Shakespeare Wasn't Perfect

So The Atlantic has seen fit to publish more "Shakespeare authorship" conspiracy-mongering, this time masquerading as feminism by proposing a female candidate. But the piece doesn't quote even a single line of the real poetry that woman wrote. It can't, of course, because that would give the game away. If the piece let you read Emilia Bassano Lanier's actual poetry it would become dangerously easy to hear that Lanier sounds like herself, not like Shakespeare. So the "feminist" conspiracy theory is dedicated to silencing the voice of an authentic woman poet. (Nobody said it was a good masquerade.)

The Atlantic piece rehashes the same old tired arguments that have been rebutted hundreds of times before. This isn't about real debate. But the biggest mistake is the assumption that Shakespeare is above criticism, and always has been. That has never been true. Shakespeare authorship conspiracies are outgrowths of an unhealthy hero-worship of Shakespeare, treating him as some infallible demigod.

Don't get me wrong. I think Shakespeare is terrific. I wouldn't spend my professional life teaching and writing about him if I didn't. But I also think he's great enough that we can admit his failings. Bardolatry, the idol-worship of Shakespeare, keeps you from understanding him.

So the Atlantic article begins by talking about how great Lady Macbeth is as a character (true enough), and rhapsodizes about how many other great female characters Shakespeare wrote. Then the first argument is basically that Shakespeare must have been a woman to write such great women. There's a little hedging, but that's the claim. Only a woman could write Lady Macbeth. If something seems wrong there, wait. One of the other examples is The Taming of the Shrew.

Yes. That Taming of the Shrew. Where the wife is, uh, a shrew. Who gets tamed. That Taming of the Shrew. Which apparently only a woman could have written.

And that, uh. Well. Kind of a surprise.

Or it would be if we were applying normal everyday logic to Shakespeare's works. To most casual observers, and a lot of professional ones too, The Taming of the Shrew looks sexist, what with Petruchio starving his wife into submission. (That is not my interpretation. That is what the text itself says. He doesn't allow her any food until she knuckles under.) But maybe it gets better if we look more closely? Say if we apply some English-major tools, like looking hard at all the metaphors Petruchio uses to describe Kate? Oops, sorry, no, he's always comparing her to domesticated animals. Whoops. Actually worse than it looks from a distance.

Now, Shakespeare being Shakespeare, there is a tradition of serious scholarship, much of it by feminist women, dedicated to saving the play from misogyny and discovering subtle anti-sexist messages inside it. We don't want Shakespeare to be a sexist pig, so we're going to work hard to get around any politics we don't agree with. I've read a lot of that criticism, and it's smart. But other feminist scholars disagree and say, Nope, sorry, all the stuff about dominating and subduing women means exactly what it says.

What's different is saying, No. The Taming of the Shrew is SO feminist that NO MAN COULD HAVE WRITTEN IT. And that, to borrow a phrase from psychoanalysis, is crazy talk.

Rather, it's a defense against cognitive dissonance, much like what we see with members of cults. The unpleasant truth has to be closed out. Our doomsday prophet isn't wrong! It's proof of how right he is! Shakespeare isn't a sexist with bad four-hundred-year-old politics! He's a feminist! In fact, he's the greatest feminist ever. He's such a great feminist that he could not actually be a man!

Whoo boy.

The Atlantic article's preferred ghost-writer, Emilia Lanier, also features in Shakespeare scholarship as a way to get past things that make modern readers uncomfortable. You see, her maiden name was Bassano (which is the name the Atlantic article uses, even though she didn't publish under it). And she had Italian heritage, and maybe-just-maybe Jewish heritage as well, so she got put forth forty years ago as a candidate for the Dark Lady of the sonnets. There's no reason to believe that. All we know is that the Dark Lady had dark hair and dark eyes, which doesn't narrow much down. We can't prove that Shakespeare and Lanier ever spoke with one another.

But, you see, if we can say the Dark Lady was a Venetian Jewess, then some things that make us uncomfortable about act four of The Merchant of Venice cease to be problems. See, Shakespeare can't be an anti-Semite! He had a Jewish mistress! (As if an anti-Semitic Gentile marrying his Jewish mistress were not part of the plot of The Merchant of Venice.)

As with Taming, there's a lively debate about whether Merchant is anti-Semitic or cleverly critiquing anti-Semitism. But having Emilia Bassano Lanier actually write The Merchant of Venice is three steps further into crazy land. If Merchant had actually been written by a Jew, that would be one seriously self-loathing Jew. It's a shonda, I tell you.

The problem here is that Shakespeare is treated as above reproach, so obvious complaints have to be explained away. No one is allowed to speak ill of the divine William. But Shakespeare was not a god. He was human, and flawed, and when we refuse to see the things that make us unhappy or uncomfortable we are refusing to read him. Better to take him as he is, flaws and all.

It isn't just the so-called anti-Stratfordians who do this. They merely express a mutant form of the excessive reverence that keeps many people from looking at Shakespeare honestly. It's not an accident that the authorship conspiracy theories don't start until 1850, when the Shakespeare cult had already taken full hold. Shakespeare got built up into a secular divinity, and then people looked at his all-too-human biography and decided it was uncomfortably ungodlike. So they looked for a better candidate. It's the literary-biographical equivalent of making up a divine ancestor for the founder of your tribe.

The author of the Atlantic piece, like many other conspiracy theorists, claims that the "doubts" began in Shakespeare's lifetime. She went on twitter to say so, and to complain that documents critical of Shakespeare had been suppressed by scholars. I mean, some of those documents get reprinted in collected editions of Shakespeare for students, and they were in my college textbooks, but I guess if you have to look in the back of the book that's a conspiracy or whatever.

The real point is that none of those critical comments about Shakespeare are disputing that he wrote the plays. They are saying that his plays suck. The conspiracy theorists claim that the plays are too wonderful for mere William Shakespeare from Warwick to write himself. But the critics they point to as "evidence" are actually saying that the plays are not good.

That seems unthinkable to us, but that's only because we've drunk the Kool-Aid. Not everybody liked Shakespeare during his lifetime. At least one person is on record liking Shakespeare as a human being but not liking his art, because he thought Shakespeare was a hack. Not that Shakespeare was too much of a hack to write Julius Caesar. He thought that Julius Caesar was hacktastic. No really.

Shakespeare also had fans and admirers, lots of them. But he had haters, especially at the beginning and the end of his career. At the end of his life, and for many decades afterward, he was considered an intellectual lightweight whose plays were not learned enough. Not that he wasn't learned enough to write the plays. That the plays themselves were not learned. Not sophisticated. Not intellectual. Pretty good, for an old guy, but no John Fletcher and no Ben Jonson.

This goes against everything our culture tells us about Shakespeare. But it's true. It's documented fact. For a lot of the 1600s the works of Shakespeare were not treated as lofty works of erudition. They were considered good, stupid, old-fashioned fun. A guilty pleasure.

That's not the way we look at those plays any more, but it isn't necessarily wrong. And it isn't crazy. Shakespeare's worth taking seriously, but he's not supposed to be a religion. If he's never fun you're doing it wrong.

cross-posted from Dagblog. Please post comments there, not here.

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside King Lear's Court

King Lear is facing a test to his monarchy unlike any other faced by a fictitious British monarch. It is not just that he parceled out his kingdom and left himself nothing. Or that the country is bitterly divided between his scheming, ungrateful daughters. Or even that the kingdom may soon be overwhelmed by French invaders.

The tragedy – which he does not fully grasp – is that many of his own followers are working diligently from within to frustrate his goals.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the mealy-mouthed “resistance” of Cordelia and her sore-loser followers. We strongly believe in the division of this kingdom into unstable warring duchies. But we believe our first duty is to unchecked, unreasoning monarchical authority, and the King’s continued ravings bring autocratic one-man rule into disrepute. That is why many of his followers have vowed to do what we can to preserve tyrannical feudalism while thwarting King Lear’s more misguided impulses until his o’erburdened heart cracks and can bear no more.

The root of the problem is that the King is outdoors, yelling at clouds. We are not even sure if he knows it’s raining. But whatever he is shouting for us to do, we’re not doing it. We could be hit by lightning out there. If he asks later, we’ll just pretend we don’t understand iambic pentamenter.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are bright spots. Both Regan and Goneril are pretty hot – like, at least eights. We’re all much bigger deals at court than we were before everyone got banished. And seeing the old Earl of Gloucester’s eyes put out was, face it, pretty hilarious.

But these good things have come despite – not because of – King Lear’s leadership, which is impetuous, petty, and obsessed with setting up obscure punch lines for his Fool.

He veers off into long, ranting monologues that force us to check our footnotes. He shows up to important meetings dressed mostly in wildflowers. And he can angrily berate the furniture under the impression that it is part of his family.

This erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes like us. Some of his courtiers have been cast as villains. But in private, we have gone to great lengths to keep his demented soliloquies out on the storm-tossed heath where they belong.

It may be cold comfort as Britain descends into bloody civil war, but you should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to keep King Lear from messing it up for us.

So when King Lear say orders us to execute a stool for the crime of being an ungrateful child, we definitely don’t do that. And we don’t go bothering Goneril or Regan. We just take away the stool. Problem solved! And also, more office furniture for us.

Also, whenever Lear has one of his crazypants "character-growth" insights about doing more for the poor naked wretches or whatever, we don’t do that either. I mean, that money could go for something useful. We just say, “Ooooh, Your Majesty, how profound! It’s like the mad have really been the sane ones all along! Who’s really blind here, and who’s, like, symbolically blind?” Then he forgets and moves on to something else.

This isn’t vulgar flattery. This is artful, steady flattery. Thou. Art. Welcome.

Given the instability many have witnessed, there were early whispers of crowning some capable, legitimate successor in King Lear’s place to guide our country back to peace and sanity.. But no one really wanted to precipitate a dynastic crisis, especially when basically we already have one. So we will do what we can to steer this monarchy until -- one way or another -- it’s all over. Really, how much worse could it get?


cross-posted from Dagblog; all comments welcome there, not here

Some People Are Not Duelable

I'm not a big proponent of bringing back customs and manners from hundreds of years back. The centuries I study were much worse to live in than this one. But there is one concept from Ye Olden Days that (suitably retooled), I have always found pretty useful. That is the concept of people being "not duelable." I use it in my academic writing. I use it in my daily life. I occasionally teach it to graduate students. And it turns out to be a concept that both the Age of Twitter and the Age of Trump badly need.

Now, dueling itself is a vicious custom and should not come back. But that custom contained one illuminating rule: dueling is something that happens between equals. (It's also restricted to the upper classes; humbler folk who fight with swords, like the playwright Ben Jonson, are just street brawling.) You only duel people who are, generally speaking, on your own level.

If you're a 17th-century gentleman, or a Russian aristocrat, or a young swell in Flaubert's Paris, you don't get in duels with servants or bartenders or some poor hapless working stiff. That's beneath you. (I'm not going to idealize this practice; this is mainly about not giving the hapless working stiffs a fair shot at the rich folk, or allowing the working stiffs to fight back.) Fighting those people isn't simply wrong. The wrongness isn't even the main problem. Fighting with those people is demeaning to you. It lowers you. It invites shame and ridicule.

Early in the 20th century (a little late for this sort of thing), the novelist Vladimir Nabokov's father got so angry about a yellow journalist's attack on him that he decided to challenge someone to a duel over it. (Neither Dr. Cleveland nor Dagblog endorses fighting duels or threatening journalists.) Did he challenge the person who wrote the article? No. That person was, from Nabokov Sr.'s point of view, just some greasy little scribbler, not worth the bother of tussling with. Papa Nabokov challenged the newspaper publisher. (The younger Nabokov has a wonderful chapter about this episode in his memoir, Speak, Memory.)  None of this is exactly Nabokov Sr.'s finest hour, but it taught me the basic "not duelable" concept, which has real value.

Let's broaden the definition of "duel" here to mean any public or semi-public conflict which, on some level, involves your reputation. That's what duels were: fights designed to protect one's reputation, and when someone was not duelable that meant that fighting them, or even challenging them, would only damage your reputation more. Some kinds of political slagging and point-scoring qualify, alas. So do some entertainers' public feuds: two rappers beefing with each other are both acknowledging each other as peers and trying to raise their profiles. And, like it or not, academic writing has its share of this, both because professional reputations are closely tied to that writing and because academic debate works, especially in the humanities, by disagreement. It is almost impossible to write a publishable article about Shakespeare where you don't at least politely suggest some other Shakespeareans are wrong about something. Often, people are much less polite. Sometimes scholars get into epic running beefs. The letter pages of the Times Literary Supplement are notorious for hosting ongoing tweedy vendettas. The question of who is duelable and who isn't in academic arguments is one I've given a lot of thought to, and it needs a post of its own.

One of my favorite examples of non-duelability in pop culture is Crash Davis in Bull Durham, flat-out declining to compete with boy idiot Nuke LaLoosh for Annie's favors: "I'm not interested in anyone who's interested in that boy." Translation: I'm not going to compete with that idiot, because he's not a suitable rival, and it would be demeaning to compete against him." Not duelable, bro.

Two major-party Presidential candidates going at each other is unpleasant and arguably unseemly. But you can't say that conflict is inappropriate. As nominees, they are peers. But if the President of the United States, with all the majesty of that office, decided to beef publicly with say, an ESPN personality like Jemele Hill, which is too crazy to ever happen, he would be attacking someone non-duelable. If he were to get petulant with an NBA player, that is fighting with someone non-duelable. Calling an unemployed NFL quarterback a "son of a bitch" in public is totally attacking someone non-duelable.

Trump does not make the duelable/ non-duelable distinction at all. He fights with people who have vastly different statuses. He goes after the grieving parents of an American serviceman killed in action. He beefs at Rosie O'Donnell, still, for God knows what reason. He gets in spats with the Emmys telecast and the Apprentice, with ESPN. The list goes on, unfortunately. It's depressing to see.

The first problem with this is it's wrong, because the people he goes after are weaker and have no defense. One of the basic reasons large categories of people were originally designated non-duelable is because those people did not have swords or guns. (The laws often restricted weapon ownership to the upper classes.) Picking on the poor grieving mother of a dead serviceman is a disgusting way to use your power. It's wrong because unjustly harms other people. It makes you a bully, and a thug, and an asshole.

The other two problems, which are interrelated, are problems because they harm you, rather than your target. The main problem is that it destroys your dignity. You get into the gutter to fight some rapscallions, what you win is a trip to the gutter. You get dirty and you make a depressing spectacle of yourself.

Trump does not preserve the dignity of his office. He screeches at people who are, since inauguration, vastly below him in station. Part of this is that Trump still insists on operating like a fairly low-level New York media figure, a guy who gets into arguments on a call-in radio show. He's like a less well-adjusted Howard Stern. Part of it is that, frankly, he's a psychologically damaged personality. The rest is that Trump has always behaved like someone from an entirely different social class, rather than like a normal, socially-adjusted rich New Yorker. For all his money, he has never been able to learn the rules of upper-class Manhattan, social norms that usually get expressed as "taste," "manners," and "class." That he's a rich guy with the manners, and open resentments, of someone from a much lower class has always been a big part of his appeal. But it's not an act; Trump isn't someone who can charm donors to the Met and then switch it up to bond with a cabbie. He genuinely doesn't understand the normal rules of upper-class behavior, including the rule that some fights are just beneath you.

What Trump gains by his refusal to observe decorum is the ability to attack people that Presidents usually don't attack. What he loses is the protective aura of his office's dignity. It feels wrong to insult a President of the United States in certain ways, but that's ultimately predicated on the fact that the President isn't going to shout crude insults at you, either. The aura is a two-way protection.

Normally, the dignity of the President's office keeps people from calling the President a bum, but Trump doesn't respect the dignity of office and so it doesn't protect him. If a pro athlete called a president, any president a bum, I'd usually think that was a classless move. But the President in question called another pro athlete a son of a bitch in public yesterday, so he's the one who changed the rules.

And related to the loss of dignity is the problem that when you get down in the gutter to fight with some guttersnipes, the guttersnipes might win. Trump publicly slagging on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry opened the door for LeBron James to just lay Trump out:

U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!

— LeBron James (@KingJames) September 23, 2017

That's not the golden political rhetoric of yesterday, but Trump is playing the playground diss game, and as playground disses go this is a classic. Trump has no one to blame but himself.

(I do not mean to imply that Mr. James is a guttersnipe. He is a sublime athlete and a philanthropist. But he's also a guy who sweats for a living, not somebody who gets called in to give the Cabinet advice. Do you remember when FDR got into that public insult match with Joe DiMaggio? That's right. You don't.)

The bigger question is whether the dictator of North Korea is duelable for an American president. All of Trump's predecessors thought not, and didn't waste time trading insults with a small-time dictator. Trump, who has no sense of dignity, is getting into a slagging match and, on balance, losing. But actually, this is not at all how people used to talk before duels. Duels are about saving face, but also about finding a way out of conflict if you can: a lot of energy focused on finding a way to say everybody's honor was satisfied without anyone bleeding out. Sometimes that failed, but that was the focus. Papa Nabokov found a way not to fight that duel. Trump and Kim are not looking for an elegant way out of this. They are woofing at each other like playground antagonists, both scared of looking "weak" by backing down. It's a situation that usually leads to the two knuckleheads trading blows because they're afraid not to.

The danger, of course, is that if these two idiots come to blows, it's not just them.

 cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

About Julius Caesar

So those literary geniuses, Fox News and Donald Trump, Jr., have decided to attack a "New York play" that they allege stages the assassination of Donald Trump. It is, of course, Shakespeare in the Park's production of Julius Caesar. And of course, Fox and Trump's loyal followers don't need to actually see the play to raise an enormous outcry, because denouncing people is too much fun for fact-checking.

It makes me sad, because Julius Caesar has been more important to America than any of Shakespeare's other plays. It was the play most taught in American schools for many decades, because it speaks about questions at the heart of the American experiment: about the nature of a republic and the duties we owe it, about the danger of tyrants and the dangers of civil violence. It's sad to see a public debate based on ignorance about this play.

So, alas, it's time for a special edition of Ask Me About Shakespeare, coming to you this time from Washington, DC, where I'm spending a month at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Let's take it away:

How much of this production was paid for by the NEA? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

None of it. Nada. Zilch.


When does a play like this verge into political speech? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

It's a play about the Dictator of Rome. It is and has always been about politics. Its central subject is politics. Every major male character is a Roman politician. Come on.

Does that change things? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

In that political speech has even more protection under the First Amendment, maybe. Political speech is a guaranteed Constitutional right.

Okay, but Shakespeare isn't about current politics.

Isn't he? Julius Caesar has been used to comment on current politics over and over again. It's been used to critique the rise of Mussolini. And at least once it's been used to implicitly comment on Obama in the same implicit way that Shakespeare in the Park is implicitly pointing at Trump.


One of the basic rules of understanding Shakespeare's history plays is that he is always more interested in the history of his own day than the history he is writing about. Always.

How is it still Shakespeare if it's in modern dress?

People have been doing "modern dress" Shakespeare for more than a hundred years at this point. Let's not act like it's some crazy novelty. And Shakespeare and his partners did "modern dress" themselves; they did Julius Caesar in 16th-century clothes, probably with a few "Roman" costume pieces thrown into the mix. People don't start putting Julius Caesar in togas until the 1800s.

The Public Theater, which stages Shakespeare in the Park, follows a standard rule about modern dress: they change costumes, in ways that are meant to work as visual footnotes, so that Roman senators for example dress like American senators. But they stick faithfully to Shakespeare's actual words and never add any modern language.

This play is not an adaptation of Julius Caesar. It really is Julius Caesar.

Why is Caesar killed by women and minorities? (-Fox N., NYC)

Because the Public Theater has, for the last fifty years or so, been a pioneer in cross-casting across gender and race. Fox News may object to this as political correctness, but it's a way of opening up parts to a wider range of American actors and ultimately making the pool more competitive. It's hard to find good Shakespeareans. Letting talented actors of color into the casting mix, and giving women a wider range of roles to play, definitely improves the overall standard of acting. This has now become standard practice; the last two professional Shakespeare plays I saw (one in DC, and one in Staunton, Virginia) cast across race and gender lines.

If you ever have a choice between seeing a mid-tier white male British actor do Shakespeare and seeing James Earl Jones do Shakespeare, by all means go with James Earl Jones. It's the American thing to do, and you won't be sorry.

But doesn't that look like Trump?

Yes, vaguely. Clearly, the Public is okay with people drawing that connection, which a lot of the audience was probably going to read into this play at this moment anyway. Much the same way that casting African-American Caesars during the last Administration let people draw the Obama connection.

But they aren't calling that character Trump, and Julius Caesar's lines are (how to put this?) deeply unlike the way our current President speaks.

But Shakespeare never depicted a living public figure on stage.

Didn't he? Actors and playwrights in his day were specifically forbidden to depict living people on stage, but they pretty clearly did it anyway. Loves Labors Lost is none-too-subtly about a particular king of France, and gives its King a posse of friends named after actual French noblemen.

Part of Shakespeare's costume inventory was clothing that various noblemen had gotten rid of once it went out of fashion. So there's always been the possibility that his actors could signal a topical reference by dressing like the political figure they were mocking, dressing in the man's actual clothes. Once, a while after Shakespeare died, his acting company bought a much-hated Spanish ambassador's sedan chair when that ambassador went back to Spain. When they carried one of their bad guys around stage in that chair, everyone knew who they meant.


So, they're endorsing Trump's assassination, right?

There is no way that Julius Caesar endorses Caesar's assassination. It is clearly a terrible thing to do, and all of the assassins are punished.

In fact, all of the conspirators except Brutus are clearly self-interested and immoral.  (As Antony says of Brutus:

All of the conspirators but only he
Did what they did in envy of great Caesar.)

Let's go to the Public Theater's own website to describe the play. In its director's words:

"Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means.
To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him." – Oskar Eustis

Eustis is right that the play presents both Caesar AND his assassins as dangers to the public. Caesar is a tyrant in the making, who is destroying the Roman Republic and replacing it with an autocracy. But his assassins are, well, assassins. They traffic in blood, and threaten Rome as much as Caesar does.

And this, of course, is why earlier productions could invite an Obama reading: that reading is that Obama is being attacked by these vicious politicians.

The joke here is that Julius Caesar depicts Caesar's enemies pretty much the way most of the people denouncing the play see Trump's critics: as a pack of conspirators who envy the great man's greatness.

Then who's the good guy?

Shakespeare's play doesn't have simple bad guys and good guys. That is why the play is still worth reading. It's morally complicated, just as the world we live in is.


But they show him being murdered on stage!

In the original script. It's been like this since around 1599. And that assassination scene is not designed to make you all excited about assassinations. Oh God, no.

No one treated Democratic presidents like this.
 
Maybe you should read Barbara Garson's Mac Bird! which specifically adapts Macbeth as a critique of LBJ.

Well, they should have left Trump out of it.

They can't. I couldn't be more sorry to tell you this, but there's no way to do that right now. People will make the Trump connection whether you want them to or not.

I just spent a semester teaching Shakespeare's history and tragedies, a semester that started about a week before inauguration. And I never discuss current politics in my classroom, least of all with undergraduates. I never said Trump's name in the classroom. But my students wanted to make the connection, over and over again.

Richard III reminded them of Trump. Hamlet's uncle reminded them of Trump. Macbeth reminded them of Trump. And those characters are much clearer villains than Caesar is. We got to an example of tyranny, or demagoguery or political dishonesty, and I had to keep students from talking about Trump. It got exhausting after a while.

Trump is on everyone's minds. He kind of insists on being on everyone's minds. And so people are going to connect him to plays like Julius Caesar.

Look, it's a play where a successful politician, who attracts huge rallies of the common people, is seen as a threat to centuries of democratic government. That politician has a band of dedicated enemies who are motivated by a mix of patriotism, rancor, and envy. 

You don't have to say Trump to get audiences thinking about Trump. (In fact, Shakespeare in the Park literally never says the word "Trump.") The audience is going to make the connection to Trump no matter what. It's inevitable. So there's a logic to just letting them do that and running with it. This has to be the Julius Caesar about the beginning of Trump's presidency, because no audience is going to let it be anything else.

Well, is Shakespeare really any guide to today's politics?

More than two centuries of American politicians have thought so. And Julius Caesar is also a play about the danger of propaganda and mob fury in politics. It's a play about lying to the people to get them angry. Mark Antony is a gifted orator and a smooth liar, who eventually whips the common people into a murderous frenzy based on falsehoods and distortions and then sends them out to do violence. 

In fact, one of the key scenes in the play has a mob murder a poet whom they've mistaken for someone else. That happens onstage too.

So, angry people on Twitter, remember: Julius Caesar is also a play about the dangers of being whipped up into an angry, undiscriminating mob. Maybe you should log off for a bit and give it a read.

(cross-posted from Dagblog, where comments are welcome. Comments are closed on this site.) 

Shakespeare 400

Tomorrow marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death (and Miguel Cervantes's death, too). There are celebrations worldwide, and there will be ongoing Shakespeare events and celebrations throughout 2016. (If you don't believe me, believe twitter, and search the #SHX400 hashtag.)

Let me recommend the Folger Shakespeare Library's 50-state First Folio tour, coming to someplace in your state. If you're near Cleveland, come see one (or more!) of the Cleveland Public Library's events and exhibits, and catch the Shakespeare Folio when it comes to town in June and July. And if you happen to see me around, say hello and ask a question or two.

In the meantime, let's have a special bonus round of "Ask Me About Shakespeare" for any Dagbloggers who have questions.

cross-posted from (and all questions or comments welcome at) Dagblog

David Bowie Lived to 69 (Alan Rickman, Too)

My social media feed, like yours, is full of mourning this week: not simply for the great and beloved David Bowie, but also for the brilliant Shakespearean actor Alan Rickman (likewise beloved from many films), the poet C. D. Wright, and two more heroes of the Shakespeare world: the eminent actor Brian Bedford, a legend of the Stratford festival in Ontario, and the scholar and editor Sylvan Barnet. (You know those Signet paperback editions of Shakespeare? Those were Sylvan's.) And I see my friends asking in baffled grief, Why so many? Why so fast? Why now?

Because they refused to die in December. So let's celebrate that. They wanted to make it through the winter holidays, into the new year -- in Bowie's case, until his 69th birthday. So they hung on: for their family's sake, and for their own. Maybe not all of them. But likely most of them.

Can someone do that? Absolutely. You're going to have to trust me on this one.

You can't keep yourself alive through sheer willpower, not forever. You can't choose your day. But terminally ill patients can rally for a while, especially when they something to look forward to. I've seen it happen.

I feel sad that these famous strangers have gone out of the world. I liked living in the same world with them, and I will be sad they are gone. Some of them were heroes of mine. But celebrate that they got their New Year's Eve, their London Christmas. Be happy that their spouses did not have to spend Christmas in raw, newly-wounded mourning. Be glad that Bowie, who had already willed himself not just to stardom but to thoughtful, searching artistry, willed himself to his 69th birthday. (And no, I couldn't resist the off-color pun in my title. Bowie was full of appetites and life, as people who knew him in his touring days have amply testified. The bacchanal Bowie of the 1970s and the Bowie who willed himself past one last milestone were very much the same man.)

And if you think your Facebook feed is sad now, think of what it would have been like if Ziggy Stardust and Professor Snape had died on December 23. Think of how that would have made you feel, and be grateful for the deep generosity, by people with almost nothing left, that held off that sadness from you.

Celebrate their lives, and celebrate their final, persevering strength.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Ask Me About Shakespeare, Round Two

Over at Dagblog, I'm hosting my second "Ask me about Shakespeare" thread. If you want to watch the steam come out of my ears as I relive my graduate oral exams, that's the place right now.

Loving Shakespeare's Language, Then and Now

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine carries an elegantly written lament by Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University, who has come to believe that his students don't love Shakespeare's poetry as poetry anymore:

Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley, Calif. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility. In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid. It is as if the sense of linguistic birthright that I experienced with such wonder had faded and with it an interest in exploiting its infinite resources.

To this, I say: Okay. Maybe. But also maybe not. But if this is so, it isn't a naturally occurring phenomenon. It results from a changed set of educational emphases. Focusing on the poetry as poetry, and relentlessly working over the rhythms and images and word choices, was the central enterprise of college English Lit classes over roughly the middle half of the 20th century. And because that was what high school and middle school English teachers had learned how to do in college, that was what they passed on to students in middle school and high school. If Stephen Greenblatt came to college already loving Shakespeare for the beautiful language, it is because he had come to college through an educational system where studying Shakespeare meant studying the beautiful language.

There was a move away from this system (which went and still goes by the name "the New Criticism") starting roughly in the 1980s. Here's another passage by a scholar of Greenblatt's generation:

In graduate school at Yale in the late 1960s, I found myself deeply uncertain about the direction I wanted my work to take. I was only mildly interested in the formalist agenda that dominated graduate instruction and was epitomized in the imposing figure of William K. Wimsatt. His theory of the concrete universal -- poetry as "an object which in a mysterious way is both highly general and highly particular" -- seemed almost irresistibly true, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to enlist myself for life as a celebrant of the mystery.

Wimsatt was one of the intellectual giants of the "New Criticism," the so-called "formalist" attention to poetic language above all else. But our former graduate student couldn't limit himself to that approach. So he struck out in a new direction and pioneered a new critical approach to Shakespeare which centered on using history to illuminate the texts in new and innovative ways.

He is, of course, Stephen Greenblatt. The second passage is from Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, page 1.

A few quick acknowledgements: Greenblatt is legitimately the most famous and influential Shakespeare scholar of his generation. He has basically been Shakespearean Number One for years now. I don't know him personally, but we are one degree of separation apart in dozens of directions. And I will admit, right now, that he has been a major influence on my own work. I'm a big, big fan. (I knew right where to find that second passage, didn't I?)

Now, I have never believed that Greenblatt's work meant turning away from the poetry itself. But many of his many, many critics have said exactly that. They view the question as either/or: are we talking about poetry, or are we talking about "early modern culture?" I have always viewed the question as both/and: the intellectual tools that Greenblatt provides supplement the older toolbox originally filled by Wimsatt and the boys. (I spent my first year in college being subtly but relentlessly drilled in the older skill set by one of Greenblatt's most distinguished colleagues. That experience has turned out to be much more formative than I once admitted to myself.)

Greenblatt's NYT Magazine piece reads from one viewpoint like an inadvertent mea culpa, bemoaning all the changes that Greenblatt's critics once warned that Greenblatt himself would bring to pass. Kids don't love Shakespeare's poetry any more! We told you this would happen! But I read it instead as evidence that Greenblatt himself has always been a both/and type. He didn't turn away from Wimsatt's methods because he thought they were wrong. He took them as proven, and moved on to a different area where things needed more clarification. Loving the language was always something he presumed as part of the basic approach. And certainly, at the beginning of his career, with decades of educational infrastructure teaching every English major to use and value those Wimsatt-y New Critical skills, Greenblatt could safely take them for granted.

But the real problem with the NYT piece isn't that Greenblatt pines for the older approach that he himself helped to dethrone. The problem for me is that Greenblatt, whose own ground-breaking work has been on examining social and cultural context, ignores the context of the educational system itself. Greenblatt 2015 writes about falling in love with Shakespeare's language as a spontaneous personal event, wholly distinct from the educational system around him. (He even leads off with a middle school teacher's failed attempt to win him over to Shakespeare, so that he can imply that his love comes from himself and not from school.) But Greenblatt circa 1985 teaches us to be suspicious of those claims, and to look for the ways that the society around the individual loads the deck.

People in Greenblatt's generation encountered the message about Shakespeare's beautiful language over and over again, maximizing the chances that it would eventually stick. Students today encounter the message that "Shakespeare can be cool in some exciting new medium!" over and over again; if students who got that message relentlessly until high school graduation reproduce that message themselves in college, that's not exactly supernatural. People don't fall in love with Shakespeare entirely and spontaneously on their own. Someone else always passes notes for him in study hall.

If Stephen Greenblatt wants students to love the Shakespeare that he loves himself, he needs to woo them for that Shakespeare. He needs to show students those poetic beauties and give the students opportunities to savor them. He needs to woo persistently without pestering, to allow the wooed party room to breathe without letting the courtship run cold. He needs to keep the object of desire before the students' eyes until they decide that, deep in their own hearts, they desire it for themselves. It's a tricky process. It's not easy, and it doesn't always work. But we've been doing it for a long time, and it has a name. It's called "teaching."

cross-posted (and all comments welcome at) Dagblog

No, Colleges Still Teach Shakespeare

You may have seen news stories, timed for Shakespeare's more-or-less birthday, claiming that top American colleges have stopped requiring Shakespeare. This is not news (nothing about college requirements has changed lately), and not really true. The study uses a very specific and misleading definition which allows it not to count most of the ways that Shakespeare is actually taught in college English departments. The study refuses to accept anything but a required stand-alone Shakespeare-only course as a "Shakespeare requirement." If Shakespeare is only part of required courses, that doesn't count. And if a department has a requirement that drives most of its students into Shakespeare courses, that doesn't count either. This is misleading.

Worse, the study then rants about the various things that can be "substituted for Shakespeare" at various schools, cherry-picking various electives with titles like "Detective Fiction," "Digital Game Theory," or "Creatures, Aliens, and Cyborgs" and fulminating that these trendy classes are replacing Shakespeare. This isn't just misleading. It's outright dishonest. The authors of the study, having read the requirements for the fifty-two schools they're discussing, know full well that these courses don't fulfill the requirements that would otherwise demand Shakespeare. The schools offering the three courses I just named require courses in earlier literature, and those courses do NOT fulfill them. The authors of the study know this. They just pretend not to.

Now, I myself could only benefit from more Shakespeare requirements. I'm a professor of Shakespeare, after all. And I certainly value Shakespeare at least as much as the folks who wrote this study did. But this report is a big nothing. When you take out the dishonesty and spin, it's less than nothing.

A little background: this study is from ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is a conservative organization dedicated to having trustees and donors micromanage academic decisions that have traditionally been left to faculty. (ACTA says it's for "Academic Freedom & Excellence," but in practice it seems upset that academics have too much freedom to make academic judgements.) And ACTA, for its own reasons, limited its study to the fifty-two highest-ranked colleges and universities in the US, according to the US News & World Report rankings. (They got fifty-two by taking the top 25 "National Universities" and top 25 "Liberal Arts Colleges"; because of ties in the rankings, that's a bit more than 50). So they didn't bother looking at the schools the vast majority of students actually attend, which might or might not say something about ACTA's own biases.

What is notable is that the focus on "Top 25" schools means that ACTA included three schools that do not have English majors. West Point, Harvey Mudd, and MIT have "literature" majors instead. MIT's literature major has two tracks, one of which looks like a traditional English major (and thus tracks its students toward studying Shakespeare) and one of which doesn't. The others have more general literature requirements that aren't necessarily focused on literature in English at all, which makes the lack of a Shakespeare requirement not terribly newsworthy. French and Classics majors mostly aren't required to take Shakespeare either. That didn't stop ACTA from listing these schools without English departments as schools where the "English major" doesn't include Shakespeare.

Now, of the 52 schools that ACTA deigned to examine, it's true that only only 4 require a stand-alone course in Shakespeare-and-nothing-else. But there are three things that ACTA isn't telling you about:

1. Historical period requirements. Nearly every school that ACTA surveyed, 47 of 52, requires English majors to take at least one course, and sometimes three or even four courses, in literature written before a certain date. For more than 40 of those schools, that date is 1800 or earlier; for another half-dozen or so, it is before 1900, 1850, or 1830.

What does this mean? It means that to "get out" of taking Shakespeare you have to take something else from a similar time period, or earlier. There are about six schools on ACTA's list where you can hypothetically get off soft by reading Bleak House, Moby-Dick, or Wordsworth. (But to be fair, it would be pretty hard to fulfill all of Swarthmore's three required pre-1830 courses with writers from 1800-1830.)

At the rest of the schools, the vast majority that ACTA looked at, the choice isn't between Shakespeare and Lady Gaga. It's between Shakespeare and Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer, or - at some places - Shakespeare and enormous quantities of Alexander Pope.

In practice, most students fulfill these requirements either with a Shakespeare course or with a thematic course that include a hefty amount of Shakespeare. (I once taught a course called "Love and Sex in Renaissance Literature" that included his sonnets, two of his plays, and his long poem Venus and Adonis, but also Sidney's sonnets, Spenser's sonnets, a chunk of The Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and healthy servings of poems by Donne, Herrick, Wyatt, Surrey, Petrarch, etc. This, by ACTA's lights, is "not a course focused on Shakespeare." And the word "sex" was in the title! Gadzooks!)

If students don't fulfill these requirements with Shakespeare, they're often taking a course in early literature that's harder, less popular, or both. Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, and Donne are all more difficult for undergraduates to read, and more challenging on a line-by-line level, than Shakespeare is. And here's an insider's tip: the 18th century, although wonderful, is the least popular literary period for English majors. It's much easier to get students to read King Lear than Clarissa.

This is not dumbing down the curriculum. Not by any means.  English majors graduating having "only" read Paradise Lost and not Hamlet is not a big crisis. But ACTA doesn't want to count these schools as "requiring Shakespeare." Smith College makes its students take TWO of three single-author courses: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Those who avoid Shakespeare by reading Chaucer and Milton aren't going to be especially ill-educated. And in practice, almost all of the students will take Shakespeare and one of the other two. What does ACTA say about this requirement? "No course focused on the study of Shakespeare is required." Oh no, the sky is falling!

2. Survey Courses. These are less popular than they once were, but several schools on ACTA's list still require students to take survey courses that include Shakespeare. Those courses have titles like "Major Poets," "Literary History," or "British Literature to 1700."

Most of the few actual English departments that don't require courses before 1700, 1800, or 1850 require a survey instead. Some schools require a number of courses before 1800 AND the survey. So students do get taught Shakespeare, in a way that's required for all majors.

This doesn't count for ACTA, either. So, for example, Yale University requires its majors to take THREE courses before 1800 AND two survey courses: "Major British Poets from Chaucer to Donne" (the semester that includes Shakespeare) and "Major British Poets from Milton to T.S. Eliot." But students can get out of the surveys by taking four advanced courses on the poets on the survey, two from each semester. So you could theoretically get a B.A. in English from Yale by reading The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost instead of Macbeth. But it would be a pretty rare student who does. Yale actually has a fairly conservative curriculum. But ACTA's verdict? "No course focused on the study of Shakespeare is required."

With requirements like that, does it have to be?

3. Limits to the number of Shakespeare classes.

Since the whole point of ACTA's polemic is that Shakespeare is being done wrong and pushed out of the curriculum, you'd think that they would point out that FIVE of the schools on their list limit the number of Shakespeare courses that can count toward requirements. (When we throw out the schools without English majors, that's 10% of ACTA's total.) At Bates, Bowdoin, Columbia, Princeton, and Rice students can only use ONE Shakespeare course to fulfill the pre-1800 requirements.

This doesn't mean that students at those schools aren't allowed to take more than one Shakespeare class. It means that the second, third, and so on Shakespeare courses are just electives. More importantly, it means that those schools require their students to read challenging early literature besides Shakespeare. The problem isn't that students at these schools are avoiding Shakespeare. The problem is that they use Shakespeare to avoid Chaucer, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and Milton. So students have to be steered to reading more widely in early periods.

These schools don't require Shakespeare because Shakespeare is doing just fine on his own. Also, the dining halls at these schools do not require dessert. That's not some liberal War on Pudding. That's because the requirement isn't necessary in the first place.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

Shakespeare "Authorship Debates" and Amateur Scholarship

So, just in time to ruin my New Year's celebrations, Newsweek has seen fit to publish a credulous article trumpeting the old who-wrote-Shakespeare conspiracy theories. I won't give Newsweek a link, but you can click through Amanda Marcotte's smart takedown at Rawstory if you're curious. The original piece is full of breathless non-facts like "Nobody ever recognised Shakespeare as a writer during his lifetime" [except for at least three dozen separate individuals, writing both in print and manuscript, because Shakespeare was famous]  "and when he died, in 1616, no one seemed to notice" [except the six different poets who wrote memorial verses for him]. Apparently you can always say, "there's no evidence" even when there is evidence.

Now, I'm on record about this question on this blog, and under my professional name, and I've been quoted about it in a major newspaper, so I don't want to belabor the key facts here. As the above example suggests, this isn't really a debate about facts anyway. But this phony debate often gets cast as insiders vs. outsiders, the stuffy Shakespeare establishment, with all the PhDs and whatever vs. the free-thinking, imaginative amateur scholars. So I'd like to clarify a few things about how academic and amateur Shakespeareans work.

1. Professional Shakespeareans constantly argue with each other and are rewarded for new ideas.

The standard position of the Francis Bacon/Earl of Oxford/etc./etc. fans is that "orthodox" Shakespeareans are all sticking together because we are afraid of new ideas. This ignores the fact that academic Shakespeare scholars argue with each other constantly about any question that can reasonably be disputed. Winning arguments with each other is how we get ahead in our careers. And winning an argument that brings in a big new idea, or overturns an important old idea, is the gold standard. The academic Shakespeare establishment isn't a conspiracy. It's a boxing ring.

This is one of the reasons that academic writing can be hard for general readers to enjoy: it focuses on highlighting the new idea that the writer is putting forward, rather than the ideas that the reader might find most interesting. Something that's interesting to you as a reader but that every scholar's agreed on for the last fifty years won't get much attention, while today's new idea, even if it's quite small, will get the most attention. And because every argument a scholar puts forward is liable to being torn apart by other scholars, scholarly writing tends to be carefully hedged and to carefully shore up even pretty small issues so that they don't give another critic an opening. That's another reason academese is hard to read.

I don't write my scholarship to highlight how much I agree with more established Shakespeareans. It's just the reverse. I once criticized something written by the then-head of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (whom many Oxfordians especially dislike) so, ah, energetically that I was publicly accused, in print, of having been "unfair" to him. (Of course, I don't think that I was unfair, but hey, to offend and judge are distinct offices.) Scholarly writing demands pointing out where other scholars are wrong.

A member of the "Shakespeare establishment" who could make a strong case that Shakespeare's works had been written by someone else would stand to benefit enormously. Even if it weren't a completely bullet-proof case, the rewards for making a reasonably strong case, opening room for legitimate doubt, would be huge. You'd immediately become a major player in the field. If I thought I had the evidence to back up a case like that, you'd better believe that I would make it. And so would a lot of other people like me. Yes, that would mean publicly disagreeing with many important senior scholars; that would only make it sweeter.

(On the other hand, the reward for believing Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is nothing, just like the reward for believing that the sky is blue and water is wet is nothing. No one beats someone else out for a job because they both believe the same thing that no one else doubts. One of the frustrations many literary scholars have teaching beginning undergraduates is those students' deep commitment to arguing things that are so obviously true that they're not worth bringing up; making arguments like that is not what professional academics value at all.)

The reason I don't make a case for someone else writing Shakespeare is that I can't. The reason that a large group of other people inside the academic world haven't done it is that they can't either. If there were evidence to make a good case, someone would certainly be ambitious enough to make it. But it never happens.

2. Amateur scholars are welcome in academic debates.

One of my generation's two greatest historians of Shakespeare's theater is an independent scholar named Dave Kathman, who doesn't have a university job or a PhD in literature. Dave works as a financial analyst in Chicago, and does the Shakespeare-theater-history thing as a hobby. But he's enormously productive and valuable as a scholar. There's only one PhD-holder in my generation who's more important to that specific field than Dave is. (That scholar is an Oxford professor, very much part of the establishment.) Dave has found original documents that we had not known about, because he looked in archives people had not thought about trying. So suddenly, thanks to Dave, we have apprenticeship records for Shakespeare's boy actors. We can prove when they joined the company, and we can closely estimate their ages. It used to be we knew very little about the boys who played female parts, but now we know more about them than we know about some of the adult actors.

Dave doesn't get turned away because he doesn't have a PhD in our field, or because he doesn't teach college. He's been welcomed and valued, because he makes important contributions. He has also made a strong argument that changed the way we think about an important primary document from theater history, a piece of old paper that's obscure to outsiders but which turns out to underwrite a lot of other theories about what was going on in the 1590s. Dave made strong case for that document being from a different year than we thought, and belonging to a different acting company. This, of course, led to a debate. Shakespeareans debate things. And Dave was opposed by some very high-profile senior scholars who were committed to the old way of looking at that document. But they didn't pull rank on him. No one said, "I teach at an Ivy and you don't have a PhD in English, so you're wrong." They had to meet him on the facts, and some eventually had to concede that he was right.

We don't turn amateurs away because they're amateurs. An amateur who makes a strong case can win the day.

3. Shakespeare "authorship disputes" are actually OLDER than professional Shakespeare scholarship. 

In fact, the "authorship controversy" started in the days when every Shakespearean was an amateur. It didn't start until the 19th century, which is long enough after Shakespeare's death to raise difficult questions. (No one in the 16th, 17th, or 18th centuries expressed any doubts. But sometime after Shakespeare had been dead for 200 years a few people suddenly decided that it was impossible that he wrote his works.) But university courses on Shakespeare come even later still, as do doctoral degrees in English literature. Those don't get underway until the second half of the 19th century.

So this didn't start as an argument between professors and outsiders. There were no professors of Shakespeare. Everyone was an amateur (and that includes some of the greatest Shakespeare scholars who have ever lived).

But when literature departments got organized and people started writing research dissertations on Shakespeare, none of the maybe-someone-else-wrote-it stuff got used by the new group of pros. It wasn't because people conspired to exclude it. Someone who could prove that case in 1865 or 1915 would have been highly rewarded, the same way someone would for proving it in 2015. But the evidence for other candidates has never been there. And you can't get away telling your PhD adviser bullshit like "No one ever mentioned Shakespeare as a writer during his lifetime." Your adviser will know that's a lie.

The "Shakespeare authorship" arguments are like astrology: an old idea that professionals working in the field have outgrown but that stays popular with a slice of the general public. Like astrology, the Shakespeare-authorship game has trouble generating new hypotheses that can stand up to a rigorous test. And so authorship debates, like astrology, tend to recycle old claims over and over again, giving them a certain time-in-a-bottle quality. I'm having trouble finding anything in that Newsweek story that you couldn't find somewhere else by, say, 1940. In the academic world, a piece that just repeats things from decades ago is completely unpublishable. But the authorship hobbyists are more than happy to dish out the same old cabbage, no matter how many times it's been served before.

Journalists writing "news" stories about these conspiracy theories need to spin the Shakespeare-not-Shakespeare idea as somehow, well, new. But it's not new. It's a very old idea, nearly two hundred years old at this point, and it hasn't made any progress in a long time.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

The Shakespeare Slly Season

This week marks Shakespeare's 450th birthday, leading to many celebrations. We don't know exactly which day he was born (because we only have a record of his baptism, not of his birth), but it was sometime before April 26, and the April 23 has become the "official" birthday. (Why? 1. Shakespeare died on April 23, so wouldn't that be cool? and 2. April 23rd is an English national holiday, so wouldn't that be lovely and patriotic?)  But because it's a big round-number birthday, it's also attracting scammers and hucksters.

First, there was a viral post about the discovery of lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio. Now, there is a lost play by Shakespeare called Cardenio, which various contemporary witnesses refer to as his. (There may well also be a lost play called Loves Labors Won, the sequel to Loves Labors Lost. If you've read to the end of LLL, you'll know why some people might be expecting a sequel.) And now, news of that Cardenio has been discovered! Bad news ... the website announcing this discovery is worldnewsdailyreport dot com (which I will not link), the online successor to The Weekly World News. It's a website about Bigfoot and Bat Boy; the story after the Cardenio one is about UFO links to the Vatican. (I did not make that last bit up, because I could not.) So, nope. Good timing to drive traffic, though.

More seriously, a pair of antiquarian booksellers in New York are claiming that they've found William Shakespeare's personal dictionary, the Alvearie (or Beehive) by John Baret. A very fair-minded response to their claims can be found here, courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. The book isn't signed; the booksellers claim it's Shakespeare's handwriting. But they claim that the expert scholars they've had examine the book are too timid to risk their reputations. Translation: they've asked a bunch of experts who haven't given them the answers they wanted. For example, the writing in the margins of this book are in a different type of script than the script we've seen Shakespeare use. (Just about everything we have in his hand is in what's called "secretary hand," and this is in an italic hand. Whoops.) But the booksellers have timed their publicity for maximum attention.

Actually, respectable scholars are willing to put their neck out to claim "new" Shakespeare all the time. In the 80s it was a "new" Shakespeare poem, duly put into some anthologies, but now back out of most of them. A few years ago it was a "new" portrait of Shakespeare, looking much thinner and better-dressed than the attested images (Shakespeare can never be too rich or too thin, it seems). That's still an image you see a lot, and it's treated in some quarters as genuine; we'll see how that goes over time.

What's amazing to me is what kind of Shakespeare discoveries, or "discoveries" get play in the news. They're always pretty concrete, but seldom anything that would tell you much about the poems or plays. If that were his dictionary, it wouldn't teach us much about his plays, because the only sign it's him is that he's underlining things we already know from his plays. (Another explanation, of course, is that an early Shakespeare fan marked up this dictionary; that's a kind of reading practice we've come to recignize and expect.)

Let me make a suggestion, if you're in the mood to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday this week: celebrate some old Shakespeare. The old stuff is right there between the covers, just as it has been, and those poems are so rich and complicated that you can almost always find something you haven't noticed before. I've been stumbling across surprises in that book for decades, and the more I know, the more new things I see.

Discover some old Shakespeare. It's pretty good.

A Plague on False Centrists

“A plague on both houses!” I've seen that line from Romeo and Juliet quoted repeatedly for the last two weeks,  as pundits and bloggers devoted to “balance” argue that the Democrats and Republicans share the blame for the current budget shutdown and the looming threat of default. The line itself is a cliche, but quoting Shakespeare makes you sound learned, and that is too often the major aim of both-sides-do-it journalism: making the journalist seem wise and above the inconvenient facts of the fray. Shakespeare was a poet, not a pundit, more interested in dramatic complexity than sound bites but if we’re going to mine his plays for lessons, we should remember what we’re quoting. Saying “a plague on both your houses” does not solve political conflict in Romeo and Juliet or in the real world. It accelerates a destructive feud, and it's meant to. Those who curse both houses are not trying to make peace. They are egging on a brawl.

    The line “a plague on both your houses” is of course spoken by Romeo’s friend Mercutio, mortally wounded in a street duel. Taken out of context, it sounds like an accusation that the Montague and Capulet families are both equally violent and equally blameworthy. But the audience can see for itself that this is not true. Romeo steadily refuses to fight. He and the other Montague on stage, his cousin Benvolio, work tirelessly to head off the duel, and when that fails Romeo physically throws himself between the fighters to stop them. Romeo and Juliet is a play about dangerous civil disorder, and the leaders of the Montague and Capulet houses do share the blame for disrupting the peace. The senior leaders who should rein in each house’s servants and young men, the clowns and hotheads, instead actually encourage aggression. But Mercutio pretends that there is no difference between the play’s most violent characters and its handful of peacemakers, no difference between starting a fight and trying to stop it. His pretense of neutrality is worse than an empty pose; it actively promotes violent conflict.

    Mercutio deliberately goads one of Juliet’s cousins to combat, and when Romeo refuses to be baited Mercutio jumps in to start the fray. He not only wants a fight; he insists. “A plague on both your houses” is the cry of a man killed with a sword in his hand. It is meant to spur Romeo to further bloodshed, accusing him of causing the death he tried to prevent, and it succeeds. Every death in Romeo and Juliet comes after the "plague on both houses" line. Blaming both sides equally undermines the peacemakers but empowers the hostile and unreasonable, freeing them from any public responsibility. If every time you kill a Montague (or a Capulet), people shake their heads and blame both the Montagues and Capulets, you might as will kill as many Montagues or Capulets as you can; your victims split the blame with you. And if you have to take half the blame every time you try to make peace and get attacked with a sword instead, you will never manage to make peace. Apportioning half the guilt for every crime to the criminal and half to the criminal’s sworn enemy is not an act of moderation. It promotes and rewards extremism.

    The American media has unerringly taken the side of confrontation and brinksmanship and discord, through years of mounting political disputes and manufactured crises. The press has done this while pretending neutrality with sad, wise shakes of the head, lamenting the unreasonableness of both sides. That head-shaking is not neutrality. It is active intervention on behalf of the unreasonable. Unprecedented acts of obstructionism are treated as routine tactics. Partisans abusing the legislative process to extract concessions are awarded the same stature and coverage given to national leaders seeking compromise. Worse, those who work for conciliation and those who work against it are portrayed as equally partisan, as if deal-making and deal-breaking were simply two sides of the same coin. Individual journalists may be liberal or conservative, but the political media itself is clearly biased toward confrontation: indifferent to policy results but hungry for drama, always looking for more juicy showdowns and shutdowns and crises. So the press has played Mercutio, standing in the street hoping to see a fight, scoring the “winners” and “losers” of every pointless showdown. The media pose as objective bystanders because they only forgive half of every crime and only slander half of every good deed. But absolving the cheats and brawlers is not objectivity. Cursing the peacemakers is not standing honest witness. The press has not been a bystander. It has acted, scene after pointless scene, to build more conflict. Our political journalists have helped to write the sorry drama our nation must now play out. They should take their bows.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Shakespeare, Oxford, and the 1%

cross-posted from Dagblog

Last weekend, Hollywood released Anonymous, a costume drama whose promotional materials ask "Was Shakespeare a Fraud?" They're not really asking the question; the movie clearly promotes the argument that it was "really" Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who wrote the plays. The studio has also sent out course materials to schools, so that teachers can teach students to think critically about embrace the idea that Oxford wrote Shakespeare.

If you followed media coverage of the movie, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the "authorship controversy" is a lively and interesting debate. If you looked at the documentary record from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you'd find that actually it's pretty boring. We have a large stack of historical documents that explicitly name William Shakespeare, the actor from Warwickshire, as the author of those plays and poems. No one from the time shows any doubt about this. We have lots of witnesses who identify Shakespeare, by name, as the writer. We have no witnesses who name Oxford, or Bacon, or anybody else. The math isn't hard.

Now, some Oxfordians will tell you that when a historical document from the sixteenth century says "William Shakespeare" that actually means "Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford," because "William Shakespeare" was his pseudonym. (I'm not making that up. That is a standard Oxfordian claim.) Why do they believe this? Because they really, really want to.

(I'm not going to go further into this issue, but if you wish to hear fuller arguments you might go here, here, here, or here; the comment thread in the last link features screenwriter John Orloff's angry and not-thoroughly-competent attempts to argue back. And the best book on this subject is James Shapiro's superb Contested Will.)

Why does this matter? Because ultimately, this conspiracy theory is about the desire to claim  that Shakespeare is in the 1%. Only an aristocrat, the conspiracy theorists say, someone in a tiny elite on top of the social and economic pyramid, could have created such art. The stakes here are to make William Shakespeare's works the property of the inherited elite.

The Oxfordian argument is, in short, a crasser and crazier version of a process that is going on all the time, in which the small elite of the super-wealthy are given credit for the achievements of the rest of society. Not only are they allowed to hog the fruits of everyone else's industry and ingenuity, but they demand to be given credit for that intelligence and labor as well. (See, for example, the "job creators" meme, which imagines wealth creation in a capitalist marketplace as the gracious gift of Lord Bountiful.) The claim, ultimately, is that we NEED to coddle the 1%, because that 1% creates everything good, such as the works of Shakespeare. All those middle-class actors, poets, and audience members were just obstacles to aristocratic genius.

And the Oxfordians' campaign displays a lot of the standard features that we see in pro-elitist propaganda campaigns:

There's the fake populism, that poses as an attack on the smug "elite" of university professors, although the actual point of the whole enterprise is to take credit away from William Shakespeare and give it to someone more elite. (And for the record, I'm not asking you to take my word for any of this because I have a Ph.D. I'm simply pointing out that there's a whole pile of evidence that you could check out yourself.) Part of the point, as always, is that middle-class professionals are to be attacked when they don't serve the super-elite agenda, like those greedy, lying climate scientists.

There's the false-equivalence press coverage, with the "on-the-one-hand" lead-in, which makes each "side" of any controversy sound equally plausible even when one of those sides has, basically, nothing.

There's the paranoid shifting of the burden of proof, so that questioners demand proof that there is not a conspiracy instead of offering any proof that there might be. Can you prove that when people said "William Shakespeare" they didn't mean someone else? Can you prove that George Soros isn't behind this?

And, of course, there's the character assassination. The historical William Shakespeare can't just be presented as a middle-class man of middling education. He has to be a completely illiterate and unprincipled buffoon. (It always blows my mind that these conspiracy theories portray Elizabethan actors, who typically performed six different plays a week and tended to have two or three dozen roles in their head at a time, as unable to read. How the hell would they learn their parts?) Anyone who's not in the 1% must be lazy, stupid, and so forth. Because meritocracy, of course, is for the lazy.

Because of that, the historical inaccuracy that most enraged me about Anonymous had nothing to do with Shakespeare. It had to do with the Essex Rebellion, an actual (documented) historical event that took place in 1601. The glamorous Earl of Essex, the Earl of Southampton, and a bunch of other aristos decided to have a coup against Elizabeth. They paid Shakespeare's acting company to put on his Richard II, which is about deposing an English monarch, before the balloon went up. (Emmerich's movie gets the play wrong, but never mind.) The idea was that the people of London would rally to Essex's cause.

And in Emmerich's movie, that's what happens. The common people get so moved by watching a Shakespeare play that they charge across London bridge as a mob, hoping to put the Earl of Essex on the English throne. (In Emmerich's movie Essex is secretly Elizabeth's son, as are Southampton, Oxford, and heaven knows who else. Can you prove they weren't?) And then Elizabeth's soldiers massacre them with cannon, on London Bridge.

That is a lie. No one rallied to Essex. No force was used against the citizens who rallied to Essex's side, because none of them did. Angry crowds had formed in London before, and they would again, but no one ran into the streets to fight for the right of an over-entitled aristocrat to get even more of his way. Essex was in fact counting on the public to rally behind him. They did not. His revolt was over before the afternoon was.

So whatever else you choose to believe, let's amend that historical lie. Essex, the entitled aristocrat, was not the hero, and the people of London did not see his botched revolution as heroic.

Some of the wealthy and privileged have done great things with their wealth. Others have not. But there's no need to rewrite history to suit the fantasies of the uppermost class.

Ask Tamburlaine: Burning Korans Is a Bad Idea

cross-posted at Dagblog

Who on Earth is crazy enough to burn the Koran? Until two weeks ago, my answer has always been "raging lunatics in Elizabethan drama." You know, stage characters from the age of Shakespeare, the kind of people who are prone to cutting off their own hands, biting off their tongues and spitting them on the stage, or baking their enemies in pies and serving them for dinner. The people who make Hamlet seem well-adjusted. Certainly, I didn't think of it as the kind of thing real people did.

The Koran burner my students know is Tamburlaine the Great, the world conqueror in Christopher Marlowe's two-part extravaganza Tamburlaine the Great. This was one of the great hits of its time, likely bigger than most of Shakespeare's plays, and Shakespeare's own characters quote it from the stage. But since no one teaches it in high schools, and almost no one teaches it in college, here's the basic story:

A raving megalomaniac conquers most of the world and makes speeches about it. Nobody can stop him. The crazier he gets, the more he wins. Then he burns the Koran (just because) and BAM! He's dead.

And yes, this play was written in a Christian country, for Christian audiences who tended to think of Muslims (like the Pope) as agents of the Devil. But even they thought Koran-burning was a no-no.

Now, I have actually exposed unsuspecting college students to Tamburlaine. And they all say the same thing: the dude's crazy. For ten acts, he's running around putting women and children to the sword. He's putting heads of state in cages and using them as footstools. He's making enemy kings draw his chariot around the stage, like they're horses. He cuts himself with a sword, to show one of his good-for-nothing sons who the real tough guy is. He generally behaves like Kim Jong-Il off his meds. And no matter what crazy thing he's done, he comes back later to top it with something crazier. Then, in Part Two, Act Five, he sets a Koran on fire. And that's just too much for everybody.

And what does he have to say after he does that?

But, stay. I feel myself distempered suddenly.

That's right. It's the Don't Burn People's Holy Books Flu, and it kills him within a scene.

So take it from heavily fictionalized crazy people, kids: don't burn Korans, or any other religious works that hundreds of millions of people value. It only leads to trouble. Try to behave like the saner and more rational characters from English Renaissance drama, like Titus Andronicus, Richard III, or Lady Macbeth.

I wouldn't bring this up if Tamburlaine were only an imaginary character. But of course, fictional characters have their way of influencing real people, and some of Tamburlaine's admirers were so excited by him that they set out to be little Tamburlaines themselves. But they were going to make it happen right there in London! And if Tamburlaine the Great had been a big hero by killing so many many filthy foreigners like Arabs and Egyptians and Turks, the little Tamburlaines would kill some filthy outsiders themselves! Which filthy outsiders?

The Protestant refugees from Europe who'd taken refuge in London. Like bakers and shoemakers.

Some of them left a note on a church door in 1593, promising to murder all of the refugees and their children (who were foreigners, after all):

Since words nor threats nor any other thing
Can make you to avoid this certain ill,
We'll cut your throats, in your temples praying
Not Paris massacre so much blood did spill.

It goes on and on like that for dozens of lines.

It's signed "Tamburlaine."

And there's the lesson. When you train people to focus their rage and fear on some foreign scapegoat, to imagine Muslims or Turks or some other group of "strangers" as frightening and inhuman, there can come a moment when the people you've gotten worked up unpredictably switch their fear and hate and thirst for blood to another group of "outsiders" that you didn't expect, some group that's closer at hand and easy to get at.

And once the mob forms, it's too late to say, "No no, we didn't mean them." Once you start whipping up a mob to go after those stinking foreigners, you don't get to tell them exactly who counts as a stinking foreigners and who doesn't. They know who's not one of them. Mobs don't listen to lectures about details. It's the principle of the thing they care about.

To Refudiate (verb)

So the whole blogosphere has been tweeting and retweeting about Sarah Palin's accidental coinage of the word "refudiate," and her subsequent comparison of herself to William Shakespeare. (If that's the standard you want your prose judged against, sister, be my guest.) It's a big serving of the regular Palin-coverage stew: mockery of ignorance, defensive anti-intellectualism, just enough genuine condescension to lend the anti-intellectuals credibility.

So let's get this out of the way: Palin did not misuse the word "refudiate." She used it exactly as it was meant to be used.

Now, if you're going to ask people to do something, as Palin's original tweet pretends to do, you don't want to use a word like "refudiate," because it's not really a word and people might not understand what you'd like them to do. But Palin was not really asking anyone to do anything. There's nothing she actually wants to happen, and she's not really speaking to the "peace loving Muslims" her sentence addresses.

Palin's tweet is doing something else, which politicians have come to do far, far too much: pretending to ask someone to do something the politician doesn't actually want done. Palin wants to make a public show of demanding some people do something, so she can get credit for demanding that thing and so she can blame those people for not doing it. The audience for the statement is not the people she is pretending to address, about whom Palin does not care a wet rag. Her audience is her own following, and she wants to show herself standing up to the dastardly villains of whom she makes her basically fictional demand. It's a posture, not a request.

Palin has to know, somewhere, that Muslims aren't going to repudiate building mosques, the same way Christians never repudiate building churches and Jews never repudiate building synagogues. If you repudiate building mosques, you're really not a Muslim anymore. (And yes, of course, it's actually a Muslim community center and it's actually not at Ground Zero. Palin doesn't give a wet rag for facts, either.) Who is going to say, "That's right, the basic practice of our religion is a terribly insensitive thing to do, inseparable from religious-based terrorism?" Palin knows perfectly well that no one is going to do that. That's why she demanded it.

She's also not interested in actually communicating with "peace loving Muslims." She's interested in defining Muslims as NOT peace loving and in suggesting to her followers that no peace loving Muslims exist. First off, she's addressing "peace loving Muslims" as if the people building a community center in Manhattan, who got permission from their neighbors, were somehow not "peace loving." She's calling on some imaginary alternative group of "peace loving" Muslims to intervene against the villainous community-center builders, who are by implication a bunch of damned warmongers. Her first rhetorical goal is to disguise the peace-loving nature of the community-center builders, who are trying to do public outreach and promote non-violent Islam, and who Palin wants to demonize. (For those of you confused at home, it's like this: the Muslims putting up the buildings in Lower Manhattan are the peace lovers. QED.)

Palin's second rhetorical goal, which is even more insidious, is to define what a "peace loving Muslim" is. What she's implying, of course, is that we'll know the peace loving Muslims when they "refudiate" the mosque. And when nobody does speak out against building a place to peaceably worship their God, it will just go to show that none of the Muslims want peace! They're all confrontational warmongers, who want to put up thirteen-story buildings exactly at the moment in American construction industry badly needs work! How much more devious could they get? (Hint: it's about zoning. The evil plan is always, always about zoning.) See that? Sarah Palin asked the peace lovers to do the peace loving thing and "refudiate" and none of them had the common decency to refudiate anything! They're monsters, I tell you!

Again, if you're asking people to actually do something, it's important to use commonly accepted words to communicate what you want. But when you only want to make a theatrical demand that parties unknown do something that you're secretly hoping won't happen, then using real words doesn't matter. Actually, it kind of helps. If you can get people to buy it, demanding that people do something that actually isn't anything, because there's no such thing as "refudiating," is a kind of insurance policy. If you asked people to denounce or repudiate or deplore something, there's a tiny chance that someone will actually do that and mess up your plan. But if you make a demand that isn't actually in English, demanding they do something that you don't quite describe, then they can't actually do it. And if they try, you can say they did it wrong, because you didn't mean that; you meant refudiate.

If Palin could swing it, she'd make more phony demands using even sillier and less meaningful words. What she would really like to say, on national television is something like: "I think Barack Obama owes it to the American people to schnarfenoggle right away, and to keep schnarfenoggling until this country's frablejam is back oshkenizing again!" Then she'd go on Fox News every seventeen minutes and hammer Obama for not schnarfenoggling enough. And Obama would never be able to schnarfenoggle satisfactorily, because it's Palin who gets to decide what schnarfenoggling actually is.

Calling her stupid misses the point. Her words follow the same malicious logic that Humpty Dumpty uses:

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Sarah Palin wants to make up the words and define what they mean, however and whenever it suits her. She doesn't intend the rest of us to get a say in it. In her private language, putting up a building and blowing up a building are pretty much the same thing. And whatever else that is, it's not funny.

On Shakespeare Probation

The Boston Globe has a story about juvenile offenders in Western Massachusetts being sentenced to act Shakespeare as an alternative to jail or community service. Lenox's Shakespeare & Company troupe, a Berkshires institution, has a special program just for these wayward youth. It's written as a feel-good story, live theater and immortal poetry as a roundabout path to rehabilitation. But I'll admit I had two instant and inappropriate responses.

First off ... acting Shakespeare is a punishment now? Whose car did Kenneth Branagh steal? (More seriously, I wonder about the wisdom of making art a punishment, and what that teaches these kids about making art.) I like to imagine Sir John Gielgud as an extremely classy former crime lord, working off a long, long sentence.

Second, I was deeply amused at the idea of Shakespearean acting as a way of keeping out of trouble, considering what menaces to the civil peace some of Shakespeare's coevals were. If only Shakespeare had gotten Marlowe a walk-on in 3 Henry VI, maybe he wouldn't have gotten stabbed in the head like that. Maybe if Ben Jonson had been good enough to get a gig with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, he wouldn't have killed that other actor in an armed brawl. (Or course, the fate of the actor Jonson killed does complicate that theory.) Maybe, though, society will ultimately benefit from a generation of hooligans who use more literate and poetic threats. Aroint thee! Art drawn, and talk of peace?

Dead for a ducat, baby. Show me the ducats, and it's done.

Not the Real Shakespeare

Flavia has a post that makes me laugh. She recently went to see a Shakespeare comedy produced by a regional theater company, who staged it in modern dress, worked to keep the piece "accessible and appealing," and used some good, old-fashioned slapstick. In short, the production was straight out of the standard Shakespearean-performance playbook: faithful to the text but using costumes and set as an interpretive gloss. At the end of the evening Flavia overheard a number of other playgoers who had enjoyed themselves enormously but were under the impression that they'd seen an adaptation, rather than Shakespeare's play. After all, how could it be the "Real Shakespeare" if it's accessible and fun?

I've run into this many times over the years with modern-dress Shakespeare, which some people view as Not Shakespeare even when the language is unchanged and the story choices are enormously traditional. What I enjoy best about this misapprehension is the how people feel free to respond honestly to the play when they don't think it's Shakespeare's original, and become willing to talk about the parts they dislike. This can be especially hilarious when it comes from professional reviewers who haven't read the play for a long time. My favorite in that genre came from a reviewer who was absolutely furious that a director at the Goodman in Chicago had "added" a scene full of wise-cracking musicians to Romeo and Juliet, especially when it was "added" at such an inappropriate moment, just after Juliet has taken the potion that fakes her death! What was the director thinking? The answer, of course, can be found in any edition of the play, because it wasn't the director's addition: a glance at, say, a Pelican paperback of R&J would have cleared it up.

Years ago, after the credits for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet had finished crawling by, one of the friends I'd seen it with stood up in disgust. "I really hated what they did to Juliet's family," she said. "They're so much worse than Romeo's family."

"But that's how it is in the play," I said.

"That much worse?" my friend replied.

The answer, although I didn't voice it, is "yeah." Romeo's mother is barely in the play, with fewer lines than it takes Mercutio to clear his throat. And since Romeo's parents never actually come face to face with their son, they don't get the kind of quality time that the Capulets spend forcing their daughter into an arranged marriage and threatening her with beatings. But the point isn't whether my friend was right or wrong; it's that she only felt free to express herself when she thought the storytelling choices belonged to someone else. My friend thought that Shakespeare's development of those characters was lame, and maybe she's right. But it was only okay to say it when she had someone else to blame.

The Real Shakespeare turns out to be an extraordinarily slippery cat. When something in his scripts rubs the audience the wrong way, somebody must have changed things without permission, because the Real Shakespeare never makes mistakes. (The actors have screwed it up again!) But on the other hand, if you enjoy yourself too much in the audience, like Flavia's new friends did, that can't be the Real Shakespeare either. How could the Greatest Poet Ever be so damned silly? I guess the obvious conclusion is that the Real Shakespeare was artistically infallible, but also sucked. It's up to those rascally actors to spoil everything, and play his comedies for laughs.