Too Close for Comfort

Source: http://www.offwestend.com/index.php/
plays/view/11030

Theatre, like many other forms of entertainment, is supposed to offer an escape from the reality that exists outside of the play house. The actors on stage are supposed to present the audience with a story that doesn't encroach on the real world. When encroachment occurs, viewers must uncomfortably confront their reality being dramatized in front of their eyes. Such dramatizations play on social anxieties, forcing viewers to recognize their fears embodied on the stage.

The Duc of Guise, ordering the massacre.
Source: http://www.thatstheatredarling.com/
2014/03/the-massacre-at-paris-rose-theatre.html

While modern movies like Zero Dark Thirty and The Fifth Estate put current social anxieties about terror activity and surveillance on our screens, it certainly hasn't only been in recent years that entertainment has showcased recent events and imagined realities to explore fears. Christopher Marlowe, ever the anomaly who did not bulk from writing about touchy subjects, took that quality of his works to the absolute extreme with his final play, The Massacre at Paris, which premiered in 1593 only four days before Marlowe was killed. Dramatizing the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, the play graphically depicts the massacre of Huguenots, giving the play one of the highest body counts of Elizabethan drama. The presence of Catherine de Medici on stage only four years after her death brought her threatening political figure back into public imagination. In addition, the figure of the Duc of Guise would also recall the drama of solidifying Elizabeth I's power because of Mary, Queen of Scots's connection to the house through her maternal line. But more importantly, the dramatization of violence towards Protestants because of their religion played on religious anxieties that continued in England. The violence done by Queen Mary against Protestants that earned her the name of Bloody Mary would still have existed in the forefront of public memory, so that seeing such violence enacted on stage would have furthered anxieties of further violence.

A masked boy in the 2011 London riots
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
/news/uknews/crime/8693701/
London-riots-11-year-old-boy-appears-before
-magistrates.html

This month, the first professional production of The Massacre at Paris in 400 years was staged at the Rose Theatre. While the new production did not play on religious anxieties as its original production would have, the suggestion of anarchy in the play certainly plays on current anxieties. The actors wearing masks and destroying set pieces recalled images of the riots in London in 2011 and the riots occurring in Ukraine right now. Marlowe's play presents an image of anarchy and extreme violence, uncontrolled and unconfined.

Winston and O'Brien
Source: http://www.whatsonstage.
com/london-theatre/news/
10-2013/headlong-production-of-1984-comes
-to-almeida-in-fe_32431.html

The production of 1984 at the Almeida Theatre presents an opposite vision, one of totalitarianism and oppression. While all dystopian texts and plays do offer a level of discomfort, since such texts are usually exaggerations of things that already exist in society, the surveillance of 1984 seems especially close in recent months. The production's programme includes quotes from Edward Snowden, pulling on the recent anxieties over surveillance that have been increased with the NSA scandal. Big Brother suddenly becomes a very real threat when we face the possibility that someone is always watching what we do. Thus, in both cases, the plays confront audiences with the problems in our culture and in our human nature that could result in our downfall.

Kings and Common Men in The National Portrait Gallery's "The Great War in Portraits"

Source: http://www.npg.org.uk/

As the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of WWI draws nearer, museums and galleries throughout London are remembering the millions of men who lost their lives in the conflict. The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, entitled "The Great War in Portraits," seeks to showcase both the powerful men of the war and the everyday soldiers. The format of the exhibition places these two types of men immediately next to each other, prestigious portraits next to paintings of dead men. The exhibit attempts to show the entire picture of English involvement in WWI, using a range of mediums and portraits to do so.

"The Rock Drill" by Sir Jacob Epstein
Source: http://theministryofcuriosity.
blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/and-so-it-begins
-great-war-in-portraits.html

The contrasts of the exhibit become incredibly clear as visitors turn into each new room of the exhibit, viewing the portraits and other art objects framed in doorways. A statue of a mutilated figure made of machine parts, entitled "The Rock Drill," greets visitors as they enter the exhibit. This black, stark figure composed of sharps angles and lines sets the desolate tone for the rest of the exhibit. Turning from the statue, a large portrait of King George V dressed in regal finery is the first object seen in the second room. The king is surrounded by images of other rulers on the adjacent walls. A portrait of the Kaiser hangs in the room, but the image of Archduke Franz Ferdinand predominates. While his official portrait may be dwarfed by the image of King George and the Kaiser, his figure appears in other forms, including a miniature attached to a keepsake box, photographs of him and his wife immediately prior to their assassination, and newspaper articles about his death. Interestingly, the room that focuses primarily on the powerful players in the war also includes a photograph of Franz Ferdinand's assassin, suggesting the beginnings of a shift in the exhibit towards showing the power of the common man.

Turning to the third room of the exhibit, the painting framed in the doorway emphasizes the shift in tone; "The Dead Stretcher Bearer" shows exactly the devastation of the war, as well as the irony that impacted many WWI writers in the fact that the image shows a stretcher bearer dead on the stretcher he's supposed to carry. The common soldier and military leaders are divided by a line down the middle of the room, which is physically made by a showcase of postcards from the home front that displayed the idealized image of the war for the women who "worship decorations" and "listen with delight, / By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled" (Sassoon, "Glory of Women," 3, 5-6). The bronze cast of the infantry man's head on the left side of the room contrasts the well-developed, layered portraits of Haig and other military commanders that display all of their military medals and ranks hung on the right side of the room. In this room, the divide in sentiments about the war which led Sassoon to assert, "I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest,"  is physicalized by the dividing line down the middle of the room.

Some of the portraits on the wall of "The Valiant andthe Damned"
Source: http://theministryofcuriosity.
blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/and-so-it-begins-
great-war-in-portraits.html

Turning to the next room, visitors are confronted by a towering portrait of Winston Churchill, but not the typical portrait we think of. He's much younger in this portrait and appears more reserved and unsure. While the portrait of Churchill may not align with the portraits of soldiers, it also isn't the portrait of grandeur like that of King George V. This understated quality of the portrait seems to transition into the wall of photographic portraits of men and women of every race and nationality who were impacted by the war. While the rest of the room includes more paintings of the aftermath of the war, showing both physical and mental injuries from where the soldiers "stood in Hell," this wall of photographs of "the valiant and the damned" captures lives that were lost or irrevocably changed by the war that might have been otherwise overlooked in other WWI exhibitions that appear in London this year. Thus, the exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery captures WWI on all levels of society, from the Western front to the home front, and from the highest powers to the lowest, to show just how great of an impact the war had and continues to have to this day.

The Poem in the Museum 

Nature and the Memory of the Battle of Culloden

The typical site of a Highland Charge

Riding through the Scottish highlands, with mountains stretching up to the sky on all sides and sun glistening off of the snow that decorates the peaks, I couldn't help but feel dwarfed by the vast nature around me. Breathing deeply for what felt like the first time in weeks, I reveled in the crisp air unmarred by pollutants and the sound of songbirds. Passing miles upon miles of fields and pastures, with more sheep and cows than I could ever hope to count, it became entirely clear how important nature is to life in Scotland. On the Tuesday of our tour, the delight I had felt being surrounded by nature was tempered when we entered the solemn site of the Battle of Culloden, a battle that forever changed the way the Scottish people related to nature.

The Culloden Moor

In 1745, Charles Edward Stuart started a rebellion, called the Jacobite Uprising, against the British government in an attempt to reassert the ruling power of the exiled House of Stuart and regain the British throne. Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he was mockingly called for his effeminate appearance, returned to Scotland from France as Prince Regent and met with clans in the highlands to gain their loyalty and access to their warriors. Having gained an army, Charles started to march south down into England, progressing as far as Derbyshire. During their march south, the clansmen met British government forces in multiple skirmishes. In these skirmishes, the clansmen used their deep-seated connection to nature to their advantage, gaining decisive victories over the British troops. In these skirmishes, the Scottish fighters used the mountainous landscape they traversed every day against the British. The men would stand on top of a mountain, luring the British troops into the valley below them. At sunset, when the sun would just touch the top of the mountain they stood on, leaving the British troops blind down in the valley, the Scotsmen would charge down the mountain, cutting down all of the British troops in their way with their large claymores. Their knowledge of their native landscape helped the Scottish troops win decisive victories in the early days of the rebellion. 

The Well of the Dead where the MacGillivray Clan fell

A change in the landscape proved to be the downfall of the Jacobite Uprising. On April 16, 1746, the Scottish clansmen met the British troops of the Duke of Cumberland not on a mountain, as they had in the previous battles won with the Highland charge, but on the flat, marshy Culloden Moor. Left out in the open, without the cover of trees and blazing sunlight, the clansmen were picked off one by one with the British muskets and cannons. The Scottish claymores and broadswords were useless when the clansmen were picked off before they could run three feet through the thick, hindering heather. Entire clans were destroyed, men, women, and children alike, while Bonnie Prince Charlie retreated through the trees, eventually escaping to Italy where he died of alcoholism and syphilis. The flat, heather-filled moor, unlike the highlands the clansmen were used to fighting in, contributed to the deaths of between 1,500 and 2,000 Scottish men, women, and children. 

The cairn for the Battle of Culloden

In the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, the Scottish clans that remained were stripped of their ways of life with the passing of laws that were meant to incorporate the highlands into the British kingdom and punish the rebels who survived. Clansmen were stripped of their lands, leaving them landless and unable to gain a profit if they remained in the highlands. This resulted in a forced exodus of the highlanders into the southern cities, out of the nature that had sustained them for centuries. But their movement into the cities was further complicated by the ruling that the use of the Gallic language was illegal. Since many of the highlanders only knew how to speak Gallic, they were left unable to communicate in the cities they had been forced into. Finally, the Scottish people were stripped of their most important cultural symbol: their tartan. The Scottish people could no longer wear the symbol of their clans and respect that part of their culture, leaving them without language, without their culture, and without the nature that had sustained them for so long. While the Scottish people were eventually granted the right to wear tartan, speak Gallic, and return to the highlands again, the impact of the Battle of Culloden and its aftermath continues throughout Scotland. Clans are still decimated, there are still stones marking mass graves where people think clan leaders fell, and there are still thousands of skeletons being trod over every day as people visit the battlefield. Historical memory and the way people relate to nature and its influence has forever been changed in Scotland because of the Battle of Culloden. But the battle site has proven how important nature still is, even if it did work against the clansmen at Culloden. The memorial cairn for the people who lost their lives has been made out of the rocks of the field and the plant life of the highlands. Thus, even in such a bleak part of Scottish history, the importance of nature continues in the continuation of memory.

From Page to Stage

Attempts to adapt any type of literature into drama can be very difficult and such adaptations run the risk of neglecting vital parts of the source text. Two French novels experienced such a transformation when The Phantom of the Opera's masked murderer threatening to blow up an opera house and Les Miserables' story of the June rebellion were translated into song. I'm not saying anything against these musicals, as I frequently find myself humming their songs under my breath, but one cannot argue that these pieces of theatre stay strictly true to their source material, Leroux's . Until very recently, I didn't think I'd ever find a piece of theatre that did adhere to the novel it is based on.

The Rosemary Branch Theatre
 in Islington
Source: https://twitter.com/rosemarybranch

When I first found out that someone (namely Bryony J. Thompson) had adapted Jane Eyre into a play while browsing the "What's On" section of the Londonist website, I was skeptical. Charlotte Bronte's novel is almost entirely internal, portraying the story through Jane's multi-layered thoughts. I suspected that the play would be something like recent movie adaptations, like Cary Fukunga's adaptation from 2011, in which Rochester and Jane convey their internal struggles through a series of drawn out, angst-ridden silences punctuated by over-the-top facial expressions (Again, don't take this critique as my full opinion of the piece; this film adaptation is one of my favorites). And while movies can hold an audience in those silent moments through closeups, changes in camera angle, and dramatic scoring, the theatre doesn't offer that same level of close intensity. I wondered how successful the play would be, but since it was playing at a fringe theatre in Islington, above a pub, and with cheap concession tickets, I thought I'd give it a try. I figured even if it was bad, the level of acting in London in a bad play would still put it above many of the "good" plays I've seen back home.

Promotional photo for Jane Eyre, adapted by
Bryony J. Thompson
Source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/
About-Thames-Ditton/350182988326159

To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. My skepticism, which had increased slightly when I saw the completely white-washed stage and white-clad actors, completely vanished as I sank into Bronte's words. Without any additions or adaptations to the original language, the cast portrayed Jane's thoughts and opinions almost musically as each company member served as a voice to her thoughts. While it seems that such a set-up would be disorienting and disrupted when it's described in words, the seamless transition between each person maintained the illusion that the words being spoken were Jane's thoughts. The actress playing Jane, Hannah Maddison, reacted as naturally to the voices around her as if she herself had spoken the words, furthering the illusion even more. While some of the choreographed movements were slightly cheesy, what stood out in the play was the fact that Jane's, and therefore Bronte's, voice was the center piece. Without fancy sets or involved costumes, with the lack of color and the subtle music backing the words said on stage, Bronte's words alone created the images for the audience. As Jane described her travel through the heath, a single light on Maddison's upturned face, I could imagine the fields around her, the darkening night, the single light shining off in the distance. Hearing Bronte's words aloud, unedited, unchanged, brought the strength of her words to the forefront. The iconic lines, read over and over by so many, took on a level of emotion when spoken aloud that cannot be conveyed from a page alone. Suddenly, this adaptation to the stage brought elements of the text to light for me that I had never considered before, despite my many readings of Bronte's novel.

From page to map: John Snow's map of the
cholera outbreak of 1854
Source: http://thesleeplessreader.com/2011/11/22/
the-ghost-map-by-johnson/

Watching this play, having my experience of a novel that I love be changed in new, interesting ways, I recognized how similar my experience was to the experiences of those who suddenly approached science differently in the long 19th century. The stories influenced by scientific discovery, such as those by Kipling and Lear, might have changed how some children experienced science. But I found myself thinking more and more of how the situations described in The Ghost Map reflected this idea of taking information or a story in form and adapting it into another form to enhance other's knowledge. Snow, taking his originally written research on cholera, adapted that information into the form of a map, which suddenly brought to light how the epidemic had stemmed from the Broad Street pump. While some people might have seen and grudgingly accepted Snow's ideas on the waterborne transmission of cholera in written form, the sudden confrontation with the same ideas encompassed in the entirely different form of a map brought about greater revelations than Snow's written work alone could have. Thus, adaptations of works, be they from page to stage or from page to map, can bring about enlightening new discoveries.

The Never-Ending Defense of Guinevere

The myth of King Arthur has pervaded Western culture since its origin and recent film makers, television producers, and writers continue the fascination with this legend. While the portrayals of Arthur are relatively similar in such adaptations, as the ruggedly handsome king who skillfully leads his kingdom and dies gloriously in battle, opinions continue to be split on Guinevere. William Morris attempts to pierce through this veil in his "Defense of Guenevere" by finally giving Guenevere her own voice.

Morgan le Fay on the door
at Two Temple Place

Guinevere on the door at Two
Temple Place

Since the story's creation, Guinevere's primary label has been that of an adulteress whose infidelity brought down a kingdom. The shaming of Guinevere inherent in many adaptations of the story finds its way into artistic renditions of the Arthurian myth, in which she is portrayed either with Lancelot or alone in physically questionable stances. On a door in the upper level of Two Temple Place, nine Arthurian women are gilded on the wood. Guinevere appears in the middle of the door, lounging on a throne. She leans forward in the image, resting her chin on her hand. In this stance, with her arms open, her entire body is visible, her breasts and open legs defined through the fabric of her dress. Contrasting this image, Morgan le Fay, the typical villain in the later adaptations of the myth, appears demurely playing aharp, her arm crossed over her body to conceal her breasts. Looking at these images alone, Guinevere's promiscuity, suggested by her open, revealing stance, seems to supersede any of Morgan's villainy, making her into the true enemy of the legend.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Arthur's Tomb
Source: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/
highlights/highlight_objects/pd/d/rossetti,_arthurs_tomb.aspx

Depictions of Guinevere with Lancelot only add to the shame consistently placed on her in adaptations of the Arthurian myth. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with William Morris, tries in a different manner to defend Guinevere in his watercolour, Arthur's Tomb. In this piece, Lancelot meets Guinevere over the tomb of her fallen husband, attempting to kiss her while leaning over Arthur's effigy. Guinevere raises her hand to stop him, almost in a show of respect for her dead husband. Regardless of this refusal, Guinevere's fallen state is alluded to by her encasement in shadow. Rossetti depicts a regretful Guinevere after Arthur has died, shunning her sexuality as she shuns Lancelot.

As Morris's "Guenevere"defends herself against her accuser Gauwaine, she gradually accepts and possesses her sexuality. After describing Lancelot kissing her in the garden, she adds, "I scarce dare talk of the remembered bliss," refusing to call their meeting anything degrading that her accusers would expect her to use in her defense. She asks after this recollection of bliss, "After that day why is it Guenevere grieves?" With this question, Guenevere not only admits to her affair with Lancelot, but questions why she should be grieved by it, when their love seems natural to her. Not only does Guenevere rise to defend herself in Morris's poem, she also draws on a sort of communion of women by recalling Morgan le Fay, another woman executed for adultery. She calls to Guawaine, "Remember in what grave your mother sleeps, / Buried in some place far down in the south, / Men are forgetting as I speak to you." This exclamation aligns Guenevere with Morgan, the two "villains" of the story, but it also betrays some of Guenevere's own anxieties: her fear of men "forgetting" her. She calls herself "a great queen," but recognizes her execution will result in her obliteration from memory. Her rescue at the last minute by Launcelot riding up on a "roan charger" ensures that the obliteration she feared will not occur, and she is left to be immortalized by poets like Morris.

Guinevere (Kiera Knightly) in King Arthur
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/
culturepicturegalleries/8737427/Venice-Film-
Festival-Keira-Knightleys-career-in-pictures.html?image=6

Guinevere (Angel Coulby) and Lancelot (Santiago Cabrera)
in the BBC's Merlin
Source: http://www.boomtron.com/2010/04/
merlin-lancelot-and-guinevere-2-04-review/gwen/

While Morris does give Guinevere a voice in his poem, he certainly doesn't write a Guinevere who definitively owns or disowns her infidelity as she continually tries to draw pity from the men who seek to execute her. The scattered nature of her defense suggests that Morris himself did not want to come to a conclusion about the queen. This tendency has been reflected in recent movie and television adaptations of the Arthurian myth. In the movie King Arthur, Clive Owen's Arthur, a Roman calvary officer, captures Kiera Knightly's Guinevere, a Pict warrior princess. The movie does not seek to explore the consequences of Guinevere's affair with Lancelot after she is married to Arthur. Instead, the affair occurs prior to a war with the Saxons in which Lancelot is killed, conveniently paving the way for a marriage between Arthur and Guinevere to unite the Romans and the Britons and usher in the golden age of Albion. In the slightly more family-friendly recent adaptation, the BBC's Merlin, the show entirely avoids demonizing Guinevere by making Morgana (Morgan le Fey in this version) entirely responsible. Morgana enchants Lancelot and Guinevere so that they will be seen together on the night before Guinevere's marriage to Arthur. While Arthur's initial reaction is harsh (he banishes Guinevere from Camelot), Merlin quickly discovers that everything was Morgana's fault and fixes everything. Both of these versions show the continued discomfort with portraying Guinevere's story. As our culture moves forward, hopefully out of the days of shaming women, the depictions of Guinevere as a fallen woman no longer seem apt, but the recent choices to sweep Guinevere's story under the rug also give a disservice to her character. Perhaps what Guinevere needs now is another William Morris, someone who will give her a voice and make her into the queen who doesn't need Launcelot to ride up on his charger and save her.

Wonder at Our Quaint Spirits

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the lovers leave the strictures of the Athens court by entering into the wild, unrestrained forest ruled by mischievous fairies. In this space, they can unleashed their basest passions, turning love to its most animalistic form. In the forest, Helena asks Demetrius to use her as his "spaniel," to beat her as he will. The lovers fall into chaos under the effects of the flower love-in-idleness, ruled by their basest instincts as their responses turn to hysterical violence. To superimpose Freud onto the play, the lovers act as the id only in the forest, unrestrained by the superego. Instinct and desire alone rule the lovers in the wood.

Titania (James Tucker) listing the ills in nature caused
by the fight between her and Oberon
Source: http://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/
visiting-productions/midsummer-nights-dream-propeller

Even if the lovers are unrestrained in the forest, the forest is still ruled by the mischievous fairies who wreck havoc on the humans who stray into their domain. But in the Propeller Theatre Company's production of the comedy, the fairies don't just rule over the forest, they are an inherent part of it. On a stage largely striped of color and props, the company members are the ones who have to create the environment of the forest, melding into the setting and producing the sights and sounds of a wild landscape. Titania emphasizes the fairies' control of nature with her explanation that the row between her and her husband, Oberon, has interrupted the cycles of nature, as "hoary-headed frosts / Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose / And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown / An odorous chaplet of summer buds / Is, as in mockery, set" (II.i). The seasons dissolve into dangerous chaos and disorder, plaguing the humans with "contagious fogs," overflowing rivers, and rotting harvests, all because of the disorder between Titania and Oberon. They become the controllers and the disrupters of the natural world.

Oberon (Darrell Brochis) with the flower love-in-idleness
Source: http://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/
visiting-productions/midsummer-nights-dream-propeller

As the "parents" of this "progeny of evils," the fairy royals and their court become essential parts of the nature of the stage. Each scene is framed by fairies observing from the sidelines. Most often, the fairy observing is Puck, laughing in delight at the disorder he creates. But some of the fairies occupy a more central space in the natural scenes. In making himself invisible, Oberon can become a more active participant in the confrontation between Demetrius and Helena, without betraying his presence. When Demetrius pushes Helena to the ground, Oberon begins to move towards Demetrius as if to defend Helena. Sensing the movement near him, Demetrius reacts to Oberon's "unseen" presence, looking through the empty air towards the fairy king's form. In a more literal instance of the fairies becoming nature on the stage, when Titania is laid to rest by her attendants, draped in a dust cloth in the middle of the stage, her sleeping form literally becomes the "dank and dirty ground" upon which Hermia rests.

Puck (Joseph Chance) and the company of fairies
Source: http://propeller.org.uk/productions/
a-midsummer-nights-dream-and-the-comedy-of-errors/about-the-show

The fairies standing on the sidelines of the stage also create the sounds of the forest scene, becoming the soundscape for the play. Reedy harmonicas, percussion instruments, and other sound effect instruments become birdsong, frogs croaking, and the wind rustling through the trees. The fairies also play a vital role in creating the disorienting sounds of the forest that drive the lovers into further confusion. Veiled behind the stage's netting, the fairies whisper around Hermia as she struggles through her nightmare, increasing the terror of her dream. Puck finds great enjoyment in ventriloquizing around Lysander and Demetrius in the darkness of the wood, drawing them towards the clearing with the sound of what they think is their enemy's voice. Thus, the sounds created by the fairies enhance the disorder of the imagined natural space, pushing the lovers into hysterics before Oberon and Puck right the havoc their magic has wrought.

Puck (Joseph Chance) and Oberon (Darrell Brochis)
Source: https://secure.theatreroyalnorwich.co.uk/OnlineCATH/
default.asp?doWork::WScontent::load
Article=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle:
:article_id=EEACB47F-3B9A-47BB-AFFE-9E1CD
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After the revels of the laughable "Pyramus and Thisbe" come to an end, it seems only fitting that the fairies should enter into the controlled space of the court. The lovers charge into the natural space dominated by the fairies in Act 2, arguably wrecking as much havoc on the fairies' world as the fairies wreck on them. Puck and Oberon are the two forces of the wood who ensure that by the end of the play, "Jack shall have Jill." Let to their own devices, the lovers would have ripped each other apart, making Oberon's final intervention following Puck's mistake necessary. The natural discord Titania speaks of is mirrored by the lovers, so that, ultimately, once Oberon and Titania reconcile, the natural world can be righted and the lovers can end up where their supposed to be. The happy ending for the lovers hinges on the status of the relationship between the fairy king and queen rooted so deeply in nature. Thus, when Oberon and Titania emerge on the upper ledge of the stage, ringing the bell for midnight, their presence in the court brings natural concord into the controlled, human space, ushering the couples into their wedding chambers and blessing the issue of their consummations. The righting of nature, embodied in the rectified relationship between Titania and Oberon, allows for happy endings and the hope of new life for the lovers.

Vampires and Superheroines

During most of my day yesterday I learned about two cultural representations that have been used to imagine various scenarios that could fundamentally alter the fabric of our society. I spent my morning and afternoon at an academic symposium about the figure of the vampire at Goldsmiths College and my evening at a screening of a documentary about the superheroine figure. While these two creations seem to be entirely different, I noticed that both served as a means for representing what is considered unusual and strange, such as an unexplained series of deaths or a strong female, in a manner that allowed for the exploration of both societal anxieties and desires. 

Bela Lugosi's Dracula
Source: https://newscenter.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/
news.aspx?s=74135

Vampires, despite their recent romanticization, were originally figures in folklore that were meant to explain the effects of decomposition on the body and any sudden mass deaths. Not understanding that bodies bloat after death or that rigor mortis will eventually wear off, people would look at bodies in various states of decomposition and think that the physical changes that occurred to the body after death meant that the person must still be alive in some form. If a large number of deaths had occurred recently, people would look at this corpse that seemed too alive, conclude that he or she was a vampire, and explain away the deaths after using various means to dispose of the offending vampire. In a society without the explanations of modern medicine, vampires became a way to explain grave illnesses like tuberculosis and the plague. But as modern medicine developed, the cultural figure of the vampire had to change. As vampires left the realm of spoken folklore and entered into literature and later into film and television, science suddenly became more and more tied with the fanged figures. The new social anxieties that science brought with it worked their way into the vampire story. The threat of nuclear and biological warfare brought with it the idea that vampires were humans who had been infected with a contagion released by an enemy or who had been mutated by the aftereffects of a bomb. The anxieties about genetic manipulation were played upon with the idea that vampires could be created by changing human DNA. In the modern vampire stories that don't involve one hundred year olds going back to high school, there is a constant emphasis on trying and failing to find a cure for vampirism, playing on the societal fear of an incurable, destructive disease. The modern vampire thus serves as an imagined, inhuman figure on whom authors and film makers can play out societal anxieties while using the vampire's otherness to keep the implications of such imaginings divorced from human experience. 

Wonder Woman as she originally appeared in 1941
Source: http://www.comicvine.com/forums/
gen-discussion-1/why-is-wonder-woman
-so-awesome-1517108/

In contrast to representing societal anxieties, the figure of the superheroine represented the societal desires of at least half of the population. In a genre dominated by hyper masculine superheroes, the creation of Wonder Woman in the 1940s suddenly introduced concepts of both a strong female character capable of saving lives and a matriarchal society on Paradise Island. While Wonder Woman appeared and continues to appear highly sexualized in her cleavage bearing leotard, the fact that she could fight off the bad guys herself makes her into an empowering figure. She became a greater symbol of female empowerment when Gloria Steinem and the other women working at Ms. Magazine put her on the cover of their first issue and proceeded to demand that DC Comics make her character, which took a hit in the 1950s when women returned to the home after WWII, back into the butt-kicking woman she was at her creation. From Wonder Woman came other strong female characters, both in other comics and in other media forms. The two parts of my day intersected when the film claimed that the precedent set up by Wonder Woman influenced the creation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shown on the screen confidently stabbing a vampire with a stake. Interviews with women off the streets reflected a desire to be as strong as the superheroines on the page or the screen. Thus, these strong female characters become reflections of the desire for greater female empowerment, inspiring girls and women to be their own superheroines. 

On the surface, vampires and superheroines don't seem connected at all, unless a superheroine is killing a vampire. But if we look at the purpose of their creation, we can see that they're actually quite similar. Both are superhuman creations meant to play out cultural scenarios within the imaginative space of media. They allow humans to examine their anxieties and desires from a safe distance, in the hopes that such examination can either help attain or avoid the ends that such figures reach. 

Bridging the Gap Between Poetry and Art

When we were first given the prompt for the pairing presentation, I was daunted by the prospect of trying to draw connections between two seemingly disparate art forms, poetry and visual art. The fact that we could pair any piece of art with any poem certainly didn't make me feel any more comfortable with the project. My group sat around the kitchen table in my flat flipping through our Norton anthologies and looking through the websites of the many art galleries desperately trying to come up with a pairing. And then Joanne read the first poem by Thomas Hardy, "Hap", in the Norton and we knew that we had found our poem. It was an moment of almost instant agreement. Not long after, Joanne also found the painting Totes Meer by Paul Nash on the Tate Britain's website and we had our pairing. We assigned research roles and went back to writing blog posts, thinking that the hardest part of the project was over.

I realized very quickly that I was mistaken. Having to connect a poem written in the late 1860s when Hardy was a disenchanted young man living in London to a painting completed during WWII by a middle aged Nash who was working for the government to create propaganda paintings was an incredibly difficult task. When I had to analyze text and image side by side in previous classes, I was always analyzing two pieces that were meant to be paired with each other because I was viewing illustrations created for that text. I felt out of my depth analyzing two pieces that had not been specifically intended to be paired together.

I found that getting as close to the painting and the poem as I could helped in creating connections between the two pieces. Looking closely at minute details in the painting, such as the black trees on the horizon line or the light blue paint used on the plane wheel, and in the poem, such as the use of a dash and ellipsis or the choice to not capitalize "god", I could dig into the significances of those choices and begin to see how those significances were similar between the two pieces. Analysis of the small details moved me towards larger, overarching themes evident in both Hardy's poem and Nash's painting.

Finding these common themes reinforced the ideas asserted by Paul Fussell in his book The Great War and Modern Memory that Thomas Hardy was a "clairvoyant" who anticipated the "terrible irony" that would define British writers' treatment of the Great War. Even Hardy's early poetry contained the dark, despairing images that would appear later in both writings about and artwork of the world wars. For that reason, as we worked on the presentation I realized that even if these two pieces came from two different time periods from men at different places in their lives who had different purposes in mind for their works, the connections between them were valid and valuable. The connections served as a means to bridge the gap between these different time periods, bringing these two British artists together in an appreciation of their individual interpretations of the common experience of mortality and chance.

The Poem in the Museum 

Archiving Everyday History

Boxes of documents awaiting my arrival to
the Reading Room

In the five weeks that I have been in London, I have already been to many museums and I'm sure I will go to many more before I head back to the States. Each museum offers a unique perspective on different aspects of life. The British Museum simply blows its visitors away with the monumental artifacts it houses. It's hard not to be amazed standing in front of the Elgin marbles, the Rosetta stone, the statue of Rameses II, and an Easter Island head. My inner child giddily took in the dinosaur skeletons in the Natural History Museum and the spacecraft housed in the Science Museum. But the museums we've visited have only showcased the exceptional members of society and the incredible artifacts of civilizations past and present. To find the everyday history of the people who haven't found their ways into the city's major museums, I had to travel to the National Archives.

I found him!

My main reason for traveling to the archives was to research the owner of the fever idol at 2 Temple Place that my group chose for the midterm project. Since the idol's placard in the museum only gave the owner's name and the ship he was serving on when he procured the idol, I needed to do some digging. Heading to the National Archives website, I found the naval records of Arthur R. Hulbert, commander in the Royal Navy and commanding officer on the HMS Proserpine when the fever idol came on board in 1905. But that was the only record on his that had been digitized. To find anything about the work he had done and try to figure out how he gained ownership of the idol, I needed to actually go to the Archives and request documents.

The prospect of getting to work in the National Archives excited me. I worked briefly in the Oberlin archives last spring for a project in Carol Lasser's First Wave American Feminism class and I can honestly say that that was the most fun I'd ever had on an assignment at Oberlin. Going to the United Kingdom's National Archives, with its records on millions and millions of people, was a major step up from Oberlin's small but rich collections.

Supporting the book with foam
wedges

After I registered for my reader's pass, ordered my documents, and made it through security and into the reading room, I was struck by how many different types of people were there, all tied together by their research into the past. I sat next to a fellow American university student, an elderly couple sat at the table next to mine, a mother and daughter looked at documents through a document camera at the other side of the room, and two members of the British army sat at the table behind me. Everyone looked at various different types of documents--letters, large books, maps, scrolls, photos, even sketches--all looking at different parts of the past. The number of lives that were being recalled in that reading room that might have otherwise gone unnoticed in the storage rooms of the Archives astounded me.

How to make a rat bomb

Fabric designed by Vanessa Bell,Virginia Woolf's sister

The exhibition room at the Archives also showcased other lives that would have gone unremembered, as well as events that might not have been as well documented in other museums. An exhibit on spies and espionage during WWII featured the pictures and names of forty British spies who were executed after they tried to escape from a Polish POW camp. The exhibit also featured information on female spies who had not previously been recognized, and instruction sheets used by spies to make bombs out of dead rats (I kid you not). The exhibit also included more obscure records from famous British citizens, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, that would not be the usual fare for the standard museum. These exhibits give the museum treatment to people and objects that would not have been otherwise unrecognized.

The National Archives offer a unique look into the everyday culture of the United Kingdom. With census records, military and political correspondences, court documents, education records, fabric samples, newspapers, and hundreds of other types of records, the Archives captures and preserves the history of ordinary men and women, the people who would marvel at the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin marbles.

Physical Divinity

As tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism rose throughout the Protestant Reformation, artists and poets organized themselves along religious lines. Catholic artists such as Peter Paul Rubens began creating Counter-Reformation altarpieces, while John Donne, an Anglican and later the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, wrote a series of religious sonnets that describe his means of connecting with God. Both of these artists, despite their religious differences, approached religion through physicality, using more understandable conceptions of physicality to ask questions of and hypothesize about the metaphysical aspects of divinity.

For John Paul Rubens, the creation of Counter-Reformation altarpieces allowed for the reimagination of Old Testament stories. Rubens created images of religious figures as distinctly, voluptuously human, engaged in distinctly human activities. His use of lighting on his figures gives them an otherworldly glow, however, maintaining their distance from the painting's viewers. In his Samson and Delilah, Rubens depicts Samson with carefully formed planes of muscle, with veins and sinews visible among the lines of muscle. While the size of his physical stature may separate Samson from the common viewer, his precarious position sleeping in Delilah's lap lowers him back onto the plane of humanity. The shearing of his hair lowers him further to the decimated state he occupies in the biblical story. Delilah's naked breasts slip out of her dress as her man cuts Samson's hair, looking down at the man sleeping on her lap dressed in bright red cloth. Her own golden hair spill over her shoulder, giving her an unkempt look. The almost wild appearance of Delilah and the overtly physical and sexual qualities of her figure places her once again in the position of temptress, an archetype she occupies throughout art. But even in this extremely physical painting, the figures are lit with a bright light coming from the left side of the painting, giving them an almost other-worldly glow. The skin of Delilah's throat, shoulders, and breast appear ivory next to the stark white of her sleeves, while the light glances off of the ridges of Samson's muscles, making his skin appear almost golden. Thus, Rubens uses the lighting in the painting to show the figures' religious importance even in their fully physical positions in this painting. The religious figures depicted in this painting are fully physicalized to tie the religion to physicality, in an attempt to influence the viewers' relation to the divine. 

The Reformation's stance against the lavish decorations common in Catholicism meant that Protestant painters could not depict religious figures in the same way that Catholic painters like Rubens could. For that reason, the depiction of physicality in relation to Protestantism was found more often in words and sermons than in paintings or stained glass. John Donne was one such writer who used the language of physicality to describe his relationship with the "three-personed God." Drawing on the language of his highly physical secular poetry, which he abandoned after taking religious orders, Donne wrote sonnets like his "Holy Sonnet 14" that physicalized his relationship with God. In this sonnet, Donne asks God to "batter [his] heart" in the hope that he "may rise, and stand." He asks God, "bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new," characterizing the Christian rebirth in terms of extreme physical change. Donne draws on the language of humanity beings Christ's bride, saying that he is "betrothed unto [God's] enemy" and begging God, "Divorce me, untie or break that knot again." His language becomes more forceful when he asks God, "Take me to you, imprison me," and finally becomes sexualized when he remarks, "for I, / [...] never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me." This sexualized language of God "ravishing" Donne completely physicalizes the divine relationship to a point that not even the sexualization of religious figures in painting can, humanizing the divine relationship in a manner that still emphasizes the power of God over human life.

The Poem in the Museum

The Poem in Nature

A painting inspired by Stourhead Gardens.
Source: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stourhead/history/

When the gardens of the Stourhead estate were opened in the 1750s, a magazine described them as "a living work of art." With its sprawling vistas and carefully constructed views, the gardens were meant to look like something out of a landscape painting. As numerous examples show, the gardens often served as inspiration for many paintings.

Walking up the path to the Temple of Apollo, though, you can see that paintings were not the only type art Henry Hoare II sought to evoke in his gardens. With the Greek and Roman temples, the gardens harken back to the stories of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, placing the whimsy and mystery of pagan myths among the landscape of the English countryside. The wooden signs that decorate the path, though, bring the literature evoked up into a time more contemporary with the creation of the gardens, the 18th century. Each sign features an excerpt from Alexander Pope's "Epistles to Several People: Epistle IV." Pope held a great respect for the classics, just as Hoare did, evoking classic authors and philosophers throughout his "An Essay on Criticism"and remarking that the "Imitation of the ancients" is the ultimate standard for taste. For Pope, the highest form of literature involves imitating the ancient writers, just as for Hoare, the highest form of architecture and aesthetic design involves imitating the ancient architects and artists. It thus seems only logical that the contemporary poet who would be evoked in this celebration of the ancient world is a one who shares Hoare's ideals.

Pope wrote the epistle that adorns the signs leading up to the temple of Apollo as a commemoration of another garden, the Stowe gardens designed by Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington. Boyle was considered largely responsible for developing the new taste in gardening and architecture in the early 18th century, which suggests that Boyle may have influenced the Stourhead gardens as well. Thus, the inclusion of Pope's poem to Boyle in the Stourhead garden layers the garden's dedication to include both ancient and contemporary influences on aesthetics.

The portion of Pope's poem that is excerpted on the path to the point in the garden with one of the most breathtaking views in the entire site offers a greater dedication, though, to the overarching force that inspired the gardens: nature. Each sign stands next to another outstanding point of view overlooking the lake and reminds the viewer that "in all, let Nature never be forgot." Pope's words remind one to "consult the Genius of the Place in all," so that each human design on nature will still correspond with the "Genius" of nature. Pope emphasizes how nature will change "th'intending Lines" of the human designers, taking on the role of the ultimate artist who "paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs." Thus, looking down from the Temple of Apollo over the views and vistas of the Stourhead gardens, one sees Nature presiding over the human design of the garden, working with and through that design to showcase its beauty.