Agenda

Questions About Assignment / Where to Find Stuff For It
Quiz
Plot Questions
Some Dropped Threads

• Gender and Sexuality in the Play
• Literary Terms

Julie Taymore’s Titus (with discussion of play’s end)

Quiz

1.  When captured, whose life does Aaron want to save?

2.  Name one of the characters Tamora and her two sons disguise themselves as in act 5, in order to trick Titus.  (Three possible answers.)

3.  After Titus kills Tamora’s sons, what does he do with their bodies?

4.  What happens to Lavinia at the banquet?

5. Who ends up emperor of Rome (give either name or describe the person).

Bonus: Definition of “habiliment”

Some Dropped Threads

[gview file=”https://robertmatz.com/mason/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/class-2-13-131.ppt” profile=”3″]

After class

How much life should we give literary characters?  They seem to have lives of their own, but they are also the creation of their authors.  We recognize this second point when we say a character isn’t believable (no real person would do what or feel as that character does).  Good authors give us believable characters.  But even so, authors still create their characters and their motivations, and we may not always believe the representation of that character is fair.  Thus, for example, different minority groups have complained that characters associated with the group are often depicted, by non-minority writers, in limited or stereotypical ways.  There are always different stories to tell about the same person/thing/event, so what story gets told, and then stands for the whole, is the power of the writer.  For example, if you were writing a play about George Mason, would you set it in the parking lot, a residence hall, a classroom?  Each setting would represent Mason differently.  And then you’d get the chance to represent students at Mason.  Would they be realistic?  Possibly.  Would they also depict Mason in a way that accords with your vision of it?  Absolutely.  Hence universities are so picky about how they represent themselves, and usually prefer this photo (right).  Don’t we always have class outside?  So while one can imagine characters as “real people,” it’s also, I think, important to think of them as the fiction of an author, or even of a culture (as in stereotypes–fictions about what people are like), and ask “what’s at stake in the fiction?”  In other words, when we ask “what does this character want?” we also need to ask “what does the character’s author want that this character to want–and why?”  The second question applies not only to the writing of the character, but to also the choices directors and actors make in performance, when they get to decide, to some degree, on a character’s motivations.

On the power of these choices.  I don’t know if any of you have seen The Mr. Bill Show from the early Saturday Night Live.   But besides being a very condensed version of what we expect from comedy, the point of this show also seems to be about the dictatorial power of the creative artist over his or her characters.  What challenges that power, however, is the pleasure or displeasure of an audience–as Shakespeare was very aware.

 The Mr. Bill Show