The curious connection between Jonathan Gil Harris and Dr. Who, plus a new-ish screen adaptation of an early modern, post-medieval play: Alan Cox’s Revenger’s Tragedy.
So many moments from Shakespeare in Love to choose from, and the scene watched in class was a good way to start off our discussion of how we see Shakespeare and the Renaissance today. The scene includes the nervous backstage happenings moments before the first-ever staging of Romeo and Juliet and the stuttering tailor-turned Prologue marvelously gets up to speed with the audience. Proof against the notion that these are literary text, like the ones written and edited by the University Wits, but rather utterances collected and put on stage for a wide variety of Londoners to enjoy. Compared with the stifling seriousness of an earlier scene, where the Lord Chamberlain’s Men perform Two Gentlemen of Verona for Elizabeth’s court, the playhouses were the purpose behind most of these memorable moments in early modern drama. And while big-moneyed patrons were not to be sneezed at, the plays gained their international appeal by being for everyone, especially the illiterate. Most of the Oxford edition scholars (Gabriel Egan, Carole Levin and Peter Thomas) agree that it took a society like late-16th century England to produce these plays. Someone as attuned to all the intricate details of life in the theatre and in such a city like London could turn what seemed like a half-baked movie pitch (let’s have Julia Roberts as the actress who played Juliet) into one of Tom Stoppard’s finest contribution to filmmaking – still not sure what to make of his adaptation of Anna Karenina, but that is another story.
Turns out that I picked a winner with my article presentation, Jonathan Gil Harris was described as a “hot commodity” among literary criticism, and the last book of his to come out was published here in Vancouver! It would be great if he has plans to return to UBC, especially as the Digital Literacy Centre is looking for someone to speak at our conference. While his study of “things” and the lives objects have may go off in many unexpected ways – who wouldn’t want to know about the smells associated with Blackfriar Theatre productions of Macbeth? – Harris seems to represent the purpose of multimodality: more than just the one way of seeing things. I jotted down in my notebook that he might be a post-thing theorist, and it would be really cool if there is a connection to string or chaos in his research. One thing he is not, it seems, is a New Historicist and it looks like the sun is setting on this critical movement. Harris even has the final word on Greenblatt’s brand of criticism: New Historicists cannot agree how the Civil Wars started, just as Marxists cannot agree how they ended. Our instructor gave another way of describing NH’s way: “funky anecdote from obscure literary source matched up with highest canonical text” like some hermit’s diary linked up with Edgar’s lines from King Lear. For my presentation (and the DLC conference) I will be finding out lots more on JGH, but it seems like he has taken historicism a step further: take a tidbit from anywhere in complexity theory and explore its connection to what we already know about the plays.