Progress?

Well, yesterday and today a couple of rather profound (I hope) things occurred to me regarding The Dissertation. (Yes, it has taken on capital-letter status in my head.)

One of them provides, thankfully, the link between the two main ideas I've been throwing around for months, and the other allows me to connect those ideas to the plays I'm intending to use. Both also allow me to fight with various established critics (one in terms of extending existing ideas the other in direct opposition), which I guess is a good way to make your entrance into the field. It also seems to be something I tend to do a lot.

I also sent back the article revisions this week - hopefully I've managed not to mess up my English grammar (as opposed to American) too badly and they won't need to send it back to me again. I have to say, if the publication process for fiction is as tedious as it is for criticism, I'm not looking forward to trying to get the novel published. Particularly because it's MUCH longer. Of course, I do have to finish the blasted thing first. Again.

Ah, the story of my life. Write thing. Give thing to reader. Rewrite thing. Give thing back to reader. Edit thing. Give thing back to reader. Rewrite thing. Give thing back to reader...
You get the idea.
Perhaps the universe is trying to tell me that writing is not where my life is intended to go.
Then again, when have I ever listened to anyone who tells me I shouldn't/can't do something?

All the time.
No, really.
I listen. I just proceed to do the opposite.

It begins

Well, it's official. I have written something for my dissertation. Not much, mind you, and it probably won't stay in the final version, but I've actually started it.

My current dilemma - which isn't admittedly much of a dilemma - is that there isn't much out there written on The Maid's Tragedy. I think I've gotten most of the articles, etc., but if anyone happens to know of a chapter, book, or article that deals with The Maid's Tragedy, I'd appreciate them dropping a comment to give me a hand.

I've also decided that it's rather irritating that I still hear the actors in my head when I read this play. Not that they were bad, mind you - as they did a very good job with it - but it's very hard to try and parse some of this when you've got somebody else's voice in your head.

Or maybe I'm just going crazy.

I seem to have overcommitted...

To do list:

1. Write conference paper on Richard III and Henry V for Performing (In)Visibility in February.

2. Put on show (Edward II).

3. Write conference paper on Richard II for Medieval Congress Medieval/Renaissance conference in May.

4. Write chapter of dissertation on The Maid's Tragedy. Maybe convince self and advisors I should write the chapter on Edward II instead. Maybe not.

5. Turn aforementioned chapter on The Maid's Tragedy into an article using the Ohio Shakespeare Conference paper on the above. This is the real reason for starting with this play.

6. Teach Shakespeare class.

7. Maybe possibly finish prospectus before I die. Maybe.

Bleargh

About a month after my last post here... and pretty much everything is still as it was.

The Ohio Shakespeare Conference went quite well, actually, and I discovered - much to my surprise - that The Maid's Tragedy is somehow quite popular. I'm still sick of it and, if my advisors are to be believed, I'm going to get much, MUCH sicker of it before this whole dissertation thing is over. Ugh. Yup, I've been ordered to write a chapter on the bloody thing. *sigh* Ah, well. It could be worse. At least I've also been ordered to write one on Edward the Second... Oh, wait. I'm going to be sick of that, too (show is March 7-9 for those of you in or who will be in the Boston area). Hopefully Marlowe has a bit more staying power than Beaumont and Fletcher.

And no, I haven't really moved past the "re-do this" part of my life. Except now it's really more of "this is too big, cut out most of it and then fill in the rest." Ack. Ah, well, at least someone (i.e. my advisors) is still excited about this project. And I can stop reading about portraiture. Oh, wait. I was done reading about portraiture. Maybe next post I'll be able to say "this will do." Maybe. (I'm not holding my breath, and I suggest you continue respirating, as well.)

I think I need some cake and ice cream. But I should probably eat dinner first.

I am so remiss...

It seems to have been an eternity since I actually said anything here...

Well, that's mostly true. Part of the issue is that I've reached that point in my life where my work - the prospectus and all - has become something to safeguard, rather than share. In other words, I have to be careful about the places in which my ideas appear, as intellectual theft could wreak havoc with an academic career. Hence my silence.

This does not mean, however, that I intend to abandon this poor little blog.

Rather, the updates will be less detailed and perhaps less academic in nature. They may begin to contain rougher ideas, conference updates, and (maybe) some of my more creative rather than intellectual ideas.

I may also be feeding this to my lj, so that those readers need not check two places and (the more motivating reason) so that I don't have to type the same thing twice.

That said... The Update.

I will be going to the Ohio Shakespeare Conference in early November - entitled "Violently Shakespeare" - and presenting a paper on Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy. I'm still debating a little whether or not to wear my t-shirt from last year's production. I think I'm just this side of that dorky.

I'm also slogging through the proverbial brick wall that is my prospectus. Maybe one of these days I'll actually get it back with "this will do" written on it, instead of "re-do this part." *sigh*

The Eroticization of the Actor

More dissertation thoughts... these about the gendered issues of the actors playing women on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage.

Part of performing gender on the Elizabethan stage is, as Mary Bly argues, the eroticization of the male player by virtue of his performance of a female character. While Bly concentrates predominantly on the Whitefriars plays, her point about the self-aware nature of erotic language is valid for any actor crossing the gender boundaries: “One consequence of a female character’s ribald wordplay is that the body of the cross-dressed actor is aggressively eroticized.”[1] The “aggression” upon which Bly focuses is particularly significant in terms of the masculinized female character – Lady Macbeth, Joan de Pucelle, Margaret of Anjou, Goneril, Regan, the Duchess of Malfi, etc. – who wields military or pseudo-military power. Their eroticization occurs in a disturbing rather than humorous way; references to being “unsexed” or martial, the adoption of the phallic sword, knife, or dagger, refocus the sexual gaze from the “female” body just as bawdy jokes do, but with a terrifying rather than comic intent. To darkly eroticize the bodies of these tiger-women (both Margaret of 3 Henry VI and Evadne of The Maid’s Tragedy are referred to as tigers) is to grant power to both the women and to the male actors who portray them, reminding the audience that such figures are transgressing transgression, not by playing women playing men, but by presenting women who feel no need to play at masculinity because they already are men; like Elizabeth, they already have the “heart and stomach of a” man, though they put on “the body of a weak and feeble woman.”[2]

---

[1] Bly, 23.

[2] Elizabeth Tudor, “Queen Elizabeth’s Armada Speech to the Troops at Tilbury,” Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus et al (Chicago, 2000), 326.

Disseminating performativity

Here is one of the thoughts that has recently been driving my ideas about my dissertation - just an exerpt that talks about how I see early modern theater functioning with relation to certain methods of performance and the spread of popular concepts of gender and treason.

The implications of theatrical marginality provide a space from which the possibilities of performance disseminate from stage to state. Both the place of the stage and the body of the actor provide a malleable surface upon which the doctrines of the dominant ideology may be inscribed, and often – though not necessarily overtly – subverted. However, both stage and body also serve as vehicles for a kind of performative contagion; performance – particularly in early modern England, and on both the theatrical and political stages – enables the transference of performative modes (gender, social position, etc.) in an often decidedly transgressive and subversive manner. The performance of certain modes – that of femininity, witchcraft, treason, and monarchy in particular – was especially threatening in relation to the dominating ideological paradigms of the English state, enabling their dissemination by virtue of performance acts functioning as a contagion capable of spreading that which is performed not only from the acted to the actuality of the actors’ bodies, but to the bodies of the populace and even to the body politic of the nation itself.

The Rough Proposal

Part of the PhD thing, apparently, is writing a rationale for the oral examinations.
Well, mine also happens to contain the questions and ideas I'm currently planning for the dissertation, so here goes.
(My advising professor has yet to approve it, so it's very likely it will change a bit.)

I propose to be examined in Renaissance literature from the period of 1530-1642 with a particular emphasis on the drama of the period from 1580-1620, with some awareness of the influence of contemporaneous prose and poetry, both secular and religious. My main goal is to create a general survey of canonical works in drama and modern criticism, with an awareness of the influences drawn from and had upon both poetry and prose. My particular interest with relation to this project is concerned with ideologies of rulership and the influence of both gender and the supernatural on these ideologies.

My interests lie particularly in the way dramatists choose to stage – and not to stage – acts of treason and betrayal with relation to ideas of rulership and kingship in both historically-based and completely fictional works. Specifically, I am interested in the representation and language of rebellion against an established or perceived figure of monarchical authority. As a part of this exploration, I plan to focus on the legitimizing and delegitimizing of the acts and language of treason; the presence or absence of the supernatural, the gender of the person(s) involved, and the presence or absence of a “legitimate” ruler are all elements I consider particularly relevant to the examination of treason within Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

With relation to gender, I am primarily concerned with the ways in which both women and ideas of “femininity” influence, corrupt, and de-authorize the legitimacy of rulership. In the Early Modern period, power in the hands of women was frequently represented as dangerous, uncontrolled, and even evil. Concerns with the body and gendered behavior – by both men and women – permeate the language and actions of early modern comedies and tragedies alike, with feminine behavior by men and masculine behavior by women considered a threat to the legitimacy and efficacy of power. Women rulers – and male rulers considered excessively feminine – are portrayed on stage as transgressive, their authority tyrannical or weak, and frequently prone to mismanagement, vice, and corruption. Finally, concerns with female power and authority give rise to questions of legitimacy, both in terms of the type of power wielded and the constant fear of bastardy and tainted bloodlines.

From out of these concerns arises a significant fear of the supernatural, particularly with relation to witchcraft and prophecy (though these are not restricted by any means to the female gender, the majority of dramas and historical cases that deal with the supernatural do concern women). Like concerns about gender and femininity, I would argue, fear of the supernatural – devils, familiars, demons, witchcraft, prophecy, and conjuration – is a manifestation of the fear of monarchical illegitimacy. Figures of evil on the stage – most often associated with witchcraft (and femininity) – serve not only to condemn acts of treason in the eyes of both divinity and society, but also to delegitimize the traitor while simultaneously providing a scapegoat for the act of treachery itself. Particularly of interest to me is the frequency of supernatural involvement (or at the least, invocation) in acts of betrayal, and the time in which issues of gendered evil coincide with both political treachery and monarchical illegitimacy.

The early modern anxieties concerning legitimacy, tyranny, gender, and prophecy (for they cannot, ultimately, be divided from one another) are all, I would suggest, particularly significant to the process of confirming or denying the viability of the treasonous act. The particular elements of gender and the supernatural – as they relate to rulership – appear in drama as a means by which the playwright can legitimate or condemn acts of both political treason and personal betrayal. The way in which the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods portray both betrayer and betrayed – particularly with regards to their gender and association (or lack thereof) with a vilified (rather than sanctified) supernatural – is particularly concerned with questions of political, spiritual, social, and blood legitimacy. The powerful women on the early modern stage are quite often also women linked with or accused of witchcraft and prophecy, their authority condemning and rejecting their gender even as they attempt to escape the bounds of appropriate feminine behavior.

The fundamental questions which I seek to answer are all preoccupied with concerns of gendered power, legitimate rulership, and the appearance and condemnation of evil. What role – if any – can a figure of female authority hope to have on a stage that automatically vilifies her? Do women have an authoritative position on the early modern stage that is not corrupted by either supernatural or political evils? How does gender and the performance of gender influence the legitimacy of monarchy? How does gender – specifically femininity – alter the severity of treason and betrayal? Considering the automatic assumptions of female treachery and frailty, is an act of treason rendered more or less acceptable when performed by a woman? How does the gender of evil – female witches, prophets, etc. – alter the perception of that evil and the acts that evil commits? In the case of witchcraft, how does the presence of evil allow for authorial subversion of monarchical ideology? Finally, does the presence of evil on stage allow – and even legitimize – acts of treason and betrayal?

Within the scope of this examination, I also plan to look at issues of kingship, the concept of divine right, and ideas of monarchical limitations, tyranny, and the question of legitimate deposition of a king. I intend to examine contemporary texts such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, Elizabeth I’s letters and speeches, and James I’s Basilikon Doron, in addition to the circulating pamphlet debate on tyranny and kingship. I plan to rely upon secondary sources examining kingship and theatre, as well as sources discussing treason and regicide.

With regard to the role of women in the early modern theatre, I plan to examine secondary sources that discuss the role of women in both society and in drama, with particular attention to women in positions of subversion and power, including Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience, Theodora Janowski’s A Woman in Power in the Early Modern Drama, and the ideas of gender performance put forth in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. I also intend to look at the pamphlet debates about the autonomy of women and appropriate gendered behavior – with particular emphasis on Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus’ Half Humankind – as well as sources that discuss the role of women in early modern witchcraft, including Diane Purkiss’ The Witch in History as well as histories of religion and evil both on and off the stage, including Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory.

With these particular questions of treason, femininity, witchcraft, prophecy, and rulership in mind, I am particularly interested in the following works: Tamburlaine parts 1 and 2, Edward II, Woodstock, The Spanish Tragedy, Jack Straw, Titus Andronicus, Richard II, Henry VI parts 1-3, Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Maid’s Tragedy, The White Devil, The Witch and Women Beware Women. I also plan to examine several pamphlets concerning the appropriate behavior of women and the rising fears of witchcraft, including James I’s Daemonologie and The Damnable Life of Doctor Faustus, as well as Hic Mulier and Haec Vir and their surroundings.

Failed Foul Wrinkled Witch

To follow up on my earlier post about Margaret of Anjou from Henry VI and Richard III...

The basic thesis of this particular paper - on the women of Henry VI and Richard III - is that the women of Shakespeare's tetralogy are the source and reason for the presence of the corrupt monarch Richard III - the Scourge of God and the bane of the kingdom.

Richard, in an attempt to retaliate against maternal cursing, truncates the maternal bonds in which he himself cannot participate: “Hath he set bounds between their love and me?” asks Elizabeth, “I am their mother; who shall bar me from them?” (R3 4.1.20-21). The Duchess of York also pleads for proper maternal rights: “I am their father’s mother: I will see them” (R3 4.1.22). Richard, however, is unmoved, and instead subjects himself to the maternal cursing of Elizabeth and the Duchess, which resonates with Margaret’s later hell-hound imagery:
Elizabeth: Death and destruction dogs thee at thy heels;
Thy mother’s name is ominous to children.
…
And make me die the thrall of Margaret’s curse:
Nor mother, wife, nor England’s counted Queen.
…
Duchess: O ill-dispersing wind of misery!
O my accursed womb, the bed of death! (R3 4.1.39-40, 45-46, 52-53)
Both women recognize the distortion of motherhood in the time and space of Richard III. Elizabeth’s exclamation that “Thy mother’s name is ominous to children” refers specifically to herself – Dorset’s mother – but also to maternity in general; transgressive femininity twists and degrades motherhood, both on a basic level in that sexually transgressive women lead to illegitimate children, but also on a more complex level. Transgression becomes embodied in the distorted state of both nation and king; Richard’s nation has become as corrupted as the mind and body of the man who has come to rule it: “The tyrannous and bloody act is done; / The most arch deed of piteous massacre / That ever yet this land was guilty of” (R3 4.3.1-3). The women have the power to engender; Richard – like his demonic mother Margaret – only to destroy, a benefit for England, even if a punishment for him. Richard’s power may destroy kings and kingdoms, but it will not be passed to future generations, guaranteeing that, with his death, England will be liberated from his threat by the far more masculine and heroic Richmond.

Even the women’s amphibolic language ultimately fails, opening space in the realm of politics for Richmond’s entrance. Margaret’s words that “fill the world” are her weapons, but even these deteriorate at the end of Richard III, just as she lost her son at the end of 3 Henry VI. Although many of her curses are fulfilled – “Margaret, now they heavy curse / Is lighted on poor Hastings’ wretched head” (R3 3.5.92-93) and “Now Margaret’s curse is fall’n upon our heads” from Grey (R3 3.4.15) – Margaret cannot prophecy or participate in the restoration of England by virtue of her alien and transgressive nature. “These English woes shall make me smile in France” (R3 4.4.115), she says, having returned, it seems, for the sole purpose of engendering hatred and murder. However, with the departure of this most-reviled “ruthless Queen,” Richard, as Margaret’s embodied curse, loses control and the play leaves behind female cursing in favor of the masculine space of Bosworth field. With the absence of transgressive femininity, the masculine principles upon which the nation should be founded are able to assert themselves once more, allowing Richmond to engage with and defeat Richard in a masculine contest of arms.

It is, finally, Richmond’s pure masculinity that brings a close to the tetralogy, not only fulfilling the Tudor myth of accession, but also destroying Richard and deflating the power of transgressive womanhood. With Richmond’s defeat of Richard, Margaret disappears back to the alien space of her home nation, Elizabeth’s angst dissolves into her daughter’s marriage to Richmond, and the Duchess of York loses her final child and the target of her anger. This fulfillment of the Tudor myth[1] finalizes the scourging of the nation and enables a generative move forward. Richmond “steps into a prepared role: Margaret, the incarnation of the wrong sort of vengeance, disappears, leaving the place vacant for the minister of God’s justice. Yet he must fight a battle, and go through all the military and political preparations” (Hammond 111). These preparations are the motions of masculine agency, the reenactment of Talbot’s lost heroism and the rejection of corrupt femininity in favor of true womanhood, controlled and nurtured by male power within the boundaries of appropriate marriage. Richmond proves his own worth by his recognition of his own power, his lauding of divinity, his appropriate relationship to women, and his military prowess: “God, and our good cause, fight upon our side; / The prayers of holy saints and wronged souls, / Like high-rear’d bulwarks, stand before our faces” (R3 5.3.241-243). With the blessing of the “wronged souls” murdered by Richard and the sanction of god, Richmond “enters the play as the synthesis that has been called for, and as the agent of divine justice” (French 71), scorching away the fog of female amphibology and restoring the sanctity of King, country, and masculinity.

---

[1] From Edward hall, particularly, Tillyard gleaned what has ever since been contentiously debated as ‘the Tudor myth’: this was the belief that, in the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York and their accession to the throne after Bosworth, the union of the houses of Lancaster and York bore witness to God’s providential pattern in history’s finally redeeming the land from the curse brought about by the usurpation, deposition and murder of Richard II. (Knowles 43)

Body Lost, and Body Regained

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the body establishes a corporeal link between spiritual and physical corruption; the spiritually figured and physically manifest body of Satan – as opposed to the more simple human bodies of Adam and Eve – enacts a performative signification for his self-corruption and as the vehicle for the corruption of the mortal bodies of Adam and Eve. The increasing physicality of Satan’s body in Paradise Lost calls to mind the significance of corporeality to the pollution of the human body; as Satan becomes increasingly rooted in his own body, his own degeneration becomes increasingly irrevocable, trapping a formerly-celestial being within an earthly form. In fact, the predominant source of corruption for both human and angelic kind lies within the realm of the body as a physical projection of rather than a mere vessel for the soul. As Paradise Lost progresses, Satan’s language and form become increasingly tangible as his spiritual nature degenerates. Satanic discourse assumes the mantle of corporeal signification as temptation, desire, and rebellion are inscribed on the outward form and function of the fallen angel’s body. The deeper Satan falls into corruption, the more physical his language and his form. Though Raphael insists on the intangible nature of the angelic body, Satan’s introduction to pain and the subsequent body of the text, articulated as it is within the discourse of the physical body, supplants the angelic body with a mortal form capable of both (sexual) pleasure and pain, the hallmarks of Fallenness in Milton’s epic. It is from the body and through the body that Sin and corruption enter into existence, and it is, therefore, through the body that divine punishment must act; ultimately, though, the body is also the site and source of redemption. While Satan’s increasingly tangible and corruptible body serves as the vehicle for Sin and Death (both literally and figuratively), the physicality he introduces into Eden is also the means by which Adam and Eve may ultimately be redeemed; the body – site of pleasure and pain, corruption and salvation – enables its own redemption even as it allows for the entry of corruption, revealing, finally, the intrinsic physicality of the soul.

Foul wrinkled witch!

The figure of the feminine in Shakespeare’s 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI and in Richard III continually transgresses the boundaries of femininity, rendering her a continual threat to King, Country, and Religion; in Henry VI and Richard III, the women are figured as both masculine and demonic, using witchcraft and war to achieve their ends. The fundamental problem of these plays lies with the continual violation of political, social, religious, and gendered boundaries; the women – Joan de Pucelle and the Countess from 1 Henry VI, Eleanor (Duchess of Gloucester) of 2 Henry VI, Elizabeth and the Duchess of York of Richard III, and – most importantly – Queen Margaret of 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III – continually refuse to be categorized within “appropriate” bounds, defying the enclosure of their gender and attempting to seize political power for themselves. This rejection of conventional roles and mores leads to their ultimate failure, both as women and as politicians. Because they become defined as transgressors – specifically as witches and prophetesses – they lose the capability to participate in acceptable politics; the turn from angels to demons embodied in the turn to witchcraft and prophecy ultimately defiles and nullifies the female body and mind, rendering women’s successful participation in the political game entirely impossible even as they metaphorically birth corruption into the national landscape.

Despite initial appearances, the impossibility of feminine political power – outside the sphere of appropriate female participation – does not cause complete impotence; the women are, in fact, quite politically successful for a time, followed, of course, by their exile, death, and/or downfall. Of these women, Margaret – transgressive against nation, husband, king, and religion – ultimately gains the longest-lasting power through her rejection of appropriate boundaries, although, ironically, it is Margaret’s transgressiveness (along with that of the other women) in the Henry VI trilogy that causes the need for her role in Richard III. Aligned with witchcraft and the amphibology of political prophecy, the language she speaks in Richard III is a language that holds sway over the entire play, politically, socially, and religiously. It at first seems contradictory that Margaret’s voice – the voice of treason and marital/martial betrayal in 2 and 3 Henry VI – returns to haunt those traitors who, in Henry VI, have escaped their punishment; her prophecies of death and devastation, precisely because they are drawn from a space of political transgression, enforce a higher (and older) order of political righteousness, speaking out in a rebellious voice against treason rather than for it.

However, despite Margaret’s seeming alliance with right in Richard III, her crimes from the Henry VI plays cannot be forgotten; the other women repeatedly remind her of her own villainous deeds even as she attempts to claim their sympathy. As a prophetess – though more truly, as a witch, because her prophecies manifest only as curses – she also fails, since she is unable to see the positives that result from the restoration of the throne to a “proper” figure of masculine authority in Richmond. The reason for this failure lies in the progression from 1 Henry IV through Richard III; taken alone, each play divulges the danger of transgressive femininity, but taken as a series, the tetralogy enables a more complex reading of the female threat. The women of 1, 2, 3 Henry VI and Richard III invade the Habermassian public space of the political forum, endangering masculine authority and engendering their own type of demonic offspring in the form of feminine political power, ultimately resulting in the creation of the most demonic monarch of all – Richard III – whose power is the bastardization of feminine political machinations and Machiavellian abuse of his supposedly legitimate masculine authority.

Hell in a Handbasket

What fascinates us about Satan is the way he expresses qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human. Satan evokes more than the greed, envy, lust, and anger we identify with our own worst impulses, and more than what we call brutality, which imputes to human beings a resemblance to animals ("brutes"). Thousands of years of tradition have characterized Satan instead as a spirit. Originally he was one of God's angels, but a fallen one. Now he stands in open rebellion against God, and in his frustrated rage he mirrors aspects of our own confrontations with otherness... Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being the "other"; and so Satan defines negatively what we think of as human.

Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan.

No doubt due to a fairly devout Catholic upbringing, the concept of Satan has always fascinated me. As a child, I expressed a disbelief in the very concept of evil - and along with that, disbelief in sin or Hell. That said, I suppose I've had to reevaluate that over the years.

Now I certainly don't believe in Hell as a physical place with devils and little red pitchforks; I'm a confirmed secular humanist (read atheist for those of you who don't want to look that up) and I think the notion of either god or a devil rather absurd in most senses. I think they're very interesting semiotic referents, however.

The very sense of divinity and devilry - of a god and a devil - is one that intrigues me so deeply that I've decided to dedicate my life to it. I believe not in the literal nature of such things, but in the symbolic value of them. Evil - and Satan - is something that human beings use as a scapegoat: "he's evil, that's why he did it," and that sort of thing. Now evil in the sense of abject cruelty, sociopathic behavior, murder, and so on I can believe in. People who are intentionally sadistic and whose behavior does far more harm than good - if any good at all - most certainly fall under the domain of "Evil."

But that isn't the evil of Satan.

Satan's evil is far more abstract than that and, as my students suggested while reading Paradise Lost, is an evil that arises from the ideology of subjugation. Satan is evil not because he is cruel, but he is evil because he chooses to rebel against godhead. The oppressive state apparatus - to borrow a term from Althusser - of religion uses Satan as a means by which to enforce obedience to their institutional ideology. Of course, there were devils and dark gods long before the rise of the Church, so naturally that isn't where it all begins, but they all seem to serve the same purpose.

But I digress. Pagels' point in the above paragraph is that we see in the figure of Satan a kind of kinship that is - whatever Milton may say about it - not one of superior beings to a lowly and base creature. Satan is not a "brute"; Satan's allure is that he is as human as we are, and yet more than human. He was an angel, the greatest of them, and his disobedience to god caused his demonization. Semiotically speaking, Satan is what we risk becoming when we risk rebellion; any act of subversion or tactic of defiance creates in us a mirror of Satanic behavior. Yet, Pagels suggests, Satan is more than human, as well. He is "a spirit" whose strength springs from "intense spiritual passion... strength, intelligence, and devotion" (xvii); Satan is more than humans can become because he begins as more than we are. Satan is both like us and Other to us; as god - since humans are ostensibly made in god's image - is both like and unlike us, so Satan is both like and unlike us.

Satan seems to me the more interesting of the two. But then, as my advisor tells me, I "do evil." Not brutality or cruelty, of course, but rebellion. And it strikes me that in a nation founded on the fundamental principles of freedom enforced by rebellion, we'd be a little less wrapped up in our righteousness, but that's a rant for another day.

Honestly, though, if you had to choose between godhead and defiance, which would you choose? Me, I'll go with defiance, thanks. Makes things a hell of a lot more interesting.

Besides, who says Satan isn't part of the whole ineffable plan?

The Doctrine and Discipline of Milton

A reaction to John Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Of Education, and Areopagitica. The first is a defense of divorce, the second elucidates Milton's ideas on Education, and the third is a defense of publication freedom.

In the excerpt from Writing the English Republic, Norbrook suggests that Milton, “Finding that the government was dealing well with liberty in the state… turned to domestic liberty, in which he included marriage, education, and freedom of speech. This is a very broad category; but one of Milton’s aims is to span conventional distinctions between the political and the religious, the public and the private, authorship and citizenship” (109). In reading Milton’s treatise on Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, and Of Education, one cannot help but notice the way in which Milton conflates these dichotomies; each treatise implies the natural conflation of all three of the pairings Norbrook mentions, especially as they concern authorship.

Milton’s frequent use of “Author” in Paradise Lost to imply the master in the relationship – both for god and Adam – is an apt demonstration of the way in which Milton seems to suggest the power of the written word. His eloquent defense of free speech in Areopagitica implies the necessity for the citizen-author to the freedom of both individual and nation. The figure of the author-citizen, as the use of “Author” in Paradise Lost implies, is a figure of considerable authority and, naturally enough, represents the image of the authoritative scholar Milton projects. This author-citizen was a synthesis not only of public and private, but of a modern man and “a return to that lost civic virtue and purity of language” (Norbrook 113) that Milton valued in Classical writing and government. As author and citizen, Milton’s suggestions, especially in treatises that could be construed as somewhat controversial, resonate with his image of the ideal nation; he desires England to be a nation of rationality and the author-citizen is the ideal member of that nation.

However, the author-citizen figure so staunchly defended in Areopagitica is already present in both Doctrine and Of Education. The rational tone that combines the language of legal and religious discourse in Doctrine attempts to argue the value of the author-citizen as more valuable to the public sphere if he is contented in the private: “The republican male must be fit of rthe public sphere, and ideological antagonism in marriage disrupts that fitness” (Norbrook 115). This conflation of the two spheres – which had hitherto and would thereafter often be kept completely separate – completely embodies Milton’s republicanism in which, Norbrook says, “he wants to destroy… a hierarchy in which power is handed down from above” (110). Although Norbrook focuses on Milton’s early defense of monarchy, specifically in Of Reformation, the ideas contained therein continue to apply to Milton’s later ideas, and Norbrook suggests that these ideas were always more compatible with republicanism than monarchy: “[Civill Government mentioned in Of Reformation] is a commonwealth in which all the parts are subordinated to the whole rather than the body’s being subordinated to the monarchical head” (113). Milton, Doctrine’s author-citizen, refuses to accept either religious or political authority that would attempt to dictate rules that suffocate the private person, rendering him unable to participate in the public sphere.

Of Education seems to be a synthesis of Milton’s republican attitude of defying authority with an understanding of self-discipline that would enable the educational system to produce more author-citizens. Following these, Areopagitica is rather unsurprising; the figure of the author-citizen – a man educated in a republican fashion and allowed to escape the strictures of a religious authority that does not have his happiness and peace foremost in mind – must have the freedom to be an author-citizen and must not be stifled by an oppressive government whose irrational fears have begun to lead it away from republic and back toward tyranny. The fundamental element of the author-citizen, as Norbrook suggests, is that he is a synthetic figure; he fuses both the public and the private, the religious and the political, and, most important of all, the citizen and the author.

The questions that arise from the depiction and articulation of the author-citizen relate to the contradictions inherent in the act of synthesis. As Norbrook points out, Doctrine is rife with contradictions both to itself and to Of Education: “As in his relations with democracy, a certain opening in the direction of wider communication creates an abrasive effect when it is then sharply limited. He expected wives to converse, but the ideal curriculum he set out in Of Education… made no mention of women” (118). Other contradictions that are complicated rather than resolved by Milton’s synthesizing appear in his desire to limit Catholic publications – “Milton then does not object to the suppression of royalist opinions in a time of war” (Norbrook 120) – while speaking against the limiting of publication in Areopagitica. At what point do we listen to the author-citizen and at what point to we ignore the strictures he sets forth? When is the authority of the author liberating and when does it cross the line it professes to defend between freedom and tyranny, especially in light of Norbrook’s observation that “Areopagitica would have been still less accessible to the artisans who were enthusiastically entering political debate. It speaks for, rather than to, them; the community it speaks to is that of intellectuals deeply versed in literary culture” (125)?

Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Signifying Nothing

And again I post a bit of my Macbeth paper. This is the conclusion, which doesn't fully do the paper justice in that it doesn't give a nice tidy overview, but it does give the conclusion I came to while writing it... which, surprisingly enough, is where I thought I was going. So cookies (mmmm... peppernuts) for me for getting it right this time.

Macbeth is a play whose complex and amphibolic language leads only to more complexity; the inability of character or audience to interpret language or action invests the play itself with prophetic agency. The theatricality of the lines, the roles, and the sense of prophetic predestination that hover throughout the text can only be comprehended from a position of hindsight; Macbeth’s words and deeds, like the prophecies of the Weird Sisters, culminate only in a return to themselves. Like the play, Macbeth’s speech is self-reflexive; just as the play must return to its beginnings –since it returns to the same field of battle on which it begins – the language of the play haunts itself. Characters repeat linguistic patterns, words, and images found earlier in the lines, actions – battle, murder, and prophecy – recur again and again, further complicating a play already dark and murky with the equivocation of political prophecy. Self-destructive treason and the haunting discourse of amphibology reduce the play to the strutting and fretting of a poor player upon the stage of political battle, ultimately, in its amphibolic circularity, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

When the battle's lost and won

The current project is on Shakespeare's Macbeth and the language and performance of treason - not only how treason is depicted in Macbeth, but how Macbeth himself is forced into committing treason (and ultimately destroying himself) by his inability to fully comprehend both the prophecy of the Weird Sisters AND of the text of the play itself.

The following is my working introduction.

In the context of London, 1606, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth offers an imagined world inverted by the “hurleyburly” (1.1.3) of war, treachery, and treason. The prophecies of the three Weird Sisters set the stage (literally) for the action of the play, infusing the text (performed and written) with the discourse of political treason and equivocation. Historically situated after the Gowrie plot and the discourse of equivocation espoused by the Jesuits, Macbeth’s amphibology resonates with the political ideology of James I’s England. However, Shakespeare’s play does not limit its textual ambivalence to a discourse of treason grounded entirely in the figures of the Weird Sisters; magic is not entirely to blame for the disintegration of Scotland in the play. In fact, the language and actions of the play itself contain more amphibolic complexities than the brief and often unintelligible (at least to the other characters) scenes containing the Weird Sisters. The body of the text – characters, roles, actions, and language – performs its own prophecies, ultimately determining Macbeth’s fate itself – the Weird Sisters’ presence seems almost superfluous and serves only to reinforce the amphibology of the text in human form. Concerns of treason and equivocation run rampant through the hurlyburly of the play, ultimately culminating in Macbeth’s self-destruction qua his own inability to read himself; the amphibology of both body (role and action) and text (language) are inaccessible to Macbeth (and to Lady Macbeth), destroying them both because they are incapable of fully accessing the multivalent meanings of their own treachery.

Byron and Prophetic Fragmentation

For a course in Romanticism and the Orient - for those of you who have any familiarity with Edward Said, his book is a central focus of the course - I have decided to write on Lord Byron's The Giaour and the politics of poetic fragmentation.
If you'd care to comment, I'd be happy to take either suggestions, comments, or questions of any sort. Or you can simply read for your own personal amusement... if such a thing could be amusing.

Lord Byron’s The Giaour textually creates a fragmented Oriental space that articulates a poetic instability simultaneously performed for and by the Giaour himself. Written out of a tradition of Romantic Orientalism in which the Oriental fragment poem – like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and others – Byron’s poem creates its own illusive history, lodging itself within an invented context of incompleteness. The Giaour – like its titular central figure – uses its Oriental history as a site of Otherness; the Giaour himself is as Other within the context of the poem as the poem itself. From this place of Otherness, the Giaour is spoken of and speaks textual self-division; the place and voice of the Oriental fisherman and the monk highlight the dual Otherness of the Giaour while the Giaour himself declares his own fragmentation in his final confession. Locked in a relationship of self-reflection and destruction with both Hassan and Leila, the Giaour ultimately condemns himself to incompleteness – mentally and spiritually –through an inability to reconcile the levels of hatred and Otherness within his own identity. Byron’s The Giaour performs the self-fragmentation of its central figure through spatial Oriental division and duality, creating within its broken lines of text an inescapable prison of reflective instability secured by the parallels between the alien self and the familiar Other of English-Oriental text, finally culminating in a prophecy of Occidental self-destruction qua the unquenchable desire for the imagined historical – and unattainable – Orient.

King, Cawdor, Glamis, all

It is truly amazing how much I can tweak out of a few scant lines...

BANQUO: “Thou hast it now – King, Cawdor, Glamis, all / As the weird women promised, and I fear / Thou played’st most foully for ‘t” (3:1:1-3)

Banquo’s speech at the opening of Act three carries several interesting implications about both the theatricality of Macbeth’s roles – “King, Cawdor, Glamis” and the fates associated therewith – and the fate proclaimed by the Weird Sisters. The enjambment of Banquo’s lines forces secondary meanings into the words. “All / As the weird women promised” is somehow less bizarre and prophetic than “King, Cawdor, Glamis, all,” with the subsequent implication that the enacting of one of them – in Macbeth’s case, Glamis to Cawdor to King (listed, interestingly enough, in reverse order) – enacts “all.” Shakespeare’s lines – spoken through Banquo, the fictitious (though believed) root of the Stuart kings – force Macbeth’s performance. Macbeth himself is subject (literally and figuratively) to the lines spoken about both himself and his titles; Banquo, Ross, Duncan, and even Lady Macbeth speak the roles that Macbeth must play, and “[play] most foully.” Secondary to the listing of Macbeth’s roles – in order, but not importance – is Banquo’s fear: “I fear / Thou play’st most foully for ‘t.” The enjambment of the line truncates the remained of Banquo’s sentence, transforming his judgment of Macbeth into an emotive indication: he fears. The addition of the remainder, unlike the previous line, which clarifies the source of Macbeth’s fortune, acknowledges Macbeth’s lack of power in the face of his naming: “Thou play’st most foully for it.” Not only has Macbeth “play’st” a foul role in murdering Duncan, but he has (and is, and will) “play” his own role to a foul end.

This is a chunk of notes that will, by the end of December, be placed in a longer seminar paper on the ideas of fate and theatricality in Macbeth (yes, dear, Macbeth). The basic premise is that Macbeth is forced into his position of regicide through the language of the play itself. Certainly, our friends the Weird Sisters have a cackling hand in it - they are the mouthpieces of the Fates, after all (three and three... think about it) - but the overarching hand MUST be that of our loveable author's Will (sorry about the punning, folks, but it is a Friday afternoon and I need dinner). The long and short of it is that Macbeth has no agency of his own, but that his character is predetermined by the lines of the play from the moment it opens.
Now, I can hear you saying "Well, duh. Shakespeare wrote it, so he could decide what to write." That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that the language of the play predetermines the character (and yes, I'm sure our dashing William did do that intentionally, but I don't care if he did or not), and since Macbeth is predestined to become the things he becomes (and to do the things he does), it isn't his fault. Whether or not I assign any blame to the sisters or his wife, I've yet to determine.

An Apple a Day...

So after a few weeks of Genesis-filled class time, we've moved on to some of the contemporary feminist representations of the story. I'm particularly fond of Michelene Wandor's "Gardens of Eden," especially the opening poem, "Eve in the Morning."

So God created man (sic) in his (sic) own image?

'Male and female he created them' Genesis 1:27

Look
it was only a tree, for God's sake
a nice tree
nice shade, green leaves
an apple

You eat one apple and they remember you forever; you
only want to be left in peace, make
chutney, compote, dried apple rings
on a string

a snake? don't be silly
knowledge? you read too many Good Books
naked? so I like the sun. I tan easy.

Hava. Eve. Me (3)

The poem continues, but this is the part that strikes me as being especially emblematic of the Revisionist Mythology movement in feminist women's writing, particularly in poetry. I'm particularly fond of the opening line; the "(sic)" is an editorial indication that the original text being quoted contained an error - though usually reserved for a spelling or punctuation error, I find it rather poignant that Wandor uses it in this case. She not only questions the gender of deity, but also of whether it was man, woman, or both that were supposedly created in the image of god. It also implies that, ideologically, the entire conception of patriarchal dominance and authority is drawn from human error in Biblical narrative.
I also like the way Wandor has Eve minimize the Fall itself - "Look / it was only a tree, for God's sake" - by reducing the importance of the Tree of Knowledge. The almost neglectful way Eve says "for God's sake" - though clearly Wandor's use of the phrase is very deliberate - downplays the 'sin' of eating the fruit and practically scoffs at the way the temptation is figured in Genesis (and in subsequent texts, like Milton's Paradise Lost).
Wandor's Eve is also very domestic (in contrast to Lilith, the other figure in the sequence "Gardens of Eden," who is exotic, sexual, powerful, and worldly), desiring to make "chutney, compote, dried apple rings / on a string." However, domestication - the language of cooking - is also a tool of minimization; the "apple" is symbolically reduced from a signifier of sin and feminine weakness in regards to temptation, becoming instead a series of foods: things to be consumed in comfort, things which are homey, things that have no mythic significance whatsoever. Eve's domestication of the Genesis myth laughs in the face of the serious and somber temptation and Tree, creating instead an image of domestic simplicity that is nevertheless both intelligent and witty, empowering Eve as woman, as mother, and as autonomous speaker.

Reign in Hell

My class - the one I teach - is reading pieces from John Milton's Paradise Lost this week. I've always been especially fond of Satan in this poem, and I have a few thoughts about how the poor guy just gets co-opted into spouting all sorts of self-defeating religious ideology in Milton's poem.
Satan in Paradise Lost I:249-263 - "Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor--one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

Power, knowledge, etc. seem to inversely impact goodness - "While they adore me on the Throne of Hell, / With Diadem and Scepter high advanc't / The lower still I fall, only supreme / In misery; such joy Ambition finds" (Milton IV:89-92). The ideology of power would seem to dictate that the higher one ascends in power, the less one wishes to be challenged; in an ideological system based on the struggle for power, it makes sense for religious ideology to encourage humility rather than ambition. The desire for power is curbed with threats of hell and the educated elite are left with power, knowledge, et al. Ironic, isn't it?

Satan seems to be attempting to escape this ideology by reversing it - "Evil be thou my Good" (ibid IV:110) - however, by constructing attempted escape as a reversal, Milton ensnares Satan within the discourse of that same ideology: "So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear, / Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good" (ibid IV:108-110). Even in rebellion, Satan is trapped - and Milton traps him intentionally in the snare of his own discourse - in an Althusserian vicious cycle in which he must always perpetuate the divine ideology, regardless of if he strives to do evil or to do good.

"We have supped full with heroes..."

Time out of mind strength and courage have been the theme of bards and romances; and from the story of Troy down to to-day, poetry has always chosen a soldier for a hero. I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valour so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship?

This passage from Thackeray's Vanity Fair makes me wonder what it is about the figure of the hero that makes him or her so very attractive. The hero - whether literary, romantic, filmic, or theatrical - nearly always manages to acquire the respect and even worship of his or her audience. Why?
Is a hero a hero because he or she is capable of doing something greater than the mere mortals in the audience? Is it because the hero lives in a world that is somehow more raw, more primitive, more visceral - a world that requires heroism in a way that ours (for all its violence and tragedy) does not? Do we respect and worship heroes because we believe they are better than we, or because we see ourselves in them?

I think, perhaps, the circumstances make the hero. In reality, heroes do things that must be done if we are to hold out hope for our species - hope in both the psychological and biological sense. If someone were incapable of risking their own life to save others, our species might die out due to excessive fear, but the presence of heroes also allows us to recognize the human capacity for ethical justice.
In literature, the circumstances are controlled in such a way that someone must become a hero or the story would fail. Certainly, some Post-Modern works attempt to argue that there are no heroes, yet they most often focus on an individual who manages to mean something or at least mean nothing (which itself means something). But the focus makes them heroic because they represent the public acknowledgement of the more unpleasant, boring, seedy, and even embarrassing sides of human nature. They are heroes because they are in the public eye, drawing its sympathy, and making us question our own purpose in relation to our own realities. We may not like them, but they force us to think of them as heroes (even as anti-heroes), nevertheless.
But heroes we respect, heroes we worship, Achilles, Odysseus, Buffy, Frodo, Aragorn, Harry Potter... they are heroes in a far more Classical sense. They are heroes because somehow they take elements of the average human being and make them greater, more powerful, longer lasting. They are not perfect, but neither are we. Their imperfections make them somehow greater for their flaws because we can see that they are capable of overcoming those flaws. Perfect heroes - Galahad the pure and lily-white - are irritating because we have no hope of becoming them. Not only that, but they do not - they cannot - belong in our world. Perfect heroes die tragically because they are "too good" to live among the corruption of reality.
I would rather be Percival any day. Maybe he doesn't always get the Grail, but he gets close enough to begin to understand it and he gets to go home at the end of the day.