28 Feb. TGV, Act 1

Discussion 1, Podcast Scripts

Questions or comments on the scripts you wrote?

The podcasts are due Friday by 5:00. Does anyone need any extra time?

Ithamore and Barabas both preview, and, perhaps, send up tropes of masculine friendship (4.297-107)
Shakespeare, like Marlowe, was a court poet as well as a dramatist, which means they wrote poetry in coterie. That is, poetry that was not, at least initially printed for larger audience, but passed around through a coterie, or group, of usually aristocratic circles and patrons
The same themes of masculine friendship and homosocial bonds that runs through Jew of Malta, as well as Shakespeare and Marlowe’s poetry, also runs through Two Gentlemen of Verona

Two Gentlemen of Verona (1589-93)

Could be Shakespeare’s first play
Not printed until the First Folio in 1623
Maybe played at the first Globe theater, which was literally rebuilt in 1599 from recycled timber from The Theatre, and then burned down in 1613. Second Globe was rebuilt in 1614.

Discussion 2: Let’s watch TGV Act 1, and then discuss some or all of the following

1. Why does Proteus stay at home and why does Valentine prepare to travel to Milan?
2. What request does Proteus make of Valentine before he leaves for Milan?
3. How does love transform Proteus?
4. How does this play define “love” in the first act? Why is love so hard to define?
5. What’s going on with the letter that Proteus sends Julia? Why are Julia’s reading practices so fraught?
6. Why does Proteus’s dad, Antonio, want to send him to the “Emperor”?
7. What lie does Proteus make up about the letter Julia sends him? Why?

http://www.ambrosevideo.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/index.php?option=com_tpc&view=resource&Itemid=230&id=24641

tagged with Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona