Shakespeare-related ramblings, both fannish and professional

[a_t_rain]

So, it's a new semester, but I've barely met my students yet, because between MLK Day weekend and the ice storm, there haven't been any F2F classes for nine days. I hope this doesn't make things too weird when we finally meet again. I always feel like those first few weeks are delicate, while classes are finding a vibe that's going to last for the rest of the semester, and rapport is getting established, or not.

On the other hand, I had plenty of time to write fluff about a hapless boy actor ordered to capture a toad because Master Burbage is taking his side-part as Paddock way too seriously, with some help from John Heminges's unruly pack of daughters: Familiars.

Other fic-roundup stuff from the last couple of months: Improving Fortinbras (Hamlet, post-canon, all the dead characters stay dead for once); Five Shakespeare Characters Who Accidentally Earned an Advanced Degree By Fighting a Snake (and One Who Didn't). (What it says on the tin. Because there clearly needed to be a crossover between FAQ: The Snake-Fight Portion of Your Thesis Defense and the complete works of Shakespeare.)

Otherwise, I've been rejiggering syllabi to deal with a missed week of classes and, simultaneously, looking over the table of contents for the new Norton Anthology of English Literature, which is coming out later this year.



OK, so I should mention that during the pandemic, one of my colleagues up and quit mid-year (which is Not Done in academia, but he's become a fairly big-name novelist who is having his stuff made into Hollywood movies, so I can't really blame him. Anyway, I volunteered to teach the Early World Lit class he was supposed to be teaching that semester, and it's become part of my regular rotation along with Early and Late Brit Lit, so I get two new sets of Norton Anthologies this year.

For some reason, the Norton editors have decided that they both need to include The Tempest? What the hell? (I mean, I might have actually suggested it on their survey for the World Lit anthology, as one of several plays they might want to consider including instead of Hamlet, which is just too damn long for a class that is supposed to cover everything from ancient Mesopotamia to the Renaissance. But ... there was nothing wrong with Twelfth Night, which has been one of the two plays in the English Lit anthology forever.)

I like The Tempest just fine. I like teaching The Tempest, and have even done it occasionally in surveys when it wasn't the anthology play, because we had a local-area production or something. But I am not sure I want THAT much Tempest in my life for the foreseeable future. And I think at least one of these anthologies should include a more ... paradigmatic sort of Shakespeare comedy, one with lots of disguises and eavesdropping and weird stuff happening in forests and Plays That Go Wrong and bad love poetry and good love poetry and young women being awesome, instead of one that's mostly about the young woman's father struggling with himself. (Yes, I know there is no Shxian comedy that includes ALL of these elements, but there are at least half a dozen that hit three or four of them.)

Growf. At least it made deciding which play to cut from Late Shakespeare this semester really easy.

Part of why I'm grumpy, I think, is that I suspect the thought process was something along the lines of "This is a play about slavery and colonialism and is therefore Important." (Which I don't really think IS what The Tempest is about, although I can certainly see that reading and would never argue with another instructor's decision to foreground it.) Whereas all that other stuff, all of that playfulness with gender and identity and language and metatheatricality? Not important, not serious, something we can do without. Ugh, maybe I can get them to switch to Midsummer next time I fill out the survey by arguing it's about climate change.

Now, don't get me started on the perhaps-not-unrelated fact that the editors of the Late Brit Lit anthology have decided that Tom Stoppard isn't important enough to be included any more. Ugh. (I will admit that Arcadia is one of those texts that the majority of students struggle with, and that I know I'm including on a syllabus for the nerdy minority who want their minds blown and are ready for it -- but those kids matter TOO, and yes, they'll be all right, but I want them to know Tom Stoppard exists, because unlike my own teenaged self, most of them aren't getting that knowledge from their parents.)

Comments

[landofnowhere]

Looking forward to the snake fight fic, but looks like the link goes to "Improving Fortinbras" instead!

[a_t_rain]

Ah, thanks! Fixed now, I think.

[nnozomi]

Your "Familiars" is sitting in an open tab right now waiting for me to get enough work finished that I can reward myself with fic I know I'll enjoy.
I hope the syllabi aren't too stressful. How could they drop Twelfth Night? Very nearly my favorite of all of them (not least because I once got a bunch of junior high schoolers with very limited English to put on a version of it, and they loved it). I feel like, as you suggest, The Tempest is going to be much more interesting when you're older and have a different perspective. (See also Japanese high school textbooks always including "Sangetsuki," a wonderful story about hitting your thirties and facing what you haven't done in life, also about turning into a tiger, NOT suited to fifteen-year-olds.) Sorry, rambling as usual... .

[a_t_rain]

Thanks! I don't know that story, but it sounds super-interesting (and a bit like teaching Joyce's "The Dead" to traditionally aged college students, which I DO regularly because I really love it, but I'm not sure anybody quite gets it until they've hit the beginning-to-be-middle-aged, is-this-all-there-is-in-life wall for themselves. Hopefully they still remember it exists when they get there?)

[tempestsarekind]

(also, ha. I have just finished grading a bunch of English 11 midyear exam essays on "The Dead," because for some reason it's tradition to teach it in English 11, and my students did not get it AT ALL. I am seriously considering not teaching it next year, tradition be darned.)

[tempestsarekind]

I suspect the thought process was something along the lines of "This is a play about slavery and colonialism and is therefore Important."

YUP. And also, ugh. I mean, *points at username* *points at entire "the comedies are people too!" dissertation* of course I am always going to be annoyed about any decision that bumps Twelfth Night out of an anthology, but it is also a way more accessible play than The Tempest!

...What did they include in place of Stoppard?

[a_t_rain]

Death and the King's Horseman, by Wole Soyinka. Which, actually, I loved the one time I saw it, so I'm not going to argue with the choice ... but, it, too, is also in the World Lit anthology, which I think might be a better fit for a play by a Nigerian playwright who spent a good chunk of his career in the US, and in any case, I don't see why we can't have two contemporary plays in the NAEL?

[tempestsarekind]

Yeah, it does kind of feel to me that one of the preeminent British dramatists of the 20th century probably ought to be in the Brit Lit anthology, and that adding a play rather than replacing one might have been the best move!

I'd be curious to know what students struggle with, when it comes to Arcadia? I've never taught it, but relatively early on in my time at the high school where I teach, a friend and I decided to run a reading of the play as a morning activity on the school camping trip, and the kids had a lot of fun even though I'm sure a lot of them didn't know who Byron was! And the drama teacher / play director did Arcadia in (I think) the fall pf 2019, and the kids who were in it absolutely loved the play.

[a_t_rain]

Some of it's cultural knowledge -- not so much about Lord Byron, because hopefully they remember a little about him from earlier in the semester, but all the British slang and math / science references and other literature and history references are daunting, and they can't really picture the garden everyone keeps talking about (although I can pretty much explain that part, with images; chaos theory, not so much). And I think the conversations between Hannah and Bernard are pretty opaque if you don't alreadly know how academia works (why they are hostile to each other, but also why these two random researchers are showing up at somebody else's country house in the first place!) Stoppard does kind of assume you've had a decent liberal arts education, which -- well, we're trying, but we can't really make up for a K-12 system that totally ignores that sort of thing.

Oh, and the whole nonlinear structure, with timelines shuttling back and forth and eventually braiding together, is doubly hard if you're not used to how plays work. (Lots of our students have never seen any kind of live theatrical performance, even though we have them every semester, and while mine have always read The Importance of Being Earnest by that point in the semester, it's hit or miss whether they have experience with anything else.)

Also, I don't know if this is a generational thing or a Bible-belt thing, but they have a REALLY hard time accepting Septimus and Thomasina's semi-relationship, even though a) she's an adult by the standards of her own time period and culture; and b) nothing actually happens between them, and it doesn't happen precisely because he has scruples! (Some of them really disapprove of Septimus, both because he has casual affairs with multiple women, which is fair-ish, but also because he has the temerity to explain sex to Thomasina without her mother's permission, which ... uh, she ASKED, and she called him on his attempts to deflect, and, as she points out, nobody else is telling her this stuff!)

[tempestsarekind]

Thanks for this reply!

Re: nonlinear structure - hmm. Do you think it's a matter of not knowing how plays work, or that it's hard to keep things straight in your head when you're reading the play rather than seeing it? I would imagine that many students have seen TV shows or films that have nonlinear structure, but would find it pretty difficult to keep track of shifting timelines in a screenplay if you just handed them one to read, even though they were familiar with TV / film generally.

(Which is not to say that a lack of familiarity with plays doesn't have other effects, of course! One thing that always perplexes at least some of my students is why Juliet would just be standing on her balcony talking to herself, so that Romeo could overhear her. Which makes sense! It's one thing to agree to the convention that the audience can eavesdrop on what are "really" the character's inner thoughts, and another thing altogether to be hit with "but sometimes they're talking out loud and other characters can hear them too.")

But yes, I suspect that the kids in our read-through just assumed that a lot of what happened in Arcadia was "grownup stuff that doesn't need to make sense to me, a youth." I assume the students who acted in the play a few years later got some sort of lecture on academia or something, because they handled all of that surprisingly well.

eta: I think we're in a moment where students are hyper-sensitive to age gaps and things like that - for very good reason, on the whole, but it does make it hard to read things written or set in earlier time periods without some disconnect.

[a_t_rain]

That's a really interesting question, and maybe my first instinct that they need more experience with live performance is wrong. As you said, movies and TV do many of the same things! (But, OTOH, they don't use space in the same ways, and I think one of the weird and challenging things about the non-linearity of Arcadia is that you have to imagine the same space as existing in two different points in time ... I dunno. It's gloriously weird and I love it, but it does seem to require a very particular leap of imagination, and unfortunately there aren't many good performance clips that could help them visualize it.)

[tempestsarekind]

I was thinking of that mainly because I didn't grow up with much live theater experience (though there were a couple of school outings to plays), and I suspect that I would likely have just ignored Stoppard's staging directions, if I had read the play when I was younger, and just imagined the whole thing in my head as a movie, where you cut back and forth between time periods. (I definitely pictured R&J as a movie and not a play when I first read it.) Which is to say, I guess, that maybe students can still get something out of reading Arcadia even if they don't make that particular leap?

I hear you on the performance clips, though! It's so frustrating to want to teach anything beyond a couple of the more popular Shakespeare plays, if you want to give students a sense of what a performance might look like.