This morning I was sitting at the table and suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to watch some ballet. I looked on the websites of the New York Times and the Guardian for clips of contemporary ballets or productions of old ones. Here is a piece from the New York City Ballet with Balanchine choreography, but the dancer seems not nearly enraptured enough for my taste, so I abandoned it.
On the Guardian's website my search led me to a series of videos of theatre monologues. I enjoyed this one from King Lear.
The video that overtook my Saturday, however, is this one featuring Damian Lewis as Antony in Julius Caesar. I have now watched it probably 8 times, and each time my eyes are streaming by the end. I find him absolutely enthralling.
This video sent me into the school library to find a copy of Julius Caesar today. We don't have one, but luckily there are loads of scripts available pdf form online. What we did have is a CliffNotes guide whose introduction talks about persuasion as an important theme in the play, particularly political persuasion.
The play was performed in 1599 when Elizabeth the first was ageing, and had no clear successor, a fact which made the populous nervous. Shakespeare mirrored some of their discontent and some of the scenarios in their minds by evoking 44BC in Rome, when Caesar comes back to Rome after defeating Pompey in Spain, one of Rome's adversaries, and tries to persuade the population to crown him king. He is highly ambitious and sees himself as superior to all other contenders for power. I've only read to scene two, but it seems already as though there could be a timely re-staging of this play around Donald Trump's candidacy.
I want to teach this play! I'm reading the study guide and wanting to have a class to go into tomorrow, to open the scene and talk to the students about the nature of democracy, and how easily a crowd can be swayed. After all, in the scene that Lewis's speech comes from, he speaks to a crowd which has just been hardened against Caesar by Brutus's comments, but by the end of Antony's speech, the crowd is howling for the blood of Caesar's murderers. If public opinion can be so quickly swayed at the hands of a powerful rhetorician, how stable is the democracy really?
On the Guardian's website my search led me to a series of videos of theatre monologues. I enjoyed this one from King Lear.
The video that overtook my Saturday, however, is this one featuring Damian Lewis as Antony in Julius Caesar. I have now watched it probably 8 times, and each time my eyes are streaming by the end. I find him absolutely enthralling.
This video sent me into the school library to find a copy of Julius Caesar today. We don't have one, but luckily there are loads of scripts available pdf form online. What we did have is a CliffNotes guide whose introduction talks about persuasion as an important theme in the play, particularly political persuasion.
The play was performed in 1599 when Elizabeth the first was ageing, and had no clear successor, a fact which made the populous nervous. Shakespeare mirrored some of their discontent and some of the scenarios in their minds by evoking 44BC in Rome, when Caesar comes back to Rome after defeating Pompey in Spain, one of Rome's adversaries, and tries to persuade the population to crown him king. He is highly ambitious and sees himself as superior to all other contenders for power. I've only read to scene two, but it seems already as though there could be a timely re-staging of this play around Donald Trump's candidacy.
I want to teach this play! I'm reading the study guide and wanting to have a class to go into tomorrow, to open the scene and talk to the students about the nature of democracy, and how easily a crowd can be swayed. After all, in the scene that Lewis's speech comes from, he speaks to a crowd which has just been hardened against Caesar by Brutus's comments, but by the end of Antony's speech, the crowd is howling for the blood of Caesar's murderers. If public opinion can be so quickly swayed at the hands of a powerful rhetorician, how stable is the democracy really?
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