Mary Mitchel

            On Monday after midnight before going to sleep I looked for bedbugs and found none. So that's none since Friday morning and three since September 1. 

            I was able to raise my arm straight up in the air most of the times I tried during yoga. I can now balance on both arms in the crow pose but not the side crow where I have to put my weight on one arm. I still can't do anything that involves putting weight on my right elbow. 

            Before song practice I realized I'd forgotten yesterday to change my high E string and so I played without it. 

            I worked out the chords to most of "La p'tite Agathe" by Serge Gainsbourg. The singer isn't really singing more than E but the band seems to be using three or four chords and so I still need to work out the instrumental. 

            Before 9:00 I started trying to log onto the Zoom lecture for my Shakespeare course. We didn't use Zoom last year and so it's new to me. First I had to download Zoom but then typed in the wrong password. I finally went on Quercus and found the right one but I was ten minutes late and the professor was already discussing Othello. I had hoped everyone else would be late but there were 111 students in the lecture at the time. I guess they already had Zoom accounts and knew their way around the application. 

            Professor Lopez was discussing the relationship between Desdemona and Amilia and how it is reflected in their conversation about the missing handkerchief. Desdemona asks Amilia if she knows where the handkerchief is and she lies. Desdemona says she is glad Othello is not jealous because he would be upset over the handkerchief. Amilia is surprised because she thinks all men are by nature jealous. Othello arrives after having been primed about the handkerchief by Amilia's husband Iago. He asks Desdemona for the handkerchief. She does not want to give in to his emotional state. She equivocates and he gets angry and gives her a warning before leaving. Amilia doesn't tell Desdemona that her husband might know the whereabouts of the handkerchief. Instead she turns against Desdemona and points out that Othello was jealous after all. No word about the handkerchief passes between them for the rest of the play. Amilia only speaks of it when Othello brings it up after killing Desdemona. She then tells him he is stupid for the conclusions to which he came. 

            Why does Amilia withhold information about the handkerchief? Why does she speak at the end as if it is the first time she'd heard of the handkerchief? These are the kinds of problems that Shakepeare presents. 

           He creates unsettling tensions between what characters say and what they do. These puzzles are rarely solveable by evidence or by figuring them out through what the characters say. One cannot trace the solutions forensically. 

            In every dense system of relations between images, phrases, words and sounds problematic relations must be interpreted in multiple frames of reference simultaneously. 

            In this course we will try to introduce problems and provide tools to adjust to their complexity. A key word is "relational". The movement of parts depends on other parts always moving at the same time. Shakespeare is interested in social relations as shaped by social context. Like any dramatist or novelist he is interested in constructing entertainment and representing complex situations between humans. The relevant social contexts to some extent require historical explanations. 

            Amilia is a servant and this service relationship is a primary frame for understanding her interractions with Desdemona. Amilia speaks as if she is Desdemona's friend and they do have some things in common such as being women but they are primarily mistress and servant. However Amilia is not a meanial servant but rather a waiting gentlewoman in privileged service to a lady because Desdemona must be served by someone refined. But Amilia is also a new servant who did not know Desdemona before the play began and they are attempting to define their new relationship. Amilia tries to close the distance by offering herself as a confidante while Desdemona seeks to widen the gap. Audiences of that era understood this kind of relationship better than we would. 

            Shakespeare is a negative dramatist. There is a famous phrase from Keats which says Shakespeare is a poet of enormous negative capability. Capable of being in uncertainties without irritably reaching after facts. He creates as many doubts as he can without feeling obliged to resolve the tension. he is capable of keeping the audience in uncertainty. It may not be annoying for some to reach for facts and so they may not agree. 

            In the quote from a letter to his brother Keats is actually not referring only to Shakespeare but using him as an example of how the greatest writers make use of negative capability: "It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." 

            Shakespeare is also negative in another sense. He is not an affirmative dramatist and is perhaps not interested in affirming anything. Most writers are affirmative. 

            There are three modes of affirmative criticism: moral, critical and political. 

            The moral mode tends to take its cue from the problems of his plays, which resolve in generic and predictable ways. In his comedies problems around sex, class, family, economic status and mistaken identity are resolved to recover the threatened social order. Everything is reaffirmed to fit the way it is expected and the action is rounded out so that for example everyone marries the right person.

            In his tragedies problems around sex, politics and ambition are usually resolved and social order repaired through violence. In Othello after Desdemona is murdered the people responsible are punished and the people not responsible are rewarded. Shakespeare is working through problems to affirm the social order. But the social order is not one that we would recognize. Monarchy, patriarchy and coupling at odds with freedom are not entirely our world anymore. It may not even have been Shakespeare's world and he may have been exaggerating. 

            The critical mode of affirmative criticism looks at the differences between Shakespeare's world and our own. We zero in on what makes us uncomfortable. They are the object of the plays. Not that someone is sexist or racist. It is not constricted by time. His drama is a form of social criticism. He speaks negatively and transcends his time. He's showing contradictions and is able to speak affirmatively to our time. The critical mode can tend towards easy moral conclusions. He distils marriage down to problems that we can relate to. The remedy might be the political mode. 

            At this point the professor's video froze and it was the second time. He froze again later on.

            Reverence for Shakespeare could affirm oppression if his work is an artistic endorsement. It's hard to be negative. Whatever he thought, he was good at representing uncertainty. That allows his plays to confront us with the ideological contract and if we grapple with it we might get a better perspective on problems and find ways to change them. It is undesirable to avoid these modes of criticism because they define interpretation as has been the case for a century. The desire to arrive at social affirmation can misrepresent the artistic achievement. Historical context is to some degree necessary but more necessary is the method of reading plays, especially the words, to see the historical context. 

            Professor Lopez says we don't have to accept his critical practice. We can find our own. 

            He freezes again. 

            Shakespeare represents strong morals through subjects and positions put to relentless scrutiny. Every view is confronted by its opposite or many opposites. 

            Three assumptions: Shakespeare is not moral and is not trying to resolve analytical drama. Morals are expressed through his characters. 

            Shakespeare is not a social critic. The goal of his plays is not a better society. He had a pessimistic view and his dramatic form was the source of a pessimistic outlook. He is an artist writing great plays. His success is formal and not ethical. Shakespeare produced in systems and his works do not serve an ameliorative function. 

            Should professors be dedicated to social justice? Probably but not necessarily. Lopez is not interested in that side of Shakespeare. 

            Shakespeare is a perverse dramatist giving the least expected and the opposite. Most literary criticism is social criticism. 

            Professor Lopez likes Shakespeare and thinks that after Bach he is the greatest artist produced by the western world. Bach will come up again in his lectures. 

            Shakespeare has the power of amelioration. His work is great complex art. 

            We took a ten minute break. 

            This week is an introduction and a presentation of the general context of the course. 

            The Comedy of Errors is easy and short. It's one of his early plays. Read it more than once. Form your own impressions. 

            Wikipedia summaries are not the worst. They are better than Spark Notes and Shmoop. We can watch plays on YouTube but not before reading them. It's hard to read a Shakespeare play and get something out of it. 

            Henry IV is a history play and this genre is what made Shakespeare famous in his own time. History plays were what everyone came to see in the 16th Century but Henry IV is an incredible tour de force that transcends the genre. It was written in the 1590s which was the beginning of his most productive and best period. 

            A Winters Tale came out in 1610 and he stopped writing plays in 1613. It defies generic labels. It's a tragic comedy and a romance. The action has the characteristic of tragedy and yet it ends happily like a comedy. It is indefinable in many ways. It is an example of his self reflexiveness at the end of his career. He's trying to find a new idiom. 

            Professor Lopez's favourite play is All's Well That Ends Well. It was written around the same time as Othello and follows Hamlet. It is a straightforward comedy but satirical and containing the outtakes from Hamlet. 

            We will use Othello at the end of the course as a global reflection of all the plays. 

            He said to send the email assignment on Monday morning and not before or after. 

            A Bach fugue can take only eighty seconds to play but it takes six weeks to learn it. 

            The short essay will be given on October 13 and will be due on November 15. It's worth 30%. He'll give us details on the word limit later. There will be a test on December 6 with short essays and some multiple choice. It will be open book and more on Othello than anything else. December 9 is the last day of the term and the test is extended to December 10. 

            I ask why he didn't include sonnets in the course. He says he has no good answer but he will refer to the sonnets in lectures. 

            For the emails he wants short, clear questions or comments. They can be informal but with no bad spelling or emojis. He's not going to enforce sending them by U of T mail but says if the student's name is not part of their email it makes it difficult. 

            There are no tutorials for budgetary reasons. They can't pay the TAs for more than help with and marking essays. 

            He hates No Fear Shakespeare. 

            During most of the Zoom lecture my webcam video was tinted green and often flickering. It didn't look like that on the format we used for lectures last year. My cam video looks fine on my computer but when I switch it to "video" rather than "photo" it turns green in the same way. I checked online for this problem and it seems to happen with some kinds of Logitech cams on Zoom. It's no fun being green.

            I weighed 89.7 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. When I got back I weighed 89.5 kilos while wearing my cargo pants, 88.6 kilos in my underwear and 89.2 kilos in my sweat pants. 

            My right elbow is getting more flexible. I'm about ten cm from being able to touch my shoulder with my right hand. 

            It took me about two hours to type up my hand written lecture notes. 

            I had the last of my fries with gravy, two chicken wings and a spine for dinner while watching Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story Carter's platoon is up for reenlistment and Carter wants to make sure Gomer becomes a civilian so he can be rid of him. He buys Gomer a set of civilian clothes, rents him a room, gets him a job as a mechanic and lines him up with Betty Lou, one of Bunny's girlfriends. But then Carter learns that his platoon got 100% reenlistment which earns Carter ten days leave. But Carter is disappointed and he feels very stupid when Gomer tells him that he had planned on going back to Mayberry until Carter started doing all those nice things for him and so he couldn't leave someone who's like an adopted father to him. 

            Betty Lou was played by Mary Mitchel, who played a lot of supporting roles in 60s film and television. She co-starred in Francis Ford Coppola's "Dementia 13" and later worked on a lot of Coppola's films behind the scenes. 

            The landlady in the rooming house was played by Canadian actor Jesslyn Fox, who appeared in Rear Window as "Miss Hearing Aid", and North by Northwest. She was Avis Grubb in The Music Man, and Miss Hemphill in The Man Who Died Twice. Only after dinner did I remember to change my E string. I took the one from the Oscar Schmidt. It isn't in great shape so I'll be surprised if it lasts.