Just another ordinary day round here.

We're currently running an Arts Festival at the university, and our department's Graduate Teaching Assistant Kauser suggested inviting Akala, the leading conscious hiphop artist, to give one of his Hiphop Shakespeare lectures.

I've really got to up my lecturing game. There may not have been an awful lot of textual exegesis, but it was a free-wheeling, massively-informed, political and cultural tour de force. Amongst the many things Akala talked about was different cultures' relationships to Shakespeare, the history of British imperialism, the need for all ethnic groups and classes to educate themselves autonomously of the hegemony but also to learn about each other, the importance of every teacher changing just one life, why Radio 1 plays adoring songs about cocaine but won't playlist him (they don't touch 'political' music') and why it's their artistic loss, an awful lot about Wu-Tang, why hiphop and Shakespeare go so well together (the audience was woefully bad at spotting which lines were by The Bard and which by Nas, RZA and others, why rappers are blamed for their lyrics rather than the audience and record companies, and why Jamaicans are stereotyped as lazy in the UK but hardworking go-getters in the US. That's just a taste. He was funny, warm, angry, witty, clever and political. And he writes books. Damn his eyes.

I took some pictures.

Last night was also very entertaining and informative: Francis O'Gorman gave a lovely lecture on the literary and cultural history of worrying, which turns out to be a Victorian invention which emerged alongside the Stiff Upper Lip, though there are versions going back earlier. His basic line was that anyone who isn't a worrier in a society designed to put maximum pressure on individuals simply isn't paying attention. Hamlet's a worrier and so – as my boss pointed out – is Tristram Shandy ('the Iliad and Odyssey of worrying' as he put it). There are plenty of others: J Alfred Prufrock, Mrs Dalloway… I wondered why so many literary and cultural worriers are played for laughs: Mrs Bennet, the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, Mr Bean, Basil Fawlty, Arthur Dent and Mark Corrigan are consumed by worry. 

Something different tonight: an evening of dialect poetry from across the UK, including Niall Griffiths, Liz Berry, Joao Morris and many more. 

Pick out mine eye's with a ballad-maker's pen

On Tuesday night I went to Stafford Castle's Shakespeare Festival to see Much Ado About Nothing, performed en plein air. I didn't really know what to expect: anything from am-dram to the Globe, but my boss and I had free tickets because we'd written the notes on the play for the programme. So I bought a load of other tickets for my friends and off we went. We dined on crisps and beer (the vaunted dining experience was inexplicably closed) and hoped for the best.

The best is what we got. The actors all had strong backgrounds in theatre (and, of course, they've all been in Doctors, Holby City and Casualty, the proving grounds for this generation's thespians) – I'd seen several of them in repertory plays at the New Vic theatre in Stoke. The setting was a bit odd: an English garden just after Armistice Day 1918 - flag bunting, delightful upper-class summer clothes or officers' uniforms. A cash-in on the current commemorative feeding frenzy? If so, it was a cheap and easily forgotten gag: the play soon took over. Perhaps, though, the setting had a deeper purpose beyond entertainment. The play starts with the successful end to a war: not many 'gentlemen' dead and of those few, 'none of any name' says the Messenger: Leonato replies that 'a victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers'. I doubt that any 1918 productions would have used a contemporary setting simply because those lines jar so much – perhaps this production is silently commenting on the current elite craze for presenting WW1 as (in the words of one of my War Studies colleagues) 'a triumph'.

Much Ado is a weird play. It's a comedy: you can tell because it finished with a couple of marriages, and there are comedy proles, chiefly Dogberry the Constable, played with relish as a stage-Welshman by actual Welshman Phylip Harries. Shy but romantic Claudio enlists his friend Don Pedro to woo posh, hot Hero for him and in the end it all works out fine. But in the two sub-plots, much nastier things are going on. Ageing Benedick (a bachelor soldier who is as they used to say 'not safe in taxis' with young women and always has a handsome young man around) and Beatrice spend most of the play wittily sparring with each other and declaring that marriage will never happen, leading the youngsters to set them up to fall in love with each other, while moustache-twirling villain Don John pays some low-lifes to fake Hero boffing Borachio the night before her wedding, with her betrothed witnessing it all from outside the window. The wedding ceremony starts and Claudio is as vilely misogynistic as it's possible to be ('Give not this rotten orange to your friend…he knows the heat of a luxurious bed; Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty') breaking off the match. Eventually, to prove her virtue, Hero agrees to have her death announced in an effort to punish Claudio and disprove the accusations against her. Even the comedy characters take sides: sad old Benedick tries to challenge Claudio to a duel in defence of Hero's honour and is cruelly rebuffed with scorn. In the final act, the villains are apprehended, Claudio keeps his word to marry Hero's cousin, sight unseen, as recompense for killing Hero (I know, I know): when the veil is removed, it's really Hero, and all's well that ends well (sorry).

As I said, it's a weird play. The first act or so set it up as a comedy of manners - life returning to sweet jests after a war. The older couple of Benedick and Beatrice are set up as the butt of the humour as well as inevitable lovers, the rude mechanicals (and the toffs actually) come up with quite a lot of surprisingly effective knob gags, but the Don John plot, Claudio's rapid descent into misogynistic hatred and the faked death move it rapidly into the territory of Romeo and Juliet and perhaps more saliently, Othello. Don John is Iago - overlooked by his brother perhaps but motivated more by depression and loneliness, he wrecks Hero's reputation and marriage simply because misery loves company:

I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in
his grace, and it better fits my blood to be
disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob
love from any: in this, though I cannot be said to
be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied
but I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with
a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog; therefore I
have decreed not to sing in my cage. If I had my
mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do
my liking: in the meantime let me be that I am and
seek not to alter me.

Shakespeare's plays are scattered with these jealous poisoners: what's truly dark about Much Ado is the way Claudio responds to this slur on Hero's virtue. That women's reputations depend on their virginity is part of the character of the times – but Claudio responds too quickly with heavily sexualised imagery direct from the dark pool of male suspicions about female sexuality:

you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pamper'd animals
That rage in savage sensuality.

Her father's no better: it's a long time before his brother and the friar convince him that further proof is needed. His first thought is of Hero's guilt, and that she'd be better off dead.

Wherefore! Why, doth not every earthly thing
Cry shame upon her? Could she here deny
The story that is printed in her blood?
Do not live, Hero; do not ope thine eyes:
For, did I think thou wouldst not quickly die,
Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames,
Myself would, on the rearward of reproaches,
Strike at thy life. Grieved I, I had but one?
Chid I for that at frugal nature's frame?
O, one too much by thee! Why had I one?
Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?
Why had I not with charitable hand
Took up a beggar's issue at my gates,
Who smirch'd thus and mired with infamy,
I might have said 'No part of it is mine;
This shame derives itself from unknown loins'?
But mine and mine I loved and mine I praised
And mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing of her,--why, she, O, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul-tainted flesh!

In this context, Benedick's resistance to marriage (to anyone, not just Beatrice) comes to seem truly light-hearted compared to what's in the heart of the aristocratic men around Hero.

So what we really have is a tragedy disguised as a comedy: it's pretty uneven, especially in the last couple of acts as the play lurches between Dogberry, the Benedick and Beatrice flirtation and Hero's fake funeral. What does it all mean? I think the lurching between registers is a social critique. Here we have a post-war society which is dangerously immature. The war's been won without any suffering. Love seems to be a pretty game, and other people pawns in it, hence the way all the toffs decide to force Benedick and Beatrice together. But when the crunch comes, it takes just one malignant individual to set family against each other, to bring out the worst in our handsome young hero, to ruin a good woman's reputation. None of these people are equipped to deal with the deeper emotions. Perhaps this is the reason for the post-1918 setting. The Edwardian toffs in their country homes were simply not prepared for the type of war and post-war society into which they were thrust. The endless summer of what seemed to them a Pax Britannica was over, and finding a new place was proving difficult, to say the least.

The unevenness of the play is what brings this out, I think: light comedy only a few lines away from genuine hatred, grief and horror. The ending works, I think, because the characters agree to stick to the old rules of honour and atonement, but it's a real effort. They don't have the emotional or philosophical resources to deal with what spills out of them when the polite surface is disturbed, and their only solution is to perform the old rituals as though good manners conquers all – a response we see in the poetry and theatre of the Restoration too. Does it work? Well, WW1 was followed by WW2 in short order, and some would say the Holocaust casts its shadow over all literature thereafter.

Apologies if I've ruined a lighthearted night out for you! I'd recommend a trip to see this production: the actors are superb, the setting lovely and the play fascinating. Ignore my over-analysis, have an ice-cream and revel in the verbal sparring.

'The bright day is done, and we are for the dark'

Yesterday, I went to see Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe in London, the open-air theatre designed to recreate the Elizabethan/Jacobean original as close as possible. There's a pit, in which the poor stood, exposed to the elements. The stage has a partial roof, while those of us lacking solidarity with the poor sit on hard wooden benches under a thatched roof (cushions can be hired). The play – one I'd never seen before – is a story of Roman power politics and sexual obsession.

Yesterday, my final-year and first-year students played the part of the proletariat  (some of them: not a single one of those who took the Shakespeare module bothered to come: clearly my teaching put them off Shakespeare for ever), or the 'rude mechanicals', standing under London's skies as the actors did their best…and worst. A shame it wasn't Lear, with its storm, because less than 500 metres away, this was happening:

Thunder rattled the building, lightning strafed the stage, the standing audience was drenched to the bone, and the actors carried on, though the lines about the weather attracted rueful laughter from audience and cast alike. Even worse, the man playing Mark Antony was ill and a stand-in had to be found at late notice. Haggard from staying up all night learning his lines, he performed with a copy of the (shortened) script in hand, and getting soggier by the minute. He performed valiantly – rather than just read as the others acted around him, he did his level best to put life into unfamiliar words.

Rather less professional was the actor playing Cleopatra. Having endured the worst of the weather and circumstances, she returned the audience's laughter by mugging to them even in the sombre scenes, turning tragedy to farce and, I thought, letting down her colleagues. For instance, near the end Mark Antony's near-lifeless body is pulled into her chamber: this time she played 'how heavy weighs my lord' for laughs as she tugged on the rope, giving in to the laughter occasioned by Mark dropping his script (he wasn't entirely innocent: he pointedly dropped it at the moment of his death). A good actor holds the audience in their hands, can turn humour to pathos and back again if s/he tries - Cleopatra gave up trying. It wasn't all her fault: as Mark's body was dragged sadly off stage, my attention was drawn to the pigeons at my eye-level having sex on the stage roof…

What a day: traffic accidents meant we turned up almost too late to get in, multiple colleagues had dropped out, and some gits tried to rob the coach driver while he waited for us – and yet we had a great day. All the disasters befalling the theatre and audience reminded us that live performance is a gamble: spectators are unpredictable, actors have artistic choices to make, the elements conspire against us, and yet we triumph.

Norman bastards and turbulent priests

Hi everyone. For a change, I'm not ranting about the inequities of the world today. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow, probably. No, I'm just going to mention cultural events today.

On Saturday I went down to London to see Henry V at the Noel Coward Theatre in Leicester Square with my good friend Adam, who had recently declined a ticket for Richard II for no apparent reason but can be crow-barred out of the house on special occasions. Before he turned up I wandered round the antiquarian bookshops nearby, returning a wiser and poorer Vole. I recommend the experience: every shop is crammed with books priced for rarity and condition rather than quality, and the shopkeepers have their own special brand of patronising disdain. Anyway, the going rate for an RS Thomas volume is now about 3 weeks' rent and signed copies are approaching 5 weeks'. I bought myself a collection of James Laver short stories for considerably less and mooned over the poetry and the Beverley Nichols novels.

After a fine lunch (andouillettes: offally good) we wandered off to the Noel Coward, wondering if the spirit of the play would be affected by the venue. It would certainly make for an amusing production: King Henry could wave a cigarette holder while declaiming 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more' in a louche manner, and leer while he discusses the 'gentlemen now abed'. The theatre itself is an Edwardian monstrosity - gilt and flourishes on every surface, and therefore rather fun. Sadly, it has the most uncomfortable seating I've ever found. Despite being only 5'8" short, I had to rest my legs on the head of the man in front of me, as there isn't any legroom between the seats.

So, the production. Minimalist set, maximalist period costume other than a Boy/Chorus dressed in jeans and a t-shirt as – I presume – a nod to contemporary theatre practice. Jude Law (for it was he) was OK, though his series of funny accents in the Crispian's Day speech was ill-advised.

The rest of the cast were impressive, particularly Jessie Buckley as the French princess, making much of the comic aspects. The coarse sub-plots weren't particularly funny, but the action was excellent, and I particularly liked the French herald and his superiors.

I wasn't sure about Fluellen, MacMorris and Jamy: their accents were truly terrible, but I wasn't sure whether this was deliberate or not. In the play, they're comedy Welsh, Irish and Scots, playing up English stereotypes of those nations. Perhaps these performances were meant to wittily send up this theatrical tradition, perhaps not. The leek-eating scene was particularly good though.

It did make me wonder why this play was put on right now. We're only a few months away from a referendum on Scottish independence, and here we are watching Henry discuss with his advisors how untrustworthy the Scots are: they're guaranteed to attack while the English are at war in France. More widely, it's a play about Britishness and territory, staged once more during a period of depressing Euroscepticism: Henry and his colleagues are of course 'bastard Normans, Norman bastards' according to the French, he himself perhaps insincerely claims to be Welsh when talking to Fluellen, and they're fighting over English claims to French territory (Henry won this battle but his son lost it all). The Norman dynasties spoke French and would not have recognised England as much more than a lucrative holiday home (I may exaggerate slightly) cut off from civilised Europe.

It's quite a jingoistic play. The Celts are blustering liars, bores or psychopaths. The French are snooty and arrogant, the English are largely doughty and bold, with the exception of the scumbags at the bottom (thieves and cowards) and a few traitors at the top. What was slightly lost in this otherwise good performance was Henry's trajectory. At the start, the bishops discuss how much he's grown into the role: in Henry IV part II, he's a carousing, dissolute, idle wastrel, yet in this play he's behaving responsibly and even morally to some extent – guilt about his father's usurpation of the throne drives him to consciously adopt kingly postures. Not all the time: he tells the mayor of Harfleur not to 'make' him let the soldiers loose to rape and murder, and he's pretty quick to tell his troops to kill all their prisoners (a line judiciously dropped in Laurence Olivier's wartime film version). But Law's receding hairline and wrinkled face do at least give the impression of a man weighed down by responsibilities.

So - well worth seeing and one I'm tempted to put on a course.

The next excitement is tonight's visit by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. Sadly he's not here to talk about Welsh literature (he's an excellent poet and critic), but about poverty…to an audience of rather well-paid members of the great and good (and me).

Not all my readers are thinkers

A local hack writes that the Shakespeare classes taught at 'a local university' are 'third-rate' and wouldn't even pass O-level in the 1960s. I think he means me, because I moved from pointing out that he's a poor excuse for a journalist to detailing the class on Jonson and Shakespeare I'd just given, in which I discussed the multiple versions of Shakespeare each 'age' arrives at: the timeless Bard, the businessman, the uncouth provincial (he slipped out of performance for a surprisingly long time), the family man, the homosexual, the imperialist and the anti-imperialist. Standard stuff at this level, these days. 

Sadly, the columnist failed to provide his readers with any of these details, or explain how and why this would have been inadequate to pass an exam for 15/16 year old kids in the 1960s. I can't dig out 60s exam papers, but I'm fairly certain that any kid pulling out this level of cultural and historical detail would actually have done rather well, despite the reactionary and uninteresting nature of the O-level syllabus.

As luck would have it, I don't need to smear and guess: the distinguished Alan Sinfield did a rather splendid analysis of 1980s O and A-level Shakespeare questions, which you can read here.

I will point out in the question papers the two fundamental mystifications of bourgeois ideology. All the questions specified were set in 1983.

They aren't exactly inspiring: sexist, uncritical and dull. Most of them go along the lines of 'Why was Shakespeare so great?', which gets us precisely nowhere intellectually, is a-historical and promotes a very conservative model of literary history.

The main move is the projection of local conditions on to the eternal. As Rachel Sharp puts it, 'The power relations which are peculiar to market society are seen as how things have always been and ought to be. They acquire a timelessness which is powerfully legitimised by a theory of human nature ... Political struggles to alter present-day social arrangements are seen as futile for "things are as they are" because of man's basic attributes and nothing could ever be very different. This move is built in to the structure of the whole exercise, through the notion that Shakespeare is the great National Poet who speaks universal truths and whose plays are the ultimate instance of Literature. It is made also through the ways the questions invite the candidates to handle the plays. Almost invariably it is assumed that the plays reveal universal 'human' values and qualities and that they are self-contained and coherent entities; and the activity of criticism in producing these assumptions is effaced.

The effect of the model still extant in the 1980s is to rope Shakespeare off as a museum piece, or as a defender of the status quo - not one his contemporaries would have recognised, given his idenitifiable responses to the political, cultural and economic shifts of his milieu.

The appeal to absolute values and qualities is ubiquitous: 'At the centre of King Lear lies the question, "What is a man?" Discuss' (Oxford and Cambridge, A level); 'Beginning with a consideration of the following passage, discuss Shakespeare's presentation of Goodness in Macbeth' (Welsh, A level). Women, of course, are a special category within the universal (there are fewer questions about female than male characters): "The Winter's Tale is much more concerned with the qualities of womanhood, its virtue, its insight, and its endurance. Discuss' (Southern, A level). If women seem not to be
manifesting the expected qualities then that is a matter for comment: "'The men in Twelfth Night are ridiculous in what they say and do: it is the women who are full of common sense". Show how far you agree. ..' (Welsh, O level). The alleged coherence and self-containedness of the text re-enacts at the level of the particular reading the coherence and self-containedness claimed by ideology. 

In the examination questions almost no reference is made to the diverse forms which the play has taken-- and may take --to scholarly discussions about provenance, to the conditions under which it has been transmitted, to the different forms it takes today, from school editions to stage, film and TV productions. Even the occasional question about staging is liable to involve the assumption that there is a true reading behind the diverse possibilities: 'How, as a young actor, would you try to cope with the difficulties of playing the part of John of Gaunt' (Southern, O level- bad luck if you're an actress). The text is there; the most common form of question at O level begins 'Give an account of ...' and 'precise reference' is repeatedly demanded. That the text is to be regarded as coherent, either in terms of action or of dramatic effect, is frequently insisted upon. "'While we may hope for a happy ending to King Lear, Shakespeare's conclusion is entirely fitting. Discuss." (Associated, O level); 'Write about the dramatic effectiveness of the last act of Twelfth Night, and show how the ending is connected to earlier episodes of the play' (London, O level). Everything comes out the way it always had to, every incident is justified by its 'effectiveness' (one of the commonest terms on the papers).

Perhaps my hack correspondent is right: a student taking Sinfield's view would have failed: not through stupidity, but because she would have challenged the use of Shakespeare as a weapon in the hegemonic struggle against cultural authority. Or as Sinfield and Anderson have it:

As Perry Anderson showed, this Leavisite strategy demands (whilst lamenting the absence of) one crucial precondition: a shared, stable system of beliefs and values'; what actually happens is that candidates are required to take up a certain system of values --those we have been identifying--in order satisfactorily to answer the question.

The exam question is the culmination of a system of oppressive power in which the successful student shouldn't think, but regurgitate a set of learned answers to authority. Agree and pass, disagree and fail. Any student who obeys is trained to obey the powers that be in non-literary matters too: on the street, in the voting booth and anywhere else independent thought it frowned upon. The exam system proves to be a fundamental point of contradiction: while individual literary judgement is condemned to failure, the questions promote an anti-social individualism of savagery:

The second fundamental mystification of bourgeois ideology is the construction of individual subjectivity as a given which is undetermined and unconstituted and hence a ground of meaning and coherence: 'In effect the individual is understood in terms of a pre-social essence, nature, or identity and on that basis s/he is invested with a quasi-spiritual autonomy. The individual becomes the origin and focus of meaning -an individuated essence which precedes and --in idealist philosophy --transcends history and society.' Eternal values can no longer be ratified securely by religion, but now they are grounded in their perception through authentic subjectivity. This relationship is figured precisely in the question: 'There are moments in King Lear when the insights of individual characters seem to provide a key to the play's deepest themes and preoccupations. Consider this claim in relation to one of the following "insights"' (Oxford and Cambridge, A level). The individual and the universal are constituted in a mutually supportive polarity. 

The examination papers construct Shakespeare and the candidate in terms of individuated subjectivity through their stress upon Shakespeare's free-standing genius, their emphasis on characterisation, and their demand for the candidate's personal response.

What kind of person does this doctrine produce?

We may envisage, then, the intellectual cast of the successfully socialised GCE candidate. She or he will be respectful of Shakespeare and high culture and accustomed to being appreciative of the cultural production which is offered through established institutions. '~he or he will be trained at giving opinions -within certain prescribed limits; at collecting evidence -though without questioning its status or the construction of the problem; at saying what is going on --though not whether that is what ought to happen; at seeing effectiveness, coherence, purposes fulfilled -but not conflict. And because the purposeful individual is perceived as the autonomous origin and ground of meaning and event, success in these exercises will be accepted as just reason for certain economic and social privileges. 

It all seems perfectly adapted for the fastest-growing class fraction, the new petty bourgeoisie working in finance, advertising, the civil service, teaching, the health service, the social services and clerical occupations. The new petty bourgeoisie (unlike the old, of artisans and small shopkeepers) is constituted not by family but through education: 'The various petty bourgeois agents each possess, in relation to those subordinate to them, a fragment of the fantastic secret of knowledge that legitimises the delegated authority that they exercise. Hence the belief in the 'neutrality of culture', and in the educational apparatus as a corridor of circulation by the promotion and accession of the "best" to the bourgeois state, or in any case to a higher state in the specific hierarchy of mental labour." The combination of cultural deference and cautious questioning promoted around Shakespeare in GCE seems designed to construct a petty bourgeoisie which will strive within limits allocated to it without seeking to disturb the system-"it does not want to break the ladder by which it imagines it can climb" (Poulantzas, p. 293).

In short, exactly the kind of selfish, individualist, obedient, Philistine reactionary the Express and Star admires and courts. If I produce Shakespeare-loving rebels, I'm on the side of the angels.

What a piece of work is a man

Firstly, a word with Mr Peter Rhodes about 'news values'.

I made a passing comment recently about my university restructuring its departments, resulting in a Faculty of Arts. People have been referring to it as FArts, which isn't very funny but is fairly predictable. My preference would be for the more accurate Faculty of Arts and Humanities, but I'm just not that bothered.

Although I can't link you to his column in the Express and Star as it isn't considered worthy of webspace, Mr Peter Rhodes thought that my comment was a) worth repeating (without payment) and b) 'whistleblowing'. Then again, he does think that the term 'school lunch' is bourgeois political correctness. Unless he's joking. I can no longer tell these days.

Whistleblowing is when you reveal dangerous, illegal or unethical activity in the workplace. It's worth column inches. I'm very pleased that Mr Peter Rhodes is a regular reader of Plashing Vole, because he might learn something. Not because I'm particularly well-informed, but because he's even less well-informed. It's just a shame that he feels it's important to recycle lame fart gags rather than reconsider whether, for instance, supporters of equal marriage are 'fascist', as he claims (clue: fascists put gay people into concentration camps and make them wear pink triangles, rather than legalising marriage between same-sex couples).

Anyway, that's as much space as Mr Peter Rhodes deserves. But I'm afraid I'm going to upset him again by telling you all what I did in class today.

The first class of the day was a two-hour lecture on Shakespeare, with me as the boss's minion. Or lovely assistant, depending on how myopic you are. An introductory session, we spent a lot of time talking about the cultural blocks around having a rich and dynamic relationship with Shakespeare. We talked about the way Shakespeare has been appropriated by the state and cultural authority as in some way emblematic of Englishness and Britishness. For instance, this 1944 Olivier version of Henry V was clearly part of the patriotic propaganda drive:



But it needs some editing to make it Glorious Brits versus Evil German Scum. Principally, the lines in the next scene in which Henry orders 'every soldier kill his prisoners' are cut - we can't have a king of England, or English people, committing war crimes (even though they did, and do, quite a lot).

We talked about Shakespeare as a businessman, as perhaps being Catholic, perhaps being homosexual, of definitely being a creation of each age. There is no Shakespeare, we said: there are Shakespeares. There's the man churning out bums-on-seats material and negotiating the political vicissitudes of a dangerous period. There's the uncouth dullard who slipped into obscurity for 150+ years after his death,  to be revived in cut-down versions and tragedies with happy endings (really: in one popular staging, Romeo and Juliet wake up and live happily ever after). There's the prophet of Empire (the Victorians saw The Tempest as justifying Empire as a means of civilising the brutes and the anti-Imperial Shakespeare, such as the Irish seashore version I saw this summer which played The Tempest as an examination of the evils of invasion and colonisation. There's Straight Shakespeare and Gay Shakespeare, all working off the sonnets, and there are Conservative and Lefty Shakespeares. Most of these send the guardians of conservative culture off the deep end, but they're all there in the texts, waiting to be uncovered. That's why Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) are so fascinating. Yes, you end up less certain at the end of the course than at that start, but I consider that an intellectual victory.

Our point was that you could easily do a degree in Shakespeare Studies without even opening a copy of the plays because in the absence of authorial intent, all texts and especially plays, can be read (or not read) in a variety of ways. Shakespeare didn't leave manuscripts, didn't do interviews in the Sunday papers, didn't arrange publication of the plays (the cash came from performances, and he co-owned a production company). There's no Authorised Version, only varying texts cribbed from actors' notes and friends' memories. Hence the Shakespeare Industry, which puts him up on a pedestal. World's Greatest Playwright. Timeless. Immortal. Always Relevant. Englishman of the Ages.

All crap. This stuff gets in the way of close, informed readings of the texts. Resistance to Shakespeare is often a result of this patronising guff, most often found in education ministers' speeches and little-Englander editorials in the Daily Mail. Once you've cleared all this cultural undergrowth, you can start reading the texts: asking how (and whether) they work on stage and on screen, what the cultural context was, what perspectives are being privileged and which are being silenced. I'm with Derrida: the author's dead. His opinion no longer matters, but the words he (probably) wrote do, and so does the relationship the reader and audience have with those words.

What we want to do is strip away the unthinking hierarchisation of Shakespeare v other authors, English Literature versus Others (such as MacAulay's assertion that a single shelf of European literature was worth 'the whole native literature of India and Arabia') and get back to texts and contexts. Down with Great Men. This is what the know-nothings refer to as Cultural Relativism and Political Correctness Gone Mad. We need to do this: there's nothing intellectually stimulating or informative about constructing league tables of playwrights. You can't compare The Frogs, Hamlet and Shopping and Fucking in qualitative terms: what you can do is compare technique, staging, setting, their relationships to each other and their contexts and learn things through those comparisons. This isn't controversial in my world, but there are plenty of reactionaries (most of whom haven't seen a play since they were the Third Ass in their primary Nativity) who think this is treason, subversion and filth.

As an encore, I went straight into a class which pulled apart the concept of universal morality based on utilitarianism, Bentham and Mill's formula which problematically relates ethics to a complicated calculation of pleasure, pain-avoidance and consequences while covertly relying on very subjective ideas (we don't agree on what constitutes happiness, nor on how to acquire it). We successfully demolished conventional bourgeois morality in one two-hour slot and thus it was a day well-spent.

Peter: if you're lacking material for next week's column, you're welcome to turn up at any of my classes.

Crumbs from Wisdom's Table

Two teachable moments over the past couple of days, both related to spelling and presentation. My earthy and erudite colleague GH demonstrated the importance of apostrophes with an illustration from his local animal emporium. Apparently a carrying case for cats etc. is a voyageur. A sign for 'Pets Voyageur' might slightly irk an anglophone, but in French it means more: 'pets voyageur' is quite literally a travelling (drifting?) fart (hence the old musical act Le Petomane, a chap who performed popular songs and La Marseillaise from his bottom).

The second moment came today when I marked a forum on Shakespeare's sonnets. One unfortunate and otherwise commendable student alighted upon these lines from Sonnet 17

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?

Not knowing the difference between 'desert' and 'dessert', she gave an interesting and imaginative reading based on the significance of Pudding in Shakespeare. Of course, we old hands know that pudding appears only in Henry IV Part I ('that roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly') as part of an insult – though 'cakes and ale' make an appearance too. But I really felt for the student: a basic weakness led her far astray, and the scansion didn't help either: the metre and rhyme scheme encourage identical pronunciation between the two possibilities.

Students: do check your spelling.

Meanwhile, I've a lot on: 2 new lectures to write ready for next week, 2 MA dissertations and 2 undergrad ones to read, and a journal article to shorten, proof and submit by Friday. Plus a trip to have a tooth extracted, an MA interview. Oh, and two funerals next week.

Animaniacal

In return for the Animated Communist Manifesto, @thehumandory sends me the Mickey Mouse Midsummer Night's Dream. It's 20 minutes long because all the knob gags are missing. Here's part 1:



Obviously I'll be incorporating this into my next Shakespeare and Milton module. If only there was a Flintstones version of Paradise Lost. It writes itself.

All sound and fury, signifying nothing

That's Shakespeare that is. Why am I quoting Shakespeare? Because Roger Gales, a twice-divorced Tory MP is claiming that if homosexuals are allowed to marry, Shakespeare and Milton will have to be changed to expunge all the references to 'husbands' and 'wives'. And then families and civilisation as we know it will fall apart.

“If we are to re-construct official and business documentation and to replace “Husband and Wife” with “spouses” and “partners” where will this stop? Will Shakespeare and Milton and The Holy Bible be re-written also? Will only “correctly” expurgated literature be allowed to be used in the classroom?”

Now as it happens, I'm teaching a course called Shakespeare, Milton and the English Renaissance. This means, I suspect, that most of the students have read more Shakespeare than Mr. Gale ever will. And therefore they all know that if you wanted a literary defence of heterosexual nuclear families, Shakespeare would not be the first port of call.

Problem families in Shakespeare:
1. The MacBeths. Though devoted to each other, Mrs MacBeth displays some mental health issues, while Mr. MacBeth has a worrying tendency to murder his friends and colleagues

2. Othello and Desdemona. Although they stayed together until death did them part, this was rather sooner than expected, the result of Mr Othello's propensity for domestic violence.

3. Katherina and Petruchio (The Taming of the Shrew): sparky intelligent woman submits (or does she) to marriage to boring old Petruchio once she's been 'tamed'.

4. Mr and Mrs Hamlet. Someone killed Hamlet Sr. It was his brother, Claudius. Never mind though - Hamlet's mother Gertrude marries him anyway. The kids are a little bit damaged by all this and both end up dead.

5. Widowed Lear is a bit of a tyrant, though pretty lazy with it. Demanding total obedience from his children, he exiles the nice one and lets the others murder and carouse their way round the country. It ends badly.

On the other hand, it's the cross-dressing, campy, sexually-liquid characters who usually have the most fun and carry the moral weight of lots of the plays. Take Rosalind in As You Like It: a duke's daughter, she disguises herself as Ganymede (a common nickname for a rent-boy) and parades round the forest dispensing sound advice, toying with the affections of men and women alike and generally discovering that there's more to life than obeying the stereotypical demands of fixed heterosexuality.

But Mr. Gale wouldn't know that, because Shakespeare's just a name to him, not a body of complex and challenging work. If he'd ever read any Shakespeare, he'd be leading the book-burning.

Which is why Gale's a twit.

The first half of 'all sound and fury, by the way, is '…a tale told by an idiot'.

Out of the mouths of babes…

No, not that kind of babes. Merely young people - two rather talented young writer/actors starting with Shakespeare and going off in interesting directions. Sent to me by a colleague:



a rather cynical (i.e. accurate) analysis of what it takes to win an Oscar:



And finally the apotheosis of culture: Frasier meets Star Trek: Voyager. How have I lived without this?

'In thy face I see the map of honour, truth and loyalty'

Shakespeare wrote that in Henry VI. Now a colleague has given me another Shakepearian Map, to adorn the office walls - click on it for a larger version.

Designed for the RSC by Hester Lees-Jeffries of Cambridge University. My favourite line is the red-and-white checked one 'Lovers Under Construction', which leads to Isabella and Duke Vincentio of Measure for Measure: the Duke repeatedly resists marriage, though it appears by the end that he is only testing Isabella, who has to learn the quality of mercy before she can be trusted as a Duchess.

How Shakespeare Can Improve Your Sex Life

No, not a learned disquisition into the romantic and sexual themes in Shakespeare's plays: I've done a lot of that recently and in any case, you lot don't pay me.

Instead, a clip from - against my better judgement - a musical (Kiss Me Kate, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew), in which two gangsters persuade the leading man that a firm grasp of Shakespeare will make a chap irresistible to the ladies. Male students, take note:

The girls today in society
Go for classical poetry,
So to win their hearts one must quote with ease
Aeschylus and Euripides.
But the poet of them all
Who will start 'em simply ravin'
Is the poet people call
The bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
Just declaim a few lines from "Othella"
And they think you're a heckuva fella.
If your blonde won't respond when you flatter 'er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopaterer,
And if still, to be shocked, she pretends well,
Just remind her that "All's Well That Ends Well."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.



And if your dramatic tastes are more classically-inclined, here's Christopher Reeve in Hamlet:

Thought for the day

'It is a wise ordinance of fate – or Providence? – that I cannot get all the books I want, or I should certainly never accomplish much. I am simply a "book drunkard". 

LM Montgomery.

Sadly, I can get all the books I want. Though all the post held today was Ryan Kiernan's Shakespeare, some record cleaning fluid and the box set of remastered Smiths albums. Mmm.

We're all going on a summer holiday

Well, not quite, but I am taking the afternoon off: Ben and I are going on a cheese and book crawl in Stratford on Avon. Because that's what we both really need more of, books and cheese.

Hopefully the place won't be packed with Shakespeare fanboys: teaching the work every year has made me immune to the marketing and Bardolatry. I don't particularly care about the Shakespeare Myth/Conundrum/Mystery. The work's important, not what happened to the best bed.

However, in honour of Shakespeare…


and less wonderfully:

A Shakespeare masterclass

I've been teaching Shakespeare this year. They weren't quite as interested as this lot…

Lovely books

Got some great dead tree media today.

Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters by Cushing and Drescher. Beautifully reproduced trades union and political posters. The Americans seem to have more consciously artistic posters - perhaps because their unions aren't so institutionally prominent as European ones. I've now ordered the British volume…

James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? The answer, of course, is Shakespeare, but Shapiro's book is an informed romp through this most British of conspiracy theories: the argument goes that Shakespeare was a thick Brummie, so couldn't possible have written these (mostly) wonderful plays and sonnets - it must have been an aristocrat like the Earl of Oxford. Blah blah blah. It's a fascinating story, and one which highlights why the British are generally so rubbish at critical theory - they so often stick to the pub-quiz level nonsense. Real critics don't care who wrote Shakespeare: it's what the plays do that matters.

Bassnett's Studying British Cultures for the Shakespeare and Wales essays, and Ian McDonald's Brazilian SF masterpiece, Brasyl.

Paul Uppal: a tedious, third-rate mind

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum. (Montaigne)

I'm getting so bored by Uppal's ignorant chippiness. His latest contributions to the public gaiety are on education and empty shops.

In 1950s Kenya, my father received an education that covered the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare as well as British history. Does the Secretary of State not find it ironic that many students in modern Britain are given a less comprehensive education in British history than many students in 1950s Kenya?

He really is laughable. Why does he think that the appropriate education for an Indian family in Kenya is 'Chaucer and Shakespeare as well as British history'? How about Kenyan history? Sikh culture? Not instead of perhaps, but alongside? Some literature written since 1611?

There's something uncomfortably cringeworthy about a child of Empire trotting out the arguments of Victorian English imperialists without any acknowledgement that the world's a more sophisticated place. (I'm not even convinced that Uppal's claim is more than impressionistic: it seems unlikely that Daddy read more than a tiny selection of the massive output by these authors). Does he really think that this constitutes 'comprehensive education'? How about maths, geography, science, languages and all the other skills? What a dumb comparison - completely unsubstantiated.

Unfortunately, Paul omits to mention his own education in the UK (and the general silence around his education is more than a little suspicious). Was it more comprehensive than his father's? I suspect it was… but that would ruin his little fantasy that generations of kids have been turned into Morlocks by Labour. I also suspect that he couldn't dredge up any Shakespeare or Chaucer - and that he doesn't know the names of any of their contemporaries either: they're just the tired old names dragged up by reactionaries like totems - not for nothing is dumbly excessive Shakespeare worship known as Bardolatry. It's boring and only demonstrates the intellectual vacuity of the speaker. Which bits of Chaucer would he like taught? The fart jokes? The bum-kissing? The students having sex with the miller's wife and daughter? The anti-clericalism? The pomposity of the upper classes? The cynicism about the rulers? Perhaps he'd like me to teach the kids all the sexually and socially subversive bits in Shakespeare? Or is he just ignorant?

My dad - who's a very clever man in many ways - is utterly resistant to most forms of culture. Whenever he says 'have you read X' as though X is the most important author in history, my reply is always 'Yes, I'm a professional literature teacher. Why is X mentioned in the Daily Telegraph?', because that's where he always gets this rubbish from.

So a note to Paul: having heard of these people isn't enough. You have to have read them, and their contemporaries, and understand their contexts before you can start throwing their names around. Otherwise you look like a saloon-bar philosopher.

What else has this pocket moron been on about? Well, I hate to shock you, but the man who owns £8million in commercial property is - yet again - begging for tax breaks on empty commercial property - while not accepting that these shops are empty because the economy's tanked, not because landlord's are paying too much tax on their speculative investments. The acorn never falls far from the tree.

I shall leave Mr. Uppal with a few more words from Michel Montaigne, whom I have read - in the original Renaissance French, despite 'suffering' a British state education:

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly. 

Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. 

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. 

Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky. 

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

And now our revels are ended

Amidst all the other teaching I've been doing, I spent the last week immersed in Shakespearian texts. I'm not a Shakespeare specialist, but I'm enjoying this course hugely, and it's wonderful to get back to the critical theory reading I often don't have time for.

This week was The Tempest - probably Shakespeare's last play, and one performed at James I's (and VI's) court at least twice. The First Folio lists it under Comedies but - as I've been trying to explain to my students - it's more like a mix of tragedy and Shakespeare's history plays for the first four acts, with a comedy resolution (marriages, restoration to power) bolted extremely unconvincingly on the end. Unconvincing because Shakespeare's made sure that every neat ending unravels: Ferdinand and Miranda cheat at chess, Prospero's blackmailing Antonio and poor old Caliban is forgotten.

I used a mix of postcolonial and New Historicist theory for the lecture, which I thought was intellectually coherent at least. Unfortunately for most of the audience, they hadn't read the play, so had to endure 90 minutes of me minutely exploring characters and events they hadn't yet heard about…

Oh well… next lecture to write is the origins of Celtic mythology. Back to the books…

Meanwhile, here's an 'interesting' production coming up: Helen Mirren, but also Russell Brand. Apart from that, I'm slightly reluctant because all the magic in the play is part of a more cerebral examination of the origins, legitimacy and application of power, particularly in a colonial context. Too much concentration on magic and special effects will detract from this. Furthermore, the original play links power and fatherhood to stunning effect and contrasts Prospero's rule over Miranda, Milan and the Island with Sycorax's mothering of Caliban: making Prospero into Prospera turns the story into something else entirely. Still, I'm sure it will be worth seeing.

So you've started fancying boys…

No, I haven't. But I'm teaching a Shakespeare comedy tomorrow, and as you know, classics of English literature aren't complete without a bit of cross-dressing (the same applies to stag nights).

And so this episode of Blackadder springs to mind:

All's Well That Ends Well

I had a disastrous day at work yesterday - everything that could go wrong did, mostly my fault. I for the first time understood the phrase 'cold sweat' from my reading: on realising just how badly I'd arsed things up, I was sweating profusely and a ripe aroma filled my (shared) office, not to be dispelled.

Today's better. I'm immersed in Shakespeare comedies and - for the first time - appreciating them rather than being disappointed by the lack of hilarious punchlines, which weren't the point then.

Will was, as you hopefully know, quite bright. He had this to say about failure:

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

Lucio, Measure for Measure 1.4.