CANS 406 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: John Donne, Absolution, Sophocles
22 May 2018
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Transformations in Midsummer Night’s Dream
-Shakespeare’s most playful play about conversion – but there are serious dimensions to the play
-Psychological and ethical questions arise when you delve into the characters
-Relationship between freedom and compulsion – we think that true conversion must be free, and
forced conversion is not really conversion
-Plato’s allegory of the cave – physical coercion does not take away from the prisoner’s
ultimate conversion/realization of truth
-Saul – being blinded by God is a physical coercion, but he too comes to understand that
the physical coercion was there to lead him to freedom
-Conversion is often more compulsory than free
-Conversion of Muslims and Jews in Spain, Catholics in Elizabeth’s reign, these
represent coerced instances of conversion
-John Donne knew people who were tortured and executed for their faith, and as a young man he
set out to think/read his way through the differences between the Catholic and Protestant
churches
-Pseudo-Martyr: people who died for the Catholic religion are not true martyrs, Donne
declares that he freely chose to join the Church of England
-People were convinced he lied, he was a coward, etc. led to an uproar/scandal
-He could not have been completely resistant to the pressures around him
-Exemplary of free conversion
-Shakespeare complicates greatly how we think about transformation and human persons
-We have an idea of ourselves as radically free beings on the inside, but Shakespeare
challenges this, seeing us as embodied persons, people nested within social situations
which are constitutive of our personhood as much as our minds/souls
-Upon moving to London, Shakespeare discovered the emergence of the entertainment industry
-There hadn’t been a commercial theatre industry before Shakespeare
-Shakespeare bought a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, meaning he took a
percentage of the Globe’s profit
-Elizabeth comes to the throne 1558, reinstates the protestant religion and is excommunicated by
the Pope as a heretic, payment and absolution offered for her life
-Spanish Armada: total bust, destroyed by terrible weather, English were ecstatic, felt that God
had saved them
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