Reviewing
I have been touching up a book review for The Shakespeare Newsletter. It is a nice gig, especially regarding the fact that I get to opine on whatever issues the book raises and often in an interdisciplinary way. The book is by an Art Historian from Yale named Alexander Nemerov, from the University of California Press, entitled Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War.
It is a quite stunning book actually. It takes a performance of Macbeth on October 17, 1863, for which we know very little, and extrapolates a lot of artistic environmental data for what it must have been like to attend that performance on that evening. It so happens that Abraham Lincoln was in attendance and Lady Macbeth was played by a very famous American actress named Charlotte Cushman. Nemerov is very theoretical with his approach, and it is not a book that you devour in a couple of sittings. In fact, you have to take it a chapter at a time and reflect a lot on it. I'll put it this way: imagine being Abraham Lincoln on that evening, attending his favorite Shakespeare play, and hearing references to blood and slaughter just three months after Gettysburg and on the same day that you sentenced a man to execution for murder of a Union soldier (the only eyewitness account of the evening remembers Lincoln leaning back into shadow on just such a reference) and you get the idea. Just simply a stunning imaginative and intellectual exercise.
Imagination like this makes me love my career. Yet, we call for scaling back of "government" intervention and budget cuts. Education is the first to be cut. And in California, the second and third to be cut. Just today, I had a beautiful idea for an article that needs to be written but it would require me to travel for the research and I can not do it on my own finances. So, the next time that people demand that we "share the pain" in budget cuts, just remember that teachers are students too and they can't learn without positions that will foster that learning. It does take money and security just like any corporate job.
I am doing this review for free. The only benefits are that I get to publish my thoughts and I get the book for free (admittedly a fairly expensive book). And if you would like to read it, I will send the review to you for free. If only the world could operate on that level more often...
It is a quite stunning book actually. It takes a performance of Macbeth on October 17, 1863, for which we know very little, and extrapolates a lot of artistic environmental data for what it must have been like to attend that performance on that evening. It so happens that Abraham Lincoln was in attendance and Lady Macbeth was played by a very famous American actress named Charlotte Cushman. Nemerov is very theoretical with his approach, and it is not a book that you devour in a couple of sittings. In fact, you have to take it a chapter at a time and reflect a lot on it. I'll put it this way: imagine being Abraham Lincoln on that evening, attending his favorite Shakespeare play, and hearing references to blood and slaughter just three months after Gettysburg and on the same day that you sentenced a man to execution for murder of a Union soldier (the only eyewitness account of the evening remembers Lincoln leaning back into shadow on just such a reference) and you get the idea. Just simply a stunning imaginative and intellectual exercise.
Imagination like this makes me love my career. Yet, we call for scaling back of "government" intervention and budget cuts. Education is the first to be cut. And in California, the second and third to be cut. Just today, I had a beautiful idea for an article that needs to be written but it would require me to travel for the research and I can not do it on my own finances. So, the next time that people demand that we "share the pain" in budget cuts, just remember that teachers are students too and they can't learn without positions that will foster that learning. It does take money and security just like any corporate job.
I am doing this review for free. The only benefits are that I get to publish my thoughts and I get the book for free (admittedly a fairly expensive book). And if you would like to read it, I will send the review to you for free. If only the world could operate on that level more often...
posted by Brian | 4:20 PM
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