Primrose Road

In all of the writing classes I teach -- freshman composition, business writing, tech writing, writing from literature -- I make sure early on to address ethos, pathos, and logos, those three musketeers of the rhetorical triangle that composition teachers must learn to love and respect (sometimes). If you're going to write a persuasive argument (especially a 'give-me-money-please' business proposal), you have to carefully consider your audience and present yourself to that audience as knowledgeable -- or as an expert, if that's what your audience wants. The rhetorical triangle illustrates for students the variables involved in constructing an argument.

Many students immediately recognize that the ethos and pathos elements of an argument are variable. (One exception: the student who does the ethos = ethics = morality Sunday School move and uses personal belief to establish credibility, i.e. "I am a person of faith, therefore I believe that abortion/homosexuality/evolution is wrong, therefore you should too.") The most challenging variable in analyzing a rhetorical situation -- not just for them, but for me too, as you'll no doubt see momentarily -- is often the 'logos' element, the words, the stuff the argument is made of.

I read a number of skeptical blogs because of my interest in debunking supernatural beliefs that seem on the surface to be about love and tolerance but are really about self-absorption, narcissism, and making money off the less fortunate or less educated. Skeptical bloggers often argue for the importance of empirical evidence in making decisions related to public policy, education, and medical matters; in these respects, I wholeheartedly agree with them. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because of what Oprah and Jenny McCarthy say need a better understanding of how evidence works. (One cannot blame these parents, however, for being sucked into this pseudoscience. They are simply turning, in desperation, to those who promise them definitive - though wrong - answers as opposed to no answers.) As long as people refuse to accept what we've learned from observation and experimentation in the last 600 years or so, PTAs and fundamentalist organizations will continue to convince school boards to teach mythology as science and history.

At the same time, they sometimes seem to advocate an Enlightenment-style philosophy of "if it can't be observed or measured, it doesn't exist." It's often difficult to talk about or theorize history and literature from this hyper-empiricist point of view. Take, for instance, the following argument from unobservability, presented and challenged in Bill Bryson's recent book Shakespeare: The World As Stage: there is no empirical evidence that Shakespeare owned any books; therefore, Shakespeare did not own any books, Shakespeare was not well-read and could not have written the plays attributed to him. Bryson cleverly responds that there is also no empirical evidence that Shakespeare owned pants. Therefore ...

Now, I (in my persona as "scholar"?) can't prove that Shakespeare owned or wore pants, but I can argue that it's more likely than not that he wore pants. I would have to make this argument via cultural artifacts: paintings of men wearing pants, writings that reference pants, bills that suggest money changed hands in relation to the production of pants, instructions for making pants, etc. As the New Historicists have taught us (I mean, of course, those studying literature and drama from an historical perspective), we can use documents to partially reconstruct a cultural scenario, though we must always acknowledge that we're working only with bits and pieces of the past, and that there will always be multiple readings of the bits and pieces available to us.

I'm not saying empiricism is a bad thing; obviously, it's incredibly useful these days in the sciences, which are being challenged by those who claim to be speaking for God. But it doesn't work as well for literature, and it doesn't serve the same functions. If I argue from twentieth-century philosophy and performance theory and a smattering of tracts, pamphlets, and playtexts that the Early Modern English theatre was profoundly anti-illusionistic in both metatheatrical and signaletic terms, I'm (I would hope) helping students of Early Modern drama better understand what they're working with. If someone then challenges my work with an additional smattering of evidence that theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries was somehow proto-Chekhovian or proto-Strasburgian, I'd be able to accept that work as an alternate (or maybe even more correct, depending on the scenario) theory, in part because our argument wouldn't put anyone's health or well-being in danger.

1615:

"Nay, before the Conquest by Bastard William that the French came in, our English tongue was most perfect, able to expresse any Hebruisme, which is the tryall of perfection in Languages."

-- J.G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors.


2008:

"Here's an example of two-letter roots taking on a stronger prefix letter to offer three similar words that go up the piano scale of intensity. BL, Bet-Lamed means intertwined, balled up like the words of the world being BaLaL (confused) since Babel. Loosely folding over two strands makes a braid or pleat called a GaBHeL. Five letters up is Het, and a HeBHeL is a string. The intertwining got tighter and stronger. Going up from letter #8 to #20 is KHaf. The strands are so strongly intertwined that KHaBHeL means CABLE. Yes, CABLE does come from KheBHeL."

-- Edenics, or intelligent design in language.

If you read the full Edenics article, note how similar the author's "methods" are to those of the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who explains to his children how the word 'kimono' derives from Greek.

If I flip a coin fifty times, that coin could land heads-up fifty times in a row. The Law of Truly Large Numbers reminds us that events we perceive as unusual/impossible/miraculous are actually more commonplace, and more possible, than we might think. It would thus be rather narcissistic for me to ask why a coin has landed heads-up fifty times in a row, or to ask whether that series of events was a sign designed personally for me or anyone else.

Last night, I attended a Limmud salon (a Jewish learning event) that explored the ways in which we could "interpret" everyday life using the same methods that Torah scholars use to interpret the Torah. I go to these events even though I don't believe in anything supernatural; they're interesting cultural experiences and they allow me to play fun ideology-critiquing games in the grad student brain that I'm pretty sure I wear outside my head nowadays.

The teacher leading the session identified two views of uncanny repetitions in everyday life:
(1) the Biblical, which says that the spiritual is in everything from food to writing to toothpaste to coin-tosses, and that everything happens for a reason;
(2) the academic, which says "shit happens."

Here is what I did not say: "Those views both sound awfully complacent."

I also did not say that I don't know of many academic types who would shrug their shoulders, say "shit happens," and walk away. Instead, many might examine how and why we tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason as a way of keeping ourselves complacent. And if we seek to identify repetitions in life experiences for the purpose of interpreting those repetitions as though they were repeated words in a verse from the Torah, perhaps it's because we narcissistically dream of a personal god and a world that exists for us, a life that is meant to be read, interpreted, annotated like the Bible or a closet drama.

Let's talk Hamlet for a moment now (since, after all, all life experience and knowledge is contained in that play ... or not): After witnessing Ophelia's burial, which I suspect crushes him, our favorite Nice Danish Boy tells Horatio that he's sleepless, torn apart over what's happened. But then, he once again proves himself entirely self-absorbed: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," he (famously) says, "Rough-hew them how we will" (5.2.10-11). Hamlet turns to God, Providence and destiny in order to absolve himself of the specific, fatal failures that lead to Polonius' and Ophelia's deaths. If there is a fatal flaw in the character of Hamlet, it is his willingness to attribute his failures to fate, suppressing what he knows in favor what what can all-too-easily be believed.

I was going to wait a few days before blogging about the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, but since there's a link to a story about it on AOL Mail's welcome page, I think it's worth it to address this "Declaration" now. Stay tuned for a series of responses to the Declaration and DoubtAboutWill.org; for now, the most significant flaw with the 'Shakespeare may not have been Shakespeare' argument is, simply put, as follows:

"Authorship" in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century does not mean the same thing that "authorship" meant to the Romantics and the Victorians, and it does not mean the same thing that it means today.

I think it is absolutely wonderful that talented doctors, lawyers, actors, and people from all walks of life are reading Shakespeare and asking questions about Shakespeare. I do not believe that the people who have signed the "Declaration" are in any way unintelligent; I think, however, that many are armchair Shakespeareans but not armchair historians. When viewed in light of history and Elizabethan/Jacobean cultural practices, the argument that 'one individual wrote another individual's plays' falls into the Not Even Wrong category.

Shakespeare adapted and adopted from Holinshed's Chronicles, Saxo Grammaticus, the Gesta Romanorum, Chaucer, Gower, Kyd, and Marlowe. The creation of a play was a collaborative process among author(s), actors, and theater managers; the printed versions of plays "belonged" to printers, not to authors. Copyright as we know it did not exist - copyright belonged to the printer, not the author. (See David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book for further discussion of how this worked.) Texts were not stable -- while I can fairly confidently hold up a copy of Three Sisters and say, "this is Three Sisters," I can only hold up two rather distinct texts of Doctor Faustus and say, "these point to a play called Doctor Faustus." (See Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, for an in-depth explanation.)

The Declaration claims that "orthodox scholars claim that there is no room for doubt that Mr. Shakspere wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to him." Scholars acknowledge that authorship was a collaborative process because they acknowledge that (1) the past was different, and (2) the past wasn't all Victorian/Romantic/an HBO costume drama.

The only aspect of DoubtAboutWill.org that I find genuinely unsettling is the "Shakespeare Authorship Coalition"'s address to students. The "was Shakespeare Shakespeare?" question isn't hyper-relevant to most of society today, and it probably shouldn't be. But, compare the following two arguments:

- Since all of the evidence we have for William Shakespeare of Stratford writing the plays attributed to William Shakespeare would be classified by present-day lawyers as "circumstantial" (cf. The Playgoer's post about the declaration), then it's perfectly reasonable to believe that deVere/Marlowe/Bacon/Queen Elizabeth secretly wrote the plays.

- Since evolution's only a theory (like gravity), and since all the evidence we have for the Big Bang is technically "circumstantial" (i.e. no direct witnesses), then it's perfectly reasonable to believe that the world was created by the Judeo-Christian God only 5000 years ago.

Ay, there's the rub.

This has nothing to do with Shakespeare, but everything to do with books.

The Unicorn Museum: a clever counter to Northern Kentucky's $27 million Creation Museum. The folks behind the Creation Museum argue that we need to accept the historical record laid out by the Judeo-Christian Bible prior to any biological, chemical, geological, or physical investigation of the Earth. But as you'll see on the Unicorn Museum's site, the young-earth creationists seem to have overlooked the unicorn, a creature referenced nine times in the Bible.

The people behind the Unicorn Museum site are seeking to place a billboard near the Creation Museum, and it appears that there's a bit more to their project than simply having a laugh at the expense of creationists. The people most likely to buy in to the "worldview-first-then-shoehorn-shoehorn-shoehorn" approach are children. I'm speaking as a teacher, not necessarily an atheist, when I say this image turns my stomach justalittle.

(The image comes from BlueGrassRoots, which offers a walkthrough and some commentary on the "parenting skills" of those who take their children there.)

A stack of books versus what I presume to be a single scroll of the Pentateuch/Torah. You could read hundreds of books and spend all day thinking, or you could just believe. The display is an insult to a Judeo-Christian tradition which, despite its supernatural side, has always depended on stacks of books. Orthodox Jews, for instance, may read that scroll from the display as law, but it's law that requires generations of books' and scholars' interpretation and reasoning. And even a quick glance at the Wikipedia digest of Christian thinkers in science suggests that books and reasoning don't quite stand apart from Bible scrolls.

Wikipedia aside, I'll be happy to take any comments supplying specific examples of Judeo-Christian thinkers who read (and wrote) books other than the Bible. I suspect that there will be many, many more than the Creation Museum's 'read less, believe more' signs would suggest.