Prospero's Books

Shakespeare behind Bars

Last month, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I showed Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller's film Shakespeare behind Bars, a 93-minute documentary on a production of The Tempest by inmates in Kentucky's Luther Luckett prison. Four observations:

• A prison, by definition, is a "closed system," increasing in entropy unless it can draw energy from outside. The introduction of The Tempest into the lives of the cast brings such energy, allowing for growth.
• The production process shown in the film is a remarkable example of how living systems grow and evolve by moving from organization through disorganization to reorganization. (The very word tempest suggests the necessary slip into chaos, and "chaos theory" can be said to have been born in Lorenz's study of complex weather systems.)
• With so little to distract them, the cast members--during several months of production--study and "live" their roles at a depth I've never seen before, in students or in actors. Shakespeare's fractal complexity constantly repays this effort.
• As the cast members perform a play that centers on forgiveness and redemption, they collectively and individually struggle with those issues in their own lives.

Shakespeare behind Bars is one of the best half-dozen Shakespeare films I've ever seen. I recommend it highly.

Alas, poor Yorick

Perhaps the most recognizable image from all of Shakespeare's plays is that of Hamlet contemplating a skull--the skull of Yorick, the court jester.

Why Yorick? While rereading Hamlet for my current "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I've come to understand one possible reason. The court of Claudius, the elder Hamlet's murderer and usurper, is a court without a jester--a court without anyone who can (to quote an old Quaker phrase) "speak truth to power."

One of the ways that Claudius's Denmark is corrupt is that information flow--essential to the continued existence of any system--has been distorted or blocked. (I count at least seven instances in the play of an attempt to gather information through deceit.)

I'll bet that after Yorick's death, the elder Hamlet's court continued to include jesters. But Claudius's court does not--until young Hamlet comes home. Hamlet's "Mousetrap" play can be seen as a replacement for the jests of a court fool. When this play-within-a-play restores some information flow, showing Claudius as he really is, Claudius panics and stops the show.

Something is rotten in the state--the system--of Denmark. Hamlet tries to restore that system to health by opening communication channels again. But he's too late, and the system collapses. Systems are often defined by contrasting them with mere heaps. The heap of bodies at the end of Act V provides a perfect illustration of the difference.

Leaving out a lot of reality

Sunday's LA Times carried a fascinating op-ed piece, by Seed magazine editor Jonah Lehrer, on the limitations of contemporary neuroscience. He writes:

The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method: reductionism. The premise of reductionism is that the best way to solve a complex problem -- and the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe -- is to study its most basic parts. The mind, in other words, is just a particular trick of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.

But the reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces. Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music is reduced to wavelengths of vibrating air -- the simple sum of its physics -- we actually understand less about the music. The intangible beauty, the visceral emotion, the entire reason we listen in the first place -- all is lost when the sound is reduced into its most elemental details. In other words, reductionism can leave out a lot of reality.

Lehrer isn't a fuzzy-headed idealist. He credits reductionist neuroscience with, for example, great and beneficial advances in pharmaceuticals. "A work of art," he writes, "obviously isn't a substitute for a scientific experiment -- Proust isn't going to invent Prozac." But, he continues:

the artist can help scientists better understand what, exactly, they are trying to reduce in the first place. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.

As a lover of Joyce's Ulysses, which traces many of the thoughts of a character during a single day, I am grateful to Lehrer for a quotation I didn't know about:

Virginia Woolf . . . famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."

And as a lover of Shakespeare's Tempest, which gives this blog its name, I especially noted Lehrer's conclusion:

Unless our science moves beyond reductionism and grapples instead with the messiness of subjective experience -- what James called a "science of the soul" -- its facts will grow increasingly remote. The wonder of the brain is that it can be described in so many ways: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. What we need is a science that can encompass both sides of our being.

In between the passages I've quoted are many more I could have. In my browser, the essay is less than four screens long; you'll be rewarded for the time you spend.

(Thanks to Seed magazine for the link.)

The course of true love . . .

This week my students and I are reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and talking about systems. I gave my students a copy of Barry Commoner's "four laws of ecology," from his pioneering 1971 book The Closing Circle:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.
2. Everything must go somewhere.
3. Nature knows best.
4. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Shakespeare understood all these.The four plots of Dream are intricately intertwined, and what happens at one level of the play affects the other levels. Everything is connected to everything else.

One of the most familiar lines of the play--and arguably the line that best summarizes the whole work--is Lysander's, in the very first scene:

The course of true love never did run smooth.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

A twenty-first-century Shakespeare?

Scott Malia, at The Shakespeare Blog, writes:

While Shakespeare appreciation might be near universal among writers, it begs the question of comparison. Who among today’s writers is what might be considered the twenty first century answer to him?

His initial suggestion: TV and film writer Aaron Sorkin--a great candidate. Over at The Shakespeare Teacher, Bill and his readers suggest others.

In my Conversations with Shakespeare course, I lead students through half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays, as well as later works in explicit "conversation" with them: Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Cesaire's A Tempest, Gaiman's Sandman treatment of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and others. The course ends with a play that I find the most "Shakespearean" of recent dramas: Tony Kushner's Angels in America. My students always find lots of ways that Angels is in implicit, if not explicit, conversation with the Bard.

So Kushner's my candidate--not in the quantity of his output, but in his almost unique ability (among many others) to give his subjects both cosmic and fractal dimensions. If you haven't read or seen the play, do so (especially the amazing HBO film of it), and see if you agree.

So do we think in pentametric lines?

I've often heard, and repeated, the assertion that Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter--indeed any poet's use of iambic pentameter--somehow captures, and elevates, the normal rhythms of English speech. So I'm fascinated by a posting this week by Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars.

Rosenbaum quotes one of his readers, an Allan Henderson, who notes that the three seconds taken by a typical spoken iambic pentameter line may be related to the approximately three-second duration of our experience of the present. He credits Stephen Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought, for pointing our that "the human experience of the present moment is not a continuous flow,  but a roughly 3-second interval."

Henderson, citing Pinker (and I'm sorry that my attributions get so many layers deep here), writes:

Steven Pinker’s observation about the 3-second present comes from Ernst Poppel, a brain researcher at the University of Munich. Dubbed Poppel’s Law it says that “We take life three seconds at a time.” Poppel illustrates his law by pointing out that a handshake lasts about three seconds. So does the preparation for a golf swing, short-term memory, a phrase in spontaneous speech, the pause when channel surfing for a television program to watch, and  line of poetry. Pinker talks about this on page 189 of his new book THE STUFF OF THOUGHT, where he says “our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an instantaneous instant. Instead, it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous ‘now’ but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.”

Rosenbaum and his commentators also continue a discussion, begun in The Shakespeare Wars, on the wisdom of including a slight break at the end of each spoken iambic pentameter line.

(Thanks to ShakespeareGeek for the reference.)

The great Globe itself

Far Explore has a beautiful set of photographs of Shakespeare's Globe, in London. Their quality is so high that I'm considering several of them for use as wallpaper or screensavers.

I've been teaching about Shakespeare's theatre for years, so when I first walked into the new Globe, I felt an especially eerie sense of deja vu, as if I had somehow walked into a familiar painting.

(Thanks to News on the Rialto for the link.)

Shakespeare mapped

Duane, at Shakespeare Geek, has posted a link to a fascinating map of Shakespearean characters based on the iconic London Underground map. The map carries the Royal Shakespeare Company logo, but I haven't been able to find it on the RSC site.

Loss, grief, cruelty, and love

At Theatre Notes, Alison Croggon has posted an extraordinary review of Peter Brook's 1971 film of King Lear. Here's an excerpt:

Watching King Lear now is a different experience from watching it when it was made: our world has changed since 1971. But this film illustrates Ezra Pound's truism that art is "news that stays news". Perhaps what is most shocking about Brook's film - and it remains shocking - is how profoundly it galvanises our present. Gloucester is a prisoner in Abu Ghraib; Lear is a bereaved father in Chechnya or Lebanon. The loss, the grief, the cruelty and the love are all of our own time.

(Thanks to Shakespeare Geek for the tip.)

We escape to what is most real

Michael Gerson, writing for the Washington Post, reflects on the persistence of Shakespeare. He concludes:

In a time deluged by ideology -- when everyone is urged to take a side and join the political battle -- Shakespeare offers a different message: that the most important and dramatic choices are made in the human soul. Some steps, once taken, cannot be retraced. Some appetites, once freed, become a prison.

But the plays are not simple sermons. Fate can be indifferent to our best intentions. Even the purest love can lead to disaster. All our explanations of suffering are incomplete.

We watch the struggling souls in Shakespeare's plays with uncomfortable self-recognition. In their raw honesty we see our own nature, even those parts that are despairing and lawless. And as these characters are transformed, we see ourselves differently as well.

And so we enter a dark theater (or green or beach or riverside) and escape to what is most real.

(Thanks to News on the Rialto for the link.)