Episodes
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Prometheus calls up the Phantasm of Jupiter to recall the curse he once pronounced on Jupiter, which he now regrets. Mercury arrives with the Furies, who, in this drama of the mind, are the forms of human despair and hopelessness. Other Spirits arrive, sent from a poet’s imagination, saying don’t give up. End of Act 1.
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Prometheus’s opening speech indicates that he has changed. He no longer hates, and would recant his curse on Jupiter, but can’t remember it. No one, even his mother, Earth, dares tell him. But Earth tells him to summon someone from a mysterious Otherworld “below” death, in which reside images which are the doubles of all things in this life.
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An “act” in Greek tragedy consists of dialogue between the hero and another character, followed by an interchange with the Chorus and a Choral Ode. In the second “act,” Prometheus speaks to Oceanus, the ocean, who counsels repentance and humble obedience. Prometheus responds by a remarkable speech in which fire becomes the fire of the creative mind.
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Hesiod, a partisan of Zeus, casts Prometheus, the antagonist of Zeus, in a negative light. Zeus’s revenge against humanity is Pandora, an artificially-constructed woman given to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother. She opens a jar (“box” is a mistranslation), and all evils fly out. Theories that Pandora is a patriarchal distortion of an original Goddess myth.
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A thank you to my listeners, all over the world, on our 200th episode. The thematic spectrum of Donne’s love poetry, continued. Moods of skepticism (“Go and catch a falling star”), hatred (“The Apparition”) and requited sexual and romantic love (“The Good Morrow,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Canonization”).
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Shakespeare’s texts, both the plays and the sonnets, are “equivocal.” They are endlessly suggestive because they seem to offer a range of interpretive possibilities, from the ideal to the ironic, and force the reader to read actively and choose. Sonnets 12, 20, and 29: the beautiful youth and an ideal love.
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