amazingly detailed and super entertaining (plus how excited he gets is just intoxicating) I watched these lectures before my ATAR exam (end of year 12 exams for those not in Australia) for Literature. This year Queensland switched over to a new system of marking and no-one was sure of what the questions would look like so of course we were all a bit terrified and felt unprepared as King Lear is a monstrously layered play. One of the questions we were able to choose form related to juxtaposition and truly, thanks to these lectures comparing convention and nature, my relief and confidence at that exam was just unparalleled.
All this talk about clothing I did not expect. “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.” Oscar Wilde
What comes out of the smoldering ruins on human tragedy is justice and Life overcoming its worst instincts of survival. The ever constant battle between Good and Evil leaves us with unanswerable questions. Like Sisyphus after his unforgiving Boulder rolls back down the eternal incline, he turns and smiles. Oh, the happy, happy dead, that Tithonus was unable to attain: it is Our mortality that is Divine Justice and the internal order of the Cosmos.
So you could say the play asks where the authority to define justice comes from. It cannot reasonably from gross nature, because the Just World Hypothesis in conjunction with the existence of evil leads to victim blaming. If the world was just, then those who suffer must deserve it, and this is clearly not the evidence of the play or world. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis It cannot reasonably be that animal nature provides a guide to justice, since humans transcend the lives of beasts when they live in polities. It cannot reasonably be one's social overlords. As the play shows, a servant defies the injustices of a duke to his own life's peril and ends up killing him. It cannot be left to fools or philosophers or kings, since these humans have their own agendas, limitations and foibles. If the question is left somewhat open, perhaps Shakespeare shows that a human sense of justice must come partly from our biological animal natures, since we must understand suffering; partly from rationality; and partly from the best examples we can see in others. And partly from the intersubjectivity that true human communication can provide (such as when the servants, or when King Lear's outcasts, debate rights and wrongs amongst themselves). I am not convinced that the play's outcome is truly bad. There was something rotten in the state of England before Lear's first plan, something he finds when he finally sees what hovels his people are living in. Cordelia's example lives on after death. The surviving good characters have learnt crucial lessons.
This is all brilliant analysis, but I cannot believe the brightest people in the audience are/were aware of 10 per cent of what Prof. Cantor is saying. Shakespeare's audience was aware of all these allusions? So many people were illiterate back then, and no one had these inexpensive paperback books of his plays that we so casually handle.
@@Tolstoy111 I’d also add they didn’t have to. A modern example would be Hitchcock. He used a ton of Freud that most of the people going to see his thrillers wouldn’t fully grasp, but it supports the whole which people do grasp. His audience understood the emotions, frustrations, and inevitabilities of life along with the struggle for power which ruled their world which Shakespeare expertly interweaves with the deeper aspects of the play, maybe not the intricacies of all of it, but enough to be engrossed in the tragic family drama of a great king. That he was grappling with deeper philosophical questions didn’t mean his audience had to as well. And his genius is such that he can both present the Everyman/woman quotidian, the larger life struggles, while at the same time offer so much philosophical/existential exploration into the nature of humanity. There’s a reason why he outshines the writers who came before him and his shadow looms so large over all writers since. One of a kind
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amazingly detailed and super entertaining (plus how excited he gets is just intoxicating)
I watched these lectures before my ATAR exam (end of year 12 exams for those not in Australia) for Literature. This year Queensland switched over to a new system of marking and no-one was sure of what the questions would look like so of course we were all a bit terrified and felt unprepared as King Lear is a monstrously layered play. One of the questions we were able to choose form related to juxtaposition and truly, thanks to these lectures comparing convention and nature, my relief and confidence at that exam was just unparalleled.
What a fascinating series of lectures. I have a different perspective of King Lear from Cantor's lectures!
All this talk about clothing I did not expect. “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.” Oscar Wilde
One suspects had Cornwall lived and won that this story would be told differently.
What comes out of the smoldering ruins on human tragedy is justice and Life overcoming its worst instincts of survival. The ever constant battle between Good and Evil leaves us with unanswerable questions. Like Sisyphus after his unforgiving Boulder rolls back down the eternal incline, he turns and smiles. Oh, the happy, happy dead, that Tithonus was unable to attain: it is Our mortality that is Divine Justice and the internal order of the Cosmos.
@45:45
So you could say the play asks where the authority to define justice comes from.
It cannot reasonably from gross nature, because the Just World Hypothesis in conjunction with the existence of evil leads to victim blaming. If the world was just, then those who suffer must deserve it, and this is clearly not the evidence of the play or world.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
It cannot reasonably be that animal nature provides a guide to justice, since humans transcend the lives of beasts when they live in polities.
It cannot reasonably be one's social overlords. As the play shows, a servant defies the injustices of a duke to his own life's peril and ends up killing him.
It cannot be left to fools or philosophers or kings, since these humans have their own agendas, limitations and foibles.
If the question is left somewhat open, perhaps Shakespeare shows that a human sense of justice must come partly from our biological animal natures, since we must understand suffering; partly from rationality; and partly from the best examples we can see in others. And partly from the intersubjectivity that true human communication can provide (such as when the servants, or when King Lear's outcasts, debate rights and wrongs amongst themselves).
I am not convinced that the play's outcome is truly bad. There was something rotten in the state of England before Lear's first plan, something he finds when he finally sees what hovels his people are living in. Cordelia's example lives on after death. The surviving good characters have learnt crucial lessons.
This is all brilliant analysis, but I cannot believe the brightest people in the audience are/were aware of 10 per cent of what Prof. Cantor is saying. Shakespeare's audience was aware of all these allusions? So many people were illiterate back then, and no one had these inexpensive paperback books of his plays that we so casually handle.
Most people in Shakespeare’s London could read and write.
@@Tolstoy111 I’d also add they didn’t have to. A modern example would be Hitchcock. He used a ton of Freud that most of the people going to see his thrillers wouldn’t fully grasp, but it supports the whole which people do grasp. His audience understood the emotions, frustrations, and inevitabilities of life along with the struggle for power which ruled their world which Shakespeare expertly interweaves with the deeper aspects of the play, maybe not the intricacies of all of it, but enough to be engrossed in the tragic family drama of a great king. That he was grappling with deeper philosophical questions didn’t mean his audience had to as well. And his genius is such that he can both present the Everyman/woman quotidian, the larger life struggles, while at the same time offer so much philosophical/existential exploration into the nature of humanity. There’s a reason why he outshines the writers who came before him and his shadow looms so large over all writers since. One of a kind