Primrose Road

Assignment: for one of three poems (Fenton, "God, A Poem"; Winters, "At The San Francisco Airport"; Shakespeare, "Sonnet 134"), identify and discuss the effects of three of the following, making specific references to the text of the poem: enjambment, irony (dramatic, situational verbal), parallelism/juxtaposition, catalog, paradox, metaphor, allusion.

25% of the students in my class identified the lines "I didn't exist at Creation, / I didn't exist at the Flood" (Fenton) as situational irony, i.e. the speaker says what he or she can't possibly mean. Y'know, because gee-dash-dee did exist at creation and all.

(Don't worry parents and administrators, I don't grade based on belief, and they got full credit for understanding what situational irony is.)

Brunel University in London is offering the first MA in Shakespeare Authorship Studies this term, and Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi, two of the (very, very good) Shakespearean actors behind the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare, are, of course, excited about the program.

First, let me say that actors are (generally) awesome. I wouldn't be able to do what I do -- I wouldn't be fascinated with what I do -- if it weren't for actors. The guys and gals up on stage can force us to think, make us want to change the world or our lives, or can make us stop breathing for just one spectacularly suspended moment.

Thanks to Early English Books Online, actors and armchair Shakespearians can learn from primary sources how production and printing worked back in the English Renaissance. (OK, they'd need to visit a university library with a subscription to EEBO, but it's still to some degree accessible.) Or go to any library, read a couple of scholarly monographs and essay collections, and learn about how there's not only not really a "Shakespeare vs. other guy issue" but also how, in spite the straw man that the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt relies on, academic-types are actually against treating Will Shakespeare like an untouchable god.

Thirteen days until my first comprehensive exam. Three hours of writing about Renaissance drama, including New Historicist, psychoanalytic, and reader-/audience-response understandings of Will S. & Friends.



I'll be in Atlantic City this weekend.

News to me, at least: there's a campaign to transform a fort on Governor's Island into the "New Globe for the New World", a project not authorized by the National Park Service (see the small print on the front page), but apparently supported by a handful of NYC politicians including Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. The list of artists involved is fairly impressive -- it includes Mark Rylance (the director of that other Globe for almost a decade), Nicholas Hynter, Harold Prince, Ian McKellen, Al Pacino, Tom Stoppard, Susan Sarandon, F. Murray Abraham, and Kevin Kline -- so I'm wondering if this project will get off the ground.

It seems to be more of a "New York Globe" than a "New World Globe"; the casts of Sex and the City and all three Law and Orders are involved (they're always filming around town), along with a handful of NYC-based actors. I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops, though right now the New Globe Theater seems to consist of a few blueprints, a Second Life destination, and a bunch of fundraising events that are wayyyy outside this little grad student's income bracket.

The Gender Genie purports to predict, with 80% accuracy, the gender of the author of any text inputted into a form.

(Tip of the something-or-other to squib, who linked to this toy earlier this week.)

It supposedly works according to an algorithm developed by a pair of computational linguists. The program searches for the following:

feminine keywords: with, if, not, where, be, when, your, her, we, should, and, me, myself, hers, was.

masculine keywords: around, what, more, are, as, who, below, is, these, the, a, at, it, many, said, above, to.

So, the "Gender Genie" seems to hinge on the idea that women use conditionals and talk about themselves more often than men. There have indeed been studies that show that women -- for cultural, not biological reasons -- tend to make their statements sound less definite (with "if"s, "maybe"s, "likely"s, vocalized pauses, etc) and use personal pronouns more often when speaking. Does this algorithm (perhaps incorrectly) assume that women exhibit the same patterns in their writing?

A columnist with The Guardian was surprised to find that the Gender Genie identified all but one of the paper's female columnists as male, yet it "correctly" identified all of the male columnists.

In the interest of self-reflexivity, the Gender Genie identifies this post as having been written by a man, apparently because (I'm not kidding) I used the word "the" seventeen times.

Though I'm usually not much for Bardography, there was a neat article in yesterday's Guardian about the wealth of biographical information that can (surprisingly) be derived from a court deposition signed by Shakespeare. Charles Nicholl's book, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, will discuss the case, what we know about the Mountjoys (a family Shakespeare stayed with in London), and what that can tell us about Shakespeare-the-man.

And interestingly,

Shakespeare's deposition in the Belott-Mountjoy case has been known for nearly a hundred years, but has been oddly neglected as a biographical source. It was found in 1909, along with others in the case, at the public record office in London. Its discoverer was a 44-year-old American, Dr Charles William Wallace, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska.

See? There is no place like Nebraska.

In his response to Nancy Glazener's American Literary History article on Delia Bacon as significant dissenter, Zachary Lesser offers an excellent comparison of anti-Stratfordianism to intelligent design theory:

"In a very real (if no doubt less important) way, the "authorship debate" is for academic Shakespeareans what creationism or intelligent design is for evolutionary scientists: frustrating and almost impossible to know how to engage, since the other side is not amenable to the usual disciplinary standards of evidence and argumentation, and since any attempt to make one's case is taken (both by the opposition and by the media) as evidence that there is, in fact, a real and ongoing "debate" over the matter" (350-51).

Lesser usefully (especially in light of some of the claims behind the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt) points out that it's too simplistic to attribute all anti-Stratfordianism to snobbery or elitism: outside the Oxfordian and Baconian camps, anti-Stratfordians argue in favor of "disreputable, marginalized" Marlowe (353). Ultimately, the anti-Stratfordian argument is quite similar to the intelligent design argument:

"They seek a solitary creator behind the complex, messy processes of cultural production and canon formation, processes that in fact are neither “designed” nor wholly random or accidental and that transcend any individual" (354).

What we know as Early Modern plays were collaborations between authors, actors, and printers. It's not some big, highly guarded, "unorthodox" secret that William Shakespeare is not responsible for every word ever published under the name "William Shakespeare." A quick readthrough of the A and B texts of Doctor Faustus will suggest to any reader that Marlowe isn't responsible for every word published under the name "Christopher Marlowe." The same goes for all of the Other Early Modern Dramatists Who Aren't Will Shakespeare. There is no Shakespeare-and-only-Shakespeare vs. Some-other-individual conspiracy at work.

Hilariously, a significant percentage of traffic to this blog for the month of October has resulted from Google searches for "saturn eighth house," "saturn in the eighth house," "saturn in your eighth house," and "saturn eighth house astrology."

(Last month, I titled a post about a possibly "accreditable" bachelor's in astrology "Saturn's in Your Eighth House, Buddy".)

So this message is for those who came to Primrose Road seeking answers about their astrological charts: The horoscope's eighth house deals with matters of sex. Back in the day (from about 1996-2002) when I was actually so into astrology that I studied it, an astrologer once joked that "delineating" the eighth house is like that fortune cookie game where everybody adds "in bed" to the end of their fortunes. The planet Saturn, meanwhile, signifies restrictions, boundaries, and limitations. Thus, if you have Saturn in the eighth house in your natal horoscope, astrology suggests that you're impotent or you are not, uh, well-endowed in eighth-house-related areas.

I hope that dissuades y'all from believing in astrology. :)

In a critical essay that appeared in a recent issue of American Literary History (Summer 2007), Nancy Glazener argues that while Delia Bacon's authorship theories were off-the-mark, she can be viewed as an important figure in American Shakespeare studies because she, unlike Richard Grant White, posited that Shakespeare's plays were politically subversive. According to Glazener, Shakespeare studies in nineteenth-century America was moving in two directions: White was “trying to distance literature from politics by celebrating its purely commercial character” (340) -- an attempt, perhaps, to connect Elizabethan culture to American capitalism? -- while others ("dissenters") read the plays as politically subversive. Plays focusing on kings, for instance, might be thought to “expos[e] … the purely artificial difference between kings and ordinary people” (332).

The possibility that certain New Historicist readings of Shakespeare's plays could owe their development to Delia Bacon is, of course, rather terrifying -- it will definitely keep me up nights from this point forward ;) -- but it does seem, at least in Glazener's view, that had Bacon ended her argument at "Shakespeare's plays contained dangerously subversive political ideas," her work would not be situated as far outside the realm of serious scholarship as it is today.

The fact that Shakespeare's plays contained potentially dangerous political ideas should not imply, however, that Shakespeare did not author the plays attributed to him. (In a previous post, I discussed how the "authorship" debate rests on several ahistorical assumptions about Early Modern authorship.) Marlowe's plays -- specifically Tamburlaine, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus -- tend to pack much more of an ideology-critiquing punch than do Shakespeare's (cf. Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy). Why didn't Marlowe, whose plays show some Catholic sympathies and portray royalty in a not-so-great light, feel the need to write his plays under an assumed name?

I think it comes back down to what Glazener sees in Richard Grant White's "commercial" Shakespeare: mythologizing the Bard. When I discuss ideological critique and proto-Brechtianism in Early Modern theatre, I go to Marlowe, Webster, and Middleton first. If 'The Guy Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays' had to write under someone else's identity, then these three would have likely had to have done the same. To suggest that Shakespeare, and no other English Renaissance dramatist, had to work under an assumed identity is to suggest that Shakespeare is in a class by himself, set upon a pedestal, mythologized, Bardolized.