tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/shakespeare-6387/articlesShakespeare – The Conversation2024-03-25T16:39:39Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2257132024-03-25T16:39:39Z2024-03-25T16:39:39ZLear is Not Okay: meta play explores what happens when teenagers rewrite Shakespeare’s tragedy<p><a href="https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/double-bill-lear-is-not-okay-lessons/">Lear is Not Okay</a>, which played at London’s Almeida Theatre this month, was something of a meta performance. The show tells the story of a youth theatre company as they rehearse a new play that responds to William Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear. </p>
<p>King Lear, <a href="https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/king-lear/">currently showing</a> at The Almeida, is about an ageing king who divides the kingdom among his three daughters, leading to betrayal and chaos as his sanity shatters. Lear is Not Okay (directed by Germma Orleans-Thompson and written by Benjamin Salmon) is a satirical piece about issues that also reverberate throughout Shakespeare’s play – the burden and dispossession of youth, and the uncertainty of the future. Making a comedy out of tragedy asks questions about what we laugh at, and why.</p>
<p>The director characters within the play (played by Alexander and Evie*) are broad stereotypes of phoney drama group leaders. The actors’ depictions of identity anxiety and awkward social interactions in a youth theatre group, although set up to provoke laughter among an enthusiastic first night audience, cut close to the bone.</p>
<p>In one scene, the actor Sarah (played by Josephine*) performs a posthumous speech she has written for Lear’s daughter, Cordelia. She explains that she sees Cordelia as a powerful woman, but the monologue she delivers sounds more like a sulky teenager. </p>
<p>Cordelia, banished to France by her father, has been forced to invade her own country to restore political stability and is somewhat disgruntled to have ended up dead. Sarah’s Cordelia concludes with the evergreen adolescent retort: “Whatever.”</p>
<p>Youth theatre encourages actors to connect with characters of canonical plays, but the trajectories of young women within them can make it hard to find redemptive or empowering touch points. Here Sarah’s attempt to find “empowerment” in the story of Cordelia is absurd, while the collapsing of high political tragedy into teenage soap opera inevitably prompts laughter. </p>
<h2>Themes of fairness</h2>
<p>We don’t see much of Lear himself. Each time someone playing Lear goes to speak, they are interrupted, or the scene cuts away. We hear more from Shakespeare’s young villain, Edmund. Kelly (Shadia*) delivers a compelling rendition of Edmund’s first monologue in a classical acting style to contrast with Sarah’s devised Cordelia speech. </p>
<p>In the monologue, Edmund is bitter and vengeful about his status as the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester and reveals he has a plot to undermine and replace his legitimate brother Edgar. </p>
<p>Edmund’s evocation of the arbitrary unfairness of the world and assertion of the necessity to fight for your place – to the detriment of others if necessary – resonates ambivalently throughout this play. Another actor, Dylan (Yee*), concludes that while we’d like to think everyone had equal rights and opportunities, we know the dice are loaded from the start.</p>
<p>This cynical insight follows an altercation in the play about private and comprehensive schools, a lottery the youth cast are very conscious of. In 2019, Nottingham Playhouse chief executive <a href="https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/increasing-social-division-schools-theatre-access">Stephanie Sirr said</a> theatres “had never witnessed a bigger gap in the cultural opportunities open to those in private schools compared to those in state education”. The subsequent five years are only likely to have widened the gap. </p>
<p>When I asked the cast how they found out about the Almeida’s Young Company, they said by word of mouth. These things depend on their school, or which youth groups they attend (though the Almeida also <a href="https://almeida.co.uk/get-involved/young-artists/young-company/">announces opportunities</a> clearly on its website). </p>
<p>Reviews of youth work are almost nonexistent, which also affects the visibility of these theatre opportunities for young people and makes the chance to write about this production all the more important.</p>
<h2>The legacy of COVID</h2>
<p>The age group represented by the Almeida Young Company (14-18) has endured deprivation as a result of COVID that has affected their personal, educational and social growth and development. In addition, 14 years of sustained public service cuts <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/24/schools-england-real-terms-cuts-since-2010-tories">to education</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/19/arts-funding-austerity-collapse-tories-labour">the arts</a> mean they inherit a landscape as bleak as that of Lear’s demise. </p>
<p>The numbers of students taking drama at GCSE has <a href="https://www.dramaandtheatre.co.uk/news/article/drama-gcse-entries-continue-rapid-decline#:%7E:text=The%20number%20of%20students%20taking,49%2C247%20entries%20to%20the%20subject.">dropped by 39.6%</a> since 2010. Specialist drama staff have <a href="https://www.nationaldrama.org.uk/response-arts-in-schools-review/">dropped by 18%</a>. </p>
<p>Giving evidence at the House of Lords inquiry into education for 11-16 year olds in May 2023, National Drama chair, <a href="https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/13147/html/">Geoffrey Readman said</a> “few subjects have been so consistently undervalued” or “marginalised” as drama. </p>
<p>While youth programmes run by theatres might help to stem the drain in creative arts in schools, opportunities remain overly focused on London. Theatre critic Lyn Gardner <a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/news/education-policy-has-had-disastrous-impact-on-drama-in-schools--inquiry">has argued recently</a> that “the performing arts are no longer available to many children in today’s hard-pressed, underfunded schools”, describing them as a potentially <a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/without-access-to-theatre-in-schools-kids-are-denied-more-than-just-great-art">“lost” generation</a>.</p>
<p>Redman quoted <a href="https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/13147/html/">the words of Noah</a>, a 15-year-old boy who spoke to ministers at the House of Lords: “Drama holds a mirror up to life” and in doing so, it makes us “think, explore, communicate, challenge and even change things for the better”. </p>
<p>The Young Company at the Almeida do exactly that. The crisis point of their play arrives with the results of their auditions for the final show. Malicious comments about race-led affirmative casting made by Zara (Eleonora*) when Kelly secures the leading role prompt “circle time” to talk it through.</p>
<p>Racism and discrimination is another key area of complexity for young people to navigate and this scene plays out clumsiness and inefficacy in the handling of racist speech that reflects the young actors own fraught experiences in the rehearsal room and beyond. </p>
<p>In this youth theatre production, drama creates an environment for young people to collaboratively play out the things that matter to them, the things that are hurting them and the things that are “not okay”. </p>
<p><em>*Only first names have been given for safeguarding reasons.</em> </p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Penelope Woods does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Youth theatre encourages actors to connect with characters of canonical plays, but the trajectories of young women within them can make it hard to find redemptive or empowering touch points.Penelope Woods, Research assistant, Empire, Migration and Belonging, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2236552024-03-10T22:48:00Z2024-03-10T22:48:00ZBell Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is side-splittingly funny – yet some of the magic is lost<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580594/original/file-20240308-18-hd5iby.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C14%2C1885%2C1264&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Matu Ngaropo and Ahunim Abebe in Bell Shakespeare s A Midsummer Nights Dream. Photo by Brett Boardman</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Shakespeare’s delightful A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a perennial favourite – and the production run by the Bell Shakespeare company (first prepared in 2021 but hindered by COVID lockdowns) is a swift and pared-back reimaginingreimagining of the play.</p>
<p>It follows the comedy of four lovers – Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius – who are lost in a forest and get tricked by the fairies, King Oberon, Queen Titania and the impish Puck. </p>
<p>The play also features the bumbling mechanicals – a carpenter, a weaver, a bellows-mender, a tinker, a joiner and a tailor – who meet in the forest to rehearse a play to perform at the upcoming wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Athens, Theseus and Hippolyta. </p>
<p>This <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/25/10-of-the-best-plays-within-plays">play within a play</a>, performed at the end, has always brought the house down with sidesplitting laughter, and this show is no exception. It must have been just as hilarious during the play’s first performance, if it’s true that Shakespeare <a href="https://www.rsc.org.uk/a-midsummer-nights-dream/about-the-play/dates-and-sources">wrote it</a> to be performed at an aristocrat’s wedding.</p>
<h2>Finally, Shakespeare for the whole family</h2>
<p>Bell Shakespeare promotes the show as “fast, funny and family-friendly”. This is welcome news for theatregoing parents. Few of Shakespeare’s plays are suitable for children, despite there being a significant market for Shakespeare-related books and activities designed <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-for-kids/">for young people</a>. </p>
<p>My two boys received a storybook version of Shakespeare’s plays from family members some years ago, but it’s a delicate operation to tell bedtime stories about the <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fratricide">fratricide</a> in Hamlet, the domestic violence of Othello, or the romantic suicides of Romeo and Juliet. </p>
<p>Certainly, Shakespeare’s delightful comedies lend themselves more readily to the young. So taking Bell Shakespeare’s promo at its word, I took my son Heathcliff, aged 9 (who contributes to this review) to the show.</p>
<h2>Powerful presence onstage</h2>
<p>Seasoned playgoers will be thoroughly impressed by the vibrant and engaging performances of the cast, who make Shakespeare’s language (and their connections to it) ring as clear as a bell. This is harder to achieve than it sounds. </p>
<p>The delightful charisma of Matu Ngaropo as Nick Bottom (the weaver) positions him as a type of leading man. A galvanising force, Ngaropo combines refined flamboyancy and outrageous sensitivity to keep the audience firmly in his pocket. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580603/original/file-20240308-18-prhzxy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580603/original/file-20240308-18-prhzxy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580603/original/file-20240308-18-prhzxy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580603/original/file-20240308-18-prhzxy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580603/original/file-20240308-18-prhzxy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580603/original/file-20240308-18-prhzxy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580603/original/file-20240308-18-prhzxy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580603/original/file-20240308-18-prhzxy.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Matu Ngaropo was a galvanising force onstage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brett Boardman</span></span>
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<p>Ella Prince is subtle in their rendering of Puck, the sprightly spirit – so watchable in their intriguing silences and confusion when manipulating mortals.</p>
<p>Richard Pyros gives a commanding performance as Oberon: fastidious and curious, with a propensity for bellowing through the forest. Imogen Sage also shows tremendous range by delivering a sultry Titania, a restrained Hippolyta, and a librarian-esque Quince. </p>
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<span class="caption">Ella Prince as Puck, Imogen Sage as Titania and Richard Pyros as Oberon in Bell Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brett Boardman</span></span>
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<p>Finally, the four comic lovers: Hermia (Ahunim Abebe), Helena (Isabel Burton), Demetrius (Mike Howlett) and Lysander (Laurence Young), give feisty performances wholly committed to the verse.</p>
<h2>A subtle set and costumes</h2>
<p>This is Bell’s national touring play for 2024, and the <a href="https://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/2024-midsummer-dream-design-inspiration">set design</a> by Teresa Negroponte centres around a dilapidated wooden construct that looks like the roof of an old barn tipped on its side.</p>
<p>But despite this dynamic set (which might double as the shipwreck from The Tempest), there are no leaves or any sort of greenery to help indicate most of the play is set in a forest – no sylvan milieu. </p>
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<span class="caption">The set, which resembled a rundown wooden barn, didn’t effectively depict the play’s setting in a forest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brett Boardman</span></span>
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<p>Indeed, this production seems, in several instances, to presuppose the audience’s familiarity with the play. This can prove confusing for newcomers to Shakespeare.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/2024-midsummer-dream-design-inspiration">costumes are</a> intriguing and subtle if you know the play, but may also be too realistic – too bland and “everyday”. This made it difficult for young people to recognise the kings, queens and fairies.</p>
<p>For example, there was nothing fairylike about the fairies, whose costumes were almost always plain black, with no hint of glitter or sparkles in sight. </p>
<p>As Heathcliff commented: “They all changed into black clothes and called themselves fairies […] I didn’t know they were meant to be fairies until the second half […] they looked more like ghosts.”</p>
<p>“Thou shall wear <em>not</em> black costumes for fairies,” he added.</p>
<p>With actors needing to double (and sometimes triple) character roles, they quickly don a new coat, scarf or hat. But again, these distinctions may be too subtle for newcomers to recognise. </p>
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<span class="caption">Laurence Young and Ahunim Abebe played Lysander and Hermia, two of the four comic lovers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brett Boardman</span></span>
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<h2>Heathcliff’s highlights</h2>
<p>While the acting proved second-to-none, many typical features of this famous play were absent. Heathcliff found the play “entertaining, but not laugh-out-loud funny”.</p>
<p>His favourite parts were the “horse’s head”, the slow-motion sequences, the fake swords used in the ridiculous staging of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pyramus">Pyramus and Thisbe</a> at the play’s end, and “the man playing the princess” (with hairy chest exposed) – which he thought was funny but a bit odd.</p>
<p>Yet, the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe at the end delivered on its promise. Many of the audience members doubled over in stitches, throwing their heads back with laughter. </p>
<p>I’ll remember this show for the many exemplary renditions of the famous characters, but while Shakespeare’s script is itself family-friendly, the play can be confusing when many of its typical features are <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-136330433/view">pared back</a> to the bone. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-50-shades-of-shakespeare-how-the-bard-sexed-things-up-106783">Friday essay: 50 shades of Shakespeare - how the Bard sexed things up</a>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kirk Dodd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>I took my young son Heathcliff to the show, and his perspective helped me see it through a kid’s eyes.Kirk Dodd, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2233122024-02-15T19:04:36Z2024-02-15T19:04:36ZShould Taylor Swift be taught alongside Shakespeare? A professor of literature says yes<p>Does Taylor Swift’s music belong in the English classroom? No, obviously. We should teach the classics, like <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/">Shakespeare’s Sonnets</a>. After all, they have stood the test of time. It’s 2024 and he was born in 1564, and she’s only 34. What’s more, she is a pop singer, not a poet. Sliding her into the classroom would be yet another example of a dumbed-down curriculum. It’s ridiculous. It makes everyone look bad. </p>
<p>I’ve heard all that. And plenty more like it. But none of it is right. Well, the dates might be, but not the assumptions – about Shakespeare, about English, about teaching, and about Swift. </p>
<p>Swift is, by the way, a poet. She sees herself this way and her songs bear her out. In Sweet Nothing, on the <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-midnights/">Midnights</a> album, she sings:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the way home<br>
I wrote a poem<br>
You say “What a mind”<br>
This happens all the time.<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m sure it does. Swift is relentlessly productive as a songwriter. With Midnights, she picked up <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/04/entertainment/taylor-swift-album-of-the-year-grammys/index.html">her fourth Grammy for Album of the Year</a>. And here we are, on the brink of another studio album, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortured_Poets_Department">The Tortured Poets Department</a>, somehow written and produced amid the gargantuan success of Midnights and the Eras World Tour. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-did-taylor-swift-get-so-popular-she-never-goes-out-of-style-213871">How did Taylor Swift get so popular? She never goes out of style</a>
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<h2>An ally of literature</h2>
<p>Regardless of what The Tortured Poets Department ends up being about, Swift is already a firm ally of literature and reading. She is <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-donates-6000-books-to-library/">a donor of thousands of books</a> to public libraries in the United States, an advocate to schoolchildren of the importance of reading and songwriting, and a lover of the process of crafting lyrics. </p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnbCSboujF4">2016 Vogue interview</a>, Swift declared with glee that, if she were a teacher, she would teach English. The literary references in her songs are endlessly noted. “I love Shakespeare as much as the next girl,” she wrote in a <a href="https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a26546099/taylor-swift-pop-music/">2019 article for Elle</a>. </p>
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<p>Her interview Read Every Day gives a good sense of this. Swift speaks about her writing process in ways that make it accessible. She explains how songs come to her anywhere and everywhere, like an idea randomly appearing “on a cloud” that becomes the first piece in a “puzzle” that will be assembled into a song. She furtively whisper-sings song ideas into her phone when out with friends. </p>
<p>In her <a href="https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/news/read-taylor-swifts-full-nsai-songwriter-artist-of-the-decade-award-speech">acceptance speech for the Nashville Songwriter-Artist of the Decade Award</a> in 2022, Swift explained how she writes in three broad styles, imagining she is holding either a “quill”, a “fountain pen”, or a “glitter gel pen”. Songcraft is a joyous challenge for her. </p>
<p>If, as teachers of literature, we are too proud to credit Swift’s plainly expressed love of English (regardless of whether we like her songs or not), we are likely missing something. To bluntly rule her out of the English classroom feels more absurd than allowing her in. </p>
<p>Clio Doyle, a lecturer in early modern literature, has <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-taylor-swift-belongs-on-english-literature-degree-courses-219660">summarised</a> Swift’s suitability for English in a recent article which concludes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The important thing isn’t whether or not Swift might be the new Shakespeare. It’s that the discipline of English literature is flexible, capacious and open-minded. A class on reading Swift’s work as literature is just another English class, because every English class requires grappling with the idea of reading anything as literature. Even Shakespeare. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Doyle reminds us Swift’s work has been taught at universities for a while now and, inevitably, the singer’s name keeps cropping up in relation to Shakespeare. This isn’t just a case of fandom gone wild or Shakespeare professors, like <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/why-taylor-swift-is-a-literary-giant-by-a-shakespeare-professor-20230518-p5d9cn.html">Jonathan Bate</a>, gone rogue. </p>
<p>The global interest in the world-first academic <a href="https://swiftposium2024.com/">Swiftposium</a> is a good measure of how things are trending. Moreover, it is wrong to think Swift’s songs are included in units of study purely to be adored. Her wide appeal is part of her appeal to educators, but that doesn’t mean her art is uncritically included. </p>
<p>The reverse is true. Claire Hansen <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/pop-star-philosopher-poet-taylor-swift-is-shaking-up-how-we-think-20240207-p5f342.html">taught Swift in one of her literature units at the Australian National University</a> last year precisely because this influential singer-songwriter prompts students to explore the boundaries of the canon.</p>
<p>I will be teaching Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together in a literature unit at the University of Sydney this semester. Why? Not because I think Swift is as good as Shakespeare, or because I think she is not as good as Shakespeare. These statements are fine as personal opinions, but unhelpful as blanket declarations without context. The nature of English as a discipline is far more complex, interesting and valuable than a labelling and ranking exercise. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-shakespeares-sonnets-an-honest-account-of-love-and-a-surprising-portal-to-the-man-himself-156964">Guide to the classics: Shakespeare’s sonnets — an honest account of love and a surprising portal to the man himself</a>
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<h2>Teaching Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets</h2>
<p>I teach Shakespeare’s sonnets as exquisite poems, reflective of their time and culture. I also teach three modern artworks that shed contemporary light on the sonnets. </p>
<p>The first is Jen Bervin’s 2004 book <a href="https://www.jenbervin.com/projects/nets">Nets</a>. Bervin prints a selection of the sonnets, one per page, in grey text. In each of these grey sonnets, some of Shakespeare’s words and phrases are printed in black and thus stand out boldly. </p>
<p>The result is a <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/palimpsest">palimpsest</a>. The Shakespearean sonnet appears lying, like fertile soil, beneath the briefer poem that emerges from it. Bervin describes this technique as a stripping down of the sonnets to “nets” in order “to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible – a divergent elsewhere”. The creative relationship between the Shakespearean base and Bervin’s proverb-like poems proves that, as Bervin says, “when we write poems, the history of poetry is with us”. </p>
<p>The second text is Luke Kennard’s prizewinning 2021 collection <a href="https://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2021/04/notes-on-the-sonnets/">Notes on the Sonnets</a>. Kennard recasts the sonnets as a series of entertaining prose poems. Each poem responds to a specific Shakespearean sonnet, recasting it as the freewheeling thought bubble of a fictional attendee at an unappealing house party. In an interview with C.D. Rose, Kennard <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/30078-luke-kennard-interview-the-answer-to-everything-notes-on-the-sonnets">explains</a> how his house party design puts the reader </p>
<blockquote>
<p>in between a public and private space, you’re at home and you’re out, you’re free, you’re enclosed. And that’s similar in the sonnets.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The third text is Swift’s Midnights. Unlike Bervin’s and Kennard’s collections, in which individual pieces relate to specific sonnets, there is no explicit adaptation. Instead, Midnights raises broader themes. </p>
<h2>Deep connection</h2>
<p>In her Elle article, Swift describes songwriting as akin to photography. She strives to capture moments of lived experience: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The fun challenge of writing a pop song is squeezing those evocative details into the catchiest melody you can possibly think of. I thrive on the challenge of sprinkling personal mementos and shreds of reality into a genre of music that is universally known for being, well, universal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Her point is that the pop songs that “cut through the most are actually the most detailed” in their snippets of reality and biography. She says “people are reaching out for connection and comfort” and “music lovers want some biographical glimpse into the world of our narrator, a hole in the emotional walls people put up around themselves to survive”.</p>
<p>Midnights exemplifies this. It is a concept album built on the idea that midnight is a time for pursuit of and confrontation with the self – or better, the selves. Swift says the songs form “the full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour”. </p>
<p>The album, she says, is “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams” for those “who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching – hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve […] we’ll meet ourselves”.<br>
Swift claims that Midnights lets listeners in through her protective walls to enable deep connection: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I really don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before. I struggle with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized and […] I just struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Midnights is not a sonnet collection, but it has fascinating parallels. There is no firm narrative through-line. Nor is there a through-line in early modern sonnet collections such as Shakespeare’s. Instead, both gather songs and poems that let us see aspects of the singing or speaking persona’s thoughts, emotions and experiences. Shakespeare’s speaker is also troubled through the night in sonnets 27, 43 and 61.</p>
<p>The sonnets come in thematic clusters, pairs and mini-sequences. It can be interesting to ask students if they can see something similar in the order of songs on the Midnights album – or the “3am” edition with its seven extra tracks, or the “Til Dawn” edition with another three songs. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of William Shakespeare – John Taylor (1610).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shakespeare.jpg">Public domain.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, in their edition of <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/all-the-sonnets-of-shakespeare/AE1912C43BE4F50391B25B83C0C03B1F">All the Sonnets of Shakespeare</a>, say Shakespeare’s collection is “the most idiosyncratic gathering of sonnets in the period” because he “uses the sonnet form to work out his intimate thoughts and feelings”. </p>
<p>This connects very well with the agenda of Midnights. Both collections are piecemeal psychic landscapes. The singing or speaking voice sometimes feels autobiographical – compare, for example, sonnets 23, 129, 135-6 and 145 to Swift’s songs Anti-hero, You’re On Your Own, Kid, Sweet Nothing, and Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve. At other times the voices feel less autobiographical. Often there is no way to distinguish one from the other. </p>
<p>Swift’s songs and Shakespeare’s Sonnets are meditations on deeply personal aspects of their narrators’ experiences. They present us with encounters, memories, relationships, values and claims. Swift’s persona is that of a self-reflective singer, just as Shakespeare’s is that of a self-reflective sonneteer. Both focus on love in all its shades. Both present themselves as vulnerable to industry rivals and pressures. Both dwell on issues of power. </p>
<h2>Close reading</h2>
<p>Shakespeare’s sonnets are rewarding texts for close reading because of their poetic intricacy. Students can look at end rhymes and internal rhymes, the way the argument progresses through <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/quatrain">quatrains</a>, the positioning of the “turn”, which is often in line 9 or 13, and the way the final couplet wraps things up (or doesn’t). </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Title page of the first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sonnets1609titlepage.jpg">Public domain</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>The songs on Midnights are also rewarding because Swift has a great vocabulary, a love of metaphor, terrific turns of phrase, and a strong sense of symmetry and balance in wording. More complex songs like Maroon and Question…? are great for detailed analysis. </p>
<p>Karma and Mastermind are simpler, yet contain plenty of metaphoric language to be unpacked for meaning and aesthetic effectiveness. Shakespeare’s controlled use of metaphor in Sonnet 73 makes for a telling contrast. </p>
<p>The Great War, Glitch and Snow on the Beach are good for exploring how well a single extended metaphor can function to carry the meaning of a song. Sonnets 8, 18, 143 and 147 can be explored in similar terms.</p>
<p>Just as students can analyse the “turn” or concluding couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet to see how it reshapes the poem, they can do the same with songs on Midnights. Swift is known for writing effective bridges that contribute fresh, important content towards the end of a song: Sweet Nothing, Mastermind and Dear Reader are excellent examples. </p>
<p>Such unexpected pairings are valuable because they require close attention and careful articulation of what is similar and what is not. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, for example (the famous one on lust), and Swift’s Bigger than the Whole Sky (a powerful expression of loss) make for a gripping comparison of how intense feeling can be expressed poetically. </p>
<p>Or consider Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) and Sweet Nothing: both celebrate intimacy as a defence against the pressures of the public world. How about High Infidelity and Sonnet 138 (where love and self-deception coexist), considered in terms of truth in relationships? </p>
<p>There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together. There’s no dumbing-down involved. And there’s no need for reductive assertions about who is “better”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223312/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liam E Semler receives research funding from the Better Strangers project which is a collaborative education research project between the University of Sydney and Barker College. Better Strangers hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website (<a href="https://shakespearereloaded.edu.au/">https://shakespearereloaded.edu.au/</a>) and explores innovative approaches to teaching and learning Shakespeare. </span></em></p>There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together. There’s no dumbing-down, and no need for reductive assertions about who is “better”.Liam E Semler, Professor of Early Modern Literature, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2225902024-02-09T13:33:14Z2024-02-09T13:33:14ZSome of the Renaissance’s most romantic love poems weren’t for lovers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574483/original/file-20240208-16-27mgyx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C5%2C750%2C552&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sonnets still have a reputation for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Codex_Manesse_Bernger_von_Horheim.jpg">AndreasPraefcke/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As poets have demonstrated for centuries, a sonnet for your beloved never goes out of style. The gift of verse may carry extra cachet this Valentine’s Day, on the heels of Taylor Swift’s announcement that <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-tortured-poets-department-track-list-1234962007/">her next album is poetry-themed</a>. </p>
<p>But in carrying out <a href="https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463720274/petrarch-and-the-making-of-gender-in-renaissance-italy">my research on Renaissance literature and gender</a>, I’ve been struck by how many of that period’s love poems were not for lovers.</p>
<p>These sonnets, composed for friends and family, are not just beautiful; they’re also a reminder that love and Valentine’s Day aren’t exclusively for couples.</p>
<h2>The love sonnet is born</h2>
<p>The sonnet was invented in 12th century Italy as a 14-line poem with 11 beats per line and various rhyming patterns. Its originator, Giacomo da Lentini, was a poet in the Kingdom of Sicily who had been inspired by <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-heretical-origins-of-the-sonnet/">older Arabic and French poetry</a>.</p>
<p>But it was the Italian poet <a href="https://poets.org/poet/petrarch">Petrarch</a> who put the form on the map. In the 14th century, he wrote a collection of 366 poems, mostly sonnets. He penned the collection for a woman named Laura, whom he loved from afar in life and after her death.</p>
<p>Petrarch died in 1374, but his poetry became the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Petrarch/tkbVMQEACAAJ?hl=en">most widely published</a> literature of the Italian Renaissance. It was so popular that it inspired generations of poets, imitators known as “Petrarchists.” Petrarchism became a global phenomenon in the 16th and 17th centuries, spreading to Spain, France, England <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo3645653.html">and even the Americas</a>. </p>
<h2>Playing with sonneteering stereotypes</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-wyatt">Thomas Wyatt</a> is thought to have written the first English sonnets, in the early 16th century. His poems strongly relied on Petrarch; some of the best known, like “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/aug/10/poem-of-the-week-thomas-wyatt">Whoso list to hunt</a>,” are quasi-translations of the Italian poet’s work.</p>
<p>Writing <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-poems/#:%7E:text=While%20he%20may%20have%20experimented,writing%20sonnets%20seriously%20around%201592.">a half-century later</a>, Shakespeare changed the form, ending his sonnets with a rhyming couplet, giving birth to the “Shakespearean sonnet.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Title page of a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets featuring a colorful illustration of Shakespeare, flowers and two cherubs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to an unnamed young man.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/FOLGERCM1~6~6~1189282~187533:-Songs--Songs-and-sonnets--manuscri?qvq=q:112125&mi=0&trs=1#">Folger Digital Image Collection</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More than four centuries after the first printing of Shakepeare’s sonnets in 1609, his poems are still oft quoted. Many valentines will find themselves <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/read/18/">compared to a summer’s day</a> or swearing there can be no impediments between <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/read/116/">the marriage of true minds</a>.</p>
<p>Less well known, however, is the fact that half of Shakespeare’s poems were addressed to a young man, an unnamed “<a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/mysterious-identity-fair-youth/">Fair Youth</a>.” Depending on which Shakespeare scholar you ask, the gesture is either platonic, romantic or a little of both. In any case, it introduces an element of queerness, in that there’s homoeroticism and a <a href="https://huntington.org/verso/queerness-shakespeares-sonnets">challenge to what society deems natural</a>.</p>
<p>Yet today the Renaissance sonnet still has a reputation, even among scholars, for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman. But even before Shakespeare, in Renaissance Italy, the sonnet was a lot more varied than that.</p>
<h2>For friends and lovers</h2>
<p>For starters, even Petrarch wrote about more than just his love for Laura. </p>
<p>A number of his poems were composed for friends, with several of them for the Florentine poet <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/petrarchs-plague/#p-3-0">Sennuccio del Bene</a>. In <a href="https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=113">poem 113</a>, Petrarch writes about returning to the region where Laura was born, but he opens by describing his love for his friend, saying he is only “half” himself without Sennuccio, and that both men would only be “whole” and “happy” if they were together.</p>
<p><a href="https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=287">Poem 287</a> is a sonnet on Sennuccio’s death, in which Petrarch’s mourning is only mitigated by the knowledge that his friend is in heaven with other great poets, like Dante, and the now-deceased Laura. The short poem mixes his love and grief for both people, his beloved and his friend.</p>
<p>Today’s “<a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a26052713/galentines-day/">Galentine’s Day</a>” – a celebration of female friendship – has yet to spawn a male-friendship-centered “<a href="https://theconversation.com/galentines-day-has-become-a-thing-why-hasnt-malentines-day-130862">Malentine’s Day</a>.” </p>
<p>But platonic love between men carried no stigma in the Renaissance. Take the verses of Venetian writers <a href="https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/orsatto-giustinian_(Dizionario-Biografico)/">Orsatto Giustinian</a> and <a href="https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/celio-magno/">Celio Magno</a>, who published their poetry in a single book in 1601. </p>
<p>Magno and Giustinian portray their friendship with the vocabulary of Petrarchan love. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rime_di_Celio_Magno_et_Orsatto_Giustinia/SI81w2hdFcMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA160&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22tu%20non%20viui%22">In one sonnet</a>, Magno describes how he hates being separated from his friend, which is almost like being severed from himself: “You do not live, I do not live; together we are far from ourselves in this bitter state.” </p>
<p>At the risk of being the <a href="https://archermagazine.com.au/2021/03/heteronormativity-popular-history/">“and-they-were-roommates” historian</a>, I’ll note that the book also contains passionate poems from Giustinian to his wife, Candiana Garzoni. </p>
<p>That doesn’t cancel out the homoerotic tension in the men’s poems to each other, but it does make classifying their sexuality challenging. And maybe this shouldn’t be the point. If anything, their <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a46410977/broad-city-10th-anniversary-loving-your-best-friend/">romantic friendship</a> seems to skirt simple categories of sexual orientation. </p>
<h2>Sororal sentiment</h2>
<p>Most published writers in Renaissance Italy were men, but a not-insignificant number <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Five-Women-Shaped-Italian-Renaissance/dp/0367533995">were women</a>. Existing in a single copy in a library in Siena, Italy, is a joint poetry collection written by two sisters, Speranza Vittoria and Giulia di Bona. They lived with their mother and four other sisters.</p>
<p>Their sisters Lucrezia and Cassandra both died at a young age. The sonnets that Speranza and Giulia <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=ahDhW3sAAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=ahDhW3sAAAAJ:Zph67rFs4hoC">composed for them</a> take the sort of heartbreaking imagery used to describe a lost partner, but is repurposed to portray their grief: the swan song, the sun gone dark, the poet’s wish to die in order to be near the object of their love. </p>
<p>In one melancholic poem about Lucrezia’s death, Speranza weeps for the “strange place, dark earth, and bitter stone” that “possess” her sister, and thus her own happiness.</p>
<p>The poems traded between Speranza and Giulia are brighter, exhibiting an abundance of love and admiration. In one pair of sonnets, written playfully yet impressively with matching rhyme words, the two liken each other to white ermines, <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/lady-with-an-ermine/HwHUpggDy_HxNQ?hl=en&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22z%22%3A8.872019804523145%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A2.7206646564529637%2C%22height%22%3A1.2375000000000012%7D%7D">an animal considered a symbol of moral virtue</a>. </p>
<h2>Love is big</h2>
<p>There are so many other Renaissance Italian poems written for friends, parents, children and grandchildren – not to mention fiery love poems dedicated to Jesus and the saints, some by clerics, like <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv15d81vf?turn_away=true">Angelo Grillo</a>.</p>
<p>They serve as reminders of what the love poem can be. They push back against narratives that champion heterosexual relationships or that tout <a href="https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/teaching-premodern-asexualities-and-aromanticisms-908cc375af12">romantic coupling and sexual attraction</a> of any orientation as the most important relationship in a person’s life, <a href="https://theconversation.com/single-on-valentines-day-and-happily-so-155191">minimizing the importance of other loving relationships</a>.</p>
<p>These poems also encourage everyone to think more expansively about their own love and home lives. As an unmarried mother of a 5-year-old – and as someone who has only ever lived with friends or siblings – I have benefited immensely from <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/01/1216043849/bringing-up-a-baby-can-be-a-tough-and-lonely-job-heres-a-solution-alloparents">alloparenting</a>, the care provided for my son by all of the nonparents in his life.</p>
<p>I ended up in these living situations in part because of the pandemic, which, in a way, was a form of luck: Sometimes it takes a disruptive event <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-rhaina-cohen.html">to break cultural expectations</a> for the nuclear family and childrearing.</p>
<p>If writers could describe different types of love during the Renaissance, why limit what we can envision for ourselves?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222590/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shannon McHugh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>These moving poems are a reminder that on Valentine’s Day, it’s OK to celebrate a broader definition of love.Shannon McHugh, Associate Professor of French and Italian, UMass BostonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2196602024-01-02T11:01:25Z2024-01-02T11:01:25ZWhy Taylor Swift belongs on English literature degree courses<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565475/original/file-20231213-25-cnwmvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C6038%2C4019&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Taylor Swift performs at Madison Square Garden in New York, 2019. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/new-york-ny-usa-december-13-2003958017">Brian Friedman/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When I started my podcast, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/studies-in-taylor-swift/id1560911222">Studies in Taylor Swift</a>, in the spring of 2021, I felt that I was simultaneously helping to invent, and trying to catch up to, the academic discipline of Taylor Swift studies. Though there wasn’t much published on reading Swift as literature, I had no trouble finding guests who had some kind of experience teaching Swift or thinking academically about her lyrics. </p>
<p>I went on to design a summer school course at Queen Mary University of London on <a href="https://www.qmul.ac.uk/summer-school/what-can-i-study/modules/taylor-swift-and-literature.html">Taylor Swift and Literature</a> in 2023. My course <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/taylor-swift-course-queen-mary-london-university-b1110058.html">made the news</a> – but only because a journalist writing about a <a href="https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/belgian-university-enters-new-era-with-taylor-swift-course-185634">similar class at Ghent University</a> in Belgium got in touch, asking me to confirm that my class had been taught first. In fact, a <a href="https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/news/ut-english-course-takes-a-swift-turn">class</a> at The University of Texas at Austin in 2022 was the first literature class on Swift to gain media attention.</p>
<h2>Dear reader</h2>
<p>Even before that, however, Swift had been in English departments for a while. For example, after her song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-a8s8OLBSE">cardigan</a> came out in 2020, I used it to teach students an introductory English class on the basics of close reading – a form of studying a text that examines specific details. </p>
<p>We talked about the line “You drew stars around my scars / But now I’m bleedin’”. The idea was to try to figure out how the “but” worked – whether the scars had reopened or new ones had been created. We discussed whether drawing stars around the speaker’s scars meant making art out of her pain, or drawing attention away from it, or fetishising it, or even planning future harm to her body.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zLSUp53y-HQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Lyric video of the song cardigan, from Taylor Swift’s 2020 album Folklore.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Beyond English literature, other departments such as media studies, fan studies and celebrity studies have already produced a fair amount of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gcmr20/40/1">published research</a> on Swift’s life and career. </p>
<p>But before she became the topic of lectures and seminars, Swift’s work was something that a lot of people – including our students – were already reading and discussing with the kind of attention often granted to texts in literature classrooms. </p>
<p>This is something Swift encourages with her elaborate system of interconnected references. For example, her 2022 song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvHZjvIyqsk">Maroon</a> is an older, more mature version of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_rUYuFtNO4">Red</a> – also the title of her 2012 album about a doomed love affair. This fits her tendency, as in cardigan, to use images of blood and rust to describe the sticky, difficult end of a relationship. </p>
<p>With this awareness of Swift’s larger body of work, Maroon becomes more than a song about one failed relationship. It is also a song about the speaker herself, someone who keeps getting “marooned” on the shores of the past.</p>
<h2>Hits different</h2>
<p>Swift’s work is by no means the first incursion of recent popular culture into academia. Many universities offer courses on Harry Potter, while the first thing I taught, as a guest seminar leader in another academic’s course, was Fifty Shades of Grey. </p>
<p>On the other hand, there is clearly something about the idea of classes on Taylor Swift as literature that catches the popular imagination. In media discussions, her name is sometimes juxtaposed with another one: Shakespeare.</p>
<p>When scholar Sir Jonathan Bate wrote an <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-taylor-swift-is-a-literary-giant-by-a-shakespeare-professor-3fmh269bt">article praising Swift’s work</a>, the fact he was a Shakespeare professor was dwelt on in the article’s headline and subhead (he is, in fact, currently a professor of environmental humanities). The Times published Bate’s article alongside <a href="https://twitter.com/thetimes/status/1645115063882199042">a quiz</a> asking readers whether Swift or Shakespeare had written a particular line. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1645115063882199042"}"></div></p>
<p>When the medievalist Elizabeth Scala taught a class reading Swift alongside many other writers, the fact that Shakespeare was being taught next to Swift was again brought up in <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/taylor-swift-university-degree-texas-b2151492.html">media coverage</a>. Scala, despite being a professor of medieval romance, historiography and culture, was described as a “Shakespeare scholar” in <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/taylor-swift-latest-addition-university-texas-course-offering-1735821">one headline</a>.</p>
<p>This emphasis on Swift’s new proximity, and potential similarity, to the most famous English language writer makes me think that the interest in classes on Taylor Swift and literature is led not so much by an interest in Swift being taught, but in her being an “author”. </p>
<p>The fact we are close-reading Swift’s words in a university setting is presented – whether this is bemoaned or celebrated – as a challenge to Shakespeare’s supremacy as the subject of literary study. But this is born from a popular misconception about what it is we do in literature classes – even Shakespeare classes.</p>
<p>Despite a shift in English literature since at least the 1960s away from thinking about authors as self-contained, important, authoritative figures, to thinking about texts that are formed by various societal and linguistic currents, we are still perceived as teaching not texts but particular authors – especially Shakespeare. </p>
<p>However, as someone who teaches the writings of both Shakespeare and Swift, I can say this: teaching each of them leads to the same conversations about how a popular form (whether dramatic writing or song lyrics) takes on literary value, and how hard it is to separate what we think and how we feel about a work from the value we are taught to give to it by its place in society. </p>
<p>The important thing isn’t whether or not Swift might be the new Shakespeare. It’s that the discipline of English literature is flexible, capacious and open-minded. A class on reading Swift’s work as literature is just another English class, because every English class requires grappling with the idea of reading anything as literature. Even Shakespeare.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219660/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clio Doyle teaches a class on Taylor Swift and Literature at the Queen Mary Summer School.</span></em></p>Miss Americana has been discussed in English literature classes for some years now – sometimes alongside Shakespeare.Clio Doyle, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature, Queen Mary University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2173242023-11-10T14:21:18Z2023-11-10T14:21:18ZRestorers uncover demon in a 1789 painting – and reveal the decline of superstition in the Age of Reason<p>Recent news that <a href="https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/services/media/fiend-re-emerges-from-the-canvas-of-joshua-reynolds-painting">restorers had uncovered</a> the image of a Gothic-looking demon in a late work by <a href="https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/sir-joshua-reynolds">Sir Joshua Reynolds</a> (1723-1792) seems fitting for these long, dark evenings. The sinister face hovers above the head of a dying clergyman in The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, painted in 1789. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mxxz6">Fake-or-Fortune-style</a> reveals such as this, where Reynolds’s hollow-eyed fiend re-emerges, fanged and uncanny from the gloom of centuries of overpainting, are always popular with the public. But what are we to make of Reynolds’s devilish detail in his painting, and how does it fit into the larger story of demonic representation in the art and literature of the 18th century?</p>
<p>First of all, we can be sure that the painted demon was put there by Reynolds because it was <a href="https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/services/media/fiend-re-emerges-from-the-canvas-of-joshua-reynolds-painting">much discussed at the time</a>. The scene of the dying cardinal comes from Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II. Witnessing bedside the death throes of Beaufort – a corrupt, mad and guilt-ridden figure – King Henry beseeches God to drive away “the busy meddling fiend / That lays strong siege unto this wretch’s soul”.</p>
<p>In Shakespeare’s writing, this fiend is a figure of speech, a metaphor for mental torment. Unconventionally for a painter at the time, Reynolds gives a face to this devil, and makes the fiend a visible being. It leers out of the shadows, behind Beaufort’s pillow, a grotesque detail out of character in Reynolds’s usual art of grand portraiture and soberly historical picture subjects.</p>
<p>Reynolds’s contemporaries were deeply critical of the inclusion of this demonic creature in an otherwise traditional history painting. Doubtless this had to do with Reynolds’s official status as the president of <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/about-the-ra">the Royal Academy of Arts</a> (which champions art and artists) and author of 15 lectures on art, known as <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/archive/papers-relating-to-reynoldss-discourses">the Discourses</a>. The art theory of the day, as far as history painting was concerned, favoured improving subjects, rendered in an idealised manner, but taken from the life. There was little room for the fantastical or the macabre, for several reasons.</p>
<h2>Demons in the Age of Reason</h2>
<p>Broadly speaking, the Age of Reason saw “the death of Satan”, when science and rational thought sought to replace the religious superstitions of the previous century. Devils and demons, since they couldn’t be proven to exist in this new era of factual enquiry, lost much of their fear-driven religious power as tangible beings at loose in the world, sent to punish sinners.</p>
<p>Yet demons didn’t altogether disappear. In literature, they left the realm of physical possibility and entered the mind as metaphors for the human struggle between good and evil. As such, demons retained their moral function of teaching good souls how not to behave. Now the punishment for sin was not eternal damnation but the threat of a far more real internal mental conflict, madness and even suicide.</p>
<p>In the new genre of the novel, especially, writers could still explore the dark forces working beneath the surface of the human condition through devilish allusions while reassuring readers that good moral conduct was within their own control. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxanna (1724), or Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), demons don’t appear as such, but the behaviour of key characters is <a href="https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI13427425/">repeatedly described in devilish language</a>.</p>
<p>The most frightening concepts, it was thought, were best left as suggestions of the mind. Embodied devils and demons only appeared on stage or in the Gothic novel later in the 18th century. In the latter they were often found in disguise, as in MG Lewis’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Monk">Ambrosio the Monk</a> (1796).</p>
<p>In art, the shift towards the Gothic was influenced by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825). His painting The Nightmare showed a real-looking demon, larger than life, crouching on the body of a sleeping woman. The imp caused a sensation when the painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1782.</p>
<p>Fuseli earned the <a href="https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:786">nickname</a> “Painter in Ordinary to the Devil”, and was influential in London for his visionary images in this newly fashionable style. One such fan was Sir Joshua Reynolds, who became closely acquainted with Fuseli and an admirer of his work.</p>
<p>In 1789, they both contributed paintings to <a href="https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Marketing_Shakespeare:_the_Boydell_Gallery,_1789%E2%80%931805,_%26_Beyond">John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery</a>, a commercial exhibition space on Pall Mall which commissioned the best artists of the day to make pictures of subjects taken from Shakespeare.</p>
<p>This was the context for Reynolds’s fiend in The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, which appeared in that exhibition. Tellingly, Fuseli had already shown a <a href="https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/artifact/death-of-cardinal-beaufort">drawing of the same subject</a> at the Royal Academy as early as 1772, a work in which Beaufort’s own face took on a demonic look with reference to his internal possession.</p>
<p>By the 1780s, Shakespearean fiends were common among Boydell’s artists. <a href="https://www.romney-society.org.uk/about-the-artist.html">George Romney</a> (1734-1802) made <a href="https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explore-our-collection/highlights/BV136">several sketches</a> of other scenes in Henry VI Parts I and II where demons are conjured up by characters, and a painting of Joan of Arc doing the same, now lost.</p>
<p>Demons and devils visibly re-entered the art of the 18th century in the realm of satire. Here, in the monochrome print, winged or inky black devils became symbols for a host of contemporary social problems. <a href="https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/william-hogarth">Hogarth</a> spoofed the religious convictions of the Methodist Church by having a little <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/400082">devil whisper in the ear of a sleeping congregant</a>.</p>
<p>Satirist <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/index.php?id=3160">James Gillray</a> pilloried the scourge of the 18th-century gluttonous diet, the painful condition of gout, <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw62371/The-gout">depicting it as a sharp-toothed demon</a>, sinking its fangs into a well-fed human foot. </p>
<p>Thus in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, far from losing the plot, the ageing Reynolds was part of a revolution in art that saw the demons of the imagination, so beloved of 18th-century literature, brought back vividly into the visual realm.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217324/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jenny Graham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Enlightenment saw science and rational thought replace the religious superstitions of the previous century, and demons became metaphors for the human struggle between good and evil.Jenny Graham, Associate Professor in Art History, University of PlymouthLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2155972023-10-17T19:06:57Z2023-10-17T19:06:57ZAustralian theatre companies are shunning Shakespeare. A much-needed break, or a mistake?<p>A decade ago, William Shakespeare was the <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/australian-theatre-exhausted-and-waning-claims-director-and-academic-julian-meyrick-20140508-zr6ph.html">most performed playwright in Australia</a>. In 2024 not one mainstage theatre company in Australia will perform Shakespeare. The only exception will be Bell Shakespeare. </p>
<p>This shift has been a long time coming. Theatre makers such as <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/we-should-ban-shakespeare-from-the-stage-for-five-years-20160502-gojv86.html">Lachlan Philpott</a>, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2021-28-10/13596856">Nakkiah Lui</a> and <a href="https://dailyreview.com.au/andrew-bovell-i-as-an-australian-playwright-am-up-for-the-fight/">Andrew Bovell</a> have been calling for less Shakespeare and more new work since the mid-2010s. </p>
<p>Today, their advocacy is bearing fruit. </p>
<p>Of the 79 plays being performed in 2024, 68 (87%) were written after 2000, 60 (76%) were written after 2014, and 23 (29%) will have their world premiere in 2024. Only three were written prior to the 20th century – and that’s if you count <a href="https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2024/dracula">Kip Williams’ new adaptation of Dracula</a>, alongside Bell Shakespeare’s two plays.</p>
<p>New work is important. A truly rich cultural conversation must include a variety of voices and fresh perspectives. But alongside new work and new voices, nuanced engagement with the past is needed.</p>
<p><iframe id="tc-infographic-944" class="tc-infographic" height="400px" src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/infographics/944/5a8b35004a978ff351142be5e221553e2378e0af/site/index.html" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>A forum for conversations</h2>
<p>Shakespeare is important, not just because he wrote great plays, and definitely not because he is perfect. He is important because we have, for 400 years, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Big-Time-Shakespeare/Bristol/p/book/9780415060172"><em>made</em> him important</a>, using his work to have rich conversations about identity, truth, meaning and morality. </p>
<p>These conversations are worth participating in. </p>
<p>Australia’s mainstage <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781003176138-1/introduction-chris-hay-stephen-carleton">comprises 11 companies</a>: State Theatre Company of South Australia in Adelaide; Queensland Theatre and La Boite Theatre in Brisbane; Melbourne Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne; Black Swan State Theatre Company in Perth; and Belvoir, Bell Shakespeare, Griffin Theatre Company, Ensemble Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney. All except La Boite have announced their 2024 seasons.</p>
<p>The fact that none of these companies will perform Shakespeare next year suggests a decline in engagement with the canon outside of adaptations. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554107/original/file-20231016-21-wgyabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554107/original/file-20231016-21-wgyabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554107/original/file-20231016-21-wgyabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554107/original/file-20231016-21-wgyabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554107/original/file-20231016-21-wgyabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554107/original/file-20231016-21-wgyabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554107/original/file-20231016-21-wgyabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554107/original/file-20231016-21-wgyabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edwin Landseer, Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania and Bottom (1848-1851). Oil on canvas 82.0×133.0cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1932. Photo: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This decline is, in some ways, justified. We don’t need to perform Shakespeare all the time. We certainly don’t need to trot out tired, uninspired performances just for the sake of doing Shakespeare. </p>
<p>But if new work is not in conversation with the canon, we risk taking an uncritical and oversimplified view of the past – and present and future. We risk understanding ourselves merely through the lens of now, rather than enriching our present through discussion with our history. </p>
<p>Playwrights <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/we-should-ban-shakespeare-from-the-stage-for-five-years-20160502-gojv86.html">Philpott</a> and <a href="https://dailyreview.com.au/andrew-bovell-i-as-an-australian-playwright-am-up-for-the-fight/">Bovell</a> have expressed understandable frustration at productions tying themselves in knots trying to make Shakespeare “relevant”. If your aim is to make the text reflect modern values, why not simply perform a new play? </p>
<p>Perhaps we do need a break from Shakespeare if all we can do is insist he is always, and in all things, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Shakespeare_Our_Contemporary.html?id=QIrdQfCMnfQC&redir_esc=y">our contemporary</a>. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shakespeares-environmentalism-how-his-plays-explore-the-same-ecological-issues-we-face-today-202891">Shakespeare's environmentalism: how his plays explore the same ecological issues we face today</a>
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<h2>Critical engagement</h2>
<p>There is an alternative to this false dilemma. We are not restricted to either using Shakespeare as a sock puppet to voice our own ideas, or ignoring him altogether. Rather, we can perform Shakespeare in a critically engaged, nuanced way. </p>
<p>This means avoiding easy categories like “problematic” or “universal”. Like any fruitful conversation, it means listening, sitting with discomfort, learning, recognising what still speaks to us, and responding to what doesn’t. </p>
<p>Conversing with Shakespeare does not mean smoothing over problems or forcing him to agree with us. Sydney Theatre Company’s 2022 production of The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, attempted to correct the play’s racism by radically editing the text. </p>
<p>By trying to solve The Tempest, the production glossed over its problems rather than engaging critically with them. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/weve-been-editing-shakespeares-plays-for-400-years-but-does-a-new-australian-production-of-the-tempest-idealise-the-bard-194635">We've been editing Shakespeare's plays for 400 years – but does a new Australian production of The Tempest idealise the Bard?</a>
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<p>There are excellent examples of Australian theatre makers grappling with problems in Shakespeare. </p>
<p>Anne-Louise Sarks’ 2017 production of The Merchant of Venice for Bell Shakespeare explored the uncomfortable religious and social dynamics of the play. </p>
<p>The scenes in which Shylock is forced to surrender both his property and his faith were jarringly and uncomfortably melancholy. There was no attempt to shrug off the pain of the play’s conclusion for Shylock and his daughter Jessica. </p>
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<p>Jason Klarwein and Jimi Bani’s 2022 Othello at Queensland Theatre used translation, casting and design choices to confront and interrogate the themes of the play. </p>
<p>This production explored and highlighted racism and sexism, both in 20th century Australia, and within the play itself. </p>
<p>Othello has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_es_tmOYY5I">a vexed performance history</a>, and this production was an important contribution to a 400-year-old conversation. </p>
<p>In Benedict Andrews’ 2009 production of The War of the Roses for Sydney Theatre Company, Shakespeare’s Henry V was stripped back to a series of soliloquies spoken by Ewen Leslie. </p>
<p>Covered in glitter, then oil, and eventually blood, Leslie as Henry V invited audiences to confront not only the humanity of “the warlike Harry”, but also the horror associated with his military triumph.</p>
<h2>Talking back to history</h2>
<p>By confronting – rather than avoiding, removing or “fixing” problems in Shakespeare – productions can invite audiences to ask important questions. Why have certain ideas been acceptable in the past? Why are they not so now? What are we doing differently today, and what should we be doing differently?</p>
<p>Nuanced, two-way conversations with our cultural history are vital to progress. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/decolonising-shakespeare-setting-othello-in-ghana-and-pericles-in-glasgow-174166">Decolonising the canon</a> does not mean ignoring it, but dialoguing with it. It means learning from, questioning, and talking back to our history. Doing this will allow us to better understand our present and know who we would like to be in our future. </p>
<p>Of the 79 works being performed on the 2024 Australian mainstage, 68 were written in the new millennium. Shifting the balance of old and new ever-so-slightly would enrich our cultural conversation. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-you-extract-a-pound-of-flesh-without-blood-how-the-power-struggles-in-shakespearean-drama-speak-to-an-age-of-decolonisation-196567">Can you extract a pound of flesh without blood? How the power struggles in Shakespearean drama speak to an age of decolonisation</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215597/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caitlin West previously completed an industry placement at Bell Shakespeare.</span></em></p>Shakespeare will be all but absent at Australian theatres in 2024 – but we need to embrace the complexities of the canon, not shy away from it.Caitlin West, PhD Candidate in Drama and Theatre Studies, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2127052023-10-12T03:48:47Z2023-10-12T03:48:47ZVenus and Adonis: this ‘play within a plague’ about Shakespeare is wildly romantic, erotic and colourful<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553128/original/file-20231010-23-zewfin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C0%2C1071%2C717&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kate Williams/Seymour Centre and Sport For Jove</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Shakespeare wrote his famous narrative poem <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_and_Adonis_(Shakespeare_poem)">Venus and Adonis</a> in a lockdown era when, in 1593, the <a href="https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/speaking-what-we-feel-shakespeares-plague-plays/">bubonic plague</a> closed the theatres in London for 18 months. </p>
<p>In Shakespeare’s poem Venus, the Roman goddess of love, continuously tries to seduce the human Adonis, who would rather go hunting with the lads than be caught kissing a goddess. </p>
<p>Shakespeare’s poem liberates female desire by having Venus lament that Adonis won’t gratify her sexually. Shakespeare makes Venus physically larger than Adonis, who struggles to defuse her lust. At one stage, Venus rips Adonis off his horse to carry him under her arm. </p>
<p>Although Adonis resists Venus, the sensuous eros in the verse of Shakespeare’s clever treatment certainly helped to drive its popularity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemmed thee here <br>
Within the circuit of this ivory pale, <br>
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; <br>
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: <br>
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, <br>
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Shakespeare’s poem has been called the <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-50-shades-of-shakespeare-how-the-bard-sexed-things-up-106783">Fifty Shades of Grey of its day</a> – a trite comparison in literary terms, but a fair comparison for its commercial popularity and erotic content. </p>
<p>Educated young men – and Queen Elizabeth I, according to Damien Ryan’s new play – kept a copy of the narrative poem under their pillow. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553130/original/file-20231010-19-f56yvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman reads over a fire." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553130/original/file-20231010-19-f56yvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553130/original/file-20231010-19-f56yvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553130/original/file-20231010-19-f56yvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553130/original/file-20231010-19-f56yvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553130/original/file-20231010-19-f56yvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553130/original/file-20231010-19-f56yvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553130/original/file-20231010-19-f56yvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Copies of the poem were reportedly kept under pillows.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kate Williams/Seymour Centre and Sport For Jove</span></span>
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<p>Ryan touts his Venus and Adonis as a "play within a plague”, yet it is more daring and ambitious than a mere adaptation of the poem. Here we have a speculative history play that culminates in Shakespeare (Anthony Gooley) and his actors performing his famous erotic poem before the queen (Belinda Giblin). </p>
<p>Ryan’s company Sport for Jove was initially forced to shoot the play as a film during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, so a “play within a plague” seems very apt. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-50-shades-of-shakespeare-how-the-bard-sexed-things-up-106783">Friday essay: 50 shades of Shakespeare - how the Bard sexed things up</a>
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<h2>Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral</h2>
<p>With super-dynamic set design and costumes by Damien Ryan and Bernadette Ryan, Venus and Adonis is largely comical, but also tragic; wildly romantic, yet erotic and colourful. </p>
<p>We jump from the rooms of an Elizabethan doctor, who earns his bread-and-butter treating sexually transmitted diseases, to Shakespeare’s bedroom in London and his entanglements with his mistress <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilia_Lanier">Aemilia Lanyer</a> (Adele Querol), a proto-feminist poet who became the first English woman to publish her own poetry in her own name in 1611. </p>
<p>Shakespeare helps Lanyer with her quest to publish (at the same time stealing her ideas for his own verse), but tragedy strikes home in Stratford with the loss of Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet. But soon Shakespeare’s company is called to perform his popular poem before the queen.</p>
<p>The editors of the First Folio might ask if this play is a comedy, history or tragedy. Perhaps Ryan would call on Hamlet’s Polonius to declare this play a very fine “<a href="https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m2846&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF">tragical-comical-historical-pastoral</a>”.</p>
<p>Ryan’s bawdy realism renders Shakespeare with many endearing quirks: his syphilis, his nakedness, his sexual affairs, his bi-curiosity, his laconic demeanour, his bewilderment at his own abilities, and the neglect of his family in Stratford. </p>
<p>But Ryan also consciously aims to liberate three women who influenced Shakespeare, often eclipsed by the shadow of Shakespeare’s monolithic achievements. </p>
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<span class="caption">Ryan consciously aims to liberate three women who influenced Shakespeare.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kate Williams/Seymour Centre and Sport For Jove</span></span>
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<p>Clearly attracted to verse, Aemilia Lanyer is construed as the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Lady_(Shakespeare)">Dark Lady</a>” mistress of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Querol drives the energy of the play to become its co-protagonist.</p>
<p>Bernadette Ryan plays a searing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hathaway_(wife_of_Shakespeare)">Agnes Hathaway</a>, Shakespeare’s neglected wife, too jaded by his absence to relish the sweetness of their romantic youth. </p>
<p>Giblin’s Queen Elizabeth is a cantankerous, yet savvy, f-Bomb-dropping patron of the arts. In one breath she pontificates as an elderly virgin queen; in the next she orders two athletic performers to her bedroom.</p>
<h2>A vivid telling</h2>
<p>The second act, concerning the rehearsal and performance of Shakespeare’s poem before the queen, rollicks forward like a rollercoaster that has, until then, climbed incrementally through the first act. </p>
<p>The second half intertwines multiple strands of drama and intrigue. The queen sits amid the audience and comments on the action (hilariously) in ways we wouldn’t dare. Her attending ladies swoon for handsome Adonis, who wishes he was Venus kissing the boys. </p>
<p>The performance goes off the rails, but the poetry shines, and the queen compares it to the brilliant work of a female poet she has just read – not realising the poet, Lanyer, has been playing Venus. Then enters the ghost of young Hamnet…</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553129/original/file-20231010-25-ivx64a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Production image" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553129/original/file-20231010-25-ivx64a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553129/original/file-20231010-25-ivx64a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553129/original/file-20231010-25-ivx64a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553129/original/file-20231010-25-ivx64a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553129/original/file-20231010-25-ivx64a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553129/original/file-20231010-25-ivx64a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553129/original/file-20231010-25-ivx64a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The play culminates in a performance of Shakespeare’s poem.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kate Williams/Seymour Centre and Sport For Jove</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The action is admirably supported by Shakespeare’s leading man, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Burbage">Richard Burbage</a> (Christopher Tomkinson), his leading clown <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Armin">Robert Armin</a> (Kevin MacIsaac) and Shakespeare’s grown up “boy player” <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Field">Nathaniel Field</a> (Jerome Meyer), utterly appalled he must play the male Adonis instead of Venus. </p>
<p>Ryan capably navigates the diverse space of the cross-dressing rehearsal room and the queered space of poetic patronage and sonnet sequence circulation. </p>
<p>If Polonius never quite envisioned what he meant by a “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”, Ryan’s Venus and Adonis delivers this hybrid form vividly in spades.</p>
<p><em>Venus and Adonis from Sport for Jove is at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, until October 21.</em></p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hamlet-a-play-that-speaks-to-pandemics-past-and-present-165106">Hamlet: a play that speaks to pandemics past and present</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212705/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kirk Dodd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>This new work from Sport for Jove is more daring and ambitious than a mere adaptation of Shakespeare’s poem.Kirk Dodd, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2146622023-09-29T16:15:44Z2023-09-29T16:15:44ZMichael Gambon: an unshowy actor of enormous range and charm<p><a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/michael-gambon-dies-harry-potter-dumbledore-2bcmw9zc2">Sir Michael Gambon</a>, who died on September 28 at the age of 82, was a hugely versatile actor who enjoyed numerous and varied roles in film and television throughout the course of his long career. </p>
<p>Gambon was also a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/sep/28/michael-gambon-obituary">titan of the theatre</a>. His major theatrical roles include Shakespeare’s Othello, King Lear and Falstaff, and Brecht’s Galileo, together with starring roles in works by the finest contemporary playwrights of his era: Beckett, Pinter, Churchill, Hare, Gray and Ayckbourn.</p>
<p>But the reality of theatre is that aside from newspaper cuttings of rave reviews and the fading memories of theatre-goers, very little record of these performances can actually survive for posterity. It is through film and television most audiences know Gambon and these are the media through which his image and presence will continue to circulate far into the future. </p>
<h2>The acclaimed Singing Detective</h2>
<p>Despite recent media obit headlines, Gambon was not just about <a href="https://www.wizardingworld.com/fact-file/characters-and-pets/albus-dumbledore">Dumbledore and Harry Potter</a>. Indeed it was <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/451441/index.html">another Potter – Dennis</a>, not Harry – through which Gambon first became a household name. In 1986, he starred as lead character Philip Marlow in the TV playwright’s most successful and seminal work for BBC TV, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/november/the-singing-detective/">The Singing Detective</a>.</p>
<p>Covered in abrasive lesions and scales from a condition that also afflicted Potter in real life, Gambon’s wracked and hospitalised visage became an iconic part of 1980s British TV culture. The grotesque and tormented character in his hospital bed imagined doctors and nurses dancing all around him as they mimed to old 1940s big-band tunes.</p>
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<p>But watch Gambon more carefully over the course of the six episodes and we get a masterclass in bravura performance. The serial could not have worked without Gambon at its core, making the audience believe in the character’s emotional journey from extreme despair and misanthropy, to more optimistic self-acceptance and a sense of equanimity at its close.</p>
<p>The serial’s director, Jon Amiel, insisted on Gambon for the role, knowing the actor would have the ability to embody not just Marlow’s rage but also, crucially, his vulnerability. This was vital for the audience to go on an emotional journey with the character, learning to peer behind all the anger, railing and self-loathing to the root causes that lay beneath.</p>
<p>And this is exactly we see. Amid all the flashbacks, fantasy sequences and musical numbers, it is Gambon to which the camera always returns as his eyes flash or his face tenses and another unwanted fantasy or forbidden memory begins to surface. It was a towering performance which would go on to win him the Bafta for best actor in 1987. </p>
<h2>Swashbucklers, gangsters, aristos</h2>
<p>The success of The Singing Detective divides Gambon’s TV and film career. Before that, he had acted in a range of plays for television in the heyday of the single play era when drama slots such as <a href="https://www2.bfi.org.uk/archive-collections/introduction-bfi-collections/bfi-mediatheques/play-for-today">Play for Today</a> (BBC 1970-84), ITV <a href="https://thetvdb.com/series/itv-playhouse">Playhouse</a> (1967-83) and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00l2wcq/episodes/guide">Play of the Month</a> (BBC 1965-83) peppered the TV schedules.</p>
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<p>But he also tried series acting, including an early part as a Scottish swashbuckler in 26 episodes of the 16th-century period drama, <a href="https://nostalgiacentral.com/television/tv-by-decade/tv-shows-1960s/borderers-the/">The Borderers</a>, made for BBC Scotland between 1968 and 1970.</p>
<p>In 1985, Gambon took the title role in the three-part BBC2 serial Oscar, about the life of Oscar Wilde. This gained him critical praise and TV industry attention ahead of being cast in The Singing Detective. Soon Gambon’s screen acting career was flourishing as more television and cinema opportunities came his way. </p>
<p>Interestingly, there is often a division between his “rage” and “vulnerability” parts. In the former camp, there are Gambon’s coruscating turns as various species of gangster, beginning perhaps most memorably with his role as Albert Spica in director Peter Greenaway’s film <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-cook-the-thief-his-wife-and-her-lover-1999">The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover</a> (1989).</p>
<p>Here, we see extreme levels of rage and misanthropy as Gambon channels the utter despicability lying right at the heart of his character Spica’s name. By the end of the film, Spica embodies all the horrors of conspicuous consumption Greenaway clearly loathed about the 1980s. </p>
<p>If not quite as vivid in their depictions of pure evil, other memorable villain roles would follow, including a warmongering general in Toys (1992) and ruthless Irish rancher in the western Open Range (2003) – both made for Hollywood – as well as wealthy crimelord Eddie Temple in the hit British crime film Layer Cake (2004).</p>
<p>But in amongst the variety of gangsters and villains, not to mention haughty aristocrats in British period films such as Gosford Park (2002) and The King’s Speech (2010), we also see the more vulnerable side of Gambon’s characters, sometimes running parallel to the gruff exterior. </p>
<h2>Older wiser characters</h2>
<p>What pleased Gambon so much about being given the role of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter franchise (taking over from fellow Irish actor Richard Harris who died in 2002), was the recognition and affection from children the world over. And among his numerous television credits post-Dumbledore, we find similar traits of darkness and redemption within his Scrooge-like turn in a special episode of another family favourite, Doctor Who.</p>
<p>Though he retired from the theatre in 2015, Gambon continued to act in film and TV until just before his 80th birthday. It was that mesmerising combination of rage and vulnerability that always made him a compelling screen actor to watch, making audiences always care about the characters he inhabited. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Britain has lost one of its greatest actors in the Irish-born star who found fame in Dennis Potter’s groundbreaking TV drama The Singing Detective.John Cook, Professor in Media, Glasgow Caledonian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2059132023-09-21T22:33:14Z2023-09-21T22:33:14ZWhat is intelligence? For millennia, western literature has suggested it may be a liability<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548552/original/file-20230915-21-gi9749.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=43%2C52%2C3152%2C1968&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Asking if computers will be more intelligent than humans distracts us from grasping the underlying ethical problem with the humans who create and use them. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/what-is-intelligence-for-millennia-western-literature-has-suggested-it-may-be-a-liability" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>In the age of <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene/">the Anthropocene</a>, humanity appears poised to destroy itself. </p>
<p>Each day brings a reminder of another threat to our peace and security. War, political instability and climate change send <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/what-we-do/build-better-futures/environment-disasters-and-climate-change/climate-change-and">migrants and refugees across national borders</a>. Cybercriminals <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2023/03/05/cybersecurity-trends--statistics-for-2023-more-treachery-and-risk-ahead-as-attack-surface-and-hacker-capabilities-grow/?sh=1a0179419dba">hack networks of</a> public and private institutions. Terrorists use trucks and planes <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/vehicles-becoming-favored-terrorist-attack-weapon-1490215358">as weapons</a>. </p>
<p>And hanging grimly above us all, like the <a href="https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-sword-of-damocles">sword of Damocles</a>, lurks the threat of total <a href="https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/">nuclear annihilation</a>.</p>
<p>At the root of these threats is a problem that is as old as humanity itself. </p>
<p>In the domain of survival and reproduction, human intelligence stands out for one specific reason. We are the only species on earth for whom intelligence is also an ethical liability. As the anthropological critic Eric Gans has argued, we are the only species for whom the <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=10442">problem of our violence is also our greatest existential threat</a>. </p>
<p>Insights from western literature and myth point to the ethical problem at the core of human intelligence. How we understand the role of humans’ symbolic communication, including language in establishing ethical relations, has profound consequences for our society. </p>
<h2>An ethical liability</h2>
<p>For most of human history, <a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/2986/violence-and-sacred">controlling human conflict has been the task of religion</a>.
For example, among hunting and foraging societies, carefully prescribed rituals must be followed <a href="https://www.asiabookroom.com/pages/books/176465/signe-howell/society-and-cosmos-chewong-of-peninsular-malaysia">when meat is distributed after a successful hunt</a>. </p>
<p>Animals are difficult to track and kill. Meat is rare and highly valued. Consequently, the possibility of violence breaking out during distribution is more likely. Religion provides an ethical guide to the peaceful distribution of meat. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Image of a mask seen on the cover of a book." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534453/original/file-20230627-27-1summh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534453/original/file-20230627-27-1summh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534453/original/file-20230627-27-1summh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534453/original/file-20230627-27-1summh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534453/original/file-20230627-27-1summh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534453/original/file-20230627-27-1summh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534453/original/file-20230627-27-1summh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Shakespeare and other writers examined the origins of human violence.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Stanford University Press)</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The ethical problem of human violence has also been explored by literature. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35000">my work on Shakespeare</a> examines his plays as a systematic attempt to understand the origin of human conflict. Shakespeare’s plays depict in exquisite detail humanity’s penchant for self-destruction.</p>
<p>Before Shakespeare, Homer’s epic poem the <em>Iliad</em> treated similar themes. Homer’s focus was not simply the war between Greeks and Trojans but, more precisely, Achilles’s <a href="https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw378/">resentment of his king</a>, Agamemnon, who has used his authority to appropriate Achilles’s war captive, Briseis. </p>
<p>Achilles is by far the better fighter, but if the Greeks are to win the war, Achilles must learn to defer his resentment of his superior. </p>
<h2>Monster as metaphor</h2>
<p>In the scientific and technological revolutions of the modern era, this lesson receives a peculiar twist in science fiction, beginning with <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm">Mary Shelley’s <em>Frankenstein</em></a>. </p>
<p>In Mary Shelley’s novel, the protagonist Victor Frankenstein succeeds in creating a being that is capable of thinking for itself. But Victor’s creature very quickly becomes Victor’s hated rival, which is why Victor refers to his creation as a hideous monster. Victor has what his rival wants, namely, a wife and, therefore, the prospect of children. Victor’s monster is a metaphor for the violence humans inflict on one another. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Frankenstein novel seen with a clock and against printed pages." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538337/original/file-20230719-23-uncvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538337/original/file-20230719-23-uncvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538337/original/file-20230719-23-uncvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538337/original/file-20230719-23-uncvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538337/original/file-20230719-23-uncvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538337/original/file-20230719-23-uncvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538337/original/file-20230719-23-uncvy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Frankenstein’s monster is a metaphor for the violence humans inflict on one another.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Of course, all animals compete for scarce resources. In this Darwinian competition, violence between rivals is inevitable. Other social animals, like chimpanzees, have well-developed pecking orders that allow conflict over disputed objects to be defused or constrained. The beta animal may challenge the alpha in a fight. If it wins, it takes the alpha position. </p>
<p>But these challenges for dominance are never <a href="https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393317541-the-symbolic-species">represented symbolically</a> as existential threats to the social order. </p>
<p>Only humans represent their <a href="https://www.google.ca/books/edition/The_End_of_Culture/TZ5sQgAACAAJ?hl=en">capacity for violence symbolically in religion, myth and literature</a> because humans are the only animals for whom the greatest danger is themselves. </p>
<h2>Establishing mutual attention: an ethical task</h2>
<p>The dominant view today is that human intelligence is measured by <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without_losing_control_over_it">how fast an individual brain can process information</a>. This picture of the human brain as an “information processor” is itself a product of the belief that the most important thing about speech <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism">is to communicate facts about the world</a>. </p>
<p>But what this picture misses is a more fundamental task of language: establishing mutual attention.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A mother and child seen looking at blossoms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548070/original/file-20230913-25-c67v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548070/original/file-20230913-25-c67v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548070/original/file-20230913-25-c67v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548070/original/file-20230913-25-c67v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548070/original/file-20230913-25-c67v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548070/original/file-20230913-25-c67v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548070/original/file-20230913-25-c67v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A fundamental task of language is establishing mutual attention.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Michael Tomasello, a professor of psychology and neuroscience who specializes in social learning, notes that at around nine months of age, children engage in what he calls <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674005822">joint attentional scenes</a>. </p>
<p>The child’s mother may point to some flowers and say, “Pretty flowers!” What is significant is not merely that the mother has uttered words, but that the child is being invited to engage in joint attention with the mother. The flowers are being made present to the child as an object of shared collective and aesthetic attention.</p>
<h2>An ethical social order</h2>
<p>These insights demonstrate that establishing a human sense of the world depends on our relationships with other people. An ethical social order depends on ethical relationships. </p>
<p>In the age of social media, the rapid rise of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-hitler-conspiracies-and-other-holocaust-disinformation-undermine-democratic-institutions-191116">extreme ideologies and conspiracy theories</a> has underscored the ineffectiveness of focusing on empirical truth alone to combat extremism. Many people remain enthralled by charged and incendiary speech or ideologies.</p>
<p>This fact ought to remind us that before we can communicate a concept, we must establish a scene of joint attention. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-donald-trumps-words-work-and-what-to-do-about-it-147255">Why Donald Trump's words work, and what to do about it</a>
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<p>The view that language is mostly about communicating concepts has consequences beyond encouraging us to underestimate the threat posed by polarizing, divisive or hate speech. This view also encourages us to see people as discrete storehouses of information, who are valuable to us for our own use, instead of in their own right.</p>
<h2>Forgetting our ethical responsibilities</h2>
<p>Increasingly, our conversations are mediated by the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-online-learning-it-doesnt-teach-people-to-think-161795">ubiquitous digital screen</a>. This is convenient, of course, but convenience comes with a cost. </p>
<p>The cost could be that we forget our ethical responsibility to others. </p>
<p>When technologists assert that <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ai-godfather-google-geoffery-hinton-fa98c6a6fddab1d7c27560f6fcbad0ad">computers may soon be smarter than humans</a> and that <a href="https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk">artificial intelligence represents an existential threat to humanity</a>, they distract us from grasping the <a href="https://theconversation.com/ai-is-an-existential-threat-just-not-the-way-you-think-207680">underlying ethical problem</a>, which lies not in the computer but with the humans who create and use it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205913/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard van Oort does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Humanity is the only species on earth for whom intelligence is also an ethical liability.Richard van Oort, Professor of English, University of VictoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2125872023-09-06T14:07:43Z2023-09-06T14:07:43ZHow linguists are unlocking the meanings of Shakespeare’s words using numbers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545592/original/file-20230830-29-o2i3fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C33%2C4486%2C2492&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/sydney-nsw-australia-may-25-2020-1944065131">Rose Marinelli/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Today it would seem odd to describe a flower with the word “bastard” – why apply a term of personal abuse to a flower? But in Shakespeare’s time, “bastard” was a technical term describing certain plants. </p>
<p>Similarly, associating the word “bad” with success and talking of a “bad success” would be decidedly odd today. But it was not unusual then, when success meant outcome, which could be good or bad.</p>
<p><a href="http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/clmtp/main-1.php">Corpus linguistics</a> is a branch of linguistics which uses computers to explore the use of words in huge collections of language. It can spot nuances that might be overlooked by linguists working manually, or large patterns that a lifetime of studying may not reveal. And numbers, counts of words and keeping track of where the words are occurring, are key.</p>
<p>In my experience at conferences and the like, talk of numbers is not unanimously well received in the world of literary studies. Numbers are sometimes perceived as being reductive, or inappropriate when discussing creative works, or only accessible to specialists.</p>
<p>Yet, describing any pattern involves numbers. In the first paragraph above, I used the words “normal”, “odd” and “unusual” as soft ways of describing frequencies – the numbers of occurrences (think also of, for example, “unique”, “rare”, “common”). </p>
<p>Even talking about “associations” involves numbers. Often associations evolve from an unusually high number of encounters amongst two or more things. And numbers help us to see things.</p>
<h2>Changing meanings</h2>
<p>Along with my team at Lancaster University, I have used computers to examine some 20,000 words gleaned from a million-word corpus (a collection of written texts) of Shakespeare’s plays, resulting in a new kind of <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/arden-encyclopedia-of-shakespeares-language-9781350017955/#:%7E:text=The%20volume%20establishes%20in%20detail,fish%20as%20opposed%20to%20beef.">dictionary</a>.</p>
<p>People have created Shakespeare dictionaries before, but this is the first to use the full armoury of corpus techniques and the first to be comparative. It not only looks at words inside Shakespeare’s plays, but also compares them with a matching million-word corpus of contemporary early modern plays, along with huge corpus of 320 million words of various writings of the period.</p>
<p>Of course, words in early modern England had lives outside Shakespeare. “Bastard” was generally a term for a hybrid plant, occurring in technical texts on horticulture. </p>
<p>It could be, and very occasionally was, used for personal abuse, as in King Lear, where Edmund is referred to as a “bastard”. But this is no general term of abuse, let alone banter, as you might see it used today. It is a pointed attack on him being of illegitimate parentage, genetically hybrid, suspect at his core.</p>
<p>The word “bad” is not now associated with the word “success”, yet 400 years ago it was, as were other negative words, including “disastrous”, “unfortunate”, “ill”, “unhappy” and “unlucky”. </p>
<p>We can tap into a word’s associations by examining its collocates, that is, words with which it tends to occur (rather like we make judgements about people partly on the basis of the company they keep). In this way we can see that the meaning of “success” was “outcome” and that outcome, given its collocates, could be good or bad.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A statue of Hamlet with Yorrick's skull." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545593/original/file-20230830-29-o6v9g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545593/original/file-20230830-29-o6v9g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545593/original/file-20230830-29-o6v9g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545593/original/file-20230830-29-o6v9g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545593/original/file-20230830-29-o6v9g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545593/original/file-20230830-29-o6v9g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545593/original/file-20230830-29-o6v9g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A statue of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/statue-hamlet-stratforduponavon-warwickshire-england-united-257161972">givi585/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Highly frequent words</h2>
<p>We can use intuition to guess some word patterns. It’s no surprise that in early modern English, the word “wicked” occurred very frequently in religious texts of the time. But less intuitively, so did “ourselves”, a word associated with sermons and plays, both of which have in common a habit of making statements about people on earth.</p>
<p>Highly frequent words, so often excluded by historical dictionaries and reference works, are often short words that seem insignificant. They have a wood-for-trees problem. </p>
<p>Yet corpus techniques highlight the interesting patterns. It turns out that a frequent sense of the humble preposition “by” is religious: to reinforce the sincerity of a statement by invoking the divine (for example, “by God”).</p>
<p>Numbers can also reveal what is happening inside Shakespeare’s works. Frequent words such as “alas” or “ah” are revealed to be heavily used by Shakespeare’s female characters, showing that they do the emotional work of lamentation in the plays, especially his histories.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G-epojal7nE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Riz Ahmed as Edmund in King Lear performing the line: ‘Now, gods, stand up for bastards.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Infrequent words</h2>
<p>What of the infrequent? Words that occur only once in Shakespeare – so-called <em>hapax legomena</em> – are nuggets of interest. The single case of “bone-ache” in Troilus and Cressida evokes the horrifying torture that syphilis, which it applies to, would have been. In contrast, “ear-kissing” in King Lear is Shakespeare’s rather more pleasant and creative metaphor for whispering (interestingly, other writers used it for the notion of flattering).</p>
<p>Another group of interesting infrequent words concerns words that seem to have their earliest occurrence in Shakespeare. Corpus techniques allowed us to navigate the troubled waters of spelling variation. Before spelling standardisation, searching for the word “sweet”, for instance, would miss cases spelt “sweete”, “swete” or “svveet”. </p>
<p>In this way, we can better establish whether a word written by a writer really is the earliest instance. Shakespearean firsts include the rather boring “branchless” (Antony and Cleopatra), a word probably not coined by Shakespeare but merely first recorded in his text. But there is also the more creative “ear-piercing” (Othello) and the distinctly modern-sounding “self-harming” (The Comedy of Errors and Richard II).</p>
<p>Why are these advances in historical corpus linguistics happening now? Much of the technology to produce these findings was not in place until relatively recently. </p>
<p>Programs to deal with spelling variation (such as <a href="https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/vard/about/">Vard</a>) or to analyse vast collections of electronic texts in sophisticated ways (such as <a href="https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/">CQPweb</a>), to say nothing of the vast quantities of computer-readable early modern language data (such as <a href="https://textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-texts/eebo-tcp-early-english-books-online/">EEBO-TCP</a>), have only been widely used in the last ten or so years. We are therefore on the cusp of a significant increase in our understanding and appreciation of major writers such as Shakespeare.</p>
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<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathan Culpeper receives funding from the AHRC and the BA. </span></em></p>Corpus linguistics – using computers to analyse texts – can spot patterns and nuances that might otherwise go unnoticed.Jonathan Culpeper, Chair professor in English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2064452023-06-21T12:28:47Z2023-06-21T12:28:47ZWhy no living people appear on US postage stamps<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529169/original/file-20230530-23-464mcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3100%2C2320&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The practice of putting images of only deceased or allegorical people on U.S. stamps dates back to 1847.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/george-washington-stamp-royalty-free-image/105098680?phrase=U.S.+presidents+on+postage+stamps&adppopup=true">Schulte Productions/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>With the ascension of King Charles III to the British throne, some commentators have made much of the fact that the new stamp bearing his image features <a href="https://time.com/6268385/king-charles-iii-stamps-no-crown/">the king without a crown</a>.</p>
<p>This is a major break with a tradition that began in 1840 with the world’s first postage stamp, <a href="https://www.postalmuseum.org/collections/penny-black/#">the Penny Black</a>, which featured the reigning monarch, Queen Victoria, wearing her crown.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529173/original/file-20230530-21-92lnkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Against a dark background festooned with Maltese crosses and a red postmark is an image of Queen Victoria on the Penny Black stamp." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529173/original/file-20230530-21-92lnkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529173/original/file-20230530-21-92lnkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=681&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529173/original/file-20230530-21-92lnkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=681&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529173/original/file-20230530-21-92lnkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=681&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529173/original/file-20230530-21-92lnkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529173/original/file-20230530-21-92lnkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529173/original/file-20230530-21-92lnkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The world’s first postage stamp was the Penny Black.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/vintage-one-penny-stamp-with-a-womans-face-on-it-royalty-free-image/172738823?phrase=Penny+Black+stamp&adppopup=true">Dave Bolton/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Less discussed is the fact that the living monarch’s image must appear on all British stamps because <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/03086530500411290">the monarch embodies the nation itself</a>. This is true even for commemorative stamps that honor historically important persons and events. Whether sharing equal billing with another person or relegated to a corner, the living monarch’s image will always be found on British stamps. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529181/original/file-20230530-19299-iawwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Tinted antique-brown, a stamp features the images of Queen Elizabeth II and William Shakespeare." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529181/original/file-20230530-19299-iawwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529181/original/file-20230530-19299-iawwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529181/original/file-20230530-19299-iawwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529181/original/file-20230530-19299-iawwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529181/original/file-20230530-19299-iawwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529181/original/file-20230530-19299-iawwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529181/original/file-20230530-19299-iawwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Shakespeare stamp commemorated The Bard’s 400th birthday. See the queen in the upper left corner?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/from-left-to-right-and-from-top-to-bottom-postage-stamp-news-photo/521170805">DeAgostini Picture Library via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>As we discuss in our recent book, “<a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-american-stamp/9780231208246">The American Stamp</a>,” when the United States was ready to release its first stamps in 1847, the Post Office returned to the issues that had first been raised in a debate about coins. In 1792, when the U.S. mint was founded, a proposal to feature the heads of living presidents on the nation’s coinage was defeated in Congress by those who argued that to do so would be monarchical. In a republic, they proclaimed, only history, not heredity, could determine who was worthy of lending their likeness to the nation’s money.</p>
<p>It was agreed that only dead or allegorical persons – for example, <a href="https://www.mysticstamp.com/Products/United-States/1035/USA/">the Goddess of Liberty</a> – can be depicted on U.S. currencies. The postal service adopted similarly democratic ideals. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529185/original/file-20230530-15-tc1lol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A portrait of George Washington appears on a U.S. stamp." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529185/original/file-20230530-15-tc1lol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529185/original/file-20230530-15-tc1lol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529185/original/file-20230530-15-tc1lol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529185/original/file-20230530-15-tc1lol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529185/original/file-20230530-15-tc1lol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529185/original/file-20230530-15-tc1lol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529185/original/file-20230530-15-tc1lol.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The 1847 George Washington 10-cent stamp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/united-states-stamp-bpa2-2948-news-photo/517323892?adppopup=true">Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>The questions of the day became “Who deserves to be honored on American stamps?” or “What does democracy look like?” The Post Office answered, “like dead heroes” – or, more specifically, like images of deceased white males whom history deemed central to the nation’s founding and growth. The country’s <a href="https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/william-h-gross-stamp-gallery-gems-of-american-philately/1847-america%E2%80%99s-first-stamps">first stamp designs</a> featured Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, who had died in the previous century.</p>
<p>Over the 176 years since that decision was made, American stamps have come to include more and more kinds of people. Indeed, stamps provide a visual history of American thinking about gender and race in a widely disseminated and easily recognizable tiny form.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532068/original/file-20230614-9255-x1etc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A postage stamp featuring an image of Benjamin Franklin, a red cancel mark, and the words 'U.S. Post Office, five cents.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532068/original/file-20230614-9255-x1etc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532068/original/file-20230614-9255-x1etc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532068/original/file-20230614-9255-x1etc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532068/original/file-20230614-9255-x1etc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532068/original/file-20230614-9255-x1etc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532068/original/file-20230614-9255-x1etc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532068/original/file-20230614-9255-x1etc5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The 1847 Benjamin Franklin stamp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/5c-franklin-single-july-1-1847-used-with-red-seven-bar-grid-news-photo/1338660128?adppopup=true">Heritage Images/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<h2>A tradition codified</h2>
<p>That tradition continued for both currency and stamps until 1866, when it became <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/2704/Barby1-the_law.pdf?1686148697">codified into law.</a></p>
<p>Why did depicting only the dead on U.S. currencies became a national priority in the year after the end of the Civil War? The answer emerged from <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/2719/congressional_debate.pdf?1686936858">congressional debate</a>: Had living persons been allowed to appear on U.S. coins, stamps and banknotes, it would have been possible to depict U.S. citizens who would go on to become traitors to the nation. </p>
<p>This law has held fast, even as stamps have quickly evolved.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532071/original/file-20230614-5932-avtzm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A two cent U.S. stamp bearing the likeness of Andrew Jackson." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532071/original/file-20230614-5932-avtzm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532071/original/file-20230614-5932-avtzm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532071/original/file-20230614-5932-avtzm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532071/original/file-20230614-5932-avtzm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532071/original/file-20230614-5932-avtzm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532071/original/file-20230614-5932-avtzm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532071/original/file-20230614-5932-avtzm8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Also known as the ‘Black Jack,’ the two-cent Andrew Jackson stamp was issued from 1863 to 1869.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/2c-andrew-jackson-re-issue-single-1875-unused-perf-12-news-photo/1338660042?adppopup=true">Heritage Images/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>At the end of the 19th century, different types of people began to appear on stamps as American democracy became more inclusive. At first, women were added: <a href="https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/celebrating-hispanic-heritage-exploration-christopher-columbus/support-of-queen-isabella">Queen Isabella of Spain in 1893</a> and <a href="https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/women-on-stamps-part-1-forming-the-nation-famous-first-ladies/martha-washington">Martha Washington in 1902</a>. The portrait of a Native American, the <a href="https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/the-american-indian-in-postage-stamps-profiles-in-leadership-the-paths-of-great-sioux-2">Sioux chief Hollow Horn Bear, appeared in 1923</a>. Then an African American, <a href="https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/the-black-experience/first-african-american-on-a-postage-stamp-booker-t-washington">Booker T. Washington, in 1940</a>. In the decades since, persons of other ethnicities and sexual orientations have been honored on stamps. For example, Hispanic labor leader <a href="https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/celebrating-hispanic-heritage-growth-reformers/cesar-chavez">Cesar Chavez appeared in 2003</a>, Arab American diplomat <a href="https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_2006.2026.345">Philip C. Habib in 2006</a> and gay rights activist <a href="https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2014/pr14_033.htm">Harvey Milk in 2014</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529189/original/file-20230530-27-z424dt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Above the words 'United States Post Office,' a portrait of Booker T. Washington appears on a 10 cent stamp." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529189/original/file-20230530-27-z424dt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529189/original/file-20230530-27-z424dt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=351&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529189/original/file-20230530-27-z424dt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=351&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529189/original/file-20230530-27-z424dt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=351&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529189/original/file-20230530-27-z424dt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529189/original/file-20230530-27-z424dt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529189/original/file-20230530-27-z424dt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington became one of America’s greatest educators and political figures.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/tuskegee-institute-alabama-the-usa-7-april-1940-us-royalty-free-image/1146931744?phrase=1940+Booker+T+Washington+stamp&adppopup=true">Massimo Vernicesole/iStock via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>In all these cases, history, not heredity, determined who appeared. The only figures guaranteed a stamp are presidents, who become eligible for this honor one year after their death. The idea remains, though, that unlike King Charles III, they did not ascend to the office of president, but earned it due to their contribution to the democratic ideals of the United States.</p>
<h2>The politics of representation</h2>
<p>Despite these clear ideals, the question of representation has dogged postal portraits. So it is no surprise that when the Post Office established the Citizen’s Stamp Advisory Committee in 1957 to make recommendations to the postmaster general about future designs for stamps, it decreed that <a href="https://about.usps.com/who/csac/#background">its deliberations be kept secret</a>. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, the current diversity of the cast of characters appearing on U.S. stamps continues to generate criticism. People with pronounced political views of whatever stripe can be unhappy with choices that seem to represent their opponents. </p>
<p>A different critique we develop in our book is that apolitical diversity allows the Postal Service to abdicate the responsibility of illustrating what democracy should look like. If you do not pick a side, we argue, then how can citizens know which behaviors or positions are undemocratic?</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532072/original/file-20230614-21-rswxhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Accompanied by the words 'U.S. Postage' and 'fifteen cents,' a portrait of Abraham Lincoln appears squarely in the center of the stamp." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532072/original/file-20230614-21-rswxhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532072/original/file-20230614-21-rswxhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532072/original/file-20230614-21-rswxhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532072/original/file-20230614-21-rswxhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532072/original/file-20230614-21-rswxhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532072/original/file-20230614-21-rswxhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532072/original/file-20230614-21-rswxhq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The 15-cent Abraham Lincoln stamp was first issued in 1866, one year after his assassination.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/15c-abraham-lincoln-e-grill-single-1867-unused-perf-12-news-photo/1338659993?adppopup=true">Heritage Images/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indeed, the pitfalls of the good-people-on-both-sides approach was strikingly illustrated in a 1995 pane of 20 stamps commemorating the Civil War, which included both Abraham Lincoln, the president of the Union, and Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Surely the legislators who in 1866 decried the possibility of traitors being featured on federal currencies would be baffled by the choice of Davis. </p>
<p>Which raises a problem: If former President Donald Trump is convicted of <a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-indictment-unsealed-a-criminal-law-scholar-explains-what-the-charges-mean-and-what-prosecutors-will-now-need-to-prove-207469">violating national security laws and obstructing justice</a>, which principle should prevail: that all presidents be guaranteed a postage stamp? Or that only those persons whom history judges to have been faithful to the nation and its democratic principles can appear on U.S. stamps, coins and bank notes? </p>
<p>It’s too soon to know the answer to these questions. But the controversy over who should represent the United States on stamps and what democracy looks like has been with our nation since 1792. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529190/original/file-20230530-11720-br74q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Against a purple background, an image of King Charles III, depicted in profile, facing left, and without a crown, appears on a UK postage stamp." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529190/original/file-20230530-11720-br74q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529190/original/file-20230530-11720-br74q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529190/original/file-20230530-11720-br74q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529190/original/file-20230530-11720-br74q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529190/original/file-20230530-11720-br74q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529190/original/file-20230530-11720-br74q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529190/original/file-20230530-11720-br74q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The new King Charles III stamp entered circulation in the United Kingdom on April 4, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sheet-of-the-new-first-class-stamps-featuring-a-likeness-of-news-photo/1464200029?adppopup=true">Leon Neal via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206445/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Hint: It’s all tied up with the country’s history with British royalty.Richard Handler, Professor of Anthropology, University of VirginiaLaura Goldblatt, Assistant Professor of English, University of VirginiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1866482023-05-05T03:54:49Z2023-05-05T03:54:49ZRichard II by William Shakespeare: why ‘the divine right of kings’ (still) matters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524032/original/file-20230503-24-zp5j43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C2%2C1732%2C947&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait of Richard II – artist unknown, c. late 16th century.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>What do you do with a bad king? And what do you do when that bad king is (allegedly) appointed by God?</p>
<p>Shakespeare’s Richard II is a play that asks us, among other things, what it means to have power, what it means to take power, and what we’re left with when power is gone. It is also a play that saw Shakespeare risking some serious trouble with the God-appointed monarch of his time, Elizabeth I.</p>
<p>Shakespeare wrote Richard II around 1595. It is the first part of the “Henriad”, a sequence of eight historical plays that span the “Wars of the Roses”: Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III. These plays were recently presented as the BBC series <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bqgjn/episodes/guide">The Hollow Crown</a> (2012-2016).</p>
<p>The “Henriad” shows the monarchy in a state of turmoil. When Richard II begins, Richard is in full king mode: throne, crown, sceptre. His authority is absolute. By the end of the play, he is not king anymore; he is dead. A brief comment by the new king, Henry IV, leads to Richard being murdered in his cell.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ngNXFbTwZZ4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Hollow Crown Trailer (Focus Features)</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/macbeth-by-william-shakespeare-a-timeless-exploration-of-violence-and-treachery-175631">Macbeth by William Shakespeare: a timeless exploration of violence and treachery</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What went wrong?</h2>
<p>The play begins with an argument in front of Richard. Henry Bolingbroke – Richard’s cousin and the future Henry IV – calls Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a traitor and a miscreant,<br>
Too good to be so and too bad to live.<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He accuses Mowbray of killing his uncle. Mowbray, in response, calls Bolingbroke “a slanderous coward and a villain”.</p>
<p>Richard knows even a king cannot command these two enemies to be friends, so ritual combat seems the way to sort things out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We were not born to sue, but to command;<br>
Which since we cannot do to make you friends,<br>
Be ready, as your lives shall answer it.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bolingbroke and Mowbray spend a long time prepping; after all, one of them is about to die. But just when they are about to fight, Richard calls the whole thing off. He banishes them both instead. </p>
<p>On the surface, Richard is not doing too badly. He listens to these two hotheads arguing and tries to get them to simmer down: “Forget, forgive; conclude and be agreed”. </p>
<p>They will not forget or forgive, so Richard goes along with the plan for ritual combat until it is clear they won’t back down from that either. At that point, he stops it with the lesser (but still tough) penalty of banishment. </p>
<p>Compared to <a href="https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/perspective/richardiii-michael-dobson2.aspx">some of Shakespeare’s kings</a>, this might seem fairly considerate. Yet Richard’s actions are undermined by his implied motivation. He responds with patience to Bolingbroke and Mowbray arguing about the murder of Bolingbroke’s uncle, but we quickly learn from Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, that Richard probably arranged the murder himself.</p>
<p>Richard’s petty qualities are wonderfully demonstrated when he is delighted to hear that “Old John of Gaunt is grievous sick”. He has just banished Gaunt’s son, so he figures he might as well help himself to Gaunt’s estate: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him:<br>
Pray God we may make haste, and come too late!<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even if we are hissing Richard, there is an underlying question: at what point do Richard’s actions <em>as</em> king allow us to ignore the fact that he <em>is</em> king?</p>
<p>John of Gaunt’s brief role in the play highlights this central tension. At first, he is not willing to make a fuss about Richard having his brother killed. Why? Because Richard is God’s appointee, and that means he is God’s problem. </p>
<p>Shortly before his death, however, Gaunt is less forgiving. He suggests Richard’s abuses of power are serious enough to have delegitimised his position: “Landlord of England art thou now, not king.” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hQQyyMyTHa0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Richard II: “This Sceptered Isle” speech (Good Tickle Brain)</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A dangerous play?</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-II-king-of-England">historical Richard II</a> ruled from 1377-1399, but his power in the play is in line with the monarchy of Shakespeare’s time, when the monarch’s absolute power did not leave much room for opposition. When Henry Bolingbroke returns from exile to demand his stuff back, he is heading into dangerous territory by threatening Richard’s crown. </p>
<p>Bolingbroke is defined by his uneasy negotiation with Richard’s seemingly unquestionable right to the throne. But so is Richard himself. He declares </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not all the water in the rough rude sea<br>
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet he struggles to reconcile this with his humanity: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I live with bread like you, feel want,<br>
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,<br>
How can you say to me, I am a king?<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>When Bolingbroke’s quest for recompense shifts to him taking Richard’s crown in “God’s name”, Shakespeare himself enters potentially dangerous territory. Dethroning monarchs was not exactly a benign topic in Shakespeare’s time. Elizabethan England was a censorious and restrictive society, with death looming as a possible penalty for subversive activity.</p>
<p>Shortly before the Earl of Essex attempted to overthrow Elizabeth I in February 1601, some of his supporters requested and paid for a special performance at the Globe of one of Shakespeare’s old plays: Richard II. As Stephen Greenblatt <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/shakespeares-close-call-with-tyranny">observes</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the conspirators must have felt that there was a benefit to be gained from representing to a large public (and perhaps to themselves as well) a successful coup d’état. Perhaps they wanted, quite simply, to make what they intended imaginable.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“I am Richard II; know ye not that?”, Elizabeth is supposed <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42003621">to have declared</a> not long after the would-be usurpers were dealt with. </p>
<p>Greenblatt <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42003621?seq=2">suggests</a> “the Queen understood the performance as a threat”. Having written a play about the toppling of a king and being part of the company presenting it a day before the attempt to topple Elizabeth, Shakespeare may have been lucky to escape serious repercussions.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513098/original/file-20230302-29-y8igux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C2%2C794%2C497&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513098/original/file-20230302-29-y8igux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C2%2C794%2C497&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513098/original/file-20230302-29-y8igux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513098/original/file-20230302-29-y8igux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513098/original/file-20230302-29-y8igux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513098/original/file-20230302-29-y8igux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513098/original/file-20230302-29-y8igux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513098/original/file-20230302-29-y8igux.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ben Wishaw as Richard II in The Hollow Crown.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image: IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-read-shakespeare-for-pleasure-136409">How to read Shakespeare for pleasure</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Why does ‘divine right’ still matter?</h2>
<p>The “divine right of kings” may not exist now – or does it? It is still technically <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/13/calling-abolition-monarchy-illegal-uk-justice-ministry">illegal</a> in England to call for the abolition of the monarchy. British monarchs have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/14/what-does-queen-legal-immunity-mean-british-laws">sovereign immunity</a>, which places them beyond the reach of laws that apply to ordinary citizens.</p>
<p>The concept of “<a href="https://daily.jstor.org/making-sense-of-the-divine-right-of-kings/">divine right</a>” may seem like an obsolete concept, but it still resonates today when we consider those people whose power, wealth or status seem to elevate them above the rules governing others in society. Social, economic and political systems can also seem to be largely immune from individual questioning and dissent. </p>
<p>In 2014, the late Ursula LeGuin <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech">made one of these connections plain</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Shakespeare reminds us we don’t have to think about power in an absolute way. He highlights the tension between absolute power and human limitations. As Greenblatt argues, Shakespeare throws “a garish light on an unnerving fact: even those in the innermost circles of power very often have no idea what is about to happen”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-shakespeares-hamlet-the-everest-of-literature-164070">Guide to the classics: Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Everest of literature</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Where does that leave Richard?</h2>
<p>Shakespeare often refuses to let us pick sides as cleanly as we might like. As Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford, has <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-read-shakespeare-for-pleasure-136409">written</a>, Shakespeare’s plays “prompt questions rather than supplying answers”. </p>
<p>In an online lecture, Smith <a href="https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/richard-ii">considers the core question</a> raised by Richard II: “was it right for Bolingbroke to take the throne from Richard?” Richard’s reign may evoke little sympathy, but Bolingbroke’s motivations remain questionable. </p>
<p>Shakespeare recognises the pathos of Richard’s fall. When Richard is overthrown, his place in the universe (its centre) is suddenly denied him. Stripped of his crown, he must confront his fallible humanity. His sense of himself is thrown into disarray: he hasn’t just lost power; he has lost his understanding of who he is.</p>
<p>Richard’s existence is suddenly one of “radical doubt and questioning”. Whatever we think of him as a king and person, his uncertainty is a trait we do not need to be a deposed king to understand. Like Richard, we can understand ourselves and our place within our own lives as something that might fluctuate between defiant certainty and debilitating doubt.</p>
<p>Slavoj Žižek has <a href="https://www.lacan.com/zizwhiteriot.html">interpreted</a> the play as</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the progressive questioning by the King of his own “kingness” – what is it that makes me a king? What remains of me if the symbolic title “king” is taken away from me?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Literary critic Harold Bloom <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Shakespeare.html?id=kPQNAQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">noted</a> Richard has two roles that “are antithetical, so that his kingship diminishes even as his poetry improves”. For Bloom, the play “studies the decline and fall of a remarkable poet, who happens to be an inadequate human being, and a hopeless king”. </p>
<p>Sometimes overshadowed by the spotlight-stealing <a href="https://www.bl.uk/works/richard-iii">Richard III</a>, Richard II is a versatile and resonant play. It has recently been presented by a cast made up entirely of women of colour as a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002zzs">reflection on Brexit</a>, and by a “predominantly BIPOC ensemble” in a radio version <a href="https://publictheater.org/productions/season/1920/richard-ii/">dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement</a>.</p>
<p>Shakespeare is not asking us to think about only one historical monarch. How we understand power and the “divine right of kings” in Richard II relates to his society, and to our own. The play can also prompt deeply personal reflections. As The Flaming Lips <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiRCsYQ1iUM">said</a>, “to be thought of as a king, you don’t need a crown”. </p>
<p>Richard II asks us to question our certainties, and how we understand our own sense of power and identity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186648/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kit MacFarlane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The ‘divine right of kings’ may sound obsolete, but it has resonances today. Richard II asks what it means to have power, to take power – and what we’re left with when it’s gone.Kit MacFarlane, Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literature, University of South AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2041172023-04-27T01:55:58Z2023-04-27T01:55:58ZAround 1600, speeches in English plays suddenly got shorter – and no one knows why<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522450/original/file-20230424-24-vj5jul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=179%2C110%2C3488%2C2462&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4 – Robert Thew and Henry Fuseli (1796).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A speech in a play by Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries can be as short as a word or as long as several hundred, or anything in between. But what is the most common length? </p>
<p>There is an interesting new story emerging about the lengths of speeches in early modern plays. Staying away from Shakespeare himself for a moment, we can take Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (1607) and count the number of speeches and their lengths. The most common length is four words. </p>
<p>In the first scene of the play, Volpone asks if an entertainment was Mosca’s invention. Mosca says he will acknowledge his responsibility only if it has pleased Volpone, who says “It doth, good Mosca.” Mosca replies, “Then it was, sir.” Later in the same scene Corbaccio asks Mosca, “How doth your patron?” and “Does he sleep well?” </p>
<p>There are 1,412 speeches in Volpone and 166 of them (12%), are just four words long. There are more speeches of this length than any other length. Four words is, as we say, the “mode”. </p>
<p>The next most common length is five words: 9% of Volpone’s speeches are this length. Of the other 16 Jonson plays, 12 also have a speech length mode of four. The four plays that don’t are Every Man in his Humour, with a mode of five, Every Man Out of his Humour and Bartholomew Fair with a mode of six, and Tale of a Tub with a mode of nine. </p>
<p>It’s not just Jonson; it’s everybody. After 1602, four-word speeches are the most common kind across all the early modern plays that survive. </p>
<p>Curiously, just five years earlier, four-word speeches were very rare: the mode was nine-word speeches. The change happened in just five years, affected every writer, and we don’t know why.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522018/original/file-20230420-28-v98zji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522018/original/file-20230420-28-v98zji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522018/original/file-20230420-28-v98zji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522018/original/file-20230420-28-v98zji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522018/original/file-20230420-28-v98zji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522018/original/file-20230420-28-v98zji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522018/original/file-20230420-28-v98zji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522018/original/file-20230420-28-v98zji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Here we see the modes of speech lengths for 273 early modern plays, shown as circles. From a slow start with few plays, the London theatre industry took off in the late 1580s and early 1590s and we see a concentration of speech-length modes around nine or ten. Then, from 1597 to 1602, a mode of four or five overlaps with modes of eight or nine, then after 1602 the mode of four predominates. </p>
<p>The pattern is not absolute: we see plays from before 1597 with speech-length modes smaller than ten and plays from after 1602 with modes greater than four. But the clustering around ten and four is visible to the naked eye. Moreover, we can quantify how strong that clustering is. Well-established statistical measures tell us to expect patterns like this only very rarely when mere chance is at work in the data.</p>
<p>If we look just at Shakespeare plays, we find him doing what everyone else did: shifting from favouring nine-word speeches to favouring four-word speeches around 1597-1602 and never going back.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522017/original/file-20230420-24-e5671v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522017/original/file-20230420-24-e5671v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522017/original/file-20230420-24-e5671v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522017/original/file-20230420-24-e5671v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522017/original/file-20230420-24-e5671v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522017/original/file-20230420-24-e5671v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522017/original/file-20230420-24-e5671v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522017/original/file-20230420-24-e5671v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-you-extract-a-pound-of-flesh-without-blood-how-the-power-struggles-in-shakespearean-drama-speak-to-an-age-of-decolonisation-196567">Can you extract a pound of flesh without blood? How the power struggles in Shakespearean drama speak to an age of decolonisation</a>
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<h2>Change in mode</h2>
<p>The credit for first seeing this pattern of change in modes of speech length goes to Hartmut Ilsemann, who published about it in 2005. In 2007, MacDonald P. Jackson showed that the change in mode in Shakespeare was more progressive than had been suggested by Ilsemann, who thought it happened virtually overnight in 1599. </p>
<p>Then in 2019, Pervez Rizvi counted speech lengths in a much larger corpus, extending the analysis to Shakespeare’s peers. He confirmed the change from a mode of nine words to a mode of four words in Shakespeare, while showing that this is not peculiar to Shakespeare. This was evidently a pattern shared across the drama of the time.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521993/original/file-20230420-1720-1unpce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521993/original/file-20230420-1720-1unpce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521993/original/file-20230420-1720-1unpce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521993/original/file-20230420-1720-1unpce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521993/original/file-20230420-1720-1unpce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=678&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521993/original/file-20230420-1720-1unpce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521993/original/file-20230420-1720-1unpce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521993/original/file-20230420-1720-1unpce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">An early 19th century depiction of Ben Jonson by Abraham van Blyenberch.</span>
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<p>These are important findings. Even nine words seems a short speech. Most literary-critical commentary focuses on longer speeches where thoughts, arguments and narratives are given fuller expression. No one before Ilsemann had identified a collective change to yet shorter speeches over the period. </p>
<p>It is also unexpected to find Shakespeare, who is generally assumed to be exceptional among his peers, participating in this change, following the collective pattern exactly, in the same direction, at the same time, and to the same degree.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0282716">an article just published</a>, we have confirmed the change in modes of speech length and explored the possible effects of other confounding factors, such as genre, author, theatrical company, and proportions of verse and prose. We find that these factors make no difference: the change is general and all that matters is the date of a play’s composition. </p>
<p>We show that the transition period can be defined as 1597 to 1602 and that there are subsidiary modes at 16 and 24 words, especially apparent in plays with high proportions of verse, suggesting an underlying unit based on the iambic pentameter line, which generally has eight or nine words. </p>
<p>There is no doubt that all those writing these plays obeyed some unspoken imperative and moved collectively to shorter speeches.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shakespeares-first-folio-turns-400-what-would-be-lost-without-the-collection-an-expert-speculates-202998">Shakespeare's First Folio turns 400: what would be lost without the collection? An expert speculates</a>
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<h2>But why?</h2>
<p>The most important question remains: how best to understand the forces behind this change? </p>
<p>Ilsemann suggests that the explanation is the move of Shakespeare’s company to the Globe Theatre in 1599. Shakespeare was suddenly able to control the staging of his plays and was able to follow an artistic preference for shorter speeches. </p>
<p>This is unpersuasive, since conditions at the company’s previous venue, the Theatre in Shoreditch, were much like those at the new venue and Shakespeare’s role as playing company shareholder and chief playwright was unchanged. In any case, the change was not instantaneous and not confined to Shakespeare. </p>
<p>Rizvi, following a suggestion by Jackson, links the change in mode to a new propensity in Shakespeare to divide verse lines between two speakers – where part of the metrical line is spoken by the first speaker, and part spoken by a second or even a third. This shift to more shared lines, as Rizvi and Jackson note, was discussed in much earlier books on Shakespeare’s versification by Marina Tarlinskaja (1987) and George T. Wright (1988), though neither of these discussions mention any general change over time in the length of speeches. </p>
<p>This is another spectacular change. Only around 2% of all lines are shared between speakers in Shakespeare’s earliest plays, but shared lines became more common in his middle period, and commoner still at the end, with the last plays averaging over 15%. In Antony and Cleopatra, it reached 18%.</p>
<p>Our suggestion is that the playwrights learned progressively from one another how to represent more closely the speech lengths of everyday exchanges and found that audiences responded well to these. As the heritage of early modern English drama grew, playwrights understood the special properties of the medium better. Their styles moved away from an allegiance to writing and towards the dynamics of everyday speech. </p>
<p>Another way to think of this is offered by the Russian literary scholar Boris Yarkho (1889-1942). Yarkho may well have been the first to consider the length of speeches in plays in a systematic way. He proposed an “index of liveliness”, being the ratio of the number of speeches to the total number of lines in a play. He calculated this index for the comedies and tragedies of the 17th-century French playwright Pierre Corneille, the comedies having a higher index because of their shorter speeches. </p>
<p>The move from a mode of nine words to a mode of four represents a shortening of the average speech, and thus a move to more “lively” drama in Yarkho’s terms. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522453/original/file-20230424-28-co7s6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522453/original/file-20230424-28-co7s6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522453/original/file-20230424-28-co7s6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522453/original/file-20230424-28-co7s6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522453/original/file-20230424-28-co7s6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522453/original/file-20230424-28-co7s6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522453/original/file-20230424-28-co7s6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522453/original/file-20230424-28-co7s6v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Much Ado About Nothing, Act 4, Scene 2 – Robert Smirke (1753–1845).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ignore-the-doubters-heres-why-christopher-marlowe-co-wrote-shakespeares-henry-vi-68229">Ignore the doubters: here's why Christopher Marlowe co-wrote Shakespeare's Henry VI</a>
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<h2>Pauca verba</h2>
<p>We have no record of any dramatist or playgoer reflecting on the shortening of average speech lengths; our only knowledge of it comes from counting the words in the plays for ourselves. But it might be reflected in phrases that Shakespeare gives his characters. </p>
<p>The Latin word “<em>pauca</em>” occurs seven times in Shakespeare. In The Taming of the Shrew, Sly brushes off the Hostess, who throws him out of her tavern with “<em>paucas pallabris</em>”, which is a kind of Latin-Spanish hybrid meaning “few words”. </p>
<p>In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Holofernes recites the proverb “<em>Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur</em>”, which is Latin for “That man is wise that speaketh few things or words”. About four minutes of stage time later, Holofernes cuts off any refusal of his hospitality with “<em>Pauca verba</em>” – Latin for “few words”. </p>
<p>In Much Ado About Nothing, Dogberry invokes “paucas pallabris” using just its second word, in the form “<em>Palabras</em>”, to shush Verges. In Henry V, Pistol silences himself to cut off his quarrel with Nim by saying “<em>pauca</em>”. And in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Evans tries to get Falstaff to moderate his tongue with “<em>pauca verba</em>”. A few seconds later, Nim picks up the phrase and repeats “<em>pauca, pauca</em>”. </p>
<p>With the exception of The Taming of the Shrew, which was written sometime between 1582-1593, these are plays from the narrow period we have identified when dramatists collectively opted for fewer words. Might Shakespeare have unconsciously registered the change in this bit of Latin?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204117/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There is an interesting new story emerging about the lengths of speeches in early modern plays. In the space of five years there was a dramatic shift in style – and it wasn’t just Shakespeare.Kim Colyvas, Research Assistant, University of NewcastleGabriel Egan, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, De Montfort UniversityHugh Craig, Professor of English, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2028912023-04-21T09:06:05Z2023-04-21T09:06:05ZShakespeare’s environmentalism: how his plays explore the same ecological issues we face today<p>Climate change, urban sprawl, air pollution, deforestation, depleted fish stocks, biodiversity and species loss: these are not exclusively modern problems that only sprang up in the last few hundred years. In fact, the common but misleading phrase “industrial revolution” masks the <a href="https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/507339/1/A%20once%20and%20future%20extractive%20history%20of%20Britain.pdf">long history of resource extraction</a> and ecological degradation in the British Isles stretching back at least to the arrival of the <a href="https://www.roman-britain.co.uk/life-in-roman-britain/mining-in-roman-britain/">tin-hungry Romans</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/key-features-of-renaissance-culture">Renaissance England</a> was reeling from the effects of all these problems. Often hailed as the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/Elizabethan-and-early-Stuart-drama">golden age of English literature</a>, the Renaissance was also the apex of the “<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-original-climate-crisis-how-the-little-ice-age-devastated-early-modern-europe-178187">little ice age</a>”, in which a cooler climate produced poorer harvests.</p>
<p>These food shortages were especially difficult because England’s <a href="https://www.gale.com/intl/essays/matthew-clark-tudor-society">human population surged</a> fourfold in the 16th century, while the <a href="https://tudorhistory.org/glossaries/e/enclosure.html">enclosure of common lands</a> forced more country-dwellers to flock to London. Given how heavily these environmental concerns weighed on a society coping with chronic scarcity, it should come as no surprise that we can find traces of them in the works of England’s greatest playwright.</p>
<h2>King and countryside</h2>
<p>When <a href="https://www.royal.uk/james-i">King James</a> became his patron in 1603, Shakespeare was tasked with writing plays to entertain a keen outdoorsman and hunter who was as much preoccupied with the material state of the British countryside as with matters of state. No wonder, then, the Shakespearean stage encompasses a remarkable variety of landscapes and features an abundance of animal imagery to rival the <a href="https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/the-tower-of-london-menagerie/#gs.ujqfoc">royal menagerie</a> – basically King James’s private zoo – and compensate for England’s dwindling numbers of wild game.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>This article is part of our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/william-shakespeare-14574">First Folio 400</a> series. These articles mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.</em></p>
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<p>It would, of course, be an anachronism to dub Shakespeare an environmentalist. But he was acutely aware of what we would term the environmental issues of his era. In particular, the plays Shakespeare composed during the reign of James frequently intervene in environmental policy disputes at the Stuart court about how best to carve up the natural riches of the realm.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bl.uk/works/macbeth">Macbeth’s</a> famous depiction of the “blasted heath” reflects the increasingly negative views of this terrain as a sterile abode of witches and <a href="https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/oms/romani-gypsies-in-16th-century-britain">Romani</a> people that should be transformed into private farmland.</p>
<p>Although James dreaded witches, he and parliament sought to protect heathland as a habitat for game animals and birds. He would have relished Shakespeare’s comparing Macbeth to a poacher and a <a href="https://www.rspb.org.uk/our-work/conservation/conservation-and-sustainability/safeguarding-species/case-studies/red-kite/">kite</a>, a species then classified as vermin. Macbeth’s killing of Duncan and Macduff’s (pronounced Macdove) family simulates illegal net-hunting, nest-robbing, and the raiding of estate buildings known as <a href="https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/history/architecture/what-is-a-dovecote">dovecotes</a>, which housed pigeons and doves for food and feathers. </p>
<h2>Enduring environmental issues</h2>
<p>In <a href="https://www.rsc.org.uk/pericles/the-plot">Pericles</a>, Shakespeare wades into pan-European squabbles about fishing rights amid a crash in North Sea fishing stocks. Its conclusion mirrors James’ plan to end the <a href="https://www.deruyter.org/uploads/media/5acf9125b45c4.pdf">herring wars</a> (the ongoing feud between England and its coastal neighbours over territorial control of fishing areas) by forging dynastic alliances through the marriage of his heirs.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Pericles also plays on fears of coastal erosion. Shakespeare adapted the story from a writer whose father had proposed the existence of a flooded land-bridge linking Britain to the continent (now known as <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland/">Doggerland</a>.</p>
<p>While the shipwrecked king refutes claims to rule the unruly seas, the costumes donned by Shakespeare’s actors would have told a different story. Pericles and his family almost certainly appeared in robes of <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180801-tyrian-purple-the-regal-colour-taken-from-mollusc-mucus">Tyrian purple</a>. This dye, made in Pericles’ home town from crushed sea snails, could only be worn by royalty and would thus have been a striking visual symbol of royal dominion over the ocean. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-winters-tale">The Winter’s Tale</a> comments on the inhumanity of the fur trade. The famous bear that pursues Antigonus off stage may have been played by an actor in a polar bear’s pelt captured by fur traders, while Queen Hermione is a personification of an <a href="https://ztevetevans.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/stoats-in-folklore-and-heraldry/">ermine</a>.</p>
<p>Spelled “ermion” in Shakespeare’s day, an ermine is a stoat in its white winter coat. Ermines were symbols of chastity since it was believed they would rather die than befoul their white fur. </p>
<p>Hermione acts like her namesake when she exclaims she too would rather die than stain her name as an adulteress. The trial scene in which she would be stripped of her white fur re-enacts the flaying of an animal, while the scene in which her statue is reanimated captures a fascination with the new, death-defying art of taxidermy. </p>
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<p><a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-plays/king-lear/">King Lear</a> proclaims humans no better than beasts and is a tour de force demonstration of our vulnerability to both extreme weather and darkness. In <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-plays/cymbeline">Cymbeline</a>, Shakespeare expresses a newfound appreciation for mountain wilderness as a preserve not only of game animals but also of Britishness and masculinity.</p>
<p>Few people realise <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-plays/tempest/">The Tempest</a> is based on legends of a demon-battling hermit from the English fens. Its notorious monster Caliban voices the outrage of fenland communities dispossessed by schemes to drain and enclose their wetlands.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-plays/measure-measure/">Measure For Measure</a> reveals how <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/plague/History">the plague</a> stoked fears of urban overpopulation, while <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-plays/timon-athens/">Timon of Athens</a> offer’s a scathing satire on the mining lobby and its cornucopian economics: the notion that the earth’s wealth is inexhaustible. </p>
<p>In inserting these environmental issues into his plays, Shakespeare forced his audience to reflect on the political, moral, and spiritual implications of early modern England’s growing power to transform the natural world. His fascination with kings might seem old-fashioned, but in our brave new era of the <a href="https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-the-anthropocene.html">Anthropocene</a>, in which our species has become the dominant geological force, we can better appreciate how he often uses kingship as a metaphor for human tyranny over nature. </p>
<p>Shakespeare’s profound sympathies for the disempowered outsider also extend to non-human creatures. When his high and mighty despots have their comeuppance out in the wilds, learning that the earth doesn’t exist to bend to them, Shakespeare’s plays are teaching us all to relinquish the delusion that we are entitled to dominate the planet.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202891/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Todd Andrew Borlik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Worrying environmental issues dominated the time of William Shakespeare as they do now, from depleted fish stocks and food shortages, to overpopulation and animal exploitation.Todd Andrew Borlik, Reader in Renaissance Drama, University of HuddersfieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2020202023-04-20T16:32:15Z2023-04-20T16:32:15ZShakespeare by numbers: how mathematical breakthroughs influenced the Bard’s plays<p>Mathematical motifs feature in many of Shakespeare’s most memorable scenes. He lived and wrote in <a href="https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/key-features-of-renaissance-culture">the late 16th century</a>, when <a href="https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/texts/mathematicus.htm">new mathematical concepts</a> were transforming perceptions of the world. Part of the role of the theatre was to process the cultural implications of all these changes.</p>
<p>People in Shakespeare’s time were used to the idea of the <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229654-800-shakespeare-did-radical-astronomy-inspire-hamlet/">infinite</a>: the planets, the heavens, the weather. But they were much less used to the inverse idea that the very small (and even nothingness) could be expressed by mathematical axioms. In fact, the first recorded English use of the word “zero” wasn’t <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zero#word-history">until 1598</a>. </p>
<p>Thinkers like Italian mathematician <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fibonacci">Fibonacci</a>, who lived in the 13th century, helped to introduce the concept of zero – known then as a “cipher” – into the mainstream. But it wasn’t until philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Descartes">René Descartes </a> and mathematicians <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Newton">Sir Isaac Newton</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz">Gottfried Leibniz</a> developed <a href="https://marktomforde.com/academic/miscellaneous/calculus-history/calchistory.html">calculus</a> in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that “zero” started to figure prominently in society. </p>
<p>Moreover, scientist <a href="https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hooke/">Robert Hooke</a> didn’t discover microorganisms until 1665, meaning the idea that life could exist on a micro level remained something of fantasy.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518478/original/file-20230330-16-xzv2wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white engraving showing Calvius with mathematical tools. He wears a clock and pointed hat." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518478/original/file-20230330-16-xzv2wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518478/original/file-20230330-16-xzv2wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518478/original/file-20230330-16-xzv2wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518478/original/file-20230330-16-xzv2wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518478/original/file-20230330-16-xzv2wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518478/original/file-20230330-16-xzv2wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518478/original/file-20230330-16-xzv2wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 16th century engraving of astronomer Christopher Clavius after a painting by Francisco Villamena (1606).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://library.si.edu/es/image-gallery/73149">Smithsonian Libraries</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With the <a href="http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/thesis/introduction.htm">growing influence of neoclassical ideas</a> in England, small, insignificant figures had begun to be used to represent very large concepts. </p>
<p>This was happening both in modes of calculation (which used proportion) and in the practice of writing mathematical symbols. </p>
<p>For example, during the 16th and early 17th centuries, the equals, multiplication, division, root, decimal, and inequality symbols were gradually introduced and standardised.</p>
<p>Alongside this came the work of <a href="https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Clavius/">Christopher Clavius</a> – a German Jesuit astronomer who helped Pope Gregory XIII to introduce the Gregorian calendar – and other mathematicians on fractions. Then referred to as <a href="https://nrich.maths.org/2515">“broken numbers”</a>, they <a href="https://jontalle.web.engr.illinois.edu/uploads/298/HistoryMath-Burton.85.pdf">stirred up great angst</a> among those who clung to classical models of number theory. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>This article is part of our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/william-shakespeare-14574">First Folio 400</a> series. These articles mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The struggle to come to terms with the entanglement of the very large and the very small is splendidly displayed in many of Shakespeare’s works. This includes his history play Henry V and tragedy Troilus and Cressida.</p>
<p>The opening chorus of Henry V displays Shakespeare’s interest in proportion and the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2013/08/04/shakespeare_defined_our_concept_of_nothingness/#:%7E:text=How%20do%20we%20write%20three,0%20(zero%20units)%3A%203%2C000.">concept of zero</a> through its repeated “O” and references to contemporary mathematical thought:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>O for a muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention: / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene […] / may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt? / O pardon: since a crookèd figure may / Attest in little place a million, / And let us, ciphers to this great account, / On your imaginary forces work. </p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/henry-v-the-oxford-shakespeare-9780199536511?cc=gb&lang=en&">Scholars</a> largely agree that Shakespeare’s “crookèd figure” is actually zero. This is despite, of course, the rather obvious objection that zero is the least crooked of all numbers. </p>
<p>In the line “a crookèd figure may / Attest in little place a million”, Shakespeare references 16th century <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229654-800-shakespeare-did-radical-astronomy-inspire-hamlet/">mathematical debates</a> surrounding the idea that the very small is capable of both representing and influencing the very big. In this case, the zero is capable of transforming 100,000 into 1,000,000.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518476/original/file-20230330-26-6m7kcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Interior shot of Shakespeare's open air Globe theatre showing its round shape." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518476/original/file-20230330-26-6m7kcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518476/original/file-20230330-26-6m7kcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518476/original/file-20230330-26-6m7kcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518476/original/file-20230330-26-6m7kcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518476/original/file-20230330-26-6m7kcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518476/original/file-20230330-26-6m7kcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518476/original/file-20230330-26-6m7kcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Use of ‘zero’ or ‘O’ in Shakespeare can also be read as a metaphor for his circular Globe theatre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/london-uk-april-20-2019-globe-1376701724">Nick Brundle/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this mathematical analogy, “crookèd figure[s]” can “attest” much greater things. The chorus suggests that by using one’s “imaginary forces”, much greater things may come from the forthcoming stage performances. </p>
<p>This extended metaphor reappears in Shakespeare’s tragicomedy, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-winters-tale-review-jarring-shakespeares-globe-production-lacks-warmth-202566">The Winter’s Tale</a> when the “<a href="https://www.salon.com/2013/08/04/shakespeare_defined_our_concept_of_nothingness/">cipher</a>” (numbers) transform into many thousands of thank yous:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Like a cipher, / Yet standing in rich place, I multiply / With one “We thank you” many thousands more / That go before it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is a further, visual metaphor in Henry V’s opening prologue where the chorus asks pardon of an “O” to help them represent many things in the “wooden O” – the <a href="https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/">Globe Theatre</a>. This is perhaps evidence of Shakespeare’s ongoing interest in insignificant figures “attest[ing]” much greater things.</p>
<p>Elsewhere in his work, mathematical metaphors encircle themselves in moments of crisis. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare uses mathematical language to chart the slow motion collapse of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24778494">Troilus’s mental stability</a> after witnessing his lover Cressida’s flirtation with another man.</p>
<p>For Troilus, Cressida disintegrates into “fractions”, “fragments” and “bits and greasy relics”. To mirror this, Shakespeare’s verse descends into jagged pieces, like the early modern name for fractions: “broken numbers”.</p>
<p>With 2023 marking 400 years since the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, it is exciting to see how the Bard’s plays spoke to significant developments in the 16th-century mathematical world.</p>
<p>Shakespeare’s plays registered the 16th-century crisis of classical mathematics in the face of newer ideas. But they also offered space for audiences to come to terms with these new ideas and think differently about the world through the lens of mathematics.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202020/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Madeleine S. Killacky does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the late 16th century, new mathematical concepts were transforming perceptions of the world. Shakespeare’s plays helped audiences to process these changes.Madeleine S. Killacky, PhD Candidate, Medieval Literature, Bangor UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2029982023-04-20T16:32:14Z2023-04-20T16:32:14ZShakespeare’s First Folio turns 400: what would be lost without the collection? An expert speculates<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518464/original/file-20230330-20-6659wf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5928%2C3871&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shakespeare's First Folio was the first published work to include Macbeth.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/OO8AEXFQtdI">Matt Riches/Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It has been 400 years since the publication of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, a volume now known as the First Folio. Prepared <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/first-folio/">by his fellow actors</a> after his death, the book presented 36 plays divided into the genres of comedy, history and tragedy.</p>
<hr>
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<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Without it, <a href="https://folio400.com/publication/">18 of Shakespeare’s plays</a> that had not previously been printed would have been lost, among them Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and The Tempest. No “friends, Romans and countrymen”, no “brave new world”, no “double, double toil and trouble”.</p>
<p>But what would really be different if this book had never been printed at all?</p>
<p>Most significantly, there wouldn’t be the cultural icon we know as “Shakespeare”. Those works that do survive would be scattered across numerous flimsy early editions, rather than gathered in this imposing and serious volume. </p>
<p>Without the weight – cultural as well as literal – of the collected edition, it’s possible few would care about these surviving plays. Something similar happened to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/nov/17/classics.theatre">other playwrights of the period</a>, whose work was not given the authority of a collection.</p>
<p>We’d also have an idea of Shakespeare as more interested in histories and comedies than tragedies. Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Timon of Athens <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/first-folio/">would be lost</a> without the First Folio. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518455/original/file-20230330-30-cjtfyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The title page of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays featuring a portrait of a balding Shakespeare." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518455/original/file-20230330-30-cjtfyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518455/original/file-20230330-30-cjtfyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518455/original/file-20230330-30-cjtfyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518455/original/file-20230330-30-cjtfyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518455/original/file-20230330-30-cjtfyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1215&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518455/original/file-20230330-30-cjtfyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1215&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518455/original/file-20230330-30-cjtfyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1215&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The title page of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Shakespeare_-_First_Folio_1623.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since some of these early editions did not name Shakespeare on their title pages, the authorship of plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus and Henry V would be uncertain. Conversely, title pages identify Shakespeare as the author of <a href="https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/london-prodigal-first-edition">The London Prodigal</a> (1605) and <a href="https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/yorkshire-tragedy-first-edition">A Yorkshire Tragedy</a> (1608), which most modern scholars do not attribute to Shakespeare. In part this is due to the fact that they are not included in the First Folio. Without it, the canon of Shakespeare’s plays would have decisively shifted.</p>
<p>This different canon would have prompted a different historical response. The convenience and ready availability of the First Folio as a repository for Shakespeare’s plays <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/lets-talk-shakespeare/how-did-shakespeare-get-so-popular/">was a significant practical factor</a> in getting him back into the theatres when they reopened at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. </p>
<p>This large collection of Shakespeare’s works took up visible space on the shelf. Had he not come back into prominence at that important moment – and had the newly revived theatre looked elsewhere for their dramatic scripts – Shakespeare’s reputation might well have been permanently lost.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520292/original/file-20230411-22-7ego8p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>This article is part of our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/william-shakespeare-14574">First Folio 400</a> series. These articles mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>If Shakespeare had not been revived in the later 17th century, it is hard to see how he would have <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/shakespeares-first-folio-9780198819998?cc=gb&lang=en&">become the national poet</a> during the 18th. No <a href="https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/william-shakespeare">statue in Poets’ corner</a>, no arguments between the literary figures of the day about the best way to edit his plays. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Garrick">David Garrick</a> – the leading Shakespearean actor of the 18th century – would have had an entirely different career (as, in later periods, would other actors like Laurence Olivier and Judi Dench).</p>
<h2>Shakespeare’s international reputation</h2>
<p>This much-depleted Shakespeare would hardly have <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-birthplace/purchase-of-birthplace/">galvanised outrage</a> about the sale of his Stratford birthplace in the 19th century. </p>
<p>Perhaps modern Stratford-upon-Avon would now simply mark its playwright son with a blue plaque (rather as Shakespeare’s writing partner <a href="https://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/retro/the-peterborough-schoolboy-who-went-on-to-write-with-shakespeare-2942419">John Fletcher</a> is remembered in his hometown of Rye). There would be no <a href="https://www.shakespearescelebrations.com/whats-on/shakespeares-birthday-celebration-parade/">birthday parade</a>, no Othello taxi firm, no tourist industry. No one would care if his wife, Anne Hathaway, <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/visit/anne-hathaways-cottage/">had a cottage</a>.</p>
<p>Without the First Folio there would be no dedicated Shakespeare theatre in Stratford, or at Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside. There would be no Shakespeare festivals around the world, such as that in Stratford, Ontario. In fact, Stratford, Ontario, named in the 19th century for Shakespeare’s hometown, would now have a different name entirely, as would Stratfords in Ohio, Connecticut, Wisconsin, New Jersey and in New Zealand and Australia.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A thatched English cottage with white walls surrounded by greenery, photographed under blue skies." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518460/original/file-20230330-24-kyaao9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518460/original/file-20230330-24-kyaao9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518460/original/file-20230330-24-kyaao9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518460/original/file-20230330-24-kyaao9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518460/original/file-20230330-24-kyaao9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518460/original/file-20230330-24-kyaao9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518460/original/file-20230330-24-kyaao9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anne Hathaway’s famous thatched cottage just outside Stratford upon Avon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/anne-hathaways-william-shakespeares-wife-famous-121825960">David Steele/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Halloween would be quite different without Macbeth, which popularised a trio of witches around a cauldron performing a spell. Valentine cliches of romantic love are unthinkable without the popularity of Romeo and Juliet. No sporting fixture between England and France would reach for the lines about Agincourt from Henry V.</p>
<p>A Shakespeare reduced in national prestige would not have been sufficiently prominent to be translated. Without German Shakespeare, we might never have had <a href="https://www.freud.org.uk/2013/01/16/shakespeare-and-psychoanalysis/">Freud’s version of the Oedipus complex</a>, which he understood through his reading of Hamlet. </p>
<p>Karl Marx would not have conceptualised his theory of capital <a href="https://theconversation.com/shakespeares-timon-of-athens-penned-in-plague-time-shows-money-corrupts-but-can-also-heal-143493">via Timon of Athens</a>. And translations around the world – into more than 100 languages – would not have established Shakespeare as a global author.</p>
<p>There are other, more serious consequences of this fancy. Colonial rule in India would not have relied on Shakespearean study as the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/post-colonial-reading-of-the-tempest">central text of empire</a>. Othello’s murder of Desdemona might not have left its <a href="https://wilson.fas.harvard.edu/stigma-in-shakespeare/othello%E2%80%99s-black-skin">long shadow of prejudice</a> about interracial marriage. </p>
<p>Perhaps the Confederate actor John Wilkes Booth would not have shot Abraham Lincoln at DC’s Ford’s Theatre, in April 1865 since he wouldn’t have been <a href="https://www.theamerican.co.uk/pr/int-Shakespeare-In-A-Divided-America-James-Shapiro">steeped in the role</a> of the assassin Brutus in Julius Caesar.</p>
<p>The First Folio’s after-effects are far reaching indeed, touching fields of human psychology and geopolitics as well as literature, culture and theatre. No First Folio means no Shakespeare. And, whether you enjoy his works or not, that’s a hard reality to imagine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202998/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emma Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Without the First Folio, the canon of Shakespeare’s plays would have decisively shifted.Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1959392023-04-02T20:03:15Z2023-04-02T20:03:15ZEver feel like your life is a performance? Everyone does – and this 1959 book explains roles, scripts and hiding backstage<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516550/original/file-20230321-14-d8qd03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3000%2C1994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Our cultural touchstones series looks at books that have made an impact.</em></p>
<p>Shakespeare’s adage — “All the world’s a stage” — suggests human beings are conditioned to perform, and to possess an acute social awareness of how they appear in front of others. </p>
<p>It resonates in the age of social media, where we’re all performing ourselves on our screens and watching each other’s performances play out. Increasingly, those screen performances are how we meet people, and how we form relationships: from online dating, to remote work, to staying in touch with family.</p>
<p>While the idea of performance as central to social life has been around for centuries, <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0228.xml">Erving Goffman</a> was the first to attempt a comprehensive account of society and everyday life using theatre as an analogy. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518637/original/file-20230331-24-w3md7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518637/original/file-20230331-24-w3md7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518637/original/file-20230331-24-w3md7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518637/original/file-20230331-24-w3md7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518637/original/file-20230331-24-w3md7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518637/original/file-20230331-24-w3md7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518637/original/file-20230331-24-w3md7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518637/original/file-20230331-24-w3md7w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In the social media age, we’re all performing ourselves on our screens and watching each other’s performances play out.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">George Milton/Pexels</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His influential 1959 book <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-9780241547991">The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life</a> is something of a “bible” for scholars interested in questions of how we operate in everyday life. It became a surprise US bestseller on publication, crossing over to a general readership.</p>
<p>Goffman wrote about how we perform different versions of ourselves in different social environments, while keeping our “backstage” essential selves private. He called his idea <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003160861-3/dramaturgy-charles-edgley?context=ubx&refId=6e9b71d0-973c-4ebe-b90b-41a372d12623">dramaturgy</a>.</p>
<p>Playwright Alan Bennett <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n19/alan-bennett/cold-sweat">wrote admiringly</a> of him, “Individuals knew they behaved in this way, but Goffman knew <em>everybody</em> behaved like this and so did I.”</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-shifting-identities-performing-sexual-selves-on-social-media-145322">Friday essay: shifting identities - performing sexual selves on social media</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Goffman as influencer (and suspected spy)</h2>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/about-isa/history-of-isa/books-of-the-xx-century">poll of professional sociologists</a>, Goffman’s book ranked in the top ten publications of the 20th century. </p>
<p>It influenced playwrights such as <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019027250907200402">Tom Stoppard</a> and, of course, Bennett, who <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Alan-Bennett-A-Critical-Introduction/OMealy/p/book/9780815335405">was interested in</a> depicting and analysing the role-playing of everyday life that Goffman identified. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518632/original/file-20230331-22-d1kllv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518632/original/file-20230331-22-d1kllv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518632/original/file-20230331-22-d1kllv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518632/original/file-20230331-22-d1kllv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518632/original/file-20230331-22-d1kllv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518632/original/file-20230331-22-d1kllv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518632/original/file-20230331-22-d1kllv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518632/original/file-20230331-22-d1kllv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Goffman was <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781444396621.ch24">born in Mannville</a>, Alberta in 1922 to Ukrainian Jewish parents who migrated to Canada. The sister of the man who would become famous for his theatre analogies was an actor, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0062844/">Frances Bay</a>: late in life, she would play quirky, recognisable roles such as the “marble rye” lady on <a href="https://theconversation.com/science-of-seinfeld-131606">Seinfeld</a> and a recurring part on <a href="https://theconversation.com/ill-see-you-again-in-25-years-the-return-to-twin-peaks-32624">Twin Peaks</a> (as Mrs Tremond/Chalfant).</p>
<p>The path to Goffman’s book was an unusual one. It didn’t come from directly studying the theatre, or even from asking questions about theatregoers.</p>
<p>While completing postgraduate studies at the the University of Chicago, Goffman was given the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in the Shetland Islands, an isolated part of northern Scotland, for his <a href="https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/ns-ccic/release/4">PhD dissertation</a>.</p>
<p>Goffman pretended to be there to <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470999912.ch3">study agricultural techniques</a>. But his actual reason was to examine the everyday life of the Shetland Islanders. As he observed the everyday practices and rituals of the remote island community, he had to negotiate suspicions he may <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Goffman-Social-Organization-Sociological-Routledge/dp/0415112044?">have been a spy</a>. </p>
<p>In Goffman’s published book, the ethnography of the Shetland Islands takes a back seat to his dramaturgical theory.</p>
<h2>More than a popular how-to manual</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-9780241547991">The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life</a> quickly became <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Sociological-Bent-InsideMetro-Culture/dp/0170120015">a national bestseller</a>. It was picked up by general readers “as a guide to social manners and on how to be clever and calculating in social intercourse without being obvious”.</p>
<p>This fascinating and complex academic work could indeed be read as a “how-to” manual on how to impress others and mitigate negative impressions. But Goffman <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Erving-Goffman/Smith/p/book/9780415355919">didn’t mean</a> “performance” literally. Reading the book as a guide to middle-class etiquette misses some of its nuances.</p>
<p>One is the sophisticated understanding of how reality and contrivance relate to each other. A good performance is one that appears “unselfconscious”; a “contrived” performance is one where the fact the social actor is performing a role is “painstakingly evident”. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bVilBKyMLYk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A ‘contrived’ performance is when the actor playing a social role is ‘painstakingly evident’, or trying too hard.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In everyday language, we tend to describe the latter as trying too hard. But Goffman is making a more general point, about the way we all perform ourselves, all the time – whether the effort is visible or not.</p>
<p>If “All the world is not, of course, a stage”, then “the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-emotional-labour-and-how-do-we-get-it-wrong-185773">What is emotional labour - and how do we get it wrong?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Playing roles and being in character</h2>
<p>Today, we regularly use theatrical terms like “role”, “script”, “props”, “audience” and being “in and out of character” to describe how people behave in their everyday social life. But Goffman is the one who introduced these concepts, which have become part of our shared language.</p>
<p>Together, they highlight how social life depends on what Goffman terms a shared definition of particular situations. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518638/original/file-20230331-28-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518638/original/file-20230331-28-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518638/original/file-20230331-28-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518638/original/file-20230331-28-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518638/original/file-20230331-28-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518638/original/file-20230331-28-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518638/original/file-20230331-28-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518638/original/file-20230331-28-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Goffman introduced theatrical terms like ‘role’, ‘script’ and being ‘in and out of character’ as ways of talking about social performance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Monica Silvestre/Pexels</span></span>
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<p>Whether we are performing our work roles, having dinner with someone for whom we have romantic affections, or dealing with strangers in a public setting, we need to produce and maintain the appropriate definition of that reality. </p>
<p>These activities are “performances”, according to Goffman, because they involve mutual awareness or attentiveness to the information others emit. This mutual awareness, or attention to others, means humans are constantly performing for audiences in their everyday lives.</p>
<h2>Being in and out of character</h2>
<p>It matters who the audience is – and what type of audience we have for our performances. When thinking about how people adapt their behaviour for others, Goffman differentiates between “front regions” and “back regions”. </p>
<p>Front regions are where we must present what is often referred to as the “best version of ourselves”. In an open-plan office, a worker needs to look busy if their supervisor is about. So, in the front region, they need to look engaged, industrious and generally perform the role of being a worker. In an open-plan office, a worker needs to be constantly “in character”, as Goffman puts it.</p>
<p>Back regions are where a social actor can “let their guard down”. In the context of a workplace, the back regions might refer to the bathroom, the lunchroom or anywhere else where the worker can relax their performance and potentially resort to “out of character” behaviour. </p>
<p>If the worker takes a diversionary break to gossip with a colleague when their supervisor is no longer in earshot, they could be said to be engaging in back region conduct.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518636/original/file-20230331-18-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518636/original/file-20230331-18-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518636/original/file-20230331-18-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518636/original/file-20230331-18-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518636/original/file-20230331-18-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518636/original/file-20230331-18-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518636/original/file-20230331-18-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/518636/original/file-20230331-18-zj6jqm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In an open-plan office, a worker needs to be constantly ‘in character’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Israel Andrade/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Front and back regions are not defined by physical locations. A back region is any situation in which the individual can relax and drop their performance. (Of course, this means regions overlap with physical locations to some extent – people are more likely to be able to relax when they’re in more private settings.)</p>
<p>Thus, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/opinion/open-plan-office-awful.html">open-plan offices</a> are often unpopular because workers feel they are constantly under surveillance. Conversely, the work-from-home arrangements that have become more common since the era of COVID lockdowns are popular because they allow people to relax their work personae.</p>
<p>Renowned writer Jenny Diski <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n05/jenny-diski/think-of-mrs-darling">reflected</a> in 2004:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reading Goffman now is alarmingly claustrophobic. He presents a world where there is nowhere to run; a perpetual dinner party of status seeking, jockeying for position and saving face. Any idea of an authentic self becomes a nonsense. You may or may not believe in what you are performing; either type of performance is believed in or it is not. </p>
</blockquote>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-moscow-stage-to-monroe-and-de-niro-how-the-method-defined-20th-century-acting-179088">From the Moscow stage to Monroe and De Niro: how the Method defined 20th-century acting</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>21st-century Goffman</h2>
<p>Dramaturgy has survived the onset of our new media environment, where the presentation of the self has migrated to platforms as diverse as <a href="https://theconversation.com/instagram-and-facebook-are-stalking-you-on-websites-accessed-through-their-apps-what-can-you-do-about-it-188645">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-corn-how-the-online-viral-corn-kid-is-on-a-well-worn-path-to-fame-in-the-child-influencer-industry-189974">TikTok</a>. In some ways, it’s more relevant than ever. </p>
<p>Goffman’s approach has been applied to <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/no-sense-of-place-9780195042313?cc=au&lang=en&">electronic media</a>, radio and <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Media_and_Modernity/asB7QgAACAAJ?hl=en">television</a> <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003160861-19/reception-goffman-work-media-studies-peter-lunt">studies</a>, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262515047/new-tech-new-ties/">mobile phones</a> – and, more recently, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565211036797">social media</a> and even <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263276419829541">AI studies</a>.</p>
<p>The “successful staging” (as Goffman terms it) of our social roles has only become more complex. This is perfectly illustrated by “BBC Dad” Robert Kelly, whose 2017 <a href="https://junkee.com/bbc-dad-pictures-kids-now-marion-james/324165">live television interview</a> from his home study was interrupted when his children wandered into the room. This was before COVID lockdowns, when our home and work lives (and personae) increasingly merged. </p>
<p>“Everyone understands that now,” <a href="https://junkee.com/bbc-dad-pictures-kids-now-marion-james/324165">wrote Reena Gupta</a> in 2022. “You or someone in your family or circle of friends has been BBC Dad.”</p>
<p>Maintaining and maximising performances still matters. And so does Goffman.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195939/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a ‘bible’ for scholars, voted a top 10 book of the 20th century. It also fascinated general readers, as a guide to social manners.Michael James Walsh, Associate Professor in Social Sciences, University of CanberraEduardo de la Fuente, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Justice and Society, UniSA, University of South AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2025662023-03-28T12:21:12Z2023-03-28T12:21:12ZThe Winter’s Tale review: jarring Shakespeare’s Globe production lacks warmth<p>The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s great “<a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781315757346-11/hospitality-risk-grace-bargain-uncertain-economies-winter-tale-james-kearney?context=ubx&refId=f9bb2210-47ca-429d-8b51-de3e182ea726">hospitality</a> plays” – a <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315612720-12/italian-pastoral-tragicomedy-english-early-modern-drama-robert-henke">tragicomedy</a> about what goes wrong when a guest outstays their welcome. </p>
<p>Leontes, king of Sicilia, suspects his friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, of adultery and catastrophe ensues. In keeping with the 16th-century genre, however, the villain is eventually reformed and the friends – and husband and wife – reconcile. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Director Sean Holmes and designer Grace Smart discuss their staging of The Winter’s Tale.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Director Sean Holmes streamlines things in this production for Shakespeare’s Globe, so the action in the kingdoms of Sicilia and Bohemia each revolve around a feast. The audience are invited in to the second but are strictly onlookers for the first.</p>
<p>The opening three acts in Sicilia are played as a dinner party with a “fourth wall” in the indoor space of The Globe’s Sam Wanamaker theatre. Set designer Grace Smart has created a strong, if claustrophobic, design – a tasteful mid-century dining room with a large glass-topped dining table, the back wall modernised with a lick of peppermint green paint. </p>
<p>The dialogue of the diners – Leontes (Sergo Vares), his wife Hermione (Bea Segura), Bohemian King Polixenes (John Lightbody) and Leontes’s son, Mamillius (George Robinson) – is punctuated by discordant string music, announcing the arrival of a stream of Heston Blumenthal-style dishes. The audience are positioned as voyeurs, while the court of Sicilia are reduced to Downton Abbey-style servants anonymously waiting at the side lines.</p>
<p>Cut down to jarringly bite-sized episodes, the production reaches for a more conceptual adaptation. It conveys something of the brittleness of Sicilia’s court but loses much of its complexity and depth.</p>
<p>Dishes continue to be served, through Mamillius’ bedtime story, the truncated prison scenes, birth of Perdita and Hermione’s trial – whether the diners are present or not. </p>
<p>The cuisine morphs from fine dining to takeaway dishes from Deliveroo, as Leontes descends into a jealous rage. Stripped to his underwear, he crawls on the table and chases his friend and servant Camillo (Beruce Kahn) around it.</p>
<p>As Hermione speaks the heartrending lines of her hopeless self-defence: “Now, for conspiracy / I know not how it tastes, though it be dish’d / For me to try how”, she clutches a steaming burger.</p>
<p>Stripped and chopped like this, the play cannot convey the tenderness of the relationship between Leontes and his son, the friendship between Paulina (Nadine Higgin) and Hermione, the concern of Leontes’ wise councillors or the pathos of Hermione’s dignity and despair. It is not exactly clear what is left.</p>
<h2>Hospitality in The Winter’s Tale</h2>
<p>The current political debate around <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/suella-braverman-robert-jenrick-home-secretary-prime-minister-cabinet-b2215331.html">the UK as a place of “welcome”</a>, calls out for artistic engagement with hospitality and its stakes.</p>
<p>An ambivalent art of social and political navigation, hospitality is a play of manners, sustained in the tensions of obligation and reciprocity. Identifying what is real and what is feigned in hospitality is hard. Theatre should be the perfect laboratory for its investigation.</p>
<p>The first scene of The Winter’s Tale, which is almost always cut – as it is here – stages a war of courtesy over whose hospitality is better, Sicilia or Bohemia. Holmes takes the bold directorial decision to stage each kingdom in a different performance space and have the audience move between them. This is the first time Shakespeare’s Globe’s two spaces have been used in tandem in a production.</p>
<p>In the cold night, with a bare and makeshift stage, Florizel (Sarah Slimani) invites the audience into Bohemia, switching on rigged fairy and flood lights. There’s a shared thrill in creeping into an empty theatre after hours. </p>
<p>Antigonus (Colm Gormley) abandons new-born baby Perdita in Bohemia and is eaten by a bear. A baroque but necessary plot device in other productions, the abandonment takes on a different gravitas in the cold open air. </p>
<p>Indoor Sicilia is stiff and uninviting by contrast with hospitable and festive Bohemia, outdoors. The contrast is over-egged, however, which means the dramatic ambiguity of hospitality on which the action turns is lost. </p>
<p>Holmes has an ambitious vision for this production of The Winter’s Tale, but its realisation is a piecemeal tasting menu that is better celebrated in its parts than its whole.</p>
<p><em>The Winter’s Tale is on now at <a href="https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/the-winters-tale-2022/">Shakespeare’s Globe theatre</a>, London, until 16 April.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202566/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Penelope Woods has received funding from the Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is a member of the Labour Party.</span></em></p>The Globe has used both its theatres in tandem for a single production, for the first time in its history.Penelope Woods, Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2019362023-03-23T12:39:42Z2023-03-23T12:39:42ZHow ‘Succession’ feeds the hidden fantasies of its well-to-do viewers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516416/original/file-20230320-20-bejszf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=172%2C8%2C1468%2C1069&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Where's the appeal in watching a group of obnoxious, pampered, backstabbing siblings?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://static.hbo.com/2021-10/succession-ka-1920_0.jpg">HBO</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7660850/">Succession</a>” has returned for its fourth and final season, giving the show’s fans one last opportunity to watch <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a22638435/hbo-succession-review/">the kids of the wealthy Roy family</a> desperately try to gain the approval of their media mogul father by any means necessary.</p>
<p>I’ve watched every episode. But at one point, I started to wonder: Where’s the appeal in watching a group of obnoxious, pampered, backstabbing siblings?</p>
<p>Inspired by the family of Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, with themes and a premise <a href="https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/of-roys-and-kings-the-shadow-of-succession/">pulled from</a> Shakespeare’s “<a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lear/full.html">King Lear</a>,” “Succession” tells the story of an aging patriarch who must decide which of his four children will replace him at the top. </p>
<p>It’s easy to assume that much of the show’s appeal lies in its playful critiques of right-wing media and the billionaire class.</p>
<p>But in my view, the show actually caters to an audience that wants to condemn the main characters – while secretly identifying with their pursuit of power and pleasure.</p>
<h2>The contradictions of the liberal class</h2>
<p>As New York Times columnist David Brooks argued in his book “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bobos-in-Paradise/David-Brooks/9780684853789">Bobos in Paradise</a>” – “bobo” a portmanteau of “bohemian” and “bourgeois” – contemporary America is full of upper-middle class professionals who long to be seen as virtuous artists, even as they engage in the relentless pursuit of money and success that allow them to ascend the ranks of the bourgeois class. </p>
<p>To hide the guilt they may feel for their capitalistic careerism, they look to signal their virtue and style through their consumption habits. They might pay more money to purchase a hybrid car so they can appear to be good stewards of the environment. Or they might fork over an extra buck or two to buy fair trade coffee. </p>
<p>Art also plays a role in status signaling. In his book “<a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674212770">Distinction</a>,” sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explained how class status and an appreciation of the arts are often intertwined. Wealthy people, he points out, have the time and resources to spend on activities that serve no direct practical function. </p>
<p>The working classes, however, have to constantly think about necessity and their limited time and money. </p>
<p>Bourdieu ultimately argues that the masses tend to avoid engaging with art and watching films and movies that place form over function because they do not have the luxury to spend time and money on these experiences. </p>
<h2>It’s HBO – not mass TV</h2>
<p>Like so many other <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Legitimating-Television-Media-Convergence-and-Cultural-Status/Newman-Levine/p/book/9780415880268">acclaimed premium cable TV shows</a>, “Succession” targets the very viewers – middle class and upper-middle class professionals – who can afford to pay for monthly streaming subscriptions. </p>
<p>To draw in these viewers, HBO needs to differentiate itself from TV networks and other streaming services. It does this, in part, by including nudity, violence and profanity <a href="https://www.tvguide.com/news/features/tv-censorship-nudity-profanity/">that wouldn’t be permitted on network TV</a>. It also seeks to highlight its series’ high production value.</p>
<p>In “Succession,” the series’ uncensored speech and behavior gives it a sense of gritty realism. But the show is also eager to flaunt its cinematic flair: <a href="https://nofilmschool.com/succession-cinematography">strange camera angles</a> and <a href="https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-post/succession">saturated colors</a> suffuse each scene. These aesthetic techniques create a distancing effect on the audience; it is hard to escape a sense that this is a carefully crafted, fake world. </p>
<p>As I argue in my book “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Political-Pathologies-from-The-Sopranos-to-Succession-Prestige-TV-and-the/Samuels/p/book/9781032403397">Political Pathologies from The Sopranos to Succession</a>,” this combination of the real and the fake allows prestige TV shows like “Succession” to present themselves as both a mirror of the world and a fictional painting full of stylistic flourishes.</p>
<p>This distance and duality allow the audience to feel like it’s a part of this world, while giving viewers the space to sever themselves from any sort of complicity and identification with the worst excesses of the show’s characters.</p>
<h2>Having it both ways</h2>
<p>Just as upper-middle class professionals may seek to hide their crass materialism through virtue signaling and status-based consumption, the show uses its own irony to reveal that it knows what it is doing, so that it can keep on catering to viewers’ anti-social desires. </p>
<p>The show’s well-to-do viewers may wish they could curse out their co-workers and underlings or indulge in wildly expensive luxuries, but they know that they have to restrain themselves – the rules of their social worlds demand it – and so they turn to fantasy and popular media to live out their repressed desires. </p>
<p>Like the politicians who say one thing but act in another contradictory way, the series itself sends two opposing messages simultaneously. One message is that people should all be free to say and do what they want. The other message is that this type of selfish behavior must be rejected because it undermines society and personal relationships.</p>
<p>New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/business/media/janet-malcolm-dead.html">who died in 2021</a>, often explored the ways in which these contradictions were ingrained in American culture. As she writes in her book “<a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/specials/malcolm-murderer.html">The Journalist and the Murderer</a>,” “Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness … Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.”</p>
<p>One of the main ways that the opposing forces of social order and individual pleasure are mediated is through <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/231833/chic_ironic_bitterness">humor and irony</a>. The key to comedy, then, is that it allows people to both say and unsay the same thing – to transgress but be protected by the guise of humor. </p>
<p>In “Succession,” characters, like Tom, will state something and then immediately take it back and qualify it. Throughout the series, he is constantly threatening his younger colleague, Greg, before backtracking and telling him that he is only kidding – only to repeat the same threat again.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Tom and Greg meet for the first time in the show’s first season.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The power of cable news</h2>
<p>The contradictions of the show’s characters – and the liberal class, more broadly – are mirrored in the past few decades of American politics. </p>
<p>One example of this is former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/third-way-dlc-bill-clinton-tony-blair-1990s-politics/">ushered in a political strategy</a> called the “third way.” In order to maintain power, the Democratic president often pushed through Republican policies like <a href="https://www.history.com/news/clinton-1990s-welfare-reform-facts">welfare reform</a>, <a href="https://prospect.org/health/fabulous-failure-clinton-s-1990s-origins-times/">financial deregulation</a> and <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/1994-crime-bill-and-beyond-how-federal-funding-shapes-criminal-justice">the war on drugs</a>. Underpinning this ideology is the desire to be both conservative and liberal at the same time. </p>
<p>Over time, the Democratic Party <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-long-goodbye-to-the-working-class/672016/">became representative of upper-middle class elites who still wanted to be seen as progressives</a>. The Republican party, meanwhile, hid its focus on policies catering to the super wealthy by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/07/college-degree-status-working-class-blue-collar-politics/">pretending to care about the plight</a> of the abandoned white working class. </p>
<p>In both of these cases, cable news and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2012/06/21/155501538/the-newsroom-caught-up-in-a-partisan-divide">fictional media</a> have played a big role in concealing the tensions of class conflict behind the wall of a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44808-4">culture war</a>.</p>
<p>In “Succession,” Waystar RoyCo, the right-wing news conglomerate owned by Logan Roy, often fans the flames of the culture war. For his part, Logan often claims that he controls the president, and it is up to him to pick the nation’s next leader. Logan’s power, then, does not come primarily from his money but from his media influence. </p>
<p>Since the media is positioned as the show’s most powerful political entity, I sometimes wonder what “Succession” is saying about its own status as a popular TV show. Is the series claiming that it has immense social power, or does it use humor and metafiction to free itself from any responsibility? </p>
<p>The answer to these questions has to be both yes and no: The series reflects the country’s political reality – but it also feeds the underlying fantasies that shape viewers’ political beliefs.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201936/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Samuels does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Do the show’s fans secretly identify with the characters’ pursuit of power and pleasure?Robert Samuels, Continuing Lecturer in Writing, University of California, Santa BarbaraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2001152023-02-20T15:16:17Z2023-02-20T15:16:17ZMuch Ado About Nothing: National Youth Theatre gives Shakespeare the Love Island treatment<p>“<a href="https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/56469/1/love-relationships-type-on-paper-dead-love-island-ekin-su">What’s your type on paper?</a>” is frequently asked by contestants on the popular reality dating show <a href="https://theconversation.com/love-island-what-the-show-can-teach-young-people-about-commitment-185459">Love Island</a>. “Rich, that’s certaine” responds Benedick, a contestant on “Nothing Island”, who appears to know exactly what he likes. “Wise, or I’ll none”, “virtuous”, “fair”, “mild” – though he concedes he is not fussed about hair colour.</p>
<p>In this <a href="https://www.nyt.org.uk/MuchAdo">National Youth Theatre production</a> celebrating their tenth anniversary, poet and playwright Debris Stevenson (<a href="https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/poetindacorner/">Poet in Da Corner</a>) adapts Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing as the final segment of reality TV show “Nothing Island”. “If it ain’t love,” executive producer Leonato (Jessica Enemokwu) says: “it’s Nothing”.</p>
<p>Stevenson’s production is sprinkled with quotations from other Shakespeare plays. “To thine own self be true,” cautions on-set therapist Dr Dogberry (a brilliant new lease of life for Shakespeare’s nightwatch policeman). “To sleep perchance to dream,” says the executive producer as the islanders turn in the night before the finale. </p>
<p>However, King Lear’s caution: “Nothing comes from nothing” might be the overriding concern, as this production sets Shakespeare’s coupling and uncoupling within the nihilistic and superficial world of reality TV.</p>
<p>The concept, however, is an effective springboard. As Stevenson and director Josie Daxter explain: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We were forced to lean into the shared, uncomfortable realities of the play [patriarchy, misogyny, racism] and the TV show [superficiality, racism, heteronormativity] in order to expose and critique them. The lens made us braver.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Through innovative approaches, theatre productions can make the historical values of Shakespeare’s plays <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Political_Shakespeare.html?id=K2UgAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">both understandable and relevant</a> to modern audiences. This is exactly what has been achieved here.</p>
<h2>Staging reality</h2>
<p>The TV production set frames all the play’s action, in a coherent, if claustrophobic, 90-minute run time. What audiences see of the play, they also simultaneously see being manipulated by a production team for an off-stage TV audience, whose torrent of caustic, sentimental and superficial social media interjections appear on screens above the action.</p>
<p>The rationale for the villainy in Shakespeare’s original plot has shifted. Don John is still the disaffected and illegitimate sibling – now sister – of Don Pedro (both decried as “nepo babies”). However, in this adaptation, she is more puppet than puppeteer.</p>
<p>Conrad (played brilliantly by Tomas Azócar-Nevin) is now the arch manipulator as an ambitious “story producer”. With an eye over all the action, Conrad seeds rumours that bloom into reality TV gold. He whispers in people’s ears (headsets) providing prompts and cues. </p>
<p>At the height of one character’s public humiliation, when they are jilted at the altar and presumed dead, he says: “Oh! I think we are going to win a Bafta.”</p>
<p>The reality show elements of the diary room (soliloquies), staged competitions (Benedick and Beatrice’s first encounter is a girls v boys “rap battle”) and parties (the masked ball), map uncannily well onto the plot devices and structure of Shakespeare’s comedy.</p>
<p>Will surprise couple Beatrice and Benedick win this year, or will it be Hero, back from the brink of death, and her lover/abuser Claudio (Jez Davess-Humphrey)? The executive producer, herself a black woman, articulates her cynical certainty that TV audiences will never vote for someone who looks like her.</p>
<p>There are also some tensions or distortions produced by this amalgamation. That Beatrice still requires Benedick, a man, to “kill Claudio”, is <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/6048">a hangover of Shakespeare’s patriarchal society</a> that feels out of kilter with the equality of the 50/50 gender split cast and female-led creative team.</p>
<p>Stevenson’s language is predominantly true to Shakespeare’s original play, with some deft interpolations and witty disjunctures: “I must cancel your company”, declares Benedick to Don Pedro. </p>
<p>However, the decision to keep other bits of original text (“he is as civil as an orange”, says Beatrice of the jealous Claudio, a pun on the sour imported Seville oranges of the 17th century, played here as a piece of nonsense), is unnecessary.</p>
<p>In other instances, Shakespeare’s verse is shown to excellent effect as rap and spoken word, though some of the play’s chipper couplets (“If it proves so, then loving goes by haps/ Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps”) could have been made more of.</p>
<p>Overall, this youth adaptation speaks with wit to a generation saturated in reality television and social media versions of love, who have missed out on real social contact during the COVID pandemic. The cynicism of the exposed reality TV strategies is counterbalanced by the warmth and joy of an assembled audience who laugh, gasp and click their fingers at this fast-paced and witty production.</p>
<p>If you want to know what love is, this adaptation suggests: switch off the reality TV and turn to Shakespeare instead.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200115/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Penelope Woods has previously received funding from The Arts Council and The Arts and Humanities Research Council.
She is a member of the Labour Party.</span></em></p>Shakespeare’s Conrad is now an ambitious ‘story producer’. With an eye over all the ‘Nothing Island’ action, he seeds rumours that bloom into reality TV gold.Penelope Woods, Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1992952023-02-14T19:11:18Z2023-02-14T19:11:18Z‘Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe’. It’s the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, a monumental project put together by his friends<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508809/original/file-20230208-22-31aufw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=42%2C14%2C3108%2C2116&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A calf-bound 1623 copy of the First Folio edition of William Shakespeare's plays.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Matt Dunham/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Shakespeare’s First Folio – more accurately known as Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies – was published 400 years ago this November.</p>
<p>It is the book that gave us Martin Droeshout’s famous engraved portrait of Shakespeare, and playwright Ben Jonson’s equally famous praise describing him as “not of an age, but for all time”. It remains one of the most iconic and recognisable books in English, with copies sometimes selling for around <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/shakespeares-first-folio-sells-ten-million-dollars-180976074/">US$10 million</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509621/original/file-20230212-27-xbxtc3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509621/original/file-20230212-27-xbxtc3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509621/original/file-20230212-27-xbxtc3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509621/original/file-20230212-27-xbxtc3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509621/original/file-20230212-27-xbxtc3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509621/original/file-20230212-27-xbxtc3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509621/original/file-20230212-27-xbxtc3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509621/original/file-20230212-27-xbxtc3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Martin Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The folio contains 36 Shakespeare plays – 18 of which had never been published before – along with two poems by Jonson that have significantly shaped Shakespeare’s reputation. </p>
<p>The first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays, it was put together by his fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Plays published here for the first time included Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and As You Like It. </p>
<p>Despite the hefty price tag, the folio is not a rare book. Of the conjectured 750 copies printed, hundreds still survive. A popular estimate is 235 extant copies, though the <a href="https://shakespearecensus.org/editions/43/">Shakespeare Census project</a> more specifically lists the locations of 228 substantively complete copies and a further 155 fragments (that is, copies with fewer than half their original leaves).</p>
<p>Of these, a staggering 82 copies were collected by the American businessman Henry Folger and his wife Emily in the early 20th century. These are held by the library they built for this purpose as a gift to the public – the Folger Shakespeare Library – in Washington, DC.</p>
<p>Meisei University in Japan holds 12 copies, and around 20 copies remain in private hands. “New” copies turn up regularly, if not frequently: in 2006, 2014, and twice in 2016, for example. Oxford’s Bodleian Library discarded its copy of the First Folio sometime in the 17th century, but in 1905 it was <a href="https://treasures.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/treasures/first-folio/">promptly snapped up again by its original owner!</a></p>
<p>So if it’s not a rare book, what makes a First Folio so special? The way the book was presented provides some clues.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-shakespeares-sonnets-an-honest-account-of-love-and-a-surprising-portal-to-the-man-himself-156964">Guide to the classics: Shakespeare’s sonnets — an honest account of love and a surprising portal to the man himself</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘What ever you do, Buy’</h2>
<p>Heminge and Condell composed two prefatory notes that frame the book rather differently. </p>
<p>In the first – the dedication to two of Shakespeare’s patrons, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery – Heminge and Condell refer humbly to Shakespeare’s plays as “trifles”. They urge the dedicatees to patronise the plays as they patronised their author, likening the plays to “Orphanes” in need of “Guardians”. </p>
<p>The pair are at pains to emphasise the lowly quality of their offering, likening the plays to the “leavened Cake” offered to the gods of many nations “that had not gummes & incense”. Seen thus, with the implication that the plays will be made precious through this offering to the earls, the folio cements Shakespeare’s reputation by virtue of endorsement by its patrons.</p>
<p>In their second address, Heminge and Condell invoke the commercial imperative, urging people to “read and censure” the book of plays if they will, but to “buy it first”. “What ever you do, Buy”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508829/original/file-20230208-22-yjceut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508829/original/file-20230208-22-yjceut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508829/original/file-20230208-22-yjceut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508829/original/file-20230208-22-yjceut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508829/original/file-20230208-22-yjceut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508829/original/file-20230208-22-yjceut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508829/original/file-20230208-22-yjceut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508829/original/file-20230208-22-yjceut.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Margaret and Gough Whitlam admiring a First Folio in 2003.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tiskas/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They style themselves as collectors and gatherers of Shakespeare’s plays: they assembled the works and brought the plays together for the first time. And of course, as one would expect of a sales pitch, they dismiss earlier publications as “stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed”.</p>
<p>By contrast, the folio they assembled offers plays “cur’d, and perfect of their limbes, and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them”. (Subsequent scholarship has demonstrated how false such claims often were; the quality of the versions of the plays in the folio is far from uniform.) Here, it’s the publishing industry that seemingly secures Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation.</p>
<p>Common to both epistles is the notion that the reader will have experienced the plays previously – on stage or in allegedly inferior published form – and that the folio marks a turning point. </p>
<p>The plays presented here are to be read and understood in the context of Shakespeare’s career:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Such sentiments remind me of the biting comment Ben Jonson makes in Every Man Out of His Humour (1599): “Art hath an enemy called Ignorance”.</p>
<h2>A shift in thinking</h2>
<p>It’s worth noting that the folio imposes the classical five-act structure onto plays that were generally conceived with only scenes in mind.</p>
<p>Between around 1590, when the public amphitheatre venues in London really took off, and 1608, when Shakespeare’s company began performing in the indoors Blackfriars playhouse (in addition to its outdoor Globe playhouse), English commercial plays didn’t typically use a five-act structure. (With its regular Choruses, Henry V – and to a lesser extent Romeo and Juliet – is exceptional in the Shakespeare canon in this regard.) </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509622/original/file-20230212-16-90lonq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509622/original/file-20230212-16-90lonq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509622/original/file-20230212-16-90lonq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509622/original/file-20230212-16-90lonq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509622/original/file-20230212-16-90lonq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509622/original/file-20230212-16-90lonq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509622/original/file-20230212-16-90lonq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509622/original/file-20230212-16-90lonq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Taming of the Shrew’s first page in the folio.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Folger Digital Image Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The generation of “university wits” who dominated the 1580s theatrical scene had all been raised on classical drama and therefore emulated its style. But Shakespeare did not go to university as far as we know, and it wasn’t until his company began performing at an indoor playhouse, where candles needed to be trimmed at regular intervals during performance, that it began to deliberately include act breaks.</p>
<p>The folio editors, however, attempt to impose them on Shakespeare’s plays, so they look more like the classical drama that was deemed worthy of serious consideration.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/weve-found-a-shakespeare-folio-but-a-swag-of-original-plays-are-still-missing-54596">We've found a Shakespeare folio but a swag of original plays are still missing</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>By the time of his death in 1616, around half of Shakespeare’s plays had appeared in print in single-text editions, typically in quarto format. (The term “quarto” refers to a sheet of paper being folded twice to produce four “leaves” – that is, eight pages – of a book; a “folio” results from folding the sheet just once, to yield two leaves and thus four pages.) </p>
<p>Modern fans of Shakespeare can be surprised by which plays were published and reprinted in this way, and which plays were not: Titus Andronicus appeared in quarto three times, Richard II five times, and Pericles three times before Shakespeare died. Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra did not appear in print during the author’s lifetime.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508833/original/file-20230208-16-w545ek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508833/original/file-20230208-16-w545ek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508833/original/file-20230208-16-w545ek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508833/original/file-20230208-16-w545ek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508833/original/file-20230208-16-w545ek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508833/original/file-20230208-16-w545ek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508833/original/file-20230208-16-w545ek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508833/original/file-20230208-16-w545ek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hazem Shammas as Macbeth in a Bell Shakespeare production.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bell Shakespeare</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Scholars have argued about what inherent quality made a play like Titus appeal to stationers as a sound publishing investment. We still don’t entirely know how such decisions were made, but the folio represents a shift in thinking: rather than speculating about an individual play’s worthiness or otherwise for print, the priority was gathering Shakespeare’s plays together. </p>
<p>A play like Timon of Athens that not only hadn’t appeared by itself in quarto, but wasn’t even originally planned for inclusion in the folio, could eventually find a home in the volume because it was contributing to the greater project, and the reasons for printing it were independent of any perceived commercial value it may have held on its own.</p>
<h2>Lost forever? Perhaps not</h2>
<p>A piece of received wisdom about the folio that most cling to is probably not true: it’s unlikely that unpublished masterpieces such as The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar would have been lost forever had they not been published in 1623. </p>
<p>The fact that copies of these plays were still available to the folio editors seven years after Shakespeare’s death and ten years after his retirement from the stage suggests that they were still accessible or even in use.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508835/original/file-20230208-30-xbi9j5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508835/original/file-20230208-30-xbi9j5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508835/original/file-20230208-30-xbi9j5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508835/original/file-20230208-30-xbi9j5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508835/original/file-20230208-30-xbi9j5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508835/original/file-20230208-30-xbi9j5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508835/original/file-20230208-30-xbi9j5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508835/original/file-20230208-30-xbi9j5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Denzel Washington in a 2006 Broadway production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Boneau/Bryan-Brown/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Presumably, like The Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher that came out in quarto in 1634, many or even all of these 18 plays would have eventually found their way into the world in standalone quartos or as augmentations to subsequent folios.</p>
<p>Fortunately we don’t have to wonder “what if”, because the folio did bring together 36 of Shakespeare’s plays in a single volume, the sum greater than the parts. Only two Shakespeare plays that didn’t appear in the First Folio (<a href="https://lostplays.folger.edu/Love%27s_Labour%27s_Won">Love’s Labour’s Won</a> and the Fletcher collaboration, <a href="https://lostplays.folger.edu/Cardenio">Cardenio</a>) are known to have been lost.</p>
<p>Literally a monumental project, the folio’s appeals to patronage and commerce, combined with its praise of the playwright’s wit, formed a multi-pronged approach to ensuring Shakespeare’s genius would receive the appreciation his friends thought it deserved. </p>
<p>400 years later, we continue to appreciate Heminge and Condell’s labours.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199295/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McInnis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the First Folio, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays were published for the first time. With its appeals to patronage and commerce, and praise of his wit, this iconic book preserved the playwright’s genius.David McInnis, Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1965672023-02-07T23:12:35Z2023-02-07T23:12:35ZCan you extract a pound of flesh without blood? How the power struggles in Shakespearean drama speak to an age of decolonisation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508727/original/file-20230207-15-2c4bdt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C1%2C897%2C700&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hazem Shammas as Macbeth</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bell Shakespeare.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are advised that this article names and quotes a deceased person.</em></p>
<p>Last October, New Zealand’s arts council pulled funding for the Shakespeare <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/14/new-zealand-pulls-funding-for-school-sheilah-winn-shakespeare-festival-citing-canon-of-imperialism">Globe Festival</a>, a school event of 30 years’ standing. They said it lacked relevance to decolonising Aotearoa. Days later, with the support of then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – once a participant – the program was reinstated. </p>
<p>This tug of war has been played out across the decades of the decolonising era, during which the pedagogical value of Shakespeare’s work has often been called into question. But the argument’s terms of reference are often confused. Attempts to cancel Shakespeare events and remove his plays from educational curricula are based on a misguided sense of how drama is made. </p>
<p>Cultural forms, such as drama, are not policies; they are creative practices. To be better custodians of all cultures, we need to understand that they are made of living layers. Shakespeare’s work is less like a limb requiring amputation, and more like a layer of living tissue that has been constantly revitalised through friction with its surroundings. </p>
<p>The British imperial project spread Shakespeare’s work throughout the world, but imperialism cannot take credit for the diverse range of uses to which millions of people have put it. If we pay attention to the layered, living history of Shakespeare in performance, rather than its superficial cultural capital, we discover that it is just as useful for exploring difference and diversity as it is for affirming continuities.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/much-ado-about-shakespeare-why-its-time-for-a-new-zealand-national-theatre-193214">Much ado about Shakespeare – why it's time for a New Zealand national theatre</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A habitable story-language</h2>
<p>Shakespearean drama is a habitable story-language shared by more of humanity than any other single author. As James Evans, Deputy Director of Australia’s Bell Shakespeare Company, sees it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>For us, Shakespeare is the world’s playwright. He transcends the label of “Western culture” and speaks to each of us as human beings. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Evans finds evidence in the fact that “Shakespeare has been translated into over 100 languages”.</p>
<p>The enduring and widespread popularity of Shakespeare has elicited many explanations. The one reached for by those who see banning Shakespeare as essential to decolonising educational curricula is that his work has been used to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/01/yale-english-students-call-for-end-of-focus-on-white-male-writers">perpetuate white patriarchal privilege</a>. Such criticism points to an idea about Shakespeare, but implies a limited curiosity about the drama itself and the felt experience of its interpretation in the world today. </p>
<p>No doubt knowledge of, or professed affinity for, Shakespeare’s plays can be mobilised to confer or perpetuate class privilege. This is an example of what sociologist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Bourdieu">Pierre Bourdieu</a> called “cultural capital”. A carefully placed Shakespeare volume on your coffee table may signal your privileged class origins. </p>
<p>But so what? Shakespeare did not emerge from privilege. He did not go to university; his regional accent would have made him a misfit in London. His plays, if you dare to go beyond the cover, mock social climbers (even though he was one) and dramatise struggles against arbitrary systems of power. </p>
<p>Injustice based on ingrained prejudice is a key theme in many of Shakespeare’s plays. The engine of the dramatic action is often resistance, revolt or revenge. Romeo and Juliet, Cordelia and Kent in King Lear, Desdemona and Othello, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Isabella in Measure for Measure – these are just some of the characters who suffer in structures of power that protect the privilege of the oppressor. And many of these characters speak truth to power, even while they are experiencing the vertigo of systemic injustice. </p>
<h2>The earth is not dead</h2>
<p>This makes it unsurprising that Shakespeare’s plays have had strong imaginative uptake by artists of First Nations origin, who have used Shakespeare to challenge the philosophical status quo of modern Western thought. As recently as 2020, a West Australian theatre company produced a version of <a href="https://www.theatreartlife.com/lifestyle/performing-shakespeare-in-the-aboriginal-language-of-noongar/">Macbeth adapted into the Noongar language</a>. This process of creative appropriation revitalises the drama and, in turn, contributes to its ongoing popularity. </p>
<p>A wonderful example of such revitalising friction emerges in an <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/king-lear/id199025817?i=1000115773894">interview with Peter Hinton</a> – director of an all-Indigenous Canadian production of King Lear staged at the National Arts Centre in 2012. Hinton refers to the scene near the end of the play, when the elderly King staggers onto the stage carrying the body of his daughter, Cordelia:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I know when one is dead and when one lives;<br>
She’s dead as earth.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hinton recounts how August Schellenberg, the Montreal-born Métis actor playing Lear, claimed that the words were “hard to say” because “the earth isn’t dead”. In Hinton’s account, this began a journey of “opening up the play in a new way”. </p>
<p>Beginning with Peter Brook’s landmark 1971 film adaptation, King Lear has been interpreted in Anglo-European contexts as nihilistic. The king is read as a paranoid autocrat unleashing cruelty and suffering that ends in unredeemable loss. </p>
<p>But this is a partial and biased interpretation shaped by Eurocentric preoccupations. The moral transformation of Lear actually contrasts sharply with modern autocratic dictators and Cordelia’s forgiveness of him transcends the retributive pattern of the play’s world. The reconciliation between Cordelia and Lear is nothing short of miraculous, even if it is followed by their demise. Think how much more nihilistic (and boring) the play would be if Lear doubled down on his rejection of his daughter, or if Cordelia refused to forgive her repentant father. </p>
<p>Schellenberg, approaching the play from an Indigenous perspective, was able to breathe new life into the possibility of spiritual transcendence through connection with the earth – the earth is not dead. His story demonstrates how cross-cultural adaptations can generate productive friction between the embedded cultural norms of the text and those of its adapters. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504583/original/file-20230116-13-v1difv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C8%2C1912%2C1397&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504583/original/file-20230116-13-v1difv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C8%2C1912%2C1397&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504583/original/file-20230116-13-v1difv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504583/original/file-20230116-13-v1difv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504583/original/file-20230116-13-v1difv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504583/original/file-20230116-13-v1difv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504583/original/file-20230116-13-v1difv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504583/original/file-20230116-13-v1difv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/macbeth-by-william-shakespeare-a-timeless-exploration-of-violence-and-treachery-175631">Macbeth by William Shakespeare: a timeless exploration of violence and treachery</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Shadow King</h2>
<p>A 2013 Australian adaptation of King Lear called <a href="https://stories.malthousetheatre.com.au/shows/the-shadow-king-2013/">The Shadow King</a> also hatched new meanings. Developed for Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre by director Michael Kantor and Indigenous artist Tom E. Lewis, who played Lear, the production’s dominant visual motif was earth. The all-Indigenous cast performed on a stage of red dust which came to coat their bodies and mark their clothes. </p>
<p>In the play’s secondary plot, Edgar, framed by his brother Edmund, flees into the wilderness and takes refuge in the disguise of “poor Tom” – a madman. In The Shadow King, this journey took on the sense of an initiation rite, which instilled new wisdom and strength in the naïve Edgar, played by Damion Hunter. Edgar sifted the earth through his fingers and painted his body with white clay. What Lear calls “unaccommodated man” was not a victim, but a thing of power, pride, and beauty – a thing rendered immortal through the narrative connection with country and people. Lear’s neglect of these connections precipitated his downfall.</p>
<p>The production also tackled the issue of intergenerational loss of identity through loss of respect for story. In allowing such detailed treatment of Indigenous cultural topics, the production arrived at new and surprising alignments between Shakespeare’s Lear and contemporary Australian Indigenous cultures. Rather than reinforcing the historic opposition between white imperial culture and First Peoples, this production took composite culture as the starting point for a story about intra-cultural Indigenous experience in a layered, living present.</p>
<p>In an interview with Matthew Westwood for The Australian, Lewis stressed the importance of holding respect for traditional stories in tension with the imperative to make them live in the present: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we disrespect, we lose the story […] From the beginning we’ve got to be true to the story that we’re doing. It will make you respect a lot of things. The story is taking us back into our cultural dynasties.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“We don’t want to take it away from the old story,” Lewis says. “But you’ve got the old mob playing an old story in a new version: that’s a good little triangle isn’t it?”</p>
<p>In June 2016, The Shadow King was <a href="https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/the-shadow-king-barbican-theatr-12995">staged at London’s Barbican Theatre</a> – a wonderful example of taking the story back with a new interpretation.</p>
<p>Throughout the decolonising era, Shakespeare’s “old stories” have been used to make meaning in fresh and unexpected ways. Shakespeare could not have imagined the particular resonances developed in the Indigenous productions described above, but drama as a cultural form is designed to accommodate local places, bodies and imaginations. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decolonising-shakespeare-setting-othello-in-ghana-and-pericles-in-glasgow-174166">Decolonising Shakespeare: setting Othello in Ghana and Pericles in Glasgow</a>
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<h2>Topical and relevant</h2>
<p>This is the dynamic I point to when I am asked if Shakespeare is still relevant today. By “relevant” people usually mean topical, and the short answer is yes. I can easily map out how Isabella’s protest against Angelo’s sexual coercion in Measure for Measure aligns with insights of the #MeToo movement. </p>
<p>But there are more interesting questions to ask of art than whether it mirrors our present preoccupations. The relevance – as distinct from the topicality – of Shakespearean drama, is in its use by so many different kinds of people across centuries as a tool for thinking about contests of power between and within human beings. Shakespeare merits the kind of respect Lewis speaks of – respect for an enduring, flexible and useful story-language. </p>
<p>Next to ice sculpting, theatre is probably the most ephemeral art form. But Shakespeare’s plays have achieved a living durability akin to lore. Consider this: at any given moment, there is probably someone speaking the words of Portia from the Merchant of Venice: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The quality of mercy is not strained.<br>
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven<br>
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:<br>
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here Portia urges Shylock to relinquish his rightful slice of Antonio’s flesh. Admirers of Shakespeare might point to the strength of Portia’s moral logic. Critics may point out that Portia is a hypocrite who shows very little mercy to Shylock – the cultural and religious outsider – when she has the upper hand. Feminists might point to the command Portia achieves through eloquence in a patriarchal society, or they may critique the exclusivity of the male pronouns. Lovers of poetry will point out how the balanced structure of the language mirrors the set of scales which are brought on stage to weigh out the pound of flesh. Others will recognise with delight that this play is the origin of the useful idiom “a pound of flesh”. </p>
<p>Whatever way you look at it, the party started a long time ago. We are joining a critical conversation about things that matter: justice, mercy, hypocrisy, retribution, and language.</p>
<p>In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock recognises too late that he has brokered a bad deal. The pound of flesh to which the law entitles him cannot be claimed without any blood. Excision of Shakespeare from educational curricula and cancellation of longstanding Shakespeare events is like trying to claim the cultural pound of flesh without any blood. Such moves defeat their own agendas because they diminish diversity. </p>
<p>Since Shakespeare’s time, many imaginations have become the sustaining lifeblood of his drama. Diminish Shakespeare literacy and we diminish the capacity to engage with this multicultural, trans-historical legacy of creative practice. </p>
<p>Without this continuous transfusion of feelings shaped by real experiences of injustice and exclusion, as well as hope, faith and love, Shakespeare would be just one of many skilled and prolific English playwright from the 16th century – all of whom are worth exploring for the curious reader. </p>
<p>But Shakespeare has the added edge of continuous use. Interpretation and adaptation of Shakespeare empowers artists to join a centuries-long global conversation, to speak back to the past, and to exercise own their creative agency in the present. It is through this continuity and diversity of use by so many different kinds of people that Shakespeare has become, in practice, “the world’s playwright”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504585/original/file-20230116-17-zfv78g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504585/original/file-20230116-17-zfv78g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504585/original/file-20230116-17-zfv78g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504585/original/file-20230116-17-zfv78g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504585/original/file-20230116-17-zfv78g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504585/original/file-20230116-17-zfv78g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504585/original/file-20230116-17-zfv78g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504585/original/file-20230116-17-zfv78g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lear and Cordelia – John Raphael Smith (1784).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
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</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196567/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Flaherty works for the Australian National University on Ngunnawal land. She has received funding from the Australian Research Council and has been an invited guest speaker at events for Bell Shakespeare. </span></em></p>Calls to decolonise curricula overlook the many ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are constantly being reinterpreted and revitalised in performance.Kate Flaherty, Senior Lecturer (English and Drama), Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1978442023-01-25T14:46:46Z2023-01-25T14:46:46ZWhat we mean when we talk about romantic comedies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504477/original/file-20230113-23-og94zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C19%2C3331%2C2482&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Still from Frank Capra’s ‘It Happened One Night’ (1934). </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.filmaffinity.com/es/filmimages.php?movie_id=118834">FilmAffinity</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Death to romantic love”, declared a celebration of a feminist Valentine’s Day promoted by a group of students on posters visible in Zaragoza (Spain) in the days leading up to 14 February 2020.</p>
<p>The feminist slogan reminded me of a little-known passage from Shakespeare, when at the beginning of <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryiv/full.html">Henry IV, Part 1</a>, Hotspur, an exalted warrior, is about to depart for his next battle. His wife tries to convince him to stay with her. Spurring his horse, he replies: “This is no world / To play with mammets and to tilt with lips. / We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns.”</p>
<h2>May the rom-com die</h2>
<p>We could use “tilting with lips” as a definition of romantic comedy; the genre most damned in Hollywood for being conservative, repetitive and predictable.</p>
<p>For most film critics and scholars, and for a large part of the audience, comedy means frivolity. Romantic comedy means little artistic quality or originality. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-rom-com-is-dead-good/2016/10/06/6d82a934-859c-11e6-ac72-a29979381495_story.html">In the title of her Washington Post article</a>, in which she joins the chorus of those predicting the death of the genre, journalist Emily Yahr was blunt: “The rom-com is dead. Good.”</p>
<p>For Yahr, as for others, the idea of a genre in which a usually white, often affluent, boy and girl meet, fall in love, get married and live happily ever after involves racism, classism, heterosexuality, monogamy, cisgender bias, a happy ending and marriage.</p>
<p>So deep is the belief in the inflexible boy-meets-girl structure that only those films that fit the bill are considered romantic comedies. If a film varies the formula, or if it is directed by an “auteur” of more or less prestige, it is no longer a romantic comedy. For example, Ernst Lubitsch’s great (romantic) comedies, such as Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Shop Around the Corner (1939) and To Be or Not to Be (1942) have been considered anything but romantic comedies.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487852/original/file-20221003-26-94v1cw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487852/original/file-20221003-26-94v1cw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487852/original/file-20221003-26-94v1cw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487852/original/file-20221003-26-94v1cw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487852/original/file-20221003-26-94v1cw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487852/original/file-20221003-26-94v1cw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487852/original/file-20221003-26-94v1cw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487852/original/file-20221003-26-94v1cw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Still from the film The Shop Around the Corner, by Ernst Lubitsch.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pics.filmaffinity.com/El_bazar_de_las_sorpresas-340597864-large.jpg">FilmAffinity</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Shakespeare and the origin of romantic comedies</h2>
<p>But let’s go back to Shakespeare, the playwright who, while not inventing anything, channelled the tradition of 16th century Italian narratives and dramas, themselves indebted to the comedies of Plautus and Terence and inspired by the stories of Ovid’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Metamorphoses-poem-by-Ovid">Metamorphoses</a>, the Petrarchan tradition of unrequited love and courtly love, the comic and erotic tales of Bocaccio’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Decameron">Decameron</a> and medieval romances, together with Eastern influences.</p>
<p>From this cocktail, Shakespeare consolidated and popularised the genre which, after several centuries of evolution, would lead to its current form. Admittedly, most of his comedies end with a celebration in the form of a wedding, almost always a double or multiple one.</p>
<p>However, what is interesting is the middle section of the plot, where we find a desire so intense that it changes our lives forever. “Even so quickly may one catch the plague,” wonders Olivia in Twelfth Night as she realises the passion she suddenly feels for Cesario, a young man who is actually a woman. In Shakespeare, desire is instantaneous, violent, brutal, impossible to tame. Therein lies the fascination of the genre.</p>
<h2>Verbal battles and erotic games</h2>
<p>In romantic comedy, this irrepressible impulse is mediated by humour, laughter and comic flair. This humour encapsulates, on one hand, the joy and delight of the lovers and, on the other, mocks the ridiculousness of those who are obsessed by passion and, above all, those who despise desire and fake it for social preferment or power, such as the sexual predators of The Apartment (1960).</p>
<p>Erotic play is verbalised as dialogues between lovers that seem to convey enmity and antagonism but which we all understand as a sign of emotional and sexual compatibility.</p>
<p>Such verbal battles, from Shakespeare to the present day, are a recurring convention of the genre. Just look at films like It Happened One Night (1934), The Awful Truth (1937), His Girl Friday (1940), Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964), Groundhog Day (1993) or The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001).</p>
<p>And despite what decades of film might have implied, the conventions of the genre need not be limited to just one race, social class, gender or sexual orientation.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487125/original/file-20220928-7170-c7bf3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man talks on the phone while looking at a woman, in a black and white film." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487125/original/file-20220928-7170-c7bf3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487125/original/file-20220928-7170-c7bf3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487125/original/file-20220928-7170-c7bf3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487125/original/file-20220928-7170-c7bf3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487125/original/file-20220928-7170-c7bf3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487125/original/file-20220928-7170-c7bf3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487125/original/file-20220928-7170-c7bf3b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A scene from His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. This film is full of fast and fierce dialogue that reflects the attraction and romantic compatibility between the protagonists.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HisgirlFriday.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Romantic comedy is not dying, it’s just changing</h2>
<p>When, in the mid-2010s, proclamations of the death of the genre reappeared, what was actually happening, as <a href="https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/after-happily-ever-after">Beatriz Oria</a> and <a href="https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/sites/default/files/San%20Filippo_introFINAL.pdf">Maria San Filippo</a> have shown, was its umpteenth mutation and displacement towards other spaces: independent cinema, digital platforms or web series, breaking sacred moulds, at least for critics, increasing the visibility of homosexual relationships, interracial and transnational love, love and sexuality in adolescence and maturity, polyamory and difference, all through the lens of comedy. </p>
<p>This can be seen in Gambit (2011), About Last Night (2013), Amira & Sam (2014), Sleeping with Other People (2015), Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and The Half Of It (2020), among many others.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487853/original/file-20221003-9083-uaaop0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487853/original/file-20221003-9083-uaaop0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487853/original/file-20221003-9083-uaaop0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487853/original/file-20221003-9083-uaaop0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487853/original/file-20221003-9083-uaaop0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487853/original/file-20221003-9083-uaaop0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487853/original/file-20221003-9083-uaaop0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487853/original/file-20221003-9083-uaaop0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Still from Sean Mullin’s 2014 film Amira & Sam.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3139538/">IMDB</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In an extremely volatile and rapidly changing world, threats to the primacy of desire, the first commandment of romantic comedy, are proliferating. The most obvious of these threats is rampant neoliberalism and the exacerbation of <a href="https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.73.1.0003">what Oria lucidly summarises as “me, myself, and I”</a> and <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Imagining-We-in-the-Age-of-I-Romance-and-Social-Bonding-in-Contemporary/Harrod-Leonard-Negra/p/book/9780367483272">Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra describe</a> as “romantic despair in the age of the self.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/sites/default/files/San%20Filippo_introFINAL.pdf">As Maria San Filippo assures</a>, the proliferation of acceptable forms of desire in the contemporary audiovisual landscape is staggering, as is people’s ability to maintain a sense of humour in the most adverse circumstances.</p>
<h2>The death of romantic love as feminist symbol</h2>
<p>Given the history of marriage as a social institution in patriarchy, it may be understandable that certain feminist discourses wish for the death of romantic love as a step towards equality.</p>
<p>But it is also worth remembering, for example, that the erotic and comic stories of the Decameron are women’s stories. Or that, since Shakespeare, romantic comedy has been one of the few film genres in which the protagonist are a man and a woman on relatively equal terms. Moreover, in most cases, the films give priority to the vicissitudes of women’s desires over those of men.</p>
<p>In general, comedy is still considered the poor sister of tragedy and its successors, the dramatic genres. However, in the century of Pericles, comedy and tragedy were inseparable, the tragic and the comic masks complementary, equally human and equally profound.</p>
<p>Is romantic love dying? Perhaps, but in a fast-paced world that few can comprehend, lips that tilt with other lips – normative or diverse, thin or fleshy, painted or chapped – are no laughing matter.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197844/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Celestino Deleyto Alcalá receives funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Diputación General de Aragón.</span></em></p>Predictions of the death of romantic comedy have been repeated over time. But it has been with us since before Shakespeare and is still very much alive and in constant transformation.Celestino Deleyto Alcalá, Catedrático de Estudios Ingleses y Fílmicos, Universidad de ZaragozaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1977392023-01-18T06:10:56Z2023-01-18T06:10:56ZWinter of discontent: the media continuously misses Shakespeare’s original meaning of the phrase<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504883/original/file-20230117-11134-54d1cx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C0%2C6000%2C3997&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nurses striking in the winter of 2022 and 2023.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/search/strikes">PA Images/Alamy </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>From 1978 to 79, public sector workers in the UK engaged in nationally coordinated strike action. The news was full of stories of limited services at hospitals because domestic cleaners were striking and streets were strewn with rubbish because of striking binmen. </p>
<p>It was deemed such chaos by then editor of The Sun newspaper, Larry Lamb, that he dubbed it the “winter of discontent”. Lamb borrowed this line, which has become common in political coverage, from the opening of William Shakespeare’s <a href="https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=richard3&Scope=entire&pleasewait=1&msg=pl">Richard III</a>(1592-4). </p>
<p>As the UK faces a similar winter this year, that line is once again peppering news coverage, making it clear that Shakespeare’s powerful image continues to hold the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/04/winter-of-discontent-harden-feeling-tories-have-broken-britain">British political imagination</a> in its icy grip.</p>
<p>Exactly how similar the UK’s current economic and social situation really is to the winter of 1978 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/08/is-the-uk-really-facing-a-second-winter-of-discontent">is debatable</a>. But the country is facing high inflation and seemingly endless waves of strike action, just as Jim Callaghan’s Labour government struggled with in the late 1970s. And the phrase “winter of discontent” is being <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b2154c20-c9d0-4209-9a47-95d114d31f2b">used in 2023</a> to capture a sense of entrenched dissatisfaction and hardship in a similar way to how Lamb used it.</p>
<p>However, the phrase in this context is potentially misunderstood. Its Shakespearean roots highlight how it might actually be used to make an even more powerful statement than is commonly thought.</p>
<h2>Tyranny and crisis</h2>
<p>At the beginning of Richard III (Shakespeare’s last play to tackle the wars of the roses), Richard, then Duke of Gloucester, describes England emerging from “the winter of our discontent” into a “glorious summer”. It’s easy to mistake his feelings towards this newfound peace as upbeat. </p>
<p>However, far from feeling optimistic, Richard asserts that as a man only suited for war he will do anything and everything he can to plunge England back into chaos. </p>
<p>Richard’s willingness to claim and hold on to power at any cost does send England back into war. So, while initially claiming to be the spokesperson for more summery times, Richard engineers political and personal conflicts to suit his authoritarian aspirations.</p>
<p>While it’s unlikely today’s government wants the strikes to continue, opposition politicians <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/dec/31/rishi-sunak-failure-negotiate-strikes-sabotaging-uk-labour">have accused it</a> of sabotaging the UK by failing to negotiate with unions. Similarly, a <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/nhs-government-jeremy-hunt-labour-steve-barclay-b2224075.html">common refrain</a> on the left is that the Conservative party is purposefully running down the National Health Service to make it politically easier to privatise.</p>
<p>Shakespeare’s original use of “winter of discontent” signals the dangers of political tyranny as a ruler, hell-bent on securing power, increasingly jeopardises the wellbeing of his country to serve his own ends. Regardless of the truth of the accusations levelled at the Conservatives, those who believe them could see the government’s intent as similar to Richard’s desire for a prolonged “winter of discontent”. </p>
<h2>Winter is at hand</h2>
<p>Later in the play, three ordinary citizens meet on a London street to discuss the declining state of the nation. “I fear, I fear,” one citizen says, “‘twill prove a troublous world”, another suggesting that “winter is at hand”. </p>
<p>While Richard never returns to his own image of winter in the play, it’s telling that an ordinary citizen of England does. Richard’s determination to drive England back into turmoil is powerfully registered through Shakespeare’s decision for a commoner to acknowledge that winter has arrived. Richard engineers the political winter to serve his ambitions and the citizens of England suffer for it.</p>
<p>The UK government continues to be criticised for the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/12/revealed-the-30bn-cost-of-liz-trusss-disastrous-mini-budget">financial challenges</a> it arguably had <a href="https://neweconomics.org/2022/11/austerity-blog">a direct hand in creating</a> and the crises in the health sector that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/14/austerity-in-england-linked-to-more-than-50000-extra-deaths-in-five-years">austerity hastened</a>. Meanwhile, its response to the strikes has not been to negotiate but rather to pursue legislation that <a href="https://theconversation.com/rishi-sunaks-new-law-could-force-workers-to-break-strikes-197482">restricts the right</a> to industrial action.</p>
<p>In this light, the politicians and journalists who employ Shakespeare’s “winter of discontent” should be mindful of its origin in a play that places authoritarian rule and the erosion of civic value front and centre.</p>
<p>The government might also take heed of King Richard’s meteoric demise. For <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/18/rishi-sunak-and-jeremy-hunt-face-a-rerun-of-the-70s-winter-of-discontent">James Callaghan in 1979</a>, and the Conservative Ted Heath before him in 1974, winters of discontent have proven to be terminal for the party in power</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197739/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Harvey Wiltshire does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Originally from Richard III, the phrase was used by a power-hungry autocrat who preferred chaos over peace.Harvey Wiltshire, Teaching Fellow in Early Modern Literature, Shakespeare, and Inclusive Pedagogy, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.