"A Round Unvarnished Tale" ... in 140 Characters

I decided that I will take a break from talking about the House of Fame and will instead regale my readers with a round unvarnished tale—of how my students read Othello and related the play to their own lives by creating Twitter accounts. This activity started out, I have to say, poorly. I put very little thought into it and just wanted to motivate students to be more involved in class discussion. Yet, it developed into something very good, thanks to my students. I set it up by putting them into groups of three or four, depending on the class size, and assigning each group a character from the play (usually Cassio, Desdemona, Emilia, Iago, Othello, Roderigo and, if need be, Lodovico—I’ll tell you why later). They are told to create a handle, follow all the other characters and to follow me. I create an account called “The Doge” that facilitates their initial connection. If they all follow me, then it is easier for them to follow each other. Then, as they read the play, they are to compose at least 15 messages from the perspective of their assigned character. I tell them to try their best to become that character and think the way, say, Desdemona would think. At least one of the 15 has to be private and at least one has to be public. So, they could theoretically send out 14 private messages to other groups. However, without fail they send out 14 public and only one private message. I have been doing this activity for over a year with many groups of students. I always begin the activity with a primer on Twitter (they wind up teaching me more than I them—I now know what subtweeting is. I think.) and go through the Twitter “privacy statement” and remind them that this is for the whole world to see, so they should be mindful what their character would want to share with the whole world. Yet, I found out that they are much more prone to publishing private matters, such as who’s really got the handkerchief or who is plotting to kill whom, than the original characters and even more so than I thought they would be. Here are some screenshots I took that show their openness in the Twitterverse:

In this conversation, taken from the first class that tried this exercise out, Othello gets a little more than he
bargained for and winds up saving Desdemona's life, unraveling Iago's plan with one little public tweet.

This displays another version of that same handkerchief conversation in another class,  but with less Othello. This could go either way: either it is really good or really bad for Desdemona. Some students speculate that, even this late in the play, Othello is too concerned with his reputation to do something he thinks would jeopardize his career as general. Thus, they argue, knowing everyone would see this, he would back off and not kill Desdemona since everyone can see that she and Cassio are not trying to hide anything.

Desdemona is much more outspoken here than in the play. It is difficult to imagine her saying this in Act 4, but not Act 1, as my students pointed out to me. She is tragically silenced when she loses the handkerchief. Also, Roderigo, who has the best photo, does his part to derail Iago's plotting ways.

Here Iago comes out to gloat near the end of the play. This is seemingly the only time in the play when Iago would want to be on Twitter. Some students speculated that he would hate Twitter or that he would hack into Desdemona and Cassio's accounts and send damning messages that he would then show to Othello. #devious (did I do that right?).

Here, in another class, Iago undercuts his credibility rather early on in the play. It would be difficult for him to maintain his reputation as "honest Iago" if he is rather insensitively writing this after the brawl that left one man in need of stitches and another without his job. Iago also has a brilliant subtweet above.

Iago has a flat-out brutal subtweet here (the Mar 6 one). Just awful. A+ work for that group. Plus, Othello also spills the beans in this conversation, just like in the first screenshot. It is telling that extreme emotion seems well suited for public consumption in our digital world. But this display of emotion was what made Shakespeare's theater so attractive. What is different is that in the Shakespearean theater it was stylized in blank verse and concentrated on one stage. Now, in a cultural turn that would have tickled Shakespeare, the stage includes everyone with a Twitter account, and the result is that people think the consequences of choosing to display one's inner, private feelings are seemingly far off and as real as a play. 

In one class the Othello character stated in a public message that he was contemplating murder. The responses are priceless. In another, Desdemona asks everyone following her if they know what happened to her handkerchief. Cassio responds quickly, which could either clear up the confusion or exacerbate Othello’s desire for “justice” and hasten her demise. In yet another, Iago is actually “honest” and displays a cockiness and arrogance only seen in private or later on in the play.  

I ask the students to conclude the activity by writing a response paper about privacy in Othello and in their own lives. They are to look closely at how their assigned character behaved in the play and contrast that with how the character behaved on Twitter. This makes for some pretty insightful papers. Students suddenly realize how assertive Desdemona really is in the beginning of the play and see her sudden change—when she drops the handkerchief—as a very tragic reversal for her. Students sympathize more with Desdemona after this activity. They also comment on how much more open Desdemona and Emilia are on Twitter as opposed to the play, and note that these two women likely struggled against greater sexism than women now do. Their sympathy for these two characters is produced mainly by this exercise. The same cannot be said for Othello, who often has the most intriguing tweets and gets the brunt of the students’ wrath for his behavior and poor communication skills. One would think that Iago should receive the most ire, but students assigned to Iago actually do not do as well with this activity. They do not say as much as those assigned to other characters. Since Iago prefers to work in the dark, they instead put out tepid public tweets or outright spill the beans about Iago’s character. Yet they do not send more private messages. There seems to be a compulsion to confess among my students that is stronger than the desire to stick to the script of the play. This compulsion is manifested by all the characters. The students seem to feel almost obliged to reveal some secret before the end of the play. This could be attributable to their unconscious desire to change the tragic outcome, their status as readers (and inability to really get into the mindset of the character), but I think both of those reasons are impacted by the culture of revelation that social media fosters. 

The ultimate aim of this activity is for them to think critically about their own use of social media and how that changes their own notions of privacy. Whereas almost all characters in Othello adeptly keep secrets (Desdemona and Othello with their elopement, Iago with everything, Emilia with the handkerchief, Cassio with Iago’s plan, and Othello with the planned revenge on Cassio and Desdemona), students in every class that has done this exercise have revealed at least one crucial secret. When Othello says openly that he wants to kill Desdemona, that stops the play right there. She would stay away from their marriage bed and change into something more comfortable. When Desdemona asks about the handkerchief, one can imagine Emilia eventually chiming in (by sending, in the words of one student, a blocked text message or an anonymous email, which would have told Desdemona the location of the fateful handkerchief and would have completely changed the outcome of the play) or Othello wondering why Cassio and Desdemona are being so open about what he thought was a secret affair. When Iago says he thinks he is better than everyone else, his credibility is impugned for the rest of the play. If Lodovico is part of the Twitter conversation, then he could instantly tweet out to all his followers that he saw Othello hit Desdemona. If Othello saw that tweet, he may choose to avoid taking further violent action since he knows that his violence is already hurting his precious reputation and his chances of ensuring that men will, after he dies, speak of him as he is and "nothing extenuate." The revelation of these secrets derails the plot and could even lead to much better outcomes for most of the characters or, at least, fewer deaths.

Thus, this activity that started out as a way to get them to read Othello more closely became more of a social experiment for digital natives and a way for my students to think hard about what privacy means for them. Although it is an experiment that proves nothing, it it still holds educational value. Most students, in their response papers, acknowledge that they freely give up certain elements of privacy. Others reflect on how privacy is gone and it is none of their doing (which the exercise, in my view, seems to militate against). They claim that, even if they try to remain private, they will be mentioned on social media or roped into it somehow, and they can only avoid it by totally separating themselves from society. There is some truth to these claims. But, most students acknowledge that Othello teaches them that there are consequences—very serious consequences—to the circulation of secrets within a social network and that they are somewhat insulated from these consequences by the warm glow of their computer screens. They tend to forget through the immense and immeasurable distance created by the digital that their behavior online can have life-changing consequences. Whether they acknowledge it or not, this activity shows that they--no, we--are complicit in the erosion of privacy in our time.

Overall, the students, as the screenshots show, have a lot of fun with this, and engage more fruitfully with a text they initially approached with either apathy or trepidation. They get much more out of the play through this exercise and they see how it can relate to their own lives, which is something that is a struggle for them when reading older literature. They come to see that their compulsion to confess is a function of the specific structure of the network in which they communicate. Twitter is structured to encourage public tweets. Plus, it’s more fun that way. The design leads people to write things that would have been kept private maybe a generation ago, and the potential to read something a bit risqué is a big part of Twitter’s attraction.

Social media now seems to be little more than a distraction and a gaffe factory. However, it also has played a key role in the Arab Spring and the self-liberation of oppressed people. Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. What in the short term may seem irrelevant or detrimental may in the long run be more significant and beneficial than we can imagine. For now, we need to, along with my students, acknowledge our own role in the melting away of our privacy and be vigilant so that our culture does not lose one of the precious resources built up through centuries of political oppression. As one of my students wisely put it, "There are pros and cons of this era of self-made mass surveillance."  

To conclude, here is this post’s edition of Canon Confidential. Below is a fuller explanation of the answer to Tweet #3: Enjaminbay Anklinfray was in an ideal position to gather information at many points in his life. He was deputy postmaster-general for North America for roughly twenty years. He was America’s envoy to Paris and was involved in secret negotiations with the French for extended periods of time. While in Paris he passed along information to the British intelligence services, giving them more information on America’s relations with the French than even Washington had! Franklin was also a reputed Knight of St Francis of Wycombe, or a member of the Hellfire Club, an eighteenth-century British club for high-society men in politics who wanted to behave like rakes—and I mean rakes: sex, binge drinking, all that was part of being a member. It was a fraternity for old British politicians. As membership in this club was very exclusive, it is difficult to ascertain what Franklin’s role was in it when he joined in roughly 1758 when in Britain. However, many powerful English politicians were in it, and he might have been, according to Geoffrey Ashe in his Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality, a spy gathering information on the British politicians to be used later by the Americans (121).

The Rainbow Portrait

This post will continue the discussion of the House of Fame, picking up where the last post left off, and will specifically explore what role the House of Fame played in Shakespeare’s time. Generally, the House of Fame was often associated with politics and war. Vincenzo Cartari’s woodcut of the goddess Fama spreading news of war emblematizes this conception of “Lady Fame,” as Benedick calls Fama in Much Ado (2.1.195). After all, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the House of Fame is only described because Fama, as a personification of rumor, brings news of the invading Greek fleet to the Trojans in Ovid’s cheeky retelling of the Trojan War. Ovid writes, “Fecerat haec notum Graias cum milite forti / aduentare rates, neque inexspectatus in armis / hostis adest” “Fama had made known that the Greek ships were coming with a strong army, and so ensured that the arrival of the armed Greek enemy at Troy was not a surprise” (12.64-6). This is right after the description of the House of Fame, which you can find a discussion of in the previous post on this blog. Fama became the prototypical herald of war in the period. In England, though, this goddess took on a greater meaning through the iconography of Queen Elizabeth I. The Crown deftly and thoughtfully shaped the image of Elizabeth that it presented to the outside world, and part of this presentation included comparing Elizabeth to Fama. The civic pageants and printed propaganda praising Elizabeth often presented her as similar to the goddess Fame.[1] Perhaps the best example of this aspect of Elizabeth’s iconography is the “Rainbow Portrait” (below), which takes its title from the rainbow that Elizabeth grasps with her right hand and the Latin motto, “NON SINE SOLE IRIS” “no rainbow without the sun,” which in the symbolic language of the painting identifies Elizabeth with the rainbow and Christ with the sun. She is the one who can see and reflect the heavenly beauty of Christ, and who therefore is chosen to protect and guide faithful adherents to what was for her government Christ’s true faith, Protestantism. The rainbow also makes her a symbol of calmness and serenity. She is also, in the words of Rene Graziani, a “peace-bringer.”[2]

The painter and the date of the “Rainbow Portrait” are unknown. Roy Strong, a renowned art historian and former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, conjectures that the date likely falls around 1600 and that the portrait was commissioned by Robert Cecil for Elizabeth’s visit to his residence in 1602 for the last great fete of her reign.[3] I find this intriguing because Cecil was, by 1600, England’s spymaster. His status adds a whole new meaning to the numerous eyes, ears, and mouths that decorate Elizabeth’s mantle in this painting. Some argue that the eyes, ears, and mouths allude back to Vergil’s description of Fama in the Aeneid (also in the last post), and so signal that Elizabeth’s good fame—it is key to distinguish fama chiara, illustrious fame or celebratory rumor, from fama cattiva, bad fame or slanderous rumor, especially for a monarch—is spreading rapidly through the world, spoken of by many mouths, seen by many eyes, and heard by many ears. Yet, these multiple low-tech devices for communicating information could also represent, in the words of J. M. Archer, “the many servants who provided her with intelligence.”[4] The serpent, which in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia represents “Intelligenza,” or wisdom of earthly affairs, also suggests that this portrait gestures at the English intelligence apparatus established in Elizabeth’s reign (primarily by Robert Cecil’s father, William Cecil, AKA Lord Treasurer Burghley), a network of spies that was instrumental in defending England from the Armada, preventing the Gunpowder Plot from succeeding (as well as the numerous attempts on Elizabeth’s life) and ensuring that Protestant England did not return to Catholicism. In fact, the “Rainbow Portrait” may be celebrating that not only Elizabeth’s fama chiara is spreading throughout the world but also the reputation of her successful spy apparatus, which did indeed have a good reputation abroad near the end of her reign, as indicated by the diplomatic correspondence of French and Spanish officials marveling at how Elizabeth’s government survived the concerted efforts of the Continental powers to end her reign.

Elizabeth’s state surveillance apparatus maybe had the strongest reputation among her subjects. We can find numerous indications of how it operated. The Scottish secretary to the Catholic John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, anonymously wrote and printed A Treatise of Treasons, a pamphlet that rails against the unjust punishments of Catholics under the Protestant Queen and that should thus be taken cum grano salis. In this 1572 Treatise he complains of a state “where few, or none to speak of, can pass from town to town unsearched; where no letter almost goeth from friend to friend unopened; where no man’s talk with other scant escapeth unexamined; where it is accounted treason, rebellion, and sedition to have or to see, to send or receive, to keep or to hear, any letter, book or speech that might show you any part either of this conjuration, or the crafts and falsehoods used to bring it to pass … Indeed, the just commendation of any nobleman among yourselves, whom these base fellows do envy or malign, is accounted a crime and a derogation to your Queen: and where every man that justly imputeth any of these disorders unto those Catilines, is taken and punished … Can any man that hath wit or judgment see there other than thralldom and slavery?” (162-3, sig. X3^v). However, state surveillance was manifested in other cultural artifacts, and perhaps we should look to artifacts that reflect popular opinion rather than those that display the qualms of an exiled Catholic. Plays from the commercial theater, such as Shakespeare’s, more closely approximate the popular sentiment since they had to—if they didn’t, no one would go see them. Their success indicates their popularity (and Shakespeare was quite successful), and, one can assume that they also reflect popular belief.

In Shakespeare’s hugely popular Titus Andronicus (it was so popular it was the first Shakespeare play to be printed in Germany), the villain Aaron says:

The emperor’s court is like the house of Fame,
The palace full of tongues, of eyes, and ears:
The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull (1.1.626-628).

Although Titus Andronicus is set in Ancient Rome, it still is relevant for and reflects on Shakespeare’s own time. Henry Peacham’s 1615 (or 1595, depending on how you do the math) illustration (below) of the play shows that the actors he saw acting this play, or imagined acting it, dressed in costumes from different ages—and some even dressed like his contemporaries, not Romans. Thus, the play certainly conjured up the present even though it was set in the past. In the speech from which this particular quotation is taken, Aaron is planning a crime, the rape of Titus’s daughter Lavinia. He therefore sees the “court” as a place to avoid since it, like all places “full of tongues, of eyes, and ears,” is not conducive to criminal activity. Instead, he prefers places like the “woods,” where crimes can go undetected. The “court,” as “the house of Fame,” is a place not only of surveillance, “full of tongues, of eyes, and ears,” but also of the rule of law, while the “woods,” which lack any surveillance, are ideal for crime. Surveillance here comes across as more protective than something inducing “thralldom and slavery.” 

Shakespeare, however, does not merely present surveillance the way governments that engage in spying want it to be presented. Titus Andronicus displays ambivalence about covert observation. Aaron himself spies on Titus when Titus, thinking he will be receiving his living sons in exchange for letting his hand be cut off, instead receives the severed heads of his dead sons:

I pried me through the crevice of a wall
When, for his hand, he had his two sons’ heads,
Beheld his tears, and laugh’d so heartily,
That both mine eyes were rainy like to his (5.1.114-7).

Aaron shows that spying—and this includes state surveillance—can easily be abused for selfish ends. Keep in mind that at the point in the play when he is spying on Titus “through the crevice of a wall,” Aaron is deeply involved in the activities at “court” as Tamora’s unofficial messenger, advisor, and servant (in more ways than one. HELLO!). Just the fact that a villain such as Aaron spies on others and is in a position of power at “court” has to cast surveillance in a negative light. Shakespeare, though, is not interested in justifying or vilifying surveillance. He just wants to present a narrative that will resonate deeply with the patrons of the commercial theater. Since surveillance was such a big part of life in Elizabethan England, it made its way into his plays. One final note: Titus Andronicus is a really violent play—and was savagely popular. It may be easy to say, oh, they were so barbaric back in those dark ages (even though we associate Elizabethan England with the Renaissance). But, it would be better not to overlook the spying and violence in our own culture and to reflect on what that says about us, that our culture is approaching that of those dark ages. Another way to look at it is to say that, yes, Elizabeth’s regime engaged in torture, which is inexcusable, and surveillance, which is morally dubious, but (and this in no way is intended to justify the unjustifiable), without Elizabeth’s state surveillance apparatus, we would not have the Shakespeare we have. “Non sine sole iris.” He is the rainbow to early modern England’s culture of surveillance. His writings were influenced by surveillance, and can tell us as a culture how to navigate the treacherous waters of spying, how to ensure one steers toward the smooth waters of protective surveillance and avoids the shoals of abusive spying.   

To conclude, here is this post’s edition of Canon Confidential. Below is a fuller explanation of the answer to Tweet #2: Anielday Efoeday was not beloved by his contemporaries, one of whom called him a “prostitute” writer who “writes for bread and lives by defamation.” In fact, Defoe skillfully integrated his talents as a writer and a spy. He became, in the words of one scholar of intelligence studies, “one of the great professionals in all these centuries of secret service.” He was “in himself almost a complete secret service.”[5] Working for Speaker Robert Harley, Defoe infiltrated almost all dissenting or dissident groups in England and Scotland (his cover was that he was somewhat of a Dissenter, so most dissident groups trusted him), while he published in his groundbreaking Review articles that swayed public opinion toward his employer’s party and used his extensive contacts in the press to glean information on political opponents and establish an intelligence network never before seen in England. The development of printing and the nascent growth of periodicals like the Review and later the Spectator were boons not only to printers but to the intelligence services, too. Perhaps when Defoe writes in Robinson Crusoe, “it is never too late to be wise; and I cannot but advise all considering men, whose lives are attended with such extraordinary incidents as mine, or even though not so extraordinary, not to slight such secret intimations of Providence, let them come from what invisible intelligence they will,” he is telling us more about how his experience as a spy shaped his belief than we have previously acknowledged.

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[1] Kiefer, “Rumour, Fame, and Slander in 2 Henry IV” Allegoria 20 (1999): 3–20, 12.

[2] Graziani, “The ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I and Its Religious Symbolism” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972), 247-259, 248.

[3] Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 45-6.

[4] Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford UP, 1993), 4.

[5] Rowan, The Secret Service: Thirty-Three Centuries of Espionage (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967), 102.