The Rediscovered Country

The Devil Is An Ass

2012-01-18T12:14:00.000-06:00

Okay, okay, okay, sometimes I like Ben Jonson. THIS PLAY is awesome. And really really weird.

Remember the way Marlowe's Dido begins on Mt. Olympus, among the gods? This play begins in hell. Pug, a junior devil, is asking Satan if he can be allowed to come to London to tempt people and cause mischief (classic Screwtape Letters scenario; if Wikipedia wasn't blacked out, I'd look it up to see if Lewis was inspired at all by this play). Satan says that Pug isn't ready for the kind of evil that London needs, but he eventually gives in and sends Pug to wait on Fitzdottrell, a squire of Norfolk.

So the first question is, what does the title mean? Is Pug an ass (an idiot) for thinking that he can do anything to London that London hasn't already done to itself and worse? Is Satan an ass (an idiot) for agreeing to Pug's proposition? Or is Satan an ass(hole) for allowing Pug to make a fool of himself?

Fitzdottrell's desire to see a devil is pretty funny. He's sort of obsessed with it and doesn't really tell us why, just tells us that he's been "run[ning] wild and call[ing] upon him thus in vain . . . these twelvemonth." Hilarious. What does that even mean? I imagine him out on the moors, naked, doing some sort of devil dances. And of course, he's so obsessed that he has to see the play The Devil is an Ass, which is mentioned in the play. So meta. (Also, Dick Robinson, an actor in the play, is mentioned as an actor who might do very well at playing a woman, one of the tricks that goes on in the play.)

Fitzdottrell is very gullible, though, and sells 15 minutes of conversation with his wife for a nice cloak. The wife is, understandably, outraged at this. She does not intend to cuckold him but she is dismayed by his lack of care for her and for their properties, which he is willing to sign away for any cockamamie plot to make money. As such, he is a gull, a target for "projectors" who try to sell him on such ideas. And, selling time but not bed-time, with his wife, he is a sort of wittol, too. When he sees (or suspects) signs of love for the young gentleman in his wife, he shuts her up.

This situation is a weird amalgam of testing and taming that I can't quite figure out yet. He trusts her enough to withstand being wooed, but not enough to talk back. And when she fails the test by having affection for her lover, she is punished and kept inside. Naturally, she seeks help but not by trading in her body; she persuades her lover, Wittipol, to give up his suit of her which dishonors them both, but to help her save her husband's money.

He does the right thing, and the con-men are conned, Fitzdottrell gets his wish to see a devil and realizes it is more terrifying than he thought, and the married couple are reconciled to each other, with a slight hope that Fitzdottrell will die early so that Wittipol and the wife might be married, a better match.

This play has a slight preoccupation with clothing, as some of Jonson's others have. Fitzdottrell makes sure to dress his wife in the height of finery. For himself, he is partial to fine clothing but cannot resist buying them secondhand, thinking he is getting quite a deal that way. The bit with the cloak is interesting; this cloak seems to be irresistible to Fitzdottrell, much to the amazement of everyone else. And Pug, the devil who has taken on the hanged-man's body, has stolen clothing; as a result of this theft, he is put back into the jail where the hanged-man was earlier executed. And at the end, the stolen clothes (and stolen body, clothing for Pug's spirit) is left behind.

There is also the preoccupation with women's makeup. Tailbush, Eitherside (extremely suggestive names for women), Lady Fitzdottrell, and the "Spanish woman" discuss "fucuses" for quite a while, in dizzying and disgusting detail. The Spanish woman uses a mish-mash of Spanish, French, Italian, and Latin to discuss these face-paints, interesting in light of today's lists of ingredients which might be equally obfuscated to the reader. As in Epicoene, one of the women is not a woman, but a man dressed as a woman, listening to feminine secrets.

And, at the end, Fitzdottrell has his own disguise, a madman who his wife has enchanted by devilry, by using soap to foam at the mouth.

Every Man in His Humour

2012-01-18T11:24:00.000-06:00

Ugh. Do I like Jonson, or do I not like him? I'm just not sure! It's so hard to tell. I find him REALLY interesting, that's certain.

This play is often considered Ben Jonson's genre-defining moment. He writes a play about the humours and then everyone writes them. The introduction points out, though, that Jonson was not the first to write a play like this, that Jonson is not even that into the idea of the humours, and that, furthermore, this is not strictly a humours play, since only one character really embodies their humour.

Kitely, apparently, is the only character who is so totally defined by his personality; he is the "jealous husband". But we have other characters in this play who are defined by their theatrical type. The suspicious father (Knowell), the errant son (Edward), the wily servant (the awesomely named Brainworm), the braggart soldier (Bobadill), and the ignorant gull (Stephen). This comedy is very Plautine in nature, coming directly from Greek New Comedy through Roman. And the plot is lovely and tangled and everyone ends up going to to dinner after the marriage of Edward to Bridget, except for Matthew and Bobadill who are symbolically banished as the symbols of war and lovesick melancholy.

I think the correspondences critics have drawn between this play and the Henry IV plays are very interesting. Knowell becomes Henry IV, worried over his wayward son who eventually does him proud. Bobadill is a loud, bragging Falstaff, purely comic in nature, whose "banishment" we do not feel bad, but laugh, about.

Stephen is also funny, the country cousin who doesn't get that everyone, even the servant, is making fun of him. He is proud of his leg, like Andrew Aguecheek, and Brainworm says, "You have an excellent good leg, Master Stephen, but I cannot stay, to praise it longer now, and I am very sorry for't." Stephen fancies himself a poet but puts nonsensical references in his poems to "make up the meter"; he is also proud of his tendency towards melancholy.

A couple notes:

There is an interesting FBAFB correspondence in a reference to "Roger Bacon" and the Brazen Head just a page later.

Matthew, the bad poet, is reading a play (within this play) called "Go by, Hieronymo."

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

2012-01-18T11:01:00.000-06:00

With a tentative composition date in 1589, this work by Robert Greene is one of the earliest plays I'm reading.

Like Romeo and Juliet, it begins with a lovesick young man being questioned by his companions as to his melancholy. Ned, the Prince of Wales is in love with Margaret of Fressingfield, a commoner, whose beauty he describes in glowing (but somewhat incongruous) terms involving Venus and cheese. His clever fool Rafe has an idea of how he will win Margaret to his bed (he doesn't want to marry her, and she will not give up her virginity for less than marriage). They disguise Lacy, one of Ned's noble friends, to become friends with Margaret and get her opinion of Ned, and then Ned goes to the famed Friar Bacon, a sorcerer, who will make Ned into a silk purse, which Margaret will put into her placket, and then hey-yo! He's in her skirt! Foolproof plan, no doubt. Lacy, of course, says that he will execute his charge "as if that Lacy were in love with her." Foreshadowing!

At the same time, Friar Bacon has this idea to make a brazen head that will "unfold strange doubts and aphorisms" and "compass England with a wall of brass." I think this is a magical item that will not only prophecy but will also protect England from invasion. Bacon makes a brave speech about his powers, much like the speech Prospero makes in The Tempest when he says he can "rift Jove's stout oak," etc. He makes people appear and disappear in a whirlwind like Faustus, and like Faustus, he seeks knowledge and to "strain out nigromancy to the deep."

So Margaret falls in love with Lacy, not with Ned. Ned finds out about this, and retaliates, through Friar Bacon's magic. He eventually realizes that they really love each other and gives her up to marry his royal bride, Eleanor of Castile. The delegation from Castile has brought a magician with them who has a magician duel with Friar Bungay, a friend of Bacon's. He bests Bungay, and then Bacon bests him without even trying. Lacy leaves Margaret who takes holy orders but then goes back to Lacy when he returns, saying that he was just testing her love (what is with all this love-testing?). Bacon's brazen head falls to pieces when Bacon's servant, Miles, does not wake him up in time to respond to its first words. Bacon renounces magic, and Miles decides quite cheerfully to go down to hell and become a tapster for the devils. He rides away on a devil's back, cracking jokes all the way. And Margaret and Lacy, and Ned and Eleanor, are married.

The obvious comparisons are between this play, Faustus, and The Tempest. All three magicians use their magic to spy on others, to create tricks and illusions to entertain others, and to manipulate others. All three get sunk so deep in study that they forget what is good for the world and those around them. All three experience a "come to Jesus" moment when they are called to renounce magic (and two do). Prospero doesn't deal with devils and his immortal soul is not at stake, but he lays down his staff and drowns his book all the same.

The comedy in this play is similar to the comedy in Faustus--merry servants trying to take on some of their master's reputation for themselves and failing. Even though Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo are funny lower-class characters, their comedy seems more funny and more sophisticated. Am I saying that because it's $hakespeare? I'm honestly not sure. Caliban himself seems a more interesting "servant" character than Rafe and Faustus's clowns, because he has such antipathy for his master, because the audience is allowed such sympathy for him, and because he's not entirely human. The clown scenes in FBAFB and Faustus seem driven by a dialogue of one-up-man-ship, each character making their line a punchline. I guess the struggle and conspiracy of the three clowns in The Tempest seems more motivated, more real, and that makes it funnier to me.

Friar Bacon has to duel another magician, Jacques Vandermast. Do Faustus and Prospero ever have to duel? Prospero sees the old witch Sycorax as his enemy but she is dead and we aren't sure they ever came into contact.

The White Devil

2012-01-14T15:48:00.001-06:00

I find that, the more plays I read, the more I'm able to focus in on what is important about that play--what makes it unique, what connects it to other stuff. Webster's The White Devil, though, is going to be hard. It's so like The Duchess of Malfi and yet not . . . I'm not sure yet what I think about it. Maybe writing will help.

I made a Wordle of the play. It took a long time because, after I made it the first time, I realized that I had to take out speech prefixes and stuff like that. I could still benefit by taking out some stuff but I really liked how the "ha" is inside the "oh". And this disproves something I thought--that "wolf" would be among the most used words in the play. It still may be important, though--it's in the first scene when Lodovico describes Fortune, and it is one of the most quoted lines of the play as Brachiano rages at Vittoria, saying that "woman to man is either a god or a wolf," either worshipped or a devourer.

This play has a lot in common with the Duchess of Malfi--a tragic female brought down by her unsanctioned sexual desires who faces trial by her peers with defiance and death with bravery, whose brother takes a greater interest in her sex life than strictly necessary. A trio of brothers-in-law take her and Brachiano, her noble lover, down. And the survivor of the bloodshed, the innocent young son and heir, has the last word in the play.

I am interested in how this play constructs itself and its characters as theatrical. There is the Isabella's performance in front of her brothers, of course, as the vengeful wronged wife (again withholding sex!) from her husband, when in actuality he is the one who has spurned her and said that they will never sleep together again. There is the dumb-show in which we see the separate murders of Isabella and Camillo through spirits or sorcery, I'm not sure. But the trial is as consciously theatrical as this, and more interesting for the meaning of the play. Vittoria, knowing that she's "on show," demands to be questioned and sentenced in plain language, not in Latin. She wants those listening to be able to understand the proceedings, probably to gain their sympathy. It begins to work, too; the ambassadors believe that the cardinal is "too bitter" in his attack on her.

Vittoria also shows an acute awareness of the way theater and public shows work. She says that the names of "Whore and Murderess" proceed from those charging her, not from herself, and refuses to accept their projection. She has a projection of her own--that of the staunchly innocent wrongly-accused--but she knows that people on stage often are subjected to the ideas of others, so she fights this. When she is taken from the courtroom to the house of convertites, she cries out histrionically "A rape! A rape!" framing this moment on her own terms, rather than letting those watching interpret it as a criminal being brought to justice.

Of course, the murders are significant, too, and theatrical in their own ways. I'm indebted to my friend Victoria for this idea, that the spouses, in the moment of their murder, are enacting normative spousal roles--Isabella, the chaste and dutiful wife, is poisoned by kissing the picture of her husband before bed. Camillo, the husband whose masculinity is threatened by rumors of his wife cuckolding him, is killed supposedly in the act of jumping a hurdle with a horse, the self-consciously showy act of a manly man.

And then there's Flamineo. I do not know what to do with this guy. He's a malcontent, a very Bosola, in some ways--except not as likeable. He's sort of whiny--"I was never rich enough, and now that I'm trying to advance myself in the world, I get caught!"--and heartless. He doesn't really like his sister or Brachiano that much but he helps them because he wants to help himself. And when it doesn't work out, he just sort of fumes about it and keeps making terrible plans. I like his name--he sort of flares up and flames out like his name.

There are some really interesting Hamlet resonances in this play, too--a ghost, a skull, a grief-maddened female singing and strewing flowers about. But I don't really have time to think about them too much. Onto the next play! I hope I get to come back to this one, though; Webster is good (when he's not writing comedy.)

edit: After listening to Emma Smith's lecture on this play, I see more Duchess correspondences. The male relatives are angry/vengeful because of a slight on their house (the Duke's unfaithfulness to, and murder of, Isabella; some "strong-thighed bargeman" "leaping" their sister the Duchess). For both, there is a challenge to posterity. If the Duke is sleeping around on Isabella, might he not raise some bastard child above Giovanni? If the Duchess is having an adulterous relationship, might she not raise bastards to inherit in her line, tainting her house's name?

Also, both Bosola and Flamineo act sort of as spies or go-betweens. I'm not sure if this is that significant, but I thought I'd add it.

Anything for a Quiet Life

2012-01-14T14:18:00.002-06:00

Another play that comments extensively on the woman question, this one written in 1621 by Middleton and Webster (of all people) borrows a lot from Dekker's The Patient Grissill and Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. It centers around three couples where the wives want to teach the husbands a lesson.

The first couple, the Cressinghams, are newlyweds. Sir Cressingham is old, landed, and dabbles in alchemy. His wife, Lady Cressingham, is young, beautiful, and demanding. She browbeats him (withholding sex) into giving up alchemy, gaming, and an old family manor so that she can use the money to buy some new property in London which will give them more revenue with rents. She is a canny businesswoman and once the deal is done, treats her husband like a child and gives him an allowance. She is also a harsh and unloving stepmother to his children, sending the two young ones away and selling the land that is to be the eldest son's inheritance.

In the end, though, it is discovered that she has reverse-Patient Grisel'd this guy, pretending to be harsh and demanding to get him to give up his bad habits, but actually willing to be guided by him. He gets his lands back and they are reconciled. I have to wonder, though, how true her repentance can be. She's willing to be guided by him, but only after she's guided him away from all the bad stuff in his life? It seems more likely that the repentance is a ploy to continue to gain her husband's and step-son's favor in the future.

The second couple, the Camlets, are housing Cressingham's younger children. The wife, Rachel, is upset at this. She is a loud, complaining woman who is certain that their two wards are actually bastards of Camlet's. She leaves him, swears to never sleep with him again, and only comes back when Camlet's resourceful employee George tricks her into believing that Camlet is going to divorce her and marry a new woman (echoes of Grisel again!). She comes back, penitent, and agrees to many demands, one of which is that she keep her voice low and doesn't use harsh words like "rogue" or "rascal." She agrees, and this is the play's tamed wife--tamed not by the husband, though, but by the tricky servant.

The third couple, the Knavebees, are playing out (with a different ending) the wittol subplot of Chaste Maid. Sib Knavesbee is beautiful and intelligent; her husband, though, is a dolt, a lawyer who asks a nobleman for a promotion. The nobleman, Sir Beaufort, agrees on the condition that he gets to sleep with Sib. Knavesbee is excited at this prospect, agrees, and tries to trick Sib into it by telling her that he has been unfaithful to their marriage (thus motivating or condoning her unfaithfulness?). He says a bunch of hilarious stuff, like after this bit of sex with Beaufort, that their relationship will begin again, fresh and new, and it will be like a totally faithful marriage.

Sib doesn't agree or disagree to the plot; instead, she gets angry at her impending prostitution and decides to trick both men. She tells Beaufort that she will sleep with him if she also gets to sleep with his page. He is upset and leaves. She then tells Knavebee that she slept with Beaufort and now, having slept with a knight, she is no longer interested in her husband sexually. Both men are repaid for trying to prostitute her out and, after threatening to kill himself, she and Knavesbee are reconciled.

I think it's interesting that a bit of with-holding sex enters into each plot here (as in Lysistrata and The Tamer Tamed). It doesn't work out so well for Rachel Camlet; this is, after all, a play for the masses and we must have a shrew-taming somewhere, right? Keep those women in their place? And while we can't be certain about Lady Cressingham's motives, at the end she is restored to a normative position within her hierarchical marriage. It seems like the play dramatizes a spectrum of spouse-taming tactics and effectiveness. As long as the marriage bed is kept pure (Camlet and Knavesbee) and there is enough money to go around (Cressingham), women are content to stay within the cage (to use Julia's term from The Patient Grissill) of marriage, even if that means being (or seeming) dutiful and quiet or, in Sib's situation, staying with an idiot wittol of a husband. Which dramatizes another point that Moll Cutpurse makes in The Roaring Girl about the fact that sometimes women, who are the fish to men's fishermen, are actually the fish consuming the male bait from a gilded hook. Women gots to get fed, and whether they do it by staying an unsatisfactory marriage or by taking other measures, it's not entirely true that they are being completely controlled by the system.

The Patient Grissill

2012-01-13T20:08:00.001-06:00

No bones about it--I really effing hate this play. It is the worst. THE WORST, I tell you.

It tells the old folk tale (retold by Chaucer) of a low-born woman named Grissel (or Grissill, or Griselda) who marries a nobleman. This guy loves her . . . ohhhh, he loves her soooo much . . . but he just can't shake the temptation to test her. So he tests her for obedience and loyalty. And boy, does she ever come through. He kicks her family back to their hovel, sends her there to join them, declares that he hates her, takes the children that she has borne him and tells her they're dead, and then 12 YEARS LATER tells her he's marrying again, a younger woman, and that she must be the new wife's bridesmaid. Only after Grissel comes through these tests with flying colors does the douch . . . sorry, the duke, ahem, finally tell her that he's only been testing her for over a decade, that the "new wife" is actually her daughter who is really alive, that he only loves Grissel, and that he's taking her back as his real wife, because she's proven that she's patient and obedient.

Now, up to the end, I can sort of get it. You get thrown out of your house, your all-powerful husband takes everything from you and you can't do anything about it, sure, there are SOME people in the world who would say, "What's the use complaining?", put on a happy/patient/constipated face, and keep gathering rocks or whatever it is you do for fun, when you're not doing your real job gathering dried cow turds for a living. And when he shows up 12 years later and says, "Hey, come do some demeaning work for me and my new wife because I like to humiliate you," you duck your head, say "Yes, gov'nuh" and get to scrubbing that new bidet or whatever, because honestly, he's a duke and will probably kill you and feed you to his prize hogs otherwise.

But THEN, when he says, "Just joking!" and "I really love you; let's be husband and wife again!" and you don't immediately paint your face like a Viking berserker and burn down his castle and then scrape up all the ashes and dump them in a slime-pit that you then use as a privy, you are just going too far. TOO FAR.

What made me doubly mad when reading this play was that somebody had written in it already, and had written stupid stuff like "good speech" and "nice plot" and even "Cinderella story." I started erasing this guy's (gotta be a guy) marginalia, which I never do because everyone deserves to have their experience of the book preserved, but after a while I stopped erasing it and started writing back. Under "Cinderella" I wrote, "Oh yes, she's so lucky," and under "duty" I wrote "dumbness." Whoever that reader was can go sit in the ashy slime-pit privy for a while.

And the detestable duke (actually the Marquis in this play) says that he "tride my Grissils patience when twas greene, like a young osier, and I moulded it like waxe to all impressions: married men that long to tame their wives must curbe them in, before they need a bridle, then they'll proove all Grissils full of patience, full of love." So he's even taking CREDIT for Grissel's patience, claiming that he moulded it.

There might be some counterpoint to the Grissel plot, however slight. The duke's sister, Julia, is very anti-marriage. Some gallants court her and she roundly rejects them all, citing marriage as a prison and Grissel's treatment in particular as loathsome. A comic Welsh character, Sir Owen ap Meredith, is courting a woman named Gwenthyan, who (rightly and Wife-of-Bath-ly) values honesty, virtue, love, and particularly having her own will in marriage. But in the end, Gwenthyan gives into Sir Owen, saying that she has only been testing him as the duke had tested Grissel, and that now "sir Owen shal be her head." Julia, who advises Sir Owen in his conduct with his wife to "weare a velvet hand, leaden eares, and no tongue" is advised by Gwenthyan (and urged by the gallants) to let go of her distaste for love and get married. The only capitulation is that Gwenthyan does end the speech saying "tis not fi[t] that poore womens should be kept alwaies under," though, and some nod is made towards Julia's life choices as well, as the duke says that Gwenthyan speaks for the "froward wives" and Julia for the "maides."

On the whole, though, this play is more rage-inducing than A Winter's Tale and that's saying something.

The Taming of the Shrew

2012-01-13T19:33:00.000-06:00

I'm saving most of my $hakespeare for last, but I read this on Monday to prepare for a class I'll be teaching at the Young Actors' Theatre in Tallahassee. On Jan 30, I'll start teaching a weekly class to sophomores, juniors, and seniors who are studying $hakespeare on Broadway. The juniors and seniors are looking at Kiss Me, Kate so Taming is the natural pairing with that.

The play begins inside a frame story in which Christopher Sly, a drunken beggar, is brought off the streets and tricked to believe that he is a lord. He begins watching a play in bed, and the play he watches is the story of Katharina and Petruchio. The Christopher Sly story interrupts the play once as we discover how Sly is enjoying his entertainment, but it never finishes--we never even see him turn back into a beggar. So, in one sense, the play is an extended interlude to another story, presented (and meant to be taken as?) mere entertainment.

And an interest in acting, in transformation, in playing a part, marks both stories. In the frame story, Sly goes from speaking in prose to verse when he "discovers" that he is a lord. The young boy actor plays at wifeliness, tricking Sly into believing that "she" is his wife. In the play's main plot, Petruchio plays at all kinds of tricks--slovenliness, irrational anger, calling the sun the moon, etc., to trick Katharina into performing her role as good wife. Lucentio plays a tutor, and Tranio plays Lucentio, the servant the master now just as with Sly and his new lordship. And of course the big question about the play is: Is Katharina truly transformed from a shrew into an obedient wife, or is she just playing along, giving Petruchio what he wants in an effort to maintain real control in the marriage? It's all about who's in control, and most often who is in control has to do with "seeming," rather than "being."

In addition to being about role-playing, marriage is about money. Petruchio comes to find a rich wife, and doesn't care at all about her other qualities; and once he marries her, she is his "goods . . . chattels . . . house . . . field. . . barn." And Minola promises Bianca to whomever can provide the largest dowry, even if it is old Gremio, the pantaloon. He cannot really promise, as he does, that whoever "can assure my daughter greatest dower shall have my Bianca's love," though, any more than Petruchio can promise that, if the money is enough, no faults will be so large as to "remove . . . Affection's edge in [him]." What does money actually have to do with love or affection? But on the flip side, who could not feign affection if offered a large enough sum of money? But the men don't seem to learn this lesson, and they gamble on their wives' obedience and affection in the end.

And the play is about learning. "O this learning, what a thing it is!" Gremio says. The daughters are brought tutors; their education is important to their father and their suitors. And Katharina is "schooled," so to speak, in wifely duty; tamed, to use the rampant animal (horse, falcon, shrew) metaphor employed in this and other works. But Bianca spends her time with her tutors (who are disguised lovers) putting up with their romantic advances; we don't actually see her learn any Latin or music. And Katharina's schooling is effective on the surface . . . or maybe, as my students hope to do, she has just learned how to fool her teacher. So is learning good in this play? Or is it another tool of deception, a way to trick, a way to transform surface but not substance?

Blah blah blah, is this play feminist or not? It is definitely about taming, but does the taming "take"? It is certainly misogynist, but that doesn't mean it necessarily takes the part of the patriarchy in the woman debate, as Linda Woodbridge notes. I see it more on a spectrum, leaning towards the anti-woman side but with a few "Sly" winks towards the woman side, winks that Fletcher expands to bawdy and obscene hand gestures in his response, The Tamer Tamed. (I think that metaphor got away from me at the end.)

Epicoene, or The Silent Woman

2012-01-12T15:48:00.001-06:00

The third Jonson play I've read, Epicoene is hilarious. I actually laughed out loud a few times when reading it. It is also strangely hard to get into. If I stopped reading for a moment to answer the phone or ask the Internet a question, I returned to it and it seemed like a different language; I just had to beat my brain against it until it let me back in.

These two characteristics might be connected. The plot is pretty complex, there are a lot of (very talkative) characters, and it repeatedly makes reference to really specific cultural "inside jokes," like the references to the College of women, which I'm still not sure I get. The resulting banter is funny, but you look away for a second and you get lost.

And, somewhat unfortunately, most of the humor is woman-bashing. In this play, women are assumed (and ultimately, proven) to be loud, over-talkative, ignorant, lascivious, and false (in the sense that their hair is false, their teeth are false, their faces are painted, etc.). The play begins with a discourse between two men on women's toilette habits. One of the men, Clerimont, despises "pieced beauty," preferring simplicity in dress and adornment (and, presumably, makeup). Truewit loves "good dressing" and would rather, if a woman has some physical imperfection, that she take any steps necessary to hide it.

Truewit maintains that women's art of adornment should be kept private, however, to maintain the illusion (on both sides) that it is natural beauty. But the play is itself an "outing" of fashion and feminine adornment. It describes many ways in which women might make themselves more beautiful and appealing--wearing perukes (little wigs), getting false eyebrows and teeth, painting their face to hide their complexion, getting their nails done, hiding bad breath by not talking unless eating, using oil, birdlime, asses' milk, and other strange concoctions for cleaning and purifying the face, wearing clothes in the latest fashion (which can change fortnightly) so that she can "come forth varied like Nature." Even Morose, the misanthropic rich uncle, can describe ladies' fashion in minutest detail: "that bodice, those sleeves, those skirts, this cut, that stitch, this embroidery, that lace, this wire, those knots, that ruff, those roses, this girdle, that fan, the tother scarf, these glove."

This preoccupation with the artifice of feminine beauty makes for the funniest part of the play, in which Otter rails against wives, who are "nasty, sluttish animals . . . scurvy clogdogdo[s],. . . very foresaid bear-whelp[s]" and against his wife in particular. He says her hair piece is "like a pound of hemp made up in shoe-threads," that every piece of her was made somewhere in town, and that, at bedtime, she takes herself apart like a German clock, and puts the pieces into boxes. His wife, of course, hears him, begins to beat him, and just when we think that she is going to get proper revenge, Morose, the master of the house, comes down the steps brandishing a great sword at her, at which she runs away screaming.

Very funny stuff. But very misogynistic.

As is the main thrust of the play, which is about Morose, who cannot abide noise, marrying who he thinks is a silent woman. Epicoene ends up neither silent, nor a woman, but the fact that Morose must specify that his wife be silent, above all other things, indicates a deep-seated distaste for female talk. The other women in the play are over-talkative and loud; they come to the wedding and end up drawing Epicoene into their circle, making her just as brash, opinionated, and verbose as they are. Morose is devastated when he realizes that his wife is talkative; he gets visibly depressed, at which she exclaims "You are not well, sir! You look very ill! Something has distempered you." Morose says, "Would not one of these have served?" to which Truewit replies, "these are but notes of female kindness, sir." The fact that Epicoene repeats herself, babbling in supposed care of him, is kind but is also female. Women can't shut up and they don't say anything worth saying.

Truewit himself later says that women "are governed by crude opinion, without reason or cause; they know not why they do anything; but as they are informed, believe, judge, praise, condemn, love, hate, and in emulation one of another, do all these things alike." Women are stupid.

It seems like the central thrust of all of this is containment, curbing something natural and undesired. The natural female form, with all its imperfections, must be hidden, painted over, pulled out, and corrected. The natural female voice should be (but, alas, cannot be) silenced, made still. Even though Morose, Jack Daw, La Foole, Otter, and even Truewit are the butt of jokes as often as the women, the jokes themselves seem to be about women and how naturally annoying they are, how much correction they need.

There is another passage that I find really fascinating--a discourse on courting women between the three principal gallants, Truewit, Dauphine, and Clerimont. Truewit is the true wit here; he knows how to court. He knows that a man must go where women are, must use force if necessary (rape? because women like it?), and must use various means to court various women. In other words, a man must seem to be something he is not, if it will please the woman he courts. Women want lies more than truth, I guess, to get them into bed.

In the end, Epicoene is not a woman but a young gentleman dressed up as a woman to gull Morose into making a bad marriage so that his nephew, Dauphine, can arrange to be his heir. I'm not sure yet what to make of this. I think, somehow, it ties into the falseness of femininity. A not-woman can pass as a woman if he takes part in all the false rituals of daily toilette, and of the falseness (to a man) of womanly speech. This play is very much about "seeming."

Theatre of the Book, 1480-1880

2012-01-09T11:03:00.000-06:00

In this volume, subtitled "Print, Text, and Performance in Europe," Julie Stone Peters performs an admirable and outrageous task--attempting to look at the ways in which the rise of print affects the stage . . . in Europe . . . over 400 years. Yup. As has been noted by basically every reviewer, this topic can be and has been broken down into much smaller segments and treated more thoroughly by other scholars.

However, it's a good intro to the topic if, like me, you have to know about it and don't have time to read every other book. And she sets the scene well: "In the late fifteenth century, half-improvised farce, costumed civic festivals, biblical stories enacted on platforms, the songs of court poets, and the dancing of mummers were confronted by print--by a drama conceived in the fixed and silent forms of the text." The basic struggle she goes on to outline is that between the art of theater--dynamic, personal, sensual, improvisatory, diffuse--and the medium of text--static, impersonal, visual, fixed, and authoritative. As print became ubiquitous, the book became an authority, something that actors, theatre architects, set and costume designers, and even playwrights themselves would refer back to. "Did I get that line wrong? Let's look back at the text." "Is this scene set wrong? Let's look at the diagram." "How is my gesture of grief? Do I look like this illustration?" "Is this a comedy or a tragedy? It has to fit into a genre."

The theater, in some ways, rebels against this controlling force by appealing to a popular, largely-illiterate viewing-and-hearing audience, by continually creating new genres and breaking old rules like the unities, by allowing for improvisation and embodiment, and by not being completely controllable.

But the relationship isn't as tug-and-pull as this brief summary indicates. As Peters notes, the professional theatre and print grew up together. Without a rebirth of interest in classical drama, made possible by the printing press, would vernacular drama have become so popular as a literary (and experiential) drama? Without drawings and illustrations of classical theatres, would early modern theatres have been conceived? Without playbills and posters, would those theatres have any customers?

This is another of those books that I might have to read in-full or at least in large part later on in the process.

Books (other than scholarly) I read in 2011

2012-01-07T21:16:00.001-06:00

Sometimes I need to remember that I love to read.

Here, in recognition of that fact, are as many as I can remember of the (non-scholarly) books I read (for the first time) in 2011:

The Magicians; The Magician King, Lev Grossman: These two books might be the best fantasy I read all year. Narnia, Harry Potter, eat your heart out. This is adult fantasy (and not in the just-off-Highway-11 way, either)
Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut: Loved it, really weird and good and redemptive; the last few scenes were amazing.
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut: It was good, but I liked Bluebeard better, honestly.
Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart: This book was hilarious and the main character pathetic, in all senses of that word.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald: I cannot believe I made it this far without reading this, but after reading it, I felt transcendent. This book deserves its place in the canon.
A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin: Meh. It was okay. The Bran parts were my favorite. I sort of liked where Daenerys' story ended up, too. Obviously I was going to read it, but it wasn't awesome by any means, and in parts it was sort of a slog.
The Wise Man's Fear, Patrick Rothfuss: Great followup to his first novel. Right up there with Grossman for best fantasy read of the year.
Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson: Engrossing, informative, but a bit confusing. I got bogged down so I didn't finish the series, but I probably will someday, since Stephenson is a literary genius and he wrote my favorite book in the entire world (which I am now reading for the third time, thankyouverymuch.)
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente: Super. Weird, satisfactory, a little twee but in a good way.
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente: Darker than the other, but still good. I felt a real desire to go to Russia after reading this book. Also, I was hungry. (She writes about food a lot.)
My Antonia, Willa Cather: I miss Nebraska. This book was good. Not as much of a revelation as the Great Gatsby, though.
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope: Good, sort of a cross between Eliot and Dickens. Not as emotional as the former or as hilarious as the latter, though.
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: Oh yeah. Read it twice. Not sure how to put my finger on the nature of this collaboration . . . is it more Pratchett or Gaiman? . . . they do it so seamlessly and it works so very well.
Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett: Very good, but this is one of those that doesn't stand alone as well as some others. I felt the need for more background. Oh well, time to Discworld in order, I guess!
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett: The first Pratchett book I've read that I felt was too long (and I've read like 10+ of them).
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon: Hilarious and dark. A great alternative history.
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman: Good but not as good as . . .
American Gods, Neil Gaiman: Really well-crafted, dark, and doing something that I have felt for a long time needs to be done for America.
Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff: Holy cow, this book was great and a real surprise. A contemporary literary novel with a real monster in it, and such a tender, delicate monster!
Towers of Midnight, Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan: I like Sanderson better than Jordan. This, like GRRM, is just one of those I had to read because it's finishing a series I'm invested in. However, these books have less art and more annoyances than GRRM, by a long shot. Sanderson does a good job of toning those down while still staying true to Jordan's vision. Finally! Wheel of Time is coming to a close!
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson: Wow. I so enjoyed this book. I do not, however, remember much of what I read. Bryson provides so many facts, theories, and anecdotes that, while I'm sure I'm smarter after reading it, I'm not sure how to prove that.

As you can see, my reading breaks down roughly: 70% SF/F, 20% classic literature, 10% stuff my boyfriend recommends. I expect that, once prelims are over, I will get back on that SF/F train again with the brick of a book, REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson. My friend Scott has floated the idea of me doing a podcast about literature, so I think I'm going to do one on sci-fi/fantasy where I undergo a (perhaps slightly less) rigorous reading schedule as if I'm reading for a SF/F prelims, reading both seminal primary and secondary works in the field, and then comment on what I've been reading in a weekly podcast.

Shakespeare In Print

2012-01-07T19:29:00.000-06:00

This is one of those books, like those by Taylor, Greenblatt, Dollimore, et al., that I will have to read in full later on, after I've finished the plays. Andrew Murphy here provides as concise a history as possible of both editing and publishing history of $hakespeare. He does not focus solely on editing or publishing because, as he said, some editions did not sell very well but still had a huge impact on the way we think about editing/$hakespeare; and some texts were not very well edited or unique in their approach, but sold so well and so ubiquitously that they made a huge dent in the history of $hakespeare as a saleable (and readable) commodity.

From what I can tell, Murphy breaks these processes down chronologically into broad-brush phases.

Phase One: Make $hakespeare famous. These editors/collectors, like Heminge and Condell, the collectors of the First Folio, were invested in getting the words of the bard out there, in increasing his fame as a great (the greatest?) English poet/playwright.

Phase Two: Make $hakespeare beautiful. His words are so inspiring, so let's highlight the good ones and emend the bad ones, as Alexander Pope did. Let's also make him elite, a property of the higher classes, the best educated.

Phase Three: Make $hakespeare accessible and popular. These editions were put out in cheaper form without much emendation or critical intervention. The job here is to bring the plays to the people. Everyone should be able to afford and own their own copy of a play, or all the plays, of the most famous (at this point) English writer.

Phase Four: Make $hakespeare understandable. As he gets more popular and less educated people read him, and as we travel in time away from his era, we need annotations, line numbering, act breaks, dramatis personae lists, to help the average reader make their way through the play.

Phase Five: Make $hakespeare scholarly. Here we need to add as many notes as possible to his works, drawing connections between his works and historical events, possible sources, other works of the time, critical viewpoints. Do we have an edition that includes all known versions yet? No? Let's make one.

Phase Six: Make $hakespeare original. Here the New Bibliographers are gaining/creating a sense of the historical process of writing/publishing, and terms like "foul papers" "promptbook" "quarto/Folio" are gaining credence. The idea here is to dig back through the layers of scribal/publisher/editorial intervention and get to the original text, the work in its purest, least adulterated form.

Phase Seven: Make $hakespeare dead. This is a joke, in the tradition of Barthes idea of the death of the author. In this schema, foul papers and bad quartos and prompter revisions are each a part of the process. There is no ideal or original work and $hakespeare himself is contigent upon the work of others and the process of production (theatrical and literary).

Phase Eight: Make $hakespeare digital. Not sure what this is about yet.

So, that's my broad-brush understanding of the book. As I read it in full, I will come back and emend this hastily drawn up blog, much as $hakespeare and other people in the process emended, revised, and changed the plays that have become a worldwide institution.

The Alchemist

2012-01-07T17:41:00.001-06:00

Ben Jonson does it again! Writes a play as strange and unique as anything I've read . . . well, okay, maybe not as ANYTHING I've read. Really, Bartholomew Fair was pretty weird. But this was still pretty different.

Three tricksters live in a house that's not theirs, conning people out of money and goods for alchemical and sexual services. Eventually, they are caught when the owner of the house comes back. Two run away, and one makes good by staying behind to help the owner with one last con that sets them both up pretty nicely.

This play really satirizes that old monkey, greed, with a healthy dose of Puritan satire and alchemical parody thrown in. The intro I read said that every victim of the conmen gets his or her moment of pity except for the two Puritans who are greedy, judgmental, and self-righteous to boot. There is some very funny business between Subtle and Ananias, as Ananias cannot resist correcting and chastising Subtle, who takes offense and threatens to undo the alchemical work at hand.

I worked on another alchemical parody once, Chaucer's "Canon's Yeoman's Tale" in which the Canon and his Yeoman attempt to pull alchemical cons, making people believe that they can make precious metals out of base, and failing. In that story, the canon possibly gets conned by another canon, and also runs away when he worries that the yeoman is going to turn him in and expose their tricks (which the yeoman does). The yeoman is the one who gets to stay behind and keep going on the pilgrimage with everyone, sort of the way Jeremy/Face gets to keep his position at the house instead of running away in shame like Subtle and Doll Common. I really enjoyed the way Jonson used alchemical terms in his play; the short dialogues between Subtle and Face as they were pretending to ready their "projection" were really great and convincing because they were so full of jargon that they sounded (as Surly notes) like "canting."

I guess if I had to compare this to anything else, it might be Volpone, which revolves around two tricksters and their greedy victims, all of whom get their comeuppance. That one seems less joyful, though, since this one has a sort of happy (and possibly redemptive) ending. Jeremy helps his employer and makes his apologies to the audience, while Volpone and Mosca never repent.

Bartholomew Fair

2012-01-07T10:12:00.001-06:00

This play by Jonson is straight-up bizarre. It starts off reading like Pirandello--the stage manager comes out and addresses the audience, telling them what to expect. "The play's not that bad, but the stupid author didn't take my advice . . ." and then a book-seller and a scrivener come in, interrupt the stage-manager and send him packing, and read mock-legal "Articles of Agreement" between the audience and the playwright, basically stating that if the audience does not like the play, they have bought the right to criticize it in proportion to how much they paid for their ticket.

After that, it gets more typical. And by more typical, I just mean, not completely avant-garde but still pretty unique from other plays of the period. It is set, largely, at a London fair. I wasn't sure how much of my fair experience to transpose onto the scenery, but I came in assuming it's dirty and chaotic, with a cast of dubious characters on the margins of society, food on the ground, lots of things to look at, people yelling about their wares/services, and crowds pushing past each other.

And I was right. The fair-people are weird, dirty, ugly, with their own language and mini-society. Food does play a large role in the play--it's the reason the Littlewit family goes to the fair, and Ursula the pig-seller is a "large" character, whose pig-stand becomes the scene of a lot of the action. People are excited about the fair for more than just the food, though, and Cokes can't stop looking around at (and buying) all the things people are selling. We hear hawkers pushing their wares and some petty violence occurs, too--pick-pocketing, and a shoving match that ends up scalding Ursula's leg. I haven't seen another play set in a fair, so this is an interesting window into a microcosm of London life that other plays don't show us, and it's kind of cool that it still matches up with fairs today.

But the play starts out feeling more like The Roaring Girl. It begins in the home of a citizen who dotes on his wife who is smarter than him; the Littlewits remind me of the Gallipots in that sense. Various other characters enter the scene, introduced (usually) one by one--a couple of gallants, a wealthy young gentleman and his betrothed . . . so far, very much the cast of characters we expect from a Middleton comedy.

But these characters are so strange. Bartholomew Cokes is a gentleman idiot, a character I'm more used to seeing in Restoration comedy. Wasp is a hilarious ball of anger, whose favorite saying is "Turd i' your teeth" and who is compared, in the introduction, to Donald Duck and other silent film comedians. Zeal-of-the-Land Busy is typically Puritan, down to his rhythmic and repetitious diction: "Now pig, it is a meat, and a meat that is nourishing . . . and so consequently eaten; it may be eaten; very exceedingly well eaten: but . . . as a Bartholomew pig, it cannot be eaten." He reminds me here of Falstaff (another character with a possible Puritan past), always spinning off of that last idea into the heights of rhetoric.

And Ursula--who is like Ursula? Is Moll Cutpurse like her? They are both large women, intimidating to men, with sharp and witty tongues, in touch with a sort of underworld. But Ursula is more obviously fat than Moll--or maybe her fatness is more grotesque than Moll's. She is angrier than Moll, too; Moll is capable of winning a battle of insults but she doesn't usually start it. She doesn't boss people around or threaten them the way Ursula threatens Mooncalf. And while Moll knows the thieves and pickpockets of London and can speak their jargon, she herself does not participate in criminal activity, which Ursula plainly does.

At the end, the two gallants get new wives, but I feel a little cheated. I didn't see it coming, really--didn't expect the gallants to be the protagonists who win out in the end and whose weddings we celebrate. My heart belongs to Littlewit and Bartholomew.

Dido, Queen of Carthage

2012-01-06T16:59:00.002-06:00

This play by Christopher Marlowe starts with the Olympian gods, which is something I had not seen yet in Elizabethan/Jacobean drama. Oh, Prospero has some goddesses traipsing around stage but they aren't really goddesses--they're spirits, tricked out like Iris, Ceres, and Juno. Oberon and Titania might be thought of as folk or nature deities, but they aren't gods in the proper sense, either; who sacrifices to Oberon? So here we have real gods and goddesses represented on stage.

We also have a very open and frank homosexual relationship between Jupiter and Ganymede. The Oberon/changeling boy relationship comes to mind except this is even more open. No beating around the bush or double entendres necessary--Jupiter and Ganymede are both dudes (although Ganymede is, in Venus's words, a "female wanton boy") who are into each other. Sexually. Is this okay because this is a mythological given, that Jupiter was hot for Ganymede? Was this transgressive in any way?

The play goes on very much as The Aeneid does, with Marlowe even using some of the same imagery to get his point across. It is easy to imagine a young Marlowe, still in school, writing this play as a scholarly exercise to show how good he is at Latin. The introduction I have says that his source is clearly the Latin, not any English translations. Marlowe's verse in this play is characterized by 10-syllable lines with end-stops, with very few run-on lines or feminine endings. He does occasionally throw in a 9-syllable line, though, and uses pauses for effect. The play also employs rhyme and alliteration: "and they so wrack'd and welter'd by the waves . . . Are ballassed with billows' watery weight."

The one new plot device that Marlowe throws into the story is the enlarged character of Iarbus, whose rivalry for Dido's love leads him to help Aeneas to leave Carthage, and whose crazed love of Dido leads him to kill himself. As in Midsummer and Romeo and Juliet, I see here another exposition on the theme of the madness and arbitrary nature of love. Dido falls for Aeneas because a goddess or two engineers it; it is not inherent to their characters or even fated, inasmuch as Fate differs from the handiwork of a deity. Her love leads her to such extremes as to kill herself. Iarbus' love, indiscriminate as Helena, Hermia, and Juliet, leads him to kill himself instead of choosing the equally-appropriate Anna as his love. And then, of course, Anna kills herself.

Connections to $hakespeare:

Shipwrecked people thrown up on a foreign shore, separated from each other, as in The Tempest.
A description of the sack of Troy, specifically the death of Priam and of Hecuba's rage/sadness, as the Player performs in Hamlet (some critics wonder if that speech was a "burlesque" of this speech).
Some confusion in Dido's first rejection of Iarbus that is reminiscent of Midsummer (and quite hilarious). She is under Cupid's spell and keeps vacillating about whether or not she wants Iarbus to come back.
There is also a description of a serpent "harbour'd in my bosom" that reminds me of Hermia's line in Midsummer when she wakes and Lysander is gone.
I'm not sure about specific Antony and Cleopatra connections but this story has always reminded me of that other story . . . both classical in origin, about a pair of dynamic, powerful lovers whose love overtakes everything, suicide ending. Cleopatra is very manipulative and Dido, near the end, becomes controlling and manipulative of Aeneas, taking his sail and tackle and hiding (who she thought was) his son from him. Also, both involve ships. Deep thoughts.

Connections to other Marlowe work:

A few echoes, usually directed towards Ascanius, of the song of the Passionate Shepherd, wherein older women (Venus, the Nurse) are trying to entice Ascanius to come along with them by promising him all kinds of good things.
There aren't a lot of powerful women in Marlowe's other famous work. Faustus has none (but does reference Helen of Troy); Tamburlaine has Zabina, the wife of Bajazeth, who bravely defies Tamburlaine and kills herself after her husband; and The Jew of Malta has his daughter who exerts power over her own life but not over the lives of others. This play has 3 really powerful, vengeful, individuated women. Favorite line is Venus talking to Juno: "But I will tear thy eyes fro forth they head, / and feast the birds with their blood-shotten balls" (3.2.35).
Now that I think about it, it seems like there is a tradition of women in Marlowe's work committing suicide . . . Zabina, Dido, and Anna, of course, but Barabas's daughter, Abigail, goes to a nunnery, killing her both her Jewish and her sexual identity.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2012-01-05T21:55:00.000-06:00

I read this play for about the seventh time and realized that I have nothing to say about this play because it doesn't surprise me anymore. Or maybe I have too much to say about it and don't know how to filter it down to what's important.

So I'll go ahead and compare it with Romeo and Juliet, a play written around the same time as Midsummer. Both seem to be "about" the madness of love, as it were; Midsummer has a comic resolution, and R&J a tragic. But in both plays the illogic of the lovers' choices and/or actions is made clear. Romeo is hasty and desperate; Juliet has no discretion, choosing Romeo over Paris. The lovers in Midsummer act hastily, escaping from Athens into the woods at night; and we have two male lovers who, for all intents and purposes, are the same person--the moody, dreaming lover.

In both plays there are themes of parental choice vs. personal choice in love. Romeo and Juliet cannot marry because of their feuding families; Juliet's father forces her to accept Paris, whom she does not love. Hermia and Lysander are forbidden to marry, because Egeus has already given his daughter's hand to Demetrius. In the play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe face almost the same problem as Romeo and Juliet, with similarly tragic consequences.

But both plays also seem to highlight the idea that accidents, or fate, can be just as powerful as human choice. In R&J, the lovers make Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C, scrapping each plan as new circumstances take shape. But despite all their planning (and all their conspirators helping them along the way), accidents line up so that they each needlessly commit suicide. In Midsummer, the lovers make their choices and swear up and down that they will have none other than their chosen love--and then fate, in the form of fairy king Oberon and his servant Puck, show how arbitrary and circumstantial those choices are as they trick Lysander and Demetrius into falling in love with the "other" woman (cf. Daileader). Titania undergoes an even more embarrassing magical transformation, falling in love with someone not only arbitrary but embarrassing.

It seems like the theme seems to be, in both plays, that love makes fools of us all. And love is a force of danger. Not only Romeo and Juliet, but also Paris, die for love in R&J; in Midsummer, tragic events are barely forestalled because Lysander and Demetrius definitely want to kill each other and Helena and Hermia fight it out as well. Hermia herself is under sentence of death from the beginning of the play as Athenian law stipulates that if she does not comply with her father's wish, she can be killed. And let's not forget the violence inherent in the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta: "I wooed thee with my sword and won thy love doing thee injuries" indeed! And when love goes wrong, as it has between Titania and Oberon, seasons, crops, weather patterns are affected--the entire natural world is under siege.

But in each play, love is also a restorative force. After Romeo and Juliet's deaths, the Capulets and the Montagues stop their vicious fighting. After the love-spells have worn off, each lover is with his or her appropriate beloved. Three nuptials are celebrated and a fourth, the reconciled Titania and Oberon, crown them all with fairy blessing that restores everything to the natural order. And this paradoxical nature of love--its destructive AND restorative powers--are referenced in both plays.

The fairy presence is also an interesting through-line. I'm not sure I really "get" Mercutio's entire Queen Mab speech. I see why it's interesting and I understand what he's saying, but I don't really know why it's there (unless as a way for good ol' $hakespeare to show off his versifying). But I heard some really cool Mab resonances in the description of Puck that is given; he is also known for creating mischief and illusions, for playing tricks on people.

Midsummer is a typical comedy in its multiplicity of plots, whereas R&J follows one plot. There is more low-class humor in Midsummer as well; the only lower-class citizen in R&J who seems fully integrated into the plot is the Nurse. She and Bottom have a lot in common, though; both garrulous story-tellers who are, in some ways, the "heart" of the play.

Finally, both plays employ lush love poetry and lots of rhyming dialogue. I'm partial to the poetry of Midsummer, though, because it is so full of flowers and plants and the moon. It is just lovely!

The Maltese Jew

2012-01-05T18:39:00.001-06:00

I'm not done with my secondary works yet; I have probably 10 or so more to go. But I am going to start working on the plays. And since I know Shakespeare best, Middleton second-best, and the others hardly at all, I'm starting with playwrights whose works I haven't read, so that when I need to speed through Lear again, I can.

Today I read The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe's Jew, Barabas, is much more central to the plot than Shylock, Shakespeare's famous Jew. The introduction said that Barabas is more sympathetic, too, but I'm not sure I agree. Barabas has a lot of Shylockian characteristics, only drawn more extreme. He loves his daughter more than Shylock loves Jessica; she is his partner in crime and in one scene, they have a sort of balcony-moment. He is yelling up to her to throw down the bags and there is a similar conflation of daughter/ducats in his line "Oh my girle, my gold, my fortune, my felicity" and later in "O girle, oh gold, oh beauty, oh my blisse." But at the same time he calls her "the Loadstarre of my life" which is pretty romantic-sounding.

But after she becomes a nun, Barabas not only wishes her dead, as Shylock wishes Jessica, but actually kills her with a poison. Barabas is more vengeful, more greedy, more conniving, more everything than Shylock. Here indeed is the Marlovian hero and even though he's a terrible person whose life goal is to thwart and hurt Christians, I find myself hoping that his shenanigans will work out--that he will be able to trick both the Governor and Calymath out of the ownership of Malta and that he'll spend the rest of his days diving, Scrooge McDuck-like, into giant piles of money--"infinite riches in a little roome." But more sympathetic than the beaten, wounded Shylock, forced to convert, whose lamentations for his daughter and his ducats are pitiful? I don't think so. Barabas scorns your sympathy; he goes down into the pit cursing everyone and assuring you that, even now, he doesn't regret a single thing.

Barabas's Jewishness is troubling. Although he later converts (is forced to), Shylock seems to have more loyalty to his tribe than Barabas. Barabas is always saying things like, "Some Jewes are wicked . . . am I to be tried for their transgression?" and screwing over his fellow Jews with false promises of help and protection. He seems to distance himself from Jewishness at the same time as he wears it as a badge "Rather had I a Jew be hated thus / than pittied in Christian poverty." I think he just really likes being disliked by people, so he takes on any identity that increases disdain and hatred.

If Barabas is a Marlovian hero, is he more like Faustus or Tamburlaine? It's hard for me to say, since I haven't read the end of Tamburlaine and I don't know how he dies. Barabas's death is a literal drop-into-hell (hell as the lower part of the theater under the trapdoor) and the analogue to Faustus is clear; on the other hand, Faustus wrestled with his conscience (and his fear) so openly and palpably, which feelings Barabas seems not to have.

Connections to Merchant of Venice:
Barabas, like Antonio, is a merchant whose fortune depends on trade and who waits for his vessels to come in laden with riches.
In the scene where Barabas loses his fortune, the Governor gives him a chance to lose only half of it, and when Barabas refuses and then recants, the Governor pulls the same sort of petty second-grade move that Portia does: "No, you already said you didn't want it, so you have to take the worst penalty now."

Connections to other Marlowe work:
Ithimore tells the Courtezan to "live with me and be my love."

Connections to other Renaissance literature:
The "Chorus" figure is named Machiavel, and although he does not appear again in the play, it would be interesting to figure out who usually played him and how this role was double-cast. Is it Ithimore, who seems to be as conniving as Barabas? Could it be Pilia-Borza? Also, it would be interesting to compare this play with other plays about more typical Machiavellian leaders, such as Henry V. Is Barabas really a Machiavel, or is he more of a malcontent like Bosola?

Questions:
Who is this Pilia-Borza chap? What's his deal? He seems pretty weird. Is he the Courtezan's pimp? Is he a dandy, or a ragged fellow? I can't tell, from descriptions of him, what he looks like or what kind of person he is (other than a thief).

A Theory of the Early English Printing Firm

2011-12-29T18:33:00.000-06:00

David R. Carlson discusses a new theory of William Caxton's printing work, beginning, not with his literary folios as many do, but with his jobbing. Explaining that jobbing was the way for a printer to start, and to maintain, some productivity, Carlson examines some of the extant pieces of Caxton's ephemera--a handbill advertising his own work, and an indulgence with blanks left for the purchaser's name. He considers briefly how the handbill reflects on and contributes to relations of production; it says "Don't pull this down" in Latin, using the innate authority of Latin to do the work of intimidating lower-classes from messing with it (reflecting on class struggle), while at the same time it is a piece of printing that is advertising for more printing (contributing to more production). In this moment, Caxton the printer was working for Caxton the publisher.

Ephemera were a good market for new printers; they were always being used and disposed of and people always needed more. But they were not using the productive capabilities of the new technology to the fullest, either. It has been assumed, Carlson says, that printing jobs was the potboiler for the real work, printing books, but he says it is probably the other way around: printing books on speculation was a way to make some money between jobs, which were paid up front.

Caxton also knew that the printing press was capable of more, so he tried to do more with it. However, he quickly learned that print could not compete with handmade books in the elite, literary, luxury book markets. So he learned to branch out and to create new markets of book-readers. He helped invent and exploit new markets for books, and to create new kinds of books. Caxton is partially responsible for Chaucer's title as the father of English literature; he began printing English literature which Continental printers were not doing much of. He also worked in ecclesiastical and legal markets, which always needed new books; the English legal market especially had idiosyncrasies that were not being served by Continental printers. He also helped to create a sense of need for individual devotional books rather than books owned by an institution and shared among its members.

Caxton was never as financially successful in printing as his protege, Wynkyn de Worde and his partner Pynson. But these men built on and expanded models that Caxton was already working with. Carlson theorizes that Caxton worked this way because of the productive capacity of the new technology, not because of some innate and sentimental love of English literature. As he says, "all this the machines decided" (61).

The Word Made Print

2011-12-29T18:04:00.001-06:00

In her article, "The Word Made Print: Luther's 1522 New Testament in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Jane Newman examines the paradox of scriptural authenticity in the early days of printing. While Luther (and others) were touting the need to rely on sola scriptura, the printing press made widespread dispersal and possession of a vernacular New Testament possible. In this way, everyone could rely on the words of the gospel for themselves and begin interpreting it themselves, which many church authorities did not like.

However, the same technology that made this possible also undermined it. Since it was so (relatively) easy to print a thousand copies of a vernacular New Testament, unauthorized translations were being created and disseminated, many with (no doubt) honest errors, and many with politically and religiously motivated differences from each other. This complicated the reassuring directive to rely on scripture alone; whose scripture should you rely on? How can you tell whose translation you're reading? If you can't, or aren't equipped to, compare different translations, how do you know if you're relying on words that were translated correctly? “For the public, however, it was difficult to distin- guish between authenticity and falsehood in printed Bibles, since all that they had in their hands was sola Scriptura, the text alone.”

Luther's New Testament is an interesting example of this. His name did not appear on any editions of his translation before the eighth. By then, his translation was such a big deal that it was being pirated by many printers and booksellers--and even other competing theologians went to great lengths to make their translations look like Luther's, so that people would buy theirs without knowing. Although he had a device created, "Luther's Rose," so that people would know it was an authorized copy of his translation they were buying, non-authorized translations were still printed and sold at a rate of 4 to 1.

Luther himself began to be frustrated with other's critiques of his work, as well. In one verse from Romans, he added the word "allein" (only) which was not in the original Greek and Latin versions from which he was translating. His excuse was that, like Paul speaking in koine Greek, he wanted to bring the Bible to people in common German, and given German grammar, this instance demanded the use of the word "allein"--otherwise (to paraphrase) it would sound funky to people and distance them from the text. He modeled himself after the apostle Paul, "a spiritual reproduction of the saint" that came about because of the literal printed reproductions of the New Testament.

The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text

2011-12-29T17:42:00.001-06:00

This article, by Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia, begins with the fact that, from the eighteenth century until 1986, there was only one version of King Lear. Now we have three versions and a collation. The same is true of Hamlet, of Romeo and Juliet, of Macbeth. What does this fracturing of the works of $hakespeare do to our conception of his corpus, of his authorial position? For many years in $hakespeare studies, editors looked for an "authentic," an "original," what Stallybrass and deGrazia call "the thing itself." However, we have finally given this up and are beginning to see a multiplicity of texts. But is this better? Is this progress? Or is this just another editorial practice that is steeped in the particular history of the time, that later generations will look back on and criticize from their vantage point, as we criticize the 18th century collations and bastardizations that brought us $hakespeare? And, whether this is progress or not, if we choose to represent multiplicities of text, how do we represent that on the page?

The authors consider four categories that affect our understanding of $hakespeare: the work, the word, the character, and the author. For each of these, they provide examples of ways in which the material multiplicity of the texts undermine what we think of as a unified whole.

As regards works, King Lear has not only multiple texts but multiple names; how do we identify it? Is it a history, a true chronicle, or a tragedy? What makes $hakespeare's version a different work from its source, which might bear the same name? How many textual variants between two documents merit reproduction of "different" editions? And what gives First Folio rights of authenticity, when other collected versions of Shakespeare were attempted or completed? Even the current First Folio facsimile, the ur-text for many scholars, is a facsimile of thirty compiled copies of that book, when it is likely that due to collating errors, printing corrections, etc., no two copies were identical.

As regards words, what do we make of words like "weyward" which might signify "wayward" or, in another spelling, "weyard," might signify "weird"? The current OED entry for "weird" gives "weyward" as an alternate spelling of this word, but the only instance it cites is this play. Was $hakespeare quoting his source, which uses "weird," or was he re-characterizing the three sister witches? If early modern readers/audience members might have heard "weyward" and registered both denotations, what does a modern editor do when the two words are no longer connotatively linked? "It is a semantic field and not a single word that needs to be retrieved," say Stallybrass and deGrazia--but how?

As regards character, character names were slippery, sometimes added to a script only after it was finished. Dramatis personae lists are irregular at best. Are we to regard $hakespeare's characterization, then, as Alexander Pope did (the first critic to read $hakespeare's plays with dramatis personae lists attached), remarking upon the unique individuation he gives the characters? I'm reminded of Tiffany Stern when she said that, sometimes, there is evidence that $hakespeare had a bit of poetry and just put it in the most convenient mouth, not really considering characterization that much.

And the author himself: I have made a big deal of writing his name $hakespeare, to remind myself that what I am discussing is not the man, but the (marketable) institution. These authors make the same point, noting that sometimes his name is not attached at all (7 of his first 8 plays are anonymous) but other times it seems attached to a play to lend the play authority and value. Furthermore, we have 37 different spellings of his name, and the one we currently use might be a printerly intervention. The long S and the lowercase k characters tended to break when put next to each other, so printers often separated them with a neutral character, - or e, giving us "Shak-speare" or "Shakespeare" or sometimes "Shake-speare." Finally, our notion of $hakespeare, whether as a never-blotting genius or a thoughtful, revising poet, tends to leave out the agency of other authors, with whom he collaborated often.

They end by remarking that paper itself--a bunch of rags cobbled together, beaten to a pulp, expressed as paper, absorbing ink--is a good analogy for what we think of as the works of $hakespeare, with their (sometimes surprising) humble and multifarious beginnings and their necessarily collaborative production.

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

2011-12-28T17:58:00.000-06:00

I know I'm probably supposed to love this book. It's a seminal work, comprehensive in scope, and about something I find really interesting. But the truth is, I hated this book. Reading it was terrible. And unfortunately, now I own a copy of it. Damn it.

Elizabeth Eisenstein makes the case that the impact of printing on "Western Christendom" (really? Are we still calling it Christendom in the 70's?) was colossal, a sea-change, and that it has gone unremarked upon by scholars. Practically every paragraph begins with some statement like "So few studies have really dedicated attention to X issue" or "Y issue deserves stronger emphasis" or "On Z issue, the existing scholarship is too restrictive." WE GET IT, Eisenstein; you're about to tell us something mind-blowing that we've never heard before.

But the frustrating thing is that she doesn't. No, it's not just that she doesn't tell me something new because, honestly, from where I sit in 2011, book history is a big deal and a lot of people pay attention to it . . . that I can get over because she was writing in 1979 and this book was filling a gap. It's that she never really states her point. She says, "we should consider the multiple ramifications of A and B," but doesn't say what they were! What were they, Eisenstein? What were they?

She does eventually get around to making her points, but her writing is so circular and timid that it is difficult to read all the way till she says her piece. Her basic points are that: printing was an enormous, overwhelming change and contemporary people noticed it; printing changed the way people thought, by making scribal innovations like indices, title pages, alphabetical order, etc., normative; printing "fixed" texts so that later editions are thought to be more authoritative and settled; printing "corrected" texts by making errors more visible to more eyes; printing contributed to an explosion of knowledge by making cross-referencing and broad, rather than deep, reading more widely available to scholars; printing contributed to literal revolutions (French, American) by getting people on the same page (pun intended) at the same time.

Adrian Johns, who argues with Eisenstein, tomorrow.

Renaissance Poetry

2011-12-28T17:27:00.000-06:00

I picked this book up at the library because they didn't have the one I wanted and this looked like a pretty good intro. It is, and it isn't. It isn't a good intro to Renaissance poetry per se, coming from someone who doesn't know much about it and really needs a book that uses broad strokes to characterize the works and critical approaches to the works. But the introduction itself is an excellent brush-up on some major critical perspectives.

The editor starts by comparing new historicism (which is new) to New Criticism (which is old). New Critics (Eliot, Leavis, Brooks, etc.) seek for paradox, ambiguity, complexity, and unity in the poems. Looking for timeless, universal meanings embedded in the technical effects of the poetry, the New Critics overlooked political, social, and historical contexts which might be just as formative as the individual literary genius, the author. This kind of reading stresses the autonomy of art, of language, and of the literary genius, from historical circumstances.

New historicists and cultural materialists see literature as part of culture, participating in larger cultural practices which are always historically inscribed. But these readings do not seek for "real" events or "true" history as much as they seek the ways in which literature springs from a historical and cultural need or impetus. Literature and history are seen as open to interpretation, and history is not static but dynamic, the result of a clash of ideologies or powers. Culture is "not made up of abstract values, intellectual ideas, or creative achievements, but rituals, experiences and habits which structure daily life according to prevailing social norms" (5). Major critics include Geertz, who focuses on how culture is a symbolic expression of status; Althusser, who focuses on how culture is the means by which the ruling class maintains dominance; Williams, who focuses on how the dominant energy is always in struggle with an emergent energy, which may use or be opposed by residual energies; and Foucault, who focuses on culture as a way to create 'subjects' and gain power.

Using these critics, we can look at aspects of early modern culture, such as the court and the role of poets and poetry in the court, as ways that individuals, classes, or ideologies gain and maintain power . . . and ways in which that power is subverted and resisted.

Feminism questions many of the self-congratulatory myths about the Renaissance, even the term "Renaissance" itself, as being white upper/middle-class male centered, noting that there was no explosion of knowledge and art for upper and middle-class women at this time, whose freedom was arguably more curtailed than that of the medieval lady. The editors discuss the "strategies used by male courtiers to control Elizabeth" and ways in which the Petrarchan language of the poetry of the Elizabethan court both bolstered and undermined Elizabeth's power. They also discuss the silencing nature of the blazon, which dissects a woman and does not allow her a voice.

The editor also summarizes psychoanalysis, race studies, and lesbian/gay studies before discussing the organization of the volume, which is larger Spenser-based but also considers the English lyric "in terms of the development of early modern subjectivity" (23).

Reading this confirmed in my mind that I would like to figure out "what kind of critic" I am. I am really interested in Raymond Williams' theories of dominance, emergence, and residual energies, especially as they relate to carnival. But how will I ever say anything new if using that rubric? And I don't know a lot about economics and so many new historicists come out of a foundation in Marxism, which I don't have. I also really like feminism, but again, I'm not sure I have the background to be a feminist scholar. A friend of mine and I were discussing the difference between being a feminist politically and in your career; I don't know that I am cut out for it, career-wise. I love performance criticism and feel the most comfortable there; it feels natural to me. But don't I need some sort of ideological framework?

Women (and Others)

2011-12-28T16:50:00.000-06:00

Celia Daileader opens the book Women and Others: Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Empire by discussing "the other woman," the woman who is not us, who is other-ed because she is like us (a woman) and unlike us (an unwelcome third). She is our competitor, our rival, sometimes our enemy. She is the anti-mother, whose destructive sexuality sets her apart from Angel in the House womanhood while at the same time encapsulating everything that is frightening and Other in a patriarchal society. Is she a whole (a whole person, with all her parts), or a hole (only one of the parts, or a lack of a part)?

Daileader points out that often the other women is other-ed racially, as well: "in the heyday of American slavery, the (white) wife's sexual "rival" was likely to be a woman of color" (4). In Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, there are two love objects--the innocent, lovely, fair young man, and the sexual dark lady who disrupts the relationship between the speaker and the young man. Traditional values of dark and light apply here, and are often applied between women to distinguish them from one another. White privilege is often constructed in literature by "aligning beauty, virtue, high rank, and white skin" (5), or, in the case of Oronooko, by giving him all the characteristics of white beauty without the whiteness (his Roman nose, his thin lips, his bright eyes).

The connection with Oroonoko is made here when Daileader points out that Behn, a woman, creates a black heroine, Imoinda, as beautiful and virtuous as any white heroine in "a rare moment of interracial woman-to-woman identification" (6). She references Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's writings as being especially indicative of an openness to racial (and moral) otherness in her descriptions of and reactions to Turkish women she encounters. This ties into Daileader's initial question: how can women speak for/as each other, or can we only speak for/as ourselves?

Her answer is that, to encourage change, we may try to speak for others. But we must also listen, and cultivate other ways to listen. And we might look to other literatures--literatures that tell stories outside of white, middle-class, nuclear family America--for "emancipatory potential".

Radical Tragedy

2011-12-25T12:20:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Dollimore's book Radical Tragedy looks amazing. I am excited to read the whole thing, as I am with Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Tiffany Stern's Shakespeare in Parts and Andrew Gurr's Playgoing and Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare. So many good books, so many introductions read and chapters left undiscovered. I think I can finish most of my reviews of books by Jan 5, though, and have the rest of January to read plays and articles and book-chapters.

Dollimore's introduction itself is a really great introduction to new historicism. Arguing against any view of literature as autonomous (something I'll get to later on), Dollimore sees Jacobean tragedy as created by and commenting upon the political and social realities of the era, an era characterized by the failure of the monarchy, the decline of the aristocracy, the rise in the gentry . . . ultimately, lowered confidence in existing authorities and sense of need for change in church and government. He compares this to Raymond William's idea of "a problem of order" and John Fekete's concept of "a telos of harmonic integration," only, instead of retreating from chaos and grasping at order as many modern artists and writers do/did, the Jacobean dramatists "confronted and articulated that crisis, indeed . . . actually helped precipitate it" (5).

He rejects the idea that $hakespeare and other authors bought into the "Elizabethan World Picture," an ideology founded on order and hierarchy. But he also rejects the idea that they rejected it wholesale. He argues, rather, that they disclosed ideology as misrepresentation from within, by dramatizing it and exposing its contradictions. He provides a really concise description of the ways in which Renaissance authors (often skeptics, whether politically or intellectually) discussed and understood ideology. Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montaigne, even John Calvin, show a sophisticated understanding of an Althusserian definition of ideology, although they may refer to it as "custom" or "manners."

And time and again, Jacobean tragedians represent skepticism about ideology: they worry about cosmic decay, they destabilize ideas and representations of divine providence, they dramatize societies being destroyed from within. These dramatists do not denounce religious or political structures outright; they subvert them. Dollimore gives the example of the masque/anti-masque tradition, in which the elements of chaos and social destruction are staged (the anti-masque) and then overcome by elements of orthodox belief in order and hierarchy (the masque). Often the king himself would take part in the masque as the representative of Authority or God on earth, making all things right. Dollimore says, "The court masque was clearly an ideological legitimization of the power structure, as was the preliminary anti-masque" (27). But what about in The Revenger's Tragedy when the antimasque comes after the masque, superceding it and overturning all the order it provided? According to Dollimore, this is an example of Jacobean tragedy's radical possibilities, showing the court as "ineradicably corrupt" and rupturing "the aesthetic front which mystified its violent appropriation of power" from within.

What I am really looking forward to about this book is that the chapters are focused tightly on different plays and they are all really short.

Renaissance Self-Fashioning

2011-12-21T18:46:00.000-06:00

Stephen Greenblatt's book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare discusses the early-modern desire to manipulate or "fashion" the self using six important Englishmen from 1500-1600: Thomas More, William Tyndale, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. The work of self-fashioning might be internal (trying to better one's own nature) or external (trying to control the image of one that others see); it is always, though, a struggle between shaping and mastering one's own destiny, and having that identity shaped and mastered by cultural and social forces.

Greenblatt pairs these six figures off opposition to each other, with a third party as the reiteration or suspension of the tension created between the two. For instance, More and Tyndale are in conflict, with Wyatt as the transformation of that conflict. The conflict between Spenser and Marlowe takes shape in Shakespeare. The third party does not reconcile the conflict; rather, they are shaped by the "historical pressure" of the conflict of the other two.

The act of self-fashioning, Greenblatt argues, always takes place between an authority (or the shadow of an authority) and an alien, an Other, which represents chaos and disruption of the power of the authority. The identity achieved from this encounter has, within itself, the seeds of its own destruction, loss, or subversion.

More's self-fashioning is testified to in many accounts of More and in his own writings. He is interested in the idea of guises, of playing a part in order to gain power, and in allowing authority figures, such as kings, to believe they have ultimate power. He recognizes the fiction that is ultimate power but also recognizes that men go along with it even while they do not believe in it: "men must sometime for the manner sake not be aknowen what they know" (13). And as a primary counsellor to Henry VIII, he accomplished this for years, creating a character 'More' that Henry relied on. At the same time, his character in Utopia, Rafael Hythloday, rejects the idea of pandering to authority or tip-toeing around a king and More himself ultimately rejects it as he cannot give up his allegiance to the Catholic church and sign the Oath of Supremacy. Was this in response to a true self or was this More acting in accordance with the "More" character he had created? At any rate, this act was his undoing. Greenblatt characterizes these opposing forces as "self-fashioning and self-cancellation."

Tyndale represents an acquiescence to the absolute power, God, as opposed to More's allegiance to the king and the church. God in Tyndale's case, though, is represented by the Book, capital B. This book is both the English Bible (Tyndale's translation) and his book, The Obedience of a Christian Man. This second book is something unlike anything we've seen yet in English literature; it is personal, confessional, internal, while yet being a manual for Christian behavior and thought. And it is here, in the locus of the Book, that the self-fashioning takes place. It is internal and external at the same time; Tyndale remakes himself after Christ's model while also putting this work on display in order to inspire the same kind of self-fashioning in believing readers.

Wyatt is something else entirely, and I'm not really clear on how he's the third term in the opposition between Tyndale and More. Greenblatt focuses most closely on Wyatt's translations of the penitential psalms (David's confessional poems in the Old Testment) and his court poetry, especially his translation of "Whoso List to Hunt". Wyatt's writing, although it recycles stale tropes, is fresh and new because of how "internal" and heartfelt it seems. Greenblatt's main point is that he is not More, not completely controlled by court and church, nor is he Tyndale, given over to the Word entirely. He manages to negotiate political and sexual struggles at court without being absorbed into a court-identity. He is a diplomat, a skilled translator (of language and experience), who attempts to conceal his criticism of the court but whose pain is palpable. Greenblatt styles him as a master of "calculated recklessness" (139). Perhaps the thesis is that Wyatt, who is dependent on secular power in ways that More and Tyndale were not, uses "realism . . . and inwardness" in his writing to dominate in the court.

Even though I haven't gotten to the dramatic part of the book yet, I see a real connection between this discussion and one of Barish's prejudicial attitudes he discusses--the concern about how much it is a) possible, and b) moral, to change or shape one's own identity. If it isn't permissible to shave a beard, the idea of fashioning a self, an internal or external identity, must be extremely disconcerting to many.

Anti-Theatrical Prejudice

2011-12-20T19:51:00.000-06:00

Jonas Barish's book Anti-Theatrical Prejudice discusses the history of anti-theatrical prejudice dating from ancient Greece until the current day. He introduces the topic by discussing all the negative epithets from theater that have made their way into our discourse: melodramatic, stagey, putting on an act, making a scene, making a spectacle, and, of course, theatrical. I wrote a paper on this subject, specifically Seventh-day Adventist prejudice against the theater, when I was a freshman in college so I was somewhat familiar with most of the arguments. I'll just list them, because that's what the book is about.

Plato:

Poets/actors/painters are "sophists," making counterfeits that look like (but are not) truth.
Drama stirs up our feelings to subvert our judgment.
Imitation is formative, so we must not imitate things that we do not want to become.
Justice and right government involve citizens knowing their place. Any crossing of identity boundaries, even imaginary, can jeopardize this.
Art is slippery; it cannot be put under exact measurements or controls; it is not to be trusted.

Classical Rome:

Actors were foreigners, slaves, and prostitutes.
Entertaining made one ridiculous (ars ludicra).
The dissolution and extravagance of Rome was demeaning to Rome; theater was part of this.

Early Christianity:

Players and mimers might mime sacraments or holy people, thus devaluing religion.
Theater was, like gladiatorial events and beast shows, a decadent extravagance that eroded morality.
Theater aims to provoke frenzy.
Changing our appearance or our names or anything else is a lie against God and blasphemy to think that we can improve on God's work: ourselves (this extends to shaving, exercising, and wearing high heels).
The Lord permits emotion but not wallowing in emotion for its own sake.

Early Lollards:

Although in the medieval period most drama was church-sanctioned, a minority spoke out against miracle and mystery plays.
God hates laughter. Christ never laughed. Amusement is a sin.
When men weep at a story, it is not real so their tears are worthless.
When people see a Bible play enacted on stage and they know it is false, they will be persuaded to believe that the Bible story itself is false as well.

Puritans:

The Catholic church rituals partake of aspects of theater: spectacle, rehearsed lines, costuming.
Playgoing brings one into contact with all kinds of other low entertainments: gambling, bear-baiting, prostitution.
Theater involves cross-dressing, which is not only a lie against a man's identity, but is also proscribed in the Bible. It encourages effeminacy.
Acting is based on hypocrisy and lies.
Theater implies that God's own work has fallen short, if we need fictions and costumes to be satisfied.
If something is true, it is unchangeable; it does not change its appearance and identity at will (Proteanism). To change is to fall.
The early modern theater took people away from work.

Jonson:

Theater-goers are a low sort, uneducated. They either come to be seen in fine dress, or to laugh at dumb shows. They cannot appreciate real poetry.
Theater is impermanent. The experience of going to a play passes away; unlike a painting or a sculpture, it does not last.
Actors on stage are not simple and sincere; you cannot trust their bombast.

The rest of the book goes on with that stuff, but I thought I'd focus on the anti-theatrical feeling up to the early modern period.

Puritanism and Theatre

2011-12-20T17:36:00.001-06:00

Margot Heinemann wrote Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts, a book which largely seeks to align Middleton with what she terms "Puritan Parliamentarianism." She argues that Middleton's plays are part of "opposition drama," a movement in later Jacobean theatre that was anti-establishment, anti-Laudian, anti-aristocratic. She attempts to reconcile the plays of his early career (satirical comedy) to those of his mid- and late career (tragi-comedy and tragedy, respectively) by seeking out a through-line motivated by religion and politics. She also asks how A Game at Chess could have possibly been approved by the censor and produced on stage when it was so obviously a satire on contemporary royal policy.

Her first chapter, "Time and Place," is great; a short and pithy introduction to the economic and political situations of the day and drama's place within them. Her second chapter covers, and dismantles, the traditional assumption that all Puritans were militant anti-theatricalists. The remaining chapters on Middleton discuss his plays, grouping them chronologically and connecting them to major themes and issues taken up by opposition drama, such as Popery, the hopeless state of the poor, the excess of the rich. Hengist, King of Kent seems to show, through the lens of a long-ago British history, the dangers of King James' dalliance with the Spanish, as well as the current wool over-production and how this affects the farmers and peasants.

I was not very convinced, though, by a chapter entitled "How Anti-Puritan are Middleton's City Comedies?" in which her major argument seems to be, When Middleton is making fun of Puritans, he is actually just making fun of all hypocrites, not Puritans especially. One of the reviews I read took her to task for that as well. Her book is also working on the assumption that Middleton is definitely Puritan, a view which Heller disagrees with. Finally, she disputes the authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy.

Animal Characters

2011-12-13T16:43:00.002-06:00

Bruce Boehrer's book Animal Characters deals with, you guessed it, how animals are characterized in the early modern period. By doing this, he also deals with the notion of human character, positing that animal characters in early modern literature were a way of creating and developing distinctions between humans and animals.

He begins by discussing what a "character" is. Are characters, as Elizabeth Fowler says, "social persons" with overlapping "legal, civic, corporate, economic, kinship, and literary" identities? Are characters basic types representative of certain virtues, vices, traits, etc., as Aristotle might class them--a catalogue of observations about a certain type of object or creature? Can animals only be characters inasmuch as they remind us of humans? Or are animals denied "characterhood" altogether because, as Descartes would say, they cannot think and have "no mental powers whatsoever"--no memory, no agency, no reason.

These questions might be applied to the distinction between human and animal, as well; what makes humans humans, and not merely an animal called homo sapiens. According to Boehrer, these questions of character, and the ensuing ways in which character is used and portrayed in literature, are answers to these questions. As he traces it, the history of character began to privilege interiority in the 18th century, an interiority which we know that we as individuals possess, which we have substantial evidence that other humans possess, and which we have very few clues as to whether animals possess it. Around the same time, animals lost subjectivity in literature and, instead of being admired, began to be degraded.

Boehrer uses a pre-Cartesian (pre-cogito, pre-interiority) model of literary character and proceeds to create character studies for several different animals. The hauler: the horse, which signals backward to feudal and chivalric associations, the knight, the warrior, the Hotspur, and forwards to the man of leisure, the "effete ninny" that has the disposable wealth to keep a horse for hunting and riding, the French dauphin who writes sonnets to his horse. Or, if we read Milton, the horses that pull the chariots of God, beings spiritual in nature and utterly un-animal.

The companion: the parrot, which reminds us of rich people trading in on the exotic nature of their pet only to receive its connotations of parroting and empty-headedness (especially associated with Catholic elite and clergy, and "the mindlessness of prayer in ancient languages and set forms" (20).) Or the cat, also associated with Catholicism in the practice of cat-torture, because cats were believed to be agents of the devil. This practice continued in Protestantism, not because cats were associated with demonic forces anymore but merely to underline the superstition and stupidity of Catholics.

The food: the turkey, a New World bird who takes the place of the large roasting fowl at the grand banquet, but whose ease of breeding and cheap cost eventually makes it available for lower-class people as well. And the sheep, who is associated with Christ, with saved Christians, with the pastoral mode, and with "emergent literatures of animal husbandry and georgic nationalism" (21), and, of course, discourses about Lent and abstinence (as we see in Middleton's Chaste Maid).

A review by Kent Steel is here.

I wonder where we are today, especially as the Internet culture adores animals, especially animals doing human things. What does this mean? Is this a step backwards, condescending towards animals and only granting them worth when they act like us, or forwards, towards allowing them rights, subjectivity, a place in society?

Performance Criticism 101

2011-12-11T16:29:00.001-06:00

The first article I ever read on performance criticism was in L.M. Pittman's class at Andrews University. She assigned us to read a chapter from W.B. Worthen's Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, a book which I still don't totally understand, but which I understand very differently today than I did then.

Worthen questions the idea of authority as something that any text or performance can have. How can any edition or production of $hakespeare be authoritative, be derived from the author? We might question the relevance of the modern author's presence to their works today; how much more so $hakespeare, who is, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, "demmed elusive"? Which is more authoritative, the written word or the enacted performance? For literary scholars, we see the meanings latent in the page and the stage as only a vehicle for expressing those meanings; for performers, we see the stage as the ultimate, animating reason for the writing. However, if we go back to Barthes, we question the meaning of the word "work" at all; he prefers the word "text" with its sense of intertextuality, a field of meaning, of playfulness of production.

But Worthen also questions text. What is a text? How do we know what Shakespeare's text was? He reminds me of Tiffany Stern when he says that "the conditions of production in the Renaissance playhouse militate against the final ascription of an ideal, coherent work to a single animating author" (8). He goes to editorial practice for his analogy to performance, reminding us (along with Gary Taylor) that any text (edited, produced) must be judged against its "proximity to [its] chosen goal" and its proximity to the goal of the reader/critic (17). Both are specific versions of a work in which a variety of possibilities of meaning are chosen and produced. For Worthen, the text produces the work as much as the production produces the work. Reading or acting are both acts of production.

In his final chapter on performance criticism and authority, Worthen begins with a rather depressing quote from G.W. Knight which suggests that performance criticism cannot do very much, because it is limited to a particular performance which can only have limited meanings and which "exhausts the play's 'dramatic quality' at the moment that the text is staged" (151). It becomes a meaningless enterprise which can offer neither the depth and range of textual criticism nor the immediacy of performance. So what should we, as critics, do, then? He goes over several works of performance criticism but doesn't really say what we should be doing, except for his last statement:

"Allowing Shakespeare such authority, we reify Shakespearean drama--and the past, the tradition it represents--as sacred text, as silent hieroglyphics we can only scan, interpret, struggle to decode. We impoverish, in other words, the work of our own performances, and the work of the plays in our making of the world" (191).

I need to read this book more thoroughly and deeply. This is why I don't really understand it. But it makes me ask myself what kind of critic I want to be. It asks me to look at my motives; was I hard on that production last night because it didn't live up to my idea of "Shakespeare"? I don't think so; I was hard on it because it wasn't coherent or, to my feminist sensibilities, very ethical. But this is why I write Shakespeare "$hakespeare"--to remind myself that he's not a he, he's not a body of work, he's an institution which many people are vitally invested in maintaining.

Time to Angst-Out and Vomit Some Feelings on the Internet

2011-12-11T15:06:00.001-06:00

Alrighty, I've been blogging (and reading) steadily for a week now, and I want to talk about what's going on in my head. I'm reticent to over-share because I don't want to be judged by anyone who might read this blog. The speed at which I'm working, the way I'm working, the ultimate and intermediate deadlines I've set myself--all of these might open me up to judgment from invisible academic readers, my friends, my colleagues, my professors past and present. But by golly, I'm not even sure anyone except for my mom is reading this blog (and even she only skims, because, in her words, my blog used to be "much more interesting," which is true, thanks Mom), and I am so tired and messed-up that I need to write it out.

My written prelims are February 13, 14, and 15th. I take my orals on the 29th. For those of you unfamiliar with the jargon, "prelims" means my preliminary exams, a huge test I take after reading a book-list that is so long and daunting that it's sort of unbelievable. I have had since May to be reading for this test. From May to December, I underwent a program, long-tested by students of all stripes, of learning by osmosis. I tried to surround myself with fun and easy learning opportunities--listening to Stephen Greenblatt on audio book, downloading $hakespeare plays on iTunes, going to conferences and performances, watching The Tudors. I would like to respectfully ask my past-self, What the hell was your problem?

My excuse was, I was doing a lot of stuff that was educational. Presenting at two conferences, preparing to teach (and then teaching) a new class in the fall, going to a 3-week workshop on performing Shakespeare, directing and performing in a play. Also I moved. And my car got smashed, so I had to buy a new one. And there was grocery shopping and working out and socializing with my friends who, you know, won't be around forever because I'm not always going to be a grad student surrounded by like-minded people my own age, etc.

But now I'm actually doing it, I'm actually preparing for an exam that is about 2 months away, and I'm terrified and I feel like crying every day. My plan, which I've been told by some people is crazy and by other people that it will totally work and I'll be fine, is as follows: read and blog on 2 theoretical books a day until the end of December. This should give me a strong familiarity with all the secondary material. In January, I'll read and blog on one play a day, and maybe catch up on some articles related to the plays, or articles I had to skip in December. Then, for the first two weeks of February, I'll review, make notes, make charts, re-read my blog summaries, and sit and wait for the axe to fall.

One of the problems, though, is that I'm not really "reading" 2 books a day. I'm reading reviews of books, the introductory and closing chapters, and perhaps skimming especially pertinent chapters. Which means I get the thesis of each author's book but none of their examples. And although I am trying to save some books to read more thoroughly later on, especially the edited collections, I'm worried that I won't remember everything I skipped and meant to read later.

Reasons why it won't be so bad:
1) They want us to pass. Of course. It would be dumb if they didn't.
2) I'm really smart.
3) I read really fast.
4) I remember really well.
5) Each day I will be presented with several questions to choose from, so I can skip the scary ones and then prep them for the defense.
6) I'm really smart?

Reasons why I'm terrified:
1) Everyone else is smarter than me.
2) When I talk about what I'm doing, people seem worried.
3) I'm directing a play next semester, too. (I respectfully ask my future-self, WTF?!?!?)
4) My professors are going to think I'm an idiot and not even qualified to be in grad school.
5) There's supposed to be a "bad cop" in every defense, and I am very sensitive and might get scared and cry in front of them, like I almost did in the Fulbright interview.

Things I need to remember:
1) Acknowledge when I don't know something.
2) Make it a conversation.
3) Play to my skills.
4) Whatever, man. The worst that can happen is I don't pass. That might seem like the Doom of Moria, but it's not.

Humanism and Emotion in Tudor Drama

2011-12-11T14:30:00.000-06:00

In his book Theater and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century, Kent Cartwright corrects what he sees as an omission in the prevailing scholarship about the Tudor dramatists. Early 20th century scholarship read these plays as highly classical in influence and academic in nature, full of "neo-Aristotelian poetics, humanist rhetoric, and literary formalism" (3). Later scholars such as David Bevington, Robert Weimann, and Alan Dessen, argue that early Tudor plays to those of the University Wits are permeated by references to popular English morality and folk drama. While their studies have been helpful, even crucial, to an understanding of the drama of this time, Cartwright takes issue with an unhelpful dichotomy they seem to draw, which places the values of "popularity," "life and vitality," "humor and freedom" squarely with the morality, mystery, and folk plays, and the values of literariness, elitism, rigidity, and dullness with humanist drama.

Cartwright studies plays from the More-circle playwrights (Medwall, Rastell, Heywood, Redford), to the school plays written and performed by students, to the University Wits like Greene, Lyly, and Marlowe. He establishes that humanist plays are full of lively dramaturgy, audience engagement, and moving emotion. "Like popular theatre, humanist plays redound with an exploratory interest in acting, human physicality, material existence, and spectacle" (18). He takes issue with an idea of a humanist "essentialism" and "idealism," claiming that the humanist plays use the tension between knowledge and experience to introduce dynamism and doubt, not rigidity, into drama. "Drama tests the scripted and the felt, the conceived and the experienced, against each other . . . early plays, moreover, repeat sententia that their characters' fortunes may or may not confirm" (17).

His first chapter points to an interesting "actor's choice" moment that makes the Heywood play The Foure PP very enigmatic to a reader. The second chapter discusses the emotional capacity in Redford's Wit and Science, arguing that in it, "a student's progress in humanist education is like that of the morality hero toward salvation" (21). The third chapter posits an empathetic reaction from the audience towards Hodge, the protagonist of Gammer Gurton's Needle. This engagement of the emotions is not found in the play's obvious classical influences of Terence and Plautus. Other chapters draw connections between popular and humanist plays in the ways they use suspense; explore plays with female characters, arguing that these plays portray a range of female values promoted by Tudor humanists; and end with chapters on Lyly's Gallathea, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and Greene's intertextual Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.

The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies

2011-12-11T11:56:00.000-06:00

This book, edited by Dympna Callaghan, attempts to find a middle ground between "revisionist" and "exclusionist" feminisms. The introductory essay by Callaghan herself poses the rite of marriage as a place that both revisionists and exclusionists could claim for themselves. The revisionists might claim marriage as a site in early modern culture where (most) women exercise choice and agency, where their cultural performance and action is a prerequisite for the existence and continuance of a "ritual on which the social order is founded" (2). The exclusionists might, rightly, remind us that "marriage is an institution not much associated with women's emancipation," a tool of the patriarchy that was often blunt and brutal.

Callaghan appreciates the fact that revisionists take a more comprehensive view of culture, allowing for women's roles in cultural performance where past scholarship has only focused on their absence in theatrical and literary performance. She takes issue, however, with the fact that revisionists are "oblivious to, or in denial about, the structural inequities in early modern . . . patriarchy" (6). A marriage of revisionism and exclusionism, or, as Callaghan calls it, a post-revisionist feminism, might create a more "nuanced picture of women's simultaneous participation in and exclusion from early modern culture" (7).
By taking into account the ways in which women participate in culture on multiple (and sometimes invisible) levels, by acknowledging that women as well as men have a stake in the patriarchy as the system which organizes not only their lives but also their world, and by integrating feminist scholarship with other modes of knowledge-making, this edition attempts to pioneer post-revisionist feminism.

Essays:

Jonathan Gil Harris: This essay reclaims "material culture" scholarship, with its focus on objects and bodies, by engaging it with poststructuralism and Marxism. He makes connections between academics writing about the early modern female body and the authors of écriture feminine in the 1970's who "insist on a diachronic, dynamic conception of bodily materiality" that is missing from current "material culture" scholarship.

Heather Hirschfeld: This essay uses Freud to discuss misogyny in revenge tragedy, a genre which, Hirshfeld argues, necessitates "a spectacle of specifically female penitence" (17).

Sasha Roberts: This essay discusses the ways in which feminism and formalism might have common ground. Women writers, especially those of miscellanies, included misogynist tracts in their books, countered by a range of writing on women.

R.S. White: This essay looks at the way current cultural appropriations of Ophelia (as a victim of the patriarchy, as a woman with specific mental pathologies) represent a "botching" (a mending, patching) of the play for today's culture.

Jean Howard: This essay looks at the genre of city comedy as one more amenable to feminism; since tragedy and history have so few women characters, more "domestic" genres such as city comedy helps us re-chart the position of women in early modern period and then re-read tragedy and history through that lens. She looks at the terms "wife," "maid," and "whore" in brothel comedies and how these terms are not mutually exclusive or permanent.

Kate Chedzgoy: Women's lives were transformed by shifting of local and national boundaries; how did women deal with dislocation from one area to another?

Kimberly Anne Coles: Sometimes women writers write like women writers not because they are "essentially" feminine but because femininity is a performance that they might gain something from, as in the case of Amelia Lanyer writing specifically proto-feminist poetry in order to distinguish herself from male poets competing for the same patron.

Pamela Allen Brown: An essay about the indeterminability of a woman's pregnancy in a painting, and how we attribute certain sexual/gender stereotypes to her.

Patricia Parker: This essay argues that Shrew is about humanist arts and learning, and that Bianca may not be the perfect submissive daughter/wife all along that we have assumed, but that her mastery of music may indicate a mastery that Katherine is denied.

Frances E. Dolan: The lack of female ghosts in revenge plays may indicate the invisibility of the "specter of Catholicism" during the early modern period, an invisibility which we are beginning to see through as we see Catholics everywhere.

Deanne Williams: An article about Frances Yates, anti-feminist scholar, and intersections between her life and her scholarship on Elizabeth I which, despite her personal politics, is more amenable to feminist agendas than the remarks of Virginia Woolf, an actual feminist.

Natasha Korda: An essay about the ways in which women contributed to the economy of the theater.

Jennifer Panek: Widows remarried because they wanted to have sex. Really. But maybe not for the reasons early modern propaganda assumes they want to have sex.

Grace Ioppolo: A study of Penelope Rich's letters to QEI and Robert Cecil.

Gail Kern Paster: Sometimes women cry because of hormones. We are uncomfortable acknowledging this fact. Biology has been demonized in feminism.

Henry Five by Five

2011-12-10T22:47:00.001-06:00

Tonight, three friends and I saw a senior thesis production of Henry V with an all-female cast. We were really excited to see it; we are English department academics who enjoy theater, love $hakespeare, and are interested in feminist-gender issues. And, in many ways, it didn't disappoint; several of the actresses were very good and no one was terrible; the script was cut heavily but it worked (with a few exceptions that made me sputter incomprehensibly); the aesthetic was provocative and interesting; and, the real thing theater has to do, the story done got told.

But the production as a whole just bizarre. Now, I like bizarre. One of my favorite productions of all time was a pretty BDSM version of The Duchess of Malfi. I enjoy people doing weird and wacky with theater; the medium not only allows, but also calls for it, so bring it on! But that production's aesthetic was clearly motivated by the text, and by issues of characterization and theme that the text brings up. This production's aesthetic, while a lot of care went into it, did not seem motivated.

The actresses were most costumed in black and grey, with color accents to denote what group (blue French, purple English, pink pub crowd, green enlisted soldiers) the character belonged to. Boots, fake tattoos, and metallic accents like chains and studs also dominated the English, who were supposed to appear "hard," I think. The French wore ripped tights, lace, bows, and sparkly stuff, even going so far as to put glittery love-marks on some of their faces. Bras and bra-straps, corsets, hotpants, and other typically feminine garments were highlighted. In short, the costumes were sexy and aggressive; most characters looked like Punk Barbies. The music went along with this--girl rock like "I Kissed a Girl," "Hollaback Girl," "Girls (Who Rule the World)."

But the direction (in general) didn't seem to want to touch any of the issues that this casting/costuming brings up--fetish culture, sexual objectification, homosexual relationships, etc. They just went ahead as if it was a normal Henry V. Nobody even kissed on the mouth which, c'mon, if you're going to go ahead and pander to titillation by costuming someone in lycra pants and a studded patent leather brassiere, at least make them kiss!

So, all of that was pretty weird. And then came the Battle of Agg-in-court. At which point, I stopped taking notes because all I was doing was staring with my mouth open, scribbling circles on the page.

The Battle of Agincourt (pronounced "Ah-zhin-koo-ur") is the major plot element of Henry V. It's when King Harry leads his men, exhausted, scared, outnumbered 3-1 by the French, to a resounding victory and conquers France. Yippee! (Sort of.) (If you overlook a bunch of stuff, like the ethics of conquering and Harry's dubious position on the English throne anyways and also what's all that stuff about giving God the glory for a bloody battle in which tons of people died?)

This battle of Agincourt was basically a dance-fight. Think strip club-meets-Fight Club, women down on their hands and knees snarling at each other, cat-walk cat-fight. The music began loudly and suddenly, and the entire cast was out on the floor, the English and French dance-killing each other with their dance-kicks and dance-punches and deadly grande jetés. (Which gives "Sweet moves, Napoleon!" a new double meaning.)

Now the dancing was cool. I freely admit that. It was fun to watch. And I can imagine a couple of ways in which this could have been more integrated into the theme of the play. If their costumes had been a little less blatantly stripper-ish, and the acting had created a stark divide between a female-dominated civil society and the unleashed aggression on the battlefield (I guess here I'm envisioning bland, sneering, icy cold women who transform into animals and Amazons); or, I guess, if Henry V had been set in two warring dance-studios. But as it was, it was distracting and unreal.

The one time where the dance fight started to win me over, I admit, was when Henry has defeated a circle of French enemies who then crawl over to her and begin to grasp her clothing and drag her down; that was pretty evocative.

I think the biggest problem I had with this production was that, while the aesthetic was defined, a clear and recognizable concept wasn't. This play, which deals with issues of betrayal, nation-making, leadership, masculine aggression, and class, does not have many women in it. Most of the play occurs in very gendered spaces--the king's throne-room, the battlefield. Casting only women brings up a whole host of issues that could make some interesting stage-time, such as:

Do women in leadership roles use similar leadership strategies as men?
How do women display and enact aggression and violence? (Like cats? Really?)
Do female soldiers create "band of brothers" bonds like male soldiers are supposed to do? What would a "band of sisters" bond look like?
What does our culture tell us about how women act when they are betrayed, or when they betray? (The somewhat gendered word "backstabber" comes to mind.)
How does a woman court another woman? Does that add to the awkwardness between Harry and Kate at all? Could that be why Kate is reticent to kiss Harry?

I had a ton of other quibbles, too, like why the hell would you cut out all references to St. Crispin's Day in the most famous speech in the play which is known as the St. Crispin's Day speech, and yet leave references to Welsh leeks and other things that are equally irrelevant and generally unknown to modern society? Can't you just trust that, if your actors are good enough to sell the leek fight between Fluellen and Pistol, that Harry will be good enough to sell St. Crispin's Day?

One thing I gained from this production, though, was a discovery. The boy! The boy might be the moral center of this play that is so morally uncentered. And what a fabulous boy she was . . .

*My title is a reference to Faith, a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The actresses in this production were dressed sort of like her, and "five by five" is her favorite thing to say.

The Woman Question

2011-12-08T16:04:00.001-06:00

If I could travel 27 years back in time, I would tell Linda Woodbridge, "You go, girl." Because that's when her book Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 was published. I was three years old. Weird.

This book provides context on the woman question, the age-old real-life and literary debate on the nature of womankind. Woodbridge works on several well-established assumptions. First, the formal debate about womankind is an actual genre with identifiable generic conventions, a genre strongly influenced by Agrippa and Castiglione. The essays foster a sense of genuine debate, drawing on oration and dialogue as forms; they argue a thesis with the help of logic and rhetoric; they address Woman in general, not specific women; they do, however, use exempla from classical and Biblical sources. Woodbridge argues that the works that fall into this category, however, do not necessarily mirror their authors' actual views on womankind. They were merely rhetorical exercises on a topic of sustained interest (like abortion and weed to our Freshman English students today). Just because a student decides to write a persuasive essay on abortion, does not mean that that particular student has actually had any contact with abortion in his or her real life (the same cannot always be said of weed, however). "There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest any connection with real life at all" (17). Finally, she believes that attacks on the nature of womankind were responses to defenses of womankind, and that the attacks are actually more in line with modern feminism than the defenses (which often followed a Patient Grissel line of reasoning).

There are, however, many works of literature that deal with the "woman question" that are not part of the formal genre, many of which do bear "a considerably clearer relationship to contemporary reality" (6). Many of these arose from the Hic Mulier/Haec Vir controversy over transvestitism in women beginning in the 1570's. This controversy was also linked with foppishness in men; both trends brought to mind the androgyne or the hermaphrodite, a fraught image in Renaissance society. For some, the hermaphrodite represented perfect unity, the "essential oneness of the sexes" (140). For others, the hermaphrodite became a symbol of effeminacy, impotence, and a lowering of human nature. Many times the hermaphrodite was linked to the monstrous. Woodbridge establishes these published arguments in relation to real-life events and people, and establishes later canonical Renaissance literature as having a similar relation. In these works, laudatory and satiric, women have power over men; "the quality of Renaissance misogyny was itself a tribute to the sturdiness of Renaissance women" (268).

She also discusses the stage misogynist, a stock character who is comic in nature and who hates women. This character has links to Vice characters from secular morality plays and the soldier who returns in peacetime to find that his warlike nature is inappropriate for civil society. He may hate women because he has been spurned by one particular woman. And he is generally unreliable as a narrative voice; we don't believe him because we know he's partial, and because we often see him proven wrong. Benedick falls in love. Bosola learns to admire the Duchess of Malfi. Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia was uncalled-for. This character may represent a distrust of civilian society in general, whose values are "hermaphroditic"; it may represent the adolescent fears of sex and becoming an adult. As Woodbridge says, out of the three dozen she examines, not one exists "whose misogynistic pronouncements are not undercut by context or deflated by humor" (297).

She ends her book by discussing the paradoxical nature of the woman question (Madonna/whore), of Renaissance views of women ("grafting female-dominated courtly love upon male-dominated marriage"), and of the Renaissance itself, a hermaphroditic age. This last bit gave me the most to think about, although the whole was delightful. Perhaps if I have to teach an "intro to the Renaissance" course, I will focus it around the idea of paradox and the image of the hermaphrodite.

Milton and the Sinful Nature of Metaphor

2011-12-08T11:46:00.000-06:00

Stanley Fish's book Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost claims that Milton's poem alternately seduces and chastises the reader, thus "surprising" the reader with a discovery of their own sinful proclivities. The Satan character is so persuasive and attractive that the reader is lulled into admiring him, and then chastised by the epic voice which reminds us that Satan is a rebel whose "vaunting" we should not heed. We then go back and read Satan again, noticing this time not only the masterful rhetoric that drew us in but also the slippages in logic and truth that denote him "the father of lies." Paradise Lost, Fish says, is not only about Christian heroes but it also creates Christian heroes out of the imperfect readers who, then, become the perfect readers.

Fish argues that Milton values logic over rhetoric, which is why the Satan character is passionately rhetorical, while God is coldly logical: "Rhetoric is the verbal equivalent of fleshly lures that seek to enthral us and divert our thoughts from Heaven, the reflection of our own cupidinous desires, while logic comes from God and speaks to that part of us which retains his image." We can see Adam and Eve's fall into sin as their language becomes more redundant, equivocal, and metaphoric, while the language of Heaven is supposedly pure and perfect in which each word only refers to one referent.

A lot of people disagree with Fish because he takes such an outrageous stance, trying to redeem the poem from its flaws and blaming the reader instead. A really detailed (and thus really long) review of the book is here, written by an academic who self-publishes on his website and appears to be an Empson fan. Empson, by the way, took the opposite tack as Fish and said, "If you praise Paradise Lost as the neo-Christians do, what you are getting from it is evil."

I love Milton, and I love Paradise Lost, but I don't know yet if I would go so far as Empson or so far as Fish. Lucky for me, I don't have to make that decision; I can just enjoy the poem.

Making $hakespeare, Chapters 1-4

2011-12-07T19:34:00.000-06:00

Tiffany Stern's book Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page is awesome. I love it. I'm having a hard time stopping myself reading it to blog. But blog I must, so . . . here goes.

Her book, which discusses the process of and the influences on production of Shakespeare's plays, from the circumstantial (the size, shape, and location of playhouses, the actors in the company for which he wrote), to the authorial (the process of writing, revising, co-authoring, adapting, etc.), to the commercial (scribes and printing houses). She situates herself in a really interesting critical location in her prologue. The "stage-to-page" methodology she's using comes out of the new historicist school with its interest in textual indeterminacy (what is the text?, in both philosophical and practical senses) and de-centering the author (who is the author?, ditto); it also comes out of the established school of theater history and the more recent but just as militant school of book history. All of this stuff, by the way, I completely love and just go all nerdy-melty for, so I could tell that this book, from the very Prologue, is perfect for me.

A lot of stuff in here I already knew, but I'll just sketch out what the chapters are about. "Text, Playhouse, and London" begins by imagining the various approaches to the theater district in Bankside; across the Thames with the waterboatmen, or across the London Bridge, or, to the Blackfriars, through the Ludgate. These approaches and their sights, sounds, and smells would have been fresh in the eyes, ears, and noses of audience members; Stern traces references to and resonances with these locales in the plays. She also explores the ways in which the large, round, open-air theaters and the smaller, rectilinear, indoor theaters affected the plays; after the move to the Blackfriars, Shakespeare doesn't write plays that demand huge battles and booming cannons or drums, but more static plays that work with the "aesthetic of fixed things, painting, sculpture, stately dance, tableaux . . . "(32).

"Additions, Emendations, and Revisions" makes the point, first, that, contrary to Heminges and Condell, Shakespeare did revise his plays, marking out lines, etc. We can still see echoes of revision when there are repeated speeches, or speeches with nearly repeated lines; when there seem to be two endings, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream; when a character learns some information, but then later, seems not to know the same information anymore, as in Julius Caesar. Shakespeare seems to write in blocks, in chunks, that might later be moved around, given to different characters, used in different plays, or left out entirely, a hallmark of "a culture that works with commonplace books" (42). Differences between quartos, or a quarto and a folio version, may also indicate revision, which might have happened because a specific actor left, a specific audience member got pissed off at a reference that hit too close to home, a political change, or a change in censorship practice. It may indicate a difference in characterization, as in Othello when, in the folio version, Othello reacts more measuredly and with more self-control at Iago's allegations. And, as we know to be the case with our boy Middleton, revision may have occurred posthumously as another playwright adapts an earlier play.

"Rehearsal, Performance, and Plays" discusses all the ways in which a specific company of actors might influence a play's creation or revision. Preparing a production in this time had to happen very quickly, with little time for intense, method-acting reflection. There were no directors. Each actor was responsible for his part (literally, handed on a piece of paper, was his part with cue lines, not the whole play). Actors were often typecast: the senex (doddering old man), the king, the rebel, the romantic lady, the lover, the fool, much like actors today always play the hilarious and perpetually single best friend, or the miraculous aged black person. If an actor left, died, or fundamentally changed (as when boy's high voices lowered), parts that were written for him might be given to a different character entirely or future roles for a similar "type" might change, as the fool roles did when Will Kemp left and Robert Armin took over. Plays often gestured towards each other, as actors in new roles made references to past roles they played. Acting was also more formulaic than today; a set catalogue of gestures signified "the passions" (the major emotions, seven or more of which had been identified and codified). Certain tones of voice signified verse or prose.

On the whole, this is an extremely readable book full of a bunch of stuff I already knew, in theory. What makes it shine are the details, the anecdotes. Traitors par-boiled, pitch-blackened faces on pikes along London Bridge may have been in mind when audience members saw an actor, face blackened, play Othello. Shakespearean heroes compared themselves to baited bears beset by hungry dogs, calling to mind the imagery of the bear-gardens. While we care a great deal about characterization, Shakespeare may at times have been using a character as a mouthpiece for a particular piece of verse, and not really cared about which character said it, as in Romeo and the Friar. Italian names in non-Italian plays might indicate that Shakespeare originally set that play in Italy--or, as Stern says, that "Shakespeare thought that everywhere abroad was a version of Italy" (52). Middleton might have written the iconic "Double, double, toil and trouble" line of the witches in Macbeth. She writes some hilarious anecdotes about Richard Burbage, one where he gets propositioned by an audience member only to find that, when he shows up for the assignation, Shakespeare has got there ahead of him. Another where Burbage, as Hamlet, adds moans, groans, and other sounds after he's already said "The rest is silence" which, when I did it myself, created quite a funny effect.

So I didn't get through 2 books today, but I may still get to Surprised by Sin and if I don't, Stern was worth not being surprised by sin, I guess.

Stage, Stake, and Scaffold

2011-12-06T16:07:00.000-06:00

In his book, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare's Theatre, Andreas Höfele explores the ways in which the early modern theatre, bear-garden (and site of other animal blood-sports such as bull-baiting and lion-fighting), and public execution scaffold exchange meaning, imagery, performative process, and emotional resonance by calling upon a common "semantic field." He argues that this exhange informs the way $hakespeare constructs and explores the "nature and workings of humanness."

We must first understand the connection between the playhouse and the bear-garden. Physically, they shared similarities--a round, open-air viewing space surrounded by seats on scaffolding. They also shared geography--bear-gardens and playhouses were in the same district and sometimes the same building performed both functions. Practically, they served a similar purpose--paid, trained entertainment.

We must also understand the connection between the playhouse and the executioner's scaffold--sites of ritualized public activity which provided the protagonist/antagonist an opportunity for a last glorious speech in front of the eyes of the watching crowd.

But what is the connection between the bear-garden and the stake? First of all, Höfele says, "corporal punishment itself entails an element of animalization" (9). The convict is reduced to a certain level of animality; it is the flesh that is ultimately being punished, not the soul or spirit. Public executions also involved "ceremonies of humiliation" like whipping or pillorying which highlight the convict's sub-human status. The bear-garden spectacle might have brought to mind the many-against-one nature of punishment; as Höfele says, "the bear would have been perceived as the more human-like creature, yet it fell to the dogs to execute the violent impulses of the human audience" (10).

He contends that the similarity between the theatre, stake, and scaffold created a well of common, easily-recognizable, and "powerfully affective images and meanings" from which a playwright could draw. And, although bestial imagery was often used to denote someone lower on a social or moral hierarchy, this was not always or even usually the case. He says that, through a process of "seeing double," one can see the animal image overlaid on the human, or vice versa, and analogize between animal and human. In the Renaissance, human nature was the object of intense scrutiny and deciding what a human was like and unlike was one way in which a person might negotiate the boundary of human/inhuman, even within one human subject such as Richard III or Bottom.

Furthermore, the term "animal" is not used often, although multiple kinds of animal creatures are mentioned with regularity in $hakespeare's works, an observation which undermines a Cartesian dualism of animal/human. "Pre-Cartesian man is animal, but never just animal," he says.

Important quotes:

"Each of the three forms of spectacular performativity confers on the others its affective energies, its capacity for signification" (13).
"This uniquely priveleged being [the human] is always in danger of lapsing from human to beast" (27).
"Shakespeare's zoomorphic blendings open up larger spaces of inclusion beyond the narrowly circumscribed 'borders of the human'" (38).
"There is a much greater variety of possible roles and zoomorphic blendings than merely those that register a downward mobility on a normative social and/or moral scale" (39).
"What is designated as 'animal,' 'brute,' or 'bestial' in Shakespeare's culture . . . is a sphere beyond the reach of rational control and discursive order, no less strange and unfathomable than the so-called supernatural, but perhaps even more uncanny because it is closer to us" (51).

Connections:

I think it's interesting that I don't feel the need to create a "human" label for this post, even though it is just as much about defining human as animal. "Human" is the understood, the privileged, therefore the invisible, category.

Höfele says that "the conclusion of Macbeth kills and removes the bestial tyrant even it refuses to oust the beast" (67). I wonder what this understanding of a beast as a bad person, a tyrant, a "monster" would do to my paper about Moll Cutpurse as an "untameable monster" in The Roaring Girl.

Subversion and Containment

2011-12-06T13:38:00.000-06:00

In his essay, "Invisible Bullets," Stephen Greenblatt tests a theory of political (and theatrical) power, namely, that a system of power will both create and contain the seeds to its own destruction.

It's sort of Derridean in nature--instead of language that both signifies meaning and undermines meaning, we have systems of control that both enact power and undermine power. My tendency here is to begin spouting off words like "hegemony" and "social coercion" (and really, I'm well on my way by using "Derridean") but I'm going to try, instead, to summarize simply to make sure that I really understand what the hell I'm talking about.

Greenblatt begins by explaining the "totalizing" nature of Elizabethan England--that the queen was seen to have total control of the well-being of the nation and its subjects, and that God was seen to have to have total control of all, the queen included. Questioning these assumptions was either treason or atheism, and sometimes both. But such questioning wasn't impossible, especially if one had read Machiavelli, who challenges the absolute nature of both political and religious power. Politicians were not divinely ordained or naturally gifted with leadership; they were swift, cunning, and ruthless manipulators of image and word. Actually vulnerable in countless ways, they represented themselves as all-powerful and their subjects (most of them) accepted this idea (most of it) and believed it (most of the time).

According to Machiavelli, religion works the same way. By claiming all power and ultimate truthiness, and manipulating images and events to reflect these claims, religion gains control over the masses. Marx claimed this too, later on.

So, Greenblatt uses Thomas Harriot's 1588 book about the English colonists experiences with the Algonquin Indians in America, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia to come up with a way that systems create and contain subversive energies. Harriot's report discusses in detail the ways in which the Algonquins understood the newcomers (as gods, as representatives of God, as bearers of technology which was miraculous, as harbingers of disaster which was divinely ordained) and the ways in which the colonists turned those understandings to their own benefit and to increase their own power. Harriot does not make explicit the ways in which this encounter between two civilizations brings into question the assumptions of total power that the Elizabethans had been working on. Greenblatt, though, reads the report as an account of a "test" of Machiavellian theories of power, one which exposes the fact that the absolute power of the queen and of God are contingent upon tricks and deliberate misunderstandings of phenomena. He systematizes this test into three phases: testing, recording, and explaining.

All of this is to work up to a reading of the Chronicles of Prince Hal--$hakespeare's 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. These plays, Greenblatt says, show Prince Hal creating and managing his power out of the very elements that threaten to undermine it--"glorified . . .theft," betrayal, and violence. These elements put Hal on the throne, through the theft of Richard II's throne by Hal's father Bolingbroke; through Hal's betrayal of his friends Bardolph and Pistol and his most adoring (and adored, by us) friend Falstaff; through Hal's counterfeiting of a new glorious kingly self out of the dross of the old drinking, wenching self; and through Hal's allowed violence towards his own low-life citizens ("food for powder") and enacted violence towards the armies of France on the fields of Agincourt.

Each of these elements, subversive because they illustrate how Hal's power is not merited or ordained, but constructed and manipulated, is contained by an interpretation in which Hal is a good guy. As for Richard II, Bolingbroke took the throne because the people willed it; and besides, Hal has reinterred the corpse and paid five hundred poor to pray for Richard's soul twice daily. As for betraying his friends, the king of England could no longer act the fool anymore by wasting his time and money with thieves; besides, he had to show justice to everyone and not favoritism to criminals who happened to be old cronies. As for counterfeiting his new self, isn't everything a performance? Is there really a "true self" anyways? And as for the violence at Agincourt, God willed it and God saved the day for the righteous, deserving English.

Greenblatt doesn't provide examples of testing in these plays--perhaps the plays themselves are tests--but he discusses how the alien voices of the oppressed and subversive are recorded in the plays: in the characters of Falstaff, Pistol, and Bardolph; in the tapster Francis with his repeated "Anon"; in the "discarded unjust servingmen, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters, and ostlers trade-fall'n" who serves as cannon-fodder to quell the rebellion against Bolingbroke; in the deliberately grotesque portrayals of Welsh Fluellen, Irish Macmorris, and Scottish Jamy; and in the voices of the soon-to-be-conquered French. These voices, and the individual experiences they represent, call out like the voices of the dead, implicity rebuking Hal and the Bolingbroke claim to power.

He also provides examples of explaining in the plays: Hal's declaration that he will "falsify men's hopes" by proving better than his word; his stated intention to be a "sworn brother to a leash of drawers" who will, when he is king, "command all the good lads in Eastcheap"; Warwick's assurance to Henry IV that Hal studies his companions only to turn them into "a pattern" to reject later; Hal's insistence to himself that the burden of kingship is heavier than any that the poor carry, and that the poor sleep while he, the king, stays awake to watch; and that the English defeat the socially superior French because of English moral superiority.

Good quotes:

"The colonial power produced subversiveness in its own interest" (33).
"Theatricality, then, is not set over against power but is one of power's essential modes" (46).
"The "larger order" of Lancastrian state in this play seems to batten on the breaking of oaths" (52).
"That authority, as the play defines it, is precisely the ability to betray one's friends without stain" (58).
"The ideal king must be in large part the invention of the audience, the product of a will to conquer that is revealed to be identical to the need to submit" (63). (I don't get this one but I think it's important)
"What is for the state a mode of subversion contained can be for the theater a mode of containment subverted . . . " (65).
"Princely power originates in force and fraud even as they draw their audience toward an acceptance of that power" (65).

Connections:
Greenblatt says that betrayals happen both to and for Prince Hal, much like the rogue in Middleton's comedies who cozens other and himself. Later, Greenblatt talks about an upper-class betrayal of the lower-class in order to eradicate it, which reminded me of Heller's argument that Middleton's cozening plays can still be moral, because the villain deserves his treatment because of his past crimes.

Middleton's Calvinism

2011-12-05T19:05:00.000-06:00

So, I just read Penitent Brothellers by Jack Heller. Pretty good. He argues that critics need to begin taking into account Middleton's religious background as a Calvinist when we read his works. Middleton is often thought of as amoral, but, Heller points out, his plays are littered with references to theology, Calvinism specifically. While many today think that being a Calvinist and a playwright is a contradiction in terms, Calvin himself wrote positively about theater from time to time and used the theatrum mundi metaphor often to describe the world and man's role in it. Some of his followers wrote plays; even Stephen Gosson, the infamous anti-theatrical Puritan, wrote a play. And what religion Middleton was matters because, as Debora Shuger says, the English Renaissance was a religious culture through and through.

Heller examines Middleton's comedies through the lens of Calvinist theology, seeing "grace at work" and "redemption" everywhere. In almost every play, there is a call for repentance or conversion. In the comedies, this call is taken up by the protagonist; in the tragedies, it is denied. At the same time, Middleton associates drama and theater with deception and illusion; plays within plays and characters performing roles often happen when one character wants to cheat or cozen another. Furthermore, such instances and the characters who perform them, the rogues and cheats, are often implicitly approved by the tone of the play. How can Middleton purify the sinner while still reveling in the sin?

For Heller, this works two ways. First, the victims are never innocent; they are usually cheats and rogues, too. Secondly, the protagonist is usually caught in their own crime; they cozen themselves, the "biter bit" and all that. And thirdly, the rogue exemplifies "grace at work" by repenting or converting at the end.

Critics have a problem with this clash of genres, though, the hilarity of the madcap crimes and the seriousness of the call to repentance. Heller answers this by saying that his thesis that Middleton’s comedy is about portraying grace can be demonstrated in two points. First of all, are the conversions and repentances coherent when applied to Protestant theology? Secondly, are the reprobate activities explained by the same theology? If so, Middleton’s plays and their seeming contradictions resolve in a theatrical representation of Christian belief. Finally, if there is skepticism in Middleton, his faith is the basis of this; Calvinist salvation and grace is unpredictable, and does not always go to the strongest or most likely candidate.

My friend and colleague, Arlynda Boyer, has an excellent theory that Middleton is deeply Calvinist but, believing in a limited election, sees himself as a "reprobate" and writes from the point of view of a believing reprobate--with much sympathy for other reprobates, but still with a determined moral ground.

Tamburlaine, by Christopher Marlowe

2011-12-05T18:19:00.002-06:00

New rule: one post a day. It's not hard, it doesn't take that long, and if I do it right after I read/listen/watch something, I have more to say and it's not intimidating.

Christopher Marlowe is known for his "mighty line," his regular iambic pentameter whose rhetoric sort of sweeps you up and along in its grandiosity. He mastered and polished the use of blank verse which, I was reading on a writing blog, encourages verbosity because the line doesn't want to end. Maybe that's why his characters are such windbags! (Antony and Cleopatra are partially inspired by Marlowe, btw.)

Marlovian heroes are larger-than-life characters whose charisma and ambition are almost too much for the human container. They seek power . . . Faustus wants the power of knowledge, the Jew of Malta wants power of money, and Tamburlaine wants power of . . . well . . . power? These characters are often called "grand" or "haughty" but in the performance of Tamburlaine that I watched, Tamburlaine didn't seem haughty to me. James Keegan, who played him, has in the past played Falstaff and I caught some echoes of Falstaff in Tamburlaine. Granted, he takes himself wayyyy more seriously than Falstaff does, but his moods of laughter and celebration seemed just as gigantic as his moods of gloom and rage and he certainly appreciated coarse jokes as much as the giant jester.

The plot of Tamburlaine, Part One lacked conflict, though. It was basically Tamburlaine just conquering a bunch of nations one after another. Maybe the conflict comes in Part Two. Anyways, you see him woo a lady, win some nations, keep wooing his lady and winning more nations and beating up and imprisoning their rulers for fun, and then finally conquer the nation that his lady is from, even though she begs him to have mercy. There is no mercy from Tamburlaine. Probably because he's such a larger-than-life character. Larger-than-life characters have no room for mercy in their larger-than-life hearts.

As a whole, it was gorgeous and grand. Every new king's crown was more awesome than the last. The scenes where Tamburlaine takes over Damascus, white, then red, then black flags were hung all over the stage. And man, was it gory. Lots of blood. They mopped up fake blood from the stage three times. But it was still watching a bunch of non-relatable characters do and say things that I found completely uninteresting and unsurprising.

Okay, to be fair, there was one part where I related to the characters. The Turkish king Bajazeth (played by Rene Thornton, Jr.) and his wife Zabina (played by Allie Glenzer) are being kept prisoner by Tamburlaine, treated like slaves, made to eat scraps. While Tamburlaine is away, Bajazeth and his wife have a touching talk about how much they love each other; after Zabina leaves to get her husband some water, he kills himself by bashing his head on the side of the prison where he is kept. When Allie came back in as Zabina, she let out a sound that I had never heard before, lamenting her husband and her existence. She eventually kills herself, too. I was crying at the end; I'd never seen something so moving on stage.

Antony! And Cleopatraaaaa!

2011-11-27T14:21:00.001-06:00

I just finished listening to Antony and Cleopatra. I think this represents either my second or third reading of the play. It gets mixed up in my head with All for Love: Or, the World Well Lost by John Dryden, which I wrote a paper on comparing it with Shakespeare's version of the story, specifically Dryden's harmless, assimilated Cleopatra with Shakespeare's orientalized, Other-ed Cleopatra.

This Other-ing is a topic of critical focus for many scholars. Cleopatra comes to represent Egypt, the feminine, darkness, sensuality, licentiousness, things soiled and rotten, the East, etc, while Antony represents Rome, the masculine, light, rationality, sparseness, things clean and fresh, the West, etc. Cleopatra, as the eastern Other, is the force that divides Antony from "himself," meaning, his Roman head-over-heart, war-over-pleasure self. She un-mans him, making him soft and weak, eventually causing his flight from a sea-battle as he pursues her instead of sticking to his metaphorical guns and fighting Octavius Caesar.

I find neither character particularly compelling or sympathetic until around the fourth act. It could be the audio version I heard, which was bad Shakespearean bluster with little to no nuance, but both Cleopatra and Antony seem to be trying to out-do each other with protestations of forever love that seem both unmotivated and uninteresting. Cleopatra is openly manipulative; Antony is vacillating and weak, not at all like the Antony we see at the end of Julius Caesar who wins the crowd with his powerful rhetoric ("and Brutus is an honorable man") and fools the conspirators with a persuasive mixture of lies and honest principle. In Julius Caesar, Antony out-Cleopatras Cleopatra. I wonder if A&C Antony is the same character for Shakespeare as the JC Antony.

They seem as stupid and immature as Romeo and Juliet, only with less reason to be so. The fake death and double suicide is perhaps a reminder of that earlier play and the sense of waste, loss, and extravagant stupidity is hightened by the global relevance these leaders have. When Romeo and Juliet die, it's just two dumb kids; when Antony and Cleopatra dies, their deaths affect nations.

Later in the play, I like them better. Antony runs after Cleopatra even while he's furious at her for leaving and furious at himself for following; this was the only part of the recording where the actors emoted at all, Antony railing at Cleopatra and she begging for his forgiveness. Poor sod, Antony can't even commit suicide well; it's kind of endearing. Cleopatra seems less whiny and manipulative when she is asking her women to drag Antony up to the monument so that he can die with (some) dignity. She's finally doing something, having a tangible and physical effect on someone in the play, rather than stalking around like a wounded cat and playing out her dramatics. When she dies, she dies with dignity, making love to Death and refusing to be Caesar's plaything.

There is a thread in this play, though, which we see in other plays (Macbeth, notably) of a powerful and seductive woman who deprives a man of the power of action, emasculating him while "masculating" herself. Sometimes this is rationalized by other characters as the power of witchcraft, which the woman ostensibly wields over the man; think Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. Sometimes the woman herself denies her femininity; Cleopatra says at the end of the play, "I have nothing of woman in me," Lady MacB asks the gods to "unsex [her] here" and take out "the milk of human kindness."

What is "love" in this play? Does Antony love Octavia, or is he lying to her? Did he love Fulvia? How is love expressed? Is love, like Cleopatra's Antony, a "dream"?

Trip to Blackfriars

2011-11-26T11:20:00.000-06:00

I went to Staunton, VA, for the second time in 2011 in October, for the Blackfriars Conference on Shakespeare in Performance. IT WAS GREAT!!!!!! (end of post, stop reading)

No, it really was great. And, I bought a rug! So, everything worked out in the end. While I was there, I saw The Tempest, Henry V, and Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe. I also went on a $hakes binge and bought a bunch of cheap recordings of his plays on iTunes, so I listened to Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, and some lectures by an Oxford professor, Emma Smith, on Shakespeare's plays.

I will be writing about all of those performances and "readings" in other posts. Right now, I'm gonna summarize the conference. I took copious notes, so, good on me.

Caroline Lamb discussed how a de-braining might have been performed on stage, noting that Tourneur prompts his audience to expect a brain by using the word seven times in "The Atheist's Tragedy." Some performers make this very bloody and gory, one even showing the audience a chunk of bleeding brain after the execution. She sees this as a "corporeal correlative" to the knowledge that Danville is a traitor--instead of spilling his guts, he spills his brains.

Genevieve Love asks us to consider, in "Alarum for London," if fat is prosthetic. Stump's stump is meant to show an absence, the missing leg, which the actor is not actually missing; the fat burgher is acted by a skinny actor, and his fat belly becomes an addition. In this case, the actor is missing what the role demands. Is a theatrical role more like a paunch or a stump?

We had presentations on paper on stage--how it was used and re-used, and what it signified. We questioned whether Banquo was the 12th or the 13th ghost in the line of kings, concluding that he was probably the 12th, since most acting companies could only support 14 people on stage. We discussed sex acts in Shakespeare--were blowjobs a thing back then, or not?

Alisha Huber gave a really interesting presentation on trumpet calls on stage, with her point being that these calls served as auditory signifiers that the audience would be likely to have recognized from Mile-End drills. They can convey information as complex as nationality and, if a theater company recognizes this and is consistent, an audience can learn to recognize and "read" these sounds as well.

Scott Kaiser gave an awesome speech on the parts of Shakespeare's wordcraft, showing us how to recognize a figure of speech and convey that figure of speech through inhalation, highlighting operative words, choosing a focal point, envisioning an image, and performing an action. He also tells actors to perform the subtext by showing us when a character comes to a realization or a decision.

I was really interested in presentations that discussed what an acting company is, or can be, in general. Andrew Phillips-Blasenak studied a particular period at the RSC in which the director chose to nurture a company by changing the audience/actor dynamic, encouraging everyone to have a lead role, and making the directing process collaborative.

There were presentations about the necessity, or non-necessity, of certain props; about schtick in Shakespeare and how, even if we choose not to have it in the play, having actors use schtick while rehearsing can be a useful tool; a presentation about all the Fletcher plays (hilarious!); early-modern lighting techniques; light and heat in Shakespeare's playhouses; using Shakespearean text in classes for law students; and "what is original practices?"

Finally, I heard two great presentations at a breakout session about Shakespeare in the Classroom. Shirley Kagan, a director, asked us, when using original practices, is the director dead? She said that in a few important ways, directing is not dead. A director is in charge of script selection, cutting, casting, staging, pacing, and arcing (or coming up with a cohesive point of view of the play and organizing the rest around that). And Brian Herek showed us several interesting tools for working with Shakespeare digitally: "Word Hoard," and TAPoR being the most interesting to me.

Yay conferences! Yay note-taking!

The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged

2011-11-26T10:47:00.001-06:00

Okay, so it's been a while. Let's talk about why it's been a while: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged. This play, written by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield in the '80's and updated in 2007, was such a blast to perform. Wil, Dario, and I put it on at the Warehouse in Tallahassee on Nov 4, 5, and 6, with the help of Christina LaRocca, Chris Dickinson, and Steve Adams. And even though it was exhausting and stressful and frankly a little much, I miss it a ton now that it's over. I wish we'd been able to do it more than three times.

The premise of the show is that three actors are going to summarize, through performance, Shakespeare's entire dramatic canon in 90 minutes. The actors, though, are a little inept and unprepared; they mess up, they argue, they forget entire works. So the show becomes a parody of Shakespeare's greatest hits; it completely passes over the comedies as having any artistic merit, plays up the Jewish presence, plays up the sex, and picks out Hamlet as Shakespeare's most iconic work. The whole thing is done as a series of jokes, one long gag . . . and makes Shakespeare out to be the greatest gag-writer ever.

But the show has two moments of pathos. One, when Dario gives the "what a piece of work is man" speech as a fed-up actor trying to prove that Shakespeare is just a bunch of long words that nobody knows (and, thus, proving that the words are "beautiful, man"), and the second when Wil, as Hamlet, delivers his final "the rest is silence" speech as Hamlet. And, among all the comedy, the pathos shines.

Doing this play was so much fun. Wil and Dario and I are going to write our own play, because we had such a great time improvising on this one. And the Warehouse was a gem of a place to perform . . . much better than we had hoped. But I think the thing I come away with from this play is that all of Shakespeare's plays can be performed as comedies, in the modern sense of the word of "comedy" as something funny. All of Shakespeare's plays have hilarious moments, and when you play up the comedy, the tragedy becomes even deeper. Thus saith the Bard: "We shall do it . . . BACKWARDS!"

No Wit/Help Like a Woman's

2011-09-17T11:45:00.001-05:00

This play, given the high usage of quotes from the 1611 almanac, was probably written in 1611. However, it wasn't entered into the Stationer's Register until 1653 or published until 1657. And, after a revival in Dublin in 1638, it wasn't played again until 1985 by the Wayward Players.

This is all probably because it sucks.

Middleton borrowed the plot from Della Porta's play "La Sorella" (The Sister), and the plot was subsequently borrowed several times from Middleton in the late 17th and 18th century (once by Aphra Behn). The plot itself could be "cute," I guess. But the comic resolutions are too perfect, and the characters seem so sharp and mannered that it feels like a Restoration play; disguises, babies switched at birth, hints of incest and homosexuality--it could be so good, but it's not. This play is full of stereotypes enacting a situation instead of personalities engaged in life.

It does focus on women, as evident in the title. The titular "Wit" and "Help" come from the two main characters, Mistress Low-water and Lady Goldenfleece, both of whom end up entangled together in complicated financial and sexual/romantic affairs. The idea of doubleness, too, holds the play together; almost every character has his or her counterpart: Jane and Grace, Philip and Sandfield, the Twilights and the Sunsets, Weatherwise and Sir Gilbert Lambstone, etc. This doubleness creates a plot in which one person may stand in for another and thus resolve what seem like impending tragedies--incest committed, love denied, homosexual desire. But the final solution is financial, not sexual. Everyone goes home with the right bed-partner and enough money in their pockets.

The Order of Persons, Part II and III

2011-09-17T11:18:00.001-05:00

In the last half of Taylor's essay, "The Order of Persons," he discusses lists of fictional people, "identification tables." These are the lists of the persons in the play, the dramatis personae, at the beginning of the play when we read it today.

Plays were not always published with these, though, because plays were not always published to be read by an individual for pleasure. The first early modern plays were published with woodcuts as part of the paratext; these woodcuts, images of generic persona represented in the play such as in Everyman, performed some of the function of later lists.

However, after 1562, most plays were published sans woodcuts, with identification tables which may have evolved as a cheaper alternative to woodcuts. Taylor proposes that these plays were published more for amateur performance purposes than for a silent reader; households might have bought plays and performed them for entertainment after supper; touring troupes might have bought them to perform in various towns.

After the Vagabond Act outlawed unlicensed players and the theater became professionalized, such plays did not need identification tables. So when they began to spring up again, it was for a different reason--to add literary legitimacy to the play. Playwrights such as Ben Jonson added them, Taylor thinks, because classic Latin and Greek plays all had identification tables in the early-modern humanist editions.

From 1611 on, though, it seems that identification tables become steadily more common, quadrupling in the next century, indicating a shift in the consumers of plays. Plays are now commodities for readers, not just for actors, and an identification table is part of the paratext that helps a reader along. In fact, Taylor makes an interesting point that identification tables are the paratextual piece most likely to interpose itself in the act of reading.

Of the plays published during Middleton's lifetime, six have identification tables included in the paratext. We do not know that he wrote them or was involved in their printing, but this can be measured by other signs of involvement: signed epistles dedicatory, introductory letters, or prefatory poems. After examining the evidence, Taylor concludes that Middleton was almost certainly involved in the Masque of Heroes identification table.

Taylor lists a few things that we can learn from such lists, indicating a way in which lists show bias rather than objectivity. Lists represent hierarchies and expose values; in identification tables, men often come before women, higher class characters before lower class characters. In The Roaring Girl, characters are listed by households.

Grouping by gender caught on slowly but gained popularity by 1679. As Taylor says, “Absence of gender as organizing principle in those [earlier] lists results, primarily, from the almost complete absence of women." By 1660 women were no longer invisible or excluded but their presence was "characterized."

An interesting, but probably unanswerable, question Taylor asks is, if a play "represents" persons who exist outside the play, where do they exist?

Finally, Taylor concludes that today's editors cannot help but mediate the text as they present it for publication, paratexts included. We either stray away from choices that the original author/publisher made, by organizing identification tables alphabetically or in order of appearance, or we value the primacy of the original by keeping the "original" (sometimes dubiously so) table with all its hierarchical values intact.

The Order of Persons, Part 1

2011-09-15T14:15:00.001-05:00

In the introductory essay to Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, Gary Taylor explores several different kinds of lists of persons related to or authored by Thomas Middleton, locating the reader in the early modern textual "situation" as it were during Middleton's lifetime and early modern readership. The Preface lets us know that any definition of "early modern," of "English," of "textual culture," or even of text is always going to represent, at best, a fraction of the reality, the place where something exists "on a continuum between . . . nothing and everything," i.e. between no knowledge and all knowledge. As Taylor tells us, all knowledge about early modern textual culture is impossible, so instead of trying to encompass it all, we enclose and define and seek for "thin description" and "deep focus."

Taylor sees lists of people as indicative of relations between people and nations (citizenship, birthplace), institutions (companies, traditions (church rituals such as baptism and burial), social class (a gentleman or a "base fellow"?), financial obligations (lists of debtors), and other people (geneologies). The first part of his essay is about lists of actual people which include Thomas Middleton's name. Through an analysis of these lists, Taylor deduces that early modern identity was categorized by geography, credit, occupation, geneology, and value. He also says that, while these lists overlap and "mix," they are also partial/fractional and always in motion. They allow us to map the distances between persons but these distances are always relative and the lists themselves are often arbitrary in what they consider important.

Important points:

Texts created geography--a sense of national identity. The texts themselves were also changing as standards of English began to form, become normative, and struggle against each other.

An economy of credit is dependent on names--you must know the name of the person indebted to you to collect on the debt. However, the economy of the theater was not dependent on the names of the playwrights, which were often left off playbills in favor of the name of the theater or company or printer.

Being part of a company (of Drapers, of Stationers, etc.) could help one in London. There was no livery company for poets; however, they held themselves to a code of ethics similar to a livery company by collaborating with each other, by attempting to distinguish, as Jonson did, between poets and those playing-at-poetry (poetasters).

The genealogical mode (seeking for a lineage) and the philological mode (seeking for an origin) are opposed to each other. However, much scholarship (in the Renaissance and now) which seeks for origins is still indebted to genealogical methods of textual transmission.

The rejection of genealogy as a source of textual authority led to a rejection of genealogy as a source of political authority--and thus, to the Revolution.

On to Part II!

Michaelmas Term

2011-09-13T16:40:00.002-05:00

This play, by Thomas Middleton, was originally performed by the boy's company, the Children of Paul's, who did not have their own theater but acted either at court or at the St. Paul's Cathedral where they trained as choristers. The action is confined to the term of Michaelmas, one of the four times during the year when the inns of court (law offices, essentially?) are in session. And while there is only one lawyer in the play and he has little stage time, the play winkingly alludes to the corruption and selfishness of the law and of lawyers. Probably the young men of the Inns of Court were a large part of the audience of this show.

It is a play about financial cunning and street smarts. Quomodo, a draper, hears of a Master Easy, a young landed man who has come to London after the death of his father. Quomodo decides to fleece him and does it by having his servant (his "spirit") Shortyard pose as a wealthy young man (Blastlight) who ingratiates himself with Easy, who is very easily taken in. Easy begins to spend money wildly, spurred on by Blastlight, and soon needs a loan of money. Blastlight takes him to Quomodo, who cannot give them the money but who gives them some valuable cloth to sell, at which point both men sign that they will return the value of the cloth within a month. However, Quomodo arranges it so that they cannot sell the cloth to anyone but him, who buys it back at a much reduced rate. When the debt comes due, Blastlight is no where to be found and Quomodo holds Easy responsible for the debt. All his lands come into Quomodo's hands; however, after this win, Quomodo does a strange thing; he pretends to be dead to see what his family will do with the wealth. His son disowns him, his wife marries Easy, and all the lands go back to Easy. Quomodo, in disguise as a beadle, actually signs a paper to that effect before he realizes that his wife and Easy are married and that he has cheated himself.

At the same time, two young gallants, Lethe and Rearage, are competing over the hand of Quomodo's daughter, Susan. Lethe is a really dissolute character, who has left his Scottish mother in poverty, who has brought a Country Wench into London to be his mistress, and who offers his sexual favors to Quomodo's wife in order for her to favor the match with Susan. Of course he is foiled, made to marry the Country Wench, and Rearage and Susan are married, much to Quomodo's displeasure.

Quomodo is such a weird character in this play; he acts sort of like Shylock in some ways, and sort of like Volpone in others. However, he doesn't have any of the helplessness and pathos of Shylock or the likeability of Volpone. He is crafty and boasts of his craftiness; Leinwand, who introduces the play, suggest that perhaps the young lawyers in the audience are supposed to relate to his character. Maybe this is true, but the lawyers would have to have a dark vision of themselves to relate to Quomodos' thieving, lying, and unexplained hatred for Rearage.

The homoeroticism in the play is really fun; Easy and Shortyard become best friends for a while, sharing a bed and everything else. The fact that both would have been played by young boys, for an audience of young men, is somewhat suggestive. Neither show much interest in women; Easy marries Quomodo's wife, but I get the sense that he does it mostly for the money.

Ultimately, Lienwand asks if perhaps the characters are just "animated ideologies" rather than round characters; sort of walking stereotypes that Middleton puts on stage to show how "London thoroughly socializes character, pre-empting any chance of individuality." This is not my favorite Middleton play, but it is interesting how much he associates corruption with the law. This focus, and his allegorically named city characters, remind me a lot of Dickens. Middleton has a similar urge to expose corruption, but lacks the sentimentality of Dickens; his exposure is less to create a social change (ala Hard Times) and more to cause cynical laughter.

The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited

2011-09-13T16:14:00.001-05:00

This article, by Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, refutes a claim made by Peter W. M. Blayney in "The Publication of Playbooks" that playbooks, as a commodity, were not profitable for publishers nor enticing for readers. Blayney had been reacting against a long-held view that versions of popular plays sold well in early modern England and that the reason we don't see more records of sales and readership is that they were mostly "pirated." Blayney, says the authors, made an important claim when it comes to the piracy of the plays; however, his statement that the playbooks themselves didn't sell well and weren't largely produced is what is at stake in the Farmer and Lesser article. They claim that Blayney only looked at the numbers of playbooks sold from year to year, rather than comparing these numbers with numbers of other kinds of popular reading material, such as ballads and sermons. For their article, they look at the numbers of original plays and the numbers of reprints of older plays published per year, looking at expansions and contractions in the market from the year 1576-1660, the market share of professional plays among all speculative (non-monopolistic) books, and specifically how playbooks performed against sermons in first-time and repeat publication. In all ways, playbooks performed much better than Blayney has said; in fact, they seem to have been very popular.

An interesting paradox crops up, though--the Caroline paradox, in which reprinted versions of plays first published from 1629-1640 drop sharply, although first editions still perform well and reprints of plays from before 1629 perform well. Farmer and Lesser posit that a canon of "classic" plays was being established during this period, and these plays continued to reprint well. In addition, people still wanted versions of the new plays as they came out. However, the new plays did not become "classics" the way the earlier Elizabethan and Jacobean plays had. While the Caroline canon looks different from our own, it has helped shape our own, which favors Elizabethan and Jacobean drama over Caroline.

Literary Cultures and the Material Book

2011-09-13T15:59:00.000-05:00

Okay, so after a two-month hiatus (during which I was studying Shakespearean original practices in Staunton, VA, moving to a new apartment, and planning for my class this semester), I'm back. Yay!

And we're starting off big this time, with Literary Cultures and the Material Book. This afternoon I read several essays in this book, edited by Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash, and Ian Willison. I was instructed to pay special attention to the final essay of the book, so I read the introductory materials, the essays that dealt with medieval and early modern book traditions, and the final essay, by David McKitterick.

In his essay "Some Material Factors in Literary Culture, 2500 BCE-1900 CE," Simon Eliot lays out very clearly three ways in which the materiality of the book affects and is affected by literary culture. The first is the physical form of the book which, in scrolls, in a codex, written on stone or wood or cloth, in a way chooses who gets to read it, what order they read it in, how they can manipulate the book (or not), and how long it sticks around. The second is the issue of copyright and ownership. Because I own a copy of a book, does that mean I own the content? What does that content ownership allow me to do? Cultures and periods differ on this, and the laws in-between countries can be especially confusing. The third is aspect of materiality hides in the wallet; how much does a book cost? How many people can afford to read it? For this, he takes the history of the Victorian novel as his exemplar. Three-volume novels, first edition, could cost as much as a weeks salary. Even depending on a circulating library, a lower-class citizen might not read a popular novel for years. However, when the novels began to come out serially, they were cheaper and more people could read them. Furthermore, second and third editions were even cheaper and more affordable for the lower class when they came out.

David Ganz, in his article "Carolingian Manuscript Culture," lays out several of the ways in which the Carolingian renaissance in medieval Francia (800-900) laid the foundation for later medieval book traditions. A new, simplified script was invented and adopted, the Caroline miniscule, which was easily read and easily learned. Collaboration and group production of texts occurred in the monasteries, a practice which allowed many more books (more than twice as many extant) to be made in this century as compared with the prior. Many monasteries began copying old Greek and Latin and patristic texts to keep them in circulation. Ganz says, "without the 280 ninth-century manuscripts of classical authors, we would not be able to read any Latin author except for Virgin, Terence, and Livy" (154). They began to copy books in vernacular languages, too. During this period, Walahfrid Strabo invented chapters, so that a reader could look for a specific place in a book. Some contemporary readers also added indices of notable words or topics to some of the classical manuscripts.

Brian Richardson contributed a very interesting article, "The Diffusion of Literature in Renaissance Italy: The Case of Pietro Bembo." He points out that the history of literature and the history of the book in Italy have long had nothing to do with each other. However, when looking at the history of the work of Pietro Bembo, an Italian poet, we see that Bembo had a hand in how his works were formatted, published, and distributed, working closely with the publisher.

So, good work, everybody!

$hakespeare and T-Rex

2011-06-19T18:59:00.002-05:00

Today we're gonna take a detour through Internet pop culture here. I know, it's a scary place, filled with the buzz of technology, the minor explosions created by rapidly-evolving memes, and the squelching sounds emitted by Charlie Sheen gifs. In this land, it is not the well-turned phrase but the visual gag that receives adulation, and anyone . . . I mean anyone . . . (and I'm looking at you, Double Rainbow guy) . . . can be famous. Terrifying, right? But I promise that by the end, we will make it back to the safe haven that is the main topic of this blog: early modern literature'n'stuff.

I love Dinosaur Comics, a web-comic created by Ryan North, whose name even my non-comic-reading boyfriend knows because I talk about him so much. The basic layout is simple and virtually unchanging: six panels showing clip-art dinosaurs talking to each other and stomping on stuff. The main character is T-Rex, whose opinions, ideas, daydreams, and social interactions make up the bulk of the comic. His friends Dromiceiomimus and Utahraptor are there, too; other (usually off-panel) characters include God, The Devil, Morris the Bug, some creepy raccoons and cephalopods, Edgar Allan Poe, and our man Shakespeare, who appears as a character in 15 Dino Comics, but is mentioned in at least 33 of them (I don't think all of the comics have been transcribed yet. LAYIN' DOWN ON THE JOB, FANS!).

If you've just completed high-school English (or, let's face it, even a graduate-level literature class), you probably have a conception of Shakespeare as some distant, dusty old dude who wrote plays with the specific purpose of having students turn around and scan his verse ("See his use of iambic pentameter, utilizing the natural rhythm of the human heartbeat?"), analyze his metaphors ("Now the Bard uses the universal metaphor of the sun in the sky to emphasize how crucial Romeo has become in Juliet's life"), and memorize his quotes ("Call me butt-love, and I'll be satisfied").

Shakespeare's name has become synonymous with all that is beautiful, clever, and artful in the English language; he's the Platonic ideal of good English writing. So we often use his writing as a litmus test, comparing other writers to his genius, and as a tool to teach about literary tropes and devices, ignoring his authorial failures and divorcing his authorial successes from any personal or cultural context. Shakespeare, the way he is spoken of today, is larger than a man; he is the Ghost of Literature past, present and future. Of course this is not helped by the fact that we know very little about his life or personality. So, instead of being this great writer whose art is clearly linked to (and limited by) his life, like Dickens or Thoreau or Cather, Shakespeare becomes a name, an idea, a hovering disembodied genius waiting to pounce on unsuspecting LIT2000 students with a "Aha! Now you must do a video project translating one of my works into modern times, and post it on YouTube, because I am the World's Best Writer! Aha!" *rapier flourish*

In this light, North presents us with a welcome imaginative difference. Shakespeare often appears in Literary Technique Comics," an ongoing series in which T-Rex attempts to explain and model a literary device. So far, you might think, par for the course--the Bard is again being used as a boring literary example. But North twists it, because usually the person T-Rex is advising about literature is Shakespeare himself. He's either telling him about the correct usage of the trope--"It's a little thing called a metaphor, Will. Man! Study literary techniques much?"--or trying to get Shakespeare to write one of his great works differently--to spell "assume" differently in order to circumvent years and years of terrible jokes, or to include elephants as human companions in his plays. Or, sometimes, he's just trying to insert himself into Shakespeare's canon, by writing Shakespeare prequels and telling Shakespeare to create a dinosaur character named "Utahraptor" and then have Hamlet tell him off.

Shakespeare himself only ever talks, from off-screen, to T-Rex. Given T-Rex's special relationships with other disembodied or imaginary figures, such as God, The Devil, and Batman, it's reasonable to assume that the voice of Shakespeare we read in the comic is actually the voice of T-Rex's imagination. Shakespeare becomes a stand-in for certain aspects of T-Rex that we already know and love--his hubris, pettiness, and belligerence. In this way, North invests Shakespeare with a personality, and it's like our good friend T-Rex's personality--full of flaws, full of fun.

This dichotomy is crucial to North's presentation of Shakespeare. He's a character who makes fun of T-Rex and who, unlike the Shakespeare we meet in class, can be made fun of in turn. We chuckle when he uses early modern colloquialisms like "alack" and "forsooth," and laugh when he tells T-Rex it's "racist" to assume that early modern folk talk like that all the time. We know that when T-Rex talks to Shakespeare, he keeps confusing the dude by mentioning car keys, and blasting into space, and guns that shoot chainsaws. And we laugh when Shakespeare retorts, "T-REX. LISTEN. I have like no context to understand any of this," because, like, Shakespeare just said "like," man! He's alternately timely and anachronistic, and it's great.

Finally, mostly because I don't know how to end this blog entry except by devolving into abject adoration of Ryan North and T-Rex, you should definitely read Dino Comics, if only T-Rex describes Hamlet as "stabbin' dudes and havin' broods." Also, because making links makes me feel like I'm awesome at the Internet, check out the two Edgar Allan Poe comics. (See what I did there?)

Whirlwind Tour to Get Us Back On Track

2011-06-19T17:54:00.004-05:00

I have written down that I am supposed to blog about religion, Spenser, travel/discovery narratives, and Sidney. The problem is, I don't really feel like writing about those things. I want to start writing about drama, which is what I'm supposed to spend my time reading anyways. Ugh, Norton. Why you gotta be so big? Okay, here goes:

1) I read the Faith in Conflict section a while ago and basically think what I thought before: the Reformation was a dangerous and interesting time in English history. So many different motives for the move away from the Catholic church and the creation of the Anglican. Even after a Protestant held the throne for a while, there was still a lot of dissent, but when a Catholic came back on the throne, many English were true Anglicans. Thomas Cranmer wrote the Book of Common Prayer, which is lovely. Printing presses made it hard to suppress different religious opinions and factions. Tyndale's translation of the Bible, John Foxe's Book of Martyrs--I just don't have a lot to say about this, because it's too large, multi-faceted, and truly interesting, and I have other things I need to get to. I can't be distracted by you right now, English Reformation.

2) Spenser? Geez, that guy. What's to say? He consciously wrote in an older English style, modeling himself after Chaucer. Some of the stuff he wrote was cool; some of it wasn't. I like some of his sonnets, but I'm not interested enough to go back and figure out which ones I liked, and comment on them. I read The Fairie Queene and mildly enjoyed it. It's a chivalric romance, with knights, fairies, damsels in distress, sorcerers, fight scenes, love scenes, magic, etc. It's basically a tour through The World of Fantasy but it's hella long and I'm bored already thanks Spenser okay bye.

3) The exploration narratives . . . now there's some stuff. Both interesting and angering. Basically stories of getting all up in the business of the natives, and screwing them over. White man lands, makes "friendly" overtures towards natives in form of trinkets that white man acknowledges in his journal to be cheap and worthless. Many natives take white man for a god, shower him with gifts. Attempts to communicate. Some natives do not love/trust the white man and prophecy that more will come and kill them and take their land. (Freelz.) When natives get sick, probably from European diseases to which they are unaccustomed, these unfriendly natives are blamed. An altercation. White man establishes dominance, natives are cowed. Endless descriptions of the oddities and backwardness of the natives (they believe in many gods! their boobies hang out! they don't conquer huge tracts of land and build enormous cities! they sleep in their own excrement! [really? I doubt this.]). White man leaves, taking some of the natives with him, who, after being shown off around London, get sick and die in a far-off country where they have no friends, do not know the language, and will be buried without the traditions or even knowledge of their tribe.

The Norton's last two sentences of Drake's exploration (and this must have been edited with some eye to irony) are: "For a more kind and loving people there cannot be found in the world, as far as we have hitherto had trial." (Wait for it.) "We brought home also two of the savages, being lusty men, whose names were Wanchese and Manteo." Oh. I see. Blah blah blah natives cool blah blah blah hospitality blah blah blah oh and also kidnapping and ultimate death.

(Reading this really gets my social justice ire up, if you can't tell. I'm not sure where to put those feelings, because 1) it happened a long time ago and I can't do anything about it, and 2) isn't remarking on how stupid and terrible these Europeans were the same as the Europeans remarking on how "backward" the natives were? Shouldn't we judge people within the context of their culture? Or should we judge them from our privileged position of future knowledge? Anyways, all this is besides the point, so . . .)

4) And finally, Sidney!!!!!! In Defense of Poesy, ya'll! This is a really good piece of early literary criticism. It's very quotable and still influences us today when we discuss genre, although not so much when we discuss the point of literature. I was just talking about it in the hot tub the other day (weird sentence) to Jen Kanke Schomburg as we discussed those annoying postmodern poets who assert that poetry doesn't need to mean anything. For Sidney, literature's reason for being is to delight and instruct . . . meaning, MEANING. Literature should have meaning; it should uplift and direct its readers. In it, we imitate the excellency of God and show the righteous downfall of the wicked. He tells us about the different kinds of poetry, too: Pastoral, Elegiac, Comic, Tragedy, Comic, and Heroical.

Also according to Sidney, stop sucking, drama! Stop telling the audience that we're in a garden, and then on a ship, and then in Africa or Asia or any of these other crazy and backward places (savages live there!). Sidney's like, "Duh, you guys. I'm obviously looking at a stage, not at a battlefield! Are those swords even real? Leontes, you're obviously some dude from down the street, and not from Sicilia! And that guy over there has obviously had too much beer to drink! Are you trying to tell me that sixteen years have passed while I've been sitting here? Somebody invent the watch so I can prove them wrong! Also, gimme my ducats back." ("Oh, my daughter, O, my ducats!" Ha. Don't worry about it. Inside joke between me and Shakespeare.) Man! Drama! Amirite?

Finally, Astrophil and Stella. If there's one thing I love, it's reading love poetry between two people who are long dead. And if there's one kind of love poetry between two people who are long dead that I love the most, it is the sonnet.

If by love I mean HATE! Ha! Psyche! Got you, Sidney! I so got you! You were like, "Oh, great, she's probably going to love my poems," and then you were totally zinged! Okay, okay, though. Your poems are pretty. (Pretty lame!) They are well-written. (Well-written . . . um . . . lame!) And I really don't know much about poetry so somebody else is going to have to tell me why these are so great sometime. Preferably sometime before I teach them in the fall, because I really have nothing to say about them.

For now, I'm off to read Doctor Faustus. Marlowe's next, y'all!

Writings of the Tudor Court

2011-06-12T14:38:00.000-05:00

A week or so ago, I finished reading some poems by Thomas Wyatt the Elder. His poetry, paired with that of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's The Courtier, and several letters and speeches by Mary Tudor, Jane Grey, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots, has really impressed me with a sense of the drama, danger, and precarious nature of the Tudor court . . . or even just of royal courts in general.

You get a sense of this with The Tudors, of course. People rising, people falling. The glorious power-grab of the Boleyns and their ignominious demise, in which Thomas Wyatt himself was implicated and tried, though not executed. Some of his poetry, specifically the translation of Petrarch's Rima 190, seems to speak to an infatuation, if not a relationship, with Anne Boleyn. "There is written, her fair neck round about, Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am." He writes about the dangers of seeking advancement as a courtier in "Who list his wealth and ease retain:" "These bloody days have broken my heart. My lust, my youth did then depart, and blind desire of estate. Who hastes to climb seeks to revert. Of truth, circa regna tonat [it thunders around thrones]." (Interestingly for me, he writes about women as hunted deer more than once, in beautiful lyrical words. Must explore this later.)

Surrey (I can never get used to calling people by their title, not their last name) was actually executed, at thirty, because of the danger he posed to the throne as a possible claimant. He, like his friend Wyatt about whom he wrote a poetic epitaph, also translates Petrarch and hints at the dangers of court.

The Courtier makes it all too obvious that being at court is like playing a game (GRRM's A Game of Thrones, or the Cairhienin Daes Dae'mar [Game of Houses] from RoJo both spring to mind here. In fact, with their plucked and powdered foreheads, I wouldn't be surprised if Cairhien is supposed to be analogous to Elizabethan England). Words and actions have multiple meaning and the most prized attribute of a courtier is that of "grace," which means saying and doing all the right things with an unstudied, spontaneous air as if they flowed naturally from you.

And finally, the letters and the histories of the four women emphasize the risks and rewards of grasping at royal life. While religion separated them, the unpopularity and failure of three (Mary Tudor, Jane Grey, and Mary Stuart) of them were not solely because of religious conviction. They made hasty and ultimately wrong political moves. But how were they to know ahead of time that they were wrong? Each had to alternate groveling and standing firm, and when Jane Grey gambled on standing firm when her future relied on groveling, she was executed.

QEI, the one success out of the four (success being measured, I guess, by longevity, autonomy, popularity, and historical legacy), won because she played the game of court as well as any trying to court her favor. She made herself the Queen of Hearts and supplanted the Virgin Mary. Her "cult of love," as the Norton terms it, was as much about her protection as it was her popularity. And her letters use this rhetoric heavily, terming herself married to the realm of England, a mother to her English subjects, calling her subjects loyal and faithful and thereby making them so. Love is a jewel to her, and in all images she is covered in, dripping with jewels. She was able to manipulate her image by suppressing representations she thought impolitic, and encouraging representations that make her iconic (Golding's Metamorphoses, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, etc., on which more later).

At any rate, the wheel of fortune metaphor has never been more clear in my mind than in reading about the tumultuous and dangerous nature of court.

The Twenty-One Balloons

2011-05-30T15:20:00.001-05:00

I love the book Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois. I read it when I was a little kid, and I still get pleasure out of reading it now. The narrator goes on a long trip by air-balloon, lands on an island populated by a wealthy utopian society, and lives with them for a while until the island (oops, it's Krakatoa!) blows up. The pseudo-scientific technology is fascinating, the description of the island's inhabitants and their customs hilarious, and the narrator's escape from the island is delightful.

But I didn't realize until I read Utopia by Thomas More how much du Bois owed this Renaissance thinker. More has also created a story, told from the viewpoint of Raphael Hytholoday (talker of nonsense), of a far-off land with undisclosed coordinates, upon which a society lives in ways that blend the hilarious and the truly utopian. And in some ways, More is ahead of his time. Euthanasia, marriage of priests, divorce on grounds of mutual dissatisfaction, communal and (sort-of) egalitarian lifestyle . . . it's great, huh?

Of course there are downsides. The island runs partly off of slave labor, women must confess their sins monthly to their husbands, and both free travel and free speech are severely curtailed.

And there are really funny parts, like how the Utopians chain their slaves with gold and silver chains, and even use gold and silver toilets, so that nobody in the society has an unhealthy reverence for (sometimes literally!) filthy lucre.

I'm not sure this piece is going to have a lot of direct relevance to my further studies, unless I refer back to it in my future work on speculative fiction, which often has utopic/dystopic settings. The Tempest makes use of utopian settings and rhetoric; any work I do on history or politics might benefit from Book 1 of Utopia, which is an extended discussion of what makes good government and the role of philosophy in ruling. But . . . I'm not so interested in those things. So, thanks, Thomas More!

Narrative Therapy

2011-05-29T16:43:00.001-05:00

I have finally made a tentative prelims list. It's three pages long right now and might get longer as I run it by my other committee members. I feel like crying almost every day when I think about how long it is and how dumb I am. BUT! Like I've said before, the point of this exercise is to gain expertise. Of course I don't have the expertise already, otherwise I wouldn't need to study for prelims. Right? Right. Pass the Kleenex.

My recent trip reading/entertainment has been going really well. Earlier complaints still stand, but I am learning so much from Stephen Greenblatt's book Will in the World. Reading about early modern England in such a laid-back, narrative form is helping me remember and contextualize facts much more easily than reading extremely specific academic articles. Each chapter, while purporting to focus on one narrow aspect of $'s life, also explicates a larger aspect of Elizabethan culture. I'm learning about the religious atmosphere of the time, expectations for romantic relationships between husbands and wives, and, lately, criminal activity and consequences in London.

Along with Dat 'Blatt, I've also been watching The Tudors. Yeah, yeah, it's not completely historically accurate. Don't worry--I don't plan on writing any papers where I support my arguments with examples taken from a TV show. (Or, at least not in early modern drama; I will probably write a paper about Game of Thrones sometime soon. For fun. Because writing academic papers is so fun.) But seriously, watching The Tudors is, again, helping me to remember and contextualize who people are. For instance, why are so many people named Thomas during this time? Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt . . . geez. And they don't go by Tommy, or Tom-Bo, or Big T either. So, if anything, by the time I finish watching The Tudors, I should have all my Thomases figured out.

Speaking of all the Thomases, why wasn't a king of England ever named Thomas? Is it the doubter stigma? After the Norman invasion, they're named William, Henry, Richard, Edward, James, Charles, and George. I wonder why those names became regal while perfectly normal names like Christopher, Samuel, Dylan, and Theodore were not. Even today, the three men in line for the throne are named, in order: Charles, William, and Henry.

Finally, the Neal Stephenson book Quicksilver is a lot more helpful to me than I initially supposed. It's largely set in Restoration and Interregnum England and Enlightenment Europe, but I'm getting kings and queens and takeovers and factions sorted in my head, which retroactively helps sort some of the earlier stuff, too. Also, I'm learning all kinds of awesome stuff about the history of science or, as they called it, "natural philosophy." Many natural philosophers are characters in the book: Newton, Hooke, Liebniz, John Wilkins, Benjamin Franklin, etc. As their theories are explained through the voice of a contemporary narrator, older scientific theories are displaced, many of which were in vogue in the early modern period.

At any rate, though, my life of ease and fun, light reading is at an end. I read More's Utopia today and found it better than I had supposed, but still sleep-inducing. Ah, well.

Open Letter to Neal Stephenson

2011-05-06T13:01:00.001-05:00

Dear Mr. Stephenson,

I am an avid reader and lover of books. Like many bibliophiles, when asked "What's your favorite book," I squint my eyes, sigh, gesture ineffectually, and attempt to explain how books are like clouds or children or sexual experiences and that one can never really pick an all-time favorite. But the truth is, I have tiers of favorite books.

Books that I have loved: too numerous to list.

Books that have influenced my mental and emotional and imaginative growth: These are listable, but really, is a fan letter the place for that? What do you care? Let's give it a ballpark and say there are about 50.

Books that have shifted my mental landscape irretrievably, to which I return again and again and still reap the rewards of reading: A year ago, there were two. Now there are three: The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, and your book Anathem.

I haven't read all of your works, or even your most famous books. I'm currently reading the Baroque Trilogy. I'm currently writing a paper on The Diamond Age. And I've read Anathem twice. And each book is so awesomely different.

I love Terry Pratchett, and I could never do what he does. But you read a Terry Pratchett book, and you know you're reading a Terry Pratchett book. There's a pattern, a rhythm to the jokes and images and plots that, even if you can't predict it ahead of time, when you look back, you say, Yes. That fits with all the other stuff I've read by him. But your books don't read this way. They share themes, of course, but experiencing each one is like moving to a new country or a new planet. Toto, we're not on Discworld anymore!

Have you ever played a game with yourself, trying to make yourself uncomfortable but not terrified? Maybe you drive around, trying to lose yourself on unfamiliar streets, hoping that you'll still be able to find the way home. Maybe you're in the ocean and you swim out past where you can touch the bottom. Your heart beats, you're thrilled and alive and extremely uncomfortable. The thing about your writing is that each book pushes my mind into terra nonfirma and makes me sit there a while. The land does not eventually become solid for me. The streets are too strange; the water is too deep. I wouldn't say, even after writing a paper on The Diamond Age, that I totally get what the book is trying to do. But my mind becomes more brave each time I play the game.

Thank you for sharing all of this with all of us.

Exhilaratedly yours,

A Fan

Will in the World, Part 1

2011-05-06T12:34:00.000-05:00

I listened to the first two chapters of Will in the World on the way down to the beach. The first chapter is all about Shakespeare's (hereafter referred to by $, like the gangsta he was) country roots and how they later played out in the London environment. He grew up surrounded by "low drama" like the medieval pageant cycles, mystery and miracle plays, mummer's dances, traveling troupes of players, etc. He might have seen more sophisticated theatrical endeavors like the Kenilworth entertainments put on by the Earl of Leicester for Queen Elizabeth. Greenblatt's thesis in this chapter is that, while $ knew he was doing something very different in London, he still realized that he "owed a debt" to his early exposure to low and high drama.

Hearing about the dramatic milieu in which $ grew up, especially the Kenilworth entertainments, was really helpful and wonderful. It is all described in such an easily digestible way, while being lavishly supplemented with quotes from original documents. And I don't quarrel with a supposition like Greenblatt's that $ certainly heard the spectacles at Kenilworth described in great detail. I do quarrel with statements that put sentiments in the mind or mouth of an author. How do we know if $ really felt that he "owed a debt" to his upbringing? Or that, while he realized that life and art in London is where he was meant to be, he never looked down on his more homely roots? Stephen Greenblatt, did you read Shakespeare's diary again? You know better than that!

The second chapter begins by doing something similar when Greenblatt refers to John Shakespeare's vocation as a glover, and infers that this is why there are so many references to leather in $. Yes, because if there's one thing that $ is known for, it's for speeches about gloves and leather. Well, Greenblatt does provide a lot of examples, but it still seems like one of those things that once you look for it in such a large body of work, of course you're going to find some.

However, this is only an introduction to a discussion of John Shakespeare's life. Greenblatt goes on to talk more his success and high social standing, later downfall, in some persuasive and moving ways, highlighting the potential ambivalence that $ seems to show towards fathers and drunkards. And then he explains his earlier comments about glovers by saying that $ obviously had a bit of knowledge about several fields (law, theology, magic, history) and that drawing a connection with gloves only goes to show how easily $ could weave anything into a metaphor or description.

So far, I'm really enjoying it. There is some silly sentimentalizing and a bit of long-stretching going on, but on the whole, it really does what Greenblatt says it does, which is introduce the reader not only to $ himself but to the early modern period in which he lived. If only Greenblatt didn't go on to say "and into the world to which he was so open." Again, that must have come direct from the diary.

Summer Readin'

2011-05-02T11:15:00.001-05:00

I'm leaving for my first summer trip on Wednesday. I'm spending a week at Panama City Beach with my parents, driving up to Kalamazoo, Michigan for conference, and then hanging around Berrien Springs and Chicago for general visiting. I'll ending by visiting Tupelo, Mississippi for a high-school graduation. I'll be gone for about two and a half weeks, and log over 2,200 miles of driving.

And, of course, I need reading to bring along. But I don't really want to start the hard-core prelim reading on a trip. I mean, that's just silly, right?

So, instead, I've gotten some more fun reading to bring along. And, like the smart cookie I am, I made everything *sort of* relate to my prelim reading. Sort. Of.

1) Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare." This book is pretty dumb so far. I mean, in the introduction, Greenblatt says that Shakespeare's writing makes him seem more like a god than a mortal. Yikes. Okay, Greenblatt, you and Harold Bloom go stand over there, and the rest of us will have adult conversation.

But Greenblatt is a well respected scholar, even if this particular book is . . . um . . . how to put this . . . imaginative. And I figure, it can't hurt to read some pop scholarship that sort of immerses me in the world of early modern England.

2) Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver," the first volume of the Baroque Cycle. This is historical fiction, set in late 17th century England, France, and America, focusing on knowledge, communication, cryptography, etc.. Again, immersing myself in a world that, if not Jacobean early modern England, arose from was influenced by those political and cultural contexts. Okay, I know it's a stretch. But it's Stephenson. He's magic. I know my mind will be expanded by this.

3) Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." Of course it relates. It's history! Of everything! And also, it has a lot of science stuff in it, which, while not directly relevant to my major project, might be helpful later . . . because animals are science, right?

I haven't thought of any other books to bring, but I might get another audio book, if I can find a good one. The library has a two-part series about Dante, who seems like someone I should probably know about, right? But it's only a seven-day rental.

Anyways, I'm proud of myself for getting mostly smart books, and not crap fantasy like I usually do. It's time to buckle down and read serious stuff (no more RoJo, for starters). It is strange to look at the process ahead of me and think about the result at the other end. I am about to become a learnéd person, a classically well-read person, an expert of sorts. I don't feel that way at all right now, and I probably won't feel that way at the end of it. But it sounds fun, to dedicate myself to reading in one field and to get super-smart in that area. Yay!

Smells Like Teen . . . Academic Angst

2011-04-21T11:11:00.000-05:00

I just finished what is probably my last paper for class, ever. From here on out, my learning is self-guided.

I'm uncomfortable with this for many reasons, first being that the paper is shit. Although it is the product of a couple of months of reading and thought, I wrote it in three days. The ideas are good but the ending is pretty nonexistent. The argument does not do what I want it to do. I haven't really supported my claims with historical fact; I've just supposed things and then said them. One of the criteria was that the paper should reflect recent scholarship in the field, and it doesn't reflect it as much as give a vague impression that the scholarship exists, somewhere out there.

I'm embarrassed to hand this in to the person who has agreed to be my dissertation director. I hate myself for procrastinating. Every semester I promise myself that next semester it will be different, I'll start my work early, I'll take notes of the reading I do, and I'll draft the entire time. But, of course, I didn't. Until three days ago, I had only underlined the relevant quotes in one of the plays I'm using. What I'm handing in is basically a first draft of what is, mostly, close reading.

Poor showing, Lechler. Poor indeed.

And this is why I'm afraid for the next stage of education. If I do this with all my class papers, what will motivate me to read for prelims? To write a dissertation? I was comfortable having my education chosen for me, directed, sometimes prodded. Now I'm in charge.

Frankly, I'm surprised I made it this far. This PhD thing has been hard and I've sometimes wondered if I'd make it. I don't feel truly cut out for academia the way some are; ambitious, self-motivated, deep thinkers who can frame their thoughts in the most current academese. At the beginning of this semester, I was starting to feel like I was coming into my own as a scholar. Well, here I am, really on my own.

Did I mention that I hate my paper? Truly hate it.

The Diss (Ideas)

2011-04-02T14:20:00.001-05:00

Is it a good idea to blog about my unwritten dissertation? Will someone else steal my plans? I'm not sure but I'm doing it anyways.

So, I started reading Bruce Boehrer's book Shakespeare Among the Animals and it's really great. He's a good writer--funny, self-effacing, and smart. I need to take a class with that guy. Not next semester, though; he's teaching at 9:30 and, y'all, I am usually sleeping then. Oh, also I'm reading for prelims next semester, so NO CLASSES. I gotta stay firm on that. No classes.

He breaks down the early modern view of animals into three (not mutually exclusive) classes of: absolute anthropocentrism, relative anthropocentrism, and anthropomorphism. The first view is characterized by believing that humans are completely different from animals, that the difference constitutes our innate superiority to nature, and therefore all of nature is at our disposal, to be used by us. Relative anthropocentrism works on the same basic principles, except that not all humans are as "human" as others, i.e. those who are female, Catholic, Jewish, African, Spanish, children, mentally handicapped, etc.

The third view, anthropomorphism, supposes that humans and animals aren't all that different. But this has two pitfalls. The first, Boehrer notes, is that what makes humans different from/superior to nature is our reasoning faculty and our moral choice, and that if we reason poorly or make poor moral choices, we become, in essence, lower than beasts. Beasts keep to their own sphere; we alone can "devolve." The second pitfall Boehrer doesn't speak to but it is something I've often thought of when teaching sci-fi/fantasy*. A lot of sci-fi stories anthropomorphize aliens, making them think and feel like people; a lot of fantasy anthropomorphizes animals, doing the same thing. The alien feels rage, jealousy, or kindness; the animal feels guilt, love, a sense of honor. It's an example of the pathetic fallacy and, I think, is a kind of condescension on our part, assuming that the only problem between animals and humans is that they aren't smart enough to understand us, never considering whether the problem is that we don't understand them.

The great thing is that the book looks at just the things I want to look at. What distinguishes animals from humans? What is "natural," and "unnatural"? Is hybridity, the mixing of two normally separate classes like human/animal, male/female, always monstrous? And where do the essentialist distinctions we draw among ourselves--gender, sex, race--come into play on the human-beast spectrum? A lot of those distinctions, at least in early modern discourse, are written about in terms of bestiality. Moors are beasts and devils; Jews are dogs; women are horses and falcons, ducks, kittens, and livestock.

The bad thing, of course, is that the book looks at just the things I want to look at. And is already published.

But I'm going to add a twist, a (pardon the pun) carnival spin to it. I'm going to ask if monstrosity and hybridity always has to be negative. Could the upending of the human/animal hierarchy be part of the celebration of the grotesque, the acknowledgement of our lower selves, the eternal biting-of-the-thumb, that is carnival? Could it be, rather than a reinforcing of old binary classes, a way to see at once both the unity and the multiplicity in the world?

I'm gonna go ahead and say, Yes. Yes it could.

*He actually does mention it in his second book. Oops.

Ground Control to Major Tom

2011-04-02T13:52:00.000-05:00

What is the nature of the humanities? What is the nature of literary studies? What is our purpose in the academy? Outside the academy?

These are questions that I've been considering lately. I read an article about academic writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and one of the suggestions the author made was that all academic writers ask themselves what they are writing that will be read 10 years from now, 100 years from now.

I also talked with a friend of mine about her teaching. She's currently teaching LIT2020, the same short story class that I'm teaching. But instead of focusing on Sci-Fi/Fantasy, like me, she is teaching a course introducing students to literary theory. Her syllabus is impressive; her stories are inspirational. She's teaching students how to think more deeply, clearly, and fairly about concepts like feminism, race, poverty, queer theory, "truth," etc. I think this is beautiful; this is the kind of life-changing teaching I want to do, that I'm not stretching myself enough to do right now.

I'd like to write a mission statement, but I'm not sure where to start. I want to do all the cheesy things that people who teach literature want to do--share my love of stories, my excitement about poetic beauty, my thoughts about how literature can touch our hearts and change our minds, blah blah blah.

But I also want to teach people to use their brains when they interact with the world. To "read" and "write" well--by which I mean, to consume and create meaning in all its various forms. To be responsible and kind citizens. I want to wave Martha Nussbaum's flag and help spread true democracy by encouraging critical thinking.

Having so many big goals makes it hard to know what direction to go in. Like, with this blog, I want to start blogging about the stuff I'm working on at school, Middleton and early modern drama, etc., while at the same time blogging about all my thoughts about sci-fi/fantasy I've been reading (did you know that Tor hires bloggers? What? Why can't I have that job? Oh right, because I just worry about blogging rather than doing it.)

Anyways, I feel a little bit like Major Tom out in space, surrounded by so much, and wondering what to do, and if he'll get back home. I wish I had a ground control. And that's my Bowie reference for the day.

2011-02-20T14:42:00.002-06:00

The Lucky Chance was a disconcerting play from the moment I laid eyes on the Dramatis Personae. Of course, Act 5 confirmed my discomfort and distaste for the action of the play, but it seemed like everything I needed to know was encapsulated in the Dramatis Personae list.

The first thing that jumped out at me was that the women were characterized very differently from the men. Every major character was described in relation to other characters, which is the norm. However, the men had societal roles—“prentice,” “banker,” “ alderman”—or other descriptions given to them—“old,” “a fop,” “disguised”. The women were usually characterized in relation to the male characters or by character judgments: specifically the terms honest, generous, and virtuous.

Immediately we see women characterized by what they are and men by what they do. But what struck me as particularly insidious is the lack of “virtuous” appended to Julia’s name. I assume that the virtue referenced is virginity, which Julia, as a married woman, cannot be said to possess any longer. This in itself is disturbing; virginity equals virtue, but married intercourse is a lack of virtue? If it is not strict virginity but simple marital fidelity, Julia is the most virtuous woman in the play. She rejects Fulbanks offer of what amounts to an open relationship in order to preserve her honor, which is later taken from her against her will and outside of her knowledge.

The absence of this simple term is small but disturbing to me, since the term is consciously applied to two other women. If Behn had used a variety of descriptors: honest, virtuous, godly, respectable, honorable, etc., it might seem less important that Julia lacks this descriptor. But since she uses virtuous with the two other principal female characters and not with Julia, this difference seems glaring and significant.

2011-02-20T14:40:00.002-06:00

The Widdow Ranter, although the titular character of this play, does not receive that much stage time. She has about as many lines as the Indian Queen, and maybe a little bit more time on stage (since she doesn’t die). The stage time she has, though, sets her up as an incredibly strange feminine trope, whereas the Indian Queen, despite her racialization, is a much more recognizable romantic female type.

The Indian Queen is praised for her beauty, her wisdom, her expressiveness. Rather than chasing the man she begins to love, she flees his advances with becoming modesty. We see her once engaging in idol worship, a clear marker of Otherness; yet on the whole, her character seems much more akin to a typical European tragic heroine, a sort of noble savage.

The true savage is the The Widdow, who lacks any semblance of normative femininity. She smokes, drinks, curses, and pursues the man she loves. She dresses like a man and fights in a battle. We hear nothing about her beauty, charm, or other feminine qualities, normal subjects of encomia. And what is her relation to Moll Cutpurse, another female character whose behavior and dress contradict normative femininity? Moll seems less strange and wonderful because we understand her choices; she has explained the why of her lifestyle. Her lifestyle, also, is consistent; she chooses to go against the flow of what the culture expects of her in almost every respect. But the Widdow Ranter is just an enigma. We don’t understand her choices to buck culture, since she has obviously not done so in every instance. She is a Widdow, so she married once, as was expected of her. She is a woman, so she will marry again. Are all these oddities merely indications that we are dealing with a strange person, or are they markers of her cultural difference from the English? Is her American-ness the most important Otherness in the play, more striking and marvelous than the Indians? Is Aphra Behn trying to make a new type, the coarse, mannish American woman?

2011-02-20T14:38:00.002-06:00

The Roaring Girl is full of animal allusions and names. People call each other horses, pigs, birds, dogs; there is a place called the Three Pigeons; characters have names such as Gull, Goshawk, Tearcat, and Neatfoot (“neat” being an archaic word for cow, or cattle). And, of course, the titular character, Moll Cutpurse, is the “roaring girl,” a lion of a woman.

Moll uses such language to her advantage in Scene 5 when she meets Laxton for what he assumes will be a sexual rendezvous. As soon as she sees him, she notes how “his eye hawks for venery” (line 43-44). Immediately he is cast in the role of predator. She, whom he calls “admirably suited for the Three Pigeons,” is his prey—a cooing, wanton bird in the hand. She goes on to describe herself sarcastically as his “hackney,” a broken-down horse which he rides hard. This sexual pun which not only puts their relationship in economic terms—a hackney is hired, as she points out when she throws his money at his feet—but also in terms of man and beast, the user and the used.

Her next animal reference carries a similar weight of sarcasm. She tells Laxton how conceited he is, hyperbolizing various situations in which he might think himself desired by a woman based on little evidence. To cap off this section of her diatribe, she tells him he’ll swear to his fellows that a lady has fallen more in love with him at first sight “than her monkey all her lifetime.” In this imaginary situation, the monkey is more than just the woman’s pet. It is also the woman, a fool, too quickly caught and snared by Laxton’s (lacking) charm and wiles. But in Moll’s sarcastic rendering, the monkey is Laxton, for imagining that women fall in love with him so easily.

In this monologue’s final extended metaphor, Moll compares Laxton’s usual prey, the “distressed needlewomen and trade-fallen wives,” to fish and himself to an angler. As noted in the text, these prey must “bite” or “be bitten”; sexual politics in Moll’s understanding is a relationship between predator and prey. She doesn’t fault women for “biting” at Laxton’s “worm”; otherwise they might be eaten by some worse predator. But she laughs at his angling for her, and at the end of her speech all animal metaphors are cast aside when she says, “I scorn to prostitute myself to a man, I that can prostitute a man to me!”

2011-02-20T14:37:00.002-06:00

Tom Wilding and the Pox

The protagonist of The City Heiress is not the City Heiress. Nor is it Sir Timothy Treat-All. The first scene sets up a dispute between Sir Timothy and his nephew, Tom Wilding, and it immediately becomes obvious that, because of his youth, charm, and wit, we are to identify with the rakish, beseeching Tom and not his “resolv’d, deaf, and obdurate” uncle who refuses to continue to pay for Tom’s debts. Tom, a spendthrift with three romantic interests and a venereal disease to boot, is an odd choice for a protagonist, but it cannot be the demurely doting Charlot, or the aging and hypocritical Sir Timothy, nor can it be the whining Sir Charles Meriwill or the duped Lady Galliard. Diana might give Tom a run for his money, but it is Tom whom everyone in the play wants—wants what he has, wants to be more like him, or wants his person.

However clear it is that Tom is universally “wanted” by the characters in the play, it seems strange to the audience that he gets what he wants. Often in such plays, the bulk of the madcap action relies on the trickster getting away with his tricks, but barely, by the seat of his pants. Tom almost never gets away with his tricks; before he even tries to seduce them, Lady Galliard, Charlot, and Diana know all about his other lovers, his pennilessness, his lies. It seems that almost everyone at Sir Timothy’s dinner recognizes Tom in his disguise at some point or another, except for Sir Timothy. He is continually being unmasked by people around him, and things still turn out exactly as he would have them.

His venereal disease is an instance of this. Pox abounds in this play; it is used as a curse by almost every male character in the play. Clacket says that she has concealed the names of his “wicked diseases” and procured “filthy surgeons” for him. His uncle makes reference to paying for “Pocky doctors.” It seems like everyone knows he has the pox. Reference is even made to Tom’s pox in the presence of each of his romantic interests—yet they still want to sleep with him. Diana sums it up, “I must love a Wit, with a Pox, when I might have had so many Fools of Fortune.”

This makes me, as an audience member, ask “Why must she love him?” It is inconceivable that Tom should be successful in his conquests, given all his negative qualities and his ineptitude at secrecy and deceit. However, his rhetoric always saves the day. He is able to spin the truth (that he’s poor, that he’s a philanderer, that he’s diseased) and make every situation seem like he engineered it. His conquests believe that he loves them when it is obvious that he does not. His verbal vomit is the cure for any other illness he spreads. It seems that, in this play, love really is blind—but it is a syphilitic blindness caused by Tom’s infectious rhetoric.

2011-02-20T14:28:00.003-06:00

“A Chaste Maid in Cheapside” shares again in what seems to be a hallmark of Middleton’s—the scene that seemingly comes out of nowhere, like the succubus scene in “Mad World” and the Dampit storyline in “Trick”. The introduction to “Chaste Maid” makes it clear that the weaving together of the four love-triangle stories is an example of masterful plotting; why, then, the scene with the Promoters?

The Promoter scene is both interesting in what it tells us about London life and funny in the way the Promoters are tricked, twice—once by the Wench with a lamb’s head, and once by Allwit, a proverbial “calf’s head”. Perhaps its interest and humor is enough reason for it to stay. Knowing what happens to the Wench’s baby provides a bit of unexpected resolution to a minor plotline and a clever mirroring of the christening of Whorehound’s bastard. However, the scene could easily be excised without hurting any of the plotlines of the play. It seems strange that Middleton would leave it in without more effort to connect it to the rest of the plot.

Thematically, though, it is connected to the plot in so many ways. The baby is emblematic of all the babies born or conceived in the play; under only slightly different circumstances, each of these children could have ended up in the meat basket of two very confused Promoters. In the play, children are something to be sold, stolen, or foisted off—never conceived legitimately and treated with human dignity. The play is obsessed with images of consumption and excretion. Meat, comfits, and wine are as greedily consumed as Moll, Tim, and the Welshwoman; children are popped out as fast as the stomach digests and the intestines excrete. A baby, basically an intake/output machine, is the symbol of all the people in this play, none of whom have control over their bodily functions or desires . The disguise of the baby as a cut of meat has a certain neat (if stomach-turning) symbolism as well. One could easily imagine a dark Swiftian side to early modern London in which some unwanted children were turned into literal food.

2011-02-20T14:19:00.003-06:00

"Meta." One of the best prefixes ever. Put simply, it means "about." Meta-communication is communication about other communication (often relationship talks end up being meta-communication). Meta-cognition is thinking about thinking. Meta-theatre is theatre about theatre--the people on stage are playing characters who are themselves playing other characters.

Both Mad World and Trick use meta-theatrical speech to indicate "tricking" or "playing a part" on stage. The more formal and mannered a character’s speech is, the more that character is acting a part within the play, either for other characters on stage or, in soliloquy, for the self.

In both, actors play characters playing characters, sometimes down to three or four levels of performativity, depending on the gender of the actor/character. Characters often slip between blank verse and prose, sprinkled with rhyming couplets here and there. Prose is used when someone is describing something mundane, or letting lose with strong, un-edited thoughts and feelings. Blank verse seems to be reserved for speech that has received the internal editor, thoughts that are intended to persuade someone.

Rhyming verse, specifically, seems to signal a character’s shift into a trictster persona who ostensibly follows normative social and sexual mores, but whose speech may be intended to gull the audience. Often rhyming couplets are sententious aphorisms that express the cultural norms rather than a character’s deeply held beliefs. At the end of Trick, both Jane and Follywit engage in long rhyming speeches promising new faithfulness and righteous actions; to different degrees, however, their previous actions do not support such a change. Are they playing “the wife” or “the husband” for now, intending to engage in more tricks later?

Sometimes even the rhythm of rhyming speech, such as the Courtesan’s catechizing of the Wife in Mad World, can signal this shift. The words the Courtesan uses undermine accepted sexual morality while upholding expected sexual roles (the adulterous wife, the jealous husband); her audience on stage, Harebrain, falls for her performance because all he hears is the rhythm of the speech. Her other audience, however, knows that she is performing, for him a role very different than the one she is performing for the Wife.

2010-12-22T10:53:00.002-06:00

It's Winter Break, and I'm working on my syllabus for my upcoming Short Story: Speculative Fiction course. The class I taught this past semester was incredibly successful, but I wasn't happy with the textbook and I just like to change things up so I'm always learning new things as I'm teaching.

My question this week is: what does fantasy literature offer us? Why do we read it? What big questions does it ask (or answer) for us?

I'm a little frustrated with this question, because I can't hit on any answers that I am really sold on. Last semester I taught that fantasy looks backwards, to our human past, while science fiction looks forwards, towards the future. I still think this is, in essence, true. Much fantasy literature written in English deals with mythology such as the creation myth, the nature of humanity, the fall of humanity from a blissful state into chaos, an epic battle between good and evil. Quest stories deal with coming-of-age issues; princess/prince stories treat issues of gender roles; stories about magic discuss issues of power and responsibility.

Even though I can point to and name these things, however, I am still frustrated that fantasy doesn't categorize itself as neatly as sci-fi. Sci-fi literature deals with concrete social issues: race relations, the impetus to conquer and colonize, different sexualities, the relationship between progress and morality, technology and human values. Most fantasy stories could be shoehorned into one of these categories or another, but I want distinctions that arise naturally from the stories themselves.

Maybe I'm too theme/issue-oriented in the way I teach. Maybe I should stop looking for distinctions between fantasy and science fiction, and just teach it all mixed up together. Maybe, since it's a literature class, I should categorize the stories based on literary techniques I want to discuss, rather than topics and themes.

Answers?

2010-11-26T14:53:00.004-06:00

I've been re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation lately. I'm only up to episode 7 of Season 1, but the experience has been fascinating. Seeing the relationships between Picard, Riker, Troi, Crusher, LaForge, Data, etc. build up again from the beginning is fun. I didn't remember that Picard could be so irascible, or Riker so smug. Re-evaluating my crush on Wesley is good, too; I can see how, as a little girl, he might be dreamy, but now all I see is his awful sweaters and the highly unrealistic way he saves the day all the time. What a Mary Sue! Best of all, the episode I watched today has Data in the role of Sherlock Holmes . . . "Oh Data, you scamp," I say as I shake my head, my face mirroring Riker's shit-eating grin.

The intro to the show, though, is becoming relevant to what I'm writing about lately. It says: "Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

This desire to explore, to seek, to know, is exactly the drive I think I'm beginning to pinpoint in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The trilogy, a beautiful set of books sort of yet not entirely written for children, is a re-writing of Milton's Paradise Lost, which is in itself a re-writing of Genesis and all classical mythology.

The central struggle in PL is between obedience and knowledge. God says, "I'm asking very little here; just don't don't eat from that tree!" Satan, Eve, and to some extent Adam, each respond, "But why?" God's command is that each knows her or his place: Satan's place is in Heaven, under the command of the Son; Eve's place is in the Garden, under the command of her husband; Adam's place is in the Garden, protecting Eve, worshipping God, and not asking the angel Raphael too many silly questions regarding the nature of the universe and Creation.

However, in each character's heart there is a need to challenge this restrictive authority. They don't want to keep to their place in the chain of being; they want the chance to grow, to ascend, to understand. Milton weaves a complex web of rules and rebellions, but the desires motivating Satan, Eve, and Adam are pretty relatable for me. How many times as a child did you ask your parent "Why?" and receive some version of "Because I said so!" or "You wouldn't understand." That was never fun for me; each time I got a pat answer, the resolve in my heart steeled all the more: Someday I will grow up, and find out, and then they'll see.

The pro-Satan reading of PL is a popular one; its most famous advocate was the poet, William Blake, who wrote Songs of Innocence and Experience, the title and subject matter of the poems pointing back to the Edenic conflict. But I'm not sure that Pullman reads PL that way. For him, Satan is not the hero of the epic because he didn't win. But, in Pullman's view, the desire for experience that motivated the first Fall is good; it is what compels us to learn about ourselves and the universe. It is, essentially, consciousness. The restriction of this desire is in itself cruel, wrong, and a restriction of absolute free will. So Pullman rewrites the story.

Pullman's trilogy is more narratively complex than Milton's. For instance, there is no single Satan character. Instead, there are a host of characters who play roles such as Lord Asriel as "the dynamic, powerful rebel," Lyra Silvertongue as "the artful compulsive liar," and Sister Mary Malone as "the apparently-innocent questioner/tempter." But these roles are slippery and unstable. Lord Asriel also performs as Christ-figure, giving his life to save his daughter. Lyra acts as a new Eve, committing a new Fall. Lyra's mother, Mrs. Coulter, is almost satanic in her single-minded avarice and ambition for evil, but even she eventually plays a combination of Mother Mary/Christ as she nurses her daughter back to health and then sacrifices herself for Lyra's safety.

I'm not sure where all this will go; the paper is about how there is a cycle of reading/writing going on, and how each author conceives of the acts of reading and writing, and the essence of the creative impulse. Chaos, the primary matter out of which God created the universe, is going to come in there somewhere; I think it is analogous to Pullman's Dust. But mostly, for now, I just love it when pieces of my life come together, when I find out that the "new worlds" I am exploring are not light years apart like they are for Picard, but just a heartbeat away, sharing space with me, and it's up to me to make the connections.

2010-11-11T15:14:00.001-06:00

I’m writing a paper about Philip Pullman’s reading of Paradise Lost in his His Dark Materialsfantasy trilogy. As such, this involves me spending a good deal of time and attention reading Milton. Compared to Spenser and Cervantes, the two other authors we are reading in the same class, Milton is awesome. The other two are interesting, funny, complex, but ultimately I find reading them to be a chore. Reading Milton is uplifting like riding the swings at the fair. I haven’t felt this joy at encountering a new work for a long time. He is a delight to read; it’s like going to C.S. Lewis’s “farther up and further in,” or to the island of Numenor, which is not an inept analogy given that Lewis and Tolkien both read, loved, and responded to Milton. I can’t believe I haven’t read Milton before. Paradise Lost is incredible and has obviously inspired so many authors with whom I’m already deeply familiar. Fantasists and mythopoets, my fun reading, take so much from him; friends have raved about the poem before; how did I miss it?

What makes reading Milton exceptional is that I’ve paired it with two bands—Jonsi and Amiina, both Icelandic groups. Listening to this music (reminiscent of Sigur Ros, especially since Jon Birgisson of Jonsi is the frontman of Sigur Ros, and Amiina has collaborated with Sigur Ros on various occasions) is magical; the sounds are both crystalline and sweeping, creating landscapes of emotion and imagination. As I read about Satan escaping Hell to plague the newly-created Earth, Amiina plays a martial drum behind a minor melody on the saw, and I feel Satan’s desperation, his courage and desire, and I see the terrifying landscape of Hell. As we pull in on the Earth, a pendant orb hanging from a golden chain that crosses the Void, Jonsi’s ethereal voice lifts me into the galaxy and I see the beams of light streaming from far Heaven.

It’s especially interesting that something sensory, almost corporeal, can enrich my reading of a poem that is explicitly concerned with the difference between the material and the spiritual. Pullman plays on this theme with his creation, Dust. Although music isn’t something I can touch, sound waves exist, and as a sensory experience, this music is making my reading so much more vibrant. I don't usually think of reading as being a sensory experience, although it obviously is--seeing is a sense! But reading while listening to music transcends what I sometimes feel as the unmediated text-to-brain, pulling in my imagination through the vehicle of my auditory sense.

I want to find more music that connects to and enriches the experience of reading. What do you listen to when you study or read for pleasure?

2010-11-10T14:30:00.003-06:00

Time for a Blog Makeover . . .

This blog is about to change. It used to be my forum (well, one of them . . . ) to figure myself out spiritually and emotionally--to talk about what frustrated, inspired, angered, and entranced me. I enjoyed organizing and presenting my thoughts on life and receiving feedback from friendly readers. It's been good for me; some of what I consider my best writing is on this blog; and though it's been sporadic, it has still catalogued many important experiences and stages in my life.

I'm still figuring myself out, but this online space will instead reflect my process of deciding who I am as a career thinker and instructor. The next two years of my life will be enormously developmental in this regard; I'll be immersing myself in my field as I study for prelims, decide on a dissertation topic, and build a name and a reputation for myself as I publish, present, and otherwise contribute to the world around me. As I push further and further into my career (or is it "farther and farther"?), I'm going to start blogging more about things that factor into that--books, art, teaching, theater, music, and literary criticism.

My personal life, likes, dislikes, momentary enthusiasms and pet peeves, will still make it in here from time to time; I want my work to be integrated with my life, not compartmentalized. No work I produce will be good if it isn't, in some measure, wholistic, engaging me emotionally, spiritually, and physically. At the same time, I feel the need for an informal space for sustained reflection on my reading and writing, and for informal feedback on that reflection.

This is where you come in. Please write back. I don't care if you are a graduate student in English, an undergraduate student in nursing, a happy barista or a career world-traveler, if you like to read Ben Jonson, John Grisham, or Janette Oke, if you'd rather listen to Matchbox 20 than David Bowie, or if you think theater is snore-inducing and/or of the devil. Please tell me your thoughts. They can only challenge, deepen, and help out my own thought processes.