Now this blog is illustrated!

Note the snazzy new title image, intended to answer the perennial question: just what is a porpentine? (I am not sure that the illustrator of this particular one, Conrad Gesner, had ever actually seen a porcupine, but his imagination clearly made up for any deficiencies in this regard. Anyway, I fell in love with this image when I first stumbled across it at the age of seventeen, in a cheap Folger paperback edition of Hamlet, and I thought it was high time that it graced the blog.)

In other news, Exciting Stuff may possibly be happening next summer (as in the getting-paid-to-travel kind of exciting!), although it's not a definite thing yet. Keep your fingers crossed!

Rumpusing

I am back from the annual Rumpus for Medievalists (and discerning early modernists), and as always, I had a most excellent time. I do have a massive scab on the chin, though, due to circumstances involving too much free ale and mead, too many things I wanted to go to at one time, and an ill-advised sprint across the campus.

I was kind of hoping my colleagues would ask me about it at yesterday's all-day department meeting, so that I could make up a colorful tale about my medieval-rumpus-related injury. Perhaps it would involve me saving a nun from a Viking invasion. Or a grendel attacking the mead-room. Or a green giant could have challenged me to a chin-swiping contest. Or perhaps there could have been a demonstration of trial by ordeal, and I could have volunteered to be a witch and get ducked in the swan pond, and one of the swans could have attacked me (because little did we know that they were not regular swans, but 900-year-old enchanted swans who were really people, and they mistook me for the real witch who had transformed them).

It says much about the general character of the Rumpus that none of these scenarios seems all that improbable.

Semester wrap-up, by the numbers

Number of papers graded: 184 (and 24 exams, and 13 presentations)

Number of papers yet to grade: 37 (and 35 exams, and 15 presentations)

Students enrolled in Basic Comp: 5

Students who still have a prayer of passing Basic Comp: 2

Students who will DEFINITELY pass Basic Comp: 0

Applications received for philosophy position: About 150

New colleagues hired in philosophy: 1

Major undergraduate-research events attended: 5

Number of these events that were full-on conferences in other cities: 2

Number of actual grown-up conferences attended: 0, but will be 1 next week.

Pages written on Kzoo paper: 5, plus one page of half-assed notes

Minimum acceptable page length for Kzoo paper: 8, probably.

How I spend my time in boring meetings

Guess the play!

Divvying up Shakespeare

Here at Misnomer U., we have an Early and a Late Shakespeare course. Officially, the dividing line is 1603, although in practice, I tend to push it a year or two earlier (because I am SO not making room for Hamlet in the Early Shakespeare course). I'm not sure I entirely like it -- the second half is tragedytragedytragedy all the time, and there are too many texts to choose from in the first half, but I like it better than dividing by genre, which is what the Beloved Alma Mater did. (Comedies and Histories vs. Tragedies. Because apparently, tragedy is SO much more important that one semester should be devoted to just eleven plays, and as many of the other twenty-seven as will fit should get shoved into the other class, and poetry doesn't count at all.)

But what if we did it alphabetically, and just rotated round and round the alphabet?

Shakespeare I
All's Well that Ends Well
Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
Hamlet
Henry IV, Part I
Sonnets 1-31

OK, that sounds kinda good, actually. A nice mix of genres. Kind of a classical theme.

Shakespeare II
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Henry VI, Part I
Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
Henry VIII
Julius Caesar
King John
Sonnets 32-62

That's maybe a lot of ... Henriosity ... even for me. Still, it could work. You could pass it off as a special topics course on Shakespeare and history. IIRC those are the sonnets where he starts getting all thinky about time and posterity, so they sort of fit.

Shakespeare III
King Lear
Love's Labor's Lost
Macbeth
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Sonnets 63-93

This sounds awesome! I would love this semester! All the best plays start with M!

Shakespeare IV
Othello
Pericles
Rape of Lucrece
Richard II
Richard III
Romeo and Juliet
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Sonnets 94-124

Kinda light on comedy, but otherwise a nice representative mix. I don't think anyone would raise an eyebrow at this.

Shakespeare V
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Two Noble Kinsmen
Twelfth Night
Venus and Adonis
The Winter's Tale
Sonnets 125-154

OK, this semester is on CRACK, but I kind of want to teach it anyway. (If you swapped Shrew for Twelfth Night, you would basically have Special Topics: Shakespeare and Misogyny, which would really be a rather interesting course.)

How does your institution divide up the Shakespeare courses? And how do you secretly wish they did?

First lines of the semester: my version

'Cos it looked like fun when Fie did it:

I'll feeze you, in faith.

I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.

If music be the food of love, play on.

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.

So shaken as we are, so wan with care

Open your ears, for which of you will stop

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

Sir Hugh, persuade me not. I will make a Star Chamber matter of it.

Why I love my university, in pictures

Because sometimes, art installments appear overnight.



Many spectators gathered on the stairs to watch the balloon.





But alas! Not all is well in balloon-land.