Steve Mentz

Crawling out of the wreckage of 2016 into the New Year, don’t we all need a little hope? Come join us at session 598 on Saturday at the Convention Center (Room 112B at 3:30 pm).

Here are the abstracts and presenter bios. Featuring Lynne Bruckner, Dan Brayton, Jen Munroe, and Tiffany Jo Werth!

Here’s how I’ll open the panel, explaining what we mean by radical hope.

When we proposed this panel last winter, we didn’t know how much we’d need hope in early 2017. We were concerned then and now with environmentalist thinking in our catastrophic present, which seems to oscillate between tragic visions of apocalypse and technology-inspired fantasies of redemption. Either we are all doomed, or electric cars will save us just the way we are. This panel on premodern literature aims to historicize the relationships between humans and the nonhuman environment. Seeking alternatives, we offer the abundance of historical difference.

Our title comes from philosopher Jonathan Lear’s 2006 book, Radical Hope, which unfolds the story of Plenty Coups, the nineteenth-century Native American Crow leader who guided his people to accept the end of their traditional way of life. Plenty Coups’s dilemma – “How ought we to live with this possibility of collapse?” (9) – resonates with the dire pronouncements of environmental doomsayers in the Anthropocene. Plenty Coups shows that it’s possible to reframe breakdown as futurity: “We must do what we can,” Lear ventriloquizes the Crow leader, “to open our imagination up to a radically different set of future possibilities” (93). Plenty Coups’s vision of the Crow people enduring without mobility, wealth, or war may parallel our prospects in the face of climate change.

Facing the unknown kindles fear and stimulates courage. The required stance, as Lear interprets Plenty Coups, is deceptively simple. “Something good will emerge” (94) insists the leader who turns forward into catastrophe. The form and shape of the good remain unknown and unknowable. Preserving optimism when facing a blank constitutes heroism. This stance is also, Lear emphasizes, a “traditional way of going forward” (154) – not because Crow traditions had any experience with a world without buffalo, but because Plenty Coups used traditional cultural resources to generate not-quite-articulable hope.

We early modern ecoscholars use this hope to historicize the Anthropocene. But as 2016 has turned out, it is not only the nonhuman environment that needs a dose of radical futurity. In the rawness of the November 21^st issue of the New Yorker, the novelist Junot Diaz reached for Lear’s book in the Age of Trump. “Radical hope,” Diaz writes, “is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence.’” We academics butter our bread by cherishing imaginative excellence, though like everyone we sometimes shy away from disorienting openness. My hope is that this panel will plant flexible seeds in our thinking and our teaching. In time, they will grow into flowers that we didn’t expect and have never seen before.

Looking forward to seeing everyone in Philly!

I blog-reviewed eighteen plays or performances (in sixteen posts) this past year, of which ten were early modern plays and seven were part of New Haven’s #artsideas festival. Here’s the year-end summary:

1. Theater for a New Audience’s Pericles
2. The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (#artsideas)
3. Our Ladies of Perpetual Succor (#artsideas)
4. Abraham.in.Motion (#artsideas)
5. Steel Hammer (#artsideas)
6. The Bookbinder (#artsideas)
7. The Square Root of Three Sisters (#artsideas)
8. Wendy Whalen (#artsideas)
9. Tumacho (by Ethan Lipton)
10. Cymbeline (RSC)
11. Hamlet (RSC)
12. The Alchemist and Dr Faustus (RSC)
13. The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth (Globe)
14. The Rape of Lucrece (New York Shakespeare Exchange)
15. Kings of War (Toneelgroep Amsterdam)
16. Coriolanus (Red Bull)

I also wrote a slightly revised and Trump-ed response to the Richard III part of Kings of War, published in Hypocrite Reader as He Must See Ghosts: Richard III, Trump, and the Future

A good year in the aisles.

 

A few stats for 2016 —

~ 12,400 page views. That’s about what it’s been for the past several years. Roughly 7000

32 posts. Up slightly from 30 in 2015, but still down from 2014’s 55 (!).

Most in one month was June (6, all theater reviews from #artsideas in New Haven). Least was zero in May.

Sixteen — exactly half — of the blog posts were theater reviews. I’ll collect them in a separate post. Of those sixteen, nine were plays from the Renaissance (or close to it.) Four were responses to academic events.

Maybe I’ll start doing something different with the Bookfish in 2016?

 

It was pretty much down to the wire, as I juggled pool-time between shuttling my kids around New Haven County in late December — but I hit my goal of 250 swimming miles in 2016. Here’s the chart —

My Progress for Go The Distance 2016

Month	Total Distance
Jan	24.33 miles (=42,820 yards, =39,155 meters)
Feb	24.82 miles (=43,690 yards, =39,951 meters)
Mar	11.82 miles (=20,800 yards, =19,020 meters)
Apr	23.81 miles (=41,900 yards, =38,313 meters)
May	29.18 miles (=51,350 yards, =46,954 meters)
Jun	23.16 miles (=40,768 yards, =37,278 meters)
Jul	14.49 miles (=25,508 yards, =23,325 meters)
Aug	15.24 miles (=26,816 yards, =24,520 meters)
Sep	22.23 miles (=39,130 yards, =35,780 meters)
Oct	13.61 miles (=23,950 yards, =21,900 meters)
Nov	21.32 miles (=37,525 yards, =34,313 meters)
Dec	26.22 miles (=46,150 yards, =42,200 meters)
Total	250.23 miles (=440,407 yards, =402,708 meters)

 

A little more detail:

19 swims in Jan = 24.33 miles

18 in Feb = 24.82 miles

8 in March = 11.82 miles (Spring break! Worst month)

17 in April = 23.81 miles

20 in May = 29.18 miles (Best month – b/c my classes end before the kids’ do)

18 in June = 23.16 miles

16 in July = 14.49 miles

16 in August = 15.24 miles (Summer travels cut into the mileage)

21 in Sept = 22.23 miles

10 in Oct = 13.81 miles (a slow transition from salt water back into the pool? Also trips to Boulder and DC)

15 in Nov = 21.32 miles

17 in Dec = 26.22 miles

 

195 total swims x 250.23 miles = 1.28 miles on average

195/366 = I swam 53% of the days of 2016

 

Not bad. Travel makes it tough — I was on the road a fair amount in March and October this past year. (Summer travels are easier: I know a great pool in Stratford, and a week in Greece gave me lots of decent-length swims.)

I wonder if I can push up to 300 next year…

 

 

Of course he didn’t show. How could he?

I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard.

He sent in his stead an early ballad, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” sung by Patti Smith. The New Yorker called her performance, with full orchestral backing, “transcendent.” Visibly moved, she garbled some lyrics in the second verse:

I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’

[Update: Patti Smith reports in the New Yorker that she picked the song.]

Recorded on Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), which was his first to feature mostly original songs, Hard Rain had its legendary debut at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village in 1962, leading the folk singer Dave Van Ronk to name it “the beginning of an artistic revolution.”

Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter

When Dylan got the Nobel nod back in October, I said that I thought the committee, in this Age of Trumpian and Brexitish Nostalgia, wanted to retrieve and celebrate the “old, weird America” in place of the Orange One’s racist fantasia. The sense that Dylan bears a harsher and truer past seems more intensely pertinent in today’s hard rains. I also think about what Robbie Robertson said about recording the Basement Tapes with Dylan: “He would pull these songs out of nowhere. We didn’t know if he wrote them or if he remembered them.” That’s one task for art: making new things that sound as if they have just crawled out from under ancient stones. He sings a painful, living, entangled past.

I met a young child beside a dead pony

He also sent some words to stand in for his absence at the banquet. Never shy, Bob was thinking about what it felt like to write Hamlet:

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”

Where are you going to get a human skull? What will we do with it now that we have it?

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breath it

In 1963 the Hard Rain was nuclear, but not only. Today’s it’s nativism and racial resentment, but not only.

Bob’s question — “What’ll you do now?” — echoes his dramatist predecessor’s: “that is the question.” Art’s past demands artistic futures.

What will we do now, my darling young ones?

 

 

 

Who cares about poetry when surrounded by #trumpnoise? As outrages and tweets accumulate, attention divides. The idea of a “public” feels fractured and disorienting. Who are we talking to? Each other?

In the bitter climate of early November 2016, I spent my 50th birthday surrounded by friends and theater. A few days later I woke feeling as if my country had morphed into its own evil twin, recognizable but horribly distorted. In this raw season, I’ve been thinking about public writing, about values, and about how to counter #trumpnoise.

Like many humanities scholars, I write largely for what Paradise Lost calls “fit audience…though few” (7.31). My books and articles are aimed at fellow specialists and students of (mostly) premodern literature. I love it when an artist or non-academic writer or actor or old friend or anyone finds something of value in my work, and I’ve been enjoying recent collaborations with non-professors in projects such as Oceanic New York — but I also believe in scholarship on its own terms.

Now I’m not sure those terms are enough, at least not by themselves.

So, a month early, I’m resolving that in 2017 I’ll do more public writing, about public questions, for public venues. It won’t all be about politics. I’ll be trying to show in public the humanist and more-than-humanist values that I cherish. It won’t cut through all the #trumpnoise, but I’m hoping for a slowly expanding circle of clarity and resistance.

To borrow a great line from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the New Yorker, “Now is the Time to Talk about What We are Actually Talking About.” Writing and talking in public — showing the reasoned and tolerant speculative intellectual culture that we in the academy teach, in all its various and sometimes discontented voices — is worth doing more deliberately.

I have no magic wisdom to impart, and I don’t want to aggrandize myself. But I believe in the diverse, imaginative, vibrant America that Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor currently playing Aaron Burr in Hamilton, spoke publicly to Mike Pence about two weeks ago. I want to bear public witness to the value of this multiculture.

I’m not aiming to become a media star like the awesome medieval-historian-turned-journalist David Perry, but it seems important, now, to reach outside academic conversations. Clarity can counter #trumpnoise, at least on the margins, over time. History moves in surprising directions, but I don’t believe that irresponsible greed and selfishness represent lasting American ideals. History reminds us that 2017 won’t be the first year that an unrepentant white supremacist will work in the West Wing — but history also shows that hatred shrivels in sunlight. Eventually.

So, here’s a new public piece on Trump and Richard III, via the online magazine Hypocrite Reader. The whole December issue — SAFE (THE TRUMP ISSUE) — is very much worth reading in these uneasy times.

The moral of my story, told by ghosts, celebrates plurality in public.

He Must See Ghosts: Richard III, Trump, and the Future

The man who wanted to rule stood apart, downstage left, staring at his body in a full-length mirror. The Dutch actor Hans Kesting, playing Richard III in Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s jarringly prophetic Kings of War at BAM the weekend before the election, projected a sinuous intensity that should have warned us all what was coming. Kesting’s Richard was enticing and violent, without any elaborate physical props except a wine-colored stain under one eye. He threatened by standing still, separate, eying his reflection while the other aristocrats pretended they were in control of the kingdom.

Kesting’s Richard walked as if on springs, unstable and uncomfortable, with his hips slightly forward and arms back, enough to disorient but not tipping into caricature. Only once did he he cascade into ridiculousness, wearing the crown he’d not yet claimed, draping a rug over his shoulders, and running around the stage in a parody of the humpbacked king.

We watched that same narcissism and blind ego triumph in pre-dawn darkness on November 9. Why did the people choose him? Shakespeare’s shown the answer for four ambivalently democratic centuries.

He dominated with unbearable greed and need. Seducing Lady Anne, betraying his brothers, condemning the princes in the tower: every step sang out reckless desperation. When he bared his breast and offered Lady Anne the knife, he revealed urgent but not sexual desire. He must be at the center, he must be the most hated and the most loved, the only one who matters. He-Who-Must-Always-Win.

Today we need a narrative to unseat that center-grabbing need. Shakespeare built that, too. Ghosts undid Richard. We must make him see ghosts.

Before the battle of Bosworth Field, King Richard sat in the chair of power with his back to the audience, staring at his own massive image on a video screen. Slowly, the features blurred to superimpose his victims: Henry VI, brother Clarence, the young princes, Lady Anne. Their presences maddened the king. As the screen faded to red he galloped around the stage bellowing:

A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!

What he wanted and could not have was a stronger and more animal body, a vehicle for boundless ambition and drive. He never got it. We saw him defeated. He galloped horseless until the video curtain pulled up to reveal the full cast, the nation, dressed as an invading army, with the future King Henry VII at the head. Trump-Richard snaked through the crowd and vanished.

We need to make him see ghosts. Against a solitary sleepless ruler with his fingers on twitter we juxtapose the relentless heterogeneity of the world. Ghosts represent history’s victims but in the half-light of this new regime history itself risks becoming spectral. Against his singularity we assert our plurality. We need everything and everyone to stay visible. He must see and we must see. Ghosts must show themselves on screens and streets—not just that shining spirit in her white pantsuit bearing the popular vote, but all the human and nonhuman people he’d rather ignore. Our ghostly plurality must refuse relegation to invisible spaces on national margins.

I missed the super-short deadline but wanted to add a final punch-line. I’ll splice it in here:

The ghosts whisper: Don’t normalize. Pluralize!

More soon!

What would it have been like to have seen Red Bull’s blazing production of Coriolanus before our national day of reckoning? Could watching this painful and bloody tragedy of egotism and political betrayal in 2016 have been experienced, before the fateful election, as a muted triumph, in which female resistance manages in the end to save civilization from masculine violence? I suppose I’ll never know, though I’ll bet some of you reading this review saw this show in October…

There’s a moment near the center of the action in which the citizens, having more or less willingly given the war hero their voices and their red-colored ballots, realize, with a little help from the slightly smarmy Tribunes, that they can change their minds. They rebel, and they retract their support. Sounds like a good idea!

Probably the most unexpectedly powerful performance of the night was Broadway vet Patrick Page as Menenius. In a dapper suit with tie and suspenders, often sipping a tumbler of bourbon, he played the Senator with old school Southern charm, reminding at least some of the older members of the audience (like me) of the days when white men with accents were the face of American liberal politics. 

Another surprise was the Rebecca Franks’s charismatic and quiet Virgilia, the hero’s wife. Tall and fierce, she was upstaged by tiger mother Volumnia but not as conclusively as can often be the case. Her silence, juxtaposed with her mother in law’s volubility, suggested a different kind of bond. With her husband, kisses were a silent eloquence.

Dion Johnstone’s excellent Coriolanus showed us no visible wounds, even while wearing the track suit and red baseball hat “of humility,” but his powerful body, black, beautiful, and finally devoured by hungry Volscians, was the star of the night. Bloodied before the gates of Corioles in act 1, when he sacked the city, and again in act 5, when its angry citizens took their final revenge, he performed towering male violence held tightly close and closed, unable to open himself up, afraid of the people and (of course) of his mother.

How did Volumnia beat her son down before the gates of Rome, after he’d rejected his comrades, wife, and son? Partly, as Lisa Harrow’s performance showed, by wearing him down: her speech to him was long, varied, a bit suffocating. She would not let him turn away, and then when he did turn, she kept talking until he turned back. 

The famous stage direction, in which the warrior “holds her by the hand, silent,” marks the hero’s surrender to his mother and the preservation of Roman civilization. It wasn’t perfectly staged, since he had to walk too far downstage to reach her hand, but the next moment, in which he knelt before her, still holding her hands, was devastating:

O mother, mother! O!

You have won a happy victory for Rome,

But for your son, believe it, O, believe it

Most dangerously you have with him prevailed

If not most mortal to him. (5.3)

She stood stoic but his pain hit me in my seat against the back wall of the theater.

The set was festooned with ballots and balloons, dropped when Coriolanus was presented to the people and popped loudly when the riots began. The last painful set of electoral props for November 2016?

I’m left thinking what I always think about in Shakespeare’s Roman plays: what is the human and bodily cost of political ambition? Who does the wolf love? (2.1).

I also wonder today about the Tribunes, Brecht’s Marxist heroes, enemies of the aristocracy. Is this play about the failures of democracy in governing a republic? Does that remind us of anything we might have experienced recently?

What will the monument to Volumnia look like? Will she stand beneath it, thinking of her dead son?

But more than anything I’m left today replaying one pure irresponsible stage moment of anti-democratic rage, when a nameless citizen jumped up onto center stage and hammered the blunt end of a sledge into a ballot box. It took a few hard blows, but she scattered the red cards of endorsement all over the stage. Votes don’t always last.

What is the city but the people? (3.1).

The most brilliant, painful, and astounding performance was the last — but I’ll take the kings in chronological order. Six of them, lined up in a long row.

Henry IV

The dying old man laid out prone on the white hospital bed dropped wisdom on the son who’d already begun playing with the English crown. There’s an easy way toavoid trouble at home, the old man advised: “Busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.”

So started four-and-a-half hours of Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s brilliant and searing Kings of War, directed by Ivo van Hove, which is spending the pre-election weekend at the BAM opera house. A master class in domination, violence, and strategy, it was just the thing to redirect political jitters for a few hours on Friday night. Politics as bloodsport and play, not exactly as Shakespeare wrote it — the performance was in Dutch with supertitles, and stripping down five plays into one night required aggressive cuts — but certainly as Machiavelli understood it.

Henry V

The first crowned monarch — all the kings were crowned on the same red carpet, followed by the same single file line, stretching out to the edge of the stage — started quietly. Ramsey Nasr played Henry V with no visible traces of Prince Hal, and he invaded France  without any leavening from Welsh or Scottish captains, fiery Pistol, or tears at Sir John’s death. Playing against the patriotic swellings we remember from Olivier’s and Branaugh’s films, this Henry V was frightening because he was just a little bit opaque, not quite accessible. Thinking back over the long arc of the full production, I see Henry V as a tactical serpent, exporting to fertile France the destructive forces that would bloody England during successive reigns. Watching his army’s march through Harfleur to Agincourt as a preface to Rose War rather than the culmination of Hal’s journey makes the wastrel-king harder to read. In the sort of outrageous theatrical coup that Toneelgroep has been specializing in for years — here’s my gushing review of their Roman Tragedies, which I saw at BAM in 2012 — the king spoke the Crispin’s day speech as voice-over on a bare stage. The band of brothers, with its fantasy of an organic (masculine) political body unified through royal rhetoric, was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it doesn’t really exist?

The stage was set in the first half of the production (a touch of H4, H5 and the first two parts of H6) to resemble Churchill’s War Rooms, now a museum in London, with maps, desks, and a single bed (in which Henry VI would sleep after kneeling in prayer). The great innovation of the staging, however, was several backstage hallways, which were included in the action via stedicam footage that was projected on a massive central video screen. The screen showed some backstage murders, conspiracies, and even, during a memorable speech in which King Henry VI indulges in a pastoral metaphor, a flock of sheep (or goats, maybe?). With the exception of the livestock, most or all of the filmed action was live, but it was only visible to us via video feed. The result was as seamless an intermingling of live and filmed action as I’ve even seen, making even the Wooster Group‘s pyrotechnics appear a bit labored. Another patterned staging showed figures of authority — York and Richard III, especially — seated with their backs to the audience but with their faces shown in close up on the big screen. The combination of contempt for and intimacy with the masses was potent and disturbing.

This staging of Henry V moved without a pause from his securing the hand of Princess Katherine to the conquering monarch’s funeral, which opens Part 1 of Henry VI. This staging of wooing scene, often a semi-comic break from the relentless battles, showed the king’s emotional neediness more than his mastery. In a sharp inversion of common practice, the scene suggested that Katherine understood the king’s English but he cannot fully decipher her French. His sometimes comic lines about being a soldier who cannot speak love-verses built to his petulant fists pounding on the table in frustration. The princess, and the off-stage negotiators of the Anglo-French treaty, rescued Henry — but the sense of not-fully-visible violence, like the rapine and pillaging the king had threatened but not visited on Harfluer, lingered after the conqueror passed.

Henry VI

Eelco Smits’s boyish Henry VI looked out of place in his pajamas among the senior military men dressed in suits. Crowned at six months old and never quite growing into his father’s bloody shoes, this Henry brought the play’s action back to England and civil war. All Shakespeare’s French scenes, except Suffolk’s wooing of Margaret, were cut, and to the list of missing figures these plays added Joan of Arc, Jack Cade, and several others. The cabinet room now overflowed with rivalries: the Cardinal and York and Suffolk plotting against Henry’s uncle, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, whose losing hand was played with brilliant frustration by Aus Greidanus, Jr., who would later play Buckingham in Richard III. But the blazing star of the Henry VI plays, and one of the two incandescent performances of the evening, was Janni Goslinga as Queen Margaret of Anjou. 

Margaret, “the she-wolf of France,” dominated the Henry VI plays, especially in a production like this one that cuts Joan of Arc and Jack Cade and minimized Warwick the Kingmaker. Goslinga’s performance ratcheted up the human intensity of the political intrigue, which shifted from Henry V’s war-strategy to a complex multi-party civil war. King Henry VI’s famous piety saw him kneeling in pajamas at his cot while the senior administrators continued their business meeting, but this abdication frustrated Margaret’s ambition for herself and her husband. She burst into rage when Henry VI disinherited their son in order to prevent his rival, the Duke of York, from pushing him off the throne. While the production skipped most of the final stages of the civil war, including almost all of Henry VI, Part 3, which includes Margaret’s great despairing speech — “Say you can swim; alas, tis but a while” — but she dominated the middle section of the performance.

Edward IV

In a nod toward clarity, Kings of War crowned the Duke of York, rather than his son, who was also named Edward. The key scene featured York with seated at a conference table with his back to us, holding aloft a lit cigarette in his right hand. The video screen displayed his impassive face. We watched the smoke curl up as the Duke let his silence negotiate with an increasingly frantic King Henry VI. At the end, York was named heir, Margaret raged against an impotent Henry, and the Lancastran forces were routed. In Shakespeare’s dramatic cycle, completing project takes several more battles and campaigns — but York’s stillness and the implacable control of Bart Sleggers’s performance stood in nicely for all that violence. When the curtain at last came down after two and a half hours (only one interval!), the white rose of York was firmly in command, though the arrival of a certain son, Richard Duke of Gloucester, whose late self-atomizing speeches were almost all Toneelgroep kept of Henry VI, Part 3, promised futures troubles.

Richard III

Hans Kesting, who I’d previously seen play Antony in Toneelgroep’s Roman Tragedies, gave the part of Richard III a sinuous intensity that I don’t think I’ve ever seen equalled on stage before. Without any elaborate physical hijinks or props, except a wine-colored stain under one eye, he carried Richard’s dark ambition and restlessness through his body. He threatened just by standing still: I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more ominous stage moment than watching him stand on one side of the stage, staring at his reflection in a full-length mirror, while other characters pretended that they controlled the kingdom. I’ve seen Ian McKellen and Kevin Spacey give strong live performances of King Richard — but Kesting roared over all of them. As my buddy Erik said after the curtain, “I guess I don’t need to see Richard III ever again.” 

It’s hard to describe the impact of seeing Kesting’s Richard on stage. I think it had something to do with the way he held his body, and also something to do with the way I’d been holding my body for the past 3 hours when he finally arrived on stage. Kesting walked gingerly, as if he were a coiled spring, with his hips slightly forward and arms back, enough to disturb but not enough to be a caricature. At one point his cascaded into full ridiculousness, wearing the crown he’d not yet claimed, draping a rug over his shoulders, and running around the stage in a parody of the humpbacked king. Most of the time he was just alien enough to disturb but not disrupt.

I also think the way the show made us wait for Richard made a difference. By the time he appeared, we’d been sitting still for over two and a half hours, and the late arrival of the man we knew would be the last titular king in the sequence focused our attention. If Henry V, conqueror of France, was understated and his play oddly calm, Richard III arrived to upstage him — though of course the final turn to Richmond, the future Henry VII, also returned Ramsey Nasr, who’d played Henry V, to center stage.

A few moments of Kesting’s Richard particularly linger. When he was sure he was about to be crowned, he sat at the war room table in front of three brightly colored hotline phones. He lifted the red phone, drawls into in in a fake American accent: “Hallo?…Barack?!” Guffawing, full of himself, he next grabbed the green phone and spoke in German to Angela Merkel. To the blue phone he barked at Putin in Russian, then mocked the Russian leader as a “pussy” after he hung up.

Especially after reading the harrowing reporting from Trump’s gold-plated plane in this morning’s Times, I’ve been mulling how Kesting’s Richard combined ruthless domination with near-absolute neediness. The seduction of Lady Anne, about which Richard crowed when she left the stage, played itself out through utter desperation and need. When he bared his breast and offered her the knife, his brutal control operated through his urgent need to be at the center, the most hated and the most loved, the only one who matters:

Lo here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword,

Which if thou please to hide in this true breast,

And let the soul forth that adoreth thee,

I lay it naked to thy deadly stroke.

No wonder Anne couldn’t kill him. Who could strike in the face of so much need?

Richard’s successful wooing of Anne to be his wife gets inverse-mirrored late in the play by his failure to convince Elizabeth to woo her daughter to be his next bride (4.4). Chris Nietvelt, who had previously played the French herald Montjoy, staged Elizabeth as Richard’s match, in a way that Anne and even Margaret had not been. After she left the stage, having not agreed to his proposed match for her daughter, Richard gave the Brooklyn theater one last crowd-pleasing ad lib: “nasty woman.”

The night before the battle showed Richard seated in the position of power on a bare stage with his back to us, staring at his own massive image on the video screen. Slowly, the features blurred to reveal, superimposed, the faces of his victims: Edward, Henry VI, Clarence, the two young princes, Lady Anne. Their presences drove the king mad, and as the screen faded to blood red he galloped around the stage bellowing, “a horse, a horse, My kingdom for a horse!” The famous line reimagined itself as pure physical need, desire for a stronger and more durable body, a vehicle for Richard’s boundless ambition and drive. We never saw him die: as he galloped horseless around the red stage, the video curtain pulled up to reveal the entire cast, now dressed as supporters of Richmond’s invading army, with Richmond himself at the head. Richard snaked through the crowd and vanished into the backstage hallway, not to return until the ovation.

Henry VII

What did the new king mean? The cycle closed with another Henry and another coronation for Ramsey Nasr, who had started us off as Henry V. The circular turning and absence of the tyrant’s body suggested that not all evils have been firmly banished. “The dog is dead,” said Richmond, as he prepared to marry to white rose to the red. Would that all political divisions were so easily sutured.

Here’s our line-up for MLA session #598, coming to Philly on Sat 1/7 at 3:30 pm in the Convention center. Please join us for Radical Hope!

 

Speakers:       Daniel Brayton, Middlebury College

Jennifer Munroe, UNC Charlotte

Lynne Bruckner, Chatham University

Steve Mentz, St. John’s University

Respondent:  Tiffany Jo Werth, Simon Fraser University

Organizer:      Steve Mentz, St. John’s University

 

Environmentalist thinking in our catastrophic present oscillates between tragic visions of apocalyptic futures and technology-inspired fantasies of redemption. Either we are all doomed, or electronic cars will save us just the way we are. This panel, featuring five major voices in early modern ecocritical scholarship, proposes that the plurality of premodern visions of the relationship between human beings and the nonhuman environment can provide alternative ways to imagine our changing ecological future. Treating early modern texts as examples of speculative ecological thinking makes new possibilities visible.

Today’s favorite new term, “Anthropocene,” over-emphasizes the supposed novelty of our latest Age of Man. Neither human-driven environmental change nor ecological catastrophes are entirely new, as Native American populations destroyed by European diseases in the early modern period grimly testify. Twenty-first century conceptions of the Anthropocene often fall into patterns that resemble Romantic or industrial visions of Nature. Supplementing these modern views with a more fully historicized sense of the plural relationships between humans and the nonhuman environment enables humanities scholarship to use alien understandings from our shared past to reconsider our fragile present. Seeking radical alternatives in early modern ecologies, we offer plurality and historical difference.

The roundtable of short papers opens with Daniel Brayton’s “Oceans of Excess,” which argues that European encounters with the World Ocean in the early modern period sparked a new sense of global scale and fascination with the alien sea. He suggests that the vastness of the global ocean created in early modern English literature a language for dynamic, catastrophic, and post-sustainable ecosystems. The marine environment exceeds the capacity of the firmament to contain it and calls into question the human ability to conceptualize nature. Man, as Vico claimed, may make himself the measure of the universe, but the ocean engulfs that yardstick. For literary figures such as Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell the ocean evokes literal and conceptual measurelessness. In Marvell’s “The Garden,” mind and ocean are equally unfathomable. Today’s marine environment continues to exceed our ability to conceptualize the totality of the biosphere. In that excess early modern poets can help us uncover hope, for resilience lies in the gap between what we know about and do to the ocean and what we cannot and do not.

Next Lynne Bruckner will turn from global observations to the local history of a narrative poem, Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece.” Bruckner suggests that the figures of Tarquin and Lucrece offer contrasting ecological visions. Her analysis focuses on wind as narrative co-actant and figure for a living nature; wind enmeshes itself with Lucrece but refuses to touch Tarquin. Shakespeare’s bivalent poem both isolates the masculine rape of nature and also makes available via Lucrece’s hybrid porousness an alternative to that separation. In the contrast between an impermeable assault on natural entanglement and an early modern anticipation of trans-coporeal enmeshment, the poem constructs an alternative to ecological despair that anticipates the “transcorporeal” mode articulated by influential contemporary eco-theorist Stacy Alaimo.

Following this analysis of narrative verse will be Jennifer Munroe’s archival intervention, “Premodern Kitchen Ecologies: ‘Sustainable Becoming.’” Munroe seeks a sustainable “common” future by revising histories of sustainability to account for the diverse practices of the past. Histories of sustainability have tended to seek the origins of our current environmental crises near the advent of industrialism. Such histories, located as far back as perhaps the seventeenth century in England, pinpoint moments when things changed, implying that the human relationship with nature was before that moment otherwise, as if articulating those differences might help remediate our current ecological crises Neither our past nor our future is “common” but rather peppered with racial, gender, and class inequity. Munroe proposes that we find hope not in an imagined ideal past but rather by moving from the global into the local, to focus on the “micro-practices of everyday life” Rosi Braidotti describes as necessary to “sustainable becoming” that articulates both the embeddedness of human-nonhuman relations and the way that those relations depended in the past, as they do now, on inequities. A focus on the “micro-practices” recipe books articulate not only helps us locate alternative histories of sustainability that revise dominant representations of human-nonhuman relationships, but they also provide alternative approaches to how we might interrogate what we mean by “sustainability” in the first place.

The last contributor to the roundtable will be Steve Mentz’s “Two Tempests,” which explores literary representations of tempestuous storms in two canonical works, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Considering the relationship between tempest and time – both terms derived from the Latin tempus – he uncovers in Spenser’s catastrophic image of a “tempest of…wrathfulneese” (2.12.83.4) an attempt to amalgamate human and divine destructives powers. The theatrical spectacle of Shakespeare’s play, by contrast, in which the storm is as much stage trope as natural force, imagines a human wizard presiding on the upper stage over salvageable devastation. These two tempests reflect alternate ways of responding to the challenges of chaotic environments and ameliorative responses.

Finally, Tiffany Jo Werth will respond to the panel papers, drawing on her study of premodern ecomaterialism and considering its resonance for a twenty-first century context.

The roundtable aims to provide a forum to explore multiple forms of early modern radical hope. The alternatives it offers are not utopian solutions or ways to “save the world,” but instead ways of engaging intimately with disorder. This group’s premodern examples demonstrate ways to pluralize our eco-thinking while recognizing the deep embeddedness of human bodies in nonhuman nature. The session emphasizes meaningful parallels between early modern materials and elements of twenty-first century critical thought, especially ecomaterialism, object-oriented thinking, and actor-network models. By framing our appeals to ecological difference through historical alterity we hope to provide an alternative to the relentlessly grim language of ecological catastrophe in the present.

 

Bios:

Dan Brayton is an associate professor at Middlebury College, where he is a member of the Department of English and American Literatures and the Program in Environmental Studies. He earned his doctorate from Cornell University in 2001. His book, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration, published in 2012 by the University of Virginia Press, won the 2012 Northeast Modern Language Association Book Prize. He has published an edited volume, Ecocritical Shakespeare (Ashgate 2011; with Lynne Bruckner) and numerous articles on early modern English literature, maritime literature, and ecocriticism. He also teaches aboard sailing vessels in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean and has held visiting appointments with Sea Education Association, the Williams-Mystic Program in American Maritime Studies, and Semester-at-Sea.

 

Lynne Bruckner is Professor of English at Chatham University. She is co-editor of Ecocritical Shakespeare with Dan Brayton (Ashgate 2011) and Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching with Jennifer Munroe and Edward Geisweit (Ashgate 2015). Bruckner has contributed ecocritical chapters to Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, eds. Munroe and Laroche (Palgrave 2011) and Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now, eds. DiPietro and Grady (Palgrave 2013). Bruckner’s publications also include articles and book chapters on Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Jonson, Atwood, and Finding Nemo. Bruckner has developed and taught multiple environmental and ecocritical courses, including Literary Approaches to the Environment, Ecofeminist Literature, Shakespeare: ecocriticism, Children’s Environmental Fiction and Film, and Organic Gardening. She earned her doctorate in English from Rutgers University in 1997.

 

Jennifer Munroe is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is author of Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (Ashgate, 2008) and co-author with Rebecca Laroche of Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory (forthcoming. Arden, 2016). She has co-edited Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (Palgrave, 2011) and Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching (Ashgate, 2015). In addition, she has published articles in Shakespeare Studies, Tulsa Studies for Women’s Literature, Prose Studies, Early Modern Studies Journal, Renaissance Studies, and Pedagogy. Munroe is also a founding member and blogger for EMROC (Early Modern Recipes Online Collective), which is creating a public-access database of transcribed early modern manuscript receipt books.

 

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. His ecocritical publications include Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550 – 1719 (Minnesota 2015); At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (Continuum 2009); the edited collection Oceanic New York (Punctum 2015); and numerous articles and chapters. He has also published on Shakespeare, early modern fiction, and book history, including Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2006) and the co-edited collections The Age of Thomas Nashe (2014) and Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (2004).

 

Tiffany Jo Werth is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Her work on the vexed relationship of romance to the long English Reformation has appeared in article form in The Shakespearean International Yearbook (2008) and English Literary Renaissance (2010) and as The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Johns Hopkins University Press 2011). Recently, she guest edited a special issue on “Shakespeare and the Human” for The Shakespearean International Yearbook (2015). Her current book project, entitled The English Lithic Imagination from More to Milton, argues that the mineral offers an unsettling touchstone for re-thinking Renaissance humanism. Article-length versions have previewed in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012), Literature Compass Online (2013), Upstart a Journal of English Renaissance Studies (2014), and a special issue of Spenser Studies on “Spenser and the Human” (2015).

 

One story (Odyssey) returns to rest with comfort and stability. Another (Iliad) seeks disruptive change. Sometimes, for a little while, the two stories entangle in a happy way. That gets us to Utopia, whether by that invented word we mean an imaginary 500-year old island or a Parkway in Queens.

Thinking about the great REFUGE symposium that Jeffrey Cohen and Jonathan Hsy put on at George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies institute last Friday — here’s Jeffrey Cohen’s blog-encomium about its the joys and struggles — I’m recalling now the ways we interlaced the home-story with the change-story.

Three academic speakers were book-ended by two glorious creative artists. I’ll start with the last one first.

D.J. Spooky, who’d flown all night after a concert in Seattle to get to his onetime home in DC, closed us out with Utopia and more. In a dizzyingly “non-linear” talk, in which he browsed us through images from his ipad rather than following a straight-line slideshow, he skated from Thomas More to Einstein and Tagore, Antarctica as symbol of de-politicized territory, deterratorialization via Delueze and Guattari, DJ-ing as the “folk vernacular” of the twenty-first century, and much more.

His speech, like his arrival, radiated motion: utopia as a constantly shifting palace of pleasures and enthusiasms, always moving but never unavailable. Not a stable refuge so much as a happy journey.

On the low-tech opening side of the evening was the poet Patience Agbabi, who gave a profoundly moving and gorgeous reading of her long poem “The Refugee’s Tale,” in which she re-fashioned the story of a Somali refugee seeking asylum in Great Britain into a “heroic crown” or double corona of sonnets. The form comprises fifteen sonnets, the first fourteen of which are linked by having the last line of one poem become the starting line of the next. The fifteenth poem crowns the whole by combining all fourteen previously shared lines. Listening to the intricate play of repetition and variation structuring a Sudanese Coptic woman’s deeply contemporary international odyssey, with its dangers and fears and frustration, shows how formal poetics still works with contemporary matter.

Patience’s poem ends in stable refuge, with memories of motion insinuating themselves still:

The story ends where you put the frame

but however it begins, remember my name.

What did we three literature professors do to fill up the space between Patience’s formal beauty and DJ Spooky’s playful movement?

Pam Troyer’s “At What Cost?” juxtaposed Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale” with the legal and personal tribulations of twenty-first century refugees, in particular young “train-surfers” entering the US from Mexico. Tales of relentless motion and struggle.

I spoke about “Motion Sickness” and the disorienting feeling of being at sea, with help from David Hadbawnik’s Aeneid, Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, and Stephen Collis’s “The Lawyer’s Tale.” Motion without rest.

Jonathan Hsy showcased several academic and para-academic projects, especially Je suis avec eux, a photo project in solidarity with 21c migrants, and the historical database, “England’s Immigrants 1330-1550.” Jonathan showed that refuge can be found, sometimes, with difficulty. The data visualization of premodern immigrants in an England that contemporary nationalists often assume to have been monoracial and monocultural gestures toward a less nostalgic and more varied history of multicultural Europe — a historical vision, as several people mentioned, that is increasingly under siege in these post-Brexit days.

I’ve seldom been part of a symposium that was so deeply intertwined, not just because several of us responded to the Refugee Tales book and project in which Patience’s poem and one of my three primary texts was published this past June. Even more, the engagement between all of our thinking, during and after the presentations, flowed out of an attempt to think across controlling master-narratives, the home-genre (Odyssey) and disruption-genre (Iliad). We used both kinds of stories to think ourselves into sympathy with radically other lives.

We need both stories, home and disruption, and we need to think them in dialogue with each other. As a parent of teenagers, I’m becoming acutely aware that home is a place to leave as well as to seek refuge. Events like this one untangle and sometimes re-interlace our craving for rest with restless curiosity.

Such a pleasure to think with the imaginative people of GWMEMSI again!