[Lecture Six] Eight Great Plays as Literature and as Philosophy
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 56 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 Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw.
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:44:16 | I wonder whether part of the issue would be—in Shaw and in the general issue of when one combines humor with serious events and things like that—whether part of the issue might be whether it’s a negative or the absence of a positive, for example, if in a play his humor gets in the way of something that could be an intensely dramatic moment. |
| 1:48:24 | We see the idea of evolution as common to both Ibsen and Shaw. I was wondering if that’s common to other playwrights of this period. I didn’t see it in Cyrano de Bergerac, for example, which I believe is of the same period. |
| 1:49:25 | Could the tragicomedy aspects of Ibsen and Shaw be due to what I call the “neo-absolutism” of both of them, like their evolutionary aspects? Like, if you were an absolutist like Rand, you would take ideas totally seriously, whereas, if you believe that if you evolve you get to a point where it changes, you would say that’s in the nature of your evolutionary viewpoint. |
| 1:54:35 | Was the movie version done after Shaw’s death? If not, do you know how he reacted to it? |