A mother raped and giving birth in secret reunited with her now grown son; a wife brought back from Death: such themes from Euripides provide what this course will explore as ‘story plots’ that demand certain outcomes. But Euripides, like Shakespeare, was expert in showing the dark side of those plots: the costs, the losses, the danger of other outcomes.
Later ‘New’ and Roman comedy built up other devices and stock characters: the disguised lover, the ‘bed trick’ and other substitutions, crossed generations, the lost child, shipwrecks, tokens and oaths, which inspired Shakespeare. (His Comedy of Errors is an adaptation of a Roman play, Plautus’ Menaechmi; his All’s Well that Ends Well asks the question of whether the Maiden with the healing potion, deploying a bed trick to fulfil an impossible condition, does at the end get her just desserts.)
In class we will discuss the motifs and dynamics of the Ion, and then focus on the endings of Alcestis and of All’s Well that Ends Well in order to explore the motifs and dynamics of Measure for Measure.
We will finish by exploring The Winter’s Tale: a late play with recognitions, restorations and reconciliation across generations. Whereas The Tempest offers ‘a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange’ located and accomplished in a tightly specified time and place, The Winter’s Tale covers decades and far-flung lands and goes beyond its source to a mysterious end. What do we make of this ‘end’? Looking back to the many disrupted closures of the earlier plays, the themes and transformations, restorations and restitutions of ‘romance’, we will identify and explore the interweaving of motifs and the various stories that need completion. We will answer as well as ask, what kind of ‘tale’ this is and what kind of closure is achieved in this entrancing play.