B (7:59)

Just a little bit of good sense from Walter Savage Lander and his Imaginary Conversations. The Imaginary Conversations has become one of my favorite sort of bathroom books. Read a few pages here and there. Anyway, Walter Savage Lander writes, quote, a little watchfulness over ourselves will save a great deal of watchfulness over others.

A (8:20)

Oh, that fits very much. That very much fits. What we're going to talk about with Shakespeare today, that. I think that's an essential Shakespearean theme. If you want to order the world, order yourself. Well, my quote has to do with Shakespeare, and it is from one of my favorite Shakespeare scholars who you will hear about later today. His name is Harold Goddard, and this is in a chapter where he's talking about Shakespeare as a poet and the kind of imagination he has and the kind of symbolic universe he presents in his stories. And he's gone through this kind of long paragraph of people making the mistake of reading Shakespeare and thinking, oh, you guys are just reading too much into it. Just look at the words on the page. And so I'm going to pick up at the very end of a long passage here. And yet there are people who say that Shakespeare always means just what he says. Lady Macbeth's famous we fail is enough in itself to put that doctrine out of court. He who thinks that to find over and under meanings in Shakespeare's plays is to take unwarranted liberties with them is like a man who holds that the word spring must refer only to a particular period of the year and could not possibly mean birth or youth or hope. He is a man who has never associated anything with anything else. He is a man without metaphors. And such a man is no man at all, let alone a poet. Wow.

B (9:48)

I thought she's underfoot. The man without metaphors, right there.

A (9:52)

Oh, it's one. It's one of my favorite.

B (9:54)

Hasn't he suffered enough?

A (9:56)

He will. We will all suffer.

B (9:57)

Kind of like the man with no music in himself.

A (9:59)

Exactly. Exactly. Oh, no. I love Harold Goddard. I just. You're lucky he's dead. That's all to say. I. I love Harold. God, I love his mind. I. When I. Anytime I read any little part of any of his books on Shakespeare, I just. I. I literally write in the margins. I love this man's mind. I love the way he thinks and. And he seems to really understand Shakespeare's imagination and. And doesn't fall into too many of the flaws that so many readers do.

B (10:24)

No, I'll definitely, definitely add him to the list of historical characters I'll have to watch out for in the. In the afterlife.

A (10:33)

It's true.

B (10:34)

It's true.

A (10:34)

It's true. It's true.

B (10:36)

All of your crushes are dead.

A (10:37)

So it's, you know, See, I thought that made me safe, and now I. I see the flaw in my plan. You've left me a bit speechless, saying, oh, there's a flaw. When I get to the afterlife, they'll be there.

B (10:46)

Yeah, I'll have to challenge them. Some duels. No, it seems kind of futile in the afterlife.

A (10:50)

The only husband I ever have or ever will have. You're it. You're the husband. You're safe. I feel like this is a parable. You know, someone comes up to Jesus and says, there's a literary scholar. She's married to one scholar, but she's in love with many dead scholars. Who is her true scholarly husband in the afterlife. Yeah.

B (11:08)

Yeah. There's something kind of rabbinical about that line of questioning, I guess.

A (11:13)

All right, well, now that you've seen what kind of quirky, odd show you've stumbled upon, let's get into it. I thought it could be kind of fun to start with, since the whole purpose of this episode is to demystify it. And I actually don't know the answer to this. So I'm gonna ask you, what was your first encounter with Shakespeare like? Tell me how old you were and your. Your story with Shakespeare, if you will.

B (11:37)

The first time I remember seeing a Shakespeare play performed, I was probably about 8 or so. I might.

A (11:45)

The best upbringing.

B (11:46)

So the. The Shakespeare festival in Ashland, Oregon, which is the largest Shakespeare festival in the western United States, annually. And if you live in the Pacific Northwest, you should definitely check it out. So my parents would take us to see one or two plays annually there because it was fairly. Fairly close to us. We were in Idaho, and I remember seeing Macbeth when I was maybe 8 or 9, and it was a really bloody Macbeth. And I responded to that. I was excited. They had a fake head that looked exactly like Macbeth's head that they brought on stage. And it was very grisly. I liked that one a lot. Very dark. King Lear I didn't like as much then. King Lear has grown on me. And so, yeah, I think it was around that time that I started noticing that Shakespeare was not stuffy and boring. Shakespeare could be lively and, you know, glorious and entertaining and just messy and yeah, it started to capture my interest and my imagination. I know my mother, I think she had read as Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare when we were a bit younger. I don't know how I responded to those at all. And then on my own, I started probably when I was around 10 or 11, reading, I know I read Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. I think maybe one or two of the comedies, Henry V and I can't. I was not a genius, by the way. I was a very, very lazy student. I read a lot, but I was the kind of student who read things enthusiastically only when they weren't assigned. So mothers and fathers out there, if that's your child, you know, maybe this is a warning to you or an inspiration, I don't know. But, but yes, I, I was, I was not a scholarly child, but I was bookish, if I can be allowed that distinction. And Shakespeare was, along with, let me see, along with Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the first authors I really remember falling in love with their imaginative world.

A (13:56)

My story is going to sound very, very, very lame compared to that. I doubt that I did not grow up in a household with parents who took me to see Shakespeare. I, I was in a home where we went to watch professional sports. I saw, I've seen up a lot of baseball games in my life. I was, you know, I, I suppose I can only describe it as. I just must be one of those persons who was born an old soul because I honestly don't remember a time I didn't know who Shakespeare was. I, I always, even at a really, really young age, was drawn to old things over new things. I, I didn't like new things when I was born. And here I am, you know, a half century later. I still don't like new things. I like, I like old things. Old things seem more real and better to me and I was always drawn to old books. No one ever had to convince me that there was value in old books. It seemed to me self evident there was value because they were old and they were still around, so obviously they were valuable. I was not a hard sell on any of those things. And so we had, we had Shakespeare in the home, but no one read it to me. So I don't think that I read it really till high school when it was assigned. Okay, and I liked it.

B (15:11)

What was the first play?

A (15:12)

I do not remember. I Can't remember, but I liked it, but I found it difficult to understand. And then when I got to college, I took two Shakespeare classes in, in college. And I don't, I don't remember what year I was in, so I don't remember how many years after high school. So let's say maybe like three years later reading it. Now I'm just like sitting down with the big volume and working my way through it. And I was surprised how easy it was. I was surprised that it was actually not that hard to understand and that I thought that my high school experience had done a mis. Service to it because they had made such a big deal about how hard it was and had all these helps and everything that honestly I, I didn't need. Now I'm not going to pretend like I was understanding, like every little thing, but I was able to follow what was going on a lot easier than I thought it was. And then the second Shakespeare class. If any of you have ever had a class with me, you've heard me talk about Dr. Fields. That was the class that flipped the switch. He was wonderful and he started that class. We spent, gosh, we spent several weeks going through medieval cosmology before we even opened a play. That's where I got ex. You know, I got introduced to Arthur Lovejoy and the Great Chain of being and E.M. tillard, the Elizabethan world picture, which I'll, I'll talk about later, and just really rooted us in having a medieval imagination. And then we started reading the plays and he would, he was everything that a Shakespeare professor should be. He had with his tweed coat and his patches on the elbows and his. He had a white beard that had like a little tobacco stain on it from a pipe. Like he was just everything a Shakespeare professor should be. And he would read them out loud to us and just roll with laughter. Like he couldn't get the words out because he was laughing. And then he'd finally catch his breath and he would explain the joke or the pun and it was just absolutely pure delight. It was pure delight. And then my first teaching gig after that, I started teaching Shakespeare and honestly have. Have never looked back. You. One thing I've noticed, you know, living with you all these years, you. You pick up a Shakespeare play as, like your bedtime reading. Like, you just read it totally.

B (17:30)

There are some. I, you know, the last time I made a point to read, say, like all of Shakespeare's tragedies or all of his comedies was a long time ago, but I'm kind of in the point of my Shakespeare reading career that there are. There's the handful that I go back to again and again. I think I've probably read. I think I've probably read Othello about six or eight times, Macbeth probably six or eight times. Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and then a few of the comedies as well. But, yeah, I mean, there are also a fairly large number of the plays, especially the histories, where I couldn't tell you the plot. Even the, you know, more than one or two principal characters in the setting, like King John or Richard II or, oh, Henry vi, parts one through three. Some of those are very kind of misty territory to me. And I. Yeah, I might as well have not read them, I guess. And I guess one or two of the comedies, even, like the Two Gentlemen of Verona, I vaguely remember a kind of a love triangle, two guys after the same girl. I know I have, but I. So, yeah, I wouldn't say that. I would not say that. Shakespeare as a country. I know on an expert level. I know certain neighborhoods in Shakespeare pretty well, though.

A (18:48)

No, that title, I think, would go to Cindy, Cindy Rollins.

B (18:51)

I think Cindy probably knows some of these better than I do.

A (18:54)

Over and over. She knows them more very, very well. And where I think I might tend to really deep dive on one or two plays and really try to fully master them and know all the scholarship out there. I don't have that kind of breath of knowledge of Shakespeare that she does.

B (19:11)

Yeah. It seems to me that you are, you know, Shakespeare deeply rather than widely, if that works. Because, I mean, you can quote chapter and verse on Macbeth and, you know, some of the others. Yeah, but I don't think I've ever heard you refer to. Well, I don't. I don't even know. But like, yeah, you have your. You have your preferences there and that. But I think that's probably true of most people.

A (19:33)

That's my personality about everything. You know, I'm going to obsess about one album and all of the Japanese B sides. You know, like, that's how you're nodding because you live with me, but, yeah, that's how I am.

B (19:44)

He's talking about the Smiths.

A (19:47)

Okay, so this is a How to Read Shakespeare episode, not a why Read Shakespeare episode. And the reason I differentiated that is because that would be way too long of an episode. But I will say that I gave a conference talk about why read Shakespeare and about, you know, how. How to read him in that way and what's going. You can find that in our store at the House of Humane Letters. Website and at the end of this episode, we're going to give you a bunch of resources of previous podcast episodes we've done on Shakespeare. But I really think the best answer to why read Shakespeare? Is just to go listen to one of those series. And as you. And when you see what it is we've done and how he sort of pulls back the veil on the divine mysteries of reality, if I can put it that way, there's people probably like, what on earth is she talking about? I should probably just not be vague and just not say anything at all. But you will understand if I just speak for an hour on why read Shakespeare? It's not going to make any sense. You need to get into the play. So I would, I would suggest the very last episode I did on the Much Ado About Nothing series that that's where you're going to get your, your best answer to, to why read Shakespeare? All right, so with regard to how to read Shakespeare, I thought let's start with the hang ups. Let's start with the things that people find intim Shakespeare. And I think probably the number one thing is this really bad misconception that Shakespeare's highbrow. It's ivory tower. This is for scholars. I have thoughts about this. What are your thoughts?

B (21:18)

Well, I mean, I take comfort in the thought that he wrote for a popular rather than an academic audience. He's, I would say, a much easier poet on the whole than just amongst the great names of European literature, say Dante or Milton or though I don't know him as well, Goethe, I would say all of those are more forbidding poets. And Shakespeare I do not believe is an author you need to approach with a lot of commentaries as crutches to guide you on your way. I wouldn't necessarily say that you need all that for that panoply of critical guides for Milton or for Dante either necessarily. But I think it's. I think you can read Romeo and Juliet without an annotated edition necessarily. I wouldn't read the Divine Comedy without an annotated edition. I would say also among Shakespeare's history plays and one or two of those, again, Julius Caesar, Henry V, these are some of my favorites. You would be surprised how little of the history you actually need to know. I mean, if you're reading Julius Caesar, yes, know who Julius Caesar was, know who Marc Antony was. But you don't need to have a detailed knowledge of how the Roman Republic collapsed to enjoy the spectacle of the tragedy itself. And the same is true of Henry V. If you do not know head or tails about the Hundred Years War. Knowing, like a encyclopedia summary of it will probably be enough. Just knowing that England was trying to conquer France because the English kings felt that they were the rightful kings of France. And that's. That's kind of the background. But it's not a. It's not a politically complex work in. In a lot of respects. So it's. Go in with the confidence that comes from knowing that it's probably easier than you think it is.

A (23:09)

That's very good advice. It is easier than you think it is. That's what. That kind of the point I was trying to make when I read it in college and realized, wait, I can actually understand this. I don't need all the crutches that my high school made it out to be. In fact, when I. So I graduated college and I took a year off between college and graduate school, and I taught at my alma mater. I taught AP English. And I came in and I wanted to teach Macbeth, my favorite play, which I've taught who knows how many hundreds of times have I taught Macbeth by now? But I remember the principal said, oh, well, you're gonna need, you know, to get the record player out and play the records for them. And I said, no, I won't. And he said, yes, you will. And I said, said, I won't. I said, we're just going to read it together. We don't need any of these crutches. I said, I'm not gonna. We're not gonna watch the movie. We're not gonna do any of that. We're gonna be able to read it. It's not that hard. And he looked at me very smugly, and he said, I think you're gonna find that you need these things. And I'll have you know, I did not. And we went in there, we read it together, and we loved it together. And I'm gonna have a story in, in a few minutes about the children. I have read it out loud, too. And this is one of the reasons why you really can read it to kids and they can enjoy. Because, like you said, you don't really need all this. This background information. Now, there's a difference, of course, between am I reading it? And do I like, you know, do I really, really deeply understand it? Well, yes, we can give you, you know, some guidance there if you want to really get into the deeper layers. But it doesn't have to be your first experience with them. You don't have to be a scholar before you open it for the first time. And you know, one of Shakespeare's marks of genius is that he is writing for a very mixed audience. First of all, he's wildly popular. Just wow, there's a huge celebrity in his own life. We don't know a ton about Shakespeare, but we know that he was very popular and in demand. And so like he is, he is performing these from everybody to the upper crust, you know, the royalty, the most educated aristocracy, to the groundlings who for a penny are watching back to back, you know, Saturday afternoon double features. And, and these are the peasants. And he is able to entertain all of them. And so they're just multiple layers going on, which means you don't have to try to understand all the layers the first time you read it. You can just read it and enjoy it as a rip roaring tale and then. But know that there's more there if you want to come back and dip deeper. Yeah, I get, maybe I'll come back to that later. But yeah.

B (25:37)

And he doesn't presume that his audience is necessarily super literate even because Shakespeare is, amongst other things, he was a businessman. Shakespeare is, I don't know sociological terms, a member of the bourgeois rising middle classes. And he had to present plays that he knew that the audience would go for. So he's, he's not, he's not a poet for the few. He's not writing for an audience that has been to university necessarily. And I think the, the subject matter of the plays reflects that. And most of his stories, almost all of his stories in fact, he does not invent himself.

A (26:24)

Right.

B (26:24)

With one or two. Yeah. I think the Tempest is really the only original plot and they would have been many of them anyway. Kind of the common imaginative fabric of the people he was writing for. The basic outlines of the stories, whether Antony and Cleopatra or, well, I don't know, the history, any of the history plays really.

A (26:46)

Right. So he doesn't presume everybody in there is super well educated. I will point out though that EMW Tillard makes this point. I think it's a very important point that even the people who were not formally educated had a literary education that's better than what that most of us have. And that is because they were deeply rooted in of course, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, but in particularly the folk tradition. So they know fairy tales and folk tales. They know. And, and as we're going to talk about in a little while, Shakespeare is the fairy tale author. He is pulling from so many tropes that these people know and he's Being very innovative with him and they would have recognized that. So, so while they're not maybe like formally educated, they're. They're literate in a way that we're not. And so some of the things that might, might. This is one of the challenges. Some of the things that to us seem very hidden and veiled. And why doesn't he just say what he means to the audience? Was very clear because it's like, oh, that's a folktale. He's referencing a folktale. And, and so I know what that is. And the other thing that even the, the, the peasants are going to have is they have a symbolic imagination which we don't have. So Tillard points out that they have an image rich culture, that there are images everywhere, that those images are symbolic. There's a long, long liter engaging in plays and seeing them as symbols of the soul and everyman journeys, a whole medieval tradition there that Shakespeare's not just him, but all the playwrights are building on. So the original audience is interacting with them a little bit differently than we are. And honestly, this is again, one of the reasons why kids do really well with Shakespeare because they are so fairy tale. They're also a folk tale. And a lot of times the kids, especially if they're being homeschooled and they, they have a very rich literary life at home with folktales and fairy tales. They, they recognize this. I mean, I can, like, I remember, I remember reading King Lear with a group of middle schoolers and one of the kids who, again, not a, not a genius, just an average kid, said, oh my gosh, this is Cinderella. You got the evil sisters and they're picking on the youngest sister. And you know, just being able to pick up on those tropes is very, very helpful. All right, another big hang up is the language. Let's talk about that. The language is a big hang up.

B (29:03)

Since his plays are written in, not exclusively in, but largely in blank verse, since he's writing his plays are poetry. Simply familiarizing yourself with blank verse and what that is, I think is a useful thing to do before you dive into Shakespeare. But again, that's a matter of knowing a few definitions and forms really Shakespeare. Some of his plays are prosier, some of them, most of them are. A majority of the dialogue is in poetry. But it's once again, I think after you've, after you've waded through some hundreds of lines in it, it starts to become much more familiar. And the vocabulary, though Shakespeare had a proverbially large vocabulary you would be surprised how few words you are going to need to look up.

A (29:55)

Right? Yeah, right. It always amuses me because people will get, you know, they'll pick up a Shakespeare play and then say, man, people sure talked weird back then. No, they didn't. This is poetry. He's writing in poetry. People did not speak like this. And, and he's writing in poetry for a bunch of reasons.

B (30:12)

One, it was expected.

A (30:13)

It was expected, right? It's a convention. You know, you go all the way back to the epic. People are writing in poetry. I mean they're writing non fiction and poetry. They're writing math, treatises and poetry. Like the idea that you write things in prose is a very, very new idea. So it was expected. Also, I understand that blank verse made it much, much easier for the actors to memorize those long things.

B (30:33)

I think that's, I think that's true. I find it easier to memorize poetry than prose.

A (30:40)

Right, right. And blank verse just means it's not rhyming, but it's one of those things. And I'm going to mention this again when we kind of go through our strategies. But, but it being written in poetry, it's very, very helpful if you read it out loud to yourself. Very helpful. That was one of the things I figured out in college right away was if I read it with voices to myself, the ear picks up what the eye does not. And of course, I've since read so many things to support that idea. But reading it out loud is very, very helpful. So those are two of the big hang ups there. Now another question people get all the time. We're gonna, well, we're gonna jump into the hot water with this one because I got some spicy hot takes for this. Another, another question that always comes up with reading Shakespeare is, well, should you be reading them at all? Aren't they plays? Shouldn't you be watching performances? And I, I have some strong feelings about that. Okay. Sometimes people will say Shakespeare intended them to be watched, not read. And so you are not doing what Shakespeare wanted if you, if you read this them. My response to that is Shakespeare intended them to be watched with his particular acting troupe that he had handpicked and he himself is directing. And so if, if that is what you are offering me, then yes, go watch it as Shakespeare intended it. But renting, renting. Boy, I'm really renting, renting. I'm hating myself there, but dreaming, yeah, back in the old day. But streaming Kenneth Branagh's version, that's not watching it as Shakespeare intended And I'm not saying you shouldn't watch Shakespeare movies. I'm simply pointing out that is a faulty argument. And one of the things to understand about watching a performance of Shakespeare is that it is a director's interpretation. And so rather than you say, having the experience of, well, I actually experienced Shakespeare the way he meant it, you're not having that experience. You're having Kenneth Branagh's experience, or you're having someone else's experience. Sometimes parents are really shocked to see how much has changed. Whole scenes taken out, huge sections gone, things added in. Another things that the Shakespeare performances will often do is just throw in random nudity. So you have to be careful for that. In fact, one of the reasons why a lot of parents are like, you're reading this to kids is because they have this idea that the Shakespeare plays are very, very sexual, when that's just. That's just the TV version. Right? So again, not saying you should never watch a Shakespeare performance. I'm simply saying that should not be your first entrance into it, because that's actually not Shakespeare. If you want Shakespeare, read it. That is my view on that. And then after you have had the experience, then you can watch all the performances and say, oh, I see what this director's doing here, what that director's doing there.

B (33:32)

One observation of my own, and I mean, Shakespeare's adapted so much both on stage and screen, that you can find plenty of good versions and even more mediocre or bad ones. But maybe just a word to the wise, the first time you encounter Shakespeare, whether it's on the page or on screen or on stage, that will probably stick in your mind more than you think it will. And, you know, if you see a bad stage version of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or whatever, you might find it's kind of hard to expunge that from your memory.

A (34:08)

It's true.

B (34:09)

When you actually sit down, read and study the play itself, that's just a warning. So I. I think, yeah, on the whole, I. I might. There are one or two plays I think I would probably enjoy more if I just read them rather than seeing this or that version first.

A (34:26)

Interesting. One of the things I really like about Harold Goddard, he. He definitely is on team read them rather than watch them. And again, he's not against watching them, but he says they. They create two different experiences and that if you only watch them, you will miss a lot of what is the genius of the poet. Like, you have to have the words.

B (34:44)

You know. What I found out is one lifelong reader of Shakespeare, who was very hard on stage productions was Winston Churchill, who of course is not a dramatic critic or anything like that, but he evidently was kind of. He had a passive aggressive way of dealing with productions that cut passages that he liked.

A (35:05)

And

B (35:08)

Richard Burton remembered that as a young actor, this is probably in the 1940s, early 1950s, he was playing in. I think he was playing Iago in Othello. And he was told that that night Winston Churchill would be there. And sure enough, in the front row, Winston and Clementine Churchill were there and he was reciting a speech and Winston was reciting it in the front row along with him. And he said, and we had cut some lines and the Prime Minister kept reciting in a louder voice the lines we'd got.

A (35:43)

Okay, I love that.

B (35:44)

I know, it's hilarious. And actually Winston Churchill had a photographic memory and had just like ridiculously huge swatches of Shakespeare memorized. And. Yeah, anyway, I find stories like that kind of charming. And I'm just trying to think like, there are no politicians like this anymore. Say what you will about Winston Churchill,

A (36:00)

but I wish politicians had Shakespeare memorized. I will say though, that something like the Archangel Recordings, you can find them on audible, they're on YouTube. YouTube from time to time, where it's professional acting troops acting out the entire play. And it's just the voices so you're not having to see like a lot of. I keep wanting to get into the weeds and then remind myself, remember, Angeline, you said this would be a not overwhelming episode. How you stage scenes drastically changes the way how some of the lines are delivered. This is particularly true in Taming of the Shrew, where people are staying standing or who are they looking at? All of these things can radically change how the, the lines, how they hit and, and, and so there's an interpretation there in the way of that they're staging it. But if you just listen to the audio recordings, again unedited, they're not going to be taking any lines out. You're not having to see any blocking or anything like that. Those can be very helpful if you want, if you want to hear the different voices as you're going along. Now, we've mentioned a few times about kids reading in, and so I, I do want to talk a little bit about that. If Cindy was on this episode, she would tell you all about how she read so much Shakespeare to her kids. But she was a great inspiration to me when my kids were little and I read a lot of Shakespeare out loud to them as well. And There are several homeschool curriculum that have reading Shakespeare to kids as a fundamental part. And. And so we get a lot of questions about that. So I want to start off with a couple of stories about. About Shakespeare and, And kids. So when I was in college, my youngest sibling shout out to Jessica was in the second grade and I was taking this class on Shakespeare and I was reading Macbeth and I was so into it, and she came into the room I was visiting one weekend and she said, what are you reading? I said, oh, I'm reading a story about this king. And he kills this. He kills this other guy and then he becomes king. And she was like, oh, tell me about. Had it. So she sat on the edge of her bed and I did a com. Just a dramatic imagine that, a very dramatic retelling. I was reading parts of it, but then also, like, if it got complicated, I was summarizing things as we went, and she was riveted. She was riveted. And I told her the whole thing. And at the end of that experience, I remember thinking, kids can totally follow this. It was one of the reasons why I absolutely held my ground in that class where. Where the principal told me I was going to need helps. And I thought, you know what? I got my second grade sister hooked on this. I'm pretty sure I don't need helps. And it's funny because she's 40 now. And I was talking to her the other day and I said, do you remember that? And she said, not only do I remember that, she's like, that's one of my. One of my core childhood memories is you telling me the story of Macbeth. And she was into it.

C (38:43)

You were narrating.

A (38:44)

I was. I narrated it and acted it out. That told me that kids can. They can now. If you're all intimidated and awkward about it, they'll be intimidated and awkward about it. It. And then of course, I ended up, you know, homeschooling my children. So I was out of the classroom for a few years for that. And. And Cindy at the time was blogging about having morning time and reading Shakespeare to her kids. And I thought, okay, okay, I can do this. And so those are honestly my best homeschool memories, was those years when we were just all together in the living room and I was reading these Shakespeare plays out loud. And now we have auditory processing disorders in our family. And so if you do too, and you're thinking, my kids could never follow along, I actually, just because you can get them so cheap at the library sale, they'd be like a nickel a piece. We would each have our paperback copy. I was reading from my big Riverside annotated thing, and they were all following along, and I was just dramatically reading it. And I wasn't. I wasn't pointing out everything. I would summarize anything that I thought was a little difficult to understand. But mostly I just read it. And they ate it up. They ate it up. And again, another just really, really good memory in our. In our homeschool. And I was. I would have the. So I had three kids. The two older ones were school age. The youngest one was not school age at the time. So I'm thinking she's like three or four. But she was very. She was hyperverbal. In fact, I was just talking to her on the phone, and she said, oh, you know me. I can talk to anybody. I never stopped talking. I think. No, yeah, you were. You were born hyperverbal. So you'll understand why I say that in just a minute, because she's like three years old. So I have the older two give me their narrations again. I was reading Macbeth to them, and I'm. And. And they're giving their narrations, and I said, okay. And so we're starting the next section, and the littlest one comes into the room. And she said, what about me? What about me? I want to narrate. I want to narrate. I'm thinking, I haven't even been paying attention to you. You're, like, coloring in the corner. You're three years old. What do you mean you want to narrate? But, of course, being the good mom that I am, I said, sure, honey. Give me your narration. And she looked at me and she said, Mr. Macbeth. And Mrs. Macbeth became king and queen. And, like, she gave a real narration. I was. I was stunned. And I thought, look. Look at that. Like, I am. I am again lowering the bar. And these kids. These kids can understand it. And then just one more story about that. So I spent so many years reading Shakespeare to my kids. And when my oldest was in college, he got a part in his college's production of Much Ado About Nothing. And I drove down to see it, and they gave me the program. And when I opened the program, he had his head shot and a little blurb about him, and he said, I'm going to get choked up thinking about it. He said he dedicated his performance to his mother, who had for years read Shakespeare to him and had ignited that love. And now he's an English teacher himself. But kids, can. They can they do. They love it. And the classes that I teach, like it is amazing because I'll be, I'll be teaching all these things and these kids can relate it to all this different Shakespeare because they just, they know the stories, they know it so well. You have anything to add about that? You're grinning.

B (41:58)

No, I can't, I can't top that.

A (41:59)

You're just grinning from ear to ear over there. Okay, let's see. I'm looking at my very ADHD notes here and they're all out of order. So. So let's see what makes sense to go to from here. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the imaginative world of Shakespeare. Some people who are new to Shakespeare don't realize that all of his plays are five act plays. They all follow the same basic structure. And so they're either comedies or tragedies. And the history plays fit into that shape as well. We're talking about shapes here. And this might be helpful to under, to understand like how to approach it. What is, what is going on in the shape Shakespeare play. So in the tragedy. Well, it's the easiest way to explain it is think about the Greek drama masks. You have the smiley face and the frowny face. The smiley face is the comedy shape and the frowny face is the tragedy shape. So we'll, let's start with the frowny face. So in a tragedy, you will watch the play move from someone is low and they are elevated high. And usually they're elevated high. There's something a little bit shady about it. Looks like Macbeth, right? He's going to kill the king and become king. So he goes up, up. But there's something shady about it. Now there's lots of variations of this. So some plays like Macbeth will actually show the rise. Others like King Lear, he's already up, right. But the assumption is at some point he was low and he came up. But the tragedy is going to be that you're up at that high point and now you're falling from it. That's the tragic fall.

B (43:22)

The word catastrophe literally means a downfall, right?

A (43:25)

Right. That's the catastrophe of the fall. And, and there's a sense of inevitability. So it's, it's a little bit like an avalanche, right? Somebody has crossed a boundary. Willingly, unwillingly, depends on the play. But they've crossed some kind of natural boundary. And now, now the ball is rolling, right. And, and the more it goes down, the bigger the avalanche ball gets and it's. And it's going to Hit the bottom, and there's going to be innocent bystanders that are going to, you know, get splashed at the bottom of that. But that's how the tragedy goes. It's a story of someone's fall. And so it's very much a cautionary tale. Very much a cautionary tale. And Shakespeare's tragedies are quite masterful in that way. So, you know, you were talking earlier about how you don't really need to know the history. You know, I'm reminded of one of my favorite Northrop Fry quotes about Macbeth, and he says, you don't read Macbeth to find out the history of Scotland. You read Macbeth to find out the story of a man who gained the whole world but lost his soul.

B (44:25)

I should have brought that example up earlier. Yeah. If you know nothing about Scotland in the, what, 11th century? I guess it is, you're completely fine.

A (44:33)

It's better that you don't, because Shakespeare changes all the way. Changes all the history.

B (44:36)

Historic Macbeth actually isn't really like that.

A (44:38)

That's right.

C (44:39)

So what?

B (44:39)

The historic Richard III isn't really like that as well.

A (44:43)

Exactly. That's a very modern idea because we do get our history from movies, but that's not how they're approaching it with Shakespeare. Shakespeare is not trying to be a historian. He's trying to be a poet. And so he's changing things because, like I just said, he's not trying to tell you the true story of Scotland. He's trying to show a cautionary tale of when a man gains the whole world, but he loses his soul, which is the much better story.

B (45:05)

The English general, the Duke of Marlborough, once said that he knew no history except what he had learned from Shakespeare's plays.

A (45:12)

That's terrifying.

B (45:13)

It's terrifying, but it's also, like, not necessarily the worst way of learning history.

A (45:17)

It's the worst thing. Yeah, it's not the worst thing. Now, his comedies go the other way. They're smiles. So you will have a group of characters, some kind of community, who are together at the beginning. And so, like, they're kind of up high, and then they're going to be broken apart for some reason. You know, a villain shows up on the scene, like John, John, and he's gonna cause trouble or there's a law. And, you know, you. Hey, you showed up on the. On this island on the third Thursday after the full moon. So, you know, it's against a lot of have blue eyes. You know, something's going to happen to break it apart. And you will see that they start to slide down that fall again, that catastrophe again, there's variation. So sometimes you can see them up high. Sometimes they're in the midst of the fall already when you open the play. But the assumption is that everything had been fine earlier. Shakespeare is the king of variations. Like, he just has a. A. A handful of things that he does, but he keeps looking at it from a different angle, that that's part of his genius. Now, what if we did this? What if this happened? What if that happened?

B (46:19)

And I would add, one variation you see in his comedies is in what is at stake. Because in some comedies, not really a whole lot is at stake. Like in Love's Labor's Lost, what is at stake? These three men who just met these three women of whose existence they didn't really know two acts before they may or they may not marry them. It's not really a life or death sort of situation. In something like the Merchant of Venice, though, you know, will this merchant actually die a unjust death or will he be spared through some providential act of mercy? So some of the comedies. Actually, I'd like to get your thoughts on this. There are. There is a school of Shakespearean criticism which divide the comedies into pure comedies and problem comedies. What do you make of that distinction? Do you think it's necessary or do

A (47:11)

you think it's so? I think that those people are failing to understand the structure of the comedy in, like, the Northrop Fry sense of it. And. Because actually, that was gonna bring up my next point. They think the problem plays are the comedies that go dark. Right?

B (47:29)

And some of them are darker. I prefer that term maybe.

A (47:32)

But see, the thing is, as I was just about to explain, with the comedy fall, okay, the comedy fall, where you're sliding down that U, right? So a smile is a U, so that the character is up at the top of the U, and they slide down. Northrop Fry says that's the almost tragedy, right? It's supposed to feel like a fall. And so Shakespeare just keeps playing with these and making the fall more and more intense. So sometimes the fall is very light light, but sometimes it's very, very intense. Winter's Tale. It's very intense.

B (47:59)

Measure for measure.

A (48:00)

Measure for measure. But that just makes the EU Catastrophe all the more significant. So you said the catastrophe is the fall. And Tolkien points out that in the comedy, the catastrophe, the fall becomes a U catastrophe, EU Catastrophe. So that prefix of good. So it becomes the good fall. And of course, being a philologist, he's well aware that the sound U is also the shape of the U, which, which is the comedy shape. So Shakespeare just, he keeps playing with it like, how hard can I make these people fall? How much of an almost tragedy can it be? And it just makes the EU catastrophe all the more significant. So as Tolkien explains, the EU catastrophe is when the fall becomes the good fall, the fortunate fall, right? It's like Good Friday, right? It's this tragic, horrible thing, but it's going to be the turn that, that makes the whole thing become a miracle. So whereas a tragedy is inevitable, you've crossed this line and now you're going to deal with the consequences of this line. I always tell my, my good book students, it's like watching a, a gang, a bank robbery movie, right? And it's like four friends from high school, we're just gonna pull off this one heist. And you're thinking to yourself, yeah, I know what's gonna happen. This is inevitable. They're gonna rob the bank, they're gonna start double crossing each other. And I said, no one ever watches.

B (49:12)

I've seen this movie many times. Yes.

A (49:14)

I always tell the kids and they always laugh because they know exactly what I'm talking about. And I say, you know, never watch a movie like that. And you think, I never would have saw that coming. They're double crossing each other. Who saw this coming? Everyone, right? It's inevitable. That's, that's the power of the cautionary tale, is that we all know this is going to go bad and yet they, they do it anyway. It's, you know, they're just like trapped in that sometimes they're trapped in a web of fate.

B (49:38)

Tale will act in such a way as to suggest that they have never read a cautionary tale themselves.

A (49:43)

Well said, dear. Well said.

C (49:44)

It.

A (49:44)

So the U catastrophe, they hit the bottom of that U and it turns and it goes back up the U. It's the miracle, right? So if the tragedy is inevitable, the comedy is miraculous. It's the expected surprise, right? So things look terrible, they look dark. How are we possibly going to get out of this? And then something miraculous happens and everything is resolved. That's the comedy structure. That's the fairy tale structure. That's the structure of the gospel, right? Oh, no. The worst thing in the world just happened. God incarnate is dead. Oh, well, joke's on you. He just, he just defeated death. Death died. And now, now we have life, right? It's that kind of deep, deep cosmic comedic structure. That's what all of Shakespeare's comedies are going About. And so it's not really about if this guy and this girl are going to be happy at the end. Right. That's. That's the totally the wrong way to look at it. Like, oh, I don't know. This guy seems not that great. I can't believe she has to marry him. Like, that's. That's missing the point. Point. The characters are like. They're like pieces on a chessboard. Right. He's moving them around and he's showing us these amazing cosmic structures, which leads me to talk about cosmology. Right. So the. The cosmology behind a Shakespeare play. I will say you can get into this as deep or as little as you want. You don't have to know all of this to, like, enjoy a Shakespeare play, but if you're really interested in it, you can get more. And so E.M.W. tillier's the Elizabethan world picture is. Is definitely the go to place for. For that.

B (51:12)

You mentioned Arthur Lovejoy's great chain of

A (51:14)

being, Although I don't.

B (51:15)

Denser. Yeah, I wouldn't know.

A (51:18)

But I'm gonna. I'm gonna just hit, like. If I could just, like, give you a hot take on Renaissance cosmology that will help you with Shakespeare. I'm not. I picked out, like the one thing of a very, very complex thing. I mean, C.S. lewis's discarded image is all about this. There's lots and lots of things if you really wanted to go deeper into this, which some of our students do. And we have loads of webinars and classes that get you deep into the cosmology. But if you're just like a beginner for Shakespeare and you're like, I don't need to be, you know, have a master's degree in Elizabethan cosmology. You know what can you tell me? I've got it for you. Here's my hot take for you. Okay. The Renaissance person is obsessed with order. Okay. In fact, that's the subtitle of E.M. tillyard's book. The Elizabethan World Picture is the Study of order. Now, they have a fundamentally different understanding of order than we do. We think of, like, you know, if. If you go into your kid's bedroom and he's left his socks out, you're like, this room is chaos. That. That's not. That's not what the Elizabethan is worried about. For them, chaos is a return to the uncreated order. So think Genesis. The world was formless and void. That's chaos. Right? Right. And so then Genesis, the beginning, first three Chapters of Genesis is the picture of divine order being laid to the cosmos. It is orderly. God has held it together. And so the fear.

B (52:40)

It's telling here that the word cosmos in Greek, one of its meanings is simply order.

A (52:44)

Oh, wow, that's. No, that's very good. And I'll have to say one more thing for this to make sense. We, as moderns think we live in a very fragmented, random world. And. And the medievals and Elizabethans see themselves much more as parts of a beautiful tapestry. And so every thread in that tapestry is important and is an important part of the overall picture that is being put together. So it's not like the red thread, one day can be like, you know what you do? You guys, I'm going to do me. I'm out of here, right? No, you can't have a tapestry if red is gone. Right? Like, it doesn't make sense. The whole thing is going to fray apart. So. And they also have this. It's very hard to hot. Take it. I'm doing my best, guys. They also have a doctrine of correspondences. So everything is related. So if there's disorder in one area, it's going to echo through the universe. And the fear is we're going to get back to the uncreated world. We are unmaking ourselves if we become disordered. So if you've ever wondered why, if you're reading a Shakespeare play and, hey, this guy killed the king, now all of a sudden there's an eclipse and an earthquake or a tempest, that's the universe shaking at its foundation. We are. We are threatening to uncreate ourselves. We're gonna. We're gonna go back to the cosmic formlessness and void. Okay, so it's that kind of obsession with order. My soul has to be properly ordered. The state has to be properly ordered. The church, my family, the natural world, the heavens, on and on and on, or we're gonna go back to chaos. Us. So I find one of the easiest ways to make sense, and this works for both the comedies and the tragedies, is to track in Shakespeare's plays that they start with order, move to disorder, go back to order. Every single one does that. Now, sometimes the order is implied, and you start to play in the midst of disorder. But as always, order, disorder, order.

B (54:40)

And one great example of that, that. And there are so many. But Hamlet, you would think that. Well, I mean, everyone's dead at the end of Hamlet, famously. Wouldn't that just be everything resolving itself in chaos? Actually, no, because Shakespeare, it's kind of a deus ex machina almost. The Norwegian army invades. And the plot doesn't strictly demand that the Norwegian army under Fortinbras show up, but at the very end, Fortinbras, you know, he has conquered Denmark and come upon this bloody scene on the stage with Hamlet and Claudius and Gertrude and all the other's dead. And that's kind of a. You can read that as almost kind of a renewal.

A (55:21)

Absolutely the same thing.

B (55:22)

Which is not to say that it comes to a happy ending. I mean, it's a tragedy, after all.

A (55:25)

But the tragedy of Hamlet. But it's the comedy of Denmark, just like in Macbeth. Macbeth is the tragedy of Macbeth, but it's the comedy of Scotland because Macbeth is destroyed, and that is what allows the rightful heir, Malcolm, to come to the throne. And so Scotland is restored. Sword. So the way it works in a tragedy is the person creating the disorder. Because. Because we're going to go back to order, right? And if you're fighting that, if you're actively fighting the return to order, you're going to be crushed by the turn. It's going to turn and go back up to order. And so, you see, Macbeth has to die for the order to come back. Hamlet has to die, you know, etc. Etc. There's also innocent bystanders that'll have. That happen. Happen to die as well. But you'll see that overall movement, order, disorder, order.

B (56:11)

And lest we sow confusion anywhere, fair, there are one or two exceptions to this. I think you could make a case that King Lear and Julius Caesar don't conform to this pattern. Exactly. But anyway. But as a rule, I think, again,

A (56:29)

I would go back to the idea that Shakespeare is the king of innovation and variation. And so. So he might. He might stop the play before the world of the play comes back to order. But in Julius Caesar, everybody who knows their Roman history knows it's going to swing back to order with Octavius, right? So. And King Lear is also another story that. That everybody would have known and actually was a comedy. So he. He just plays with the tragedy part of it.

B (56:54)

Oh, I forgot.

A (56:56)

He changes the ending. So again, variation. But basically, order, disorder, order. And in the comedy, it's very easy to see the order, disorder, order, because the disorder comes. But then there's the eucatastrophe. And so there's always like, this sense of, like, repentance and the turn, and then, you know, then there. Everybody's swept up in the. In the return to order, and they're all reordered at the end and redeemed rather than being crushed but by that return. So that's, that's a, just a really easy way to look at it. Order, disorder, order. Another very, very important theme. And she, Shakespeare is, and it's very closely related to this because he's exploring in all of his plays what are all the different ways that we can end up being disordered, right? You can have a civil war, you could have an assassination, but it might be something much smaller than that or different. And so another big theme is appearance versus reality. Things are not as they seem, right? There are disguises. We can't see through people. And that will create a lot of disorder.

B (57:53)

Not always, but very, very often his villains are two faced and also very often his villains are malcontent and just kind of existentially at odds with their place, right?

A (58:04)

And that would show a disorder in their soul which then becomes magnified, usually

B (58:09)

expresses itself through some kind of ambition to supplant somebody else.

A (58:13)

And that's why there's so much disguises in Shakespeare because it's appearance versus reality. So if you take, take if you think of, of a play with a lot of disguises, okay, at the beginning there's order. People are who they really are. Something happens, there's a shipwreck or something and I'm not sure if I'm safe here. So I'm going to, I'm going to pretend to be somebody different, right? A bazillion different variations on that. And so in the middle when it's disorder, part of that disorder is nobody is who they really are. They all have a fake identity. They are all trying to appear to be something they are not. And then at the end what happens, happens. All the disguises come off, your real identity comes forward, right? And so we're back to reality. So this is, there's a, again this is the big, the big fairy tale theme is the movement from blindness to sight, right? So these characters are all on those kinds of journeys and, and, and modern ways of reading which I think are wrong are heavily focused on the psychology of the characters. They'll say things like Shakespeare's the master of psychology. And I just want to stab my

B (59:10)

eyes out because no, with the Shakespeare this is. And Bardolatry, which goes back to the 19th century, this idea that Shakespeare's kind of in this, kind of in this class apart by himself as a storyteller and a dramatist and almost this kind of titanic figure that Shakespeare has sort of recreated human nature itself. This is actually A serious thesis in. Well, Harold Bloom, I think he had a book, didn't he? Shakespeare the Invention of the human or something so mad.

A (59:39)

Because he said Shakespeare invented personality. And I thought, have you never read Chaucer? What are you.

B (59:44)

Oh, sure. And you can find any number of authors before.

C (59:47)

Yeah.

B (59:47)

Who are working in the same vein. But no, we have to set Shakespeare on a shelf by himself. Which is another reason, I think, why people are kind of afraid of me.

A (59:54)

And so, you know, if you're brand new to the podcast, my saying Shakespeare is the fairy tale author might not really mean a lot to you. So you probably should listen to our episode. Why read fairy tales and you'll understand why this is a huge compliment that I'm paying him that I say is a fairy tale authority author. But he's showing he's not interested in things like, oh, power dynamics between these two people, or are these people going to actually have a marriage? Like, there's a whole tradition of all of those characters being types for the audience and them understanding. These are, these are journeys of the soul. Right. This is somebody whose soul is moving from order to disorder to order again, who's moving from blindness to sight, appearance versus reality, these kinds of deep, deep themes. And he's not interested in all of that other stuff. Stuff. Again, we will list at the end of the episode all of the Shakespeare episodes we've done all the series. And you'll see what I'm talking about as you, as you read those along with us. Now, the Globe Theater itself also helps to explain the cosmology. And this is, this is a, this is, again, a warning against film versions and modern black box versions of Shakespeare. The Globe Theater has the heavens painted at the top in the middle. You are on the stage acting it out, and then you're over a trapdoor which leads to hell. And that is, of course, the way they viewed their own reality. We are actors on a stage. We're living the life right here on this sphere. But we live under heaven, right? And we're, we're teetering on hell. The decisions we make, the things we do, we're always in between these two things. And so that means all of Shakespeare's speeches are rooted in that cosmology. So to be or not to be, for example, that is going to play or even Macbeth's tomorrow and tomorrow speech. Right. That whole like, what's the point of living? We're all going to die anyway, that lands so differently if it's on the Globe Theater because he's saying that while he stands under heaven and stands over hell, right? He's having this moment of nihilism. But the play's not nihilistic. The audience knows, oh, no, your choices do matter. You're either going to go to heaven or hell. We can. Can see that visually right there. But the modern way of acting it out is what they call the black box. Right? It's literally a black box. Maybe some of you guys have seen that. You just go into a dark room. There's no. There's no stage. There's no sets. The audience is sitting around the box, and the actors just come out and it's black. It's completely black. It's dark. They come out, they give their speech, they walk out. Well, then, now, if Shakes. If Hamlet comes out and says, to be or not to be in the middle of the black box, you're looking like, really? I know. Do you. Should you live? Should you die? Does any matter? Right? Macbeth comes out and yells, you know, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It feels nihilistic. But that. But that's not what it is.

B (62:40)

I once saw a Hamlet that was done. I mean, you're giving what might seem like a fanciful example, but it's really not. I've seen a Hamlet. Everyone was like, it's fine to have Hamlet wearing all black. It describes him wearing all black at the beginning of the play, but everyone was wearing all black through the entire play. I think there were no props except for a couple of swords and a skull. There was no furniture. Everyone. It was like everyone was awkwardly standing, even in scenes where the characters might not be awkwardly standing. Yeah. I think some Shakespeare plays can be too lavish or adaptations can be too lavish and too baroque, but I think we really overdo the minimalist sometimes.

A (63:22)

And. And my point is, if you go see a black box production, Hamlet comes out and says, should I even exist or not, or should I just kill myself? It. It will seem in that black box moment, like, that's a legitimate question for all of us to be asking. What's the point of any of this? We just live in a random, meaningless universe. We live, we die. Who cares? Right? But that's not how Shakespeare intended that to come across. That would be a modern interpretation. And if you. If you. If you stand on the Globe Theater and say that, though, and you're literally standing under the eye of heaven and you say, live, die, whatever, doesn't matter. The character is having that crisis, but the audience is not having that crisis. Right? The audience is. Is literally seeing the order of the universe and that your life does matter, and how you live your life matters a whole lot. It's the difference between hell and heaven. So that's. That's another way in which the cosmology is embedded. And I'm looking at all of my notes and looking at the time. All right, so those are some strategies. I also want to give this a strategy too. Yes.

B (64:29)

I actually had something I wanted to also. And this is really good. And I think this is a part of his genius. Shakespeare doesn't over explain things. And of course, all sorts of dramatic criticism focus on the motives of characters. The motives. Why does. Does Iago betray Othello and all that kind of thing? And up to a point I think that's fine. And you do have to talk about these things. But it's interesting often what Shakespeare, Sometimes I think his brilliance reveals itself in what he doesn't tell us. One of my favorite examples of this, he never explains what the Montagues and the Capulets are actually fighting about, which makes it seem all the more irrational. And it is irrational. So sometimes Shakespeare's silences are. Are very pregnant with all kinds of dramatic meaning and importance.

A (65:15)

So Shakespeare presumes the presence of sin in the world. And so the fact that neighbors can't get along and hate each other irrationally is just evidence of that. We live in a fallen universe. It's. And sometimes modern readers will say, well, this is a flaw. He didn't give these people any motivation. Like, I've literally had somebody tell me on a podcast that it was a flaw in Much Ado About Nothing, that Don John didn't have a motivation, which was absurd. He was. He was the snake in the garden. That. That's like taking issue with Genesis that Satan doesn't have any motivation for what he's doing. Like, this is the presence of evil in the world. The question is not why does evil happen? It's how do you respond to it. Here's. Here's what? Evil. Evil can destroy you if you fall to that temptation. If you resist that temptation, you know you can be redeemed. That's what Shakespeare is interested in. Not is there evil in the world or why is there evil in the world? He just accepts that there is, as his audience would have accepted. So another good strategy, I think since we did talk about the language, sometimes people are tempted to pick up one of those, like, no fear Shakespeare's or Shakespeare Made Easy. Okay. Where it's got. Oh, I know, I know. The look on your face on one side it's got the real Shakespeare and on the other, the facing page, it's got like a modernized version. Version. And I have heard English teachers say, my students need this. Your students do not need this. Okay.

B (66:37)

Your students are a lot smarter than you realize.

A (66:39)

Well, that's right. Okay, but let me just tell you why. I'm going to give you some better options. If you're worried about can your students follow the language. The no fear Shakespeare is bad for a number of reasons. Okay, how about a pragmatic read? Is it? Shakespeare has a lot of sexual innuendo and euphemisms that are so planted in Elizabethan imagery and language that it will go right over your students and head. Right over your kid's head. But not in a no fear Shakespeare. They're gonna spell it out to you in modern language. And all of a sudden you're gonna have a problem on your hand that you're giving something sexually explicit to these kids. But it's not explicit in Shakespeare. Right. So that's a place where you want the language to be a little bit obfuscating. So that's one reason. The other thing is the no fear Shakespeare guts the language. And the language is where the meaning is. Is the metaphors are where the meaning is. You, you cannot gut it that way. Now however, if you are concerned that your student can't follow the plot honestly, get yourself a Mary and Charles Lamb's Tales of Shakespeare. Edith Nepet's got a Tales of Shakespeare. Read a story version. It's really okay. You can become familiarized with the plot. And then when you read the, the, the play, you can be looking at the language and the poetics of it and, and you won't have to worry about. Well, I'm just confused in terms of plot about what's going on.

B (67:58)

And also if you're worried about spoiling the ending, I'm gonna guess that most people probably know the endings by now.

A (68:04)

It's called the City of Hamlet. You know, everybody's gonna be dead. Like that's literally how it works.

B (68:08)

Yeah. So I, I wouldn't, I don't, I don't think I've ever seen a Shakespeare play where I didn't know the ending beforehand just because through hearsay.

A (68:15)

Or it's would have done it too.

B (68:17)

Especially because he's pulling from so many, so many of these are well known stories already. You know what mean I like it's not like a murder mystery.

A (68:23)

You're not going to spoil it.

B (68:24)

And, and you killed King Lear.

A (68:25)

I know it doesn't work like that. Well, I mean, before the modern age, suspense is not how things worked anyway because we're interested in the structures. You can also just get, like, plot summaries off of sparknotes.com for free. Like, just read it right before the scene. Read the summary of the scene, then read the scene. And. And that it takes some of the pressure off if you're feeling a little bit confused. Confused about what's going on. You know, when I was describing the shapes, I forgot to say. So the. The U shape, the tragic shape that ends in death, that's the cautionary tale. And the comedy shape ends in either a wedding, a dance, or a feast, which, again, is the shape of the gospel. Right? Because after. After the Good Friday, you, catastrophe. And there's a literal ascension, right? So he goes back up the U, and order is restored. You know, the culmination of that is the marriage, Supper of the Lambs. So. So you have that deeply embedded shape, and that's why Shakespeare's comedies end in a wedding, not because Shakespeare just thinks marriage will solve all your problems. Nope, nope. He's. He's writing journeys of the soul. That's. That's what he's doing. I already said the thing about read it out loud. I really, honestly can't recommend that enough. Read it out loud to yourself. It'll be so much easier. Now, I have one last thing I want us to mention, just. Just briefly before I start giving you our list of resources of things to help you if you want to go deeper. What is the most ridiculous advice you've ever heard for reading Shakespeare? I've. I've got two. And maybe if you can't think of one, I'll. I'll just say what mine are.

B (69:59)

You go first. I'm.

A (70:00)

I'm. Okay. The most. The most ridiculous thing I ever heard. And this will not surprise anybody that it was an actor who said this. He actually said, if homeschool moms want to read, read Shakespeare to their children, they need to go down to the community theater, get a bunch of outer work actors, invite them to their house, and have them do a table read of Shakespeare for their kids. And that was how they could understand it. And that is insane. That is genuinely insane. You do not need all of that.

B (70:33)

Just go down to the Greyhound bus station and gather. Okay. Yeah.

A (70:36)

Just with, like, a sign. Any actors looking for a day job? I mean. I mean, I looked across the table at this guy, and I just thought, what are you smoking? Like, who. I thought all you've Done is discourage anybody from ever opening Shakespeare ever again. If you think you need an acting troupe, that. That was absurd. But of course, he was an actor, and he had a very high view of actors, and I have a very low view of actors.

B (71:01)

I mean, look, it's a prejudice you carry around.

A (71:03)

Absolutely. Like Liz Taylor, who said about her performance of Catherine in. In much. In how to Read. I'm sorry, In Taming of the Shrew, she said, oh, yeah, I didn't know anything about Shakespeare. I just played it like how I would act in that moment. And I was like, I will literally kill you right now.

B (71:18)

But you have to admit, you could not choose a Shakespeare character. More like.

A (71:22)

No, it's true. That's right. No, it really wasn't in Richard Burton. Right, exactly. But you know that that doesn't work because you can't know how to play the part if you don't know what the play means. Right. Which leads me to the second most absurd thing, which was also said by the same person you're going to see. He really had a high view of actors. He thinks that the only way you can understand Shakespeare is if you act it out. And he went on and on to me about how you have to embody the character. You cannot know what Hamlet is about if you do not embody Hamlet. And I said, wait, so you're going on record?

B (72:00)

Do I have to kill my uncle?

A (72:01)

So he said, you're going on record then that nobody in the audience at the Globe Theater could understand what Shakespeare is doing, only the actors. And then I would have to act out every single part of every single play to know what was going on. This is your position. And he just kept saying, you have to embody it. Yeah.

B (72:22)

He did realize that method acting did not exist until the 20th century.

A (72:25)

I don't think he knew anything. I once asked him, okay, I said, all right, fine. You're a Shakespearean act. How do you know how to deliver your lines? And he said, oh, I have a coach who's an expert in these things. And she tells me. And I said, so she read it. That's. You're saying she read it? Because all I'm saying is people should read it.

B (72:40)

Much simpler that way.

A (72:41)

Yeah, exactly. Oh, I.

B (72:45)

Actually, here's one. I. I cannot remember where I heard this. I think this was in. I think this was in college at some point. It wasn't in a Shakespeare class because I had a very good Shakespeare professor, but I remember a teacher in college saying that you should never stage Shakespeare except in A purest historical fashion.

A (73:09)

Oh, that's not true.

B (73:10)

That you should never stage Shakespeare using any kind of costumery which would not have been used in the Elizabethan theater. I don't know exactly what his point was, because the Elizabethan theater made use of whatever props laid hang which. So they'd use the same kind of armor for a Roman legionary as they would for a medieval knight. Yeah, so they weren't. Yeah, that was. Even at the time, I don't think I could have articulated it, but that seemed, that seemed false to me. So I'm actually, I'm hospitable to some. Not all, but some modernizations where people cut fast and loose with the historical setting. Some I think don't really work and actually obscure the meaning of the play. Others I think actually. Others I think are actually more.

C (73:52)

More hospitable to it.

B (73:54)

But yeah, so I, I don't think I could match the find out of work actors and have them perform for your children.

A (74:01)

We did a podcast episode on various Shakespeare adaptations. You guys should look that up because there were some we really did a while ago and some not. Not so much. I think that was as part of our Much Ado About Nothing episodes that we did. All right, now for the book list, which I know you guys are waiting on. So I mentioned Harold Goddard. He's got a two volume set called the Meaning of Shakespeare. And I really like this a lot. He covers all of the plays. The thing to know about these books, however, is don't just say, oh, I'm reading Romeo and Juliet. Let me flip to the Romeo and Juliet chapter, because that's not how it's put together. He very much correctly perceives that Shakespeare is making a world of stories here and that it's wrong to approach each one individually and be like, so what is, what is this play saying? Because he realizes that all of the plays are sort of talking to each other and he's. He revisits old themes and just kind of does a twist. Like, for example, Much Ado About Nothing. Right. Harrow gets dishonored by a guy, and so she runs to her local priest who says, hey, I know what'll help. Let's fake your death. What could go wrong? Right, right. And it's like, later, Shakespeare's like, oh, I know what could go wrong. Let me write Romeo and Juliet. Right? So Goddard takes that approach. So he will sometimes mention stuff about Romeo and Juliet, for example, in the Much Ado About Nothing chapter. So just, just know that this isn't like an encyclopedia Right. He, he's, he's looking at the world of Shakespeare. That's why it's called the Meaning of Shakespeare. It's when you take the world of Shakespeare as a whole, this is, this is what it means. So that's one of my favorite favorites. Now this is the next one's a Cindy pick. This is Isaac Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare and this also covers all of the plays. And this is a very beginner friendly guide. He goes through just like some basic context and maybe like a couple of the folk tales that are being referenced or something like that. Very, very basic. Doesn't get into like any heavy cosmology. Very beginner friendly. I already mentioned E.W. tillard's the Elizabethan World picture. This is this along with a Discarded image by C.S. lewis are your go to books for understanding cosmology.

B (76:08)

We also Hilliard wrote a lot about Shakespeare. I think he must have half a dozen books.

A (76:13)

I have all of them. I'm not going to recommend all of them because this is the episode to not, but I am going to recommend one of them. We have several webinars and mini classes on our website too that if you're interested in that are on different aspects of cosmology that can be very, very helpful. Helpful. But again this is just if you want to go deeper. Tillard has lots of different books about different plays. The one I'm going to recommend is actually his volume Shakespeare's History Plays. And he actually includes Macbeth in the history plays because the first couple of chapters are just background on the Elizabethans. And he's got one chapter here which is basically a summary of the Elizabethan world picture. He gets into the tutorment and a lot of the interesting background and then he goes through the plays which again he sees as order, disorder, order plays. And then good old Northrup Fry, his book on Shakespeare which does not cover all of the plays but which is absolutely brilliant about the ones that it does cover. And he's going to be looking at the images and the overall structure and he's just the best. And the last one is a student of CS Lewis. His name is Martin Lingerie Things. And this is a book called Shakespeare's Window into the Soul. It also does not cover all the plays, but the plays that it covers it looks at very specifically as journey of the soul stories that, that these characters are every man and they're on the journey to the soul. And you can see, you know, the tragedy shape and the comedy shape there as well. Right. We're either Our soul is either moving toward death and hell and damnation, or it's moving toward the marriage, Supper of the Lamb. And he sees Shakespeare's plays in, in those terms.

B (77:48)

I see the Ford is written by King Charles.

A (77:50)

It is. It is. Isn't that cool? The current King Charles. Yeah, like I'm not going to get distracted on that. But yeah, this is a, this is a fun book. And that's sort of what I was getting at when I said that we make the mistake of reading all of these, these through a psychological lens when these are much more Journey of the Soul stories. And as promised, these are the series we did on Shakespeare, which I would recommend that you listen to if you want to know more. Like, you know, the nitty gritty. And I will say this because people misunderstand this about this podcast. Every time I talk about a Shakespeare play, I am talking about every Shakespeare play. Okay? So just because the series has so much to do about nothing, you're going to learn how every Shakespeare comedy works? Because that's how I talk about stories. I will be talking about how all of them work. So even if I'm listing the titles here and you're like, but that's not the one I want to know about. If you're reading a comedy, listen to the one we did on comedies. If you're listening to a tragedy, listen to the Othello. If you're listening to a romance, you know, if you're reading a romance, listen to the one we did on Winter's Tale, because they're all about how to read all of Shakespeare. So we did a series on Much Ado about Nothing. Highly recommend you start there. We did the tragedy, Othello, we did Winter's Tale, and we did A Midsummer Night's Dream. And so you can find, we'll link all of those below and you can find all of those, you know, in our, in our back catalog. And I also have a five session mini class called how to read Taming of the Shrew. And I also highly recommend that one. I go, I pitched that one because that one's the one that's most easy to misread through a psychological lens. And then I show you how it's actually a fairy tale. And we go through it very, very minutely. And lots of people say that it just completely blows their mind. And I show you all the folk tales, he's referencing the fairy tales, and, and all that good stuff. And you see that the play is not at all what you thought it was about. All right. I think that about covers it. Mr. Banks, what do you think?

B (79:57)

I think so.

A (79:58)

Hopefully this was a not overwhelming episode and you got a few laughs in there with us, a few eye rolls and guffaws at some of the crazy things people say and we've helped you have a way in. But really the biggest advice is just jump in. Don't try to understand everything. Get the basic shape of it and you'll find out that there's a reason why we've been reading him for 500 years. He's fun.

B (80:23)

Amen.

A (80:23)

He's good. Well, next week we start a series that has been long requested. I gotta tell you, Mr. Banks and I cannot put this book down. We are flying through it. We're gonna start a series on Jane Eyre by Sharon Charlie Bronte. You can find the schedule, the reading schedule for that on our website, the Literary Life, on our Facebook group and on our Patreon Forum. But next week we'll be back to introduce Jane Eyre and to talk about chapters one through five. Stick around to the end of this podcast. Mr. Banks has a special poem for you. Shout out to our Patreon who keep us going and keep this podcast going for free. And if you're interested in becoming a member of the that really, really awesome community, you can find out about that@patreon.com TheLiteraryLife until next time, 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 Cindy@morningtimeformoms.com. join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this video 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,

C (82:09)

Juliet's Nurse by Walter Delamere in old world nursery vacant now of children with posied walls familiar fair, demure mirror and facing southward, O' er romantic streets sits yet, and gossips winter's dark away One gloomy, vast, glossy and wise and sly and at her side a cherried country cousin her tongue claps ever like a ram's sweet bell. There's not a name but calls a tale to mind some marrowy patty of farce or melodrum. There's not a soldier but hath babes in view.

A (82:46)

You.

C (82:46)

There's not on earth What? Minds not of the housewife. O widowhood that left me still espoused beauty. She sighs o' er and she sighs o' er. Gold. Gold will buy all things, even a sweet husband. Else only heaven is left. And farewell, youth. Yet, strangely in that money haunted head the sad gemmed crucifix and incense blue is childhood once again. Her memory is like an ant hill which a twig disturbs, but twigs stilled never. And to see her face broad with sleek homely beams, her babied hands ever like lighting doves and her small eyes blue wells at twinkle, arch and lewd and pious. To darken all sudden into stygian gloom and paint disaster with uplifted whites is life's epitome. She prates and prates a water brook of words o' er 12 small pebbles. And when she dies, some gray, long summer evening when the bird shouts of childhood through the dusk neath night's faint tapers Then her body shall lie stiff with silks of 60 thrifty years.