Our Great Books course on William Shakespeare’s plays is fresh off a visit to the Guthrie Theatre in downtown Minneapolis to see Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, as the class transitions from a set of courtship plays to those of confusions and mistaken identities.
While the performance was phenomenal and attending an afternoon performance with students represents one of the unique benefits of our campus’ downtown location, I was struck by the way the performance kept expanding its energy, jocularity, and musical fun. It went on and on until the play seemed to run out of itself. This effusiveness reminded me of our class’s conversation just a few weeks ago of one of Shakespeare’s early comedies—Love’s Labor’s Lost (1594). The wit and the repartee carry the play through masquerades and courting confusions, all because a group of bachelors in Navarre has haughtily taken an oath to study for three years banishing all women from their presence. These men find themselves “foresworn” as they all instantly fall head over heels in love as soon as the Princess of France and her handmaidens, Rosalind, Kathryn, and Maria, arrive.
But the weight of the play—its ballast and therefore its glory—is not found in the riotous fun, but rather in the unlooked-for catastrophe that crashes into Act 5. The death of the King of France and the reality of mortality turns the plot towards the maturity that all of the characters so desperately need: repentance, humility, and formation.
In a play so full of fun, there is a relief to discover that this serious matter—rather than ruining the play—actually saves it. We would call the death of the king, therefore, an “eucatastrophe” or a “good ruin.” The sobriety that comes with the news of the king’s death makes the marriage plot possible in the comedy precisely because it offers a way for the characters to become marriageable—something all are decidedly not at the play’s beginning. A move towards temperance and fortitude and mercy and charity governs the final lines of the play.
Bethlehem is hardly a cloister where our days are all philosophy and no fun for four years—nor do we encourage flirtatious folly. Rather, my colleagues and I find ourselves enacting something like Act 5 of Love’s Labor’s Lost. In our classes at Bethlehem, we are in the business of encouraging men and women toward godly maturity across all areas of life and for the rest of their lives. And my, is there a lot of wit and winsomeness that grows right along with it.
Betsy Howard, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Literature
Prayer Requests:
- Pray for our students as they push toward mid-terms and grow in maturity.
- Pray for our faculty as they teach and mentor our students.
- Praise the Lord for his provision thus far in the Million Dollar+ Challenge and pray for the full funding of of this year’s Serious Joy Scholarships before June 30.