(Cross posted at Stanford CMEMS)
Why, in the age of MOOCS and the Internet, should students continue to enroll in my courses and others like them? Why pay tuition for a Shakespeare class at Iowa when professor from a shiny Ivy league school will teach it to you for free? These were some of the questions I tried to answer this weekend at the first Annual Des Moines Humanities Festival at Salisbury House in Des Moines. It was a great day, with Jim Leach, a native Iowan and the chairman of the NEH, in attendance to discuss his own education in the humanistic three-R's ("In Iowa," he deadpanned, "that's readin', writin', and wrastlin'").
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| [Courtesy University of Iowa Women's Archive] |
So
it seems inevitable that students wanting such an education will soon
seek it online. But before humanities professors pack up our jalopies
and head to California, like John Steinbeck's Joads did after the
tractor took their land, I suggested that we might take another lesson
from the family farm -- which has recently found new life thanks to the
booming "locavore" movement taking root in restaurants and farmer's
markets across the country.
When teaching
Shakespeare, for example, what can we offer locally that's totally
unique? The answer goes to the nature of the humanities themselves,
sending us into the archives, not in search of some unchanging
Shakespeare whose "eternal summer shall not fade," but in search of a
Shakespeare that has put down roots, and grown, in the Iowa soil.
As
an exercise in discovering this local Shakespeare, I'm teaching a class
this summer called "Study Abroad -- in Iowa," in which students will
research the local archives, curate exhibitions on their findings, and
hold panel discussions with local book artists and performers who draw
on Shakespeare's work. To get some idea of the kinds of materials they'd
be working with, I took my own trip to the University of Iowa Special
Collections, where I pulled up various works, old an new.
Above, for example, is a picture of the scrapbook of the Marion, Iowa, Shakespeare Club, founded in the 1890s for the "Intellectual improvement" of Marion's citizens.
The
women, who hailed Shakespeare as "The Bard of the Cornfields," gathered
to have tea, to read Shakespeare, discuss the plays, and compose their
own original poems, as well as debating the duties of citizenship. In
other words, Shakespeare was (and is) part of their broader civic
engagement.
Eventually, club members built a
“Shakespeare Garden” in Marion’s Ellis park, which became a focal point
for community restoration efforts after the historic floods of 2008. In a
newspaper article about the rebuilding, one club member said that the
group had moved away from their original insistence on plants that grew
in Shakespeare's own garden in Stratford, and that their plantings now
included flowers that thrive more readily in Iowa's own climate.
Here's another example of a locally remade Shakespeare, by the book artist Emily Martin.
[Courtesy University of Iowa Special Collections]
This is an edition of Romeo and Juliet, but
as you see in the picture below, it is an unusual one. Martin
specializes in pop up books, and here she's chosen one line of text
selected to represent each act of the play.
[Courtesy University of Iowa Special Collections]
On these side leaves (the pillars of the castle) we find variations of the Chorus' opening lines:
Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona where we lay our scene.
From ancient grudge to break new mutiny
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. (1-4)
As
she moves through the play, Martin inserts modern equivalents for
Verona: "fair Bosnia," "fair Israel," "fair Rwanda," "fair America," as
well as her own commentary.
In brief, I hope to
facilitate such experiences of adaptation and reclamation for my own
students, too. With our emphasis on historicizing and analyzing early
modern works, scholars like myself sometimes hesitate to embrace such
heritage, or fail even to see it. But taking our students into the
archives in this way can help demonstrate the great insight of
humanism and the humanities -- that when we're reading Shakespeare we're
not really processing information (in a way that we can broadcast over
the web) so much as discovering ourselves and our relationship to
others, past, present, and future.
