By all these lovely tokens, September days are here...

I love autumn.  Every last bit of it.  The leaves change color, the smell of woodsmoke, apple cider and pumpkin is thick in the air, I get to go office supply shopping (don’t judge, I love office supply shopping), boots and adorable denim jackets are seasonal attire once more, and the spirit for my favorite holiday ensues.  The first whiffs of fall make me tingle with anticipation and here in New Jersey the season began to peek its nose around the corner this very week.

Maybe it’s because my life centers so much around school, but the autumn is always a time of new things to me.  September is exciting because I get new notebooks, new classes, new textbooks, new research, new schedule, new back-to-school clothes, new projects… what a whirlwind of change.  This year is looking particularly scary and wonderful due to several factors.  So today, rather than my traditional blogy narrative, I’d like to take a moment to write an autumn-themed list of various and sundry things that have been and will be whirling into (and out of) my life in the past/next few weeks on the harvest wind.

*I’m down to one job!  Briefly, albeit, before work at the theatre starts up again.  My last day at the archive was yesterday.  The life of an archivist is one that I had never thought to live and, I can say with some certainty, it’s much tougher than anyone would have imagined.  Digging, piling, compiling, categorizing, counting, labeling, all the while being paranoid of mouse droppings and assorted pests which may or may not be skittering out of assembled boxes at any given time.  I walked out of the archive every day feeling like I needed to be decontaminated rather than cleaned.  Coated in dust, sneezing, eyes watering, I also felt satisfied.  It was an Indiana-Jones style hunt through paths unblazed by second-generation human knowledge.  That was as exciting as it sounds.  The feeling that around any corner could be waiting a surprise find to change the face of knowledge, the idea that I was doing something worthwhile, and the notion that (while on a small scale) I was becoming an expert in a previously undiscovered area of  comprehension made this perhaps the most fulfilling job I have ever worked.  I would not hesitate to do it again.  That and the pay was good.

*PhD application process begins (seriously) now.  I don’t want to speak on this at great length just now because a) I will likely be speaking on it in future blog entries and b) because it scares me.  More than a little.  The acceptance process into any given program is so arbitrary that, while I know I have done everything right and that I am a prime candidate for my programs, I can’t help but dwell upon the great and imminent coin flip that determines the rest of my life.  This entire ordeal is equally strange because it feels like college applications all over again.  You know, that time in your life that you thought was done but (apparently) is not.  That great burgeoning uncertainty as you stand on the precipice of your future waiting to jump but uncertain which direction will be your best bet for surviving the fall (sorry, can’t resist a pun…).  Looking over the abyss, teetering on the edge, dipping my toe into its unknown depths, I think fear is a natural reaction.  I keep trying to remind myself that fear is an acronym for “False Expectations Appearing Real”, but this seems to only deepen the illusions rather than make them disperse.  I’m fairly certain that I am approaching a jittering, uneasy serenity about this entire process, which, really, is all you can do.  Lay back, enjoy the ride, and accept that for a time you’ll just have no clue.  Yup.  Blissful Cluelessness here I come…

*I cleaned my bookshelf last night of last semester’s textbooks (with the exception of those on the Master’s Reading Exam List which got re-located to a separate shelf) and placed upon it instead this semester’s new acquisitions.  Somehow, this makes everything feel more real.  My first class is on Wednesday, I just completed my first academic reading for the semester, and my first syllabus is printed and ready to go.  I am pumped.  I’m already thinking about paper topics and possible conference papers... though this likely means that I’ll have to finally get around to reading Judith Butler.

*This year at the theatre seems to be Shakespeare year and I can’t be more thrilled.  Two of our four annual productions will be Shakespeare-themed!  In the fall, we will be doing a production of Magic Time by James Sherman followed by a Spring production of Twelfth Night.  Twelfth Night is definitely one of my favorites and a show that I’ve had an intimate knowledge of for some years.  Featuring the best Shakespearean clown (in my opinion), one of the best heroines, and (drum roll please) a comic fight scene, this play really has just about everything that a novice Shakespeare Company would need or want.  Granted, we’re not a Shakespeare company, but we do have some pretty amazing people who work on these things.  Stay tuned for more info on Twelfth Night.  In the meantime, I have been asked to work on Magic Time as the fight director.  Magic Time is a show about a Company producing Hamlet.  Naturally, the duel scene is enacted several times in the script.  Which means that I get to live every fight director’s dream and do the infamous duel.  I’ve started kicking around ideas (it’s harder than you think to kick ideas with a sword when you don’t even know who your actors are and if they have any scrap of hand/eye co-ordination).  Will our heroine be able to pull through?  Will she kill and/or gravely injure any actors in the process?  Will the fight look good and not like a clay-mation Errol-Flynn wanna-be sequence?  Only time will tell….

*I am about 98% certain that I will again be grading for the Best Professor in the World (who may or may not be reading this right now).  Pending financial disaster in the Department or a lack of registration for Eighteenth Century British Lit (part I), I will definitely be on board as a paper monkey for Dr. Lynch.  I could not be more thrilled.  This man has been (and will continue to be) an inspiration and mentor to me as I pick my way through academia.  I am waiting with bated breathe for his Spring Graduate Seminar in Gothic…. Oh, and for those of you who have had need of (and will need in the future) a GREAT style guide written to be useful, readable, and fun, check out his.  It is complete with historical tid-bits and lovingly annotated grammar rules and regulations from a man who knows his stuff.  That and it’s online for free (though it does come in paper version, which, let’s face it, is totally worth having).

*I want to go apple picking and eat pumpkin everything.  I understand that the weather will be kicking back up to eighty degrees this weekend as summer shows us the strength of its death throes.  I hope that this won’t foil my perky autumn-inspired mood…

Hear me, Beatrice

A week ago today, I gave a talk at the annual Pawling Shakespeare Club end-of-year luncheon. The club has been in existence for 112 years this year and is one of the oldest continually meeting clubs in the country.

Initially started as a book club for elite women (an endeavor unique in and of its own), eventually membership was opened up to men. The club reads two plays a year and meets on Monday evenings for three months in the Fall then again for three months in the Spring (much like college semesters). This past year, they read Richard III and Much Ado about Nothing. This year, club president Marie DiLorenzo proudly announced at the luncheon, the club would be reading the only two plays which have gone unread by its contingent for the past thirty years: Cymbeline and Pericles.

Sitting in the private party room of a lovely local Italian restaurant (made to look like a wine cellar) as a guest of the club, I couldn’t help but be inspired by the people around me. Here were individuals, all of them over the age of fifty and many of them holding much greater seniority than that, continuing to expand their own minds. There is Intellectual life after Graduate School! Here were people who continue to strive to connect with a world of literature that most chose to leave in the dregs of their college careers. Here were intelligent, creative and driven people who have the chutzpah to read not just one but two plays which may be entirely unfamiliar to them every year, meet together, and discuss these plays. Analyze. Critique. Speak theoretically. Most importantly, here were people who carried a long tradition of parlor Shakespeare to the present day.

By “parlor Shakespeare” I mean a romanticized practice all-but-outdated of individuals assembling to read aloud together for each other. “You be Romeo and I’ll be Juliet. Here’s a Norton…. Go.” This sort of chicanery is certainly not the soul purpose of the Pawling Shakespeare Club, but I have been told that it is of primary interest to club members. And I, personally, could not be more delighted.

Here’s a little tidbit for you; the word “audience” shares the same etymology as the word “audio” (the Latin word “audire”, “to hear”). Perhaps the connection seems obvious now that I’ve put the two words together, but I know I didn’t make it until it was pointed out to me. This little factoid becomes important imminently. In modern times, we assemble as an audience to “see a play”. In Shakespeare’s time, an audience would assemble to “hear a play”. The distinction is abundantly clear, and one lost to our visually-driven culture. What with film, television, video games, computer screens, and a plethora of other digital media, we are a culture that demands and craves constant visual stimulation. Without it, we (literally) tune out.

Perhaps this is why modern audiences sometimes find Shakespeare’s plays so inaccessible. You ask any High Schooler who hates Shakespeare (and my grandmother will gleefully reveal that once upon a time I was one of them) and that teenager will tell you it is because she finds dear William difficult to read. Well there’s a few good reasons for that. The first is that Shakespeare was never meant to be read, it was meant to be heard. Take this famous example;

Richard: Now is the winter of our Discontent,
Made glorious Summer by this Son of Yorke…

(Richard III I I 1-2). Reading this line, you say “Certainly, Son of York, we know who that is… it’s a man who was born into the house of York”. If you know a little something about the play, perhaps you even say, “Oh, check it out, he’s talking about Edward”. But what you probably do not say is what you miss by not hearing the line. Read the line out loud to yourself. Go on. Do it. Nobody’s watching. Okay, maybe if you’re in a library you may want to wait until you get home to do so, but at least try to whisper it.

Get anything you didn’t get before? How about a nice little double entendre? Take a gander at this… The winter is a time of cold. It is turned into glorious summer by a change in temperature. How else is a change in temperature created but by the presence of the sun? Try reading the lines again, but this time, read them this way…

Richard: Now is the winter of our Discontent,
Made glorious Summer by this Sun of Yorke…

The meaning is similar, but certainly tweaked. The Sun of Yorke evokes an image of Edward not just as the glorious monarch of England with his household heraldry wafting behind him in an action-movie-style breeze, but also one that will warm and please the world. He begins to have cherubim qualities, a golden halo that surrounds and suffuses those around him. Moreover, he appears to us in a sort of Monty-Python’s-God-esque motif (a la this). Shakespeare uses the verbal double entendre which his audio-centric audience would certainly have been sensitive to to establish Edward as a cosmic force; not just of an age, but for all time.

Thereby, if a group of people merely read Shakespeare and absorb him through the eyes, they miss an entire world of the playwright’s intention. This is part of what makes Shakespeare so important to experience rather than read. He is a playwright of the senses and much be treated as such.  Read.  Aloud.  Together.  

So back in the wine cellar, while we chatted and I waxed poetic about the quirks and eccentricities of the first folio that make it a text worthy of note rather than to be shoved to the back of the bookcase, it occurred to me. Though these people were hedge scholars, though they were brought together by interest rather than any expertise in the material (don’t get me wrong, there were certainly experts in fields other than Early Modern Theatre sitting in that room with me), they had caught onto something entirely lost upon most modern readers.

Shakespeare is communal. It brings us together as audiences, certainly, but also as friends. If we can sit in parlors and debate the meaning of Olivia’s epically cryptic “If one should be a prey, how much the better/To fall before the Lion, then the Wolfe?” (Twelfth Night III i, 1342-43) over coffee, perhaps this discussion can bring us closer to some communal harmony. We all know that Shakespeare touches upon the raw nerve of universal humanity, perhaps discussion and discovery of this can bring us together as humans.

Like any member of the Pawling Shakespeare Club can attest to, it can certainly bring us together as colleagues and friends. Especially if there are snickerdoodles involved.

The Twelfth Day of Christmas

In the spirit of the holiday season (what? It’s not New Years yet and we still have a few nights of Chanukah left, folks!) I would like to take a moment to reflect upon what is often viewed as Mister Shakespeare’s most festive play: Twelfth Night (or What you Will).

Twelfth Night’s title refers to the celebration of the twelfth night of Christmas. While in this day and age twelfth night really only matters in a popular Christmas Carol whose words nobody seems to be able to remember (FIIIIVE GOLDEN RIIIINGS!), the Elizabethans celebrated twelfth night with full holiday gusto. The celebration would have been complete with music, dance, feasting and (of course) a play. The popular opinion is that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night for the 1601 celebration of twelfth night held at Whitehall. We know for certain that the show was performed at Candlemas (February 2) of 1602 at Middle Temple Hall.

Twelfth Night is the only play of Shakespeare’s to have a subtitle. “What you Will”. This pairing of titles has always struck me as rather odd, for neither of them have really anything to do with the content of play itself. It is almost as if Shakespeaere dashed off the show in time for twelfth night but had no time to title it. I can picture the exchange backstage now- “WILL! They’re announcing your show, what should they call it?” “Oh, I don’t know Henslowe. What’s today? Twelfth night? What you will.”

Like many of Shakespeare’s comedies, Twelfth Night is an amalgamation of various plot items which are familiar to the Shakespearean cannon. It can be argued that, in his rush to put together a show for the twelfth night celebration, Shakespeare just threw a bunch of the “old tricks” into a blender and got Twelfth Night. Indeed, we have the story of a separated pair of identical twins (and all the hilarity and mistaken identity which ensues therein) as seen in The Comedy of Errors (written somewhere between 1589 and 1594). We have a woman who dresses as a man to serve a man whom she has fallen in love with as seen in Two Gentlemen of Verona (written in the early 1590’s). We have a comedic Falstaffican figure who drinks to excess and takes advantage of his rich friends (Falstaff was first introduced in Henry IV i- written around 1597). And last but not least, we have a false love letter written by a smart woman as a tool to manipulate her arch nemesis into tomfoolery as seen in The Merry Wives of Windsor (written in the late 1590s).

Noteworthy as a decidedly fresh vein for Shakespeare is the character of Feste, a new breed of fool for our bard. With the departure of Will Kempe in 1600, Robert Armin took up the role of Company Fool for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. While Kempe’s fools were outlandish and raucous and Kempe himself was known for his improvised additions to the script (some say Hamlet’s “And let those that play your Clownes speak no more than is set down for them…” (1886-1888) is a direct reference to Kempe’s antics); Armin played a much more sedate fool- world-weary with an undeniable sadness. Lear’s fool, Feste, Touchstone- these are all Armin fools. Armin was also known for his amazing voice and musical talent, which Shakespeare used to great advantage in Twelfth Night- his most musical play. Feste sings no less than five songs and sometimes more like six or seven depending on the performance.

While written for a festive occasion, in my opinion Twelfth Night is much more of a problem play than a jaunt-through-the-woods-comedy. While the play does end in the tradition mass marriage (there are three in this show- Orsino to Viola, Olivia to Sebastian and Toby to Maria), the content of the play is far from Disneyland joviality.

Death hangs ever-present over Illyria. In the first scene of Twelfth Night, we learn of one death (that of Olivia’s un-named brother) and in the second scene we learn of two more (Sebastian’s and Olivia’s father). These deaths shape the world we enter greatly- if not for Olivia’s loss, Viola could have gone straight to her rather than donning britches. If not for Viola’s loss, she would have had a male compatriot- a much less desperate situation for a traveling woman. The umbrella of death immediately gives Illyria a melancholic tone- well-suited to its histrionic Duke.

Further into the play, it becomes apparent that a great section of Twelfth Night’s plot details the antics of Sir Toby and Company to bring down Malvolio, one of the few truly stable characters in the show. Once they have him in their clutches, the crew tortures (both physically and mentally) Malvolio to his breaking point, and when he is released he receives no just revenge for his nearly entirely unwarranted and outrageously embarrassing captivity. He storms from the stage at the end of Act Five declaring “I’ll be revenged upon the whole pack of you” (2548). Malvolio’s exit casts a shadow upon the end of the play, leaving the audience unsettled and with the distinct impression that, should this show continue for another act, the jovial comedy would quickly turn into a revenge tragedy.

In addition to the madly abused Malvolio, there is a second character whose story does not bode well- though he receives no closure. Antonio, the pirate who saves Sebastian’s life, is clearly onstage for the entire fifth act. His love for Sebastian has brought him to ruin in Illyria- having started the show as the captain of one of the most successful pirating vessels in Illyria’s waters, Antonio ends the play as a prisoner of his arch-nemesis- penniless and with no hope for the requisition of his love for Sebastian. He watches the entire fifth act: the reuinion of the twins, the marriage proposals, Malvolio’s return and departure, and says nothing.

So- Death? Torture? Unresolved stories? Love unrequited? This sounds not like a happy nuptial…. Or… really… anything like Christmas… So what are directors thinking when they stage Twelfth Night as a happy-go-lucky, festive and inviting piece of theatre right around dead-pine-tree-in-the-living-room time? 

Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, there is nothing straightforward about Twelfth Night.  Yes, the darker undertones are undeniable.  But everyone gets married in the end and that's what counts, right?  Twelfth Night also contains one of the most memorable and delightful scenes in the cannon; Act II scene iii, colloquially referred to as "the caterwauling scene".  There is something absolutely intoxicating about seeing this scene performed- I truly think it has to do with how much childish glee the actors take in making as much drunken, rowdy noise as humanly possible (and how far they drop when Malvolio comes in to break it up).  I think that's what makes Twelfth Night festive- the highs are incredibly high and the lows are rock-bottom (kind of like a family gathering).  What I can also say in favor of the festive choice for this show is that it leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth. Reminiscent of gingerbread cookies; it’s good because of that spicy bite, not in spite of it.