1 00:00:01,070 --> 00:00:05,890 So thanks a lot for coming in to this first lecture on Sindelar. 2 00:00:05,890 --> 00:00:10,650 Some lecturing this term on five slightly odd Shakespeare plays, 3 00:00:10,650 --> 00:00:18,150 partly because last year increasing number that are left from the ones I've already done like the previous lectures. 4 00:00:18,150 --> 00:00:21,000 These will all be recorded on two years. 5 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:26,970 So if you're wondering why I'm not lecturing on Tamla or something, it's because I've already done it and it's already available. 6 00:00:26,970 --> 00:00:34,500 If there are twenty seven lectures on Shakespeare's plays available on how to do as part of the Approaching Shakespeare series. 7 00:00:34,500 --> 00:00:41,490 There's also a series on other Renaissance plays, not Shakespeare. You might find interesting too. 8 00:00:41,490 --> 00:00:44,040 Each letter follows the same pattern. 9 00:00:44,040 --> 00:00:55,380 Trying to focus the kind of critical history of the play via a particular insistent or self-evident question is Prospero Shakespeare? 10 00:00:55,380 --> 00:01:00,510 Why is Falstaff fact? How sad is King Lear? 11 00:01:00,510 --> 00:01:04,960 I give a short summary of the play so you can understand the lecture even if you haven't read it. 12 00:01:04,960 --> 00:01:08,030 That might be more necessary this time than ever. 13 00:01:08,030 --> 00:01:15,330 And I tried to suggest some of the ways you might link it to other plays chronologically, pneumatically or critically. 14 00:01:15,330 --> 00:01:19,620 So coming up this term are all's well that ends well. 15 00:01:19,620 --> 00:01:29,040 Merry Wives of Windsor to Henry six two gentlemen of Verona today, symbolism. 16 00:01:29,040 --> 00:01:37,890 So Simelane is one of Shakespeare's last plays written in 16 10 and will see its own thematic affinity with other plays of the same period, 17 00:01:37,890 --> 00:01:44,730 most notably Winter's Tale and The Temperance. It also fits alongside romance. 18 00:01:44,730 --> 00:01:48,570 Tragicomic plays with Shakespeare, co-authors with Fletcher. 19 00:01:48,570 --> 00:01:56,910 At the end of his career, Two Noble Kinsmen and All Is True, or Henry the eighth Simon Foreman, 20 00:01:56,910 --> 00:02:03,840 the astrologer and quack doctor went to see the play in April 16 eleven and he wrote a short account of it. 21 00:02:03,840 --> 00:02:12,810 Then I'm going to discuss in a minute. So what I'd normally do at this point in the lecture is to summarise the play 22 00:02:12,810 --> 00:02:16,380 with some implications that I want to discuss in more detail as we go along. 23 00:02:16,380 --> 00:02:21,000 Summarising the play is quite difficult in the case of symbolism. 24 00:02:21,000 --> 00:02:30,360 There is an awful lot of plot. It's as if Shakespeare, through all the elements of his, plays into this one before the reshoots. 25 00:02:30,360 --> 00:02:35,250 You do? Shakespeare Company ever got their idea? It's got across dressed woman. 26 00:02:35,250 --> 00:02:39,960 It's got beheadings, it's got cancer death, poisonous potions, battles, 27 00:02:39,960 --> 00:02:46,210 intense father daughter relationships, unwarranted, me, jealous husbands, innocent wives. 28 00:02:46,210 --> 00:02:55,140 But to put it another way, it's as if someone ransacked the filing cabinet of the structural chemist Vladimir Propp and emptied out all 29 00:02:55,140 --> 00:03:02,370 31 of his functions of narrative from absence Haitien and interdiction to transfiguration and marriage. 30 00:03:02,370 --> 00:03:08,100 If you look at these fabulous fun for all kinds of things, including at Cymbeline, 31 00:03:08,100 --> 00:03:14,430 so all I'll say about the plot of the play for now is enough to set up the question I want to organise. 32 00:03:14,430 --> 00:03:24,990 The lecture around simply takes place in ancient Britain and then begins with the King simply refusing to pay 33 00:03:24,990 --> 00:03:34,710 tribute money to the Romans symbolisms daughter imagines or in some editions imagine with a double edged. 34 00:03:34,710 --> 00:03:41,790 This is a very, very vexed question in Shakespeare studies. And even though I do like those kinds of arcane details, I can't get too excited about. 35 00:03:41,790 --> 00:03:46,230 Imagine. Imagine. But it's good to know about. 36 00:03:46,230 --> 00:03:53,720 Imagine or imagine. King, the King's daughter, have secretly married a commoner, Posthumus. 37 00:03:53,720 --> 00:03:59,550 And when the king finds out, he vanishes Posthumus in a fury in exile. 38 00:03:59,550 --> 00:04:07,250 Posthumus has a bet with the wild man of the world, he Alkimos that Imogene would always be faithful to him. 39 00:04:07,250 --> 00:04:12,180 The acumen goes to Britain to test her Shakespearean manual. 40 00:04:12,180 --> 00:04:20,420 Realised or always jealous. Think of much ado as Claudio or Othello or closer to the time of Composition Assembly. 41 00:04:20,420 --> 00:04:30,330 Lay on Tis a Winter's Tale. Except when they should be the Emperor saturnine us in Titus Andronicus doesn't seem to realise that his wife's 42 00:04:30,330 --> 00:04:38,290 copping off with Aaron more even when she gives birth to a baby described in the play's very problematic racial. 43 00:04:38,290 --> 00:04:47,670 LAX's a black tadpoles. But the rest of the play symbolism is about how this mistaken and misdirected jealousy is sorted out. 44 00:04:47,670 --> 00:04:54,090 Against the backdrop of a battle with the Romans over this issue of tribute. 45 00:04:54,090 --> 00:04:59,760 There is one other major plot element to introduce at this point symbolisms to some. 46 00:04:59,760 --> 00:05:04,670 Were stolen away from court by a disgruntled quartier. In their infancy. 47 00:05:04,670 --> 00:05:13,720 Course they were. They've grown up as outlaws in the Welsh countryside where image and their sister encounters that when she's dressed as a boy. 48 00:05:13,720 --> 00:05:17,110 And there's lots more plots, as I've said. But that's probably quite enough for now. 49 00:05:17,110 --> 00:05:20,170 The point I want to get to is that at the end of the play, 50 00:05:20,170 --> 00:05:29,830 when the identities of being revealed and the relationships repaired and the twists and turns unmask the British beat the Romans. 51 00:05:29,830 --> 00:05:35,500 The Roman general Lucio's is brought in with a number of prisoners and they sound 52 00:05:35,500 --> 00:05:42,490 captured on stage as witnesses to the multiple revelations of the final scene. 53 00:05:42,490 --> 00:05:49,900 Then similarly announces, although the victor we submit to Caesar, 54 00:05:49,900 --> 00:05:58,590 although the victor we submit to Caesar and to the Roman Empire promising to pay are wanted tribute. 55 00:05:58,590 --> 00:06:04,130 So although the victor wants to submit to Caesar promising to pay Özlem to tribute. 56 00:06:04,130 --> 00:06:09,170 So you've refused to pay the tribute? We've gone to war on the point. 57 00:06:09,170 --> 00:06:13,800 We've won the war. And now you're going to pay the tribute. 58 00:06:13,800 --> 00:06:15,160 Why? 59 00:06:15,160 --> 00:06:27,250 I want to try and focus on the oddness, the unnecessary ness of this plot twist and ask why Dustin Belene agreed to pay the tribute to the Romans. 60 00:06:27,250 --> 00:06:33,140 Why paid tribute? And that's the question I want to find by the various kinds of my lecture. 61 00:06:33,140 --> 00:06:40,250 Peter. Let's approach this first via the question of genre. 62 00:06:40,250 --> 00:06:46,620 I've already suggested that symbolism has close affinity with other of Shakespeare's late plays, especially The Tempest in A Winter's Tale. 63 00:06:46,620 --> 00:06:58,400 Like then, it draws on elements of romance in the mediaeval narrative sense, including storytelling stretched across time and geographical space. 64 00:06:58,400 --> 00:07:00,200 An interesting family dynamics, 65 00:07:00,200 --> 00:07:08,960 particularly between fathers and daughters set against wider political issues and favour tropes including Disguise Revelator, 66 00:07:08,960 --> 00:07:17,000 which birthmarks prominent and active heroines and a high emotional temperature. 67 00:07:17,000 --> 00:07:27,320 To some extent then this 19th century designation. Nobody calls these plays romances until Edward Darden's in the Victorian period coin's this term. 68 00:07:27,320 --> 00:07:38,090 But to some extent, this 19th century designation overlaps with an early modern ones, the fashionable new genre of tragicomedy tragicomedy, 69 00:07:38,090 --> 00:07:44,680 particularly associated with Shakespeare collaborator and his successor with The King's Men, John Fletcher. 70 00:07:44,680 --> 00:07:49,310 The tragic comedy is the coming thing. It's the theme that will outlast Shakespeare's career, 71 00:07:49,310 --> 00:07:57,440 which is coming to an end and which will dominate the theatre during the security teams and sixty twenties. 72 00:07:57,440 --> 00:08:02,480 Tragicomedy sometimes presents impossibly ominous situations. 73 00:08:02,480 --> 00:08:10,130 The tragedy fixed but are miraculously resolved. The comic fades and sometimes it mixes are kind of tragic. 74 00:08:10,130 --> 00:08:17,090 Sensibility within a comic framework similarly conforms to this to some extent, 75 00:08:17,090 --> 00:08:22,760 bringing the apparently dead back to life and reconciling the jealous husband with his wronged wife. 76 00:08:22,760 --> 00:08:29,310 But it doesn't really conform to Fletcher's oft quoted definition of tragic comedy, which is in community to the preface. 77 00:08:29,310 --> 00:08:36,350 Included in the preface to his play, the fateful shepherdess klatches played a fateful shepherdess. 78 00:08:36,350 --> 00:08:43,280 Fletcher describes a tragicomedy as a play that once again lacks warmth sex, 79 00:08:43,280 --> 00:08:50,180 which is enough to make it no tragedy yet bring some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy. 80 00:08:50,180 --> 00:08:55,340 It's quite interesting definition of tragedy and comedy. In fact, tragedy, tragedies about deaths. 81 00:08:55,340 --> 00:09:02,780 Comedy is about no one being too close to death and tragic comedy somehow blows those two. 82 00:09:02,780 --> 00:09:12,350 But in fact, there are deaths in Cymbeline, most notably beheading the beheading of the king's creepy stepson, Coton, whose mother wants him to marry. 83 00:09:12,350 --> 00:09:20,780 Imagine the scene in which imagine cuddles up to this bloody corpse in the mistaken grief that the headless 84 00:09:20,780 --> 00:09:26,960 body dressed in her husband's clothes is indeed posthumous is a really good example of this place. 85 00:09:26,960 --> 00:09:38,900 Uneasy tone. Many of symbolisms, moments of high emotional authenticity, including perhaps its most famous lines, fear no more. 86 00:09:38,900 --> 00:09:44,630 The feet of the son are in the context where they appear in the play. 87 00:09:44,630 --> 00:09:55,220 Ironically, undermined fear no more. The heat of the sun is a funeral threnody for a corpse that we, the audience, know is not really dead. 88 00:09:55,220 --> 00:10:05,530 Imogen has taken one of those ubiquitous Shakespearean potions that only mimic death just as her tears over this bloody man are misplaced, 89 00:10:05,530 --> 00:10:10,300 directed towards a man she hates rather than loves. 90 00:10:10,300 --> 00:10:16,640 Fear no more. The heat of the sun is, perhaps not incidentally, the Shakespearean quotation Winnie is trying to remember. 91 00:10:16,640 --> 00:10:24,540 While she's buried waist deep in the ground, led to neck deep in Samuel Beckett play hockey games. 92 00:10:24,540 --> 00:10:34,160 So simple in here is Romeo and Juliet rewritten so that Juliet cries unwittingly over the body of Paris, thinking it is Romeo and Juliet, 93 00:10:34,160 --> 00:10:44,020 and in so doing undermines the difference between Paris and Romeo, which was so substantial that she herself would die for it later in the play. 94 00:10:44,020 --> 00:10:49,400 This sardonic manipulation of tone is one of the ways symbolic teeters between genres. 95 00:10:49,400 --> 00:10:58,970 Somehow at once de authenticating its own moments of apparent sincerity and thereby stable at destabilising our response. 96 00:10:58,970 --> 00:11:05,300 It's a tone we might you bring it off by a critical concept that enjoy those kind of switchback moods. 97 00:11:05,300 --> 00:11:18,530 Irony, kitsch, Cameron. While seeing symbolism alongside these other late plays gives us perhaps as a reason for the capitulation on the tribute. 98 00:11:18,530 --> 00:11:29,090 It's a point about forgiveness. Shakespeare's tragedies, as you know, tend to hurtle headlong from catastrophic error to ultimate destruction. 99 00:11:29,090 --> 00:11:33,940 But there's no time to reflect or reconcile or get a second chance. 100 00:11:33,940 --> 00:11:45,450 You screw up, you die. The romances seem to visit those tragic scenarios, explicit and explicitly, to imagine what could happen next. 101 00:11:45,450 --> 00:11:49,530 How might time heal this terrible situation? 102 00:11:49,530 --> 00:11:58,320 What might it be if you screw up and you have to live with the consequences rather than be done in The Winter's Tale? 103 00:11:58,320 --> 00:12:09,750 Lyons's is an a fellow who has to live with the consequences of his jealousy for 16 long years and then is rewarded by the return of his wife. 104 00:12:09,750 --> 00:12:21,960 In The Tempest, Prospero is a hamlet. Both the old king and the young prince who chooses virtue over vengeance and gets his power back in symbolism. 105 00:12:21,960 --> 00:12:26,460 The king is a leader who is reunited with his daughter. 106 00:12:26,460 --> 00:12:33,060 The comparison with the text of Lear is published in the Folio in sixteen twenty three is a really, really interesting one. 107 00:12:33,060 --> 00:12:40,800 Most critics now think Shakespeare was reworking his play King Lear around the same time as his writing symbolism. 108 00:12:40,800 --> 00:12:46,590 So perhaps this mood of forgiveness is one way to understand the last scene of the play. 109 00:12:46,590 --> 00:12:53,730 Separated lovers in Shakespeare's tragedies are often representative of larger sociopolitical conflicts from the 110 00:12:53,730 --> 00:12:59,760 feuding Montagues and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet to the Greek controlled insides and Choice and Cressida, 111 00:12:59,760 --> 00:13:05,270 perhaps even including the fellow in Desdemona. Against the background of the Turkish threat to the nation, 112 00:13:05,270 --> 00:13:11,160 Cyprus and at the end of symbolic but some sort of analogy between the reconciled couple 113 00:13:11,160 --> 00:13:16,890 Posthumus and Imagine and the reconciliation between the Roman and British powers, 114 00:13:16,890 --> 00:13:24,480 it seems that general amnesties for a general mood of forgiveness. 115 00:13:24,480 --> 00:13:28,190 OK, so so far I've talked about romance and tragicomedy, a chance for this play. 116 00:13:28,190 --> 00:13:35,000 There are two more possibilities I want to touch on. One relates to the play's first publication. 117 00:13:35,000 --> 00:13:43,300 Like many of the plays from the second half of Shakespeare's writing career and like its own compromise hero, 118 00:13:43,300 --> 00:13:49,310 an artist posthumously an artist, Cymbeline is published posthumously. 119 00:13:49,310 --> 00:13:54,740 It has to wait until the First Folio of sixteen twenty three to be printed. 120 00:13:54,740 --> 00:14:00,530 You may remember that one of the only explicit editorial interventions into that big volume 121 00:14:00,530 --> 00:14:07,470 of collective plays and the one that gives us its full title is the division into genres. 122 00:14:07,470 --> 00:14:10,040 Master William Shakespeare's comedies, 123 00:14:10,040 --> 00:14:21,260 histories and Tragedies Cymbeline appears as the very last play of the 35 listed on the Kassala page at the end. 124 00:14:21,260 --> 00:14:29,150 Perhaps surprisingly of the tragedies, in some ways it seems as if the blame has been placed there because of its title. 125 00:14:29,150 --> 00:14:37,610 Singular names are either history or tragedies. In Shakespeare and the Folio, for reasons that we won't go into now, 126 00:14:37,610 --> 00:14:45,740 has decided that history for its purposes is a box set of serial mediaeval English kings from John onwards. 127 00:14:45,740 --> 00:14:53,720 So it's not the ancient histories of Masback or King Lear, even though those plays share with Henry Problem Henry the Fifth. 128 00:14:53,720 --> 00:15:01,850 A common source in Holland Szeps Historic Chronicles. And it's not either Julius Caesar or Coriolanus works that are about history, 129 00:15:01,850 --> 00:15:08,660 but not English history by the folio that's become mediaeval English history. 130 00:15:08,660 --> 00:15:19,580 So simply wouldn't really fit into that. So maybe we need to add tragedy into the mix of ex generic expectations the play evokes. 131 00:15:19,580 --> 00:15:25,840 Even though it's a designation that sets up expectations, the play does not entirely fulfil. 132 00:15:25,840 --> 00:15:37,820 Symbolism is not the tragic hero of a play, but like much of Shakespeare's last work, explores this strange post, tragic space of possibility. 133 00:15:37,820 --> 00:15:43,370 And finally, generically and perhaps most closely associated with the central question of this lecture. 134 00:15:43,370 --> 00:15:55,760 The tribute payable to the Romans simply looks like the last of Shakespeare's Roman plays in all his plays about ancient Rome. 135 00:15:55,760 --> 00:16:05,370 Shakespeare shows Rome in conflict with itself, with enemies, without with contrary views of the world. 136 00:16:05,370 --> 00:16:14,690 And he usually does that from the point of view of Rome as the centre of interest against which others variously goths, Egyptians as well. 137 00:16:14,690 --> 00:16:19,120 Skins are distinguished or something similar here. 138 00:16:19,120 --> 00:16:27,230 But it's been flipped. Britain, the non Roman pole in this binary, it's the centre of the action. 139 00:16:27,230 --> 00:16:32,750 Rome, it's the other. Rome is the alternative viewpoint, not the central one. 140 00:16:32,750 --> 00:16:38,660 It's perhaps the ultimate development of Shakespeare's interest in Rome throughout his career, 141 00:16:38,660 --> 00:16:46,790 in which his heroes increasingly want to escape from Rome with Antony in Antony Cleopatra or about Coriolanus, maybe. 142 00:16:46,790 --> 00:16:50,150 And here we have a Rome that the players escape from. 143 00:16:50,150 --> 00:16:56,080 That is itself decentred and marginal. 144 00:16:56,080 --> 00:17:04,510 These hybrid generic influences and expressions point to something that I think is useful for thinking about this play more widely. 145 00:17:04,510 --> 00:17:15,040 Hybridity, hybridity, a term from cultural and political animal studies, has a number of contact points with similarly hybridity signals, 146 00:17:15,040 --> 00:17:24,880 culture or cultural artefacts produced by the blending of two parent cultures into a new and distinct form. 147 00:17:24,880 --> 00:17:34,330 The language of the generations is interesting for linking the structural and formal qualities of this play with the familial dynamics of its plot. 148 00:17:34,330 --> 00:17:39,870 If hybridised cultural forms combine the qualities of parent cultures into something new. 149 00:17:39,870 --> 00:17:46,330 And if in doing so, they have the capacity to disrupt or challenge those perspectives. 150 00:17:46,330 --> 00:17:53,470 Hybridity has an affinity with intergenerational strife at the hybrid project is at odds with 151 00:17:53,470 --> 00:17:58,810 the parent cultures that produced it and from which against which it wants to define itself. 152 00:17:58,810 --> 00:18:07,180 We could think then about hybridity as a as a framework for the relations between parents and children in the play, 153 00:18:07,180 --> 00:18:17,720 between symbolism and imagery, between Cymbeline and the stolen sons, between the wicked queen Cymbeline second wife who sold the kids. 154 00:18:17,720 --> 00:18:21,770 You can only be called Queen and her son Clode term turn. 155 00:18:21,770 --> 00:18:30,040 And between Posthumus named because his birth post dates the death of his father and his own parents, 156 00:18:30,040 --> 00:18:39,010 who he sees in a kind of spectacular dream vision sequence. After the battle with the Romans, it's a great safe direction in the Folio. 157 00:18:39,010 --> 00:18:45,550 Enter as in an apparition Sicilia's slaying Nazir's father to Posthumus, 158 00:18:45,550 --> 00:18:56,560 an old man attired like a warrior with an ancient matron, wife and mother, his wife and mother to Posthumus. 159 00:18:56,560 --> 00:19:03,980 It's a moment of particular spectacle when Posthumus, his family, summon up the gods, Jupiter, 160 00:19:03,980 --> 00:19:12,390 who the Foleo stage direction tells us, descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. 161 00:19:12,390 --> 00:19:21,700 He throws the Lord who might want to think of this unexpected sequence, the sequence of Jupiter, the God, Jupiter coming down on an eagle. 162 00:19:21,700 --> 00:19:25,370 Everything about it is unexpected. I mean that this is a world few better. 163 00:19:25,370 --> 00:19:30,960 It is. Or is this quite weird for a start? Saturn Eagle would come down from the heavens above. 164 00:19:30,960 --> 00:19:37,390 The sage is also probably quite unexpected. So we might think about the element of surprise. 165 00:19:37,390 --> 00:19:49,600 Here is itself a kind of hybrid forms. The intrusion of a distinctly visual moment into the generally verbal textures of Shakespearean dramaturgy. 166 00:19:49,600 --> 00:20:02,320 For some critics, this relates to a new style of drama prompted and fostered by the increased visual palette afforded by the new indoor theatres. 167 00:20:02,320 --> 00:20:09,540 The King's Man Shakespeare Company began to perform at the Indoor Theatre of Blackfriars in 16 08. 168 00:20:09,540 --> 00:20:17,400 I talk a bit about Blackfriars and the impact its audience might have had on Shakespeare's plays in the lecture on Coriolanus. 169 00:20:17,400 --> 00:20:25,720 For what we might want to think about in relation to Cymbeline is an increased focus on site as the dominant economies 170 00:20:25,720 --> 00:20:34,240 in indoor theatre culture reship recent work prompted by the building of a Blackfriars inspired indoor theatre. 171 00:20:34,240 --> 00:20:44,950 The Sun Wannamaker, as part of the Globe Complex on London's South Bank, has begun to explore many of the visual tropes directional candle light, 172 00:20:44,950 --> 00:20:50,020 the chiaroscuro possibilities of darkness and shadow to the shimmering shot 173 00:20:50,020 --> 00:20:55,630 silk worn by wealthy patrons that made them a glittering spectacle to rival. 174 00:20:55,630 --> 00:21:08,040 The players were interested in the visual dynamics of the indoor theatres, not least because of this experiment laboratory in the Wannamaker. 175 00:21:08,040 --> 00:21:14,710 Now, relatively few of Shakespeare's plays rely too much on the visual. 176 00:21:14,710 --> 00:21:24,580 It's actually quite hard to think of a play where you actually need to be able to see something in order to understand what's happening. 177 00:21:24,580 --> 00:21:29,500 Shakespeare has, as we know, a thoroughgoing habit of verbalising all actions. 178 00:21:29,500 --> 00:21:38,700 Almost all stage actions are implied in dialogue, dialogue, which tells us where we are, at, what time it is, whether it's night or day. 179 00:21:38,700 --> 00:21:44,980 And what what what it is we should be imagining that we see, for instance, 180 00:21:44,980 --> 00:21:50,380 perhaps until the apparent revival of Khomeini's statue at the end of the Winter's Tale. 181 00:21:50,380 --> 00:21:54,350 No play of Shakespeare's turns on a specifically visual. 182 00:21:54,350 --> 00:22:01,080 No one might argue with me, I guess, about the reconciliation between us, a comedy of errors. 183 00:22:01,080 --> 00:22:07,410 Or in Twelfth Night. But given that the two actors playing the twins probably didn't look that similar. 184 00:22:07,410 --> 00:22:15,690 So maybe that that's actually kind of a. Visuals point rather than a pro play place. 185 00:22:15,690 --> 00:22:22,400 However, perhaps written particularly with Blackfriars in mind, or perhaps particularly with the high end, 186 00:22:22,400 --> 00:22:30,360 the aesthetic of Blackfriars in mind for Shakespeare's plays continued to be performed in both venues in the Globe as well as Blackfriars. 187 00:22:30,360 --> 00:22:38,460 But the Globe Theatre productions probably change abase because of the high status that's given to a kind of Indore picture setting, 188 00:22:38,460 --> 00:22:50,210 which is more expensive, more so. The descent of Jupiter events and thinking about back about legal fate. 189 00:22:50,210 --> 00:22:58,040 You think the descent of Jupiter from the heavens above the stage can seem like special effects in a modern film to be. 190 00:22:58,040 --> 00:23:02,210 Just because they can rather them, because they need to. 191 00:23:02,210 --> 00:23:09,140 It's a way of showing off the technical capability rather than wonders necessitated by the plot. 192 00:23:09,140 --> 00:23:12,000 But it's also hybridising in another way. 193 00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:23,540 It brings in the expensive visual effects popularised in the jack to be in court by max by court masks as another generic influence. 194 00:23:23,540 --> 00:23:27,650 And thus it participates in a wider aesthetic quarrel, 195 00:23:27,650 --> 00:23:35,780 often articulated by the violent disagreement between Ben Johnson on the words side and Inigo Jones 196 00:23:35,780 --> 00:23:42,440 on the set design side about whether words or spectacle are more significant in dramatic production. 197 00:23:42,440 --> 00:23:48,000 This is a big example of the second decade, this gem to train. 198 00:23:48,000 --> 00:23:56,580 Is it an indoor indoor theatres like Blackfriars tend to prioritise spectacle because they have better technical facilities, 199 00:23:56,580 --> 00:24:03,630 but also because of the relative proximity of audiences within a space where lighting is controlled. 200 00:24:03,630 --> 00:24:09,330 If you followed the controversies about the rebate global impact site and its former director and the rights, 201 00:24:09,330 --> 00:24:14,230 you may recall that shed light was one of the great points of controversy. 202 00:24:14,230 --> 00:24:21,370 That's to say the belief of the globe that audience and state must exist in the same unmanipulated 203 00:24:21,370 --> 00:24:27,690 light environment to start with the kind of red lines that they weren't prepared to cross. 204 00:24:27,690 --> 00:24:33,900 So if the outdoor theatres are based on shared lives, audience and stage in the same light conditions, 205 00:24:33,900 --> 00:24:41,730 indoor theatres can do something quite different with lighting technology using candles on walls or pillows or in hanging candelabra 206 00:24:41,730 --> 00:24:51,850 or carried by actors and using shutters to block out Daylife to light up particular themes or areas and to darken others. 207 00:24:51,850 --> 00:24:58,640 We're not quite yet in the modern standard theatre where the audience is in pitch glass and the stage is brightly illuminated. 208 00:24:58,640 --> 00:25:07,380 But in the Blackfriars, we are in an environment where lighting effects can highlight, should be seen and have no symphony to take on. 209 00:25:07,380 --> 00:25:13,440 This is complicated. And if it was performed at Blackfriars, it was also probably performed at the Globe. 210 00:25:13,440 --> 00:25:18,360 That may account for it. Or maybe a player has to think about two different environments. 211 00:25:18,360 --> 00:25:23,970 It's one of the longest plays in Shakespeare's canon. Almost 4000 lines. 212 00:25:23,970 --> 00:25:27,570 Only a couple of minutes shorter than Hamlet. 213 00:25:27,570 --> 00:25:33,660 If we take seriously the Royal Shakespeare Company director Greg Dolan's assessment of Shakespeare's verse, 214 00:25:33,660 --> 00:25:43,750 jogging along at about 800 lines and our 800 lines and our 4000 lines of simply well over four hours of dialogue, 215 00:25:43,750 --> 00:25:50,820 it will be hard then to say it marks a shift towards a more visual and less verbal form of theatre. 216 00:25:50,820 --> 00:25:56,300 But on the other hand, it's a play deeply interested in the dynamics of looking. 217 00:25:56,300 --> 00:26:00,150 And I want to spend a bit of time on a scene I haven't yet mentioned to discuss 218 00:26:00,150 --> 00:26:08,550 this parting with Imagine when he's banished from Britain by Cymbeline. 219 00:26:08,550 --> 00:26:18,390 Posthumus gives her a bracelet and she gives him a reason that whilst her mother's he goes to Rome, 220 00:26:18,390 --> 00:26:23,190 the other curiously hybridised aspects of Sindarin is when it takes place. 221 00:26:23,190 --> 00:26:29,270 Ancient 50s and imperial Rome seemed to coincide temporally with Renaissance Italy. 222 00:26:29,270 --> 00:26:37,740 Posthumus goes to Rome to meet a lot of fit, fashionable, cynical, well-educated young men straight out of Italian literary fiction. 223 00:26:37,740 --> 00:26:42,570 Rome in symbolist is both the ancient empire and the contemporary city. 224 00:26:42,570 --> 00:26:43,500 It comes as a shock. 225 00:26:43,500 --> 00:26:52,410 Later in the play to see the urbane renaissance, a kind of caught me at figures Quartier Pigot, Yaki Mode's amongst the Roman Legionaries. 226 00:26:52,410 --> 00:26:59,490 This looks like a kind of mattea plus distinct times and places. 227 00:26:59,490 --> 00:27:10,070 But there are other historical palimpsest or Heidrich Harpe historical palimpsest or hybrids in this play that prominently named Milford Haven. 228 00:27:10,070 --> 00:27:15,860 I want to talk more about the role of Wales country that has not been managed in a moment. 229 00:27:15,860 --> 00:27:21,920 I think Wales is one of them. I mean, the marine whale is one of the things that's not in symbolism, 230 00:27:21,920 --> 00:27:33,960 a good kind of antidote for the things that are unsupervised, knows about whales with an aim being fit right in. 231 00:27:33,960 --> 00:27:38,150 And tell me. Oh, yeah. 232 00:27:38,150 --> 00:27:43,970 Exactly. He knows they're in the clouds. That's right. And so wherever I got to. 233 00:27:43,970 --> 00:27:49,460 Yeah. So Milford Haven in Wales would have probably recalled the founding of the Tudor dynasty in 234 00:27:49,460 --> 00:27:55,040 the 15th century is the port where Richmond landed to take the throne from usurping Richard. 235 00:27:55,040 --> 00:28:03,950 The third aspect. It tells us at the end of to the first Cymbeline was supposed to have been king of Britain at the time of the birth of Christ. 236 00:28:03,950 --> 00:28:09,170 Another quite interesting historical conjunction. 237 00:28:09,170 --> 00:28:13,820 But the world of the play is that of the Renaissance Court clocks, for instance, 238 00:28:13,820 --> 00:28:20,870 strikes in emittance bedchamber so simply occupies a non-contiguous historical moment, 239 00:28:20,870 --> 00:28:28,760 partly because explicit material about the Romans in Britain with a contemporary prose story from the Italian right to the catcher, 240 00:28:28,760 --> 00:28:36,740 but partly because these kinds of hybridity are. I hope you're coming to see its distinctive mode. 241 00:28:36,740 --> 00:28:44,440 But back to Posthumus and the importance of looking away in Rome praising imagines beauty, 242 00:28:44,440 --> 00:28:50,900 Posthumus prompts one of his fellows the acumen to a kind of rivalrous jealousy akin 243 00:28:50,900 --> 00:28:56,030 to that that Shakespeare explores with his rapist character toplines in the poem, 244 00:28:56,030 --> 00:29:01,120 The Trees Toppling claims that he has been prompted by an increase. 245 00:29:01,120 --> 00:29:05,840 His husband, Coller Times Back, boasts about his wife's perfections. 246 00:29:05,840 --> 00:29:17,540 Boasting has raised her value in this violent way for two men, Posthumus and the Arkema make a bet of ten thousand Duckett. 247 00:29:17,540 --> 00:29:20,690 Depending when you think of this play takes place, that seems quite a lot of money. 248 00:29:20,690 --> 00:29:25,130 Remember, it's three thousand ducats in The Merchant of Venice, and that was quite the problem. 249 00:29:25,130 --> 00:29:35,560 So here we've got ten thousand ducats and and imagines ring that state that that's the best emergency room. 250 00:29:35,560 --> 00:29:43,340 We'll go to Yakima if you can bring proof that he has enjoyed the dearest bodily parch of your mistress. 251 00:29:43,340 --> 00:29:51,290 What happens is that Yakima goes to Britain to meet Imogen. He's charmed by her virtue and realise he's not going to be able to seduce her. 252 00:29:51,290 --> 00:29:58,070 But he gets himself smuggled into her chamber in a chest and she sleeps. 253 00:29:58,070 --> 00:30:03,380 He opens the chest and creeps out to watch her. 254 00:30:03,380 --> 00:30:10,370 He gained such detailed knowledge of her body, particularly the mole on her left breast. 255 00:30:10,370 --> 00:30:20,120 It's a way a kind of fairy tale trope about a distinctive mark is really distorted and perverted and used in a quite different way again. 256 00:30:20,120 --> 00:30:27,320 Such detailed knowledge of her body under fear Vivian declaration of her bedchamber and he is able to slip posthumous his 257 00:30:27,320 --> 00:30:36,650 bracelet from her sleeping arm that he returns to Posthumus in Rome with clearly definite proof that he has had sex with her. 258 00:30:36,650 --> 00:30:44,730 The scene of the upheaval in emergence bedchamber is one of the most intense that Shakespeare ever wrote and I think one of the most uncomfortable. 259 00:30:44,730 --> 00:30:53,780 It brings centre stage the sense of theatrical spectatorship as voyeurism or Freudian analysis. 260 00:30:53,780 --> 00:30:57,120 And cinema theory calls Scott's a failure. 261 00:30:57,120 --> 00:31:06,800 Scott paraphilia the erotic pleasure of looking, particularly the pleasure of looking at another person still shocked. 262 00:31:06,800 --> 00:31:10,700 Now, if we accept that the visual elements of theatre have been downplayed in the 263 00:31:10,700 --> 00:31:15,680 development of drama in the 16th century and are just now coming into prominence, 264 00:31:15,680 --> 00:31:24,680 we can see that Skop Ophelia, the erotics of looking. It's a relatively new dramatic concept, like a hidden camera. 265 00:31:24,680 --> 00:31:26,960 Another kind of technological possibility. 266 00:31:26,960 --> 00:31:37,610 But for people, again, lots of technologies have been used to people in that private, private kind of happenings or private things. 267 00:31:37,610 --> 00:31:48,350 That's how cinema is is advertised. A peep show and prepared and peep show at the indoor theatres are an early version of a new technology that 268 00:31:48,350 --> 00:31:54,400 allows us to see something more voyeuristically allows us to see into places that we don't normally see. 269 00:31:54,400 --> 00:31:57,900 So like a hidden camera, the argument looks at image and you cannot look. 270 00:31:57,900 --> 00:32:04,530 Back, his long speech of description turns into an object of back crisis. 271 00:32:04,530 --> 00:32:09,300 But we also know that he means a harm to her, more indirectly cruel. 272 00:32:09,300 --> 00:32:17,010 And that's a tough one to decrease. Yakima likens himself explicitly to talking at the beginning of the season. 273 00:32:17,010 --> 00:32:26,640 We don't get it. Yukino consumes and takes power by looking, but uncomfortably. 274 00:32:26,640 --> 00:32:36,960 So do we. For the Victorians, Cymbeline was a favourite play because they constructed Imogene as the most womanly of Shakespeare's heroines. 275 00:32:36,960 --> 00:32:42,420 Swinburne saw her ask the immortal Godhead of womanhood and Ellen Terry, 276 00:32:42,420 --> 00:32:50,670 the actress whose 19th century performance of the play cemented its reputation in the period, remarked, I can find no fault it had. 277 00:32:50,670 --> 00:32:54,810 So the big talk of the 19th century simply is one of Shakespeare's great plays. 278 00:32:54,810 --> 00:33:00,540 And that's first quite an interesting thing to look at. Why such a popular at certain times? 279 00:33:00,540 --> 00:33:11,190 Why is it that we that the Victorians simply was what was important image and came to be the epitome of what Coventry Patmore, 280 00:33:11,190 --> 00:33:17,340 in a famous and indicative poem now is best known for the way in which Virginia Woolf rejected it? 281 00:33:17,340 --> 00:33:22,230 Ask the angel in the house. That was how it came to that scene. 282 00:33:22,230 --> 00:33:32,640 Despite or perhaps because of that, perhaps there's a distinct thrill imperilling this power to the frisson of Imogen's in danger. 283 00:33:32,640 --> 00:33:35,820 Trance. Chastity is a deeply troubling one. 284 00:33:35,820 --> 00:33:45,030 Like the chemo, we are voyeurs in a bedroom decorated in a distinctly unhealthy, determinately sexualised matter. 285 00:33:45,030 --> 00:33:53,710 If you Google Victorian images of imaging, you'll see what I mean about the titillating depiction of imperilled off the shoulder innocence. 286 00:33:53,710 --> 00:34:01,230 Is at once wearing a kind of an innocent mate, innocent kind of person's nightgown. 287 00:34:01,230 --> 00:34:05,200 But it's also just kind of fallen open so we can look at her. 288 00:34:05,200 --> 00:34:09,810 It was a very weird erotic salt's image and being so innocent. 289 00:34:09,810 --> 00:34:14,530 And that's what's so dangerously desirable about her. 290 00:34:14,530 --> 00:34:20,280 Imogen's bedtime reading in symbolism is the rape of Philomel by terrier's in of its metamorphosis. 291 00:34:20,280 --> 00:34:23,490 The prototype for the violence in Titus Andronicus. 292 00:34:23,490 --> 00:34:31,580 Her chamber is decorated with the delicious images of Diana bathing another prototype for keeping spectators. 293 00:34:31,580 --> 00:34:40,120 Imogene is disturbingly presented as somehow inviting her violation by willingly participating in these sexualised narratives. 294 00:34:40,120 --> 00:34:43,170 She's reading that the salt really uncomfortable. 295 00:34:43,170 --> 00:34:55,230 Wrong, perverse logic of this scene is that she's reading about rape and therefore a man is going to come out of the chest and under attack. 296 00:34:55,230 --> 00:34:58,020 She's somehow seen as to be flaunting herself. 297 00:34:58,020 --> 00:35:07,420 And it's precisely the problem of gender and power within that notion that I think the play makes us look at that, 298 00:35:07,420 --> 00:35:16,110 that it's a really, really uncomfortable moment by prompting both dangerous desire from the acumen and from Clinton, 299 00:35:16,110 --> 00:35:21,780 her encroaching stepbrother, brother, sister, and violent hatred from her jealous husband, 300 00:35:21,780 --> 00:35:30,210 persuaded she's been unfaithful image and makes them look like the same thing, makes desire and violence, desire and hatred. 301 00:35:30,210 --> 00:35:35,640 The same thing supposed to prompt both Posthumus and the Alkimos and Clinton 302 00:35:35,640 --> 00:35:42,190 combined in a version of what ran Azera influentially called my Mesic desire, 303 00:35:42,190 --> 00:35:49,290 my its desire. I want what you want in a couple of significant 21st century productions with 304 00:35:49,290 --> 00:35:56,070 Mark Rylance of The Globe in 2001 and Tom Hiddleston for Cheek by Jowl in 2007, 305 00:35:56,070 --> 00:36:05,310 Posthumus uncloaked and have been doubled to bring out the symmetry of these threats to Emerson. 306 00:36:05,310 --> 00:36:14,100 The best chamber scene then revisits the boy Ristic complicity, both of the Lucretia Pelin and of the rape of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. 307 00:36:14,100 --> 00:36:17,250 To come back to my point about Spectacle and Blackfriars, 308 00:36:17,250 --> 00:36:26,340 it's all about looking deeply uncomfortable for it, describing the performance he saw in sixteen year. 309 00:36:26,340 --> 00:36:35,940 Simon Foreman was particularly struck by this encounter, recollecting how the Italian is not very convinced that Yakima is a Roman. 310 00:36:35,940 --> 00:36:44,370 Clearly how the Italian that came from her lover conveyed himself into a chest and said it was a chest of plate sanctorum, 311 00:36:44,370 --> 00:36:51,150 her love and others to be presented to the key. And in the deepest of the night, she being asleep. 312 00:36:51,150 --> 00:36:57,810 He opened the chest and came forth of it and viewed her in her bed and the marks of her body. 313 00:36:57,810 --> 00:37:04,630 And took away her bracelet and after accused her of adultery to Haldun, etc., 314 00:37:04,630 --> 00:37:11,080 it's much the most detailed bit of Foremans analysis of the performance goes to see about three or four plays. 315 00:37:11,080 --> 00:37:14,910 Don't if we ever stated the and certainly not interested in what happens at the end. 316 00:37:14,910 --> 00:37:22,960 But maybe he's gone earlier. Or maybe he gives us an example that the ending of Shakespeare is not actually easily the most interesting thing. 317 00:37:22,960 --> 00:37:29,830 But he's really into this scene with Yukino observing the sleeping image. 318 00:37:29,830 --> 00:37:35,330 It's a crucial scene for thinking about the representation of women of sexuality and the 319 00:37:35,330 --> 00:37:43,840 new visuals of psychotic economy encouraged by the dramaturgy of the indoor theatres. 320 00:37:43,840 --> 00:37:50,830 So we've got so far different kinds of hybridity, generic, generational, representational. 321 00:37:50,830 --> 00:37:55,880 So we'll come back to the question about the tribute. Why does the victorious British Kingsley take the view? 322 00:37:55,880 --> 00:38:03,670 We could say it's a final gesture of hybridity. It replaces conflicts, a compromise antagonism with melding. 323 00:38:03,670 --> 00:38:10,510 And he imagines an ending for the play that prioritises national mingling rather than distinctiveness. 324 00:38:10,510 --> 00:38:23,110 Paying the tribute proposes a kind of hybrid colonial model where the willing colony is happy to acknowledge the superiority of the imperial power. 325 00:38:23,110 --> 00:38:30,640 Maybe something historical might help amplify this suggestion. Like other ancient Britain plays, most notably King Lear, 326 00:38:30,640 --> 00:38:37,150 symbolism speaks of King James's interest in reviving the historical idea of Britain as a precedent for 327 00:38:37,150 --> 00:38:45,430 uniting his two adjacent but administratively and culturally distinct kingdoms of England and Scotland. 328 00:38:45,430 --> 00:38:51,320 John Speed's suggestively named Atlas, the Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, 329 00:38:51,320 --> 00:38:59,980 which published in 16 Latin so almost contemporaneous with Cymbeline, begins with a map of Britain at the time of the Saxons. 330 00:38:59,980 --> 00:39:05,230 So even as it's giving us the kind of geography of modern counties, 331 00:39:05,230 --> 00:39:16,830 it gives us this historical map popper of an old kingdom, Britain, to do this typical work of James's union. 332 00:39:16,830 --> 00:39:24,220 So James and the Jacobean Corp. might feel an affinity with symbolism as the king of a united Britain. 333 00:39:24,220 --> 00:39:34,040 But James was also strongly associated in those iconography with the play's absent Roman emperor Augustus Caesar. 334 00:39:34,040 --> 00:39:39,760 Poets scrambled to nominate him a new Caesar at his succession in 16. 335 00:39:39,760 --> 00:39:45,940 Three. His coronation medal showed him as Caesar Augustus of Britain. 336 00:39:45,940 --> 00:39:53,230 A paradox that perhaps can explain some of the contortions of the play called Sindarin King of Britain. 337 00:39:53,230 --> 00:39:59,410 He is both symbolism and Caesar. Maybe the fudge about the tribute then. 338 00:39:59,410 --> 00:40:04,300 It's a topical Miguel, because Rome is both self and other key. 339 00:40:04,300 --> 00:40:13,690 It's the imperial entity against which the plucky kingdom struggles and the ambition towards empire of contemporary England. 340 00:40:13,690 --> 00:40:20,330 England had established Jamestown in Virginia in 16 of seven just a couple of years before this plague. 341 00:40:20,330 --> 00:40:26,650 And it's just on the cusp of imperial and colonial expansion. 342 00:40:26,650 --> 00:40:33,040 The myth of ancient Britain was founded on the myth that was derived from the myth of the Foundation of Rome, 343 00:40:33,040 --> 00:40:38,200 just as in A-s, according to Virgil, had founded Rome out of the ashes of Troy. 344 00:40:38,200 --> 00:40:45,220 So knew Troy, as London was sometimes known, were said to have been founded by the native son, Brutus. 345 00:40:45,220 --> 00:40:51,880 Britain was thus the little brother or reincarnation of Rome rather than its contrast. 346 00:40:51,880 --> 00:41:00,250 So it's written in this play. It's both. Let's look at it really mainly has suggested Little England and Great Britain. 347 00:41:00,250 --> 00:41:06,760 It is beleaguered island nation and with expanding proto imperial powers. 348 00:41:06,760 --> 00:41:18,010 This paradox expresses itself most clearly when the island nation and the imperial power are at odds in the matter of the tribute. 349 00:41:18,010 --> 00:41:21,610 I want to just spend a little bit more time on that idea. 350 00:41:21,610 --> 00:41:31,570 The idea of kind of imperialism, the island nation, and how early modern colonial colonialism might benefit from the notion of hybridity, 351 00:41:31,570 --> 00:41:38,680 which comes from post-colonial studies by thinking about the play's depiction of whales without me. 352 00:41:38,680 --> 00:41:44,040 Before King James deployed Britain as the time for his preferred United Kingdom's, 353 00:41:44,040 --> 00:41:49,570 the word was mostly associated with Wales writers and historians look to Wales 354 00:41:49,570 --> 00:41:54,820 as the site of ancient British values and where we see the idea of Britain's. 355 00:41:54,820 --> 00:42:03,370 They usually Welsh. When Imogene leaves her father's court dressed as a male page, she heads for Wales. 356 00:42:03,370 --> 00:42:10,650 And there she encounters, though she does not know them. Her lost brothers stolen from the court as children. 357 00:42:10,650 --> 00:42:16,150 It's these brothers good areas. And after August, miraculously, who brought the Roman army? 358 00:42:16,150 --> 00:42:20,320 Almost, it seems, without any help at all. And a victory to Britain. 359 00:42:20,320 --> 00:42:27,580 And if you look at the depiction of the two brothers in the play, you'll see that they alternate between scenes where they are barbaric. 360 00:42:27,580 --> 00:42:31,750 And scenes where they're civilised. They're both the same off. 361 00:42:31,750 --> 00:42:42,490 And the threats to civilisation. It's an ambivalence that speaks to colonial anxieties about the role of Wales in the English or British politics. 362 00:42:42,490 --> 00:42:48,340 Interestingly, as nationalism, devolution and calls for independence grow across the UK, 363 00:42:48,340 --> 00:42:56,270 we're probably closer right now to understanding this combination of separateness and union in Great Britain in the early modern period dominance. 364 00:42:56,270 --> 00:42:59,840 Any period since no cuidad. 365 00:42:59,840 --> 00:43:04,450 It's a no obvious, a strongly associated with a particular place in Wales. 366 00:43:04,450 --> 00:43:13,720 The court knows that Haven, a port in southwest Wales, now best known as a oil refining natural gas onshore. 367 00:43:13,720 --> 00:43:17,450 There are 17 mentions in the play of Milford Haven. 368 00:43:17,450 --> 00:43:25,140 I look that up in Folger Digital Text stock of which is the best online site researching Shakespeare's play. 369 00:43:25,140 --> 00:43:32,590 So there are almost as many mentions of Milford Haven Cymbeline as there are of Venice in Merchant of Venice or Windsor. 370 00:43:32,590 --> 00:43:40,570 In my wife's of Windsor. And I talk more about the significance of place in Shakespeare's plays when I get to know wives in a couple of weeks. 371 00:43:40,570 --> 00:43:48,970 So why do we keep hearing this about welfare payments? Well, Wales had been absorbed into England during the Cheesa period. 372 00:43:48,970 --> 00:43:54,400 It's an idealised version of the peaceable relation between dominant and subservient powers. 373 00:43:54,400 --> 00:44:01,200 But we get in the agreement to pay the tribute at the end of the flag. Of course, it looks idealised from the centre of power from England. 374 00:44:01,200 --> 00:44:04,150 It looks so great if you're Welsh. 375 00:44:04,150 --> 00:44:12,790 It's also perhaps a part of Britain that can more safely engage James's ongoing project in the first year of his English 376 00:44:12,790 --> 00:44:20,470 reign to unite England and Scotland for Wales gives us a way of talking about the relations between England and Scotland. 377 00:44:20,470 --> 00:44:30,070 Jane is continuing his doomed attempts really to unite the kingdom's right up to six in 10 when this place first performed at the end of symbolic. 378 00:44:30,070 --> 00:44:34,450 The King calls for the flags of Rome and Britain to fly together. 379 00:44:34,450 --> 00:44:42,400 Perhaps recalling one of James's most important political rebranding exercises, the Proteau Union Flags of 16 and six, 380 00:44:42,400 --> 00:44:48,400 which combined the Red Cross of St George with the Blue Cross some boundaries. 381 00:44:48,400 --> 00:44:53,350 The role of the ancient kingdom in Britain in this union project was significant. 382 00:44:53,350 --> 00:44:59,590 It seems that Shakespeare identify as symbolic in sons with the noble savages of historic Britains, 383 00:44:59,590 --> 00:45:03,910 such as the fierce tattooed warriors pictured in John Stevens Atlas as the great 384 00:45:03,910 --> 00:45:12,510 picture of an ancient Briton holding the beheaded head of one of his enemies. 385 00:45:12,510 --> 00:45:19,090 And that's exactly what happens in force, even to when the sons kill Clayton and topple Saddam. 386 00:45:19,090 --> 00:45:28,420 When imaging approaches the cave in which these men live, her address identifies a kind of colonial encounter between Explorer and Native Home. 387 00:45:28,420 --> 00:45:35,920 Who's here? If anything, that's civil speak. If Savage take over land. 388 00:45:35,920 --> 00:45:39,520 New world travellers frequently identified the people they encountered in the 389 00:45:39,520 --> 00:45:44,860 Americas as analogous to people who had lived in Britain in the ancient past. 390 00:45:44,860 --> 00:45:50,770 It was as if they were travelling in space and time at the site at the same moment. 391 00:45:50,770 --> 00:45:54,130 There's something similar going on here. I think so far in Wales, 392 00:45:54,130 --> 00:46:03,250 countryside is related to the ambivalent geography of Virginia and thus similarly engages with some of the same questions about authority, 393 00:46:03,250 --> 00:46:09,710 centre and margins that were more used to discussing in relation to the temples and temples that seem to be Shakespeare's colonial play. 394 00:46:09,710 --> 00:46:14,380 I guess what I'm suggesting is that symbolism is very close by in time. 395 00:46:14,380 --> 00:46:19,180 Might be a more interesting, unsustained look at that hybridity again. 396 00:46:19,180 --> 00:46:27,510 It is a helpful framework here. The borderlands between cultures, the sense of in between ness that characterises post-colonial theory. 397 00:46:27,510 --> 00:46:37,960 Prakriti scientists Helmy Bahbah and Robert Young. The idea that cultures at their borders produce new hybrid forms of understanding and identity. 398 00:46:37,960 --> 00:46:44,820 The two princes. The two princes. Good Arius. A number of us have Celtic names Cartwell and Polledo. 399 00:46:44,820 --> 00:46:50,320 Their border crossers trickster the figures at the intersection of cultures. 400 00:46:50,320 --> 00:46:57,720 The Welsh border is both an example and a metaphor for that kind of created uncomfortable mingling that we've seen. 401 00:46:57,720 --> 00:47:03,660 As characteristic reassembly in its generic political and total aspects and the Roman 402 00:47:03,660 --> 00:47:09,720 British border at the very end of the play is another manifestation of the same thing. 403 00:47:09,720 --> 00:47:13,890 So I've been trying to answer the question about why the British agreed to pay tribute to the Romans at the 404 00:47:13,890 --> 00:47:21,120 end of symbolism as a final and pointed version of the plague impulses to hybridity in terms of genre, 405 00:47:21,120 --> 00:47:24,120 in terms of representative and identity politics, 406 00:47:24,120 --> 00:47:35,070 in terms of the way it encodes the contested geography's of early modern England ideas of Britain and the new colonialism of the Americas. 407 00:47:35,070 --> 00:47:41,820 We could think about that just in the last moments, a little bit more about in the context of the play's final scene. 408 00:47:41,820 --> 00:47:51,900 More generally, numerically minded critics have identified 24 separate revelations in the play's final scene. 409 00:47:51,900 --> 00:47:57,350 Everything gets revealed to us, but curiously and in a way which is structurally problematic. 410 00:47:57,350 --> 00:48:07,740 They're all things that we already know. It takes a long time to have these revelations, even though they were never secret to us in the first place. 411 00:48:07,740 --> 00:48:16,080 The Alkimos confession about his trickery in particular, revisits that traumatic scene in Images bedchamber in considerable detail. 412 00:48:16,080 --> 00:48:23,550 The scene Iboga spent time talking about what? Thinking structurally about why the place wants to re re reinstate that. 413 00:48:23,550 --> 00:48:26,850 Revisit that switz at such length at the end. 414 00:48:26,850 --> 00:48:32,970 The whole final scene is an interesting coda to what we've seen at the importance of the visual interplay. 415 00:48:32,970 --> 00:48:37,700 There's nothing to look at at all except for the moment when Posthumus strikes. 416 00:48:37,700 --> 00:48:44,640 Imagine thinking that she's a boy. It's just a series of revelations that astonish the characters on stage, 417 00:48:44,640 --> 00:48:52,740 but merely reiterate the excessive plot for us simply as a place to glory in that excessiveness. 418 00:48:52,740 --> 00:48:57,840 By revisiting it all and lay all out so clearly at the very end, 419 00:48:57,840 --> 00:49:04,530 more recent productions have tended to play the scene as ironic or self-conscious rather than straight. 420 00:49:04,530 --> 00:49:06,070 But all is not well, 421 00:49:06,070 --> 00:49:14,370 posthumous Knox Imogene to the ground and then appears to forgive her rather than acknowledge that she's done nothing to be forgiven. 422 00:49:14,370 --> 00:49:18,990 And that might suggest the kind of new maturity about women, sexual conduct and its significance. 423 00:49:18,990 --> 00:49:25,980 It also perpetuates the calumny from which she's tried to escape the Posthumus, as I forgive you see me. 424 00:49:25,980 --> 00:49:31,380 Or I forgive you for this robot bad behaviour rather than saying there was no God. 425 00:49:31,380 --> 00:49:37,260 The play's conclusion, and including the tribute paid to the Romans, suggests that the shattered, 426 00:49:37,260 --> 00:49:44,610 broken world of loss, war and rejection of simply can only be healed in self-conscious fantasy, 427 00:49:44,610 --> 00:49:48,900 only in the fairytale world of wicked stepmothers and miraculous victories and 428 00:49:48,900 --> 00:49:52,870 birthmarks through beatings of children's considered bullying find its end, 429 00:49:52,870 --> 00:50:03,350 if not quite a conclusion. Perhaps we need to see the paying of the tribute within that as a part of the commitment to the happy ending, 430 00:50:03,350 --> 00:50:09,420 a play world in which war and politics become knowingly or perhaps even satirically 431 00:50:09,420 --> 00:50:15,900 Disneyfied into a prince and princess romance and a declaration of peace. 432 00:50:15,900 --> 00:50:28,440 Next week I'm going to talk about another problematic ending and one which is the title of its play, Teasingly Corpse.