Considering How My Dissertation-Writing Time is Spent and "Ladie Astrey"

As a new semester begins, and as I have no classes to teach (since I have been awarded a Ballard-Seashore Fellowship), I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the process of writing a dissertation chapter (since I am starting to write one today—that’s the last parenthetical (Maybe)). I like to think of writing a chapter in geologic terms. A chapter is a creation, after all, and, not to be too grandiose about my own work, but its magnitude resembles the earth itself. Its development resembles the history of the earth. For example, a lot of stuff happens before the actual writing. It is mainly gathering all the disparate elements of a chapter into one place. All the dusty books on the topic once scattered throughout the library, through a gravitational process of selection, recalling, and making some poor undergrad get my books for me, slowly converge on my place of study and revolve around me (not literally. Well, sometimes it seems like it). It is a process of accretion, and takes what feels like eons. 

Once a sufficient amount of information has accumulated, I feel a core of knowledge has been obtained. 

Then, a new phase begins: the rapid-fire flow of ideas to write about. These ideas just bubble up to the surface, erupting like so many volcanoes (I’m thinking of that scene from The Tree of Life here--5 minutes in). 

Once I have settled on a cool idea, everything starts to solidify, and I develop a thin outline. When I get a first draft done, I promptly (prematurely) send off to my committee who slices it up like moon from earth. 

Once the dust settles after that, the chapter is more focused, and I can get into revisions. The argument flourishes with nuance, crackling with wit and verve, evolving in sophistication and sustaining greater and more compelling argumentative life. Then, when I feel I’ve read it so much that it’s a dinosaur, I send it off to my committee again …

Canon Confidential Time:

“Ladie Astrey” was the famous personification of justice in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who fled the earth during the brutality and carnage of the Iron Age. In Arthur Golding’s translation she is the “last of heavenly virtues, from this earth in slaughter drownèd passed” (1.169-70). The original Latin is “virgo caede madentis / ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit,” and Golding seems to misread uirgo, maiden, as uirtus, virtue, but it still works (1.149-50 in Ovid). Astraea, or Lady Justice, shares her name with an unlikely author, Aphra Behn. She used it as her code name when she worked as an agent for the Crown during the Restoration. Behn got her start during the Interregnum, likely as a copyist for noted spymaster Thomas Killigrew, who went on to become one of Charles II’s preferred courtiers. During his reign she traveled to Dutch-held Suriname with her family and immediately got involved with the unsavory character William Scot, the son of Thomas Scot, who was executed for regicide. William was a person the Crown was anxious to keep eyes on. She is referred to as Astrea by other spies on Suriname and in correspondence from Antwerp, another home of exiled relatives of regicides. After getting fed up with spy work, Behn from Antwerp “passed” to England. She chose to keep the name Astrea as her nom de plume, smoothly transitioning from spy to writer as she translated her espionage experience into plays about slavery, rebellion, intrigue, romance, and kings. She was a wildly successful playwright (the theater was likely a good fit for her because the theater is a world of surveillance, with spectators spying from behind the fourth wall, spying occurring onstage to further the plot, and actors going about their business in their various disguises—it’s like what Spottswoode somewhat reductively says to Gary in Team America: World Police, “That’s all spying is: acting”).  Her time as a spy furnished her with not only plots and counterplots to write about, but also a unique perspective on justice and its relationship to the practices of spying and slavery.  

“Avert Your Liking A More Worthier Way”

After a long hiatus over the summer break, I thought that I, too, would weigh in on the recent comments made by Ira Glass on Twitter about the relative quality of Shakespeare’s plays, specifically King Lear. When I graduated from college, I went to see a performance of Lear (because of what I am going to say, I am withholding the name of the theatrical company and its location). When Lear came out onstage at the end with his murdered daughter in his arms, I did not hear gasps. I heard laughter. The same thing happened when I saw Oedipus Rex at the same theater—howls of laughter at the end. Oedipus was so upset that clawed his own eyes out, people! How could two of the most tragic plays in, well, the known body of European literature, be laughed at? Who knows why those people laughed? Maybe they were nervous laughers. Maybe philistines. Maybe the productions were bad (I personally thought both were excellent). No matter what, when people see a production of a play by Shakespeare or Sophocles, they expect it to be the greatest because they have been told their whole lives (and by the program) that it is. It’s like when a friend tells you to go see a movie because it’s the greatest movie he’s ever seen. Inevitably, it will never live up to the expectations, as apparently was the case with Ira Glass.

I have seen other productions of the same plays when the more “appropriate” gasps were heard in the conclusions, but these two performances were unforgettable, and I immediately thought of them when I read about Ira Glass's interpretation of Shakespeare:   

Ira Glass, hero of every ninth-grader suffering through Romeo and Juliet. I already hopped on that crowded anti-Ira bandwagon on Twitter. I don’t want to hate the hater here. Plus, I think the lesson to take from this is pedagogical. Ira Glass has been compared to a “millennial filling out a teacher evaluation.” This insightful comparison helps us to see how to get students to feel like Shakespeare is meaningful, and that does not mean making Shakespeare relatable. Even the type of art that the kids nowadays like is “not relatable.” 

Who can relate to a middle-aged Chemistry teacher with lung cancer and the world’s biggest chip on his shoulder? What Breaking Bad has that King Lear does not is access to our cultural codes of emotion. Lear cannot express his “noble anger” or his “sovereign shame” by looking off-camera with a pouty or angry look on his face, which helped make Walter White and other heroes/heroines of this golden age of TV such round characters. So much emotion is communicated without words. Imagine how popular that show would be if Walter White’s speech followed the Senecan model.

So what is the answer? It is not making Shakespeare new or “relatable.” Ironically, this whole relatability craze is related to the way we teach Shakespeare. He expresses universal themes, after all, and appeals to people across time and space. This leads audiences to think that he should be relatable. But, the onus is not on someone who died 450 years ago. It is on us, the instructors. Students should be given access to Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural codes of emotion—he did not write in an “unemotional” time—and be shown the Shakespearean equivalent of the Walter-White stare. Instead of telling students to appreciate Shakespeare because they’re supposed to and because he comes to you as a brilliant author who already knows how you feel (because he is a genius), perhaps we should focus on his role as an entertainer—you know, before he was a genius or a fraud or a poor actor who surely couldn’t’ve written the plays. I don’t mean we should reductively focus on his status as an actor (try to get through Anonymous if you want to see how that argument plays out). 

I mean, did they only cast Bret Michaels look-alikes for Anonymous?

Shakespeare was a writer, sharer (that is, part owner), actor, and all-around man of the theater deeply involved in multiple aspects of the work his company did. He was a very successful entertainer in his day. He managed to convince many thousands of Londoners for two decades that he didn’t “suck.” Maybe knowing him better will help us “relate” to Shakespeare. True, this is not as easily done in performance as in the classroom, and it won't reform all of those nervous, confused laughers or the puerile, irascible viewers. Still, this will make for a far more rewarding educational and, maybe, theatrical experience. Don't blame Ira Glass. Blame the way he was taught Shakespeare. Instructors have to fight against the deeply ingrained, almost unconscious cultural forces that subtly work on students and warp the ways we interpret and see Shakespeare, whose work is now, more than ever, worth understanding, precisely because of the ways his responses to surveillance can inform our own (see my previous--and, most likely, future--posts on this blog for more on that last point).

Canon Confidential Time:

Frenchman Pierre Boulle worked as a rubber planter in French Indochina in the 1930s. When World War II started, he worked for the Free French and as a British undercover operative in China, Burma, and Vietnam. His experiences and training in how to blow up a bridge and evade or kill guards perhaps inspired his two best-known books, The Bridge over the River Kwai and The Planet of the Apes. Overall, his sense of the morally ambiguous motives driving men to do desperate acts of faith, valor, and duty was informed by his experience as a spy employed by overtly principled but covertly unscrupulous governments  (see this great article on the BBC).