Via Renaissance Lit comes the news of The Shakespeare Post, a new site on Shakespeare. It promises to bring you the latest news on all matters Shakespearean, gathered from the net and based on the editor’s own journalism. In the latter category, the site features a podcast of an interview with archeologist Jo Lyon about the discovery of the foundations of the Theatre in London. [On that subject, Will at I Love Shakespeare reposted a SHAKSPER post by Dave Kathman with a link to a Google Earth image of the site.]

The Shakespeare Post also includes news in the categories of research and scholarship, education, books,exhibitions, film, tv and radio, archeology and history as well as ‘unusual news.’ The site is edited by John D. Lawrence, an Internet producer for Fox News Chicago, who - I guess - has a thing for Shakespeare.

I read on The Freudian Petticoat this morning that the Arden Shakespeare has one-sidedly decided to end their contract with Patricia Parker for her edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Arden 3 series. The Chronicle ran an article on the matter. There is also a website in support of Patricia Parker on which she tells her side of the disquieting story. The site also links to a petition started by Richard Halpern to ask the publishing firm that now owns the Arden Shakespeare to reinstate Parker as the editor.

Riddle machines, virtual codexes and algorithmic criticism - it’s all in Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007). I am slowly making my way through its 620 pages printed on good old-fashioned non-digital paper, to review it for The European English Messenger. 

I started, of course, with Matthew Steggle’s chapter surveying the field of early modern literature and digital literary studies. Starting from the 1971 e-text of Paradise Lost by Judy Boss, he discusses Luminarium, Renascence Editions, Literature Online, Early English Books Online, the Interactive Shakespeare Project, the SHAKSPER discussion list, and his own Early Modern Literary Studies, to finally glance at the future of the field:  

The newest area of interest in early modern studies, and one where, again, the technology remains to be proven, is the early modern blog. Three early entrants into what will doubtless be a burgeoning field might be mentioned here: Adam Smyth’s Renaissance Lit Blog, the collaborative project Blogging the Renaissance, and Sharon Howard’s Early Modern Notes. (97)

Congratulations to these three blogs for being anthologized in this monumental tome! That said, Steggle’s positioning of weblogs seems a tad tentative for a book published in 2007 (and a chapter written no earlier than February 2006, when BtR kicked off) - or perhaps I am too much of a blogger to be objective. I turned to Aimée Morrison’s contribution,  ”Blogs and Blogging: Text and Practice,” to find out.  

This chapter starts with the very basics (”blog” is a contraction of “weblog”) and discusses technologies of blogging, genres of blogs, the practices of reading and writing blogs, and academic bloggers. Morrison writes that academics are drawn to blogging because of its opportunities for networking, to avoid academic isolation in an arcane speciality, to test new ideas and/or to keep abreast of colleagues and research. Referring to Ivan Tribble’s column on academic blogging in the Chronicle and the many responses it received, she comments: 

Often generating more heat than light, these writings nonetheless indicate the challenge that this particular writing genre poses to the academy, and as with other online practices before it, invigorates the debate about the values as well as the failings of our established pedagogical, research, and collegial practices. (383)

The section on “Blogging in Literary Studies” focuses mainly on academic scholarship that studies blogs, some of it by literary scholars. Its view on blogs in literary studies is confined to the statement that “many very worthwhile blogs [...] offer information of use to the literary studies community, providing annotated and focused lists of resources and offering opportunities for rich interaction among blog-readers and blog-writers” (383). It’s hard to disagree with that! 

Online material from the book: 

• Gregory Crane, David Bamman and Alison Jones’s chapter, “ePhilology: when the books talk to their readers” is available in PDF from Tufts Digital Library
• Willard McCarty’s chapter on Modelling in the Humanities on his website
• Excerpt from Alan Liu’s introduction to the volume, “Imagining the New Media Encounter,” are on his blog
• The whole volume of the other digital companion, A Companion to Digital Humanities, is available online here, for free!

A recent article by Rebecca Atwood in the Times Higher Education reports that new research has found that young academics in the UK experience high levels of anxiety over their ability to “perform.” Louise Archer, the reader in education policy studies who conducted the research, concludes that young academics worry about the pressure to publish and obtain grants, as well as their temporary positions:

Contract researchers described the insecurity of their positions and felt that they were seen as being of lower status than permanent staff. “If you are a contract researcher you are never part of the team - people don’t remember your name [...] You are just here to fill a function,” one said.

Dutch young academics are not immune to these anxieties either, as Intermediair reported only a day earlier (in Dutch). Their article states that in The Netherlands and many other European countries, the system of temporary full-time research appointments after the PhD is a trap in which most young, enthusiastic researchers get caught. After piling short-term contract on contract, seventy percent of these researchers do not get tenured.

According to Intermediair, in 1999 fifty-four percent of all academic faculty had a permanent position; in 2006 that number fell to 44 percent. I am very happy working here at the Vrije Universiteit - where I am not treated as contingent at all, quite the contrary - but I do find these numbers worrying. Although the situation with regard to teaching assistants is perhaps not as serious here as it is in America, these figures do resonate with the growing numbers of contingent faculty that Marc Bousquet describes at How the University Works.

See also:

• Aik Kramer’s film on the position of temporary lecturers ['flexwerkers'] at the University of Amsterdam: I love UvA [in Dutch].

This week, archeologists of the Museum of London, have possibly and quite serendipitously found the foundations of The Theatre on a building site for a new theatre. The Theatre was one of the first purpose-built theatre in London, located in Shoreditch. Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s men performed at this theatre until a dispute with the landlord forced them to dismantle the theatre and transport it across the Thames to build the Globe in Southwark. Jo Lyon, a senior archeologist at the site, says that there is a “pretty high possibility” that these are indeed the foundations of The Theatre, since they are in the right place, and have a polygonal shape.

CBC News spoke to Martin Wiggins of the Shakespeare Institute:  

“The first thing I want to know it is what the foundations can tell us about the architecture,” Wiggins said. “How big was it? How does it compare with the Rose? How does it compare with the Globe? How similar are they?” Wiggins said an understanding of what the theatre looked like could help Shakespearean scholars understand more about this period in the playwright’s history. ”The size of the theatre will have an impact on the way the play is written,” he said.

The Theatre opened its doors in 1576. Nine years earlier, in 1567, a grocer named John Brayne had already built a theatre in the garden of his farm, called The Red Lion, but not much is known about this theatre, and it probably did not survive long. In his biography of Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt writes that The Theatre was attacked from the pulpit for being made “after the manner of the old heathenish Theatre at Rome.” Since the structure was stood on the land of a former priory of Benedictine nuns, the liberty of Holywell, the city authorities could not obstruct the building work (Will in the World, 183). 

• See the 24Hour Museum for more photos.

Embodied books on the cover

“Glosing wordes tickle and stirre vp the affections to be conceited of some fond passion” [1]

Henry Crosse, Vertues Commonwealth (1603)

It took me a while after this first post, but this summer I did finally buy Katherine Craik’s Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). This is a book I wish I had written. Its subject matter is utterly fascinating and Craik writes in a beautifully crisp style. 

The book posits that reading in early modern England was a bodily, material experience. In its pages, readers can be found licking the sweet juice of stinking books, being tickled with sugared rhetoric, softened or sharpened by words, pricked or pierced by sermons, or stirred and inflamed by poetry. Indeed, words themselves are material; they have weight and texture, while books have humoral properties that interact with the physiology of their reader, conveying the humoral state of its author to the reader’s body.

The topic resonates with recent interest in the body and embodiment in early modern culture (see also this bibliography). It picks up on Gail Kern Paster’s exploration of the porousness of the body and its exchanges with its environment. Craik studies the exchanges between the word and the flesh - “the relationship between literary texts and the bodies of English gentlemen.” Continue reading ‘Reading sensations’