In which the Counseling Center is no real match for John Webster

So our Counseling Center is offering a new service, called "Don't Cancel Class!" Basically, one of the counseling staff is offering to go around to classes on days when the professor is absent and conduct a workshop for the class.

Which would be nice, since I do have to miss a class this semester -- except the class in question is, um, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. And the list of available workshops ("Stress Management," "Body Image and Eating Disorders," "Finding Your Place at [Our University]," and so forth) seems entirely too mundane.

Forthwith, a list of workshops I think the Counseling Center should totally consider offering:

-- Revenge Management
-- Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine, or Phlegmatic?: What Your Humours Say About You
-- What to Do if the Devil Speaks to You
-- How to Fake a Mental Illness Convincingly
-- So You Killed Your Twin Sister and Now You Think You're a Werewolf
-- Coping with Grief by Carrying Around Your Dead Girlfriend's Skull
-- How to Turn Your Gender Identity Crisis Into a Successful Stage Career

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.

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!

Summer (re)reading: A Yorkshire Tragedy

OK, so I think I'm going to teach this one in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama next semester. I will admit that I decided to teach it because it's basically a one-act, and therefore easily Xeroxable and ideal for slotting into an already-overstuffed syllabus. But I'm seeing a lot of interesting potential in it.

The play is based on the real-life case of Walter Calverley, who was apparently always something of a gambler and a drunk, and who snapped one day, murdered two of his three young sons, and attempted to murder his wife and his other son. The playwrights don't use real names -- the surviving Calverleys were naturally averse to having the family tragedy put on the public stage, and they were a wealthy family with some political clout -- but it's pretty clearly the early modern equivalent of a ripped-from-the-headlines episode of Law and Order.

The only named characters are three servants who appear in the opening scene, gossip a bit about their masters, and are then never heard from again. Everyone else is nameless: Husband, Wife, Son, Maid, Knight. The servants' dialogue at the beginning is the only bit resembling comedy. It's a stark play, very stripped-down, and makes you realize how overstuffed most full-length plays are by comparison. (I suspect it may be unfinished -- there are references in the first scene to an old flame of the husband's, and maybe the playwright(s) intended to develop all these loose ends, only someone else wanted the play to be rushed onto the stage while it was still topical. At any rate, it's probably fortuitous that they didn't -- I doubt that a comic subplot and a hefty load of moralizing would improve it.)

The Husband is the only character with much in the way of complexity, and you can almost see the playwrights grappling with the same questions you read in newspaper columns today after some apparently inexplicable act of violence: What would make someone do this? Where do people like this come from? Are they like us, after all? The other characters use the words unnatural, barbarous, monstrous, but these don't quite seem like answers. In his more outrageously antisocial moments, the Husband accuses his virtuous wife of adultery and his children of being bastards; at other times, when he seems at once more honest with himself and perilously close to madness, he despairs of his own prodigality and inability to provide for his family: How well was I left, very well, very well! My lands showed like a full moon about me, but now the moon's i' th' last quarter, waning, waning. And I am mad to think that moon was mine: mine and my father's, and my forefathers', generations, generations. Down goes the house of us, down, down, it sinks. Now is the name a beggar, begs in me that name which hundreds of years has made this shire famous: in me, and my posterity runs out. And these reflections lead him to the fatal conclusion that his sons would be better off dead.

I'm curious to see how it teaches. We'll be coming to it after Faustus, and after the revenge tragedies -- I think they will have the whole tortured-antihero formula down. It also seems to raise odd, uncomfortably contemporary questions about crime, media, and notoriety, in ways that (say) The Duchess of Malfi does not, even if you know intellectually that Giovanna d'Aragona was just as much a real person as the Wife of the play. I'm both looking forward to it, and apprehensive about it. We will see.