By Leonard Peikoff
This course is designed to give you the ability to understand, judge and savor the values offered by great drama. A list of recommended translations is included.
Plays include: Antigone by Sophocles; Othello by Shakespeare; Le Cid by Corneille; Don Carlos by Schiller; An Enemy of the People by Ibsen; St. Joan by Shaw; and Monna Vanna by Maeterlinck.
Lecture topics include: plot-theme as the key to a play; Antigone as a great heroine; Iago as the blackest villain in literature; the Corneillian hero; Schiller's Grand Inquisitor scene as the most dramatic and philosophic in all theater; Ibsen and Roark; Shaw's genius in presenting the genius against society; and much more. The course concludes with a lecture, not part of the original series, on Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand.
Recorded in July, 1993 in San Francisco, CA.
(MP3 download; 18 hrs., 27 min., 796.09 MB)
This content is also available as a free course offering at campus.aynrand.org: link.