Dr. White describes the comic novel Don Quixote as a great Catholic work, in fact the best-known Spanish novel ever. He proceeds with a dramatic reading of G. K. Chesterton’s poem, Lepanto, dealing with the great naval battle in which Cervantes, a devout Catholic, took part. Following Lepanto, Cervantes became, in essence, the lonely knight riding through Spain, always failing but never giving up. Out of this came Don Quixote, the first of a new literary genre: the modern novel. Dr. White closes his commentary by noting that Cervantes died on the same date as another of his literary heroes, William Shakespeare.
Dr. White opens by drawing a parallel between Don Quixote (part one) and King Lear, both of which he sees as great counter-reformation works. He describes the independent assertion of man as a strictly Protestant notion and goes on to detail how Lear and Don Quixote both go mad in their own ways. With his dramatic readings from several sections of the novel, and while introducing Sancho Panza, he demonstrates its episodic nature and the absence of a narrative plot line. Dr. White points out that though it’s a comedy, there is something sorrowful in the story. He closes with a brief Q and A session.
Dr. White reviews the classical tragic structure of Shakespeare’s Richard II in this first of several lectures on the Bard’s English history plays. This is perhaps Shakespeare’s first great tragedy, outlining the fate of Richard II who is in the drama a great figure indeed, blighted only by his excessive pride. Not only is that tragic flaw responsible, in true classical fashion, for his own demise, but it leads likewise to the ruin and chaos of his fourteenth-century English environs. Also consistent with the classical model is the fact that while suffering Richard gains knowledge about himself and reality that was arguably otherwise unobtainable.
Before his introduction to comedy, Dr. White declares A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be one of the few perfect works of art, and that it is comedy with a serious core. He then delves into the nature of comedy: a structure of action leading to delight, renewal, and re-invigoration. He goes on to describe the Greek satyr play, the beginning of comedy; and he discusses the history of “old comedy” originating in Greece and the “new comedy” (romantic comedy) that came from Rome. Dr. White says comedy brings us down to earth and that it must be true.
Here Dr. White begins his detailed analysis of the groups of lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by describing the different poetic forms in which Shakespeare has them speak, i,e., iambic pentameter, rhymed couplet, prose, etc. It is, he says, a play about weddings, with recurrent themes such as the moon and dreams. White points out the absurdity of young lovers who go to extremes to break the law, and he sites ones of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”
In Shakespeare’s Henry V, Prince Hal, who was in effect the subject also of the preceding plays, Henry IV (parts 1 and 2), finally takes center stage in this play that chronicles the struggle of former Prince Hal to put away youthful ways and adopt the persona and integrity of a king. Dr. White, in this last of his four presentations on the Henry plays and Richard II, posits that Henry V is an epic of sorts, tracing as it does the chronological, emotional, and moral quest of the new young king Henry for greatness, maturity, nobility, justice, and mercy. Of note is the effort expended by Henry to become the opposite of the man of our age – integrated rather than alienated; a coherent whole rather than fragmented parts; a genuinely moral and stately figure, rather than a pathetically amoral and degraded vagabond.
