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.

Campus-visit eve

We're hiring for a new colleague this year -- the first one in my department since I came along. The two finalists are coming next week, one right after the other. The first one arrives tomorrow, although he's requested to have a day on his own to explore (which sounds like a fine idea), so I don't get to meet him until Monday. (I wonder if he knows exactly how dead downtown Deep South Town tends to be on a Sunday; although I think one of our two coffee shops is open on Sundays, so at least he won't starve.)

I walked around the campus a little, trying to imagine it through the new-person's eyes. We have some lovely buildings: Victorian, rambling, asymmetrical, towered, balconied. We'll be putting the candidates up in one of them. And April is our best month, I think. My own campus visit was in April, though at the other end of the month: magnolia-time rather than azalea-time. I remember the ivory cups spilling their fragrance on the air. I remember deciding (a good decision) to ditch the interview suit and wear a nice summer dress. I remember noticing all the little details that spoke of bare-bones budgeting -- one and only one search committee member at each meal, an ancient TV cart instead of a smart classroom for the teaching demo, a suite in the Honors dorm instead of a hotel room -- and deciding I didn't care. (This may not have been the best decision, as Misnomer U. spent my first couple of years lurching from one crisis to another.)

I hope one of them falls in love with this place. I hope the rest of us fall in love with the same one who falls in love with this place. (Oh God, what if they both fall in love with this place? And what if we fall in love with both of them? I want there to be enough happy endings to go around, but I know that in humanities job searches there never are.)

On wealth

Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860 — Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored, I suppose, by the recital. And she told me — rooms were hired. Committees met. Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held; letters were read out; so-and-so has promised so much; on the contrary, Mr —— won’t give a penny. The Saturday Review has been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall we hold a bazaar? Can’t we find a pretty girl to sit in the front row? Let us look up what John Stuart Mill said on the subject. Can anyone persuade the editor of the —— to print a letter? Can we get Lady —— to sign it? Lady —— is out of town. That was the way it was done, presumably, sixty years ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of time was spent on it. And it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds together...

This is Misnomer U's story, pretty much. The long struggle continues; now and again we have to lobby the state legislature for our continued existence. Otherwise, barring a fresh round of budget cuts or a natural disaster, they ignore us. We are small and do not have any sports teams, and while we are no longer exclusively female, we are still stubbornly woman-serving in our demographics and outlook.

Over spring break I went to visit the University of Basketball, where I went to grad school. No particular reason, just missed the campus and the town. There is a small art museum at the edge of campus; I went there now and again when I was a student, though I don't remember thinking it was anything special at the time.

I went in, and followed the signs upstairs to the study gallery. Oh, my God. How did I not know about this when I was a grad student? Faculty members can request to have specific works put on display for their classes -- anything in the collection, any class. There was a corner set aside for a Brit Lit II survey, an ordinary sophomore-level gen ed class just like the one I'm teaching now. Only the students in this Brit Lit class get to go in and see works by Blake and Turner and Beardsley. I hadn't had any idea you could do that -- nor would I have thought to take advantage of it, not back then, when I was still struggling to get through one day of class at a time, trying not to expose my ignorance in front of a horde of unruly undergrads. You don't think about giving your students cool and enriching experiences until later, after you've got a handle on what you're doing. But God, what wouldn't I give to have a resource like that now!

The galleries at Misnomer U. are strictly for rotating exhibits, mostly of faculty and student art; we don't have a collection as such. Much of what we do have on display, at any given time, is for sale.

We don't have a performing arts series. This is why I ferry students "all over hell and creation" (I thank thee, Fie, for teaching me that phrase) to piggyback off of other schools' visiting artists. We don't even have a film series.

We try to pretend these things don't matter: with a little imagination, one can put together a fairly respectable-sounding schedule of "cultural events" for the freshmen in Intro to College Life, even if most of them are homegrown. But opportunities and experiences do matter, and they especially matter when most of your students come from places where the arts are not part of their everyday life, and frankly I am getting sick of pretending.

Taking it on the road

I just got back from an excellent student production of Othello at Scarlet Letter U*, about an hour and a quarter away from here. They really stripped it down to the bone, and cut some of my favorite bits like Emilia's speech about men, but what was left was fast-moving and powerful and generally awesome. I took one student. I was supposed to take two, but one of them bailed without letting me know she was going to bail, and seemed surprised when I told her I'd already bought her ticket.

On Friday, I went to see a touring production of Twelfth Night at BigBox Mega U, half an hour away in the other direction. That was great, too. Fun, inventive staging, and one of the best Sir Tobys I've ever seen. Three students came. There were originally supposed to be six. The production was supposedly sold out two weeks in advance, because most of the tickets went in large blocks to schools; I spent the first fifteen minutes of Friday's Shakespeare class on hold with the box office, and felt lucky to score seven same-day rush tickets. Then, when we got there, there were dozens of empty seats. Apparently the other schools have the bailing-students problem, too.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to see a different touring company perform The Taming of the Shrew at Don'tCallUsWe'llCall U,** fully two and a half hours off in the boondocks. That was pretty awesome too, done with a cast of seven, and with a female Lucentia and a lesbian wedding at the end. I took two of the students from the Shakespeare class, one who's writing her honors thesis about the play, and a friend of the honors thesis student who agreed to come at the last minute when, you guessed it, someone bailed. We got home sometime after midnight, a long dark sleepy drive. I felt bad for the three students squished into the back seat of my tiny little Hyundai. They all said it was worth it. Honors Student also said it was the first time she'd really gotten the subplot; it's hard to keep all those Italian names straight, and so much easier when you see the characters embodied.

Here is the thing. We don't get a whole lot of opportunities to see live Shakespeare around here (this month was something of a fluke), so I take them when I can and drive long distances when I need to, and I love doing stuff like this. I love watching students discover that Shakespeare in performance is funny and scary and moving and not at ALL hard to understand. But I am getting frustrated as hell with the 50% last-minute attrition rate. And it's mostly not the students' fault. They have complicated lives: work schedules that change at the last minute, and babysitters who cancel, and other classes to juggle, and they are genuinely disappointed when things don't work out. I did not have a particularly complicated life when I was a student. I also grew up half an hour away from a major East Coast city, where you could see lots of different plays any week in the year, and with parents who believed in taking their kids to the theater. These things are luxuries. I didn't realize that at the time. I want more of my students to have them. I also want to change the culture at Misnomer U so that it's less conducive to apathy and flakery, and so that more students want to go road-tripping with Shakespeare.

And, as Bill Watterson says, as long as I'm dreaming I'd like a pony.***

* Technically speaking, I believe the letter in question is actually crimson, but I can't resist the appellation.

** Because I had a phone interview with them way back in my first year on the job market, and because apparently when I'm tired I spend all my mental energy making up cute nicknames for the local universities.

*** Not really. I don't think I ever got the appeal of ponies, even when I was a kid.