Young Milton

At long last, Oxford University Press today publishes Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-42. Edward Jones, the editor of Milton Quarterly and sleuth responsible for dozens of new records related to Milton's life, conceived and edited the volume. Most of the essays come from the "Young Milton" conference at Worcester College, Oxford, in 2009. Although I didn't attend that conference I was fortunately able to contribute an essay on Milton's Mask (which most people know as Comus, although Milton never called it that). The book looks lovely, and it contributes to a major reassessment of Milton's early work and the mode of "authorship" that it represents. Unfortunately it is also $100.00 ... but maybe we can look forward to a paperback or digital version soon?

Tweet

The Bard of the Cornfields

This summer I'm teaching a class on Shakespeare with the theme "Study Abroad -- In Iowa." In years past I've taught summer courses in Oxford and Cambridge, always exploring the connections between authors like Milton and Shakespeare and the places in which they lived and worked. For this class I thought we would turn that concept on its head, exploring the meaning of Shakespeare, contemporary and historical, closer to home.  How have Iowans read Shakespeare throughout their history, and how has their reading shaped the state we inhabit today? What resources do we have to study Shakespeare that truly are unique to this place, and how might place figure into our reading of the plays and poems? As universities across the country embrace Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) -- which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing -- it will be important to ask what we can do in our smaller, local classrooms that can't be done anywhere else.

For my class, we'll spend time researching in the university library's special collections (which holds a second folio and much other Shakespeareana). We'll also meet with the actors and director of the local Riverside Shakespeare Festival and take a field trip to Des Moines to visit Salisbury House, a replica Tudor mansion, complete with rare book library, built by Carl Weeks, the eccentric "cosmetics king," who had the materials for his Xanadu shipped over from England during the 1920s.  

Today I spent some time in the Iowa Women's Archives, which we'll also visit. What I found shows in some pretty concrete ways how Shakespeare is built into the material fabric of Iowa and the diverse ways that Iowa's women have responded to his work.

First I called up the scrapbook of the Marion, Iowa, Shakespeare Club, which was established in 1909, for the purpose of the "Intellectual improvement" of Marion's citizens. 

As an etiological poem (pictured above) on the group explains:

“Eight there were of the dear ‘Old Guard’

When the Shakespeare Club was born,

And the Harvest Moon rose full in the East

O’er Iowa’s golden corn.”

 

As the moon rose, the group gathered to discuss a whole series of plays: the first was Romeo and Juliet, followed by The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, and As You Like It. 

According to their meeting minutes, the  women memorized passages, analyzed characters, composed original poems, as well as  debating the duties of citizenship and such hot button issues as whether the local school should provide cups for children. 

Although its goal was intellectual improvement, the Marion Shakespeare Club was not open to all comers.  The “Constitution and Bylaws” state, under Article III, section 1, that “The membership of this club shall be limited to fifteen in number.”

It continues:

2. All members shall be elected and selected by the club.

3. All elections must be unanimous.

4. The membership fee shall be One Dollar per year.”

After the first year, a clipping from the local paper in Jan. 3 1910 announced that  “The Shakespeare club is well pleased with the progress that has been made in the study of the beautiful English which the poet employs, and the next regular meeting will be held Jan 6....The club will attend in a body the Merchant of Venice matinee on Tuesday afternoon.”

A handwritten note identifies this as “The Merchant of Venice as produced by the Colburn Players at Greene’s Opera House," a Cedar Rapids staple that was once one of the largest venues between Chicago and Denver. Soon, Greene's began working in collaboration with the Shakespeare Club and the produced Macbeth the next year.

Eventually, club members built a “Shakespeare Garden” in Marion’s Ellis park, complete with a bust of the bard. This still exists, by the way, as does the club. The original entrance, a rustic shelter with a thatched roof, was designed by Grant Wood, but unfortunately no longer remains. The theater, the park, the archive: they all hold a distinctly Iowan Shakespeare.

While contemplating this Shakespeare, what he meant, and what he means, I also called up a box of papers that belonged to the Yiddish writer, Bertha Korn Tucker.  She's the young girl on the left rear of the photo, a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants (Sarah and Samuel Korn, center). She grew up in the Des Moines Ghetto, and from there she went to Drake University, where she penned a paper for one of her classes titled "Had I been Mrs. Shakespeare, or Had She been Me."

“Had I been Mrs. Shakespeare," Bertha begins, "Stratford-on-Avon couldn’t have held any part of me while exciting plays were being created and acted in the theatres of London...”

Bertha-as-Mrs. Shakespeare proceeds to explain to her truculent, dismissive husband the ways that she would rewrite Lear -- in large part by reconfiguring Shakespeare's female characters:  “Your alabaster Cordelia was only fit to sojurn with angels – which is where you eventually felt you must send her. But not in my – we’ll come to that later...”

The monologue is incisive and often hilarious (My favorite transition in the paper:  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the Fool.")  In the end of this version, Cordelia departs for France and Kent, in a gruesome bit of offstage business, stabs Lear and then himself, so that the old man will not be forced to live with his mental powers in decline.  

So what lines can we trace between the ladies of the Marion Shakespeare Club and the young, female Jewish writer who decided to rewrite Shakespeare so that his works adhered more closely, as she explained, to nature as she understood it? Are there connections between the production of the Merchant of Venice at Greene's Opera House and the voice that Bertha Korn Tucker carved out of Shakespeare's works for herself? That will be one of the questions of my class and one that may give us a new perspective on our own work as a kind of "Iowa Shakespeare Club" (perhaps we'll need to make bylaws, too...)

Tweet