Primrose Road

The other day, as I was telling my Intro to Lit class about how Shakespeare became "The Bard," "The Best Playwright in the World!!!," "The First English Novelist," etc., one student asked, "Ms. P., do you actually *like* Shakespeare?"

Yes, it's possible to *like* Shakespeare outside the context of Bardolatry.

Irvin Matus' Shakespeare, In Fact (1994) presents an exhaustive amount of documentary evidence demonstrating that William Shakespeare of Stratford is the man behind William Shakespeare's plays and, perhaps more importantly, that the "authorship" question simply does not make sense in the context of Early Modern culture. Chapter 5, "Questions About the Writing of the Plays," clearly explains why the argument that one man wrote another man's plays is not valid in this context and also challenges those who would view Shakespeare as a story-inventing novelist.

He also suggests that those arguing for alternative theories of authorship have set up a straw man in the figure of the "orthodox scholar": so-called "orthodox scholars," he claims, are perfectly aware that William Shakespeare did not write every word that was attributed to him.

In a chapter on the dating of the plays (in which he does note that dating methods are not always ultra-accurate), he points out just how conspiracy-theory-like the Oxfordian view is, noting that

"According to the Oxfordians, the traditional chronology of Shakespeare's plays -- from 1589 at the earliest to 1614 at the latest -- is merely something tailored by scholars to suit the lifetime of the man they presume to be the author and nothing more -- a very strange accusation when one considers that the Oxfordian chronology is tailored to suit the lifetime of the Earl of Oxford" (145).

Yet, the sole purpose of this book is not merely to critique the Oxfordian view; Matus also discusses some of the ways in which the rise of this view and the fact that people are buying into it suggest problems with the ways in which scholars have (or have not) argued the case for Shakespeare.

This is worth reading alongside the more recent The Case For Shakespeare for those seeking an understanding of what "authorship" was in Early Modern English culture.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior is a quick read, shelved with Who Moved My Cheese-style books, but far more insightful (and interesting).

The book describes experiments in economics, psychology, sociology, and biology that have attempted to explain why people make obviously bad decisions, and tells the stories of some of these radically bad decisions, including those that led to the Tenerife airplane disaster and Challenger explosion. Some of the research it describes also has implications for educational psychology: while reward systems work in terms of specific goals, they're much more complicated and problematic than we may think, actually suppressing "altruistic" mechanisms in the brain.

One amusing fact presented in the book: On the American "Who Wants To Be A Millionare?", audiences always try help the contestant when polled for the "ask the audience" lifeline, voting for the answer they genuinely believe to be correct; on the French and British versions of the show, audiences tend to help those contestants who they feel are "deserving" of the million-dollar prize but try to sabotage (i.e. purposefully voting for the wrong answer) those contestants who they feel aren't deserving of the prize (for example, one man in France who didn't know that the moon revolved around the Earth); finally, on the Russian "Millionaire," audiences almost always "deliberately misled both smart and less smart contestants alike."

"Millionaire" provides for the authors a jumping-off point for describing different cultures' notions of "fairness," and how perhaps the most economically rational notions of fairness come from an isolated tribe in the Peruvian Amazon. The book may go too far into the hackneyed territory of "negotiation skills" in the last chapter, but the stories it tells and research it describes offer some great insight into why people may be evolutionarily biased towards the irrational.

According to Wired (which incidentally this month also declared THE END OF THEORY!!!111!!5!!#1!!), there's a game/SIM called Zero Hour: America's Medic which is being used to train paramedics in disaster response. Basically, paramedics get immersed in one of three situations: an unusual flu breaks out at an apartment building, a possibly radioactive bomb explodes at a baseball stadium, and finally (here I'll quote the item) "a freight train has derailed at a downtown station during rush hour, spewing lethal chemicals into the air." Other people realize what's kind of funny about that last one, right?

Meanwhile, I do like the idea of computers that can think better than humans do, because they can serve to remind us humanpeople that thinking isn't supernatural or preternatural.

Oh, Barnes and Noble ...



Sylvia Browne (obnoxious "psychic"/scam artist who takes advantage of grieving families -- and is worshipped by Larry King) in the Science section at my local B&N.

On that note, I'm moving Macbeth to the "Self-Help" shelves. :)

In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse divides her exploration of Jews' relationship to power into three interconnected time periods: first, the Biblical era through the European Renaissance; then, the Enlightenment, which brings about liberal democracies that permit Jews to become citizens but unintentionally lead to the rise of pogroms; and finally, the founding of Israel and Israel's development as a military power in the face of Arab challenges to the country's sovereignty. I thought that she offered a number of interesting arguments that complicated the Judaism/Jewish ethnicity/power triangle in Parts 1 and 2; unfortunately, she did not seem to do enough to complicate this relationship in Part 3.

Early on, Wisse notes that Jews' relationship to political power as laid out by the Bible has never been entirely uncomplicated, especially in comparison to the other Abrahamic religions. Writing that "Christian countries may have fought in the name of God, but they did not contemplate fighting by the rules of their savior" (15), she explains why there is no such thing as 'ethnic' Christianity, while the Jews, whose beliefs required them to always follow Torah law to the letter, seemed to constitute their own country-less nation regardless of where they lived. For the Islamic people, there was a stronger perceived relationship between political power and religion because the prophet Muhammad was clearly portrayed as a warrior, religious leader, and political leader who organized his people on both the battlefield and in the city. Moses, meanwhile, was a prophet who gave the people Israel a set of laws but was not involved in actively enforcing them.

Wisse does complicate the present-day issue of Israel-Palestine relations, finding that the Jews mistakenly expected that possessing liberal democratic sovereignty would effectively mean the end of anti-Semitism. She references the mid-twentieth-century Jewish fantasy embodied in the character of Reschid Bey in Theodor Herzl's Altneuland; the character, an "Arab created in the image of a Jew" (165), is grateful that the Jews rescued the Arabs from a life of poverty. What actually happens in the decades after the founding of the state of Israel is that because of the Arab resentment that utopians like Herzl should have predicted, the Jewish state's political power must instead be supplanted by its military power.

Unfortunately, Wisse doesn't do enough (in my view) to critique this form of military power, constructing her argument so that it would seem that militarism was the only way for Israel to go. She's seemingly not bothered by Golda Meir's statement to Anwar Sadat: "We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours" (156); I thought that the extremely disconcerting implications behind this statement would have been worth further exploration.

All in all, Jews and Power offers a well-written political history of the Jewish people, with some interesting insights into the ways in which the advent of liberal democracy led to both new freedoms and new forms of anti-Semitism. Ultimately, however, it does not do enough to question all forms of violence (especially that of the 'eye for an eye' variety) and to suggest that there might be a yet-to-be-discovered "middle ground" in terms of Israeli politics.

I picked Betraying Spinoza up after hearing author Rebecca Goldstein talk at last week's Nextbook: Jews and Power conference. Goldstein briefly discussed the challenges inherent in writing a "Jewish" Spinoza biography and focused mainly on her personal narrative of encountering Spinoza as a high school student at an Orthodox Jewish Bais Yaakov school. Despite my distrust of personal narrative, I decided that the book was worth a read.

What Goldstein offers is far more than a personal narrative of her experience as a young Orthodox woman hearing the story of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community due to his insistence on reason over superstition, being told that Jews should avoid Spinoza, who asked questions that he shouldn't have asked. She presents a captivating speculative biography (though, in my view, she doesn't do enough to announce that the bio is speculative) of the philosopher, deriving her narrative of Spinoza's life from historical documents describing seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Spinoza's own work. Perhaps most interesting are the moments when Goldstein subtly analogizes the Dutch Jewish community headed up by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira to the post-Holocaust religious Jewish community in the 20th and 21st century: severe unthinkable trauma, she suggests, led to three possibilities for people in the community: "fierce religiosity, messianic and mystical," "disappointment, disillusion, attempts to argue with the rabbis about what true Judaism ought to be," and "ultimate rejection and a return to Christianity," to which many had converted when the Inquisition came to Portugal a generation earlier (120-121).

Interestingly, Goldstein argues against her high school teacher's assertion that Spinoza was an atheist simply because he believed in reason over superstition and because he claims in his Ethics that one is naturally inclined to preserve oneself before anyone else. (No wonder this work led, via Locke, to some of the ideas on which America was founded ...) Reading Spinoza's ethics of love, Goldstein seems to find a frustrating God in his work: "He who loves God cannot endeavor that God will love him in return" (237). The mistake made by "superstitious" religions is that they carry on as though God were a tyrant, requiring believers to act in certain ways in order to earn his love.

Another important strength of the book was Goldstein's ability to explain relatively complicated philosophical ideas to a general audience, especially in relation to what she labels the "if-is" gap (a gap that, she notes, Spinoza closes up). This book could conceivably be used, therefore, as a "way in" to Spinoza for students.

In sum, read it.

Current break-from-dissertation reading list:

1. Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

2. Ruth Wisse, Jews and Power

3. Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel

4. Robert Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not


I've also recently had the chance to read Revolutionary Strategies in Early Christianity, which I would review in depth were I qualified in any way to review a political science text. It's actually a very clearly-written book (in the interest of full disclosure, the author is a friend of mine) and a useful primer for terms regularly encountered in the political science blogosphere, especially those related to military strategy. The book is an interesting read regardless of what side of the political spectrum one is on -- though the analyses often skew right, this is more of a text intended to expound terminology, not ideology. My only [major] concern is that the history element of the book rests on the assumption (stated explicitly in the introduction) that the New Testament is for the most part an accurate historical record. I'd like to hear Dan's explanation of what warrants this assumption (i.e. I challenge him to a duel).

After my three week post-semester break, I'll get started tracing the history of blank verse as a new medium. [sarcasm]Woohoo![/sarcasm]