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The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/28/20, 11(15 PM Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/28/20, 11(15 PM ISSN 1554-6985 VOLUME VII · (/current) NUMBER 1 SPRING/SUMMER 2012 (/previous) EDITED BY (/about) Christy Desmet and Sujata (/archive) Iyengar CONTENTS Shakespeare, Humanity Indicators, and the Seven Deadly Sins Peter (/783091/show) (pdf) (/783091/pdf) Holland Shakespeare in Stained Glass: The Shakespeare Memorials of Brian Southwark Cathedral and "Local" Bardolatry (/783058/show) Walsh (pdf) (/783058/pdf) Regula Hamlet's Soliloquy: An Eighteenth-Century Genre Hohl (/783057/show) (pdf) (/783057/pdf) Trillini Playing the Fool with Shakespeare: Festivity, Falsity, and Feste Giselle in Twelfth Night and King of the Masquerade (/783056/show) Rampaul (pdf) (/783056/pdf) B OOK REVIEWS Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling Julie and Lyric Plots, by Barbara L. Estrin (/783054/show) (pdf) Sanders (/783054/pdf) http://borrowers.uga.edu/7163/toc Page 1 of 2 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/28/20, 11(15 PM The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory, edited Lisa by Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann (/783055/show) (pdf) Bolding (/783055/pdf) C ONTRIBUTORS Contributors (/783042/show) (pdf) (/783042/pdf) © Borrowers and Lenders 2005-2020 http://borrowers.uga.edu/7163/toc Page 2 of 2 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/28/20, 11(15 PM Shakespeare, Humanity Indicators, and the Seven Deadly Sins (/current) PETER HOLLAND, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME ABSTRACT | I | II | III | IV | V | NOTES | REFERENCES (/previous) (/about) ABSTRACT Given the current obsession in universities with "Humanities Indicators," this article proposes a new (/archive) measure for Shakespeare studies: "humanity indicators." It traces the possibilities for such measurement of using different senses of "humanity" derived from the OED by examining three different versions of Shakespeare in popular and elite culture: an episode of Doctor Who in which the Doctor meets Shakespeare (The Shakespeare Code, 2007); an opera in which a version of Macbeth is sung by baboons (The Okavango Macbeth, 2009); and the graphic novel by Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col, Kill Shakespeare (2010-11). Finally, it turns to the implications for Shakespeare studies of the brutal and racist state law in Arizona that has led to the closure of Mexican-American Studies in schools across the state. In the last while, the obsession among universities in the U.S., in a mood reminiscent of the "decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed" (Luke 2.1), is that anything and everything must be counted.1 Humanities indicators are particularly odd since, though scientists and social scientists know exactly how to count output, dissemination, and publication, no one has had much idea how to count what is done in the narrowly-defined humanities and even less idea how to count paintings, lighting designs, or concerts in disciplines in the arts that may or may not be part of the humanities. As Stefan Collini commented presciently in 1989, "Not everything that counts can be counted" (Collini 2012, 20). As early as 1998, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences set up its "Initiative for Humanities and Culture" because "the Academy recognized that the humanities are the only disciplines that lack reliable, comprehensive, and consistently updated statistical data necessary to chart trends and draw conclusions" (Humanities Resource Center Online, 2009). Rather than considering that there may be good reasons, inherent in the nature of the humanities, why these disciplines are not amenable to statistical data collection, the Academy has worked with assorted other bodies, like the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the http://borrowers.uga.edu/783091/show Page 1 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/28/20, 11(15 PM Humanities, "to develop an infrastructure for the compilation, analysis and publication of comprehensive trend data about the humanities"; and in case anyone is wondering what the basis for this urgent need to spend millions of dollars developing such an infrastructure might be, the AAAS explains that "the Humanities Indicators . is [sic] modeled after the Science and Engineering Indicators published biennially by the National Science Board." We may not be the sciences and engineering, but we can try. Too many of us have suffered under such modeling. One of the aspects of this work that I find continually startling is the deafness, the sheer inability to hear the implications of the language and acronyms into which this project slips. So the massive 2002 report of the AAAS's initiative was called Making the Humanities Count: The Importance of Data (Solow et al. 2002), with no one apparently alert to whether the coercive tone of "making" was to be enforced on a society unaware that the humanities mattered or on the humanities themselves, now to be compelled to spend thousands of hours counting anything and everything. Did no one find it odd that the acronym for the Humanities Indicators Prototype used pervasively in the Project's own reports is HIP? As if there is anything hip, let alone cool about it. As if. One segment of the HIP, part five of the reports on the data gathered in, for instance, its survey of 1400 humanities departments, after segments on "undergraduate and graduate education in the humanities" and "humanities funding and research," is called "The Humanities in American Life," known as HAL — and producing phrases like this from Julie Ellison in her account of "This American Life: How are the Humanities Public?": "encountering the HAL portion of the HIP is like selecting the 'hybrid' view in Google Maps" (Ellison 2009, 1). HAL might suggest to us a certain prince whose journey to rule we follow attentively and anxiously — I leave it to you, when you are bored with this article, to work out what the acronyms HARRY and HENRY might stand for, or, for the really ambitious, FALSTAFF. But HAL might also suggest the rogue computer of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose dedication to the mission's success and increasing recognition of the malign influence of human error on that mission leads to its breaking the first of Asimov's three laws of robotics and seeking to eliminate the humans on the spaceship. The HAL part of HIP might then be seen as unintentionally imagining an American life in which the humanities would exist without the inconvenience of humans. My purpose is not to play easy games with factors in our academic activities that, in the middle of the night and through most of our waking hours too, send most of us into unremitting panic. Instead, I want to try an indirection by which we might find directions out. I propose instead that a more reasonable focus would be on how to count humanity, rather than the humanities, how to understand humanity indicators. And, being endlessly intrigued by the stranger manifestations of Shakespeare in our popular and not so popular cultures, I use four examples of him and what he might represent in such cultures as test cases. I humanity, n. II. Sense relating to human adj. 3. a. The condition, quality, or fact of being human; human faculties, attributes, or characteristics collectively; human nature. (OED) http://borrowers.uga.edu/783091/show Page 2 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/28/20, 11(15 PM Shakespeare's army of biographers has unaccountably ignored an extraordinary first-hand account of the opening night of Love's Labour's Lost, provided by a doctor who attended it. At the end of the performance, it appears, Shakespeare was called out of the tiring-house, where he had been watching the performance, by repeated cries of "Author, author" from the capacity crowd at the recently- opened Globe in 1599. The evidence puts the conventional dating of the play in question, making it significantly later than has usually been argued and making one wonder why it didn't appear in James Shapiro's micro-biography (Shapiro 2006). And my comment on "opening night" was not a slip for "afternoon" — the performance does indeed appear to have taken place at night. It also adds fuel to the argument about the conceptualization of authorship in the period, the extent to which an author-function was crucial to reception, especially as this would appear to be the first time that playgoers called for the playwright at a premiere by calling "Author" — Jeffrey Masten and Jeffrey Knapp might be particularly interested in this. But what is most remarkable of all is the doctor's description of Shakespeare and his humanity. Since even more surprising than the existence of the account is the existence of film of the event, I should allow you to hear what the Doctor has to say. 0:00 / 1:52 1x This is from The Shakespeare Code, an episode of Doctor Who, written by Gareth Roberts and first broadcast in 2007. Roberts was advised on the project by the scholar of early modern theater Martin Wiggins, thereby explaining the presence of a character called Wiggins in the cast, as well as the remarkable awareness of current scholarly debate mockingly present in this and other sequences. Shakespeare as celebrity, with a hint of rock-star, makes his very self-satisfied entrance as mocking abuser of his fans — and they love it. Martha's wry comment may stand for that desire to know and fear of knowing, the gap between the character the culture creates and the individual who cannot http://borrowers.uga.edu/783091/show Page 3 of 23 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 2/28/20, 11(15 PM possibly adequately be that myth, a sense here of the limits that reality always imposes.
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