NEIL SAFIER: I'm thrilled
to see everybody here tonight and want to offer
you a very warm welcome. The first thing I
wanted to mention is a question that I'm sure is
burning in all of your minds, which is why a lecture on
Shakespeare in the John Carter Brown Library? Well the easiest justification
to respond for that question is on display right over here. Indeed, it's the last
book in this display case, which is the first folio,
1623, of Shakespeare's work. The first printed
collection of Shakespeare. The story of our own first
folio acquired by Sophia Augusta Brown-- John Carter Brown's widow-- in the years following
his death was quickly recognized as a book not
only for its cultural value but of extreme importance
to the whole mission of this institution. It is said-- I'm not sure if it has
been confirmed yet, which the Shakespearean
scholars will tell me if this is the case-- that Shakespeare
himself may have had a copy on his desk of the
work of Michel De Montaigne as he was writing The Tempest. In fact, it is the tempest
to which our first folio is opened, as you will see. De Cannibal on The Cannibal's
was one of the essays that Montaigne composed,
which was very much influenced by the 16th century attempts
to colonize the land of Brazil and many parts of the Americas
from which Montana derived much of his own wisdom and
arguments about the relativism of human culture. So that is really more of
a hook than anything else, but it enables me to introduce
our evenings speaker, Michael Witmore and his lecture
tonight, 10 Things I Learned From Shakespeare. Michael Witmore is probably
known to a lot of you. He received his
undergraduate degree from Vassar College, an
MA and PhD in rhetoric from the University of
California at Berkeley, and was a professor at the
Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, prior to taking up
his current position as director of the
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. I came to know
Mike most directly as a participant in the
Independent Research Library Association of which the Folger
and the John Carter Brown library are both members. I was very impressed
in my first meetings there to the extent to which
Mike was a very natural leader of that group, and also the way
in which he spoke eloquently about the humanities and the
public role of institutions like this one, like the Folger
Shakespeare Library, especially vis-a-vis, the political
and cultural organizations in Washington DC,
which, as I said, is where Folger makes its home. On a very personal
note, I will also say that Mike has been
a fabulous colleague and mentor in many
ways to me helping me to manage the transition
from scholar to administrator and director, which he himself
navigated those roiling waters just a couple of
years prior to me. Without a doubt, both
of these abilities, both, as a scholar
and a library leader, will be on display this
evening as Mike showcases his knowledge, both, of
the Shakespearean opus, as well as his ability to
deliver a clear and very public facing message about the
relevance of the humanities today. With that, I would
like you to join me in welcoming Mike Witmore to
the John Carter Brown Library and to Providence for
the very first time. Mike. [APPLAUSE] MICHAEL WITMORE:
Thank you, Neil. I have had a thrilling
day here today. I got a chance to look
at the collection. I've gotten a chance to
talk to grad students. I had some time at the library
talking about digital projects. It's very exciting to be here
and in this space talking to some of you who
are colleagues, and some of you who may just
be interested in Shakespeare. I'll tell you that I wrote this
talk after a year of talking about Shakespeare. We sent at the Folger
first folio to 50 states and to two
territories last year. And half a million
people came face to face with this
book, some of whom cried when they saw the book. At least one person proposed
marriage in front of the book. We learned about that from the
Twitter hashtag she said yes. [LAUGHING] There was a jazz
funeral for Shakespeare in honor of the
book in New Orleans. The indie rock band,
Low, from Duluth did a special concert for the
book in a rare book manuscript in Manuscript Library. It was hard for me to believe
how many people connected with this source,
powerful source, for 36 of Shakespeare's
plays, half of which we might not have today
if this book didn't exist. And the question I
set for myself was, what is it that I personally
take from the stories, and why is it that we still
connect with the plays themselves? My background is in rhetoric. I do now lead a library
in cultural institution. But one of my research areas
has been into wisdom literature and wisdom culture. And as a part of
early modern culture, it's a very important
area of publishing and of just mental life,
thinking about proverbs, learning to apply proverbs
to situations, taking a maxim and looking at it from a
couple of different directions. In some way, play
going was probably a way in which people
exercised this ability to sum up a situation, and then
apply a short proverb or maxim to what they were seeing. And at least in
Shakespeare's plays, it's interesting because
some of those plays were actually named with
maxims and proverbs. And it suggests to me that part
of play going was actually-- just as in the casket scene
in The Merchant of Venice-- was a process in which
you would go see a story, and then try to figure out what
the proverb was that applied to what you were seeing. There's a particularly
wonderful first folio at Massey University, which
is in Tokyo, that I covet. It is the most annotated
first folio I've ever seen. And a 17th century annotator
went through page by page, and almost line by line
wrote the proverbs and maxims that came to his-- likely a he-- to his mind
as he saw or read the plays. So in The Merchant of
Venice, in the margin he writes, "All that
glitters is not gold," a proverb that actually
is then reproduced in the drama of the play. But I'm interested in that. I'm interested in that
process whereby people take a situation,
and then they think about what larger rule of
thumb, maxim, or proverb might apply to that. And I decided to take a modern
approach to that by asking myself what are 10 things-- 10 proverbs, maxims,
rules of thumb-- that I take from my life
of reading the plays, and teaching them, and
reflecting on them with others. I'll be talking about
many of the plays. By the time I'm really talking
about the Winner's Tale, you'll know I'm about to end. [LAUGHING] All right. Number one. I want to begin with something
that politicians know about, theater artists know about,
jazz musicians know about. Number one, Shakespeare
knew that you have to improvise
to get things done. When Shakespeare thought
about improvisation, he would have thought
about the art of rhetoric. Rhetoric is something
that I was trained in and I think about a lot. Let me give you a
definition from Aristotle. According to Aristotle,
rhetoric is the faculty of recognizing the available
means of persuasion in any given situation. I'll repeat that because
it's complicated. It's the faculty of
recognizing the available means of persuasion in any situation. For Aristotle, rhetoric
is an art of perception. It's an ability to size
up a situation and say, this would work,
and this won't work. Eventually, it translates
into action using words in a particular way. But this whole practice
of readying oneself so that one can act with
the right set of terms, the right set of
arguments, no matter what, presents itself as a situation. It's one of those arts that was
very close to the Renaissance. And it's one that
Shakespeare would have understood very well. One of the greatest improvisers
in Shakespeare's plays is Viola who, as
you'll remember, is washed up on the
shores of Illyria in a shipwreck
believing that she has seen the last of
her drowned brother. The sea captain
tells her about where she is, about lady Olivia,
who's a countess who has lost her father,
lost her brother, who has been enclosed in a
kind of reclusive mourning. Viola sizes up that situation
in her usual quick witted way. And she decides
there and then what she's going to do
to bide her time. She says, "Oh, that
I serve that lady and might not be
delivered to the world till I had made my occasion
mellow what my estate is." Made my occasion mellow. Mellow there, as in the
ripeness of a piece of fruit. She knows that she can't act
yet, that she needs to wait. And later when she's
been mistaken for a man and is now the object
of Olivia's advances, she throws her hands up, and
she says, "How will this fadge? Oh time, though must
untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot
for me to untie." Someone who is
watching this action and thinking about
the word of occasion would have brought to mind
the Renaissance emblem, which is one of those beautiful,
allegorical pictures that were created in this. The emblem of something called
Ocasio, also known as chance. Ocasio is a goddess
who stands on a sphere. We often see sculptures of
females standing on spheres. It's connected to this picture. She has a shroud or
a sail around her. And she's bald. She has a single
forelock in front of her. And if you look at this
picture and think about it, why was it a good illustration
of occasion or chance? When opportunity is coming
toward you, you see it, and you can grasp it. But once it's passed you by,
there's nothing to grab on to. That's what that picture
was meant to illustrate, the changeability and the
fact that, once it's gone, it's really gone. The other interesting
thing about that picture is it's a great picture to
illustrate improvisation. If you're standing
on a ball, you need to constantly and perfectly
readjust and recalibrate your weight. So Ocasio, this goddess
of improvisation, is the fastest,
most reactive deity who can accommodate
all of the occasions and variety of circumstances
that she faces. Viola is someone who knows how
to wait for the moment to act. And it's something that a
great director knows how to do, as well. Rhetoricians do it. But Shakespeare liked to
show things in opposites. And so now, I want to consider
another virtuoso improvisor. This time, Iago when he tries
to frame his rival, Cassio, who's been promoted to
lieutenant as they arrive at Cyprus. Cassio has embarrassed himself
by fighting while drunk when he was supposed
to be holding a military watch at night. Iago has framed him with
a man named Rodrigo. Cassio decides to
win himself back in the graces of the
general, Othello. And as he Iago and
Othello are walking up, they see Desdemona having
a conference with Cassio. And Cassio turns to leave. As he walks away,
Iago's says, [SNAP] "Ha! I like not that." Othello, "What does thou say?" "Nothing, my Lord or
if I know not what." There's an art in the
Renaissance called sprezzatura. And what it means is practiced
ease or feigned casualness. You're pretending to do
something by accident. But in fact, you've been
rehearsing it all along. You can see how this
applies to politics. It also applies
to this situation. What Iago does is he
seizes an opportunity, like the forelock of occasion. He sees the arrangement
of circumstances, sees his actors in
the right place. The scenario which he can
sum up, and he says, [SNAP] I don't like it. And once he's gotten
Othello's attention, he can start to
back off and say, I really can't say
what I've seen. The danger of being
around a great improviser is that you don't know
what role chance has played in the production. You don't know whether they're
making their own fortunes, or whether they're
seeking to make the most of a misperception. Number two, Shakespeare
knew that decisions must be made in the
absence of all the facts. Knowing what to say in a
shifting situation where sometimes an audience looks one
way and then another means you don't really know everything
about what you ought to do. And the conditions that
undergird rhetoric, which is this art of perceiving
what can be done in the moment, are also the conditions that
undergird all really important decisions in life. Drama is almost by definition
taking an action when you don't have all the information. That lack of clarity is what
makes a situation dramatic. You have to consider
what you would do in the same situation in the
audience with the same amount of information that
the characters have. Sometimes you have more. But often, you're
looking at people who are working
with what they have. Hamlet's often been described
as a play about someone who couldn't make up his mind. I would say that
it's really a play about a man who chose to
test things and test them obsessively. There's the question
of the ghost. Is that ghost a Catholic
ghost or a protestant ghost? Is it a spirit of health
or a goblin damned? Is it someone come back from
purgatory, the real father-- Hamlet's father-- telling
him what happened? Or is it the devil coming to
tempt Hamlet into mortal sin? Hamlet understands
that that's a choice. And he decides to test it with
a play called The Mouse Trap. He makes that famous comment. "The plays the thing
wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." And that image of the king's
guilt unkenneling, like a dog, running out when he's seen
the image of what he's done, activating his guilt, and
turning it against him. 19th century German romantics
loved this indecisive prince, and called attention to his
slowness in making decisions. But in fact, Hamlet
was like a scientist. He set up experiments. He set the conditions in which
he could observe and so confirm what he thought
was true or untrue. There are other people
making decisions and testing hypotheses in Hamlet. You'll remember that
Polonius is employed in the task of figuring out what
Hamlet is really brooding on. He sets up a scene like a
director in which is daughter, Ophelia-- once the lover of Hamlet-- is going to walk
up and down stage. She's holding a prayer book
and, as it were by accident, encounter Hamlet. When they observe
this interview, and the interviewer is
one in which Hamlet says, "Get thee to a nunnery." You remember how that
conversation goes. Claudius, having seen what
they've said to each other, makes up his mind immediately. He says, "Love, his affections
do not that way tend. Nor what he spake, though
it lacked form a little, was not like madness. There's something in
his soul over which his melancholy sits on brood." And as soon as he's
figured this out, he writes the death
sentence in a letter he sends with Hamlet to England. Claudius is an executive. He makes decisions. And no matter what we
think of this character, I think that Shakespeare
thought of Claudius as someone who was
actually very good at taking incomplete information
and doing something with it. It's really his ruthlessness
that's so unsettling. A different scene of
weighing probabilities, this one from Othello. As you'll remember in
the Venetian Senate early on in that
play, Othello first has been accused of
seducing Desdemona. He stands up and acquits
himself beautifully. Then, there's the
discussion of where the Turkish fleet is going. Is it going to go to Rhodes? Or is it going to go to Cyprus? Conflicting accounts
come into the Senate. The first senator after
hearing the two versions says, "We must not think the
Turk is so unskillful to leave that latest which
concerns him first, neglecting an attempt of ease and
gain to wake and wage a danger profitless." He's weighing probabilities. Why would the Turk
be headed to Rhodes? It's not a useful objective. And in the context of
deliberations in the Senate, this is a perfect example of
how one sifts probabilities based on the information
that one has. People make decisions with
incomplete information. And it turns out that this
was the right decision. They got that one right
based on the kind of clues that they had. All of this is
important to drama because what makes life
dramatic is that we have to act without certainty. It's an unavoidable
fact of our existence, a fact that makes all
real choice in life and in human life compelling. That's why this
particular Maxim strikes me as appropriate within
Shakespeare's plays and outside them, as well. Number three. He knew that
reputation is a bubble and that it is easily popped. If you look at 17th
century Dutch still life paintings, sometimes
you'll see a figure of a child who has a little
pipe and is blowing bubbles. Maybe you know what
that figure is. He's called Homo Bulla. It's the boy blowing a bubble,
and he's an example of one of those themes in Dutch
still life painting of the vanity of this life. Reputation is like a bubble. It inflates. And then, somehow, by its
own size and elasticity, suddenly it pops, and it's gone. Cassio feels that
he's lost his command in being lieutenant after the
brawl that happens in Cyprus. And he has this to
say about reputation. "Oh, I have lost my reputation. I have lost the
immortal part of myself. And what remains is bestial." Iago then responds, "Reputation
is an idol and most false imposition oft got without merit
and lost without deserving. You have lost no
reputation at all, unless you repute
yourself such a loser." That may be the first time
the word loser is used. The problem is that it's
difficult to unhear things. Advisors to kings,
generals, and presidents can fall from their perch
in an instant because of this weakness. And Cassio is described
as being an equinox. His faults and his virtues
are equally poised. I think, in the end,
Shakespeare sided with Iago. In The Seven Ages Of
Man Speech, Jaques describes the soldiers searching
after the bubble of reputation. It's something you can't
control completely, even though entire professions
as rhetoric in the Renaissance, and PR, and social media
today, were created to try to protect that thing. As I think about
the internet, which is the place where that
bubble inflates the most, reputation has to be
the internet bubble. Number four, he knew
that power is harder to give away than it is to get. This is the lesson from
King Lear in the history play, Richard II. Consider the famous opening
scene from Lear in which he says, " Which of you shall
we say doesn't love us most?" And his daughter,
Goneril, arrives right on time, great
improviser, with this. "I love you more than
words can wield the matter. Dearer than eyesight." Lear's attempt to give away
power to the next generation may seem to go badly wrong
because one of his daughters refuses to play the game. But that problem starts earlier. Power isn't something
you can simply hand over. There needs to be a ritual,
some order in which it can be cleanly passed from
one person to another. Shakespeare thought about
this in his second tetralogy, a play written entirely in
verse, called Richard II. Now you'll remember that
Richard II was a medieval king. He was one who had a tendency
to vacillate to change his mind. He's also someone who
really didn't have a talent for self-preservation. At one point, another
character named Bolingbroke who will eventually become
Henry IV, rebels against Richard who's gone to Ireland. And when he learns
of the rebellion, Richard asks how
it was possible. Richard, "Show us
the hand of God that hath dismissed us
from our stewardship, for well we know no
hand of blood and bone can grip the sacred
handle of our scepter." Richard is a divinely
anointed king. He's the one who occupies that
magical state of the King's two bodies. The physical body,
which is proper to him, and that second
body which attaches to the metaphysical kingdom. The voice that comes
from an anointed king is not the voice of one person. It's the voice of a multitude. It's everyone speaking
through one person. Bolingbroke corners
Richard, demands the crown. And in giving it over,
Richard says, "Now, mark me how I will undo myself. I give this heavy
weight from off my head and this unwieldy
scepter from my hand. The pride of kingly
sway from out my heart. With mine own tears,
I wash away my balm. With mine own hands,
I give away my crown." The imagery here tells us that
Shakespeare is suspicious. How can tears of water wash away
the oil of an anointed king? It won't work. Carlyle prophesies that,
quote, the blood of English shall manure the ground if
he, Bolingbroke, is crowned. And this is a story that
Shakespeare has already told in the Henry VI plays where
Bolingbroke's grandson loses what Henry V gains in France. There is some connection
here to American politics. I think this country's
founders, many of whom read and reread
Shakespeare, knew that a constitution
solves the problem of how to give power away. The solution is you don't. Instead of giving
away power, you have to return it
because the power in a constitutional democracy
is only ever on loan to the person who wields it. Number five, he knew
that our love of legends is greater than
our love of fact. I remember Sarah Silverman
talking about her new show. And she said, you know,
facts don't change minds, which may be a mark
of where we are. But facts may not change
people's minds, but stories do. And someone asked me if I had
a number 11 for Shakespeare. That would be it. In the absence of facts, or
even in the presence of facts, stories seemed to frame things
in ways that compel action. So it's very important to me
that we keep these stories and we take from them
things that will really nourish our democratic life. Let's start with Shakespeare. He was not a historian, but
he sourced his stories from chronicles by [? Hall ?]
and [? Shedden ?] Hall. Chronicles that are
in our collection, and maybe they're in
your collection, as well. When Shakespeare was
writing his plays, there wasn't anything
like a profession of professional history where
you sift evidence, again, a bit like sifting
probabilities, deciding what's likely, what's unlikely,
using methods of comparison, and contextual thinking. There's a tendency in the
histories that Shakespeare read and the history
plays that he went on to write to cast real
people in history acting as heroes or
villains, martyrs, or saints. That certainly happened
in the history plays. Think about them as an
exercise, both, in storytelling, in history storytelling, that is
the stories of medieval kings. But also, myth-making
in and of itself. Showing characters
who themselves are in the process of
making their own myths. So even while
Shakespeare's sources were what we would
say biased when you look at what the
Tudors made of Richard III, they also show his tendency
to think of history as if it were a play. In Henry V, some of the
most important action is related by the chorus. It's a device that Shakespeare
uses because he can't troop an entire army on to stage. And he can't get his characters
to fly to the vasty fields of France in one instant. But of course, the
imagination can do that. The chorus describes the night
before the Battle of Agincourt. The men are awake. They're nervous. Blacksmiths are pounding
rivets for their armor, and the sound of
war is everywhere. In the midst of that nervous
army, there goes Henry. And here's what the
chorus has to say. "Every wretch, pining,
and pale before. Beholding him plucks
comfort from his looks. A largess universal,
like the sun, his liberal eye doth
give to everyone, thawing cold fear that
mean and gentle all. Behold, as may unworthiness
define a little touch of Harry in the night." The chorus is helping
us make up the scene. And Harry in going
out to the night to raise the spirits
of his troops, is also thinking about
the legend of Harry, about what will be said. And a good leader, or at
least a canny politician, he can't ignore that aspect of
his future and of the stories people will tell. Contrast now Harry
to Richard III. Another character who loves
to talk about what he's doing and who loves to
think about himself as if he's a character in a play. Early on in the
history of Richard III, Richard says after noting
his own deformity that he's been created to descant upon He says, "I've been created to
look upon my shadow in curse. And therefore," he adds,
"since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these
farewell spoken days, I am determined to prove a
villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days." He's a villain. And later when he's talking
to the two young princes who are about to go into the tower,
he calls himself a vise figure, like a figure from
the morality plays. Richard knows that his
audience knows that he's a character in a play. And he also knows that
history likes such characters. If you watch the
House of Cards today, you know that it's the
story of Richard III married to Lady Macbeth. [LAUGHING] Historical figures sometimes
styled their actions after stories that they had
encountered in sacred texts or in folk tales. And politicians--
today, at least-- as well as actors
keep an eye on where the legends may take them. I think no modern
president can avoid being compared with others whose
actions were larger than life. A Lincoln, or a Reagan. Both of these presidents
were well aware of the way in which life becomes a story. Lincoln, with his frequent
readings of Shakespeare, we know that he was able to
quote Macbeth and, in fact, interview an actor on
the version of the text that he was using. And then, Ronald Reagan, who
as Michael Rogan has shown, quoted his own films
in which he was a star during his presidency. [LAUGHING] I think Shakespeare
would have appreciated what is said to Jimmy Stewart
at the end of the man who Shot Liberty valence. When the legend becomes
fact, print the legend. Number six, Shakespeare knew
that race is a kind of script that governs our actions. The period in which
Shakespeare lived and wrote was one in which the
foundations of what we now call the modern world
were being put in place. He had a front row seat
to colonial expansion to the beginning of
the modern corporation, scientific communication,
international commerce, double entry bookkeeping,
trade, religious conflict, and the media revolution
that was the printed book. He also saw conflicts around
race that mirror our own. For example, Shylock's
brutal treatment at the hands of his
Christian counterparts. Aaron the Moor's mockery
of white limed Romans in Titus Andronicus. And the fact that
Othello must constantly disprove the assumption that
he lacks the moral temper of a Venetian or a Christian. A script says what will happen. It puts words into
people's mouths, which is just what
assumptions about race do in Shakespeare's plays. Antonio, for
example, is following an anti-Semitic script
when he mocks Shylock for loaning money at interest. Shylock repeats the
script back to him when Antonio asks for a
loan noting the Venetians lapse in memory. Here's Shylock. "In the Rialto,
you have rated me about my moneys and my usances. Still, I have borne it with a
patient shrug for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me misbeliever,
cutthroat dog, and spit upon my Jewish gabardine,
and all for use of that, which is mine own. Well then, it now appears
that you need my help." It's interesting that Shylock
is the one doing the reminding here. The fact that only some
people have to negotiate race all the time, the Jews,
Africans, and non-Christians in these plays have no
choice but to think twice about what they say and
do is a telling one. If race remains a script,
perhaps, the unstated script of American contemporary
life, Shakespeare's plays show us not only that it exists
but that part of its power resides in the fact that only
some people can ignore it. Number seven. He knew that words can
do almost anything. We've been talking about
rhetoric and improvisation. The plays are
filled with moments when an improviser takes on a
situation in which he or she is cornered. Think about Isabella talking
with Angelo, Desdemona confronted by accusations
of Othello's witchcraft. Othello himself accused
by the Venetian Senate. These characters are able to
acquit themselves in speech. And that's part of the
drama of their characters is this ability to just
stand up while cornered, and say why the
accusations aren't true. They come to an audience or come
at the listeners from an angle that they're not expecting. They have that ability
to reframe the situation and force a listener to
consider it differently. And I think about
this in connection with the opening of King Lear
where Edmund the bastard begins to talk to his
father, Gloucester, about his brother, Edgar,
the brother who's legitimate. And you'll see an
Iago like trick here. As Edmund is
talking about Edgar, he stashes something
quickly in his pocket. His father, Gloucesters,
say, "What's that with such dispatch
that you put in your pocket? Why are you so quick
to conceal that?" And Edmund says, "I
beseech you, sir. Pardon me. It is a letter from my brother
that I have not over-read. And for so much
as I have perused, I find it not fit for
your overlooking." Of course, that only
creates curiosity. And curiosity
leads to suspicion. The sense that
Edmund doesn't want to show what he
pretends to hide implies that he is withholding
something, something that, therefore, must be true. Push comes to shove, his
father takes the piece of paper from him. And Edmund says, "I
have heard him off maintain that it
be fit that son's at perfect age in
father's declined, the father should be
as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue. This is a scene where
everything turns upside down. It's where the play
tips on its hinge. And this is the beginning
of Gloucester's journey to blindness, disaster,
and redemption. There's a similar scene in one
of Shakespeare's late plays called Pericles. In this story, a
wandering prince named Pericles loses his
daughter, Marina, in a series of accidents at sea, which are
typical of the romance form. And this style of
storytelling is one that Shakespeare adopted more
toward the end of his career in plays like Cymbeline, The
Tempest, and Two Noble Kinsmen. Stories about families that
are separated about disguise, about chance coincidences,
encounters with pirates, rescues at sea, improbable
reunions and, finally, recognitions. She herself is
kidnapped by pirates. And as these stories
go, she ends up in a brothel in Mytilene. Romance will not encourage
you to suspend disbelief. In fact, it'll do
just the opposite, which is something I'll
talk about in a moment. But when Marina encounters
the governor of Mytilene,-- his name is Lysimachus,-- he is her first customer. She's the first man
she must resist. And here's what she says. "If you were born to
honor, show it now. If put upon"-- that is if that
honor was thrust upon you-- "make the judgment good that
thought you worthy of it." Lysimachus, "I did not think
thou couldst have spoke so well, nor dreamt thou couldst. Had I brought thither
a corrupted mind, thy speech had altered it." Marina accomplishes
this rhetorical magic by flipping the
situation at hand. She's got to work with the
facts that are on the ground, but place them in a
different arrangement. I know why you're
here, she's saying. There's no ambiguity about
what you want from me. Look where I am. But then she refrains it. She says, "Think
about all the people who expected you as
governor to act virtuously, who inferred that that's
what you would do. Why don't you honor their
hope and faith in you rather than your
current intentions?" It's brilliant. She reframes what
he's thinking now by getting him to think
of what other people would think of him. That's a great
example of words doing something almost miraculous
given that situation. But Shakespeare, I
think, was also aware that words sometimes fail. That's a wrenching possibility
but a very real one when we're dealing with
language and with human beings. Think about Lear again at
the beginning of the play. What can you say
here to Cordelia to earn yourself
a bounty a third more opulent than your sisters? Goneril has already gone. Regan has already gone. They've said what
he wants to hear, both of them
improvising beautifully. Cordelia's gambit, if that's
what it is, is to say nothing. "Nothing will come of
nothing," Lear says. "Speak again." Cordelia tries to speak
the truth to her father. "I owe you a divided duty. The duty I owe to you as
the person who raised me, of course. But there's also the duty
I will owe to my husband. You've just heard your
daughters write checks that they could never cash
pledging their entire loves and lives to you. I, who truly love you, will
give you a just reckoning of my love, of who I am." And Lear spurns her. Eloquence, even simple
eloquence, fails. By the end of the
play in one version, King Lear approaches
his daughter who is now dead because the
countermand to the order to kill her has not reached
the executioner in time. Lear puts a feather over
his daughter's mouth and says, "This feather stirs. She lives. If it be so, it
is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
that ever I have felt." But of course, the
feather doesn't stir. And the words don't revive her. What we're seeing
here is words fail, which is another way
of calling attention to their remarkable
power since now they function as expressions of grief
rather than a reviving spell. Number 8. He knew that the capacity
to forgive is precious and that it goes hand in hand
with the capacity to love. Continuing on with Lear. Shakespeare begins
this play with a man who is utterly unforgiving. His youngest daughter
disappoints him in a love competition. And the punishment is swift. When Kent begins to
object to say to Lear, you're moving too
quickly, Lear says, "Come not between the
dragon and his wrath. The bow is bent. The shaft is drawn. Make from it." Step back. One of the most important
moments in the play occurs when the tables
have been turned completely and Lear himself must
ask for forgiveness. Asking is not enough,
however, since the asker has to recognize what he's done. That moral recognition
coincides exactly with his recognition of
the woman in front of him, the fact that she
is his daughter. Lear, "I am a very
foolish, fond old man. Do not laugh at me
for, as I am a man, I think this lady to
be my child, Cordelia." Lear is just climbing down
from the wheel of fire getting his bearings in a new
world where his daughter really is his only hope. Later, he looks to
the future and thinks about the ways in which his
experience could be redeemed. He looks to his daughter and
says, "Be your tears wet. Yes, faith. I pray. Weep not. If you have poison for
me, I will drink it. I know you do not love
me, for your sisters have, as I do remember,
done me wrong. You have some cause. They have not." And she responds, "No cause." No cause. He's forgiven. Later, he looks at his
daughter, and he says, "Come. Let's away to prison. We two alone will sing
like birds of the cage. When thou dost ask
me blessing, I'll kneel down and ask
of thee forgiveness." It's not the prodigal daughter. It's the prodigal father
who comes home and kneels in front of his daughter. A clear sign in
Elizabethan and Jacobean culture that he is the child. This moment of
loving connection, which is also one
of dreamy exclusion from the rest of this
world, is one remove away from the trials of
the life he's lived. It's one of the
only respites that's given to Lear and the
audience in this play for whom Lear's trials are experienced
as a kind of ordeal. At the play's
opening, such a change would have seemed
nearly impossible. But of course, in
the theater, it is not, which leads us to the
ninth point and my last remark about Lear. Number nine. He knew that people
actually change. Changes of heart require
changes in perception. That's the crucial point
in many of these plays, whether they're comedies,
history's, tragedies, or romances. How hard is it to see
things in a different way? How do we know that a
character has seen things anew? In Lear, that change is signaled
by a change in language. And in this case, a
language that mixes simplicity and concreteness. This is a play with some
of the most devastating Anglo-Saxon monosyllables
in the Shakespearean canon. That is that low voice,
that direct voice, of the life world that comes
from that register in English. The kind of left-hand
that's played where the right hand plays
in the Latinate, post conquest, romance words. Those are the words that
are about life, love, the body, about the world. "Poor, naked wretches,
wheresoe'er you are, that bide the pelting
of this pitiless storm. How shall your houseless
heads unfed sides? Your looped and
widowed raggedness defend you from
seasons such as these. Oh, I've ta'en too
little care of this. Take physic, pomp." Take your medicine, pompousness. "Is man no more than this? Thou." He's looking at Edgar. "Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodating man is no
more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art." Wonderful moment in this play. Shakespeare's hitting
those short words that bring us, slow down the tempo. And then, he'll drop in this
very long, latinate word, unaccommodating in the middle
of words like thing and forked. He's trying to make
something very concrete here. Lear has changed his mind
after the trial in the storm. And the experience of nature and
of the suffering that he sees prompts him to return to
humility and to this new and simpler language. Shakespeare also used
theater to change people, whether it was
him, or his company, or an audience who was willing
in all of that transaction. And here we turn to
one of his late plays, my favorite play,
The Winter's Tale. Like many of the
other late plays, The Winter's Tale is filled
with fantastic events, chance encounters, lost children,
special tokens of recognition. And of course, a dreamy
reconciliation and reunion at the end of the play when
a family comes back together. It's definitely a once
upon a time story. And that's the point. We're dealing with an
adult nursery rhyme because it begins in a realm
of fantasy and sudden violence. Leontes, as you may know,
turns against his wife before we have any sense
of why he might be jealous. His turn against his
wife kills his son. Mamillius, his son, dies
upon hearing the news of what his father has done. And this leads to
the death he thinks of his wife, her Hermione. He also exposes his
daughter, Perdita, who is somehow taken
up, taken away by sea, and brought back for a reunion. All of that has to be
transacted in the plot. Paulina, who's her
Hermione's lady in waiting, does something very interesting. By the end of the play,
Perdita is back in Bohemia with Leontes. And Perdita says, essentially,
come into this space. I want to show you a statue. It's a statue that is
preternaturally like that of her Hermione, of this woman
who's gone and who's dead. Here's Paulina gesturing
towards the sculpture. "So much more are
carvers excellence, which let's go buy
some 16 years and makes her seem as she lived now." Leontes. "As now she might have done
so much to my good comfort as it is. Now it is piercing to my soul. Oh, thus she stood. Even with such life of
majesty, warm life, as now it coldly stands when
I first wooed her. I am ashamed." A work of art, and we'll
soon learn what kind of art, has brought Leontes to a
full and frank admission of his terrible
error and the price that he and others
have paid for it. That price is too high,
something that Shakespeare asserts with the deaths in
the middle of this play. But it is a play. And even in the very
adult world of jealousy an unforgivable
error, the audience wants some kind
of reconciliation. And here we learn something
about ourselves and our stories as Shakespeare cues the ending
of The Winter's Tale, which leads us to the final
point, number 10. Shakespeare knew that our hopes
sustain us even when we think they cannot be satisfied. The adult pleasures
of The Winter's Tale, the persistent hope for
an outcome that we know has passed out of reach. The truth of our longing
for the impossible, which is what theater and poetry
deliver, not in the naive way as in once upon
a time, a story told by the fire,
what Shakespeare thought of as a Winter's Tale. But in a way that makes
his audience, its hopes, its longings, the efficient
cause of a miracle, which the theater creates. Here's Leontes looking
at the sculpture. "What you can make her do,
I am content to look on. What to speak, I
am content to hear. For it is as easy to
make her speak as move." In other words, he
doesn't expect either one. Paulina. "It is a required that
you do awake your faith. Then, all stand still. For those that think it is
unlawful business I am about, let them depart. Music strikes. And as surprising as it is
to Leontes and his daughter, it's also a surprise
to the audience." Hermione comes back to life. She steps back into that
life, the impossible revival that the dramatist said
could not happen, at least from the middle of the play. What theater creates
in this moment is a world in which
one thing and one thing only is completely real. Shakespeare believed in
the persistent reality of our longings. Our longings for
reconciliation, for justice, for a world in which
the good prevails, even as he and we know that we
are being told a fairy tale. It's a knowing falsehood. But it's also one of
the great achievements of the theater and, perhaps, the
source of its redeeming power as an art form. Theater's power
grows from the fact that its effects are shared. We don't come to the stage
with equal resources. We find unequal
freedoms, unequal access to the precious
things of this world. But in the middle
of all these things that we bring free and
unfree, Shakespeare creates a democracy
of perception. Theater at its best gives
us the ability to see. There are things, true
things, that we can all witness in the theater,
even if we do not equally possess the power to
act on those things. That is the great gift of these
plays, the last great gift of this dramatist. And it's the one to which
we must all hold fast. Thank you. [AUDIENCE] Should we do some questions? NEIL SAFIER: Yeah, absolutely. MICHAEL WITMORE: Great. NEIL SAFIER: The floor is open. MICHAEL WITMORE: I don't think I
can recite those in order, but. [LAUGHTER] Yes? AUDIENCE: Of all the
things about The Folger that attracts people to
the library, what currently draws the most people? I recently hightailed
it over there right after reading the recently
published book, Collecting Shakespeare because
I was so moved by the story of the passion
of collecting all things Shakespeare that brought
Emily and Henry Clay Folger together that I had to just run
right over there as soon as I got to Washington
on my next trip. MICHAEL WITMORE:
Well I like that you had to run right there. AUDIENCE: What? MICHAEL WITMORE: I like that
you had to run right there as soon as you-- [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: I did. MICHAEL WITMORE: Usually,
it's the second day. AUDIENCE: I took the metro. But is it going to see
plays in the theater? What attracts the most people
to the Folger, at this point? MICHAEL WITMORE:
So 60,000 people a year come to our concerts
and performances at night. We have the first
Elizabethan Theater in North America
created in 1932. We're performing the plays
all year, except the summer. And that is filled to capacity. We couldn't sell more tickets. But it's a limited number. We get around 50,000 visitors by
day to see our exhibition work. I think that number
could be much larger. The Library of
Congress currently gets 1.8 million visitors a
day at the Jefferson Building, which is right
across the street. They're going there to
see Mr. Jefferson's books. But in Washington,
we have Magna Carta. We have the Declaration
of Independence. A lot happened in
between those two things. And the Folger is really
the only institution in the US capitol that
can tell that story, for better and for worse,
how we became modern. And we can debate
whether that's something that happened in the 16th
century, in the 14th century, in the 17th century. But I do think it's a
vital part of the story. And my hope for the Folger is
that we can show more and talk more to people who visit. Not just about Shakespeare
who had this front row seat to a world that was really
hurdling towards something that we recognize as our own,
but that we leave visitors with stories that they
can use to understand the historical sources
that, yes, in part, they informed the
declaration of independence, but they also inform
the modern corporation. They also tell us
about urbanization. There are all of these forces. And so I think we have
a double proposition. If it's the public, we
do our day time work. In exhibitions, our nighttime
work and performance. And then, there's the
online collection. So the Folger additions,
which are the best selling high school edition
of the plays, 95% of American schoolchildren
encounter Shakespeare at least once before they're 18. We put those plays
online for free. And we're currently
in the process of stacking collection images
behind the words in those plays so that people don't have
to know what to search for. If you're reading
Shakespeare, we can take you to a picture of
a bare Bodkin, if it's Hamlet. We can take you to five of them. But I believe in all
three of those things. The power of seeing an early
modern book or artifact and what it does to people. I think the living art of
poetry recitation of rhetoric, of lectures, and of
performance are vital. And we want to continue
and deepen that work. But I also think that one of
the great opportunities we have is that people can
enjoy a collection, even if they don't
know what to look for. And with a playwright who
is as pervasive and working in so many languages, and
translation languages now, we have the ability to
take this collection and really share it on
a much broader scale. I think we could probably accept
or welcome three to five times the number of people who come
by day without disrupting the scholars who are working
in this intense environment in the reading rooms. Yes? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] MICHAEL WITMORE: Yeah. When we she asked me a
question about the public, there is a connection
between our scholarship and the public work. We have about 800 scholars who
come to work in our collection. They are the most
advanced scholars using a research instrument
that, if you're a scientist, I would say-- I don't want to
become too grand-- but it's the equivalent
of an atom smasher. It's a very powerful instrument
that these 800 people can use with an intensity
that really is unparalleled. And I'll just give
you an example of this because it's illustrative. We did an exhibition on the law. And the Chief Justice
came over with his clerks. That's a pretty
impressive bunch. So he was not wearing his robes,
but he had his five clerks. And then, he had
his security detail. And those are some big guys. So he looked at the exhibition. We talked about the sources of
US law, the cook, other things. And I said, Mr. Chief
Justice, would you like to see our reading room
where 800 scholars a year are coming to work with his
unparalleled collection? And happily, he said,
yes, I would like that. So if you know the
Folger, there's the great hall
over here, and it's right next to the
Renaissance reading room. To get in between
the two, you have to throw open some glass doors. So in walks the Chief
Justice of the United States with his security
detail and his clerks. Scholars working
throughout the room. No one looked up. [LAUGHING] And it was one of
the proudest moments I've had as someone
who's privileged to lead this institution,
because I said, these people are connecting with
sources that are 400 years old. They are diving
deep into history. We don't matter. And that's the kind of intensity
on the scholarship side that I think we need to sustain. It's something that you can
sustain here at the John Carter Brown Library. But there is another
direction connected to this. We asked the Mellon
Foundation for support so that we could sponsor
multi-year research projects where we identify a
part of the collection where grad students, a
couple of senior scholars, and then conservators,
and curators could work together
and produce a traveling exhibition, a digital archive. Our first project, which
was funded by Mellon, is on early modern food
ways in the Atlantic, which is very exciting. But it's another
form of scholarship that we're seeing happen so
that of the 800 people who are intensely communing
alone with those early modern sources, there also need
to be teams of people who can talk out loud
and share knowledge from different disciplines. So that will put pressure
on our research spaces. I saw this beautiful reading
room when I arrived today. It was relatively quiet. But sometimes you really do
want to lay out 30 receipt books or manuscripts for recipes, have
the curator there, and really start working
through the material. So I think that's a
positive development in humanities scholarship. It's collaborative work. But it is essential
that research libraries have the ability to sponsor
and fund the research of people who use the collection. And as I see universities-- it
may not be the case at Brown-- but many universities have
shrunk their humanities faculty, and enrollments
have gone down. And that has led to
cutting research budgets. That means we should continue
to pay people to read things in our collection. And we should pay more of them. There's nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong
with sponsoring research with collections. But I appreciate your question. And I do want to give the
full picture of what I hope the Folger can and will do. Yes? AUDIENCE: What was your
introduction to Shakespeare? And did you like it? MICHAEL WITMORE: No,
I did not like it. I read Romeo and Juliet
when I was in junior high. I didn't like it. I wasn't that interested
in school either. So it maybe not have
been the right time. When I was a senior,
I read Othello. And that play, I
found, really changed the way I thought about
literature because it was a story about what
do you do when you meet the one person who
can tell you the lies that you just can't resist. Everybody will meet that person. You know, everybody
will meet there Iago. And when I was 17, that
was really a powerful idea. And so that was the beginning. And I was lucky to have a
great undergraduate education. And I met some wonderful
Shakespeare scholars at Berkeley. And now I do this. Yes? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
those questions. But I'm going to be
teaching high school juniors one high Shakespeare
play this spring. They've already read
Romeo and Juliet. They'll read Hamlet as seniors. What would recommend given our
current national world order that they would be inheriting? MICHAEL WITMORE: Yeah,
I think it's Othello for a lot of different reasons. I'll give you an
example of something that happened with us. We were lucky to receive
any H funding last year to do something
called cross-talk, which were a series of
community conversations in mosques, temples, churches,
and community centers around racial justice and
religious intolerance. And it's tricky. Those were conversations that
were driven by a community. We could arrive with
a scene from Othello and some historical materials
to talk about how race played, and what it was in
the Renaissance, and what the history
of performing Othello was from the prohibition
of [? ropes ?] and playing in
the United States. But there's a really rich,
and complicated, and sometimes painful history of that play. And I think that for
students who are 17 or 16, that's a conversation that
they're ready to have. But I also think that if
it's a difficult conversation about race, a teacher can't
force that conversation or force certain people to
lead those conversations. And so I think you
should teach that play because it's marvelous for
a lot of other reasons. But I think at our moment
where there's really an unequal recognition of the
unequal distribution of justice and resources in this
country, that is a play that can start that conversation. Yes? AUDIENCE: You spoke
about maxim and also about how the titles of
some of Shakespeare's plays are the maxim that
represent the play. But do you feel that often there
is a double message with those? And then, what do you
think about productions of Shakespeare that
bring out the, sort of, contradictory points? MICHAEL WITMORE: Yeah. Well they're almost
all contradictory. And the thing about a
maxim is seize the day tells you to act quickly. And then, a bird in hand is
better than two in a bush tells you not to do that. For any good maxim,
there's another side. And the Renaissance
understood that, which is why they
practiced arguing two sides of any issue,
Which is a good habit. And I think we
should keep that up. But with Shakespeare's titles
of plays in particular, I am interested in a
wisdom practice that is expressed in things called
lottery books where there's a volvelle or spinner
in the back of the book. And you generate
a random number. And it leads you to a proverb,
which is then connected to an emblem and a poem. And the idea is that you
use chance to put yourself in a unique situation. And the proverb
may apply to you. I am curious about
the possibility that people saw a play
going as a kind of lottery. And there's some comments in
Johnson about how many lots you're buying when you
buy an expensive ticket. But I think that one of the
things you might have thought is, I'm seeing an
advertisement for a play that is a proverb or a maxim. I'm gonna take the bet. And I'll go see the play, and
see if the proverb applies. And I think Shakespeare
is gesturing toward that in the casket
lottery in Merchant of Venice. But it's really
interesting in King Lear where Lear says, what
can you do to draw yourself a third more
bounteous than your sisters? And the word draw there
seems to refer to a lottery. And lotteries had blanks. So you could pull out a proverb,
or you could pull out a blank. And so when she
says nothing, and he says nothing will come
of nothing, speak again, it's a bit like the first
proverb didn't work. And so he's going to
pick out the second one. But I have an entirely
just scholarly interest in whether people
thought of plays and play going as an attempt
to match a maxim to a scene. Now maybe they did,
maybe they didn't. But I think you're absolutely
right that if the public asks us to boil Shakespeare
down into 10 maxims, I would hope they're
contradictory. And in my case, you
know, I do think these are defensible maxims. But by the time
I get to the end, I really want to talk about the
power of theater and the fact that there are certain powerful,
compressed longings that are recognized as, both,
impossible and completely necessary, and that that's
where Shakespeare was going. NEIL SAFIER: Well if
there is one maxim that is not very well in
use or in vogue today, I'm not sure is
Shakespeare said it, but it is to admit
error in public when you have spoken untruth. [LAUGHING] And therefore, publicly,
I will say that it is not this that is the first folio. Although, it may have been
a good idea for us to make you think this the first folio. [LAUGHING] But in fact, this
is the first folio. And as I sat there and I saw
Shakespeare staring at me from the image, I thought, I
should correct my falsehood. This is the second folio, 1632. We Have very much in
Shakespeare's spirit some food and drink. MICHAEL WITMORE: What
revels are in hand? NEIL SAFIER: Exactly. [LAUGHING] Thank you very much. But please, join me in
thanking Michael Witmore. MICHAEL WITMORE:
Thank you very much. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
