Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Calm, with agitation

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Today’s bloggy text  comes from that medievalist exemplar of academic blogging, Jeffrey Cohen (inthemedievalmiddle.com ).  He was posting while on family vacation in Bethany Beach last weekend —

And is there anything more beautiful than the noise of the water upon sand? I was reading Michel Serres’s short book Genesis just before I left, and I keep thinking about his obsession with the creative spur that marinal disorder yields. I believe it. There is nothing so calming as the ceaseless agitation of the sea.

It may seem churlish to pounce on such musings, & I certainly love a trip to the beach as much as anyone, but I’m struck by the closeness of “calming” to agitation and to Serres’s “creative spur.”  Do academics go to the beach to work, or to forget?  I sometimes joke that I’ve structured my whole  recent academic focus so that every time I go to the beach — and I live at the beach, albeit not a surf beach — it’s a work trip for me.  But is that b/c I try not to be too calm when I hear oceanic noises?

Three things seems possible.  Maybe all three at once.

First, our 21c experience of beachy calm is historically contingent, a function of our culture’s loss of the sea’s full terror and danger, partly b/c of the marginalization of sea travel & also, perhaps, because so many more of us are taught to swim reasonably well than was historically the case.  I certainly think the “meditation” that Ishmael claims 19c New Yorkers connect with the sea in Moby-Dick is a more fraught thing than today’s calm recreation.

Second, writerly types like to conceal disorderly thinking under a calm facade, so that the agitation of the surf covers up the ceaseless churn of (imagined?  inchoate? real?) intellectual productivity.  Perhaps this is a happy fiction?

Third, maybe  it’s our separation from the natural world, not any potential union with it, that “spurs” human creative work.  The distance between us & the sea motivates.

Is it a different love than we feel for tall mountains or wildflowers or Tintern Abbey?  I think it is.

A Question from the Woods

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  • I used this image in my talk at Farleigh Dickinson today to talk about the purportedly living forest of Birnam Wood in Macbeth and, by extension, the dream of a green pastoral ecology — a place of natural stability and sustainability that can serve as a kind of model for human practices.

I then went on to talk about a “blue” or oceanic ecology based on change & disorder, using this image

As I was talking about these two visions of nature in the play, I admitted that they are caricatures or cartoons, but I also got a great question, after the talk, from a grizzly old guy who, apparently, hadn’t wanted to raise his hand in the full Q&A.

“I live in the woods,” he said.  “It looks nothing like that picture.  The woods are messy, chaotic, with things falling & breaking & dying everywhere you look.  That picture isn’t a real woods.  It’s something somebody planted.”

Sounds right to me.  The green world, the green pastoral utopia that will heal all our ills, is a fantasy projection.

I suppose that implies that the blue world is too.

The Green and the Blue in Macbeth

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As a quasi-reply to my first batch of student papers, here’s an offering of my own, a few paragraphs out of an oceanic reading of Macbeth that I’ve just finished.  This version will be published in a Forum on “Shakespeare and Ecology” next year in *Shakespeare Studies*.  I’ll be giving a slightly different oral version atthe Annual Shakespeare Colloquium at Farleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, this Saturday at 1 pm.  Come by if you’re in the area!  It’s free & open to the public.

The ecological humanities have been drawn to Shakespeare in part because he’s the biggest fish in the Anglophone literary sea, but also because his long and living stage history provides tangible evidence of canonical texts engaging contemporary dilemmas.  The current surge of ecocritical Shakespeare, however, risks seeing only the happier side of nature, a beach where the weather is always good. Sustained attention to the Shakespeare’s “green” should not occlude his dramatization of a harsher “blue ecology” that locates itself not in cultured pastures or even marginal forests but in the deep sea.  Shakespeare’s literary works can’t get us all the way into this massive blue body – the most basic feature of the world ocean is that humans don’t live there – but they can serve as a fictive beach house, providing us with a beguiling window onto an inhuman space.  The view from Shakespeare’s beach house shows the void next to which we perch our fragile bodies.  It locates us right at the boundary which we can only temporarily cross.  Like other beach houses, it’s vulnerable to coastal storms, and probably built on sand.  It’s a place to which we return because of (not in spite of) the disorder in front of it.

Shakespeare’s dramatization of this inhuman, oceanic ecology appears in two intertwined tropes in Macbeth.  The play’s “green” ecology imagines Scotland as a troubled agricultural land, husbanded by King Duncan, violated by the Macbeths, and eventually renewed by Malcolm.  Against this now almost-traditional eco-reading, a “blue” ecological countercurrent exposes the play’s fascination with the inhospitable ocean.  References to the sea teem in this land-locked drama.  The bloody Captain analogizes battle to “shipwracking storms” (1.2.26); the Weird Sisters assail the merchant ship Tiger (1.3.7-26); and Macbeth himself rejects the “sure and firm-set earth” (2.1.57) for “multitudinous seas” (2.2.66).  Even Lady Macbeth’s fantasy that water can wash away murder represents a fervent plea that the liquid element might serve human purposes.  The play’s blue ecology combines the Weird Sisters’ inhuman perspective with the topos of the mind-stretching sea, which, as Auden observes, “misuses nothing because it values nothing.”  The green and blue in Macbeth represent different visions of how humans live in the natural world, with green sustainability first displaced by Macbeth’s oceanic ambitions and then finally re-asserting itself after the tyrant’s death.  For twenty-first century Shakespeareans living in an increasingly oceanic and disorderly world – the summer of this essay was the summer of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico – supplementing green narratives with blue incursions feels urgent.

What we’re looking for

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I wrote, with a little help from Shakespeare & Melville, about the sunken treasure that’s at the bottom of all of our literary excursions in Shakespeare’s Ocean —

They wink up at us from the depths, skulls with be-gemmed eye-sockets, wedges of gold, encrusted anchors, heaps of pearl.  Fish-gnawed men and what’s become of a thousand fearful wracks.  Treasures of the slimy bottom.  Captives of the envious flood.  What we’re looking for.

I’ve been thinking about those slimy treasures while reading my students’ essays this week.

The hardest thing about literary & literary-critical writing in any form — and I’m pleased to see a very wide formal range in these papers, from pedagogical plans to theatrical outlines, intertextual readings, and archival historicism — is trying to make sure you get down to some real and meaningful bottom, even while knowing you’re not likely to reach firm ground.  Often in reading these papers, which are of course just early drafts or hints of what’s to come, I wanted you to dive deeper, to press harder, & to make a lunge at the analytical or pedagogical or creative pay-off that seemed just out of reach.  There’s a certain recklessness and risk in literary writing — there’s no real way to be sure of what Shakespeare meant, at this historical remove, just as there’s no real way to be “sure” of any literary text.  I’d like to see more risk-taking, and more self-aware speculation about risks & rewards, in the final versions of these papers.

I’m looking for papers & projects that get us a little bit closer to that ungraspable bottom & its glittering treasures.  But I should remember, as I also wrote

It’s to the bottom of Shakespeare’s ocean that this book takes you, except for one thing: we never get to the bottom.

Derek Owens on Composition and Sustainability

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I’m looking forward to reading your short papers, which should start rolling into my email inbox any hour now.  As we all get ready for our next meeting, on Oct 19, here’s a link to our special guest Derek Owens’s 2001 book, *Composition and Sustainability*.  The whole text is online.  Read as much as you like, but at least the preface plus the first & last chapters.  (That’s a good model for dipping into a scholarly book, btw — first chapter, then the last, then see what you need from the middle.)

Composition and Sustainability

Columbus the Aquaman

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In Short Beach, Columbus Day is the semi-official end of the swimming season.  When it’s chilly but clear, like this weekend, it’s not all that easy to get in the water.  I ended up making the shift to wetsuits on Friday afternoon.

What did Columbus discover?  Certainly not America: he thought it was China, it had been visited many times before by Northern Europeans since the time of Erik the Red, and he had no interest in new places.  The thing he found that was new — or at least new-ish, for the part of Europe that had been formerly oriented toward the Mediterranean — was the deep sea.  “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” was what the Spanish called him.  He wasn’t really a land creature.

Today Olivia & I pulled on our 2mm Body Glove suits & walked past the fall colors to the beach.  A few teenagers were diving off the Yale boathouse docks & then shrieking as they rushed to get out.  The wet suits make it a little easier to get in, though it’s still a shock.  The real payoff is that as soon as that film of water gets warmed up, you feel ready to stay.

How many more swimming days are left in 2010?

Not enough.

The Breakdown of the Multiple Parts in the Cutting Ball Tempest

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I mentioned in my last entry that three actors play all the roles in our version of The Tempest. The breakdown of the parts are as follows:

David Sinaiko – Prospero, Alonso, Stephano

Donell Hill – Ferdinand, Caliban, Antonio

Caitlyn Louchard – Miranda, Ariel, Gonzalo, Sebastian, Trinculo

The first scene with the Boatswain we have staged as a kind of collage of voices, and Adrian and Francisco’s lines have been redistributed amongst the other lords.

Our director, Rob Melrose, is working with the concept that there are three meta-roles – Prospero, Ferdinand, and Miranda – and that the other doubled characters may be understood as fragments of their personalities and psyches or how they are perceived by another character. Other three-actor productions, such as the London Globe’s 2005 Tempest, have used a similar conceits to ground their actors (in their case, Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel instead of Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand). Critics like Marjorie Garber have noted that the, with the abundance of similarities between the sets of characters, that the story may be reduced to a story involving certain key figures or types.

With this understanding, the actors change characters not simply when there is a need manifested by the plot (i.e. it’s now time for the Stephano scene, so the actor playing Prospero has to turn into Stephano), but when there is a need created within the meta-character (Prospero is turning into Stephano because something in the last scene has triggered the Stephano aspect of his conscience).

To give an example: we begin the first scene between the shipwrecked lords with Alonso drinking from a bottle out of despair from the loss of his son. By the time this scene comes to a close, Alonso has drunk so much that the Stephano aspect is able to appear. Stephano and Alonso share many of the same defining traits as Prospero – they are, each in their own way, leaders and masters, but with varying levels of sophistication and mastery. In the case of Ariel and Miranda, the first instance of the change is manifested when, after Prospero lulls Miranda to sleep, he awakens the latent Ariel personality within her almost by means of a kind hypnosis. In some instances, we need to get a little creative with the narrative. Sebastian and Gonzalo cannot be onstage at the same time, so the Sebastian aspect only awakes when Gonzalo is asleep.

It may appear from my account that we are taking quite a bit of liberty with the text. True enough, our production is not as strict as a more “traditional” interpretation (whatever that means), but I feel that a lot of the logic we have created for the transition between characters is more for the benefit of the actors than the audience. When they are able to make sense of why they change characters, the audience can make sense of the transitions as well. Once again, we are not trying to force a new narrative down the audience’s throats that warps The Tempest, we are telling the story of the play.

The actors have all taken great pains to significantly differentiate the characters through their voice and physicality and those choices, with the aid of certain costume choices (glasses for Ferdinand, sunglasses for Antonio, etc.), but, with the same three actors playing all the roles, it is impossible to dupe the audience into believing that the characters are entirely distinct. Shakespeare was undoubtedly conscious of these similarities when he wrote the play, and if those similarities are expressed so clearly with three actors, we would be doing ourselves a disservice by trying to mask it.

-Bennett Fisher, Dramaturg

Cutting Ball Theatre’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest opens November 5 at the Exit on Taylor in San Francisco. More info at www.cuttingball.com

Julie Taymor’s Tempest

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The trailer for Taymor’s forthcoming sound-and-lights extravaganza Tempest is now on YouTube:

Tempest Trailer

It’s supposed to open Dec 10.  Maybe the class should all go together on our last night, 12/14?

Thanks to Tara for the link.

Update: Watched it again today & it looks fun, if perhaps a bit over-the-top.  Sorcery. Passion. Stupidity.  Treachery. Revenge — so go the subtitles.  An interesting summary, I suppose?

We certainly should go on 12/14.  Anybody know a movie theater close to campus?

Cutting Ball Theatre’s Three Actor Tempest in Rehearsal

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In my dramaturgical research for The Tempest, I was delighted when I stumbled upon blog entries written by actors during the rehearsal process for Globe Theatre in London’s three-actor production of the play in 2005.  I found those entries profoundly informative, since the actors not only discussed their interpretation of the characters and their understanding of the play’s meaning, but addressed the challenges of manifesting those ideas physically in the production. So, when Professor Mentz offered to have us blog about our production at the Cutting Ball Theatre in San Francisco, which begins previews on November 5, I was delighted. I hope that these entries provide an interesting and worthwhile supplement to the course.

Our director, Rob Melrose, has chosen to stage the play with three actors – David Sinaiko, Caitlyn Louchard, and Donell Hill – playing all the roles, hoping that it will give “an up close and personal look at the monsters lurking inside all of us.” Our staging includes video projection, original music, and other surreal elements that I hope to describe in more detail in future entries.  Most dramaturgs are justifiably wary of more experimental stagings, but I believe theater is a living organism, and just in the way modern critics have been able to read everything from Freud to Fanon into The Tempest, so should we freely though heedfully dive certain fathoms into a piece to find what may be buried at the center. Combing through some critical writings on The Tempest and seeing the actors on their feet in rehearsal, I feel that this production succeeds in uncovering compelling and essential aspects of Shakespeare’s play that may not be as readily apparent in a “traditional” staging. Overlapping groups of threes abound in the play – the Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand trio, the Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban trio, the Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo trio, and so forth. Seeing the same actor in a different role a few pages creates wonderful, unexpected moments of revelation. Prospero’s line to Miranda that “to the most of men this [Ferdinand] is a Caliban/And they to him are angels” is deliciously curious when the actor playing Ferdinand has just minutes before left the stage as Caliban: the audience is left to question whether or not there is any fundamental difference between the two. Just so, when Stephano (played by the same actor playing Prospero) shows affection for Caliban, we are reminded of that missing episode before the events of the play when Prospero was loving and compassionate to his sole subject on the island. Moments later when Caliban entreats  “Prithee, be my god”, we are viscerally made aware that this new allegiance, like Caliban’s allegiance to Prospero, is not much better. Oddly, by reducing the number of actors, we have revealed more about the similarities and differences between each character than one might be able to do with a larger cast.

Innumerable critics have talked about the relationship between The Tempest and psychology – likening the island to the human mind, arguing Ariel and Caliban are Prospero’s Superego and Id respectively and that the play is the story of reconciling these aspects of his conscience. Melrose is interested in exploring the play in this light, but also sees it as a deeply personal story about a father letting go of his daughter, a man forgiving his enemies, and the universal desire shared by all men and women to be “released.” I think this focus on the human element has helped keep our production grounded in the story, and, ultimately, is what preserves, what is, in my opinion Shakespeare’s most essential messages in the play, that “the rarer action/Is in virtue than in vengeance.” Freud and Jung are there, and plentifully, but the audience is not held hostage by the concept but given freedom to draw their own meaning. Our Island may be more surreal at moments, but we’ve built a bridge to the mainland.

-Bennett Fisher, Dramaturg