• About
  • Contacts & Membership
  • Submission Guidelines
  • General Interest
  • Job Openings
  • Digital Publishing Column
  • Journal
    • Volume 1.1, 2005
    • Volume 2.1, 2006
    • Volume 3.1, 2007
    • Volume 4.1, 2008
    • Volume 5.1, 2009
    • Volume 6.1, 2010
    • Volume 7.1, 2011
    • Volume 8.1, 2012
    • Volume 9.1, 2013
    • Volume 10.1, 2013
    • Volume 10.2, 2014
    • Volume 11.1, 2014
    • Volume 11.2, 2015
    • Volume 12.1, 2015
    • Volume 12.2, 2016
    • Volume 13.1, 2016
    • Volume 13.2, 2017
    • Volume 14.1, 2017
    • Volume 14.2, 2018

Hortulus

~ The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies

Hortulus

Tag Archives: exhibitions and events

The Kids Are Reading Chaucer

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by hortuluseditors in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

conferences, exhibitions and events

Review by A.W. Strouse
Department of English, CUNY Graduate Center

At a recent symposium of the BABEL Working Group, I remembered something that Bob Dylan says in the 1967 biopic Don’t Look Back. The symposium aimed to rethink the boundaries between artistic creation and scholarly knowledge, to combine academic knowledge with a little rock ‘n’ roll. Although the two are not necessarily opposed, they clearly are in Dylan’s mind. Asked if he’s ever read the Bible, he says “I may have skimmed through it,” and somehow he manages to keep a straight face. Too cool for school, Dylan pretends he’s an illiterate fool—a posture that is necessitated, apparently, by some glitch in the matrix of the socio-cultural time-space continuum: ever since Bede’s Caedmon, English poesie has been selling the myth that the poet must be a know-nothing. (Caedmon, according to Bede, could not sing like the other monks, and so he went out to sleep in the stable. Struck by divine inspiration, a dream-angel teaches him to compose verse.) Dylan’s “I may have skimmed through it” is the Caedmon theory of poetics: these fables try to teach us that artistic making and scholarly knowledge have nothing to do with one another.

Of course, scholars and aesthetes know full well that knowledge and enjoyment are inseparable: clearly Dylan is familiar with the Bible. Artists do need training, and scholarship is thrilling, creative work. But one’s credibility as an academic often requires self-denial of pleasure. And for Caedmon and Dylan, poetic authority comes from being stupid. As Allen Ginsberg puts it, “Businessmen are serious, Movie / producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.” The scholar ranks among the “serious”: pleasure never figures into the official metrics of academic professionalism. As far as I know, no Graduate School of Arts and Sciences offers a course in Professionalization and Personal Satisfaction, and the official rhetoric rarely endorses soul-formation or titillation. Efficiency and “academic excellence” mark the bottom line. As Christopher Newfield says in Ivy and Industry, “academics are neither artists nor bureaucrats but both at the same time”: we are vexed by an oppressive double-consciousness, trying to produce humanist work but measuring ourselves according to anti-humanist standards (215).[1] Or, as Stanley Fish so graciously puts it: “Save the world on your own time.” (I say nothing about the millions of adjuncts who live in academia’s flowerpots under the light of five hundred PowerPoints.) But if art and critique are the opposed terms of our current condition, then who better to help us than the great poet and bureaucrat Geoffrey Chaucer?

Today, a vanguard of radicals and misfits is turning to Chaucer (and to the medieval generally), looking to form a rapprochement between the dream-angel of individual talent and the monastery of academic tradition. You’ve probably already heard about the BABEL Working Group: a ragtag band of merry pranksters and philologists, BABEL is an interstellar Raft of the Medusa, patched together from the ruins of the postmodern university, a make-shift escape-pod sending out distress signals (and mating calls) to other Gonzo medievalists. This September, BABEL came together at the CUNY Graduate Center for the second in a pair of symposia on the “Critical/Liberal/Arts,” organized by J. Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, and Myra Seaman, with help on the ground in New York City from the GC’s Steven Kruger and Glenn Burger. (For the organizers’ manifesto, see http://babelsymposia2013.org/.)

Participants experimented with new forms of artful and critical expression, making art critically, doing critique artistically, and practicing all manner of liberality, with the largesse and romanticism of an Arthurian knight.

  • Ammiel Alcalay, initiator of the Lost and Found Project and beloved hero of poets/medievalists everywhere, spoke about the need to bridge creative writing with a “little history.” About transgressing disciplinary boundaries, Alcalay said: “Sometimes you start out having an affair, and pretty soon you want to move in together.”
  • Mashing up video and remixing critical theory, Jamie Bianco did to the stale genre of the conference talk what Hurricane Sandy did to Brooklyn, and then calmly receded. She tenderly told us about the need to save our garbage.
  • Eleanor Johnson descended like Boethius’s Lady Philosophy. She read some of her new poems about toads, and she suggested that scholars might engage in “parallel play”—that is, we should try to write like the texts we study. (Your assignment, dear reader, is to write a Boethian prosimetrum for your next article.)
  • Bruce Holsinger, doing some parallel play of his own, read from his A Burnable Book. As if Raymond Chandler had written the Domesday Book, Holsinger’s novel, starring Gower and Chaucer, explores the relationship between bureaucracy and art, poetry and regicide.
  • Henry S. Turner reminded us that the “corporation” has existed since at least the medieval period. Looking into this history, Turner wagers, might be our best shot at staying alive as humanists while the university becomes more and more corporatized. Turner’s current research involves incorporating people into his Society for the Arts of Corporation.
  • Grooving to the beat of this year’s hit single, the Digital Humanities, Michael Witmore gave the data mine a new spin: he pointed out that the digital is “fuzzy”—there’s space for us to play within new computerizing methodologies.
  • Marina Zurkow and Una Chaudhurl helped everyone make friends with global climate change, using a pedagogical approach inspired by the Buddhist profession of compassion. Technologies like compassion, meditation, and the koan offer a new way to connect the intellectual and the spiritual.
  • The Hollow Earth Society, in a hilarious, para-academic performance piece that remixed the discourses of university administration and satirized post-structuralist science, proved that slime mold has colonized the university. If you don’t believe it, you might already be a slime mold.
  • I wondered aloud if Sir Orfeo is a secret model for the critical/liberal/arts. It is: the Middle English Orfeo, unlike his Classical counterpart Orpheus, retrieves his beloved from hell in a way that validates a romantic poetics of historiography.

Proceedings will be printed in a special issue of postmedieval in 2015. By that time, we’ll have already translated the entire corpus of Verso books into rhymed couplets, and sneaked the poems of the Alliterative Revival behind the lines of all NSA firewalls. The future of the critical/liberal/arts is coming, and it’s going to get medieval.


[1] The academic profession, for Newfield, is a mash-up of craft-labor ideals and corporate management. Influenced by corporate models of administration during the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century, the university “yoked personal relations to explicit, impersonal procedures, procedures which treated individual exceptions as anomalous. Official authority arose from the office rather than from the person. This person, in theory, functioned through his or her specialized expertise. He or she held personal power to the degree to which expertise fit with the larger structure” (78). Our knowledge, through corporate management, becomes disembodied and impersonal—data for the administrative accounting office. This causes a kind of “double-consciousness” that prevents academics, and the middle class that they train, from realizing political agency (215). One could argue that C. Stephen Jaeger says something similar about pre-modern education in his enviable The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200. Jaeger shows how the medieval university is born out of a conflict between the body and the text.↩

Oxford drama fit for a queen: William Gager’s “Dido” four centuries later

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by hortuluseditors in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

exhibitions and events

The production of William Gager’s Dido in the Great Hall of Christ Church, Oxford, on 21st September 2013 was by any measure a special occasion.  The Early Drama at Oxford (EDOX) research project aims to bring to light medieval and early modern plays staged within the University.  One of the guiding lights of the project is Elisabeth Dutton, who directed Gager’s play as part of their ‘Performing Dido’ event, with the work performed alongside Edward’s Boys production of Christopher Marlowe’s more famous dramatization of the tale from Virgil.  Gager’s Latin drama had been originally acted in June 1583 as part of the Christ Church celebrations in honour of visiting Polish prince, Albrecht Łaski.  430 years after this first performance, Gager’s Latin, smoothly translated into English by graduate student Elizabeth Sandis, was again staged before an influential Polish visitor – this time Minister Counsellor Mr Dariusz Łaska.  As on the original occasion, parts were played by male university students (here with a couple of slightly older exceptions) before an audience partaking of a College banquet.  It was impossible not to find thrilling an event so similar in many ways to that experienced by sixteenth century Oxonians – even down to a reconstructed period menu.

Dido EDOX production Sept. 21, 2013

Photo by Maud Fasel

Having, in February this year, staged work by late Elizabethan Middle Templars in that Inn’s Hall, I was intrigued to see this similarly site-specific performance.  Christ Church was as famous as the Inns for its early modern student drama.  Although the College has not regularly enabled them, modern stagings such as these, in the same environment, allow an enhanced scholarly understanding of the plays concerned and their reception.  The relationship between the physical space of college and Inn halls in the sixteenth century and the drama staged there has been the subject of debate; but the layout of the Great Hall for the 2013 productions of the Dido plays was largely that which most scholars now seem to agree was used in the sixteenth century.  With a raised stage space in front of high table, nearest to the visitors of honour, and the actors able to enter and exit through the screen or doors at the far end, the play could be enjoyed by the whole institution and its guests, although to varying degrees.  Those sitting nearest the entrance doors would, of course, be quite a distance from the main action, and the actors in this modern production worked hard to project their lines along the length of the hall.  The able direction of Elisabeth Dutton, assisted by Matthew Monaghan, meant that the modern-clad Trojans performed as they approached the stage, and the retained parts of the Latin choral odes were delivered evocatively from the doors, making best use of the space.  But the reconstruction leaves no doubt that some Elizabethan students attending such events must have had a somewhat reduced experience.

Dido EDOX production Sept. 21, 2013

Photo by Maud Fasel

Such evenings as this also remind us how central acting was to Renaissance education, and the presence in Dido of a blazer-clad Cupid (played by Matthew Monaghan), together with odes delivered by uniformed schoolboys (from King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon) made this visible throughout.  A means of developing young men’s verbal skills in a society which lionized public speaking and performance, plays such as Dido owed much to Senecan models and their structure allowed for the rhetorical delivery of long set pieces.  Dutton and Monaghan had decided to cut several of these in performance, and along with the slick direction this reduced the length to about an hour, but it remained clear how drama such as Gager’s enabled university students to practise vital verbal skills while providing rich entertainment for visiting dignitaries.

In September 1592, the Queen herself had been presented at Christ Church with Rivales, the comedy by Gager which was to accompany his Dido the following summer.  And the portrait of Elizabeth which regularly hangs above high table in the Great Hall meant the audience was continually reminded of the connection with the Tudor queen – a connection drawn out by the play itself.  Dido, powerfully played by Alex Mills, wore grand sixteenth-century costume evoking that of the Queen in the portrait, and was often referred to by the classical heroine’s alternative name, Elisa.  The parallels were striking, and indicative of the potential danger of writing for the stage in this period.  Thus we saw Dido, visually evoking the Virgin Queen, fall hopelessly in love with her articulate Aeneas (Chris Williams), giving him authority in her realm and then, at his rejection and departure, killing herself for the loss of that love.  It was necessary for the epilogue (delivered with aplomb by Stephen Longstaffe from one of the dining tables) to reassure the audience that we had in fact just witnessed the amours of Dido/Elisa, and not those of the English queen.  The humour of his comment that ‘Foreign weddings seldom end well’ was undoubtedly meant to resound amongst those in court circles who, in the 1580s, were opposed to a French marriage – a group including Christ Church graduate Sir Philip Sidney, who knew Łaski and travelled with him to Oxford.

Dido EDOX production Sept. 21, 2013

Photo by Maud Fasel.

Though a figure of university drama, rather than the more often discussed London public theatre, William Gager deserves to be better known.  Study of his work reveals much about the influences and fashions in dramatic writing, and about the experience of playgoing familiar to many influential London audience members before their arrival in the city.  The relationship between those two environments was perhaps more fluid than many scholars have acknowledged, as Gager’s friendship with playwright George Peele suggests.  Correspondent of anti-theatricalist John Rainolds of Corpus Christi, the academic playwright defended drama against the accusations made by his Oxford contemporary: accusations of immorality and, in particular, the ‘abomination’ of boys performing ‘in women’s raiment’.[1] We are forced to doubt whether university plays were for most men in Elizabethan audiences, as Rainolds claimed, productive of a lewdness the Bible warned against: ‘execrable villainies, to which this change of raiment provoketh and entiseth’.  Indeed, if this modern production of Dido gives us insight into early modern theatre production, the alternating serenity, passion and pathos of a queen could, indeed, be well represented by a young man.  It is perhaps worth remembering that although Rainolds was to become a pugnacious puritan by the 1580s and 90s, he had in 1566, as an undergraduate, played Hippolyta in the production—also at Christ Church—of Richard Edward’s Palaemon and Arcyte.  It is likely that his performance, like that of Alex Mills, inspired admiration in the audience – at least it certainly did for one member of it.  Queen Elizabeth, part of that audience at Christ Church Great Hall, rewarded the young Rainolds with ‘eight old angels’ for the power of his acting.[2] The power of Gager’s argument thus might be argued to lie, not in the rhetoric of Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes, but in the experience of his work on his own stage.

Indicative of a connection between university writing and that for both the Court and the contemporary public playhouse, Gager’s works make our comprehension of the Elizabethan playgoing context more coherent.  Equally, a consideration of the time and place of its original performance can allow a much fuller understanding of a play.  As this EDOX production demonstrates, a modern student can gain a great deal by seeing Dido in its original setting, informed by the 1593 political context and the relationship between different dramatic institutions.

Jackie Watson
Birkbeck College

For a hypertext version of the complete works of William Gager, see http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/gager/.


[1]Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes, by the Way of Controversie betwixt D. Gager and D. Rainoldes (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1599), p. 97.↩

[2]The event is recalled by Oxford antiquary, Miles Windsor, and cited in John R. Elliott et al. (eds.), REED: Oxford (Toronto, 2004), 1.131-3.↩

Navigation

  • Contacts & Membership
  • About
  • Submission Guidelines
  • Journal
    • Volume 1.1, 2005
    • Volume 2.1, 2006
    • Volume 3.1, 2007
    • Volume 4.1, 2008
    • Volume 5.1, 2009
    • Volume 6.1, 2010
    • Volume 7.1, 2011
    • Volume 8.1, 2012
    • Volume 9.1, 2013
    • Volume 10.1, 2013
    • Volume 10.2, 2014
    • Volume 11.1, 2014
    • Volume 11.2, 2015
    • Volume 12.1, 2015
    • Volume 12.2, 2016
    • Volume 13.1, 2016
    • Volume 13.2, 2017
    • Volume 14.1, 2017
    • Volume 14.2, 2018
  • General Interest
  • Job Openings
    • Co-Editorship (Junior)
    • Assistant Editorships (4)
  • Digital Publishing Column
  • The Reliquary Triptych, the Arms of Christ, and the Visual Language of the Relic Thesaurus ca. 1160–By Julia Oswald
  • Fortress of the Free Mind: The Contemplative Nature of Personal Liberty in Early Anglo-Saxon Monasticism—by William Tanner Smoot
  • BOOK REVIEW: The Eufemiavisor and Courtly Culture: Time, Texts and Cultural Transfer—Review by Heidi Synnøve Djuve
  • BOOK REVIEW: 
Kungamakten och lagen. En jämförelse mellan Danmark, Norge och Sverige under högmedeltiden (Kingship and Law: A Comparison between Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the High Middle Ages)—Review by Beñat Elortza Larrea
  • IMPERIUM ET CREDO: Frankish-Byzantine Rivalry over Leadership of the Roman-Christian Credo-State in the Ninth Century–By Elijah Wallace
  • Letter from the Editor
  • “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth”: The Material and the Political in Ricardian Nature Allegories–By Allen Fulghum
  • Troilus’s Future: Perspectives on Futurity in Troilus and Criseyde–By Tyler Jones
  • Reform and the Welsh Cistercian Houses: Colonialism and Postcolonialism–By Frank Lacopo
  • “Fully His Entente”: The Allegory of Chaucer’s Pandarus—By Kayla Shea
  • Call For Papers: Fall 2018 Themed Issue
  • Letter from the Editor
  • BOOK REVIEW: 
Walter Map and the Matter of Britain—Review by Thomas Sawyer

Twitter Updates

  • Call for Participants! ICMS 2020 'Graduate Student Publishing: A Roundtable on Publishing for Graduate Students and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 years ago
  • We are now accepting applications for both the Junior Co-Editor position and 4 Assistant Editorships. Applications… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 3 years ago
  • Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies welcomes submissions for Spring 2019 Open Theme issue. Su… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 3 years ago
Follow @hortulusjournal

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Hortulus
    • Join 127 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Hortulus
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...