But why do I mention it?

I've just returned from my own encounter with academia, as a student in Prof. Reina Green's 6-week summer course on Shakespeare at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia (in eastern Canada). It was an undergraduate credit course, intensively paced with four 2.5-hour classes per week. We devoted two classes (5 hours) to each of the following Shakespeare works:

• Richard III
• Henry V
• Twelfth Night
• The Merchant of Venice
• Titus Andronicus
• Hamlet
• King Lear
• Othello
• The Winter's Tale

I was enrolled as an auditing student (I don't need the academic credit and the tuition is half price that way) but was doing the assignments like the other students, including mini-essays on each of the above, responding to specific questions assigned by the prof.

Of Twelfth Night's Orsino, for example, I wrote that there is irony in his view that "no woman's sides / Can bide the beating of so strong a passion / As love doth give my heart":

The woman to whom he expresses this [Viola] loves him so much she is prepared to die to serve his impulse of spite towards another woman. This, indeed, is Orsino's test of love: "But died thy sister of her love, my boy?" Would Orsino's love pass this test?

Orsino sees death everywhere. He aspires with his love to kill "the flock of all affections else / That live in" Olivia; he is tempted to kill Olivia herself, and fully intends to kill Cesario; he seeks an excess of music in order to kill his appetite for love, and he foresees the death of his own love, since men's fancies are "giddy and unfirm"; he notes that "women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour"; he imagines that in past, more innocent times, the "spinsters and the knitters in the sun" used to sing a lugubrious song he enjoys about a man, "slain by a fair cruel maid", who is buried in a black coffin without flowers in a grave that cannot be found; and he often senses his own death from love. Nevertheless, Orsino never seems to us to be in active danger.

My Hamlet mini-essay began:

Hamlet aggravates our usual epistemological quandary: even after overcoming doubts as to whether we are truly in a theatre watching a play, we are assailed by suggestions that now put the events on stage into question. Is what we see at but one remove from reality -- real within Shakespeare's invented story -- or have we assumed away our own delusions only to be deceived by Hamlet's?

This made no sense at all to the prof, who returned the paper with a question mark next to that paragraph. Evidently she has not seen The Matrix.

The question on The Merchant of Venice asked whether Shylock's wish to kill Antonio is justified, and my mini-essay, "Judging Shylock Anew," begins:

Weighing who is most villainous in this misanthropic play of hatred, hypocrisy and deceit is not an easy chore. A cycle of offenses predates the events depicted, as suggested by Shylock's "The villainy you teach me I will execute". What is clear is that Shylock is cheated of the provisions of his bond. Although Shylock is false in proposing the bond's penalty provision only "in merry sport", Antonio invites stern terms and is fully cognizant as he enters into the contract:

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends- for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?-
But lend it rather to thine enemy,
Who if he break thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty.

However, trickery and hypocrisy prevail in extricating Antonio from his commitment. This is in character for Antonio and his friends, who are consistently unprincipled, insincere, and untrue to their vows.

Is Shylock justified in wanting his pound of flesh? The prof's checkmarks on my paper implied she largely agreed with my view:

Antonio has insulted and injured Shylock in the past, and he makes it clear that Shylock can expect the same in the future, even if a satisfactory loan transaction is effected: "I am as like to call thee [dog] again, / To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too." There is thus considerable justice in Shylock's retort when mercy is urged upon him: "What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?" This is also a man who has just lost his daughter, money, and possessions having sentimental value -- losses that involve Antonio. There is clearly cause for fresh hatred, as Solanio recognizes: "Let good Antonio look he keep his day, / Or he shall pay for this."

Shylock's wish to kill Antonio is thus only human, no worse than what many or most people in his situation then or now would feel, and no worse than they would act upon had they legal sanction.

Does the text support a view that Shylock's wish to kill Antonio is justified? Clearly it is unjustifiable under the Christian ethical framework -- but of course Shylock is not Christian. Audiences in Shakespeare's time presumably felt that the Christian framework was applicable nonetheless. Today, or even then for the open-minded, it would not be uniformly held that Shylock's culpability is settled by Christian doctrine.

Under one commonly held, intuitively natural, and non-Christian ethical framework, Shylock's justification would require reasonable, or in some sense justifiable, hatred. Certainly the fact that Shylock wishes his own daughter dead -- or says he does, perhaps speaking hyperbolically -- amplifies the weight we must attach to the possibility that Shylock's hatreds are unfounded.

Among Shylock's reasons for hating Antonio, some are particularly weak:

I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.

Reasonable hatred would also require that the offenses and injuries inflicted by Antonio were not themselves justified by prior offenses committed by Shylock. The text offers us only Shylock's opinion on the origins of the cycle of offense between the two men: "Thou call'dst me dog before thou hadst a cause". Since this opinion is undependable, this too we cannot assess.

In summary, Christianity straightforwardly delivers a guilty verdict; but under the commonly held alternative ethical system referred to here, Shylock cannot be convicted.

Can you stand one more excerpt? On Othello I had this to say:

Desdemona's character is a central enigma. How can her own father know so little about her? Certain that his daughter can only have been bewitched by magic potions, he describes her as:

A maiden never bold;
Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
Blush'd at herself

Yet she is thoroughly self-possessed when summoned before the Duke, confidently asserting to the assembly that her primary duty is no longer to her father. Although her father had thought her "tender, fair and happy," her speech expresses no tenderness for him, and once the breach has occurred it is unacceptable to all for her to stay at his house even temporarily. It is unclear whether she ever learns that her father later dies of grief because of her marriage, but if so there is apparently no reaction. The man appears to be forgotten.

We see her blithely bantering with Iago ("O, fie upon thee, slanderer!"). And from Othello's account, which there is no reason to doubt, it also emerges that it was she who initiated their romance:

she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake

Desdemona has supreme confidence in her complete power over Othello, even on the question of designating his second-in-command, assuring Cassius in advance: "I give thee warrant of thy place." From Othello's "I will deny thee nothing," it is clear that, but for Iago's interference, her confidence would not have been misplaced.

Brabantio warns Othello: "She has deceived her father, and may thee." If there has been no deception, it is difficult to explain how the senator could be blind to such a point that the daughter he loved and raised is a stranger to him. The generally incisive Iago's view of Desdemona as "a supersubtle Venetian" seems closer to the truth than anyone else's.

Generally speaking, I will say that the prof was prepared, covered a lot of points, taught me to be much more alert to subtleties in Shakespeare, and revealed several central, significant things that I had totally missed. For example: I'd always thought that in Hamlet, Claudius's reaction to the play within the play is (further) evidence of his guilt.

Wrong.

While it's true that the play seems to re-enact his own murder of his brother, it in fact portrays a king being killed by his nephew. Thus Claudius may react as he does because he sees it as a threatening portent of his own murder by Hamlet.

In short, this was overall an enjoyable, stimulating course in which I got a close look at 10 plays.

So what was the problem?

[Continued ....]