Henry Five by Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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!

The Diss (Ideas)

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

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.