Serendipities

A new issue of the online journal Early Modern Literary Studies has appeared! It contains an article on the role of Shakespeare’s Richard II in the Essex rebellion, representations of the supernatural in the early modern country house poem, and interestingly in the context of my earlier post on Paster’s fluid sense of selfhood (in which men can feel the melancholy of cats) it contains an article on lycanthropy in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.

Brett D. Hirsch wonders why Webster’s play features a werewolf, when despite many cases on the Continent, no cases against werewolves were known in England in the early modern period. Webster’s lycanthrope has been explained with reference to demonic possession, but Hirsch looks for its connotations in medical, theological and philosophical texts. He demonstrates that the werewolf is a border creature, both human and animal, evocative of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Both man and wolf, the werewolf in early modern culture blurs the lines between man and beast, and thus evokes anxieties over the boundaries between good and evil, civility and wildness, reason and madness, and masculinity and femininity.

At a time when so much has been said about the principle of order and of the hierarchies in English literature of the Renaissance tradition, it is not likely that anyone will question my conclusion that Shakespeare’s Histories with their constant pictures of disorder cannot be understood without assuming a larger principle of order in the background.

With these words, E. M. W. Tillyard (1889-1962) opened his conclusion of Shakespeare’s History Plays in 1944. (The initials, by the way, stand for Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall). In this book, Tillyard puts forward his famous interpretation of Shakespeare’s history plays as revolving around a principle of divine providence. The disorder of the Wars of the Roses is contained within a divine scheme in which God scourges England for the deposition of Richard II by Henry IV, and order is restored with the Tudor reign. “Behind disorder is some sort of order or ‘degree’ on earth, and that order has its counterpart in heaven” (16).

Tillyard was wrong, of course, in his assertion that no one would question his conclusion. Some of his reviewers in the years of the Second World War already found his pattern of order too monolithic, but in the 1970s and 1980s Tillyard’s works became the focus of the new historicism’s objections to older kinds of historicism. These newer forms of historical literary criticism disagreed with Tillyard’s view of Shakespeare as uncritically supportive of the historiography of the Tudor monarchs, and emphasized moments of subversion of this absolutist Tudor Myth.

I’ve been rereading Tillyard’s book on the history plays this weekend, and I realised how much we are still indebted to his work. Not to his idea of a monolithic Elizabethan world view, of course, in which everyone knew his or her place in the divinely ordered great chain of being. But in a way, although their answers tend to be contrary, the questions that the new historicism asks of literary texts are quite similar to Tillyard’s questions. The notions of subversion or containment, of order and disorder, of support or subversion of absolutist monarchy, are still central in criticism of the history plays today. Greenblatt comments that Shakespeare’s history plays “have been described with impeccable intelligence as deeply conservative and with equally impeccable intelligence as deeply radical” (Shakespearean Negotiations, 23). This is not a very deep observation, and I am sure there must be intelligent evaluations of Tillyard’s legacy, but I found it strange to realize that sixty years on, we are still concerned with such the same questions Tillyard asked. Can we fit sixty years of historical criticism on two sides of the same coin?

Sharon Howard continues the ongoing discussion (see here and here) on forensics with a captivating tale of sheep in court as material evidence — although she still cannot quite picture the fleecy flocks inside a Welsh legal institution.

Jonathan Edelstein at the Head Beeb reminds us that modern forensics has three constitutive parts: investigative methods, physical evidence, and the presence of expert witnesses in court. He looks at these expert witnesses in eighteenth-century legal cases, and ventures that modern forensic science perhaps originated with insurance companies who did not trust their clients’ claims.

I recently bought Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. OK, so the title is perhaps not quite in accordance with my work ethic, but the book itself is a little miracle.

Bolker is a co-founder of the Harvard Writing Center, and her book is full of really practical advice on the writing process. It says nothing on style, bibliographies, or how to structure your thesis, but focuses on issues such as “getting started writing”, writing drafts, reviewing, and sharing your material with supportive readers. Whenever I feel that I get stuck in the writing process, I browse her book for a little while, and the inspiration returns as by magic.

The book tries to foster a kind of writing addiction in its readers. It recommends you to start each day by writing, but not with the aim to produce perfect paragraphs. Rather, you sit down behind your computer, and just start to write down what you are thinking. Perhaps something about your chapter keeps nagging at you — then write about it, examine what it is that bothers you. Or if you are not sure how to start your chapter, then play around with different ideas, list the pros and the cons (perhaps blogging about such questions is even better?). These kinds of musings will then almost effortlessly produce all kinds of new insights, and sometimes whole paragraphs can be copied into your chapter! And it really works, I can testify to that. In fact, I even miss the free-writing on days that I’m teaching.

Bolker offers enthusiastic and practical tips such as this one on the ebbs and flows of a writing day:

When you’ve hit your natural number of pages, you will experience this sequence: some slowness getting in, for, say, the first page, then the sense that you’ve hit your stride and can just write along for a while, thinking things, following some byways, exploring, maybe even discovering a new idea or two. Then you’ll come to a point at which you start to tire and feel like there’s not much left in your writing reserve for the day. This is the time to begin to summarize for yourself where you’ve been, to write down your puzzlements or unanswered questions, to do what Kenneth Skier, who taught writing at M.I.T. many years ago, calls “parking on the downhill slope”: sketching out in writing what your next step is likely to be, what ideas you want to develop, or follow, or explore when you pick up the writing again the next day. This step will help you to get started more easily each day, and it will save you an enormous amount of energy and angst.

If you think I am a bit too enthusiastic, check out these reader reviews on Bolker’s page…

The 18th issue of the History Carnival is up at Acephalous. I spent my early Sunday morning reading sensational true crime headlines and wartime issues of Good Housekeeping with, shall I say, interesting notions of women’s responsibilities during the war. I compared skulls as well as different ways of opening academic essays, and peered at T. E. Lawrence’s newly discovered map for the division of the Middle East. But there’s more, much more!

Today I met professor Nicole Pellegrin from France, who has just been inaugurated as the new “Belle van Zuylen” (or Isabelle de Charrières)-professor at Utrecht University, and who focuses in her research on representations of femininity in word and image. She showed me the website of a virtual exhibition she worked on at the University of Angers in France, which is devoted to historical representations of masculinity and femininity.

The site is in French, has been produced with fantastic attention to detail and to the possibilities of the virtual medium. It contains wonderful material on representations of Jeanne d’Arc (researched by Nicole Pellegrin), on gender and football, women in colonialist postcards, and historical women dressing like men, to name but a few subjects. The illustration I copied from the site (© BM Rouen) is from a paper doll game, in which children can dress Jeanne d’Arc either as a (feminine) shepherdess or as a (masculine) warrior.

Reading Sharon Howard’s post on forensics in early modern crime cases and Chris Williams’s comments on it, I was scraping my brain for early modern plays that feature what we would now call forensic methods of crime solving. Strange that I never pondered this before, fan as I am of Waking the Dead, Prime Suspect, Inspector Morse and even the Midsummer Murders. At first I thought that no Holmesian deduction based on cigarette stubs or muddy shoes can be found in any of the plays I read. In Hamlet, the prince who according to Lorna Hutson can be compared to a detective, uses theatrical techniques rather than forensics to “catch the conscience of the king”. The same goes for the cases Heywood mentions in which the theatre solved crimes.

But then I thought of the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1591), in which Alice Arden murders her husband. The murder is discovered by Arden’s friend Master Franklin, who finds his body in the snow-covered fields behind the Abbey of Faversham. He is sure that Arden must have been murdered in his own house, for he has followed the tracks in the snow, and has found rushes from the house on Arden’s body:

Fra.
I feare me he was murthred in this house.
And carried to the fields, for from that place,
Backwards and forwards may you see,
The print of many feete within the snow,
And looke about this chamber where we are,
And you shall finde part of his giltles bloode,
For in his slipshoe did I finde some rushes.
Which argueth he was murthred in this roome.

These forensic deductions, however, fail to impress Mistress Arden, who claims the blood they find in her house is really spilled wine. It is only when she is confronted with her husband’s body, which starts to bleed afresh when she arrives, that she confesses to her crime.

In Holinshed’s chronicles, one of the sources for the play, it is the mayor of Faversham who does the detective work. He even orders everyone to remain within the house, like a true Hercule Poirot:

Then the maior commanded euerie man to staie, and herewith appointed some to go about, & to come in at the inner side of the house through the garden as the waie laie, to the place where maister Ardens dead bodie did lie; who all the waie as they came, perceiued footings still before them in the snow: and so it appeared plainlie that he was brought along that waie from the house through the garden, and so into the field where he laie. [...] Then they examined hir seruants, and in the examination, by reason of a peece of his heare and bloud found neere to the house in the waie, by the which they caried him foorth, and likewise by the knife with which she had thrust him into the brest, and the clout wherewith they wiped the bloud awaie which they found in the tub, into the which the same were throwen; they all confessed the matter, and hir selfe beholding hir husbands bloud, said; Oh the bloud of God helpe, for this bloud haue I shed.

The final conviction, then, is not exclusively based on the forensic material, but on Mistress Arden’s confession at the sight of her husband’s blood. But in both texts, the detective work that leads to the discovery of the murderers is very graphically described in what we would consider to be forensic detail.

I am sure there are more early modern plays in which forensics play a role in a crime plot - I’m going to mull over it this weekend. Let me know if you can think of any!