Here are the slides and the recording for this week’s lecture. The recording is a little frustrating to listen to because you will only be able to hear my side of the conversation. From next week I will be posting up the video version of our sessions (with student permission) and you will then be…
Tag: Shakespeare
Ben Jonson’s Shakespeare and More About Midsummer!
We had a wonderfully dramatic day today with hours spent on Ben Jonson’s extraordinary poem in praise of his rival William Shakespeare, followed by much hilarity watching Egeus challenging Theseus to help him tame his recalcitrant daughter into marrying the man she DOES NOT LURVE!! We then finished with a beautiful poetic rendering of the…
Shakespeare Blogs 2018
Hello All, I have had a wonderful day trawling through the ePortfolio/ Blogs produced by the Shakespeare Class of 2018. Such talent and inspiration is hard to find anywhere else. The top 6 ePortfolio/Blogs (all scoring High Distinctions) were as follows. I would encourage you all to scroll through these as powerful examples of what…
Shakespeare Week 6- from Classical Tragedy to Romantic Comedy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Today we broached one of Shakespeare’s most loved plays, his celebratory fantasy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We explored the ways in which Shakespeare in his opening scenes ricochets his audience from the high-sounding, poetical iambic pentameter of the Greek court through to the passionate language of the Romantic lurvers and then down into the depths of…
Rilke The Duino Elegies Part 3
Our third Rilke seminar at the Aquinas academy began by looking at the following proposition and then at the same time pondering the relationship between this and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146. (click to view). Both Rilke and Shakespeare indicate that living in the face of death can indeed be a sober annihilation of all that is false…
The Merchant of Venice for Clemente Students (and Blog Topics)
Hello All, this week we begin our “serious” professional rehearsals with the Bell Shakespeare Company who are going to help us prepare our scenes for performance on November 1st. Here is the PROMO for our performance- please distribute this to your friends! THE BLOG TOPIC FOR THIS WEEK IS SIMPLY A REVIEW OF YOUR ATTENDANCE…
The Merchant of Venice: Clemente
Today we begin our journey into Venice where Shakespeare has created a fascinating interlocking group of tales that take us into the heart of the conflict between Christianity and Judaism. But this is also a wonderful love story with an almost fairy-tale quality. So this is a complex play, romantic, comic, seriously political and almost…
The Merchant of Venice with Bell Shakespeare and Clemente Students
Please find here the beginning of some useful resources for our study: Bell Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (this is what we are going to see in a few weeks): https://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/whats-on/the-merchant-of-venice/ Review of Bell Shakepeare’s production (by the Australian Book Review): https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-arts/4166-the-merchant-of-venice-bell-shakespeare Wikipedia’s overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice Here also is the PDF of the Introduction and Act 1 of The Merchant…
MidWinter Spring!
Little Gidding I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart’s heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A…
The Tempest Part 2
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a play about many things; in one way it is as the large as The Globe itself! However, at its heart it is concerned with the power of art, of drama, of poetry, of music as transformative agents in a crazy, greedy world full of conflict and opposition. If Shakespeare’s message could…
The Tempest Part 1
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is his crowning masterpiece. This play contains so much about the nature and purpose of creation itself; it is a work that embodies so much of what he as an artist hoped to achieve and simultaneously crowns that achievement with a wonderfully humble stepping off the dramatic stage: Now my charms are all…
King Lear & Cordelia
How can we understand Cordelia’s confrontation with her father King Lear? In the Edwin Sherin directed version with James Earl Jones as Lear, staged in Central Park New York, King Lear’s violence seems to provoke a response in Cordelia which is a mirror of her father. Like father like daughter? Is there any grace in this Cordelia,…
Education of the inner self: Dickens, Mill, Arnold, Newman
The Nineteenth Century was as “distracted from distraction by distraction“as we all are in the early years of the Twenty First Century. The messages sent to us by the “poets” of the inner-self in Victorian England (Dickens, Arnold, Newman … and others) are as relevant to us now as they were then. Matthew Arnold had…
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
We had a remarkable conversation about this sonnet (no 30) today in which we discovered that the “sessions of sweet silent thought” were those rare meditative moments of complete freedom from automatic, associative thinking that give space to the soul to BREATHE. But what Shakespeare describes in this sonnet is what happens when we give…
Shakespeare/ Victorianism & Charles Dickens – Week 6
Thomas Carlyle the great Victorian historian, close friend of Charles Dickens wrote these wonderful words which have been carved in stone in the foyer to the Mitchell ( State Library) in Sydney. This is where many of us visited the Shakespeare Room this week. But for those of studying Charles Dickens and Victorianism, these words…
Romeo & Juliet- Bell Shakespeare
This would have to be one of the liveliest, most powerful productions of Romeo and Juliet! Congratulations to the director, Peter Evans and the whole cast who brought the inner significance of this play so vividly, so entertainingly alive. In his pre-performance interview Peter Evans had spoken about the vitality of Juliet as a character. And Kelly…
End of Week 3: Shakespeare’s Madness
Is Shakespeare really as pessimistic as he seems to be when describing the nature of “love”? When Lysander says (1.1.142) about true love -if and when it is eventually found- that “War, death, or sickness did lay seige to it/ Making it momentary as a sound”, I really did have some students clawing up…
Week Two Summer/Autumn: A Muse of Fire
At the start of our tutorials this week we looked long and hard at that amazing speech written as the Prologue or Chorus to Henry V. This speech is like the key that unlocks so much of Shakespeare’s purpose and magic and puts his audience (and us as readers) in the hot-seat: in order to follow him…
Everyman- Review of National Theatre Live Production
As a group we went yesterday to see poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s new translation of Everyman with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the title role and movement by Javier De Frutos. The original morality play called Everyman (written in the late 15th Century) was a play designed to remind people of their mortality. It was designed to…
Best WordPress ePortfolios for Autumn 2015: Shakespeare and the Nineteenth Century
These students have been blogging as they have been studying Nineteenth Century Literature and The Age of Shakespeare. Some of these students have been doing both courses. They each had to showcase their best blogs and also write a Summative Comment explaining what they have learned from the course and how the content still has…
Shakespeare the Magician, Transforming A World of Enmity into a Holy Place- The Tempest
In The Tempest Shakespeare takes on all the hostility in the world and uses the extraordinary magic of his art to transform hostility into love- then and now! This is in fact the signature of all his comedies and romances and maybe even the implied cathartic outcome of that series of desperate tragedies (Othello, King Lear,…
All the World’s a Stage – and are we really nothing but players?? Rehearsals! Clemente/Catalyst students
In 3 weeks time the Clemente/ Catalyst students have to present extracts from As You Like It to a public audience at the MAC (Mission Australia Centre) Surry Hills. We are going to begin with a dramatised reading of Jacques’s speech (perhaps the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare): “All the world’s a stage, And all…
Falstaff and Prince Hal
Falstaff is one of those amazing characters who, although from many points of view, is just a “bad” man, from other points of view he is the life of the party! Intelligent, witty, full of good humour, full of appreciation of the good things in life and scathing about those things that drive ambition: “honour”,…
Clemente/ Catalyst students visit NSW State Library and Shakespeare Room
What a great introduction to our imminent study of/ participation in a production of scenes from Shakespeare’s As You Like It! Thank you Julie for your wonderful tour of the resources in the Mitchell Library, the Dixon Library and the Shakespeare Room itself! We were taken through the Mitchell (fabulous space for letting the creative spirit soar!)…
Leo Tolstoy and the Search for Truth
Tolstoy was passionate about uncovering those aspects of a human being in society that prevented him or her making contact with something true or real. He saw people in the law courts, in families acting out a kind of public drama which put each person centre-stage, totally ignorant of the other. It was like a…
Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Henry IV
Today we had some fabulous tutorials exploring the kind of language Shakespeare uses in the opening scenes of Henry IV. Here is the king trying to bind together his empire with a proposal that all the civil warmongering British unite in one force and go on a crusade to rescue Jerusalem from the “infidels”. This is such…
Art in the Age of Shakespeare: A Distant Mirror over 450 Years Ago!
Thank you all for your keen participation in today’s visit to the Renaissance section of the NSW Art Gallery. We all got a very good taste of the range of art work from the period and the connections of all this work to Shakespeare’s imagination. Most powerfully this painting by Jacques Blanchard Mars and the Vestal…
The Shakespeare Room: State Library of NSW- into the bosom of Shakespeareana.
We visited the Shakespeare Room in the State Library today. This room is a wonderful expression of how much Shakespeare has meant to the Australian colony since the time of Captain Cook. One of the first plays ever to be produced in Sydney was in fact Henry IV with a complete convict cast! When you get to…
Prose versus Poetry- what are the key differences- if any?
We tackled this question in our class this week. Here is a very simple way of showing the differences. We drew attention to these differences initially with special reference to Shakespeare. We have all just been to see As You Like It with John Bell in a leading role. We were trying to identify why and…
Henry Lawson’s “Sweeney” and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” at Mission Australia
What a fantastic session we had this week with Henry Lawson and Robert Frost. Both these poets display such a deep insight into the human condition but do it in such dramatically different ways. …
As You Like It: Will Shakespeare…. what is it that we (are) like?
What a fantastic performance by the Bell Shakespeare Company at the Opera House Drama Theatre. Around 60 students from ACU and another 20 or so from the Clemente program witnessed this great event. Thank you all for attending. Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a play that appeals above all to our sense of order, our…
Shakespeare and the Quest for a Golden Age
Shakespeare’s contemporary Pietro da Cortona The Golden Age Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’sMetamorphosis (1565) has this wonderful description of the four ages of man on earth: the golden age, the silver age, the brazen age and the iron age. The golden age – as here described- is a wonderful period in which humans lived in harmony with…
Clemente Mission Australia Week 2 Continued
The Clemente Program being run from Australian Catholic University in close partnership with range of Welfare Organizations such as Mission Australia, was started some years ago by an American, Earl Shorris. Shorris had a vision that poverty stricken Americans needed a way in which they could reclaim their dignity, their creative spirit, their intelligence. He wrote a…
Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Sundry Other Literary Delights
With third years I went last night to see John Bell playing Falstaff in the complete production of Henry IV Part One and Part Two at the Sydney Opera House. As was said in a recent review, this was John Bell’s best performance of his career. This was an amazing, energizing production that brought Falstaff…
Welcome to Literature and Life 2013
Hello all! This semester I have the pleasure of teaching second year Nineteenth Century Literature and third year Shakespeare and the Renaissance. Both these units have challenging and exciting components. For the 19th Century we are going to be challenged by Shelley’s verse drama “Prometheus Unbound” and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. For Shakespeare we will plunge into Twelfth…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Summer 2023 
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