Anton Chekhov Upon Meeting Tolstoy at Yalta

He was still confined to bed but talked a great deal about everything and about me, among other things.  When eventually I get to my feet to make my farewells, he pulls me back by the arm, saying: “Kiss me!” and after giving me a kiss, he suddenly bends over swiftly to my ear and says in that energetic quick-fire old man’s voice of his: “But I still can’t stand your plays; Shakespeare’s are terrible, but yours are even worse!”

Early Modern History - Politics

Created as a video to introduce undergraduates to the overarching themes and movements within early modern English history.  By no means is it comprehensive, but it was never meant to be.  Just a bit of a primer, to supplement lectures.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

For those who are interested, Part Four is available through the link below:

http://youtu.be/N2_ae998RXc

Part Four

Early Modern Authors and Playwrights

Green, who had in both Academies ta’en

Degree of Master, yet could never gain

To be call’d more than Robin; who, had he

Profest aught save the Muse, serv’d and been free

After a seven-years prenticeship, might have

(With credit too) gone Robert to his grave.

Marlowe, renowned for his rare art and wit,

Could ne’er attain beyond the name of Kit,

Although his Hero and Leander did

Merit attention rather. Famous Kyd

Was called but Tom.  Tom Watson, though he wrote

Able to make Apollo’s self to dote

Upon his Muse, for all that he could strive,

Yet never could to his full name arrive.

Tom Nash (in his time of not small esteem)

Could not a second syllable redeem.

Excellent Beaumont, in the foremost rank

Of rar’st wits, was never more than Frank.

Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill

Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will;

And famous Jonson, though his learned pen

Be dipt in Castaly is still but Ben.

Fletcher add Webster, of that learned pack

None of the mean’st, yet neither was but Jack.

Dekker’s but Tom; nor May nor Middleton;

And he’s now but Jack Ford that once was John.

Heywood, Thomas (Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (?))

Review of Donmar King Lear

This is by no means a formal review in any sense of the term.  These are just some things jotted down after seeing it through the wonderful NT Live program at my local theatre.  I don't know if anyone will be interested, but here it is:

First off, that was amazing.   I had high expectations of Jacobi, of course, and every one of my expectations he met.  The madness scenes were so delightfully paternal.  It is as though the only time that he could manage to feel compassion for others or want to take care of them in any way was during his madness.  Also, he managed to make some of the most high-rhetoric lines in Shakespeare sound almost colloquial and natural.  An achievement unto itself.  His relationship with Cordelia was touching and not because of the actress playing Cord (Pippa Bennett-Lee).  (Truth be told, I wasn’t very fond of her.  She was far too declamatory for my tastes.)  But Jacobi invested so much emotionally in the relationship that the recognition scene in act 5 actually made me cry.  And when he came back on (Howl, howl…), that was some of the most heart wrenching classical theatre I’ve ever seen.  There’s nothing to fault about his performance.  When the introduction claimed that this was the Lear for a generation, I thought, ‘Of course this is this generation’s Lear… hype, meaningless hype.’  Thing is, I think they were right.

The set design I was skeptical about at first.  I have seen so many variations of the black box that it is now beginning to seem lazy to my eyes.  Also, as a onetime actor, it presents challenges to an actor that I never really liked.  (I always want to have something in my hands.)  But the simplicity of the design worked very well overall.  In such a small space, it would have undoubtedly have had the effect of drawing the audience into the show, as though you were at a rehearsal rather than a performance.  The actual intimacy of the space was counteracted by the parallel white of the boards that gave an impression of height that the space really doesn’t have.  It seemed to be larger than it was.  The lighting and sound design was never obtrusive, and indeed the sotto voce “Blow winds” really worked I thought.  Instead of external rage, you could really see into the mind of someone whose heart is breaking (and who might very well be having a stroke!).

Michael Hadley Photo from Rialtoentertainment.com

Kent, played by Michael Hadley was a real stand out among the supporting cast.  I have always sympathized with Gloucester – poor deluded and suicidal Gloucester – than with Kent.  He’s always seemed too much of a fairy tale character for me to really hook into.  But Hadley’s performance was stellar.  Here’s a man who takes his duty very seriously.  I’m so glad that they kept in the lines about Kent’s eating fish and then eating meat when he’s in disguise.  I know it is hard to play up things like his position as a Christian in a pagan world in a modern production, but I’m still glad that those were there.  There was one point in act three, when Gloucester came in to usher the king and his motley troop back to some shelter, where Kent just leaned forward and stretched out his back.  You just got this sense of incredible exhaustion.  Talking about it with a friend later, she exclaimed how Kent was a soldier.  Both literally and figuratively.  He’s tired of putting up with all this shit from other people, but he keeps doing it.  Brilliant performance.

Gina McKee and Justine Mitchell, photo from NT website

The other two great stars of the show, I thought, were Goneril and Regan (Gina McKee and Justine Mitchell).  Given how many times I have read that play, I thought I saw most of their characters already.  I thought that I had a grasp on what kind of people they were.  But clearly the image in my mind was flat and washed out because when those two spoke, they breathed a new life into the characters that I had never known was there.  The archness – almost like a Disney witch, but never so flat – of Gina McKee as Goneril was withering.  And Regan’s journey over the course of the play – from subdued follower of other’s plans to lustful hunger and then her death – I had always known but never seen so tragically.  They were fascinating.  I wished that they had more stage time, which was something I never thought that I would say.

There were, of course, some less than stellar performances, and by that I’m not damning with faint praise.  There were no outrageously bad performances.  Well, Cornwall wasn’t hot, but we will get to that.  No, by less than stellar, I mean just that.  Edmund (Alec Newman), for instance, did a very passable job… but…  See, I have very particular views on Edmund.  I used to do “Thou, Nature” as my audition speech back in the day.  And though he did a fine job, he was simply outclassed by the sheer energy and commitment of the performances around him.  One of the things about the character that I thought was irksome was in the first scene.  Gloucester accepted Edmund right from the beginning and had a paternal relationship with him from the moment they walked on stage.  This, to me, is a misreading of the beginning of their relationship.  Gloucester has got in trouble in the past for having sex out of wedlock.  Edmund is a bastard son that almost cost him quite a bit, perhaps even his life – Lear intimates as much later.  Gloucester even says that he has blushed to admit he is his son.  Why start them off as sniveling son and respectful father?  Why not – as I believe is indicated in the lines – have Gloucester only barely accepting his boy and then, on force of evidence, believing that he has had it wrong this whole time?  It makes the journeys for Gloucester, Edmund and Edgar so much more interesting.

Gwilym Lee photo from rialtoentertainment.com

Speaking of Edgar (Gwilym Lee)… one of the strange things I thought about the part of Edgar (who for the most part was really quite good in the role: athletic, desperate, noble…) was his inability, refusal or poor direction in not adopting radically different accents for the radically different characters that he has to take on.  Lord knows that there is an imaginative license necessary to make theatre work.  For instance, a friend of mine wished that Jacobi hadn’t been so obviously breathing after Lear was dead.  I didn’t care, because the imagination demanded that he was dead.  But that said, when Edgar talks to his own father in his own voice, you can maybe *maybe* get over that.  Gloucester is blind, he’s suicidal, he’s probably not paying attention to the voice of the guy who is taking him to Dover.  But when the guy who has lead him to Dover sounds exactly the same as the “fisherman” who supposedly witnessed his fall?  Now that is stretching imagination a bit.  Maybe it is my interest in radio drama and voice work, but… seriously?  Couldn’t he have put on a stronger accent?  I noted that he had changed it a little, but it seemed so slight a change in the vowels that it was hard to credit.

The Fool, played by Ron Cook, was fine.  The relationship between Lear and the Fool was one of two old drinking buddies in a way, two men who have known each other for a long, long time.  I’ve always seen the Fool in more youthful, acrobatic, musical and (if I may coin a word) prestidigitary terms.  I was happy to have my impression of the Fool challenged, but I’m not sure how great an impression it made.  It’s possible that, like Edmund, he was just having an off-energy night or was simply being outclassed by Jacobi and Hadley, but I’m not sure.

The only person on the stage who I actually disliked was Cornwall.  I’m never sure if, when I dislike an actor who is playing a loathsome character, it is because I dislike the actor’s interpretation of the character or that interpretation is wonderful because I dislike the character so much.  I think this time I will actually lean on the side of disapproving of the actor because he seemed to be acting in a style that had nothing to do with anything else on stage.  Oh, everything was there.  Hips thrust forward, swaggering walk, dismissive tone… but it all sounded like he should be in a modern piece, not in a work of classical drama.  The words were too much for him.  The physical presence was right, but he couldn’t get across the meaning of the words.  I think the reason why I believe it was the actor not the character that I dislike is that when the actor came back on as a messenger in Act Five, he tried to aurally upstage Kent.  It may have been a youthful slip or nerves, but I’m still a bit leery.

Goodness, this has gone on far longer than I intended.

Brian Blessed - has he played Lear? 

Does anyone know?

 One thing I thought afterwards was - Lear was supposed to be a massive, larger than life warrior figure in his youth.  You know who I would love to see at Lear?  Brian Blessed.  He's the only classical actor that I know who I can imagine in his younger days having actually hefted a battle axe (Flash Gordon notwithstanding), and he could really pull off the early scenes.  I wonder how he would deal with the tender scenes with Cordelia, mind you.That would be really interesting.

 

I could go on.  I really hope the NT decides to make these performances available to educators at some point in the future because that was one of the best pieces of theatre I have ever seen in my life.  I never get so emotionally invested in a piece that I cry, but Jacobi drew it out of me.  It was almost enough to forgive him for thinking that de Vere wrote Shakespeare.  Silly Jacobi.  Nevertheless – what did YOU think?

-AB

Diogenes and Socrates

Last night I went to a party filled with grad students and recent graduates who are just starting the contract academic staff run around.  Inevitably, the conversation turned to the bleak economic climate in which we find ourselves and the positively desperate position of most humanities departments these days as we are pushed again and again to justify our own existence.  What is the purpose of the study of philosophy?  What does the study of history give to the world?  Why should anyone bother to study literature?

Not this Academy

Obviously there are a lot of interrelated problems here – from the growing lack of discipline specific objects of study (a philosopher may study Shakespeare as much as a literary theorist can turn to Husserl), to the reactionary resistance of the academy to any change to its organizational status quo – but one thing that repeatedly comes up in conversations of this sort is some variation on the refrain, “We teach critical thinking skills.”

Don’t get me wrong.  In what follows, I don’t mean to side with the perceived others who doubt the value of the continued existence of the humanities or even argue that we should move to a more quantitative rubric against which to measure the humanities.  Though it is theoretically possible to count up the economic value & impact of, say, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, it is deeply reductionist to do so.  No, in what follows, I want to point to the difficulty of using the concept of “critical thinking skills” to justify our own existence as humanists[1].

“Critical thinking skills” is a notoriously slippery term to define, which I think is one of the reasons why it is brought out first in conversations of this sort.  It seems to refer to a set of skills that anyone who participates in the conversation feels that they have and that they can impart to others.  Exactly what those skills comprise can be unique to each individual participant in the conversation, unless the term is interrogated, which, often, it is not.  One person may see numeracy as a critical thinking skill whereas another may see situating an object of study within a larger discursive frame as a critical thinking skill.  Without going into the meaning of the term for each individual, the term becomes at best a cipher for what those individual participants in the conversation see as the fundamental value of their discipline.  At worst, when two people or groups have radically different individual definitions of “critical thinking skills,” the term becomes a buzz phrase bandied about that makes it seem as though knowledge is being created, yet the very ambiguity of the term denies that possibility.

So then, what are they?  These “critical thinking skills” that we supposedly teach as humanists?  And not only do we teach them, but in order to use them to justify our own disciplinary existence, we must teach them better than others.  Well, they can’t be things like numeracy, because clearly accounting, mathematics, engineering, logic and other disciplines teach those skills far better than we do.  After all, there are many humanists I know who have problems even doing basic long division.  I’m one of them.  Clearly, that isn’t what we mean when we say “critical thinking skills.”

Literacy

Numeracy

One of the things that we do as humanists is to situate our objects of study within a discursive framework, showing how the figure and the ground interact to produce an object of knowledge.  We teach our students to “think big” and to look at an object of study – a work of art, a play, a text, a statue, what have you – in terms of its ideological, political, historical, etc. situation and situatedness.  We look at the big pictures and in doing so have to be self reflexive regarding our own disciplinary attitudes towards the objects of study and the methods of study.  We resist any totalizing model of our methodologies or objects of study because that totalizing model reifies us, the humanist, into an unchanging object.  Our resistance is itself a form of humility because it makes every statement about the situatedness of the object of study a conditional statement.  If we use these terms and we apply these methods, then we get this result.  But we can always use other terms of analysis, other methodologies, other objects of study.  Our terms are only bound by our imaginations.  Indeed, if this is what we do as humanists (and in a blog post I am necessarily giving what can only be a thumbnail sketch of this position), then what we do is we resist.

The Scientific Method in a Nutshell

Part of the problem of this model is that it sounds remarkably close to the scientific method insofar as the scientific method presumes that any model of the universe, though it may be presented as a totalizing explanation, can only be at best a limited guess based on the available evidence.  There is a built-in humility to the scientific method that requires scientists to always append their statements with a silent, “but I could be – and probably am – wrong.  At least, I’m certainly incomplete.”  Humanists likewise present our statements on our objects of study, where we situate Love’s Labours Lost for instance within the discourse of genre and irony, with an inherent resistance to the very terms that we are using to describe the objects.  (“Genre” and “irony” are both inherently fraught as terms of literary analysis, to the point that many scholars would love to abandon them altogether.)  It isn’t quite the same as the scientific method, but every humanist must silently append each statement of knowledge with, “but it can also be otherwise.”

Didn't think I'd bring him in, did you?

Another objection to the model of the humanities as a form of self-reflexive analysis on our own disciplinary methods and models is that it is not unique to the humanities.  Physicists do it.  Theologians do it.  If you want to do well in business, you are expected not to simply follow the methodologies laid out for you by the past, but to innovate through reflection on your discipline.  Richard Branson would still be poor if he hadn’t essentially built a better mousetrap.  We are not the only ones who are self reflexive.

So if what we teach when we say we teach “critical thinking skills” comes out on the one hand as humility and on the other hand as self-reflexive analysis of the terms of our discipline, then there really isn’t much that we do that is different from anyone else.  I haven’t yet dealt with the other major term in my thumbnail definition of what it is humanities does, however – “resistance.”

Croix de Lorriane

By “resistance,” I don’t think that necessarily implies the model of speaking truth back to power.  Though some people might actually hold the view that humanists are indeed in the vanguard of resisting the hegemonic oppressions of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, etc., I think that that view is largely precluded by the very fact that those who hold the view have the opportunity to speak their view in the first place.  That is, if they can speak the truth back to power, they must themselves hold some power to begin with, in order to speak.  The academy, despite all of the cuts in recent decades, holds an incredibly privileged position in our culture and to say that we are somehow without power or that we are not a part of the mechanisms of power and oppression is, at best, ignorant and, at worst, lunacy.

No, by “resistance” I think that it makes more sense to point to the place of the academy as a part of a democratic state.  Thank you, Hannah McGregor for pointing this out.  That is, if the critical thinking skills that the humanities teach are “resistance” in some form or another, it is a form of resistance that is essential for the proper functioning of a democratic state.  We teach rational beings the skills to approach texts (be they Shakespearean plays or newscasts from Fox) with not only curiosity but a bit of scepticism and cynicism.  Not the cynicism of Diogenes, mind you; more the scepticism of Socrates.

Diogenes the Cynic

In pairing the two classical philosophers, I am actually recalling Plato’s own description of Diogenes as “Socrates gone mad.”  Socrates in his dialogues taught people not to simply accept the traditions and beliefs of their ancestors, but to think on their own.  His questioning of his interlocutors was skeptical but never nihilistic.  He always produced new methods of knowing and objects of knowledge through his interrogation of traditionally held ideas.  On the other hand, Diogenes utterly rejected the traditions and beliefs of those around him as at best fallen and at worst perverse.  Though none of his writings survive, the image of Diogenes in his barrel is an indication of his particular mode of resistance.  He utterly rejected the mores of his culture, whereas Socrates interrogated those mores and, in doing so, taught people to think.

Socrates

Critical thinking skills indeed.

So I think that most of us would prefer to think of what we do as humanists as falling into the shadow of Socrates rather than Diogenes.  We want to think of ourselves as teaching resistant forms of thought that nourish the democratic state, because, after all, democracy only runs well when the forms of resistance are explicit but contained.  I think also that one of the reasons why we would prefer to associate ourselves with Socrates rather than Diogenes is that Socrates is a martyr for rational thought and the model of humanities as a form of resistance positions the self as a rational being.  Socrates died for reason and we see ourselves as rational, resisting beings within a democratic state.

You can probably already see where I am going with this.

We’re not rational.  Indeed, by arguing that we are rational, and that is what makes humanities worthwhile, we are doing exactly what we said that we didn’t do in that thumbnail sketch I offered off of the top – we are reifying ourselves and presenting a hegemonic view of the self-in-inquiry.  You could call this, I guess, an ontological objection to the idea of “critical thinking skills” as resistance.

Further, Socrates was put to death in a democratic state.  Diogenes wasn’t.  I don’t know many academics in the western world who have been publicly put to death by their state for teaching “critical thinking skills.”  Obviously the simple equation between the two periods is a bit facetious, but it is a telling analogy.  That is, to say that we are providing models for and mechanisms of resistance through the humanities, then either we mustn’t be doing a very good job of it because no form of resistance has resulted in such drastic oppression as Socrates met with, or our democracy can accommodate a great deal more resistance than Athenian democracy and we aren’t providing it with the amount of resistance it needs to be a properly functioning democracy.  Either way, the problem lies not in the stars but in ourselves.  The academy is not the centre of resistance and the vanguard of revolutionary change that I think many humanists think of it as.  Indeed, by the time something gets into the academy, or the academy gets a hold of an idea, it dies or is on its way to death.  We’re preservationists, not revolutionaries.  We’re Diogenes – a civic nuisance who clips coins and makes obscene comments in the agora – not Socrates – who corrupts the youth of Athens by teaching them to question the gods.  One can easily argue that the analogy does not hold because what we have is a democratic system unlike what they had in Athens; that our system accommodates more freedom of thought and expression than was available in Athens.  The problem here is that teaching people new modes of thought ceases to be resistance if our culture can accommodate these new modes of thinking without blinking.  Indeed, the freedom of thought and expression, which is necessary for modern democracy, which provides for resistance to that same freedom, can only be resisted by an attempt to curtail freedom of thought and expression.  Either you must argue that we do not have true freedom of thought, in which case our democracy is similar to Athenian democracy, and our work is genuinely resistant, but for some reason no one is being killed for that resistance (which is internally incoherent), or you must argue that we do have true freedom of thought, that our democracy is dissimilar to Athenian democracy and our work is not genuinely resistant.

Resisting who?  Resisting what? 

Not the darling of humanists

If “critical thinking skills” DO mean “resistance” in some form or another, and we genuinely want to teach people these much vaunted skills, we need to ask ourselves what forms of resistance actually matter. (I’m looking at you, Wikileaks.)  If it was really all about resistance in the academy, I would find a lot more people in the hallowed halls who approve of Sarah Palin, who think that the Holocaust was all a bunch of hooey[2] and who want to suggest that gravity works by suction[3].  They aren’t in the academy.  Humanities scholars tend to speak with one voice.  If “critical thinking skills” were another way of point to “resistance,” then where are the conservatives?  Where are the people arguing for the increased hegemony of white, North American, heterosexual males?  They aren’t here.  And again we fail at self-reflexive study.

I guess one of the things that I am trying to say is that I don’t think that an appeal to democracy is going to help us to understand what it is we mean when we try to justify the existence of the humanities.  

Again, it isn’t that I don’t believe that the humanities should exist.  I am an early modern drama scholar – I love what I do and I want to keep doing it.  Nor is it that I think that what we do has no value.  If I didn’t think it had value, I wouldn’t be doing it.  Rather, I think that the simple minded appeal to “critical thinking skills” as a way to justify our own existence is deeply problematic.  If we are to convince people outside of the academy that what we do has value, then we have to approach the issue without using catch phrases and buzzwords that simply make us feel better for having chosen a career in which others don’t see the value.  

We’re not raging against the dying of the light.  

We’re not übermensch.  

We’re not Socrates.

At best, I’m Diogenes screaming “Fuck” in the middle of the agora.  It may get me a stern talking to by the police, but I don’t think anyone will accuse me of being at the vanguard of decisive social change.

---

[1] A term I loathe, but which, for the sake of argument, I use to mean anyone who is engaged in a humanities discipline (i.e. Philosophy, Literature, Arts).

[2] Just to be clear: The Holocaust happened, no matter what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks.

[3] Gravity doesn’t suck.  Just ask Newton.