Events and classes > Read the Classics > 1600s & 1700s
Read the Classics: 1600s & 1700s
Join the "Great Conversation" of the literary imagination by participating in a reading, lecture and discussion series focused on four masterpieces from the 1600s and 1700s. Robert S. Knapp, from Reed College, will lead the discussions. 2010–2011 season.
Hollywood Library
Sundays in October, December, February and April, 2–4 p.m.
The Discussions
- King Lear by Shakespeare · October 24, 2010 ·
- The Tempest by Shakespeare · December 19, 2010 ·
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe · February 20, 2011
- Candide by Voltaire · April 17, 2011
Registration is required for each session. Register online, in the library or call 503.988.5234.
There are many editions of King Lear and The Tempest in the circulating collection. Please check one out on your library card. A limited supply of "bring-'em-back" copies of Robinson Crusoe and Candide will be available at the preceding book discussions. Pick up a copy of these two books, which you do not have to check out, at Hollywood Library after registering. Return the book at the discussion.
Meet your professor
Robert S. Knapp is the Reginald F. Arragon Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, where he has taught for 36 years. His doctorate is from Cornell University. He is a specialist in Shakespeare and early modern literature. In addition to his monograph Shakespeare: The Theater and the Book, Princeton 1989, he has published numerous articles and is working on another book tentatively entitled Circe's Rod: Shakespeare and the Disciplines of Culture.
The Books
This series focuses on differing visions in early modern Europe of three interconnected topics: the relationship of nature and culture, the contrast between life in a fallen world and the idea of justice, and the prospect that human failure might be redeemed by providential design. We will read two early 17th-century plays by Shakespeare, and two short works of fiction written in the 18th century by Daniel Defoe and Voltaire.
King Lear
Probably written in 1606, and indirectly deriving from The History of the Kings of Britain (a text that was one of the 2009 "Read the Classics" selections), King Lear tells the story of a father who mistakes fine words for love, giving away his kingdom to two of his three daughters, then discovering too late that he has disinherited the one who truly loved him. Ranging over an entire dysfunctional social order, this play questions both the legitimacy of parental and political authority and the value of a nature uncontrolled by deference and ceremony. At the end of this harrowing tragedy, one of the five onstage survivors (in the Quarto it is Albany, in the Folio, Edgar), utters these famous lines:
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
Refusing to allow us the consolation of any philosophical or theological rationalization of suffering and injustice, King Lear — which has for many people become the Shakespearean tragedy that best expresses our contemporary human condition — demands that we nonetheless respond, that we speak what we feel.
The Tempest
Written in 1611 (the same year in which the King James Bible was published), The Tempest tells the story of an Italian Duke and magician exiled to an island inhabited only by spirits and a "savage and deformed slave." Not Shakespeare’s final play (that honor goes to his part in the composition of Henry VIII, whose first performance in 1613 caused the fire that burnt down the Globe Theatre), The Tempest nonetheless engages in profound reflections about the relationship between nature and art that we can imagine as saying something about Shakespeare's own views on the workings of theatre. The play also invites speculation about the justice of imposing civilization upon a magical island, and about the complex interplay between our willingness to be entertained and our need for mutual forbearance and forgiveness.
Robinson Crusoe
Written in 1719, Daniel Defoe's narrative of a prodigal son's improbable survival on an island in the West Indies is often thought of as a children's story. The book partly owes this reputation to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought it supplied "the best treatise on an education according to nature" that had ever been written, and that it should form the core of the program for bringing up his ideal child, Emile. Today Robinson Crusoe makes many of us very uneasy: we are likely to find the hero's relationship with the good cannibal Friday condescending, the views of divine providence naïve, and the whole-hearted endorsement of human mastery over nature somewhat dangerous. But few books have mattered as much to the shaping of modern identity.
Candide
Voltaire's scathing satire of the view that Providence has designed the best of all possible worlds was written in 1759. Partly a reflection of Voltaire's response to the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Candide tells the story of a young man ousted from paradise for having engaged in certain experiments in physics with the daughter of a German baron; after many disastrous adventures in the old and new world, Candide rejects the optimism of his mentor, Pangloss, in favor of simply cultivating one's own garden. Relentlessly funny, almost cartoon-like in its characterization, Candide rejects all theories that would reconcile the world as it is with any kind of ultimate justice. Yet it nonetheless offers that most modern of all consolations: the virtue of work.
More classics of the 1600's & 1700's — Suggested Readings
Further reading about the literature of the 1600's & 1700's
For King Lear:
For The Tempest:
For Robinson Crusoe:
For Candide:
Read the Classics is cosponsored by Reed College and Multnomah County Library.
