Tag: Shakespeare

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Lit Eval

A responsible reader will 1) grant that values always inform the act of reading, 2) attempt to put Christian values to work in his or her reading, 3) consider the purpose and point of view of the text, and 4) realize that texts may be immoral in other ways than by using profanity and sexual explicitness.

From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith

These are Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin’s guidelines for evaluating work in a Christian way that neither discourages reading something just because it has an immoral act in it nor dismisses ethical perspectives in favor of a work’s aesthetic achievement.

Two cases in point…

In my Intro to Lit course, I teach Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The former is an example of a work filled with explicit violence that never gives us a sense that the text supports what’s being represented. Macbeth is not completely irredeemable, though he tries to act like he is, and it would be a perverse reading indeed that says he’s supposed to be praised for killing Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff’s wife and children. John Cox’s article “Religion and Suffering in Macbeth” works out a pretty convincing Christian interpretation of the play.

Mother Night, on the other hand, wants to make a moral statement, but I don’t think it’s central insights can be completely reconciled with Christianity. Vonnegut wants to make the point that everyone can hate and that the worst kind of hate is to believe that God supports your hate. We get all of this filtered through the novel’s conflicted and unreliable Howard Campbell, however. By the novel’s end, he believes that evil is a more ultimate force in the world than good. It’s a grim view that Vonnegut’s authorial comments–“We are what we pretend to be”–cannot wholly ironize. The novel criticizes adroitly, but I don’t think it’s positive view matches anything like Christianity. Vonnegut was a virulent atheist who thought religion encouraged evil rather than stemming it.

Gallagher and Lundin call for me to make these evaluations much more overt as I teach and to model the four steps above that avoid simplistic aesthetic approval or dismissive moral disapproval.

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The Story Grid and King Lear

I’ve been working through Shawn Coyne’s book The Story Grid and its accompanying podcast the past couple of weeks, and it’s been creeping into my teaching.

Coyne edited novels for Random House and Doubleday for 25 years and wants to teach fiction writers how to become their own effective editors. At the heart of Coyne’s work are the five building blocks of every scene:

The five elements that build story are the inciting incident (either causal or coincidental), progressive complications expressed through active or revelatory turning points, a crisis question that requires a choice between at least two negative alternatives or at least two irreconcilable goods, the climax choice and the resolution.

I’ve started internalizing this heuristic by applying to things I’ve been teaching. When we add to this five-part structure Coyne’s idea that every longer work should have a beginning hook, middle build, and final payoff, we get this schematic for Shakespeare’s King Lear.

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A couple of comments:

  1. The play is divides more evenly into three acts then five: banishment, reconciliation, final separation.
  2. The play’s heartbreaking conclusion (which Shakespeare famously altered from the play’s sources) is so crushing because of the reconciliation that ends the Middle Build.
  3. The Gloucester subplot works more as a two-act structure: Edmund’s deceit through Gloucester’s punishment through Edgar’s performance for his father through his final battle with Edmund.
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Politics and Performance in Henry IV Part 1

I took my own undergrad survey of Shakespeare in the spring of 2001. George Bush Jr. had just won a highly contested presidential election, and even pre-9/11, my professors were skeptical. During the campaign, Bush had adopted the narrative of a redeemed man. His past was pretty sordid: alcoholism, shirked duties, the stereotypical foibles of a rich kid with tons of privilege and little common sense. But now? He was a highly successful Texas governor, a born again Christian, a compassionate conservative who was tough on crime but merciful to his political opponents.

George Bush, my professor Ted Brown told us, was Prince Hal: not the historical Prince Hal, but Shakespeare’s representation of him. Someone near the Shrub, as Dr. Brown was wont to call the president, had been reading his Shakespeare (Doc Brown couldn’t imagine that Bush himself had read the play). They knew that the redemptive, comedic narrative succeeded in the 1590s just as well as the 1990s. Continue reading “Politics and Performance in Henry IV Part 1”

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Wrestling with Othello

We happened to read and talk about Othello the same week we celebrated the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. While the play’s early (white) audiences may not have reacted to the play’s racial dynamics, I cannot, in 21st Century America, read Roderigo, Iago, and Brabanzio’s descriptions of Othello and not think of our nation’s own conflicted relationship to black men and women (#blacklivesmatter). This is a play that asks us to balance the duties of individual and social responsibility. We can lay blame for what happens to Desdemona on Othello alone or even extend the blame to Iago (whatever his real motivation is). But what responsibility does the larger society have for enabling a world where Othello associates the color of his skin with sin? Continue reading “Wrestling with Othello”