Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education: Recent Episodes
Michael Dolzani
This podcast is aimed at a non-specialist audience interested in acquiring what Northrop Frye called, in the title of one of his books, an educated imagination. Its materials are drawn from the many courses in literature and mythology that I taught, combined with material from my book The Productions of Time, for which I hope the podcast may provide an accessible introduction, with concrete examples. Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Walpurgis Night, April 30, the day before May Day, an old fertility festival demonized by northern Christianity into a witches’ Sabbath. Goethe backs away from initial plans to show an orgy, substituting a strange “Intermezzo,” but there is a catalogue of demonic female spirits, from Lilith to a figure who looks like Gretchen, with a red line across her neck.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Gretchen distrusts Faust’s lack of religion. What does he think about God? “Feeling is all,” he says. Faust, with Mephistopheles’ help, kills Gretchen’s brother Valentine in a sword fight. Then Faust and Mephistopheles begin ascending a mountain to attend the witches’ sabbath on Walpurgis Night.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The “Gretchen tragedy” is not a tragedy at all but Aristotelian or Shakespearean standards, not to fall of a great and elite figure but of a common and unknown one. Perhaps more accurately called “melodrama,” an important genre in the 19th century. Faust seduces Gretchen, who falls in love with him. Her friend Martha, a much more down-to-earth figure.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The Witch’s Kitchen episode is satiric—the Witch’s servants are marmosets, and the spell by which she makes a youth potion for Faust parodies the symbolism of alchemy. Faust sees an ideal Feminine image in a mirror. On the street, he sees and is infatuated with Margarete, or Gretchen. He and Mephistopheles snoop in her bedroom and leave jewels.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The black poodle turns into Mephistopheles, who escapes by having a rat gnaw a hole in the pentagram that traps him. But he returns. The famous pact—with the twist that what Faust demands is unsatisfied desire. The minute in which he is fulfilled enough to wish the moment to linger—then he loses. Mephistopheles disguised as Faust demoralizes an idealistic student. In Auerbach’s tavern, drinking, drinking songs, and hijinks. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Distracted from suicide, Faust walks with Wagner among the townspeople celebrating Easter and spring. Faust’s famous speech about having “two souls,” one aspiring upward, the other holding fast to earth. A black poodle follows him back to his study, where, in another famous speech, he changes “In the beginning was the Word” to “In the beginning was the act.” The black poodle turns into Mephistopheles.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Faust has mastered all conventional knowledge and finds it worthless, so he turns to “forbidden knowledge,” a book of magic. He sees a vision of celestial harmony, the Macrocosm, but it is transcendent and beyond him. So he conjures the Earth Spirit, but is terrified. The Earth Spirit dismisses him with contempt. Faust is about to drink poison in despair, but is distracted by Easter celebrations outside his study.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Three preliminary poems deepen the meaning and experience of the poem to follow. The third, the “Prologue in Heaven,” is a revisionist version of the Book of Job. God and Mephistopheles make a bet—but about Faust, not Job. God says that humanity is lazy and needs to be pricked out of its passivity by the likes of such a “rogue” or Trickster.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The greatest work of German literature by German’s greatest writer, by reputation. Goethe as Renaissance man with accomplishments in many fields. The Romantic style of Faust: the Contraries of visionary idealism and down-to-earth satire. The Faust legend. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and other works about Faust. The development of Faust over 60 years.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Prospero’s melancholy speech about life as a vanishing illusion seems to subvert the paradisal vision of the wedding masque. But the illusions of art provide the model of a greater reality and the power to work towards it by changing people. In three hours, true love has transpired, people have been rehabilitated and changed for the better, and the dead have come back to life. Life is “strange,” life is a “wonder.”
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Prospero summons up a masque, a spectacle in honor of the newly betrothed Ferdinand and Miranda. Using characters from Classical mythology, it dramatizes the four levels of the Chain of Being, especially the paradisal imagery of the Golden Age. Then, suddenly, Prospero dismisses the vision, and gives his famous speech. All things pass away leaving “not a rack behind.” How to reconcile this with the ideal vision?
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
In the central act, Prospero puts three sets of characters through ordeals that are at once punitive, when appropriate, and transformative. Ferdinand humbles himself to draw logs to win Miranda—and does. Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban’s attempt at a Jan.6-style insurrection is turned into farce by Ariel. The Court Party is offered an illusory banquet, which vanishes and a harpy accuses all but Gonzalo.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Gonzalo indicates that he does not mean literally his speech about ruling the island to excel the Golden Age. But in what sense, then, does he mean it? While the Court Party sleeps, Antonio and Sebastian plot murder. Caliban meets the two lower-class, satiric characters: Trinculo, the jester, and Stephano, a “drunken butler,” and begins to worship them as gods.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Ferdinand and Miranda see each other and fall in love. Prospero pretends to be the irate senex or possessive father of New Comedy. The Court Party: Alonso is in deep depression; Gonzalo tries to get him to change his negative, hopeless attitude, but is countered by the nihilistic cynicism of Antonio and Sebastian.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The long but necessary back story of Propero and Miranda’s exile. Prospero’s servants, the elemental spirits Ariel and Caliban. Shakespeare’s prophetic foreshadowing of later imperialism and colonialism in the treatment of the native Caliban. Shakespeare’s most famous song. Ferdinand and Miranda meet.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Prospero, in Act 1, Scene 2, gives a long speech to his daughter Miranda telling how, 12 years ago, he was deposed as Duke of Milan to this island by his evil brother Antonio. Prospero and the theme of the wielding of power, in four roles: as ruler, as magician, as artist (creator of theatrical illusions), and as educator.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The four romances at the end of Shakespeare’s career, belonging to an age-old genre, the tale of wonders and marvels, from the Wanderings of the Odyssey to fantasy and science fiction in our time. Act 1, scene one. Why try to stage a storm at sea? A touchstone: how various people face imminent death.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The Duke returns and passes judgment. Mariana pleads for Angelo, wanting him despite his faults. Remarkably, Isabella pleads for Angelo. Four possible weddings: Angelo and Mariana, Isabella and the Duke, Claudio and Julietta, Lucio and the prostitute he got pregnant. A happy ending? The double meaning of “measure for measure,” according to justice or to mercy.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The Duke’s plan to fool Angelo by substituting the head of Barnardine won’t work because Barnardine humorously refuses to be hanged. So they substitute the head of an already dead criminal for Claudio’s. The Duke “returns” in Act 5. Isabella and Mariana accuse Angelo but are arrested for slander. Lucio unhoods the Friar—to reveal the Duke.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
In the middle of Act 3, at a dark moment, the plot turns. The Duke speaks of Mariana, abandoned by Angelo, now in the “moated grange.” Tennyson’s famous monologue “Mariana.” Pompey and Mistress Overdone are arrested. Lucio has gotten a prostitute pregnant and refuses marriage and child support.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
When Isabella informs Claudio of Angelo’s offer, that his life may be saved if she has sex with Angelo, in terror of death he begs her to do it. Her cold, angry response, lacking all compassion, is absolutely unChristian, and we have to probe her deeper psychology, her need to be sheltered from life and its imperfections.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Angelo is reluctant to come right out and say it, but finally tells Isabella that she must give herself up to him sexually in order to save her brother’s life. The Duke, as Friar, counsels Claudio that he should be detached about death because life is not worth living. This is a possible religious attitude, though not one that Shakespeare’s comedies ever endorse.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Elbow, the Constable, has arrested Pompey because something insulting was said to his wife when she entered the whorehouse to ask for stewed prunes. Elbow is so confused that we never learn more. Isabella pleads for her brother’s life, and Angelo, after she leaves, discovers he is sexually obsessed with her.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The Duke of Vienna puts young Angelo in charge in his absence, but disguises himself as a Friar and intends to observe what goes on in his absence. Angelo has Claudio arrested because his fiancée Julietta is pregnant, though they are engaged in a binding, though secret contract. Lucio goes to the convent to fetch Claudio’s sister Isabella to plead to Angelo for Claudio’s life.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The common pattern of all three plots in Twelfth Night: a deadlocked conflict of opposites into which a third factor enters to transform the situation. In all three plots, this involves a character with two identities and gender ambiguity. Introduction to Measure for Measure: the meaning of the designation “problem play.”
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Feste as Sir Topas the cleric accuses Malvolio, desperate and shut up in darkness, of being mad. Act 5 is a single scene of multiple recognitions, climaxing when Viola/Cesario is standing on stage and her identical twin brother Sebastian walks on: “A natural perspective, that is and is not.” The couples are sorted out, Viola and Orsino, Olivia and Sebastian. Malvolio stomps out, vowing revenge.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Sir Toby’s crowd play a joke on both “Cesario” and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, pushing two terrified characters into a duel. Antonio intervenes, thinking “Cesario” is Sebastian. Malvolio acts so bizarrely that Olivia fears he has gone mad, though he is following the instructions of the fake letter, designed to humiliate him.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
A false letter, faked by Maria, makes Malvolio think Olivia secretly loves him, and gives him advice which will humiliate him when he follows it. Another practical joke: “Cesario” is supposedly challenged to a duel by Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Antonio dares to stick by Sebastian, though he is subject to arrest if apprehended by the Duke’s officers.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Viola’s brother Sebastian, disguised as Roderigo, and his good friend Antonio. Orsino is increasingly drawn to Cesario, the disguised Viola. But Olivia is as well. The reveling crew of Sir Toby Belch hatch a plot against Malvolio. Songs of carpe diem and of death.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Viola, dressed as a young man named Cesario, is sent to woo Olivia on his behalf. Olivia is shut up, wearing a veil, vowing to mourn her brother for 7 years. In comes Cesario, and Olivia promptly is infatuated with her, not realizing that “Cesario” is another woman. The antagonism between the steward Malvolio and the rowdy crew of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria. The contrast between Feste the Clown and Malvolio, the “refuser of festivities.”
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Shakespeare transforms the New Comedy or comedy of manners pattern by having the action move through some realm of mysterious transformation. In Twelfth Night, Viola, the heroine, comes of out the sea, surviving shipwreck, disguises herself as a male, and enters the court of Duke Orsino, which eventually leads to the transformation of the whole society of Illyria, an imaginary country, the intersection of “delirium” and “illusion.”
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The mystery of how the English won, suffering small losses, though hugely outnumbered. Slapstick scenes with Fluellen, the true honorable soldier who publicly humiliates the fraudulent braggart soldier Pistol. Act 5 ends the play like a comedy, with a betrothal. The comic wooing of the princess Catharine by Henry, though neither speaks the other’s language very well.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The conflicts in Shakespeare’s tetralogy are one phase in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, followed by the Wars of the Roses, a civil war that ended the Plantagenet dynasty. The astonishing victory at Agincourt on October 25, 1415, against seemingly impossible odds. The question of whether Henry followed the honorable rules of war.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The central theme of the play: what is justified in Henry V’s career? The death of Falstaff, and his replacement by the comic Welshman Fluellen. The comic pattern of alazon vs. eiron, boaster vs. self-deprecator. The siege of Harfleur. Another theme: the power of language. Henry’s speeches.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The portrait of Henry in this play as an idealized model or “mirror” of a “Christian king, not a realistic characterization. The mirror contrast with Richard II, who uses his imagination as escape into narcissistic fantasy. Henry inspires the imagination of others. A long disquisition over Henry’s legal right to rule France. In Act 2, the return of the lower-class characters, the quarreling Nym and Pistol, who note in passing that Falstaff is ill.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Henry IV dies offstage between Acts 4 and 5. Hal, now Henry V, embraces his brothers and vindicates the Lord Chief Justice, who had had him arrested, notwithstanding he was the future king of England. The play ends as he rejects his false father figure, Falstaff, in a devastating speech. Henry V opens with a famous Prologue that is in fact about the power of imagination, working through language, necessary to swell the bare “O” of the stage into two nations and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Prince John defeats the rebels without battle by breaking his word to them with cold calculation. Falstaff carouses with Shallow and Silence, and remembers the “chimes at midnight” from the days of their youth. On the good news of the rebels’ defeat, Henry IV collapses. Hal enters his chamber, sees him unconscious, assumes him dead, and puts on the crown. Henry wakes and accuses Hal of being eager to assume the crown.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Northumberland is persuaded by his wife and Hotspur’s widow to betray the rebel cause a second time and flee to Scotland. An extraordinary reality-TV-style scene in the tavern. The prostitute and “drama queen” Doll Tearsheet loves to pick fights with men just as entertainment. She picks a fight with Falstaff, then with Pistol, the braggart soldier, and gets the two men to fight each other. Act 3 opens with the soliloquy of Henry IV: “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” in despair of England and of life.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Part 2 mirrors Part 1 but has a harsh, almost naturalistic realism that is quite different and modern-seeming. It takes place immediately after the first part, and a personified Rumour spreads fake news about the outcome of the Battle of Shrewsbury. Northumberland throws away his crutches and decides he isn’t sick anymore, now that the battle is over. Falstaff encounters the incorruptible Lord Chief Justice but succeeds yet again in exploiting Mistress Quickly, who loves him maternally and will do anything for him.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The king offers clemency, but Worster and Vernon lie to Hotspur and Douglas and say the king showed “no mercy.” Walter Blunt is killed by Douglas. Falstaff’s famous soliloquy about honor. Hal saves his father’s life, then fights and kills Hotspur. He thinks Falstaff is dead, but Falstaff is “counterfeiting” death and “rises” once Hal leaves. The rebels lose and are captured.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The intense and moving confrontation of father and son, Henry IV and Hal, in which the king says that Hal is not only a failure but, for all he knows, possibly a betrayer. But Hal placates him. In Act 4, Falstaff has allowed the good men to buy their way out and instead conscripted troop of pathetic failures. On the eve of the decisive battle, one by one all the rebels send word that they are backing out, finally leaving only Hotspur and Douglas. Most shockingly, Northumberland abandons his own son.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The double tetralogy of history plays as the “Henriad,” a quasi-epic. Yet the surprising amount of humor in the play, subverting epic high seriousness. Hotspur and the Welsh Owen Glendower argue while trying to carve up a map of England. Hotspur deflates Glendower’s pretensions as a mighty magician. Hotspur and Kate: an attractive marriage, full of bantering, poignant because we know that Hotspur will die.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Plays relevant to our time, because they explore the social chaos that ensures when the rule of law is overthrown by various kinds of people with interests of their own. Henry’s allies have turned against him, the lower-class characters in the tavern are out of control. There is nothing to constrain aristocracy who do not like to be constrained, or who are psychologically disconnected from reality. There is nothing to constrain lower-class characters from anarchistic behavior.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Within a year, Henry’s allies turn into his enemies. We see those who put him on the throne in Richard II now begin to plot against him in 1.3. Hotspur, who fancies himself a man of restless action but who is really driven by his own fevered imagination. In contrast, Falstaff, weighed down by his enormous body. Hotspur and Falstaff: mind and body. Poins and Hal disguise themselves and rob Falstaff and the rest of the gang after they have robbed the king’s men—Hal is helping to rob his own father. A glorious joke.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
It has been a year since the end of Richard II. Henry IV is king, but faces Scottish and Welsh rebels. Hotspur, son of Northumberland, refuses to ransom prisoners until Mortimer, his brother-in-law but also heir presumptive to the throne, is ransomed in return. Where is Hotspur’s counterpart, Prince Hal? In a tavern with Falstaff and his gang, planning robberies. Hal’s soliloquy that he is only pretending to be a ne’er-do-well. Falstaff: one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic creations, but introduced in a history play. He is not historical: why is he here?
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The Queen sent into exile in France: the imagery of a “divorce.” York discovers that his son Aumerle is plotting again Henry and goes to Henry to denounce him as a traitor. His wife helplessly tries to intervene. A scene that degenerates from seriousness into farce, a pattern in the play. Richard’s lyrical soliloquy of himself as a microcosm, but one divided. His unexpectedly heroic death. In the final scene, Henry learns that his former allies are now rising up against him. In a key line, repeated verbatim, the word is set against the word.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Richard is deposed in a public trial, which Bolingbroke and Northumberland hope to turn into a Soviet-style mockery in which Richard confesses all his wrongs. Instead, he steals the show, and makes them look like bullies and himself like a martyr—like Christ as the Man of Sorrows. The scene was not printed until after the death of Elizabeth, who is reputed to have said, “Know ye not I am Richard II?”
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Richard, having made enormous, though eloquent, speeches of self-pity instead of bolstering the morale of what followers remain to him, holes up in Flint Castle. But when confronted by Bolingbroke and his fellow rebels, descends, slowly and ritualistically, from the walls, surrendering without the slightest resistance into the hands of his enemies. In the next scene, the Queen, speaking to a Gardener, speaks of her husband’s fate as a second fall of Man.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The exiled Bolingbroke lands in England and gathers an army, claiming he has returned only to claim his legal rights as the heir of John of Gaunt. Old York, the last of the 7 sons of Edward III, helpless and feeble, switches his allegiance to Bolingbroke, the symbolic turning point of the play. Richard returns from Ireland and makes a bizarre, theatrical speech about how the earth itself will rise up and angels descend to aid him because he is God’s anointed king.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
John of Gaunt is inspired on his deathbed with a famous speech about the glorious land of England—now fallen on hard times due to the corrupt Richard II. Richard comes in, and Gaunt tells Richard what a fool he is being, angering Richard. Gaunt dies offstage, and Richard immediately moves to take his estates, which should go to Gaunt’s son Bolingbroke, in order to fund wars in Ireland. This not only gives Bolingbroke yet more reason for rebellion but creates sympathy for his cause. Richard puts old, feeble York, the last of the fabled 7 sons, in charge of England while he is in Ireland.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
In a ritualized, formal scene, Bolingbroke opens the play by accusing Thomas Mowbray of having murdered Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Mowbray denies it, and a date for a trial by combat is set. Mowbray hints what is widely believed, that he was acting on the orders of Richard II himself. Gloucester’s widow seeks justice from John of Gaunt, but Gaunt says nothing can be done because the king, who is clearly guilty, is nonetheless “God’s anointed.”
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The place of the history play among the four genres that Shakespeare wrote in. Its origins as a native form of drama, unlike tragedy and comedy, derived from Classical literature. The historical background of the plot of Richard II, the first of Shakespeare’s double tetralogy dramatizing English history for well over a century before his time.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
After the crisis of Act 4, with two sets of lovers estranged and good friends quarreling, a happy ending brought about by Hero’s symbolic death and rebirth. A ritual at her supposed tomb is followed by a wedding of Claudio to a masked woman, who turns out to be Hero. Much Ado is a play about the instability of the human condition, the revolution of opposites: merry and melancholy, love and hate, friendship and enmity, youth and age. peace and war. The hope is that such instability can be good as well: it means we can change, that we can undergo “conversion.”
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Claudio, out of revenge, publicly shames Hero by accusing her of infidelity at her own wedding ceremony. All the men behave badly in reaction—except Benedick. Benedick and Beatrice finally confess their love for each other in a short but touching scene.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Their friends contrive through staged conversations intended to be overheard to bring Benedick and Beatrice together. Meanwhile, Don John and his henchmen also stage a false drama, attempting to make Hero seem unfaithful. Dogberry and the Watch, the lower class characters, overhear the plotting and actually arrest Don John’s henchmen, but they are not “noted” by their social superiors.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Don John the melancholic. “Merry” and “melancholy” as two of the play’s many opposites. His attempt to cause mischief by telling Claudio that, in the masked ball in the first part of Act 2, Don Pedro woos Hero for himself rather than for the sake of Claudio. Meanwhile, Beatrice wounds the disguised Benedick by telling him that no one respects Benedick because he is too “merry,” always joking and frivolous. Much ado about “noting,” i.e., about taking note of: a comedy of gossip, rumor, deliberate lies spread both innocently and malevolently, a play with a new relevance in the age of social media.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
A comedy of manners, a great deal of it in prose, about “noting,” i.e., taking note of. “Nothing” would have been pronounced “noting” in Shakespeare’s time. Rumors and misinformation spreading like wildfire and wreaking havoc with social life: Much Ado takes on new meaning in the age of social media. Two romances with two women: the lively, independent Beatrice and the patriarchally controlled Hero.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The mystery of Hamlet’s seeming “conversion” in Act 5. Most of the cast wiped out in the final scene. Can the complexities of Hamlet be drawn together into a unified pattern? Three types of tragedy: (1) of social order; (2) of isolated, alienated consciousness; (3) of love and gender. Hamlet as an attempt to encompass all three.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The mixed mood of the famous graveyard scene, mixing seriousness and humor in violation of the neo-Classical unities. Hamlet and the gravedigger speaking of death as leveler of social distinctions. The skull of Yorick the jester, whom Hamlet knew as a child. The funeral of Ophelia. Hamlet and Laertes struggle in her grave. Hamlet’s new sense that “There’s a divinity shapes our ends.”
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Act 4, Scenes 5 and 7, form a continuous series of dramatic interruptions of the Court. Ophelia’s mad scene, which is also her suicide, in fact consists of three entrances, although the last is by messenger only, announcing her death by drowning. The psychoanalytic complexities of Ophelia’s songs and speeches. Laertes also bursts in, ranting melodramatically about revenge in a way that out-Herods Herod. The court is interrupted yet one more time as Horatio delivers Hamlet’s letter to Claudius announcing his return after having been captured by pirates (!). Meanwhile, Laertes and Claudius plot Hamlet’s death.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Gertrude feels guilt over her marriage to Claudius—but was she ignorant of the murder? The key word “nothing” begins to resonate through the play. Hamlet has hidden Polonius’s body. When confronted about it, his seemingly mad speeches revolve around the idea of metamorphosis—in the words of Ophelia, we know not what we may be. Ophelia’s mad scene.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Hamlet tells the Players not to overact, to suit the words to the action. Audience conversation before the play: Hamlet’s passive-aggressive sexual remarks to Ophelia. The Mousetrap play. Claudius leaves. His guilty soliloquy. Hamlet chooses not to kill him while he is praying. He goes instead to his mother’s bedroom to confront her.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The First Player, at Hamlet’s request, recites a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, the death of King Priam at the hands of the son of Achilles. Why is this in an already-long play? The most famous soliloquy in all of drama, “To be or not to be.” Why not suicide? Hamlet’s furious tirade when Ophelia tries to break up with him, following her father’s orders. Is this misogyny, justified because Ophelia is indeed spying on him for his enemy, or both?
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Everyone is acting. Polonius instructs his servant to act a part and spy on Laertes. Hamlet pretends to be mad to Ophelia. Polonius bursts into the Court, where Claudius has averted an attack by Fortinbras, and reads a love poem from Hamlet to Ophelia—a very bad poem. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, courtiers, attempt to draw Hamlet out. The arrival of the Players.
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
Horatio and two other friends tell Hamlet they have seen the ghost of his father. Polonius gives longwinded advice to his son Laertes, and a humiliating admonishment to his daughter Ophelia for believing Hamlet’s professions of love. Hamlet talks to the Ghost, who claims to be from Purgatory, and speaks of “murder most foul.”
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-dolzani/support
The opening scene: darkness, paranoia, uncertain identity. Threats from without and within: invasion and the Ghost. Scene 2: The Court. Hamlet’s Biting One-Liners. Hamlet’s first soliloquy: rage and sexual disgust.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The fascinating background of Hamlet. Its enormous influence on 19th and early 20th century writers and critics due to its themes of alienation, isolated consciousness, and the ambiguity of reality. The origin of the basic plot in Danish legendary history. The vogue for the “revenge play” in Shakespeare’s time. The uniquely complex textual background of the play, which means that any modern edition you read may differ from other editions.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is over by the end of Act 4. Is Act 5 a mere crowd-pleaser? Or, rather, does it widen the play’s thematic perspective? Theseus’s skeptical speech about the imagination is clearly not the whole story. Among the many opposites reconciled by the play are reality and imagination, but Shakespeare leaves the transforming power as a mystery, something we cannot understand, something language cannot even speak of. In the words of Bottom’s speech, it is a bottomless dream.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The action of the play is over by the end of Act 4, culminating in two speeches. One is the renowned speech of Theseus on the imagination—of which he is completely skeptical. The other is Bottom’s soliloquy about having had a “bottomless dream,” which echoes I Corinthians 2:9. The sense of a mysterious power that has shaped the ends of all the characters, including the fairies, a power that works by recreating conflicting opposites into a two-in-one.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The riotous farce in the middle of the play, courtesy of Puck and the “love juice.” Titania infatuated with Bottom, who has the head of an ass. The male lovers keep changing who they are in love with, resulting in complete confusion. Yet behind all this there is a strange order reflected in imagery of opposites that are yet identified with each other and interchanging.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
In the “green world” comedies of Shakespeare, the action moves from ordinary society out into a wood in which all sorts of transformations happen. The uncertain dating of the play’s action, though “midsummer” is the summer solstice (June 21). Women’s friendship, a theme that Shakespeare is exceptional in regarding as important. The theme of metamorphosis and influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Male-female power struggles occur in all four of the play’s sub-plots, even in the comic relief of the “rude mechanicals,” who are preparing a dramatic version of the story of the star-crossed lovers Pyramis and Thisbe out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The lunar imagery of conflicting opposites: love versus irrational social law; madness versus reason; feminine versus masculine; stable identity versus metamorphosis. The fairies: originally the Faery, out of Celtic mythology, itself emerging out of the feminine imagery of the “Goddess cultures.”
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a “festive comedy,” i.e. associated with seasonal festivals, from Shakespeare’s “lyrical period.” Three interlinked plays all dating from around 1595: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The contrapuntal plotting of the comedies. Here, four interlinked sub-plots, three of which represent social class distinctions: the ruling class (Theseus and Hippolyta), the well-born elite (the lovers), the working class (the “rude mechanicals,” and the fairies.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
What we know for sure about Shakespeare, contrasted with the numerous speculations and conspiracy theories. The four genres of Shakespearean drama: comedies, tragedies, history plays, romances. The theory of comedy, and comedy’s poor reputation in the critical tradition.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Comic relief: Samson has mysteriously recovered his high spirits and his martial vigor, and challenges the giant Harapha to single combat. The cowardly Harapha refuses. What has changed Samson? He has resisted temptation and cast off an inward passivity. As a result, obeying another inward “motion,” Samson agrees to go perform for the Philistines, and brings the arena down upon the Philistines, killing himself along with them in the process. Two versions of Christianity, both valid. In one, God is transcendent, in the other, immanent, an inward “motion,” an Inner Light. Milton inclines to the latter, and in doing so is the forefather of the Romantic theory of the imagination.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Dalila comes to visit Samson in an attempt at reconciliation. Samson furiously rejects her attempt, abetted by a misogynistic Chorus whose Ode should not be identified as Milton’s own opinion of women. Dalila’s betrayal cannot be justified, but is it possible to view her in part sympathetically, as a woman caught in a power game, trapped in a no-win situation?
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
In Act 1 Samson defends himself to the Chorus: in twice marrying Philistian women, he was following inward “motions” from God. But in Act 2, speaking to his father, Manoa, he takes full responsibility for allowing those women to manipulate and betray him. His mood by the end of the second act is hopeless and near suicidal, and the Chorus, so confident in the first act that God’s ways were justifiable, is severely shaken and finds God’s ways baffling and disturbing.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Written at the age of 21 while on Christmas break from Cambridge, the Nativity Ode almost amounts to what Milton later called a “brief epic.” Its theme is “our great redemption from above,” the descent of a miraculous power down the vertical axis of being to our fallen world, redeeming in a moment of new Creation. But that moment of redemption is paradoxical—“now,” but “not yet.” And yet now—as there is a “paradise within,” there is a miraculous birth possible at every moment if we look with the inward eye of the spirit, which is to say the imagination.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Samson justifies his marriages to two Philistian women as commanded by God. Samson’s God is always an internal “motion,” never a projected supernatural figure. Echoing Paradise Lost, the Chorus says that God’s ways are justifiable—but not by reason. The case for a Trickster God, when reason and realism lead only to hopelessness and despair.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
An emotionally intense drama of the mind, in which the blind and enslaved Samson confronts the failures of his life and questions the ways of God. Modeled on Classical tragedy, yet also with a hidden 5-act Shakespearean structure. Samson, originally a folktale Trickster rehabilitated into one of the Old Testament judges, is an unlikely-seeming choice for tragic hero. Samson’s opening soliloquy: the theme of despair. Despair at the self-caused ruin of Samson’s own life, including blindness. The play begins in literal and emotional darkness.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The third earthly kingdom, Athens, is the temptation of humanism and humanistic culture as a substitute for the spiritual vision of the Bible. The 3rd temptation, to stand on the pinnacle of the Temple, is the temptation to exercise one’s own will and draw upon one’s own power rather than trusting to the will of God. As with all the temptations in Paradise Regained, it is a temptation for all human beings, and the outcome is never assured. God intervenes and sustains Jesus here, but the second time Jesus is raised to a height, during the Crucifixion, it was God’s will that he go through with it and die a human death. Yet both outcomes regain paradise, though in the paradoxical sense, central to Christianity, that redemption has occurred but is also “not yet.” It is at once timeless and in time.
--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The suspense of Paradise Regained lies in the fact that Jesus is fully human and vulnerable. The temptations are the temptations that every one of us faces in this world. The ultimate argument of Satan is that to survive in the world you must make a deal with the devil. You must compromise, and can only choose which temptation you will give in to—which will thereafter become your prison. The poem offers a hope that Satan is lying, that there is a way to win through. Jesus rejects, often with dry wit, the temptations of military power (Parthia), imperialism disguised as “higher civilization” (Rome), and Classical humanism as an end in itself (Athens).
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Paradise Regained is a profound analysis of human nature, whether or not one is committed to its religious point of view. The enormously expanded second temptation comprises temptations of desire (2a) based on physical appetite rather than need: sex, food as sensuous luxury, riches. These are succeeded by the temptations of ambition (2b): glory and various forms of earthly kingdom, beginning with Parthia, the military kingdom, the kingdom of war, seen as necessary. The suggested need to “buy protection” from such a powerful empire.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
In Milton’s interpretation, the first temptation is that of survival, of physical need. In the 2ndbook, he enormously expands the 2nd temptation into a full range of the temptations of desire, beginning with those desires that have a basis in physical appetite: sex, food, and riches. Jesus’s refusal is not mere ascetic refusal of pleasure. If he accepts Satan’s offers, he is then in Satan’s debt and Satan’s power. He also implicitly would accept the value system and lifestyle implied when such things become one’s first priority.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Milton’s Jesus is fully human and vulnerable: there are real stakes in the temptations. But that makes his temptations a model for us. Milton expands the temptations to include the full range of possible human temptation, beginning on the most basic level of physical survival, symbolized by the temptation to turn stones into bread—both for personal survival, but also to feed the hungry. “Man does not live by bread alone” sounds elitist, but is not. Jesus will go on to feed the hungry, but whatever you make your primary value becomes your God.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
While not as famous as Paradise Lost, Milton’s Paradise Regained is not only comparable in artistic quality but continues the expansion of perspective that began in the last two books of Paradise Lost, from tragic fall to divine comedy. Milton’s theory of the “brief epic,” a form that has no Classical model. Paradise Regained is a recreation of the Temptation in the wilderness of Christ by Satan. It is the contest of the hero battling a serpent or monster—but deliteralized. This contest is a debate, a duel of words, the true Word against the lying words of Satan.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The expansion of vision from tragedy to spiritual comedy. Numerical symbolism of the 12 books. From law to gospel, the letter to the spirit, type to antitype: the vision of Biblical history as one of progressive internalization. The internalization of paradise for Adam and Eve—and also for us.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Michael takes Adam to a high mountain and gives him a panoramic view of both space and time. The continuing aftermath of the Fall. Death: the murder of Abel by Cain. Sickness: the vision of the Lazar House. The mysterious episode of the sons of God mating with the daughters of men. The coming of war, and God’s eventual decision to wipe out all but a saving remnant in the Deluge, the end of the first cycle of history.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The question of why Paradise Lost does not end with Book 9, the fall, or at least with Book 10, the aftermath. The story of Adam and Eve is a tragedy—but the vision of Christianity is a divine comedy, and the poem’s last two books, 11 and 12, will turn the perspective inside out. But that reversal begins with Adam and Eve hitting rock bottom emotionally. Adam’s dark soliloquy and the painful conversation between Adam and Eve, the ultimate question being, why go on living? Why not suicide?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The fall of Adam and the Corruption of Human Nature. Scenes from a marriage: Adam and Eve’s lust and subsequent marital brawl. Book 10: the Son of God confronts Adam and Eve. Satan returns to hell, triumphant—he thinks. The humiliation of the devils, changed into serpents.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Book 9, the climax of Paradise Lost, an epic without a true epic hero, which is why Milton will have to go on to Paradise Regained. Satan returns, no longer the titanic rebel, reduced to animal disguise and low cunning. A scene of marital discord as Eve insists in going off alone. She is accosted by the talking serpent, beguiled, and eats the fruit. The immediate corruption of her nature.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The unexpectedly jarring end of Adam’s conversation with Raphael, where he confesses an emotional dependency upon Eve and is sharply criticized for it. It is this hidden weakness that brings about the Fall. The superior sex life of angels, with their spiritual bodies. The Invocation of Book 9, the moment of the Fall. Milton’s methods of composing poetry. The old conundrum: who is the hero of Paradise Lost?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Book 8 falls into symmetrical halves, one concerned with unanswered questions about cosmology, the other with the creation of Adam and his relationship with Eve. These are unified by the theme of education, a primary theme in all Milton’s work. Raphael tells Adam that what matters is not speculative learning but life learning. Adam tells Raphael of his creation, but, strikingly, what it felt like from the inside. His naming of the animals: names as the essential identity of what is named.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Books 7 and 8 were originally one book, divided in the poem’s second edition. Book 7 is what we know, from Scripture. The first half of Book 8 is what was still speculative and up for grabs. “Saving the appearances”: the term used by scholars of that time to salvage the old geocentric model. God’s refusal to make known the answer to certain questions—really because Milton doesn’t know the answers. The distinction between theoretical knowledge and the practical life knowledge that is what we really need.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Milton does not just paraphrase Genesis. While faithful to it, he recreates it in the light of his own vision of the upward metamorphosis, matter leaping up the vertical axis of being towards spirit. He also gives or implies his own answers to questions about the Creation that have arisen of the centuries.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Following both the Odyssey and the Aeneid, the epic falls into two halves, one wandering and one stationary. Here, we are halfway, and the poem returns to earth. Another invocation to the Muse, and a reference to Milton’s personal circumstances, dark in every way. The Son as the traditional active agent of the Creation, Michelangelo notwithstanding. God’s insistence that at the end of time, earth will be changed to heaven and vice versa, “one Kingdom.”
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The Son rides out on the third day of the war in heaven in his chariot, and the rebel angels cast themselves into hell in terror. Why does God allow this war to happen, since he could have eliminated the rebel angels in an instant? Perhaps in order to teach: to provide an illuminating reversal of perspective, from heroic tragedy to divine comedy, and a reversal of mood from our own self-centered misery.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
God announces in the middle of Book 5 that he has begotten a Son who shall rule over the angels. Satan revolts and gathers rebel angels, the only holdout being Abdiel. On the first day of battle, Abdiel strikes the first blow, and the battle goes badly for the rebels. Michael wounds Satan. Night falls, and to recoup their fortunes Satan invents gunpowder and cannon.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Milton’s vision of the entire universe as undergoing a process of vertical spiritual evolution, upward from matter to spiritualized matter, has profound social implications. It implies that the Chain of Being is not fixed, and that human nature might by the end of time become so spiritualized that God will, as the Son says in Book 3, lay his royal sceptre by, for God will then be “all in all,” a New Testament phrase that could imply the identity of God and man, “united as one individual soul.” Historically, a fixed chain of authority has been attractive to the churches as a guarantee of their own power. But Milton was a revolutionary. The second half of Book 5 shows the shattering of the unified body. The first event chronologically of Paradise Lost is the Father’s announcement that he has begotten a Son who has authority over the angels—immediately precipitating Satan’s refusal and revolt. Milton denied the doctrine of the Trinity—as did many Christians until the Council of Nicea in 325 CE declared it. The Nicene Creed insists that the Son is “begotten not made, of one substance with the Father.” In Arianism and in Milton the Son is not identical to the Father nor as powerful. Milton lays out his reasons for his beliefs in his prose work Of Christian Doctrine.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Raphael arrives in the Garden of Eden to talk with Adam and Eve. When asked if angels eat, he enthusiastically affirms that they do—and enjoy it too. Milton is defending the real belief of Christianity, which is not that of a disembodied soul that eventually transcends the body and the physical world, but the spiritualization of matter, a process that the entire universe, from the elements through the natural world through the human world undergoes. If humanity had not fallen, it would not have remained in its fixed, subordinate position. Their physical nature spiritualized, human beings would have been able to rise to heaven and descend to earth again at will, enjoying both levels of being. At stake in this conversation is the ambivalence about the body with its unruly impulses, with its vulnerability to sickness, old age, and death—this conversation is relevant to issues that haunt us still today. There is a yearning to escape the body’s fragility, but what would a disembodied consciousness leave behind? The sensual pleasures of eating and drinking, of sex, of emotions, which are physically rooted—of so much that makes us human.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Milton’s bold defense of human sexuality against a tradition going back at least to Augustine regarding sexual desire as a necessary evil. Satan whispers into the ear of sleeping Eve, planting a dream of temptation and eating of the forbidden fruit, appealing to her will to power and latent desire to be a “Goddess.” Gabriel and his watch accost Satan, but God holds up his golden balances, which tip against Satan, who flees at the end of book 4. In book 5, God sends the angel Raphael down to have lunch with Adam and Eve in the garden.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The most sexist and patriarchal passages of Paradise Lostare usually a statement of Christian doctrine. Milton does what he can to liberalize doctrine by stressing the spirit of the law over the letter. This leads him to, first, an eloquent praise of human sexuality, denying the Augustinian doctrine that sexual desire is a product of the Fall; second, to a denial that Adam’s “rule” over Eve involves coercion; third, that Eve’s “narcissism” is, yes, partly a weakness (the weakness by which Satan undoes her) and yet also gives her an attractive independence, which both scares and attracts the male. It’s complicated.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Milton attempts to liberalize the teachings about gender that were historically founded on the story of Eve in Genesis (see Elaine Pagels’ brilliant Adam, Eve, and the Serpent). But he does not break with them entirely, which would have meant breaking with the Bible itself. Milton’s complex personal history of three marriages, the first of which was highly troubled in its beginnings and inspired him to write four pamphlets arguing for freedom of divorce, although he and Mary Powell were never divorced and she went on to bear all three of his daughters. How much does his personal experience inform Milton’s treatment of women and of Eve in particular—for both better and worse?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Milton’s complex cosmos, his knowledge of the “many worlds” of modern Galilean astronomy. Satan lands on the sun and deceives Uriel, the angel of the sun, travels to Earth and the Garden of Eden, where he looks up at the sun from which he has just descended and, thinking himself alone and unseen, launches into a soliloquy that shows that the titanic rebel of the first two books was just a pose. In actuality, he knows he is wrong, and is consumed with nihilistic despair. The opening lines may be the first part of the poem to be composed.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Despite the frequent prejudice against Milton, his view of the difficult problems of Christian theology were more liberal than all but a few people in his time, perhaps any time. He revises the doctrine of predestination to mean that God gives sufficient grace to all to be saved, and only then puts the burden on us of using our free will to choose. He revises the view of the Atonement, the sacrifice of the Son to the Father to atone for human sin, by saying that at the end of time God will put by his ruling sceptre and be “all in all,” a view that may possibly hint at the full identity of the human and the divine, on the level of the spiritual rather than the ordinary self.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
God’s speech from his throne in Book 3 lays out the most difficult problem in Christian theology, the conflict between human free will and the doctrine, stated by Paul in Romans 8-9, that God predestines every human being either to salvation or damnation before we are even born. The Father pronounces humanity guilt, “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” but how can that be reconciled with the idea that we are saved only by God’s grace, which he withholds from some for reasons no one knows? Milton’s daring liberalization of predestination, in which everyone is given sufficient grace, even if some are given extra. Also, the problem of how Satan, Adam, and Eve ever chose evil if he created them perfect. And finally, the issue of why atonement is necessary if God is love—why does God demand a human sacrifice?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The bizarre, satiric reunion of Satan with his daughter, Sin, and their offspring, Death, a parody of the Trinity, among other things. The shift of style to allegory for satiric purposes. Satan’s journey through Chaos on his way to earth. Chaos as “the deep” of Genesis 1, but also the Chaos of the Creation myths of Hesiod, Ovid, and Lucretius. The surreal picture of an undignified Satan having to fly, creep, swim, as Chaos turns moment by moment from solid to liquid to gas. The moving personal invocation to God as an inward light at the opening of Book 3, compensating for the painful solitude of Milton’s blindness. One of the most beautiful parts of the poem.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Milton’s analysis of why revolutions fail: what Blake called the “mind forg’d manacles” that imprison the would-be revolutionaries within. Moloch, Belial, and Mammon represent various false attitudes that subvert any revolution, good or bad—as they did in the French Revolution in the Romantic period, as they did in the Sixties. The devils’ attempt to pass the time while Satan goes on his spying expedition: the various ways people try to distract themselves from their sense of life’s meaningless futility.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The incantatory epic catalogue of pagan deities that the Devils will later become in human history. The discovery of gold by Mammon, and the building of Pandaemonium, the palace of the Devils, by Mulciber. The deceptively beautiful story of Mulciber’s fall, suddenly revealed as a lie. Milton’s demand for active interpretation, the responsibility of the reader of Paradise Lost.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The epic plunges in medias res, into the middle of things, and begins in the aftermath of the war in heaven. Satan and the rebel angels lie stunned on a burning lake in hell. Satan rouses his second-in-command, Beelzebub, and delivers two famous speeches of great dramatic power. Paradise Lost was originally conceived as a drama, and retains many dramatic features. Satan has been a strangely attractive figure to many intelligent readers, including famous ones like Blake and Shelley. Why is this so in an epic that wants to justify the ways of God to men?
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Milton’s extraordinary achievement, writing his epic at the end of his life when he was old and blind, the Puritan revolution defeated. His choice of a Biblical rather than Arthurian subject. The famous Invocation, invoking a Muse that is really a symbol for divine inspiration. The real chronology of the poem’s events, though they are recounted out of order. The beginning “in the middle of things” in Book 1, with Satan and the rebel angels in hell just after their defeat in the war in heaven.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The rewards of reading Milton with or without a religious commitment. The magnificence of verse informed by a sophisticated knowledge of music. Milton’s sense of a total vision in which the Bible, Classical mythology and literature, and other writers, from Plato to Shakespeare, form an interconnected whole, what Northrop Frye calls the order of words. You can get a whole humanistic education from studying Milton. Milton’s revolutionary values in religion, politics, and the domestic realm. God as an Inner Light or inward presence, a main source of the later Romantic theory of the imagination. Milton’s part in the English Civil War in the cause of liberty, a forerunner of the democratic revolutions of the Romantic era. Milton’s attempt to liberalize as far as the Bible permitted the relationship between men and women, including his argument for the freedom of divorce. Milton’s great prose work Areopagitica, an argument in favor of freedom of thought and expression.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Achilles still grieves for Patroclus while the gods debate on Olympus. Zeus sends Iris down to arrange for Priam to go to Achilles and collect his son’s body. The tough, irascible Priam and his equally tough wife, Hecuba. Hermes, in disguise, conducts Priam to Achilles’ tent. Priam’s heart-rending speech, which stirs a new and unexpected compassion in Achilles. The mystery of Achilles’ new humanity. The parable of the two jars of Zeus. The return of the body, and the speeches of three women: Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen. The final line of the poem given to the noble Hector.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The building suspense between book 18, when Achilles learns of the death of Patroclus, and book 22, in which Achilles and Hector engage in the final showdown. Achilles is lured off the battlefield to give the two armies time to clear the field, the Trojans going back inside their walls. All of Troy begs Hector to come inside, but the heroic code demands that he refuse. But he panics, and runs from Achilles three times around the wall of Troy. What do we think of this? Even if we do not subscribe to the heroic code, do we think less of Hector for running? Reasons why perhaps we should not. The final showdown and Hector’s mortal wound.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Achilles goes to the ramparts and cries his chilling war cry three times to scare off the Trojans, so that the Achaeans get Patroclus’s body back—but minus Achilles’ armor that Patroclus had been wearing. Hector refuses to retreat, a refusal he will live long enough to regret. Thetis goes to the wondrous workshop of Hephaestus on Mt. Olympus to get armor for her son. The elaborate ekphrasis, or description of a work of art inside another work of art, detailing the scenes on the shield of Achilles. What is the artistic purpose of this description, which interrupts the narrative. The Olympian perspective of art.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Patroclus begs Achilles to let him go into battle wearing Achilles’ armor so that the Trojans will panic, thinking it is Achilles. Achilles does so on the condition that Patroclus not try to take Troy on his own or go up against Hector. He disobeys and is killed by Hector. Zeus ponders whether to go against fate and save his son Sarpedon, but gives in and Sarpedon also dies. Antilochus breaks the news of Patroclus’ death to Achilles, whose weeping brings his mother Thetis from the ocean with her sea nymphs. She goes to Mt. Olympus to get new armor from Hephaestus for her son.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Sarpedon’s famous speech to Glaucus in Book 12 affirming the heroic code of fighting for “glory” because no one escapes death. Is there anything we can still admire in the heroic code? The spirit of competition and striving for excellence and self-transcendence. The need for a “moral equivalent of war.” Hera seduces Zeus in Book 14 to distract him, but the Trojans eventually breach the ramparts and try to set fire to the ships, which are defended single-handedly by giant Ajax.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Book 9 is a crucial moment in the Iliad. Consisting of nothing but talk, it is nevertheless the turning point towards inevitable fatality, as Achilles refuses to return to battle. The speeches in which he refuses are fascinating but difficult, because he seems to be doubting the value of the heroic code by which he has lived his entire life. With no help forthcoming from their greatest warrior, the Achaeans try to figure out their options. While it is still night, Odysseus and Diomedes go on a spying expedition to the Trojan camp. They encounter the unlucky Trojan counter-spy Dolon and kill him. In book 11, the Achaeans suffer yet another setback as three of their main warriors, Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Odysseus, are taken out of the battle with minor injuries.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Zeus begins fulfilling his promise to Thetis to make the Achaeans lose. Giant Ajax helps prevent a complete rout, fighting a battle with Hector. Anachronisms in the text show the changing methods of warfare between the time of the Trojan War and Homer’s own time. Zeus warns the other deities not to interfere: the famous simile of the golden chain. Three times he curbs the attempt of Diomedes, who is experiencing his moment of aristeia, or self-transcending excellence, to take Troy directly. Night falls at the end of Book 8. The late-night emergency assembly of Book 9, in which Agamemnon promises a catalogue of gifts if Achilles will return to the battle.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of judging Paris and Helen, in Book 6 and elsewhere. Are they selfish and manipulative, self-deluding—or genuinely compelled by the will of the gods and fate? They seem as contradictory and enigmatic as people often do in real life. In Book 7, Big Ajax (contrasted with Little Ajax), a major figure in the Iliad, fights a duel with Hector, but inconclusively. Paris refuses to give Helen back to the Achaeans.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Zeus procrastinates fulfilling his promise to make the Greeks temporarily lose, and due to the leadership of Diomedes the Trojans are driven back against their own walls and are in danger of losing the war. Diomedes, the quiet team player, a contrast to the difficult Achilles. Hector comes inside the walls of Troy, and, as he is leaving meets his wife Andromache and their small son. Andromache begs Hector to stay, but Hector shows himself trapped by the demands of the heroic code. And the audience knows that adherence to the code will eventually kill him and doom his family and the whole city.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Hand to hand combat between Paris and Menelaus to settle the issue of who gets Helen. Paris, the beautiful lover who wears a leopard skin, is badly outmatched but rescued by Aphrodite, who orders Helen to join him in the bedroom and threatens her when Helen tries to refuse. The mystery of Helen’s character, complex, ambiguous. Another complex question: the role of the gods in the Iliad. Sometimes they can be taken non-literally as symbols of inner psychological forces and conflicts.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The society of the Iliad as an example of what some social scientists have called a “shame culture,” in which men are driven by the need for status in a peer group. Failing to achieve it, they are “shamed.” We are ostensibly a “guilt culture,” driven by individual conscience rather than outward social pressure, but in fact there are many similar tendencies in our culture. The rage of Achilles spreads all the way to Mt. Olympus and results in a quarrel between Zeus and Hera, defused buy Hephaestus, the smith of the gods and a fascinating anomalous deity.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The explosively dramatic opening of the Iliad, starting with its first word, “Rage!” Two men fighting over a woman, who is a “war prize.” And yet, according to what scholars call the heroic code of honor, neither man can back down, for fear of public shame, for fear of looking weak. Being “reasonable” is not permitted by their culture’s value system, and that is the tragedy.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
What is still relevant about the Iliad today: the rich, complex characterization and the theme of anger, revenge, and justice. The many mysteries: Was there a “Homer”? Was there a Trojan War? The real Troy, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann. The plot background: Helen of Troy.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Diomedes’ speech admitting that the Trojan War had been wrong. The tragedy of Camilla, the great woman warrior. The suicide of Queen Amata. Jupiter forbids Juno and Turnus’s sister Juturna from interfering further. The final showdown between Turnus and Aeneas. Turnus, wounded, begs for mercy—but Aeneas sees the belt of young Pallas, worn by Turnus as a war prize, and in the last four lines of the epic kills Turnus in a fit of blind rage.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The theme of the Aeneid, explicitly announced in crucial passages, is the hope of escaping from history as an ironic cycle, the hope that the tragedy of the fall of Troy does not have to become the model for all of human history. Virgil hoped that Augustus could establish not just a more just society but one that would bring justice and civilization to the whole world, that history might become progressive. But he does not minimize the cost, and focuses upon the deaths of a number of innocent, idealistic young men as representing the price to be paid. The two friends Nisus and Euryalus die together, young Pallas goes up against Turnus and is killed, Mezentius’ son Lausus is killed by Aeneas in an attempt to rescue his father. Turnus is a complex figure. His arrogance and hot-headedness result in his being trapped alone in the Trojan fort, yet along with his male pride is a real grievance against the Trojans, who we remember did bring the Trojan War upon themselves in the past.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Aeneas is in one way an imperialist, establishing his people in a foreign land despite the resistance of its native peoples. Yet he longs for a just war and a just peace, wishing that this conflict might be a war to end war, renouncing any intention of dominating the Italian peoples. Virgil clearly intends a parallel with Augustus, who conquered his own version of Turnus, Mark Antony, and wished to end decades of civil war and establish justice. But Virgil counterpoises this ideal against the reality of war, of the death especially of young men cut off in their prime, especially Pallas, the son of Evander, Aeneas’s ally. On the other side, a motley crew of revolutionaries, from the woman warrior Camilla to the psychotic sadist Mezentius.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Aeneas and the Sibyl leave the Underworld by the Gate of Ivory. The new world of Italy, and the native people there. Aeneas forms an alliance with King Latinus, to be sealed by marriage with Lavinia, but Juno sends the Fury Allecto to demonically possess Queen Amata and Turnus. Against the progressive vision of history that Anchises spoke of in the Underworld, Juno represents the vision of history as an ironic cycle, so that Aeneas is the new Paris, and the new Troy will suffer the same fate as the old.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Aeneas meets with his father Anchises in Elysium in the Underworld. Anchises’s speech expands the Aeneid into a cosmic dimension, with a World Soul instead of a creator deity, a system of rewards for the good and punishments of evildoers, then reincarnation in this world. The mystery of where Virgil derived this imagery. Finally, a vision of Aeneas’s descendants, culminating in Augustus Caesar.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The struggle to reach the goal. Funeral games for Anchises. The women set fire to the ships because they don’t want to go on. The death of Palinurus, “one life given for many.” The mysterious imagery of the entrance to the underworld, created by Daedalus. The Cumaean Sibyl, Aeneas’s guide, and the golden bough, talisman that Aeneas needs to take with him on his journey.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The famous tragic love affair between the passionate, impulsive Dido and the restrained, disciplined, responsible Aeneas. Dido’s madness and suicide. The Aeneid’s greatness lies in its double vision: cyclical pessimism and progressive optimism held in creative tension.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Aeneas loses his loving wife Creusa at the end of Book 2, and wanders with his people for seven years, comparable to the Wanderings of Odysseus, for the entirety of Book 3. His father Anchises dies at the end of Book 3.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Aeneas, taken in by Queen Dido of Carthage, recounts his adventures, beginning with a vivid, book-length account of the fall of Troy.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Jupiter’s long speech to Venus about the glorious destiny of the line descending from her son Aeneas, the future history of Rome. Aeneas and his people land and are taken in by Dido, Queen of Carthage, in what should be a happy ending—but which the audience knows will end in tragedy. The happy ending is for a future Rome, not for Aeneas personally, who knows only self-sacrifice and loss.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
A new type of hero, “duty-bound” Aeneas, sacrificing himself for a higher cause, not merely for a future home for his people but for the cause of law, order, and higher civilization. The unique organization of the Aeneid through a series of parallels with Homer’s epics.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Virgil’s life and career. The Aeneid influenced by Virgil’s experience of anarchy and civil war as the Roman Republic crumbles. The rise of Caesar Augustus, first Roman Emperor: the promise of law, order, and civilization. But at what cost? The “Virgilian melancholy.”
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Is Book 24 by another, and inferior poet? Is there any artistic necessity for it? Is there a total thematic pattern to the Odyssey that draws together all the various themes we have been tracing? The fascinating character of Odysseus in later literature, up to our own time.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The suitors’ self-humiliation, unable even to draw Odysseus’ bow. Odysseus shoots through 12 axe heads. The battle with the suitors and its aftermath. The hanging of the 12 treacherous maids, and the disposal of Melanthios. Penelope tricks Odysseus but proves he is really her husband. The joyful reunion.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The famous episode telling how Odysseus was given his significant name by his grandfather Autolycus, a thief. Setting up strategies ahead of time to even the odds against the suitors. The bow contest.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The moving and yet psychologically complex reunion of father and son in the hut of Eumaios. Devising strategies to make up for being greatly outnumbered. Odysseus meets his old dog Argos, a wonderful tearjerker in the midst of a heroic epic.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Athena, in a famous scene, puts Odysseus on a level of equality with herself—as storyteller, liar, trickster. The power of stories that shape people’s view of reality. Eumaios the swineherd as a genuinely good man of lower-class origins. The return of Telemachus to Ithaca.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The Wanderings, Books 9-12, suggest an underlying pattern of symbolic death to an old identity and birth of a new, often at a point of crisis in mid-life, as is true of both Odysseus and Dante in the Divine Comedy. For Odysseus, this involves a coming to terms with the feminine, portrayed by a remarkable spectrum of female figures ranging from the ideal to the ambiguous to the evil. The landing on Ithaca: the sense of a nexus of realities, of Odysseus crossing from the mythlike, dreamlike world of the Wanderings to the realistic world of his home island.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Possible mythical patterns of death and rebirth to a new identity underlying the Odyssey, especially in the Wanderings, patterns that are universally human and not limited to exceptional heroes.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
A brief recap of the first six episodes of the Wanderings: the Kikones, the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops, Aeolus (god of the winds), the Lestrygonians, Circe. The central episode of the Wanderings, the descent to Hades. Meetings with Elpenor, the seer Tiresias, Odysseus’ mother Antiklea, Agamemnon.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
For the four books of the Wanderings, Odysseus acts as his own bard and recounts retroactively his ten years of trial and adventure since the fall of Troy. Recurrent themes tie together these seemingly disparate episodes, including resistance to temptation, the virtue of active striving, and the contrast between civilization and savagery.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The ideal society of the Phaiakians throws a party in honor of their guest, in which Odysseus outperforms the younger men, and the blind bard Demodokos sings three times, making Odysseus weep for the past.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Book 6, a wonderful comic interlude in which Odysseus, naked from the storm and wearing only an olive bush, has to befriend and get help from Nausikaa, the young princess of the Phaiakians.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Odysseus’ 7 years captive on Calypso’s island. Sexual politics in the Odyssey. Odysseus’ most heroic act: choosing life and its trials over immortality.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Telemachus finds that there is more to becoming a man than being a warrior. The Odyssey is a peacetime epic, and during his visits to Nestor in Pylos and Menelaus and Helen in Lakedaimon that it is necessary to learn the skills of social interaction. He is also given a lesson on the complexities of marriage.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The psychology of masculinity. Manhood is not merely chronological, but has to be achieved. The suitors and the complicated question of the rules of succession to the kingship in Homeric times.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The complex structure of the Odyssey. “Who has known his own engendering?” Telemachus’s troubled search for his own identity in relationship to his unknown parent, a timeless human dilemma.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The fascinating mysteries of Troy and Homer. The Odyssey as a comic epic. Odysseus as Trickster, the polytropos, or man of many turnings.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
A series of emblematic visions, each expanding beyond the limits of the last, culminating in Dante’s ultimate vision of God as the circumference of all things, binding the universe together in beautiful order and all-embracing love, whose symbol is the circle.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
In the sphere of Jupiter, Dante is lectured by the Eagle of Justice about predestination, the mystery of why God saves some people and damns others by giving or withholding his grace.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Dante and Beatrice rise into the spiritual realm. Beatrice lectures Dante on the nature of that realm. Intellect and love as God’s twofold image in both nature and human nature.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Reunion in the Garden of Eden and Beatrice’s anger over Dante’s “infidelity.”
Ways of imagining Heaven, an experience beyond time.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The theme of reunion begins, as Dante meets his dead friend Casella. Casella, a musician, performs a poem by Dante that he has set to music, until they are interrupted by Cato, who tells them to stop wasting time. Art can be redemptive or escapist depending on how it is used. At the top of the mountain, Virgil tells Dante he has achieved the only true freedom, which is internal and disciplined, not a mere absence of external rules.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Recreation as the real promise of Christianity: we can change; we can be recreated through trial, an insight not dependent on literal belief in Christian doctrine. The role of education in the purgatorial or recreative process, and the role of the arts in education.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Easter Sunday, 1300: the 7-story mountain of Purgatory, and image of the human hope of transformation through trial and suffering, whether in this life or the next.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Why is betrayal the worst of all sins, far worse than murder? The psychological nature of evil, the rending of the bonds of human interconnection, the essence of damnation.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The thrilling famous speech of Ulysses, questing for experience and knowledge. What is forbidden knowledge? Knowledge sought for selfish reasons, including power. The real forbidden knowledge is of our true motives, about which we lie not only to others but to ourselves.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Canto 5, continued: The tension between romantic and spiritual love in Dante.
Canto 15: The mutual affection and respect between Dante and his former teacher (and father figure) Brunetto Latini, punished for homosexuality.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
A psychological speculation on the motive for human evil that does not depend on religious commitment.The damnation of unbaptized infants and virtuous pagans: the acceptance of tragedy within the divine comedy.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
The problems of ideal romantic love, which we still wrestle with. The issue of commitment, of taking a stand, which we also still wrestle with.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Canto 2 of The Divine Comedy, in which Dante, as reluctant as any hobbit, is induced by Virgil to embark upon his quest by speaking of Dante’s love Beatrice Portinari, a real woman, though loved according to the new conventions called Courtly Love, from which descend our ideas that romantic love can save you when nothing else can.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Canto 1 of The Divine Comedy: in mid-life, we suddenly realize we are “lost in the woods,” and no longer know “the way.”
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support
Introduction to the “Expanding Eyes” podcast series and to its first subject, Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed exactly 700 years ago in 1321.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michael-dolzani/support