Ep. 217: Discussing Calderón’s “Life Is a Dream”

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 217 is something like, is our fate determined? Or should skepticism about the world make us more moral? And we read Life is a Dream, AKA La Vida es Sueño, a play by Pedro Calderon de la Barca from 1635 or 36. To listen to our full audio performance of that play and get other information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, about whom no prophecy dares to speak. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, paying my dues for the crime of being born in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:49 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, damp and wet in a dungeon in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:54 Bill: This is Bill Youmans dreaming My Life Away in New York City.

0:58 Erica: This is Erica Spires, living my hillbilly dreams in New York City.

1:05 Mark: Bill and Erica, so glad to have you join us this time. We didn't get you for Lysistrata. So you're veterans. You're veteran pel. Players. Yeah, it's like uncarsen being summoned over to the chair. It's exactly like that.

1:19 Erica: Well, I gotta say, I think I get the most hits on my name from that Lysistrata podcast. So you guys are doing well or. I'm not doing. I don't know what's going on with my career, but my name always comes up when Partially Examined Life comes up. Awesome.

1:35 Mark: So, yes, we are here to talk about the play. I did pick out a few secondary sources that were strictly optional. Some of us have read them, some of us have merely skimmed them. Some of us have not looked at them at all. So I'll put those in the show notes and we'll bring them up only insofar as we actually talk about them. There's been a lot of writing on this. I think this is like a required text, at least in Spain. Like that. All high schoolers read this, from what I understand. That is that it may not have filtered out to us, you know, so it's all Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Shakespeare in the English speaking world. But this was a very, very big thing in his day.

2:10 Wes: Yes, it's the. Did you mention the Spanish golden age of theater?

2:14 Mark: Tell us about it.

2:15 Wes: Well, they had theater.

2:18 Dylan: It was golden.

2:19 Wes: It was a golden age.

2:21 Mark: So it was golden because they had conquered south and Central America and they were bringing back all this actual gold. That's what made it golden age.

2:30 Dylan: Well, you know, they call Shakespeare the Pedro Calderon de la Barca of England,

2:39 Wes: even though he came before.

2:41 Dylan: Sorry.

2:44 Wes: Yeah. When they say the golden age of theater, though, they just mean there's a lot of good stuff going on. And actually, theater was a very popular pastime then. And, you know, one of the things I think it's in the introduction of the version that we have of this play is just the sheer amount of production that playwrights like de la Barca were involved in. So they would write a play and would only get two or three performances, and then they'd be on to the

3:08 Bill: next one, like most Broadway shows.

3:12 Wes: Yeah, right. Think about that. But you're at least aspiring to a longer run. I think even for a successful play, you didn't plan on doing it more than a few times, and then that was it. So he. I forget how many plays he wrote, but it was a. 70. 70.

3:30 Bill: Not as many as the playwright who also comes from the Spanish golden age, who wrote the most plays in the. And Wes probably knows who that is.

3:38 Wes: Is it Lope de Vega?

3:40 Bill: Lope de Vega. 2,200 plays.

3:46 Erica: Oh, goodness.

3:47 Bill: Nobody knows where to even begin.

3:50 Wes: Amazing.

3:50 Mark: Yeah. So those are the two names. Lope de Vega was first and also Cervantes. I didn't know Cervantes, like, wrote plays, but apparently he was just prior and overlapping with Lope de Vega kind of set a lot of standards. Cervantes was a big deal.

4:04 Dylan: Well, like La Vida es Sueño. Don Quixote has a play in the book, and La Vida es Sueño has a play in the play. Yeah.

4:13 Wes: And it's interesting that Lope de Vega I had heard of, but De la Barca I hadn't ever heard of him. And I had never heard of this play.

4:20 Mark: I think he's known as Calderon. I don't think anybody calls him de la Barca. Does anybody know enough about Spanish last names to know how these two together.

4:29 Wes: Yeah, that makes sense.

4:30 Erica: Yeah, that makes sense.

4:32 Dylan: So now Wes has heard of him before because he heard of Calderon, but.

4:35 Wes: Yeah, right. Who's this De la Barca guy?

4:40 Mark: Yeah. So I picked this just because I had reached out to David Epstein, who was our Segismundo that I had done drama with. I directed him in a play and acted with him in a couple plays in high school. We'd just been Facebook friends. So I cued him into that. We were doing these things and said, hey, you should do one with us sometime. Do you have any suggestions of philosophical plays? And he sent this one, and I looked it up, and, you know, right there in the Wikipedia.

5:06 Bill: It's like.

5:06 Mark: Well, he's like Lope de Vega, but more philosophical. And those are kind of the two big figures in the Golden Age. The connection between all the treasure coming in. And so Philip IV was the king at the time and was a big patron of the arts. So there really is a direct connection between all the riches coming in and the fact that then he was able to foster this very artistic community.

5:27 Dylan: Is this where the notion of a golden age was coined? That the original Golden Age was actually paved with gold?

5:34 Wes: It's the Golden Age because the arts. I mean, Mark, I think you already said the arts flourished during this time of conquest and riches.

5:42 Erica: Yeah. Originated from Greek and Roman poets, but, yeah, a time of great works.

5:47 Mark: So it wasn't in the Greek and Roman poem. It's also because they pillaged their neighbors and were able to gain the financial standing to have the leisure to produce great works.

5:57 Erica: Oh, exactly.

5:58 Wes: Yeah.

5:59 Mark: It seems that the having of slaves and the affluence does go with this. It's not an accident.

6:03 Erica: Wasn't it in Fiddler on the Roof? You know, a big reason that Tevye wants to have something is so he has more time to spend studying and to be a scholar. That was considered something that only people of a certain status could do because they didn't have to be out working all the time. So that makes a lot of sense, Golden Age going with having the means by which to be able to produce those works.

6:27 Mark: I was also looking a little more at the history that this was in the middle of the thirty Years War. It was kind of while things were still going pretty well. I mean, the 30 Years War was not fought in Spain. Calderon himself was a soldier in Italy. He was actually still a soldier when this play came out. Like, it wasn't till 1642 or so that he got out of the military. This is only his fifth play. He produced more and more and more, eventually became a priest. His brother and his. His girlfriend and some other folks died off and after a certain point, wrote only sacred plays. But at this point early in his career, it was secular plays in these comedias, which just means play. It doesn't actually mean comedy.

7:06 Erica: Was he eventually funded by the Jesuit Church? Is that why he started writing Jesuit plays?

7:11 Mark: Well, I don't think there's a distinction between the church and the state so much at this point. In fact, this very play was redone. Or he did another play with the same name of this as an auto sacramentales, which are these morality plays, dramatic depictions of the Eucharist, that would be a whole other episode to figure out what exactly those amount to. But if you make this more symbolic. So, like the auto version of this. I think it was the Kluge article that was describing this, right? Yeah. Sophie Kluge Calderon's anti tragic theater. The resonance of Plato's critique of tragedy in La Vida es Sueño is the article and was saying, you know, so like Segiz Mundo's release from the cave is like man's release from non being.

And then what happens? Well, he's tempted that he has temptations of power, and he has to overcome that temptation and discover true wisdom. And so, you know, just make it into a straight up morality play. Whereas according to Kluge, this version, a lot of the reason why it's so cool is because just because a character says something doesn't mean that's the philosophy of the play. A lot of these characters are expressing things like, at least according to Kluge, that whole, oh, there's no escaping destiny. You know, you go out of your way. This is what you were saying, Erica, at the end from Clarine's last line.

You know, you go out of your way to escape fate and it just smacks you. I mean, that sounds like a very tragic position. But according to Kluge, Calderon actually ended up repudiating that view, or at least has a more nuanced view that, yes, there's some sort of predestination because God knows everything, but unlike those battle Lutherans that thought that predestination governs everything, and so it's just faith over works and stuff. No, for the good Catholics that still dominated Spain, it's a matter of you have to use your prudence and your good human judgment in light of how fate seems to be pointing you that we ultimately do have free will.

Basilio even says eventually that the stars are inborn tendencies point us in certain directions, but ultimately it's our own free will that makes the final decision.

9:13 Wes: Let's say a little bit more about this idea that resisting fate leads to the fulfillment of fate, because it's very different in this play than it is in a. In, say, a comparable kind of plot in Oedipus Rex, for instance, where it's prophesied that Oedipus will kill his father and sleep with his mother. And so his parents, they think they're going to have him exposed and killed as an infant, but he's rescued and taken care of and then ultimately comes back to fulfill the prophecy. In this case, there's kind of a funny scene towards the end of the play when Basilio tries to avoid the king, tries to avoid his fate in. This is really comical, right, because what he does is he raises someone who's basically savage or wild and who will naturally want to take revenge on him. He basically sets himself up.

10:11 Dylan: Maybe we should give a quick rundown of the plot.

10:16 Wes: Well, the plot just is that King Basilio, he's into astrology, which he thinks of as a branch of mathematics, Subtle mathematics, yeah. The stars are not aligned well. Or however you put it, when his son Segismundo is born. And there's also the fact that his mother had a bad dream about the birth and then it came true and basically she died in childbirth. And so the prophecy was that this guy would be a tyrant, his heir would be really tyrannical and monstrous and horrible if he raises him and lets him become king. And so he imprisons him basically out in the wilderness in a.

I think it's like a cave, right. And has him guarded and educated in a way. But there's a lot made out of the fact that his real education comes from the wilderness and from nature. He's sort of a representative of that, in some ways, a representative of the instinctual. The king has this idea that he is going to give the son a test. He has a conscience about what he's done. The son is now of age and so he wants to actually see, well, what if I give this guy a go at being king? So what he does is he has him drugged and then has him taken out of his place in the wilderness and put in the palace and dressed up.

And then he's woken up and told who he is. And then the whole experiment involves seeing how he's going to behave. Is he going to be a tyrant or is he going to be good? And of course he doesn't behave well. And Basilio, the king had a plan all along that if he ends up being a tyrant, we'll just knock him out again, send him back to the place in the wild and wake him up there and tell him that it was just all a dream. So that's what happens.

12:03 Dylan: In fact, the other way is true as well, right? That they drug him and bring him to the palace. And the idea, wasn't it that his previous history was supposed to have been a dream, or did it not go that far?

12:13 Wes: I don't think so.

12:14 Dylan: Okay.

12:14 Wes: You know, when he's woken up, the king says to Clotaldo, who is the guy who's had to guard him and educate him all these years. He's like, yeah, just go over and tell him what's going on. Tell him that he's actually the son of the king. And now he's the king, the crown prince of Poland. Right?

12:30 Mark: Yeah. So, Dylan, that actually might have been a good move if they told him, oh, actually, you were never in the tower. You've been in a coma since birth or something. You've been dreaming since birth. We didn't do those terrible things to you.

12:43 Wes: But it also might have been a good idea to have civilized him in a way. Right. Instead of leaving him to become this representative of savagery and monstrousness. In a way, parenting in general. Right. Confronts you with this prospect that you might raise a monster, that things might go wrong. And as a parent, you're one of the prime formative influences that could make things go wrong. And you want to get it right and you want to.

13:10 Dylan: I'm pretty sure that there isn't any advice that says the great way to raise a good, healthy, flourishing child is to lock them up in a dungeon and raise them in the wild and force them to fend for themselves.

13:26 Erica: He had a caretaker. Come on.

13:28 Mark: Okay, well, who taught him Christianity?

13:33 Dylan: I was gonna make the point is it's a funny kind of living in the wild. For his sophistication.

13:38 Bill: In one of his last speeches, Sigismundo summarizes the whole thing and he definitely blames his father. He says, my father here present to exempt himself from the rabid fury of my nature, made me an animal, a human beast. So that whereas through the gallant nobility of birth, through my high minded heredity, through my generous nature, I might have been born tractable and humble. All that was needed was that way of life, that. That sort of upbringing to make my manners fierce. What a fine way to counteract them, he says. So, yeah, he's accusing his father of actually bringing on the very effect that he dreaded to begin with.

14:17 Wes: Yeah. In a way, there's an implicit contrast to Oedipus. Right. Because in Oedipus, King Laius is just trying to do a relatively practical thing to avoid his fate. Here it's entirely counterproductive and impractical. And he's very actively making come about the prophecy.

14:34 Bill: Right. In the same speech, Sigismundo compares it to waking up a lion or an inhuman animal when it's been prophesied you'll be killed by a beast, then finding one sleeping and waking it up in order to test the prophecy. And he also compares it to it's been prophesied you're going to die in a shipwreck. So testing the prophecy by going out to sea during a storm, it's very clear that this was a proactive strategy which directly brought on the very thing it was meant to avoid.

15:08 Wes: And you get the sense during the play that being scientifically minded, there's almost a perverse motivation that Basilio has. In other words, he really wants to test this whole free will theory out. So let me subject someone to the worst possible upbringing that you can subject them to and so give them a. It's not just fate that is in question anymore, it's poor character. Right. Most of us seal our fates through our vices and our character flaws that cause us to repeatedly do things which are not necessarily best for us. So let's give someone a really poor character and see if they can free will their way out of that. It's a terrible experiment.

15:52 Bill: Clotaldos. A bunch of times it said, a man with foresight can gain victory over fate. In other words, if we really exercise our good character and I guess our Christian free will, we can overcome any fate that's put on us. We have the ability through our free will to countermand any decree of fate or prediction.

16:17 Dylan: But it's that adjective, Christian free will that makes a big difference there.

16:20 Wes: Right.

16:21 Dylan: Because it comes with the power of grace.

16:23 Bill: Ah.

16:24 Dylan: It's a funny kind of free will.

16:26 Bill: Very interesting.

16:27 Mark: Right. If you see fate as the action of the gods. So for the ancient Greeks, the gods are a bunch of bastards. And so fate is fickle ultimately, you know, the tragedies are just. Often people just. They're righteous, but they have one tragic flaw and, you know, everything falls apart. Whereas it seems like fate, in the Christian view, is something that you can negotiate a little bit with. In other words, if you act righteously, if you act according to the Christian doctrine, things are just going to go down smoother.

16:54 Wes: But I don't know that this is fate in the sense of Christian predestination. He's into astrology. Right. Which is a very pagan thing. And I think that's why this had to be set in Poland.

17:04 Bill: Yeah, the play is very much an attack on those types of things, on astrology and all those kind of sort of superstitious stuff. And supposedly Christianity is not superstitious as an antidote to all that stuff or something.

17:19 Wes: Yeah. So the concept of fatedness at work here, there's the superficial sense, which doesn't make a lot of sense, this whole astrological idea that if the stars are aligned in certain ways, things go well, and if not, they don't. It's a pseudo scientific explanation. But there are more cause, effect, scientific, psychological ways of approaching fatedness. Right? And we've talked about character. That's one way to talk about it. There are conflicts between one's tendencies, one's propensities or dispositions, and one's free will that make sense to talk about it. And sometimes the force of one's again vices or poor character seems like a kind of fadedness.

18:03 Erica: Sigismundo says that, right? He first is cursing everything else outside of himself. That's what one of the articles pointed to as well. And it wasn't until. Was it Clotaldo, I believe, who told him that. No, no, no, no. You have to be good for good sake and take some sort of action, rather than allowing everything else outside of you to determine what you're going to be.

18:24 Dylan: Yeah. So in that way that Christian free will is acting to countermand both senses of fate. The fate that you would have as a kind of predestination through just the actions of the universe, or the fate that would be determined by your crappy upbringing, or even the seeds of your character that you'd be able to overcome them.

18:49 Wes: What allows you to overcome the character stuff? You saying grace does.

18:53 Dylan: Christian free will. Part of that Christian free will is orienting you towards virtue and choosing the good as a way of parsing out the universe. To me it also includes an act of grace, though probably that's not explicit. In fact, I'm pretty sure there isn't any place where that way of speaking about your free will as by the grace of God or something like that. So maybe I'm going too far in.

19:20 Wes: Well, yeah, and the way it happens in the play is actually really interesting because it's also a product of Basilio's perverse little experiment, which is the thing that cures Segismundo, is the realization he applies this once he learns that all this stuff has been a dream, the whole life is a dream thing becomes a kind of lesson for him. And it's the application of that lesson that allows him to escape his fate. In other words, it's this application of the lesson that life is a dream that gives him some sort of freedom and also gets him beyond.

19:56 Bill: I must say I don't understand that. Maybe you can help me, Wes. It seems to me that if life is a dream, anything goes. Why don't I just live it up? Or do all the sins I want? How could this notion that life is a dream lead to Sigismundo's? Like at one point Clotaldo says, even if it's a dream, you should do the right thing. And then subsequently Sigismundo keeps saying, well, it might be a dream, therefore I should be good. But I don't understand how that follows. Help me.

20:27 Wes: I mean, I had exactly the same reaction. Most of my time in preparation was spent thinking about that question, because it is, as you said, really weird. Dreams are the place where your impulses can be given free rein. It should lower the stakes, Right? To say, if it's a dream, don't kill the servant because it's a dream. Well, if it's a dream, I should just be able to do what I want and I don't have to worry about anything.

20:53 Erica: Sure, but look where it got him, right? I mean, it's not like he received some sort of feedback that what he was doing was at all acceptable. Nobody was having a good time with Segismundo when he went over there and was destructive in court. I would say it wasn't until he started doing things for the people that he did receive positive feedback in his own satisfaction.

21:15 Dylan: Right. I think the idea is that choosing this virtuous path, or the path of doing good for others is adding value to break the dream, Right? Well, maybe that's not quite the right way to put it. You have this kind of nihilistic position if everything is a dream where nothing matters, there's no distinction to be made. And so you can do whatever you want. And not only can you do whatever you want, there's no reason or way to choose. And then if you choose to do good, either way, it doesn't matter whether it's a dream or not, you're still adding value to it. Whether it's reality or a dream, you are giving value to your actions.

21:55 Erica: Yeah, I think positivity and value begets more positivity and value.

21:59 Mark: There's a quote. So this is the closest to where he tries to explain it at the bottom of 137, Act 3, right before Segismundo is going out to fight fortune. Let me go and rain. Don't awaken me if I'm asleep, and if this is reality, don't put me to sleep. But whether it's reality or a dream to do good is what matters. If it should be reality just because it is good, if not for the sake of winning friends for the time

22:23 Wes: when we awaken, I don't think that's really ultimately what's going on, right? Because what he finds out, when he finds out that everything is a dream, is he finds out that his position of power has been a dream. He didn't really have the power that he thought he had. So that suggests a few things to us, right? There's the age old sort of chestnut about the changeability of fortune. We may have power one minute and then we lose it. And so we have to handle power responsibly so that when we don't have it, sort of do unto others thing. But the other part of this is just the extent to which power is a social construction or a product of convention, a product of the perception of other people.

It's non natural, it's conventional. And so the dream can be dispelled in the sense that other people might deprive us of that recognition, as Basilio and the others do. The dream comes to an end, right, when they just simply say, okay, you're no longer king. And that can actually happen to any king. The authority of the king is vested in the recognition of others and their willingness to comply with that designation. So you get this idea that everything is a dream in the sense of everything conventional is very, very dreamlike. Everything that is socially constructed or essentially social is dreamlike.

So one of the lessons is that once you realize that, it should change your relationship to both power and to desire, so you realize that your power is always partly illusory. So even if I have it, even if I'm doing really, really well, whether it's because I'm a king or something else, it's the idea that it could be taken away, but it's also the idea that I don't really actually have it in any deep sense.

24:09 Bill: That makes a lot of sense. That totally answers my question exactly what

24:13 Wes: does everyone think about all that?

24:15 Mark: I don't think that is incompatible with the Platonic way. I was just trying to put it in other words, waking would be waking up to the real eternal world. The whole earthly realm is just temporary and dreamlike and flitting. And in. In line with the Platonic metaphysics that these Christian thinkers have inherited, anything earthly as temporary is just less real than what's going to happen when we actually wake, when we're dead. And so yes, of course, as a subdivision of that, the social goals, dreams of glory, being a king, all that stuff is pretty flimsy. But I think on top of that, you might even have to add that even animal desires and things like that are ultimately unimportant. It's kind of A more profoundly Buddhist, Hindu kind of message. Not just the social stuff, but the whole lot of the human desire.

25:11 Wes: I mean, this is the other aspect of it. Our desire is imbued with the desire of the other. Right? We don't just have instinctual animal desires. Our desires are informed by the existence of the desires of other people. And we always want more. This goes back to De Beauvoir and existentialism and a lot of other stuff. When we desire things, there's always an element of the illusory in it or the dreamlike in the sense that we always want more than we can actually get. And so we often end up disillusioned. We often end up getting what we want and realizing that there was an element of dreamlikeness or illusion in that very act of desire.

So to be in romantic love and the desire to have a relationship and then to actually be in that are two very different things. On one level, we can live in the realm for a little while of fantasy, but we always come out of that dream. And the extent to which it's a dream is a function of the extent to which our desire is more than mere desire in the animal sense. It's something else. So that's the importance of the emphasis on Segismundo's wildness. It's the fantasy dream element which is strongly correlated with the social. That's what makes us human.

And he is humanized or civilized in the end by being given a quick and dirty lesson in fantasy, in the difference between fantasy and reality and the difference between having a dream and the dirty reality of things, which is disappointment.

26:43 Bill: Maybe this is a good time to ask you guys who are familiar with the philosophical debates going on. Some of the essays that we read talked about Neoplatonism versus maybe the Aristotelian view of reality in terms of this life is real and substantial on the one hand, or it's not real and substantial on the other. It's more dreamlike. Is there anything there? I couldn't quite get it.

27:14 Mark: That is what I was trying to spell out in terms of the Platonic view that accords very well with various religious views that take the ultimate reality being something that is not material, not of this world, not of the social or the animal, any layer of our desire, that it's something ultimately inhuman. But I don't know exactly how Aristotle fits in with that. Other than just rejecting that premise, other than he had just a very worldly focus in his philosophy.

27:42 Bill: And how is this at this time? What's the basic debate about that either the real life is beyond this life or the real life is this life. What's the debate that they're having that this play is a part of?

27:57 Mark: Yeah, I think we might have to read more religious philosophy that's of this time to really know. Certainly Aristotle had been adopted in the late Middle Ages as foundational for and as compatible with the teachings of the

28:11 Dylan: Catholic Church by Aquinas.

28:13 Mark: Yes.

28:14 Bill: Does it have something to do with the idea that you can know what's right for sure? That in one system you can know what's right? This is like the difference between Calderon and Shakespeare, for instance, in Calderon's Catholic world, you can know what's right from what's wrong. In Shakespeare, you really can never really know for sure what's right and wrong. Part of it was what they were calling in the Paulita article, Pyrrhonian skepticism. There's a relativity of truth against which this play is trying to argue or something.

28:51 Dylan: So this part is why I'm a little bit skeptical about going as far as Wes was going with the interpretation of that dreamlike nature and it being mostly focused on the uncertainty that comes with our social relations as opposed to that, plus the certainty that comes with the metaphysical position of there being a ultimate, certain state, whether, you know, be in heaven or be in forms or that kind of thing. And I agree. I think that there's something compatible to both interpretations. And the articles that we read definitely put Calderon solidly in the theological camp.

And without really presenting the argument for it, say that that's clearly what he's doing. And the one that contrasts it with Hamlet makes the point that you just made, Bill, that in both cases you have dream worlds and you have the uncertainty presented by there being dreams or ghosts. And in the case of Hamlet, that that is not resolved in a way towards certainty, but in Calderon, it is resolved to a point of certainty. And in fact, in the end, you know, not everyone dies and there's a happy ending as opposed to everyone dying in Hamlet. And it's more of a tragedy.

30:15 Mark: The source of the certainty is from a different place. We did read Montaigne. Montaigne is 1533-1592. So it's before this, but the same. And I remember Montaigne was a Pyrrhonian skeptic in certain ways, but his skepticism didn't lead him to think, like, well, we just can't say anything either way about religion. You know, the way that you think of skepticism now, it's a skepticism about our capacities to reason. It's a skepticism about our arrogance in thinking that we can read the will of nature. So in other words, what Basilio is doing is astrology is not only just superstitious, but it's also arrogant.

Talking about his subtle mathematics and it's, it's such a, it's a high minded scientific work that, that is just a load of bull. And so when you get rid of that, you end up just falling back in Montaigne's case, at least on faith, on religion as it has been handed down to you and your faith in it. So when you say you can know the good, that sounds like a positive epistemic accomplishment. I can use reason as Aquinas might put together syllogisms to get to the good. But no, it's actually sort of abandoning that game and saying no, it's, you know, there's something more, I guess, more basic about it.

The way that Sigismondo finds out in the very childlike way that Clotaldo and the servant, that wes servant too, who got thrown out of the window, you know, he's one of the nobles. Yeah, it's just like everybody knows what the good is because the social mores of the day have captured it. They are dominated by the church, so you don't actually have to think too hard to find out what's good.

31:53 Bill: And yet there's still this weird strain with Clotaldo and Rosaura. There's this kind of pre Christian thing going on where he's saying it's vile to be dishonored and not revenge yourself, which is totally pre Christian. And that's considered good, I think still in this play, as it is in all of Shakespeare's plays almost.

32:17 Wes: Yeah. This play reads very pagan to me.

32:20 Bill: You know, at first when I was reading it and Clotaldo says it is vile to be dishonored. I thought he meant that in the Christian sense, that it's vile to feel resentment and want to hold on to the idea of getting revenge. This is totally anti Christian. I thought that's what he meant by it's vile. But no, later on it's very clear that what he means is vile to have been wronged and not revenge yourself. It's funny that that idea is there in the play. Maybe Calderon is making fun of it or something.

32:52 Mark: Right. That's why I found the Kluge again, that's just her interpretation. But that it goes into detail about, you know, kind of gives a defense of the things that it's attacking so according to Kluge, the idea that there's an unavoidable destiny is something that is indulged. You know, that more than one character is voicing it, but that ultimately the play turns against that. And she also has a whole section then, on this exploration of the rules of honor. And there's just even a weird dialectic where it's you and Clotaldo and Rosaura talking about how it's shameful to receive, but more shameful to give.

33:31 Erica: What.

33:31 Mark: What is that? That whole. I'll try to find that passage. Yeah. Erika, what did you take? I mean, your character was very much involved in this honor stuff as well. That this whole. It's not enough that I'm gonna marry the king, you know, the future king. It's that Estrella has to have been held without competitor or.

33:48 Erica: I was thinking about. I think it was the Kluge article where she talked about Machiavellian state over morals. That's one thing I found very interesting, was that there's this. How do you say it? Ratio status, the reason of state. So that it was okay to do wrong based on moral standards as long as what you were giving back to the people and what you're giving to the state was preserved.

34:12 Bill: Right. That's the Machiavellian idea. Right. That if it's for the ultimate good, the end justifies the means.

34:20 Erica: Exactly. And that he himself, Segismundo, by the end, does just that by coming back and restoring his rightful place, even though the things that he did to get there may have been suspect.

34:34 Bill: Just to go back quickly to what you had referred to earlier, Mark, I think it's Clotaldo who, in the scene with Rosaura, says, because Astolfo saved my life, I'm paraphrasing, I should kill him, because a gentleman should not be in debt to anyone. Surely there Calderon is making fun of this old idea of morality. It seems so laughable. It must have. Well, maybe it wasn't laughable to the sensibilities of the era when this was being performed. Yeah.

35:09 Mark: Any other thoughts on the honor stuff? I'm having trouble finding that particular passage.

35:13 Wes: So it starts on page 141. So Rosaura, the very bottom, she detains Clotaldo. Maybe 145 is a good kind of representative passage. So there's a lot of basically sophistical reasoning, moral reasoning in this passage, which is very entertaining and funny. Okay, 145. So give me heed. How can I now, with my grateful soul, cause the death of the man who gave me life, basically Astolfo gave him life because he saved him from Segismundo. Segismundo was going to kill him. And so with affection and concern, divided between the two of you, since I have given life to you and received it from him, so he has saved her life.

At a certain point, I don't know which side to support, I don't know which side to assist, since I am under obligation to you for giving you life and to him for receiving it. And so in the present emergency, nothing can satisfy my love, because I am both the active party and the passive party. And then, Rosaura, I don't need to be the first to tell you that for an eminent man, if giving is a noble action, receiving is based to the same extent. And that principle having been established, you have no cause to be grateful to him. Because if it was he who gave life to you and you to me, it's perfectly clear that he compelled your noble nature to perform a base act, whereas I led you to a magnanimous one.

Thus you've been offended by him, thus you're obliged to me, because you gave me what you received from him.

36:38 Bill: It's so twisted. He's got to be making fun of this.

36:43 Wes: He did complete law school, right? Or was he just supposed to go to law school and he didn't?

36:47 Mark: Oh, yes. Calderon was not Clotaldo. Yes.

36:51 Wes: So there's lots of this kind of stuff in Shakespeare too. The sort of fine quillets of the law type stuff where people get into these legalistic. And of course a lot of stuff that doesn't actually follow. And so it's very funny. But yeah, you could see this definitely as a critique of an honor society, Right. As a system in which honor is essentially the highest good.

37:11 Bill: It also seems satirical in the sense that you could come up with a legal justification for any act under the various codes of honor. Right?

37:21 Wes: Yeah. And it reminds me of Nietzsche a little bit. Right. If you do someone a favor, you're essentially humiliating them. So to save someone's life, on one sort of argument, you've done them a favor and they owe you. On another sort of argument, you've humiliated

37:35 Mark: them, so you owe them another favor.

37:37 Wes: Yeah, well, that's why you make your friends your enemies, Right. You're not so nice to people that you put them in the position of where you're humiliating yourself or humiliating them. So there's an element for the consideration of status in our day to day social relations. But I think here it's when the status calculation takes over everything, you can reason your way to any moral conclusion.

38:02 Bill: I mean, Nietzsche is right in a way. You really can take away someone's dignity by helping them too much. I mean, that's almost a trope of pop psychology.

38:14 Erica: Should we talk about the Metatheater and the play within a play idea?

38:18 Mark: Start us off. So what is. Had you guys dealt with this whole metatheater thing? I watched a couple videos like on YouTube about this is not just a historical artifact that just the whole idea of metatheater being breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging that it's a play and things like that, that that's like the bread and butter of theater, live theater. Given that if you just want to do a straight story, just put it on tv, just do a movie or whatever, like actually having people in the room with you, why wouldn't you do something that is meta theater? Ish.

38:44 Erica: We are right now in a golden age of television. And, you know, we had the golden age of film or some might say already. And the golden age of television is happening. So what can you find right now that's special? And it's being around other people. And I think people really have a thirst for that. So in theater, yes, you are seeing a lot of breaking the fourth wall. Sometimes people narrating, but a lot of times people just trying to bring people in. Like, there's a big immersive theater movement that's been happening. There are a lot of shows where they try to bring the audience in and give them a unique experience. But this is, I guess, a little bit different than what this particular play is doing.

39:21 Mark: They call them up to play Soldier one and Soldier two. Is that what they mean?

39:26 Wes: Let's give some examples from breaking the fourth wall from this play, because there's a lot of comic relief, right, that comes from that. And it has a lot to do with drawing attention to the fact that it's a play. But to, you know, to the fact that something is being said for the purpose of exposition. Right. I forget where this is exactly, but, you know, which might seem kind of too on the nose or ham fisted. So there's explicit, you know, attention drawn to the fact, hey, I am now just going to give you some plot stuff, some background stuff.

39:54 Erica: Clarine does that. Right? Clarine. At the beginning of Act 3, he has a giant bunch of exposition. But even in the beginning, Rosaura.

40:01 Wes: Yeah, it happens quite a few places.

40:03 Mark: Astolfo, when he's introduced, sets out the whole, like, as if Estrella doesn't know how they're related, you know, this whole Mr. Exposition there, going through the. Who Basilio's parents were and how Basilio's sisters are my mother and your mother, and that's why we're here today.

40:22 Erica: And oh, my goodness. And then he goes on for what, like five pages, is it? And yeah, of course they do, but they of course have to play the game of. Yes, anything you say, sir, anything. What do we get from you? Now?

40:35 Wes: One of the things that I marked, it's not the best necessarily, but just as an example, Act 2 on page 59, Clotaldo is talking about creating a poison that will put someone to sleep or make it seem as if they're dead, but they're not. You know, it's the sort of device that's been used in Shakespeare and probably by a lot of other poets, and it's a sort of thing which is just might seem like too convenient, and one wonders if it's possible. So he draws direct attention to that and says, there's no need for us to debate whether such things are possible because experience, sire, has informed us of it so often and has verified that the medical art is full of natural mysteries and so on and so forth, and eventually says.

And then you get this repetition, which makes it even funnier, you know, so later on, setting aside doubts as to the possibility of such an occurrence, since it has already been proved by reasoning and evidence to return to the case before us, blah, blah, blah. So it's those sorts of, you know, instead of just an offhanded reference to that device, you draw attention to it. You say, yep, we know this may seem contrived, but we're doing it anyway.

41:39 Mark: Yeah, I certainly found it natural to be doing Clarine and also the narrator, because as the clown character, I think that is one of the. The shticks that the clown can address the audience and acknowledge the traditions of theater and the goofy stuff that's going on. So it's just very natural then to even break halfway out of character to start talking about who's entering and who's leaving and what the sounds are being made.

42:02 Dylan: Well, and clearing's like a little bit like the MST3000 soundtrack to a movie.

42:12 Mark: Which fits for Mark you that Segi's moondized me absolutely.

42:17 Erica: The components for being metatheater too, is as we have here, is one, is that life is a dream. So it does give you the very meta sense at the end of it. What questions is it asking about this play? And what is it asking us about our own lives and our own reality and what's true? What do we choose to create?

42:35 Bill: I'd never heard this term metatheater before, and I have a very thin grasp of it. Can somebody tell me exactly what it is and to what extent does it relate to this idea that the world is a stage, that everything we're doing is some sort of act, and how that relates to the moral or ethical idea of authenticity or falsity? Is all of that part of this?

43:01 Mark: The definition of metatheater is just anything in theater that calls attention to the fact that you're watching a play. And so the play within the play is the classical sort of starting point for that.

43:11 Wes: Well, the most simple form is an aside where you address the audience, like, immediately drawing attention to the fact that you acknowledge the existence of the audience. And you've broken the.

43:20 Mark: There's no directions in this translation, at least, of, like, what's an aside and what's not. Whereas I remember reading Shakespeare and it's like, aside, blah. So Rosaura gives this really long speech, or longest speech to Segismundo at the end of the play, begging him to, you know, come to her side to avenge her. And then he responds with a very long thing. And she says, why are you silent? Which. Oh. Oh. So that whole thing was an aside. And I think maybe it was supposed to be. I don't know. I was interpreting it as. That was part of the humor of it, that it was kind of ambiguous.

43:49 Erica: Was that all supposed to be in his head or.

43:51 Mark: Yes.

43:52 Erica: Or could that be directed as an aside to the audience in particular? Or is there also a choice for it to be directed as. This is this person's inner thoughts, and it's not trying to get past the point.

44:01 Wes: Which speech are you guys talking about?

44:02 Mark: Rosaura's speech starts on 153, and it's really long. His starts on 165. Heavens. If I'm really dreaming, let my mind cease working now. Because it's impossible for so many things to be contained in one dream. God help me, if I could only escape them all, or not think any of them. Who ever beheld such painful uncertainty? If I only dreamed that grandeur in which I found myself, how then, now can this woman mention such accurate details? Then it was reality, not a dream. And if it was reality, which only adds to confusion and doesn't lessen it, how could I call it a dream? Are glories then so similar to dreams that real ones are considered fictions and famed ones true? So he's giving us a lot of the philosophical meat here about the whole trappings of power being vainglory and dreamlike. This is definitely his inner thoughts.

44:42 Wes: It's not to the audience, it's a soliloquy. And I think that does technically fall within the category of metatheater, any. Any sort of soliloquy. But it's kind of on the border. Right. Because it's just a device for someone could be thinking out loud. Right. It's possible.

44:56 Bill: Realistically, in the o' Connor essay, he talks about kind of a larger concept of metatheater. He says he's talking about another theatrical scholar. Abell's concept of metatheater is founded upon the view that life has already been theatricalized even before the dramatist's imagination begins to act on the raw material of life. This theatricalization inexorably links illusion and unreality to life. A life in which characters have full self consciousness of their own dramatic posture. This attitude is principally revealed in six ways. One, there's an essential illusoryness in life.

Two, there's a loss of reality for the world. Three, the world cannot be proved to exist. Four, there's a lack of implacable values. Five, life is a dream. Six, the world is a stage. The latter two are manifestations we're most accustomed to seeing, but the former are the bases and premises on which they're constructed. So somehow he's relating metatheater to this larger philosophical or epistemological view of the world.

46:10 Erica: Wouldn't be possible that so many comedies would fall into this. There was an essential illusoryness in life, a loss of reality for the world.

46:20 Dylan: Yeah, well, I think you're right. I think it's easy for me to get stuck on what is meant by the term metatheater. In that particular article, I found it to be a little bit hard because again, it seemed kind of stuck on a scholarly debate about what that term meant or didn't mean.

46:42 Bill: Yeah, right. I'm just trying to find if there's any larger meaning to the idea of metatheater that applies to this play other than an aside here or an acknowledgement of the audience or the inherent theatricality

46:54 Erica: of the piece of if it is metatheater, what is the point of it being that in this particular play, then I started to think of other examples of that in modern culture. And I feel like most of the time there's like an innate awareness of that actor. Right. Of either they're in a landscape that's not Real, which I guess in this case would be Segismundo. But I think this is gonna sound funny probably, but Deadpool is a really good example of that, right? The character Deadpool. Because in both comics and in the movies, he's completely aware that he's a character in a film. So there is a play within a play element. So what is the point of that? Well, we identify with him, we feel closer to him, because it's funny, it's inviting, and there's something about the awareness that makes him relatable to us.

47:40 Wes: It's kind of a paradoxical way of keeping people in the illusion. Because, I mean, one of the problems with film or theater, right, is that if you, if the devices become too obvious, then it takes you out of the illusion and the experience of simply being absorbed in the movie or absorbed in the play. But on the other hand, some of those devices are inevitable and they're necessary. So you acknowledge them in order to get people past them. And in the case of Deadpool, you're watching your millionth superhero movie. And so there's the worry that you're too cynical for this.

You know what's going to happen, you know what the story is, basically. And so the function of it, I think, is to. I mean, he's a very cynical character, but strangely enough, the function there is to disarm the cynicism of the audience and get them to actually take the movie seriously. Because they think. They're more likely than not to think, okay, this is what we're doing here is dumb.

48:38 Erica: So maybe that's part of the device of this type of theater, that self

48:42 Dylan: consciousness where you have characters explicitly commenting on breaking the fourth wall, explicitly commenting on the fact that they're in a play or in a movie, is interestingly different from other kinds of self referencing that can go on in a play or a story, where as the reader or the viewer, you see that the piece of art displays a self consciousness of itself as art, a sense of artifice without it being a function of the characters themselves knowing that they are characters.

49:19 Mark: So if it's kitschy.

49:20 Dylan: Yes.

49:21 Mark: If it's exaggerated or action.

49:24 Dylan: Movies do this a lot, right?

49:25 Mark: Yeah. The whole idea of a comic book movie, the fact that it's referred not just because it's based on comic books, but as being like a comic book, that it was just so over the top, it's not trying to be mimetic anymore, it's not trying to imitate life by presenting itself as artifice. It can be more consistently Just entertainment rather than trying to manipulate you, right. If something tries to be mimetic, it tries to evoke real emotions, then it's according to the Sartre thing we just talked about in what is literature, it's kind of getting in your space in a way. Whereas having a self conscious artifice declaring that this is a work of entertainment, there's something more honest about that and that you could then enjoy.

50:04 Wes: It's trying to tell you this is not hacky and derivative also. Right? And inevitably every form of art is susceptible to that charge, right? So even, even Shakespeare's plays, right? He's just lifting plots from various histories or other works. So I was just thinking of Deadpool again. Again, the worry is that it's been done before and we know what's going to happen. So you lose the element of freedom. And this brings us back to, I think, the question that Bill was asking about the relationship to the whole theme of the play, which is that again, this is.

It's about whether we can be free in a world that is fated in one sense or another. And in the end, the freedom comes from the acknowledgment. This is a dream, right? So this, this is a dream is the version of Metatheater in that sense. This is a play. It's a very similar idea, right? To say I'm in a play or hey, I'm in a dream, that's what life is. And to the reason why that's freeing. And so that's what inevitably gives Segismundo's freedom and allows him to break out of his fate, is the ability to acknowledge this is a dream. And the reason why that's freeing is because it's an acknowledgement.

I mean, I think there's a lot of different layers to it, but the layer I drew attention to in the beginning was just the sense in which things are sort of unreal. Everything social is in some sense unreal. And a constructed.

51:23 Bill: It's a role. It's a role you're playing, a social role.

51:27 Wes: We play roles and there's a performative element and it's. To be subject to fate is to not be aware of that is to not be aware that we are playing that role. But to be free doesn't mean that we can simply transcend our roles or transcend the causative forces that make us who we are and give us the certain dispositions that we have. But it involves becoming aware of those forces. And then we should be able to say something about how that's freeing But I don't have.

51:56 Erica: Well, so the illusion, the illusion that he gets to experience within the play is something that is freeing to him to help him understand his nature and then how he can overcome or not. Right. The illusion of the play itself helps the audience and at this time be able to watch something like this and see it through a lens that is a little more welcoming than say, like just a regular morality play. And going back to. I think it was the. In the Kluge article, she says, in the second book of the Republic, Socrates and his friends discuss the educational value of tragic poetry, its ability to turn young people into good citizens.

But then it says, how is the state supposed to inspire courageous behavior and self sacrifice in its young soldiers when the tragic poets depict death and the afterlife in such somber tones? And it says, the tragic poets certainly seem to delight in representing the violence and the misery of human existence. So I think that there is some beautiful element of this being a play about illusion and a play that's also a comedy in so many aspects that allows these people to learn something and feel like it's not just what the church is doing to them and feel like they can relate to it well.

53:06 Dylan: And that would be where the seat of freedom is. Right. Where they're able to not be subject to merely to the forces of society, but to have enough consciousness of it ultimately to see how they would choose something different, even if they end up not doing anything different. Understanding that there's something that could be done would be the source of that freedom.

53:33 Erica: Yes. There's an awareness and there's at least the possibility for choice.

53:37 Wes: Right. It corresponds to approaching the world. Right. Changing one's behavior either through the sort of, I'm going to rationally control my impulses and so change that way. Right. As opposed to the therapeutic approach, where instead of trying to repress, you become conscious. And it doesn't mean you simply give in to impulses, but you do what Nietzsche called spiritualized instinct, so you do something with it. So it's this other way between simply repressing down. Right. Putting the Segismundo in the rock versus just giving free rein to his barbarity.

54:09 Dylan: There's a third way, and that's exemplified in the play. I mean, with him choosing in the end to not be a tyrant. Right.

54:18 Mark: So I was wondering about this. All the world's a stage from Shakespeare. I mean, there's actually a Wikipedia article for all the world's a stage that talks about that. Erasmus in 1511 came in the praise of Folly Says something like that. For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them off the stage? And he was known. We should probably read some of him someday. I looked at him when we were reading Machiavelli because he also wrote a guide for princes at the time, which was very much reacting against Machiavelli.

That no, no, you actually need to use Christian virtue to guide you to be a good prince. It was a much less interesting text than the Machiavelli. It read like it sounds there. So I was thinking about. This is the point of the stage, the transitoriness. So this long passage from Shakespeare, as you like it, all the world's a stage. All men and women, merely players. They have their exits and entrances. One man at his time plays many parts and then it goes through. He's an infant, he's a schoolboy, he's a soldier, he's eventually an old person.

So it's kind of seemingly like the life is a dream, just pointing to how these things seem very substantial to us when we're going through them. But in the long view, when you're looking at your life as a whole, they seem much more insubstantial, like you were just playing a role, as opposed to the interpretation of all the world's a stage that we are there for the entertainment of the gods or of God, that that could have been something that. I don't know if there's anything like this in Homer specifically, of. Are we just dancing puppets for the gods entertainment?

I could certainly see that kind of thing being in Homer. But Calderon is following Plato and reacting to that kind of impious take on the gods. If it's as the gods, obviously the director, in this metaphor here, what do you think? Does it mean that we are kind of leaping about for his, not for his entertainment. He doesn't need entertainment, but certainly it's a test, right? And that's what. When Segismundo started to act poorly, he's been taken up, put in the position of power, and he's killed somebody immediately and is considering raping Rosaura.

And Basilio comes in and Clotaldo, at various points in, like, you better not act like this, because this might just be a dream, which sounds weird unless you understand that if you equate it being a dream with you acting a part on the stage before God who is testing and judging you, like, then, then it kind of makes sense. At least the syntax of it makes sense in a way that it Didn't. If you just take it straightforwardly, like this might be a dream, who the hell cares? Like you were saying before, Wes, about how it should be the opposite effect.

56:55 Erica: You just unpacked a lot. What would you like to know? The interpretation of all the world's a stage in particular.

57:01 Mark: Yeah. Do you think more it's the transitoriness that's the point, or is it the all the world's a stage because there is an audience of some sort?

57:09 Bill: No, not in Shakespeare. No way. No, in Shakespeare, it's closely aligned to the tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow speech in Macbeth. I think it's pure pessimism. It's completely meaningless, all of this. We have no idea what it means. We're playing these parts through life and then we die. And there's no meaning or redeeming anything to it. It's completely meaningless.

57:36 Wes: And no underlying reality, I guess no underlying reality.

57:41 Bill: That certainly can be understood by a

57:44 Wes: human mind, especially an underlying moral, absolute moral reality.

57:48 Erica: I know that Bill's the Shakespeare expert, so I'm not taking anything away from what he's saying. I would just say, if it were me and I had to choose a meaning for all the world's a stage and maybe in the way that it relates to this play, if we wanted to look at it that way, I would say as actors, as all of us being actors, what our job is to try things. And when we think about Seigismundo and the way that he tries different actions to lead him toward a different goal, or actually ends up probably being the same goal, it's very similar to learning a play, Right?

So you go out and you know what the lines are going to be and you know what the conclusion is going to be, but you have no idea how you're going to get there if you have good scene partners. So if we think of that the same way in this, he knows eventually he's going to be the king of Poland, right? Or maybe he doesn't know, but we all know. But how he gets there is the question. And he is able to act out many different ways to get him to the same ending.

58:46 Bill: Yeah, good point, Eric.

58:47 Mark: Even though he ultimately forgives his father and becomes the philosopher king, becomes the wise Christian ruler, he also gets to fulfill the prophecy of having his father grovel at his feet. He can get there in multiple ways. Like, you would think that throwing somebody out a window would be a disqualifying event for future kingship, but no.

59:11 Erica: Unless you're Basilio or like Cersei, you know, when we were Talking about Game of Thrones. Right. She didn't throw Bran out the window.

59:18 Wes: But we have to suspend our disbelief when it comes to his transformation, as unlikely as it is.

59:25 Dylan: Segismundo.

59:27 Wes: Yeah. And to do that, we have to read into the whole his realization that life is a dream. We have to take that epiphany really seriously. And yes, in a more realistic context in life. Yeah. No one changes that quickly and all that stuff. It's completely unrealistic. But you could see, I still think there's a larger realistic psychological observation there about what it is that changes people and how a realization like that might be transformative.

59:52 Bill: It's a realization that the parts we play in life are not our true self, I guess, or something. We can't derive our valuation of ourself from the roles we're playing in life because they're just roles and they may change. He seems to realize, it seems to

1:00:11 Dylan: me that that implies something further, which is that there is no real self in the sense that it's a permanent, unchanging thing that you are trying to manifest. Rather, it's an ongoing piece of work that is malleable.

1:00:27 Bill: Well, the permanent, unchanging thing has to be your soul, right? In this Christian theology.

1:00:33 Dylan: Well, putting aside the Christian theology part there, it would be that the notion that that soul is permanent and unchanging and that somehow it's being realized, the only way you would get to it is either you are changing in your material manifestation on Earth with a direction hopefully, towards your authentic, permanent soul. And so there's this kind of problem of corruption of the world that you are trying to reveal that true soul, or it's that there isn't a true soul, so to speak, but that who you are is changeable and malleable and transformable, such that you are, in important ways a different person or could be a different person later than you are now.

1:01:23 Bill: Yeah, I'm thinking he's now wearing the costume of a king. Previously, he was wearing the costume of a destitute prisoner in a Castle Rock prison, and neither of them defines him. Therefore, he can't take credit for being a king, and he can't feel ashamed of being a nobody, a prisoner. Therefore, he has to change his behavior. He has to do the right thing, no matter who he is. And it also says whether it's a dream or whether it's real is irrelevant in the Catholic idea. Right? We have to do what's right no

1:02:03 Mark: matter what, even though it's only a role. That doesn't mean you don't take it seriously. He takes his kingly role seriously. That is the conclusion of the play.

1:02:13 Bill: Yeah.

1:02:14 Mark: So where does that leave honor? Because I would think honor you could see as a disease of taking these social roles too seriously. But it still seems that, you know, at the end of the play, like Astolfo is supposed to marry Rosaura, but he says, I can't actually do that. It wouldn't be honorable. Oh, but actually she's of noble birth, so it's okay. So it ends up like. It's not like Segismundo just says, screw your honor. Astolfo, you, you know, liaised with this girl, besmirched her honor.

1:02:46 Wes: Sorry,

1:02:48 Mark: it's ambiguous. Seth asks before we start, like, wait, is this Astolfo a rapist? Did he rape her?

1:02:54 Bill: No.

1:02:55 Mark: And at that point somebody said yes.

1:02:57 Wes: Well, she suggests she's been seduced at some point.

1:03:00 Bill: Taleen thought she was raped, but I don't think it's very clear in the text that he deceived her. Meaning he made her believe that he was going to marry her and then he didn't.

1:03:11 Mark: Yes.

1:03:12 Bill: And this was where she was dishonored.

1:03:14 Erica: But he was still very much in love with her because he still had the, you know, locket with her picture.

1:03:18 Bill: Right, right.

1:03:19 Erica: But he didn't want to marry her because he didn't think she was noble.

1:03:23 Bill: Exactly.

1:03:23 Mark: We affirm, though, at the end it seems like honor is affirmed. There's diseases of honor. Like he ends up not taking her vendetta seriously. That desire for honor you need to channel properly, I guess, is how it's supposed to work.

1:03:35 Wes: Well, he does. I mean, for him to marry her is for her honor to be satisfied.

1:03:40 Mark: Well, Taleen did not agree with that interpretation at all.

1:03:45 Wes: Yeah. But I think in the context for her motivations, I think her idea is that he has to make good or

1:03:51 Dylan: die in the context of the mores of the time.

1:03:54 Wes: That's true, Right? Yeah. And then she even talks about her mom saying, no, just follow him and beseech him to get back with you. Or whatever. I forget how she responds to that. But obviously she's following him in order to kill him.

1:04:08 Mark: Yeah. It was in the Kluge article that I'll even quote here, page 35 of that. Segismundo spiritual conversion prevents the Rosaura plot from turning into the honor revenge tragedy that she herself considers it to be. Stoically renouncing Rosaura as the object of his amorous passion, Segismundo finally overcomes the ultimate Challenge of defeating himself.

1:04:28 Wes: I think that's a little overwrought. There's no indication that he has a deep attachment to her. Right.

1:04:34 Mark: I guess that's another question.

1:04:35 Wes: I mean, Estrella shows up and he's like, damn, you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. And then Rosaura shows up, Damn, you're even more beautiful. That's true. It's kind of the sum of all that.

1:04:48 Mark: Even when Rosaura shows up the first time dressed as a man, he's like. It's a very similar reaction.

1:04:55 Wes: You were a woman.

1:04:58 Mark: Just because, like, he hasn't had people before. So, you know, to keep Clotaldo and the soldiers from killing these people who have trespassed upon his prison, he goes as all out as he is able to do as a prisoner, to defend them, because they so affected his sensibilities.

1:05:14 Erica: Right.

1:05:15 Mark: So do we think that the Platonic. I think this is just referred to in some of our articles as an idea that earlier commentators had. It was maybe not so good, but that the idea in Plato that one way to get to the world of the forms is to behold beauty and so beholding the sun. And he uses these sun analogies, you know, when he sees Estrella and he sees Rosaura. Estrella, I think, even more so that she is, you should say, the sun. That it is like, it's those encounters that enable him to turn his eyes upward, essentially toward the good. That he contemplates maybe sexually assaulting Rosaura, but then decides against that ultimately, even when he's in his bad part and when he wakes up and he thinks it was all a dream, he says, like, the only thing that really cuts through that was life transforming, was the image of woman that he can't believe that that was purely a dream.

That's the only thing that he really holds on to.

1:06:11 Wes: I was going to object to your interpretation until you justified it that way. Mark. That's a good justification. Yes. This whole idea about the beauty of women cutting through.

1:06:21 Mark: And you might even ask, like, why is the whole Rosaura plot in here in the first place? But if it's she who is ultimately in the last scene kind of is the last straw in turning him toward responsible, divine attitude just through her presence.

1:06:38 Wes: I mean, she shows up and she gives that great speech about being a man and a woman in various ways. Right. And she is going to. Yeah, she wants to defeat Astolfo. And he. Yeah, there is that moment where he basically averts his eyes from her.

1:06:54 Mark: Yeah, that's why he can't answer her long speech.

1:06:56 Wes: To actually honor her is inconsistent with looking at and therefore desiring her. So that might be an indication that his attachment is deeper. I've made it out to be. Or her effect on him is more profound. But yeah, at that point, she just wants revenge. And somehow he has been persuaded. It is a pivotal moment. Right. Because when he had first woken up, yeah, he's going to rape her. He's going to take her if he wants her, and that's it. And she does say, if you try to treat me like sex object, I'm going to kill you. She says that in that speech. But he is persuaded to treat her as an honorable war ally as opposed to an object of desire at that point. I think, Mark, you're right. That's gotta be part of the transformation. I mean, I see overall, I see the transformation as involving this acknowledgment that life's a dream. But I think that fits into it in some way.

1:07:47 Bill: I hadn't understood that, but I have a better grasp of it now. What about.

1:07:53 Mark: So there's no such complication in his beholding Estrella. She's just hot. And he gets to have her at the end just because he says, you wanted royalty, you're not gonna marry Astolfo anymore. But I'll give you something that's just as good. So it's like her honor gets to be intact too, because she gets him.

1:08:10 Erica: Yeah. I think she was kind of just a device there, it seems, between Astolfo and Rosaura.

1:08:16 Mark: Well, that's why I was asking before about, like, is she also playing an honor game too? Like this whole thing with the portrait of, ugh, I don't want to marry you because you love somebody else. And I'm disgusted with myself that I even asked you for the portrait. What did you make of that whole character moment? I mean, that is giving her some subjectivity and ambiguity.

1:08:35 Erica: No, absolutely. She's. Yeah. I don't know what, you know, historically in the context of this time period, what the women were like in this area. Does anybody know the Spanish women of this time?

1:08:46 Wes: Feisty. Sorry.

1:08:49 Erica: I mean, if they were, then that makes total sense. But if they weren't, you know, like, it just makes me wonder what he was getting at with these strong women characters.

1:08:56 Wes: Well, they're certainly strong in this play.

1:08:58 Erica: There's no for sure.

1:09:00 Mark: And they do talk about, like, Estrella does have a claim on the throne.

1:09:04 Erica: Right.

1:09:05 Mark: Astolfo thinks that his claim is stronger because He's a man. He says that right out. But that doesn't mean she has no claim. Like, that's the whole reason they're getting married, because her mother was older than his mother, she would declare war on him. There would be squabbling. It's not like in Game of Thrones, where the default seemingly is that the women have no power. But.

1:09:25 Dylan: Well, it's like Jon and Daenerys, Right?

1:09:26 Wes: What do you mean? The default is that women have no power. Like, every power. Almost every power player at this point is a woman now.

1:09:34 Erica: Yes, they are definitely very strong in it now. But, you know, that's why Daenerys. Spoiler alert. Why she's getting upset over possibly losing the power to the Iron Throne.

1:09:45 Dylan: The Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms.

1:09:47 Wes: Yeah. The fact that she's his aunt does not seem to faze her.

1:09:52 Erica: No, no, not at all.

1:09:54 Wes: Forget about that.

1:09:55 Mark: Just.

1:09:56 Wes: What's that again? You're right. You're the king.

1:10:00 Erica: But it's similar in this, right? Are they cousins or.

1:10:02 Wes: No, she's his aunt.

1:10:04 Erica: Aunt in this play as well.

1:10:06 Wes: Cousins.

1:10:06 Erica: Yeah, yeah, cousins.

1:10:09 Mark: That's fine.

1:10:10 Erica: That was so common, though.

1:10:11 Mark: Well, and Segismundo is a cousin, too. They're all cousins.

1:10:14 Wes: Well, I actually looked this up when I. Because the first episode of the season where there's that reveal, Sam reveals it to John and his reaction, he didn't seem all that concerned about either, about the fact that she's his aunt. And so I don't know what I Googled, but I got to this article that compared the genetic perils of dating your cousin versus dating your aunt versus having a child with your sibling or something like that. And anyway, there's not an awful lot of danger for cousins. And it has been historically common, significantly greater for a nephew and an aunt.

1:10:56 Mark: I mean, it's interesting that we don't have in this play, I don't think the idea of love as something that would derange you, which is something that's all over Game of Thrones and that we talked about with our Roman.

1:11:09 Erica: No, but there is a very clear, I think, comparison between Game of Thrones and this play.

1:11:17 Wes: Tell us about it.

1:11:18 Erica: Which is what keeps coming up to me. It's kind of like the Oedipus story is the fortune teller who predicts that Cersei will have three children. Right. So in the whole prediction, she says to her, she says, everyone wants to know their future until they know their future, and eventually tells Cersei that, yes, you will remain queen for a time, and that you will have three children, and gold will be their crowns and gold will be their shrouds. So in telling Cersei what her fate will be, one could make the argument that Cersei then became more of a tyrant and more of a controlling ruler to try to keep her children safe and in doing so, endangered them through her brutality.

So each of them were hurt in different ways, and they were all different types of spawn. Right. One of them was a terrible child. One of them was a very sweet child. And the other one, she tried to move away into safety and regardless, she couldn't stop the fate of that. I just kept being reminded of it. It's like, once again, you can know what it's going to be and you can try to avoid it as much as possible. But like this play says, there's no way to avoid it if that's what's going to happen. You're going to end up creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

1:12:32 Wes: And that's a very real psychology to that. Right? The sort of there are good ways for us to try to change ourselves and change our behavior, and there are ways that are completely counterproductive. And what's counterproductive is simply to try to strong arm fate, to evade it by trying to violently break with the thing that is fated. Right. Sending a child out to be killed. And the right way is something that takes more time and involves more acknowledgement of the thing that's fated rather than its complete disavowal on avoidance and so on.

1:13:05 Erica: Yes, more of a self reflection and a call to action maybe. There's a podcast I listen to called Hidden Brain. Have you guys ever heard that one? And there is one that he talks about Chinese children and how these particular kids that were born in the year, I believe, of the tiger were supposed to be smarter and better and have great success. And they ended up doing these studies and finding that, sure enough, those kids did end up having greater success than their peers who were born just the year after, but partially because they were expected to. So they were afforded certain opportunities and pushed in a certain way to fulfill that prophecy.

1:13:43 Dylan: You have to go to the very best school because of course you're going to be a success.

1:13:47 Erica: Exactly.

1:13:49 Mark: It's amazing that we still have such a fascination in the culture with. So I see it now in time travel movies and it's difficult to draw out the psychological parallel that you were just pointing out, Wes, because when you do it in a time travel movie, it kind of becomes a gimmick about what are the mechanics of the Time travel involved that so much of the time, it's like we don't want to deal with the whole multiple realities issue. So we're just going to say that whatever it is that you are trying to avoid. What's the one with The Bruce Willis 12 Monkeys?

1:14:23 Erica: Yeah.

1:14:24 Mark: It turns out that you thought you could go back and change the past, but it just ends up that what you did caused a link in the chain that led to the current circumstance that you were trying to avoid. And that's presented just as a metaphysical reality that you actually can't change time. So it's only like when you get into things that are trying to play with that, like Doctor who, which had to live with that, not just like Back to the future three movies, but like for 50 years of shows. So they're going to screw with it every possible way. And like, oh, if you try to change time, then these alien bats come and destroy the world or something.

1:15:02 Wes: Right.

1:15:02 Mark: An idea that was brought up in one Doctor who episode and was never mentioned again. So I guess. I guess that's not canon or something. You know, it's so similar to what's going on in here that it's difficult to think about this in a more philosophical way as opposed to just some, you know, thinking about the metaphysics of time or something. Or prediction.

1:15:23 Erica: Right, Absolutely.

1:15:24 Mark: And I will point folks to my discussion with the Consulary Tales guys of Minority Report, which is all about this prediction as well. And pre crime that just as with throwing Segismundo because of something that he hadn't done yet in prison, you know that this is explored in much more detail in that story by Philip K. Dick.

1:15:42 Erica: Great story.

1:15:44 Mark: Let's see, any final topics? I want to make sure we have a little time to just kind of talk about the fact that we did this play together and talk about what you guys are up to and how impressive all the cast members that are not on here are. In addition. But before we do that, any other topics that we haven't gotten to that are bugging you here?

1:16:03 Bill: Just one thing. The reference to, in some of the essays to Descartes and Descartes observation that he says, I cannot find any certain marks by which to distinguish waking life from dreaming. And he goes on, he says, if I'm seated by the fire, how can I know that I'm not dreaming, that I'm sitting by the fire? The play seems to come down on the idea that it doesn't matter whether you're dreaming or not. But Shakespeare, it sure does. There's the whole question of whether it matters and whether there are any marks by which we can tell. Does the play give us any marks? I guess it doesn't. And it's with Descartes on that, but not necessarily with him in the ethical implications that follow from it.

1:16:57 Wes: So I think it's worth noting because I thought a little bit about Descartes as well. Meditations on First Philosophy is published in 1641. So that's like five years, I think, after this play. But the climate, this sort of thing with Montaigne as well, and Shakespeare, skepticism is in the air. And Pyrrhonian skepticism that you talked about. There are ancient texts basically being rediscovered. And that's a big part of what the Renaissance is. And that includes Sextus Empiricus and this skeptical frame of mind. It's important to keep in mind Descartes is not a skeptic, he's a rationalist.

And he is entertaining skepticism for the purpose of refuting it. So he's going to entertain the possibility that life is nothing but an illusion or a dream, the product of the deceit of an evil genius or something like that, for the purpose of getting us to this foundational, unquestionable bedrock, which is the self. I can't question the existence of my own consciousness of the questioner. If I'm asking the question, there's got to be a questioner. If I'm suggesting that everything is an illusion, there's got to be someone to whom there is an illusion.

So you establish that foundation and then you build everything back. So you build everything back by ultimately the way he gets the external world back. And the certainty and the existence of the external world is by appealing to God and doing kind of version of Anselm's argument for the existence of God. But basically the idea is that to have an idea of God implies the existence of God. Therefore, God wouldn't be deceiving us. And so we get back the external world and everything is certain and so on. Those are the sorts of ideas that are.

1:18:42 Bill: That are in the air at this point. Calderon is saying it doesn't matter whether life is real or not, we still have to be good.

1:18:52 Wes: I mean, I take the deeper significance of all this as to say, you know, as I said in the beginning, that there is some deep sense in which we take life to be a dream. Throughout the history of philosophy, you might treat that just as saying that the world is a kind of becoming. And becoming means a combination of being and non being. Non being is sort of woven into the texture of things. That's one way of acknowledging that life is a dream. But for me, what's important here is the social and psychological element where, as you could say, inner subjective beings as beings whose existence, in a way, is predicated on this Hegelian mutual recognition, on the internalization of other consciousnesses.

We, like someone like Sartre, calls consciousness a nothingness. Nothingness is the metaphor for consciousness, and so to say life is a dream is to acknowledge this peculiar status of consciousness and to acknowledge the human condition. And then beyond that, to say that these roles and that status and that desire, all of these things are imbued with an element of illusion. So again, to go back to the example of desire, desire is, in the existentialist phrasing, is lack. It's not just desire. It's not when we want things, it's not just that we have an animal desire, say to eat something, or even an animal desire for sex.

Desire is always desire, plus for us, it always has a significance that goes beyond mere desire. So it's imbued with a longing for completeness, for instance, to completely be dissolved of any lack, to use de Beauvoir's term. And the illusory part of that is that that's impossible. So that when we desire things, we are always deluding ourselves to the extent that we have this fantasy of it giving us a completeness which is unobtainable. And a lot of maturity is about becoming aware of that, being able to sort of analyze our desire and understand we can't get rid of it, but be aware of the sort of strain of unrealistic stuff that is always alloyed with the more basic desire.

I don't know if that makes sense, but it does.

1:21:11 Bill: That's really. I was trying to figure out how that fit together. And. Yeah, so I want to read.

1:21:18 Mark: We didn't consider this one part, which I found very weird at the time. It's the speech where Segismundo actually says, in capital letters in all caps, life is a dream. It's in Act 3, 131 of the dual language, when the soldiers go to free him. And you would think then that he would say, oh, so Clotaldo just told me that being in the house was a dream, but evidently he was lying. It was not a dream, it was real. But that's not the conclusion. He goes, he says, once again, what can this be? Heavens, you want me to dream of grandeur which time must undo.

Once again you want me to see amid shadows and sketchy Forms majesty and pomp dispersed by the wind. Once again you want me to experience disillusionment or the risk into which human power is humbly born and of which it is constantly made aware. Well, it won't happen. It won't happen. Behold me once again, subject to my fortune, since I know that all of this life is a dream. Away with you, you shadows that today pretend to my numbed senses that you have a body and a voice, though the truth is you have neither voice nor body. For I don't want majesty that is feigned.

I don't want pomp, that is imaginary illusions that the slightest puff of the breeze will disintegrate, exactly like the blossoming almond tree, etc. Etc. I know you by now. I know you by now and I know that you do the same thing to everyone who falls asleep. For me there is no more pretense, because now, undeceived, I know perfectly well that life is a dream. That's an interesting inversion. Like we think, oh, if it's a dream, that you are being deceived. Right? That's kind of the whole point of Descartes. No, I'm undeceived. I see. That life is a dream, Right?

1:22:53 Wes: That's a very good.

1:22:54 Erica: So he's awakened to what exactly?

1:22:57 Dylan: The becomingness of life and the uncertainty of it. In some ways, saying that last line, the way Wes was putting it, you would say, I am mature now.

1:23:12 Erica: All right?

1:23:12 Mark: So at the beginning of that speech, I would read as, oh, you soldiers, you're just like those, you know, last time when people came and told me that I was a prince and I found out in the morning that that was just a dream, that that was all bullshit. So why should I believe you here? But then, you know, as he goes through that speech, it's not just that he believes that it's not really going to work out. The soldiers are. Are either actually figments of imagination or are planning revolution that is going to fail in the first five minutes and he's going to be back in this damn cave.

You know, I think those are all possibilities that he's entertaining. But even if it's I don't want pomp, that is imaginary illusions that at the slightest puff of the breeze will disintegrate. Is that referring to the fact that it's so tenuous being a ruler at all? Or is it that not just that it's tenuous, but that it's fundamentally unreal? Right? That it's, as Wes was saying, that it's just A social fiction.

1:24:05 Wes: Yeah, I think it's both. Right. There's the temporal, there's the cross temporal version of it, which is that these things are transient, but there's a deeper reality which underlies that transience. And it's not just that, you know, I can be king and then not be king. Being a king is particularly precarious, particularly unstable, because of the fact that it's a social construction in a way. It's just a. It's a role that's predicated on other people acknowledging at such. I mean, it really is a fiction and it only becomes real through collective acknowledgement.

1:24:38 Mark: Since we have two professional actors here, I guess I wanted to ask one more question related to the metatheater thing. Part of that definition that in this Thomas Austin o' Connor is the Spanish comedia a metatheater article was. He described metatheater as the characters having a sense that their life is dramatized. And this really resonated with me, this idea. Just when you are the kind of person that thinks a lot and sort of thinks out loud, or maybe you write in a journal or something, I don't know. People that are into drama, it's not an accident. Usually I feel like there's a. And despite the fact that I did not pursue this as my profession, I feel like I had that emotional strain where I'm walking around.

1:25:23 Wes: And to me it kind of goes exhibitionism.

1:25:26 Mark: Yeah, well, it kind of goes with being raised when I was really young, being religious, that you got this idea that everything I do, even my secret thoughts are not actually private. They're.

1:25:37 Bill: Yes, you're being watched at all times. You're on stage.

1:25:42 Mark: Exactly. Even if you then stop being religious, there's. That mindset still persists. So that I think that's kind of the conceit of the artist that, like, my thoughts are worth spreading on the canvas, are worth immortalizing in some way, are worth writing down. It's not because you're so wise, but just like the fact that it is, you know, you've kind of considered yourself or the contents of your mind sort of a work of art on display in some way. Is that just me being narcissistic or does this resonate with.

1:26:13 Erica: No, that makes a lot of sense. And I would say that a lot of actors are fairly narcissistic, or I would say most people are narcissistic and just actors are very honest about the fact that we are. Yeah, I think. I never thought of it that way, but I think that's true because I was also raised very religious, and I really thought everything I did was so important, every little thing. And I remember the first time somebody said to me, you know, Erica, not everybody's paying attention to you all the time, and everything you do doesn't matter that much to everybody else.

And I was so offended by it, and I didn't understand why. And that kind of goes with what you're saying is like, maybe that's just how we were raised in that religious realm is like, yeah, even your thoughts, Nothing is secret. But I do think that I know a ton of actors who have either dabbled in going into religion as a profession or just have been raised very religious.

1:27:03 Wes: Aren't you all required to be Scientologists

1:27:05 Erica: or only if you have money? So, no, but the rest of us, I think it's just a matter of there is a curiosity about philosophy and a curiosity about religion and psychology, and that all helps when you're an actor. I think those are all very real, closely related, don't you, Bill?

1:27:25 Bill: Yeah. I've always felt that my life has been a series of parts that I was acting out, none of which were expressive or comprehensive of the real me, whatever that might be, whether it's my consciousness, my awareness, and, I mean, as far as the artistic impulse, yeah, it's egotistical, sure, you gotta have an ego, but it's also. I'm sure it's something more than that. It's a need to be seen. You know, you're playing a role, and yet somehow you want the real you to be seen, or you have to imbue it with your actual truth, some truth of yourself that's not false. I'm not sure I completely understood Mark's question, but.

1:28:14 Mark: Well, I think there are certain things, not just if you're explicitly religious, but the ethics that has come out of religion, which is very much on display in this play. Of course, it's an emphasis on motives, not results. This is especially an attractive thing for a child because a child doesn't have the power to actually bring out a lot of results in the world. So if it matters, it's the thought that counts. And the more philosophical you get, the more you feel like it is the thought that counts, that your mind becomes this Cartesian theater, a literal theater.

Even. Even when you get rid of the God, you retain the structure of dealing with yourself that performing before a God had. I'm giving a Nietzschean interpretation that there are lots of things about us that living for a couple millennia of highly religious thought, it shapes Our culture. It shapes our psychology. It shapes the way that we relate to ourselves. And even if you become an atheist, a lot of those things remain. And, you know, I guess it's an open question whether you should then, out of consistency, try to excise them and say, what I think doesn't matter.

Only what I do matters. Or whether you should, as I think Nietzsche actually thinks, make something of this creation. You know, don't fool yourself into thinking that somebody is watching you all the time. But still his advice is make of your life an art.

1:29:41 Erica: Yes, I think that seems to be what this play is getting at. And also I think what hopefully we strive for as artists of any kind. It doesn't matter how many people attend. It doesn't matter if it's well received. It matters if you're trying to do something that's worthy of having a voice. And ultimately you're making your own life matter. It doesn't matter what the critics or the audience or anybody else says or the gods.

1:30:08 Mark: Erica, I saw your Facebook page. You had something else that you were once. The musical or something.

1:30:13 Erica: I was in that a while ago, actually. But, okay. What I did just end up doing, which was actually really interesting and hopefully will continue to have a life beyond the four months I spent in California. I was doing a show called Paradise Square, and it is about the Five Points area in New York City during the draft riots. It's a really interesting story. It has the music of Stephen Foster in it and it really explores the African American and Irish relationships and how they basically lived very well together for several years. And then the Civil War kind of brought that all to a halt.

1:30:50 Mark: Bill, are you allowed to talk about the thing that you were working on? Why you didn't come to Pel Live? That you were up all night filming something?

1:30:57 Bill: Yeah, I have one line. In the new prequel to the Sopranos, I play a judge who sentences Tony Soprano's father to jail that we shot in an actual courthouse in the Bronx after hours. So they started setting it up. We didn't get in front of the camera until 2:30 in the morning.

1:31:18 Wes: Wow.

1:31:19 Erica: Glamorous life.

1:31:20 Wes: Yeah.

1:31:21 Bill: Yeah.

1:31:22 Mark: So I guess our minor technical follow ups while we are recording this play are nothing compared to having to sit around in a movie set while they screw around with the lights for two hours and then.

1:31:32 Bill: Oh, that's fun.

1:31:34 Mark: Say one line. You're there all night to say one line.

1:31:37 Bill: Yep, that's right. Yep, that's the movie.

1:31:40 Mark: How many times did you have to say the line?

1:31:42 Bill: About 10.

1:31:43 Mark: How many takes did they get?

1:31:44 Bill: About 10 takes. Yeah.

1:31:46 Erica: That's what they call them. 10 take, Bill. Humans.

1:31:52 Bill: Nice.

1:31:53 Mark: Could you.

1:31:53 Erica: Next time.

1:31:54 Mark: So the first time you said guilty, like doing a little. You're so guilty.

1:32:00 Bill: You know what required. Try something else, Bill.

1:32:04 Mark: So were they all approximately the same as far as you were concerned?

1:32:07 Bill: No, they were. Yeah. They really only had the camera facing my direction for two takes. The were a couple of other angles.

1:32:15 Mark: Gotcha. And then you hooked us up with. I gave the origin story of David Epstein, who I should say runs an actor instruction studio that I will put a link to so people can see that. But then you hooked us up to the rest of the folks. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about Chris Martin and Taleen Monahan?

1:32:33 Bill: Taleen and I were in a production of the Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol. Gogol, right. And Taleen was brilliant in that. So I thought of her. I cast things sometimes in New York and I thought of her right away. And Chris was the founding director of Classic Stage Company, which is still an important Off Broadway theater in New York City. And I was an apprentice for him when I was in high school, starting around age 16 for three years. So I learned about a lot of the great plays through working there.

1:33:11 Mark: Had you run into this play before or any other Calderon or.

1:33:14 Bill: No, I had read this play and I read Lope de Vega in a book that was edited by my professor, Norris Houghton. I read Life is a Dream and also the Sheep well, by Lope de Vega in his edition of Plays from the Golden Age.

1:33:30 Mark: Yeah. I should mention that Chris was saying as we were tearing down that he did not approve of this translation. I'll stand behind it.

1:33:37 Erica: Oh, that was so funny.

1:33:38 Mark: I'll stand behind it. I mean, I was just looking at Applebaum's explanation in the intro of why he made the decision. So it's a pretty recent. It's 2002. It's a pretty recent translation. And it is like the one that we did for Lysistrata. It is line by line. Correct. So he doesn't have all the rhyme scheme he spells out in the intro. Like the fact that it's not a simple rhyme scheme. It's not just like iambic pentameter. It's like, I guess in Spanish, a lot rhymes. So there's a lot of ways you can do it. You know, everything ends in O or ah. Anyway, so many of the words.

But was, you know, giving, like, 12 different kinds of rhyme schemes that. That come up in different parts of the play. And so, I don't know, Chris did not feel like this was poetic enough. And he then started to rant about something that we've discussed a little in here, in our discussion of Homer's Odyssey, about how people are doing translations of Shakespeare to modern English to actually make them understandable on a first listen without reading them to an audience. Which is something that, as far as getting at the philosophical meat of it, I wouldn't mind at least trying.

1:34:36 Erica: Oh, absolutely.

1:34:40 Mark: It's, you know, that's the reason we're not probably going to do Shakespeare on here. Besides the fact that, you know, I don't want to read a five act anything, this was really stretching our limit as far as the length of something that we could possibly do. It was a longer day than we intended.

1:34:54 Bill: Yeah.

1:34:54 Erica: You know, I went to school for classical music and I would never tell people that they shouldn't learn what classical music is by listening to the Looney Tunes, you know, Warner Brothers classic cartoons back in the day. Like, that's how a lot of people learned about it. But I do understand wanting to keep the integrity of what this text actually is. But until we all become at least bilingual, good luck with that, right?

1:35:19 Mark: Yeah. So, you know, I didn't get to pursue this with him, but I guess he thought some of the older translations preserved more. You know, he was kind of just saying, like, you have to keep this in its historical setting. So just like in Shakespeare, you're not really going to understand it unless you read all the footnotes and kind of learn the lingo of what was going on at the time. So was the argument that no translation of this would be really any good or just he thought in particular this translation, just like you couldn't say these things, that they did not roll off the tongue.

1:35:46 Bill: I don't know. I'm not sure what his objection was. I think it has something to do with. In the Appelbaum, there's a kind of sense of humor about the whole enterprise of this play. Maybe this is part of the Meta theater. But as we read it, things came out just theatrically absurd and we were laughing at it. But in the translation, I think it also remains like you say, it remains faithful. So it's doing this subtle thing. We were very close to getting something that's very difficult to do. And it's a kind of post modern approach to theater or to classic plays, which is to kind of make fun of the antiquated structures that the play presents and the melodramaticness of it.

But at the same time, kind of actually do it. You have to balance those two things. And we almost got some of that. I thought in our reading. I don't think that they would have been making fun of it back in Calderon's day. And that may have been Chris's objection, that dimension would not have been there.

1:36:55 Mark: He really tried. He said, you know, there are gonna be some Spanish puns that you just can't get. So actually, I delved into the footnotes and I changed the lines a little bit to explain when Clarine has his soliloquy about how hungry he is, no cena. The Nicene Creed. Get it? Because it's a pun in Spanish, no cena that means no dinner. But he really tried. Like, there was one that I read wrong at the time where Rosaura is talking to Clotaldo, says, I venerate your feet with a thousand kisses. And Clarine says, and I validate them because between friends, a few letters in a word makes no difference.

So in other words, venerate versus validate. But I'm sure nobody got that, and I certainly didn't read it right. You know, the best we could do in any translation and certainly the way we were, you know, without quite a lot of thought, is to approximate and hope people got the general gist. I don't know. I still thought, even on a first read, this was much more understandable to me than, say, when I saw the Tempest last year, right? Dylan's son was in a production of the Tempest, and it sure flowed by fast. I was like, I'd like to read that someday and understand more of what was going on there.

1:38:02 Erica: Well, I told Bill, check out the Margaret Atwood book, the Hag Seed. It is the Tempest, like play within a play. And I'd seen the Tempest before, but that was the first time. I actually, you know, kind of delved more into it, and I found it really interesting. And it's super easy read. And, you know, she's a wonderful, beautiful writer.

1:38:22 Wes: All right. I'm putting that on my list.

1:38:23 Mark: Yeah. One of these things, I don't know if it was the one we looked at the Metatheater one or another one of the Metatheater articles I was looking at that was, you know, talking about Tempest is a lot like that. That it's. Prospero is the director. Basically, the whole thing is him staging a production.

1:38:35 Erica: Yeah. This is what this is about. There's a director who is removed from his. And then he goes and sets the Tempest out of prison. And he himself plays Prospero.

1:38:46 Mark: Wes and Bill recorded a prior recording of Subtext on the Tempest. So I will refer folks to that.

1:38:51 Wes: I've gotten a lot of nice feedback on that.

1:38:54 Bill: Oh, good.

1:38:56 Mark: Next time, we're going to take a left turn and we're going to spend several episodes on the Philosophy of Mind. So we're going to, for the next episode, talk about the hard problem and the harder problem of consciousness.

1:39:07 Wes: And then the hardest.

1:39:08 Bill: Oh, David Chalmers.

1:39:10 Erica: Right.

1:39:12 Mark: That's too hard for us even to think about. Yes, David Chalmers, consciousness and its Place in nature. Ned Block, the Harder Problem of Consciousness. He's the guy that we're going to be interviewing eventually. That's why we have to talk about the Harder problem, which is the problem of other minds. And David Papineau's Could There Be a Science of Consciousness?

1:39:30 Bill: I can't wait to hear that. That's my main interest right now.

1:39:33 Dylan: Are we going to read Clementine de Jones? There's hardly a problem with consciousness.

1:39:40 Wes: Maybe I just made it up. It's a very mark. That's a very mark like joke.

1:39:48 Mark: As a last thing, I want to thank Jonathan Segel, who did the wonderful harpsichord and violin music that I inserted between the acts of our play. I interviewed him for nakedly examined music 38. He appeared on Partially Examined Life 115 and 118 as our first and best rock star guest. He's just released an instrumental album called Moving Through Loneliness, which you can find on bandcamp or through jonathansagel.com to conclude here, I'm going to play the first track from that, Pulling Apart. So thanks again to Jonathan. Thanks so much, Bill and Erica.

1:40:16 Wes: Thank you.

1:40:16 Erica: Thank you very much.

1:40:17 Wes: Thanks.

1:40:18 Mark: Good night, everybody.

1:40:19 Wes: Good night.

1:40:19 Dylan: Night.

1:40:20 Bill: Take care, everybody.

1:40:21 Erica: Thanks. Good night.