Shakesblogging 450: Happy Twelfth Night!

Fulfilling my resolution to post more regularly, even if it's just idle and random thoughts about Shakespeare:

Today is Twelfth Night, and who doesn't love Twelfth Night? It's certainly one of my favorites, at least most of the time. (I always have problems answering the "what is your favorite Shakespeare play?" question, because I change my mind all the time, and I certainly can't pick just one anyway. Shakespeare is awesome because he's varied. But Twelfth Night is delightfully varied in itself, so it is a pretty good pick.)

Anyway, I've just been thinking: I really like Orsino. Students tend not to like him all that much, because yeah, he is silly and self-dramatizing and "in love with being in love" (somebody always uses this exact phrase, every single time I teach this play). And he does say some dumb, sexist things, although it's hard to take him seriously when he turns around and says the opposite thing five minutes later. Opals and changeable taffeta, indeed.

So by the end of Act One, you can see exactly why Olivia doesn't want him, but you also see why Viola does. Because she gets to know him as his servant, and this is a man who is consistently polite and generous to his social inferiors. Valentine assures Viola that he's not "inconstant in his favors" where his servants are concerned; he also accepts Feste's teasing with good grace and insists on paying him properly for his song, even when Feste insists that it's no trouble at all. It's a nice little set of character notes; and it's particularly nice that he starts to get over his posing and eventually wakes up to Viola's love for him because he listens to his servant. He doesn't just treat "Cesario" as a convenient sounding board; he asks questions, pays attention to the answers, and apparently remembers every word of it later ("Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times / Thou never shouldst love woman like to me.")

(All this characterization, by the way, for someone who isn't even in the play all that much -- he's got a grand total of four scenes and fifty-nine speeches, and disappears for two whole acts in the middle. Orsino is right up there with Shylock, in terms of being a presence without actually being present all that much.)

Happy (busy) New Year!

Holy hell, has it been almost three months since my last post? Here's what has been going on in my life:

1) I moved. In the middle of the semester. Into faculty housing, which I've always been sort of ambivalent about, because it feels like acknowledging that I have no life whatsoever in this town outside of Misnomer U. But it is RIDICULOUSLY cheap and only two blocks away from campus, and since it had been five years since the last time I moved, I had forgotten how hellish moving was. And because I am really NOT good at housekeeping and organization and all that, I've been living among the boxes and sort of hoping they will unpack themselves; and because AT&T is EVIL, I still don't have Internet access at the new place. (Which is a good excuse for not blogging during the semester, but I will admit that I decamped to my parents' house for almost the entire break, in part to get away from the boxes, so I haven't had that excuse for some three weeks.)

2) I have been busy with stuff that I don't want to jinx by blogging about, like trying to plan a brand-new summer study abroad trip from scratch, and like going up for tenure. I feel like both of these things could go horribly wrong if I talk about them the wrong way. You'll get to hear about them when they are over.

3) I have been trying to revise the Edited Collection Chapter from Hell in a way that might possibly please the (apparently very grumpy) external reviewer. I am deathly afraid of jinxing this, too, so that's all I'm going to say about it.

4) Conversely, the other chapter for the other edited collection seems to have sailed through the review process, receiving about three lines of blandly positive comment and one request for a very minor revision. This is, I think, the difference between writing about the most canonical work by a majorly canonical writer and writing about an obscure play that no one ever reads or performs. I swear that any scholarship I attempt after this will be confined to the second category.

5) I'm running a Shakespeare film series this spring! (The honorarium for my award-thingy turned out to be just enough to pay for it, so I figured that was a sign that we needed to have one. And yeah, I'm a sucker for doing this out of pocket, but it seemed like a whole lot less trouble than trying to persuade someone else to fund it, and it's not like Shakespeare turns 450 every year.)

So yeah, that's my life. I'm starting to feel a bit like I made vows of chastity and poverty to Misnomer U., in exchange for a job, a succession of long lazy summers, and a sense that I'll be looked after. And you know what? I think I'm OK with that bargain, as long as they don't demand obedience also. (Which they might, unfortunately. Which is another story, and a totally unbloggable one.)

Anyway, I swear I will be better at this blogging thing in the new year. Maybe I'll do another series of Shakespeare posts, because I'm always up for geeking out about Shakespeare, and hey -- 450!

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.

Kazakhstan

After the Meeting of the Committee From Hell:

Me: I don't think I even understand what we are supposed to be doing. But apparently it is going to be a lot of work.

Awesome Historian Colleague: I think we are supposed to be assessing our assessment of the assessment. No wonder everyone is confused.

Me: With rubrics for evaluating rubrics! Don't forget that part!

AHC: We HAVE to get off of this committee.

Me: Only six more months. Then we will have tenure! We can tell them to go fuck off! Or else we won't have tenure, and we can ... go fuck ourselves off, I guess.

AHC: [laughs]

Me: I think I will fuck all the way off to Kazakhstan. And teach English As A Foreign Language! I bet they don't have assessment in Kazakhstan...

Courseblogging: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama

I'm teaching Elizabethan / Jacobean drama for the first time this semester, so I thought it might be fun to revive the "Courseblogging" tag. (This is my first new course in FOREVER, so I'm pretty excited about it.)

So far, I think we have learned:

1) You're supposed to renew your vows for your four-and-twentieth Sataniversary, even if you wrote them in blood the first time.

2) And, by the way, if you ARE crazy enough to make a contract with the devil, don't ask for 24 years of fun! You may as well make it 2,400, or 24,000, or infinity. (Actually, one of my students had an interesting idea about how this might represent the 24 hours of the day, which I think is pretty neat, especially in conjunction with all the "eleventh hour" stuff at the end.)

3) Faustus and Mephistopheles are "like unholy pranksters," according to another student. Yes. Yes, they are. (ESPECIALLY in the recent Globe production, which is awesome, and on DVD. There's also another pretty-good stage version of Faustus on DVD, by a company called Stage on Screen. I love being able to use clips from live productions in the classroom. (Among other things, it saves me from having to show the Richard Burton version, which is kind of entertainingly trippy in a late-1960s way, but I would not go so far as to say it is actually good.)

4) Conversely, absolutely nobody bothers to film stage productions of The Spanish Tragedy. COME ON GUYS WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

5) If you're gonna kill your enemy, you may as well trick him into wearing a fez and a ridiculous fake mustache while you kill him. What is revenge about, if not excess and humiliation? (My students also did a pretty good job with the weirdness of Soliman and Perseda, especially the ironic-but-oddly-apt choice to cast Lorenzo as the apparent good guy.)

Revenger's Tragedy on Friday! I cannot wait!

Going public

So I won this award-thingy, which is nice, I guess. It means my colleagues think well of me, and it will look good when I submit my tenure file (which I am resolutely NOT THINKING ABOUT, as it is not due until January and I have ten million more urgent things to do between now and then.)

One of these things, as of yesterday, is giving an hour-long lecture on "scholarly research or current humanities interests," open to the public. This is one of the obligations that go along with accepting the award (which is why it is a bit of a white elephant, and why people who have already won it once tend to decline all future nominations). The lectures are videotaped, and possibly made available online, and / or archived somewhere forever (I'm a little fuzzy about what goes on after the taping, although I have definitely witnessed the taping). So it is very public. This is precisely the kind of thing I find terrifying. My colleagues in the history department are better at this, since they get called upon to talk to the public much more regularly. One of them was even on TV last February, explaining how Valentine's Day is all about wolves and blood.

Also, most people at four-year schools seem to do some sort of research talk, although some of the presentations at community colleges are more generalist in nature. And I kind of hate my scholarly research. Well, I don't absolutely hate it now that I am at a school where nobody really cares whether you do any, and you're free to work on random puttery little projects, or not, or whatever you feel like. But I truly cannot imagine giving an hour-long public talk about my dissertation (which I haven't even thought about much for the last five years) or about either of the current puttery projects I'm working on. One of them is about a play that almost nobody other than early modern lit scholars has ever heard of. The other one is about a very, very canonical text that everybody has heard of, but that particular project is making me feel like an idiot right now. (I have NO idea what possessed me to take on Hypercanonical Author, who isn't even early modern, but it was clear from the reviewer's comments that I have a lot to learn about "the rich history of Hypercanonical Author criticism," so I've been trying to soak up as much as possible before the revisions are due. So maybe I should talk about Hypercanonical Author, because at least he's inhabiting a lot of headspace right now. But I don't really WANT to talk about something that makes me feel like an idiot, and also this project would STILL take a lot of explaining, because although people know who Hypercanonical Author is, his actual works aren't familiar in the way that Shakespeare, for example, is familiar.)

Honestly, I think I just want to geek out about Shakespeare. I can do that for an hour, easily, and people are interested in Shakespeare. Would it be weird or nonscholarly to just deliver a "here are some random moments that I like in Shakespeare, and here is why they are cool" talk? (Of course I would jazz it up with a proper title, like "Shakespeare at 450: Why He Still Matters" or something. Or "Shakespeare: He's All About Pirates and Severed Heads.")

Freshman freshman composition composition

So, I don't know whether I mentioned this last spring, but until further notice I am NO LONGER A BASIC COMP PROFESSOR! Woo hoo!

What this does mean, however, is that I am teaching two sections of freshman composition for the first time in forever. The last time I had more than one section of anything was in Fall 2009, and it was Brit Lit I. I'd have to go back another year for doubled-up sections of English 101.

I understand there are people who prefer to have multiple sections of the same class, but I have to say that I find it weird. They are back to back in the same classroom, and it makes me feel like I have become stuck in a time loop. Except not, because as always, the two classes are quite different in character -- the students in the first section are chattier and much more willing to play along with the whole "class discussion" thing (which, by the way, students at Misnomer U. often seem to regard as a weird infringement upon their right to sit stone-still for an hour and fifteen minutes). So I teach one class, and then I do the same thing over again, except things don't go as well the second time.

I can already tell the second section is going to be that class. You know, the one that always reminds you that you are not the most awesome professor in the world, and that this is not necessarily the world's best job; the one that, around midterm time, makes you seriously consider just calling in sick on Tuesdays. I'm almost starting to miss the predictability of knowing that Basic Comp was always going to be that class.

So, in just about three weeks, I will be getting my first massive stack of thirty-six freshman comp essays, with accompanying draft work, peer workshop comments, and first attempts at a Works Cited page. Hoo boy.