Homework

Today we listened to Emma Smith's lecture:
http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/antony-and-cleopatra-audio

What I'd like is for you to get a detailed essay plan together using anything you gained from her lecture, plus ideas from the A03/4 pages on this site. You might want to listen to the lecture again. The essay question uses a quote by A.C.Bradley and is really asking you both about your personal response to the play (is it 'painful?'; remember too that for some critics its 'painful' quality is its length or unstageability!) and questions of genre (Emma Smith talks about how it has elements of satire/farce but also discusses how it's been viewed as a comedy/history play/problem play/romance):

   ‘For a tragedy it is not painful.’ By considering the dramatic effects of Antony and Cleopatra, evaluate this view.

Homework

Thanks for yesterday everyone - and thanks to Joshua, even though Skype sabotaged us.

Don't have too much chilling out this holiday (see below). Here's the home work which you must do for the first lesson back:

 1.   List the 5 most important ideas you gained from our reading yesterday of Acts 4 and 5.

 2.   (IMPORTANT!!) Re-read the play: even if you just skim through what you’ve underlined in class, this is better than nothing. We will be working on what you’ve gained from re-reading the play on the first lesson back!

 3. Place the following statements on what the play’s about in rank order; then write a detailed post on the statement you agree with most:

a. The play has no moral value whatever.
b. The play is about the most magnificent love affair the world has ever known.
c. ‘Antony and Cleopatra is at last not about tawdry middle-aged lovers but about the power of imagination to place an Egyptian puppet and a drunken Antony on stage and, by poetry, to make the audience forget their smaller-than-life reality.
d. The play isn’t so much a love story: it’s about power.
e. The play dramatizes mythical encounter between Venus (the principle of love) and Mars (the god of war).
f. The play dramatizes the encounter between the pleasure principle and the desire for order, duty and boundaries.