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.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
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!
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!
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
Sunday, June 19, 2011
$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?)
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!
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!
Sunday, June 12, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, May 30, 2011
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!
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!
Sunday, May 29, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, May 06, 2011
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
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.
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.
Monday, May 02, 2011
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!
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!
Saturday, April 02, 2011
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
The Lucky Chance was a disconcerting play from the moment I laid eyes on the Dramatis Personae. Of course, Act 5 confirmed my discomfort and distaste for the action of the play, but it seemed like everything I needed to know was encapsulated in the Dramatis Personae list.
The first thing that jumped out at me was that the women were characterized very differently from the men. Every major character was described in relation to other characters, which is the norm. However, the men had societal roles—“prentice,” “banker,” “ alderman”—or other descriptions given to them—“old,” “a fop,” “disguised”. The women were usually characterized in relation to the male characters or by character judgments: specifically the terms honest, generous, and virtuous.
Immediately we see women characterized by what they are and men by what they do. But what struck me as particularly insidious is the lack of “virtuous” appended to Julia’s name. I assume that the virtue referenced is virginity, which Julia, as a married woman, cannot be said to possess any longer. This in itself is disturbing; virginity equals virtue, but married intercourse is a lack of virtue? If it is not strict virginity but simple marital fidelity, Julia is the most virtuous woman in the play. She rejects Fulbanks offer of what amounts to an open relationship in order to preserve her honor, which is later taken from her against her will and outside of her knowledge.
The absence of this simple term is small but disturbing to me, since the term is consciously applied to two other women. If Behn had used a variety of descriptors: honest, virtuous, godly, respectable, honorable, etc., it might seem less important that Julia lacks this descriptor. But since she uses virtuous with the two other principal female characters and not with Julia, this difference seems glaring and significant.
The Widdow Ranter, although the titular character of this play, does not receive that much stage time. She has about as many lines as the Indian Queen, and maybe a little bit more time on stage (since she doesn’t die). The stage time she has, though, sets her up as an incredibly strange feminine trope, whereas the Indian Queen, despite her racialization, is a much more recognizable romantic female type.
The Indian Queen is praised for her beauty, her wisdom, her expressiveness. Rather than chasing the man she begins to love, she flees his advances with becoming modesty. We see her once engaging in idol worship, a clear marker of Otherness; yet on the whole, her character seems much more akin to a typical European tragic heroine, a sort of noble savage.
The true savage is the The Widdow, who lacks any semblance of normative femininity. She smokes, drinks, curses, and pursues the man she loves. She dresses like a man and fights in a battle. We hear nothing about her beauty, charm, or other feminine qualities, normal subjects of encomia. And what is her relation to Moll Cutpurse, another female character whose behavior and dress contradict normative femininity? Moll seems less strange and wonderful because we understand her choices; she has explained the why of her lifestyle. Her lifestyle, also, is consistent; she chooses to go against the flow of what the culture expects of her in almost every respect. But the Widdow Ranter is just an enigma. We don’t understand her choices to buck culture, since she has obviously not done so in every instance. She is a Widdow, so she married once, as was expected of her. She is a woman, so she will marry again. Are all these oddities merely indications that we are dealing with a strange person, or are they markers of her cultural difference from the English? Is her American-ness the most important Otherness in the play, more striking and marvelous than the Indians? Is Aphra Behn trying to make a new type, the coarse, mannish American woman?
The Roaring Girl is full of animal allusions and names. People call each other horses, pigs, birds, dogs; there is a place called the Three Pigeons; characters have names such as Gull, Goshawk, Tearcat, and Neatfoot (“neat” being an archaic word for cow, or cattle). And, of course, the titular character, Moll Cutpurse, is the “roaring girl,” a lion of a woman.
Moll uses such language to her advantage in Scene 5 when she meets Laxton for what he assumes will be a sexual rendezvous. As soon as she sees him, she notes how “his eye hawks for venery” (line 43-44). Immediately he is cast in the role of predator. She, whom he calls “admirably suited for the Three Pigeons,” is his prey—a cooing, wanton bird in the hand. She goes on to describe herself sarcastically as his “hackney,” a broken-down horse which he rides hard. This sexual pun which not only puts their relationship in economic terms—a hackney is hired, as she points out when she throws his money at his feet—but also in terms of man and beast, the user and the used.
Her next animal reference carries a similar weight of sarcasm. She tells Laxton how conceited he is, hyperbolizing various situations in which he might think himself desired by a woman based on little evidence. To cap off this section of her diatribe, she tells him he’ll swear to his fellows that a lady has fallen more in love with him at first sight “than her monkey all her lifetime.” In this imaginary situation, the monkey is more than just the woman’s pet. It is also the woman, a fool, too quickly caught and snared by Laxton’s (lacking) charm and wiles. But in Moll’s sarcastic rendering, the monkey is Laxton, for imagining that women fall in love with him so easily.
In this monologue’s final extended metaphor, Moll compares Laxton’s usual prey, the “distressed needlewomen and trade-fallen wives,” to fish and himself to an angler. As noted in the text, these prey must “bite” or “be bitten”; sexual politics in Moll’s understanding is a relationship between predator and prey. She doesn’t fault women for “biting” at Laxton’s “worm”; otherwise they might be eaten by some worse predator. But she laughs at his angling for her, and at the end of her speech all animal metaphors are cast aside when she says, “I scorn to prostitute myself to a man, I that can prostitute a man to me!”
Tom Wilding and the Pox
The protagonist of The City Heiress is not the City Heiress. Nor is it Sir Timothy Treat-All. The first scene sets up a dispute between Sir Timothy and his nephew, Tom Wilding, and it immediately becomes obvious that, because of his youth, charm, and wit, we are to identify with the rakish, beseeching Tom and not his “resolv’d, deaf, and obdurate” uncle who refuses to continue to pay for Tom’s debts. Tom, a spendthrift with three romantic interests and a venereal disease to boot, is an odd choice for a protagonist, but it cannot be the demurely doting Charlot, or the aging and hypocritical Sir Timothy, nor can it be the whining Sir Charles Meriwill or the duped Lady Galliard. Diana might give Tom a run for his money, but it is Tom whom everyone in the play wants—wants what he has, wants to be more like him, or wants his person.
However clear it is that Tom is universally “wanted” by the characters in the play, it seems strange to the audience that he gets what he wants. Often in such plays, the bulk of the madcap action relies on the trickster getting away with his tricks, but barely, by the seat of his pants. Tom almost never gets away with his tricks; before he even tries to seduce them, Lady Galliard, Charlot, and Diana know all about his other lovers, his pennilessness, his lies. It seems that almost everyone at Sir Timothy’s dinner recognizes Tom in his disguise at some point or another, except for Sir Timothy. He is continually being unmasked by people around him, and things still turn out exactly as he would have them.
His venereal disease is an instance of this. Pox abounds in this play; it is used as a curse by almost every male character in the play. Clacket says that she has concealed the names of his “wicked diseases” and procured “filthy surgeons” for him. His uncle makes reference to paying for “Pocky doctors.” It seems like everyone knows he has the pox. Reference is even made to Tom’s pox in the presence of each of his romantic interests—yet they still want to sleep with him. Diana sums it up, “I must love a Wit, with a Pox, when I might have had so many Fools of Fortune.”
This makes me, as an audience member, ask “Why must she love him?” It is inconceivable that Tom should be successful in his conquests, given all his negative qualities and his ineptitude at secrecy and deceit. However, his rhetoric always saves the day. He is able to spin the truth (that he’s poor, that he’s a philanderer, that he’s diseased) and make every situation seem like he engineered it. His conquests believe that he loves them when it is obvious that he does not. His verbal vomit is the cure for any other illness he spreads. It seems that, in this play, love really is blind—but it is a syphilitic blindness caused by Tom’s infectious rhetoric.
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