【英美系專題演講】

講題：Shakespeare and History

講者：Prof. Jonathan Hart （Shanghai Jiao Tong University）

主持人：楊植喬 教授

時間：104/10/26(一) 10:00-12:00

地點：人社一館第二講堂
 

內容摘要： Teaching rhetoric in Shakespeare often begins with the opposing speeches that Brutus and Antony speak in memory of Caesar after the assassination. In the English history plays, Henry V appears to be the paramount orator, persuading his men to heroics, but rhetoric, the art of persuasion or the relation between speaker and audience, in the name of politics is much more nuanced than that and has a wide spectrum in the English history plays. There are vying rhetorics of political advantage, high and low, king and rebel, English and other, male and female, old and young. In the contention over kingship, for instance, Richard II and Bolingbroke use language to different political ends. All the English kings share a field of political rhetoric, but with a difference, especially surrounding the theme of legitimacy. Henry IV, Hal, Falstaff and Hotspur all contend over honor as a way to understand political and personal rhetorics. Joan de Pucelle, Lady Grey, Queen Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, Anne, Queen Isabella, and the Duchess of York all express tensions between private and public speech that have political implications. Machiavellian and saintly rhetorics vie as the speech of Richard III and Henry V suggests. The public rhetoric of King John and Cardinal Wolsey round off the political language of the ten English history plays. Teaching this rhetoric involves teaching the students the basics of rhetoric (schemes, tropes, strategies) and how language takes into account the audience and the means of persuasion. Such language shows the tension between the personal and the political whether in soliloquies that contribute to dramatic irony or to speeches that are more overtly public in the plays that appeal to an audience within and audience. Shakespeare gives the epic life of England in these history plays an appropriate, invigorating and wide-ranging political rhetoric. Thus, a rhetoric of politics in the history plays is important, particularly with respect to the intersection between politics and theatricality. Teaching this aspect of the plays has practical benefits for the students because Shakespeare, a master of language, that is rhetoric and poetics in non-dramatic and dramatic works, himself probably attended the petty and grammar schools, where they studied language closely and came to master the literary, grammatical and rhetorical arts. Students of Shakespeare today learn from Shakespeare, who, as a student, learned rhetoric in school. Shakespeare’s rhetoric is a topic much traveled, but recent work continues and has implications for teaching and communications even if some of it can be at a theoretical and critical level more focused on research than teaching. Although I have discussed rhetoric and political theatre in Shakespeare’s history plays, especially in the Second Tetralogy and have explored the history plays and the politics of Shakespeare’s drama more generally, I wish here to concentrate on the relation between rhetoric and political and public theatre in a new context here and across the ten English history plays and do so in terms that help the teaching of the history plays.

～敬邀參與～