New and Strange: Thinking About Transformation Through Shakespeare
When I think “humanities moment,” this song from William Shakespeare’s <em>The Tempest</em> pops into my head. It’s almost too fitting: “Full Fathom Five” is such a momentary diversion in the play—a random and beautiful intrusion to the plot. The song seems interested in how we process death—something I have been doing a lot lately. These are the words to the song: <br /><br />Full fathom five thy father lies; <br />Of his bones are coral made; <br />Those are pearls that were his eyes: <br />Nothing of him that doth fade <br />But doth suffer a sea-change <br />Into something rich and strange. <br /><br />A tree spirit named Ariel uses this song to get the attention of Ferdinand, a prince who has recently crash-landed on the island Ariel shares with a magician named Prospero. At this moment, Ferdinand believes that his father, the king of Naples, has drowned in the storm. The prince thinks he’s the only survivor, and Ariel sings to him, to get his attention, but also to offer a kind of consolation for his drowned father. <br /><br />The image the spirit describes—a human body mutating and transforming into coral and pearls, is one of the most beautiful images I have never seen. You have to imagine it: when you see The Tempest on stage, you hear Ariel’s description, but this otherworldly transformation is something that can only really exist as a poetic description (or maybe really good computer graphics). <br /><br />The other thing about the song that strikes me is its futility: try using these lines on someone grieving the death of a parent and see how far they get you. At the same time, this moment tries to give voice to forms of life outside of humanity as it attempts to explain something precious and important, not just about life, but art. Death is inevitable, and imagination, though it can never make up for that fact, does fascinating things when it tries. <br /><br />The last thing I’ll bring up is the way this song, which makes visible a new and strange transformation, becomes visible in other media: Julie Taymor interprets the song in her 2010 film adaptation of <em>The Tempest</em>; Jackson Pollack has a painting named “Full Fathom Five,” and Beck, back when I was a teenager, titled his break-up album <em>Sea Change</em>, an allusion to the weird expressions we give to grief. These artworks show us that, while a human body can’t really transform into coral and pearls, one poetic moment can transform into another.
William Shakespeare
<em>The Tempest</em>
2021
Philip Gilreath, 32, University of Georgia Ph.D. Student
new-and-strange
The Power of Performance
One night during my first semester of undergrad, I flipped on PBS on my tiny dorm room TV to watch <em>Richard II</em>. Or, half-watch, I should say – I was still convinced that I could multitask, so I was also reading one of my history textbooks. As I nursed a cup of black tea and highlighted what was probably entire pages of that book, I would look up occasionally to see Ben Whishaw’s performance. My memories of the event are a little hazy (that’s what I get for multitasking, I suppose), but I can recall the ephemerality of the blue, gold, and white color palette, the powerful emotions captured in the cast's performance (especially during Richard's deposition), and the brilliant ways the cast played off each other, especially Whishaw's Richard and Rory Kinnear's Bolingbroke. <br /><br />I also distinctly remember watching Whishaw write “Richard II" in the sand, only for it to be washed away by the waves, and thinking how amazing it was. I did eventually sit down and watch <em>Richard II</em> without distractions (and on a better TV), but that first viewing shaped the way that I approach Shakespeare. Without that performance, I wouldn't have become interested in <em>Richard I</em>I, and I wouldn't have become a graduate student studying early modern drama. My fascination with Whishaw's performance led to my undergraduate senior seminar paper and helped to shape part of my Master's thesis; I have no doubt that it will influence my dissertation, as well. <br /><br />Most importantly, it changed how I think about plays and performance. I had always thought of Shakespeare’s plays as texts to be performed, but watching <em>The Hollow Crown</em> was the first time I realized just how much performance can bring to the text, as well. Whishaw’s writing on the sand, for example, isn’t in the text of Shakespeare’s play, but showing Richard's name being washed away provides a clear image of the fragility of Richard’s kingship. Now, when I open up Shakespeare (or any other drama, for that matter), my first thought is always “how would someone stage this?” In my own research, I focus on these questions of performance (both by the characters in the text and actors on a stage); I want to know how to bring those nuances and details to life myself – to help others see the powerful emotions that these plays can provoke, just as <em>The Hollow Crown</em> did for me.
William Shakespeare
<em>The Hollow Crown: Richard II</em>
2013
Angeline Morris, 25, Ph.D. Student
power-performance
Capacious Language in <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>
Despite its cultural prominence and my specialization in early modern English drama, I have not worked closely with <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>. I did read it once, but that was when I was a freshman in high school. And by “read” it, I mean that I relied on the modernized parallel text supplied in our edition. However, on day one of my first college-level Shakespeare course, my professor administered a reading exercise to acclimate us to the type of reading we’d be doing all semester. She gave each of us a printout of the following passage from Act 1, Scene 5 of <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, wherein the lovers first meet: <br /><br />ROMEO, [taking Juliet’s hand] If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: / My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.<br />JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, / Which mannerly devotion shows in this; / For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.<br />ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?<br />JULIET Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.<br />ROMEO O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. / They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. JULIET Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. <br />ROMEO Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. [He kisses her.] / Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged. (Folger ed., 1.5.104-18) <br /><br />A newcomer to Shakespeare, I felt confused and not the least bit intimidated after reading this passage silently to myself. I genuinely couldn’t sort the palms from the pilgrims. But once my professor began close reading the passage for us – the first time I’d witnessed such a mode of analysis – I felt my world expand. By tracing syntax and mapping out metaphors, she helped us see that it is Juliet who is both a temple and a saint, Romeo’s lips that are religious pilgrims, and the meeting of palms and prayer that are synonymous with the culminating romantic kiss. While these takeaways seem elementary to me now, they were ground-breaking to my sophomore self. Moreover, it wasn’t just these insights that made me choose this as my humanities moment. Rather, it was the moment when my professor taught us that Romeo and Juliet develop a shared sonnet in this scene. Together, they deliver fourteen, alternately rhyming lines in iambic pentameter – a whole Shakespearean sonnet. Within that sonnet, the initial “-iss” rhyme traverses Romeo’s first quatrain and into Juliet’s, providing a literary manifestation of their bond. Finally, each lover delivers one half of the final heroic couplet, and the close of their sonnet is literally sealed with the meeting of palms: a kiss. <br /><br />For whatever reason (though it’s not hard to guess), this lesson vastly broadened what I thought language and, more generally, art were capable of. By showing us how to cipher the rich information harbored by this group of words, my professor sparked a drive in me to perform future such analyses and see how their revelations might further enhance the way I viewed the world. Now, I am a PhD student studying early modern English literature with a special interest in drama and poetry. I am still chasing the same feeling I got that day – the one where, as cheesy as it sounds, anything seemed possible through language. Luckily, I am still periodically graced with that sensation because, as all educators know, there is always more to read and learn!
William Shakespeare
<em>Romeo and Juliet</em>
2016-2017
Morgan Shaw, 23, Graduate Student
capacious-language-romeo-juliet
Shakespeare at Winedale and the Winedale Historical Center, near Round Top, Texas
Tucked away into Central Texas' Hill Country is the repurposed ghost town of Winedale. Built by German immigrants in the nineteenth century, it nowadays features several creaky homes, a stagecoach inn, a single-room school, and a couple of ancient barns. By 1960s, the town was long-abandoned and consolidated into a single property, which the spectacularly named philanthropist Ima Hogg bequeathed to the University of Texas at Austin. Today, it is a space dedicated to the Humanities. UT-Austin's Dolph Briscoe Center for American History manages the property as a museum of nineteenth-century material culture and daily life in an agrarian, immigrant community, where guests can wander the dirt roads linking buildings nestled among forests, bogs, and meadows. <br /><br />Yet Winedale's beating heart is not the historical center, but an academic program run since 1970 by UT-Austin's English Department: Shakespeare at Winedale. Premised on the notion that the best way to study Shakespeare's (and his contemporaries') dramatic literature is through performance, one of the 1880s-built barns now serves as a theater. The Theater Barn is the home for several educational outreach programs and summer camps aimed at elementary- and middle-school-aged children, not to mention occasional professional theatrical productions, but its most distinctive residents are university students. Each summer, a cohort of students (mostly UT-Austin attendees) takes up residence on the Winedale property. (Other students spend several weekends there in the spring semester as part of a similarly-structured course.) They maintain the theater and its storehouses, construct props and sew costumes, assist in Winedale’s educational outreach programs, and prepare a 24-show season (mostly at Winedale, with three or four other performances elsewhere in Texas and in Stanton, Virginia's American Shakespeare Center) with minimal assistance from the supervising faculty, who conceive of their roles as professors rather than directors. Though they themselves are students of Shakespearean literature and theater, they become educators themselves, helping curious youngsters and general audiences access art stripped of any pretensions or prohibitive pricing. <br /><br />As an undergraduate, I spent two summers as one of the program's students, in 2014 and 2017 (and took part in the similar Winedale Spring Class in 2016). To quote Shakespeare's <em>Coriolanus</em>, Winedale is "a world elsewhere." The nearest town, Round Top, boasts of its ninety-person census count on signs and t-shirts. Cities like Austin, Houston, or Dallas are at least two hours away along highways with rather generous speed limits. (Round Top itself is an art hub for classical and contemporary music, poetry, food, and, most famously, antiquing.) Program participants—'Winedalers'—live on-site in a younger building referred to as the Dorm. Workdays at Winedale, particularly throughout June and into early July, before any of the performances reach the general public, begin early and end late. Meals, exercise, breaks for coffee and gatorade, and a few quiet moments punctuate rehearsals (referred to as 'performances' in-house), line practice, sewing costumes, practicing musical numbers, and choreographing dance and combat. Performances dominate weekends from mid-July through August: four evening shows, beginning Thursday, and afternoon matinees on Saturday and Sunday. And while weekdays are calmer once shows begin, work does not stop. There are lines to practice, costumes to touch-up, and scenes to polish.<br /><br />All of this occurs in Central Texas' verdant, gently rolling countryside. Life is everywhere. Critters abound, and the thrumming drone of locusts and cicadas, interrupted by birdsong, fills the day, giving way to choruses of tree frogs and crickets at night. More exotic creatures make appearances, as well—bald eagles, feral boar, bobcats, copperheads, velvet ants—I was once made eye contact with a mountain lion who chanced to peek over his shoulder while crossing a meadow. The most familiar critters, however, are dogs, either brought in by audience members or who wander in form the neighboring farmsteads to receive baths and belly rubs from the students. This environment is critical to Winedale. <em>As You Like It</em> is best viewed with songbirds contributing impromptu lines; <em>Macbeth</em> benefits from summer storms' distant thunder; barking dogs contribute to the climactic battles of the Henriad. <br /><br />On a scorching summer day, audience members crowd the barn, often with coolers holding beer or lemonade tucked beneath their chairs. Fans whir overhead, cicadas buzz outside. Actors wearing upholstery gowns and doublets deliver Early Modern English, their lines often inflected with a Texan twang. They take gag lines to children, or to the numerous Winedaler alumni in attendance. The end result is Shakespeare as it exists nowhere else. The entire space is dedicated to the production and appreciation of art, and that imbues both Winedale and the community of performers and audience members it has constructed over the past five decades with with an incredible sense of purpose. <br /><br />I’m a historian, not an actor or literary scholar. Nonetheless, I’ve never seen a space embody what humanities education should be more than Winedale. The past and the art it left to us comes alive there in ever-surprising ways. More importantly, this space is engaging and accessible in a manner unthinkable elsewhere. Older literature suffers from snobbery and mass inaccessibility; Shakespeare is the foremost example. Yet Winedale sweeps those barriers aside. In The Barn, 'the Bard' becomes just another author, and anyone and everyone—small children, English-language learners, Bard-fanatics, proud rednecks—can sit side-by-side, watching youngsters breathe new life into ancient text. The Barn is not a single ‘humanities moment’—it’s a factory of such moments, archived in scuffed stages, costumes, photographs, and memories. So, if you ever find yourself in East-Central Texas, I encourage you to stop by Winedale, its museums, and its Barn, and create your own humanities moment there. <br /><br /><em>Artwork curtesy of Wendy Pillars, who produced this image of the Barn after reading an earlier draft of this work as part of the National Humanities Center's 2020 Graduate Student Summer Residency.</em>
Shakespeare at Winedale, a museum and performance space dedicated to education
The summer of 2014, spring of 2015, & summer of 2017
Bryson Kisner, age 26, Ph.D. student at Rice University
shakespeare-winedale-winedale-historical-center-round-top-texas
Transforming Loss into Artistic Expression
In this video recording, actor and musician Noah Reid describes the way that a Neil Young song allowed him to understand and portray the way that loss shaped Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Neil Young’s “Natural Beauty,” and William Shakespeare’s <em>Hamlet</em>
Noah Reid, actor and musician
noah-reid-transforming-loss-into-artistic-expression
“It’s not nonsense, it’s Shakespeare.”
Dr. Michael P. H. Stanley describes an encounter with a terminally ill patient who, in his pain and confusion, demands to leave the hospital ward in the middle of the night. While the patient’s pleas are initially regarded as “nonsense” or evidence of his delirium, Dr. Stanley recognizes the patient’s writings as lines from Shakespeare’s play, <em>Macbeth</em>. As Dr. Stanley highlights, his experience speaks to the lasting power of texts and stories to leave an indelible imprint on our minds, offering up a means of communication when all other words fail.
<em>Macbeth</em>, written by William Shakespeare
Dr. Michael P. H. Stanley
its-not-nonsense-its-shakespeare
A Lifetime of Humanities Moments
<p>Some years ago, I was asked to give a lecture to students enrolled in a small university’s humanities program describing the personal epiphany I experienced which led to my passion for the humanities. Try as I might, I could not think of an isolated, single experience but rather a series of moments that stretch back to my childhood and have “stuck to my ribs” over a lifetime.</p>
<p>A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.</p>
<p>Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!</p>
<p>During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s <em>The Deerslayer</em> and <em>The Last of the Mohicans</em>, Alexander Dumas’ <em>The Three Musketeers</em> and Jules Verne’s <em>The Mysterious Island</em> were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s <em>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</em>, <em>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court</em> and <em>Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc</em> and Willa Cather’s evocative novels <em>My Antonia</em> and <em>O Pioneers!</em></p>
<p>I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in <em>How Green Was My Valley</em>, Walter Hampton in <em>The Patriots</em> and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, <em>Cyrano de Bergerac</em>. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s <em>Anthony and Cleopatra</em> and George Bernard Shaw’s <em>Caesar and Cleopatra</em>. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.</p>
<p>A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—<em>Henry V</em>, <em>Macbeth</em>, <em>Hamlet</em>, <em>Merchant of Venice</em>, <em>Midsummer Night’s Dream</em>, <em>Othello</em> and <em>King Lear</em>—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s <em>The Visit</em>—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.</p>
<p>The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.</p>
<p>Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!</p>
<ul>
<li>Who can forget Hector’s farewell to his infant son in the <em>Iliad</em>?</li>
<li>Or be struck by George Elliott observing in <em>Middlemarch</em>, “No age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.” Or, “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our mortality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”</li>
<li>Who can forget Huck Finn introducing himself on the opening page of the eponymous novel and then later wrestling with his conscience and eschatology whether to report Jim as a runaway slave?</li>
<li>Of a different nature but just as memorable are the exquisite and subtle emotions experienced and described by Virginia Wolff in <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em> and <em>To the Lighthouse</em>.</li>
<li>And, most recently for me, the moment in Proust’s last volume, <em>Le Temps Retrouvé of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</em> where he describes his epiphany that enables him to be a writer and thus realize his literary ambitions.</li>
<li>Finally, mention must be made of poignant moments so touching to me in Japanese literary gems. To read Shikibu Murasaki’s masterpiece <em>Genji Monogatari</em> is to be transported to another time (11th century), another world (medieval Japan) and sensibilities to be treasured. Love poems two centuries earlier capture the mood and the feeling. Consider these two gems by Ono no Komachi:<br />
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border-bottom: none;"><em>Did he appear<br />because I fell asleep<br />thinking of him?<br />If only I’d known I was dreaming,<br />I’d never have wakened.</em></td>
<td style="border-bottom: none;"><em>I thought to pick<br />the flower of forgetting<br />for myself,<br />but I found it<br />already growing in his heart.</em></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s <em>Apology</em> and <em>Phaedo</em>? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.</p>
<p>These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the <em>Enchiridion</em> of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his <em>Meditations</em> advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.</p>
<p>As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s <em>Messiah</em> was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.</p>
<p>Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cherobino’s incomparable profession of adolescent love “Non so pia cosa son” and the Contessa’s “Dove sono I bei momenti” lamenting her lost love—both from Mozart’s <em>Le Nozze di Figaro</em></li>
<li>Wotan’s “Farewell” bringing to a close <em>Die Valkyrie</em>, the second opera of Wagner’s <em>Der Ring des Nibelungen</em></li>
<li>Hans Sachs “Wahn, wahn” monologue from this same composer’s <em>Die Meistersinger</em></li>
<li>Iago’s great aria “Credo in un Dio crudel” from the second act of Verdi’s <em>Otello</em></li>
<li>Schaunard, the philosopher, bidding farewell to his cloak in order to purchase medicines for the dying Mimi in Puccini’s <em>La Bohème</em></li>
<li>The transcendent trio sung by the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie in the last act of Richard Strauss’s <em>Der Rosenkavalier</em>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.</p>
<p>How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!</p>
Peter A. Benoliel, Chairman Emeritus, Quaker Chemical Corporation
benoliel-lifetime-humanities-moments
Growing Up with the Humanities
Building on their shared love of Shakespeare, Horowitz’s mother taught her daughter how the act of writing can cultivate ideas, prompt questions, and nurture a deeper appreciation for literature. In this light, Horowitz reflects on how the practice of reading and writing about works such as <em>King Lear</em> and <em>As You Like It</em> provided an opportunity to engage with the world in a meaningful way.
Mirah Horowitz describes the lessons imparted from her mother, an English professor, on reading and writing as ongoing practices of critical inquiry. Building on their shared love of Shakespeare, Horowitz’s mother taught her daughter how the act of writing can cultivate ideas, prompt questions, and nurture a deeper appreciation for literature. In this light, Horowitz reflects on how the practice of reading and writing about works such as <em>King Lear</em> and <em>As You Like It</em> provided an opportunity to engage with the world in a meaningful way.
William Shakespeare's <em>As You Like It</em> and <em>King Lear</em>
Mirah Horowitz, Russell Reynolds Associates
mirah-horowitz-growing-up-with-humanities