[Lecture Two] Eight Great Plays as Literature and as Philosophy
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Course summary: In this course, Dr. Leonard Peikoff selects eight great plays from Western literature to analyze. He examines the literary and philosophic qualities of each play and indicates how the drama concretizes certain ideas from a variety of philosophies. Peikoff masterfully situates each play in its historical period, both from the world events and philosophic context, as he discusses them. Peikoff builds the whole course around a demonstration of how to arrive at objective esthetic judgments about art. Read more »
In this lecture: This lecture is a discussion of Othello by William Shakespeare.
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:46:57 | I believe it was Aristotle who said that tragedies are written in times of moral upheaval, when people are caught between two moral codes. And I think that would be the case in both Antigone and Shakespeare in the late Renaissance. Do you see that as happening here and a factor in both of these plays? |
| 1:50:39 | I wanted to know how you came to the conclusion of the six points by which we understand the artwork. |
| 1:56:36 | When you said that Ayn Rand was the only person since Shakespeare to understand the hatred of the good for being the good, two exceptions came to my mind and I wondered if you would agree with me. One of them is Nietzsche in regard to the antichrist and the other is Nurse Wretched in the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. |
| 1:59:00 | This question concerns the conflicting theories about the seeming causes of the downfall of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. The most common theory that has been formulated is the notion of the tragic flaw (greed, ambition, jealousy, etc.). The other is a more recent theory that all of their downfalls are caused by a limitation of human knowledge. |