[Lecture Nine] Eight Great Plays as Literature and as Philosophy
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 52 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 Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:43:01 | How much of this analysis of Cyrano is your analysis and how much do you know Ayn Rand agreed with? |
| 1:44:04 | I was wondering about the use of the term “panache” that you so often hear used as a description of Cyrano. |
| 1:48:20 | What relevance to the theme is Cyrano’s delirium? |
| 1:49:10 | Can you discuss your opinion of the José Ferrer and Gérard Depardieu movies? |
| 1:51:44 | Cyrano says “all gone” at the climax. I took that to mean that Cyrano believed that true love was possible if you had a perfect mind and a perfect body and the perfect body died there. |