[Lecture Seven] 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 Monna Vanna by Maurice Maeterlinck.
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:20:53 | An anecdote about Maeterlinck and Shaw and their dealings with Hollywood |
| 1:25:07 | We seem to have given Monna Vanna a “philosophical mercy grade” by including it as a great play, yet the reference to the Ayn Rand quote about it being one of the great plays leads me to wonder what somewhat different standard she was applying there. |
| 1:27:55 | A couple of things threw me off and confused me. Monna Vanna was weak when she left the tent of Prinzivalle and he had to help her, yet she got back to Guido. And then, in her final speech with all the double meanings and strength, she leaned up against a pole as if she was going to pass out and I feared that she was actually dying because of this underlying thing with her weakness. Do you know what Maeterlinck’s intention was with that? |
| 1:31:20 | Do you think there are any moral rules that would apply to whether a man starts a courtship with another man’s wife and, if so, did Prinzivalle violate any of those principles? |
| 1:35:10 | Can you comment on the characters’ context in judging them? I was discussing this play with someone and telling him how much I admired Prinzivalle and he was horror-struck on the grounds that Prinzivalle initiated force in the war. |
| 1:38:46 | Of all the plays we’ve read, Monna Vanna seems peculiar in that the protagonist was not in the main conflict, that being between Guido and Prinzivalle… |
| 1:40:17 | A true story whereby a wife rejected her lover and stayed with her husband after he gave her his blessing to leave him for the lover. |
| 1:42:53 | In thinking about Ayn Rand’s life and the fact that she had such passionate values when she was very young and gradually formed an explicit philosophy, I’m wondering whether you can answer this question: Is the main function of an objective philosophy to lead us to find values worthy of living for, or is it to teach us how to objectify, integrate, defend, and achieve rational values that we already have discovered and possess? |
| 1:48:37 | Could you explain why you say that Monna Vanna made her decision to stay with Prinzivalle in Act 2? |
| 1:50:38 | You compared Monna Vanna to We the Living. I saw tremendous similarity to Ideal. Would you comment? |
| 1:53:25 | There’s an aspect of the play that you didn’t mention at all, the aspect of the fact that the Florentines were planning his demise, in other words that he was under threat of death from the Florentines during this whole period. Does that factor in as a motivation for his actions? |
| 1:55:29 | He did offer Monna Vanna an impossible choice, the main one of which was that, if the city were sacked, in all probability, she would lose her life. So, in that sense, there really wasn’t a lot of choice on any basis. |
| 1:56:00 | Regarding the morality of approaching another man’s wife, and not knowing whether Monna Vanna was in fact happy in her marriage, I find it implausible to give Prinzivalle an A+ in morality. |
| 1:56:56 | When Prinzivalle makes this offer to Monna Vanna, doesn’t he then treat Monna Vanna, an honorable woman, as a prostitute? |
| 1:58:42 | I saw Guido as a concretization of second-hander values and the characters of Prinzivalle and Marco (the father) as being characters of independent values. Wouldn’t this explain some of the character motivation in the plot development? |
| 2:01:06 | I agree with you totally that Monna Vanna is not a prostitute. My question is: does not Prinzivalle treat her as one? |