Steve Mentz

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THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

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“Creation’s O”

October 4, 2010 by Steve Mentz 3 Comments

For me, the shockingly brilliant insight and innovation of The Sea and the Mirror is how Auden asks us to think about Antonio.  He tends to be an afterthought for many readings of The Tempest — an Old World Machiavel who’s easily forgiven & forgotten — but Auden (perhaps writing with 1930s Europe in mind) gives him the choral role in Chapter II, with each lyric ending up as part of Antonio’s “alone.”  Auden’s Antionio ‘s a deeply skeptical, deeply individual poetic creation.  He mocks Prospero’s magic: “What a lot a little music can do.”  He doubts that mercy and book-drowning will have lasting consequences: “they will soon reappear, / Not even damaged.”

Against P’s show-and-tell, Antonio places individual will.  “Your all is partial,” he argues against his brother, “I am I, Antonio / By choice myself alone.”

He gets the last word each time: “choice for himself, burning in the dark for Ferdinand, toasting with Stephano, talking with Gonzalo, playing in his head with Adrian and Francisco, wearing a diadem with Alonso, sailing with the Master and Boatswain, fighting the white bull with Sebastian, laughing with Trinculo, dancing with Miranda.

As “Creation’s O” he is beyond his brother.  Outside of his control.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010

Auden’s “silent dissolution”

October 3, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best,

Then, I surrender their fascinating cousel

To the silent dissolution of the sea

Which misuses nothing because it values nothing

Whereas man overvalues everything…

Auden’s great poetic commentary & meditation on The Tempest, which is also very much a poem of a European fleeing Europe during WWII, operates throughout between the dissolving opacity of the sea and the artistic fantasy of the mirror.  It’s a strange and gorgeous poem, though I’m not always sure in re-reading it whether it’s a hymn to the power of art or a lament about human failure.

I suppose that I see the same deep ambivalence in The Tempest as well.

We won’t have too much time at the NYPL on Tuesday to talk about Auden, so let’s bring him online for the next few days.  It’s a poem to chew on.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010

Robinson Crusoe

October 2, 2010 by Steve Mentz 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking over the past few days about Robinson Crusoe, Mariner.  We’ll be busy next week with the NY Public Library & Dr. Lubey’s work, but esp. since she’s one of our resident Defoe experts, we might want to expand this conversation.

Matt P., our roving seminar member who’s spent the last two weeks in China, has started his project by thinking about the similarities between Prospero’s exile and Crusoe’s: both Europeans on isolated islands who survive, enslave non-Europeans, and appear, perhaps in slightly different ways, to represent fantasies about the colonial experience.

There’s lots to chew on in that parallel, but I also thought I’d share some recent material on Defoe that I put together this summer at the Folger.  Here are links to a web site based on his comprehensive world history, the Atlas Maritimus of 1728, to a map of his maritime travels that was published in Part II of his story, and to two audio clips.  (The first is recorded by my brother-in-law, Maury Sterling, last seen in the cast of “The A-Team” this summer.)

Defoe’s Atlas Maritimus

Map of Robinson Crusoe’s Travels

Crusoe’s Shipwreck

Alexander Selkirk

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, E. 110 Fall 2010

Three by Dr. Lubey

September 30, 2010 by Steve Mentz 15 Comments

Here, for your reading pleasure, are three articles by Dr. Kathleen Lubey, one of our department’s specialists in 18th-century literature.  Please read at least two — or if if you’d prefer.  The article on pornography, which emerged directly out of a grad seminar, might be particularly interesting & accessible to those who are not deep in 18c waters.

Lubey on pornography

Lubey on Haywood

Lubey on Addison

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010

Shakespeare and Slavery

September 23, 2010 by Steve Mentz 2 Comments

A few sources for Danielle’s project on the Atlantic slave trade in the early modern period, which may be of interest to the rest of you.

Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999)

Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (any number of editions of the well-known & influential abolitionist autobiography)

Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African (Penguin, 2005) (a controversial & well-regarded biography that provides evidence that Equiano may have been born in North Carolina)

Nick Hazelwood, The Queen’s Slave Trader (2004) a good popular bio of John Hawkins

I’ll also see if I can find a copy of vol 10 of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, which has Hawkins’s most substantial voyage to Africa in it.  If I can’t find it, the NY Public Library is your best best.

I’ll also bring in an interesting short article in the journal Sea History that discusses the American anti-slavery squadron in the early 19c, & their use of African small boat handlers to negotiate the dangerous surf along the West African coast.  Interactions between Europeans & Africans were quite complex during the slave trade, with lots of individuals and groups on both sides of the various transactions.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, E. 110 Fall 2010

A review of the Bridge Project Tempest

September 22, 2010 by Steve Mentz 5 Comments

A slightly edited version of this review will appear this winter in Shakespeare Bulletin, alongside reviews of As You Like It (Bridge Project) and Measure for Measure (Theatre for a New Audience).  Anybody see any of these productions last winter?

How many versions of Prospero have we each seen or imagined?  Even though we no long believe the old stories about the play as Shakespeare’s self-portrait, there’s something about this familiar figure—magician, teacher, slave-holder, father—that carries the over-ripe taste of the familiar.  Even very strong performances by big-name actors—Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan—can, in retrospect, fade into the role rather than putting an individual stamp upon it.  Stephen Dillane’s Prospero, while very faithful to the text, was probably the most distinctive I’ve seen.  He played the magician as threadbare and scholarly, deeply engaged with his inner spirits.  He arrived on stage for the first scene before the house lights went down and was distractedly reading a book.  Sam Mendes’s direction emphasized Prospero’s control of the island by having all the play’s action take place inside the sand circle of his art, with the actors not performing in each scene sitting motionless around the edge of the stage like marionettes without strings.  Despite his control inside the circle, Dillane’s Prospero didn’t feel all-powerful.  He paced urgently around the circle in the storm scene (the impact of which was slightly muted by having the wizard visible from the start); he seemed angry and impatient in the “great globe itself” speech (4.1); and he needed to blindfold Miranda in 1.2.  The production emphasized both Prospero’s power and his human frustration with that power. He controlled everything inside his circle, but that circle itself, which seemed to represent a navigator’s compass and a child’s sand box as well as a conjuror’s circle, was frustratingly small.  There was a lot outside that Prospero could not dominate.

The empty recesses of the stage, filled with the slumping figures of actors not participating in Prospero’s action, testified to the limits of his power.  This part of the stage contained perhaps two inches of water, as if it were the edge of the ocean itself, the shores of which marked the limits of human and dramatic magic.  This opacity and emptiness helped explain Prospero’s sometimes perplexing anxiety, his worries about managing a series of events that he seems always to have well in hand. In Mendes’s production, there was always something visible on stage outside of his control.  The emotional urgency of Dillane’s performance finally burst through in the epilogue, for which he stripped himself down to an undershirt and boxer shorts and spat out his lines in a mixture of contempt and deep need: “Let your indulgence set me free.”  I’ve never been so moved by those very familiar lines, never seen a Prospero who so desperately needed indulgence.

Not everything in this production was as strong as Dillane’s performance.  Juliet Rylance’s Miranda seemed a bit insipid, as if, lacking the physical and dramatic range of her Rosalind, she could find little to do with the part.  Edward Bennett, who was so striking as Oliver, played Ferdinand with much less punch.  Christian Camargo’s Ariel wore some great costumes, especially a striking full-sized harpy get-up with black wings, but even though the relationship between Prospero and his magical servant seemed to be at the heart of the production, the spirit himself seemed static.  Ron Cephas Jones’s Caliban presented himself, uncomfortably, as a kind of natural slave, ceding the play’s emotional center to Ariel’s claims upon his master.  It was, above all, a production that revolved around its lead actor; any Tempest must be Prospero-centric, but none of the other actors, not even the fine Alvin Epstein as Gonzalo, managed to escape his overshadowing presence.

The one element of the production that rivaled Dillane was the set design and the lighting.  The circle-plus-ocean design of the stage managed to convey Prospero’s near-omnipotence inside his magic realm and also the vast emptiness outside it.  The staging of Ariel’s song (“Full fathom five…”) in 1.2 was especially memorable.  The stage lights glimmered on the water that surrounded the sand circle.  Prospero’s urgent pacing around his circle slowed down.  Inside, at the center, Ariel gathered Ferdinand in a seductive and constrictive embrace, while the spirit, along with the on-stage chorus of women who would later play the goddesses in the masque, sang to him.  The effect was other-worldly.  It was as close to a vision of the bottom of the sea as I’ve ever seen on stage.  Five fathoms down, with a King’s body that is not really there, Prospero showed the prince and the audience a vision of dramatic transformation and its threatening consequences.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010, New York Theater, The Tempest

An Interested Void

September 22, 2010 by Steve Mentz 4 Comments

Yesterday we were talking about how grad students need to be self-interested readers, looking at least as much to advance your own projects as to be a good student who reads what he/she is supposed to.  (I know we’re all “good students” in this group.)

Thinking back, I realized I had a perfectly good example of that sort of self-interested classroom behavior on my side.  When we were talking about emptiness in “our revels now are ended,” I was (not quite consciously) thinking about the paper that I’m presenting at the end of the semester as George Washington U’s “TemFest II” event on Dec 3:

http://www.gwmemsi.com

(Scroll down a little to get to TemFest II.)

Maybe I’ll use this paper as my “work in progress” for the seminar.  I’m going to talk about gaps and vacancies in the play and its after life — my opening line will be, “The Tempest is full of holes” — with some attention to the Roman poet Lucretius and his “atomist” theories of matter and empty space.

I also note, if anyone wants to make a field trip, that the Dec 3 event in DC is open to the public & should be lots of fun.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010, The Tempest

Oceanic Nature and Literary Studies

September 20, 2010 by Steve Mentz 7 Comments

Just a couple of broad points for us to think about on Tues when we discuss “blue humanities” or the “new thalassology” or whatever we’d like to call it.

1. Natural Disorder and Literary Form: In both the oceanic and non-oceanic elements of my work on nature, I’m interested in contrasting the disorder of the natural world (and the environment-human culture relationship) with the kind of order — provisional, of course — that literary form provides.

Prospero’s “revels now are ended” speech might be relevant here.

2. Historicism and Anachronism: In early modern studies (and, I believe, other areas of literary studies as well), much research in recent decades has been historicist in a comprehensive and horizontal sense: scholars immerse themselves in the culture & habits of thought of one particular age.  Part of what At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean and the Shakespeare Now! series of which it’s part tries to do is open up this closed historicist circle & ask Shakespeare to speak directly to 21c questions and concerns.  There are lots of risks involved in this sort of thing; sometimes it doesn’t work; and I think that a deep historicism is part of this project.  But I also want to talk on Tues night about the blindfolds that history puts on us.

The passage in The Tempest that might be relevant here is Miranda’s recollection of her mother, in the “dark backward and abysm of time” in 1.2.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, E. 110 Fall 2010

A Different Salty Allegory: The Mariner’s Mirror

September 18, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Last week we talked about the chaotic opening scene of The Tempest as a representation of the educational process.  I’ll suggest a different, and perhaps more palatable, image this week.  The Mariner’s Mirror was a Dutch atlas translated into English in the late Elizabethan period, in order to advance English navigation and cartography.  The Folger copy was hand-colored at some later date —

For some more information on the Mirror, you can look at the entry in the Lost at Sea website

Mariner’s Mirror Website

and also listen to my 90-second description of it on the Audio tour

Mariner’s Mirror

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, E. 110 Fall 2010, Lost at Sea, The Tempest

Thalassological Readings

September 16, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

For my grad class for next week’s reading, here are pdf versions of two articles that give you a pretty good idea of my recent work in maritime ecocriticism.  When I get back from this conference, I’ll post a little bit more background, but in case you want to get started reading, here they are.

Strange Weather in King Lear

Toward a Blue Cultural Studies

Note: I’m having some trouble with the first link.  I’ll try to repair it but might not get to that until tomorrow (Fri).  You can also find that article in the journal *Shakespeare*.

Seems to work now!  Let me know if you have any problems.

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010, Uncategorized

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About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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