Serendipities

Most of you will know Ann Hathaway, whether it be from a biography of Shakespeare, from education, popular literature or the internet. The image most people have of her is based on a few facts. When they married, for example, William was eighteen while Ann was twenty-six and several months pregnant. In his will, William left Ann his second-best bed. In the words of Germaine Greer, she “left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare’s Wife convincingly shows how biographers have filled this void with their own ideas of what Shakespeare’s wife would have been like. In the popular imagination, she or her parents and friends forced the young Shakespeare to marry her after a roll in the hay at Shottery. A few years later, Shakespeare escaped to London and led a wild life among the brothels in Southwark. Here, for example, is a quotation from the page on Ann’s life on the website of Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare:

At 26, Anne knew the way of the world while William was still a troubled youth, unsure of his path and coping with the collapse of his father’s businesses and the uncertainty of the times. After William turned 21, there would be no more children for Anne and him. There would instead be long absences as William later toured the country and set up home amongst the theatrical community in London. There would be extramarital affairs and head-turning passions for the poet, and he would encounter much more of the world than Anne in rural Warwickshire ever could.

The great thing about Germaine Greer’s biography of Ann Hathaway is that she challenges the representations of Ann that are commonly taken for granted, even (or perhaps especially) among academics. In a podcast she says that it was her reading of Stephen Greenblatt’s biography Will in the World that made her want to write this book, but her biography includes revealing quotations from many other works besides Greenblatt’s.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at The Valve, Adam Roberts posted an unorthodox theory on who wrote the Ur-Hamlet.

Scholars suppose that there was a version of Hamlet before Shakespeare wrote his play in 1600 or 1601, and they refer to this version as the Ur-Hamlet. No text of the play survives, but an earlier version of the revenge tragedy must have existed, because contemporary references to the play have survived. Thomas Lodge in his Wit’s Misery (1596), for example, famously refers to the “ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oysterwife, Hamlet, revenge.” Not only does this passage give us an amusing glimpse of the warlike King Hamlet shrieking like an oysterwife, it also tells us that a Hamlet must have been performed in or before 1596 in The Theatre.

Who wrote this earlier Hamlet? Read the rest of this entry »

At the close of summer, I wrote a post on my plans to use a weblog in my MA course on gender theory in the first semester (see also this later post). I received a lot of very useful and encouraging comments, and took the plunge. The semester ended just before Christmas, student essays are trickling in now: it is time for an evaluation.

“Theories of Gender and Culture” was a 15 week MA course with twelve students who met once a week for a two-hour seminar. Because gender theory was new to most students, and because I put some difficult texts on the Syllabus, I was looking for a way to keep students engaged with the material outside class. I made a group blog on which students (and I myself) could write blog posts, and comment on each others’ posts. I posted a discussion question each week, in which I asked students to apply the theory of that week to a cultural object. (Here is an example of such a discussion question.) Students had to write responses to three discussion questions, they could pick which ones to answer. I also created the categories “queries” (for any questions that students were struggling with during the week) and “gender notes” for observations on gender in daily life, the news, commercials — anything. For more information, see also the document on the Course Blog that I put in the Blackboard module for the course. I also posted “household notes” on the blog, with information on the course, presentations schedules, etc. The sidebar was filled with a “recent comments” widget, a twitter widget with links to interesting websites or online articles that we happened to come across during the course, and link lists to personal websites of theorists, to organizations, databases, online journals and theory sites.

There were several ways in which I hoped the blog could aid the learning process:

• to provide a space for students to tackle the material outside class
• to enhance critical and analytical thinking
• to foster a sense of community
• to enhance class discussion
• to practice writing skills

The evaluation that follows is based on my own experiences as well as an anonymous online survey (via Blackboard) among my students, submitted by 10 of the 12 students.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 35th Carnivalesque “We are the memory keepers” — medieval edition — is up at Atol · is · Þin · Unseon! It’s long and brimming with new (to me) things to read: sexuality in the middle ages, performative reading in class, and much much more. Thanks, Alun, for the pointer.

My hopes of Apple ever releasing an e-book reader with beautiful software and the same sleek looks as their new MacBook Air were crushed by the New York Times this morning. In an interview, Steve Jobbs declared that the idea of e-books is based on a fundamental mistake:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

A book token I got for Christmas came with a ticket from our National Railservice (NS), which allowed one free trip, as long as the traveler was accompanied by another person who did buy a ticket. So we made one of the longest Dutch train journeys possible from where we live (still only 2 hours), from Utrecht to Maastricht in the southernmost tip of the country.

The last time we were there, we walked into the Dominican church and found to our surprise that it was being used for bicycle storage. This time, the architects Merkx + Girod had metamorphosed the church into a wonderful bookstore. Selexyz Dominicanen, which opened just before Christmas, is really one of the most beautiful bookshops I have ever been in.

• More images of the bookshop on flickr
• Googling for images, I found that the bookshop is also the favourite of The Guardian in a new list of 10 bookshops from around the world that complement their database of best bookshops in Scotland, England and Wales (Ireland coming up). Nine more beautiful bookshops to go and see…

The discussion about Stanley Fish’s column on the uses of the arts and the humanities at the Valve (here and here) reminded me of the Belle van Zuylen lecture that Jeanette Winterson gave in Utrecht, just before Christmas. Her thesis was that art is essential equipment for the task of being human — a “basic kit for life.” The entire text, in English and in Dutch is on the SLAU website.

The person who introduced her spoke about truth and beauty, and despite being a fan of Winterson’s novels, I was a little worried that the evening was going to be a little too Harold-Bloomian. Then Winterson’s sheer enthusiasm and her engaging style grabbed me.

By cutting through the non-speak and the triviality that surrounds us, art’s language finds the truth about ourselves that we whisper in the night, find revealed in dreams, fend off with good works and good intentions. Under the babble is everything we are not saying about the way we live, privately and collectively, and it is not enough to try and say it in conference notes or essays, or even in the best journalism and non-fiction. We still need the numinous, metaphorical, allusive complex language of poetry – the heightened dialogue of the dramatic text, the strange journeys of fiction.

Next to popular culture and capitalism, Winterson targeted literature courses in academia :

Even people who are supposed to be in charge of education worry about whether the canon of Western art will be too racist, too sexist, too offensive, or just too difficult.

I agree wholeheartedly that a teacher’s enthusiasm is vital in order to stimulate students to read more literature outside class, to go out and explore on their own. Winterson’s lecture really infected me with the desire to do so even more.

I do not quite agree, however, with the critique on modern literary theory that seems to underly this statement. I think that literary and cultural theory, too, are part of the toolkit that can make you see differently and make you think around different corners. Like the strange journeys of fiction, theory can take you out of your familiar ways of thinking.

This idea that theory stands in the way of enjoying literature is alive in Dutch academia, too. The worry is that if we include theory into the curriculum, students will not read enough literature. I agree that students could read more, and it sure would be nice if they also read books in their spare time every now and then. But I do not think that introducing students to the basics of literary theory stands in the way of that. I think it would be good if in addition to being able to close read and analyze a literary text, they could view a book from different perspectives and to see how their reading related to bigger ideas. I even think it could make them enjoy reading literature more.