This is a talk with Peter Herman of the University of California, San Diego about his new book, Early Modern Others and other elements of his research that focus on the relationship between literature and culture.
This is a talk with Peter Herman of the University of California, San Diego about his new book, Early Modern Others and other elements of his research that focus on the relationship between literature and culture.
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This is Speaking of Shakespeare conversations about things Shakespearean I'm Thomas Dabbs broadcasting from Aoyama Gakuin University in central Tokyo if you are joining us on YouTube you should know that this program is also available on your favorite podcast platform this talk is with Peter Herman of San Diego State University we will begin with his newly released book entitled Early Modern Others Resisting Bias in Renaissance literature. This talk will take us on a wide journey through early modern literary history a history that includes but is not limited to Shakespeare we will also take a look at Peter's work on the broad topic of literature and terrorism the subject of his 2020 book entitled 'Unspeakable', literature and terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 911 this series is funded with support from the Aoyama
Gakuin University Institute of the Humanities and also with a generous grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Peter thank you so much for joining us today and taking time to come visit our little podcast and uh YouTube series here speaking of Shakespeare well thank you for inviting me uh this is a great pleasure for me I think you have just uh published a book the title of which is early modern others and this is a book that I have just finished and had to go back because there are a lot of details you do some very very um deep uh you drill down a good bit into things that that are uh not immediately obvious to us and you come up with this key term pushing back and you show us how when we want to see this whole period as a as an era of misogyny and racism uh imperialism colonialism all of those isms that are are bad and Western and that in many cases have been attacked uh in in recent decades uh you're pushing back against that idea by showing that there is this sensibility that has grown out along with these horrible things grew out and there were people were very well aware and they weren't unpower people but they just weren't powerful enough and there's another way this book pushes back too and that is in our time uh when when their movements like recent movement in New Zealand to just wipe Shakespeare out of the curriculum we want to push back against that you know just because the play is about racism doesn't make it a racist play and and make those distinctions clear and when people go after erasing things I think we just have to be very very careful and indeed push back so could you tell us more about this book and and uh what you uh hope to achieve uh what you hope your readers uh will get from it well I think that you've got it uh I you know if I can sum up the thesis of this in just a few words it's exactly as you said someone always pushed back there was always somebody uh very often very smart you know like Sir Thomas Moore some of them are very very successful others are not as well known today uh Thomas delone in particular but there was always somebody who look at what we would call you know the the different isms be it misogyny which isn't an ism it's an is whatever you know hatred of women hatred of Class People of a different ethnicity people of different religions and they would as I say push back against it criticize it um demonstrate that the early modern period like our own period is not of one mind I am as I say surely not arguing that there is no racism in this period as we understand it I am surely not arguing that this was a feminist Paradise or there was no anti-Semitism or anti-islamic phobia anti-l islamophobia at the time most certainly there were but then is today there was always somebody pushing back and as I keep telling my classes culture is complic at and contradictory now like as you just said there are many today both inside Academia and outside Academia who want to see the world in no pun intended I suppose black and white terms you're either a racist or you're an anti-racist and there are a lot of critics who look at the early modern period in particular and speak in blanket terms all white people thought the following all men thought the following all Christians thought the following and that's just not true yeah and in a sense well not in a sense it's actually quite overt what I am trying to do do in this book God knows if I'll succeed but what I'm trying to do in this book is to push back against for lack of a better term at the moment the wokeness that I see all around me where again everybody's supposed to think the same thing and we're always supposed to assume that all white people are fundamentally racist and the result of that is I mean give a couple examples of the book that anybody who is white you know Shakespeare Milton all of them they're all racist they're all homophobic they're all misogynist and therefore out they go and I'm trying to push back against that Ross duat of the New York Times I think that's how his name is pronounced has a column today I think U suggesting that Peak woke them has finally decided to kind of reduce so finally you know the wave is is is receding and it is a little bit but it's only receding outside the academy inside the academy it is as powerful today as it ever was yeah yeah and there uh I I I picked up on this too you know with various podcasts that I listen to whatever article that I've read read that there there seems to be um a drawing back in some quarters uh things were pushed a little bit the pendulum is coming back a bit but pendulum is starting to swing back yeah and you know we don't want it to swing back too far because you and I both remember in our early days of teaching and so forth you know when I walked into the early Humanities classrooms with some brilliant wonderful professors but they they were white men there weren't many women uh they're certainly uh not were not represented uh the humanities were not represented by people of color uh and we in our careers have seen this great transition within the academy where you can take a uh you know a photograph of the faculty in Humanities at uh San Diego State University and you'll see a picture that looks uh a lot more like America than it did say in 1980 and so there we are and we are big Advocates are of that both of us but then again uh you you just can't take bring into this a sophomoric um you you have to read it you have to study it you have to look at it and see what it is you have to think for instance that there's an enormous number of oppressed people within England and you point this out in your later chapters with deloney and so forth there's that fourth group that are yes the fourth sort is that right yes people almost you know this just this classist attitude and there was antipathy between these two classes there was an unwillingness for the elite classes to understand how their bread was buttered and uh and there's that now that these people suffer as badly as uh people in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived you know we could we could have that conversation they did not you know they they weren't they weren't wiped out uh but they they suffered and they and and it's the same kind of thing uh what I really enjoyed is you leading into Thomas Moore with that introduction to remind us of the um even even the Spanish Christianity the the Canon uh laws set against destroying a people before at least trying to attempt to convert them and yes well there several points one in no way am I nostalgic for a Humanities Department in English Department that was populated exclusively by white males in one way I suppose I was extremely fortunate because my education both as undergraduate and certainly in graduate school was diverse I had an well how not africanamerican an African Nova scotian combination believe me um you know was one of my main teachers an undergraduate um in Graduate School Colombia had very powerful women professors especially my great uh dissertation advisor the wonderful and Lake Prescott but there was also Carolyn hbr and Joan fante and I'm sure I'm missing one or two so I never actually did I recognize this is very unusual I never had an image of a Humanities Department an English Department that was populated exclusively by white men white Christian men that has never been there now going back to the book um we do need to remember that barol deasus and monos they were lone voices and they went up against the establishment Church they went up against the Spanish King and as we all know ultimately they lost however however the fact that they lost doesn't mean that their voices shouldn't be heard today and in fact you can draw a direct line between what Theus says in his books the later editions in English of Lascassas and the Abolitionist Movement which starts up roughly late 1700s early eight you know to and then moves into the 18th century but even that there's always been a germ of it in English law we need to remember that English law said quite overtly there are no slaves in England now outside of England of course they had no problems with it but inside of England there are no slaves and if a slave ever landed in England they were automatically freed this is in Holland shed's CR Chronicles and it's actually repeated almost verbatim in blackstone's commentaries in the 18th century so here you've got the Paradox on the one hand you have people talking about the liberty of the subject and the evils of slavery and yet at the same time they are holding slaves that's you know a contradiction that needs to be made explicit and it was a contradiction that was noted at the time Samuel Johnson actually rather cervically noted in an answer to something that Thomas Jefferson wrote you know how is it that those who you're yelping loudest that's actually his word yelping loudest against slavery how come you own slaves yeah so yeah that's the old Jeffersonian problem too yes it is and recently I've been reading some of the pamphlets uh that are part of the runup to the American Revolution and numerous times many times they are explicitly anti-slavery explicitly saying that black people deserve the exact same rights as anyone else because they are human beings like anyone else yeah now for complicated and frankly ugly reasons that point of view did not succeed yeah until the 1800s but you know as they said the voice is always there yeah um it's short anecdote I have a um a lifelong friend who's a business person and he years some years ago he did a u he was uh contractor I won't go into great detail but he was stiffed by one of his clients for a lot of money and basically what happened was that the client said brought in a lawyer and said listen it's going to cost you more to sue me than to collect money from me you know and these were good people I knew the people involved here and I said how do how can they possibly think that they can ask you to do this work and did you put all of this money into and not pay you for your work when they have no complaints about the results and he said when money's involved people can rationalize anything and I think I'd like to add to that when it's power when it's Imperial power when it's gold when you have these um near it seems all like Hen Henry VII whether it's uh the um oh you know the whoever's big in the Holy Roman Empire or whatever they're always out of money because they always have to have these troops out in the field uh trying to get more land trying to protect what they have and they just had power and they wanted money and you can form an ideology around that uh and they they had they had the guns they had the swords they had the um certainly did although as I point out at a certain point the natives in Amar India they started to fight back oh yeah and did some pretty horrible things yeah and say I blame them you know they would capture a Spanish person and poor Molten gold down this throat yeah it's like you want gold here AB some yeah here it is well uh moving more directly into your book you do talk about Mo his humanism as expressed in Utopia a work that was a canonized part of the humanities curriculum in my college training and it as far as I'm concerned should remain so uh there's so much to be gathered from Utopia and from Utopia after that uh if we could look into some of the Shakespearean stuff too yeah I was actually very surprised when I first started working on this how the connection between Utopia and the new world was just not something that Scholars had looked at I remember I first started looking into it just because I was kind of interested in it oh here's this fascinating book surely there is something because this was like just at the time when Steph greenblat was doing his new world stuff uh that great book of his um New World encounters and the like surely something has been done on Moore's Utopia and the new world because Moore says three or four times I think that hitas sailed with Americo vuchi several times where is it oh it's in the new world okay surely there must be something but for whatever reason no you know and and the one or two articles that I found on it uh it said basically it's not a big deal which seemed to me about as wrong as you were going to get so that was The Germ for the Utopia chapter and then you know you compare Moore's vision of utopian civilization which is always you know meant to be better than well partially better than European he always complicates that relationship and then you compare that to what's going on um in the new world you know so but my point is that the more in Utopia challenges the notion that any and all civilizations in the new world are by definition inferior and then you add to that uh the section on who is going to you who is who is going to go to you Utopia to convert the natives and it's basically the worst that Europe has to offer more is very clear that theologians are going to go there well that's not a neutral term for more it's because he hates theologians so these are the people and sure enough when they come or one in particular there's a utopian who is on fire with Christianity and immediately starts to say if you don't believe in Christianity then you're damned you're not allowed to do that and that cuts against um the basic rules of Utopia now while it's true utopus the king Exiles the man as I say the damage has been done because once that virus enters a culture it's like coid it seems to be almost impossible to get rid of and and then there's one other part I want to talk about just because I I just found it so fascinating that in 1520 or so more would intu it this which is the danger of importing Western technology to a culture that isn't prepared for it yeah and this is taken there's a direct illusion here to one of vpi's letters so I mean he's clearly thinking in the terms and he gives the talks about how he gives the na these natives the um I was about to say the Periscope that's not it at all the compass small you know we're used to it they're not yeah and we know the dangers so we're not going to go out too far these people don't and they think oh great a compass I can go anywhere I want to with this thing and Moore says this can very well lead to disaster and I'm how is he able to intu this that exporting technology to a culture that doesn't have this technology is not going to work out well or it may very well not work out well and I suppose you could also push it even further by saying that Moore is basically warning the West all of us about where technology can go yeah we have as he would say the Prudence to know how to use this technology and here of course I'm thinking about AI well there you are yeah that's on on the horizon and I'm even thinking uh when social media platforms were dumped on us suddenly we had the these handheld objects everybody could get on and uh we're in a culture that has a free press uh I think people who lived in cultures that have state-owned media may have been better trained to to manage this explosion in media because they they knew already they were already trained culturally to be skeptical of what the state-owned media said whereas we have a little bit more trust in what we read and and whatnot and then boom uh and it's shaking things up but I do see that you know you when you just drop this into a middle of a population and you know more still in the kind of seminal period of the printing press which just changed everything uh and better better technology to make the paper to get more out and of course he's using it but I I think that might be where he's drawing his ideas it is the irony however or the tragedy if you will Moore is writing this in what 1515 1516 or so and Henry VII had just asked him to be part of his court the Reformation had not yet fully taken hold in England well Henry vi8 excuse me Moore is going to join Henry VII's Court he's going to be the Lord Chancellor and essentially he becomes the Hitman against the attack dog against Lutheranism and all of that wonderful stuff in Utopia about how maybe God wants us to have multiple forms of worship right out the window yeah yeah um yeah uh well this we I could talk about this for hours because but I wanted to move into uh Messiah the Shrew uh you take up in your second chapter shrew the the Shrew plays of course there more more than one and uh uh we of course are Fami familiar with the Shakespearean play but it sort of surprised me you came out very directly and said listen these are not in essence misogynistic plays if you look at them uh I spoke with uh Richard strier the University of Chicago and he I think you would find K Richard the the Great Richard stri uh you you sit back and you look at this and you go wait a second when we take in the whole you know the entire form here uh we are possibly seeing ideas of empowerment feminine empowerment here and so I I'll hand that to you yeah Richard and I disagree on this and he he uh he read part of the book and actually no he read the whole book and we were constantly going back and forth about this I I strongly suspect it would be a much better book If I Had the benefit of our discussions before I submitted it but my view at least is that if you go from The Taming of I'm just sort of glancing over here because they never get it right The Taming of a shrew to The Taming of the Shrew to the Tamer Tamed you see an in increasing pressure on misogyny now the my well there's also another point for reasons that I just frankly don't find convincing in the least many Shakespeare critics think that the Taming of the Shrew came before The Taming of a this to me makes no sense whatsoever uh so I am assuming that a shrew is roughly 59 you know late 1580s or so we know that it was performed uh because there's a reference to it in Hall in not Holland shed in uh henslow's diary and then because it's a popular play Shakespeare does his own version of it which we now call The Taming of theom Taming of the shrew is a really weird play in a lot of ways not the least of which is we don't have the ending fly does not come back I mean is was it lost was it used to wrap fish was this intentional I mean at this point it's impossible to know the play was also not printed in quto which is not that usual but it's a little bit odd nonetheless because other plays were published in quto and there's no record of a performance of it Francis mirz when he gives his list of Shakespeare's favorite you know his favorite Shakespeare plays leave shrew out so it's very hard to know what the Contemporary response was nonetheless John Fletcher circus 1610 or so writes his sequel to The Taming of theu which means the play had to have been current in some way otherwise why would you write a sequel to it um and here you can see you know the movement away from a play where it's both misogynistic and anti- misogynistic to just Mis anti- misogynist istic I mean the end of the play there's an overt call for parity in marriage that men and women need to be treated equally The Taming of thew on the other hand is really mixed and as one of my teachers Jean Howard put it in an article a long long time ago um if you want to say that that Catherine is broken you could do that but you have to ignore certain scenes if you want to say that she is playing at the end same thing do but you have to ignore certain things that problematic speech at the end where she if you take it that this literal value she is fully submitting she has uh given given up the fight but on another glance it could be ironic you know depending on how you want to receive it could be ironic
but that Bianca and the Widow clearly don't think it's clearly don't think she's being ironic they are both appalled at what they are seeing now what also complicates things is the final speech Shakespeare adapts from The Taming of asre and makes it all about politics and he puts into it well you know a view of politics which is absolutist that the subject has no right of rebellion to uh to the Lord who so long as the commands are lawful so long as the commands are in line with God's laws now the problem with that of course is the end of the speech we get an example example of a command she says I'm ready to put my foot my hand underneath my Lord's boot which no one is going to in this period is going to assume is rational is appropriate not even patrcia does that but if that's her view of what a lord is entitled to the kind of obedience the Lord is entitled to we are H we are going to have real problems yeah and well one other point is that while I think that that would have not gone over too well in Circa 1590 or so that kind of rhetoric in 1623 is really not g to go over well so I think as I said at the end Shakespeare tilts the balance towards Katarina being broken but we are meant to be appalled at this what a foolish Duty you call this says either the widow or Bianca one the other yeah isn't that a Shakespearean thing if we just take it away from uh true for a moment and racism for a moment if in 12th night I don't see a way uh I I don't see a way to understand the play in a way in which malvolio isn't overp punished okay we don't like him he's officious he deserves punishment but they really really pun and you go oh you know I'm being you know my chain is being jerked here I am being drawn in with these people who are essentially torturing this poor man eventually right whatever he did he didn't deserve all of that you know uh and he was confined and I remember maybe 10 years ago I went to a production a little bit longer ago than that of um the at Globe Theater production uh Merchant uh The Merchant of Venice and they pretty much you know what is playing Shakespeare straight but there there wasn't any emphasis on how badly Shylock was treated by the let's say white people or and uh well by the Christians by the Christians by the the yuppies you know those you know the beautiful the bman the beautiful people but they just played it out straight with charlock and you get this this sense this man is being abused you can see why he would become the man he became why whatever cruelty that's in him might not be the product of his own nature but might be something that was developed and cultivated systemically uh by this uh culture of beautiful people around him who spurn him and it just seems there it's also there in aell where you know uh I spoke with David Avid Brown is a young um scholar who does Black studies uh at Trinity College and you know looking at it from a black perspective right you can see Iago as someone where does his evil come from right and it comes from the fact that he has to hate aello and this hatred is it maybe an outgrowth of self-loathing and both feed on each other and that creates the evil in him and this thing and it goes right into aello you know it it takes it takes over uh so it's so complex but to to just you know say aello is a racist play is I'm sorry just idiotic I don't I cannot imagine anybody who's read that play or scene of production uh who would called the play itself racist well I can give you a couple of names of people who say exactly that yeah um just a general comment Shakespeare loves to insert lines which re which raise questions and you have no answers to this for example in the Kate talks about how she needs to speak or else she needs to express the anger of her heart or else her heart will break what what's what are you talking about and you don't you don't know um similarly in the play we hear that uh that Bianca and the Widow are conferring by The Parlor fire what are they conferring about well you know given everything in the play I doubt if they're talking about how to make the best kind of blueberry scone but we don't know it's left up in the air he does something also very similar to this at the end or almost towards the end of Midsummer Night's Dream where Heria and Helena's last line hermia's last night also is like one of the two males I think it's Leander says oh wasn't that the Duke and her last line is yay and my
father where's that going to go what's their relationship going to be you don't know because they're completely silent for the rest of the fifth act so there's no reconciliation that we see so I mean Shakespeare loves to to to borrow from what I say about Milton and I suppose also terrorism you know he loves to generate incertitude what does this mean you know where's this gonna go and he raises the questions and refuses the answers yeah same thing for Iago what is it that is motivating him I mean Iago gives three or four different answers yeah none of which seem to be satisfactory yeah so you know is he says he thinks that aell was sleeping with his wife like really where's that coming from you know is it because someone got promoted over him well I suppose although again doesn't really get come back to that who was it um who said that Iago was a motiveless [Laughter] malignancy very true I I think it was colorid or katees other yeah I I I kind of uh I tend to think of Iago is is being part of a um systemic ideology uh that in the end uh in the end if you think you're better if you think you uh have been shunned uh if you're in an ideology where just because you're you're white you're better than someone who is not uh order it takes an enormous amount of psychic power to maintain that and it's destructive to the uh it's destructive to the soul uh and you know in the examples in the American South as much of the burden that is placed upon black people in the Jim Crow era uh that that is uh that comes at the cost of what we' call the oppress oppress class the uh dominant class it comes at a great cost to them too and a kind of evil is created yet and yet the Venetian Doge Duke whatever they are they don't share iago's view I mean all of the nasty comments about aello and race the thick lips uh the you know they're making the Beast with two backs the bar B Ram etc etc etc they're all said by the bad guys of the play Yago Rodrigo and banio when Bano comes roaring in and says oh my God my daughter is married you know this this terrible animal this thing the response is not oh my God a black man has married a white woman ah the response was whatat are you talking about yeah yeah then when he he unloads they you need something called proof yeah you don't have it so you know I I resist the notion that the venetians are ipof facto racist now having said that a fellow has clearly absorbed a negative view of Blackness you know when he says for happily I am black he's the one who's raising this no one else has except for of course Rania but that's what again s what makes the play so fascinating so complex Venetian culture is not universally systemically racist because the do and Company don't have a problem with a fellow marrying desona they're very very clear about that yeah well that kind of brings me to your third chapter and it's a a little bit of a bone I would like to pick with the world because me which is the third chapter now the uh where that's when you get into class and chapter I'm so ill with this uh since my younger days just the uh in the American Consciousness when we when we do identity politics and this sort of thing the Eraser of class and uh of of economy you know and I'm an old Fuko and you know just going you got to look into this right there's a huge difference between the rich and the poor and you can you know we're talking in thew about and also in Midsummer about pretty much Elite women right from an Elite Class when you get into shoemakers holiday you get to see this whole other world I love this element mainly because it's so rare there's not that much of it in Renaissance drama uh in particular but in there's not the the working class the largest body of people in society don't have a voice and this is women men whatever color whatever background they're from uh and we do get it in deloney and you know of course when Decker adapts him yeah I love those plays I love deloney I I I was introduced to delone my first or second year of graduate school by the late lamented late uh Howard sches and I always wanted to do something with him and then the Ed editor for Broadview asked me if I wanted to do an addition I said how about a collected deloney he said how about one how about we just do one not a collective okay so I did the so I did my little addition of um Jack of Newbery where I asked them how many copies it sold I think he said 75 I never asked him again I don't want to know but the stuff is phenomenal and what's phenomenal is that hey it was done it was written suggesting that these you know these the notion that the fourth sort can push back was absolutely thinkable and it's phenomenal because the book was literally read out of existence three additions I think the the addition that we finally have is the fourth the fourth printing I should say all the others were just literally read out of read out yeah they don't exist anymore so my point is that the stuff was incredibly popular yeah so he's clearly saying something that's resonating all over the culture and the same thing would also go for Decker shoemakers holiday which was also a very very popular play yeah so know again you have Holland no not Holland shed this is in front of Holland shed it's you know William Harrison and then it gets turned into Sir Thomas Smith's you know the four-fold division of the culture and the fourth is the fourth sword those who are to be ruled and to rule no other right oh you know they too have a voice and it's through deloney and it's through Decker and other writers yeah for people in our audience who may not know this deloney himself was a silk Weaver I believe was his craft and uh they I I need to check into this uh many of these people in his Society belong to guilds that were quite they yeah they yes I mean you know unlike today I mean you couldn't just simply hang out a shingle and say guess what I'm a barber or a rope maker no you had to belong to uh for lack of a better phrase at the moment a Professional Organization yeah and some of them were quite powerful and some of them yeah maybe not so much but it all feels feeds into this I mean well let's face it the playhouses were not filled with the elite I mean there you know so not entirely true when I was doing the research for another article on um Shakespeare's history plays and I was doing some research on the impressing meaning you know the rating of lower class people and putting them into the army I came across a um set of documents it was you know in an article on this it wasn't like I was one doing this where London's mayor did something that he was told not to do and he didn't care he raided a playhouse uhhuh that meant he got everybody yeah it's absolutely fascinating because yes you had some of the lower the lowest of the low but as the mayor was complaining about this you also caught some of the queen's men yes you caught some of the lawyers they even caught an Earl yeah yeah so I didn't mean to suggest that the elite didn't go to plays but they most certainly you know and the topmost of society the plays went to them yeah well the court they I think they were designed you know that Midsummer is it's amazingly flexible how it could entertain and not offend a court audience and yet you can take it right into the globe uh or the um uh whatever the northern the theaters near north of town the the big public ones uh and it works there too it has that amazing flexibility and the the jokes on the Tradesmen you know the Mechanicals that work it works for the aristocracy and it also works in kind of I the Brits would say taking the piss out of uh you know your own your own folks right you know These Guys these Tradesmen and uh if you are one of them right and some of their uh and some of their pretentions which are always punished in all pretentions among that class are punished in shakes that is true yeah Midsummer is an astonishing play I don't know how she does it because on the one hand as the phrase goes if you're not on the floor laughing there is a hole in your soul yeah yet there are these moments of dissonance you know the the undercurrent of violence that just keeps coming back over and over and over again again it's like there's this dissonant Basse note and he's able to combine the two and it's just astonishing yes it it really is astonishing uh because it you know the in the end uh the uh the young people that the you know the our four lovers who are married their comments about the production right if you're part if you're a part of their class ahha look at these stupid people right if you're not you go what asses these people are you know these guys they're making fools out of themselves but you know come on I mean then there's great line BW my heart but I do pity the man she's the only one of the aristocracy to actually get the message of the play yeah um have you seen this what Sam Rockwell does to that final scene it's extraordinary uh it's in the last movie version of myth ice where he starts off he's playing you know th is it pyramis or thisby I always forget which is which yeah and at first you know he's saying the lines comically oh with the voice you know and it's all ridiculous it's all very funny and then he stops and he starts to speak the speech straight seriously his eyes were green as leaks and all of a sudden you are Weeping at the tragedy I remember reading one yeah I'm sorry I didn't know that I just had forgotten the name of the actor that's the yeah that's I just showed it in class which is well it's it's coming up in my class next week that same um I love that I I still have um Kevin Klein in my mind to
bottom but yeah the switch the switch that um BBY makes uh it's just a it's an amazing moment of acting to show you how quickly you can turn uh a cinnamon takes the wig off and that makes that makes him more feminine at that time uh it seems if if we can say that now but uh you you you feel a sense of pthos at that moment exactly that's just I remember reading once that uh Rockwell hadn't planned it so the other actors who are watching this are not expecting this so when um you see them lean forward with the what is happening here they are actually responding in the moment to what he is doing yeah I mean I hope that's true well we're talking about the Michael Hoffman Production of they does such a wonderful job sets it in the 19th century uh shows the yeah for you know the flexibility again of that play how you can drop it here and there um and and that sort of thing well let's move on uh I I I love the class element here oh I wanted to ask you one thing though I've seen this I don't think I came up with the idea although I had you know how you have an idea and go wow I have an idea and then you start reading and you realize somebody 30 years ago had the same idea oh yeah yeah happens all the time but I thought at one point I was working on those Mechanicals I have an article coming out about that and uh the silk weaving delone it's hard to you know there may be some a direct reference to deloney because he was well known as a writer of ballads and there there may be a model there for the character of bottom uh again taking taking the piss out of a guy you might know uh like he takes like he does with the master of rebels in at least the quto version right everybody knows that fillrate or Phil estate is Edmund tilney there's no no other person he could be very brave of Shakespeare giv tilney's power but it also shows that um I don't know the fellowship when you feel close enough to a person to you know my guess is we don't know what it is on but my guess is that tyy knew what was coming saw it and when he saw it he just grinned from ear to a everybody knows no no mistake like that could ever happen you know there would never accidentally be a play for the Queen's court or for court exactly the impossibility there's no reason not to assume that that they didn't have a sense of humor about themselves yeah of course of course that would have been tiy's worst night nightmare that it somehow a play makes it through and uh and these guys are suddenly playing in front of his uh you know a I think he knew it yeah uh but maybe there's a little deloney in bottom too I I don't know possibly although tone I mean the story there is a really fascinating one where as you say deloney is a silk Weaver and he has this sideline in writing ballads which are sort of the lowest you know in the hierarchy the lowest of the lowest of the low um but then you've got the crisis of the 1590s and you have the starvation the dir the food riots the sense that uh the safety net has completely broken the rich are getting richer the poor are left to starve and deloney then writes a ballot with the queen featuring the queen and the people quote on the want of Court unquote and that gets him into real trouble the uh powers that be London's mayor go looking for him he's about to be arrested near as we can tell because the Lord mayor in his letter to Burley then says we can't find him went underground which I would imagine isn't all that hard to do in London at a time without addresses without telephone numbers and the web credit cards Etc um but it's at that point that he starts writing these Pros fictions and that's where you know that how he then moves from um a situation where Authority is directly threatening him I mean presumably he was not the people were not all that polite to the queen and that didn't go over over well the kind of expansive generous Vision that you get in the you know in the pros fictions granted what he is doing there is completely overturning the conventional ladder putting those who work first and Aristocrats right at the bottom but he does it uh generously he's not saying these people all need to die just they need to just the workers need to have their value recognized their interests have to be put first which in his fiction that is exactly what Henry VII realizes U earlier on yeah well there is delon's you know the he moves from his trade silk weaving to an Aspire ing writer and there is that reflection in bottom too I you know hey to be something else uh but to to go back to the um the idea of um the rioting uh it was a very riotous time and again that's how sh Shakespeare doesn't get us he's not a city dramatist he doesn't put us there you know if there's a if there's a riot is in Cory elanus and of course it's it's another time in play but it's right you know it's right there in in in memory in living memory and then corus's attitude toward the people and uh that just just disdain uh for their sense of U what entitlement that they deserve food um and then it comes up yeah and it comes up again in Julius Caesar there there's a lot of Street action there U rius behavior and and you know there's a river you know in Julius Caesar there's a river it's not the Tims there people riding their uh citizens uh being outspoken and uh uh you know not not being uh not addressing their superiors in the right way that kind of thing but it always happens in Rome it happens somewhere else but you can see this reflected uh what we call working class uh contempt for and there's one case your book where the uh what the mayor of London had a has a chance to move his daughter up into the aristocracy and he doesn't want to do it he doesn't like those people they spend too much money they're IND excuse me that's that's a Lucy and Oakley is that that's the shoemaker's holiday the Shoemaker holiday yes yes it's you know the Lord you know the Earl is the one who's subject to class Prejudice which is really kind of a wonderful thing and it's because right that's because yeah what this it um cour or what's the line corders spend more in a day than I am worth all year is that you know the aristocracy or a bunch of wasteful you know drone you know parasites really yeah yeah well let's move on to religious tolerance I want to get through oh yeah the um and I'm I'm just interested I was surprised by this because I I've looked a lot you I've been a um a Marlo guy for decades and tamberlane I would say that that one play may have been the reason I thought I could maybe do this this business right I just never you I've never seen and such a character but the those lines just the art Artistry of it like you can't miss it you know you can be a a dummy like me from a you know farm town and you just can't miss it and then it's it's tamberlane and you go God I love this stuff you know uh this guy is a really really bad dude and I can't help but like him because he's such a good poet you know and then you know selinus and King Le the um this but uh tamberline does not care for those people in Damascus and when he's approached by The Virgins he goes no I set out my rules show him the sword I hoist him on the gates and then right at that moment he turns around and just delivers a sonnet to zoc this is beautiful how much he loves he goes oh I'm getting to be girlish in my you know it's just outrageous but the contempt that tamberlane can show on an early modern stage toward Christianity just amazing yes it's astonishing I don't know how he got or maybe he did get away with it I don't know it is astonishing and you know it demonstrates the play demonstrates once more that culture is complicated it is contradictory and yes obviously you you know church and state at this you know in this culture were one and as I also tell my students this was a culture where people did not believe in God they knew God existed they didn't believe in heaven and hell they knew that Heaven and Hell existed and yet even then there's this push back you know this you know what you think at four in the morning when you're alone and no one else is you know no one else can hear you and this is kind of your worst nightmare come true and I think that with with tamberlane the criticism of Christianity is inseparable from the class criticism you know the fact that he takes all those early modern certainties he being Marlo at this point and breaks them yeah I mean Marlo is this you know Ultra skeptical Voice who takes what Society holds to be sacred and unquestionable and questions it it's really is just astonishing I mean that's at least what he does in tamberline and in the Jew of Malta yeah Dr Fus maybe maybe not well he gives it to you straight in Dr F you want Heaven and Hell I'll give you Heaven and Hell ex I'll give I'll give you devils and let's let's face it devils are a lot more interesting than Angels so we're just here it is and there's almost comic that ending you know being dragged down you know and uh you know looking up at the firmament you know and I can see Christ's blood streaming in the firmament it almost goes over in fact it kind of does in my mind yeah there's this wonderful line where uh he's just called up mephistophiles and he says to mephistophiles well I think hell's the
and mephistophiles says I think so still till experience do change your mind it's like what are you talking about but um back in Hell nor nor are we out of it you know that that line yeah uh go lay there some great just so many well I I think it goes back to the point that even somehow Bor born out of born out of these movements uh to consolidate a new church in the Church of England uh to maintain and from the Church of Rome and whatever countries in Europe uh these movements that are were highly oppressive towards people even indigenously but of course you know led to massive genocide uh because that that one idea we are Christian and you are not makes us better you know this is before we get to White um and then well we're white too and we have guns but uh the the thing is that born out of this is also the push back that you point to and I thought and you know at first I thought was idiosyncratic kind of selection of text but I see now you know having read the book how this works together you could have done this book with other text uh I could have but I wanted to you got to you got to select something you know uh and it doesn't seem to me like you blindfolded yourself and through darts at you know a whiteboard or you know the wall anything because these these are very seminal Works Utopia Lear uh tamberline in my view uh and of course you know Merchant of Venice the these things do they're salent you know if you're going to pick something that shows that gives examples of what you're talking about these are the right choices Titus aello and London's Africans you know as we get to the end of the book yeah that's that's where have to go uh well and that's also why it's at the end assuming I actually have a reader who's going to go all the way through but for that uh for the that chapter I have to give credit where credit is due uh while um I have some criticisms what inas khabib did going into these archives and finding all of these records of AFR Britains is extraordinary service and now also these records have been digitized yes they're available through I think it's called the switching the lens web through uh London's City archives so you know I don't even think I thought about the audience when I first started being a professor um I don't think I ever really thought about whether there was darker people who were living in London but there were and uh in between inas khabib and uh Kaufman also has a terrific book about you know black people in tutor London uh we realize I mean there was a relatively small but they're still there community and using the records that uh the late inas khabib uh came up with we see that they married black and white married there was not any uh objection or bar to this they had children the children were baptized and They carried on there's one in particular her name is Mary Phyllis and nobody knows why the uh the Parish Clerk gave such an extended uh account of this but it's it's a her basically her life This Woman's life history her employment history leading up to the fact that she decided that she needed to be baptized that she wanted to be baptized and what's you know extraordinary about this is well clearly her not being baptized AP ized was no bar to her being employed in VAR by various people so she gets baptized but the baptism isn't just by herself she goes with a group there is clearly a community here I mean it was their version it seems of a bot Mitzvah you know they then go had take and Ale afterwards but again my point is that here is a woman who is clear a a black woman African woman who is part of a community you cannot assume that everybody in early modern England did not like black people right cannot assume that and I think that once you you realize that there is no reason to assume that there were no black people in Shakespeare's audience that no black people were going to the theater just as you know there's well I think we actually have some evidence to prove that there were women who went to the theater as well but once you realize that then you know Titus and aell I think they look very different yeah I that you're not just dropping in this exotic notion of uh the AF African there would be over here you know I I just bought you know a basket from this man yeah or you know I just had a beer with him yeah yeah um you you could see though that maybe uh their Blackness got them othered in these communities too and there would be understanding of that also yeah well I'm I'm going just encourage people to read all the way through to get to chapter six Titus and aello uh there's so much stuff Peter you've done you're you I think have benefited greatly from the proximity you have to the Huntington uh not at all oh not at all it's mostly English books online ebom ebom early English books online I we struggled about 10 years ago we struggled we had climbed you know we we were ready to die on that hill to get access and we won we got the attention of the right people here in Japan and it just changes everything it changes everything I will never forget um I was doing a chapter researching a chapter for the Milton book um D stabilizing and I wanted to find out what was the view of the Book of Job in this period And I found that there was like this 10 12 volume uh commentary on the Book of Job over published over the course of a decade really well long story short no live no one library in the United States had this book had this you know so there was like sum are at the Huntington sum are at the Newbury some are at the folder you know one has four six and eight the other has one three and five so if I was going to consult this either I was going to use microfilm God help us all or I would have to travel the world for this yeah well it took me an hour and a half yeah to do the you know to get to see to get what I needed I mean I was able to consult each and every one of these books and yes I mean I've always been because of my training um more interested in primary sources than and uh then thear it yeah you know good primary source quickens my soul yeah yeah and early English books online ebo changed my life it's just extraordinary yeah and now there's actually another added little twist to it where there's something called TCP tation part partnership yeah yeah where many of the books not all of them but many of them have been transcribed and made searchable right what that allowed me to do was look at the use of the word black was black you know always used negatively yeah so I you know put in a chronological you know uh chronological limit of one year yep I think I chose 1595 yeah and did Black yeah got a bunch of but you know I'd say 75% of the sites were negative 25 were very positive yeah Edward the BL Prince yeah that's not done negatively tough guy tough guy so you know the the availability of these texts through early English books online democratizes research because if you have access you know you could be anywhere so long as you have access to ebo and you can get access to ebo now through the Renaissance Society of America yes yes I'm not sure if you can get the searchable uh I haven't gone back we have it now okay we bought a um kind of national license in Japan p uh which was uh they did and I I knew those folks for a while it's been handed over uh and Evo itself is an interesting research project what is what is going what went into creating it you know starting with the microfilm at University of Michigan that kind of thing and uh the labor that was involved in um making and the labor that's involved with the TC yeah essentially Outsourcing was outsourc mational Corporation and this is done by some poor soul in India somewhere that's right that's right quarter a day for yeah we can do our obstru research yeah yeah that that kind of thing but um we don't think about that we don't We're Not Gonna think we're not gonna go there we're yeah that's just one of those things I don't think that anyone involved actually knew at the time what was act really going on you know the the public face of the company that agreed to do it would looked good and happy and you know oh yeah and then I forget the details of this but a guy writes an article about ebo and I noticed in a footnote that it's wait a minute yeah talks about how yes you know our researchers our researches really are done on the back of exploited labor yeah um not gonna stop using it but it's something we should keep I don't know I I you know it's there yeah uh there's so many analogies just flying into my mind there so many you know you know things you'd have to stop using if you starting with your iPhone here's my little IOP but you know how many bridges in this world can you not cross if I you know know how they were built you know all kinds of things but uh let's move to terrorism oh the AI is gonna pick yeah we're gonna we're gonna end up in some kind of watch list here just with the key word because AI I am sure there was some I flagged I was flaged by Homeland Security by some of the Google searches I was doing yeah I there's no doubt and uh AI now is not big brother not yet is more like a little nephew a niece it's still kind of in in his childhood and so it doesn't quite it's not able to distinguish necessarily between Peter Herman's views on terrorism and the bad guys out there whoever they might be I hope you know then again you know maybe they were checking me out and maybe they read my book I don't know yeah yeah well if they did then nothing to worry about Gunpowder Plot there it is I mean nothing more no nothing more what audacity you know just every time I look into that I'm going what there is something creative this is we're going to do this you know we're blowing up the houses of Parliament uh and they almost did capting the nation yeah they almost did it they almost did it no how that would have changed the world you know who knows I try not to think in the yeah um after 911 the immediate aftermath of 911 and I'm hearing in Reading how it was unspeakable it's unprecedented no one has ever thought of anything like this before that one of the reasons why um the security agencies didn't connect the dots was because they never thought anything like this could happen and I reading this and I'm thinking I've heard this before yeah I have heard this rhetoric before so I did a little searching and sure enough I found all of this rhetoric of the rhetoric of unspeakability about the Gunpowder Plot and then that's when I formulated um My Little thesis about the my definition of terrorism and the title here is unspeakable literature and terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 911 thank you yes where Terror terrorism is a paradox on the one hand terrorism is violence that speaks it's not mindless it's not just something that happens um you know as you know to quote that great line from Batman you know it's not done by people who just want to see the world burn it's done for a message you know National Liberation uh the protest imperialism something or religious persecution something but for terrorism to earn the time terrorism to get the attention that it was terrorism has to do something that had never been done
before and that's the Gunpowder Plot I mean there are there have been lots of massacres you know that's not new there are lots of uh monarchs who have been assassinated that's not new
but to blow up England's ruling class in one Fell Swoop the clergy the commons the Lords and the royal family that had never been done before and that creates this shock wave where people are saying you know never never happened it's you know it's unspeakable uh James says in one of his speeches my voice quoting Virgil my voice sticks in my throat I I don't have the words yeah to describe this cook says you know we do not have a word to describe this crime we do terrorism yeah yeah so then what this means is that terrorism is not something that happens every day so then terrorism essentially goes to sleep um comes back again and you know with the French Revolution which is actually where we get the term for it uh but that's the French Revolution the English really don't deal much with it in their fiction but then you get the 19th century and the invention of dynamite and dynamite you know again we forget what an extraordinary invention that was yeah Mr Nobel right when guy foxing company wanted to blow up Parliament they had Barrel after Barrel after barrel of gunpowder you know it they basically filled an entire basement with it well with gun with dynamite all you need is like four or five little whatever they're called and put it in a bag and you can then blow up an entire building yeah but then the phans the Irish nationalists they decide that they're going to do something else with this they're not going to go after people because they suppose you could say any damn fool can kill a whole lot of people instead they went after cultural monuments yeah so actually the the death toll for their bombing campaign was very very low yeah they weren't you know trying to kill M they wanted to do was attack England's culture yeah and that's where some years later um Joseph Conrad picks up on this in the secret agent yeah you need to come up with something that's going to attack you know the you the central cultural fixation of the age which for them was science so blow up an observatory yeah that's what's going to cause this then you know obviously you get World War I then you know World War I but that doesn't quite fit into terrorism um then you get what happens after World War I two which are the uh the National Liberation movement and here something else happens which is really interesting which is you have political scientists and people who are Soldier Scholars looking at terrorism as a rational as a rational tactic that had not been done before because everyone's going oh it's un you know it's Unthinkable the people who do this are animals they're not human it's craziness it's insanity and these guys are going no no no no these are very smart people who are doing this and it is a tactic and it is a rational tactic to a rational end hence you get ponac corvo's movie The Battle of ALG last then we get of course the Arab Israeli the Palestinian Israeli and once more terrorism goes in a way that had never been done before and you get the same responses to it but I also as as I had finished the book as I was finishing the book my wife says to me you know there is a book by Jody Pico you really need to read and it's the you know the book where she's dealing with white nationalism and white nationalist terrorism and that I read that because it's the same problem how um such Scholars as Richard Jackson critical terrorism studies they all argue that what we need to do is to try and see the world through the eyes of the terrorist you know that these are not animals these are human beings and why are they committing these Grievous acts and it's something which as literature people were kind of kind of used to doing you know we read Beowolf and then we try and see the world from either grindle or grindle's mother's perspective yeah we try and figure out the world from iago's point of view why is he doing this we sympathize with McBeth you know we're used to seeing the World Through The Eyes of a monster and I always quote the great song by Pete Townson Behind Blue Eyes we need to do that with terrorism but is there a limit and is white nationalism the limit yeah that the LIE yeah that seem yes he is a culture will not cross it is yeah is odd in the sense that white nationalism you have groups that are if we look at this again sophomorically from what we would call the hegemonic group you know the the group that has a geminy but usually these people who are most involved uh feel dispossessed in some way uh so uh so you it there's a there's a turn there that just mathematically or geometrically um seems uh hard to hard to deal hard to put into the same bracket I guess is the way I'm trying it doesn't to the Box uh that people from the dominant class would go and burn churches and uh do things to terrorized communities uh all for a sense of being threatened and establishing their superiority uh when there was no need to do it no need to do it but they you know these are also people who do feel and in no way am I am I defending this but you know you know they do feel threatened they do feel that the world is caving in on them and that's why they are lashing out I mean the difference is you know while I have no problem extending imaginative sympathy to the Catholics in the Gunpowder Plot right I have no problem extending imaginative sympathy to the Phats you know uh to the Irish nationalists I even have no problem understanding what is motivating a Palestinian terrorist yeah this is my life yeah I it might it might be a real line I just don't I don't remember and I tried to figure out I don't think I was trying to empathized with Timothy McVey but I wanted to know he I never found the place where he articulated the reason for doing what he did with that other guy is blowing up the That's the Oklahoma bombing and I was just you know could you AR what do what was it you what statement were you trying to make because you did something up you know be that was it before 911 that was like the main thing uh and you know he had his come up and uh but the uh uh you know at one point you just go maybe it's just meanness it's just anger and meanness uh and I think he was you know Loosely connected with people felt that that to read the Turner Diaries this fiction piece of fiction that so uh inspired McVey and I got about halfway through it's just cannot cannot deal with this it's utter nonsense and uh that building had a a daycare you know just it's just it's unspeakable it's unspeakable it just it is you know all again you know I don't have a a problem trying to understand and extending simp sympathy to Catholics or to you know the Irish or whoever whoever whoever that is where I get off the train which leads me to kind of speculate well is that how Protestants in 1605 felt about Catholics I cannot you know was that there lying in the C yeah that's so complex you know when we really place oursel in it uh they had to change how many times did you have to change in really kind of two generations uh certainly three but you know at one point you can't be a Catholic any you can't be uh Roman uh Affiliated and that's just boom
ande and then and then Sun comes in it gets even stronger you know oh you know those guys were all wrong Queen Mary I really was a Catholic the whole time I mean but I had to say this or else they would have you know hanged me and uh and then five years later oh well you know I just had another one day you were burned for not saying the mass and the next day you are burned for saying the mass yeah so when we get to the 1590s these are your parents or your grandparents the these this is the living memory of uh of of church practices that were followed so you know who knows how people felt when people uh there couple Scholars you know Shakespeare's a Catholic you go what would that be exactly you know now I know there was some hard line you people on both sides but so many John Dunn has a poem about this in the renado there is a moment where one of the lower class characters you know says you know well all be whatever religion you know you when you guys finally decide which is which is the right religion and he basically goes through well in Geneva it's one thing in Paris it's another in London it's another it's like come on guys you know figure this out and you know you I can't imagine that people were unaware of how many different versions of Christianity there were I mean Dunn has a sonnet about this you know is it this one is it that one is it the other one and that this led to shall we say a certain skepticism about the various truth claims I mean when I was writing another book uh my short history of early modern England I was looking at all of the different statements of faith that Henry VII issued over you know the last 10 years or so of of his Reign and I just had this vision of uh somebody walking into the local bookstore going okay so how many do we have today you know how many sacraments are there you know which what's this week's religion and I think that that kind of led to a sort of builtin skepticism you yeah how do you claim that you have the truth when there's one truth in London another in Geneva another in Paris then there is Islam then you've got the Jews and nobody agrees with each other everyone has a different version of this and they're willing to kill you and they are willing to kill you which is why the guy in the renegado says I am the religion of wherever I am yeah yeah which is also in and of itself fascinating because they are in an Islamic country in the renado yeah and while this was never made explicit um you would imagine that people did say when you were in an Islamic country you might want to keep your religion to yourself yeah people take it very seriously and if you open up your mouth you are going to die yep painfully so you know shut up yeah and you might not even be the right kind of Islamic person you know you know just yeah well that used to be the Old Pub rule you know no no religion in politics uh well especially with this because Rel religion and politics are going to get in the way of money and that we need to remember was the primary goal here yeah they wanted cash they wanted trade and well there were narratives and it fits into your uh I hope I didn't miss this when I was going through but it fits into your narrative there there were into your uh thesis uh of a good Sultans a good Solomon and uh you know the uh he's hardly good yeah doing a good thing I I guess it would be a better way to put it uh but there's an admiration I guess is another way um it there's not the their view of the Islamic World starting I guess in uh what would be now uh Turkey um was not did not mirror the The View current view let's say from west to uh near East uh well yeah I'm not going to they were quite impressed I think with the powers oh yeah I mean they would have to be especially because the Islamic empire the Ottoman Empire was not a pushover and they had reached as far as Austria I think yeah they certainly yeah and I know MOA was very concerned about that with good reason with good reason yeah well that's why he wanted to remain Consolidated said if Christian doesn't stay together we're toast these guys come in and take us over not wrong he's not wrong no you know the Islamic empire the Ottoman Empire had every intention of expanding as far as it could possibly go yeah these were not Peaceable people they wanted as much Empire as they could possibly get I just remember looking the first time at the map you know you go through various times of the Ottoman Empire I'm going this thing is huge I thought it was sort of smallish and then it sort of dissipates into it's enormous it goes all the way down into Africa and these guys Consolidated power they had power uh and some I guess one reason they didn't take over Europe is that they were busy taking over Africa and all of this other territory which might have been more valuable to them at that time um well Elizabeth was didn't happen but it's really fascinating that Elizabeth actually wanted to have a um a a military alliance with the Ottomans against Spain so the enemy of my enemy is my yeah it didn't quite work yeah but Elizabeth also very much wanted to open up trade relations with the Ottomans and we now I mean there is actually diplomatic correspondence going back and forth between them and they are very willing to say oh we're going to Grant free reign to those of your religion yeah in the interest of trade yeah that's not something you're expecting to see you know that there's no problem with the idea of taking taking back Granada particularly in the South you know where they had all already been still were you know and may have viewed uh internationally is taken Land by the great you know Conquest with the when the castilians went down and pushed everybody out but yeah that I I I can see that you know they I mean certainly selem is I mean that play registers more fear and respect these are people you have to take very very seriously yeah yeah this is not a com I mean wonderful and scary as as H tamberline might have been he is long since dead but selus you're talking about your grandfather Yeah yeah not that ago so be scared be very scared yeah it's just amazing uh uh we run I'm I've we've gone a while Peter I've taken too much of your time and so I'm going to kind of wrap things up here but if you would stay for a moment after we finish one big point I wanted to make is it uh Shakespeare leads to all this you do something that reminds me of the good old days in in in some ways because I don't think there ever were the good old days but I did like the flexibility of Scholars that we studied with to to move through Shakespeare Beyond uh before tying it all together if not in a you know the old Harvard great book series I understand the criticisms there but but the the the way that Shakespeare prompts so much other thought and how so much other thought brings us back into Shakespeare and this weaving together of of things and and when I was talking with stepen greenblat he goes like I can't help but just see the world through the lens of Shakespeare you know when I see a a Russian uh all well a Russian a powerful Russian man on a table that just you know it's just you can just see it through sh but I think it goes the other way too uh and that's why I was interested in the lens turning to lens and and that's what I think people in scholarship now are doing a lot of in and good work in um gender and racial studies you know uh and and have my greatest support as long as they're not trying to erase me because or cancel you or cancel me uh but you know that at point taken there's been an eraser of Blackness in historical Shakespeare criticism and some fine Scholars have brought this back up into uh and there's some wonderful work going on uh now uh and I just want it all to keep keep happening let's let's keep the I hope so I mean as we said at the beginning I think there is a pendulum I think that when people talk in terms of systemic racism inadvertently they are leaving out the contrary dissenting voices yeah and I'm not going to say that dissenting voices are the only voices you know I'm you know I'm very aware that there was racism and sexism and islamophobia etc etc but there was always dissent there were always cracks in the edifice fissures in the edifice you know there's always some resistance and I think that the pendulum at the moment has gone towards erasing those fissures erasing the dissonance I want to restore the dissonance yeah um yeah again this is because I was in a little bit of a conflict with an editor not that long ago were writing about Shakespeare in Japan and the the editor just automatically took the um uh postcolonial view on Japan and I had to bring in some Scholars and some EXC Shakespeare Scholars to remind the editor that Japan was not colonized Japan actually colonized other countries uh so you know there when Shakespeare comes to Japan is uh it's japanized as as as it enters and this it's enjoyed it's beloved here by the people who are in that uh but you know you could talk about cultural colonization elsewhere and it has happened uh and go Edward S or posted side as much as you want but that doesn't work here there's a different model at work here uh and people just have to think this whole thing through you know before they get busy um uh uh knocking down uh a lot of good work uh and what is every generation going to reinvent the wheel you know we can look back at these things and we can see this Consciousness we can add to it uh we can benefit from it and you know is a I don't know a j a child born to two white parents in uh Enid Oklahoma uh today is that child going to have to carry the burden of um uh what a bunch of people did in 1849 I don't know I you know I don't know where where the cut where the cut off point is you know I think I I I think we got over the conquest or over the Norman Conquest you know at some point you're over the Norman Conquest now it's still fresh and new and you still have you the whole thing the whole list the Litany of these horrible uh racial crimes you know particularly George Floyd and all of this that stood out you know to to remind us it's not over we're we're nowhere close to a post-racial society and um uh yet I just hope I just hope we can keep everything in play and I think it would be a better world because of it and I think you have contributed to this B well thank you very much I much appreciate that and provoking our thoughts and and again Peter thank you so so much for joining us for this little series my pleasure thank you so much again for asking [Music]
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