SEMINAR PROFILE

H19 -
Family Values: Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear

Is it natural for children to revere their progenitors, for parents to cherish their offspring, for siblings to support and defend each other? Is the social order based on the conviction that these bonds are natural a stable ground of human happiness? If the bonds and the order are natural, how can they be broken as cruelly and disastrously as they so often are? These are questions Shakespeare dramatizes in his three most famous tragedies, which are all stories of familial life run personally and politically amok. In these plays Shakespeare takes his place with the classical tragedians and Biblical prophets as an analyst of the problem of virtue, vice, and blood ties.

Scholar:

Theo Theoharis

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

10/29/2009, 11/12/2009, 11/19/2009

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H19 -	Family Values: Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear

	Is it natural for children to revere their progenitors, for parents to cherish their offspring, for siblings to support and defend each other? Is the social order based on the conviction that these bonds are natural a stable ground of human happiness? If the bonds and the order are natural, how can they be broken as cruelly and disastrously as they so often are? These are questions Shakespeare dramatizes in his three most famous tragedies, which are all stories of familial life run personally and politically amok. In these plays Shakespeare takes his place with the classical tragedians and Biblical prophets as an analyst of the problem of virtue, vice, and blood ties.

		Scholar:	Theo Theoharis
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	10/29/2009, 11/12/2009, 11/19/2009