Shakespearean Subjects

Othello and the Problem of Being Venetian

In Othello and Merchant of Venice we have two of Shakespeare's "Venetian" plays, and both concern characters who feel their differences from the dominant culture represented in the play. Was Shakespeare ever in Venice? What did he know about the "real" place as opposed to the Venice of his imagination? And further, what did he "really" know about Moors, or people from Africa or African descent? Venice, it seems, was more of a crossroads for Europe, Africa, and the Levant (the "Biblical" lands of the Middle East) [Listen to this NPR piece about Venice's multicultural history]. So the Venetian setting seems to be a prime theatrical and imaginative locus for addressing questions of difference.

Peer Review Workshop

Here you can find the links to all papers for this class. Download, comment, and re-upload (see the Instructions and the Peer Review Guidelines documents.

NANCY

LINDA

MITCHELL

MICHELE

For some basic guidelines on revising your work (after you get comments from your readers) see the Purdue University Online Writing Lab.

Hail, Macbeth: Weird Secrets

There are secrets, and then there are secrets (I know that's not very helpful). But if we look at the role of Cassius in JC and the ghost in Hamlet, we see some interesting points of comparison. Cassius is helping to midwife a secret that he discerns already to live within Brutus - something Brutus is afraid of more generally (he "fears the people choose Caesar for their king"), and something within himself that is almost too awful to give voice to, until, in his orchard, like his own private Gesthemane, he concludes "it must be by his death." Like Cassius, the Ghost may or may not be trusted. The Ghost entrusts Hamlet with some deadly knowledge, but Hamlet like Othello must have "ocular proof" before he can act on it. But with Cassius, the secret that he shares with Brutus, or elicits from Brutus, is more in the manner of spreading a virus or disease that soon they are spreading throughout much of the Roman senatorial class, and then, briefly, to the citizens of Rome. But the Ghost's secret is also a death sentence. There is no way for Hamlet to come out of the performance of the Ghost's charge alive, and whole.

LAT: Review of new productions of 2 Gents, Measure, and Hamlet

Today's LAT has a review of three plays: Hamlet, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Measure for Measure currently running at the Globe in San Diego. This festival runs through September . . . I've seen this theatre but never been to one of the plays.

Here is the file of notes, etc. from W4.

Download W4.zip

"Thou owest God a death"

Hal: "Thou owest God a death" - death is a payment?, an obligation we have to a transcendental power. Or at least, the fiction of transcendence that underwrites temporal political power. For Hal, the death he owes is that of his "factor" Percy, and  he owes it not only to his father, but to himself. For if he cannot overcome Percy, his life will be worth little afterward. In order to "become" himself ("I shall be more myself"), he must give death to Percy. 

Book Review: How Shakespeare became "Shakespeare"

A review in today's LAT of Jack Lynch (Rutgers U.) Becoming Shakespeare. From the review, it sounds as if this book takes a similar approach to Greenblatt's Will in the World, picking up where Shakespeare died (and conflicting accounts of his funeral), to focus on how his reputation was made by others who edited, produced, printed, and played his works in the years following the restoration (during Puritan rule in the 1650s, the theatre was virtually outlawed).

"I do fear the people chose Caesar for their King . . "

When we looked closely at Act I scene 2 of Julius Caesar, the initial encounter between Buruts and Cassius, the line where Brutus reacts to the cheers of the crowds passed without notice. Just as we never really see Caesar and Brutus interact, except in the assassination seen, we never see the mob clamor for the crowning of Caesar. We have an imagined and reported scene, reported, it should be noted, by one who becomes one of the conspirators - and we have Brutus' fear.

Research Questions

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
  - Thorstein Veblen

There are questions we ask because we can find the answer, and questions we ask because they help us ask more and better questions. A successful research project in this class, and in the humanities generally, is measured not in whether a question was answered with finality (such questions of fact that have specific solutions that can be found are all too rare). Rather, a successful research agenda in this class will allow you to learn something that you didn't know before, but also to see the material you are working with in a different way. You will be educating yourself, your colleagues, and your readers in a new way of thinking about the texts and issue you are dealing with.

When you take a shot at creating a research question, you have several criteria to consider:

Secrets and Lies

The Sonnets are, like many of the plays, something of a Rorschach test for the reader.
Is it too tempting to read a narrative progression in the sonnets, to read them as a sequence with identifiable dramatis personae, referring to some long-ago soap opera of same sex desire, love, heterosexual love and lust, betrayal, loss, reconciliation, and so on? Are the diads, triplets and other "sequences" (e.g. 60-63, 113-116) real or just artifacts of our need to create compelling stories that explain what is apparently before us? We have no independent authorial evidence for the sequencing, only the 17th century Quarto, and some possible internal evidence (linguistic and stylistic cues). Do we see the Shakespeare we want to find?
On the other hand, I have no particular personal investment in a same-sex love, recusant Catholic Shakespeare, other than this is a different (and therefore more compelling) version of the Bard I was taught to believe in (and this is not an accidental choice of words) when I was in school.
Are these poems about love? If so, they offer a picture of love that may be more realistic than thy movies or later literatures seem to be offering: dark, obsessional, jealous, self-torturing, by turns self-aggrandizing and self-annihilating; conrolled by the ego and the perjured (but answerable and guilty) "I".
And when it comes to the ego, and strategies of self-revelation and secrecy, there is no more apposite play than Julius Caesar. This play asks us to meditate on, among many other things, the nature of subjectivity - how do we know what we think and who we are? Does Brutus know his own thoughts before Cassius tells  him "Let me be your glass [i.e. mirror]" As Wilson demonstrates in Secret Shakespeare - the playwright was masterful in concealing his own thoughts and beliefs. For such a public person who left so many plays and poems, we cannot finally nail him down on his own views on religion, politics, marriage - all the evidence that remains are a will, some real estate transactions, and the plays and poems. It is as though Brutus is some exemplar of what we can expect if we do turn our own private beliefs into public action: danger at best, and death and defeat at worst. As Wilson notes, Shakespeare lived in anxious times where it could be dangerous to profess one's religious belief (other than the state sanctioned church), or one's political views (other than blind allegiance to the monarch); an age of paranoia and where agents of the state were thought to be everywhere at once, and where secret networks of dissidents practiced the old religion in fear and distrust. This image of Elizabeth I, known as the Rainbow Portait is one the frontispeiece of Shakespeare's Perjured Eye. It shows the queen holding a rainbow and the Latin motto reads "Non sine sole iris" (No rainbow without the sun). But look at her gown adorned with eyes, ears and mouths. What message is being sent here - surveillance? The all-controlling, all-seeing monarch? No wonder Shakespeare wanted to keep his own thoughts and beliefs secret.

Docs from Class 1; Secret Shakespeare

Greetings -
Attached to this post are a zip file containing all notes, slides and materials from our first class meeting. Also attached is a PDF of Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, chapter 1.

Download SecretShakespeare.pdf

Download SS_weekend1.zip