The whirlwind pace of German in Summer Term is a real challenge, but I can recommend this type of total committment to a language first year if you can swing it.   I am packing a lot of information into this old non traditional student head, it is nearly full, not much more room left!   When you start dreaming about conjugating verbs and vocab tests, it must be a sign of information overload…   One benefit of this type of class schedule is that you really get to put learning skills to work in a major way.    Starting in the fall, I’ll be heading into second year German, only taking one section per term.   I will have to shift gears and make sure to study a little German every day and not put the homework off til the night before a class.

One of the buildings on campus that I will be spending many hours in is Kidder Hall, which is located across the Quad from the Valley Library.   This facility is one of the older buildings on campus and it has a “vintage college” feel to it.   I am taking in all of the experiences of being in college with an appreciation of what I missed so many years ago.   Even the creaking floors and windows excite me!  Being a non traditional student is more to me than just returning to school.   It has become a life changing experience, and I am trying to get every last drop out of it.   Older students returning to college is the overall theme of Reaching Lifelong Goals.com, but I’m finding the experience to be so much more than that.

Yes, this non trad has made it to “big boy” college, although some 35 years late, I am a proud OSU Beaver!   Clicking off bucket list items is more rewarding than you could possibly imagine.  My summer will be a fast paced initiation into college life, as I am pulling 16 credits during this term.   I am finally going to finish my math requirements for my baccalaureate core with Math 105.   This will be a math class that I can sink my teeth into.   Opened the textbook and there were no polynomials or quadratic or any of this number mixing with alphabets nonsense!!    Numbers and letters just do not belong in the same math problem!!

My main focus this term will be my beginning of two years of a foreign language requirement.   I am taking a full year of German (GER 111, 112, 113) all packed into this summer!!   It works out to about a Term every 12 days!!   This will be a huge challenge.  Two days into the class and we had our first vocabulary test.   First mid-term will be on Friday!   My brain hurts.    One positive note here is, my wife is taking German with me!!   She is an employee of Oregon State and is using vacation time each day to be a Non Traditional Student just like me.   So far she is kicking my butt in this class, but the competition will soon morph into cooperation I’m assured.   The sharing of this goal with me is very special and I am blessed to have Patty as my wife.   I will be posting about our progress in this endeavor throughout the Summer Term.   I have the whole afternoon each day to do my homework and study.   I ride to school with my wife and after she goes to German class with me, she goes back to her desk and spends the day catching up on work.   I spend my time just enjoying the experience of finally reaching one of my goals in life, attending college.   As a History Major, I’ll use my spare time (if there is any) to begin researching my thesis topic here at the fine library at OSU.   I think I’ll take a walk around MY campus for a while.    More later…

Shakespeare’s Sources for The Tempest – Reflections of a “Born Again” Stratfordian

The evidence of William Strachey’s 1610 True Reportory being a major influence in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is profound, or is it?   Again and again in my research of the works of William Shakespeare, anti-Stratfordian arguments seem to wash up like flotsam on a Bermuda beach.  The parallels of the experiences of William Strachey and the wreck of the Sea Venture with the plot and details of The Tempest seem overwhelmingly obvious to me.  To the Oxfordian author Nina Green, somehow there are none to be found.

In a 1996 article, David Kathman lays out a detailed comparison of the events of the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture and the subsequent narration sent back to England by the expedition’s chronicler, William Strachey.  He lists over 50 connections to the play from the events from the voyage to the new world.  Kathman states, “William Shakespeare had multiple connections to both the Virginia Company and William Strachey, and it is not at all surprising that he would have had access to Strachey’s letter. As I will also show, this letter saturates The Tempest, providing the basic scenario, many themes and images, and many details of plot and language. The first recorded performance of The Tempest was at Court on November 1, 1611, allowing us to date the play’s composition with remarkable accuracy to the roughly one-year period between the fall of 1610 and the fall of 1611″ (Kathman 1).  With close examination of this comparison, Kathman gets into minute detail with phrases found in the Strachey letter and their use in The Tempest. I agree with most of his findings, but feel he may have been trying a little too hard to find some of the links.   Overall, his arguments are sound, historically factual, and logical.

The rebuttal from Nina Green tries to disprove each of the 50+ parallels, and to put forth the idea that Edward DeVere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, somehow wrote the play under the pen name of Shakespeare.   The fact that DeVere died on the 24^th of June, 1604, seven years before the documented first performance of The Tempest, is not mentioned in her attack on Kathman’s work.  The 94 page refutation paper begins with the tone, “When subjected to analysis, David Kathman’s false parallels all melt into thin air. They are insubstantial and baseless. They dissolve and fade, leaving ‘not a rack behind’ “(Green 1).  It goes downhill from there.   The attacks on Kathman’s parallels are, at best, nitpicking, taking each entry and coming up with an explanation that seems to be correct on the surface, but missing the main point that Shakespeare used the accounts as inspiration for a work of fiction, not a travelogue or a documentary.

One example that I found indicative of Nina Green’s overall arguments is about the actual geography known to the Elizabethans of the islands around Bermuda.  She questions, “Would Shakespeare have used a tract mentioning a group of five hundred islands as a source for a play about a single isolated island”(Green 2)?  The simple answer is, why not?   The Kathman paper proposes that Shakespeare used the accounts of William Strachey as a source, not as an actual template of the events that were somehow required to write the play.

Along the same vein of reasoning, Green further writes, “Similarly, the flora and fauna in Bermuda as described by Strachey and Jourdain are markedly different from the flora and fauna mentioned by Shakespeare in The Tempest” (Green 3).  The island described in the play is only loosely based on Bermuda, and perhaps Shakespeare felt no need to include “…stingrays, whales and sharks” (Green 3) as set pieces on the Globe Stage.

Only three pages into this diatribe that tries to disprove Shakespeare’s use of sources that were very definitely available to him, we begin to see the desperation of many of the Oxfordian arguments.   Carefully reading all 94 pages of this rebuttal only reinforces my status as a “born again” Stratfordian.   Seeking arguments that are considered to be peer-reviewed, I researched articles published in the Shakespeare Quarterly as an effort to make some sense out of Shakespeare’s sources for The Tempest.

Alden T. Vaughn published an article in the Fall 2008 issue of the quarterly, titled William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence. In this work, the author explores some of the attacks on Strachey’s True Reportory, both as it was probably available to Shakespeare in 1610, and the published version of 1625.  The author gives a very detailed account of the challenges to Strachey’s letter as a source, and refutes each of them.

The main issue surrounding the debate on William Strachey’s chronicles seems to boil down to what access Shakespeare had to it as a source in 1610.   Strachey’s ties with the Elizabethan theaters before the voyage, and his probable connections to both Burbage and Shakespeare, are documented in Vaughn’s dissection of the previous work on the issue.   The author cites the works of Edmund Malone (1808) and Morton Luce (1901) as being important early articles linking Bermuda and William Strachey to the writing of the play (Vaughn 245).

Finding credible arguments about the sources for The Tempest in peer-reviewed articles further reinforces my conclusions about the historical events involved.   I feel that Alden Vaughn was correct in stating, “The virtual certainty that Strachey’s letter reached London in September 1610 and the overwhelming probability that at least two copies circulated widely among Company officials and their friends establish that ‘True Reportory’ was available for Shakespeare to use in The Tempest. The abundant thematic and verbal parallels between the play and ‘True Reportory’ have persuaded generations of readers that Shakespeare borrowed liberally from Strachey’s dramatic narrative in telling his island tale” (Vaughn 273).

Total immersion in all things Shakespeare over the past three terms has given this old history geek a new-found appreciation of the works of the Bard.  Looking at the plays from my historical perspective has been a journey into 16^th century Elizabethan England, and how Shakespeare dovetails into its history.  The authorship debate is often a side-trip that diverts my research path, but I remain steadfast, a “born again” Stratfordian.  And yes, the government faked the Apollo moon landings on a sound stage in Burbank!

Works Cited

Green, Nina. “False Parallels in David Kathman’s Dating The Tempest.”  Oxford-Shakespeare.com. 2005. 22 May 2010. Web.

Kathman, David. “Dating The Tempest.” Shakespeareauthorship.com. 1996. 22 May 2010.web.

Vaughn, Alden. “William Strachey’s ‘True Reporatory’ and Shakespeare: A Closer Look At the Evidence.” Shakespeare Quarterly . Volume 59, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 245-273. 22 May 2010. Web.

The Racism of Othello – Historical Perspectives

When we look at the racial overtones of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moore of Venice, one must recognize the historical context of Elizabethan England.  To truly evaluate the treatment of Othello as a “Moor”, his position in Venetian society, and his marriage to Desdemona, the play must be judged on the societal norms and current events that William Shakespeare had to draw from.

The English encounter with Africans began from about the mid-sixteenth century. Native West Africans had probably first appeared in London in 1554.  Certainly, as Martin Orkin points out in an article for The Shakespeare Quarterly, “by 1601 there were enough black men in London to prompt Elizabeth to express her discontent ‘at the great number of ‘Negars and blackamoors’ which are crept into the realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain’ (Orkin).    Elizabethan adventurers John Hawkins, John Lok, and Martin Frobisher were among the first raiding African coastal villages, kidnapping inhabitants and bringing them back to England in the mid-1550s. Although initially a small population, these involuntary exiles were the forerunners of much larger numbers, who would eventually be enslaved in the Caribbean and the American colonies.   Blacks were a very visible minority in Shakespeare’s London.  Only recently have historians documented the proof of Africans in 17^th century London.  Initially brought in as slaves or as “human curiosities,” some blacks soon assimilated themselves into Elizabethan life as laborers and domestic servants.   Author James Shultz noted; “We now have documented proof of the residences of black people, which must be reckoned into the colors of Shakespeare’s world, in a very literal sense. Shakespeare knew people of color. He walked through their neighborhoods every day” (Shultz).  This author goes on to propose that the “dark lady” of the Sonnets was a black prostitute that William Shakespeare formed a relationship with.   Although an almost plausible solution to the issue, too many other pieces to this puzzle do not fit.

Shakespeare most certainly had contact with Africans living in London, but was this interaction tempered by the prevailing prejudices of his English countrymen? English ethnocentrism fastened upon differences in color, religion, and style of life. Orkin has assembled material that shows that Englishmen saw Sub Saharan Africans as barbarous.  He includes an excerpt from Richard Eden’s account of John Lok’s voyages, published first in 1554-55 and reprinted in 1589.  “An account of the inhabitants of ‘coast of Guinea and the middye partes of Africa’…were in olde tyme called Etheiopes and Nigrite wich we nowe caule moores, morren or Negroes.  A people of beastly lyvynge, without a god, lawe, religion or common welth, and so scorched and vexed with the heate of the sonne, that in many places they curse it when it ryseth” (Orkin).  In the OED the meaning of the word “black” includes, before the sixteenth century and were subject to the prejudices of the day.   Othello, being a General and of higher status than other blacks in both Venetian and English societies is Shakespeare’s way of breaking down these stereotypes.

The racial slurs and insults by Iago, as he says “…an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.” (O.I.1.88-89). Roderigo also makes racist comments referring to Othello as “the thick lips”(O.I.1.66).  There is racist sentiment within the play, but it is to a large degree it is confined to Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio.   The character of Othello does not lower himself to respond to these insults.   This highlighting of the injury of words by the “white” characters only strengthens Othello against the stereotypes of the day.  Looking at the character of Othello through the color prejudices of early 17^th century England further shows how Shakespeare was very progressive for his time period.

Research yields volumes of works about racism in Othello.  Evaluating the theme of racism by 20^th century thinking is valid only when the comparisons are tempered with an understanding of Elizabethan and Jacobean social norms.  Only then can one really see the true brilliance of Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Tragedy of Othello, the Moore of Venice.

Works Cited

Orkin, Martin.” Othello and the “plain face” Of Racism” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 166-188. 5 May 2010.web

Shultz, James. “Shakespeare’s Colors: Race And Culture In Elizabethan England“. Old Dominion University’s Quest. January 2002, Volume 5 Issue 1.8 May 2010.web.

Bartels, Emily C. “Making more of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioning of Race”. Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), pp. 433-454. 8 May 2010.web

Bartels, Emily C. “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered”. The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 45-64. 8 May 2010.web

Neill, Michael. “Mulattos,” “Blacks,” and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference”. Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 361-374. 9 May 2010.web