Shakespeare’s Friends - AAALA029A
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Rozvrh Nástěnka
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Shakespeare’s Friends
Friendship was a captivating concept in the Renaissance. Indeed, in his 1508 edition of Adages, Erasmus, the contemporary creator of a cult of friendship, commences his considerations with a saying attributed to Pythagoras, “amicorum communia omnia” – all is common among friends – concluding that “the whole of human happiness [is] included in this brief saying”. Among the many types of friendship, one draws singular attention: a non- instrumental alliance rooted in unconditional mutual affinity. Celebrated in fiction and non-fiction alike, this idealised bond – in which, as Montaigne memorably maintains, “minds […] intermix and confound themselves one in the other, with so universal a commixture that they wear out and can no more find the seam that hath conjoined them together” – follows the ideal of true friendship found in Aristotle and Cicero. This ideal, however, receives at once an endorsement and a sceptical treatment in Shakespeare’s works. While firm at the basis of such glorifications of friendly devotion as the close of Sonnet 29 (“For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings”); the ideal is tainted in a number of plays, which seem to concede that “most friendship is feigning” (AYLI, 2.7.181). At the heart of Shakespeare’s treatment of friendship is a tension between an ideal and the experience, the paradoxical realization that we seem not to be able to fully accept that what we cannot live without. Through a reading of a selection of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, this course will explore this tension that arises from Aristotle’s contention, much revered in the Renaissance, that a friend is a heteros autos: (an)other self, difference and semblance in one. Primary reading: Aristotle Books 8&9 of Nicomachean Ethics; Cicero De Amicita; Erasmus Adages; Montaigne “On Friendship”; Francis Bacon “Of Friendship” Plays: Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale Sonnets: a selection Secondary reading: Agamben, Giorgio. “Friendship” in: What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (2009) Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Blanchot, Maurice. Friendship (1997) Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship (2005). Trans. George Collins, London: Verso. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-century England (1997). London: Routledge. MacFaul, Tom. Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2007). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poslední úprava: Znojemská Helena, Mgr., Ph.D. (21.06.2016)
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Resources available in library (secondary materials):
Bigsby, C.W.E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Volume three, Beyond Broadway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Bigsby, C.W.E. Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Bigsby, C.W.E. Modern American Drama, 1945-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
A handout on selected web resources and essay topics will be provided in week 2 Poslední úprava: Znojemská Helena, Mgr., Ph.D. (15.06.2016)
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Seminar Poslední úprava: Znojemská Helena, Mgr., Ph.D. (15.06.2016)
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See http://www.english-department-prague.cz/ Poslední úprava: Znojemská Helena, Mgr., Ph.D. (15.06.2016)
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