Manchester’s AA306 group met for its final tutorial on Saturday. We thought about Measure for Measure – and we talked about the coming exam.

Let us take the exam first. How might students reduce their feelings of anxiety and even enjoy the weeks ahead? Several people felt it was important to be selective about what is revised: it isn’t sensible, everyone agreed, to try to cover everything. There was also a belief that it is best to work in small bursts: to work on one limited task and then to have a break was the advice to one another. One student also spoke of the pleasure that could be gained from exerting a kind of control over the chosen course material: there is an odd satisfaction that can come from list-making and summarising and from trying to make a large body of information into something more manageable. More simply, another student felt that the chance to concentrate upon the plays that had been most pleasurable was one route towards enjoyment.

Everyone felt that to try to identify “themes” or “topics” – ideas that ran across different texts – was the most sensible way to organise revision. Students swapped specific suggestions that related to the three plays not assessed in earlier assignments and (more briefly) those that applied to the greater body of works that already been the subject of essays. Revision topics that were flexible and adaptable were also praised. For example, “kingship”, “authority” and “power” might fall neatly together: episodes, speeches and critical lines of enquiry that touched on one of these might well apply to the other topics.

In looking earlier at Measure for Measure, students had thought about a play that had not previously been the subject of an assessed essay. What attracted people about this play? One student drew attention to the function of the law within the play. Of course, it did not have any straightforward function and it was viewed at different times and by different characters in various ways. This ambiguous quality, another student felt, is one that more generally coloured the play. It applied to the various actions and dilemmas of the play (“What was the Duke up to?”), to the characters (“Was the Duke trying to ‘play God’?”) and even to the odd parallelisms that the play brought forth (“Are Isabella and Angelo more alike than their confrontation suggested?). It was Isabella that most intrigued those present. On the one hand, students were repelled by her rigidity. And on the other, several people felt that there was an erotic quality to much of what she said.

A voice was also raised in favour of the play’s language – and Isabella was the focus of this too. We looked at the short scene (the Norton Shakespeare’s 4.1) set in Mariana’s home. This is where the arrangements for the bed-trick are made: the substitution of the wronged Mariana for the Isabella whom Angelo has been trying to coerce into a sexual relationship. Isabella tells the Duke about the layout of Angelo’s dwelling:

He hath a garden circummured with brick,
Whose western side is with a vineyard backed;
And to that vineyard is a planckèd gate (. . .)
There have I made my promise
Upon the heavy middle of the night
To call upon him. (4.1.25-27, 31-33)

What is going on? Why is there such an evocative description of Angelo’s house? Why are Isabella and Angelo so engrossed in their plan? And how might this scene be staged?

In closing this post I’d like to wish everyone well during the coming weeks, for the exam that you face, and for the future!

Students were very aware on Saturday that a long assignment was nearly due. This tended to concentrate minds. How could we together address the fact that people were very aware of their current project and at the same time prevent the discussion from being one-dimensional?

In the end we decided to move from the poems to the task, and we progressed from thinking hard about one sonnet – Sonnet 25 – to comparing notes about the pleasures and problems involved in writing about masculinity. Presenting this account backwards, I report that students finished by outlining one challenge that each person faced in giving a final shape to his or her work – and then hearing the “troubleshooting advice” of their fellow students. As you might expect, the dilemma for most lay in making a match between what The Sonnets may (or may not) suggest about maleness and what students’ chosen plays had to say. I don’t want to summarise this advice at too much length, but the main view was this: there is a merit in diverse viewpoints, and if students feel that The Sonnets present one kind of idea and certain plays (Macbeth, say, or The Tempest) another one, then this is not necessarily a difficulty. We do not need (students said) to find an artificial unity: if there’s a difference of approach between one work and another, then that’s how it is – and we can frame an essay around the difference.

And that’s all I will report about assignments!

Sonnet 25 is fun. We looked at a modern edited text and at a facsimile of the 1609 poem. What were the differences? Layout, punctuation, spelling and capitalisation were amongst these – and they could certainly affect the way that a poem is read, even though Shakespeare was hardly likely to have been responsible for the 1609 text’s appearance. But there was one highly significant difference. The ninth line read “worth” in 1609; it appeared as “fight” in the modern edition we viewed; and the Norton prints “might”. So what is going on? Students suggested various reasons why the modern versions make good poems – but they were troubled by the thought that modern editors “knew better than Shakespeare”. But the problem the editors face is that “worth” doesn’t rhyme with the “quite” of line eleven. This suggests an error in the printing or the printer’s copy. And so (unless it was felt that Shakespeare decided not to bother with a rhyme on this occasion) the question has to be: do we keep “worth” or “quite”? Most editors dump “worth” (though, as you see, there’s no agreement about its replacement). But one student had a copy of the Arden version, where the editor decided that “quite” had to go. We enjoyed the reasons offered for this decision, which included the thought that rhyming may not have been Shakespeare’s strong point.

Of course, by this stage we hadn’t really raised our eyes to the beauty of the verse or the delicacy of the suggested relationship between speaker and addressee. And so we tried to work out what was going on. “Great princes’ favourites”, the speaker seems to be arguing, may flourish for a while but then “at a frown they in their glory die”. Or (syntactically speaking) is it the marigolds that die? At all events, being the darling of some powerful figure of authority was a vulnerable position, for this approbation could disappear as capriciously as it arrived.

The speaker of the poem ends by declaring that he and his friend have a relationship so secure that neither may “remove” the other or indeed “be removed”. Is it therefore a straightforward poem about confident, non-exploitative and mutually respectful love and trust? Possibly it is. Then again, perhaps it is not. For various sonnets suggest that the man whom the speaker addresses is actually himself something of a patron. This, then, throws into question the claim that one may not “remove” the other. And students wondered whether the speaker’s claim has more troublesome overtones. Is the speaker cocky and over-presumptuous about the feelings of the other? (After all, each sonnet presents one perspective only.) Is the speaker trying to close off the possibility of a “removal”, perhaps because he fears it? Or is there even a kind of subdued threat present: is he seeking to tell his friend what he can or cannot do?

And then students started to turn from the sonnet to their coming task; and they began to ask: what notions of maleness are to be found in Sonnet 25? And there I shall end.

• Why is Cymbeline called “Cymbeline”?
• Does Cymbeline have its comic moments?
• Where are the play’s decent men?
• What are the attractions (if any) of the dense language of Cymbeline?
• Is Cymbeline really a tragedy?
• Who is the play’s main character?

These were some of the initial questions that students brought to today’s discussion about Cymbeline. Several voices sounded in favour of Innogen, whose integrity and loyalty inspired respect and admiration. On the other hand, she faded away in the final act, people felt, and there was no fulfilment of the rich role promised in the play’s early scenes. There was a grudging liking for Posthumus too, who had a sadness to his history, though some students found it difficult to look beyond his weakness and gullibility. King Cymbeline himself was a pale figure and perhaps his kingly status caused the play to be named after him. Pisanio was the male character who appeared most favourably, though one student came to feel that the three cave-dwellers also had a claim upon the viewer’s or the reader’s sympathy. On the other hand, the desire for new experiences that the kidnapped princes showed, their relish for hunting, and the possibility that court life might corrupt them, made others hesitate to see them as paragons. No-one quite said that they might be played as moody teenagers, but that was the tendency of some responses to these bizarre young men.

There was also an oddity to the feelings of Guiderius and Arviragus for “Fidele”. They expressed an attraction towards her (or him) that went beyond what seemed reasonable, and the fact that she was really their sister tended to make this worse, not (as various characters from the play seemed to suggest) better. Of course, this may lead us to question our own responses: we may ourselves have strong ideas about what are appropriate feelings to express – but is this necessarily a good guide to what a spectator 400 years ago at the Blackfriars theatre would have thought?

There was special praise for the beauty of Innogen’s verse as she discovered (as she thought) the body of her dead husband. But students did not find “Cymbeline” a very easy play to like: it drew respect and encouraged reflection rather than caused sheer pleasure – or such was the general view. But then (the question went) was this a limitation in our own responsiveness – or may Cymbeline be a flawed and uneven play? And this, of course, led us towards the current theme of AA306: what is a marginal text and what is canonical? There was wide agreement with the notion that each reader may decide for himself or herself what is important or valuable about a play.

And what did students feel about the coming assignment? For one person, defining “masculinity” would be important; for another, deciding what is “maleness” requires a view about what “femininity” is (or was). Some students were drawn to the way that Innogen disguises as a boy, and for these students Twelfth Night is an attractive option as a partner text to discuss. Others noticed how weak the play’s men appear to be, and how much in thrall to its women – and these students looked towards Macbeth or Antony and Cleopatra as possible companion plays.

And (with regard to the final leg of the coming assignment) how might The Sonnets fit into the picture? There’s a blending of gender there too: as in “the master-mistress of my passion” (Sonnet 20), for example. And the relationship between the speaker of The Sonnets and his male friend has a colouring of dependency and patronage: and this too offers connections with various plays that students have read.

But The Sonnets is the subject for a future discussion!

The OU’s online library offers students all kinds of resources. Here’s one that may be of special interest to those studying Shakespeare. “ScreenOnline” includes clips from (I think) every film in the BBC Shakespeare as well as from many other film and television productions.

There’s a link to the library on your studenthome page. You can reach ScreenOnline from the list of library databases. And if you put “Shakespeare” into the Screen Online search box you will find all that is available. Have fun!

What was it about “King Lear” that struck students?

In summary, this is what Manchester’s AA306 group thought. First: what terrible families are on display! Every family that appears in the play is divided and dysfunctional. Of course, Lear’s behaviour towards his daughters is one part of this. Even at this early stage there is something obsessive about the way that he relates to them. This was one of the first indications that Lear was unbalanced, and his concern over the numbers of knights in his retinue was a second. There was a kind of insecurity apparent over both, it was felt.

When Lear became deeply distressed, it was said, he used remarkable language patterns: not only extravagant language but certain rigid formulations of speech. For another student, there was a progressive pathway to his madness: it grew more pronounced and yet it did so in marked stages. Students also asked why madness might have been a dramatic feature in demand, and they thought of other characters who have struggled for self-control: Lady Macbeth, Malvolio, Hamlet, and even Richard II.

For another student, for all the nihilism of Lear’s final state and for all the awfulness of his five ‘nevers’, there was an impressive humanity to be found in him during the play’s final scenes. And on this point, students linked him to Gloucester, whose blindness, physical and moral, was vital to the play. In their final generosity of spirit as much as in their earlier blindness, the two men were alike.

With the coming assignment in view, people also wanted to think about the play’s servants. Students tabulated all the servants to appear in “Lear” and those in “The Tempest”. But who is a servant? Certainly there are the unnamed servants of the blinding scene and also Goneril’s steward. Is the disguised Kent a kind of servant? The Fool? Even, in a kind of way, Lear’s daughters? And this reminded people of Prospero’s daughter, for The Tempest’s ousted duke was also a controlling father. And Caliban and Ariel are rather different kinds of servants to those in Lear.

What was decided was that students might be well advised — whatever view they took — to set out with clarity exactly who they were planning to treat as a servant.

This blog will continue to be a resource for the Manchester AA306 Shakespeare group. Rob has passed it over to me. My name is Charles Cathcart and I will shortly be working with the group’s students. As soon as I have your details I will get in touch with you directly and introduce myself. In the meantime: good luck with your studies and I look forward to sharing Shakespeare’s plays and poems with you in the months ahead.

We met on the hottest day of the year so far to discuss a play whose title is redolent of winter, but which is, as we agreed, a rather sunny comedy of errors.

I made a short presentation, unaided by technology this time, as someone had thoughtfully removed the technology (though the slides are attached below). I tried to make a few points about the nature of the play, linking my comments to the issues raised by Barber and Pequigney in their articles.

The play’s title, and its early history, suggests that the play celebrates the carnivalesque atmosphere associated with Twelfth Night and the sense of joyous excess associated with the pre-lent celebration of Candlemas, the day on which the play was probably first performed at the Inns of Court. Clearly too, the play examines notions of sexual identity through the well-established plot device of the woman disguised as a man. I emphasised that, since we should always keep the performance aspects of the text in mind, it was important to note the stage practice of the time, whereby boys played the female roles.  The complications that arise when Viola (a boy playing a woman playing a boy) inspires the love of both Olivia ( a boy playing a woman) and Orsino ( a man playing a man) are at the root of the play’s exploration of festive disequilibrium. I mentioned Catherine Belsey’s chapter in Drakakis’s Alternative Shakespeares, where she examines the changing perceptions of gender roles at the time and suggests that the play shows the disruption of “the system of differences on which sexual stereotyping depends.”

We examined concepts of masclinity and femininity in the play, and discussed some of the ambiguities- for example, Orsino seems to choose Viola / Cesario as his ambassador because of her female qualities (“All is semblative a woman’s part”, 1.4) Concepts of masculinity seem to be diverse in the play, from the testosterone-charged Sir Toby to the effete Aguecheek, with all points in between occupied by such figures as Feste, Orsino and Malvolio. Concepts of femininity, on the other hand, seemed quite conventional, perhaps best expressed in Viola’s soliloquy in 2.2  about “women’s waxen hearts”.

We then considered the two articles that you need to examine for the TMA. Some differences were immediately apparent- Barber’s is more general, and not as focused on a single issue as Pequigney’s is. Barber’s was written 40 years ago, and is part of a larger volume in which he explores the influence of folk customs, religious observances and other aspects of Elizabethan social life on the comedies; Pequigney is writing much later, and to a clearly stated critical agenda, which seeks to foreground issues of sexual identity.  We agreed that there is evidence of the readings being shaped by what the guidance note calls the “cultural prejudices” of the critics. I think it’s fair to say that Pequigney’s view was not received well. His insistence on the homo-erotic / homosexual nature of Sebastian and Antonio’s relationship was, we felt, grounded in a too-literal reading of the dialogue. In particular, expressions of love can connote a paternal relationship as well as a sexual one, and we felt Pequigney ignored this aspect.

You must, of course, make your own mind up, and ensure that, though you will be weighing the issues raised by the two critics, that your essay is fundamentally about the play. To that end, you might consider setting out your understanding of the central issues, before examining the approaches of the two critics. It’s a lot to cover in 2000 words, so, once again, my advice is to be ruthless with extraneous matter.

Those of you who have read your email will know that I am stepping down from my OU duties from tomorrow, so I will not be maintaining this blog any further. I will leave it as it is, available to you and any other passing strangers who might want to read it. Best wishes for your future exploration of the bard!

Rob

12th Night (Powerpoint slides)

12th Night.ppt (PDF of slides)

Twelfth Night (Handout)

In yesterday’s tutorial, Crystal mentioned an article written by a friend of hers that expresses a jaundiced view of Shakespeare. It’s here, and is worth a look. Sample:

In my experience, reading or watching Shakespeare is, by turns, baffling, tiring, frustrating and downright unpleasant. It does not, as those suffering from bardolatry repeatedly claim, offer unparalleled insight into universal human truths (most “universal” things, when scrutinised, turn out to be specific to a dominant class anyway). Don’t get me wrong, Shakespeare’s writing isn’t exactly torture – it doesn’t possess the sheer, purgatorial dullness of a Faerie Queene or a Finnegans Wake – but it is out of date, out of touch, and we read him, I’m convinced, out of habit.

Here’s an interesting point of view on WS. I don’t agree, but I know what he means.

English of the late 1500s presents us with a tricky question: At what point do we concede that substantial comprehension across the centuries has become too much of a challenge to expect of anyone but specialists?

There is indeed just such a gap. Shakespeare lovers of all kinds miss much more of Shakespeare’s basic meanings than they tend to suspect. Way back in 1898, Mark H. Liddell made this point in the Atlantic, taking as an example Polonius’ farewell to Laertes in Hamlet. The speech is full of hidden deceptions, often leaving little more understanding of what Shakespeare said than we would of a Jamaican saying goodbye to his son in patois.

Meanwhile, Ian McKellen’s reading of the sonnets demonstrates how accessible these poems can be.

Today’s the day, and if we were in Stratford, evidently, we’d all be dressing up.