Shakespeare - Great (of) Course

My latest Great Course was William Shakespeare: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, taught by Dr. Peter Saccio. 

Back at Luther, I took a Shakespeare class from Dr. John Bale, and it was one of my favorite courses.  Over the years, though, I have forgotten more than I remember from that class.  And, after all, in a one semester class, we could only read a few plays.

Fifteen plays are covered in this Great Course, each of the comedies and histories gets two lectures, as do three of the tragedies.  Then, the Four Great Tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth) are each covered in three lessons.

And, since this is a Great Course, no lecture is the same as any of the others.  Dr. Saccio examines various attributes of the plays, and of Shakespeare as a writer, by using the plays.

Now, I have seen or read some of the plays covered in the course, but not all of them.  Yet I was able to follow every single lecture, and to appreciate the incredible richness of the scripts, because of the insightful Dr. Saccio.  He is not only a professor, but also an actor, so his readings of various lines in the plays added depth and context one might not get from another teacher, and are almost certain to miss from just a reading.

Dr. Saccio convincingly argues that the "tragic flaw" theme taught by so many English teachers, and taught to so many young people, is simplistic at best, and quite misleading at the worst.  He shows the pervasiveness of Christian imagery in many of Shakespeare's most powerful soliloquies.  He explains the bleeding of comedy into tragedy, and both into history plays.  In the end, I learned a tremendous amount from this course, and I am anxious to see some of these plays, again, or for the first time.


=========


Interesting word fact:  "Assassinate" is coined in Macbeth.  While "assassin" came into English the previous century, Macbeth says "assassinate" during a soliloquy when he is deciding whether or not to commit the murder which begins his rise and fall.  As he considers the deed, he doesn't want to call it "murder," and so he creates a new verb from an obscure, exotic noun.  Brilliant psychological writing.



[999]