Shakespeare Unbound KINNEY CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RENAISSANCE STUDIES AND W.E.B. DU BOIS LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST 2023-2024
INTRODUCTION
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays (1623). At the W.E.B. Du Bois Library and Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, the Shakespeare Unbound exhibit asks: what happens when Shakespeare appears in fragments or as momentary flashes in history? This campus-wide exhibit explores stories of Shakespeare unbound and rebound, scattered and gathered together into new assemblages across place and time. Shakespeare Unbound is made possible through a private collection of rare books generously on loan to the University in honor of the collector’s life-long friendship with former UMass Amherst Professor Pieter Elgers. This extraordinary collection contains extracts from the First Folio and complete copies of the three other early folio editions of the plays (1632, 1663, 1685), along with a diverse array of materials that trace the history of Shakespeare’s plays—on page, stage, and film—from the Restoration through to the Twentieth Century.
Shakespeare in Print This exhibit begins here in the Special Collections Reading Room with key early items from the collection, including extracts from the First Folio, the three other early folio editions of Shakespeare, and rare copies of an early quarto edition of a single play and of Shakespeare’s Poems (1640). The First Folio fragments, from “disbound” copies of Shakespeare’s 1623 volume, provide the exhibit with its organizing concept of binding and unbinding.
Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Henry V (1623)
Shakespeare begins as a writer bound to his place and time (and in the pages of these folio volumes), but over time his works were increasingly unbound: unbound by time, by geography, by culture, by artistic medium. The exhibit continues downstairs on the ground floor of the library, where selections from the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, including the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Phillis Wheatley, and others, are joined in conversation with William Shakespeare to show the ways these plays have spoken down the centuries to other writers, thinkers, readers, and audiences.
Poems on various subjects, religious and moral (1773)
Early Influences in America Before Shakespeare arrived as literature into America, Shakespeare’s English was informing trans-Atlantic ideas of settler colonialism, gender relations, and forms of poetic expression. Initially, Shakespeare-in-print was imported from England but New England was able to claim him for their own with the first North American publication of Hamlet, printed in 1794. Women’s publications in print increased exponentially over the 17th century when we witness a great burgeoning in the volume of poetry published by women. At the same time, the traditions of poetry, made widely popular in part by Shakespeare’s works, became increasingly within reach for American women poets of the 17th and 18th centuries and reflected their own experiences. Poet Phillis Wheatley, at age 20, was educated in British as well as Greek and Roman classical literature. Though enslaved, while living in Boston she became the first American person of African descent to be published in 1773.
MIGRATION, SLAVERY AND COLONIZATION
The age of Shakespeare was fundamentally shaped by historically unprecedented movements of people across Europe and around the world. Colonization and imperialism fueled the European marketplace and systematically oppressed and disenfranchised native peoples. Slavery forced the mass movement of millions of Africans and native peoples in the New World. All the while, poetry and plays hinted at both the zeal and ramifications of such movements. Post-colonial reexaminations of The Tempest foreground the darker side of the Renaissance through fresh perspectives onto the magician Prospero, his tyrannical reign over the enchanted island, and his enslavement of the “monster“ Caliban. African American poets have long expressed their collective trauma over enslavement and disenfranchisement. From the voice of Phillis Wheatley in the 1770s to works written during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, poetry has been a forceful medium of resistance.
“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.” W.E.B. DU BOIS
W.E.B. Du Bois & Playwriting
“The Star of Ethiopia,” The Crisis, official magazine of the NAACP, (1915)
Writer, sociologist, activist and co-founder of the NAACP, international spokesperson for peace and the rights of oppressed minorities, W.E.B. Du Bois articulated the strivings of African Americans and developed a trenchant analysis of the “problem of the color line” in the twentieth century. Noted for his monumentally prolific and melodious prose, he also wrote plays and poetry. Considering Hamlet among his favorite works, Du Bois was inspired by his classical education in the ancient Greeks and Romans plus authors from the Renaissance and Enlightenment. His own fictional works, such as The Star of Ethiopia, emphasize the proud, ancestral homeland of Africa and promises of political and creative liberation for African Americans once America reaches beyond the “color line”.
Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois (1949)
Othello
Othello (1681)
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African American actors and playwrights are at the forefront of confronting the racism of this play and exploring possibilities for the black actor’s resistance to the histories of racism that link Othello’s story to our contemporary moment.
Ira Aldridge as Othello (1851) American Moor, Unpublished Edition (2018)
Letter from Nina Du Bois to W.E.B. Du Bois (1936)
Macbeth Featuring witchcraft, prophecy, and murder, Macbeth has been staged and depicted many ways. Abraham Lincoln once wrote to his favorite actor, James H. Hackett, “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth—It is wonderful.” In this display case, you’ll discover both a haunting moment in the play linked to the assassination of Lincoln and images of Orson Welles’ production of Macbeth, featuring an all-Black cast in Harlem. In a letter dated May 1936, W.E.B. Du Bois’ wife Nina writes asking if Du Bois has seen the reviews of the Macbeth staging in Harlem. Reimagined in a Haitian setting, this revolutionary production came to be known as “Voodoo” Macbeth.
Macbeth playbill (1863)
CURATORS Marjorie Rubright Joseph Black Kirstin Kay SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS Liz Fox, PhD Arts & Academic Programs Coordinator Kinney Center Jeff Goodhind Librarian Kinney Center Evan MacCarthy Five College Visiting Associate Professor Department of Music and Dance, UMass Sarah Patterson Assistant Professor Department of English, UMass Aaron Rubinstein Head of Special Collections & University Archives W.E.B. Du Bois Library Debapriya Sarkar Assistant Professor Department of English, UConn Justin Shaw Assistant Professor Department of English, Clark University Jimmy Worthy Assistant Professor Department of English, UMass Adam Zucker Associate Professor Department of English, UMass
Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, additional books from this collection will be on display at the Kinney Center and in the Du Bois Library as part of the Shakespeare Unbound campuswide exhibit. Future exhibitions at the Kinney Center will focus on a wide variety of themes, including: Shakespeare and the Renaissance of the Earth (Fall 2023) and Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Spring 2024). For a complete online catalog of this exhibit, please visit our Shakespeare Unbound website:
Shakespeare Unbound NOBLE FRAGMENTS: EARLY PRINTING FROM GUTENBERG TO SHAKESPEARE KINNEY CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RENAISSANCE STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST 2023-2024
INTRODUCTION
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays (1623). At the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, the Shakespeare Unbound exhibit asks: what happens when Shakespeare appears in fragments or as momentary flashes in history? With selections from the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Phillis Wheatley, and others are joined in conversation with William Shakespeare. At the Kinney Center, A Noble Fragment is the first of many exhibits that will rotate throughout the academic year. It tells the story of the print revolution in Renaissance Europe and the emergence of the book in its modern form. The exhibit’s title derives from publications in the 1920s that marketed leaves from damaged and disbound copies of the Gutenberg Bible (1454-1455) and Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), iconic artifacts in the history of printing, under the
title A Noble Fragment. The “noble fragments” exhibited here remind us that books are unmade as well as made: they come apart over time, but they are also often reassembled and repurposed in ways that leave traces of that history on their pages. The exhibition concludes with a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632), an important version of the most iconic gathering of “noble fragments” in English literature. This exhibit showcases selected items from an extraordinary private collection of rare books on loan to the Kinney Center and the W.E.B. Du Bois Library in honor of lifelong friend of the collector and University of Massachusetts Professor, Pieter Elgers, Isenberg School of Management.
1. The Gutenberg Bible (Mainz: J. Gutenberg, 1454-1455) is not only the earliest substantial book printed in Europe, it is also a masterpiece of typesetting and printing. Johannes Gutenberg’s print shop set standards in quality of type, paper, ink, page design, and sheer professional skill that printers of any later generation have found difficult to match. That Gutenberg was able to produce a book of this quality while solving a multitude of technical problems is astonishing. 2. Gutenberg’s innovative solutions created a long-lived technology: workmen from his shop would be familiar with every element of the type making and printing processes depicted in the mid-eighteenth-century illustrations. 3. The Gutenberg Bible launched a “print revolution,” but as far as book design was concerned, the revolution was slow moving. Early printed books looked identical to the manuscripts they would eventually supplant. Notice the double columns of tightly set black letter type with numerous abbreviations on a leaf from a Latin Bible copied in Paris, c.1220.
By 1500, printers had introduced our familiar Roman and Italic type fonts, and successfully integrated illustrations, maps, charts, and tables into their texts.
Latin Bible, c. 1220
Up Close: How different do you think the manuscript Bible page looks from the Gutenberg Bible page, printed over 200 years later? Imagine 200 years from now: how different might our books look from the way they do today? It took decades for printers to introduce the reader-friendly features we now take for granted: title-pages, page numbers, cross-references, line-numbering in poetry, for example.
4. A leaf from Petrarch, Opera (Basle: J. Amerbach, 1496) displays the Roman type developed and perfected in the later decades of the fifteenth century. Many fonts in computer menus today are based on or named after type designers working in the first century after Gutenberg. 5. A leaf from a commentary on the Roman poet Martial (Venice: Aldine Press, 1513). The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius introduced italic type in 1500. Its elegance and efficiency of space soon made it very popular and defined the look of the best-selling humanist editions of classical writers Aldus produced. 6. The Aldine press developed a similarly elegant font for printing in Greek, exemplified here in a leaf from an edition of Lucian (Basle, 1545). 7. A leaf from an early sixteenth-century antiphonal featuring two-color music printing. The large format was designed to enable use by several members of the choir at once. 8. Up Close: Notice the ways in which a leaf of Augustine (Strasbourg: J. Mentelin, 1470) resembles the Gutenberg leaf but with generous margins and spacing that allow the text to breathe. Do you see the wormholes throughout this leaf? This is where we get the phrase “bookworms.” They are one of the many perils that faced early books. 9. The “print revolution” also played a major role in standardizing vernacular languages. William Caxton was England’s first printer, as well as a translator and author himself. By adopting the London dialect in his widely marketed books, Caxton is credited with regularizing and homogenizing the English language. This leaf is from the first printed edition of Chaucer (Canterbury Tales, 1476). Augustine (1470)
11. This leaf from a rare breviary (Strasbourg, 1478) is printed on vellum, a material more expensive than paper and difficult to print on. Only a few copies of this book would have been printed on vellum, either for presentation or for elite buyers willing to pay a premium price. This copy was taken apart and its durable vellum used to make bindings of other books, probably in the sixteenth century. 12. The Parisian bookseller and printer Antoine Verard (leaf from a printed Book of Hours, c.1495) was the first in France to popularize both illustrated books and, like William Caxton, the use of the vernacular. In addition, Verard published printed Books of Hours like this one. A book of prayers designed for personal use, Books of Hours were one of the most popular forms of medieval books, and over the centuries they played a major role in the history of women’s reading. Manuscript Books of Hours were also often elaborately decorated and
Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)
10. Martin Luther did for the German language what Caxton did for English, through his enormously influential translation of the Bible (leaf from a German Bible, c.1520s).
embellished. Working only a few decades after Gutenberg, Verard showed that printed books could reproduce the look of even the most beautifully decorated medieval manuscripts. 13. An illustrated world history, the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) is one of the earliest printed books to successfully combine illustrations and text, thereby opening up the early modern visual imagination. Publications like the Nuremberg Chronicle proved that print could be as successful as manuscript in producing lavishly illustrated books such as the histories, chronicles, atlases, and books of travel that followed in its wake.
The Whole Booke of Psalms (c.1610)
14. These pages from an octavo edition of The Whole Booke of Psalms (London, c.1610) represent one half of the printed sheet as it would have left the press. This sheet was cut in half then used as scrap paper in a book binding. Unfolded fragments like this remind us of the technical complexity of handprinting: the amount of type on every page had to be planned out word-by-word, then arranged on the press to create a properly ordered gathering once the completed sheet was folded. There was much room for error, and understanding the errors in the texts we read often requires understanding the processes involved in making early modern books. Up Close: An octavo sheet, like this one, is folded three times to produce a page that in size and rectangular shape is the ancestor of the modern paperback format. Here at the Kinney Center we have a printing press. We welcome you to learn more about early print practices with a short lesson on the press.
15. The First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) was the first folio-scale book published in England devoted entirely to plays. Gathering the texts and the rights to publish the 36 plays in the folio was a risky venture, and if Shakespeare’s friends had been unsuccessful then 18 plays (not published earlier in quarto format) might have been lost. These include many plays frequently read by University students, including Macbeth, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. About 235 copies of the First Folio survive in the world today, almost all in institutional collections. Centuries after Shakespeare’s friends assembled his plays, dealers and collectors reassembled copies of the book. Every copy of the First Folio is different due to changes made during the printing process, and any given fragment can shed light on those differences. Most copies are themselves a collection of sorts. They combine original leaves with facsimile leaves, and sometimes also include leaves imported from other (less complete) copies. The process of remaking First Folios left many fragments, ranging from single leaves to complete plays to multi-play gatherings. In this way, the history of Shakespeare in print is the history of Shakespeare unbound and rebound, scattered and gathered together in new assemblages for the marketplace. The private collection from which these fragments are selected includes 17 complete plays and at least one leaf from each of the remaining 19. Every one of the 36 plays in the First Folio is represented here—a remarkable feat of collecting, potentially impossible to replicate. Up Close: Every leaf here tells a story, material as well as textual: mice, for example, have enjoyed Romeo and Juliet. What other signs of use and abuse do you spot on the pages of this Folio? If you’re familiar with the play, do you notice anything missing from the play’s beginning?
Romeo & Juliet (1623)
16. Published less than a decade after the First Folio, the Second Folio (1632) launches the ongoing project to update, repackage, protect, save, and “bind” Shakespeare. It is, by and large, a page-by-page reprint of the First Folio: the main addition is a new poem by the young John Milton, future author of Paradise Lost, praising the “livelong monument” of Shakespeare’s folio works. The Second Folio is the product of a group of investors working in syndicate, and their collective effort tells a story in itself. Comparison of the two folios reveals about 1700 deliberate textual changes. The Second Folio reflects careful editorial attention, and represents the first systematic edit of Shakespeare’s plays. About half of these changes are still accepted by modern editors, making the Second Folio a key source for all modern versions. Up Close: Take a look at the First Folio and Second Folio. What differences do you notice upon first glance? The subsequent history of these plays is one of constant dialogue between binding and unbinding: binding the plays together, binding their meaning through emendation, binding the rights to publish and market the plays.
Second Folio (1632)
Up Close: This copy of Donne’s Devotions raises an immediate question: what has happened to this book? Do you notice the blackened, uneven edges? Reading Donne by candlelight, one reader held the book too close to the flame and set the book on fire. The scorched pages signal the perils to which early books were subject.
Devotions (1624)
17. The idea of gathering scattered fragments into a collected whole exerted a powerful pull on the Renaissance imagination. “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume” writes John Donne in his Devotions (London, 1624), in the same meditation on human connectedness in which he proclaimed that “No man is an island, entire of itself.”
To Donne, Paradise is a library in which the divine gathers and rebinds the noble fragments of the scattered self: “when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; … God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” Books are lively objects that connect us: to the books themselves, to ourselves, and to one another. Each of the books, leaves, and printed pages on display in this exhibit— scattered, fragmented, torn, eaten by mice, even scorched by a candle’s flame—invite us to reimagine the resilience of the printed word, never more fully in force than when it has been unbound.
CURATORS Marjorie Rubright Joseph Black Kirstin Kay SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS Liz Fox, PhD Arts & Academic Programs Coordinator Kinney Center Jeff Goodhind Librarian Kinney Center Evan MacCarthy Five College Visiting Associate Professor Department of Music and Dance, UMass Sarah Patterson Assistant Professor Department of English, UMass Aaron Rubinstein Head of Special Collections & University Archives Du Bois Library Debapriya Sarkar Assistant Professor Department of English, UConn Justin Shaw Assistant Professor Department of English, Clark University Jimmy Worthy Assistant Professor Department of English, UMass Adam Zucker Associate Professor Department of English, UMass
GLOSSARY antiphonal book of liturgical chants used in the Catholic service. binding outer covers of a book, in early books usually leather, vellum, or boards made of wood or coarse paper pasted together but potentially a variety of other materials. breviary book containing psalms, hymns, lessons, prayers, etc. used in the Catholic service. black letter English term for “gothic” script and type fonts. facsimile reproduction. Incomplete copies of early books often contain replacement leaves made by processes such as photocopying, photography, or typesetting. Some contain reproduction leaves drawn by hand that are surprisingly difficult to distinguish from the printed originals. folio book with pages created by folding a printed sheet once, to produce a large-format book usually reserved for works of reference or other substantial or serious works. gathering group of leaves (pages) all printed on one sheet of printing paper before it is folded and cut: 2 leaves (4 pages) in a folio gathering, 4 leaves (8 pages) in a quarto gathering, etc. leaf single piece of paper: one leaf comprises two pages, front (“recto”) and back (“verso”). manuscript book or text written by hand, as opposed to printed mechanically. octavo book with pages created by folding printed sheets three times, to produce a smallish rectangular format which, in shape and size, is the ancestor of the modern paperback. quarto book with pages created by folding a printed sheet twice, to produce a medium-format book which, in shape and size, is the ancestor of modern hardcovers. Roman type the familiar font in which this brochure is printed. Derived from the capital letters used in ancient Roman inscriptions, hence the name. stationer umbrella term for members of the early modern book trade, including printers, publishers, and booksellers. typesetting or “composition”: the art of setting individual pieces of molded metal type (print characters) by hand in preparation for inking then printing on the press. Type is set upsidedown and in mirror image to the printed sheet, and it takes enormous skill to set type well, elegantly spaced and with no errors. One reason why spelling in early modern books is so variable is that typesetters (compositors) often had to alter word length to fit type into a predetermined space. vellum calfskin, treated and scraped but not tanned: a flexible yet durable material often used in book bindings and for legal documents but occasionally also as a surface to print on. vernacular native languages people spoke, such as English or French, rather than Latin.
Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, additional books from this collection will be on display at the Kinney Center and in the Du Bois Library as part of the Shakespeare Unbound campuswide exhibit. Future exhibitions at the Kinney Center will focus on a wide variety of themes, including: Shakespeare and the Renaissance of the Earth (Fall 2023) and Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Spring 2024). For more information, please visit the Shakespeare Unbound website:
A Shakespeare Unbound Exhibit
Shakespeare & Mass Incarceration
Spring 2024 Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies
INTRODUCTION Why is Shakespeare so often found in prisons? His plays frequently appear in prison libraries, arts programs, and higher education classrooms. This is, in part, because of the plays’ cultural prestige, but it is also because they invite readers to consider the relationship between justice and mercy, the nature of revenge, and the reasons a virtuous person might be driven to violent acts. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, he would have encountered a variety of prisons—debtor’s prisons, houses of correction, and the Tower of London. Imprisonment, forced labor, and corporal punishment are central themes in his plays. This exhibit traces the entanglements between Shakespeare and prisons across time, placing the plays in conversations with writing from within and about Massachusetts prisons.
Curator, Shakespeare & Mass Incarceration Liz Fox Curators, Shakespeare Unbound Marjorie Rubright Joseph Black Kirstin Kay
Shakespeare & Mass Incarceration Symposium March 7, 2024 | 4pm This symposium involves diverse voices and perspectives on the impact of encountering Shakespeare in prison. Explicitly, it asks: What are the most important considerations today for people teaching or studying Shakespeare inside? What expectations are imposed on these encounters? How can we reexamine histories of incarceration through links between past and present?
1. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1623) pivots on legal questions about sex. The play opens with Lord Angelo being granted temporary rule over Vienna, Italy. His first order of business is the strict enforcement of the city’s archaic law against fornication. A young man, Claudio, is arrested and swiftly sentenced to death for impregnating his girlfriend, Juliet. As friends and family advocate for Claudio’s release, the play explores issues of justice, discipline, and punishment. 2. This text highlights the historical relationship between incarceration and forced labor for the state. Instruction manuals like The Compleat Constable (1700) offer insight into what constituted a crime in the early modern period and the related forms of punishment. On this page, we see the prescribed punishment for rogues and vagabonds (early modern terms for unhoused people, thieves, and prostitutes), which included being whipped, deported, or “conveyed to the house of correction” where they could be forcibly “imployed in work.” People held at the “house of correction” were not paid for their labor in 1700, but neither are people incarcerated today in Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas. Incarcerated people in Massachusetts typically make between $5 and $35 per week and have little choice in whether they labor in prison. 3. In the early 20th century in Massachusetts, superintendent Howard Belding Gill proposed building a “model community prison” in Norfolk, Massachusetts that would represent a radical approach to dealing with punishment. Built by incarcerated men, Norfolk prison opened in 1932, promising “community within a wall.” But opponents decried the experiment as a “country club” that coddled prisoners. Written by Thomas O’Connor, one of Gill’s supporters, this manuscript, “Norfolk Prison” (1934) was intended for publication in The Survey, a New York magazine that tackled social and political issues. However, the essay was so controversial that it was rejected for publication. Norfolk Prison (1934)
Writing Exercise (1973)
4. The architecture of prisons was at the forefront of Howard Belding Gill’s vision for alternative models of incarceration. His prison featured dormitories rather than cell blocks. Each dormitory housed 50 men and 2 officers who were supposed to act like social workers rather than prison guards. Each room featured an unbarred window to provide fresh air and natural light, and community was fostered by way of meals in the shared dining room, visible in these photographs of Norfolk Prison (1934). 90 years later, debates about models of incarceration continue. California Governor, Gavin Newsom, recently announced that by 2025 the entirety of San Quentin Prison will shift to what is known as a “Scandinavian model” of imprisonment. This model prioritizes making life as normal as possible for people while they serve their sentence, viewing the loss of liberty and forced separation from family and community as the main punishment. 5. In a writing course inside Norfolk prison, Joseph T. Mealy, an incarcerated student, writes about prison programs. In this writing exercise (1973), he argues that “prison programs fail to meet the inmates’ real needs.” While the first paragraph supports this argument by citing administrative incompetence and an unstable environment as the source of the problem, the second paragraph offers a different contention. Mealy states that it is the kind of courses on offer that fail to meet the needs of students inside. Debates about curriculum for higher education in prison programs continue into the present day as incarcerated students question the relevance of canonical authors (such as Shakespeare) to their own experiences.
6. Incarcerated scholar, Gary E. Mosso, writes from Norfolk Prison to defend higher education programs in his essay, “The Truth About Prison Education” (1996). In this essay, Mosso quotes Senator Clairborne Pell, founder of the Federal Pell Grant, awarded to students who demonstrate exceptional financial need. Although incarcerated students qualified for this grant since its inception in 1973, their eligibility was revoked in 1994 when Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This made higher education unattainable for many people in federal or state prisons. Pell eligibility was only recently reinstated for incarcerated students in July 2023. 7. What do Shakespeare courses inside prisons look like? This Beacon College Project Description (1980) for a 16th Century Literature/ Shakespeare course outlines course goals for one incarcerated student, Tiyo Attallah Salah-el. While serving a life sentence, Salah-el was involved in a range of programs and was a lively activist, scholar, and prison abolitionist. His ambitious goals for a 3-credit course include reading the complete works of William Shakespeare to discover if Shakespeare’s writing has “any relevance to today’s social, political, and cultural conditions.” This question remains an important and open-ended one in many prison education courses today. 8. Many of the prison education and arts programs that feature Shakespeare are offered in men’s prisons, not women’s. More often, women in prison receive vocational training as food service workers or seamstresses, positions that offset institutional costs while reinforcing caregiving as women’s primary aspirations. But what unique perspectives might an incarcerated woman bring to a character like Katherine or Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew (1632), a play that showcases violence against women as comic? How does our current prison industrial complex aspire to tame, silence, abuse, or erase women? While Shakespeare’s plays reinforce misogynistic notions of femininity and portray tactics for subduing women, might they also offer women inside the opportunity to critique such notions, tactics, and experiences? Dining Room, Norfolk Prison (1934)
Hamlet (1723)
9. Hamlet declares, “Denmark’s a prison” in Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet (1723). The presumed—but thwarted—heir to the throne, the character Hamlet openly questions the transfer of power in the state of Denmark to his corrupt uncle. Shakespeare’s play stages themes of guilt, revenge, mental health, and suspicion about who to trust, as Hamlet investigates his father’s murder and grapples with when and how to commit a murder himself. How might this play, staged inside prison, invite conversations about revenge, insufficient evidence, and state violence? 10. When is prison a useful metaphor for thinking about feelings of isolation and mistrust? What about our current prison system makes this metaphor sustainable across 400 years? After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees inside prison, Tiyo Attallah Salah-el led reading groups at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, PA. In Questions for Students Who Are Reading Hamlet (2007) Salah-el remarks that the play, “sounds a lot like this prison” and invites readers to explore connections between Hamlet’s action and their own lived experiences as incarcerated men. 11. Shakespeare’s Othello (1881) weaves a story of treachery as the villain, Iago, spins false evidence to convince Othello that his beloved wife, Desdemona, is disloyal and cannot be trusted. In the scene displayed here, Othello demands that Iago “Give me the ocular proof” (Act 3, Scene 3). Iago fabricates evidence to intentionally mislead Othello. This play pursues how a system of power can manipulate what counts as evidence, particularly when that system is one of white supremacy. 12. A clipping from the Boston Globe (January 16, 1985) announces that the murder conviction of Frank “Parky” Grace was overturned due to false testimony. Grace, a Vietnam veteran and a founding member of the New Bedford Black Panthers Party, served 11 years of a life sentence at Walpole State Penitentiary in Massachusetts before he was released. Grace was harassed by New Bedford Police for his political affiliations, including over 40 arrests without conviction. Police also pressured key witnesses to present false testimony against him at his trial. What Shakespeare plays can you think of that pivot on false testimony?
Letter (1977)
13. Through the character Caliban, The Tempest (1801) invites questions about the incarceration and treatment of minority and enslaved populations. Described in the list of actors as a “deformed slave,” Caliban accuses the magician Prospero of a litany of abuses and mistreatments, including physical harm and labor exploitation. Above all, Caliban resents his oppressors for “learning me your language.” Why should incarcerated people be pressured to learn the language of Shakespeare? What if there were an equivalent tradition of teaching W.E.B Du Bois, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison in prisons today? To what extent is the power of a language also the power of racialist ideologies? 14. The impact of being inside prison has ripple effects that reach beyond prison walls. During his incarceration, Frank “Parky” Grace wrote letters to Gloria Xifaras Clark, an elementary school teacher and activist from New Bedford, Massachusetts. In this letter dated February 27, 1977, Grace describes the impact of his incarceration on his relationship with those outside, compares his working conditions to slavery, and recounts the various programs with which he is involved, including attending classes. This letter makes visible the inhumane conditions and harmful effects of incarceration on individuals, their families, and the communities that the prison industrial complex is designed to both perpetuate and hide. 15. Just this past summer, a Massachusetts state Judiciary Committee heard testimony for House Bill No. 1795 (2023). This Bill aims to establish a five-year moratorium on jail and prison construction in the state. Such a Bill, and the movement toward prison abolition more generally, invites future considerations of the relationship between education and mass incarceration. Advocates of the Bill hope that funding for prison construction will be allocated to the root causes of incarceration such as affordable housing, employment opportunities, and access to education. What would it look like if everyone had equal opportunities to earn a college degree and make a living wage? How might the citizens of Massachusetts enact policies that rewrite and resist the entwined histories of Shakespeare and Mass Incarceration?
This exhibit showcases selected items from an extraordinary private collection of rare books on loan to the Kinney Center and the W.E.B. Du Bois Library in honor of lifelong friend of the collector and University of Massachusetts Professor, Pieter Elgers, Isenberg School of Management. This exhibit is part of the 2023-2024 campuswide Shakespeare Unbound exhibition. Future exhibitions at the Kinney Center this spring include: Water-Worlds: Ripple Effects or Sea Change? For more information, please visit the Shakespeare Unbound website:
KINNEY CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RENAISSANCE STUDIES
WATER-WORLDS: RIPPLE EFFECTS OR SEA CHANGE?
SPRING 2024 A RENAISSANCE OF THE EARTH EXHIBIT
INTRODUCTION This exhibit is an outgrowth of many cross-disciplinary campus-wide collaborations. At the Kinney Center, we are in the midst of a multi-year project entitled, Renaissance of the Earth, which explores what it means to engage the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Through a range of cross-disciplinary collaborative models, it puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research mandate with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life. The Renaissance of the Earth joins as an investigator with the Anthropocene Lab, an interdisciplinary group of humanists, scientists, social scientists, and artists who seek new interdisciplinary narratives about the Anthropocene in an effort to engage the deep past and shared futures, humans and non-human communities. This year, under the directorship of Prof. Evan MacCarthy, the Center has launched the Elements series, an arts and humanities project which explores the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water through a variety of cultural lenses across disciplines and across time. Water-Worlds emerges at the crosscurrent of these conversations. In the exhibition cases, you’ll discover water-worlds depicted in drama, poetry, novels, natural philosophy, early earth science, music, origin myths, fables and more. As you explore, we invite you to consider how these water-worlds transform by way of subtle ripple effects and stunning sea changes. Much of what you’ll discover is drawn from the Kinney Center collections as well as works of Shakespeare on loan from a generous friend of the Center. Our exhibit also features the contemporary poetry of Joan Naviyuk Kane. Inside these works, water appears in all its states (from ice, frost, and snow to liquid and vapor). In adopting water as an Element we are exploring at the Kinney Center throughout 2024, we are interested in how humans have engaged the changing, moving states and qualities of water: melting, freezing, drying, evaporating, flowing, soaking, dripping, rising, flooding, poisoning, disappearing, cleansing, nourishing, preserving. In this exhibit and our related programming, we will explore human and non-human contexts of the creative, destructive, and restorative powers of our water-worlds. Co-curators Marjorie Rubright and Evan MacCarthy
Living in the midst of a Little Ice Age, early modern Europeans debated extensively about what it meant to impact the natural world on a planetary scale and returned to the story of the biblical Flood time and again to explain the diversity of life on the terraqueous globe.
Geneva Bible (1594) In the book of Genesis earth becomes a water-world. Environmental disaster transforms both the face of the earth and the course of human history in the story of the Universal Deluge. “Behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life under the heaven: all that is in the earth shall perish” (Genesis 9.17). Accounts of the biblical Flood in literature, art, natural philosophy and early earth science gave rise to questions of how humanity escaped near extinction and would embark upon living in imperfect environments thereafter. The above image illustrates the floodwaters rising as a human figure clings on the far right to the trunk of a tree.
Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684) In Sacred Theory of the Earth, Thomas Burnet argues that the Flood sparked what today’s readers might recognize in terms of a climate emergency as humans were “transplanted” from an “excellent” climate to a “worse,” and themselves “degenerated” in the process. “Insisting on the Flood’s universality was a way for Burnet to turn the Flood into a ‘golden spike,’ or geochrononological marker, between two distinct geological epochs” (Barnett, After the Flood, 94). This image conveys the surface of the earth before the Flood: “not a wrinkle, scar or fracture in all its body” and “not so much as a Sea, nor half so much water as we have in this Earth.” Beneath the surface of that perfect sphere lies the Great Abysse into which a perfect world “broke and fell.” When the “fountains of the great Abysse were broken open,” Burnet writes, the old World was destroyed as the transforming effects of its waters reshaped every aspect of the natural world.
John Woodward, An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth (1695) For John Woodward, life on planet Earth is a story of one water-world replacing another. The Flood was nothing short of a “mighty Revolution” that left the “Earth quite unhinged, shattered all to pieces and turned into a heap of ruins.” In his Preface, he contends that “the vast Multitudes of Shells, and other Marine Bodies, found at this day incorporated with and lodge in all sorts of Stone, in Marble, in Chalk” could be “found in all Parts of the known World, as well in Europe, Africa, and America, as in Asia, and this even to the very tops of the highest Mountains”— all evidence supporting the universality of Noah’s Flood and disproving the notion that fossils ‘grew’ in situ, arising from the rocks and soils in which they were found.
Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605) The earth after the Flood was marked by ruin. The title page of Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (on display) illustrates humanities’ migration across the globe following the curse of the Tower of Babel, one of three catastrophes that shaped the early history of mankind in the book of Genesis. Each catastrophe resulted in a fragmentation and scattering of life on earth: first, the Fall from Eden, leaving man and woman to wander and toil beyond the walls of the garden; then, the Flood, which reshaped both the form of the earth itself and life upon it; and third, the destruction of the Tower of Babel as a result of God’s curse of linguistic confusion among mankind.
As Verstegan focuses on the postdiluvian reality of living in a waterworld, the story of the Flood emerges as the catalyst for the building of the Tower of Babel. After the flood, he writes, Noah’s sons were living in fear “upon hilles & mountains”; after they descended, God told them to disperse and settle the earth, which they refused to do out of suspicion that this was but “a device or plot,” whereby God “the more easely once again . . . destroy them.” Verstegan lived his entire life on the borders of the North Sea, and much of his life in the Netherlands. Floods were a real, frequent, and often devastating part of living at or below sea level. The story of The Flood aroused Verstegan’s environmental sympathies. To him, mankind’s building of the Tower was not an act of defiance, disobedience, or hubris against God but was, instead, savvy environmental planning in the face of eco-catastrophe. Catalyzed by the desire to live on higher ground, to stay clear of the low-lying plains, the Tower of Babel was mankind’s first earth-work project: a feat of engineering aimed at living sustainably on a floodplain.
Edward Jorden, A Discourse of Natural & Mineral Waters (1631) In each of its states (water, ice, and steam), the restorative powers of water for both body and soul have long been advocated. For centuries, guides and treatises in the fields of hydrotherapy and balneology have professed definitions of the medical properties of mineral waters and identified the effects of natural baths across the world. English physician and chemist Edward Jorden (1569-1632) completed his medical training at the University of Padua, then practiced medicine in London and later in the town of Bath, Somerset. He also published a discourse on hysteria, A Brief Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), which drew the attention of James I for its relating of hysteria to demonic possession. In this treatise on natural baths and mineral waters, Jorden defines the three sources of mineral waters: (1) “from moist vapors congealed by cold in the air” (i.e. precipitation), (2) from the earth (e.g., perpetual springs and rivers), and (3) “by percolation from the Sea.” He also explores in detail the simple and compound minerals and metals found in water, claiming distinct medical benefits for them, from affecting humors, opening pores, inducing sweat, moving bodily fluids, comforting nerves, cleansing the skin, and removing salts. For Jorden, the temperature of the bath’s waters induces different effects on the body, as does duration of the patient’s immersion in the waters, even the time of year and day. Consumption of heated or cooled mineral waters also has salutary results. Ultimately, Jorden warns that the authority to distinguish “the virtues and uses of our Baths” remains with the physician, and the two “cannot well be intimated to the patient without dangerous mistaking.”
Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens (1617) The artistic craft of alchemy primarily focuses on processes of transforming physical matter through the use of a transmuting agent, the philosopher’s stone. Beyond objectives to change lead into gold, alchemical transmutation also had medical motives: to heal, to extend life, to expel sickness. Once again, the element of water features in these processes of transformation. The German alchemist Michael Maier (1568-1622) produced the multimedia work Atalanta Fleeing: New Chymical Emblems Relating to the Secrets of Nature, which features in opening of the book emblems, mottos, discourses, and musical works that were intended, as the title page states, “to be seen, read, meditated [upon], understood, distinguished, sung and heard.” With these instructions, “Maier underscores the fact that Atalanta fugiens is…a collection of emblems, a genre that demands of its reader not flight and forward motion but pause, lingering, and stillness. Moreover, the emblematic mode of reading demands multiple senses: not just the intellect or eyes but also (in this case) the voice and ears” (Nummedal, “Sound and Vision,” 1).
The twenty-eighth emblem and fugue features the alchemical allegory of King Duenech, whose melancholy, which was caused when he found himself despised in a meeting of monarchs, was cured by a steam bath. The etching by Swiss engraver Matthäus Merian (1593-1650) depicts the naked, but crowned monarch reclining in a compact chamber, as vaporous steam rises through the floor’s vents, inducing sweat in the king’s body. The music of this three-voice fugue is composed by John Farmer, published earlier in a collection of Divers & Sundry Waies of Two Parts in One, to the Number of Fortie upon one Playnsong (1591). Maier’s Latin text (and its German translation) of the accompanying fugue reads: Prince Duenech, armed with the Lions strength, Grew melancholic and morose at length: Pharut is sent for to contrive a cure, Who by a vaporous bath does health assure; Which means by frequent use wrought good effect, And his distempers wholly did correct. Like Jorden’s Discourse, Maier argues that the water’s temperature is key to its curative powers, since with “hot stoves or baths... a beautiful complexion is acquired to the face and whole body,” signaling that “the melancholic blackness, which infects the skin, may by degrees be evacuated, and all the humors corrected, that pure and rosy blood may afterwards be generated.” He also warns that the “water may…burn his tender flesh, or obstruct the pores, whereby more damage than utility would ensue, and his malady not be cured.”
Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1947) In 1580, the philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) embarked on an eighteen-month journey across France, Alemannic Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, and Italy in order to present a copy of his Essays to Pope Gregory XIII in Rome and to seek out mineral waters and hot baths, which might bring relief to his kidney stones. In a travel journal, maintained by Montaigne and his secretary, there are frequent, detailed accounts of the taste, smell, temperature, and curative strengths of waters at Plombières-les-Bains, Baden, Bagni di Lucca, Pistoia, and many other baths visited by Montaigne during these movements around Europe. In the displayed pages from this 1947 translation of Montaigne’s Essays, which feature illustrations by the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), we find Montaigne reflecting on the varied therapeutic practices found at such baths. Learned from his wide travels, he writes of differing prescribed methods of washing, soaking, drinking, and mixing mineral waters with “other drugs to make it work the better,” but observes that the “best and surest part” of these healing waters is the opportunity to “enjoy the pleasure of company” encountered at the baths. The juxtaposition of Montaigne’s thoughts on restorative waters with Dalí’s surreal painting, itself inspired by another of Montaigne’s essays (“Of repentance”), invokes the reflective nature of water seen by the lone wanderer, and water in states vaporous (clouds) and solid (snow), and even the perhaps confounding, suspended dodecahedron, which Dalí elsewhere celebrates for the “luminous and Pythagorean instantaneousness based on the celestial communion of the number twelve” (hours, months, apostles, signs of the zodiac, et al.). Christy Wampole reminds us that the reader of this particular edition of Montaigne’s Essays “is invited to determine the relationship between Dalí’s image and Montaigne’s text but not to conjure [their] own image” (Wampole, “Dalí’s Montaigne,” 327).
John Ray, Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1693) Were any of God’s original creatures lost in the planetary catastrophe of rising waters? Fossilized sea life became the focus of significant debate among natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who raised questions regarding the extinction of species. Natural philosophers speculated on the similarities and differences between the pre- and post-Deluge water-worlds. These illustrations convey the diversity of ante-diluvian sea life, including: “Petrify’d shells,” “two petrify’d fishes lying in stone, with their scales and bones,” and “a Sea-Urchin petrfy’d with its Pricles broken off.”
The Great Frost (1608), a pamphlet. (reproduction) Houghton Library, Harvard University Throughout the Renaissance, Europe was in the midst of a Little Ice Age. Beginning in the fourteenth century, temperatures in the British Isles cooled by two degrees celsius. By the early seventeenth century, “frost fairs” were regularly taking place on London’s river Thames. This pamphlet’s title page conveys the seemingly playful “cool doings” during the “terrible frost,” but obscures the large-scale crop failures and food shortages that resulted as well as the significant challenges that frozen waterways pose to a maritime trading center dependent on rivers for trade, fishing, and transportation. The Little Ice Age reached its peak intensity between 1680-1730.
2019
François Rabelais, The Fourth Book of Pantagruel (1552), a page. (reproduction) Bibliothèque nationale de France On a bitter cold voyage, Rabelais’ Pantagruel hears faint and undefinable voices trapped in the surrounding icescape. His captain reveals that “this is the edge of the frozen sea” where a battle once ensued. “Frightful noises of battle” were once “frozen on the air” but with the thaw “noises are melting, and so you can hear them.” “Here, here,” exclaims Pantagruel, “here are some that are not yet thawed.” “Then he threw on the deck before us whole handfuls of frozen words, which looked like crystallized sweets of different colors. We saw some words gules, or gay quips, some vert, some azure, some sable, and some gold. When we warmed them a little between our hands, they melted like snow, and we actually heard them, though we did not understand them, for they were in a barbarous language.” In this image, drawn from a page of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, words begin thawing together into a slurry of non-sense sounds: “frrrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, traccc, trac, trr, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrrr, On, on, on, on, ououououon: goth, magoth” which conclude with the exclamation, “& ne scay quelz autre motz barbares” [“and goodness knows what other barbarous sounds”].
Joan Naviyuk Kane, “Dark Traffic” in Dark Traffic (2021) “Dark Traffic contains a series of poems that reflect upon the changing nature of water in Alaska’s Bering Sea coast . . . [Kane’s] verse, in the title poem and throughout the collection, respond to the fracturing of the Arctic climate by evoking pervasive loss, exploring forms of adaptation, and imagining possibilities for new relationships with a changing place. As new texts for blue humanities scholarship, the poems in Dark Traffic open windows onto a remote and changing icescape” (Mentz, Blue Humanities, 113-14).
Ludovico Einaudi, Elegy for the Arctic (2016)
Lamenting the loss of glaciers is at once an urgent cry for the planet’s future and a mourning heartache for its deep history. In 2016, the Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi was invited by Greenpeace to participate in a global campaign to mandate the creation of a marine sanctuary in Arctic waters, saving them from oil and gas drilling, industrial fishing, and military activity. A threeminute video was recorded in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the same islands where over a million samples of the world’s crop seeds are conserved in a vault surrounded by slowly melting ice and thawing permafrost. Set in the icy waters below a calving glacier, Einaudi is seen floating on a small pontoon, seated at a grand piano while warming his hands before performing a wordless Elegy for the Arctic. Greenpeace describes the moment of the recording against the thunderous chaos of ice breaking away from the glacier into the sea: “The silence broken by the noise of the glacier as it fell off. Some notes torn from a grand piano floating in a sea of ice” (Einaudi, Elegy for the Arctic [The Making of]). Since its release on YouTube in 2016, Einaudi’s Elegy has had over 20 million views, but an Arctic sanctuary awaits declaration.
Laura Alexandrine Smith, The Music of the Waters: A Collection of the Sailors Chanties or Working Songs of the Sea (1888) The thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi likens the art of singing to “sea foam,” for its “graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor.” Such an evocative image of song’s beauty hailing from the depths of the sea connects human-made music to the music of nature, especially of water. Smith’s maritime music collection The Music of the Waters, published in London in 1888, seeks to do the same. It is considered by scholars to be the first comprehensive, ethnographic treatment of sea shanties and sea songs, aiming to bring together tunes from all maritime nations. For this study, Smith transcribed tunes and their texts of music related to the sea and to life at sea, having collected music and stories received from active and retired sailors who responded to calls and ads placed in trade journals. The volume is arranged geographically, featuring distinct chapters on nautical songs from England, America, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Greece, Japan, Egypt, India, China, and Peru. Highlighting the intersections of labor, warfare, commerce, and travel with poetry, folk music, and oral traditions, Smith’s gathering of songs and song texts made for and by those living on and with the sea is a powerful snapshot of an evolving understanding of the planet’s oceans amid the Industrial Revolution and a profound respect and growing nostalgia for a deep history that these songs engage with in their performance and in their collecting. According to Laura Alexandrine Smith, the passage of time has “made very little difference in the music of the sea,” since the “winds moaned their sad dirges, or thundered their great stormchords, the waves have murmured their lullabies to the waiting shores, and the wild sea-birds have screamed their hoarse choruses through all ages, and will continue to do so as long as man and the world of waters exist.”
Frank Martin, Der Sturm (1956)
The violent energy of the sea is vividly captured by Austrian artist Stefan Hlawa (1896-1977) in this title page for an opera based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890-1974) started composing this magic-comedy opera (a “Zauberlustspiel”) in 1952 and premiered it with the Vienna State Opera in 1956. Setting August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck’s German translation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Martin arranges the play’s text across ten scenes in three acts with eleven singers, one dancer, two choirs, and a large orchestra, as well as a small orchestra featuring jazz percussion, a harpsichord, and a string quintet, enabling Martin to move between musical styles and orchestral colors. Hints of the looming storm are revealed amid the opening moments of calm in the Overture, but Martin’s opening scene of Act I features dramatic percussive rolls to imitate surging, crashing sounds of Hlawa’s hurling waves as the ship’s crew begin to panic before finding themselves overboard, amid the sea’s waters.
Robert Johnson, “Full fathom five” (ca. 1660), a page. (reproduction) Folger Shakespeare Library Robert Johnson (ca. 1583-1633) composed a version of Ariel’s song from The Tempest Act I, scene 2, which is believed to be one of the few composed Shakespearean songs to survive in its original musical setting. This manuscript copy of “Full Fathom Five” (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.411), believed to be in the hand of John Playford, is a three-voice version attributed to John Wilson, but based on Johnson’s setting.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Second Folio, 1632) on loan from a generous friend of the Kinney Center Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell. Isolated by water’s frontiers, islands are singular water-worlds, often sites of mystery, utopias and dystopias, elected isolation or exiled, new beginnings or desolation. Waves, tides, reefs, storms, and the deep blue seas defend and contain an island’s inhabitants and its secrets. Water both creates and destroys islands. Shipwrecked by Prospero’s titular storm, the King of Naples Alonso’s son Ferdinand appears in Act I, scene 2, puzzled, wondering aloud how and from where the songs of Ariel and the spirits have reached his ears: “Where should this Music be? I’th air, or th’earth?” And later: “This Music crept by me upon the waters.” Confused, Ferdinand claims to follow the song, or to be drawn by it. It is at once there, then gone, then returns. Ariel’s song “Full fathom five” relates Alonso’s apparent drowning in the tempest, leading to a transformation, “a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange” at thirty feet below the sea’s surface, evoking images of an aquatic metamorphosis, both physical and spiritual, as bones become coral, eyes pearl, and underwater angels (here, sea-nymphs) mark Alonso’s apparent passing with tolling bells. Upon hearing Ariel’s song, Ferdinand responds, “The ditty does remember my drowned father. This is no mortal business, nor no sound / That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.” Shakespeare’s use of the term “sea-change” marks the first time the term appears recorded in the English language.
Aesop’s Fable, “The Shepherd and The Sea” (late 15th c.), a page. (reproduction) New York Public Library Calm, violent, inviting, threatening, nourishing. These are but a few of the adjectives humans have long deployed to personify the ocean, bestowing a human-like agency on the sea and its energy. From cosmogonic myths about the planet’s origins to tales of catastrophic floods, oceans actively wield creative and destructive powers. Found among the large corpus of Aesopic fables, “The Shepherd and the Sea” recounts a shepherd who sells his flock after encountering a peaceful seashore and sets sail with a ship laden with a supply of dates to sell in new ports. While caught in a tremendous storm and fearing the ship would go down, the shepherd throws his cargo into the volatile waters, and the sea is suddenly appeased. Upon returning home, the shepherd laments to a passerby that the sea is hungry and “quiets down when it wants another helping.” The ocean’s voracious nature leads to the fable’s moral: “Even accidents can teach us valuable lessons.” In an illuminated Greek manuscript of Aesopic fables (New York Public Library, Spencer MS 50, f. 28r), produced for the Medici family in the late fifteenth century, we find the fable’s text in Greek. The single frame of the accompanying illumination depicts the shepherd’s misadventures in a continuous narrative from right to left.
Joseph Moxon. A Brief Discourse of a Passage by the North-Pole to Japan, China, etc. (1697) Title Page. (reproduction) Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College Tales and images of ships trapped by sea ice are plentiful. Navigating patterns of freezing and thawing has long been a challenging, unpredictable science for sailors, but many have pursued passage through Arctic seas driven by the promise of shorter routes or the discovery of new lands. In addition to a career as a printer of mathematical texts and maps and as producer of celestial and terrestrial globes, Joseph Moxon (1627-1691) was appointed in 1662 by Charles II to be the court’s hydrographer, overseeing the mapping, measuring, and describing of maritime features for navigation, defense, and commerce. Among his endeavors in this post was research on securing a safe, clear route for the Northwest Passage by way of the North Pole.
Moxon published in 1674 A Brief Discourse of a Passage by the North-Pole to Japan, China, etc. (on display is the 3rd edition, published in 1697), where he reports of a conversation with a Dutch sailor in a tavern, who described “a free and open Sea under the very Pole, and somewhat beyond it.” Moxon shares further the absence of ice there and reports of “fine warm weather, such as was at Amsterdam in the summertime, and as hot.” Inspired by this conversation and its promise of ice-less seas, Moxon attempts to address three commonly held objections: (1) since the sea is full of ice, ships cannot sail through, (2) the North Pole cannot be as warm as Amsterdam since it is so far north, and (3) it would be impossible to employ a navigational compass to return from the magnetic North Pole. Moxon argues that the twenty-four hours of sunlight in summer make the North Pole quite warm. Furthermore, only winds off the land are what make Greenland and Russia cold, while the air above the open seas at the Pole would be warmer. Finally, Moxon claims that “the Mare glaciale is not a Sea, but a Sinus or Bay, the waters whereof are sweet, which is the same with what the Tartars do also assure us, who have tasted those waters in the very midst of the Sinus.” Collecting such reports from attempts to sail north spurred Moxon and contemporaries to chart new northerly routes and theorize the nature of sea ice and the Arctic climate.
The Renaissance of the Earth revolutionizes what it means to think with the early modern past about our environmental future. Through a range of cross-disciplinary collaborative models, it puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research mandate with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life. www.renaissanceoftheearth.com
BIBLIOGRAPHY Lydia Barnett, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Ludovico Einaudi, “Elegy for the Arctic (The Making of)” YouTube, uploaded by Ludovico Einaudi July 18, 2017. Steve Mentz, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2024. Tara Nummedal, “Sound and Vision: The Alchemical Epistemology of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens” in Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary. Eds. Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. https://furnaceandfugue.org Christy Walpole, “Dalí’s Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice” in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present. Eds. Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy. Oxford University Press, 2020: 323-348.
This exhibit is part of the 2023-2024 campuswide Shakespeare Unbound exhibition, which showcases selected items from an extraordinary private collection of rare books on loan to the Kinney Center and the W.E.B. Du Bois Library in honor of lifelong friend of the collector and University of Massachusetts Professor, Pieter Elgers, Isenberg School of Management.
For more information, please visit the Shakespeare Unbound website: