On Holy Terror

Years ago in graduate school, I wrote a paper about Frank Miller's 300, arguing that the film version was a deliberate and brash manifestation of post-9/11 paranoia and xenophobia. I was only just venturing into my studies of late medieval crusades literature, but I already noticed startling similarities between the narrative mechanics of the film and of the romances that fascinated me. I remember sitting in the theater watching the film, amazed by its beauty and appalled by its blatant homophobia and racism. I had expected, however, that Frank Miller (for all intents and purposes the godfather on set) and Zach Snyder (the director) would at least try to offer some sort of defense of the film. In interiews, Miller waxed downright belligerent whenever questions about the film's depiction of the Persians and its implied critique of the contemporary Middle-East came up. Take, for instance, his statements during NPR's State of the Union broadcast (the irony of his segment following Kwame Anthony Appiah's was not lost on me):

FM: When you think about what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities, and all the good it’s done in the world, it’s kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally.  

NPR: A lot of people would say what America has done abroad has led to the doubts and even the hatred of its own citizens.  

FM: Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that Miller would go on to create Holy Terror. The comic was originally intended to be a Batman story that pitted the caped crusader against Bin Laden and other extremists. Somewhere along the way, and perhaps to the relief of most franchise lovers, Miller decided that this was not, in fact, a Batman story. Batman was replaced by a hero known as The Fixer, and his accomplice/lover is a catburgler rather than Catwoman.

I remember hearing about Miller's Holy Terror a few years ago, but it fell off my radar rather quickly amid the maelstrom of dissertating and a cross country move. It came to mind a couple of weeks ago, however, after I got into a lively conversation on Twitter about modern iterations of militant Christianity, and I realized -- especially since I plan to talk about this topic at length in the conclusion to my book -- that I needed to read it. I bought a copy (used, since I couldn't in good conscience buy a new one) and have spent the past couple of weeks figuring out what to say about it.

Its xenophobic portrait of Middle Easterners is so appalling that -- at first -- it's hard to know where even to start. I'll describe a few of the most crucial moments in the comic, however, in part to give readers a sense of what takes place in the comic, and in part to help me sort out my thoughts on it.

You don't need to look any further than the cover or the comic's epigraph to gather that this comic is is a reactionary post-9/11 revenge fantasy (that it was released close to the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is, perhaps, evidence enough). The cover (pictured left), gives us the first glimpse of the The Fixer and one of many nameless assailants. I couldn't help but notice the difference in the features: consider the clearly defined white/Anglocentric face of our hero with the faceless (and black) void, human only insofar as it has eyes and, at least in the recent past, teeth. From its inception, then, the comic perpetuates the horrendous notion that dark skin connotes threat. And we need only look at any number of tragic narratives in our own country's very recent history to get a sense of why the perpetuation of that kind of imagery is both grotesque and downright dangerous.

Things escalate quickly just a few pages into the comic, where we encounter this epigraph:

"If you meet the Infidel, kill the infidel" -- Mohammed

This is not, in fact, a direct quotation from the Q'uran. At best, it's a heavily paraphrased (and wildly decontextualized) version of 9:5: "Slay the pagans wherever you may come upon them, and take the captive, and besiege them, and lie in wait for them at ever conceivable space . . . ." It's unclear whether Miller is aware of the original version and its context, but the point of this epigraph is nevertheless crystal clear: to ensure that readers of the comic are encouraged from the start to perceive Muslims as inherently threatening. Again, wildly problematic, but hardly unsurprising.

The first sequence in the comic introduces both The Fixer and the Catburgler, the former chasing the latter on account of a stolen bracelet. The chase takes an erotic turn, but a nail bomb interrupts their rooftop tryst. The comic then flashes back to the events leading up to that bomb going off, and it is here that we are introduced to the first of many caricatured Middle-Eastern villains:

The fact that Amina is both an exchange student and a humanities major should give us pause. In this one panel, Miller implies that both exchange programs and the humanities are in some way in direct/indirect collusion with al Qaeda. And as we recently saw with UMass's decision to deny Iranian students entry, or this study on the likely effects of post 9/11 policies on Muslim exchange students, Middle-Eastern students seeking an education in the U.S. face a plethora of difficulties and are discriminated against in a variety of overt and covert ways. The roots of this discrimination are found in post 9/11 fears of al Qaeda and other forms of militant Islam gaining traction in the U.S., and Holy Terror directly capitalizes on those fears in its depiction of Amina.

Several reviewers have mocked the fact that she's a "humanities major" since no such major actually exists, but I think Miller knew exactly what he wanted to do here as well. All of the characters, both heroic and villanous, in Holy Terror are generalized caricatures created for the sake of the jingoism Miller wished to promulgate. Amina, as a humanities major, then, embodies dangers Miller sees in academia writ large, as he apparently views the scholars within it as left-leaning cultural relativists who inadvertently support the causes of those who would see the end to freedom of thought or expression. His inability to envision academia (or, let's be honest, any corner of the globe) as a space occupied by an array of complex and dynamic persons would be hilarious if it its effects weren't so awful. The representation the Amina as the femme-fatale-suicide bomber-humanities-majoring-exchange-student is deeply problematic, then, because -- like the epigraph that begins the comic -- it relies on a host of oversights that, when played out in the actual world, have direct and downright catastrophic consequences. It perpetuates a cancerous and self-contradictory mythology that condemns freedom of expression while trying to protect it, while also pointing an accusing finger at any exchange student who happens to come from the Middle-East and/or be Muslim (Miller regularly fails to distinguish between the two).

He also deliberately conflates al-Qaeda/Islam (the two are, regrettably, one and the same to him) with "the Dark Ages," implying that the insurgents in his story will usher in second Dark Age if they are allowed to succeed (see left). As many have argued (myself included), to associate anything we perceive as Other or as aberrant with "the Medieval" betrays both ignorance and an unwillingness to grapple with the very real and modern problems of the contemporary world. Al Qaeda is not medieval. It is the result of a complex series of modern events, pressure points, and entanglements. To refuse to see that, is to refuse to take ownership of our contemporary world. An interpretive and an imaginative failure to say the least.

To make matters worse, the comic insists on genocide and torture as the only way to confront and defeat the Other, resorting every step of the way to one-dimensional and caricatured portraits of both hero and villain. Consider, for instance, the implications of this portrait of an insurgent (below right), or the crude and offensive scenes of mass-killing and torture (below left).

The comic reaches its zenith of anti-Muslim rhetoric in its depiction and description of a mosque in Empire City:

The Saudis spent a fortune on this place. It's the oldest mosque in Empire city. People come from miles around -- but only a very few are let inside. It's as close to an inner-city sovereign nation as you'll find, this side of Rome. It's as silent as a tomb. It keeps secrets.

It goes without saying that this evokes and plays upon the the xenophobia that surrounded (and in some ways dominated) discussion of The Ground Zero mosque back in 2010. Consider the following quotation from this regrettable and inflammatory op-ed about the proposed mosque, for example:

Not only that, but Rauf [the Imam behind the proposed project] has called America compatible with sharia law. Indeed, America, he says helped deepen his identification with Islam; talking to The New York Times, he stated, "in that sense, you could say I found my faith in this country. For me, Islam and America are organically bound together. This is not my story alone. The American way of life has helped many Muslims make a conscious decision to embrace their faith." And his partner, el-Gamal? He turned to Islam after the attacks of 9/11. (He also has a history of violent crime, with attacks coming as recently as 2005.)

This, of course, raises the question of whether Cordoba [the name of the proposed mosque] can or will become a seat of a jihadist movement. And the truth is, the more we know about Feisal Abdul Rauf and his cohorts, the more I tend to wonder. Rauf has already skillfully turned American Muslims and non-Muslims into enemies of one another -- something even Osama bin Laden failed to do. His disingenuousness, dishonesty, and disrespect make me wonder what else he and his mosque might be capable of achieving in the name of what he calls 'peace.'" 

The author's cognitive dissonance and weak arguments in this quotation (and in the article as a whole) are obvious, but the paranoia seeping from the op-ed is worth considering alongside Miller's Holy Terror. Both respond to perceived threats of Islam by assuming that we're embroiled in a religious war. Both strongly suggest that a mosque -- ANY mosque -- can and will harbor terrorists. Both insinuate -- if not state outright -- that all Muslims are to be feared and are, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit in acts of terror waged by Muslims extremists. Both authors, in other words, caricaturize twenty three percent of the world's population in order to promote a deeply xenophobic jingoism.

It's no surprise then, that the mosque in Holy Terror affirms and validates such a worldview. The Catburgler enters it -- grudgingly disguised in a burka -- with our narrator describing "the night wind blow[ing] away seven centuries." Yet another attempt to distance the heroes in the text from the insurgents (and, more broadly, America from the Middle East), by insinuating that the latter is somehow still "stuck" in the Middle Ages.

The description of the mosque's interior only builds on that assumption. The Catburgler is almost immediately apprehended by the mosque's inhabitants, and she is led down below sea level into what she describes as "The Old City -- built by long-forgotten ancients . . . a race of madmen." As you can see in the image below, this underground space is adorned with grotesque sculptures and -- oddly -- what appear to be ancient Greek helmets. She encounters both a traitorous drunk Irishman who has teamed up with al-Qaeda and a leader of sorts -- a diminutive figure so covered in jewelry that only his misshapen mouth is visible. This leader ridicules Westerners for their

obliviousness and states the following:

"We come right out and call ourselves al-Qaeda -- the cell -- and you don't stop to consider what that means. We're scarcely a microbe, a speck, a tiny part of an organism so vast as to be beyond belief. Were I utterly at your mercy . . . even I could only provide the vaguest hint of the organization's size -- or its true purpose. Even Sheik Osama -- may peace be upon him -- was merely a slave beneath a slave beneath a slave."

In sum, we're given a vision of a vast and impossibly organized network of insurgents, and we're told that The West (America specifically) has been too blind and oblivious to its vastness. And, as a aside, Miller appears to completely misinterpret and mistranslate the meaning of the name al Qaeda. Again though, here we have an instance where the paranoia and xenophobia characteristic of Miller's worldview loudly proclaim themselves. The insurgents, as we soon discover, are about to launch a weapon of mass destruction on Empire City. They are halted (read: massacred) by the Fixer in the nick of time, the weapon described in ways that clearly attempt to justify the indiscriminate killing. The comic doesn't end there though. Instead, we're introduced one final time to Dan Donegal -- the tough-talking cop in league with The Fixer. We see him "shivering in his sheets like a scared little boy," traumatized by the terrorist attacks at the outset of the story. We are made to bear witness to his trauma, again, as a means of justifying the brutality and xenophobia that precede it.

In sum, this raw, wildly problematic, and downright incoherent story is even more virulent and extreme than the post-9/11 film version of 300. I kept thinking about that film, and about Miller's incendiary comments about Islam and the Middle East at the time of the film's release, as I read this comic, because Holy Terror strikes me as simply a more ossified (I can't really bring myself to call it "refined") reflection of his fear and hatred of Islam and his inability to distinguish between the majority of its adherents and the extremists who warp it.

It struck me as curious (and, if I'm being honest, more than a little hopeful), then, that this comic garnered nowhere near as much attention as either the graphic novel or the film version of 300, and that few -- if any -- could formulate any sort of defense or dismissal for the obvious anti-Muslim sentiment. Supporters and defenders of 300 often resorted to the argument that it's "just an action flick" and that people who objected to the vilification of the Persians (and, to be fair, any non-white person in the film) were just "thinking too hard." The film was frequently praised for its cinematic prowess and was relatively popular at the box office. To be sure, it garnered a reasonable degree of criticism, but there seemed to be a somewhat even number of critics who overlooked or weren't concerned enough to comment upon the racist/xenophobic undertones of the narrative. With Holy Terror, however, you're hard pressed to find a review that doesn't comment on the awfulness of the worldview it espouses, and it garnered nowhere near the cultural traction as 300, even though the two works proffer similar kinds of cultural fantasies.

I wonder, as a result, what role temporal distance has to play in these reactions. Is it easier to tell a story laced with xenophobia when you place the events in the distant past and bury your message in a swords and sandals epic? When, in other words, you appropriate and elide ancient historical particulars as opposed to recent ones? That certainly seems to be the case when you compare the two stories and their reception. And it has made me wonder about the similar "problems" I see in Richard Coer de Lion. As I write in one of my book chapters, relatively few versions of the medieval story include the more fantastical episodes that we often associate with it (the repeat cannibalism, the demonic horses, the lion-heart-eating, the demon mother), and I argue that these omissions in the RCL tradition have to do with the problems inherent in presenting a fantasy version of events in the relatively recent past.

Perhaps, then, we could consider Holy Terror as a very modern sort of "recovery romance" -- a type of romance that, as I describe in my book project, proffers fantasies of Christian/Western triumph over perceived Muslim enemies. Like Isumbras or RCL, Holy Terror (and 300) are symptomatic of cultural desires, appetites and impulses -- specifically of desires for stability and superiority at a time where neither seemed or were possible. It's very easy to dismiss Miller's Holy Terror for its awfulness, its incoherence, even its artlessness, but I think it's important to avoid Othering him over much. To do so would be to risk making the same moves that he deploys by repeatedly arguing that Islam is "medieval." I see Miller, then, as an alarming harbinger of sorts -- as a representative, however, hyperbolic, of a worldview that needs to be paid careful attention to so that we can find ways of pushing back against it. We need -- especially in light of the persistent tendency to code anything that we don't want to acknowledge as modern as "medieval" -- to remind ourselves of the fact that his work is symptomatic of a worldview hardly unique to him and him alone.

When Giants Walked the Earth: Jurassic Park, The Legend of Albina, and Inherited Topography

Having recently been to see Jurassic Park in 3D, I have felt a renewed enthusiasm for dinosaurs. Kate's delightful post on "Deadline Anxiety and Dinosaurs" further reminded me of the wonders of the classic film. At the same time, I was working on a paper about the legend of Albina for Plymouth's 34th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum, which led me to connect the two in my mind. Let me start with a recap of each story:

Jurassic Park is a tale about scientists who figure out how to bring dinosaurs back through the magic of DNA. Chaos ensues.

The legend of Albina (or, sometimes in Middle English, Albin) gives an origin story for the name Albion. Albina is a princess from Greece (or perhaps Syria) who plots with her many sisters to murder their husbands and is thus exiled on a rudderless ship. Fate intervenes, and the women land safely on an unnamed, uninhabited island at the edge of the world. Albina calls the mysterious land Albion after herself and goes about setting up a home there. Mating with incubi, Albina and her sisters produce giant offspring and populate the island with their monstrous progeny. The giants rule the island for 800 years, and then Brutus shows up from the wreckage of Troy. He kills the giants and renames the island Britain for himself. He tames the wilderness and cultivates the land. From the wood and stones of the island, he fashions a New Troy that we call London.

On the surface, I will admit that these two stories have little in common. A modern warning story about the dangers of unexamined scientific exploration and a medieval mytho-historic explanation for the name Albion might seem, quite literally, worlds apart. And yet fortune has thrown them together in my mind, and I'd like to humor myself by thinking about possible connections.


The edge of the world seems like a good place to stop Like dinosaurs, the giants of the Albina story walk the same land that we inhabit. The only thing that separates us from these frightening and yet fascinating forebears is time. Though we're not descended from them -- both dinosaurs and giants have been extinct since prehistory -- we have inherited their realm. As Jurassic Park opens, paleontologists in Montana are digging up fossils. The ease with which they dig up these fossils has been making paleontologists chuckle and children look optimistically at their toy shovels ever since the film opened. The image of these fossils, hidden away by the sands of time and yet still just below the surface of our landscape, connects these ancient bird-lizards to our own countryside. Time may separate us from the dinosaurs, the movie seems to indicate, but only by a couple feet of dust. Their bones lie under our feet, and our land was theirs first.

Similarly, the Albin story imagines British history beginning with monstrous creatures: a murderous woman, a mother of monsters. The image of a man called Brutus pulling himself from the carnage of his fallen city and making his way to an island on the edge of the world was widely recited in medieval England. The story usually begins with Brutus landing on the island, finding it populated with barely-human giants, and conquering the land by dispatching of these unpleasant natives. Surely this is a colonial fantasy, in which the colonizer need not feel guilt for taking over a new land because the inhabitants can be discounted as less than human. The versions of this story that insert the Albina legend in the beginning, however, shift the reader's perspective. In these texts, we follow not Brutus but Albina to the island; we sit with the giants on the shore as Brutus sails up to claim the land and rename it for himself. Brutus may kill these giants, Brutus may remake the landscape into his own version of civilization, but the story still begins with Albina and her larger-than-life children. They stomp around, and their movements undoubtedly shift and mold the topography, carving out lakes and valleys and mountains with their rumbling steps. The wilderness that Brutus discovers when he arrives on the island still lurks beneath and beyond the streets and buildings he commissions. The people who live in the London of the 14th century (or today) may not be able to trace their ancestry back to Albin or her outsized offspring, but the chronological and topographical link is nonetheless inherent in the narrative. In The Short English Metrical Chronicle, readers are told that Albina landed "here" and on "this land" (307, 306). There is never any doubt in the text that her location, even before it has a name, is the reader's location as well. We can kill off the monsters, the legend seems to tell us, but we can't escape their influence. The island may be Britain, but it is Albion as well. As with the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, only time stands between us and the monsters from whom we inherited our earth.


What is this strange, four-wheeled creature? Jurassic Park increases this uneasy sense of chronology with a particularly 1990s fable in which technology can bridge the gap between past and present. Dinosaur DNA, with a little frog DNA thrown in for good measure, initiates a shocking confrontation with the past. As with the story of Saint Erkenwald speaking to a long-dead judge (see my Titanic post for more on that), our paleontologists can see the bones they've studied come to vibrant life. I was speaking with some fellow medievalists recently about how Jurassic Park is a fantasy for anyone who studies the past. We can collect our evidence, we can imagine how it must have been, but we know that there's always a little bit of guesswork, a little bit of our own time and place getting in our way. The centuries are, despite our best efforts, an unpassable obstacle to full engagement with past people and places and events. When Doctors Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (played by Sam Neill and Laura Dern, respectively) gaze in wonder at the living versions of the fossils they have studied for so many years, it's hard not to feel a sympathetic twinge. When Alan Grant murmurs gleefully "They do move in herds," I can't help but think that I would make similar comments if I got to view a performance of the medieval York Cycle or a production of Shakespeare at the original Globe. And when the doctors pet and hug a living triceratops, the tactile interaction means that they are literally touching a creature of the past. The new 3D version enhances these interactions and confrontations by making the dinosaurs appear to pop out of the screen toward us as we watch. The years have been kind to these dinosaurs, and they appear more real than ever. Yet these dinosaurs, made from prehistoric DNA, are still born here and now. They're still in a contemporary landscape, no matter the efforts put into recreating a proper habitat (maybe this is why that triceratops is so ill). The bit of modern frog DNA making up each one means that, even on a genetic level, they are modern creatures even as they are ancient ones. The closest we can come is still imperfect. Still, ultimately, dangerous in its imperfections.

Even as time in Jurassic Park is both then and now, place is both real and imagined. We may recognize the Montana badlands, but Snakewater is a fictional Montana city. The backstory of this fossil paradise is that it was originally an island. In other words, a fictional place was once a fictional island, subsumed into the middle of the modern-day United States. The park itself is built upon a fictional island as well, Isla Nublar (meaning something like "clouded island" or even "obscure island"), just off the coast of Costa Rica. As with Snakewater, Isla Nublar is given a specific location in relation to real geography (and, of course, was filmed in a real place that we may visit if we wish), and yet it is imaginary. Off the coast of the known lies the land of the film, connected to the world we know and yet always separate from it.

Albina is given a much more specific location in that she lands where the reader now stands. Her time at sea may exist in a geotemporal shadow realm, but before and after she travels we can point to her on a map. As I mentioned above, she lands "here." And when Brutus comes to the island, the city he builds is the city we now call London. Her island is not ours -- it is a mythic wilderness ruled by overly-ambition women and their overly-corporeal descendants. They are vanished into the past. Their imaginary bones are dust, and we cannot simply dig them up in our backyards. Yet if their bones are dust, even the dust of legend, then that dust makes up the story of the modern island. Albion both is and isn't Britain.


Not as cuddly as you might think The monsters of our past (the monstrosity of the past?) is both frightening and fascinating. (For a detailed examination of this paradox, see Monster Theory, especially Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's sixth thesis: "Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire" (16).) Albina may create giants from her lust, forging progeny with an incubus to populate the island, but her desire isn't totally disconnected from our own readerly desire. Albin and her giants and her alien-familiar wilderness are tantalizing fictions of British chronology. Similarly, dinosaurs maintain the capacity to terrify and attract us. When I was four or five, I received a blow-up Tyrannosaurus Rex for Christmas. Obsessed with T-Rex, I was delighted with this gift. I couldn't wait for my father to blow up the toy so I could exist in an imaginary dinosaur world with my T-Rex friend. Yet when night came, I was suddenly panicked because I knew that a T-Rex prowled in my house. I begged my father to deflate it for the safety of everyone involved. For the next several days, we repeated this pattern. By day, I loved my T-Rex; by night, I wanted him annihilated. Finally, my dad, exhausted from blowing up a four-foot-tall dinosaur day after day, said I could choose special days to play with my T-Rex, but that it couldn't be everyday. The terror induced by the T-Rex and velociraptors in the film is not the only reason it has been so popular. Yes, we love to be afraid of dinosaurs, but we also just love dinosaurs. The tender moments of the film in which characters lovingly pet peacefully plant-eating dinosaurs are there for a reason. Whether we would hide from T-Rex in a bathroom or wave a flare at her to distract her from the children, we know that she is deadly. The way that Dr. Grant revels in frightening an obnoxious child with a description of the velociraptor's hunting style at the beginning of the film gets echoed in the famous last words of Robert Muldoon (played by Bob Peck) as a velociraptor leaps toward him: "Clever Girl!" He admires her for outsmarting him even in his last breath.

An aspect of the monsters of the past that makes us love and fear them is that they can't really be controlled. Albina's father sends her away on a rudderless ship, a punishment which is surely a death sentence. A punishment which robs her of narrative control as she floats powerlessly around the world. Yet she manages to claim a land for herself, to attach her name to that land and to become a part of a nation's history. Even as she and her sisters consider their position as an island full of women, they find a way to reproduce, monstrous and unnatural as that way is, producing as it does children who are both more and less than humans. Brutus may tame the land by killing Albina's monster-children, but they haunt British chronicles nonetheless.

In Jurassic Park, modern science and technology may seem to contain and control the past even as they resurrect it, but the monsters of the past defy such efforts. The opening scene, in which a velociraptor manages to kill a worker even in the most carefully planned situation, indicates for us from the first moments of the film that modern knowledge has met its match. When we are told later that the velociraptors methodically test each section of their fence for weakness, it's clear that they do not take well to their high-tech cage. Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) sums up the dangers of such attempts at containment when he states that "the kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is." In this speech, monstrous vitality is life itself, that which breaks free of control and simply finds a way. Everything on Isla Nublar is an attempt at control, down to the jeeps which can't be steered (am I going too far to compare these to medieval rudderless ships, outside of their riders' control and yet firmly on the track of fate?). The designers of the park may have automated the vehicles, but it never occurred to them that riders could (or would) simply open the jeep doors and step outside. Given all of these hints, we're not terribly surprised when we see a dinosaur egg in the wild. Despite the careful breeding of only female dinosaurs, we learn that these dinosaurs, made partly with frog DNA, can switch sexes in order to reproduce. Like Albin and her sisters, the dinosaurs manage to procreate even when denied the normal means of doing so. They can neither be kept in cages nor kept from expanding their population.


At least Skull Island had King KongWe might say that the real monster of the film is human greed, but this very greed is predicated on human desire to encounter dinosaurs. The monsters can only menace us because we bring them back in order to do so. John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough) speaks with wonder of creating a park in which people can see and touch real dinosaurs, and he says plainly that "this park was not built to cater only for the super-rich. Everyone in the world has the right to enjoy these animals." But his wonder at scientific possibility, in the real world, translates into the chaos that characterizes the film from the opening scene. We never believe that things are going to go well, even as we also to want to see and touch the dinosaurs.

I am not saying that Jurassic Park is a modern-day Albina myth, nor that either Michael Chrichton or Steven Spielberg had considered or even read the obscure medieval tale when they created first book and then movie of this modern story. Rather, I suggest that attempts to engage with the past, or to imagine how that engagement might take place, may partake of the larger-than-life. The past is monstrous in that it is both wholly other and wholly familiar, in that it is distant and yet part of us, in that the here and now will inevitably become the past. The past, whether we understand it or not, will always swallow the present. The giant lurks just beneath the surface of our modern world, unattainable and yet tempting us with possible proximity. Albina, giants, dinosaurs, titans -- all are creatures of the past both consumed and consuming. And, yes, I would probably visit Jurassic Park, even knowing what I know. Who could resist?

In fields where they lay: The Second Shepherds' Play as the original Christmas special

Second Shepherds' Play Manuscript
Huntingdon Library MS HM1, fol. 38r

In keeping with my tradition of writing a holiday blog (started last year with Gawain and the Green Knight), I would like to write this year on another of my favorite medieval Christmas stories, The Second Shepherds' Pageant. The Second Shepherds' Pageant, also called The Second Shepherds' Play, has been burdened with its confusing title simply because it's the second play on shepherds in the Towneley manuscript (though the two weren't necessarily meant to be performed as a pair). Though the play is anonymous, the author has become known as the Wakefield Master. The play inserts common shepherds into the nativity story, and it combines social commentary and humor with piety. Simultaneously medieval England and biblical Bethlehem, the play is a beautiful example of the ways in which biblical stories were alive for medieval people through medieval dramatic practices.

The play opens with a lone shepherd's complaint. The weather is cold, and conditions are intolerable for poor men, who are beaten down by hard living and made submissive to the gentry. Both the weather and the social structures described sound an awful lot like late medieval England. As other shepherds arrive on the scene, squabbling (good-natured and otherwise) ensues. When Mak, a man of unsavory reputation, makes an appearance, the shepherds greet him with suspicion. Their suspicion soon proves well-founded, as Mak slips away while the shepherds nap and steals a prize sheep. He takes it to his wife, Gill, and the two concoct a plan. If the shepherds come looking for their missing sheep, they will put the lamb in their cradle and Gill will pretend to be in childbirth. Mak and Gill are known for having children constantly (sometimes twice a year, Mak complains earlier in the play), so her sudden condition shouldn't take any one by surprise. The trick works well at first. The shepherds do show up quickly (and angrily) to seek their lost lamb, but Mak begs them to pity his wife in her childbed while Gill makes terrible moans. The shepherds finally leave, and Mak and Gill breathe a sigh of relief. But then one shepherd realizes that he gave the new baby no gift, and the others respond in kind. Their generosity proves troublesome for our thieving couple, when the shepherds return and pull the swaddling clothes aside to present the child with birthday presents. They cry out that the child is a monster, and then recognize that monster as their own missing lamb. It's no accident that they only discover their lamb once they turn from anger against Mak and Gill to generosity toward the "child." At this point the play, so farcical in tone, could turn deadly. The shepherds have a right to execute Mak for what he's done. After some deliberation, they turn merciful and decide to toss him up in a blanket instead, a humorous solution to the problem. Tired out, they lie in their field to sleep. As if in response to their mercy, a star appears and an angel tells the shepherds of the birth of a savior. They go to seek the Christ child in his manger, and this time they do remember gifts. They give cherries, a bird, and a ball (meant to symbolize life in a time of death, the holy spirit, and a royal orb, respectively). This story, an alternate to the Magi, shows us not wise men, but everymen. They are common shepherds, people the audience might know, granted entrance into the joyous and miraculous scene of the nativity itself.

The setting of the play is particularly resonant, since it is always both Yorkshire and the Holy Land. The characters talk of walking on the moors, and mention many English locations throughout the play. When Mak first arrives, he pretends to speak with a southern English accent, and the others tease him until he resumes his customary Yorkshire speech. People and place all seem firmly located around Wakefield itself. Yet when the star appears, the shepherds need not travel far to find Bethlehem. And, as David Bevington notes in his Medieval Drama, there would have been two platforms for the play. Mak and Gill's house would have been parallel to the manger on the set, with the shepherds' field in between, connecting the two and presumably holding the audience as well. Bevington explains how the staging gives "a visible form to the parallelism of the farcical and serious action. Although the Wakefield Master never calls explicit attention to the resemblance between the two births, the stage itself would help make the point" (384). The playing space would have visually enacted the themes of the play, yoking together sacred and profane, past and present, there and here. For many people in medieval England, the Bible itself was inaccessible. Books were expensive and the Bible was in Latin. Medieval Drama was thus an important way in which people of the period engaged with scriptural material in a highly interactive way. They wrote and acted in these plays. They stood in their city centers among biblical set-pieces and cheered and laughed and booed and cried. Perhaps they threw things at devils and perhaps they sang along with songs they knew. Puritans were horrified by such spectacles, wanting people to have access to scripture itself instead. But the plays give us insight into the way people of late medieval England saw these as living stories, as stories that were real parts of their own lives and with which they could engage actively. Real emotions, including humor, could be part of sacred drama. Biblical time and place collapsed with contemporary English spaces. The Second Shepherds' Play takes the collapse of time and place to an extreme as the play inserts Yorkshire shepherds into the nativity. In fact, the majority of the play follows these shepherds, who could be anyone from anywhere and anytime, and yet are also clearly from Yorkshire. It's not until the star appears near the end of the play that we get any overt hint that this is a Christmas story. The play seems to suggest that even mundane moments can be part of a miraculous larger narrative, that we are all part of this narrative together and that it thus continues to have real existence in the world.

I had the good fortune to see the play performed at the Folger Institute several years ago when my good friend and colleague Dan Stokes and I participated in an Early English Drama workshop there, and the performance was engaging, beautiful, hilarious, and moving. I laughed; I cried. I know that sounds cliché, but I really did laugh and cry over the course of the production. And I wasn't the only one. The most amazing part was the mixed audience. Scholar of medieval drama sat next to families with small children, and all were captivated. Dan and I were having a pint at the pub after the performance, and we saw the actor who played Mak there. When we told him how much we'd enjoyed it, he was thrilled and offered to buy us a round. Apparently, the actors had been terribly nervous that night, since they knew that the academics were coming to the show. We reassured him that they had managed to make the play both wonderfully accessible and scholarly fascinating. In fact, I found it fitting that this play had remained so engaging to so wide an audience. The way in which the play infuses the familiar and yet incredible story of the nativity with everyday people and their hijinks is striking even to modern audiences. The way that these quarreling, complaining, scheming characters can be so moved by the baby in the manger lends the final scene a real sense of awe.

As funny as the play is, the ending is surprisingly poignant. These characters we have come to know seem a bit awkward in the holy scene, but they are so genuinely enamored with the baby that it's hard not to feel a shared sense of joy in the moment. Their gifts to the child may be simple, but they are heartfelt. And the manger is a humble space not unfamiliar to our common shepherds. A play that could have ended in death (either of the sheep or of Mak), ends instead in miraculous birth. And while the symbolism of the lamb in not lost, nor is the audience unaware of the larger story which includes the Passion, we are allowed for a moment, like the shepherds, to just enjoy the scene. Affective piety was popular in the later Middle Ages, and holy people imagined themselves at the foot of the cross and felt the pain and sorrow of that moment. The Second Shepherds' Play gives us a chance for a different kind of affective engagement, one in which we place ourselves instead in the manger and feel the shared joy. After I saw the play performed, the group of us remarked at how moving it was to all of us, despite our different belief systems. The message is one of mercy and joy and hope, a sense that any one of us could play a part at any moment in something greater than ourselves. This year has been difficult for many, and these last few weeks filled with unimaginable heartache (see Kate's recent beautiful post on the Coventry Carol). I only hope that we can respond to tragedy with compassion. Like the red cherries picked in the frozen white winter, like the baby born when nights are longest and days are coldest, even the bleakest moments are available to hope and beauty. And the beauty of basic human compassion is that we all have the power to bring it into the world. Perhaps this is the perfect time to think about how the simplest things can be miraculous. Even moments that are common or silly or petty or sad can be made precious if we remember to treat each other with kindness. With that in mind, I wish you all a season filled with love.

Musings of an InterSwervist*

Reactions to Stephen Greenblatt's recent book The Swerve reached a fever pitch on the blogosphere and twittersphere yesterday and today in response to the announcement that the book has been awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the MLA. Much has been said already about the book's willful disregard of facts in favor of a highly reductive approach to the roughly thousand-year period known as The Middle Ages, and you can find wonderful responses to the MLA's questionable decision and to Greenblatt's book here, here, here, and here.  The reactions of medievalists and early modernists on Twitter have been equally vivid.

I've been trying to pinpoint why I've been so dismayed by Greenblatt's book and, most recently, about the MLA's decision to give it a prestigious award. I think it comes down to a few concerns, many of which have already been eloquently expressed by the posts I mentioned previously. 

One of my primary concerns lies in Greenblatt's baldly outdated approach to the Middle Ages, made very clear in the book's preface when he states: "Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested." There is, quite simply, no way to support this statement if you include, say, Alfred the Great's investment in literacy, the popularity of French Fabliaux, the ENTIRE polymorphous "genre" of medieval romance (and let's not forget about Chaucer and Boccaccio).

Another of my concerns ties into the conversation on periodization well underway in the interwebs: click here for a great recap. Call me a naif, but I had thought that we had largely moved passed the idea that the complex millennia between the so-called "Classical" and "Early Modern" periods was nothing more than an intellectual sink hole. As Elaine Treharne so eloquently put it, by presenting this fictionalized view of the Middle Ages, Greenblatt "provides us with a sequence of superficial imaginings that might yet prove damaging to readers who, assured by the prize-winningness of this volume, assume they are being told something other than fiction." This really bothers me — that a book like this one (because of its Dan Brown-esque glitz and its earning both a Pulitzer and the Lowell Prize) has so much potential power to reinscribe and promote popular myths about all things medieval. The fact that much of the damage in The Swerve is done by way of insults made in passing ("[In the Renaissance] it became increasingly possible to turn away from preoccupations with angels and demons . . .") make the work's popularity even more vexing. 

As many have already noted, The Swerve is overtly polemical. One of the most obvious of such moments occurs in the passage below, which Jim Hinch explores at length:

"It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing. As the Roman Empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed, trade declined, and an anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the ancient system of education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books. Lucretius’s poem, so incompatible with any cult of the gods, was attacked, ridiculed, burned, or ignored, and, like Lucretius himself, eventually forgotten.

The idea of pleasure and beauty that the work advanced was forgotten with it. Theology provided an explanation for the chaos of the Dark Ages: human beings were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them. God cared about human beings, just as a father cared about his wayward children, and the sign of that care was anger. It was only through pain and punishment that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation. A hatred of pleasure-seeking, a vision of God’s providential rage, and an obsession with the afterlife: these were death knells of everything Lucretius represented." 

Hinch does a beautiful job pointing out the voluminous fallacies in the above quotation, but what struck me most about this passage is how it seems to have far more to to say about very contemporary anxieties over the state of education than it does about the Middle Ages. Like the film 300, it is a fantasy that appropriates historical events in order to fuel personal agenda. In this respect, the passage above, and the general tenor of The Swerve, reminded me of some of Frank Miller's more inflammatory statements offered in an NPR interview shortly before 300 hit theaters:

"Lets talk a minute about the enemy . . .  and the 6th century barbarism that they actually represent. . . . These people saw peoples head's off. They enslave women. They genetically (???) mutilate their daughters. They do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I'm speaking into a microphone that never could have been the product of their culture and I'm living in a city where 3,000 of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built."

A clue as to the inspiration for Frank Miller's garbled and factually inaccurate description of the Middle East (and for his investment in the film version of 300) lies in that final sentence: his very personal experience of the traumatic events of 9/11. Greenblatt is nowhere near as unhinged as Miller, but a similar tell exists in Greenblatt's book. Indeed, the entire premise of the book seems less inspired by Bacciolini's discovery of Lucrecius that it was by Greenblatt's discovery of Lucretius  as a young man -- a discovery that, no less, allowed him to heal from the emotional traumas of his youth. I have no problem with personal anecdotes (I actually found his willingness to get personal refreshing), and I am not saying that the personal has no place in academic discourse -- Kristi and I frequently interweave the two here, and I recently argued in favor of that kind of approach in an earlier post. I wonder though whether this book might be a perfect example of what can happen when someone becomes far too invested in making a speculative version of history (fueled by personal response) an authoritative one. Far too many of his arguments rely on what I can only describe as personal opinion and bias for their existence, and he disregards (as Bruce Holsinger's recent tweets make hilariously clear) a vast array of information in order to perpetuate his own vision of the so-called "swerve to the modern." This is a hard pill to swallow when I have to explain to students (in almost every class I teach) why you have to rely on MORE than the stuff that's in your own head when you try to substantially add to an academic conversation. 

I think, in the end, what I find so problematic about The Swerve and the accolades it has earned is this: that the author makes the same rhetorical mistakes (over and over again) that I find in freshman essays. I expect to find these kinds of mistakes in the latter, just as I expect to encounter misconceptions about the Middle Ages (or in Frank Miller's case, the Middle East and its inhabitants) in popular culture. But it's more than frustrating to see those kinds of errors not just overlooked but actively perpetuated (and rewarded) in a book written by a well-known scholar. What kind of example is this possibly setting for the students we teach and in whom the MLA is ostensibly invested? What kind of example is it setting for discourse in general? What does it mean that factual inaccuracy and dated polemic are overlooked by prestigious award committees in favor of rhetorical swagger? 

----

Ok -- I think I've vented my spleen enough for one day. Time to practice sochin (the Mjollnir of all katas . . . good lord, did I just write that?!?!) and listen to Tool on repeat while doing so. I will, however, leave you with the following (my very first meme contribution) before I jump into my white pajamas and pretend to kick copies of The Swerve around my living room. A message from all InterSwervists, perhaps: 

*All due credit goes to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen for coining the term!

How do you get from A to B if you have no alphabet?

I was recently talking with my wonderful dissertation group, consisting of Kara McShane and Laura Bell, about traveling. Though we are all three writing about different texts (and Laura is writing about nineteenth-century literature, whereas Kara and I do medieval), all of us are dealing with travel in some way. We were thinking the other day about how frequently we answer distance questions with time. "How far is it to your apartment?" "About ten minutes." We very often measure length of distance with how long it will take to traverse it. We measure distance in minutes, in hours, in days. "A day's drive" can mean different things on different days and for different people, but we all understand that it means the limit of how far a person could travel on a given day. All of this got me thinking about the word "journey," which clearly has its origins in the French jour – day. A journey, then, is how far you could get in a day, the pre-modern equivalent of a day's drive. Before speedometers and gps systems and google maps, how would you tell someone how far to travel? How would you orient yourself on a trip? How would you negotiate between spaces?

As a Californian, the most tangible experience I have of day's travel is of learning about the missions that dot the expanse of the state. As a history-loving child in a fairly new state, the missions were exciting to visit when I was growing up because they were some of the oldest buildings around. Through them, I had a tangible connection to the way that cultural and historical change had occurred in my state. I made a model of the San Carlos Borromeo Carmelo Mission in fourth grade for school, and I poured over the history, architecture, landscape of that mission. I was so proud of my model because my dad helped me cut the top layer from cardboard and then paint the wavy part of the board red to create the roof tiles of the building. This was, for me, a crowning achievement of my elementary school career. What I couldn't replicate, however, was the geographical and temporal connection between my mission and the rest of the missions. An isolated model of a mission, or even an isolated visit to one mission, misses the larger network of the 21 missions that run up the Pacific coast. The missions are all a day's horse ride apart, since the Spanish missionaries would ride a full day and then stop to build another one. The distance between these buildings, then, is not one of miles but one of time travelled. Length as time is literally written onto the landscape in California. The Spanish missionaries colonized and converted the Pacific coast one day's ride at a time. By building actual edifices to mark the journeys and by planting European crops around these missions, the colonializing progress up the coast alters the landscape as well as the culture of the region. Missionaries marked their day-long movements with adobe and timber and stone, and each building also served as a locus for the spread of Spanish language and religion and culture and flora and fauna.

The missions are interesting for my thoughts on distance as time because they represent a larger teleology, both of linear progress up the coast and of the colonization and conversion of the locals, and yet each point on the line of missions is of equal importance. It's not about making it to the northernmost or southernmost mission, but rather about the presence of missions along the whole length of the state. It is, to give into the inevitable cliche, about both journey and destination. Perhaps the answer is that there's a larger movement up the coast, but yet each mission also represents its own destination. The line is made up of individual journeys. And though we no longer ride horses to get from one spot to another (or, rather, I never have), we still think of movement across the state or country or world in terms of segments of travel.

They said to make a left at the blue-green wave...

When we answer distance questions with time we collapse time and space. But often such a collapse serves a particularly teleological way of thinking. I answer that it takes ten minutes to reach my apartment because I assume that you plan to go from point A, here, to point B, there. What happens, then, when there is no destination in mind, when we know neither point A nor point B? This, as anyone who knows me might have guessed already, leads me back to the idea of rudderless ships. In the ocean, when the directions one could travel are endless and when no point can be permanently marked as A or B or anything else, how can we conceive of a journey? With no oars, with no sail, with no observable landmarks, distance is unmeasurable. And perhaps, on a journey, unmeasurable distance leads to unmeasurable time. Perhaps this is why, as I have mentioned before, Custance travels for "years and days" in the Man of Law's Tale. We don't get specifics about time (how many years? how many days?) because neither time nor space nor the connection between them is clear on a rudderless voyage. Custance doesn't know how far she travels, how long she's at sea, or where she's heading. Her boat floats in all directions for some amount of time. Fate has a larger plan for her, as the Man of Law makes clear, but fate isn't quantifiable, and thus can't be productively measured in time or space. I guess, if you don't know where you're going, you really have no choice but to focus on the journey.

The Proof is in the Plotting: Stratford, Cymbeline, and Much Ado About Nothing

A photo I snapped of the Avon River
(Yes, this means that Canada
has its own Stratford-upon-Avon)

I recently spent a weekend in Stratford, Ontario for the Shakespeare Festival. Each Fall the University of Rochester English department makes a theater pilgrimage to Stratford led by the indomitable Russell Peck and his equally incredible wife Ruth. The trip is, for me, wrapped up in the changing season, the new school year. As leaves turn and new courses begin, the trip cements old bonds and creates new ones. Returning each year to the same small town to see very different plays helps create for me a sense of both the cyclical and the ever-new. The trip also encapsulates what I love about my program. Not only do I adore a chance to see such wonderful theater, but I treasure the kind of community fostered by the trip. The last night always ends in the Pecks taking everyone out to dessert, and professors, grads, undergrads, family, friends, significant others all crowd around pub tables to discuss the plays and gorge on chocolate and meringue. The connections made across horizontal and vertical lines through the shared experience of theater remind me of what a vibrant community the university can be.

My co-blogger Kate flew back from California to make the trip, and it was good to spend quality time with her in pursuit of our favorite hobby -- trying to cram as many plays as possible into one weekend (we saw five plays in three days). I'll focus in this post on the first day, when we saw both Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing, because seeing those two together really called my attention to interesting aspects of each play. Though I have seen Much Ado many times and know the play well, I had never before seen Cymbeline, nor have I studied it much or taught it before. I'll admit that, aside from reading it in a youthful effort to read all of Shakespeare, I hadn't given Cymbeline much thought. But this particular production was so engaging that it made me want to take another look at the play. Both of these plays feature a man's misplaced jealousy against an innocent lady, so that connection was immediately clear, but I started to notice other connections as well. Each play has an intriguing focus on misunderstood evidence, on bodies themselves misrepresented and misread. A striking scene from Cymbeline features Imogen weeping over the headless body of her enemy, who had dressed in the clothes of Imogen's husband Posthumus before getting himself killed. We the audience realize that the body doesn't belong to her husband, but she reads the body based upon its clothing, and her grief is terrible to behold. The most startling part of this scene to me was when Imogen dissected the body with her words, saying that she recognized the calves, arms, chest of the corpse as those of her own husband, when in fact all that she recognized was the textile exterior of shirt and breeches. This corporeal misrecognition comes after we have already seen a corporeal misrepresentation of Imogen herself. The scheming Iachimo, unable to seduce the virtuous lady, sneaks into her bedroom and takes note of the features of her chamber and, more disturbingly, of her sleeping body. This production maximized the tension in the scene, having Iachimo literally crawl over the inert body of the unconscious lady like the ghoul from Fuseli's The Nightmare. The violation involved in his actions were readily apparent, and I had a visceral reaction which I thought was exactly the right feeling for such a scene. In many parts, the production played up the comedic potential of the play, and this scene could have been funny or even ridiculous, but I felt they made the right choice by making it instead terribly uncomfortable. So details of Imogen's body related to her husband cause him to think her unchaste, while details of her husband's clothing cause her to think him dead. The evidence in each case seems strong, physical, tangible, and yet in each case it proves false. Compounding such bodily misreadings, when Imogen arrives dressed as a boy, her husband doesn't recognize her. In fact, no one but her servant realizes that it is she in boy's clothing. As his clothing made her believe a strange body to be his, strange clothing made him believe her body was not her own.

The production made even more of this focus on clothing in that it combined various historical eras of costume. Some characters seemed from the 12th century, while others seemed from the 16th or even 17th. When the Roman soldiers arrived, they were dressed as centurions. The Roman costumes complicated matters, since the Italian characters from the play are also from Rome, and therefore Romans, and yet their dress was from a much later period. During the battle scenes at the end, these Italian characters joined the Roman forces and slowly merged into the visual homogeny of the Roman troops. Kate and I wondered if the varying costumes were connected to the fact that the many-stranded plot is itself pieced together from a variety of sources. Part Geoffrey of Monmouth, part Holinhshead, part Boccaccio, Cymbeline partakes of stories from other times and places and combines them all, as Shakespeare tends to do, with Elizabethan England. The costumes may therefore represent the different narrative threads, and the changing and merging costumes at the end might show how all of these threads come together to give the play its satisfying, if someone ridiculous, conclusion. It's to the production's credit that the entire audience was so moved by the ending, which could easily have lapsed into the absurd. I heard delighted sounds and chuckles and sighs all around me at the end, and we all jumped to our feet as soon as the lights dimmed.

The Much Ado that we saw was enjoyable, though not my favorite version of the play. The overall concept of the production didn't always come together for me. There were insertions of singing and dancing which could have been charming, but seemed a little disjointed. But the witty lines and a strong Benedick made it still a fun performance. The physical comedy in the scenes where Benedick and Beatrice overhear their friends discussing them was, I thought, quite effective. I was most interested, however, given my musings on Cymbeline from that afternoon, in the fact that the play didn't feel the need to show us Margaret and Borachio at the window. So many versions of the play include the mis-viewing at the window, and I feel that it actually does make a huge difference whether we as the audience have seen the "evidence" or not. Since the play didn't include that scene, we not only know that the evidence is false, that it's not really Hero at the window, but we are only told of any of it secondhand. The misunderstanding of physical evidence, the misrecognition of Hero's body and voice, exists at an extra remove from us. And yet the misrecognition of the faithful woman occurs firsthand for Claudio, who believes Margaret to be Hero, whereas Posthumus only hears about his wife (and receives her bracelet), but never sees any misconduct with his own eyes.

So much of Much Ado is about the way in which narratives can be used constructively (to bring Benedick and Beatrice together) or destructively (to tear Claudio and Hero apart). I've had wonderful conversations before with Russell Peck and Russ McDonald about the fact that “nothing” may have been pronounced “noting,” a fact which opens up my interpretation of reading and misreading and fiction and truth. The play is so much about listening, overhearing, and reading people and situations. The characters, like the audience, bare the burden of interpretation, and much of the plot hinges on how they choose to interpret. There are many lines in the play about reading evidence or noting something, and Benedict even says that he doesn’t want Beatrice to see his bad rhymes. Even the comic relief with lower class malapropisms make more sense to me in this context of noting, since malapropisms call attention to the importance of effective communication. And let us not forget that it is the malaprop-wielding Dogberry, in all his ridiculous comic presence, that stumbles upon the truth of Don John's deception -- the learned and witty characters can't untangle that knot on their own. It is the character with the least command of language who is able to apprehend the truth in the form of Borachio and Conrade.

The protagonists of Much Ado spend their days creating deceptions, whether simply for fun (the masque, which leads to several cases of mistaken identity), or for redefining the community (the verbal games to bring Benedick and Beatrice together, the near-deadly game to convince Claudio of Hero's betrayal/unchastity). The image of the second wedding, in which Claudio believes the veiled woman he's marrying to be Hero's cousin, brings together the elements of disguise and misunderstanding in the play. Whereas before Claudio assumed a woman was Hero without seeing her face, he now assumes that a woman is not Hero when he can't see her face. In either case, he believes what he is told about the female body before him without actually looking at the evidence for himself. This production gave us a Claudio who seemed perfectly fine with marrying another woman in place of Hero, as if Hero herself really were interchangeable (as the fact that he twice mistakes her for someone else suggests). The multiple ways that evidence is uncovered at the end, both in the confessions from the villains and in the literal unveiling of Hero's face, allow for ultimate clarification even as the play makes us uncomfortably aware of the limitations of evidence to reveal truth.

I would like to teach a class one day with Cymbeline, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello. (Now that I think of it, I could include some great medieval stuff as well -- rewritten letters and mistaken identities as false evidence in "The Man of Law's Tale" and The Roman de Silence, for example.) In each of these plays, evidence, even strong evidence, proves insufficient. Characters read evidence through the lenses provided for them by other characters with various motives. I think it could be instructive to think about the ways in which we rarely can see evidence objectively. It could be interesting to even talk about objectivity itself and if/when objectivity is desirable. We necessarily bring our own interests and experiences to texts, and I have argued elsewhere that this is not a bad thing. (And, hey, Benedick and Beatrice find happiness because the false rumors of love for one another they overhear match with their own actual desires to be together.) Perhaps the important thing is to be aware of our own subjectivity. To try to examine our influences as well as we can. Characters in these plays hear with their own ears and see with their own eyes (or see with the eyes of others who have some token or proof to back up their stories -- a bracelet, a handkerchief), and yet they are wrong again and again, sometimes with disastrous results. Their fault is in believing themselves to be objective receivers of fact rather than active interpreters. Teaching a class about the reception of evidence itself could call attention to the very processes of close-reading and writing that take place in such a class, could call attention to the fact that I want the students to think for themselves even as I, the instructor, lead discussion and provide context. I may choose the texts, but the students have a responsibility for their own ideas and writing, and I think a discussion of such texts could lead to some fascinating dialogue about the act of interpretation itself.