, who had a complex relationship with Shakespeare, and I think he kind of posthumously envied him. I mean, Bernard Shaw, writing a few hundred years later, I think he had a sense that he could never quite equal Shakespeare either, as an artist. He always feels the need to write him down, to denigrate him. And he writes here, short and sweet. Shakespeare had no idea of comedy, period.

[Angelina Stanford]

What?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, he says he was a good showman and he knows how to. He knows how to generate lively action in his comic plays, but he didn't understand comedy in, I guess you could say, the roots of it as a form. He had no idea of comedy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, I wish I could remember the quote, but there's G.K. chesterton wrote an. An essay, actually several essays on Shakespeare where he totally roasts George Bernard Shaw.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, there was a point of disagreement between them because Chesterton, being a normal Englishman who likes Normal English things like Shakespeare and death.

[Angelina Stanford]

But he roasts him pretty hard. It's off the tip of my tongue, but I'll get it wrong.

[Thomas Banks]

But like Bernard Shaw, he's always looking for a little. Just a place where he can insert his knife. I mean, he says in another piece of writing, another critical piece of writing, that Shakespeare's fight scenes are all inconsequential staging and fake.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Theatrical.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I know. Like, they. Because, like, the guys don't. Guys don't talk when they're actually trying to kill each other in a dual convention. I know. It's. Yeah, it's.

[Angelina Stanford]

He just couldn't like trying to turn Eliza Doolittle into a lady as a stage.

[Thomas Banks]

You almost get the impression that that Shaw. It's not so much he dislikes Shakespeare as he dislikes theater, which in a playwright is kind of an odd prejudice. But there you are.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't like these plays. They're so theatrical.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, my turn. Before I do that, I realized I forgot to say the date of that nature webinar. That is March 19th. And as with everything we do, it's available live or later. So you can again, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and you can register for that webinar. It's going to be fantastic. I should also say that we did keep our promise a couple episodes ago when we read Ulysses Soliloquy from Troilus and Cressida. We said, oh, we should go over this in our next all fellows Eve event, which are with our Patreon. And we did. We did. And we had a great time. We spent like 90 minutes, and we went through that entire soliloquy and talked about medieval cosmology and Shakespeare and order, and it was fantastic. It was. It was a. It was a great.

[Thomas Banks]

It was a fine tooth comb kind of experiment.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, we did it together. It was so much fun. Several people have mentioned how much they're enjoying how much fun we are having.

[Thomas Banks]

No, that's good.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is good. But I am having a ball. I'm having a ball talking about Shakespeare with you. I want to just, like, scrap the whole rest of the year and just go through all the Shakespeare plays. I'm having so much fun with you.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Don't worry, guys. I'm not gonna do that, but I'm tempted to.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. We might get a little bit bogged down around Henry VI, Part two, but I think. I think. I think it's actually a challenge. Maybe next year or some year in the future, we should take a Play that nobody really likes. I think that's a great idea. Here's something. I don't know why. It's not even a play I really like, but I've read it six times or so. Timon of Athens or Timon of Athens, if you want to say it the British way. I don't know something about that. Maybe it's like self hatred or something. But I'm drawn back to that play again and again. It always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But I keep reading it. I would love to do it on the podcast someday.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. I have to confess, I've never read it and that's hard. It's one of those hardly the, like the. The marketing scheme here to get me to do it.

[Thomas Banks]

And like, have you ever, like seen an ad for it being performed? It's not one of those that really has entered the repertoire the way that most many of the others have.

[Angelina Stanford]

But you would do a great job taking us through any of the Greek or Roman plays, I think.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's another for sure do. I'm just. We're spitballing right here on a live show. But we definitely could do Julius Caesar together. You have so much.

[Thomas Banks]

I taught that one in a Shakespeare mini class and really enjoyed it, but I'd like to go through it with you as well.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I have not read. I don't think I've read Julius Caesar since maybe high school.

[Thomas Banks]

If you're a homeschooler.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I've read it again since then, but not. But only a couple times.

[Thomas Banks]

And if you're listening to this and you're a homeschooling parent, as we know many of you are, Julius Caesar is really one of the first plays to read with your kids. It's one of those Shakespeare plays. I wouldn't say read Hamlet or Lear as their first taste of Shakespeare. That might turn them off. That's for slightly older audience. But Julius Caesar, I mean, there's some darkness in there. I mean, there's assassination and plotting, but there's nothing to make you squeamish. Saying it's a play that children can appreciate, I think understand too. And it's a good lesson in political manipulation in skullduggery. And I really liked it at that age and I enjoyed teaching it to me middle school students as well. When I've done that in the past.

[Angelina Stanford]

Definitely do that. We should. I'll put it on my list. All right, my turn for the commonplace quote. So I've got something. Another quote from good old Harold Goddard. So this is from his book the Meaning of Shakespeare. And at the beginning he's kind of summarizing the way that Shakespeare has been approached and judged over various centuries since his demise. So I'll summarize what he's saying, then I'll get to the actual quote. Well, first of all, the first sentence of this is just will tell you why I love this man so much. The history of Shakespearean criticism confirms this statement, demonstrating how only the imagination can apprehend the imagination. I like him so much. So he's talking about first of all the neoclassical period. So immediately after Shakespeare's death. And the neoclassical period is the one that decided Shakespeare didn't follow the classical rules, therefore he wasn't very good. And Godd points out they might admit that he had moments of genius, but overall they thought he lacked art because the way they defined art was very, very narrowly, it had to follow so the so called classical conventions. I love how he says at the end of that. But they showed how powerless reason is to grasp imagination. Then he goes on to describe the romantic period and says that that period at its best produced as good criticism of Shakespeare as has ever been written. So this would be Coleridge, for example, his lectures on Shakespeare and MacDonald and even, even your Guy Hazlett. And then he says that after that criticism started degenerating. And so I just, I love the last sentence of all of this. For alongside the man who finds his own soul. And so the soul of everyone in a work of art is the man who reads into it his own prejudices and opinions, makes it a point of departure for some sheer invention, or uses it to grind his own axe. All of them fatally different things.

[Thomas Banks]

Was he thinking of Bernard Shaw though, do you think?

[Angelina Stanford]

He may very well have been, yeah. I of course am thinking of every homeschool curriculum company that I don't like. But. Oh yes, but this is it. This is it, right? In art you can find your own soul and therefore see the soul of everyone. And whereas most people today are reading into Shakespeare or really any literature, they're reading into it their own prejudices of opinions or. The point he makes is they make it a sheer departure just to talk about something else. And that's what C.S. lewis said to. In experiment he talks about how a lot of times when people are reading, what they're responding to is their own emotional reaction and that they have brought that to some from some other place. Or he says they might be responding to like a mental or an emotional association, but it's not the work of art itself.

[Thomas Banks]

Or they might be using the work of art in question as an excuse or a means of importing whatever. Hobby horses.

[Angelina Stanford]

Correct.

[Thomas Banks]

Historical, political, economic, whatever they want to talk about. I once read an essay, I think it was by the. Actually, it was by an economist. It was the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who occasionally wrote newspaper essays about literature and things like that. He wrote an essay about Evelyn Wall in which he criticized Brideshead Revisited for an inegalitarian sensibility. And it's, I mean, it's like, well, I mean, you're dealing with an aristocratic recusant family who has servants and things like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

These sayers. Because Lord Peter Whimsy was an aristocrat.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Leave your marks.

[Thomas Banks]

And I love. I love. Or Orwell. I absolutely love Orwell. But yeah, it's. It was a bugbear. It was. And even his friends, his friend Cyril Connolly, who is also a very, you know, credentialed left wing journalist, remarked that Orwell, I mean, he had been at school with him when they were kids. He said he was the kind of man who could not blow his nose without talking about workers, conditions in the handkerchief industry. Yeah, yeah, maybe that's.

[Angelina Stanford]

But you know, it's a great example, right. Literary scholars, readers, people admire, none of them infallible. We are not infallible. Right. We have to push back against the idea that, that our, that our experts are infallible. You know, for the most part, I, I really, really like George Orwell. I respect his mind. I think he's a very good reader. That doesn't mean I agree with everything out of his pen. I thought he really lost it when, when it came to evaluating the Lord Peter Whimsy books and. But again, it's because he had his personal bugabear, like you said, like he's so focused on the plight of the proletariat that this, I mean, we can't have an aristocrat as the main character. And he's likable. Like, no way. This won't do. Right. I mean, everybody has their blind spots. I'm sure I have my blind spots as well.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, don't we all? Yeah, yeah. Also, interestingly, one longer essay of his where you see, I think both kind of his strengths and weaknesses as a literary critic is the one on Swift. We have some brilliant observations, but also, but yeah, but I think he like ends up kind of falling down the hall. A lot of Swift's critic do that. This man is a misanthropic people Hating nihilists and.

[Angelina Stanford]

But he loved that book and well, we were really getting off topic. He loved that book.

[Thomas Banks]

He read it once a year.

[Angelina Stanford]

He read it once a year. Huge influence on 1984 when I treated Teach Gulliver's Travels. I have a good time pointing out to my students all the echoes of 1984.

[Thomas Banks]

But.

[Angelina Stanford]

But, yeah, yeah, anyway, good, good to be reminded that we can all have our blind spots. And so one of the things we're trying to do on this podcast is to give you a way to talk about arc that's not just jumping on your hobby horse or just are not a place to air your personal prejudices and opinions or to even see them reflected back at you. And when we get to the end of this podcast, I hope that I can give some examples of what it is that we're talking about. But first, let's carry on with Acts 4 and Acts 5. So Act 4 in a Shakespeare play is traditionally the most difficult act for him to write. Because in a five act structure, if the climax always comes at the end of Act 3 and it does, and the resolution can't come to Act 5, then he's always left with the problem of what do I do with Act 4? And if you read enough Shakespeare, you see that he handles it differently in every play. But I thought he handled it very well in this play. He just continues to further knot things up. But it doesn't feel like it's dragging. It doesn't feel like it's a big one.

[Thomas Banks]

Thing I think is actually very impressive in this play is that the latter acts don't feel like an anti climax of any sort because they apprehend the bad guys. Or I mean, two of the bad guys are caught and one runs away. Yeah, like halfway through.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. No, no, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, that he can keep the tension up because sometimes Act 4 and some of the plays can drag a little bit.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, certainly.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he can't introduce new conflict in Act 4. He can only twist up the conflict that he introduced earlier. And he does it really well here. And I think part of it is that he has so many excellent subplots that he can, that he can, you know, develop. So without thinking, like, yeah, trying to think of an example, like we've all seen, we've all seen a movie where the guy and the girl, we know they're going to end up together and there's some obstacles and it just feels like the filmmaker is just dragging on the obstacles and you're just like, get it over with already. Just get him back together. You know, you kind of lost interest. Sure, they can't hold the tension, but he holds the tension.

[Thomas Banks]

I think he does. W.H. auden remarks about this play that it's one where even the boring passages or the not as interesting passages seem to have their place either as a fleshing out of one of the principal themes or as simply a means of furthering the plot in one way or another. And there doesn't seem to be anything extraneous. I don't think there's any fat in this place.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, no, I agree. I feel like this is about as close to a perfect comedy as you can get.

[Thomas Banks]

And actually, I remember once listening to Peter Lightheart, who's a pastor and also, you know, a literary scholar of some of some eminence. He made a really good point. And I was like 14 when I heard this. And I don't even know why it stuck with me, because it wasn't like my mind necessarily moved in these things naturally at that point in my life. But he said that the more you read Shakespeare, the more you notice that things that seem to occur for no reason actually kind of a very, very good reason for existing. So he gives the example. I remember he gave the example. I'm sorry, I'm remembering something that happened 20 odd years ago.

[Angelina Stanford]

But no, that's okay. I'm grinning because I know what he's quoting, but go ahead.

[Thomas Banks]

But he uses the example of a scene in Hamlet between Polonius, the scheming, spying, you know, Lord Chamberlain and a servant of his named Ronaldo. And Polonius is telling Ronaldo to go follow his son, that is Polonius's son Laertes, who is in Paris, who's probably living the high life of a young man there in fashionable company and gambling and getting into trouble and find out who he's hanging out with. And he basically act as my spy to keep me informed of my son's whereabouts. We never meet this character Ronaldo again. He says, I will do this, my lord. And then he goes and he never comes back into the play. And it seems like an entirely unnecessary little bit of distraction. He doesn't even weave a subplot out of it, but it tells you very much about the kind of man that Polonius is. Polonius is the kind of guy who likes to listen to conversations behind curtains and likes to spy on other people.

[Angelina Stanford]

Cost him, dude.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's a bad habit. But, yeah, it turns out it doesn't pay off.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I'm so glad that stuck in your mind. And I'm grinning because Peter Leithart, I know, quotes Harold Goddard a lot. And that's a Harold Goddard quote.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, well, there you go.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes. Harold Goddard makes that point that it's in those throwaway moments that usually Shakespeare is telling us his most important thing. And I think that that's true in this play as well. All right, so Act 4, we are under the shaming of Harrow. So Claudio has decided to go with the wedding and publicly shame her because he believes that he has been dishonored. And Don Pedro is going to participate in it because he also thinks he's by proxy been dishonored because, you know, they, they feel like they are the.

[Thomas Banks]

No words are harsh enough for this hussy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Correct. They, they, they've been, they've been duped and, and used. Illy. Now, let's just pause for a second. Any emotional response you might be having about, I can't believe a woman could be treated like this. And they're such jerks and oh, this is just misogyny. And let's just, just, let's just let the story unfold. And then when we get the end and we just look, we'll look at the whole thing together and not hyper focus on. On things that perhaps are not what you think they are. So he, he waits until they're like, are there any just causes why these two should not be together? What? Okay, that's actually very clever in terms of storytelling though, because how many romantic comedies do you get to that. Does anyone know just cause. And it's someone bust in the door. Okay, but the fact that it's. It's the groom who says it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Is kind of awesome in the way that he structured. Does anyone know any just cause why these two should not be together? Yes, I do. I know. And they. And Benedict thinks it's a joke.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

He thinks, oh, Claudia, stop fooling around at your wedding, man. That's not funny. And. And then. So there it is, right? He says the whole thing, and so he makes his accusation. And Harrow is blushing. And I love this because it points out that Claudio misreads the signs.

[Thomas Banks]

Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Claudio is blind. He only sees the appearance of things. And because he's been poisoned, he sees what he expects to see. Right? He's. She's been slandered. And so when she blushes, he says, look, look at that guilty blush on her face. Right?

[Thomas Banks]

She realizes she's been caught. And of course she feels remorse now. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

The friars are Going to say, I've been quietly watching everything. And those signs mean the opposite of what Claudia. Right. So you have these. This two. The setup of the person who can see and the person who cannot see. So Claudio has been blinded. He's been blind the whole way through. Right. Don John's been just yanking his chain from the beginning. Right. First telling him Don Pedro was wooing harrow for himself, and he fell for it. So we know Claudio is the kind of guy who's impetuous. He falls for things very quickly. He has intense emotional reactions to things. And so he's kind of losing his mind publicly here. And he misreads the signs. He's blind. And I love how I'm trying to think how to say this on a podcast when I know their little ears around. I love how her dad just assumes.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. These guys, they. Right. They're high ranking men and friends of mine. They accuse my daughter. They must.

[Angelina Stanford]

They must be right reasons.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

First thought was perhaps the honeymoon got started early, huh? Right. And he's like, Claudia. Well, I mean, if.

[Thomas Banks]

I was trying to think of a euphemistic way of saying that. Yeah, okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Where he's just like, claudia, I mean, if. If perhaps things got a little out of hand last night. I mean, you know, y'all are basically married and you were her husband in a way. And Claudio looks at him like, I'm not talking about me. It's not me I'm accusing her of. But now. So what we need to pay attention to here is the fact that Don Pedro and Claudio are appealing to. Like, how do I know something's true? I saw it with my own eyes. I heard it with my own ears. Right. That's how we know something's true. Of course, we, the audience know. This is how Shakespeare, you know, holds up that irony. We know what they don't know, which is that their eyes have been deceived and their ears have been deceived. Indeed, that those are. Those are actually faulty ways to know truth. So we're right back to our appearance versus reality. But there's a double thing, because Claudio's speech is, you appeared to me to be Diana, but you're really Venus. Diana being a virgin.

[Thomas Banks]

God. Venus being famously not a virgin. A woman of easy virtue. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, a goddess.

[Thomas Banks]

I love that expression. A goddess of easy virtue.

[Angelina Stanford]

That you do you love that. You're always looking for a way to toss that into conversation.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I think usually in context, when it's at least semi appropriate, it was appropriate now. Well, yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So the irony is, is that he is saying, she is not what she seems, but he's the one who has been fooled. He's the one who is seeing things that are not there. So the whole appearance versus reality thing is being played on multiple levels. And then Don Pedro's just like, I also am dishonored. I'm throwing my hat in the ring, too.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. Because I had, you know, played a. I've been his wingman in all of this.

[Angelina Stanford]

Correct. And I'm just an innocent wingman bystander.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, interestingly, however, Benedict does not join in.

[Thomas Banks]

No. And he says he's just confused. He's perplexed, he's confuddled. He says, I know not what to think.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he keeps. To calm him down. Specifically her dad, who's, like, losing his mind. I've been dishonored. Just, someone kill me right now. And he's like, wait a moment. Patience, patience. Let's. Let's watch this out. So it's very interesting. We see something about Benedict's character here. He didn't just immediately throw his hat into the ring with his bros and take their side. He's watching. He's observing. He's trying to make sense of this. He's not. He's not the one having the intense emotional reaction and jumping the gun. Harrow says, God defend me. And they continue to. To attack her. And then Don John's right there. He's right there, and he's making his little comments, too, because Leonardo's like, tell me exactly. List. List the charges against my daughter. Tell me exactly what you are accusing her of. And Don. Don very wisely and slyly comes in with Fifi. They are not to be named, my lord. Not to be spoke of. There. Chastity enough in language without offense to utter them.

[Thomas Banks]

The charges are just so heinous that we're not even gonna really bring them up in specifics, you know, lest we get caught out here.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now, I will say this, though. So Don Jon is obviously. He's slander. I mean, he's. I'm not gonna say he's allegory, but he's almost an allegorical character.

[Thomas Banks]

He could be. He's one of those characters that's simple enough that he could be a vice in a medieval passion play or something like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, I'm reminded of the personification of rumor in the Aeneid. Remember?

[Thomas Banks]

You know, with a thousand eyes and ears.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep. Rumor runs really fast through the camera.

[Thomas Banks]

She grows as she goes. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, it's just Genius. That, that image of rumor literally running through the camp and everybody's losing their mind.

[Thomas Banks]

When I teach the Aeneid, I tell my students that's actually a very important moment in literary history because in, at least in epic poetry, I don't think you have an example of a character like that before Virgil. Because there's no purely allegorical character. Character in Homer.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that's true. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. Well, that's just one of the many ways that C.S. lewis talks about that, that Virgil anticipated so. So many things. Yeah. Gonna. Boy, this is gonna turn to a five hour episode because this. Where we're thinking of all the connections. But if Don John is kind of the allegory of slander here, and I think he is, there's something very telling then that, that slander exists. Slanderous power exists in the shadows, in the insinuations, in the. Well, I don't want to say it right. I don't want to say it out loud, but you know what I mean.

[Thomas Banks]

Just hint a fault or hesitate. Dislike.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly the kind of thing where somebody comes to you and says, well, I don't want to gossip, but. And then, you know, whatever they're about to say after that is straight up gossip. And they're just pretending to be too sweet. You know, sugar wouldn't melt in your mouth. I'm so sweet. I wouldn't possibly be the slanderous Don John here. But that's how it goes, right? So that's, that's, that's without the great.

[Thomas Banks]

Line at Alexander Pope, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's excellent. That's excellent. Okay, so, yes, so we're just going to hint and suggest we're not going to say anything. Then Claudio goes on to say, well, I'm, I'm so distraught now. I'm never gonna love another woman now. Okay, so we gotta put this into a larger context. So, because remember, they're, they're on these journeys. Claudio and Harrow were the ultra romantics at the beginning and Benedict and Beatrice were the anti romantics at the beginning. And in this act we see them switch.

[Thomas Banks]

And now that Claudia is the kind of misogynistic.

[Angelina Stanford]

I hate all women. Benedict's over there writing love sonnets, right? So they, they've switched in this act. They're not gonna stay here. Be patient. So it's very interesting that it's a callback to the first act when Benedict says, I'm not going to get married because women are unfaithful, and she will cheat on me. And so here's Claudio thinking, yes, women are unfaithful and they cheat on you. And this is what happened to me, right? So they. They've. It's almost like Claudio and Benedict have switched places. So then they leave. Well, Hera, okay, so Leonato wants to die. Harrow faints. So fainting is a type of death. Yes. So slander has murdered. Which everybody knows that, right? Slander murders. Murders with the tongue, Right? And so it. Slander has murdered her. This play is very, very allegorical. Slander. So slander has murdered Harrow. So they all leave, and Benedict. Benedict says to Beatrice, you know, how is she? And Beatrice thinks Harrow's dead and she's freaking out. But the friar believes her, as I said earlier. He says, you know, I've been watching this, and I think that's the blush of an innocent woman.

[Thomas Banks]

No, we may have. I think we did bring this up before. We did talk about Shakespeare sometimes reusing props, prop devices. But this seems very much like he thought, oh, yeah, that thing I did with the friar and Romeo and Juliet here, like, you know, can pretend to be dead, and then that'll, you know, be the catalyst for a reconciliation. Let's do that again.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's do that again. But that's so great because. Well, I was gonna talk about this later, but we'll talk about it now. In the comic structure that Act 4, where you're sliding down to your catastrophic fall in a tragedy be your catastrophic fall that would end in your destruction, is the almost tragedy. The almost catastrophe, or as to, as Tolkien calls it, the EU Catastrophe. And so the fact that he uses a plot device that did result in a tragedy, and he's going to use it here as the almost tragedy, is brilliant. It's brilliant because you're reading this and you're thinking, oh, yeah, what could go wrong? I'm going to fake my own death. What could go wrong? And, you know, here you have Romeo and Juliet showing you literally everything that could go wrong.

[Thomas Banks]

I was thinking of the friar here. It's interesting that both you have a Franciscan friar in each case. He's thinking, yeah, a colleague of mine tried this up in Verona a few years ago. And did it work? Actually, they both died by their own hands. But I'm convinced that the theory is sound.

[Angelina Stanford]

The theory is sound.

[Thomas Banks]

100% success rate, 50% of the time.

[Angelina Stanford]

So his plan is, let her pretend to be dead, and this will calm everybody down, and Claudio will come to his senses, and the Slander will die with her. And. And this is. This is going to all be okay. And Benedict continues to tell Leonardo, you know, to. To relax. And. And he's saying things like, these men. Why would these men lie? And this doesn't make any sense. Why would they lie? Now, it's very interesting if we go back to our Much Ado about noting idea. The Friar says, I have been noting the lady. Right. So we're back to noting, which means eavesdropping. Noting, which means I've been paying attention. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

Reading people's reactions.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. And so his. He didn't overhear anything. He's actually looking at her and he says, I see a thousand innocent shames. And because of the slander, which has blinded everybody and turned everything upside down, innocent blushes look guilty. Right? You following me? So everything's upside down.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Proofs of innocent make you look guilty. The slander has turned everything upside down. And so that when Benedict says to Beatrice, did you share a room with her last night? She says, no. And Leonardo immediately says, see, that proves it. It. And she says, but I've been with her every night in the last year. Okay, well, if Leonardo would have stopped to consider that, because Claudio said, Harrow's been meeting with this guy a thousand times. Okay, so how could that have happened if she's been.

[Thomas Banks]

We've heard it from her own mouth.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. This whole time. Right. So that's actually evidence supporting Harrow's innocence. My point is, once the slander is, you know, out there and turns everything upside down, they no longer have eyes to see the signs of innocence, look guilty to them. So the whole world turned upside down. All right? And Leonardo is like, I think she did it. And she's. She's dead to me. Okay? So everything's falling apart. This. This is. This looks like a tragedy. But Benedict sees, rightly, because as soon as he hears it, he goes, I think Don John's at the bottom of this. I think. I think he.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, he sniffs it out almost. Yeah. If there's any mischief in this, it's certainly due to him. Him.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Leonardo says, I don't know. I don't know anything about that. And Benedict's like, seriously, you need to. You need to calm down. All right? So they go on to say, let's. Let's do this. Her infamy will die, and it's all going to work out. And. And the friar even gives that. That religious language. She's going to die to live. This wedding day is just delayed.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So.

[Thomas Banks]

So we'll have a resurrection.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. The better resurrection. Slandered Harrow will die and. But the real hero will live again. So now they all leave. And we are left with Benedict and Beatrice. And so many people, Mr. Banks, have commented about how much they have loved our reading. Would you please read these declarations of love with me? Oh, yes, and Benedict and Beatrice at the end of scene one, act four. Do you want to just.

[Thomas Banks]

Certainly, if you share your book.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's start with I love. Okay, so what happens is she's crying.

[Thomas Banks]

And he goes to comfort her.

[Angelina Stanford]

He goes to comfort her. He's so moved by her grief and comforting that he goes ahead and this.

[Thomas Banks]

Is the first, really, the first conversation. Well, not even between them, but where either of them is talking. Where there's not really any irony and they let their guard down.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right, they're not. No irony, no barbs. This is just such a good scene. All right, so start with Lady Beatrice.

[Thomas Banks]

Have you?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, we don't have to start at the very beginning because it's gonna go kind of long. How about as strange as this? That's Beatrice. Sorry, go.

[Thomas Banks]

How about I do love nothing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Benedict's line.

[Thomas Banks]

I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?

[Angelina Stanford]

As strange as the thing I know not it were as possible for me to say I'd love nothing so well as you. But believe me not. And yet I lie not, I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing. I am sorry for my cousin. Okay, just pause right there. Notice all the nothing, nothing, nothing. Right. This is the much ado about nothing. I deny nothing. I confirm nothing. Okay, go ahead.

[Thomas Banks]

By my sword, Beatrice, thou lovest me.

[Angelina Stanford]

Do not swear and eat it.

[Thomas Banks]

I will swear by it that you love me and I will make him eat it that says I love not you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Will you not eat your word with.

[Thomas Banks]

No sauce that can be devised to it? I protest I love thee.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, then God forgive me.

[Thomas Banks]

What offence, sweet Beatrice?

[Angelina Stanford]

You have stayed me in a happy hour. I was about to protest I loved you.

[Thomas Banks]

And do it with all thy heart.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.

[Thomas Banks]

Come, bid me do anything for thee.

[Angelina Stanford]

Kill Claudio.

[Thomas Banks]

Not for the wide world.

[Angelina Stanford]

You kill me to deny it.

[Thomas Banks]

Farewell, Terry. Sweet Beatrice.

[Angelina Stanford]

I am gone, though I am here. There is no love in you. Nay, I pray you, let me go.

[Thomas Banks]

Beatrice.

[Angelina Stanford]

In faith, I will go.

[Thomas Banks]

We'll be friends first.

[Angelina Stanford]

You dare easier be friends with me than fight with mine enemy?

[Thomas Banks]

Is Claudio thine? Enemy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Is it not approved in the height a villain that hath slandered, scorned, dishonour'd my kinswoman. Oh, that I were a man. What bear her in hand until they come to take hands. And then was public accusation uncovered, slander, unmitigated rancour. O God, that I were a man. I would eat his heart in the marketplace.

[Thomas Banks]

Hear me, Beatrice.

[Angelina Stanford]

Talk with a man at a window. A proper saying.

[Thomas Banks]

Nay, but Beatrice, sweet harrow, she is.

[Angelina Stanford]

Wrong, she slandered, she is undone.

[Thomas Banks]

Beatrice.

[Angelina Stanford]

Princes and counties, surely a princely testimony. A goodly count, Count comfect. A sweet gallant, surely. Oh, that I were a man for his sake. Oh, that I had any friend would be a man for my sake. But manhood is melted into curtsies, valor into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones, too. He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.

[Thomas Banks]

Terry. Good Beatrice, by this hand I love thee.

[Angelina Stanford]

Use it for my love some other way than swearing by it.

[Thomas Banks]

Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yea, as sure as I have a thought or a soul.

[Thomas Banks]

Enough. I am engaged. I will challenge him. I will kiss your hand and so leave you. By this hand, Claudio shall render me as dear an account as you. Hear of me, so think of me. Go comfort your cousin. I must say, she is dead. And so farewell.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, what a great scene.

[Thomas Banks]

That is a great scene. That is a great scene.

[Angelina Stanford]

What a great scene. Okay, so. So they confess their love to each.

[Thomas Banks]

Other, finally, at long last, in a moment of crisis.

[Angelina Stanford]

In a moment of crisis. Oh, that line. I love you. It's so much of my.

[Thomas Banks]

You had said we need to go back to, like, how misogynist is it that this would, you know, happen in this. We're not meant to understand that. I don't think Shakespeare wants us to understand that even if Harrow had been guilty, it would be right for Claudio to publicly disgrace her. I mean, that's frankly cruel. Yeah, that. I mean, like, even assuming she is guilty, like. Like. Actually, it reminds me a little bit. You remember in the Gospel of Matthew where it says that when St. Joseph had learned that our lady was pregnant with Christ, he had planned to put her away quietly because he was a righteous man and he didn't, you know, he didn't want to pull a Claudio here. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So there's epic Susanna here, the public shaming the. The out to get you thing. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

And I. I was actually reading Cecily Wedgwood's History of English literature in the 17th century, and she. She remarks that in Restoration performances of this play, that particular scene, I think, was sometimes shortened and trimmed down a bit because it's bad manners. It's just, this is not a way a gentleman ought to act. And it's like there's something just kind of sadistic about it.

[Angelina Stanford]

But that's part of the upside downness of it all. This has turned the world upside down. Claudio is not acting gentlemanly. This is a horrible, horrible thing to do. Okay, so let's go back to the idea that we're in the almost tragedy. So part of what you see happening in comedy, and this is. This is a big difference between Shakespearean comedy and what we would consider a modern romantic comedy. So on the surface, there's a lot in common. We have lots and lots of movies and books about guy meets girl, they fall in love, guy loses girl, guy gets girl back. Right, right. But there's more to it when it comes to Shakespeare here. So first of all, you have the double fairy tale motif. In fairy tales, you have two patterns. One, the bride and the bridegroom are separated, and they go through a number of obstacles and they're together. That's the, you know, and they get married and live happily ever after kind of fairy tale. The other fairy tale pattern is the parents child separation and reunion. So think, you know, Hansel and Gretel. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

Winter's tale.

[Angelina Stanford]

And. And. And of course, it's going to be a winter's tale. So the parent and children are separated, they go through a number of obstacles, and they are reunited. What Shakespeare does is usually in his comedies, combine both of those, and you see that here as well. So when the guy and the girl is separated. Yes. It is also the parent and child being separated, because here Leonato is saying, she's dead to me. Right. So this. This almost tragedy is a breakup of couples, but also a breakup of families. But in the comedy. And so here's what's. Here's. Here's. Here's what's different between a Shakespeare comedy and a traditional, like, modern romantic comedy comedy is that the plight of the couple is always situated into the larger context of the plight of the community. I'll give some examples of that. But in a rom com, no matter how high the stakes might be, in a, you know, a modern romantic comedy, it's. The stakes are really never larger than, will these two people fall in love like they might? Their lives might be Ruined. But it's not like, you know, New York City is going to come to a grinding halt. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

And maybe it ends with us. Not. It ends with. With the five boroughs. Oh, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Nice. Well done. Well done. Maybe there's, like, a best friend who's plotting to get you together. And maybe that best friend falls in love with his best friend. Kind of like, maybe there's that. But what you don't see is what happens in Shakespeare, which is that when the threat comes. Okay, so all comedy is moving from order to disorder to the restoration of order when the disorder comes. And this play comes in the form of slander. Yeah. It's not just couples that are broken up. It is an entire community. So. So the slander, you can think of it as a. As. I mean, there's a lot of Garden of Eden imagery at the beginning here. They're in Messina. This is a time when it's not war. So they've.

[Thomas Banks]

This is another fall.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Yes, exactly. It's another fall. And so through the temptation of Don John, the whole community has fallen. Right. And so what we need to see here is that the friends are being separated, a couple broke up, families are being torn apart. In the next. For her to say, kill Claudio. This is the ultimate disorder. Kill your comrade in arms. The guy that actually saved your life on the battlefield saved Don Pedro. He. You now you have to kill him. Right. So in the next scene, when he goes and challenges him to a duel and then he quits Don Pedro's service, that's what this is. Every relationship has been broken apart. Now, not Benedict. And Beatrice is. But she threatens to break that up if he won't kill Claudia. Right. So what we should see here is that because it's a fall in the garden of eel, that's exactly what it is. With the introduction of this slander, the whole world has fallen apart. And honestly, it's not very hard to see how Shakespeare could have turned this into a tragedy.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, very easily.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Harrow's dead. Leonato drops dead of a heart attack. When his daughter is slandered, Benedict and Beatrice declare their love. But then he goes and gets in a fight again. Romeo and Juliet style. I know. I thought. And he. And Claudio and Don Pedro, all three frightened, they all end up dead.

[Thomas Banks]

I know I've said this in another episode.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Beatrice kills herself. Like, it's so easy to see how this could have gone tragic.

[Thomas Banks]

May I?

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you.

[Thomas Banks]

I know I said this in an episode somewhere else, but conversely, Romeo and Juliet, for the first three acts could be a comedy. Actually, there's quite a bit of funny dialogue in it too. If you pay attention.

[Angelina Stanford]

It follows the shape of a comedy much more than it. Well, now I'm getting on my soapbox here. It doesn't actually follow the shape of a tragedy. It follows the shape of a comedy that fails. And I really feel like Shakespeare was, was playing with what if, what if I set this up as an almost tragedy and let it go to tragedy? Because comedy deals with a community being broken up. Tragedy deals with some, some slightly different things. So Romeo and Juliet follows more the comic shape that sort of fails. Yeah, it's like they get stuck at the bottom of the U. They don't get the U. Catastrophe be.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so what we want to see is right on the cusp of everything's. Everything's just. I was going to say no. Trying to think again, little ears. Everything's gone kaplooi. All right? Everything's gone kaplooi. Everything's a mess. Everything's upside down. Friends are separated, lovers are separated, parents and children are separated. In that moment, Dogberry walks in.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, now this is going to connect this whole upside downness. There is a reason why in Shakespeare's plays it is always the fool who sets things right. Because in the upside down world that is caused by the fall, the only way to turn it right side up is to be upside down. So Dogberry, who is completely upside down, now this is done for comic effect, but it's still there structurally. Dogberry, who is completely upside down and cannot get any of the words right, is the one who's going to accidentally unravel the whole thing. But what we're seeing is that, that it's that upside downness that is required. That's the only way you can fix an upside down world is to be upside down.

[Thomas Banks]

William Hazlett, in his essay on this play, makes a funny. It's a gratuitous stab, but it's hilarious. He says that were this play set in today's world rather than the world of Shakespeare here, Dogberry, for you know, his just utter incomprehension of all that's going around him, Dogberry and Verges, they probably wouldn't be, you know, night watchmen, but they would be high ranking dignitaries of state, because that's what we do with idiots today. We make them prime ministers and senators and rulers and things like that. Anyway, I thought that was funny.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, again, that's part of how it's an almost tragedy. Because if the Cops are Keystone Cops here. How are they going to fix it?

[Thomas Banks]

You would expect them to fail as they fail at everything else.

[Angelina Stanford]

But they, they. They keep stumbling. Like. His opening line is, our whole dissembly appeared. Now that. That's a joke because he means to say assembly, but he actually.

[Thomas Banks]

The word disseminately. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Don John has dissembled. He's put on dissimilar, meaning he put on a false face. He's deceived and saying, has the dissembling appeared actually accidentally?

[Thomas Banks]

He says the right thing and it's appropriate that. I mean, he actually does get his men and he actually does save the day. I mean, you said Keystone Cups. We also have Keystone villains here, if we're being honest.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. No, no.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

They just throw up their hands and say, we're caught. Let's confess it all.

[Thomas Banks]

Pretty much, yeah. I mean, and like, even when they're in the circumstances, in this couple scenes before, when the watch fall on them and arrest them, them, they basically just wander up and confess a crime before, like, they've even been told to. So anyway.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, okay. And so I'll have thoughts about what's going on with that when we get to the end. So we see that everything's been knotted up. It's the almost tragedy. Everything's upside down, but it's about to be righted. And it's about to be righted because truth is revealed. Right. And so truth. Truth is able to. It's like light, immediate. It's like you light a candle in a dark room and that light just grows and pushes the dark out. That's what happens. So the second the truth comes out, they confess and they say, throw us. Throw. Throw us in jail. Throw away the key. Right. Lock us up. We're terrible. And then Don John hits the road. He flees. Right, Right. And that's that idea. Just all disperses. It scatters the second that light shines on this darkness. Okay. Obviously. I mean, we could talk about how funny that scene is. It is hilarious. That whole, like, let the examination down. It's so funny.

[Thomas Banks]

Shakespeare and Dickens have this in common. They tend to find legal procedure funny. I mean, there's the famous Dickens line that everyone quotes. If that's what the law says, then the law is an ass and an idiot. Shakespeare also, like, how many times do you have some mockery of a trial scene? Merchant of Venice.

[Angelina Stanford]

This.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Anyway, no, agreed, agreed. Well, I think there's a lot of humor to be found in just bureaucracy and politics and. I mean, that's also in Jonathan Swift. Remember, he's got. Oh, boy. I'm gonna really get off. Sorry, guys. Your goods. All books. Talk about all other books, and you're gonna get it here today. But there's that in book three of Gulliver's Travels, when Gulliver meets. He's trying to explain to the king of this other country how our legal system works. And it's all like, he's so good at defending bad guys that if he has an innocent client, he doesn't know how to connect how to defend him. So he has to make up something. Fake lie. So that's the only way he can defend anyway. It's just like a whole. It's hilarious. The whole.

[Thomas Banks]

I think I know. I think I know the part you're talking about. Is that the City in the Clouds?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean, he goes down in book three, but. So it's in the down part. But, yes, same idea.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

He goes to that island. All right, act five. Now, this really struck me this time on this read, because typically in a Shakespeare comedy, Act 5 is super short. And it's longer in this one. Act five is longer than act four. And that's very unusual. So something like Taming of the Shoe. You have a very long act four and, like a super short act five. Just like, boom. And that's usually because when you have the turn, okay, so you're headed down the U toward that almost tragedy. And then you have a turn, a miraculous, unexpected turn that pushes you back up the U. That gives you that death and resurrection moment. Usually that happens very fast. But it's interesting to me that he. He takes more time in Act 5 here. I find this. I find this interesting. It's probably because of all the subplots.

[Thomas Banks]

He does end it abruptly.

[Angelina Stanford]

That part does happen. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Because, I mean, what. I hadn't really thought about it before, but they say, hey, we caught Don John. And Benedict says, yeah, we'll deal with him tomorrow. And that's almost the last line in the play. I'll devise brave punishments for him. Which is a good line.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so let's review a few things before we move into Act 5. We've already talked about order, disorder, order. And we've also been talking about ultra romantic versus anti romantic. I'm going to have more to say about this when we get to the end, but for now, we're noticing the switch also.

[Thomas Banks]

Pious deception versus malevolent deception.

[Angelina Stanford]

Correct? Yes. So that's all coming to a head here. Here as well. And all deceptions will be revealed in Act 5, as they always are in Shakespeare's comedies. All the masks will come off and there are no deceptions. Every. You're standing in the midst of reality and truth and light. At the end of a comedy, everything is restored. So we said we had Claudio and Harrow as the ultra romantic couple, and now they have moved to the anti romantic couple. Right? He's pretending to be dead, and he's sworn off women. Benedict and Beatrice were the anti romantic couple, and now they have moved to the ultra romantic couple, first indicated by Benedict. As my husband said, put product in his hair and changed his clothes, saved his beard, tried to look good for the ladies. And then he's. This scene where he's writing a sonnet is amazing and hilarious. So they're. They're trying to be the ultra romantic.

[Thomas Banks]

Lover, trying to do what a Renaissance gentleman does when he is in love, which is write a bad.

[Angelina Stanford]

Correct. And I just want to say, for the record, you have written me a number of wonderful sonnets. You're a much better poet than Benedict.

[Thomas Banks]

Thank you.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm not gonna say you're a better poet than Shakespeare. I love you, but I won't lie to you. Okay, but you're better than Benedict.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I can live with that.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's the scene where he's like, I can't think of anything to rhyme with lady, but, baby, that was. That was like every pop song ever.

[Thomas Banks]

PG Wodehouse wrote a funny article about song lyrics, English love song lyrics. You know, he. He wrote for the stage. He wrote for Broadway, actually, I think, a number of musical comedies. And he said that every poet or songwriter or lyricist has reached some moment of frustration when he ends a line with love. Because there are not really that many words in English which rhyme with love. And I think he does something with, like, shoving a dove or something, like. And then he talks about, like, how much lucky they are in romance languages, like French. Amour. And a lot of things rhyme with amour, but in English, we're stuck with love. And not a lot works with that. Hard to make that word function at the end of a line.

[Angelina Stanford]

Love and shove. I gave you a love shove. Clearly, I'm not the poet of the family. All right, well, some of the stuff that happens in the first act of first Scene of Act 5, we've already talked about.

[Thomas Banks]

So.

[Angelina Stanford]

So. So Leonato first challenges Claudio, right? Claudio's like, I'm not gonna fight an old man. He's like, well, at least I'll die. I'm a Man. You know, so he's looking to kill him. At this point, Leonardo is believing Harrow has been unjustly shamed. And then Benedict comes.

[Thomas Banks]

Leonardo doesn't come out of this play looking very good either.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, he does not. He honestly, he reminds me so much of the dad in Taming of the Shoe, who also does not come off looking very big.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, Shakespeare has some ass admirable parents, but these are not among them.

[Angelina Stanford]

No. No. Okay. So Benedict just goes up to Claudio and says, you've done a terrible thing and now we have to fight. And he thinks it's a joke. They're all just laughing and yucking it up.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. It's not really until he walks away that like, was he in earnest. And Don Pedro says, I think he really wants to kill you.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And because he also said, don Pedro, it's been a pleasure to be in.

[Thomas Banks]

Your service, but I wonder, more to do with you, I must discontinue your company.

[Angelina Stanford]

We're done. We're done. And they're. They're both kind of stunned, so.

[Thomas Banks]

And yeah, this is. This is. I mean, presumably they've seen Benedict in a serious or somber mood before some point, but it's not. This is not characteristic. Yeah, he's a different guy. Very much a different guy.

[Angelina Stanford]

He wants to kill you because of Beatrice. So it's kind of like we wanted him to fall in love and now it's about to bite us. All right, so in busts Dogberry, and he kind of falls all over the place. And he tells him, yes, this is what happens. But they don't really understand what's going on. But Don Pedro definitely picks up this. You said my brother fled. That was it. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And then Borachio just confesses, oh, we've done some villainous dealings and we're just going to tell you. We're going to tell you. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

These are remarkably, remarkably.

[Angelina Stanford]

John planned everything.

[Thomas Banks]

I was going to say that the villains in this are remarkably penitent. Very quickly. They're conveniently so. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Don John's earlier line, I'm just a plain dealing villain.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so these guys are just plain feeling plain dealing, villainous henchmen.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, sure. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

But isn't that what happens when the main bad guy runs away?

[Thomas Banks]

The minions don't know how to operate.

[Angelina Stanford]

So they spill the beans and they're like, they're basically. They. I don't think it's completely unbelievable that they just throw themselves on Don Pedro's mercy. Don John has left and they're like, here's what we did. Your brother was behind it.

[Thomas Banks]

That's. That's a fair point, I would say. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So they tell the whole thing. And Claudio says, I feel like I've drunk poison while I heard these words.

[Thomas Banks]

So this is another interjection. I. I use that word minion. I found that that's a word that tends to confuse students anymore. Like, yeah, I think I've encountered students, like, bright students, but who really think that, like, a minion is a little animated yellow thing and that it doesn't have a more general meaning. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because they're his henchmen.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're no minion, dear. You're not my minion.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, thank you. You're just building me up, you know, on top of myself today. I'm a better poet than Benedick, and I'm not a minion. My gosh, can my ego even digest all of this praise?

[Angelina Stanford]

I have to keep you humble, dear. I did say you're the Benedict to my Beatrice. Come on, now. We're gonna also read this last thing.

[Thomas Banks]

Never asked me to challenge a friend to a duel, by the way.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, not yet. Should we tell people how that is kind of a running joke, though. Sometimes you will look at me and you'll say, can I do anything for you? Like, it's always like, I'm going to the grocery store. Can I get anything for you? But sometimes you'll phrase it in, is there anything I can do for you? And then I like to come back and just. Just very seriously say, kill Claudio.

[Thomas Banks]

There's actually a. There's a contemporary movie critic whose work I enjoy who has a blog called Kill Claudio.

[Angelina Stanford]

Really?

[Thomas Banks]

That's his. That's his. Where he. Yeah, his blog of film criticism.

[Angelina Stanford]

There you go. All right, so let's see. At this point, the truth is revealed. And Claudio immediately says, I've done a horrible. A horrible thing. I'm so sorry. And runs to Leonato and says, how can I. How can I make this up? And he says, harrow's dead.

[Thomas Banks]

He.

[Angelina Stanford]

She's dead, and you killed her. And so now he's taking it really hard. And he says, how can I make this right? And he says, well, you can go write an epitaph for her so you can publicly declare her innocence. So this is going to be part of the reversing of the slander, will be a public declaration of. Of her innocence. And then what happens next, I think modern audiences really struggle with. Because we don't know how to read plays, and we're Thinking of this in terms of what it would mean if Hera was my sister and Claudia was her abusive boyfriend who did something horrible to her and tells the dad.

[Thomas Banks]

We tend to import a lot of modern, sociological.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. Exactly. What can I do? Well, you can marry my niece who looks just like her.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And no, modern readers are like, wait a minute. Why would. Why would heroin want anything to do with this guy? Well, because you're reading him wrong.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, you're a horrible fiance to my daughter, but I think we're going to give you another shot with my niece here.

[Angelina Stanford]

With my niece. Exactly. And then he's just like, okay, that's fair. He says, that's fair. That's fair. Okay, I'll do it. So a couple thoughts about that one. Let's go back to that. Was it. Yeah. That Fry quote at the beginning. You don't pull characters out of a play and. And look at them. What would it mean if. If we were all on the Jerry Springer show, what would it mean? Would mean something very different than then. Then in the play. Okay. You could put this family.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, my God. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like, like, like they just. They have Claudio on there and they're all booing him. And then Harrow comes out. I'm not dead. I have a whole moment. This is how I'm using myself, folks. But Fry's point is, you don't. Look at that. You ask your. The characters only exist for their function in the story, and so we have to be patient. Let's get to the end and see the function of these characters. Okay. We don't. What we don't want to say is, well, a long time ago, they just did this. Just married off anybody that didn't care. Like, no, no, no.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. You know, they had laws in Venice that allowed a guy to cut off a pound of flesh if you couldn't pay him back. Seriously.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, exactly. That's how. Exactly. Just fair. That's just how it was. And. And, you know, was. It's just super common. And because of misogyny, you know, girls would just marry guys they'd never even met before, like this niece. And, you know, they don't let her remove her mask because he's just forced to marry her. But in terms of the play, snark aside, in terms of the play, this is supposed to be seen as an attempt to put himself fully under Leonardo. How can I make this right? And he says, well, you can marry this other girl. It's a little Rachel and Leah. Ish.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, very much so. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so they say. Okay. All right. So Scene two. In the midst of all of this, Benedict has thrown down the gauntlet. And he's going to duel Claudio. Or so he thinks. And now he's over here getting teased by Margaret because he's trying to write a poem. This is so good. The God of love that sits above.

[Thomas Banks]

I think Shakespeare had fun. I think Shakespeare. What if he sat down and said, I'm gonna write a play which has virtually no good poetry at all?

[Angelina Stanford]

On purpose.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

The God of love that sits above knows me and knows me. Where can I go with this work? Oh, man. Actually, just. Just. Just read this whole thing. It's so hilarious to me.

[Thomas Banks]

And therefore will come the God of love that sits above and knows me. And knows me. How pitiful I deserve. I mean, in singing. But in loving Leander, the good swimmer. Troilus, the first employer of panders. And a whole bookful of these quondam carpet mongers. Whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse. Why, they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love, Mary, I cannot show it in rhyme I have tried. I can find no rhyme to lady, but, baby, an innocent rhyme for scorn, horn a hard rhyme for school, fool, a babbling rhyme. Very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet. Nor I cannot woo in festival terms.

[Angelina Stanford]

Love that I cannot woo in festival terms. So good. So good. You're right. He is acting like a conventional Renaissance man. And this is what you do. You write a sonnet. But he fails at it. And it's not just meant for humor, although it is humorous. This. He's trying to turn himself into an ultra romantic. And he can't.

[Thomas Banks]

It runs against the grain of his nature.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. I think we're going to see what Shakespeare is going to do with that. He's. He's going to do something different than you think. All right. The Beatrice comes in and he says, or she says. He says, would you come when I called you? Yay, senor. And depart when you bid me. Oh, stay. But tell them that is again straight out of Taming of the Shrew. I'll come when you call me and I'll leave when you call me. So, like she. She says, I have tamed myself, so she's not going to fight him anymore. And then. Okay, so. Okay, this really blew my mind. I've always thought much to do about nothing with Pride and Prejudice. I happen to be teaching Pride and Prejudice right now, so I'M reading these at the same time. Holy cow. This is Pride and Prejudice. Okay, so we've talked about. Not only do you have the A couple, the B couple. So the A couple, Bingley and Jane, they fall for each other right away. They be couple. Lizzie and Darcy are fighting in the war of words, and your face is tolerable and all that. We even have Claudio, who is easily swayed by something someone tells him to give up his love. That's what Bingley does. But this next part where he just. He just blurts out, tell me, for which of my bad parts did you fall in love with me? That is totally out of pride. Like, they have that whole scene, Lizzie and Darcy at the end where they're like, tell me about the first time. When did you finally fall in love? What are my bad parts? What are my good parts? Did you fall in love with. Tell me. Tell me what you loved about me first. Was it my eyes?

[Thomas Banks]

Like, you're right.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's.

[Thomas Banks]

You're absolutely right. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's just killing me. This really is Pride and Prejudice. She loved her Shakespeare. But I really want us. This is. This is so good. This is so good. Should we. I don't know. Should we read this? This part, I think.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, but we'll. We'll just stop right here at this line. So start with. They start with that. We'll do a couple lines. They're just too good.

[Thomas Banks]

Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense, so forcible is thy wit. But I must tell thee plainly, Claudio undergoes my challenge, and either I must shortly hear from him, or I will subscribe him a coward. And I pray thee now tell me, for which of my bad parts didst thou fall first in love with?

[Angelina Stanford]

For them altogether, which maintain so politicked a state of evil that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them.

[Thomas Banks]

Them.

[Angelina Stanford]

But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?

[Thomas Banks]

Suffer love. A good epithet. I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.

[Angelina Stanford]

In spite of your heart, I think. Alas, poor heart, if you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours, for I will never love that which my friend hates.

[Thomas Banks]

Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. They're too wise to woo peaceably. Okay. So even though they're trying to talk like lovers, like, tell me what you loved about me, there's still that little bit of sting there.

[Thomas Banks]

And even if he were more of a poet, do you think she would be the kind of girl who would really be impressed by a sonnet. I'm not entirely sure that she would.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. So let's. Let's talk. Let's revisit that. Let's revisit that. Okay. Ursula comes in, says, guess what? Everything's revealed. We now know that it was slander from Don John. Everybody's been abused. It's very interesting here because it's not the way that we look at it. We would say, oh, Claudio is responsible for what he did 100% and he needs to roast. But twice in the play, it says, the prince and Claudio have been abused. The play presents Don John as the villain, and everybody has been.

[Thomas Banks]

Everybody else is just too credulous. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep. They've all just. They've been played by him. But that last line by Benedict, that's a very ultra romantic line. It makes this girl swoon. Beatrice says, will you go hear this news, senior? And he says, I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes. And moreover, I will go with thee to thy uncles.

[Thomas Banks]

Which is. I mean, it is ultra romantic. But then that last bit. I will go with thee to thy uncles. It's very prosaic. And everyday. Yep, it's. Yeah, yep.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because they're trying to force it. That's my point. It's not going to stay there.

[Thomas Banks]

So.

[Angelina Stanford]

Hang on, hang on. All right, Scene three. Okay, so Claudio is coming to try to undo. He's trying to reverse the slander by publicly declaring her innocence. And he. And he. He writes that epithet, that she died because of slander. But here lies hero, and she's completely innocent and she's been undone. So this is supposed to. Even if we don't like it, in terms of the play, this is his repentance, his public repentance.

[Thomas Banks]

And he actually writes a poem.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he writes a poem. Yeah, that's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Which actually has an interesting use of an allusion which I didn't notice at first, but. So the poem is. Pardon, Goddess of the night, those who slew thy virgin. Okay, so think about this. Goddess of the night is Diana or Artemis. And if you have ever read the AENEID in book 10, or book 11, I think it's book 11, Camilla, who is one of the attendants and warriors, dedicated. She's a virgin. She's not married to any man. And she is shot in the back by a soldier who.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the gods go and get him too, man.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, she's avenged. But, yeah, I mean, her death is kind of a Betrayal. There's something dastard bastardly about it. So it's. I think it's an interesting implied comparison between Harrow and Camilla I had. Again, it's not one of those things I would make too much of, but I hadn't noticed it before and thought I would raise it.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so this is Claudio's repentance here, and he's doing this at her grave. So let me see if I can explain this because it is blowing my mind. A tragedy moves the main character to his inevitable death. Death, right. How do you know if you're in a Shakespeare comedy?

[Thomas Banks]

Or ruin. Yeah, yeah, well.

[Angelina Stanford]

Or his symbolic death, his exile, his blinding, etc. I'm trying to keep it simple. Some variation of a death. So he's going to move from, you know, his. His height to his catastrophic fall and his death. The comedy takes that I'm dropping to my catastrophic fall and death and then flips it. There's some miraculous events which changes that death into a rebirth. And so a Shakespeare tragedy ends with everybody dead on the stage, and a Shakespeare comedy ends with the wed. So the fact that he takes this almost tragedy. Where's the turn gonna be? Where's the repentance gonna be? It's at her funeral. They're having a funeral for her. And Claudio does this. And then the very next thing, it's a wedding. So act scene three is the funeral and scene four is the wedding. Like, that's literally the comic turn. That's literally the shape of a comedy that you're headed toward a funeral and surprise. It's really a wedding.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Which is a very fine observation. Very fine observation.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. The gospel story is a comedy. We're all headed toward a death. But surprise. You die to live. Right? You flipped around. You're. You're, you're going to be resurrected instead. Okay, pardon me if you're like, wait, she hasn't explained. I feel like I explained that all day long. And I'm sure I've gotten into it in some of the podcasts, but that's all I'm going to talk about it for now. It's too much. Okay, so again, they're all being portrayed as victims of Don John at the beginning of scene four, and they come masked to the wedding ceremony. Again, lots of echoes of Rachel and Leah here. And then Benedict takes the friar and Leonato aside and says, can you marry me? And Beatrice, too. And Leonardo's like, wait, what? What? You love her. I do. I love her. Okay. All right. So they're gonna get married Also, I love that line about Benedict. Why do you have such a February face? That is a fantastic. I want to name something February face. Maybe I'll have a webinar next thing.

[Thomas Banks]

That Kill Claudia would be a good name for an indie band.

[Angelina Stanford]

Fantastic name for a band.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Yeah. Also.

[Angelina Stanford]

Or maybe an album.

[Thomas Banks]

Chesterton, in one of his pieces of occasional journalism on Shakespeare, remarks that people who think that Shakespeare is always florid and flowery and can't say anything directly, he said, just quote them the line kill Claudio.

[Angelina Stanford]

But Auden has such a.

[Thomas Banks]

He can actually be very direct, to be honest.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm going to get to that when we finish because Auden has a lot to say about the plain speaking people in this play. All right. So although we don't see it on stage, obviously Claudio, Don Pedro and Benedict have all made up. And then we have this kind of full circle moment where Claudio realizes Benedict's going to get married and he says, aha. I think he thinks, upon the savage bull tush, fear not, man will tip thy horns with gold, and all Europa shall rejoice at thee, as once Europa did at Lusty Jove, where he would play the noble beast in love. So he's joking, because the bull is the cuckold in animal. And that was what Benedict feared more than anything, becoming a cuckold. And yes, it's a pun on Europe and Europa.

[Thomas Banks]

And we already had that savage bull line in time. The savage bull doth bear the yoke.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Right. So it's full circle now. It's a gilded. It's gold horn.

[Thomas Banks]

It's also an Ovidian image because the story of Europa and Jove is in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book two, I think it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the references to Ovid's Metamorphosis are very intentional here. And that's hard for us. We're like, well, how can everybody change so quickly? Because they're having metamorphoses. Just like, you know, this is very good, my love. This couple can be shot down. And now they're trees. And it happens that fast. And we. Because, see, this is where you have to be careful not to impute your assumptions about how stories work. Because you have been living in a psychological age that you expect all stories to be psychological. We want to see gradual change, slow change. But when you're dealing with highly mythic and symbolic stories, people change quickly. There's enchantments and curses and become something.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe that's an effect of. I mean, you said we live In a psychological age. Which is. Which is true. But also because we tend to judge story types by the standard of the novel.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, 100.

[Thomas Banks]

I think that's. We tend to expect.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, we expect every old story. Story to be a novel.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Shakespeare plays are not novels. They're much more like romances. So C.S. lewis is the way a romance works is the characters are visible souls and their insides are on their outsides. I think that's the right way to read this play. This is how you can understand how people are changing so quickly and how somebody can be going from such a horrible behavior to now they're super sorry and everybody's okay and they take them back because the internal struggles are all being externalized for. For us.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So we have our resurrection, repentance. And then Harrow unmasks herself and says, when I lived, I was your other wife. And when you loved, you were my other husband. Our hero died defiled. But I do live. So this is all death and resurrection. I'm actually hero.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, the. The Easter imagery, the slanders.

[Angelina Stanford]

The slandered person is dead, but I live again. Right. So we have a. A death and resurrection image right here that is going to turn the tragedy into the comedy. Right. Instead of getting death, we're gonna have the wedding, the gospel feast, the feast of the lamb.

[Thomas Banks]

You're on fire today.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

Keep on burning.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So after their reconcile, Benedict says, where's Beatrice? And she takes off to her mask and says, I answer to that name. What is your will? Okay, so now we have the other deception revealed. And he's like, wait, are you actually in love with me? And she's like, are you actually in love with me? And he's like, I heard you get tricked. She's like, I heard you got tricked. So there is each retreating into their corner, but then their friends out them out them here. You actually do love them. Okay. And so what we see here at the end is they are. They have moved away from their anti romantic position, but they've also rejected that ultra romantic. That's not them. And now we see who they really are. They're in love, but they're still who they are.

[Thomas Banks]

But they're always going to be Riley Ironic about it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's right. This, I think this, this last little, little exchange between them, I just think is the absolute stuff. I love it so much. I mean, you know how I know.

[Thomas Banks]

They'Re going to be the couple who fights all the time and just loves.

[Angelina Stanford]

Each other so much and they're so snarky and salty and fantastic. So what? It's again, Shakespeare is like poking at all these conventions. Right? So what you think is love isn't love. This two human beings who come to each other as equals, who. Who have their eyes wide open about who they are and getting married like that's love. And each of them, Auden makes the point that they're not actually anti romantic at the beginning. It's that they have mistakenly assumed the ultra romantic conventions is love. And they want nothing to do with that.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, they've rejected a false picture, a falsely idealized Petrarch and understanding of these things.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's exactly what he says. He references Petrarch's conventions. And so they reject all of that. They trust. But then they try to force themselves into it and they can't. And so now at the end of the play, we see them as they truly are. And this is so good. So Claudio says, you know, haha, no. Benedict wrote a sonnet for you. And Hero says, here's another one. Okay. And this is so good. Benedict, are you here? It's just two lines. You read Benedict, I'll read Beatrice.

[Thomas Banks]

All right. A miracle. Here's our own hands against our hearts. Come, I will have thee. But by this light I take thee for pity.

[Angelina Stanford]

I would not deny you. But by this good day I yield upon great persuasion. And partly to save your life. For I was told you were in a consumption.

[Thomas Banks]

Peace. I will stop your mouth.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's so good. That's so good.

[Thomas Banks]

I feel sorry for you. So I guess I'll marry you. Oh yeah, I'll. I also feel sorry for you because I heard you were dying. So.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So then they kiss. So that's your fairy tale kiss. The ending and the comic ending there. So we have our. Our double wedding. And then we end with Benedict's speech, Right? So they're teasing him. How dost thou, Benedict the married man? I'll tell thee what, prince, A college of woodcrackers cannot flout to me out of my humor. Does thou think I care for satire and epigram? No. If a man will be beaten with brains, a shall never wear nothing handsome about him.

[Thomas Banks]

That has always been one of my favorite expressions from Shakespeare, by the way. A college of wit. Crackers.

[Angelina Stanford]

You would like that one.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

In brief. So this is if. If a play had a thesis. Okay. Please don't have thesis. But if it did, this is what he's saying. This is what Benedict is saying is the whole point. In brief, since I do purpose to Marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it, and therefore never flouted me for what I have said against it. For man is a giddy thing. And this is my conclusion. So this goes back to this idea of changeableness. And remember, so once again, we're going back to these conventions. The Renaissance convention is that women are unchangeable, Right? That's why Benedict says he won't get married, because he'll get cheated on.

[Thomas Banks]

Giddy here would be mad camp.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, changeable.

[Thomas Banks]

Changeable, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Shakespeare's showing us it's men who are changeable. Men are just as able to be changeable as women. It's not just a women thing. Right. So far from this being some misogynistic play, he's actually saying men are also changeable. Claudia was changeable. Benedict is saying I'm changeable. And thank God, right? Thank God. We are all changeable. Come, come, we are friends. Let's have a dance Ere we are married that we may lighten our own hearts and all our wives heal. So it ends with a dance. And then Benedict says, let us play music. Prince, you're sad. Get a wife. Get the wife. Okay, so comedy's in the. So the comic ending, the picture of everything is restored. The community. We should see that. The community is restored here. So it's a wedding, a feast, or a dance. We're actually going to get all of those. So we've seen the dancing the whole way through. Right? Like when she says, wooing is a jig. Okay? So that's why it's ending in a dance. So the dance is harmony. What you need to see in a wedding, a feast or a dance is that. That is a picture of a community back together because these are public events. So it's not just, yay, Benedict and Beatrice fell in love. It's the whole community has been restored. And if, you know, if you're a Christian and you know the Bible talks about marriage as a picture of Christ's relationship with the church, you know, that's. That's undergirding all of these comedies where the ending is a wedding.

[Thomas Banks]

The wedding feast of the lamb.

[Angelina Stanford]

The wedding feast of the lamb, right? Because Christ is coming to rescue us. And the death is turned into a resurrection, and you die to live. But the end game is the marriage supper of the lamb, right? So you are. You are married by Christ, Are married to Christ, and then the church is married to Christ. And then you end up with the. The wedding feast, the marriage Supper of the Lamb. So that's that comic shape, and that's what we have here. And yes, we find out at the end that Don John has left, and he says, well, we're not going to worry about that now. So Northern Fry points out that in the comedy, the. All you have to have that, like, it's not like a tragedy. You're not going to, like, catch Don John and have a trial and like that. That. That would be all wrong for this kind of setting because the emphasis here is on what happened to this community. So this, this slander comes in, it causes all this trouble. The light is shown, truth is revealed, deceptions are revealed, and he flees. And that's. That's how the community can be restored. That. That. It's just gone. So either in a comedy, the, The. The. The villain, we'll say he either dies off stage or he just leaves. But. But he. He has.

[Thomas Banks]

He's been defeated.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now there are some plays in which he will be sort of reabsorbed into the community. So he'll be repentant and, and be reabsorbed, but it's always a picture of the community.

[Thomas Banks]

Merchant of Venice is kind of like that. And of course, the ending of Merchant of Venice is kind of controversial, and we don't need to go into it now.

[Angelina Stanford]

Auden had a lot of good stuff to say that fits with what we've been talking about, this move from anti romantic to ultra romantic, or move from ultra romantic to anti romantic. And he talks about how Shakespeare is really drawing attention to who are conventional characters and who are unconventional characters. So this fits with the whole thing that we've been talking about. And so we've been talking about noticing when people are talking in prose and when they're talking in verse. So one of the things that happens with Benedict and Beatrice is, is they were talking in prose at the beginning. When they fall in love, they start talking about poetry, and at the end they're back into prose. Right. Because Auden says, for this play, the conventional people are being presented as speaking in verse because they're speaking conventionally, and the honest, original people speak in prose. So he says that the play.

[Thomas Banks]

Say it again.

[Angelina Stanford]

He says that the honest, original people in this play, okay, speak in prose, and the conventional people speak in verse.

[Thomas Banks]

I see. Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that would be. Benedict and Beatrice are honest, original people. They. They don't live by convention. Okay? We already said that. They fool themselves. He says Benedict and Beatrice fool themselves into believing they don't love each other. They mistake their Reactions against the conventions of love to be lovelessness. Yeah, I said some of this already. They reject the whole love at first sight thing, which. I mean, that's Pride and Prejudice, too. The original title of Pride and Prejudice was First Impressions. And Jane Austen is all about showing you don't fall in love after a first impression.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm really glad she didn't name the book.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's a third impression. It's a fourth impression. Like, that's how you get to know somebody. So he says that the plotter's deceptions work because they work against the conventionally minded. So he says this is the way to understand Claudio. Claudio is so conventional that. That he goes from conventional over the top lover to conventional over the top. I've been cuckolded in a flash. Because everything he does is conventional. Even Don Pedro wooing Harrow for Claudio is a convention. So he says. Claudio is chief among the conventional characters. He's the conventional tough soldier. He's the conventional Petrarchan lover. Even his jealousy is conventional and expressed in conventional puns in Act 4.

[Thomas Banks]

This is another one of those books, his lectures on Shakespeare, which I'm really glad is still in print or has come back into print. Because it's not usually listed among W.H. auden's major works as a literary critic. I think he was almost a. As great as he was as a poet, to tell you the truth.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so let me add just a couple things then about how our order, our disorder, order, okay? So I've already said the stuff about the Garden of Eden. Slander comes in and breaks it up. So here's the point I want to. One more point I want to make about that. And you see this in Shakespeare's comedies, especially something like Twelfth Night, okay? He will deliberately give us a lot of upside down imagery, okay? So the idea there is because of sin, because of the fall, in this case, because of slander. The world is turned upside down. And the only way you can turn it right side up is for you to be upside down. That is why it's often the fool character who is the one who can see clearly and set everything back to right. So in this case, the upside down fool is dogberry. And Dogberry being connected to the rowan tree does connect him as a Christ figure. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying Jesus is a fool. It's just that you will see that type of character, that upside down character being the one that sets things to right. And that's an echo of the function that Christ has So we don't think of Christ as an upside down figure, but in so many ways he is. So let's take a few things. For example, the very fact that he enters the world, okay? So because of the fall, the world is upside down, right? So Christ is going to have to come and he's going to have to be upside down to flip this upside down world right side up. So he comes down first of all. Everyone's born literally upside down. So he's born upside down, head first, right? He's born, born of a virgin. That's upside down. Virgins don't get pregnant, right? So he's born of a virgin. Everything that happens after that is upside down. He's a 12 year old boy teaching everybody at the temple. He, one of his first acts, he literally goes into the temple and flips the tables upside down down, right? He's turning everything upside down. He's saying things like, you got to die to live. You got to be last to be first, right? So all of that upside down imagery. And then of course, he dies to conquer death, you know, and then he ascends. So you look for in Shakespeare's comedies when everything is turned upside down and you're like, this is the almost tragedy. Everything's crazy. The, the, the resolution will often come by somebody flipping everything upside down, and that's what writes you back up.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe a. Do you think maybe a better way of saying that? I mean, instead of saying maybe Dogberry is a Christ figure.

[Angelina Stanford]

That can't be overstating. He's not a Christ figure.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe Shakespeare's clowns frequently, whether in Lear or Touchstone, in as yous like it, or in, I mean, Dogberry here, can serve paradoxically heroic purposes.

[Angelina Stanford]

What I'm trying to get at is this idea of the wisdom of God is the foolishness of man.

[Thomas Banks]

That's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, that's what I'm trying to get at. So you will see that kind of upside down, is this a fool or is this actually wisdom character that will set things right? Because from the human perspective, the person who's setting things right will look upside down to us. He will look like a fool.

[Thomas Banks]

That's there. I would agree.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's what I'm getting. All right, so final thought then as I bring it on home. Do you have a final thought first? Because I'm going to go for it. I'm just going to.

[Thomas Banks]

I exhausted my thoughts about 15 minutes ago.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, well, fortunately for you, I got two pages of notes left. All right, so when we follow Northrop Fry's advice here. To look at the play as a whole, the shape of the whole. To look at the characters in terms of how they are functioning in the play. Instead of pulling them out and. And examining them under a light. You know, CS Lewis talks about trying to cross examine them in the interrogator's room. You find that the story reveals different meanings to you. So a lot of people are going to look at this play and hyper focus on things like, come on, guys, really? Is this a happy ending for Harrow? This guy's a jerk. Why would you want to marry her? All right, let's sit around and talk about whether or not we think Claudio and Hera are going to have a good marriage, okay? Yawn. That's not what this play is about. Shakespeare is not writing a how to on how to choose a husband. That is not what this is about, okay? This isn't about misogyny. We shouldn't stop and ask something as stupid as. Should Claudio have listened to Don John? Should Claudio have shamed Harrow?

[Thomas Banks]

The kind of criticism whose favorite word is problematic? Oh, yes, this is a problematic.

[Angelina Stanford]

So problematic. Claudio, why would you give your daughter to such a problematic character? Here's why. Okay, guys, here's why. The real issue is that in a fallen world, slander and deceptions hurt us. They destroy. They murder. They turn the world upside down. The question is never should this happen, should these characters somehow not let this happen? Because in the fallen world, this is what has happened. This is the reality we find ourselves in. To read stories focusing on, could we somehow have stopped sin? Could we somehow have stopped the effects of living in a fallen world is beyond pointless. Instead, what these stories are supposed to show us is this is the reality we live in. This is the fallen, upside down world we live in, where deceptions and slander can murder. How do you fix it? And the stories are showing us how you fix it. It. The upside down one, the one who has the wisdom of God but looks foolish to man, will bring the truth to light, will remove all the masks, restore friends and families, and even bring the dead back to life. So it is not true that a play like this is completely unrealistic. It's the only real story ever told. He's grinning at me, Guys.

[Thomas Banks]

I like your summaries. Like the. The judicial summary from the bench.

[Angelina Stanford]

Indeed, my judicial summary. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

I'll get you a robe.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is what Shakespeare's plays are doing for us. They are entering us into the heart of divine reality. This is the pattern of the universe. We live in a fallen world. We are trapped in a fallen world. We are in the almost tragedy. How do we get out, out? And he keeps showing us variation after variation after variation of how we get out. And that's. Guys, I know for some of new listeners to the podcast, you have these moments where you're like, she is splitting hairs. Why is she so mad about people having psychological readings? And it's because they are hyper focusing on surface level minutiae that in the end just doesn't mean anything. They're missing the big picture. You know, Tolkien talks about art as a prism and light, capital L shines through. And so for me, all these different ways of readings, it's like I'm looking at this window right now, okay? And so a book is a window. And my job as the teacher is to rub all the smudges off. Like, oh, look at all the thumbprints of modernity. Let me just clear off this psychological reading. Let me clear off this critical theory. Let me, let me throw off this Marxist agenda, this feminist agenda. I'm rubbing it clean so that you, my students and my audience can look through the window and see the light on the other side. And I get angry because I feel like everybody else is hyper focusing on the window instead of looking through the window. They're like, hey, look at this latch. I wonder what it was made of. Should the guy have made the latch like this? What's it? Was this properly sourced gold?

[Thomas Banks]

Consider this Freudian smudge.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, consider this morning. Yeah. Why did they paint this window frame white? That's something. Let's, let's, let's discuss this. I mean, white racist. Am I right? It's a white window, okay? We're hyper focusing on all the surface level stuff. And I'm not saying that the hinge is not interesting. I'm not saying that the color they painted the window is not interesting. But I'm saying it's secondary. It's tertiary. Because everybody's looking at what color the window pane is painted, or they're looking at the sticker decals on the window, or they're looking at the hinge. And I'm just yelling, look through the window. Look through the window. Because you're going to see Christ on the other side. That, guys, is why I have my hills to die on. That's it. And when people defend to me the various bad readings that I say are all surface level, all I can think is all you're telling me is you've never looked through the window. So today in this series. These last few weeks, I've tried to give you the slightest little glimpse that you look not at the beam, but along the beam. To paraphrase C.S. lewis, don't look at Shakespeare, look through him and you will see truth and light. All right, well, I hope you guys have enjoyed the series on Much Ado About Nothing. I've enjoyed it. I've had a ball I love you.

[Thomas Banks]

With so much and you don't even like dancing.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, there is none left to protest. I just love everything about this play. So next up gang, we are going to rebroadcast our series on Experiment and Criticism. And then at the end of that we're going to have a brand new episode we'll come back on. I've called it Experiment and Criticism Revisit, Visited, and I have a lot of other thoughts to help us to make sense. I've had several years now of airing that episode and hearing the kinds of questions and the stumbling blocks people are having as they go through it. And so I'll have some new stuff to say that I hope will elucidate things even more. So don't forget House of Humane Letters for Ella's fabulous Nature Webinar for Jen's wonderful Inklings class. You can also register for our conference there and we'll see you back here next week. Shout out to the Patreon, stick around to the end. Mr. Banks will have a special poem for you. And now that you've heard me talk about the window, you'll have one more inkling to understanding what it is. I mean when I say keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook Discord discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas banks.

[Thomas Banks]

Amoretti Sonnet 3 by Edmund Spencer the sovereign beauty which I do admire, Witness the world how worthy to be praised, the light whereof hath kindled heavenly fire in my frail spirit by her from baseness raised, that being now with her huge brightness dazed base thing I can no more endure to view. But looking still on her, I stand amazed at wondrous sight of so celestial hue. So when my tongue would speak her praises due, its stopd is with thought's astonishment. And when my pen would write her titles, true, it ravished is with fancy's wonderment. Yet in my heart I then both speak and write the wonder that my wit cannot indite.