G. Thompson
Drama: Traditional literary study sorts literary texts into (lyric) poetry, fiction, and drama, and SVSU's curriculum for English majors asks you to take one of these--they are also part of the curriculum for English education and creative writing. The idea is that by focusing on a genre you come to understand its unique characteristics, whether these are important to you for creating your own texts or for studying them or for teaching their conventions to others. Drama is unique in that what we are reading is not the primary text: plays are written to be performed, live, with significant differences between performances. We can do only so much in a classroom setting to intuit the missing elements of the text. What are some of these?
Staging. Directors have to decide on the period of the performance. Dr. Gates recently described a performance of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing set in revolutionary Mexico. Shakespeare did not have his Roman plays performed in togas, but in Elizabethan dress of the time, and directors now have a number of choices which throw the play's events into relief. You probably read about the Julius Caesar production this summer in which Caesar had a pronounced blond combover and a Melania-like Calpurnia at his side.
Sets. There has to be some sort of representation--even a bare stage is a representation. Realistic staging attempts to recreate fine granular detail, which is characteristic for plays of the late 19th-c.-early 20th-c. Other approaches may rely upon more stylized sets.
Music--this can be crucial for setting mood; Miller makes important use of music in Death of a Salesman, for example, to reinforce Willy Loman's withdrawal into memories of the past; Tennessee Williams does something similar in The Glass Menagerie.
Lighting--lights are used to direct attention, sometimes to a character who is not delivering lines.
Actors' performances / deliveries.
Presence of the audience. Plays are performed live--this is obviously distinct from film / video / television.
In reading scripts, we need to learn to make an effort to think about not only how lines are delivered, but to whom, and with what reactions. As we work through these plays, I will try to interrupt our proceedings to reflect on these in key moments.
For each play, the first class will try to situate the play in its culture and historical moment, with more or less depth depending. With some, such as The Merchant of Venice, the play's subsequent history, and subsequent events, have changed the play's reception significantly (it is much more about Shylock than it would have been originally). Intermediate classes will sort out the movement through the play's events and the emerging conflicts; terminal classes will draw out the significance for us.
How do you read plays? Depending on how foreign the play is to you, you may need to break it down into acts and scenes and read each several times before moving on. Start with the dramatis personae--who is the protagonist? Who are the characters allied to him/her? Who are the antagonists? Keep track of who is speaking and who is listening as you work through each scene. Highlight, annotate, and write notes for discussion. I'm not planning on having a journal or informal writings as a requirement this term, but if discussion begins to fall flat because people aren't keeping up with the reading, we may institute these. The readings for this semester are pretty light, so there should be no problem keeping up.
Back from sabbatical . . . here's how I got from that to the theme for this semester.
My project had to do with the vexing problem of critical thinking and how it is / is not being taught. There are several problems: no disciplinary home (if it's everyone's responsibility, it's no one's); impossibility of thinking critically if you lack background knowledge; philosophy-based approaches don't account for cognitive psychology, etc. We fall into cognitive traps when called upon to evaluate and use information.
These approaches also assume good faith on the part of participants, and if this year has taught us anything, it's that we should not assume good faith in discussions of public issues. Increasingly, many of us live inside our own informational bubbles or silos, and fail thereby to address the crucial matter of how to live together in a diverse and democratic society.
All this points to problems for which I don't have much of a solution, but I did come away with renewed interest in another aspect--when do we perceive the need for critical thinking? The informal logic textbooks and programs I became familiar with do not deal with timing--key moments of decision which define us in a crisis. (The term of art for this concept is kairos, and you'll hear me invoke this term from time to time.) These moments involve human beings in conflict, and here's where drama has something to say to us about what may prove to be crises in our own lives. Drama is essentially about conflict, pared down to its essential elements and acted out before us.
Aristotle writes about tragedy as catharsis, the purgation of pity and fear: in his culture, ancient Greece, excesses of these emotions were seen as harmful, and the audience for drama was to empathize with the characters represented, and thereby exorcize the extremes of these, so as to live a more moderate and regulated public life, aspiring to arete (translated sometimes as excellence, sometimes as virtue). We don't necessarily share this theory of the effect of drama, but it is still for us a representation in which we can consider human beings in times of crisis, so as to contemplate actions we might ourselves take in analogous moments.
With this in mind, I thought it useful to select plays for this semester in which the protagonists face moments of crisis of a public nature--not so much about domestic or individual issues, but those in which personal behaviors and codes of ethics come crashing up against forces from the wider community. We will work through these patterns--call them political dramas--in a number of contexts, always looking for areas of application to our own circumstances.
We will be looking then at plays which either treat political issues in themselves or which are connected to political issues, at the time of their performance or close to our own time. This involves what might be called a fusion of horizons, as those elements which resemble our own concerns loom larger for us, while those which do not match up for us recede from our sight. For example, in An Enemy of the People the specific concerns about disease transmitted by public water may not be relevant, but with the Flint water crisis in mind, maybe not all that much, and the general issues of inattentive bureaucracy and the workings of public opinion vs. one person's ethical actions are enduring.
[Political . . . I don't mean the Republican vs. Democrat sort. Politics has to do with how we relate to each other, with reference to power differentials. Students, professors, other groups among their peers might seem to be equals, and often are--but we aren't just that. Among professors, there are senior and junior levels, tenure-track and contingent, and less clearly, people who are and are not respected. There are power differentials in some contexts between men and women, between peoples of different races, between social classes, between religions, between regions. [Examples] Politics has to do with interpersonal relations, then, both in smaller groupings and in terms of the public sphere. In Lysistrata, a group relatively powerless in that society, women, asserts power through collective action to restrain the relatively powerful men. In The Merchant of Venice, the relatively weaker Shylock (and other Jews) becomes stronger because of his role as money-lender--until he overreaches. (Sometimes we are expected to consider characters as individuals, sometimes as representative of groups.)
You may be bored or put off by politics of the usual sort, referring to who gets elected to legislatures or Congress or the White House. Or you may be strongly engaged. But as we are considering politics as including both interpersonal relationships of power and individuals' relations to the public sphere, you can't get away from this sort of politics.
In some cases we look to art to get away from our daily concerns, and I'm supportive of escapism within limits. But IMO Americans do more escape than perhaps we should, and withdrawal into our own bubbles / silos (choose your metaphor) can be unhealthy.
Plays are devices to try out political conflicts at a safe distance. The closest to us we will come might be Stuff Happens, about political events ten years ago which are still having effects. (Any Iraq war veterans in the class?) But all of our plays have relevance to the present by implication. In some societies at some times, plays have been considered dangerous and subject to censorship. (One of Shakespeare's plays, Richard II, includes a scene in which the king has to abdicate, and that scene was not performed during Queen Elizabeth's lifetime because it might be considered threatening to a monarch with no direct descendants.) So plays often flirt with crossing a line between being relevant and being threatening to those with real power.
Plays may involve an individual, minority voice or perspective speaking back to an indifferent or hostile majority. While we may be sympathetic to the characters in Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun now, during a period of much more widespread racial segregation, a lot of the potential audience would not have wanted to confront the issues raised by the play. And while the situation in the baths in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People isn't directly related to us now, we have our own public health issues to confront. Flint water supply, anyone?
What happens when political concerns are transmuted into art? Do they become aesthetic, i.e., well-stated and appealing? Does the treatment on stage transfer into thoughtful consideration in the actual world? Do they become part of the cultural capital--cf. references to Angels in America in discussions of AIDS. [other examples]
As evidence that theater still has something to do with public issues, consider the performance this summer in New York of Julius Caesar. The play was done, as is often the case, in modern dress. Caesar, as is not often done, was consumed in "a blond pompadour and solid red and blue ties extending below his waist" (Washington Post). Calpurnia, his wife, speaks in what is meant to pass for a Slovenian accent, and dresses like a supermodel.
[Peter Marks, "When ‘Julius Caesar’ was given a Trumpian makeover, people lost it. But is it any good?" Washington Post, June 16, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/06/16/calpurnia-as-melania-octavius-as-jared-the-public-theater-goes-full-trump-with-julius-caesar-in-central-park/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_marks-1015pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.d94bf156d55c.]
“Now hold on a darn minute,” I hear some of you saying. “You’re telling me that a character resembling Donald Trump is fake-stabbed to death in a 400-year-old piece of fictionalized history by costumed people trained in the art of make-believe? Someone call out the National Guard!”
Others among you, I imagine, are better equipped to grasp the stunning information that seeing something enacted on a stage doesn’t mean you should go out and do it yourself.
But it's not just an innocent, politically unmotivated choice by the director, Oskar Eustis, to equip Caesar with totemic signs pointing to Trump, any more than Kathy Griffin chose to hold up an identifiable decapitated head. The placement of Trumpian signs into Julius Caesar provoked angry responses from Trump supporters (who did not attend the play, as I did not), in a manner far more significant because of the genre. Write a political stance into a poem or work of fiction, and you have no more outcry than did Lawrence Ferlinghetti for Tyrannus Nix or Philip Roth for Our Gang. (Marks points out that the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis cast a black Caesar in its 2012 production, with obvious connection to Obama, without any outcry.)
Drama is the most carefully watched of literary arts in terms of political consequences. Shakespeare had to contend with controls by the crown (Master of the Revels?)--cf. Shakespeare in Love for a fictional address of this issue. One scene in Richard II, the deposition of the king, was not played on stage during Queen Elizabeth's lifetime. Drama is a live event, subject to ad libs and departures from the script, as well as audience (over)reaction to portrayed events which are relevant to the political situation.
As you will see from the course syllabus, we are starting with Ibsen. I decided to go with Arthur Miller's adaptation, which isn't terribly far from other translations--he did cut a character and some lines in the process, and at times his mid-20th-c. idioms haven't survived, so the effect can be as stilted in its own way as some earlier translations. We will need to read An Enemy of the People with at least three horizons in mind: Norway / Sweden / Europe in late 19th-c., US circa 1950 / Cold War period, and present day. As you read, make note of anything that feels surprising to you in this respect.