Courseblogging: mid-semester update

So, we're already more than halfway through. Edward II this week, The Duchess of Malfi before that. (They pair amazingly well, what with all the prison / torture stuff, and the ways the protagonists find this incredible level of dignity and wisdom when they're stripped of their temporal power and brought about as low as they can possibly go, and the way that Bosola -- I've only just realized this in retrospect -- refuses to play along with the disposable-hired-assassin script. Which Lightborn, as awesomely creepy as he is, never manages to transcend. One of my students said that she was disappointed to discover that Lightborn could be killed, and killed in such an anticlimactic way at that. She was expecting him just to vanish in a puff of smoke. I liked that.)

It's been ages, really, since I had a chance to spend so much time reading The Other Guys. Not since I was writing my dissertation. I mean, I love teaching Shakespeare, God knows, but teaching Webster and Marlowe back to back just reminds me of how good they both are, and how much the early modern theater world is collaborative and competitive and all about playwrights picking up tricks from each other. And so much of that gets lost in the standard, single-author Shakespeare course. It's really HARD to teach a Shakespeare course without inadvertently perpetrating the lone-genius myth, as much as you don't want to. With this class, I feel more like I'm immersing myself in a much larger world, getting to know its tides and currents.

(I also finally got around to watching the first episode of The Hollow Crown, which has been sitting on top of the bookcase for weeks since I haven't had time to watch anything, and thinking about Edward and Richard together really makes one realize how much Shakespeare and Marlowe owe to each other. You hear little echoes everywhere. It's neat.)

Shoemaker's Holiday next week. This is going to be an interesting change of pace, since it's the first thing we've read with a happy ending since The Second Shepherd's Play, way back on the third day of class. How do you get from ass-pokering to happy singing shoemakers? I do not know. (It's also going to be straight back into dissertation-territory for me, and oddly enough I'm not sure that I'm looking forward to it; in a lot of ways, I feel like I'm better at teaching things that I haven't attempted to do Serious Scholarly Writing about. I think it's just plain easier when I'm feeling my way through a text, the same way as the students are, and don't have such definite ideas about it.) Anyway, we shall see how it goes. We read some of Stowe's Chronicle yesterday, and one of the students made the very smart point that we don't really see much of the common people in Marlowe, even though they're mentioned in the chronicle -- it is all about this little group of aristocrats -- and Dekker's take on history is so, so different that I'm looking forward to blowing everyone's mind.

we offer you our failures, we offer you attempts

Hey, everyone. I'm not dead. Nor have I fallen off of the face of the earth. I have been at my brother's wedding, and then at my college reunion, and two out-of-state trips on consecutive weekends tend to screw with one's blogging schedule. I owe y'all another Shakespeare courseblogging post, this one on why The Merchant of Venice is my favorite play to teach ever, but it's not getting written tonight.

Instead, I wanted to post a little about the Brit Lit survey class, the one that is, at best, touch and go if not completely moribund. I plucked up the courage to tell my Official Mentor that I thought things were going badly, and her reaction was basically, "Don't worry about it, sometimes you just get a bad class." Which was comforting, and something that nobody would ever have said at New SLAC (even if I had told any of the senior faculty there that I thought I was screwing a class up, which I wouldn't have done because they were all on the search committee for my job). I like the fact that none of the English faculty here seem to subscribe to the "you have to be 110% brilliant all the time" philosophy that prevailed at New SLAC. It's a relief.

We read The Duchess of Malfi last week. The discussion was actually halfway-decent, which surprised me, because this class met Dr. Faustus and Twelfth Night with stony and baffled silence. It may help that I'm a lot more personally invested in The Duchess, which is probably my second-most-favorite play to teach ever.

While I was at the Beloved Alma Mater over the weekend, I stopped by the classroom where I first read Webster. It looked much the same as always, apart from the tangle of smart classroom equipment in the corner: chipping blue paint on the windowsills, circle of too-small desks, chalkboard. In 1996, before there were fancy computers and projectors in every classroom, my Renaissance Drama professor passed around a book with an image of de la Tour's Penitent Magdalen.

I still show my students that image every time I teach this play. I point out, as my professor did for me, the play of darkness and light, the implicit messages about mirrors (Doth not the color of my hair 'gin to change?) and penance (nought made me e'er go right / But heaven's scourge-stick) and facing death with grace and courage (Yet stay, heaven gates are not so highly arched / As princes' palaces). This would not be particularly unusual if I had liked the professor in question. We all emulate the teachers we loved, consciously and unconsciously. But when I do this, I am imitating the one moment that touched me in a class that I spent in a state of silent, seething resentment.

I don't know how much of this was the professor's fault and how much my own. It's possible that I might have liked him if I had met him as a grad student, more confident in my ability to defend my own intellectual positions. As it was, I spent most of the semester feeling that the questions I cared about were off the table, and that "class discussion" was merely a farce intended to give the prof a chance to inform us that we knew nothing. Little things irritated me: the way he insisted on calling me "Miss Porpentine," on the grounds that he wanted to be called "Professor F." Probably, if he had asked me "What do you like to be called?" or even "Do you prefer Ms.?", it would have diffused at least some of my annoyance -- but at the time, I didn't know how to articulate what was wrong. I was astonished to discover that a number of my classmates actually enjoyed the class and liked the professor's digressions about his home repairs. I felt like they had personally betrayed me.

This is the class I imitate, perhaps in more things than I know. Perhaps some of my students are as bitterly resentful of me as I was of him, and will spend as much time excoriating me on the evaluations as I did. And yet. The Duchess, and that Magdalen, have stayed with me, and perhaps they will stay with some of these students. If I cannot be the professor I wish I could be for them, if this class is mostly a failure, I hope that I can touch them for a moment at least.