Shabby Sightseeing and Naive Newcomers

After hearing Dr. Jenstad's presentations on the Map of Early Modern London site, I was intrigued to learn more about its many capabilities, especially those beyond the map itself. By exploring the website, I stumbled upon an article by Benjamin Barber entitled "London's Early Modern Tourists". This topic piqued my interest because of Helen's participation in travel in All's Well that Ends Well. When I first read the play, I was bothered by the fact that we learned very little of Helen's travels to Florence and what it took to get her there. Traveling alone in this time period, particularly for a woman, would have been exceedingly difficult, especially given that her destination was a major city. This train of thought led to me to the question that I explored using this article, namely, how feasible would it have been in early modern times for a woman to travel into a major city alone?

Using intuition and common sense, I assumed that I would find a traveling horror story in Barber's article; and, using London for a basis, I was not too far off. The article draws from the poem "A Strange Sighted Traveler" and the ballad "The Great Boobee" in order to explain the hardships of early modern travelers. In both stories, a foreigner to London comes to the city and is duped and subsequently robbed by the "nips" and "foists" that frequent tourist destinations. Both of these contemporary sources served to warn travelers about the dangers of visiting a city unaccompanied while scolding London for its lack of control over its criminals. Clearly, traveling alone to London, or any major city for that matter, was no easy feat for any foreigner, though the danger and troubles faced would likely have increased two-fold for an unescorted woman. It seems impossible that a purportedly beautiful young woman such as Helena would have been able to travel by herself from France to Florence without incident.

I feel that this line of inquiry could lead to an argument about the negative aspects of social networking for women in early modern times, namely, the fact that a lone woman had very limited capabilities according to the social constructs of the time. Drawing from this topic, further inquiry could be made into women's social independence and how women's networking abilities often depended on the men that they were acquainted with.

All's Well That Ends How It's Destined To Be

Out of all the concepts we’ve come across so far, the idea of fate has caught a particular interest with me. Shakespeare’s characters seem to rely on what they believe their lives are destined to be more than how their own actions can shape their future. Calling upon the “wheel of fortune”, gods, goddesses, and spirits alike, Shakespeare uses this Medieval ideal to create intriguing plays.

Using the Shakespeare Concordance, I wanted to know about fate within “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Before searching, I expected to find many terms throughout the play that were tied to fate and I expected to see a majority of the main characters using them. I searched a few terms that I remember were correlated with fate. “Fated” came up two times for the play, and the terms “stars” and “goddess” came up three times each. The interesting thing about this is that Helena was the person who was using most of these terms. She relied heavily on fate and that she was destined to end up with Bertram. This idea of Helena’s belief in a system that was beyond her reach could be turned into an argument that looked into other characters from other Shakespearean plays who also believed in fate.

Some other questions I thought of while doing this search was the idea of multiple religions/beliefs being used at once. Though Christianity was so popular at the time, there were still influences of older religions and their appearances through the beliefs and actions of characters. Also, though England (Protestantism) was separated from all things Catholic, and therefore Roman, why are there so many appearances of Rome in Shakespeare’s plays? Was this a reflection of Shakespeare’s own thoughts?

In Which I Fail To Answer A Question, And I Stumble Across Another

            After exploring the Map of Early Modern London and hearing Janelle Jenstad speak twice, I have been fascinated by the notion that like-minded people naturally tend to congregate in the same area and work together.  Stow’s Survey, tended to characterize each ward by the neighborhood’s dominant profession, evidenced by its portrayal of Eastcheap as the meat district.  Knowing that there was some precedent for artistic collaboration, I went to MoEML with this question:  What was the nature of artistic community and collaboration in London around this time?  In other words, did artists of all disciplines prefer to work independently, coming together only to vie for patronage (as in the first scene of Timon), or was there an active exchange of ideas (similar to that of the American authors living in Paris in the 1920s)?  I expected, and somewhat hoped, to find confirmation of the latter, given Shakespeare’s well-known collaborations.

            Starting in the site’s personography, I opened the pages for all artists, poets, writers, playwrights, and patrons from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries.  I hoped that I would find similar locations reappearing in each of their biographies, as MoEML linked homes and restaurants to famous occupants; alas, there was almost no commonality, giving me no easy answer to my question.  The only reference I could find to artistic community was that of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who, though active nearly a century after Shakespeare’s heyday, frequented one particular French restaurant on Abchurch Lane (not far from Eastcheap).  I found this amusing, since it resonated with Timon’s artists sharing a meal, and it brought to mind Lewis and Tolkien centuries later, sitting in the Eagle and Child Pub in Oxford, reading each other drafts of their novels.

            Despite the small satisfaction I drew from this discovery, I was generally disappointed with the results of my research.  I would not disregard it as a valid research topic, since it does have the potential to yield wonderfully surprising results; however, I would hesitate to pursue it for this particular assignment, since its scope seems much too large for a mere five pages.  If I were to continue this train of research, I would adjust it to specifically look at the restaurants of London and what social interactions and exchanges among artists, writers, and “commoners” took place there.  I would search EEBO for mentions of specific restaurants and their reputations in historical accounts of the city, and if possible, I would love to read transcriptions of artists’ and writers’ personal papers to see if they frequented particular establishments.  Further examining this act of breaking bread could not only illuminate texts like Timon and King Henry with a fresh light, but it could also enhance my understanding of artistic collaboration and the writing process within a bustling community like Early Modern London.

Obscurity of Honor

     After considering some of the major themes we've covered in class, honor was the one that stood out to me the most. There's such a vast difference between characters' honor in each of the works, and often times the concept is at the forefront of the play's meaning and theme.
     I decided to look up the word 'honour' in the Concordance, and see how often it appears. But more specifically, I was interested in how many times it was used in Timon of Athens, and King Henry IV Part 1. Both of these plays deal heavily with honor, and what it means to be honorable. I assumed King Henry would have many more instances of the word, seeing as it's brought up so often by Falstaff and Hotspur, and how Timon seems to lack honor amongst its characters.
    To my surprise, Timon had double the uses of the word, with 28. Even words like honourable, honoured, and honours were used more in the play. A funny thing I noticed was that Timon, the man with arguably the most honor in the play, has a smaller percentage of uses than Falstaff, who is arguably the least honorable one in King Henry.
   It's interesting to me because both Cymbeline and All's Well That Ends Well have many more occurrences of honourable, but the theme of honor doesn't stick out to me as much in those works. If I were to narrow this down for a research paper, I would maybe focus on the honor of characters from Athens, or English characters in Shakespeare's plays. Or I could look at how honor is represented amongst classes, since Timon generally focuses on the upper class, whereas King Henry IV Part I is more diverse. I think honor is one of the most fascinating aspects of Shakespeare's plays because it's always there, no matter what character.

Revenge and Shakespeare: So Overt It's Covert

Upon reflection of the four plays we’ve read so far this semester, I was overcome with a wave of pity upon remembering Timon, the naïve and generous Athenian whose vast underestimation of the affection of his friends resulted in his irrevocable transformation into the worst of misanthropes. The second half of Timon’s tale revolves almost entirely on his hopes to utterly destroy (with the exception of Flavius) not only those who have wronged him, but all of mankind . Whether it be funding Alcibiade’s campaign to bring about the slaughter of every breathing person in Athens or encouraging prostitutes to keep up with their profession so that they may transmit lethal diseases, Timon’s plots for revenge are beyond overdramatic.

            With this in mind, I turned to the Concordance to see just how many times the word “revenge” appeared in Timon. Imagine my surprise when I found that out of 160 possible matches in all of Shakespeare’s plays, “revenge” is used only twice in Timon, and each time he is not the speaker. Slightly bemused, I decided to try various synonyms of the word such as vengeance (no match), spite (3 matches, two of which belong to Apemantus), hatred (no match), rancour (no match), wrath (3 matches) and curse (5 matches). By this point, I was a bit frustrated because it was absolutely clear to me that Timon hated mankind with a passion and I could find few, if any, word-for-word instances to prove it (I did however find that “plague” resulted in 10 hits, most of which involved Timon using the word in “A plague upon thee!” context).

            What’s interesting is that when I ran these same words again in relation to other plays centered on vengeance such as Hamlet or Titus Andronicus, I also found few matches (although “revenge” does pop up in the latter almost 30 times). In fact, in all of Shakespeare’s plays there are more occurrences (sometimes even hundreds more) of words such as “peace”, “pardon”, and “forgive” then there are of “revenge”, “hate”, and so forth. I found these results to be quite fascinating. One of the many reasons people continue to read Shakespeare is because his work is always contemporary and relevant to human nature. And, like it or not, revenge is a significant and relatable aspect of human nature. I think it would be very interesting to look more into the topic of revenge and its (c)overtness in Shakespeare’s work. 

Reality and Dreams

After attending both Janelle Jenstad’s open lecture and a private lecture she led for our Literature class I am increasing interested in the layout of Early Modern London and its’ inhabitants. More so, I am interested in the themes and life lessons these plays try to elaborate to its’ audience. Janelle Jansted discussed the lodgings of early modern inhabitants in London which helped me to understand the distinct difference in lifestyle between the upper class and lower class. This distinct difference allowed me to deduce that Shakespearean plays could either be relatable (for the upper class) or, for the lower class, a fairy tale that allows the poor to step outside of their internal hell of daily life and experience a life many would dream of, in the form of Shakespearean plays.

I used the Map of  Early Modern London to look at different housing units. Janelle drew a little map of what houses would’ve looked like in the 16^th century and elaborated on the upper classes placement and the Lower classes housing. The map allowed me to see how separated the units were. It’s amazing that this map is over 400 years old and yet, geographers can still continue to make this map. 

posted by EM on behalf of Chelsea Mills

"Oh, those Athenians!"

I decided that I would do a very narrow search using the Shakespeare Concordance. Since I liked Timon of Athens a little bit more than other people seemed to, I thought I'd search the word "Athens" in the concordance and see what it returned. (Note: I did not modify my search to include words such as "Athenian", which could refer either to the characteristic of a person or thing or to a person who comes from Athens. I wanted to limit my search to the city itself.)

I expected that the most references to the city to come from Timon and I was right--of the 54 times that the word "Athens" is used in Shakespeare's plays, 28 of them come from that play (that's more than half of them, to save you math). Of the only three other plays in which the word "Athens" is used, 20 of those uses come from A Midsummer Night's Dream. I was surprised by this at first. It took me a moment to remember that AMND is also set in and around Athens, at which point it made sense. After this small connection between Timon and AMND was made, I made a bigger one soon after--both plays involve the protagonist(s) fleeing the city of Athens. In Timon, the titular character leaves the city scorned after none of his friends from the Athenian upper class would lend him financial support when his money ran dry because of his generosity towards them. In AMND, Hermia and Lysander run leave Athens because Hermia's father demands that she marry a man that she does not love instead of Lysander, who she does love. In both cases, injustice leads the protagonist and protagonists, respectively, out of Athens.

If I were to build this small search into a research paper, I believe I could focus my research on Shakespeare's and his English contemporaries' attitude towards Athens and perhaps Greece in general, looking for a potential pattern of negative representations of Athenian and Greek culture and society, and finding out the reason for such a pattern. This could be an especially rewarding study as Shakespeare wrote after the Renaissance, in which the works of the ancient Greeks were given renewed interest and reverence, begging the question of why, in a world where Greek culture was being revered, did the epicenter of that culture get such a bad name in the two plays of Shakespeare that it is the setting?

The Lord Mayor Method

I attended Janelle Jenstad's talk after class on Monday, and one of the first things that she did was ask who was there for what aspect of her talk taking a survey of who was "literature people" or "coding people". It was fascinating that her knowledge and talk was able to cover both topics, with interesting details about the MoEML project that overlapped both. For example, she talked about how they had to change the programs and coding they used in order to more effectively showcase the information that would be more useful to those interested in the literature aspect, so they had to consider both audiences when creating this.

Another aspect that I found that I found compelling in her talk was about how theater worked in general in London, which drastically contrasted how I thought it worked. She highlighted the fact that many people would have seen theatrical performances, not in formal theatre settings, but instead in the streets as the actors passed by in parade-like performances. I found that to be absolutely fascinating, especially since it would have made for a disjointed experience of the performance to each person who witnessed it. I am excited to investigate more into the Lord Mayor’s Shows that she has included on the MoEML to see how those were put together and performed as opposed to the traditional theater plays.

MoEML prompt

Today Dr. Jenstad described as the best approach to new corpus or archive a process of cutting away what is not relevant--as in the Eastcheap assignment, in which all other locations and districts are eliminated from the search.

For this blog post, I want you to execute a simple and preliminary research query using any of the following:

The Shakespeare Concordance (linked in our blog site)
The Map of Early Modern London (linked in our blog site)
Early English Books Online (only accessible through the IU Library research portal)

Given what you know about how these sites/tools/archives operate, please devise a question (ideally one that relates to one of the plays we have read thus far), then describe how you used your chosen electronic resource to answer it.

Make sure you note:
What you expected to find
What you actually found
Whether the results seemed like something you could turn into an argument (why or why not)
What further questions/lines of inquiry might arise after this first effort

Please complete this assignment by midnight on Tuesday so that we can discuss your work Wednesday.

Being an Aguecheek in Shakespeare's Witty World

On Thursday, I attended Adam Zucker's talk about Twelfth Night and jesting. This talk was compelling to me because it centered on a topic that I am sadly familiar with: failing to understand jokes from Shakespeare's time. Apparently, I am not the only one with this problem, namely because many insult-words have vanished without a trace of linguistic history for scholars to follow. Yet, despite their confusion over the insults used, a modern audience will laugh at early-modern jokes that they do not understand. This point brought the talk around to Twelfth Night, namely, the character Sir Aguecheek. Aguecheek is the highly scorned, bumbling fool of this play who is willing to laugh at the complicated jokes and puns being bantered around him, despite the fact that he cannot comprehend them. Though we in the audience laugh at Aguecheek's stupidity, in reality, we are also Aguecheeks because we understand the jests no better than the inept, blundering nobleman. According to Mr. Zucker, it is the historian's job to save the jokes in their original form and help us poor audience members gain some clarity and appreciation for the humor. His new book in the making hopes to do just that, as well as trace the history of many insult-words, in particular, the word "stupid". Being myself interested in linguistic history and hoping to improve my understanding of early-modern English drama, I found this talk intriguing, witty, and highly enjoyable.

Map of Early Modern London

Dear Brave MoEML bloggers,
I won't have you try to blog your experience with this tool until after Dr. Jenstad's discussion. Hold tight! There will be a quick assignment thereafter. And make sure you do the assignment I handed out today (also available on Oncourse).

Redemption Through Blood

Redemption must come from action.  In the play King Henry IV pt 1 there are many people who need redemption but few who actually seek it out and do what is neccessary to receive it.  The two main characters seeking redemption in this play are Prince Hal (the focus of my blog) and Hotspur, perhaps not so coincidentally they must gain redemption through the defeat of the other in valiant battle.  This is shown in Prince Hal's answer to the king's claim of having a "degenerate" son; "Do not think so; you shall not find it so: / And God forgive them that so much have sway'd / Your majesty's good thoughts away from me! / I will redeem all this on Percy's head / And in the closing of some glorious day / Be bold to tell you that I am your son."  (Act 3, Scene 2, Line 134-139)  The scene containing this quote is all about the king degrading the prince about his previous interactions with the lowlife tavern folk and then the prince having to vow to redeem himself by killing the greatest threat to the throne, Harry "Hotspur" Percy. 
Action must happen in order for the prince to gain redemption, he must be victorious in battle against his honorable enemy Hotspur.  The prince cannot just say that he will be a better man, he cannot just say that he will appear more honorable, he cannot even earn his father's love without first defeating Hotspur and thus redeeming his honor in the eyes of the king.  Redemption needs action; it takes the action of thrusting his sword through the body of Hotspur.  It takes the action of claiming that he will be victorious and then the seeking out of Hotspur in battle and his subsequent defeat to gain his, Hal's, redemption.
But, to complicate the argument, we see Prince Hal's redemption come early in the eyes of King Henry just from Hal's battle prowess and his narrow save of the king's life. (Act 5, Scene 4, Line 47-50)  Hal's redemption still requires action in the king's eyes but not neccessarily the proclaimed action that we hear earlier in the play of him needing to kill Hotspur.  The redeeming of Prince Hal must be through his valiant and heroic actions on the battlefield, actions that the king must witness firsthand.  So, in conclusion, redemption can only be granted through heroic actions that are viewed by the party that required it in the first place.