Shakespeare, he is good.

There is a reason we still, after 400 years, read Shakespeare. And it's not because he's a dead, white male. He is, but that isn't why we read him. The man had a gift. I hesitate to say "genius," if only because that is a word charged with so much angst and excuse, but Shakespeare, he is good.

Some of Shakespeare, of course, is not good. Some of it is downright terrible (and yes, I still think the terrible bits are Shakespeare, too, despite what certain *ahem* editors out there tend to argue). But that does not change the fact that the man was an intellectual giant.

What I perhaps love the most about Shakespeare is the fact that he became what he became simply because he was so damn good at what he did. Not because he was highly trained (he wasn't) or educated (he wasn't that either) or born into the right family (nope, still not).1 He was just plain and simple good at what he did. It didn't matter that his spelling was terrible or that he made up new words (we like that about him). He wrote what he saw, and when he saw, he understood. He recognized the patterns and the passions in the world and put them into a language that translates into performance as well as writing. He saw the intrinsically human, the universally recognized, the basest and greatest drives we possess, and he translated them into something that survived for centuries.

All this is, of course, instigated by my dissertation, about which I will not write. But suffice it to say that today I found yet another pattern, a perfect circularity, a flawless symmetry that made me recognize that what so many critics view as a "flaw" is, in fact, no such thing. It is deliberate and elegant. And it works. It reaches out off the stage and grabs us by the ruff and shakes us, it makes us feel something we should not feel, forces us to recognize in the most pathetic of figures the beautiful contradiction that is the human condition. It causes in us the same epiphany we have just witnessed - and the most glorious part is that we are not told what to think. We are shown. The scene is played out before us and it is up to us to recognize what we have seen, to bear witness to the passing of a man who has only just learned how to become great. To mourn his death, but to revel in it, because it is only through this single scene that he could become what he has just become. And it is great, and it is terrible.

And it is what makes us question whether we, too, can be both saint and sinner. Whether we, like this figure before us, have the capacity to be at once so mighty and so fallen. We are, it tells us, flawed. But we are also great.



1.[This is supposing, of course, that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the playwright rather than the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or Elizabeth I or Christopher Marlowe or whatever-other-monkey-they've-come-up-with-this-week. Not to say that some of those figures don't have a case... Oxford in particular is an intriguing suggestion, though I do have to note that both Elizabeth and Marlowe died before Shakespeare stopped writing. And don't give me crap about "they found it later," because those later plays were referring to contemporary historical events.]

Revisiting History

I've been reading a good deal of history lately - and along with it, some historical fiction. Sets the brain cells a-churning.

The most recent book to have filtered its way through my brain is C.J. Sansom's Dissolution, purchased on a whim at Kalamazoo. It's set in Tudor England under Henry VIII just following the death of Jane Seymour (that's after the Reformation and after the execution of Anne Boleyn for those of you who don't keep tabs on 1500s England). The subject, rather unsurprisingly, is the dissolution of a monastery - more specifically, the dissolution of a monastery following a series of gruesome (of course) murders which must be solved by the main character.

When I started it, I hated it. I thought the writing was flat and uninteresting. But, since I was on a plane, I made myself keep going. Turns out it was one of those books that gets you hooked and then you can't put it down. And it was well-researched, as I'm discovering in reading Derek Wilson's In the Lion's Court, which is about the reign of Henry VIII.

But that's not the point. The point is that we have - as a friend and I talked about a couple weeks ago - this fascination with the early modern period in England. Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth, to be specific.

Sure, there are reasons. Henry's six wives, the Henrician Reformation, the Golden Age of England... But, as my friend pointed out, we don't seem to be nearly as interested in one of the most ground-breaking and soul-shattering instances in English history: the public execution of Charles I.

Why is that? What do we find so utterly fascinating about Henry and his two daughters that we don't find in Charles? There was depravity, disillusionment, and corruption in the Caroline court. Religious upheaval, even a civil war. But we're drawn to the Tudor dynasty like flies to honey. And believe me, the Stuarts have their fair share of scandal and strangeness. But we aren't interested in them.

Is it charisma? The figure of the magnificent, leontine Henry VIII, strutting about in his ruff and puffy sleeves; "Bloody" Mary who executed more people in five years than Elizabeth in forty-five, wearing severe black, subject to cancer and false pregnancy; and Elizabeth, Gloriana, the greatest ruler (supposedly) to ever sit on the throne of England. We can't let go of our fascination with them. TV, movies (Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Tudors, Blackadder II), and books (again, The Other Boleyn Girl, Firedrake's Eye, Unicorn's Blood, Six Wives, the list goes on). And that doesn't even mention Shakespeare in Love.

I say - though I'm a bit biased - that it's propaganda. Portraits (Elizabeth had dozens), pamphlets, pageants, progresses, plays, poems (there are an awful lot of Ps there)... all dedicated to the Tudors. Designed and very often censured or sanctioned by them. And this is what has passed to posterity. The images they wanted us to remember. Yes, we also recognize that Henry was something of a nasty bastard, cutting of two of his wives' heads, divorcing one, annulling another. But he was good at what he did. It all comes down to publicity.

And from this, we learn that the power of media is ancient. It isn't that FoxNews has just figured out the influence they have over us (okay, maybe they just figured it out), it's that we the audience has suddenly recognized what the early moderns knew very well: we are subject to the things given to us. To subvert the system, we must recognize it as as system. And once we understand the mechanisms directed toward us, the tools and tricks of the trade, then we can learn to read between the lines... and to write between them.

Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, Chaucer... the list goes on. They all knew how to write between the lines. To contain in something seemingly innocent or propagantist the message that you don't always have to believe what you're told. Sometimes, you should. But simply knowing that the choice is yours to accept or condemn...

It causes a revolution.

The reason we look at Tudor England? Because without the Tudors, I'll bet you anything Charles I would have kept his head.

La Vita Academia

Writing from a Medieval and Renaissance Conference, at which I am surrounded by not just hundreds, but thousands of academics and scholars from all over the globe, I can’t really help but be prompted to think a bit about what it means to be an academic.

My musings began on the flight over. During the second leg of the trip, two men were seated in the row behind me, a older and a younger, seemingly strangers, discussing the younger man’s life and career. He was in aviation administration somehow – this was not of particular interest to me – and was on a trip to visit his girlfriend, who is still in school. When the older gentleman asked what she did, the younger replied “She’s a women’s studies major. But don’t worry, she’s not one of those man-hating types,” to which the other replied, “What the hell do you do with that?” the disdain evident in his tone.

Part of me wanted to turn around and smack them both., but things like laws and federal aviation behavior requirements kept me facing forward and seething invisibly in my seat. While I give the boyfriend kudos for calmly explaining that the girlfriend wants to go into politics, “because that stuff is useful, I guess,” I couldn’t quite give him enough to make me not want to scream. First of all, the caveat – “But don’t worry, she’s not one of those man-hating types” – was both bigoted and entirely unnecessary (she’s dating one, after all). Second of all, he should have enough respect both for her and her choice of career not to be apologetic about her major.

I don’t really blame the other man for wanting to know what career she will enter with the degree (after all, people ask me that all the time, and I’m getting a degree in something nice and non-threatening), but the tone irritated me no end. It was one of those oh-how-cute-the-little-lady-is-getting-an-education tones. The kind that is usually possessed by persons who are under the impression that women belong in the home, making dinner for their menfolk and raising the kids.

And then at the conference I was taught by a female professor how to “shake hands like a man,” because “this is a man’s world, honey, and you got to fight to stay in it.”

I can’t decide which is worse. The chauvinism inherent in the “uneducated masses,” or the self-perpetuating deprecation practiced by women in the profession. We wear masculine-style suits (particularly to job interviews, where, I learned, skirts are a no-no) and blocky clothing designed to hide our figures – so we won’t be distracting. We put on ball-busting attitudes that will, ostensibly, allow us to get ahead. But these are the very things that cause the illusion that we aren’t as good as our male counterparts to be perpetuated.

I’m not exactly the most girly female in the world. But if I want to be girly, then, dammit, let me. Let me earn your respect regardless of whether I act tomboy or butch or fem or frills-and-ponies. I shouldn’t have to – nor should anyone have to – pretend to be something I’m not just to earn the respect I should deserve simply because I’m competent at what I do.

It’s one of the things I generally like about this particular conference. I’m a little out of my time-period, but I enjoy this place because it accepts everybody based on their competence and intelligence, not on what they wear or how “acceptable” they appear. I’ve seen academics here wearing kilts, dresses, period garb, t-shirts and jeans, sundresses, suits, clerical habits, sweats, and – in once case – the weirdest ensemble I’ve ever seen on ANYONE. There’s no pressure to appear or behave in a certain way. Just the expectation that you accord the other people the respect they deserve as people and as scholars. It’s refreshing.

That said, academics are a very strange breed. They live and exist in a world entirely different from the one in which “normal” people operate. They are people to and for whom the historical world is present – as real as the tangible world outside their windows. They’re people who speak a different language and worship different deities than everyone else, people who understand their existence in relation to a past – or even a fiction (as in my case) – they never saw. They worship it like a god, nurture it like a child, and caress it like a lover.

I can think of worse ways to spend our lives.

Death and Life

In the spirit of several recent events - and a plethora of student papers - I'm addressing death. The death of people, the death of things, the death of relationships. (No, this has nothing to do with my own personal life.)

Phoebe S. Spinrad writes in The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage,
The human mind is afraid of Nothing.
It is at the moment of death that Everything and Nothing meet, and throughout the history of humankind, art has struggled to make them both less frightening by transmuting them into Something, a something that can be borne. (ix)

Spinrad's observation is as applicable to literal death as it is to the figurative deaths that fill our lives. When we experience loss - whether to death, to divorce, to a move - we struggle to find larger meaning or intention. We fear the absence of meaning, of purpose, of design in our lives. We want all our losses to mean something else, something other than - as Spinrad says - Nothing.

Meaning is one of the many reasons people choose to believe in religion. We want to know that our lives have a purpose. That our deaths, our tragedies, will give rise to something larger than ourselves. And sometimes, it does.

Sometimes it is a sign that we have made the wrong choice - of mate, of behavior, of job, of living place. Sometimes it means nothing more than a bad coincidence. But we don't appreciate coincidences. We don't want to think that randomness can cause us hurt and pain. We want our suffering to have greater import than just the randomized stimulation of nerves or emotions.

But we also tend to avoid confronting the possibility of this loss. We don't want to hear when a spouse is cheating, when our behavior could make us sick or injured, when we have been the cause of either our own injury or the neglect that has led to it. We don't want to know when we are at fault.

Nor do we want to know when our own prosperity, our own happiness, has come at the expense of another's pain. And yet it is something in which we participate daily. Often through ignorance, often through deliberate disavowal of our own capabilities. We are a society and a culture that enjoys shadenfreude, that takes pleasure - even humor - in the suffering (physical or psychological) of others.

It is the hypocrisy that I find despicable. The refusal to acknowledge our own animalistic nature, to reconcile ourselves as fierce and ferocious beings with our innate desire for compassion. For we are, ultimately, both compassionate and cruel. We enjoy pain, but we also enjoy its mitigation. We are healers as much as - if not more than - harmers. Ultimately, the kind of pain in which we take pleasure is the kind that passes, the kind that teaches, that makes us stronger.

We are vicious, but we are also gracious. We understand the gains to be discovered in suffering, the advantages to being the stronger, the victor. But we are also infinitely kind, infinitely considerate, infinitely compassionate. We are creatures of contradiction, and creatures whose contradictory natures make our flaws our saving graces. And in this, we find the Something for which we risk the greatest Nothing of all.