Early Modern Renaissance

Excuses, excuses ...

2011-06-27T21:48:00.000-04:00

I'm reviving this, my moribund blog, with a couple excuses.

Excuse One Promotion and tenure.

Excuse Two Somewhat incidental to Excuse One, Routledge has updated and reissued the encyclopedia I co-edited with my former advisor, Tudor England: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 2001), in their rebranded reference series. A trifle garish, but nice to have it in paperback now.

Excuse Three Somewhat important to Excuse One, and a very fun project (and total time sink), is my edition of Twelfth Night for Broadview Publishing's Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Originally it was commissioned for publication in the 2nd edition of the anthology (joining King Lear in the Renaissance volume), but costs mounted and it was relegated to the online text. Not where I wished a fully-annotated and freshly-edited text with 25 pages of contextual material to end up. Wiser heads prevailed and after another round of editing in a new format, it entered Broadview's spin-off Anthology Editions series. They did a handsome job and I'm very pleased to have it out (and done!).

So there. At least I had a good excuse.

Wolf Hall

2009-10-07T10:22:00.006-04:00

The Henrician period is back in the news (actually, when is it out?) with yesterday's award of the Man Booker Prize to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall, treating Thomas Cromwell, the Anne Boleyn marriage, and it's dissolution. The title refers to Wolf Hall, the seat of the Seymour family, and home of Henry's next wife, Jane Seymour. Reviews here, here, and here (the last a terrific review by Colin Burrow in the London Review).

Carnivalesque 54

2009-10-04T08:01:00.003-04:00

The day job has been getting the best of me, and I almost missed Carnivalesque 54 over at Early Modern Notes. EMR gets a first blogosphere mention, but you really need to check out James Holloway's quite brilliant Eastern Association.

Nature's Bias: Sex Testing

2009-08-25T13:38:00.011-04:00

In the bewildering and wonderful scene in Twelfth Night where Viola (dressed as Cesario) and her twin brother Sebastian appear on stage together for the first time, Orsino and Olivia see the object of their desire mirrored, like “an apple cleft in two.” Sebastian blithely attempts to reassure Olivia that her attraction to Cesario was not misdirected, but that “nature to her bias” drew her desire to its proper object, that out of ambiguity Nature drew a man who was, technically, both “maid and man.”

Sebastian’s breezy explanation comes to mind in the current media frenzy surrounding the 18-year-old South African runner, Caster Semenya, who won the women’s 800 meter at the world track and field championships in Berlin, only to have her gender immediately questioned and put to the test. The headlines cannot decide whether the issue is her sex or gender. The whole sad situation--with a young woman’s identity and talent exposed to lurid scrutiny--has fortunately prompted some well-meaning writers to tackle the topic again and educate the public about her case, with some frank opinion on what is really at stake with sex testing.

One thing is clear–sex testing is a cultural and scientific trap. In his Microcosmographia (1615), Helkia Crooke (much like Vesalius in 1543) takes a long, at times reverent, but often skeptical look at Galen. In book 4, from which the illustration above is taken, Crooke follows Vesalius in illustrating a central paradox in Galen’s views on sex and gender. Illustrated are the female reproductive organs, but one could be forgiven (and this is Crooke’s point) for thinking that fig. IV is a penis and not the neck of the womb. Take away the Fallopian tubes and ovaries in fig. III and you are left with the same impression: that male and female reproductive organs are analogous in their shape and function. After restating (with some skepticism) Galen’s theory of sexual inversion by innate heat, Crooke takes a more progressive view: “Both these sexes of male and female do not differ in the kind as we call it or species, that is, essential form and perfection, but only in some accidents, to wit, in temper and in the structure of the parts of Generation. For the female sex as well as the male is a perfection of mankind.”

The dramatic uneasiness in Twelfth Night persists over whether Viola can emerge from Cesario’s entanglements to reclaim her gender and feelings. The erasure of her identity, of course, serves to expose Olivia and Orsino, for they see in her not only what they desire, but alternate visions of who they are. Yet, unable to secure her “maiden weeds” to convince Orsino to stop calling her “Boy,” Viola remains trapped within a dramatic illusion. Yet perhaps the dramatic option was worse, for Shakespeare eliminates the “drop trousers” scene in Barnabe Riche’s “Of Apollonius and Silla” (his source for the twin plot) in which Silla (passing as “Silvio”) is forced to undress before Julina to prove she could not have fathered her child.

Caster Semenya’s options seem equally bleak: Riche’s more prosaic, empirical test, or perpetual (and alien) ambiguity. Sadly, the awful, tragic theater she finds herself in fears ambiguity as much as it desires bland assurances, and there will be no happy ending, either way.

Update: Tenured Radical has caught up to this story. Essential reading.

Local (Alternative) Shakespeare

2009-07-24T10:42:00.008-04:00

The Shakespeare festival season is upon us. Always fun, and often revealing of who Shakespeare is in the popular imagination. The town I’ve lived in for two years is, by all measures, stuffed with Boston-area academics, many of them historians. So when I saw the notice for a 400th Anniversary celebration of the publication of the Sonnets this weekend, I was more than curious. Then I read the program.

The weekend-long series of talks and performances is being held at the local public library and the town’s Masonic Temple, and features spoken word performances by some British eurythmists. No, not followers of Annie Lenox; eurythmy is a performance style emphasizing “visible speech” and “visible singing." Next is a presentation is which the Earl of Oxford speaks with Lady Mary Wroth in 1604 about his life and fears that his family and writings will be forgotten, followed by another presentation on de Vere’s private life as Shakespeare. Another presentation will investigate (and dramatize) the “moving, tragic deaths of Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona,” asking why they have to die? That night participants are invited to drink and present (in whichever order, I imagine) their favorite bits at an open stage.

Those conscious the next morning are in for some sobering esoterica: a one-man show titled “The True Story of King Henry IX, Last of the Tudors,” which “dramatizes the veritable tale of the sonnets” by following the Earl of Southampton’s political fortunes. Then a presentation on politics in Richard II led by an Oxfordian and an anthroposophist. Hmmm ... Last, a talk for our times on Shakespeare and monetary history, arguing that “this culture-forging canon of literary masterpieces sounds with a moral timbre that is not merely utilitarian, but allegorical: altogether a temporal tale of the gods. Is this the elixir it holds for this ‘post-modern” era, soon to metamorphose (dare I ‘prophesy’) into a post-commercial age?” A post-recession Shakespeare? Heady stuff.

A sedate, almost orthodox afternoon of Ralph Vaughan Williams settings and Wagnerian adaptations wraps it up.

Unfortunately, I seem to be traveling this weekend.

Carnivalesque 52

2009-07-21T11:14:00.006-04:00

Carnivalesque 52 is now up at Gilbert Mabbott.

Playing Shakespeare

2009-07-08T10:56:00.004-04:00

Back in 1984 a British television series called Playing Shakespeare, hosted by John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company, aired in a few American cities and made its way onto VHS (some local libraries have it). The companion book by Barton (with a foreword by Trevor Nunn) was reissued by Anchor Books in 2001. But only now is the series available on DVD, just issued last month by Athena Learning.

The series features all the usual suspects from that era in the RSC: Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, David Suchet, Peggy Ashcroft, Ben Kingsley, and so on. Yes, that generation of Shakespearean actors, but what Barton and they achieve in these shows is still utterly relevant in the classroom. Take the episode where David Suchet and Patrick Stewart trade takes on Shylock, Suchet playing him as Jewish, with a bit of eu veh, and Stewart playing him as less Jewish than simply greedy. There is also a marvelous scene where Barton steers Judi Dench (as Viola in Twelfth Night) line-by-line through the speech hiding her love from a self-absorbed Orsino.

Yes, these shows tend to reinforce the notion that Shakespeare must be played with an English–especially an “expensive”–accent, and they tend to emphasize formal over cultural issues in performance. But they manage what is often hardest to achieve in the academic, text-centered classroom: simultaneously showing Shakespeare’s malleability and the constant, guiding motion of his language.

Rare books and their readers

2009-06-11T19:29:00.004-04:00

After spending a dreary day on EEBO, I enjoyed Sarah Werner's nice piece on rare books, and the readers who read them, over at Wynken de Worde.

Emblematic: a once and future book

2009-06-08T16:26:00.019-04:00

Books, being economic and social objects, come into being and either thrive or fail for economic and social reasons. Here is an example of how early modern book design and brand marketing brought one book back from the brink.

On July 16, 1602 one William Everard entered a bookshop or stationers’ stall and bought a book. He paid 6s. 8d. for a quarto bound in eights, a moderately expensive book but an expected price for several hundred pages of print. On the inside margin of signature B5r Everard inscribed his Latinized name, Guill. Everardi, the date and price, and added a Greek motto in bold ink, Láthe biósas (Δαθε βιωσασ), an Epicurean commonplace meaning “live concealed.”

This phrase urges the ideal life lived in moderation and withdrawal from the distractions of power or riches, but written here and not in the traditional space of the title page, the phrase is a sly wink at the enduring paradox of prominent seclusion. If indeed Everard wished to live in scholarly seclusion, announcing this fact where he did may be the sole reason his book has not slipped into oblivion with him.

Everard’s book survives as a fragment in the British Library with the running title A Triall of Wits. Katherine Pantzer correctly identified this fragment in the revised STC as the first English edition of Juan Huarte’s Examen de Ingenios, probably published by John Wolfe around 1592, but the fragment has not been closely examined to establish its relation either to Huarte or the English book market. First published in Baeza in 1575, Huarte’s Examen was widely translated before being reissued posthumously in 1594 in an expurgated edition. But by then the original had become a publishing sensation, best know in English from Richard Carew’s stylish indirect translation from the Italian translation by the poet and linguist, Camillo Camilli, and printed by Adam Islip in 1594.

What happened to the version of Huarte that Everard bought? John Wolfe, attuned as he was to the fashion for foreign, and particularly Italian, books in early 1590s London, jumped on the Huarte bandwagon by entering to his copy on 5 August 1590 “A booke entituled Essame degli Ingegn[o]s, to be printed in Italian and Englishe.” This was the Camilli translation, which printed four times between 1582 and 1590. There is no evidence Wolfe produced an Italian version.

Everard’s book could not be more different than Islip's production, textually and paratextually. Where Carew’s translation is fashionably literary, with elegant phrasing and humanist polish, the version Everard read proves to be an accurate translation of Huarte’s Spanish, down to Huarte’s awkward syntax and phrasing. Where Carew follows Camilli in nearly eliminating scholarly citations and marginal notes, Everard’s reproduces all of Huarte’s scholarly features (but with frequent typesetting errors and authorial intrusions: at one point “Christe” replaces “Aristotle”). Most notable is textual presentation, with A Triall of Wits following the typical mixed typography of the late 1580s and early 1590s: “english” (13 point) black-letter type set densely, 37 lines to the page with tight margins. Islip pretends he’s printing prose romance: 33 lines of octavo pica italic, with ample margins. Old school, new school?

If a prominent printer such as John Wolfe published a very popular work such as Huarte’s, why do we have only a scant fragment extant, but more important, why was a competing edition published (to great success) a mere two or so years later? One answer is that fashion had passed Wolfe’s more traditional version by, but it could also be that it was marred by production errors and translator bias. In either case, the print-run was still not exhausted in ten years. Circumstances suggest a reason. By 1592 Wolfe was principally a publisher and many of his late books, before he became Printer to the City in 1593, were printed for him. Supervising his many copies, Wolfe may have overlooked the poor production of his Huarte. In any case, one of his printers was Adam Islip, who apparently bought much of Wolfe’s printing material in 1593/4 along with rights to some copy, including Huarte, and set up shop.

Islip's 1594 production of Carew’s translation, far from setting itself up in direct competition with Wolfe’s edition, signals its filiation to it in several ways that indicate both Islip’s debt to Wolfe and savvy marketing. Most obvious is that the Carew edition shares Wolfe’s running title, despite the different book title, An Examination of Men’s Wits. Islip also deploys what had amounted to Wolfe’s brand on numerous editions during the 1580s and early 1590s: the famous frontispiece emblem of the palm tree with snakes below it and the motto, Il vostro malignare non giova nulla, encircling the trunk (see the title page above).

Derived from a cut in Hadrianus Junius’ Emblemata (1565, at left), but also appearing in Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586), the emblem appeared on Wolfe’s clandestine "Palermo" editions of Machiavelli, beginning in 1584, and more recently on Gabriel Harvey’s Foure Letters (1592) and Pierces Supererogation (1593). It is quite likely that it appeared on the cover of Triall of Wits; Harvey had read Huarte in the 1570s in Spanish and as Wolfe’s would-be literary consultant in the early 1590s, he might have suggested Huarte as a sure bet in the English market. It was, but with the readers who found Wolfe's presentation unappealing.

After its transfer from Wolfe, Islip immediately puts the emblem to use marketing all editions of The Examination (1594 [3 issues], 1596, 1604, 1616) and numerous other books. It’s final appearance in 1616, well after Wolfe’s death and Everard’s purchase, retires the brand that links one likely publishing failure with its refashioned successor.

Carnivalesque

2009-05-24T19:03:00.005-04:00

Carnivalesque 50 is up today, and very emblematic, hosted by Nick at Mercurius Politicus.

Digital History

2009-05-20T13:35:00.003-04:00

The May issue of Perspectives on History features a forum on history and the new media, with articles on digital archives and one on the top-ten myths about historical blogging.

One CMS to Rule Them All

2009-05-18T21:20:00.007-04:00

With Blackboard’s announcement that it would be taking over rival course management system provider Angel Learning, Blackboard is one step closer to a monopoly. After its rocky take-over of former rival WebCT in 2006, and lawsuits against its largest competitor, Desire2Learn, “Blackborg” (as some are calling it) is making no friends. An article in The Chronicle yesterday cited what must be obvious to faculty and administrators at many schools: we are being assimilated, like it or not, into one way of doing technology in the classroom. At least, that is, if you only look to buy your solutions; open-source competitors Moodle and Sakai have been stealing market share for some time, not just at small colleges but at many large institutions, too.

My small university, traditionally a business school, prides itself on keeping abreast of enterprise solutions, Blackboard among them. But a recent training seminar on Blackboard’s updated grading tool left some of us bewildered by its complexity and wondering why we needed a bulldozer to build a sandcastle. Nonetheless, the widespread use of course management systems has mostly positive implications for a wide range of faculty, both at “teaching schools” like mine and lecture-heavy research institutions. For many teachers I know who are wholly invested in students, classroom work, and the design and management of their classes, course management systems make much of the logistical complexity of teaching easier, more transparent, and greener.

But for those of us who balance teaching with research agendas and maintain professional identities beyond our institution, course management systems offer no effective, let alone attractive, means to promote our work and connect with our larger communities. Fortunately, new media provide many alternatives. Blogs such as this one provide flexible platforms for blending teaching with research in a format that students find accessible and the profession takes increasingly seriously. And course management can be integrated into a web presence. A case in point is NfoMedia’s blend of web and course management features. Lately, I have been resisting the dark side as I begin to prepare my fall courses. Update: The Chronicle reports that CUNY is considering using blog software in response to widespread discontent with Blackboard. Make sure to watch the accompanying video on why "colleges should move away from commercial course-management tools to reflect new Web trends like social networking."

How are you incorporating Web technologies into your teaching and professionalization?

Shakespeare’s Footprint

2009-05-06T11:52:00.000-04:00

The theme of this fall’s GEMCS conference, “Tracing Footprints,” has got me thinking about Shakespeare’s footprint on our shelves and in our classrooms, and to what degree the Shakespeare industry is committed to the economics and perceived authority of print. In terms of sheer shelf space, Shakespeare is the SUV of early modern authors (in my office at least), taking up over four feet of shelving in assorted editions alone. The market for Shakespeare editions appears robust and stable, and the offerings in early modern drama are improving, yet if the energy being put into the Internet Shakespeare Editions is any indication, the greening of Shakespeare might be slowly underway.

Despite today’s announcement by Amazon of a textbook-format Kindle, I doubt scholarly texts of Shakespeare will be available any time soon from the Kindle Store; it has too many limitations. Right now the pickings are slim, and most of my students would prefer to read a text (or surf in class) on their laptop anyway. One student, perhaps to prove me wrong, got rather skilled at navigating through an online, unlineated text on his iPhone. Yet every time I survey students on what navigational aids they prefer, where they like their notes, and how they use a text, print remains their top choice, even when told their teacher is preparing an online edition.

Letting go of the book might be tough.

Torture Memo, 1571

2009-04-29T21:43:00.001-04:00

On September 15, 1571 Queen Elizabeth I wrote the following authorization for the use of torture against two of the plotters in the Duke of Norfolk's effort to secure the English throne for Mary Stuart (which came to be known as the Ridolfi Plot). The letter is addressed to Sir Thomas Smith, who opposed the use of torture, and Thomas Wilson, who was in charge of the Duke of Norfolk's interrogations and had himself been tortured by the Inquisition.

"Right trusty and well beloved, we greet you well, and finding in traitorous attempts lately discovered that neither Barker nor Bannister, the Duke of Norfolk's men, have uttered their knowledge in the under-proceeding of their master and of themselves, neither will discover the same without torture; forasmuch as the knowledge hereof concerneth our surety and estate, and that they have untruly already answered, we will and by warrant hereof authorize you to proceed to the further examination of them upon all points that you can think by your discretions meet for knowledge of the truth. And if they shall not seem to you to confess plainly their knowledge, then we warrant you to cause them both, or either of them, to be brought to the rack and first to move them with fear thereof to deal plainly in their answers. And if that shall not move them, then you shall cause them to be put to the rack, and to feel the taste thereof until they shall deal more plainly or until you shall think meet. And so we remit the whole proceeding to your further discretion, requiring you to use speed herein, and to require the assistance of our Lieutenant of the Tower."

The Duke of Norfolk was executed for treason on June 2, 1572.