Contemporary Shakespearean Criticism:



Resources for the "Modern" Reader





Dr. Tita F. Baumlin

Eng 513

















ENG 513 Course Documents

Formal Writing Project Assignment



General Requirements

Your graded Term Paper for the semester (see Syllabus for due date) must be written during this semester and for this class only. For the technical matters involved in documentation for a literary analysis, use the new MLA Handbook, Sixth Edition guidelines --see "Paper Guidelines" handout on MLA style in this packet and consult me and/or the MLA Handbook for anything not covered there. Each paper will need a Works Cited page, of course. Please do read the section on MLA Style in this packet, even if you think you know how to use MLA Style, since there are many suggestions there for writing the paper as well as for using correct documentation.



In terms of content and format of the paper, I expect that it will argue a specific thesis and will offer quotations from the text of the poem(s) or play(s) of Sh.

(Note that throughout these course materials, I will often abbreviate Shakespeare with "Sh" and play titles with the standard MLA abbreviations [the Course Syllabus uses these]. It is fine with me if you do likewise in your Exams, though in your formal graded papers you must always spell out his name and any play titles. as well as added quotations/paraphrases from secondary material in order to prove or illustrate the argument. Always avoid plot summary (assume that your reader already knows the story) but do include quotations from the primary text (the play or poem) in order to offer analysis of the text. Also try to aim for a variety of stylistic ways of incorporating quoted material smoothly into your paper (see section on MLA Style below).



My major criteria for grading the paper will be (in order of importance): (1) depth of content, weight or importance of argument, and evidence for your argument, in terms of passages from the primary text(s) being analyzed and in terms of secondary research when research is assigned; (2) clarity and persuasiveness of the style, grammar, and mechanics; (3) technical smoothness/precision regarding quotation and documentation.



Your best procedure would be to mention to me before or after class the topic you're considering, as your ideas are beginning to take form, so that you can be sure that we are on the same wavelength. In any case, before or on a specific date in the syllabus, you must turn in to me a written prospectus of the paper--a brief paragraph (handwritten or typed) that simply describes the topic you are planning to explore (you may turn it in via e-mail, and you may also turn it in as soon as you are sure of your idea--you don't have to wait for the due date) . Be as specific as you can at that point; include a thesis statement if you know what your thesis will be, but in any case you need to offer the basic kernel of your paper's argument. After that time, if you decide to change topics, please notify me. I don't want surprises when you turn in the paper.

Specific Requirements



The minimum length requirement for the Term Paper is 3000 words, not including Works Cited (about 9 pages, typed and double-spaced, using Times New Roman 12 pt and standard 1-inch margins). Please be aware that this is a minimum length requirement; anything less that this number will not receive full credit and will be penalized at least a full letter grade (or more, depending on how deficient in length the paper is). On or before the due date (see Syllabus), you must turn the Term Paper in with the word-count (not including the Works Cited words) displayed clearly on the front of the paper somewhere, so that I will know exactly how many words are in the paper. Most computer programs will count the words for you (but you will have to store your Works Cited page in a different document, so that the program does not count those words), but you may also manually count the words. I will not grade any Writing Project that does not show the accurate word count on each paper turned in, so be fairly warned.



In general, I have no particular preferences for the format of the paper (font size, how you display your name, whether you use a cover sheet or put your name on the first page of the text, etc.), though I do wish to see it double spaced for ease of my reading, and I MUST see an accurate word count displayed somewhere at the front, for it is as essential as your name.

Policy on Research



In general, for a paper of 3000 words or more, I would expect to see in an undergraduate's paper a minimum of 6 secondary works (not including the play or plays examined in the paper) listed on the Works Cited page and used in a strong manner in the paper. For graduate students, I would expect to see this doubled, say, 12 works (not including the play or plays examined in the paper). As with any research paper, I like to see that you have attempted to look at fairly recent criticism (let's say 1970 to today), but I do not mind seeing research from earlier in this century. Be aware, though, that any criticism written before 1900 is going to have a particular slant colored by the age in which it was written; quoting Coleridge in your paper doesn't necessarily help your argument, unless you are dealing with Romantic views of the play, for example. Be critical of the criticism you choose: all criticism is not created equal, and some critics are more highly regarded than others. Notice the names that keep cropping up as you read.



A word about web sites in research papers: web sites containing primary materials (that is, materials written in Shakespeare's age that are reproduced on the web for your convenience--for example, the 16th-century Book of Common Prayer) are useful and may certainly be used as research in your paper in this class. Web sites that do not come from refereed publications are not true research, in my opinion, and therefore are not as credible as works that are published through books and journals (examples of this would be "topic" or "subject" web sites written now by various individuals). I do not accept these because conventionally published articles and books have gone through an exhaustive refereed process that assures us, to some extent, of the quality of the work. If you are in doubt, please feel free to speak with me any time. There are two exceptions to my policy on web sites: (1) I will accept pedagogical material from web sites (materials about teaching Sh in the secondary classroom) if you are writing a paper about teaching Shakespeare (see discussion below, but do plan to show me what you will cite); (2) articles from reputable journals that reproduce their journals on the internet.





Some Tips and Suggestions for Research Papers

Topics for Research Papers:



Other than the two exceptions noted below, the paper must be centered on literary analysis and it must examine only a work or works we have studied in this class this semestser. You may, of course, choose to apply one of the strands of current criticism that we cover in our class discussions, but your paper does not have to approach Shakespeare from any current critical angle. Character studies, thematic studies, historical analyses-- these are all options for you. Some brief examples, just to get you thinking: examine some historical aspect (such as attitudes toward witches in Sh's day) and then apply it to a play (such as Macbeth); examine the question of whether or not Macbeth is a true protagonist; do a feminist analysis of Lady Macbeth. Or take a broader approach: examine the "fool" character across several plays; analyze "disease imagery" in several plays. If you feel shaky about doing literary analysis, in general, come look at some of the sample student papers I have on file in my office.



Topics that are not acceptable are: biographical speculations about Sh's own life, personality, experiences, etc.; the authorship question; modern adaptations of Sh (musical versions such as West Side Story, or the movies O or Ten Things I Hate About You); Ozark dialect as "Shakespearean" in origin (it's no longer an acceptable theory, anyhow).



Acceptable topics not covered above:



(1) Theatrical approaches (acting, directing, styles of productions, theatrical history) may well be acceptable--check with me if you come up with an idea, and we can probably work something out. I realize that many students in this class may be theatre majors who could benefit from using this paper in some non-literary fashion.



(2) I am very much open to pedagogical topics-- that is, a paper that discusses teaching Shakespeare or a specific work and offers one or more strategies for the secondary classroom. Many of you do (or will) teach Shakespeare at the secondary level or otherwise, and such a project could be very useful to you (which would be my wish, always). There is a wealth of material about education and about teaching Sh (and lots of further links) on the internet at shakespeare.palomar.edu/educational.htm; at the Folger Sh Library (www.folger.edu); and at the Public Broadcasting site (www.pbs.org). The Shakespeare Quarterly occasionally devotes issues to the subject of Shakespearean pedagogy; a recent issue of NCTE's English Journal (vol. 92.1, September 2002) is entirely devoted to teaching Shakespeare in the secondary schools. There have been some significant books and articles on teaching Shakespeare, such Rex Gibson's Teaching Shakespeare (1998); the MLA Series on Approaches to Teaching Specific Plays; NCTE's various books on teaching Hamlet and other such books; Peter Roberts' Sh and the Moral Curriculum (1992); several essays in Robert Merrix's Ideological Approaches to Sh (1992), and several books on teaching Shakespeare in the secondary classroom that I own and will loan out to you if you ask me (Sh Among Schoolchildren; Unlocking Sh's Language; Focus on Sh; the Sh Set Free series on teaching R&J, Macbeth, MND, Othello, TN, Hamlet, 1H4; Peter Reynolds' Practical Approaches to Teaching Sh, and others). In general, a pedagogy paper must include as much secondary material (support for your arguments) as any other, and it must have a central thesis, just like any other paper. You may choose to evaluate the assignments, suggestions, materials about teaching that you find, for example, critiquing a teaching exercise suggested in one of the resources and showing the reasons that it might not be effective. While these books and articles contain a wealth of valuable ideas, I would urge you not to accept wholesale the ideas expressed, just because it is in published material. Instead, I urge you always to read any teaching manual critically with an eye toward evaluating what you read: do you think these procedures will or will not foster literacy? Unfortunately, there are many procedures being urged on the English classroom that have more to do with other disciplines (such as art or drama) than with English, and while I would argue that an occasional "fun" exercise involving artwork or acting may be useful for opening up students' interest-levels, the question must always center on whether the overall focus on the play for the English classroom helps young students learn how to read with meaningful depth, since the low level of reading skills among American youths continues to plague our schools. Be critical when you read these manuals; evaluate; come up with better ideas whenever you can!





Tips on Research Procedures:



When you are conducting secondary research, budget your time wisely and choose carefully what you will read or lay aside, what you will take notes on or simply peruse. There is so much Shakespearean criticism available that you can waste a lot of time reading, so choose with care. ALWAYS try to incorporate the most current scholarship possible.



Meyer Library actually houses a pretty good collection of works on Shakespeare; I ask you to respect this collection and keep it intact for the next generations of researchers. Make use, also, of Drury library's collection, for they have a pretty good section on Shakespeare. Here are a couple of tips for you as the semester's research progresses: (1) if you find that a book you need is checked out, please let me know and I'll announce it in class-- the material(s) may be checked out to someone in our class, and students' sharing will save a lot of time and headaches, since it will take several days for the library to recall a book; (2) feel free to ask me if you are looking for a specific book or article that our library does not have; if I own it, I will loan it to you. But get started early so that you will have time to ask me and/or your classmates to help you locate things.



Good places to start: try the MLA Bibliographies Online or the World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD/ROM. The most useful bibliographic guides are Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide (1990) [this book is extremely useful, because Wells discusses each play in terms of the major issues (up to 1990) that critics and scholars have raised, and he lists the works to consult for each of these issues] and David Bergeron and Geraldo de Sousa, A Study and Research Guide (1995).



There are many useful books on Elizabethan history that might be useful to historical topics you are researching: Jo McMurtry's Understanding Sh's England (it is in our library; I own a copy, as well) and Ralph Berry's Sh and Social Class present good overviews of the culture itself. I have placed several works on reserve in the library that may provide useful background material.



Don't forget that books have Works Cited, footnotes, and bibliographies that might send you to fruitful sources, too. Another useful place for discussions of previous criticism is each separate volume of The New Variorum editions of Sh's plays, located in the book stacks of the library-- each edition prints the text of the play and gives an ongoing discussion of criticism on each passage (in footnote form) as the text of the play progresses.



In addition, be aware that there is a yearly annotated "SQ World Shakespeare Bibliography" that exists as an edition of the Shakespeare Quarterly each year (in the bound periodicals section, but sometimes the most current volume is in the Current Periodicals stack); since this bib arranges its entries according to major subheadings, it is easy to locate the entries for your work. It may be more useful than the CD/ROM MLA Bibliography, since the SQ World Shakespeare Bibliography gives annotated entries (prose descriptions of each article's or book's contents). To do thorough research, start with the most current edition, then check each year's bibliography as many years back as possible, then locate the books or articles you want to read according to the subjects shown in the annotations. I have copies of these bibliographies (back to about 1985) that you may use in my office, if any of the library's copies prove temporarily missing.



Also, try browsing through the latest (unbound) copies of scholarly journals in the periodical section-- you'll be surprised what you can find that is absolutely up to date.







English 513 Graduate Students' Book Reports and Term Papers



Graduate Student Book Reviews



I will assign each graduate student a book. I am deliberately choosing books from the "bygone" era of Shakespearean scholarship (that is, the era of scholarship before the explosion of what we now call current critical theory) that I feel made important contributions to the study of his plays and therefore should be known by any advanced student of Shakespeare. In a sense, these books laid the groundwork for twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism, and they are as crucial to our exploration of Shakespearean Criticism as any of the current theories that we will be exploring along the way.



Write a one-page (single-spaced) handout to distribute to class on the date assigned, and prepare to speak for about 5 minutes about the book. Unlike the popular connotation of the word "review" ("I liked it; I didn't like it") this is an academic review, in which the reader finds the thesis of the book and then locates the most important demonstrations of that thesis and the most important overall arguments. Granted, in an "ordinary"scholarly review of a new book, the reader must decide for himself/herself whether this book is useful to scholars or not. BUT, since I have chosen your book for you, you will assume that this is an "important" work in Shakespearean scholarship, and you will not offer your own opinion about its usefulness. Therefore, your goal is to summarize the book and to estimate the major contributions that this book made to a study of Shakespeare and/or to the play that will be covered on the date of your assigned report.



The Book Review that you hand in to me may be as long as you wish it to be (as opposed to the one-page handout you will also prepare for class distribution). Please double-space the Book Review you hand in. Your Book Review grade will be based upon my evaluation of all three aspects of your performance: your handout, your in-class discussion, and the longer written review handed in to me.



If you can give me the handout a few days before your report, I will have it duplicated for the class. Otherwise, take it to the departmental secretary (PUM 301) and tell her that this is a handout Dr. Baumlin wants duplicated for ENG 513 (if there's any problem, ask her to call me), or have it duplicated on your own.

Graduate Student Term Papers



In general, I will expect a much higher quality of Term Paper from a graduate student than from an undergraduate. I expect more research, deeper content, more polished writing.

Whenever you write a major paper in graduate study, keep in mind some basic pointers (please forgive me if this is stuff you already know):



although you should include research, an excellent graduate student paper shouldn't be merely a research paper. You may include textual footnotes that indicate various critical works the reader could consult if s/he wanted to read more about the issues at hand. But don't include any secondary material in the text of your paper that doesn't contribute to your thematic unity of your argument. Do show your reader that you have read all the criticism that is relevant to the topic of your paper; don't let that alone suffice as the subject of your paper.



the paper shouldn't be just a "mosaic" of secondary material. The major idea, the thesis, is to be your idea and you should work as hard as you can to come up with a fresh perspective. You can then use the secondary material either as support of your idea, or as "targets" for arguing against someone--that is, use some critic's statement as a place to begin your argument or take it deeper. I realize that in the field of Shakespearean study, you simply can't read ALL the criticism (an impossible task), so choose carefully as you go along.



your goal is to write as original an essay as possible: the more original your idea, the more you'll get out of the project. The paper does not have to use any of the critical theories we have covered in class. While I don't expect or ask for publishability, I would love nothing better than for you to write in this class an essay that can be read at a professional conference and eventually published in a journal. Trying to keep this sort of goal in mind whenever you write in graduate school will keep the quality of your work high and it will keep you from becoming bored.



to get pointers on style and format, try reading a published journal article with an eye not for content but for tips on how to write in the conventions of the profession. Some journal articles are conventional, with the traditional introduction and thesis statement, etc., while others are less conventional. But all published authors have an important case to make and they go about it in such a way that they prove they've "done their homework," so to speak-- that they've read as much of the other secondary material as is relevant to their perspective, and they've found a loophole for their own argument. In other words, don't let the Term Paper for any graduate work become merely a pro forma satisfaction for exiting a course. Instead, try to make the project an attempt at mastering as much as possible of the criticism in the area you are working in, and try to think in terms of professional quality (what is required for publication) rather than in terms of pleasing a teacher. After you have finished a course, follow up by revising the paper and sending it to a regional (or national) conference's call for papers. Reading your papers at professional conferences will be crucial for your development, especially if you intend to go on to doctoral-level study. Feel free to ask me or the Director of Graduate Studies for details about submitting papers to conferences.



If at some point you would like to inquire about expanding your Term Paper from this class into a MA or MSEd Degree Paper (Seminar Paper) for your degree, please consult the Graduate Handbook. You will first have to obtain permission from the Director of Graduate Studies (since this is a 500-level class) and you will also have to speak with me about the project well in advance before the date you plan to graduate: degree papers are much longer than class papers and require a great deal more research; they also require second readers, and both of us will expect to see multiple drafts of the paper.









Pronunciation Guide for ENG 513



Note: accented syllable is in all caps, and the pronunciations are not printed according to IPA (international phonetic alphabet) but instead according to general American English sounds. I have included only the names that may be foreign to English speakers, and I have given the pronunciations that I feel are standard for Shakespeare studies (mostly British-ized, yes).

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE:



ANTONIO (ann TONE nee oh)

BASSANIO (bus SAHN nee oh)

PORTIA (POR sha)

NERISSA (nuh RISS sah)

GOBBO (GAHB boh)

SOLANIO (soh LAWN nee oh)

GRATIANO (graht see AHN noh)

SALERIO (suh LAIR ree oh)

LORENZO (low RENN zoh)







AS YOU LIKE IT



JAQUES (jakes)

CORIN (CORE rinn)

SILVIUS (SILL vee us)

PHEBE (FEE bee)

CELIA (SEEL lee uh)





HENRY IV Parts 1 & 2



WESTMORELAND (WEST mer lnd)

WORCESTER (WOOS ter)

GLENDOWER (GLEN DOW wer)

POINS (POINZ-- just like "point" in English but with a "z" instead of a "t")

BARDOLPH (BAR dolf)

PETO (PEE toh)

NYM (Nimm)

MOWBRAY (MOWW bry)

GOWER (Gore)

GLOUCESTER (GLOSS ter)



Other notes about names: British aristocracy uses place-names as well as family names here. Thomas Percy is also Earl of Worcester, so he is usually referred to simply as Worcester. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, is usually referred to as "Northumberland." His son, Henry Percy (nowadays we'd probably call him Henry Percy, Jr.) is usually referred to by his nickname, Hotspur. "Bolingbroke" or sometimes spelled "Bullingbrook" was King Henry's family name, a place-name, before he became King Henry IV; "Monmouth" is Prince Hal's surname as a place-name, hence "Henry of Monmouth" refers to Prince Hal.







ROMEO AND JULIET



ESCALUS (ESS kuh luss)

MERCUTIO (mer KYU shee oh)

TYBALT (TIBB bult)

MONTAGUE (MONN tah gyu)





JULIUS CAESAR



LEPIDUS (LEPP id duss)

CAIUS LIGARIUS (KAY us ligg GAIR ree us)

PORTIA (PORR sha)

CALPHURNIA (cal PURR nee uh)

PUBLIUS (POOB lee us)

CINNA (SIN nah)





HAMLET



POLONIUS (po LOAN nee us)

HORATIO (hor RAY shee oh)

ROSENCRANTZ (ROSE enn krance)

GUILDENSTERN (GILL den stern)

FORTINBRAS (FORE ten brahs)

OPHELIA (oh FEEL yah)

LAERTES (lay AIR teez)







KING LEAR



LEAR (leer)

GLOUCESTER (GLOSS ter)

CAIUS,Kent's disguise (KAY us)

REGAN (RAY gun)

GONERIL (GON er rill)

CORDELIA (cor DEEL ya)





MACBETH



FLEANCE (FLAY ahns)

SIWARD (SEE ward)

HECATE (HECK kut)







THE WINTER'S TALE



HERMIONE (her MINE nee)

PAULINA (pahl LINE uh)

LEONTES (lay AHN teez)

MAMILLIUS (muh MILL lee us)

POLIXENES (puh LICK sen eez)

CAMILLO (kuh MILL loh)

ANTIGONUS (ann TIGG go nus)

FLORIZEL (FLORE i zell)

AUTOLYCUS (ott toh LYE kuss)

PERDITA (pair DEE tah)



THE TEMPEST



PROSPERO (PROSS per oh)

MIRANDA (ma RAN dah)

ARIEL (AIR ree uhl)

CALIBAN (CAL ih BANN)

GONZALO (gun ZAHL loh)

TRINCULO (TRINK kyu loh)

STEPHANO (steff FAHN noh)

ALONSO (uh LAWN zoh)

IRIS (EYE riss)

CERES (SAIR reez)

JUNO (JUNE noh)







Paper Guidelines for Use of MLA Style





Note: the following information is based on the MLA Handbook, 6th edition, 2003. (For most English classes, OMIT the Appendices in the handbook--those sections refer to other disciplines and alternate methods if you should ever need them elsewhere.) You may use textual footnotes or endnotes to add statements that extend the information or offer extraneous/interesting asides, but do not use footnotes/endnotes to document sources in your paper. Use instead the parenthetical method I will describe below. More information may be found in the MLA Handbook, but I am hoping that if you are new to this method you will not need to buy one just for this class. Feel free to ask to borrow my copy, if you have need. There are also several university websites that offer examples of the uses of MLA Style; use a search engine to look for "MLA Style" if you need to see more examples than I list here. Or feel free to e-mail me or ask me in person, if you have a question that is not covered here.



My general approach to grading research papers is to evaluate the content and argument first. Mere errors in citation form or Works Cited page will not cost points on a paper in my class. However, wholesale misapplication of the documentation process can cost a writer a lot of points, depending upon how much the errors obscure the clarity of the argument or obscure my ability to see which sources were used at specific places in the paper. If the documentation style is shoddy enough, it can even gain a charge of plagiarism. I also evaluate the writer's style, and therefore I urge to you look carefully at the section below on "Dumped Quotes," which is an all-too-common style problem I see in student papers every semester.



Further: the MLA Handbook, 6th edition, contains a valuable chapter on plagiarism that describes plagiarism effectively and also offers valuable advice on how to avoid "unintentional" plagiarism (that is, plagiarism that happens simply because you were ignorant of the rules or imprecise in your paraphrasing).



Some advice about British/American usage: British texts not only use British spellings (such as "colour" for "color"), but they also reverse the American usage of quotation marks (that is, they use single quotation marks for a standard quotation, and they use double quotation marks for a quote within a quote). If in your paper you quote from a British text, do take care to preserve the British spellings, but it is permissible (and advisable, to avoid confusion) for you to change the quotation marks to American quotation marks silently without alerting your reader that you are doing so. You are not changing the author's work, but you are merely making it readable to an American audience.





I. Technical Rules



(A) Nuts and Bolts



(1) The simple and most important rule: whenever you bring in outside material, whether you quote it directly or you paraphrase it, you indicate the source by putting the author's name and the page number in parentheses following the material that is borrowed. If you mention the author's name in your sentence, then you may put the page number alone in parentheses. MLA Style dictates that the parenthetical citation should follow as close in proximity as possible to the material it covers (in other words, don't just put the citation at the end of the sentence, unless the entire sentence is meant to be covered by the citation). If the work is written by several people, use all their last names in the citation (Jones and Smith 42). Notice there are no commas between author and page number, nor is there any use of "p."--just author and number in parentheses. If the author you cite shows up on your Works Cited in more than one entry, then place a comma after the author's name and give a shortened form of the title in order to signal to your reader which of the works you are citing at this time (Marcuse, Survey 197). If there is no author listed (as is often the case for encyclopedia articles, dictionary entries, etc.), then use the title of the work as the main referent, followed by the page number. If the work you are using quotes from yet another source, then mention the name of that source in your sentence and cite the work itself this way: (qtd. in Brooks 98).



EXAMPLES (See the section on Works Cited entries to find each of the works in examples):

Formalist criticism is "the rediscovery of metaphor and the full commitment to metaphor" (Brooks 82), according to one school of critical theory.



Brooks argues that Formalist criticism is "the rediscovery of metaphor and the full commitment to metaphor" (82).



The interest in metaphor--as the overriding effect of the criticism--is what distinguishes Formalism from other strands of critical theory (Brooks 82).



Because the sun is daily swallowed by the sea only to be reborn in it (Cirlot 230), "immersion in water" symbolically represents "a return to the pre-formal state, with a sense of death and annihilation on the one hand, but of rebirth and regeneration on the other, since immersion intensifies the life-force" (Cirlot 345).



Copernicus studied canon law in the early stages of his university education at Bologna ("Copernicus" 352).



ABOUT THESE EXAMPLES--NOTICE:



that the paper text (even block quotations) should always be double spaced, even though I'm using single spacing here to keep down the length of this handout,



that you should strike two hyphens to make a dash-- and you should use a single hyphen to indicate a page range, such as (Cirlot 110-11), and if your computer is sophisticated enough, use the longer em-dash as a dash--and use the shorter en-dash for number ranges (110-11).



that the quotation is placed in a sentence of the paper's text and is followed by a parenthetical reference (NOT by a footnote), which is then followed by the punctuation called for in the sentence. The only exceptions to this rule are when a quotation uses a question mark or an exclamation point that is needed for the completion of the quotation itself, and in this case you place the mark inside the quotation marks, followed by the parenthetical citation. It depends upon the quotation and your sentence:



Kat Ashley asked her interrogators if Elizabeth should "distance herself from Dudley?" (Weir, Life 78).



Does Weir prove her thesis that these Tudors were "individuals, who, in the final analysis, were people not so very unlike ourselves" (Children xiv)?





(2) VERY IMPORTANT: You must include a parenthetical citation for quotations or paraphrases in EVERY sentence! This means that you cannot simply put a parenthetical citation at the end of a paragraph with the intent that it be meant to cover everything in that paragraph that came from some other source. Students often tell me that they have been told that you need not repeat the citation until the source itself changes, but this is not correct! The MLA Handbook is very clear on this: every sentence that contains outside material MUST contain a parenthetical citation. Even if you must keep repeating the same citation (that is, even if you have many successive sentences that quote or paraphrase from the same source), you may not leave a citation out of a sentence that contains any material (whether quoted or paraphrased) from a source. Otherwise, you are asking your reader to read your mind to figure out what material came from the source and what material is your own analysis. And, more to the point, you are risking charges of plagiarism by crafting an individual sentence that contains outside material without acknowledging that within the sentence. This is one of the areas in which I, as a grader, am very strict, because it is difficult for me to decide whether the lack of citations is mere sloppiness/ignorance on the student's part or whether the lack of documentation indicates an intent to cheat and pass off someone else's material as one's own.



(3) DO NOT use ellipsis dots ( . . . ) at the beginnings or ends of quotations (even when you pull out only parts of sentences); use them only WITHIN a quotation to indicate that a word or words have been left out of the middle [see Part II-B(2) below] (notice here I just now flipped parentheses into brackets when the material inside the parentheses contained parentheses!). Do not put brackets around elipses that you insert into quotations.



During Henry VIII's reign, many economic problems came from "the enclosure of land . . . used as pasture for sheep belonging to the greater landlords" (Weir, Children 24).





(B) Quoting from Literary Sources (poems, plays, novels):

When in the paper itself you quote from literary works, be particularly sensitive to poetry vs. prose: type poetic lines exactly the length as they appear in the book, inserting a "slash mark" to indicate line-breaks for poetry. If you quote prose (criticism, a novel, short story, some plays, even some passages from otherwise "poetry"-type plays--such as Shakespeare--when the speaker's lines look like a paragraph rather than like a poem), then treat it as you would ANY prose passage--that is, DON'T insert any slash marks and DO type the lines continuously like any normal sentences.



Plays, poems, fiction, and non-fiction are each slightly different in the technique of citation, but all operate under similar logic:

EXAMPLES:



Hamlet proposes that "in that sleep of death what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause" (Ham. 3.1.65-67).



Marlow's first major vision of Africans occurs in a dark grove: "'they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now--nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom'" (Conrad 31).



Lycidas died because of that "perfidious Bark" which was "rigg'd with curses dark, / That sunk so low that sacred head of thine" (lines 100-02).







ABOUT THESE EXAMPLES--NOTICE:



that a slash mark indicates the line-breaks in poetry when you are not using a block quotation, and the prose passages do not use any slash marks and are typed like normal prose across the page,



that a Shakespearean play title (if your paper deals with more than one play) is indicated with an abbreviation underlined (the MLA Handbook contains a list of abbreviations for Shakespearean plays at 6.7.2, but you can also see them on my syllabus); act, scene, and line numbers (in that order) are placed as arabic numerals followed by periods,



that the first time you reference a poem, use the word "lines" inside the parentheses, but thereafter you need use only the numerals,



that when you quote material which in the TEXT already has quotation marks around it, you replace them with single quotation marks and place your own double quotation marks on the outside (see Conrad quotation above) (and remember that if the text is British and they reverse this convention, it is good for you to reverse them to the American style).







(C) Block Quotations:



If you quote (a) prose which, when typed in your paper, will make up five or more lines of your paper, or (b) quote four or more lines of poetry, then you must do a block quotation. Double space the block, even though I will single space it here.





EXAMPLES:





It is unclear exactly how Mary viewed the accession of her younger brother, Edward, to the English throne:



Mary's reaction to her father's death is not recorded, although she was in Whitehall Palace at the time. What is known is that she was angry with Hertford for not coming to pay his respects to her for some days afterwards. Within a short while she had left court and taken up residence in one of her own houses. Thereafter, her visits to the capital were rare and mainly through her own choice. (Weir, Children 26)



The new King Henry makes a vow to absolve his past sins:



I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land,

To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.

March sadly after, grace my mournings here,

In weeping after this untimely bier. (R2 5.6.49-52)



NOTICE that in a block quotation, the quotation marks are left out, the passage of poetry is typed in lines that appear exactly as they appear in the book (poetry is not run-on across the page), and the parenthetical citation appears after the final period (the opposite of method for working quotations into your sentences normally).





SUGGESTION:



Use block quotations sparingly: in a short paper (say, 10 pages), I would use block quotations only two or three times at the MOST. Otherwise, the paper appears to be a mosaic of big chunks of other people's writing. Your paper should show off your thinking and your digestion of outside material (paraphrases) as you argue your points. The best method is to weave quotations into your sentences a little at a time and to use paraphrases when you are dealing with historians, critics, etc. See Section II below for further discussion.





(D) Citing Online Sources:



I allow online sources only in limited cases, and in some classes none at all, so please be sure to check your assignment sheet carefully to see what kinds of limitations are in place for your class. In general, be careful about citing internet sources written by anyone who does not give his/her credentials to indicate how much of an authority on the subject s/he is. Printed publications have been rigorously refereed by established scholars, so that we may be relatively assured that what appears in a printed journal or book is reliable and accurate. However, anyone can put anything online at any time. Therefore, do not assume that I will count any website as a bona fide source in your research paper. If it is a website we have used in this class, I will accept that as a source. Otherwise, it is prudent to check first with me before you use the site in your paper.



In general, the rules for documenting quotations or paraphrases from websites are comparable to any other kind of material. If there is no discernible author of the webpage, put its title in the parenthetical citation. If there are page numbers or paragraph numbers, use them after the author's name or the title. If there are no page numbers or paragraph numbers, then use only the author's name or the title in parentheses. To list it on your Works Cited (see below), list the following basic information:



Author's name. "Title of the document." Information about print publication, if applicable. Information about electronic publication, if applicable. Access information. Date accessed.

OR

"Title of the document." Information about print publication, if applicable. Information about electronic publication, if applicable. Access information. Date accessed.



Thomas More's son-in-law, William Roper, said that Henry VIII "devised a causeless quarrel against [More's] father, keeping him in the Tower till he had made him pay a hundred pounds fine" (qtd. in "St. Thomas More").



NOTICE here that I have also given you a form for a quote-within-a-quote, where the person who said it (William Roper) is significant and should be given credit, though you are taking the quotation from not Roper's book but a source who quotes him. I also am giving you here an example of how to insert a clarifying word into a quotation, since the original said "quarrel against his father," and my sentence made it unclear whose father was being discussed until I inserted [More's] in brackets to clarify. (See style section below.)







(E) The Works Cited Page



Step Two is to make sure that every work you refer to in your paper also has an entry on your Works Cited page (a separate page at the END of your paper which is simply titled Works Cited centered at the top of the page). The Works Cited page should be double spaced throughout. Your reader will look for the citation on the Works Cited page based on the information you give in the parentheses in the text of your paper; therefore, you must be careful. In the example from Cleanth Brooks quoted above, you MUST put the entry on the Works Cited page under "Brooks, Cleanth" since you wrote "(Brooks 82)" as the citation (you may not list this work on the WC page under "Keesey," the editor of the book where the Brooks article appears). Here is the Works Cited page for the above examples-- notice that they are double spaced with no extra space between:



Works Cited



Brooks, Cleanth. "Irony as a Principle of Structure." Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1987. 82-90.

Cirlot, J. E. A Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. Jack Sage. New York: Philosophical Library, 1962.

"Copernicus." The Catholic Encyclopedia. 2nd edition. 352-54.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.

Milton, John. Lycidas. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 809-14.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 1141-86.

---. Richard II. The Riverside Shakespeare. 847-81.



"St. Thomas More." The Catholic Encylopedia Online. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14689c.htm>.



31 July 2003.



Weir, Alison. The Children of Henry VIII. New York: Ballantine, 1996.



---. The Life of Elizabeth I. New York, Ballantine, 1998.



NOTICE that if you need to cite more than one piece out of the same book (as in the Shakespeare examples here), you need give full bibliographic information about the book on the Works Cited page only once. Notice also (1) the use of three hyphens instead of repeating the author's name, (2) the use of page numbers at the end of any "self-contained entry like an article or a poem or a play (but not simply passages out of a single-author book), (3) the practice of alphabetizing the entire Works Cited by the authors' last names (and within by the works' titles if you cite more than one work by the same author, in which case you use three hyphens in place of the author's name after your first entry). This method is not difficult, once you get used to the logic behind it. Consult the MLA Handbook if you need to cite kinds of documents other than the ones listed above.





II. Paper-writing Strategies



(A) Always Incorporate a Quotation into Your Sentence



Although you will find that many critics use a variety of methods (some of them better than others) to incorporate quoted material into their essays, here are some guidelines to producing SMOOTH and UNDERSTANDABLE uses of quotations:



always place a quotation INSIDE your own SENTENCE somehow. A quotation that stands alone as a separate sentence is called a "dumped quote" because it is just "dumped" into the paper, and although you may see this kind of poor style committed even in published material from time to time, your writing will be best if you avoid dumped quotes. Here is an example:



POORLY WRITTEN (these are what I call "dumped quotes"):



The Ghost delivers the ultimate shock to Hamlet. "The serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears the crown" (Ham. 1.5.39-40).



At first, the British statesmen did not tell Edward that his father, Henry VIII, was dead. "They bade the Prince prepare to visit his sister Elizabeth at Enfield, but did not tell him anything further" (Weir, Children 25).



DISCUSSION: The above examples are "dumped quotes" because each is "dumped" into the paper without any connective tissue, such as an introductory phrase. You can correct this example by simply using a colon to connect the sentence to the lines of the play, or some form of the verb "says," as long as the lines quoted make a grammatical unit that can stand on its own and be understood.





WAYS TO CORRECT DUMPED QUOTES:



You may use a colon to introduce a quotation and thus tie together the two disparate sentences, or you may use more sophisticated sentence-combining techniques to create a single sentence, or you may use simply some form of "says" to introduce the quotation, as in the following examples:



The Ghost delivers the ultimate shock to Hamlet: "The serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears the crown" (Ham. 1.5.39-40).



At first, the British statesmen did not tell Edward that his father, Henry VIII, was dead; instead they simply "bade the Prince prepare to visit his sister Elizabeth at Enfield, but did not tell him anything further" (Weir, Children 25).



At first, the British statesmen did not tell Edward that his father, Henry VIII, was dead. Weir points out that "They bade the Prince prepare to visit his sister Elizabeth at Enfield, but did not tell him anything further" (Children 25).



Keep in mind, also, that in the text of your paper, you will want to use a VARIETY of methods of incorporating quotations-- a paper that keeps repeating phrases like "Brooks says that" or "Weir argues," will become monotonous in style. See the next section for examples.

(B) Be Aware of Your Style, Throughout the Paper



The best papers try to use a variety of methods for incorporating quotations into the sentences of the paper, for the simple reason that the same method over and over becomes repetitive and boring. Do NOT overuse block quotations (use no more that two or three in a ten-page paper). Here are a few other suggestions:

(1) You can (occasionally) use "says" (or variations on the verb, such as "states," "reasons," "offers" and so on) as a way to introduce a quotation. This can become repetitive, so be careful not to overdo this one.



EXAMPLE: When the Ghost delivers the ultimate shock to Hamlet, he says, "The serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears the crown" (Ham. 1.5.39-40).



NOTICE the punctuation (a comma AFTER the word "says"). IF you make a variation on this (using the word "that"), then you will omit the comma, like this:

When the Ghost delivers the ultimate shock to Hamlet, he says that "The serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears the crown" (Ham. 1.5.39-40).



(2) Another method is to try to use quoted words to complete your own sentence. This method can offer a great deal of wonderful variety to your style of writing! Still, it can be a little tricky because of grammatical problems that may arise when you try to shove someone else's words into your own sentence. If you need to insert a letter, or change an existing verb's tense, or insert a simple clarifying word into the quotation, do so with brackets [ ], (and if your typewriter/printer doesn't have brackets you may draw them in by hand, but in any event DO NOT SUBSTITUTE PARENTHESES). If you find you must leave out any word or words, use three ellipsis dots ( . . .) to indicate this, and if the ellipsis dots occur at the END of a sentence, place the sentence's period first and then a space and three dots after that: "and that's that. . . . Still, be very careful" (Baumlin 5).

EXAMPLES:



Hamlet argues angrily with his mother that it is "not alone my inky cloak, good mother, / Nor . . . all forms, moods, shapes of grief, / That can denote me truly" (Ham. 1.2.77-83).



Hamlet's "inky cloak . . . of grief" is nothing compared with "that [grief] within which passes show" (Ham. 1.2.77-85).



At the end of the novel, Conrad leaves us with a vision of the Thames River as "that tranquil waterway . . . [which] seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness" (94).



Hamlet reveals in soliloquy that his own silent judgment of his mother's untimely marriage to his uncle "break[s] my heart, for I must hold my tongue" (Ham. 1.2.159).



At first, the British statesmen merely "bade the Prince [Edward] prepare to visit his sister Elizabeth at Enfield," but they "did not tell him anything further" about the state of his father's health (Weir, Children 25).



NOTICE the greater variety of sentence constructions that you can use when you learn how to weave quoted material into your own sentences. If you put into one sentence lines from two DIFFERENT parts of the work OR from two different works, simply put the parenthetical citation after EACH quotation, like this:



Marlow sees life as "'that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose'" (Conrad 86), but Hamlet comes to believe that "There's a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will" (Ham. 5.2.10-11).



Antonio "hold[s] the world . . . / A stage" (MV 1.1.77-78), while King Lear likens the world to "this great stage of fools" (Lr. 4.6.183).



CAUTION: Every time you use quotations, be sure to preserve the grammatical integrity of the ENTIRE sentence. TEST: imagine that the quotation marks are invisible--does the sentence still read clearly and correctly? If not, you will need either to tinker with your part of the sentence or insert a word in brackets in the quotation to improve the grammar. This is a crucial concept.





(C) Some Simple Advice



When you are using quotations in your paper, try to avoid referring to book titles and numbers such as act, scene, line, page, section numbers, or chapter numbers in your own sentences; whenever possible, save all such references for the parentheses in the sentence. Here are examples:



NOT ADVISABLE:



In act two, scene one of The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio says at line 182 that he will call her "Kate, for that's your name, I hear" and later at lines 185 to 190 he calls her "Kate" ten times.



At line 65, Milton laments how useless it is to "tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade."



On page 25 of The Children of Henry VIII, Weir says that the councilors "bade the Prince prepare to visit his sister Elizabeth at Enfield, but did not tell him anything further."



NOTICE how the above sentences are cluttered with information that can be easily moved into one short parenthetical citation. If the writer shifts this information into the parenthetical citation, this can free her or him to use the sentence to offer more important analysis or simply to be more articulate.



BETTER:



When Petruchio first lays eyes on Katherine, he calls her "Kate, for that's your name, I hear" and then proceeds to call her "Kate" ten times in one speech (Shr. 2.1.182 and 185-90).



Milton laments how useless--even "thankless" (66)--it is to "tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade" (65).



EXCEPTIONS: Of course, if the text of your paper in its content is meant to examine the structure of a work--how one scene mirrors another scene, for example, or how one line LOOKS when contrasted with another, or how one chapter of a book is to be distinguished from another--directing attention to chapters or scene numbers is perfectly fine. A general rule of thumb: don't talk about chapter number, line numbers, page numbers, or act/scene numbers if you don't need it as part of your argument.



Some Advice on Structure and Content:



(1) In terms of structure, offer ONE strong introductory paragraph that ends in a unified thesis statement. For some odd reason, students are now writing two introductory paragraphs, one that eases into the topic and then a second that ends in a thesis statement. This is one of the most common errors I see nowadays. It is problematic because most readers go to the end of the first paragraph to locate the thesis and see whether this article is something s/he wants to continue reading, so in this two-paragraph-intro scheme, the reader will be totally misled by the first paragraph. Also, the two-paragraph-intro method usually creates short, choppy paragraphs, while a good introductory paragraph should be about one page in length, maybe slightly longer, to indicate that a healthy argument is to follow. But, in any event, the thesis statement must reside as the last sentence of the first paragraph in papers written in my classes.



(2) This thesis statement should reflect the basic argument of the entire paper, and a good paper will be strongly focused on a single, unified argument. The focus of the entire paper is one of the most crucial aspects of a good paper; a second element is the depth of the content-- is the analysis throughout the paper strong and clear? Try to avoid plot summary when you are dealing with literature or history; assume that your reader has read the literary work you are analyzing or is familiar with the historical period you are examining; use the quotations or paraphrases in order to prove your argument rather than to retell the story.



(3) Use of Outside Material:



In general, as a grader of papers, I'd say that the next most prevalent element that drives down grades is the lack of finesse in quoting from sources (this takes two extreme forms--not quoting literary or critical sources very much at all or, on the other hand, quoting too much and achieving a shallow "mosaic" effect). Sometimes this lack of finesse even borders on or dips into plagiarism, as when a student uses a lot of paraphrased information but does not tell me the source that has given information into each sentence.

Quite often I find that a student may turn in a paper that contains strong content--sometimes very original ideas, brilliant conclusions--but the style of the paper, awkwardness in the use of quotations, and a general inability to FIND the RIGHT quotations all conspire to prevent that brilliant argument from coming together in its most convincing way.

I have several files of excellent sample student papers in my office; you are welcome to drop by or make an appointment to glance through these student papers, looking at content, structure, quotation strategies, and so on.

The most important element to improvement of paper writing may be this one: do not procrastinate!!! Write a draft of the paper at least two weeks before the due date, so that you can ask the questions that arise and can "work out the bugs" before you must turn in the paper. Often, writing the paper and putting it away for 24 or 48 hours can help you approach it with "new eyes." Also, reading someone else's paper can help you come back to your paper with "new eyes" to see mistakes, missed strategies, and places where the paper can be strengthened.

























Shakespearean Criticism: An Overview



Since the catalog description for this course includes "criticism" as an element of the course content, we will spend a significant amount of time talking about the various ways that Sh's works have been read and approached. There is a useful summary of many years of Sh'ean criticism in Raymond Powell, Sh and the Critics' Debate (through 1980) and in Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (2001), on reserve in the library, if you are interested. In the late decades of the 20th century, there was an explosion in the field, mostly due to the impact of the explosion in contemporary Critical Theory. In fact, many of the most current trends in Critical Theory began in Sh'ean studies (New Historicism, for instance). Currently, pure Historical Criticism and "New Criticism" (formalism) are no longer dominant in Sh'ean criticism, though elements of either or both may turn up in any given piece of criticism. Today, some of the most influential strands of current criticism include: Feminist Criticisms, Rhetorical Criticism (including Metalinguistic and Metadramatic Criticism), New Historicism (Cultural Poetics/Cultural Studies), Reader Response Criticism, Performance Text Theory, Reception Theory, Materialist (Marxist) Criticism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Archetypal/Jungian Criticism, Semiotics, Speech Act Theory, Queer Theory, and the list goes on. Even the briefest look at these newer trends in this exciting and burgeoning field will offer some new and useful--and, perhaps, disturbing--ways to look at Sh's plays. We will encounter several of these strands along the way in this course, though we will not attempt to cover them all, nor even to "cover" any single strand of criticism. Neither do I wish to convince you that any specific kind of critical approach is better than another: my goal is to give you a taste (but, admittedly, only a taste) of the great variety of ways to look at Sh. While my personal goal is to maintain an equal curiosity and tolerance for all these approaches--and I hope that you will learn to develop the same--I also know from experience that there will probably be one or more times this semester when our discussions will push your own personal "buttons." I have noticed that people seem to argue more passionately about Sh than about any other literature. This is normal (though it may not be healthy). Remind me sometime to tell you about the time I threw a book of Sh'ean criticism at the wall of my study. Nevertheless, we will strive for curiosity and tolerance, and perhaps we will even develop some delight along the way about the incredible varieties of view that exist, even if one does not personally agree with many of them. There is no need to defend any particular view in class discussions; I will not be doing so, and neither will you, though you may certainly do so in your paper.



If you would like to know more about the theories themselves--how and when they developed--the best single general discussion of Critical Theory that I know is Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), though a reader should keep in mind that it is written by a Marxist critic who, fortunately, makes no bones about his political/critical affiliation. The book is fun reading, with Eagleton's humorous and engaging style, and most accurate in its discussions of the history of literary criticism and the origins and applications of the various strands of Critical Theory now in practice. Another good book is A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1993).



There are also several recent critical books that rather vigorously attack the newer trends in Sh'ean criticism: most notorious are the recent books by Harold Bloom (Sh and the Invention of the Human, and The Western Canon), but there's also Graham Bradshaw's Misrepresentations: Sh and the Materialists (1993); Brian Vickers' Appropriating Sh: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (1993); R. A. Foakes' Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Sh's Art (1993). An earlier example is Richard Levin's "Feminist Thematics and Sh'ean Tragedy" (PMLA 103 [March, 1988]: 125-38), which opposes feminist criticism on the grounds that it takes the play out of the historical context and forces modern viewpoints into it. Others have countered this kind of opposition by arguing that we cannot escape being modern readers, since even a reading that attempts to place a play in the historical context of Sh's lifetime is nevertheless a twentieth century reading and cannot claim to understand fully the age. Our entire notion of history itself must be called into question (see "New Historicism" later in the course), according to the newer line of thinking, and many current critics would argue that any reading that seeks to free itself of the political arena is, in itself, a political approach.



In the area of Sh'ean Biography, here is a sketch: Some new and useful biographies are Catherine Loomis's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Volume (vol. 263 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography) and Stanley Wells's Shakespeare: For All Time (2003). Shakespeare by Michael Wood (also a multi-part television show on BBC/PBS) is unfortunately flawed by the author's attempts to convince us that Sh was a Catholic and an anti-monarchist without acknowledging this hidden agenda and without acknowledging the complexities in the "facts" he states. By contrast, Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) clearly labels speculations and conjectures and comes up with many intriguing possibilities. Useful for secondary teachers is Eyewitness: Shakespeare by Peter Chrisp and Steve Teague (2002), a short biography with many photographs and useful, basic material about the man and the culture. For most of the later twentieth century, the "standard" scholarly biographer of Sh was Samuel Schoenbaum: his Sh's Lives (1970; rev. ed. 1991) offers details of the scant known facts, along with reams of material on the voluminous legends about the man; Sh: A Documentary Life (1975) reproduces many pictures and documents; Sh and Others discusses some of the Prior to Schoenbaum, the principal biography was E. K. Chambers' William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols, 1930). Marchette Chute's Sh of London (1949) is easy and fun reading, though not as reliable factually as Schoenbaum or Chambers. Some recent versions of the Sh biography include: Russell Fraser's Young Sh (1988) and Sh, The Later Years (1992), Peter Thomson's Sh's Professional Career (1992), Ian Wilson's Sh: The Evidence (1993), Dennis Kay's Sh: His Life, Work, and Era (1992), Park Honan's Sh: A Life (1998). There are many works devoted to arguing that Sh did not write the plays, but since these are not strictly "Sh'ean" criticism (such scholars tend to be called "Oxfordians" or "anti-Shakespeareans") they will not concern us here.



On the time period and culture, E. M. W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture (1946) is a "standard" work, although current scholarship and criticism is now calling into question this earlier "picture" of the culture (see the discussion on New Historicism later in this packet). I believe this book is still useful as a starting place to understanding the basic culture of the time.



What follows in this packet will be brief descriptions of a strand of critical theory and its application to Shakespeare studies that we will base our class lecture/discussions upon. After each description follows a "sampling" bibliography in that strand of Sh'ean criticism. These bibliographies are by no means fully representative bibliographies and they are not in full MLA form; the attempt is to acquaint you with some of the major names in that field of criticism and to include references for the works we will discuss in our classroom application of it, along with a few new notable books. Some works will appear on more than one list, because nowadays most critics combine various strands of criticism. Our library owns many of the books listed, as do I (please ask me if you are having difficulty finding a particular book). The "sampling" bibliographies will not include any bibliographical studies (that is, books about editing the plays or about the controversies regarding word variants in the differing editions). If at some point you need to do any bibliographic work on Shakespeare, I suggest consulting first the textual study portion at the back of each of the plays in the Riverside Shakespeare; also Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, A Textual Companion to Shakespeare can probably tell you anything you want to know about the text itself, or the history of that text, of any play you are studying.











Source Study: A (Possible) First Step in Renaissance Criticism





To conduct advanced study in the literature of the Renaissance or Early Modern age, one must first understand some basic principles of source use in that time period. Unlike today, when we tend to value absolute originality most highly, Renaissance artists believed that a work is best generated out of pre-existing sources. (Copyright laws were only beginning to become an issue.) "Imitation"-- of a contemporary or, better yet, a classical (Greek or Roman) writer--was a highly prized talent in the Renaissance poet. But we must understand what the age meant by "imitation," for the Renaissance artist saw pre-existing sources as a means to generate his own (original, perhaps) perspective, since he could take for granted that his audience was familiar with the source material and thus he could use his own work as a departure in some way or other. "Imitation" did not mean that one simply adopted wholesale the voice or style or subject of the predecessor.



Note, for example, what Ben Jonson (a contemporary of Shakespeare's) wrote in his personal journal about this topic:



A requisite in our Poet, or Maker is imitation, to be able to convert the substance or Riches of another Poet to his owne use. To make choise of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him till he grow very Hee, or so like him as the Copie may be mistaken for the Principall. Not, as a Creature that swallowes what it takes in, crude, raw, or undigested, but that feedes with an Appetite, and hath a Stomacke to concoct, devide, and turne all to nourishment. (Timber 1: 53-54; italics are Jonson's)



Notice that a simple consuming of the source is not urged but rather a digestion of it. Often poets in Sh's age referred to such a source-based work as a "counterfeit."



Two modern post-structuralist critical theorists use some similar terminology (by the way, they are not discussing Renaissance poetry specifically, but instead the principles of poetic creation in general). Harold Bloom writes that poets both find inspiration in and struggle against their predecessors--a reaction to what he calls the "anxiety of influence." Thus poetry must engage in combat with its predecessor, even if the predecessor is not strictly a "source" of the new poem. Bloom points out: "The poet's conception of himself necessarily is his poem's conception of itself, in my reading, and central to this conception is the matter of the sources of the powers of poetry," for "the truest sources, again necessarily, are in the powers of poems already written" (Bloom 3) [in "The Breaking of Form" in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Geoffrey Hartman, New York: Continuum, 1979]. Students who are shocked to find out that Shakespeare had sources for almost all his plays (and thus didn't actually invent most of the plots and characters, himself) might take note here, for Bloom is suggesting that any artist in ANY age does not invent entirely "new" art: any artist necessarily makes use of the art of his or her predecessors.



J. Hillis Miller finds it essential to the composing process (in any age) that the "host" poem (the original work) becomes "food, host in the sense of victim, sacrifice":



The previous text is both the ground of the new one and something the new poem must annihilate by incorporating it, turning it into ghostly insubstantiality, so that the new poem may perform its possible- impossible task of becoming its own ground. The new poem both needs the old texts and must destroy them. It is both parasitical on them, feeding ungraciously on their substance, and at the same time it is the sinister host which unmans them by inviting them into its home. ("The Critic as Host," in Hartman, cited above, 225)



These views of poetic art are particularly applicable to the Renaissance poet, who deliberately adopts a pre-existing text as his inspiration but must also somehow fashion his own poetic voice in the process. And that violence that Miller cites as a necessary part of the psychological process of aesthetic creation is certainly implied in Jonson's earlier metaphor of "digestion" of the "food" of source material. By the way, both Bloom and Miller are incorporating elements of deconstruction here but are principally relying on psychoanalytic tenets, implying that the poet must always work through the classic Oedipal complex in relation to his poet-"father(s)"-- he must do battle with the father and kill him in some metaphoric manner if he is to find his own adulthood (that is, if he is to create his own poem that can stand on its own). Stay tuned for our later discussion of Psychoanalytic Criticism.



Therefore, any time one wishes to embark on deeper critical exploration of one of Shakespeare's works, a useful place to start may be a comparison of Shakespeare's work with the source material. However, one's task in such an adventure is to find the places where Shakespeare departs from the source, where he changes the character or the plot, in order that one may demonstrate ultimately how Shakespeare is fashioning his own work and creating his own legacy in the process. Your Riverside Shakespeare contains a section called "Chronology and Sources" if you wish to look at the list of proposed sources for any given work. Keep in mind, also, that for non-English works, one needs to be certain to use the translation that was available in Shakespeare's day, if indeed he would have used a translation. How is one to know? Check the following multi-volume reference work (we have it in our library; I also own a set) by Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957), which summarizes decades of scholarship on the subject and which actually reprints the applicable passages from all probable sources.



Be aware that, in terms of publishing on Shakespeare, source-study alone is no longer fashionable. But many published critics nowadays find that to build a case for almost any "new" reading of Shakespeare, source-study can provide excellent material as grounds for a larger argument. For our purposes now, as we begin, we'll examine how a source-study can help us explore Shakespeare's relationship to his material and his fashioning of his own voice. Along the way in this course, we will discuss ways in which knowing Shakespeare's source material can help illuminate specific problems as well as create new ones.



Stuart Gillespie, Sh's Books: A Dictionary of Sh's Sources (2001), may be useful for any kind of source study you may wish to do, as well as Geoffrey Bullough (mentioned above). A recent book discusses imitation as a thematic device within Sh's own works: Mark Taylor, Sh's Imitations (2002).







Shakespearean Feminist Criticisms





In criticism today, we encounter a problem in terminology: "feminist criticism" can result in radically different readings of any given work, and it is a mistake to think that a feminist reading necessarily results in a hostile or negative approach to the author's view of women. Literally, a "feminist" reading means simply a reading that is centered on the woman's experience, the woman's concerns-- what happens to the "feminine" in this play? However, so far, this question has resulted in at least two oppositional strands of feminist criticism in the field of Shakespeare (though this is admittedly an oversimplified division) as outlined below. I should also mention that some critics combine a feminist approach with some other approach(es), such as psychoanalytic, new historicist, deconstruction, or materialist/marxist, and often this added theoretical flavor will tend to determine whether the reading is "hostile" to the "conventional" (celebratory) readings of Shakespeare or not. On the other hand, some feminist critics argue that these other approaches are "hostile" to the feminist perspective in various ways. There is a great deal of controversy in this particular field of criticism, and many people now believe that the term "feminist criticisms" better indicates the multiplicity of the field.



Consider this proverb that was common currency throughout the Early Modern time period: "An eloquent woman is never chaste." If we begin with even this most basic look at the culture's values, how might Sh's plays reflect discussion of this proverb?

Shakespeare the "Proto-Feminist"

Some feminist critics explore the notion that Sh's characterizations question the reigning, limiting assumptions about femininity in his own day (and in our own). These critics see Sh as a sort of "proto-feminist" or early feminist who was willing to portray and celebrate (in the context of the plays) strong women who went against the grain of their culture's expectations and are admirable for it, a playwright who criticized the tragic limitations placed on women in his culture.



Example: Irene Dash (Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Sh's Plays, 1981) says that "strong, attractive, intelligent, and humane women come to life in Sh's plays. They not only have a clear sense of themselves as individuals, but they challenge accepted patterns for women's behavior" (1). The Taming of the Shrew, for example, "offers a remarkably mature affirmation of the potential for understanding between a man and a woman" and also offers a triumph of unconventional wooing patterns over the stereotypes of the age (64).



Example: Coppelia Kahn ("The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage," MLS 5 [1975]: 88-102) says that in Shrew, Kate's outward submission in public is matched with an indefatigable private spirit of mischief: Petruchio "has gained Kate's outward compliance in the form of a public display while her spirit remains mischievously free" (98), since Kate's final speech "allows the speaker to dominate the audience" (99).



An Interesting Note: There is a 19th-century book called Sh's Heroines: Characteristics of Woman by "Mrs. Jameson" (actually, Anna Jameson) that, in many ways, presents a thoroughly 19th-century view of Sh's plays. However, it may be the first to assert that Sh presents an uncompromisingly positive view of femininity throughout his works, and to that extent it may be classified as a forerunner of the late 20th-century feminist criticisms that value Sh's view of women in his plays. (If you quote from this book in your papers, however, be sure to do so with the explicit acknowledgment of its historical context; do not quote from it as if it is just another piece of modern criticism!)



Shakespeare the Sexist

"There is no document of civilization

that is not also a document of barbarism." --Walter Benjamin



Although not a feminist critic himself, Walter Benjamin's Marxist/Materialist approach to the documents of our civilization is friendly to some feminist criticisms that offer readings more "hostile" to the conventional view of Shakespeare's plays, finding Shakespeare (a man) writing in a patriarchal (male-dominant) culture about women characters whom he portrays as either male-fantasy figures or as destroyers of masculinity who receive "just" punishment (in the context of the play) for their sins. Ultimately, according to this position, the plays display women who are either dangerous to or supportive of the "right" and "good" order of the world of the play, and their respective punishments or rewards thus ultimately reinforce the reigning attitudes about women in the Elizabethan culture.



Example: Linda Bamber (Comic Women, Tragic Men, 1982) says that in Shrew, Petruchio represents the "arrangements of society itself" (33); Kate "represents the Other very feebly while Petruchio is splendid and triumphant as a representative of the social Self." The battle ends in "complete humiliation for the feminine; insofar as it is a power struggle, Kate loses" (33). Kate is "less powerful, less wealthy, less cheerful, less in the playwright's confidence--less everything than Petruchio" (34). The play shows "Shakespeare at his most self-flattering: he imagines the feminine offering explicit social subservience without sacrificing its delightful equality as a sexual partner" (34). In other words, Kate's character is a male fantasy (Shakespeare's, specifically) because she is fiery in private but submissive in public.

A Sampling of Shakespearean Feminist Criticisms:



Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (2004) [I own a copy you may borrow]

Jonathan Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean (2004; uses also queer theory)

Cristina León Alfar, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy (2003)

Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women (2002)

Sarah Werner, Sh and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (2001) [on Shrew]

Dympna Callaghan, A Feminist Companion to Sh (2000); Sh Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (2000); The Weyward Sisters: Sh and Feminist Politics (1994); Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, and The White Devil (1988)

Heidi Hutner, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (2001)

Alison Findlay, A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (1999) [about women in Sh's audience]

Dympna Callaghan, ed. A Feminist Companion to Sh (2000)

Kate Chedgzoy, Sh, Feminism, and Gender (2001)

Marianne Novy, ed. Transforming Sh: Contemporary Women's Re-visions in Literature and Performance (1999)

Philippa Berry, Sh's Feminine Endings: Figuring Women in the Tragedies (1999)

Lisa Hopkins, The Sh'ean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands (1998)

Gillian Murray Kendall, ed. Sh'ean Power and Punishment (1998)

Irene Dash, Women's Worlds in Sh's Plays (1997); Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Sh's Plays (1981)

Georgianna Ziegler, Sh's Unruly Women (1997)

Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (1997); Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Sh (1981) [combines psychoanalytic with feminist]

Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Sh's English Histories (1997)

Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Sh's England (1996)

Lisa Jardine, Reading Sh Historically (1996); Still Harping on Daughters (1983)

Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Sh'ean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (1994)

Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Sh's Unruly Women (1994)

Marilyn French, Sh's Division of Experience (1981)

Angela Pitt, Sh's Women (1981)

Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in 17thCentury Drama (1981)

Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men (1982)

Marianne Novy, Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Sh (1984)

Kathleen McLuskie, "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure," in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (1985)

Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Sh's Plays (1985)

Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Sh's Plays (1985)

Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (1985)

Stevie Davies, The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Sh, and Milton (1986)

Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (1988) [combines rhet, fem, NH]

Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love & Sexuality in Engl RenDrama (1988)

Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (1990)

Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (1991) [combines fem, rhet, and New Hist]

Philip C. Kolin, Sh and Feminist Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography and Commentary 1975-1988 (1991)

Valerie Wayne, ed. The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Sh (1991) [combines Marxist and feminist perspectives]

Ann Jennalie Cook, Making a Match: Courtship in Sh and His Society (1991)

Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Sh's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (1992); also Shakespeare's Late Tragedies (1996) [combines feminist with psychoanalytic]

Evelyn Gajowski, The Art of Loving: Female Subjectivity and Male Discursive Traditions in Sh's Tragedies (1992) [combines feminist with psychoanalytic]

Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Sh'ean Drama (1992) [combines fem, psychoanalytic, and NH approaches]

Lynda E. Boose, "The Father and the Bride in Sh," in Ideological Approaches to Sh: The Practice of Theory, ed. Robert Merrix (1992)

Mary Ann McGrail, "Feminist Criticism and Macbeth: A Fundamental Question," in Ideological Approaches to Sh: The Practice of Theory, ed. Robert Merrix (1992)

Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992) [combines elements of deconstruction and feminist criticism)

Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (1992)

Susan Zimmerman, ed. Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (1992)

Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Sh'ean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (1993)

Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (1993) [includes some New Historicist aspects]

Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (1994) [combines feminist and Marxist perspectives]

Allison Findlay, Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (1994) [combines fem and NH]

Deborah Barker and Ivo Kamps, Sh and Gender: A History (1995)

Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (1996)

Suzanne L. Wofford, ed. Sh's Late Tragedies (1996) [a collection of essays from contemporary critical viewpoints--NH, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, etc.]

David Young, ed. Sh's Middle Late Tragedies (1993) [a collection of essays from contemporary critical viewpoints--NH, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, etc.]

Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether, ed. Sh'ean Tragedy and Gender (1996)

Juliet Dusinberre, Sh and the Nature of Women (1975) [the earliest; some now find it naive]

Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Sh (1980) [a collection of essays; the first self-named feminist work on Sh]

A Sampling of Works About Women and Culture in the Time Period: (not specifically Sh'ean criticism, but these contain a wealth of historical info about women and the culture in the Early Modern Period that may be useful to a research paper on the female perspective)



Christina Luckyj, "A Moving Rhetoricke": Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (2002)

Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seeff, ed., Attending to Early Modern Women (1998)

David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997)

Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance (1996)

Carole Levin and Patricia Sullivan, Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women (1995)

Elizabeth Hageman, ed., Women in the Renaissance: Selections from English Literary Renaissance (1988); includes a valuable bibliography of works about women in Sh's time period

Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (1991)

Joan Larsen Klein, Daughters, Wives and Widows (1992)

Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (1956) [the "standard" work in a pre-feminist age of criticism; it is still somewhat useful]

Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (1975) [again, not a feminist work, but he quotes many texts about women from the period that may be useful]

Roberta Hamilton, The Liberation of Women: A Study of Patriarchy and Capitalism (1978)

Patricia Labalme, ed., Beyond Their Sex (1980)

Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640 (1982)

Retha M. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (1983)

Margaret Patterson Hannay, ed., Silent But For the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (1985) [rhet focus]

Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, eds., Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy About Women in England 1540-1640 (1985)

Mary Beth Rose, ed., Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (1986)

Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (1986)

Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women's Work in England, 1500-1660 (1987)

Caroline Lucas. Writing for Women: The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance (1989)

Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, eds., The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon (1990)

Betty Travitsky and Adele Seeff, ed., Attending to Women in the Renaissance (1994)

Pamela Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (1992)

Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (1993)

Tita French Baumlin, "'A good (wo)man skilled in speaking': Ethos, Self-Fashioning, and Gender in Renaissance England," In Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Ed. James S. Baumlin and Tita F. Baumlin (Dallas: SMU P, 1994), 229-64.



Shakespearean Rhetorical or Metalinguistic Criticism



"Rhetorical criticism" used to be any kind of examination of a writer's rhetorical devices (metaphor, simile, tapinosis, zeugma--to name a few). As you can imagine, that kind of criticism often leaves one wondering the perennial question, "So what?" In this category, such "bygone" critics are Sister Miriam Joseph (Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language, 1947; Rhetoric in Sh's Time, 1962), and M. M. Mahood, (Sh's Wordplay, 1957), who are both still useful in limited ways. However, in the 1970s and 1980s there appeared and flourished a new slant on this method: examining Shakespeare's use of rhetorical devices in characterizations in order to determine larger thematic issues. This strand of criticism is called "Rhetorical Criticism" by some folk and "Metalinguistic Criticism" by others (presumably to distinguish it from the earlier kind of Rhetorical Criticism and from "Linguistic Criticism" or Semiotics). Here, the playwright's use of language is examined in order to speculate on the play's themes about human language, since language, after all, is the playwright's medium. Critics began to ask such questions as: how did Sh's culture view language itself? how does language function in the world of this play? how does language function for a dramatist? what might this work be suggesting to us about the ways in which language functions in our own worlds? Often, this examination of theme also leads the critic to see the playwright as a self-conscious user of language, that is, one who knowingly uses language in order to convey to an audience or reader the complexities, the problems, the agonies, and the ecstasies inherent in human language, which is that "thing" that distinguishes humanity from both the beasts and divinity. Sometimes critics in this field also examine the texts of the rhetoricians who were contemporary with Shakespeare (such as Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham, and others).



There have appeared some arguments against this kind of criticism. Margreta de Grazia, in "Sh's View of Language: An Historical Perspective," SQ 29 (1978): 374-88, insists that Sh's age was not troubled about language and therefore much of this kind of criticism is nonsense, because the deeply Christianized Renaissance culture saw the Pentecost as having solved all the problems of language for all time. In response, many of us argue that while this view of the Pentecost is indeed present in Renaissance writings, so are a number of other opposing attitudes toward language; thus I argue that De Grazia is ignoring the numerous texts from the period that reveal a deep ambivalence toward language that the Renaissance inherited from the classical ages (an ambivalence that still continues today in philosophy and rhetoric). For an excellent and detailed examination of this argument about the historical development of language theory in Shakespeare's day, see James L. Calderwood's appendix chapter in Metadrama in Sh's Henriad: this chapter contains a wealth of information about the rhetorical climate of the day and about Renaissance attitudes toward language as a medium of communication. For additional material about the history of the philosophical controversies about the nature of language, see Samuel Ijsseling's Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (1976).



Because of the intense focus on the uses of language in this type of criticism, some critics enlarge their discussion to include an examination of the ways that Sh's drama examines the genre of drama itself. Such criticism is often referred to as "Metadramatic" criticism (or "Metatheatrical"), and here the principle practitioner is James L. Calderwood.



A Sampling of Rhetorical and Metadramatic Criticism:



Trevor McNeely, Proteus Unmasked: Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric and the Art of Shakespeare (2004)

Christina Luckyj, "A Moving Rhetoricke": Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (2002)

Frank Kermode, Sh's Language (2000)

Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric from the Counter-Reformation to Milton (1994)

Kenneth J.E. Graham, The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (1994)

Peter Wolfensperger, Sh, Impartial and Partial: Strategies of Persuasion in the Comedies (1994)

June Schlueter, Dramatic Closure: Reading the End (1995)

Rawdon Wilson, Sh'ean Narrative (1995)

Patricia Parker, Sh from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (1996)

Pauline Kiernan, Sh's Theory of Drama (1996)

Frederick Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (1996)

Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England: 1500-1700 (2000)

Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Sh: Looking Through Language (2000)

N. F. Blake, A Grammar of Sh's Language (2001)

Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (1992)

Marjorie Donker, Sh's Proverbial Themes: A Rhetorical Context for the Sententia as Res (1992)

Christy Desmet, Reading Sh's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992)

Gert Ronberg, A Way With Words: The Language of English Renaissance Literature (1992)

Judd D. Hubert, Metatheater: The Example of Sh (1993)

Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Sh'ean (1994); also see Barton's introductions in The Riverside Sh

Robert F. Willson, Sh's Reflexive Endings (1990)

Tita French Baumlin, "Petruchio the Sophist and Language as Creation in Shrew," SEL 29 (1989): 237-57 [Reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism, vol. 64. Ed. Michelle Lee. Farmington Mills, MI: Gale, 2002. 273-83]; "Language and Ambiguity in AWW," EIRC 17 (1991): 125-43; "The Birth of the Bard: V&A and Poetic Apotheosis," PLL 26 (Spring 1990): 191-211 [Reprinted in Gale Research Shakespearean Criticism 51. Ed. Kathy D. Darrow and Michelle Lee. Detroit: Gale Research, 2000. 335-45]; "'A good (wo)man skilled in speaking': Ethos, Self-Fashioning, and Gender in Renaissance England," In Ethos Ed. Baumlin and Baumlin (1994), 229-64.

Timothy Hampton, Writing From History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (1990)

Maurice Hunt, Sh's Romance of the Word (1990)

William B. Bache, Design and Closure in Sh's Major Plays: The Nature of Recapitulation (1991)

Robert Owen Evans, The Osier Cage: Rhetorical Devices in R&J (1966)

Ralph Berry, Sh and the Awareness of the Audience (1985); Sh'ean Structures (1981); The Sh'ean Metaphor (1978); Sh's Comedies (1972)

Richard Lanhame ofM>The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (1976); also his Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (2nd ed. 1995) is a useful tool for defining and understanding rhetoric as a field in Sh's day (and in our own)

Madeline Doran, Sh's Dramatic Language (1976)

Lawrence Danson, various works, most notably Tragic Alphabet: Sh's Drama of Language (1974); The Harmonies of the Merchant of Venice (1978)

James L. Calderwood, Sh'ean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in Titus Andronicus, LLL, R&J, MND, and R2 (1971); To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet (1983); Metadrama in Sh's Henriad (1979); The Properties of Othello (1989); Macbeth and Tragic Action (1986); Sh and the Denial of Death (1987)

Marjorie Donker and George Muldrow, Dictionary of Literary-Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance (1982)

S. S. Hussey, The Literary Language of Sh (1982)

Marion Trouesdale, Sh and the Rhetoricians (1982)

James J. Murphy, ed. Renaissance Eloquence (1983)

Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth Century Study of Language (1984)

Karen Newman, Sh's Rhetoric of Comic Character: Dramatic Convention in Classical and Renaissance Comedy (1985)

Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (1988) [combines rhet, fem, and NewH]

Brian Vickers, Returning to Shakespeare (1989)







Shakespearean "New Historicism"

Some critics are now shifting the name of this method to "Cultural Poetics," so you may see either of these terms. "New historicism" can result in a lot of different readings, but basically, the new historicist approach seeks to reexamine history, to rewrite the history of an age to show that it was not one conventional, cultural voice, but instead a great many opposing voices competing for attention, negotiating for cultural attention. New historicism actually may be said to have begun in Sh studies when Stephen Greenblatt began to examine the ways in which Sh's plays reveal or imply various complexities about the society and political power structure in Elizabethan/Jacobean England. New historicism is still currently the place where the greatest amount of publications are occurring in Sh studies, along with "cultural studies," which is a term for a more generalized kind of new historicism that does not use the premises of "negotiations" and "social energy" that we will discuss here but that utilize historical research in more sophisticated ways that in the past. I will describe here the basic tenets of Stephen Greenblatt's approach, though you should be aware that various other new historicists do not accept Greenblatt's ideas wholesale, nor do all new historicists fulfill the very letter of what I will describe here. Also, keep in mind that you will no doubt find theorists and critics in other areas of literary studies who will define it in its most basic terms as a re-vision of history.



According to Greenblatt's method, political power is not merely a matter of one segment of society (the ruling class) controlling the mode of production (and therefore the wealth). On the contrary, political power is a matter of complex negotiations between the "empowered" as a social group and those various "powerless" groups (here, new historicism draws heavily on the critical theorist Michel Foucault and the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz). As such, those who wield power often court the favor of the powerless in various subversive ways, and vice versa: the social community, then, is made up of complex strands of social energy that circulates among the various negotiating individuals and/or groups. At some point in a new historicist exploration, the very terms "empowered" and "powerless" become meaningless, since there is a constant oscillation or give and take of power (this is where Greenblatt shows the influence of deconstruction). Political "power" then becomes a kind of illusion, a theatrical feat, which inscribes a certain link between the monarchy and the theatre and explains, Greenblatt argues, why Elizabeth and James loved the theatre so much.



Not that this kind of negotiation is altogether conscious, however, neither in terms of the participants (the actual historical people of Sh's time) nor the playwright himself. The new historicist, then, incorporates a few strands of methodology from other schools of critical theory: Materialist (marxist) criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and deconstruction, principally. The new historicist often locates examples of these circulating energies in Shakespeare's plays by quoting widely from a large body of thoroughly un-literary Elizabethan works (such as pamphlets, histories, behavior manuals, travelogues, memoirs, etc.) to demonstrate the ideologies of that culture, ideologies that then become applied to Sh's plays in an act often called "localizing" Sh's plays (or, reading the plays according to the "local" cultural climate in which they were written--another popular use of NH in Sh'ean studies). The plays, in turn, are often seen to have certain effects on the circulation of that social energy. Often new historicist titles will use the words "power" or "representation" (a re-presentation of a culture) or "circulations," though you'll seldom find the phrase "new historicism" anywhere in their works.



There are at least two main differences between the "old" and the "new" historicism:

(1) The earlier historical critics would have insisted that Shakespeare had to be conscious of (and therefore in control of) "what" he was writing about, that is, that a critic can't use public pamphlets or any other contemporary texts to illuminate Shakespeare's plays unless one can demonstrate (through word-links, allusions, etc.) that Shakespeare had read those specific works. The new historicist (along with practitioners of a few other contemporary theories, such as psychoanalytic, deconstruction, and materialist/marxist) operates on the premise that an "author" as such does not really "write" the literary text; rather, the culture (or, perhaps, the subconscious--the same thing, according to some schools of thought) writes the text in ways the author may not be aware of at all. Such a premise has been said by some to herald the "death of the author," a phrase that has provoked a wide range of reactions.



(2) The earlier historical assumption was that the "Elizabethan world picture" (to borrow E.M.W. Tillyard's famous book-title) was a singular, stable, definable culture adhered to by everyone, while the new historicist explores the notion that any given culture is never stable, is made up of countless perspectives that often operate in quite antithetical (and sometimes subversive) ways.



Stephen Greenblatt's books are exciting and energizing, in my opinion, because they open up wholly new ways to look at Sh's works and culture. Various other new historicists disagree with Greenblatt; for example, several critics find that his examinations (not his theories but his specific analyses of plays) are sexist; thus some new historicist critics have now gone about applying his theories in more gender-sensitive ways. Hence "new historicism" itself can produce several radically different readings of any one work. Other critics--materialist/marxists and some feminists, principally--argue rather vehemently with some of the basic new historicist theoretical viewpoints on politics and culture, as well as with their uses of criticism (see section on materialis/marxist criticism in this packet).

A sampling of Shakespearean New Historicism and broader Cultural Studies:



Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (2001); Practicing New Historicism (2000); Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1982); Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988); Representing the English Renaissance (1988); Marvelous Possessions (1991, about Columbus); Learning to Curse (a collection of many of his most celebrated essays); also note that Greenblatt's introductions to each play in The Norton Shakespeare (1997) are well worth citing

Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England (2004)

Jonathan Locke Hart, Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World (2003)

B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage (2003)

Natasha Korda, Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (2002)

Hugh Grady, Sh, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (2002)

Edward Berry, Sh and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (2001)

Louis A. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing (1996); "'The Place of a Brother': AYL: Social Process and Comic Form," SQ 32 (1981): 28-54; also "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Eliz'an Culture," in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt (1988), also rpt. in Wilson and Dutton listed below

Douglas Bruster, Sh and the Question of Culture (2003)

Jeffrey Masten and Wendy Wall, Institutions of the Text (2001)

Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (2000)

David Scott Kastan, Sh After Theory (1999)

Geraldo de Sousa, Sh's Cross-Cultural Encounters (1999)

Lisa Jardine, Reading Sh Historically (1996)

Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Sh, Marlowe, Milton (1996); Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (1988)

Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Sh and the Contemporary Past (1996)

Eric Malin, Inscribing the Time: Sh and the End of Elizabethan England (1995)

Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (1985)

Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Sh (1985)

Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display (1986)

Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds. Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (1986)

Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Sh's Comedies (1986)

Margaret Loftus Ranald, Sh and His Social Context (1987)

Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in Engl Ren Drama (1988)

Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (1988)

Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (1988)

Arthur Kinney, "Imagination and Ideology in Macbeth" and John Michael Archer, "Sovereignty and Intelligence in Lear"-- both in Ideological Approaches to Sh, ed. Robert Merrix (1989)

Harold Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (1989) [theory; not specif.Sh'ean]; also The New Historicism Reader

Janet Clare, "Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority": Eliz'an and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (1990)

Annabel Patterson, Sh and the Popular Voice (1990); also Reading Between the Lines (1993)

Deborah Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Ren: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (1990)

Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Sh and the Politics of Spectacle (1990)

Theodore B. Leinwand, "Sh and the Middling Sort," SQ 44 (1993): 284-303; The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613 (1986); "Negotiation and New Historicism," PMLA 105 (May 1990): 477-90 [not specifically Shakespearean, though some applications are made to Sh, but a useful discussion of what constitutes "New Historicism"]

Howard Dobin, Merlin's Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Ren England (1990)

Graham Holderness, Sh Out of Court: Dramatizations of Court Society (1990)

Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Ren Drama (1991)

Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Sh's England: A Cultural Poetics (1991)

Francois Laroque, Sh's Festive World: Eliz'an Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (1991)

David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Eliz'an and Jacobean Drama (1991)

Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Sh'ean Drama (1992)

Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton, eds. New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (1992) [includes helpful introductory essays on New Historicism/Cultural Poetics, Cultural Materialism (Marxism), and other subjects, and a glossary of Key Terms in Criticism]

Donna Hamilton, Sh and the Politics of Protestant England (1992)

Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England, 1993 [also fem]

Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Sh (1993)

Richard F. Hardin, The Varieties of English Political Thought (1993)

Steven Mullaney, "Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607," SQ 45 (1994): 139-62.

Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Lit from Utopia to The Tempest (1994)

Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric from the Counter-Reformation to Milton (1994)

Allison Findlay, Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (1994)

John Gillies, Sh and the geography of difference (1994)

Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994)

William C. Carroll, Fat King,, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Sh (1996)

Suzanne L. Wofford, ed. Sh's Late Tragedies (1996) [a collection of essays from contemporary critical viewpoints--NH, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, etc.]

David Young, ed. Sh's Middle Late Tragedies (1993)

Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance (1998)

Philip K. Bock, Sh and Elizabethan Culture: An Anthropological View (1984)







Shakespearean Reader Response and Performance Text Criticism



As one might expect, Reader Response Criticism (and its cousin, Reception Theory Criticism) focuses its attention on the ways readers read texts. And yet in practice, this criticism is not as idiosyncratic as such a definition may imply. Reader Response and Reception Theory grew out of the developing study of hermeneutics and phenomenology; the application of such inquiry, in the literary sphere, resulted in an increasing interest in a basic question: what does it mean to "read"--that is, to "experience"--a text? Some Reader Response theorists, such as Wolfgang Iser and Louise Rosenblatt, concentrate on searching for elements in the text that control the reader's response.



Other Reader Response critics such as Stanley Fish argue that the meaning, or the controlling devices, are not located in the text at all. For Fish, what the text "does" to a reader is more accurately a matter of what the reader does to the text, that is, it's a question of interpretation out of what one brings to the text. However, Fish is careful to avoid the obvious pitfall (expanding the text to millions of different, competing, idiosyncratic readings) by arguing that there are certain "interpretive communities" of readers who negotiate the meanings in a text. According to Fish, this accounts for varying--but not infinitely varying--responses to the text. Still other Reader Response critics delve more deeply into readers' psychological patterns of reading, often combining Reader Response with Psychoanalytic criticism.



In Shakespearean studies, this flavor of criticism also may incorporate investigation into Performance Text theory-- performance strategies and ways in which the plays ask to be performed on stage or in the "theatre of the mind." How does the text control the performances? Do audiences produce the performances in their responses? Hence, Performance Text Criticism may, in my opinion, be categorized along with Reader Response Criticism in dramatic studies. What are the "instructions" coded in the text that produce certain responses in directors, actors, audiences? Here, Performance Text Criticism may share some qualities with what we have called Metadramatic Criticism earlier in the course.



The following pages (the "sample assignment") show a strategy I've used with introductory students; this strategy is meant to explore some of the interpretive cruxes regarding knowledge, choice, and consequence which Hamlet forces on its readers or audience. My goal was to attempt to create a classroom of Hamlets, so that each student reader might be more keenly aware of the choices Hamlet considers at every turn.







A Sampling of Reader Response and Performance Text Criticism:



E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited: The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response (2002)

Younglim Han, Romantic Sh: From Stage to Page (2000)

Charles Frey, Making Sense of Sh (1999)

Barbara Hardy, Sh's Storytellers: Dramatic Narration (1997)

H.R. Coursen, Sh'ean Performance as Interpretation (1992)

Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (1992)

Martha Tuck Rozett, Talking Back to Sh (1994)

Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Sh's Historical Plays (1993)

Christy Desmet, Reading Sh's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992)

H.R. Coursen, Sh in Production: Whose History? (1996)

Michael E. Mooney, Sh's Dramatic Transactions (1990)

Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett, Analyzing Sh's Action: Scene Versus Sequence (1991)

Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland, eds. Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception (1991)

Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Sh, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (1991)

Kent Cartwright, Sh'ean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (1991)

Susan M. Bagnoli, Towards a Theory of Female Spectatorship: Empathic Identification and Sh's Cross-Dressed Characters (1989)

Mark Rose, Sh'ean Design (1972)

James E. Hirsch, The Structure of Sh'ean Scenes (1981)

Stephen Booth, Indefinition and Tragedy (1983); and "Twelfth Night and the Audience as Malvolio." In Sh's "Rough Magic": Essays for C.L. Barber Eds. Coppelia Kahn and Peter Erickson (1985)

Jean E. Howard, Sh's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984)

Philip McGuire, Speechless Dialect: S