Join us for a compelling discussion on the enduringly popular playwright, William Shakespeare. Four centuries after his final curtain call, his influence still resonates deeply in our culture, our language, and our understanding of human nature.
We'll explore the man behind the myth, the truths and misconceptions that have shaped his portrayal in popular culture, how race influences the interpretation of his plays, and the indelible mark his words have left on the English language
How did a child from a rural town rise to become the dominant figure of Elizabethan theater? What is it about his work that keeps him at the forefront of literary greatness and cultural relevance? And how might we use his plays to better understand our current moment?
Moderated by:
Andrew Stott, vice provost for academic programs and dean of the graduate school; professor of English, USC Dornsife; author, What Blest Genius? The Jubilee that Made Shakespeare
With:
Bruce Smith, Dean's Professor of English Emeritus, USC Dornsife; author, Phenomenal Shakespeare
Ian Smith, professor of English, USC Dornsife; author, Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race
Learn more about the Dornsife Dialogues and sign up for the next live event here.
Join us for a compelling discussion on the enduringly popular playwright, William Shakespeare. Four centuries after his final curtain call, his influence still resonates deeply in our culture, our language, and our understanding of human nature.
We'll explore the man behind the myth, the truths and misconceptions that have shaped his portrayal in popular culture, how race influences the interpretation of his plays, and the indelible mark his words have left on the English language
How did a child from a rural town rise to become the dominant figure of Elizabethan theater? What is it about his work that keeps him at the forefront of literary greatness and cultural relevance? And how might we use his plays to better understand our current moment?
Moderated by:
Andrew Stott, vice provost for academic programs and dean of the graduate school; professor of English, USC Dornsife; author, What Blest Genius? The Jubilee that Made Shakespeare
With:
Bruce Smith, Dean's Professor of English Emeritus, USC Dornsife; author, Phenomenal Shakespeare
Ian Smith, professor of English, USC Dornsife; author, Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race
Learn more about the Dornsife Dialogues and sign up for the next live event here.
00:00:00:17 - 00:00:27:07
Speaker 1
Welcome to the podcast version of Dornsife Dialogs, hosted by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Conversations feature our distinguished scholars, alumni and other thought leaders discussing the fascinating issues that matter to you. You can also find video recordings of these discussions on the USC Dornsife YouTube channel. We begin this Dornsife dialog with an introduction from Dean Amber Miller.
00:00:28:21 - 00:00:54:04
Speaker 1
Welcome back to Dornsife Dialogs. Today we are exploring the world of William Shakespeare, who's been stealing the literary spotlight for more than four centuries. His works have survived empires, new media, landscapes, even high school English classes, proving that a good story never goes out of style. His influence endures in everyday conversations. You may not know it, but expressions like tongue tied and in a pickle come directly from Shakespeare.
00:00:54:19 - 00:01:17:20
Speaker 1
Our experts today will explore the elements that keep Shakespeare alive from his elaborate plots and audacious wit to his approach to universal themes like power, betrayal, fate, and free will. We'll also hear how modern perspectives breathe new life into Shakespeare's classic texts. So let's get started. Our moderator today is professor of English Andrew Scott, who's an expert in British popular culture.
00:01:17:20 - 00:01:39:05
Speaker 1
From the 16th to 19th centuries. He's authored four books, including 2019 What Blessed Genius The Jubilee that Made Shakespeare, which won the Marshfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. He's been a fellow of the British Academy and the American Council on Education and the U.S. He serves as the vice provost for academic programs and dean of the graduate school.
00:01:39:14 - 00:01:48:22
Speaker 1
So without further ado, I'll hand it over to Professor Start to introduce our panelists. Thank you, as always for tuning in and enjoy the program.
00:01:51:23 - 00:02:14:10
Speaker 2
Thank you so much for that warm welcome, Dean Miller. And hello, everybody. Good afternoon. And in the words of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a 100,000 welcomes. I could weep and I could laugh. I am light and I am heavy. Welcome. So thank you for spending your lunchtime with us as we consider one of the most important cultural figures in history and also one of the most scenic Mattick.
00:02:15:01 - 00:02:42:16
Speaker 2
As is often noted, the verifiable facts of Shakespeare's life can be written on a postcard and still leave room for an address and a postage stamp. He was baptized, although we don't know his birth date. He was married. He owned some property in London and his hometown of Stratford upon Avon. And during a course, during the course of a career in the entertainment industry, he wrote poems and plays that have become some of the world's foremost literary monuments that Shakespeare has attained.
00:02:42:16 - 00:03:09:04
Speaker 2
This status is remarkable considering that his works were rarely performed following his death in 1616. As fashions changed in the English and the English Civil War forced the closure of the public theaters for a period of almost 20 years. Indeed, if it wasn't for the fact that the dramatic culture of England had been rendered virtually extinct during that period, his work might have stayed as dead as he was when the theaters reopened in 1660.
00:03:09:10 - 00:03:34:21
Speaker 2
They needed material. And Shakespeare's oeuvre represented a treasure trove of ideas to be plundered. And so Shakespeare returned to the stage, often in almost unrecognizable form, adjusted to suit the tastes of a contemporary audience who found Shakespeare's language archaic and his plots slow moving and dull. Music, dancing and spectacle were added, as were new characters and altered endings.
00:03:35:01 - 00:04:02:04
Speaker 2
Indeed, the version of King Lear with a happy ending in which both Lear and Cordelia survive, was the standard version on the British stage until the late 19th century. We might even say that the lack of autobiographical information about Shakespeare and the fact that his work seemed to lend itself to adaptation so well is what has ensured his longevity in a way that would not hold for an author more firmly anchored to the coordinates of time, place and identity.
00:04:03:09 - 00:04:29:13
Speaker 2
But as Touchstone tells us, and as you like it, the Fool does think he is wise. But the wise man knows himself to be a fool. And so I'll stop my speculations there and introduce two internationally renowned experts on this matter who can help us make sense of how Shakespeare became became Shakespeare. First we have Bruce Smiths. Bruce is a Dane's professor of English emeritus at USC Dornsife.
00:04:29:23 - 00:04:54:08
Speaker 2
He recently retired after 51 years of teaching. He is the author of seven books, including Homosexual Desire and Shakespeare's England, 1991, one of the first books of LGBTQ studies in shape in Shakespeare Studies. And also, I might add, my first publication was a review of Bruce's book. So thank you, Bruce. I think you sent me on the path to what has been a very enjoyable career.
00:04:54:20 - 00:05:18:22
Speaker 2
He's also the author of The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, which helped establish historical sound studies as an academic field. Bruce has recently completed chapters on voices interface for the Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface, Authorship and Sexuality for the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship and Shakespeare's vibrant theaters in the Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies.
00:05:19:02 - 00:06:04:12
Speaker 2
Welcome, Bruce. We also have Ian Smith. Ian is Professor of English, also at USC Dornsife. He's the author of Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England. Barbarian Errors in 2009 and a collaborator on Othello reimagined in Sepia from 2012. In most recent book, Black Shakespeare Reading and Misreading Race was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. He's the recipient of multiple fellowships in support of his scholarship and most recently held the Los Angeles Times Chair in the History and Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library and is currently the president of the Shakespeare Association of America, which is one of the most vibrant and important intellectual communities in academia.
00:06:05:06 - 00:06:29:01
Speaker 2
So before we jump in, I just like to remind you that you can post your questions to the Q&A for our panelists. And I'd be very happy to incorporate them into our conversation. So let's begin. And Ian, let me begin with you. So 400 years after his death, why does Shakespeare remain so popular? Who was he? What was he like?
00:06:29:10 - 00:06:33:22
Speaker 2
And what are some of the more common misconceptions we find about him in popular culture?
00:06:35:08 - 00:06:53:01
Speaker 3
Right. Hello, Andy, and hello, everyone. Thank you for the introduction. I think you already answered a part of the question about why he continues to be popular. You shared about his sort of being sort of unmoored in time and place that allows for the constant sort of reproduction of his work and so on. So I think that's true.
00:06:54:03 - 00:07:30:05
Speaker 3
The question about biography and how do we understand Shakespeare's biography? Again, you had you addressed the sort of the part of it that people sort of expect to hear us talk about, Well, who Shakespeare? What is he like? What has he done, etc.. But I'd like to do instead is talk a little bit about something else, which is to talk about how Shakespeare sort of constructs himself in his works and how that might actually be something that is perhaps more interesting or at least offers more possibilities and might dispel some misconceptions.
00:07:30:12 - 00:08:03:18
Speaker 3
What I'm referring to in particular is his construction, his self construction in the sonnets, in the sonnets that we refer to as a rival poet, sonnets say the sonnets from 78 to 85 and beyond. Shakespeare very cheerfully describes and writes about himself as ignorant, unlettered, rude as in not having quite the right style, lacking the skills of rhetoric and eloquence and what he's doing there in terms of the narrative of those poems.
00:08:04:01 - 00:08:26:20
Speaker 3
He's contrasting himself with other poets, with the other rival poets who are seeking attention for this man, Shakespeare's writing to and about. And in so doing, he sets them up as more eloquent, more learned in some way than he is. And he comes off as the one who is rude and in in eloquence and someone who is not skilled.
00:08:27:01 - 00:08:46:12
Speaker 3
And yet, of course, part of the joke is, as we read those poems, what we're looking at is someone who is anything but in eloquent and who is skilled and craft in writing, in fact, have become the gold standard of literature of that period. So what is he doing and why is he doing that? Well, there are two things that we can point to.
00:08:46:12 - 00:09:10:00
Speaker 3
But the first I'd like to to recall is this If we think carefully about that self construction, why does that matter to us and why do Shakespeare do what he's doing? Well, it what is interesting is that if we think about the connection of this sonnets and the drama, Othello is a play in which a character does the very same thing.
00:09:10:13 - 00:09:40:17
Speaker 3
Othello in the Senate scene in that one, scene three speaks about himself in similar forms, in similar terms. He talks about a rule Am I in speech? And he goes on to deliver what I think. Anybody who has read Shakespeare would admit, is one of the most eloquent speeches in the entire canon of Shakespeare's works. And so there is this interesting self construction which mimics and is repeated in this narrative of a black man, a black character.
00:09:41:00 - 00:10:13:13
Speaker 3
And so my question is, why does Shakespeare then craft a narrative about himself that then he goes on to deliberately identify with and we play in this character of a black person? Now, we shouldn't really be surprised that it turns off in Othello, because in fact, this whole narrative, this this narrative of being someone who can't speak well, etc., etc., that narrative is something that in fact is a racialized one to begin.
00:10:13:18 - 00:10:35:07
Speaker 3
And for a long time, scholars have not paid attention to that. But indeed, the whole idea comes from this notion of barbarous innocence. Right? And Boris Ness has this history of being relating to grammar and speech and rhetoric and the idea, and on the other hand, it relates to this early modern conception of North Africans and black people as barbarous, too.
00:10:35:13 - 00:11:03:08
Speaker 3
So we shouldn't be surprised. But what is fascinating for me to present, to put on the table for us to think about is why then this merging in Shakespeare's own construction of himself with blackness, so to speak, and himself in this character, that then turns out to be someone that can Othello and I. I present this because among the many misconception about Shakespeare is, is the one that says, you know, well, Shakespeare has nothing to do with race.
00:11:03:08 - 00:11:14:08
Speaker 3
And we've been living with that narrative for the last 30 years or so. And yet whereas when he tells his story is a story that is in fact deeply embedded in the notions of race.
00:11:16:08 - 00:11:30:08
Speaker 2
That's really fascinating. Thank you. To Bruce, what would you say to this question, Shakespeare's popularity? The question is, does his identity some misconceptions? We may have about him?
00:11:30:20 - 00:12:04:21
Speaker 4
Well, thank you. And thanks to you for that wonderful introduction to the topic. I particularly like the idea of Shakespeare's so assessment as as as as author coming out of the sonnets. I think what I would like to emphasize is Shakespeare as a writer in popular culture, I think you'll see alumni of all people want to appreciate the fact that Shakespeare was operating in a commercial theater.
00:12:05:02 - 00:12:29:00
Speaker 4
There were multiple commercial theaters operating in London at the time. There was an audience demand for constantly new material, and it would be often the case that they would be performing five different plays in the course of a week, very unlike the kind of theater that we're used to, where there be a run of six weeks or something like that.
00:12:29:00 - 00:12:56:09
Speaker 4
So it was constantly changing. The other thing is that in what authorship of the scripts was often a group endeavor in the same way that it is in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles today, someone versus person's name might be on beyond the title page if it were published, but joint authorship was a very common, a very common practice.
00:12:56:09 - 00:13:28:14
Speaker 4
And Shakespeare began his career and ended his career as a collaborative as a collaborative writer. And there's no embarrassment about that. It's it's it's is pointing to the fact that theater was a vibrant enterprise that was constantly changing and was constantly adapting to whatever was new in the air historically, politically at the time. So Shakespeare, there's a kind of double life going on here.
00:13:28:14 - 00:14:07:12
Speaker 4
First there is Shakespeare, the collaborator, the professional writer, but there's also Shakespeare, and I hope you'll agree with this, that there there's a there's a Shakespeare that was also conscious of his reputation, some of the documents having to do with Shakespeare. His life, I think, point out the fact that although he was a common player, was the term and within the economic scheme at the time that that he was technically the servant of whatever patron, there was noble patron there was for the company.
00:14:08:00 - 00:14:40:16
Speaker 4
But Shakespeare came on his mother's side from a distinguished family in Stratford upon Avon, and after he became a big success, he went to the college of her rose, which was the body that kept track of who was a legitimate person entitled to style themselves, a gentleman. And he successfully applied for a document that would say that his father was a gentleman and therefore Shakespeare himself was a gentleman.
00:14:40:21 - 00:15:22:10
Speaker 4
And when he retired, he retired back to Stratford and lived in a very pretentious house, which unfortunately was demolished in the 18th century. So there's a curious there's a curious dynamism there, I think, about who Shakespeare was and what his personal identity was. But out of that dynamism comes, I think, the reason for Shakespeare's longevity and the fact that he remains a vital figure, a vital figure today, because as a man of the theater, he knew how to create characters and situations that would appeal to the audience at the time.
00:15:22:10 - 00:15:56:14
Speaker 4
And I think Ian's point is very good that in a way he wasn't present in his plays directly in a way that other writers like Ben Jonson or Thomas Middleton were. Other successful writers for the stage at the time. So it's the fact that he created this wonderful material that can easily be adapted, reinterpreted to changing theatrical conditions, but also the changing political conditions that in my view, explains Shakespeare's longevity.
00:15:58:08 - 00:16:34:12
Speaker 2
Thank you both wonderful answers, and thank you, Bruce, for drawing our attention to the parallels between the entertainment industry in which Shakespeare was obviously a major participant and of the 16th and 17th centuries and the entertainment industry of Southern California, because I often think there are some real parallels between the early movie industry and the sort of 1915 to 19, 1920 period and the 1590s where Shakespeare first started writing plays and responding to the popular tastes of his audience.
00:16:35:00 - 00:17:02:10
Speaker 2
However, the experience of going to a cinema and watching a movie is very different from that of going to a public playhouse on the South Bank of the Thames in London in 1588 or 1590. Bruce You've done such wonderful work on the soundscapes and the experience. You're part of attending a Shakespeare performance. Can you describe for us what it would be like to go and see a Shakespeare play during Shakespeare's time?
00:17:02:18 - 00:17:12:12
Speaker 2
What are some of the sights and sounds? How does the the materiality of the performance affect the kinds of things that I might see and experience in the audience? There?
00:17:12:23 - 00:17:57:23
Speaker 4
Thank you. Thanks. On the day that the Playhouse was around the globe, theater was an outdoor playhouse. The company actually started at another theater, which was outside the city on the northern side, and the Globe Theater was outside the city of London on the Southbank side. This was important because these two districts were not under the control of the city government and therefore there was something slightly disreputable about the play industry as as there was about movies in the 1920s, there was a similar demand for just constant, constant new material and but a huge success.
00:17:58:07 - 00:18:30:01
Speaker 4
So the Globe Theater held held 3000 people. And those of you who have been to London and perhaps have toured that theater can appreciate what a concentrated contains space it is. It's open to the sky. So the quality of sound in the theater is somewhat like a stadium. It has a broad sound that has the effect of drawing the audience into the sound, the sound experience.
00:18:30:23 - 00:19:02:09
Speaker 4
We know the costumes were a major part of the cost of putting on a play. Another company, not Shakespeare's company, but another successful company there we have some of their bookkeeping records surviving, and there is a complete inventory of all the costumes that they owned. And these were real clothes and they were made out of the most expensive, the most expensive materials that were available.
00:19:02:10 - 00:19:37:09
Speaker 4
Often noblemen would give their clothes to the company after the clothes had no longer become famous. So I imagine a very intense sound experience that we can kind of experience today if we go and watch a performance at the Globe Theater, but also a very intense spectacle, very intense visual experience in which the dominant colors of the costumes were red, white, black with gold trim.
00:19:37:23 - 00:20:04:20
Speaker 4
So the intensity of this, I think, is something that's lost in a lot of contemporary productions, live productions, which tend to to be minimal. So the work that I've done about sound has been complemented with the work I've been doing lately about the sensorium in the theater and Shakespeare's theater. And we need to imagine what kind of total immersive experience.
00:20:05:05 - 00:20:05:16
Speaker 4
Thanks.
00:20:07:13 - 00:20:29:17
Speaker 2
That's great. Thank you so much. I mean, one of the things I find so interesting about the Globe reconstruction on the Southbank is that its capacity is around 1500 people, whereas the capacity of it in Shakespeare's day would have been closer to 3000, three and a half, even though the dimensions are exactly the same. So that really does give you a sense of how packed in people were, although of course we're all a lot larger these days.
00:20:29:17 - 00:20:51:21
Speaker 2
Plus we need fire exits. So there's some reasons for that. So, Ian, in what ways how do you think the canon of Shakespeare has evolved over time over the past 400 years or so? And what factors have really changed the way that some plays have been considered more culturally important than others?
00:20:52:18 - 00:21:24:21
Speaker 3
I would say my response I will for most myself, cite, first of all, Michael Neal's response to such a question. I think in his edition of the Oxford World Classics of Othello, he does attempt to talk about this, and he talks about, first of all, by referencing Hamlet and talking about Hamlet as the kind of text that scholars for a long time held up as the text that they respond to.
00:21:25:14 - 00:21:50:02
Speaker 3
That makes sense. Of course, because there's a way in which that scholars often identify with Hamlet, this this sort of reflecting, thoughtful prince and so on. So I suppose that makes sense. And and Haslett famously said, No, it is. We were Hamlet, right? So there's that idea that, you know, the critic, scholar finds Hamlet to be a safe space and a recognizable space.
00:21:50:15 - 00:22:16:13
Speaker 3
But then he goes on to say that during the wars, that with world wars of the 20th century and beyond that, King Lear became sort of the play of choice. It's sort of a very bleak, dark sort of outlook of the sort of world in the sort of exhausted, exhausted sort of landscape of tragedy and human destruction seems to to echo and find that sense of the world in that period during and after the wars.
00:22:16:22 - 00:22:48:08
Speaker 3
And then he says Othello is a play that over the last quarter of the 20th century, because that play picks up on all these questions of global encounter cultures meeting each other, this sort of awareness of otherness and so on. And so that makes a lot of sense. I would add to to Neal's reading that Othello is also play about an immigrant, because in effect, that's one way of seeing Othello.
00:22:48:21 - 00:23:14:03
Speaker 3
And so for me, I would say the answer that Neal provides is one that says, Well, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's plays sort of evolve and find their sort of cultural and critical and scholarly home because of historical events. And so that we are constantly sort of looking at the plays through the lens of our current circumstance. I think that's true.
00:23:14:03 - 00:23:51:05
Speaker 3
But this question of immigration, however, I think that we can push, yes, a play not just Othello, but any of the plays that will deal with similar kinds of issues into the 21st century and talk about how immigration has become a one, we argue a critical, if not one of the critical issues of our time. It's also a play about how people sort of global movement of people because of war and military conflict and how people have to then be relocated in different places.
00:23:51:15 - 00:24:14:23
Speaker 3
And I think that a play like, in fact, like Othello, can be used to sort of reference those kinds of questions as well. Recently, I believe there's an article in The Atlantic that talked about a current political candidate who apparently is threatening to create a kind of Red Guard to go after immigrants in various states to move that.
00:24:15:08 - 00:24:37:23
Speaker 3
That is a very sort of current sort of, I'd say, threat that is out in our political environment. And certainly insofar as we continue then to face these fears around immigration and continue to wrestle with the questions of how to live with other people, how to live with one another, and how to be in spaces with one another.
00:24:37:23 - 00:25:03:20
Speaker 3
And what that means then plays like Othello and Titus and and other plays that you might not think necessarily speak to race initially, but do or speak to conflict. Do those plays continue to be relevant for us in ways that are not just thematic, as people might often say, but important for us because they speak to the crucial and urgent moment of our lives today.
00:25:05:04 - 00:25:24:00
Speaker 2
That's great answer. Thank you so much, Bruce. Of the many adaptations that are out there, have you had a favorite over the years, something that you think has particularly resonated or done What Ian has said in terms of ventriloquist using the times and the concerns of the day particularly?
00:25:24:00 - 00:25:55:08
Speaker 4
Well, let me just think about this for just a minute, because there really have been several such productions. I mean, for me, my memory of productions becomes kind of amalgamated so that my ideal production of Othello, say, has yeah, has won a certain actor in a role and then another actor in another role, and they work in the same production.
00:25:55:08 - 00:26:28:07
Speaker 4
I would say that I would say that, that the, the production that these are not productions that I've ever the one production I want to talk about is not one that I have seen but there have even found home is that the directors name a Dutch director who's who has done amalgamations of the role and plays an amalgamation of the history page.
00:26:28:07 - 00:27:26:22
Speaker 4
History plays that use modern technology to have a kind of multimedia and a multimedia presentation of the play that for me, these really revolutionized. I've seen them, I've seen videos of them, but they were actually live live productions that there was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a Spell, and they met at various venues in London. But the history plays in particular by having some of the tropes of contemporary news and contemporary politics invoked in such, such and such events as a a news broadcast that talks about the battle that is happening out of out of sight of the audience, the battle that one actually seen is in the theater.
00:27:26:22 - 00:27:58:13
Speaker 4
It forces you to It doesn't change the material, it doesn't change the history, but it forces you to think about our own engagements with what's going on politically and how mediated that is. And the result is an enhancement of not only our our own our own sense of our own time, but of understanding the political importance of Shakespeare's history plays in their own time.
00:27:58:14 - 00:28:08:02
Speaker 4
It's not a denial of the historical meaning of the plays, but it's a revitalization of them in terms of contemporary media.
00:28:09:07 - 00:28:38:23
Speaker 2
Yeah, and I'm thinking now of Ian McKellen, Sir Richard the third, which I think was came out in the early nineties, which is set in a sort of Art Deco London of the 1930s in which Oswald Mosley's Brownshirts fascist party is sort of seize control and yeah, it does exactly what you're saying, It has a sort of wonderful resonance of the juxtaposition of more contemporary political events with the sort of machinations of Shakespeare's characters.
00:28:38:23 - 00:29:16:23
Speaker 2
So they really are fantastic ways of, of focusing on contemporary issues through his works. You know, this this question is just sort of occurred to me, but I'm I'm thinking we've been talking a lot about how open Shakespeare is to adaptation and how the texts really lend themselves to sort of multiple lenses of interpretation. And I'm wondering, can you think of a play or an example of Shakespearean work where we've had radically different readings of the same play, you know, whether where where somebody might say, well, you know, obviously Shakespeare is trying to say this.
00:29:16:23 - 00:29:27:14
Speaker 2
And another will say, you know, Shakespeare's attention is the polar opposite. So are there any examples of that that you can think of, Ian, of any examples for us that you might be out to share?
00:29:28:18 - 00:29:51:08
Speaker 3
I'm not sure this is the example that comes to mind. I'm not sure the example that we respond directly to the questions you were asked. But there's other comes to mind is it Balkans 2015? I think it's Othello production for the Irish Sea in which he chose to you to make Iago a play by a black actor as well.
00:29:52:06 - 00:30:25:20
Speaker 3
And so I would just say a role when you when you're finished watching that performance, you just think this is entirely different play. That was my sense. This was just not the play that quote unquote, Shakespeare wrote. It just felt like a very different thing, whatever that means. But what was striking about it was I think, in terms of the changes that he made in making Iago a black character, using that black actor in the role of Jago, what he did was he he sort of made sense.
00:30:26:11 - 00:30:59:00
Speaker 3
I think one critic called attention to this him. It made sense of why there was this trust between Othello. Jago to be in. So I guess you could read it in that way. The other thing I thought when I, when I saw that and in listening to Connor as well and having an opportunity to speak with him, my sense was that he was exploring the idea that there are different kinds of black people in the world, that we all didn't come from one place and we're all islands of one type.
00:30:59:08 - 00:31:21:12
Speaker 3
And so what he was exploring was people of African descent, but with different experiences and different cultural backgrounds in the moment. And so by putting on display, he was exploring that dimension of the experience in a way that I had not seen or thought about before. So that to me is a striking and that's what part Parker made this very different play.
00:31:21:12 - 00:31:32:11
Speaker 3
It wasn't just a play about what do we think what it's about. It became. This other theater is investigating a whole other history of sort of cultural and racial diasporic in a completely different way.
00:31:32:23 - 00:31:41:14
Speaker 2
Yeah. Fascinating. Bruce, same question to you. An example of two wildly divergent readings.
00:31:41:14 - 00:32:24:14
Speaker 4
I can actually think of two, and you've inspired me to think particularly about an all black production of Hamlet by the Orissa Royal Shakespeare Company. It must have been about one eight, nine years ago. And I'm so sorry that I can't name that director, but it was set in an African country where plausibly, I guess to some people's revolutions, could constantly be taking place, that there could be power, struggle, struggles among members of the same family to to rule.
00:32:24:22 - 00:33:05:02
Speaker 4
So that seemed very gimmicky in a way. But the quality of the actors in this production had exactly. It was in some ways the opposite effect because it displayed the artistry of the of the RC actors and especially the person who played who played Hamlet and the person who played Gertrude. I will never forget those characterizations, but they were not simply examples of what the African setting would call for it.
00:33:05:02 - 00:33:33:20
Speaker 4
You transcended the African setting and it was it was actually staged. I think I remember this, that it was staged as a it was staged as as a protest against the fact that there were, well, at that time, limited roles that black actors were thought capable of performing in Shakespeare. So fine, we're going to have the entire production performed by black characters.
00:33:34:02 - 00:34:07:20
Speaker 4
And it made one realize that black actors could perform anything. And actually, in the case of Hamlet and trying to produce characterizations that will always, always stick with me. The other one was really a very long time ago when I was teaching at Georgetown, and it was at Wolf Trap Farm Park in the summer, and it was a traveling production from England, not from B or C or any particular theater, as I recall, but it was an all male production of As You Like, It.
00:34:07:20 - 00:34:49:05
Speaker 4
And I will never be able to think about the character of the country girl Audrey differently than I did at this production, where the guy who played Audrey did it in a low drag with a gold lamé dress and and and flip flops on. And it was absolutely hilarious. I guess the bigger point I try to make is that that the productions that the best productions that do something new revitalize the play but they also make one realize that the potentialities in the play potentialities that have not been tapped are.
00:34:49:23 - 00:35:21:11
Speaker 2
Wonderful that as you like it production I think was the early seventies and it's still cited and said to history continually. And but I do want to remind our audience that Shakespeare's theater was of course all male, all performers were male. So everybody it would have been an all male cast in the original as you like it. So the the idea of men dressing as women who then have to pretend to be men and the multiple confusions therein is sort of baked in to that idea, which I love.
00:35:21:11 - 00:35:53:19
Speaker 2
I also want to remind our audience, please send in your questions and we'll put them to Professor Smith and Smith. And you have mentioned a couple of times Shakespeare is real interested in and sensitivity to difference to the fact that, you know, Shakespeare was interested in multiple identities. Some of which were sort of outside of the sort of current stream of Elizabethan daily life.
00:35:54:05 - 00:36:19:09
Speaker 2
We know that the early modern world was a dynamic time of change and invention and exploration and of new encounters with people from across the world. Sometimes for the first time. How does Shakespeare handle those encounters in his plays, and what do they tell us about attitudes towards identity, race, self and this bigger place of humanity in the world?
00:36:19:09 - 00:36:55:07
Speaker 3
Well, yes, Thanks for that question to again. A.N. Well, first of all, as a kind of set of baseline, the question you're asking really is the a place to start when one makes the argument about thinking about race and difference and otherness and so on, in the early modern drama in particular Shakespeare, because the idea that it wouldn't be there is, is would be more unlikely than it would be there, because this was a world that was opening up to different places.
00:36:55:15 - 00:37:16:05
Speaker 3
The culture was changing and international trade was a it's such a critical part of that world. So with not only with people meeting other people, but with the importation of goods from other places, it meant that there was this constant sort of fusion and and things sort of coming up against each other, that kind of traces of other cultures with them.
00:37:16:13 - 00:37:49:12
Speaker 3
So it just makes sense that this idea of a world in sort of transition and change due to new encounters, that is just simply a part of the the, the reality of that world. And in, in a recent book, Naomi and I quote titled Scripts of Blackness, she does document at the end of the book the list of plays that featured characters from other cultures, especially black characters.
00:37:49:12 - 00:38:08:18
Speaker 3
And the list is long. So she's her book is the most read that does that. So if we want proof of the sort of actual text in the pure that deal with this, you can find it easily there as well. So so there so there is that. So the first point I'm making is that it just makes sense and it's part of the reality that they're dealing with.
00:38:08:23 - 00:38:47:14
Speaker 3
And so it documents those things. I'm going to sort of take a slightly different path to answer that question, however, because I think it's also critical to say this, that it's it's important to think not only of Shakespeare and the world that he is trying to engage as a world that is becoming increasingly diverse and racialized. I'd like us to think about ourselves as readers and what it means for us to be readers of those texts.
00:38:48:18 - 00:39:26:12
Speaker 3
And I'm thinking about the First Folio and Shakespeare's two actors who became the first editors, Hemmes and Condell, and they talked about how literacy was an important part of marketing this book for success. They talked about as people were, he told. They talk about diverse capacities in literacy. And if we and I argument is to the extent that people can read these texts, they will pass the word on and by word of mouth books will be sold.
00:39:26:16 - 00:40:04:20
Speaker 3
That was the sort of basic thinking about this. What I want to underscore is that although that is true, but the idea that literacy we know is not simply an unmarked or on racialized project, certainly in the United States, literacy is has a history of being entirely racialized, certainly in the 18th century. We know that, for example, from 1840 in North Carolina, there was a law passed that prevented blacks from learning to read, and that continued in what, 1875 55.
00:40:05:06 - 00:40:38:20
Speaker 3
Another passed in Georgia in 1819 in Virginia. And by in 1831, in the wake of the Nat Turner Rebellion, there's a death penalty attached to that, a death penalty, but learning to read and write. So reading and reading, if you are a black was a significant thing and that was denied. So what really is happening here is that reading becomes a is fundamentally a white project underscored by the legal system itself.
00:40:39:14 - 00:41:27:13
Speaker 3
And beyond that, there is a culture in which one can argue that in the United States history there's a culture of whiteness that is dominated all our institutions from Congress in 1719 declaring that full citizenship is limited and determined by white people with certain residency qualifications. I mean, that's what they said. So from our Congress all the way through and beyond the idea of being white and whiteness dominates in the culture from a legal standard all the way that what that means, I would like us to think about is the degree to which that that one can one can speak about a white epistemology that is a white way of seeing things.
00:41:27:21 - 00:41:52:04
Speaker 3
And I know that sounds sort of odd to put it that way, but that's perhaps the most simplest and I think most the way that sort of cuts through a lot of verbiage to say that way, which is a white epistemology that explains why we see things in a particular way with a particular through a political lens and with a bias and so on.
00:41:53:22 - 00:42:18:16
Speaker 3
And that, in fact, experimental psychologists have argued and explained that in our culture, in the United States culture, even in the 20th and 21st century, there is a white preferential bias that still exists at 75%. So despite everything that we've gone through, that number is still significantly higher. And the researchers themselves were surprised that number was still that high.
00:42:20:00 - 00:42:56:04
Speaker 3
My point is then that, yes, we can speak about the changing times of Shakespeare and we must. And that's important. And it's not an attempt to dismiss that, but it's an attempt to to see that as a grounding point of departure, to then talk about how we the real story that we need to also think about is how we as readers have been produced by our cultural institutions to see, think and reflect and imagine it through this lens of whiteness as well.
00:42:57:12 - 00:43:44:22
Speaker 3
And if that's true, then we need to ask how does that limit us from seeing and reading texts, but also limited reading Shakespeare? How does that sort of racial illiteracy, so to speak, limits us in some way? And so the project I imagine that we need to undertake is one that is about racial literacy, that is to say a project that feeds us on attempts to free us from the limitations imposed on us by a white epistemology, but then help us begin to not only read texts better, but to understand the significance of living in a society with other people and and in a way that demands not that we just see from our perspective,
00:43:44:23 - 00:44:19:15
Speaker 3
from multiple perspectives and in a way that can best establish and give us a hope towards something that looks like a real democracy in which all people are valued and have value for a host of reasons. That I think is something need to think about. When we think about when we talk, and imagine the sort of history of the global transformation that happened four or 500 years ago and what it means for us today.
00:44:19:15 - 00:44:58:06
Speaker 2
Thank you. And I mean, that that is an incredible answer and there's an enormous amount to unpack there. And so I think if I understand what you're saying, you're saying that we were a culture acculturated into ways of reading Shakespeare, which actually shut down the sort of multiple perspectives that provide voice to a variety of different opinions, because we're seeing it from this kind of singular point of view, which I think is, you know, has incredible ramifications for opening up interpretation and for literary exegesis and as you say, for the articulation of self in a sort of broader social context.
00:44:58:06 - 00:45:21:15
Speaker 2
That will lead me then to my last question before we go to our audience questions. Given that the concept of Shakespeare is so familiar to us, you know, he's he's in the ether really, from the moment we start to think about these kind of things as children, he's a part of the cultural furniture. He's genius, He signifies legacy, he signifies prestige.
00:45:21:15 - 00:45:43:00
Speaker 2
He's part of the tourist industry. He's used to market and sell ideas. If we were going to encourage somebody to get out from under these prefabricated ideas of what Shakespeare represents, and I think he did that just incredibly powerfully then and and we were going to invite people to read Shakespeare with fresh eyes. What advice would we give them?
00:45:43:00 - 00:45:48:08
Speaker 2
So I'm going to ask that to you, Bruce.
00:45:48:08 - 00:46:21:20
Speaker 4
Since production is something that something that interests me on multiple fronts, I would say it would be to look at, to find that there's lots of this online productions of Shakespeare that have been done by people in other cultures that that bring some of their own cultural traditions and their own views to what? To the material that's that's in this is Shakespeare.
00:46:21:20 - 00:47:09:03
Speaker 4
I know that for the anniversary of Shakespeare's death, there was a festival in London that companies from all over the world, each of them took a different play and did a different play. And the one that I had seen on online came from Sri Lanka, I believe. And it really changed my ideas, my feeling about the importance of dance movement and spectacle that these actors brought to that production.
00:47:09:11 - 00:47:40:07
Speaker 4
That created a whole new sense of meaning for me. So it's a matter of being open to other other cultural interpretations, and a little searching online will turn out some of these productions. I do think the ones from from 2016 are available in the UK online. I'm not sure about whether that's true here.
00:47:40:07 - 00:48:01:11
Speaker 2
Wonderful. Okay, I'm going to turn now to some questions from our audience. We have one here. I mean, we have a couple of questions on this theme. And as we were preparing for our Dornsife dialog today, we knew it would come up. The question of whether or not Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to the person known as William Shakespeare.
00:48:01:19 - 00:48:30:07
Speaker 2
So we have two questions, and I'm going to I'm going to compare and contrast, and we'll just talk about the subject generally. The first is from Robert, who says, Would you say that there is irrefutable proof that William Shakespeare is the soul author of all this material? How do you reconcile this with the abundance of biographical detail for the Earl of Oxford, i.e. his travels throughout Italy, his tumultuous past, personal life, etc., etc.?
00:48:30:11 - 00:48:58:20
Speaker 2
Even the name Shakespeare doesn't match the signature of William Shakespeare and could be a pen name for Oxford. Who would Shakespeare but those in power in England at the time. So that's a point I'm going to posit Point B from Jason, who says, I'm also curious about the authorship debate, but about the debate about the authorship debate. Shakespeare's text is timeless and directors will continue to interpret the plays in innovative ways.
00:48:59:03 - 00:49:23:05
Speaker 2
So does it matter if Shakespeare was a commoner, a nobleman, a woman, etc.? Would evidence in either direction truly make a difference to our enjoyment of the plays, let alone the scholarship? So the authorship debate. Gentlemen, let's have at it. Let's start with you in What are your thoughts on this?
00:49:23:05 - 00:49:56:16
Speaker 3
Well, I don't have much to say on this matter because I was trained in a way that didn't pay attention too much to those kinds of questions about authorship. I, I was trained in a in an era when the focus was about the text for me. And and that's what mattered. Crucially, I believe the second question seemed to suggest that would it make a difference?
00:49:56:21 - 00:50:22:12
Speaker 3
Well, it might make a difference. I suspect if somebody you know, as has been said by many people in Shakespeare as a woman, for example, that kind of thing, it might make a difference or any other formulation it might have. I personally don't. I don't care that much about that question, because for me, the texts, the text is what matters.
00:50:22:17 - 00:50:47:06
Speaker 3
And to the earlier question that you asked Bruce about, what advice might you give about moving forward? And, you know, and Bruce gave that really interesting response. My response was and about Bruce's ones is about looking at other productions of other countries and places and so on. My response that question would have been, let the text be your guide.
00:50:47:17 - 00:51:14:03
Speaker 3
Because one of the things I've noted noticed in the years, over the years of teaching is more and more I can get more out of the text and what I think is conquered Shakespeare by looking at the language and looking at what comes where in a text more closely than imagining about, you know, who is the author and getting to a debate about Oxford or not.
00:51:15:04 - 00:51:23:02
Speaker 3
And so for me, that's that. That's my short answer. I don't care. I wasn't trained in that way. And the text is what matters to me more.
00:51:23:13 - 00:51:33:11
Speaker 2
Yeah. President of the Shakespeare Association of America said it right here. He doesn't care, ladies and gentlemen. So I think that's important to note. Bruce, what would you say.
00:51:34:13 - 00:52:06:21
Speaker 4
From there is actually a site I don't think I'm convinced of, So we will believe the evidence that's there. But there is a website at the Folger Shakespeare Library that's Folger dot edu, and there is and they have photographs of every set of digital images of every single document that mentions William Shakespeare and William Shakespeare was an author in his own time.
00:52:07:05 - 00:52:34:09
Speaker 4
It is absolutely true that the number of documents that are exclusively about Shakespeare, he was born. So the parish register, we have his christening, but not his birth date. We have his death date in the parish register and Stratford Stratford upon Avon. We have various legal documents that he signed and it is a pretty small group of documents.
00:52:34:09 - 00:53:15:00
Speaker 4
But the number of documents in the period that mentioned Shakespeare are huge. And the Folger Shakespeare Library has reproductions of those documents, transcriptions of those documents. And it's pretty convincing that there was a writer as well as an actor named the William Shakespeare. So I do have that. It's not something I get particularly exercised about like it, but I do get exercised by this fact, and that is that when this whole business about who was the real author started, it was Americans who had the idea that it had to be Francis Bacon.
00:53:15:21 - 00:53:42:16
Speaker 4
That was the big deal in the 19th century. And the people who pursued this were, from our standpoint, absolutely crazy. I mean, the woman who thought Delia Bacon's we thought it was bacon, she would do things like pay a huge amount of money to dig up a chest that she thought was buried in a river at Chepstow because there was going to be a document in that that that proved this.
00:53:42:16 - 00:53:53:09
Speaker 4
So I think it's a patriotic argument on my part. I don't understand why Americans are so in awe of in which aristocrats.
00:53:53:09 - 00:54:28:11
Speaker 2
Well, I mean, let let me defend you and maybe not stick up for my own country people because. I find the authorship debate actually to be tied very much in to the class power nature of British society. I mean, British society is still really beholden to class and status. It's really meaningful in the UK even in 2024. And the idea that a provincial sort of lower class individual could be a literary genius offends some people in the upper echelons of sort of blue by British society.
00:54:28:11 - 00:54:53:19
Speaker 2
So I think there's a real kind of class based element to this, which as a student of a public school, you know, offends me so and so this that Right. I'm we're going to finish now with one question. It's a lovely question from Cameron McKeever, who says, What was the first piece, whether play or sonnet, they introduced you to Shakespeare and what theme or emotion that enticed you to read more, learn and pursue?
00:54:54:00 - 00:55:06:21
Speaker 2
And secondly, what's the piece that you now seem to return to over and over after years of study? And why do you feel you return to this particular pace so Bruce, what first drew you in and what keeps you coming back?
00:55:08:08 - 00:55:34:20
Speaker 4
It was actually reading Julius Caesar, and just as a senior at Central High School in Jackson, Mississippi, And that play got taught all the time because it was short and Macbeth got taught all the time because it was short. Maybe those are not the best place to try to interest people who are 17 or 18 years old in Shakespeare.
00:55:35:05 - 00:56:07:09
Speaker 4
But it was a speech by Portia in Julius Caesar in which she is in a garden and has a kind of monologue that very beautifully evokes the night and it was so it was actually Shakespeare's language that that initially drew me in. It was it was five years later that I saw the first production that I saw by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
00:56:07:13 - 00:57:03:07
Speaker 4
And that's what actually convinced me. But initially it was that language as to what I come back to. I find myself coming back to plays that when I was a younger person I really was not that interested in, or I thought that everything that could be said about that play had already had already been said. So at least in terms of the work that I've been doing on sound and on the sensorium, I would say that I have an altogether new interest in Coriolanus, which seems one of the Roman plays that had a big heyday of productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
00:57:04:09 - 00:57:15:04
Speaker 4
But it is not like a certified hit play because it seems extremely self-conscious about self representation and so.
00:57:17:11 - 00:57:18:18
Speaker 2
Ian closes out.
00:57:20:19 - 00:57:50:06
Speaker 3
As for the play that first excited me. It would have been King Lear, which I believe I read in High School and I just found it very powerful and moving, so much so that for many years I would not teach the play because I thought it was just so powerful and so in some ways so personal. And so I and then I decided no, I needed to teach it because I have a responsibility to students, at least let them have a go at it, sort of as that.
00:57:50:11 - 00:58:14:20
Speaker 3
And Bruce mentioned earlier in McKellen's in a different production, and I must just plug this one. His his more recent two years ago production of a King Lear that played in London and I think was due to come here and then COVID happened and it didn't come to us. That was just a brilliant production, just so it was great.
00:58:14:20 - 00:58:50:19
Speaker 3
Then as to what I keep coming back to, it's not so much any one play so much as a methodology. It's coming back and realizing that the language does keep giving and giving and that the, you know, there's this there's something about slow reading which Shakespeare did, or just coming back and finding a section and just going back and reading carefully and suddenly just so many new things opened up because there's a word you hadn't paid attention to the first or 10th time around, and it makes so much difference.
00:58:50:19 - 00:58:54:21
Speaker 3
It's a method more than any one book wonderful.
00:58:54:21 - 00:59:15:09
Speaker 2
That's all we have time for now. The play is done, all is well ended. If the suit be won that you expressed content which we will pay with stripped to please you day exceeding day as be your patients then and yours are parts your gentle hands lenders and take our hearts. Have a wonderful afternoon. Thank you so much, Ian.
00:59:15:09 - 00:59:19:06
Speaker 2
Thank you so much, Bruce. And thank you all for attending this Dornsife dialog.
00:59:20:12 - 00:59:32:21
Speaker 1
We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dornsife Dialogs Podcast. Please leave us a rating and a review wherever you listen. Thank you for your support and fight on.