Luther's Faculty Research Symposium is Coming Up!

Are you interested in sleep? Are you interested in what happens when a doctor falls asleep in 1605, and somehow magically ends up preaching a sermon for an hour and a half--with witnesses? If so: stop by the Luther College Faculty Research Symposium at 3:00 this Saturday. I'm giving a short talk on Richard Haydocke's experiences as a sleep preacher, and how they intersect with the strategies of diagnosing a sleeping speaker in Macbeth.

For details and a schedule, click on the FRS banner below:

Teaching with Lingfish

One of the joys (and difficulties) of teaching students about the early modern period is that there are so many subtle differences between 1600 and 2014. In Shakespeare's time, spelling wasn't standardized, mass production didn't exist, and blood-letting was a sensible medical practice. Without taking up too much time in the classroom, how can we as teachers underscore these important differences, which can help students gain a foundational sense of the time period they're about to study?

As one possible solution, I propose lingfish. Lingfish are great for a couple of reasons. First, it's fun to say "lingfish." Second, they're apparently great with butter. And, third, the students probably won't have any idea what they are. (I confess: I didn't have any idea what they were, either, until I took a paleography seminar at the Folger Library, and we transcribed a very fishy dinner menu.) This lack of familiarity means that you can introduce students to a range of fantastic databases and online resources, which will help them learn what lingfish are. (And also, you know, where to look for help with strange early modern words and concepts, in general. Which is the sneaky pedagogical goal.)

Here are some fun things to ask your students to do with lingfish:

1) First, explain that spelling was not standardized, and that vocabulary was pretty flexible. Students will therefore need to type "ling," "lyng," "lyngfish," and "lingfish" in each of the resources below. (They should also try "fish," on its own, which produces some delightful results.)

2) Then, split your students into small groups, and ask each group to find information about lingfish (or fish in general) in each of the following online resources. This shouldn't take very long, and each group can share an interesting fact with the rest of the class.

Resource #1: The Early Modern Recipes Collective. [Because people did really weird and interesting things with fish. Importantly: lingfish aren't featured in this collection. This is a deliberate plant, because it allows you to discuss what to do if you're not finding your specific word or concept right away.]

Resource #2: Luna: the Folger Shakespeare Library's searchable digital archive of manuscripts, correspondence, and more. [Because ling transactions were worth writing home about. And students get a kick out of seeing early modern handwriting.]

[Image courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.]

Resource #3: The OED. [Because, after all, it's important to know what lingfish is, and how folks were using it in literary contexts. Jonson, Shakespeare, and Pepys are all cited here. (Also, fun fact: "ling" can mean different things in the US and the UK, and that transatlantic difference can be important to highlight.)]

 

Resource #4: EEBO. [Because everyone should have the experience of typing "lyng" into a search engine that does variant spellings, at least once in his or her life. Bonus: you get to talk about strategies for refining a search. And, also, about the probable happiness of sailors on ships that have been "victualed, with 32. sortes of Ling."]

[Image courtesy of EEBO.]

 Enjoy!

 

What I did on my summer vacation (and, um, my spring semester!)

After a couple of months of focusing on research and teaching, I'm excited to surface and share what I've been up to. On campus in the spring, apart from developing two new classes ("Literature and Medicine" and "Literature by Women"), I helped to plan a day-long birthday party for Shakespeare, featuring three live scene performances and an "insult smackdown." Here's a YouTube clip of me talking about the events:

Especially after hearing Coppelia Kahn's thoughtful SAA talk on commemorating Shakespeare, my colleagues and I were enthusiastic about staging the texts themselves. 

My year's Shakespeare theme continued when I spent the month of June in Washington, DC, taking a paleography course with Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library. We learned to read secretary and italic hands, and spent hours in the reading rooms, poring over manuscripts. For our final project, my class transcribed selections from the miscellany of Henry Oxinden, c. 1642-1670. Here's what my chosen opening looks like:

 

(For a larger version of the page, displayed on the Folger's fantastic (and free!) Luna manuscript database, just click on the image.)

Finally, I'm capping off my summer in three ways. First, I'm finishing an article on watching the sleeper in Macbeth. I'm also taking part in a summer reading workshop for teachers of Paideia (an introduction to the humanities course). My group has just finished We Need New Names, a compelling novel about diaspora and identity that won the PEN-Hemingway prize earlier this year. Finally, I'm preparing to welcome my first group of advisees to their new college careers. So it's been a busy but productive few months!

Happy Twelfth Night!

There was a great social media post earlier today: "Because it's Twelfth Night, Nature has decided to become the Lord of Misrule." (Hence the -60 windchills tomorrow, etc.) And that got me thinking a bit about the Elizabethan calendar--which seems to have a whole different attitude toward winter than we do now. While they celebrated the New Year on March 25th, with lots of fancy gifts to the queen, we've decided to plonk the same holiday just a week after Christmas, when our weather is at its coldest, and the nightly darkness hasn't really begun to recede. I'm beginning to wonder if the Elizabethans didn't have the right idea: spread out the holidays, and celebrate newness when the daffodils are actually coming up.

There's another ramification, as well. Because our New Year (January 1) actually happens before Twelfth Night/Epiphany, we tend to bundle both celebrations up into one snowy/cold idea of renewal, mystery, and frenetic buying of fitness equipment--that is, if we even think about Twelfth Night at all any more. For the Elizabethan court, though, Twelfth Night (associated with the gifts delivered by the Magi to the Christ Child) was a time of snuggly indoor dramatic revelry, with carbtastic cakes and momentary reversals of position. As a release valve in the middle of the winter season, Twelfth Night provided a way to confront the dullness and unrelentingness of winter, without implying that one was supposed to feel renewed, or even "new," in the midst of subzero temperatures. As a person who gravitates toward warmth and little flowers, I like this idea.

However: the best thing, I think, would be to combine the Elizabethan and contemporary New Year celebrations, while keeping Twelfth Night (preferably with lots of plays by Shakespeare). All that needs to happen is for March weather to start in January. (Or, failing that, maybe I could try to grow some early daffodils.)

Sleep, Virtuous Behavior, and the Adage

In a Newsweek article called "Sleep in!" (June 4 & 11, 2012, page 19), Trevor Butterworth gleefully debunks the myth that getting up early is somehow virtuous. In fact, he quotes sleep researcher Till Roenneberg, who says "We need to get rid of the old rule that the early bird catches the worm." But how old is this rule--and what are the sneaky links between early rising and moral standing, from a historical perspective?

"Early to bed, early to rise,/ Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." Current in the eighteenth century, this saying links not only intelligence but also wealth to sleeping habits--presumably because those who rise "early" do so in order to work at some form of remunerative labor. Less well known--but no less morally laced--is this early modern adage, quoted by A. Roger Ekirch in At Day's Close (265): "Nature requires five [hours of sleep], custom takes seven, laziness nine, and wickedness, eleven." From a historical standpoint, then, not only the time of rising, but the length of sleep itself reflected a person's inherent moral character.

It's quite interesting, then, to realize that Butterworth's article is calling for a sea change in the way that we ascribe morality to sleep practices. Instead of judging those who sleep late, Butterworth claims, we should view them as victims of "social jet lag"--which "happens when your internal body clock wants you to stay asleep but your external social clock wants you to wake up" (19). Here, the terms of the debate seem to have switched: a sleeper's body is now framed as the correct (or, at least, legitimate) arbiter of waking and sleeping times, and society stands as the cruel taskmaster, forcing the body into routines that can lead to obesity and exhaustion. I'm not quite sure what to make of this shift--but I'm very interested in the way that it tries to decouple sleep from morality, despite hundreds of years of proverbial linkages. 

"Shakespeare's Hand": Collaboration Studies and Shakespeare

There's an article in the New York Times this week called "Much Ado about Who: Is it really Shakespeare?" The subtitle is "Further Proof of Shakespeare's Hand in the Spanish Tragedy." It's a great exploration of the modern, tech-driven scholarship that's exposing the intricacies of early modern collaborative authorship practices. But it's also a fascinating example of the ongoing glorification of Shakespeare as, well, "Shakespeare." In other words, the article is simultaneously saying that collaborative authorship existed and holding Shakespeare above his peers--as a supreme collaborator, or first among equals.

Here's an example. Near the end of the article, a quotation from the scholar Douglas Bruster explains the ramifications of locating Shakespearean text in the play The Spanish Tragedy--largely written by Thomas Kyd. Bruster says, "...once you realize that it’s Shakespeare’s handwriting that’s responsible for the misreading, it’s no longer a bad line... It’s actually a gorgeous passage." On one level, Bruster is saying that the printer read Shakespeare's handwriting incorrectly, and inserted textual errors that mess up the inherent loveliness of the poetry. It makes absolute sense, then, that fixing these errors would improve the reading experience.

On another level, though, the quote (framed within the context of the article) could be read to pivot on the identification of Shakespeare himself. Here's how it reads with the framing in place:

"Mr. Bruster once counted himself among the many scholars who have thought the passage in the quarto was simply too poorly written to be Shakespeare. “But once you realize that it’s Shakespeare’s handwriting that’s responsible for the misreading, it’s no longer a bad line,” Mr. Bruster said. “It’s actually a gorgeous passage.”"

Within this crucial framework, it's Shakespeare's handwriting (not, say, Kyd's), and therefore the passage can now be read as "gorgeous." Moreover, assessing whether something is Shakespearean becomes, implicitly, a matter of assessing its literary quality: while Thomas Kyd could conceivably write something bad, Shakespeare, clearly, would never do such a thing.

All of this points to an interesting problem for the larger scholarly community. When we explore collaborative practices, whose collaborations do we privilege, and why? (And where do we find aesthetic beauty, and what's at stake in that beauty, or in newly identifying beauty where it previously didn't seem to exist?)  

Things I Learned While Writing About Sleep

At the close of my project, I thought I'd take a minute or two to reflect about what it meant to write a dissertation on sleep. When people have asked me about my project, they tend to have a slightly disbelieving smile on their faces: "You write about looking at sleeping people?" ["And you talk about this for two hundred and eighty-eight pages??"] Indeed, yes--and I've learned some unexpected things from doing so.

1) Talking about sleep is great. It's recreational. College students in particular really enjoy that element of my topic: "I'd love to have a nap right now!" or "Man, I wish I could think about sleep all the time." Sleep is a desired state of being, and many people self-identify as lacking sleep--or, at least, lacking as much sleep as they'd like to have. So sleep is a fabulous conversation-starter, and almost a modern rhetorical commonplace.

2) Talking about watching the sleeper is weird. The same college students who are interested in sleep, in general, look at me very strangely when I say that I specifically wrote about watching people sleep. I'd like to tie this, in part, to the modern (roughly post-Cartesian) emphasis on a person's internal experience of sleep, which has almost completely subsumed the early modern idea of watching and (ideally) safeguarding one's bedfellows. (The early moderns definitely did think about a person's experience of sleep, as well--but they also often contextualized it within a community setting, in ways that we no longer frequently think about.) In other words, the idea of watching a sleeper is "weird" from a modern stance because the idea of being watched in a vulnerable state openly challenges the idea that the internal person always retains power over himself. It makes folks uncomfortable. There are overtones of surveillance, peeping-tom-ness, judgment, and maybe even desire--signalling both its complexity and the multifaceted nature of its ethical ramifications.

3) Sleep can't be detached from communities. Whether I'm talking about sleep or actually sleeping, there are always people nearby, and their presence makes sleep an essentially ethical and relational matter. Although the sleeper himself or herself does not actually perceive this community, its existence forms the vital context against which the sleeper signifies, and within which the sleeper can be either safeguarded or harmed.

"Updating" Shakespeare, Part Two

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the short films that adapt/stage/body forth Shakespeare's sonnets. Now, there's an interesting new plan for a different kind of adaptation. Novelists are signing on to "novelize" Shakespeare's plays--and the series will begin to be published in 2015. Two plays have already been chosen, by established novelists who have won awards in their own right. Intriguingly, Jeanette Winterson (who is both a novelist and a screenwriter) has chosen The Winter's Tale; Anne Tyler will adapt The Taming of the Shrew. (The best part of the article, though, isn't necessarily these details: it's the fabulous portrayal of a "hipster" Shakespeare, who looks exactly like someone from our creative writing department!)

Again, this project calls up really interesting questions about genre and accessibility. Unlike the sonnet-film project, though, this project adds the dimension of cultural translation: a sixteenth-century art form is giving way to a twenty-first-century one. Depending on the project's overall guidelines, and on the authors' individual choices, anything from complex Italian names to economic background information, character gender roles, family structures or mythological references could be "translated"--in addition to the language itself. As a translational project, then, this project has fascinating implications: What does it mean to study "Shakespeare," and what does it mean to "translate" his works? How is this process similar to what Shakespeare himself did, as an adapter of source material, and how is it different? (And what do these similarities and differences tell us about the changing cultural status of a "translation?")

Staging the Blazon has landed!

I'm really excited to announce that Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater has just been released! (I know this, because I got a mysterious cardboard package from Sweden today, and my contributor copy was inside.) The essays in the book explore how the blazon--which is a physical description of a person, often head-to-toe, usually found in written poetry--translates onto the stage in Renaissance England. It was a lot of fun to take part in the SAA seminar on Staging the Blazon in Chicago, and also a lot of fun to contribute to the book project.

Night Knitting (or, Knitting in the Dark?)

In his compendious study of nighttime in the Renaissance, At Day's Close, A. Roger Ekirch writes the following:

"Enea Silvio Piccolomni, the future Pope Pius II (1405-1464), while traveling in northern England, observed a large company of women sitting all night by a fire, conversing and cleaning hemp. Less common elsewhere in England, spinning sessions, even in the nineteenth century, remained widespread in the north... Assembling one or two nights a week, work parties could last until one or two in the morning... On frigid nights, the presence of farm animals generated warmth, as did steaming manure. Often, a cottage hearth supplied small quantities of both light and heat... Requiring the sharpest sight, women usually sat up front [nearest to the fire], spinning, knitting, weaving and carding wool either for themselves or for one another" (New York: Norton, 2005, 178-9).

I was intrigued. Given my drawbacks (lack of hearth, lack of female posse, lack of spinning and carding skills, lack of manure), I decided to undertake a modified experiment. Could one really knit in the semi-dark? Would this knitting turn out to be wearable? (Or even recognizable as knitting?)

The procedure: I waited until the sun had almost set, and left the shades partially open. There wasn't much sunlight, but I could still kind of see. (Almost.) Plus, I was using chunky white yarn, which was more visible than, say, a Regia sock blend in dark blue. I knit about seven rounds on a cable/rib hat that I was working on. Then I went to another room, turned on a light, and had a look.

The verdict: Oops. My first cable now had five stitches, instead of six; my second cable had seven, and the strip of ribbing in between looked like something out of a Robert Frost poem. (And not in a good way.)

The analysis: Clearly, I was missing something. How were these ladies, in fact, actually producing garments at one or two in the morning, in minimal lighting conditions, while listening to gossip or fictional tales, with freezing fingers and sleep-deprived brains?

I have come up with three possible theories: 1) They were not, in fact, knitting. That was just a cover for their actual purpose in convening: a plot to overthrow Enea Silvio Piccolomni. 2) The purpose in having the other ladies nearby was to have at least one functioning as a quality control agent. 3) (Possibly the most disturbing option:) They didn't actually care whether their cables all matched. 

So: there you have it. The moral of the story? "Night knitting deserves a well-lit night. I'm not sure all these people understand."

Derek Jacobi was on Frasier!

I think I'm probably quite late to the party. But I'm re-watching Frasier this summer, and today, I came across "The Show Must Go Off" (exciting clip available here). In this episode, Derek Jacobi is a former Shakespearean actor turned sci-fi superstar, and Frasier tries to entice him to go back on stage. When he does, Frasier and Niles realize that he, um, can't act. And it's pretty funny to see Jacobi doing Hamlet 'badly.'

Except, the weird thing is... he does Hamlet badly well. I mean, there are asthmatic gasps every few seconds, and his poses are always overextended--but behind everything, you can hear Jacobi's fabulous intonation, and his sense of timing is precisely honed for the genre(s). And also, he's Derek Jacobi, and there's that ghosting thing going on, which would be a lot of fun to explore on a more critical level. For now, though: I saw Derek Jacobi on Frasier tonight! *geeks happily*

Shakespeare's Sonnet 44, on film

Okay--so I've solved my computer's seeming inability to stream video (or, um, my own actual inability to stream video), and I watched my first filmed sonnet today. It was #44, and it was filmed in front of (and, sometimes, "on") a giant globe called the Unisphere in Queens. I think I've got two levels of reaction to it: a specific reaction, to the filming choices of this particular sonnet-film, and a general reaction--slightly different than yesterday's--to the larger idea of filming the sonnets.

On the specific level: I'm embarrassed to say that I got a little distracted by the mood music, and the camera angles, and the lovely photography, and the movement, and trying to figure out what exactly was happening to the actors (were they being slowly glitter-painted?). So, I didn't recognize the sonnet until maybe the second quatrain, where the word "earth" came in, and I went aha--that's why they picked the big globe setting. On the one hand, it's great to be re-introduced to a sonnet in a totally new way, and to see it completely through someone else's interpretation first. On the other hand, I felt like the music and the lighting and the camera and the scenery choices were sometimes so dynamic, so overpowering, that the words themselves got subsumed. (It's difficult enough to listen to Shakespeare and make sense of his words without reading them, for me--but it's way harder to do that when you're trying to figure out why that actor is becoming a metal robot-villain.) But: I think it's a great exercise in visual rhetoric, and a great chance to talk to students about the impact of lighting/camera movements/words/other choices in a dramatic piece.

On the general level: I don't think the sonnet-film is my favorite medium, and I think it raises some interesting questions about what lyric should be in the age of YouTube. (Not drama, incidentally. I'm building on my argument that drama is conceptually different from lyric here.) If somebody adds moving pictures, sound effects, and grey paint to make a poem "marketable," or to give it mass appeal, that (to me) verges on implying that the poem on its own terms is somehow lacking. And it's not. Far from it. In fact, the poem is so rich that it could inspire ten or twelve different filmed variations. For me, those potential variations only emerge when I read the poem slowly and carefully, going back to check on syntax and shifts that I didn't understand, processing and reprocessing over the course of maybe five minutes. But, again, that's me. The person who spent two hours trying to figure out why her computer (i.e., herself) was incapable of streaming video. Mm-hmm....

Filming Shakespeare's... Sonnets?

When I heard about the new project to film Shakespeare's sonnets--all 154 of them--on the streets of New York, I had a mixed reaction. On one level, what a great idea: drawing attention to the sonnets in a completely different cultural context from the one that students usually expect; enlisting respected actors and actresses; using Kickstarter and the app format to get the public involved. On the other hand, the lyric poet in me went... well, are sonnets actually filmable? I mean, they're not plays, and they're mostly not written for explicit, embodied performance (unless you're writing them as a set of song lyrics, or unless you're Romeo and Juliet--in which case, have at it). But most sonnets aren't drama, after all, and part of their point is that they speak in a different generic mode; one of their voices, for better or for worse, is always the one that you hear in your own head. From that angle, I'm a little worried that the project mashes two distinct art forms together without interrogating their differences, or even pointing out to the public that the differences exist.

Now, I have to admit, I feel a little pedantic writing that. After all, anything that appifies the Bard is a fabulous idea, and it generates discussions like these in the first place. So, I've decided to sign up for the app. There's only one sonnet-film available at the moment, but (for some reason) I haven't been able to access it on this machine. I'll check back once I've figured out the difficulty, and I'll keep you updated on my reactions. For the moment, though, I'm thinking that the sonnet-films are going to be, at the very least, fabulous conversation starters about genre, drama, and inwardness--particularly in the Shakespeare classroom.

Picturing Richard III

I just ran across a picture of Richard III's skeleton, as displayed on people.com. (It was in the trendy "The Royals" gossip section, right near teasers for articles about Prince Harry in America! Which may or may not be how I found the picture.)

Anyway. The picture is a fascinating thing to analyze. Here's why: it shows a skeleton on a table, like the skeletons of murder victims on a show like Bones. Except this skeleton also has a visible curvature of the spine, and the bones look like they're being photographed through murk or fog. They look old--they're the color of coffee stains, and parts of the hip and skull are fragmented--but they're framed in a visibly modern context, like the horror shot of the victim's body after the first commercial break.

All of these elements make the picture a fascinating artifact to close-read in the classroom (maybe juxtaposed with a little Thomas More!) Why is People showing Richard in this particular way, instead of inserting a standard portrait mugshot? What cultural currency do we ascribe to bones--seeing them, evaluating them--and did people feel the same way in Richard's own period? (Or, even, Shakespeare's?) Finally, how is the idea of respect being defined in all of this: respect for the past, for victims/villains/new discoveries, for somebody's relative, for history?

I haven't got the answers, but I'd love to have the conversation.

Poisonous Words: The Fallout in the Early Twentieth Century

In the course of doing some JSTOR research, I stumbled across this absolute gem from the British Medical Journal (1900). It's from an article called "Speech as a Septic Influence":

"Not long ago Hubener raised his voice in warning as to the infective possibilities of the surgeon's beard, and recommended that ornamental appendage to be enclosed in what may be called a bacterium net. One may conjure up a prophetic vision of the twentieth-century surgeon with antiseptic mask, beard-bag, gloves, and sterilised robe, operating within a glass sanctuary into which no one is admitted except after the fullest disinfectant lustration. But Fluegge's doctine [that speech puts forth germs into the world] has a much wider application... If speech has these hitherto undreamt-of dangers for the audience, Parliamentary and pulpit orators will have to wear germ-catching muzzles; this, besides protecting their hearers, will doubtless have the further advantage of making their eloquence less copious as well as more sanitary. Society would find in the same sanitary appliance an effective safeguard against bores." (Feb. 17, pg 401)

I love this passage for a number of reasons (principal among them, the idea of a "beard-bag," which I'm trying to imagine appearing on a show like ER or Grey's Anatomy.) I think the most interesting (and the most terrifying) thing about the piece, though, is the way that it couples light sarcasm with the idea of sanitary measures. After all, nobody understands the extent to which germs can be verbally transmitted yet: preventative measures like antiseptic masks (for doctors) and "germ-catching muzzles" (for preachers!) are spoken of as equally possible necessities. At the same time, delightfully, the author is implying that both measures are also equally ludicrous. I'm tempted to pull this out in a classroom setting, ask what the author is doing rhetorically, and then ask the students what we're saying today that will look equally hilarious (and terrifying) in a hundred years...

Almonds, Onions, and Lettuce

What do these foods have in common, you may ask? Well, according to Sir Thomas Elyot (writing in The Castle of Health, in 1539), they're the early modern equivalent of Lunesta. Here are a few excerpts from Elyot's useful self-help guide, which tells users how to balance their humors by eating particular foods:

Almonds "do... clense without any byndynge, wherfore they purge the breste and lunges, specially bytter almondes. Also they do mollifye the bealy, prouoke sleape, and causeth to pysse well, fyue or syx of theym eaten afore meate, kepe a manne from beynge drunke, they be hot and moyst in the fyrst degre." (22v)

Lettuce: "AMonge all herbes, none hath soo good iuyce as letise: for somemen do suppose, that it maketh aboundance of bloude, al be it not very pure or perfyte. It doth set a hote stomake in a very good temper, & maketh good appetite, and eaten in the euennynge, it prouoketh slepe, albe it, it neither doth lowse nor bynd the bealye of his owne propertie. It increaseth mylke in a womans breastes, but it abateth carnall appetite, and moche vsynge therof, hurteth the eye syghte. It is colde and moyst temperatly." (23v)

Onions "styre appetite to meate, and put awaye lothsomnesse, and lowse the bealy, they quycken syght: and beynge eaten in great abundance with meate, they cause one to sleape soundely." (26v--theoretically. The printer had a bit of a mix-up, and labeled page 26 '29' by mistake.) (all italics mine)

So: if you're hoping to fall asleep after your Thanksgiving feast, maybe eat salad with your turkey? (Or just rely on the turkey itself. Which, as we all know, not only contains tryptophans, but is also "hot and moist.")

Sleep Advice from the Elizabethan Era

In 1636, a book called The Haven of Health was republished in London, in its sixth edition. This book, quite frankly, is a gem. After 240 chapters of recipes and helpful hints about improving your health through food (tip: "raw Creame well boiled with a little Sugar, is a good nourishing meate, and good for a weake student"), Thomas Cogan turns his attention to sleep:

"...it is most wholesome to sleepe first on the right side, that the meat may the better descend to the bottome of the stomacke, and be nearer to the liver. Which is to the stomacke as fire to the pot, and after to turne to the left side. For this change doth greatly ease the body, and helpeth concoction. But to lie upon the backe, causeth flegme and other humours to fall into the hinder part of the head, where is the originall of the sinewes, and by that meane the spirits being stopped, the nightmare (as they call it) and palsie, and such like maladies be engendred. Again to lie on the belly, draweth the humours to the eyes, and so hurteth the sight. Yet it helpeth them that have feeble digestion. And we must not onely regard that wee lie on the... side, but also that wee lie with our heads somewhat high, well bolstered up, having sufficient clothes upon us, least that while naturall heate is within about digestion, the outward parts be grieved with cold. It is good also to weare a kerchiffe, or some such like thing in the night on our heads. But to have the feet covered with shoes or otherwise, is very hurtfull to the sight and memory, and distempereth the whole body with heate..." (274).

Clearly, I should not be asking for those fuzzy socks for Christmas.

Sleeping on Stage

Hi again! I took a month-long hiatus from blogging to concentrate on my teaching and my dissertation, but I wanted to mention a really interesting staging of sleep that I saw at a conference recently.

A few weekends ago, I went to Grand Valley State University to take part in their Shakespeare Festival Conference, and I saw a performance of Richard III. Set in a half-modern world of gangs and graffiti, the performance featured a large tarp mounted on the left side of the stage, where a running tally of the dead bodies was kept in hot pinks, blacks, and greens.

Here's where sleep comes in. During the portion when Clarence dies (a death caused by a chainsaw, incidentally, and not a butt of malmsey), the murderers approach from stage right--and Clarence's bed is behind the tarp on the left. The audience can see Clarence's outlined shadow, breathing quietly, but not his features, clothes, or expression. As the murderers do their brutally comic routine, Clarence sleeps, and the audience watches--but only halfway, because the actual body has been replaced in our sight by a simulacrum, and that simulacrum is characterized by the graffitied death count that literally overwrites it. It's a fascinating and rich tableau (complicated even further when the chainsaw-wielding murderer does his thing, and the tarp gets splattered with hot pink 'blood.')

There are a few importance consequences of this staging. First, it literalizes the early modern connection between sleep and death--and the correspondence between the sleeper and the already-dead, codified in language and numbers (and record-keeping). Second, it puts distance between the audience and the (doomed) sleeper, by interspersing a written record of deaths to separate them. Third, it extends the possibility of never quite knowing the identity of a sleeping body, because its features, expression, and even clothing are not distinctly visible--even though the outline can be seen.

I'll have to think more about this production, and its consequences for the portrayal of Clarence's body, but I wanted to jot down some notes, and to update the blog!

Petrarch's Rime Sparse 65: Saturday Sonnet-in-Translation

For this week, here's something slightly different: a prose translation (by Robert Durling) of the famous moment when Petrarch sees Laura for the first time. Enjoy the poem!

Rime Sparse 65

Alas, I was little wary at first, the day when Love came to wound me, who step by step has become lord of my life and sits and the summit!

I did not believe that by the power of his file any bit of strength or worthiness would fail in my hardened heart, but so he goes who esteems himself too highly.

Form now on any defense is too late, except to test whether Love looks on mortal prayers much or little.

I do not pray--nor can it be--that my heart burn moderately, but that she have her part of the fire. 

Mingle Mangle Invective (Saturday Not-quite-Sonnet)

This week, we have a prefatory poem to Rachel Speght's 1617 polemic A Mouzell for Melastomus. Writing in response to an antifeminist tract by Joseph Swetnam, Speght castigates the tract's disorganized rhetoric (or "mingle mangle invective") in her letter before the work. Perhaps to continue this theme, the prefatory poem stresses Speght's education, and shows off Speght's own organizational and rhetorical skills (if, in fact, Speght is the author).

If he that for his Countrie doth expose
himselfe unto the furie of his foe,
doth merit praise and due respect of those,
for whom he did that perill undergoe:
Then let the Author of this Mouzell true
receive the like, of right it is her due.

For she to shield her Sex from Slaunders Dart
and from invective obtrectation,
hath ventured by force of Learnings Art
(in which she hath had education)
to combate with him, which doth shame his Sex,
By offring feeble women to perplex.