[See SEGMENTS below] Thomas Dabbs speaks with David McInnis of the University of Melbourne. Along with Roslyn L. Knutson and Matthew Steggle, David is founder and co-editor of 'Lost Plays Database', and is the author of 'Shakespeare and Lost Plays' (Cambridge, 2021).
LINKS:
Lost Plays Database: https://lostplays.folger.edu/Main_Page
Shakespeare VR: https://cmu-lib.github.io/dhlg/project-videos/wittek/
SEGMENTS:
0:00:00 - Intro
0:02:07 - 'Shakespeare and Lost Plays' / 'Lost Plays Database' (LDP)
0:08:00 - LPD and the Folger Shakespeare Library
0:09:15 - History of LPD / Funding / Sustainability
0:11:05 - Future of LPD
0:13:30 - The need for academic credit for digital development
0:17:40 - Bibliographical work contrasted with theoretical work
0:21:05 - Lost plays before Shakespeare and their influence on Shakespeare
0:23:25 - The Curtain Theatre archeological find and its impact
0:24:30 - Speculation about what the Curtain meant for Shakespeare
0:28:00 - Absence of evidence as potential evidence
0:31:14 - Shakespeare and Virtual reality / Stephen Wittek / 3D Modelling
0:35:38 - Timon of Athens / Off Shakespeare and on Shakespeare
0:40:23 - Tamburlaine the Great / Comments on Marlowe
0:46:20 - Lost and literary culture / Lost as a theme
0:50:00 - Responsible conjecture, honest scholarship
0:52:24 - Asserting ourselves as scholars / the advantages of remote access
0:55:20 - The Wild Goose Chase going viral
1:02:18 - David's background, turning points / Dympna Callaghan
1:07:10 - Who may we be influencing as teachers?
1:08:38 - More on David's academic background
1:09:55 - Closing remarks
TOPICS:
#shakespeare
#shakespeareantheatre
#shakespeareanperformance
#shakespearescontemporaries
[See SEGMENTS below] Thomas Dabbs speaks with David McInnis of the University of Melbourne. Along with Roslyn L. Knutson and Matthew Steggle, David is founder and co-editor of 'Lost Plays Database', and is the author of 'Shakespeare and Lost Plays' (Cambridge, 2021).
LINKS:
Lost Plays Database: https://lostplays.folger.edu/Main_Page
Shakespeare VR: https://cmu-lib.github.io/dhlg/project-videos/wittek/
SEGMENTS:
0:00:00 - Intro
0:02:07 - 'Shakespeare and Lost Plays' / 'Lost Plays Database' (LDP)
0:08:00 - LPD and the Folger Shakespeare Library
0:09:15 - History of LPD / Funding / Sustainability
0:11:05 - Future of LPD
0:13:30 - The need for academic credit for digital development
0:17:40 - Bibliographical work contrasted with theoretical work
0:21:05 - Lost plays before Shakespeare and their influence on Shakespeare
0:23:25 - The Curtain Theatre archeological find and its impact
0:24:30 - Speculation about what the Curtain meant for Shakespeare
0:28:00 - Absence of evidence as potential evidence
0:31:14 - Shakespeare and Virtual reality / Stephen Wittek / 3D Modelling
0:35:38 - Timon of Athens / Off Shakespeare and on Shakespeare
0:40:23 - Tamburlaine the Great / Comments on Marlowe
0:46:20 - Lost and literary culture / Lost as a theme
0:50:00 - Responsible conjecture, honest scholarship
0:52:24 - Asserting ourselves as scholars / the advantages of remote access
0:55:20 - The Wild Goose Chase going viral
1:02:18 - David's background, turning points / Dympna Callaghan
1:07:10 - Who may we be influencing as teachers?
1:08:38 - More on David's academic background
1:09:55 - Closing remarks
TOPICS:
#shakespeare
#shakespeareantheatre
#shakespeareanperformance
#shakespearescontemporaries
0:00:05.600,0:00:10.400
This is Speaking of Shakespeare, a series of conversations about things Shakespearean
0:00:10.960,0:00:16.640
with the focus on new digital technologies
and also about developments in Shakespearean
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performance and education across the globe.
I'm Thomas Dabbs, recording this introduction from
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Aoyama Gakuin University in central Tokyo.
The following conversation is with David McInnis
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of the University of Melbourne. We will talk among other things about things lost
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and particularly about lost plays in the early modern period in England. This conversation is
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made possible with the help of institutional support from Aoyama Gakuin University.
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This series is also funded by a generous grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of
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Science, called Kaken, and this organization thankfully includes support for research
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in the humanities. Hello David, good afternoon.
I've known you for years, we've known each other
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by email for years, and we've never met.
I've never actually seen you in person, and this is
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the closest I've come. It's taking a pandemic to bring us together. It's a pandemic to bring us
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together. And and we should have seen each other.
Absolutely. There were certain types and I
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was in the Folger Library with you at the same time and missed you some years ago when you were
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researching there so was I, and we should have but it didn't happen, but it's kind of happening now
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and will happen in the future. I'm sure. Absolutely, I'm looking forward to meeting in real life some
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point soon when travel is possible again and the world comes back to being a little bit
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more normal hopefully. Yeah, I'm hoping that will be very very soon. But we have some exciting
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news for you, you have a book coming out on lost plays. I do. The Cambridge University Press.
0:02:13.520,0:02:20.800
I'm very excited. Yes, and not only do you do really lost plays, you kind of have a bit of a philosophy
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about things lost and recovering things lost. And anyway, tell us a little bit about your book and
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what is... well, the central theme of course is lost plays but what do you say about lost plays?
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Well, Tom, I know you all, we know each other because you signed up to become
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a contributor to the Lost Plays Database that I founded with Roslyn Knutson back in 2009,
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and that I now edit with Matthew Steggle and Misha Teramura, and is now hosted by
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the Folger Shakespeare Library. And that project, and you've given us at least half a dozen entries of
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information about plays that were
once available and performed perhaps
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and have since been lost to modern audiences, we don't have play texts for them anymore.
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And what fascinates me about these texts is how significantly influential these plays would have
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been during Shakespeare's lifetime, because there were things that people Shakespeare
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knew, maybe Shakespeare himself would have seen. So they would have been an easy reference point
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for anyone who's interested in drama, if you want to see a Shakespeare play, you would draw on your
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knowledge of other plays that you had seen as the most popular form of entertainment from the period.
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So, that was an immediate context that helps us make sense of the work of Shakespeare and
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his contemporaries. And it's frustratingly elusively just beyond our grasp but present,
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because most of us have been trained in that 20th century school of close reading
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that levocite formalist analysis which requires a text, so when you don't have a text suddenly
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these things are little bit too difficult to grapple with until quite recently I think.
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I think there have been some important shifts in the way scholarship in this period has been done,
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which now let us make better use of these lost plays and what we know about them. So that database
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that you contribute to is, it is a database, right? There's some new ideas in there of course, some new
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identifications and discoveries, but essentially it's a storehouse of information about the lost
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plays, it's the sum total of what we know. And so the book that I've just put out is my attempt
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to do something with that data, that information.
I think I was encouraged by the wonderful
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responses I've had over the years, people will get excited by the prospect of working on lost plays,
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but I haven't yet seen a lot of that translate into other people's work necessarily. And so what
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I really wanted to do is to show people through this book how it's possible to work with lost
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plays, what it means for everyone ranging from performance scholars and textual scholars to
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theatre historians and everything in between really, why everyone can and should be using lost
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plays in their work. And that's what I've tried to do in this book. Well, I can't wait to read it.
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Now, yes, I'm an enthusiast and I did some entries, these are not easy entries to do because
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you have to collaborate a lot of different sources. And
fortunately Wiggins has its multi-volume work that
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I think is exquisitely well done. And there's no real that I've seen no real problems there, but
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for the fact that know it's hard
copy and you have to go back and forth and
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maybe another volume here and there, and I have little markings whereas the way that
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Lost Plays Database is developing, is getting very good in terms of searchable
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information where you can do, because a lot of this stuff requires cross-referencing
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and collaborating two different particular plays and so forth, so the online resource is
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extremely important to research and being able to see the whole picture. And
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it's just wonderful in that regard. Oh,
thank you for that, Tom. I should say that
0:06:01.600,0:06:05.920
Martin Wiggins incredibly useful catalog of British drama which is nearing completion, now he's only
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got two volumes left to come out, is encyclopedic in terms of knowledge. He has read
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everything and he's looked up everything along with in conjunction with Catherine Richardson is
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also on that project. It's a phenomenal resource, and there is now a digital version of that which
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is not a database, it's like the oxford text online, their platform. So you can search things
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online, but the one of the principal differences between what Martin has accomplished in that
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magnificent catalog and what we try to do in the Lost Plays Database is (A) the database,
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our database is open access. It will never cost anyone anything to use it, but (B) where Martin lists where
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references can be found, he has citations which are quite incredible and fantastically useful,
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we try and transcribe those historical documents or to digitize the original manuscripts or other
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print documents that you provide direct access through our database, so that our users can come
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along to that entry for a lost play and look at the primary evidence itself, and they can see it in
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context because we usually try to link to the bigger document that it came from. So for example,
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if we're dealing with a play from say the 1590s, that we know of primarily through the records of
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the Rose Playhouse manager, Philip Henslowe, we can look at Henslowe's diary and excerpt the relevant
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lines for our entry, but we also hyperlink to the digitized version of the diary so you can
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see the context those lines came from and see what other plays we performed that week or
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or that month. And so it enables a kind of lateral exploration. You really do go down the rabbit hole
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with you know Alice in Wonderland, and you start exploring in non-linear ways I suppose.
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And you are, I hope, empowered as the reader by the provision of that full transcription or
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digitization to then go away and make your own judgments and build your own arguments as well.
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And so I hope it becomes quite productive in that sense.
Yeah, I want to go into that a little bit in
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the way has helped my research, but I don't want to miss the fact that when I first started working
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with you in my smaller contribution to a few little plays, you were pretty much independent and
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then I noticed that you became affiliated with the Folger Shakespeare Library and that now is
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your domain. And that partnership is superb, I think, because I know and you know the members of
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that team Eric Johnson and the members of his team, and they are extraordinarily good people and
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what a wonderful collaboration or collaborative partner you have with the Folger. Oh absolutely,
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we are completely blessed to have that resource to have the support of the Folger team behind
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the database now is not just peace of mind, it's really tremendously reassuring in terms of
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the stability and the longevity of our website, and also just the fact that it's now part
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of a suite of resources there, the Folger resources that collectively the sum exceeds the parts. I mean
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they already have their early modern plays online and their access to digitalizations, so
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with our information on lost plays, they sort of have everything from the period really.
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But we started off at the University of Melbourne, that's my home institution.
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You can see in my background here. And it started off as a very small project in fact
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the prototype for the Lost Plays Database was developed by final year IT students, who are looking for
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what they call an industry project. And so I gave them this academic problem with this challenge
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that we needed a solution for and that's what they came up with, and that prototype served
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us very well for a number of years. But I should confess it was only ever so tacitly hosted by
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my university. It wasn't something we went out of our way to make a big song and dance about it.
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We found some room on a server and we shuffled in there that was fine, but we didn't have any funding.
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It didn't have that sort of IT support. I did manage to secure a very large grant from
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the Australian Research Council which I'm tremendously grateful for a six-figure grant back in 2014,
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and that enabled amongst other things, some of the digitization work so that our users could
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access manuscript images free of charge through the database, but it still didn't really provide
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ongoing IT support. So now that we're affiliated with the Folger and they can host our site,
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we have that security, that stability, and it means that we have every confidence moving forward that
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we're going to be around for a very long time.
Yeah it's become sort of cliche in our business
0:10:21.040,0:10:25.680
in terms of digital development, when you have students and particularly graduate students,
0:10:25.680,0:10:30.800
the problem with graduate students who are often extraordinarily diligent is that they
0:10:30.800,0:10:38.000
graduate, and... That's the habit of doing that, don't they?
They have a habit of doing this in the name. And so
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what you have it the Folger is what you're saying stability and a dedicated staff and
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along with the actual technical support, there's a heck of a lot of moral support that
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comes with that too. And a wonderful international collaborative effort that has this global reach.
0:10:58.320,0:11:05.840
That is wonderful to include for the project. You see this then as kind of continuing
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the lost plays project just keeping on and keeping on. I mean
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we're gonna fail, we're gonna continue to find new stuff. Well that's right, our work is never going to
0:11:15.840,0:11:19.680
be done which sounds like the sort of thing you shouldn't admit for grant applications and so forth
0:11:19.680,0:11:24.160
that people like to fund discrete projects that are achievable within a finite time period.
0:11:24.720,0:11:30.480
But the fact is this is ongoing work. There is tremendous amount of information to locate and
0:11:30.480,0:11:37.360
to transcribe to then put into dialogue with the scholarship that has been written to investigate
0:11:37.360,0:11:43.600
a possible narrative for dramatic sources for which takes time and responsible conjecture I suppose, so
0:11:43.600,0:11:48.080
there's a lot of information to put together and to make judicious judgments about how to assemble
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that information. And then there's a number of plays to do that for, and so working our way
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through what was originally going to be just 1580 or so to 1642 with the closure of the theatres,
0:11:59.520,0:12:04.560
that itself is a huge project, the reason it's a collaborative enterprise is because it exceeds
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my knowledge alone exceeds, Roslyn Knutson's knowledge alone, when the two of us are working together,
0:12:09.200,0:12:12.560
and we have all these wonderful, we've got about three dozen people contribute now to
0:12:12.560,0:12:17.040
varying degrees, some just do one entry and they've had their say others keep coming
0:12:17.040,0:12:22.160
back and do tens of entries and that's wonderful too. So we do rely on the expertise of a number
0:12:22.160,0:12:27.040
of people across the world and on growing that team of collaborators as well. The more we grow
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like that the more I see scope to work backwards, we've started populating some 1570s and 1560s
0:12:32.400,0:12:37.520
entries now as well, and we hope to formalize that soon with some proper tables of contents for those
0:12:37.520,0:12:41.920
currently invisible decades in our database, we've been approached by colleagues
0:12:41.920,0:12:46.400
in Europe actually about doing
Restoration plays as well, so extending the
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historical reach in the other direction too, beyond 1642 right through the end of the century.
0:12:52.080,0:12:55.840
And that's something I'd really like to
know more about and spend a lot more time on,
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but that will take a concerted effort and we'll have to think carefully about how we expand that
0:13:00.720,0:13:04.800
in that regard. I've also had a number of questions over the years about whether we'll consider doing
0:13:04.800,0:13:08.720
continental plays or plays from other
countries in general, which I think has
0:13:08.720,0:13:13.760
fantastic potential but again not my primary research expertise, so I need the right people
0:13:13.760,0:13:18.000
to make sure that we have that quality control there and that we're doing a responsible job of it.
0:13:19.760,0:13:23.760
I contributed to four or five, I
can't remember exactly, I think five
0:13:24.400,0:13:30.640
plays in the database. And I did
it more or less for the love of it,
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because I'm just that nerdy I think, but I'm in the autumn years of my career, I really don't need to
0:13:38.800,0:13:45.120
amass publications or whatnot. But what I want to do is just be king for a day and
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make a declaration that if you contribute to Lost Plays Database or to the Agas Map
0:13:52.400,0:14:02.400
or to any of these ongoing projects that you get credit, for credit is due, and that way I can
0:14:02.400,0:14:08.400
encourage some of my colleagues in Japan, younger people who can do this type of work and do it
0:14:08.400,0:14:16.000
much more meticulously really than I can, who are unflawed and unflappable and
0:14:16.000,0:14:20.960
they just don't stop until every detail is right, which is the type of diligence you want.
0:14:22.160,0:14:27.120
But I think some people might feel like, oh no I have to do something else, I'm going to have to
0:14:27.120,0:14:32.560
get that referee publication and I have to stack up everything and get my portfolio ready for
0:14:32.560,0:14:38.960
whatever review evaluation or whatnot. Do you see a change happening though in mentality about
0:14:39.680,0:14:48.720
credit given to work like digital publication as would happen in on your site? I absolutely do.
0:14:48.720,0:14:54.880
I think that conversation changes around the world, and how our work is recognized institutionally is
0:14:54.880,0:14:59.760
always going to be refined and adjusted. Here in Australia, I've just edited
0:14:59.760,0:15:04.720
Thomas Dekker's Old Fortunatus for the Revels Plays series, which is a wonderful series, but
0:15:05.360,0:15:10.400
literally until the year my edition came out, scholarly editions didn't count as scholarship
0:15:10.400,0:15:15.600
in this country. So that was a labor of love for me, I spent almost 10 years working on that book
0:15:16.240,0:15:22.240
out of the pure joy and love of that play and a desire to see Dekker's work attended to more
0:15:22.240,0:15:26.880
widely. And I just happened to get lucky that essentially the year it came out my university
0:15:26.880,0:15:32.000
in particular started counting it the same way they would count an academic monograph. So these
0:15:32.000,0:15:35.680
things change all the time. In the case of the Lost Plays Database and those individual entries,
0:15:36.720,0:15:42.080
they are all edited by the general editors, so Misha and myself will look through everything
0:15:42.080,0:15:47.360
that is published on the database as Roz used to do before she became editor emeritus of the whole
0:15:47.360,0:15:53.680
thing. So there is quality control built into it in that regard whether an institution wants to
0:15:53.680,0:15:58.160
count that as peer-reviewed or not is another matter and, I can see there's an argument why
0:15:58.160,0:16:02.560
a lot of the work could be considered tertiary rather than secondary if it's an assemblage of
0:16:02.560,0:16:08.080
known information and on a particular title the contributor hasn't advanced new original thinking
0:16:08.080,0:16:12.480
as well, they simply summarize what's out there, that's a tremendous service to scholarship
0:16:12.480,0:16:17.520
but it may not be what their institution counts as peer-reviewed and original insights, right?
0:16:17.520,0:16:22.320
So to that I would just point out that there is a way that this is still going to be productive for you.
0:16:23.840,0:16:28.800
If you are thinking about writing a peer-reviewed article in a journal or a book chapter for
0:16:28.800,0:16:35.600
an academic publication, I still recommend working on these Lost Plays Database entries and using those
0:16:35.600,0:16:41.440
as your working notes if you like. I wrote an essay about Richard Wilson for Helen Ostovich when
0:16:41.440,0:16:45.360
she was doing the Three Lords and Three Ladies of London project, and to
0:16:45.360,0:16:50.000
do that, I wrote all the entries about lost plays for Wilson. And so I have quite a few of
0:16:50.000,0:16:55.360
those Wilson plays now documented and having put all that data up there online. I haven't had that
0:16:55.360,0:17:00.880
at my fingertips and I was able to use that as my research to draft the article. I knew
0:17:00.880,0:17:04.800
all the historical records, I knew everything that had been written about these lost plays, all that
0:17:04.800,0:17:09.440
scholarship that all had to be read and summarized for those entries, and then I had those building
0:17:09.440,0:17:14.400
blocks ready to use to make my own article out of there after. So it's never going to be a waste
0:17:14.400,0:17:18.880
of time as a way of thinking about how you're going to benefit from doing such things, and as
0:17:18.880,0:17:24.080
you were hinting before Tom as well, more and more universities are recognizing the benefit of being
0:17:24.080,0:17:29.440
the kind of good global citizen who contributes to
digital projects especially open access ones, and
0:17:29.440,0:17:34.160
it's a form of public engagement, it's a service to scholarship, there are all sorts of useful
0:17:34.160,0:17:37.760
things that come out of doing this kind of work regardless of whether it ends up being classified
0:17:37.760,0:17:47.760
as be reviewed or not. Now, what you're saying brings up really a long history. I studied
0:17:47.760,0:17:56.160
under a bibliographer of Shakespeare, Trevor Howard Hill. And no one ever questioned his enormous
0:17:56.160,0:18:01.200
contribution. I think he was he was the editor of the British bibliography of bibliographers,
0:18:02.480,0:18:08.800
you know meta level and on computers very very early on. And there's a whole list,
0:18:08.800,0:18:14.480
we all go back to these really bibliophiles, these collectors who put together information,
0:18:14.480,0:18:20.400
there's some interpretation. E. K. Chambers, usually when I go to Chambers, I'm not looking for
0:18:20.400,0:18:26.000
some new theoretical angle, I'm looking for information that he had to collaborate with
0:18:26.000,0:18:32.800
other information, Feuillerat for the Office of the Revels that I've used that a lot in recent
0:18:32.800,0:18:40.160
years. And the point I'm making is I'm using them. Now I could name right off the top of
0:18:40.160,0:18:47.680
my head three dozen people who were huge big deals
in the 80s and 90s in critical theory. And I am not
0:18:47.680,0:18:53.600
opposed to critical thinking and critical theory at all, very open-minded, but they're gone. It's done.
0:18:53.600,0:18:58.960
There's nothing else to do there in a lot of the subfields that they had chosen. And I'm still
0:18:58.960,0:19:06.000
using these basic sources. They're the ones that still are driving this forward. And so it makes
0:19:06.000,0:19:12.880
me wonder whether or not the work that people do in this bibliographical area isn't in some ways
0:19:12.880,0:19:21.920
much more enduring than the latest spin that all of us have on a play or on a particular
0:19:22.480,0:19:28.880
trend in that has not yet been
seen in early modern drama or in Shakespeare.
0:19:30.320,0:19:34.480
A reserve judgment about colleagues working in theory and things like that, and I won't cast
0:19:34.480,0:19:39.520
any nasturtiums on their work I think, as you say, it's incredibly valuable work, sometimes
0:19:39.520,0:19:44.800
things move on. Can I do it?
Yeah, we all do that. But what I
0:19:44.800,0:19:49.600
will say is Bill Ingram wrote a really lovely essay for a book I edited last year, a Loss in
0:19:49.600,0:19:54.160
the Literary Culture of Shakespeare's Time, and Bill was drawing attention to the fact that facts
0:19:54.160,0:20:01.040
by themselves don't really have a value I suppose, they're relatively neutral and what happens
0:20:01.040,0:20:06.480
that makes them valuable is when people bring attention to them and interpret them and make
0:20:06.480,0:20:11.520
use of them. And so it perhaps the work of Chambers and others isn't especially glamorous doing that
0:20:11.520,0:20:16.400
hard slog of archival work and documenting things that on the surface of it amount to nothing
0:20:16.400,0:20:21.840
they seem to be a very obscure reference to something, but those facts are tremendously enabling and
0:20:21.840,0:20:26.320
providing that access to that information that raw data so that other people could then go and
0:20:26.320,0:20:30.080
do their things with it. That's why that kind of work persists over time, because you can keep
0:20:30.080,0:20:34.800
coming back to it and keep finding new meaning there and joining new dots and finding exciting
0:20:34.800,0:20:39.600
discoveries and whole perspectives shift with the addition of just one more piece of information,
0:20:39.600,0:20:43.440
coupled with what was already there. And so I think for me that is in a very nerdy way
0:20:43.440,0:20:47.840
quite exciting work, but I can see how it can be perceived as being dry or tedious to some, right?
0:20:48.960,0:20:54.800
You don't get far in this business without being a nerd. That's right. It's been a great
0:20:54.800,0:21:02.000
joy in my life to be nerdy. But I'll give you one case in point, and one thing that drew me to
0:21:02.000,0:21:07.760
the work that I did on the Lost Play site was that I was looking simultaneously at Midsummer Night's
0:21:07.760,0:21:13.600
Dream and the workmen and Midsummer Night's Dream, and how these workmen seem to sort of
0:21:13.600,0:21:20.880
appear in those records, Feuillerat records. And I needed more of a connection between
0:21:20.880,0:21:25.120
that play and what was going on with artisans around the theater, there's a lot of work has
0:21:25.120,0:21:32.480
been done on that. And there it was, right there with Thomas Painter and with Ovid. And you
0:21:32.480,0:21:39.200
could just cross references and see that there was a generation of playwrights before Shakespeare who
0:21:39.200,0:21:45.600
went straight to Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis or Metamorphoses,
0:21:46.160,0:21:53.440
and then Thomas Painter's Palace of Pleasure. They just those, they just knew, just like with marvel
0:21:53.440,0:21:58.240
comics, you go straight there, you're gonna get a base audience, you know you're going to get
0:21:58.240,0:22:04.560
your base audience. And not only that, you're going to get the aristocratic audience, because you're
0:22:05.280,0:22:09.440
at a level where, oh these are stories
old continental classical stories,
0:22:09.440,0:22:14.720
that's good, and you can run them right through the popular playhouses, that are popping up
0:22:14.720,0:22:20.960
20 years or so before Shakespeare.
And so that's just one example of what
0:22:21.840,0:22:28.560
is revealed by an examination of a database like that.
Absolutely, and there's that elusive
0:22:28.560,0:22:32.960
quest for what was Shakespeare doing in the 1580s. He must have done something theatrical, he must
0:22:32.960,0:22:36.800
have been in London by that stage, we don't really know much about him until 1594 or so.
0:22:37.520,0:22:42.080
And you know for now that is true, we don't have the documentary record of what Shakespeare
0:22:42.080,0:22:46.400
specifically was doing, but we do know an awful lot about what everyone else was doing in the theater
0:22:46.400,0:22:50.240
industry. There's a lot of information out there, a lot of players that survive and a lot of records
0:22:50.240,0:22:54.240
for those that don't that paint a very rich picture of the pre-Shakespeare period. And there's
0:22:54.240,0:22:58.640
that wonderful project over in the UK and London before Shakespeare, that's dealing precisely
0:22:58.640,0:23:03.040
with that period and how much we do know about the pre-Shakespeare London theatrical scene.
0:23:03.680,0:23:07.440
And there's a wealth of information that suddenly helps us make sense of what Shakespeare was doing
0:23:07.440,0:23:12.880
earlier in his career, especially in terms of what his play going public understood the theaters to
0:23:12.880,0:23:19.600
be and what his contemporaries understood their craft to be. So it makes it much richer and
0:23:19.600,0:23:23.920
easier for us then to understand what Shakespeare was doing to situate his achievements within that
0:23:23.920,0:23:29.360
context. Well, I can see this, this also
being collaborated with what's going on
0:23:29.920,0:23:36.160
at MOLA, and the archaeological finds and so forth, particularly with the Curtain theater.
0:23:36.160,0:23:42.560
I had the pleasure of meeting one of
the members of their team a couple of years back.
0:23:42.560,0:23:48.800
And there was a huge debate that
went all the way through lunch because
0:23:48.800,0:23:55.360
that theater was supposed to be
circular. And it doesn't look like it was.
0:23:55.360,0:24:00.880
It looks like it was square. And I'm going, okay so it was square, but that really bothered some poor
0:24:00.880,0:24:06.240
souls who had a good bit of public, you know, a good bit of their career invested in
0:24:06.240,0:24:12.240
the wooden O as it's called. Well, I actually touched on this a little bit in my current book.
0:24:12.240,0:24:16.480
This was one of the moments where... so one of the things I did want to do throughout
0:24:16.480,0:24:22.880
this book was to be quite open and transparent about when we have to do guesswork, because the
0:24:22.880,0:24:28.640
documentary record simply isn't sufficient for us to offer conclusions with any degree of certainty.
0:24:28.640,0:24:34.640
It's patchy at best, right? We have irregular intervals of really rich detailed historical
0:24:34.640,0:24:38.240
information and then periods where there's not really enough to say things with confidence.
0:24:38.800,0:24:43.600
And in terms of Shakespeare's company for whom we don't have an equivalent of Henslowe's diary,
0:24:44.720,0:24:51.440
the second part of the 1590s isn't necessarily that strong, there's a period 1596-98, I'd love to
0:24:51.440,0:24:55.360
have a lot more information about what the company was doing. But that's the period around which
0:24:55.360,0:24:59.440
Shakespeare's company does move to The Curtain, which is the playhouse you're talking about,
0:24:59.440,0:25:04.640
that was always assumed to have been circular and excavations in Shoreditch about six years ago
0:25:04.640,0:25:10.800
now, no more than six years ago now, have suggested that was actually a rectangular
0:25:10.800,0:25:15.840
building instead. And so in that part of my book, because the book is chronological mapping
0:25:15.840,0:25:20.240
Shakespeare's career over time against what's known of the lost plays from the same periods,
0:25:20.880,0:25:25.440
I instead start thinking about what it would have meant for his company to have moved from
0:25:25.440,0:25:30.800
The Theater as it was called the circular building, when that lease expired and everyone knows that
0:25:30.800,0:25:35.920
famous slightly apocryphal story about the least expiring on The Theater and Shakespeare's company
0:25:35.920,0:25:40.240
eventually dismantling that building and taking it across the Thames and rebuilding it as
0:25:40.240,0:25:44.800
The Globe, in some versions it happens in the middle of winter when the Thames is frozen
0:25:44.800,0:25:49.360
over they literally carried over in one night and it's all exaggerated, but there's a kind of truth
0:25:49.360,0:25:53.680
to the story in terms of them transporting the wood. But in the interim they move next door to
0:25:53.680,0:25:57.120
The Curtain. And I'm quite interested in what happened at that point, because traditionally
0:25:57.120,0:26:01.440
that's been seen as a low point in the company's career, they were forced by necessity having been
0:26:01.440,0:26:07.120
evicted from their previous location to make do at The Curtain, which had always been assumed
0:26:07.120,0:26:12.320
to be an inferior make-do venue, right? But with this information that we now have with Muller's
0:26:12.320,0:26:18.320
suggestion that The Curtain's dimensions were significantly larger as well as rectangular,
0:26:18.320,0:26:22.880
that offers us pause to reconsider what happened at that moment, and I suggest that it may have been
0:26:22.880,0:26:28.960
an unthought for start of something bigger for the company. We like to celebrate when they finally
0:26:28.960,0:26:33.200
arrive at The Globe, that was the announcement of we've made it, we've got this purpose-built venue,
0:26:33.200,0:26:38.640
this is ours, we can be proud of it, but The Curtain offered certain possibilities they hadn't had
0:26:38.640,0:26:44.880
previously including much grander scale for fights, think of all the fight scenes in Romeo and Juliet
0:26:45.680,0:26:51.040
for processions and marches and hunting scenes, think about Titus Andronicus, which was reprinted
0:26:51.040,0:26:55.120
shortly after the move to The Curtain and was likely therefore to still have been in repertory
0:26:55.120,0:27:00.400
at that point in time. So it seems to me that just like ballet companies when they transfer from one
0:27:00.400,0:27:05.440
stage to a significantly larger stage have to re-rehearse all their choreography. And think
0:27:05.440,0:27:10.240
about the expanded space they're going to occupy, or else use shutters and different scenery to try
0:27:10.240,0:27:13.840
and make the bigger space small enough so they can retain their old steps, I don't think they
0:27:13.840,0:27:16.960
would have done that for Shakespeare's company. I think Shakespeare's company would have been more
0:27:16.960,0:27:23.200
likely to have had to rethink how they made use of space on a significantly larger Curtain stage.
0:27:23.200,0:27:28.640
And so it's quite interesting to think not of lost plays at that point but lost performances and lost
0:27:28.640,0:27:35.200
choreography and lost movements of bodies in space, and how the plays that we have today
0:27:35.200,0:27:39.360
may have been performed on two very different scaled venues and what difference that would have
0:27:39.360,0:27:43.840
made to performance as well. Those two plays in particular Romeo and Juliet, and Titus, the one that talked
0:27:43.840,0:27:47.840
a little bit about but the principle extends to quite a few others from that period also.
0:27:48.880,0:27:52.480
Well, I know that you like me
occasionally I'm asked to review
0:27:53.280,0:27:59.120
a paper for publication or
whatnot, and I always do the...
0:28:00.320,0:28:08.080
I don't know if I can use the term, it's a sandwich with something really really bad in
0:28:08.080,0:28:13.760
the bread, okay let's just use our imagination, but you start out very positively say okay here's
0:28:13.760,0:28:18.800
where it could get better, and then you end with an upbeat note, because all of us have gone through
0:28:18.800,0:28:25.440
this, all of us have submitted something to a journal or an idea proposal and
0:28:25.440,0:28:31.360
had it come back. You don't succeed in this business if you don't get rejected, right?
0:28:31.360,0:28:40.720
And it's amazed me how vitriolic some people can be in their rejections like, my goodness
0:28:40.720,0:28:47.520
okay what else you want my children
to enjoy some kind of misfortune, what does
0:28:47.520,0:28:54.720
that have to do, but I've heard more than once that you can't use not non-evidence as use of evidence.
0:28:55.360,0:29:01.680
And in one case it was very fair, I was stretching a bit, but in another case, yeah you can't,
0:29:01.680,0:29:06.160
if you're looking for dinosaur bones and you have one hectare there and you have all the equipment,
0:29:06.160,0:29:11.600
you have now and you find no dinosaur bones over 20 years of searching, you might assume that, well,
0:29:11.600,0:29:16.000
there weren't many dinosaurs here. They didn't pass through here, at least they didn't die
0:29:16.000,0:29:22.320
here. So, there are cases where what is lacking tells you something. And
0:29:22.320,0:29:27.680
I think you just brought that up too about the performances what we're missing, and
0:29:27.680,0:29:34.800
we're missing an O, so that means something else was done. And I love the cross,
0:29:34.800,0:29:39.840
these are sub disciplines let's say but there there are people who are solely devoted to
0:29:41.040,0:29:46.800
acting in theater and performance and those who are solely and very dedicated to theater history,
0:29:46.800,0:29:53.440
and then more people like us who are more textual, bibliographical rather
0:29:53.440,0:30:00.560
we're not very in lost plays, we're not being very textual but bibliographical. But
0:30:00.560,0:30:07.520
the people who like us who learn early on what you can learn from in my case just going through
0:30:07.520,0:30:13.120
a card catalog, before you even get to the book or the old MLA bibliography that was published
0:30:13.120,0:30:20.640
every year that we sort of waited on to see what was coming out, but there are things
0:30:21.280,0:30:28.480
when they are. Well, I did a book on Marlow and basically what I saw was no Marlow for 150 years.
0:30:28.480,0:30:34.720
And that was the beginning of why wasn't there Marlowe and why suddenly was there Marlow. So, like
0:30:34.720,0:30:41.840
you say, a lot of ideas come out of just looking through bibliographies and yes it is a bit nerdy.
0:30:41.840,0:30:48.160
Now, you have something here on virtual and that kind of caught my attention.
0:30:49.200,0:30:55.840
Well, you have quite a lot, this is going on here, I don't know. I told this to Brett Greatly
0:30:55.840,0:31:01.120
Hirsch last week when I talked with him, I thought that I was gonna have to wait till
0:31:01.120,0:31:05.840
the end of the pandemic get a handheld camera and chase him down the street, because I can't see
0:31:06.640,0:31:14.560
when you guys stop working. But there is... you did something with, let's see if I can find it
0:31:14.560,0:31:20.720
here very quickly... virtual reality, that's it. Now, that's forthcoming and that's an addition,
0:31:21.600,0:31:28.080
you're bringing out in 2021. What's going on with virtual reality? First I will just
0:31:28.080,0:31:32.160
say it's quite an honor to be compared to Brett in terms of his productivity. We're very old friends
0:31:32.160,0:31:36.000
and I always keep an eye on how productive he's being and I'm always, he's one step ahead of me
0:31:36.000,0:31:40.480
like always thinking about what he's doing next. So, hi Brett, if you're watching.
0:31:41.280,0:31:45.600
Shakespearean virtual reality is a project that we work on with Steven Wittek from
0:31:45.600,0:31:51.600
Carnegie Mellon University. It's his brainchild really, Stephen has a large fellowship-funded
0:31:51.600,0:31:57.600
project on virtual reality that enabled him to go to the Blackfriars recreated theatre in Stanton
0:31:57.600,0:32:04.080
Virginia, where the American Shakespeare Center is, and to film a few scenes in that theatrical space
0:32:04.080,0:32:09.280
using the 360 cameras that I think Google lent them actually. So they're quite state-of-the-art
0:32:09.280,0:32:15.360
expensive machineries that you've been using. And I knew he was interested in that. I have experiment,
0:32:15.360,0:32:20.240
I've dabbled a little bit for pedagogical purposes, I'm not a director or an actor or anything like
0:32:20.240,0:32:25.920
that, but I have friends who are colleagues who are even, we filmed the final scene of Taming of
0:32:25.920,0:32:31.680
the Shrew in 360 as part of a project to develop a suite of pedagogical resources for when I teach
0:32:31.680,0:32:36.160
Shakespeare here at Melbourne. We filmed the same
scene three different ways using the Melbourne Uni
0:32:36.160,0:32:41.040
Shakespeare company, which are a student group, who that year had decided to perform Taming of the Shrew
0:32:41.040,0:32:47.680
in a very dark domestic abuse focus way I suppose, rather than anything lighthearted or slapstick.
0:32:47.680,0:32:52.240
And so we got them to film three different ways without changing the text, just changing the acting
0:32:52.240,0:32:58.720
styles and the technology to allow my students to understand how production variables contribute to
0:32:58.720,0:33:04.560
the creation of interpretation how they can change it to to create the actors vision, their director's
0:33:04.560,0:33:09.440
vision. And the 360 footage one was really quite interesting I think because coupled with that
0:33:09.440,0:33:14.480
darker take, you felt incredibly claustrophobic being stuck in that room and if you've done any
0:33:15.120,0:33:20.160
VR or 360 experience, you're often
stationary, you often can rotate, you can
0:33:20.160,0:33:24.720
pivot and swivel and look all around you up and down and so forth, choose what to look at or what
0:33:24.720,0:33:29.440
not to look at but you often can't move. So you're not so much a fly in the wall as you right in
0:33:29.440,0:33:33.680
the thick of things. And it's a very uncomfortable scene that final monologue from Katharina,
0:33:33.680,0:33:38.240
where we think she'd been completely broken down and become submissive to her husband Petruchio,
0:33:38.240,0:33:44.320
he's been tamed as birth the title. So having that shot in 360 is quite profoundly discomforting.
0:33:48.320,0:34:00.640
So, vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, and place your hands below your husband's foot, in token of
0:34:00.640,0:34:08.240
which duty, if he please.
So Stephen knew I'd done that, and so the two of us led a seminar at SAA on
0:34:08.240,0:34:12.880
Shakespearean virtual reality, and we now have a contract with Cambridge for their elements
0:34:12.880,0:34:19.040
series on Shakespearean pedagogy. We put together a series of small papers, so micro chapters about
0:34:19.040,0:34:25.520
using 360 and virtual reality technology in the classroom essentially. And thinking about what
0:34:25.520,0:34:29.600
Shakespeare can do for virtual reality as well as what virtual reality can do for Shakespeare.
0:34:30.160,0:34:34.400
So, I give Stephen full credit for
dragging me into this, I'm very excited
0:34:34.400,0:34:38.080
to be his passenger and his co-driver on this. It's very much his project in the first
0:34:38.080,0:34:41.920
instance and I've learned a great deal from being immersed quite literally in that world.
0:34:42.800,0:34:45.760
It's really exciting to see how people
are experimenting with technology.
0:34:46.960,0:34:54.160
Yes, it is. I saw his presentation in 2019 at the Digitizing the Stage Conference. It was
0:34:54.800,0:35:02.640
hosted by the Folger and the Bodleian. Some of our friends there and got to see a smidgen of
0:35:02.640,0:35:08.400
what was going on, just very very interesting of course, the resources the Carnegie Mellon, they
0:35:08.400,0:35:15.680
are built historically to do digital humanities really, because they for a long long time
0:35:15.680,0:35:20.960
have had much more of a collaborative environment between technology and
0:35:20.960,0:35:27.200
humanistic study, that now other places of course, many very famously have
0:35:27.200,0:35:34.560
acquired over the past couple of decades. And so, I'm going to move along a little here, now
0:35:34.560,0:35:40.960
you've done some more lost plays and Timon of Athens. I interviewed Ben Crystal, the actor Ben,
0:35:40.960,0:35:47.680
I don't know if you met him, but he did a Timon of Athens recently. We talked about how actors have to
0:35:48.400,0:35:55.920
survive, have to eat, pay their rent,
during a pandemic, back last year. And
0:35:55.920,0:36:02.880
I don't know if the answer is good, but they're experimenting with ways to do theater and
0:36:02.880,0:36:09.040
do their work, the work that they do,
which really is built for face-to-face,
0:36:09.040,0:36:16.800
stage acting environments. So, there's a group there what the the Show Must Go Online.
0:36:16.800,0:36:23.600
It's a website, and he was working with. But you did Timon, you were really attracted to...
0:36:24.240,0:36:30.640
you don't go for Hamlet. You go for things that are a little bit more
0:36:30.640,0:36:36.720
on the fringe, you know. And I did too in my career, so what do you think...
0:36:37.440,0:36:41.520
the big joke here is that I've never been a Shakespearean person, I've always been more
0:36:41.520,0:36:45.840
of an early modernist, I've been attracted to all of Shakespeare's contemporaries except Shakespeare
0:36:45.840,0:36:50.560
and yet Shakespeare's the name that always crops up, right? So when you teach it's Shakespeare,
0:36:50.560,0:36:54.800
you'd have to teach first and foremost when you explain someone outside the industry what you do,
0:36:54.800,0:37:00.560
you don't say early modernist, you say Shakespeare. And so, my friends like to teach me, I'd
0:37:00.560,0:37:04.480
like to tease me because now I've got this book out on Shakespeare and lost plays, and the next
0:37:04.480,0:37:08.480
book I'll be doing will be the scholarly edition of Timon of Athens, which I haven't actually started
0:37:08.480,0:37:13.040
yet, that's the work in progress, it's about to commence when I'm on sabbatical next semester,
0:37:13.040,0:37:17.840
and I also have plans for another monograph on Shakespeare at present too. So I find myself
0:37:17.840,0:37:21.440
in a ridiculous situation of moving from all of Shakespeare's contemporary to starting doing three
0:37:21.440,0:37:26.960
books in a row on Shakespeare after having sworn I'd never do such a thing, but Timon of Athens is just
0:37:26.960,0:37:32.320
an interesting play, like I think it's a
play that has never been much loved, but I think
0:37:32.880,0:37:37.840
Jan Kott had this argument about Midsummer Night's Dream which everyone knows in Shakespeare,
0:37:37.840,0:37:42.480
Our Contemporary, and it's quite an
out there, reading the psychological reading
0:37:42.480,0:37:46.960
and about the sexuality in the Midsummer Night's Dream, but
the interesting thing he says about it that stuck
0:37:46.960,0:37:51.920
with me always was that Shakespeare was trying to do something in Midsummer Night's Dream that was
0:37:51.920,0:37:58.800
only imperfectly realized and didn't become readily or widely understood and accessible
0:37:58.800,0:38:04.160
until centuries later when we passed through the lend of the surrealists and other avant-garde
0:38:04.160,0:38:09.280
artistic movements that enabled us to see the world differently, and therefore understand what
0:38:09.280,0:38:14.080
Shakespeare was driving at in Midsummer Night's Dream differently. And I think Timon is like that
0:38:14.080,0:38:19.600
too, I think the time is right for Timon now. It's a play that hasn't made much sense,
0:38:20.240,0:38:25.760
but I think the pandemic in particular has changed the way people think about the world,
0:38:25.760,0:38:34.160
about social relationships, about isolation, about what it means to be part of a community or society,
0:38:34.160,0:38:41.040
about a society that is structured on transactions that commodifies people and relationships rather
0:38:41.040,0:38:45.520
than thinking about the people behind those relationships and the human interaction side
0:38:45.520,0:38:52.000
of things. It's a play that gestures
repeatedly towards plague and sickness,
0:38:52.000,0:38:59.120
it uses them as metaphors but in a very disturbing sense of moral contagion and psychological
0:38:59.120,0:39:05.520
abuse almost, in ways that resonate with us I find since the pandemic has sit.
0:39:05.520,0:39:09.680
In a way that I just don't think Timon had that purchase on our imaginations previously and
0:39:10.400,0:39:13.840
I'm not saying this in a self-promoting wake that I said I haven't even started work on this edition
0:39:13.840,0:39:17.520
yet but I really do predict this will become one of the most important Shakespeare plays in
0:39:17.520,0:39:23.120
the coming decade. I think its significance is only now going to become fully apparent to people,
0:39:23.120,0:39:28.960
because our collective mindsets have been indelibly adjusted by the pandemic.
0:39:29.760,0:39:33.360
This covert outbreak has fundamentally shifted the way we think about the world
0:39:33.360,0:39:38.320
and our interactions with people and I think this play is well poised to speak to that new
0:39:38.320,0:39:43.040
modern condition in a way that perhaps it's always been an outlier for the past four centuries and
0:39:43.040,0:39:48.160
hasn't been much loved. Yeah, and you're talking about some very serious stuff and I think I caught
0:39:48.160,0:39:53.440
myself smiling on camera here because I was thinking I'm going to write you a little
0:39:53.440,0:39:58.640
email and say okay here's your next article, and I already have the title, Time for Timon. Thank you.
0:40:00.000,0:40:04.480
And all you have to do is just say what you just said there and add in whatever
0:40:04.480,0:40:10.160
supporting evidence, and you got it. It's there, it's time. Excellent, that's a freebie, thank you.
0:40:10.160,0:40:15.280
I'll be sure to acknowledge you.
This is how articles are born and
0:40:15.280,0:40:23.200
how faults are born. I'm gonna move down here to one of my pet things, Tamburlaine.
0:40:23.200,0:40:29.040
You've done a critical reader Tamburlaine. I would say if I had to choose one play that kind of
0:40:29.040,0:40:34.880
converted me to renaissance, at that
time it was called renaissance tragedy but
0:40:35.680,0:40:42.480
you read okay, Shakespeare, yes okay, but you read Tamburlaine, and you know who
0:40:42.480,0:40:51.360
is, what is this, who is this guy? And you think it's impossible,
0:40:51.360,0:40:57.520
it's just impossible that somebody could write something like this. And then you get into it and
0:40:57.520,0:41:05.440
you go this is just, it's just stunning, it is a just I am whoever... now, I talked with Brett
0:41:05.440,0:41:12.080
about this, there has always been a little bit of concern about Marlowe's authorship.
0:41:12.080,0:41:16.240
And I told Brett that I would like it would be fine for me to go to my death thinking that Marlowe
0:41:16.240,0:41:24.240
wrote the play, just to have some some body to it, to some body to attach to that level of genius.
0:41:24.240,0:41:31.520
But there is a problem there, and
you're, you know here we are,
0:41:31.520,0:41:36.320
I'm from the American south and we're of different ages and different, but here
0:41:36.320,0:41:44.080
we are with Tamburlaine. It's just
a stunning play, and then not the most pc
0:41:45.360,0:41:50.720
plays out. But none of Marlowe is. Marlowe is, you pretty much everybody just gets it.
0:41:50.720,0:41:58.000
Marlowe is profoundly shocking but also magnificent and inspiring in a very visceral way
0:41:58.000,0:42:04.240
that Shakespeare often isn't. Shakespeare is appreciated by many, Marlowe sort of shocks you out of
0:42:04.240,0:42:09.840
any apathy you may have and makes you sit up and to pay attention I think. There is something
0:42:09.840,0:42:14.160
startlingly different about Marlowe's kind of writing, I mean Michael Stapleton has that wonderful book
0:42:14.160,0:42:19.760
about Marlowe and Ovid, and thinking about the way most poets from this period, model their poetic
0:42:19.760,0:42:26.400
career on Virgil, but Marlowe turns to Ovid instead. And there is something categorically different
0:42:26.400,0:42:32.000
I think about Marlowe's work. It is exciting, it's raw, it's passionate, it's emotional, it's violence,
0:42:32.640,0:42:38.720
it's sadistic at times. But it is original in our sense of the word original, like I think for most
0:42:38.720,0:42:43.120
of Shakespeare's peers originality meant to return to origins and it was the renaissance
0:42:43.120,0:42:47.440
and rebirth in the classic, and Shakespeare was imitating and refining and tweaking and
0:42:48.560,0:42:53.680
the way I like to think of it as Shakespeare often had the last word on something. He would
0:42:53.680,0:42:56.880
take something that was already out there that people have been playing with a story that was
0:42:56.880,0:43:01.920
well known, and he would refine that, and he was just superb at coming up with like a definitive
0:43:01.920,0:43:06.320
version of that, that was masterful. Marlowe I think has the first word more often, I think he's
0:43:06.320,0:43:10.960
much more exciting in that regard, he comes up with
these sensational ideas and concepts for plays and
0:43:10.960,0:43:16.400
stories of plays, and the sound of his writing, that Marlowe's mighty line as Ben Jonson
0:43:16.400,0:43:22.160
called it is just astonishing to listen to. It bowls me over every time, and when I teach Marlowe,
0:43:22.160,0:43:26.240
and I teach about three or four of his plays to my fourth year students, my honors students,
0:43:26.240,0:43:29.600
I always make sure we've read some of that out loud in class, because there's something about
0:43:29.600,0:43:35.280
speaking the Marlovian verse that it's just wow.
Well, behind me I fortunately have that
0:43:36.000,0:43:42.960
magnificent recording they made
of Ian McKellen's Edward II. And
0:43:43.840,0:43:51.920
It was granted a graduate class
of maybe four students and we did Edward II.
0:43:51.920,0:43:57.520
And now these are second language people and we're in the early modern period, so usually I put on
0:43:57.520,0:44:03.920
the subtitles. And at one point one student said we don't need these. This is understandable, and
0:44:03.920,0:44:09.360
it's amazing, have the clarity, and it's all in pentameter. I am contaminatory it is not
0:44:09.920,0:44:16.000
that but the clarity of those speeches in Edward II. And you have it in
0:44:16.000,0:44:22.800
Tamburlaine. There's no doubt what's going on. There's certain sorts
0:44:22.800,0:44:27.600
of conceits in there you may have to pull out and read and kind of figure out where he's going,
0:44:28.160,0:44:33.120
but Shakespeare can get a little bit I think the word would be naughty and meaning
0:44:33.120,0:44:38.960
to take a little while to get through it, whereas Marlowe is just very direct, right there in your face.
0:44:39.840,0:44:43.760
I don't know if you watch the Ben Elton series, Upstart Crow with David Mitchell as Shakespeare,
0:44:43.760,0:44:47.840
but they're frequently making jokes about the Shakespeare character just being so obsessed with
0:44:47.840,0:44:52.560
his own cleverness and coming up with these very naughty passages and dense illusions and they're
0:44:52.560,0:44:56.560
very very witty but no one else understands them, they all think they're tedious and dull and boring.
0:44:58.480,0:45:04.400
Well, it can get that way. So we're
supposed to reimagine. You've been talking
0:45:04.400,0:45:08.960
about reimagining things and going
through the example I've used in other
0:45:08.960,0:45:14.000
conversations I've had is the
ending, the kind of famous ending of
0:45:14.000,0:45:18.160
Romeo and Juliet, there's nothing that's not famous about the play but the ending
0:45:18.160,0:45:24.640
is as written I always thought was just stupid, the guy gets locked up because there's
0:45:24.640,0:45:28.160
a plague out there and that's why the letter doesn't get to Romeo and that's why everything
0:45:28.160,0:45:32.880
ultimately ends badly. And I thought that that was stupid until the past year.
0:45:32.880,0:45:37.680
I had to live through a plague where I had to see the reality of how you could get locked up.
0:45:38.960,0:45:44.240
And how that might keep a letter coming, well, for instance my tax statement to the
0:45:44.240,0:45:51.200
United States of America. I couldn't send, and they don't understand. So I managed
0:45:51.200,0:45:57.680
to find a private carrier and pay about 70 American dollars just to send in,
0:45:59.040,0:46:05.120
just to send in a report that I don't owe the Americans any money. If only
0:46:05.120,0:46:12.320
we had electronic communication that they would accept. Oh, that's when we degenerate into some good.
0:46:12.320,0:46:20.480
We'll say that for after. Cursing, what my mother used to call tax language with my father.
0:46:20.480,0:46:29.600
So, I love hear the idea that
you draw back it seems with Roslyn and Matthew,
0:46:30.160,0:46:37.520
and edit a series that just talks about loss. Loss and the literary culture of Shakespeare's time,
0:46:38.960,0:46:47.200
because this does lost play signals loss. And I would like you to maybe for our viewers talk about
0:46:47.200,0:46:54.000
this idea of loss in this period.
So I'm quite fascinated by the idea of loss, and I think I first
0:46:54.000,0:46:59.840
started getting to lost plays specifically as an undergraduate, I remember seeing
0:46:59.840,0:47:04.320
the Norton edition, is it? No, the Oxford edition, one of those complete works, well, Norton based
0:47:04.320,0:47:09.280
on Oxford anyway, where they had entries for Cardinio and Loves Labour's Won amongst all the
0:47:09.280,0:47:13.200
full Shakespeare texts that were there. And there was only a page or two where they acknowledged
0:47:13.200,0:47:17.920
that those plays had once existed but that was fascinating to have included that allusion to lost
0:47:17.920,0:47:24.320
plays in a complete works edition. And so I have had a long-standing interest in loss in that sense.
0:47:24.320,0:47:28.640
But of course when we work with loss in early modern theatre especially from the perspective
0:47:28.640,0:47:34.000
that I adopt the repertory studies perspective that Roslyn Knutson really pioneered of focusing
0:47:34.000,0:47:40.000
on the play as the basic commodity that a company owned and using that as the basis for commercial
0:47:40.000,0:47:45.600
competition, rather than fetishizing the author or anything else as an organizing principle,
0:47:45.600,0:47:50.080
so when we take that repertory studies approach and we think about playing companies and commerce
0:47:50.800,0:47:57.040
we have an inbuilt safety net for understanding loss, because we don't necessarily need a play text
0:47:57.040,0:48:02.240
in order to understand why a company may have acquired a play on a specific topic or in
0:48:02.240,0:48:08.080
a specific form or genre at the time that they did. It makes sense in relation to other company's
0:48:08.080,0:48:12.000
offerings or the successful offerings of their own company in the first place. So you can start
0:48:12.000,0:48:17.040
doing interesting things because of the logic of how companies acquired plays when they did
0:48:17.040,0:48:21.120
in response to what others were doing, but of course not everything has that sort of safety
0:48:21.120,0:48:25.120
net, and I look at our friends who work in the classics, people who work on Sappho, which is
0:48:25.120,0:48:30.720
a couple of lines and a couple of words in a line even sometimes, and I have no idea how they
0:48:30.720,0:48:35.280
work with that level of loss, given that each of these classical writers was writing in very
0:48:35.280,0:48:39.760
different contexts and the classical theater even was nothing like the repertory theatre of London,
0:48:39.760,0:48:45.600
so they don't have that to fall back on this logical underpinning of commercial offerings, so
0:48:45.600,0:48:51.200
they have a very different experience of loss. So after the 2014 book that Matthew Steggle and I added
0:48:51.200,0:48:55.920
specifically on lost plays in Shakespeare's England. We were thinking more about loss in
0:48:55.920,0:49:01.680
a broader sense, a more capacious sense, other forms of loss. Things beyond play text specifically,
0:49:01.680,0:49:06.240
thinking about performance of plays, thinking about things beyond London, beyond England, thinking about
0:49:06.240,0:49:13.040
things that weren't plays, some cases lost people even, lost concepts altogether. And so we really
0:49:13.040,0:49:19.440
wanted to broaden that idea of loss and think more broadly about acknowledging very openly
0:49:19.440,0:49:25.520
just how much of the core information that should be our bread and butter that we deal
0:49:25.520,0:49:32.000
with on a daily basis as early modernist, actually suffers from archival loss. So the bigger project
0:49:32.000,0:49:36.960
here I think is to stop dancing around all these gaps in our knowledge and pretending they're
0:49:36.960,0:49:42.880
not there and building confident sounding narratives on what's really quite a fragile
0:49:42.880,0:49:48.880
foundation. And instead we hoped through that book in the way that showcased a variety of loss,
0:49:48.880,0:49:53.280
that we could be a bit more open about how we have to work with these gaps in our knowledge
0:49:53.920,0:50:00.240
and the limits of what can be said responsibly and also offer some models for ways to conjecture
0:50:00.240,0:50:04.320
responsibly I suppose, so that people get a sense of, well, it's not the end of the world.
0:50:04.880,0:50:09.440
If we acknowledge the elephant in the room that we're missing all this data all this information,
0:50:09.440,0:50:14.800
that doesn't mean the end of our field in fact, it's remarkably generative because it allows
0:50:14.800,0:50:20.640
us to return to what we thought we knew with fresh eyes. It's when graduate
0:50:20.640,0:50:24.800
students approach me asking me what they should write their thesis on or asking for suggestions,
0:50:24.800,0:50:28.880
one of the pieces of advice I usually give them is to start off with something that you have always
0:50:28.880,0:50:34.800
taken for granted as being self-evidently true and ask why and just return to it and think,
0:50:34.800,0:50:38.320
should I always have accepted this as the truth, why have I always thought this
0:50:38.320,0:50:43.040
is the truth, and let's just go back to exploring those premises that have led to that conclusion
0:50:43.040,0:50:47.040
and see whether they actually hold up, and maybe they do, but often they don't or often
0:50:47.040,0:50:51.120
there's new ways to approach things and to sort of get to know the period better.
0:50:51.680,0:50:56.880
And so this broader project on loss was along those lines really it was trying to think about
0:50:56.880,0:51:02.240
new ways to practice scholarship, so that we as scholars retain authority, because we do
0:51:02.240,0:51:06.720
have the expertise, but doesn't cost us anything to acknowledge when we don't know something or
0:51:06.720,0:51:10.800
when something is unknowable because that data that documentary evidence simply isn't there.
0:51:11.520,0:51:15.920
And I think it's ultimately we do a
disservice to future generations of scholars,
0:51:15.920,0:51:21.360
if we are lied over those gaps and pretend they're not there and just assert something, and then they
0:51:21.360,0:51:25.360
have to all this legwork to undo those assumptions and return to the primary evidence themselves to
0:51:25.360,0:51:29.600
work out, why did he say that, why did he write that he had no reason to say that? That's misleading.
0:51:30.320,0:51:34.080
Let's just clear all that debris and start again and be very open about what we do and don't know.
0:51:34.720,0:51:39.760
And then let people come to it with their own conclusions, their own arguments. Yeah, that's
0:51:39.760,0:51:44.320
interesting that coincides with the review that I just wrote was someone who was pointing out that
0:51:44.320,0:51:52.240
Frederick Boaz back in the day boy as a sort of rescued Kyd, Thomas Kyd from obscurity even
0:51:52.240,0:51:57.840
though he sort of wrote Marlowe's tales through the revival period in the 19th century that
0:51:57.840,0:52:06.320
Boas kind of felt Kyd, he was just in
his edition and then later on scholars they
0:52:06.320,0:52:13.440
basically just reamed him for his inaccuracies and so forth, but the proposal was arguing that
0:52:13.440,0:52:21.200
the basis for Kyd's importance
never was challenged. It was just mistakes that
0:52:21.200,0:52:27.360
Boas made here and there. But anyway, what it comes up to is that after World War II in my reading,
0:52:27.360,0:52:31.760
that's not what this writer said but it looks to me and I remember these guys. They were very
0:52:31.760,0:52:38.160
old when I came along. But they were strident. Post-World War II America, basically
0:52:38.160,0:52:44.160
we're more scientific, we're more empirical, we have better tools and these guys in the past,
0:52:44.720,0:52:49.760
look at these mistakes and they kind of tore at them and says not their time, is our time.
0:52:50.320,0:52:56.560
Well, in my generation perhaps in yours, I think that we have become maybe a little too obsequious
0:52:56.560,0:53:03.840
in our view of our four bears, right? The greats ahead of us, and
0:53:03.840,0:53:09.680
there was too much of that progressivist mentality and post-war criticism, and there may
0:53:09.680,0:53:15.440
be a little too little now where we might want to step forward and talk about, listen, this is
0:53:15.440,0:53:22.000
our time, let's see what we can do to push this forward, which I think is ancillary at least
0:53:22.000,0:53:28.000
to what you are talking about. And also I love the idea of looking at what's not there. That's
0:53:28.880,0:53:34.080
so revealing. I think we're so fortunate at the moment and this brings back to the discussion
0:53:34.080,0:53:40.880
the digital humanities earlier on, that we are in a position now where we can enable widespread access
0:53:40.880,0:53:46.560
to the raw documentary evidence that we're using as the basis for our arguments. Part of the problem
0:53:46.560,0:53:51.600
that people often have, myself included with some of the 19th century giants of the field, is that
0:53:51.600,0:53:56.640
they had very privileged positions in terms of being able to access these primary documents
0:53:56.640,0:54:01.280
in the British Museum and other places, that most scholars could never get to see firsthand.
0:54:02.080,0:54:05.440
And they could compare things that most people couldn't compare because most people didn't get
0:54:05.440,0:54:10.160
access to these sources. And so the Edmond Malone of the world for every wonderful thing they said,
0:54:10.160,0:54:13.520
there were also all the other things that you could never check whether it was accurate or not.
0:54:13.520,0:54:17.280
It's a bit like during Shakespeare's lifetime, there's that proverb that travelers may lie
0:54:17.280,0:54:22.320
with authority and the idea being that no one can travel as far as them to verify the tales
0:54:22.320,0:54:26.560
they tell of men whose heads do grow beneath the shoulders and so forth, right? That's what the 19th
0:54:26.560,0:54:31.360
century scholars were like. If Frederick Gard Fleay said something about Henslowe, you had
0:54:31.360,0:54:34.800
to accept it because when were you ever going to go to Delegate College to see Henslowe's papers
0:54:34.800,0:54:40.720
in person to fact check. Fleay, you couldn't do it. So we now have a quantitatively different
0:54:40.720,0:54:44.640
approach in the sense that we are digitizing material or transcribing materials or making
0:54:44.640,0:54:49.360
things available so that people can actually see our working as well as our conclusions these days.
0:54:49.920,0:54:55.440
And I think now that everyone can fact check that brings about a shift, qualitative shift
0:54:55.440,0:54:59.360
in the way people then have to write about this period and think about the conclusion of their
0:54:59.360,0:55:04.480
drawing, because it's a very different ball game now compared to 150 years ago. Well, we're
0:55:04.480,0:55:10.000
going in a direction and I had to mention this, and it's a little bit controversial now.
0:55:10.720,0:55:17.600
The small little program that I have here, it is what
0:55:17.600,0:55:23.520
something I enjoyed greatly when it happened was your article on the wild goose chase.
0:55:24.320,0:55:29.040
And I... was the madman and the professor of the professor and the madman? I can't remember the
0:55:29.040,0:55:34.480
order in that title that book that I enjoyed so much maybe 20 years ago with the origins of
0:55:34.480,0:55:43.440
the OED and how kind of eccentric and crazy it was, and it turned into this monument. Anyhow,
0:55:43.440,0:55:48.240
you pointed out that you know of course wild goose chase, that term was attributed to Shakespeare,
0:55:48.240,0:55:53.920
you've done some more work in this area of showing how we tend to reify these authors
0:55:53.920,0:55:59.120
and give them everything, whereas they're basically echoing what they're hearing around them, what
0:55:59.120,0:56:04.240
they're reading around them, and that's far more interesting in terms of even their creative
0:56:04.240,0:56:11.920
capability to show how they mix and make match all of these things that are echoing around them.
0:56:11.920,0:56:17.440
But anyway, I think that what happened, now correct me if I'm wrong, you put this out
0:56:17.440,0:56:21.840
and you're in an academic publication and somehow it got picked up by local media,
0:56:21.840,0:56:28.320
and it went sort of viral that the OED had missed this and then suddenly all of this attention isn't
0:56:29.440,0:56:36.320
on you. And I was talking with Pip Willcox at the National Archives, and I brought this up
0:56:36.320,0:56:42.880
and she knows people who work
0:56:42.880,0:56:48.240
at the OED now. And she says, I will assure you, they are very politely that they are working
0:56:48.240,0:56:54.400
on this and they're using EEBO and these resources too now, but it is fabulous that you brought
0:56:54.400,0:56:59.360
that you would shine light on it. I want to say that, and I also want to say that I could
0:56:59.360,0:57:08.400
never anywhere near the altar of the OED.
Let me tell you the story about that, Tom, that was
0:57:08.400,0:57:11.840
ridiculous that I was having out of body experience at that point, because
0:57:12.400,0:57:16.560
the local media that you mentioned we know ended up becoming the New York Times and
0:57:16.560,0:57:21.600
the BBC and the Guardian and people in India and people in China and all sorts of amazing media
0:57:21.600,0:57:29.360
outlets were covering this story, which was not a story in my mind. But we have a platform,
0:57:29.360,0:57:34.080
an electronic platform at our university, a bit like the conversation if you know that platform, which
0:57:34.080,0:57:40.880
is a sort of academia meets news hybrid designed to try and showcase latest academic research or
0:57:41.680,0:57:46.720
insights, I suppose, expert commentary on topical issues. So we have our own version of that called
0:57:46.720,0:57:51.760
Pursuit, and some really wonderful editors who work on that platform for us. And one of
0:57:51.760,0:57:55.760
the things that the senior has said to me at the time was, well, maybe you don't feel like you've
0:57:55.760,0:57:59.440
got anything to write for us right now as a public engagement piece, but I guarantee you,
0:57:59.440,0:58:05.200
there are universal truths in your discipline that every Shakespearean knows but the people
0:58:05.200,0:58:09.040
outside the academy just haven't got the faintest idea about. So one of the things that you
0:58:09.040,0:58:13.040
need to take seriously is a public intellectual because university positions are tax
0:58:13.040,0:58:17.120
payer funded, you're going to share that knowledge, you think about how you can bring that off campus
0:58:17.120,0:58:21.920
to a wider audience. And so one of those, the first things I thought about was those posters and
0:58:21.920,0:58:26.000
tea towels and things you see that did you know Shakespeare invented all these words and this,
0:58:26.000,0:58:30.880
every Shakespearean will cringe when they see those posters because we all know he didn't invent
0:58:30.880,0:58:35.920
those words. If a player went to
a Shakespeare play for two and a half hours, three
0:58:35.920,0:58:40.400
hours, and every word they were hearing was some gibberish that he'd made up. It wouldn't make sense.
0:58:40.960,0:58:44.800
Clearly these words signified, they had semantic content, they're in circulation.
0:58:45.520,0:58:50.720
Occasionally there's a nice turn of phrase or a unique image or metaphor that we can
0:58:50.720,0:58:54.480
trace back to Shakespeare putting these things together for the first time interesting ways,
0:58:54.480,0:58:58.960
but by and large he didn't invent the words. I mean I think when Caliban offers to get fresh
0:58:58.960,0:59:03.120
scamels from the rocks that's scammers is like the one word in the whole Shakespearean canon that
0:59:03.120,0:59:06.560
we have no idea what the hell it means or where he got that he really seemed to just invented
0:59:06.560,0:59:12.240
that unless it was the compositor who types that it mistyped it somehow. So this piece wasn't ever
0:59:12.240,0:59:17.440
meant to be showcasing new research as such and it wasn't even having a go at the OED as such.
0:59:17.440,0:59:22.320
It was about trying to let the public know that here's this thing that's always touted
0:59:22.320,0:59:27.680
as being why Shakespeare is great. His invention of words, that's not why he's great. Look, when the OED
0:59:27.680,0:59:31.600
was being assembled back in the centuries ago, they were look one of the things that
0:59:31.600,0:59:36.320
distinguished that dictionary from others was the fact that it showed examples of the words in use.
0:59:36.320,0:59:41.760
And to do that, they would turn to widely available examples and the works of Shakespeare was
0:59:41.760,0:59:46.800
on the desk at the time basically, it was a go-to source to look up how did Shakespeare use this.
0:59:46.800,0:59:50.160
And that makes sense. That's part of the historical project of the OED, that's why
0:59:50.160,0:59:57.280
they did it the way they did. But people have then subsequently misunderstood that process
0:59:57.280,1:00:01.200
and thought that if the first instance is Shakespeare, then Shakespeare invented it.
1:00:01.760,1:00:06.160
And now that we have these digital tools like Google Books and Early English Books Online.
1:00:06.160,1:00:10.800
It takes all of five seconds to type a phrase into the search box and and disprove that notion and
1:00:10.800,1:00:15.840
show just how much earlier a word or phrase was in cultural currency. And so that's all I wanted
1:00:15.840,1:00:20.000
to say, but it's really interesting that the media all picks this up. Some in particular were
1:00:20.000,1:00:24.240
crossed that an Australian academic had dared to speak truth to power and correct the Brits,
1:00:25.040,1:00:28.880
as if there's anything nationalistic about this. This is just a common sense, public
1:00:29.520,1:00:33.280
engagement piece. But they had a field day with that. It was quite funny.
1:00:34.640,1:00:40.240
Well, it's all good. Anytime you
bring attention to this and of course
1:00:40.240,1:00:45.760
we all get irritated when something's distributed the Shakespeare even correctly but actually is
1:00:45.760,1:00:52.640
attributed to a Shakespearean character, like if we were never borrowers or lenders, we would be in
1:00:52.640,1:00:58.640
pretty bad shape economically.
That's right. Globally, there may be too much of it going
1:00:58.640,1:01:05.200
on but still that's how, that's what
drives economies is borrowing and lending.
1:01:06.000,1:01:11.600
And Shakespeare never said that, of course. Polonius said it, I should say to anybody who
1:01:11.600,1:01:20.560
might fall into this. Well, that all just is extraordinarily delightful for me that
1:01:20.560,1:01:28.880
we can bring a little bit more clarity into what were the sources of... let's just say
1:01:29.520,1:01:38.480
creative energy, how that works rather than falling yet for another century under the auspices
1:01:38.480,1:01:45.680
of post-romantic searches for genius and in inventiveness where you're hit by the muse and you
1:01:45.680,1:01:52.960
suddenly see things, you see the light on your various road to various damascuses,
1:01:53.520,1:01:58.720
but the real creative process of
hearing and listening and being part of
1:01:58.720,1:02:05.120
the world around you, and putting together narratives from various sources that entertain people
1:02:05.120,1:02:12.160
and it also endure. So that was a little speech there, I'm sorry. And I'm just,
1:02:12.160,1:02:20.160
it's just wonderful to have that in
every conversation what I do is ask.
1:02:20.160,1:02:25.040
We deal with, I'm talking to people who are very bright who could have gone in many many directions
1:02:25.040,1:02:31.760
in their lives and in all cases there
seems to have been just an early childhood
1:02:31.760,1:02:40.560
understanding that what maybe we are nerds or there's a point at which you turn. With me, it was
1:02:40.560,1:02:45.520
a foreign study that I did in undergraduate school where I'm going. Oh, it doesn't look like I'm going
1:02:45.520,1:02:51.440
to go home and be a successful insurance guy, which would have been just fine, it's
1:02:51.440,1:02:58.480
a wonderful life. I've been infected now. This is probably the wrong word to use right
1:02:58.480,1:03:05.600
now, but I have seen something that I don't think I can ever return to that I've loved so much.
1:03:05.600,1:03:10.800
So, is there any kind of point where, let's say young David is wandering around... did you grow
1:03:10.800,1:03:18.560
up in Melbourne, is that for you? I did, that's right.
So, young David is in Melbourne
1:03:18.560,1:03:24.160
and in school and being whatever, and suddenly you go, well, I think that I'm going to go and study
1:03:24.160,1:03:30.240
literature, and have the the like in my case, I always mention my... it's not mythological real uncle,
1:03:30.240,1:03:34.320
who just could not understand what in the world I was going to do with a major
1:03:34.320,1:03:39.760
in English. What are you going to do
with that? So, we all kind of face this,
1:03:39.760,1:03:44.720
when were the turning points and at what point did you realize that you were going to head in this
1:03:44.720,1:03:50.640
direction? I think I had a number of those turning points to be fair. I think when I was 13, I first
1:03:50.640,1:03:55.120
read Shakespeare. I'm sure I'd seen Shakespeare earlier, but I was meant to be reading a play
1:03:55.120,1:04:00.800
called Away by the Australian playwright Michael Gow, and it begins with an epigraph that quotes
1:04:00.800,1:04:05.200
The Tempest. And so before I even got to the first page of that play, I go well I better find out what his
1:04:05.200,1:04:09.040
epigraph's about went off and read The Tempest. And then I was hooked on Shakespeare. I love The Tempest.
1:04:09.040,1:04:13.840
It's still my favorite play. It's a play that a 13-year-old boy could read and enjoy in a very simple
1:04:13.840,1:04:18.480
way it makes sense, but every time you come back to it and revisit it, it becomes more complex and you
1:04:18.480,1:04:23.680
see things and subtleties and nuances in it that you missed earlier and you can appreciate a new, so
1:04:23.680,1:04:28.000
that play in particular is one of my favorite Shakespearean plays. I was about 13 at that point.
1:04:28.640,1:04:32.000
In high school, literature was one of
my worst subjects, got my worst marks.
1:04:33.280,1:04:38.880
But I think when I was in literature classes, my brain was being very scientific, and when I was
1:04:38.880,1:04:43.440
in science classes chemistry classes, I was more of a humanities brain, and never quite worked. And
1:04:43.440,1:04:47.840
then when I get to university, there's different ways of studying both those disciplines and
1:04:47.840,1:04:51.600
you can be more scientific and rigorous and approach the literature in a quantitative
1:04:51.600,1:04:57.360
way or a theater history, factual study, kind of way rather than necessarily doing the
1:04:57.360,1:05:02.000
close reading or doing theoretical
insights and things like that. So I found
1:05:02.000,1:05:06.720
more ways that my interest literature could actually flourish. I think the importance of good
1:05:06.720,1:05:11.920
teachers of course can never be underestimated, and I just for fun more than anything else,
1:05:11.920,1:05:14.960
I indulged and did one of those Cambridge summer schools when I was an undergraduate,
1:05:15.520,1:05:19.280
and Dympna Callaghan was my teacher there was the time that she was editing Romeo and Juliet
1:05:19.280,1:05:23.360
for the Bedfords and Martin series, and Dympna, if you've ever met her or had the good fortune
1:05:23.360,1:05:29.360
to be taught by her is an amazing educator, just so inspiring. And I very clearly remember after three
1:05:29.360,1:05:33.680
weeks of the summer school in Dympna's class, her asking "So, have you decided to be an academic yet?"
1:05:34.960,1:05:38.960
And what can I say but "Of course, yes". You've done it, you've converted me. So I think that
1:05:38.960,1:05:45.440
was probably a really important moment too.
I met Dympna and she probably don't remember me. I remember
1:05:45.440,1:05:55.200
her, she gave a paper at a Marlow Conference and I might get this wrong, it was the year 1993.
1:05:56.160,1:06:03.040
And I guess it was... kind of plenary speaker was Patrick Collinson in
1:06:03.760,1:06:10.240
Cambridge, but we were at Corpus Christi, it was held in Corpus Christi, a Marlow Conference. And
1:06:10.240,1:06:16.800
is it Charles Nicoll? The writer who did... he was there. And he had just published that book.
1:06:16.800,1:06:26.160
And he was waiting for all of this just to be. I don't know kind of a cast
1:06:26.160,1:06:32.320
out of the inner circle, because he's a popular writer, and instead he was completely embraced.
1:06:32.320,1:06:36.720
And I remember Dympna, I remember several other names, I won't go into it. But it was one of
1:06:36.720,1:06:42.080
those transformative conferences where you just knew that there were people like
1:06:42.080,1:06:47.440
you out there. And even though there may be few, there were people like you.
1:06:48.000,1:06:54.320
And it was just a delightful. I'm just so happy. This shows sort of the difference in our
1:06:54.320,1:07:00.480
ages because we were much younger then, right? Or maybe as Dylan said,
1:07:00.480,1:07:06.720
we were much older than we're younger now. But anyhow, it was a different time and so she has had this
1:07:06.720,1:07:13.600
marvelous career and has influenced you and other people. And I think that would be something is best
1:07:13.600,1:07:21.920
for all of us to remember that when we're teaching, we really do home in on the students
1:07:21.920,1:07:27.600
who aren't getting it, who are falling asleep in the back and it sometimes it's very discouraging.
1:07:27.600,1:07:33.200
And we think we get angry with the
student or angry with the whole thing and start
1:07:33.200,1:07:40.000
self... we don't see the people that we actually influence. And there are those people out there.
1:07:40.000,1:07:46.000
And I meet them occasionally and I'll go, "Oh, I did do something". I did help to
1:07:46.000,1:07:51.920
change a life. It happens too rarely because my students go out into the big world
1:07:51.920,1:07:57.440
in this huge city and sometimes I don't see them ever again. But I think probably for the teachers
1:07:57.440,1:08:02.960
who may watch, to keep an eye on that kid up front, the quiet kid
1:08:02.960,1:08:11.360
who's kind of, you know, they're taking it in. And also if I could,
1:08:11.360,1:08:16.240
I wish I could just broadcast to all my kids, listen, 15 years from now when you remember something that
1:08:16.240,1:08:21.200
I said that may have helped change your life for the better, why don't you send me an email?
1:08:21.200,1:08:25.920
It helps get me through the day after
teaching hundreds and hundreds of
1:08:25.920,1:08:32.400
students sometimes and these big lecture halls and so forth. Well, that's just wonderful. And so
1:08:32.400,1:08:39.280
you were in Melbourne and you... oh, you did a master's at Toronto.
1:08:39.280,1:08:43.120
I went on exchange to the university of Oslo when I was an undergraduate. I've lived in Norway for
1:08:43.120,1:08:47.280
a little while. And then I did my masters in Toronto, so I had another cold climate experience for
1:08:47.280,1:08:55.280
tertiary study. Yeah, well, a commonwealth experience for sure, in Australia and Canada. My son
1:08:55.280,1:09:04.640
graduated from Queens a couple of years back in Ontario. I almost went to U of T, but
1:09:04.640,1:09:12.080
I've gone to Toronto one, two, three
times in the past five, I feel part Canadian now.
1:09:12.720,1:09:16.640
And I'll tell you what, if you get there
when it's not winter, what a wonderful town.
1:09:18.880,1:09:24.000
But it is... Well, we don't get any snow in Melbourne, so it was pretty amazing when there was snow in
1:09:24.000,1:09:30.880
Toronto. It was very very cool, I've never been so cold in my life.
It is the dictionary,
1:09:30.880,1:09:39.920
It is the OED definition of cold. Nicely done.
But a fabulous, fabulous university as is Melbourne
1:09:39.920,1:09:46.560
of course, and some fabulous people there who have helped sustain our field, and also in medieval
1:09:46.560,1:09:53.200
studies too very famous that way. But what a great experience. Well, I would like to get just
1:09:53.200,1:09:58.400
kind of open things up here. I think we've sort of covered it, but I may have missed something that
1:09:58.400,1:10:05.120
you want to get out there and what we do, I should tell people is that I go back through and I make
1:10:05.120,1:10:12.960
little segments that are under topic headings anything that we covered, so that if you
1:10:12.960,1:10:17.120
don't have time to listen to an hour's worth or an 90 minutes worth of
1:10:17.760,1:10:23.120
podcasting that people can see that.
Is there anything else you'd like to put
1:10:23.120,1:10:30.080
out there that could be a bullet point or a segment that I failed to ask you about?
1:10:30.080,1:10:33.600
I think you've been very thorough actually, Tom. I can't think of anything off top of my head.
1:10:35.280,1:10:41.440
Well, what I'm hoping, David, is that
somewhere in the future five years from now,
1:10:41.440,1:10:45.920
eight years from now, you don't know
what that this will still be out there.
1:10:45.920,1:10:51.520
And that people will see what is a younger version of you, and they'll say well and you would see it.
1:10:51.520,1:10:56.480
And that there's this chronicle. I had an uncle and I mentioned him in another podcast who
1:10:56.480,1:11:05.920
wrote five books. And there's only one video of him being interviewed on national television in 1958
1:11:05.920,1:11:12.000
I believe. And that's all I have of him. That's all I have of this guy who wrote all
1:11:12.000,1:11:20.320
of these things. And that's part of
our theme here, that this will not be lost and
1:11:20.320,1:11:26.480
this is something that is found. And I
hope that it survives and that YouTube doesn't...
1:11:27.440,1:11:32.000
it doesn't go under and everything. Well, we have backup copies and so forth.
1:11:32.000,1:11:40.720
We'll find the next YouTube but in any case, there is nothing, this gives me nothing
1:11:40.720,1:11:47.520
but absolute joy to be able to talk to you and all the others on this program. And if you could
1:11:47.520,1:11:53.920
stay for a moment right afterwards and debrief, but I wanted to thank you very much and thank the
1:11:53.920,1:11:59.120
University of Melbourne for allowing, you know, getting you off the treadmill there for
1:11:59.120,1:12:06.240
a little while to come talk to me. And I also wanted to point out that Japan is between
1:12:06.960,1:12:12.800
where you are and sometimes where you go, like if you're going to the UK, you know there
1:12:12.800,1:12:18.320
could be a stopover and we could maybe have you talk to the Shakespeare Society of Japan or
1:12:18.320,1:12:24.240
my students and so forth. So
just let me know if you come in and out and don't
1:12:24.240,1:12:29.520
let me know then I'm going to hold it against you.
I've never been Japan, I would love to go one
1:12:29.520,1:12:34.800
day, that sounds like... You'd love it here, you would love it there, people are so gracious and welcoming.
1:12:34.800,1:12:40.240
When you've been here for 20 or more years like me, I'm old hat, but when you're new
1:12:40.240,1:12:46.320
and fresh and come in nothing better, great food, great people. And we hope to see you in person
1:12:46.320,1:13:02.560
very soon, but thank you so much for joining us today.
My pleasure, Tom. Thank you for having me.