Apollo: A crash course on why Leontes isn't the sharpest crayon in the box

As I've mentioned in class before, I'm taking an awesome mythology class this semester! One of the biggest benefits from it is that I notice more classical allusions and the influence of mythology on basically all of literature. So I was intrigued-- shocked, appalled-- at Leontes' reaction to the Oracle of Delphi's response to his accusations. In ancient Greece, it was common for nobles and peasants alike to bring their questions to Apollo's prophetess at Delphi, the Pythia. She would answer their questions, personal or communal, and those answers were received and acted upon with respect because she spoke for Apollo. It's similar to how we treat personal revelation in Mormonism-- whatever divine guidance we receive, we typically treasure and act accordingly. Understanding this allowed me to understand how irrational and out of line Leontes' response was when he disliked the Oracle's content. You don't just declare that divine advice is wrong (especially if you believe in Apollo and know of his wrathful nature)! It's not a Magic 8 ball that you can shake over and over again until you get the answer you want, even if you are royalty. Dismissing it as "mere falsehood" demonstrates Leontes' jealousy (WAY out of control, even if you're trying to sympathize with him...) and the sense of entitlement that comes with kingship (remember Richard and how he expected his subjects' adoration and support, regardless of his actions? It sounds like Leontes isn't used to hearing the word no, either).

However, Leontes quickly changes his tune and fears his blasphemy when his wife and son die. He begins to believe the oracle's contents once he attributes these deaths to Apollo's anger. This fear talks reason into his jealousy, but it's too late! Turns out that it's probably wiser to listen to divine advice, even if you're ruling with divine authority...

So maybe it helps to be an extrovert

Recent progress in terms of social proof:
I found an article online by BYU professor Bruce Young about teaching the unrealities within The Winter's Tale. I sent him an e-mail with some specific questions about my research paper, and this morning he sent me back a beautifully helpful e-mail. He answered my questions directly, and also kind of just went on a rant about time in The Winter's Tale. I think the rant was just because he felt like it, but almost all of it fit in with other already-written paragraphs within my paper, which is fantastic because now I can go through and add a quote or two from him to beef up my paper. He also sent me some links to resources he thought would be helpful which I'm planning to read through once I finish this post :)

I've been thinking recently about how time can be a liberation to audience members watching The Winter's Tale. The irregular use of time definitely adds an element of mysticism to the play, and I believe that that element of mysticism makes it easier as an audience member to be enveloped by the foreign world on the stage and forget about our individualized everyday realities. I sent an e-mail to my theater history professor asking some questions about theater and escapism and hopefully he'll get back to me soon!

Dan: Oh Dan. He works on the fifth floor in the library, and honestly he's been my sounding board through this entire process and he still is (if you're having issues organizing your thoughts I suggest going to see if you can find a guy wearing a nametag that says "dan" at the help desk on the fifth floor. He's the best). Recently though he's been working on some research papers too so its been fun to be able to return the favor and be a sounding board for him as well. In terms of helping people within class, I've mostly just been trying to read other's posts on the blog, and I have a tendency to stumble upon information pertinent to her when I'm doing my research, so when that happens I try to pass it along to her.

Here comes J - er, Mikaela!

First off, I hope you all enjoyed my reference from The Shining. Second - some of you may have noticed that I didn't really post last week. The long and short of it is that I was fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster named illness and rehearsal and have only recently been vomited back up into the world of school work. Bear with me as compensate for last week and post incessantly this week.

Those who've been reading my posts know that I'm writing about the constraints/liberations of time and so in analyzing The Winters Tale I decided to look specifically at passages about the seasons. Some things I noticed:

Winter is heavily associated with Leontes and his suffering. Just before Leontes accuses his wife of having an affair, his son gives the audience a precursor to the story saying, "a sad tale's best for winter" (2.1.25). Paulina also tells Leontes, "A thousand knees, ten thousand years together, naked fasting/ upon a barren mountain and still winter in storm perpetual, could not move the gods/ to look that way thou wert"(3.2.230-3). I took "knees" as a synecdoche for prayer, and then read the quote again replacing "winter" with "Leontes' suffering," which made sense and reaffirmed my thoughts on winter's association with suffering.

Summer, contrastingly, is more associated with Perdita and with happiness. When Polixenes first meets Perdita he addresses her, "a fair one are you - well you fit our ages/ with flowers of winter" (4.4.77-8). Later on in the scene Perdita says,
"Sir, the year is growing ancient,
Not yet on summer's death nor on the birth of trembling winter,
the fairest flowers o' th' season
are our carnations and streaked gillyvors,
which some call nature's bastards" (4.4.80-5). A gillyvor, according to a footnote in the copy of the book I was using, is a July-flower. Reading these quotes I saw Perdita as these summer flowers - hence her being a flower of winter (born during Leontes' grief) and hence the flowers being bastards (just like Leontes wrongly supposed her to be a bastard). This would also explain the parallelism between Polixenes defining Perdita as "fair" and then Perdita describing the flowers as "fair."

Leontes is characterized by winter and spends the majority of the play in anguish, and Perdita is correlated with summer an spends the play infatuated with Floriziel. Seasons are a manifestation of time, and in this sense time is a constraint, because each of the characters is constrained to joy/sorrow dependent on season.

...ok so obviously that needs some more development, but it's a start for one of the ideas in my paper!

For Rachel: who is having to do way too much research on her own ;)

Dearest Rachel...
I love your thesis. Love it. I'm not sure if you already know this, but you're actually echoing an extremely prevalent idea through theater theory which is that the unreal is real or that the real can only be divulged through examining the unreal. So some suggestions...

1. Try looking at your thesis through the lens of theater history/ look at different performance histories of The Winter's Tale.
2. When I was talking with some of the cast members of BYU's production of The Winter's Tale they talked about the element of magic in it. I can probably give you some contact information so that you can e-mail one of the cast members if you want.
3. http://metalib.lib.byu.edu/V/PR25DA99MGXLGGAE74A2Q8A9GY22L379VL9TRVDGLQVEGQK72B-65344?func=meta-3&short-format=002&set_number=002313&set_entry=000005&format=999 this is an article I found online and it's actually about a man who was the lighting director for a production of As You Like It and The Tempest. It's pretty short, but relevant to your topic - he talks about how it's difficult to work the logistics of creating the "magic" of Shakespeare's plays. For anyone involved in putting on a production, magic is a very real. If you want to present magic on the stage you have to have a firm connection with reality - how are the lights going to work? what about the stage crew? costum changes?

I know that this wasn't an angle you were taking, but I think it's one worth considering :) Good luck!
Yours truly,
Mikaela

honestly relieved I don't have to do full citations

Working thesis: In his play, The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare utilizes the duality of time as being simultaneously constraining and liberating.

You'll be humming it in the shower

I got a lot of feedback on my idea about Shakespeare as a musical so I decided to look a little further into that. When I told a friend about my idea he asked, "Well what play?" which I hadn't considered. Looking through everything I've read this semester, every play incorporates music in some way, but a Winter's Tale does so most prominently. In fact, most of the songs also connect with the theme of time in that they depict the seasons. Autolycus sings a song about daffodils and summertime at the beginning of the fourth act, and then at the end of the act begins a song with, "lawn as white as driven snow..."(4.4.220). I'm still not completely sure what I want to write on, but I found that correlation interesting. My roommate also suggested that I look at international productions of a Winter's Tale to see the different uses of music (Bollywood??) Another thought: music is dictated by timing, as is iambic pentameter. So in that sense, music could be seen as another display of time's power.

Too Many Possibilities!

After reviewing my Digital Dialog posts I’ve come up with three options for my final paper. There are advantages and disadvantages to each one, so if anyone is out there, please help!

Love’s Labour’s Lost – I want to analyze the conversation to show either of two things: there is a difference between understanding the words of the conversation and understanding the meaning of a conversation or how those who are witty are not always wise.

Henry V - Many people consider Henry V to be manipulative and overbearing. However, by analyzing his conversation with Katharine, one notices that Henry is in fact not as controlling as some claim him to be. Henry’s complex rhetorical power is not based on manipulative plans but genuine feelings and speeches adapted to be the most effective for his various audiences.

A Winter’s Tale -  Leontes unconscious obsession with all conversation maintaining adherence to the Gricean Maxims can be directly linked to his belief of Hermoine’s unfaithfulness.

Any feedback will help! I just need to get a feel for what everyone thinks. Thanks!

HECK YES

That's my answer to the question we were supposed to respond to ("Have I reviewed my own recent writing and thinking and identified texts and topics of real interest to me?"), But also my general response to this whole experience that Dr. Burton is setting up for us. I just feel like this is why we live in the age we live in--to talk like we've never talked before and think like we've never thought before and create like we've never created before. I want to do something new because I want to live in the world I live in now, simply because no one else before us got to and I feel like we should take full advantage of it because they're probably jealous.

So I want to write about Shakespeare and video games. I feel like The Tempest is a great springboard, but I hope to touch on many other plays as well. I want to prove we've learned from the past, but I want the past to learn from us as well. I want to create dialogue that's never happened before--both between people and between texts (media? I don't even know how to jointly label Shakespeare with video games).

I wasn't only just excited by my own ideas, however (that would be kind of hypocritical to what I'm saying here). I also was really excited by Nyssa's idea about Kate not being tamed, but just putting on the final disguise of the play, as well as David's idea of the symbolic nature of the names in A Winter's Tale, and Mikaela's ideas of how Shakespeare presents Time almost has a dominant force over men. Lots of great stuff.

Why fix it if it ain't broke...

While reviewing my own attempts at conversation on Digital Dialogue, I found that from comment to comment, I was particularly drawn to the topic of character.  Within the idea of character, much less character analysis and much more the idea of how characters create the plot.  Shakespeare loves his disguises and the confusion between characters.  Taming of the Shrew is a prime example of this with the similarity in names and the multiplicity of costumes.  Similarly in A Winters Tale and Othello, any given character is a mismatch of identities stuck onto a single individual to supply the necessary constructs of a plot.  I found it was posts approaching the varying degrees of this idea that I was most drawn to throughout my digital dialogue experience.

Why not sing to Shakespeare?

I went through and skimmed almost all of my posts in our class blog, making a list as I went of different topics I blogged on and the frequency with which I was returning to the same topics. Really there were two things I returned to over and over again which were 1. time within Shakespeare's plays and 2. Shakespeare in relation to theater history/music (with more posts on the latter). So I'm currently between a couple ideas for my research paper: 1. Time is a persona within Shakespeare's works that dominates the lives of the characters (this would be an extension of our earlier paper where I focused on A Winters Tale) 2. Shakespeare the musical! Music is used so heavily within every Shakespeare work I've read, and yet the general population seems completely oblivious to it. Modern productions of Shakespeare almost never incorporate it. In fact, when I told my roommates about this idea (one of which is an English major) they both said "but Shakespeare doesn't have music Mikaela..."Why was he so concerned with music? What are we loosing in our modern productions without it? Do we now have elements of lighting/spectacle that compensates for whatever Shakespeare was trying to achieve with his music? 3. It would be interesting to look at production histories of different works in correlation to acting theory history. Different acting styles can completely affect the interpretation of a script - just like different people can read the same text and have extremely different interpretations. Well everyone - I need some help! Which idea sounds most interesting to you?