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The Tempest & Grad School in English

September 7, 2010 by Steve Mentz 28 Comments

Here’s a cover image of The Tempest from a 1707 ed of Shakespeare’s Works that I used in the opening case of the Folger show last summer.  If you look at the terror on the faces of the mariners, the demonic glee of Ariel in the clouds, & the bemused unconcern of Prospero on shore (hard to see on the left hand side), it’s a pretty good image of grad school in English.

Please comment below  & read this image back for me: do you see a different allegory, of teaching or learning or something else?

(This’ll give me a chance to test the comments, & to approve each of you as a commentor for the blog going forward.)

Filed Under: E. 110 Fall 2010, Lost at Sea, New courses, The Tempest, Theater

a fragment from W. S. Merwin

September 2, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

They began to go

To pieces at once under the waves’ hammer.

Sick at heart since that first stroke, they moved

Nevertheless as they had learned always to move

When it should come, not weighing hope against

The weight of the water, yet knowing that no breath

Would escape to betray what they underwent then.

Dazed, incredulous, that it had come,

That they could recognize it….

…And to some it seemed that the waves

Grew gentle, spared them, while they died of that knowledge.

“The Shipwreck” (Green with Beasts, 1956)

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Sea Poetry, The Tempest

Indigo: a tale of two Mirandas

August 18, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Indigo, or Mapping the Waters

A compelling & poetic re-take on The Tempest in a Caribbean setting by Marina Warner.  A first-contact narrative portraying the origins of the Sycorax-Caliban-Ariel family broken by the arrival of Kit Everard from England in 1609, framed by two different sections about the modern Everards: Ant, the patriarch & master of the Game at Flinders; Kit, his uncertain son; Miranda, Ant’s grand-daughter; and Xanthe, the patriarch’s late-arriving daughter, who displaces both Kit & Miranda from the family succession.  The two girls, Miranda & Xanthe, compete for the role of chosen daughter just as the two cousins in Sacred Hunger struggle to be Ferdinand.

Some nice writing about the sea and Shakespeare: “But for Xanthe Everard this was the final transformation: a pearl of rare size and beauty, she had become incapable of further motion in mind or body; she had given her first and last cry for the love that most people crave all their lifelong days” (376).  Sounds a bit like Garcia-Marquez, I guess.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, The Tempest, Uncategorized

Sacred Hunger: Who gets to play Ferdinand?

August 18, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger

A very good novel about slavery by way of *The Tempest*.  The main plot concerns the legacy of the merchant William Kemp, who invests in a slave ship in an attempt to save his sagging fortunes.  (His son, who chooses sugar, gets better results.)

But the key tension operates between the son, Erasmus Kemp, and the nephew Matthew Paris.  Kemp wants the good mercantile life; Paris, fleeing from the death of his wife and child while he was imprisoned for publishing heretical (proto-Darwinian) tracts, wants something more radical.

From a Shakespearean point of view, they both want to be Ferdinand: the heir & chosen suitor.  Kemp even plays Ferdinand in a failed production of *The Enchanted Island* opposite a wealthy merchant’s daughter early in the novel.  But it’s Paris’s multi-racial world, on the slave ship, in Africa, and in Florida, that redefine Prospero’s magic isle.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, The Tempest, Uncategorized

TARA’s Bollywood Miranda

July 28, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

TARA is a London-based theater group that does multicultural productions; I saw a good mostly-Arabic Tempest a few summer ago.  Their current production is a Bollywood-inflected new play called “Miranda” that transposes The Tempest to Goa.

http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/event/195713/miranda

Filed Under: The Tempest

Podcast of my July 13, 2010, Folger lecture

July 26, 2010 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

The podcast of my “Stories from the Sea” lecture at the Folger’s Elizabethan Theater is here 

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, The Tempest

Lost at Sea

June 8, 2010 by Steve Mentz 1 Comment

The show is up: www.folger.edu/lostatsea

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Lost at Sea, The Tempest

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About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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