Celebrating the persistence of Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of his death

Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Doug Lanier, UNH professor

 

One fateful day in high school, Doug Lanier’s English teacher played a 1964 recording of Richard Burton performing Hamlet. When she dropped the needle on the record, she profoundly impacted Lanier’s life. Burton’s Hamlet was angry and rebellious, yet he sprang from respectable classical literature. It was a powerful combination that amazed and delighted Lanier. Today, as an English professor who specializes in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, he says, “that voice has never been far from my ear.”

Shakespeare at the Quad

Upcoming Events at UNH in Durham:

Film screening of “Shakespeare Behind Bars,” directed by Hank Rogerson
March 23, 2016, 7 p.m., Memorial Union Building Theater I

Lecture by Curt Tofteland, founder and director of Shakespeare Behind Bars
March 30, 2016, 7 p.m., Memorial Union Building, Theatre II

The Music of Shakespeare performed by the UNH Music Department
April 14, 2016, 5:30 p.m., Courtyard Reading Room, Dimond Library (Floor Five)

UNH Shakespeare Festival
April 12, 2016 

 

Full info at cola.unh.edu/shakesquad

Upcoming Events at UNH Manchester:

The First Folio Teaches Teachers: Shakespeare’s Text Demystified
April 23, 2016, 8:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m., Room 201, UNH Manchester

Upcoming Events at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester

Signature Event | Exhibition: First Folio–The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare
April 9 – May 1, 2016

Shakespeare Family Day
April 9, 2016, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Art Talk
April 10, 2016, 2 p.m.

First Folio Late Night
April 21, 2016, 6 – 9 p.m.

 

Full info at www.currier.org

 

Lanier’s passion places him in the company of centuries of scholars who have dedicated themselves to William Shakespeare’s work — four centuries, to be exact. This year marks the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death. The occasion provides an opportunity to celebrate the poet considered to be among the finest in the English language. To commemorate the anniversary, Lanier and a committee of scholars from UNH, St. Anselm College and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell worked with the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester to bring a rare copy of Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio to New Hampshire for public viewing. The free exhibition runs April 9 to May 1, 2016 at the Currier Museum. A series of related events are planned at both the Currier and the UNH campus in Durham.

In an introductory poem to the First Folio, fellow thespian Ben Jonson famously writes of Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time.” Lanier calls the poem one of the most successful ever written because of the influence it has had on the way we view Shakespeare.

“That line has set the expectation for what Shakespeare's works would be — that they would be timeless, they would be universal, they would contain a kind of wisdom or power that transcends the particular concerns of his own age…,” says Lanier. Jonson was prophetic. “Shakespeare uniquely seems to be the playwright that occupies that space. It's very hard to think of another playwright or poet that we see in those terms.”

The poem is one the reasons that the First Folio is such an important document. It has defined what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare and what makes great literature great literature, says Lanier.

The First Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, including 18 plays that were first published in that volume. Perhaps the most important reason to celebrate the First Folio is that there would be no record of half of Shakespeare’s works, including some of his most loved — “Macbeth,” “The Tempest,” and “Twelfth Night” among them. The Shakespeare that we know today would simply not exist.

Plus the Folio is “a miracle of physical survival,” notes Lanier. Scholars estimate that fewer than 1,000 folios were printed in 1623, of which only 233 are known to survive today. Given the extreme vulnerabilities of paper and the large number of other Renaissance texts that have been lost to time, it is extraordinary that any Folios survive at all.

Lanier’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare extends well beyond the 1623 Folio, with a focus on how Shakespeare persists and functions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His 2002 book “Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture” (Oxford University Press) examined how modern popular culture has appropriated and refashioned Shakespeare as a cultural icon through film, television, radio and other mass culture mediums. One strand of his current research looks at the newest medium, the Internet, and how Shakespeare has been appropriated for the Web.

“The latest thing on YouTube is that classical texts are reconceptualized as a series of vlog posts, which started with a 2012 series called ‘The Lizzie Bennett Diaries,’ based on Jane Austen,” says Lanier. “After that, people who like Shakespeare said ‘hey, we could do this with Shakespeare,’ and there’s been an explosion of Shakespeare Web series.”

The series are typically amateur videos that use contemporary language, characters and settings to episodically tell a recognizable Shakespearean story.

“They are exceptionally creative,” Lanier says. “They are very much engaged with the world of digital technology themselves, so they thematize the idea of how can Shakespeare be digital. A number of them are pretty interestingly progressive, particularly in terms of their gender and racial politics.”

“They are exceptionally creative ... A number of them are pretty interestingly progressive, particularly in terms of their gender and racial politics.”

Lanier credits Shakespeare’s “infinite variety” for keeping him coming back to the Bard, engaged and excited, over the course of his career. Every time he goes back, he sees something new, he says. Because he’s working with adaptations that push the boundaries of what it means to “do” Shakespeare, the infinite variety is even greater. Add a global dimension — Shakespeare on stage and screen in Africa, India and Asia — and you’ve got linguistic and cultural variety of a new order.

As extraordinary as the survival of the First Folio is, perhaps more extraordinary is the idea that Shakespeare’s work has not just survived but thrived for over 400 years, deftly moving from Elizabethan stage to YouTube vlog, from imperial West to post-colonial East, from the English language to a host of non-western languages, in a series of transformations that not many other texts have successfully performed.

But, Lanier warns, that doesn’t mean that Shakespeare won’t fall out of favor in the future.

“How culture survives in new cultural conditions — that's really what animates a lot of my research,” says Lanier. “I’m finally interested in the question of how art lives on beyond the moment of its own making. What are the conditions that challenge that process? What are the conditions that allow it to happen? Shakespeare is just the best way to study that issue.”

 

Photographer: 
Perry Smith | Freelance Photographer