I Saw a Werewolf Writing an Almanac at Trader Vic's...

Fig. 1. A penny saved is a penny arrghararagagawooooooo!

...And his hair was perfect.

In honor of the only holiday I truly observe anymore, this link, and Figures 1-3.

Fig 2. Little Red Riding Steampunk-aerialist

Fig 3. Peter and the Wolf

And now, I ruin Halloween and the new movie ANONYMOUS

 All Hallow’s Eve is upon us again, and as a holiday particular concerned with roleplay and performance it certainly falls within Joseph Roach’s recognition of “social drama,” briefly those public performances in which we as a society engage in order to define, solidify, and if necessary amend our sense of ourselves as a community. And, like almost all such events in our culture, it is absolutely riddled with a level of amnesia that would be astonishing if it wasn’t so omnipresent. It is hardly occult knowledge that Halloween was originally an autumn festival practiced by Celts, called Samhain (“summer’s end”). This festival appears to have had a somewhat spooky tone to it, which included playing pranks, dressing up to scare people, and carving turnips to resemble folks who had passed. It also seems to have encompassed a traditional begging ritual, in which the poor members of the community would go door-to-door to accept gifts to see them through the coming winter (they did this at Christmas, also, when they would sing songs in exchange for gifts – this was called wassailing). According to what we might deduce from the 10^th century writings of Irish monks, the Christian missionaries in Ireland centuries earlier appear to have worked to co-opt Samhain into a Catholic hegemony of rituals. Ireland was declared Christian in the 7^th century, and the Church invested the religious holiday “All Hallows Day” (or “All Saint’s Day”) in the 9^th – to take place the day after Samhain. Some authorities suggest that this was part of the ongoing attempt by the Church ease the process of converting Europe by making an effort to merge with, rather than eliminate, local pagan customs – this missionary strategy appears also in the history of Christmas, and is fairly explicitly laid out in Beowulf. Perhaps because of its pagan roots, it was able to survive the anti-Catholic purges of the 15^th century. In fact, the Bard makes a reference to it in his 1593 Two Gentlemen of Verona, wherein a character is accused of “puling like a beggar at Hallowmas” (II, i). Whether you want to take the position that the Church is sanctifying the pagan rituals, or vice versa, the preponderance of evidence is pretty clear – holidays like this represent occasions when two cultures knead and bleed into one another. This is a fascinating process, always – it is perverse, bizarrely expedient, weirdly pragmatic, and usually desperate to cover its own tracks so as to eliminate its hybrid origins. But, alas, this process, Roach has demonstrated, never works – the threads of the true origins are woven into the fabric of the new event, and they tend to fray and show up at the most inopportune moments, requiring ever more revision and whitewashing.

Thankfully, this observation does little to complicate the performative observance of this festival by the vast majority of people, who think of it as an opportunity for carnivalesque release, a little vacation into what Arthur Sullivan called “topsy-turvydom,” and a little no-rules quality time with the kinder. Unfortunately it also does little to deter those in our society who seek to quash this kind of performance; those who fear the pernicious influence of paganism in what some think is a perpetual American war against Christianity. Thus, the proliferation of “Hell Houses,” a sort of alternate to a traditional “Haunted House,” where patrons are marched through a hall of horrors depicting scenes of botched abortions, drunk-driving disasters, people dying of AIDS, rapes, and school killings. Clearly the effort here is to divorce Halloween from its pagan, and celebratory, roots by creating a sort of four-dimensional performance-sermon, scaring us all straight. But, of course, such a performance is just as problematic as an unconscious one. Both involve a semi-conscious erasure of part of the whole shebang. Culture just doesn’t work like that – it’s a far more chaotic, multi-headed process.

Which brings me, rather circuitously I admit, to my main point. Part of the seasonal festivities includes the release of the new film Anonymous, which according to its promotional text is a “movie that explores the theory that Shakespeare never wrote a single word.”

Oh, lord, again? Seriously?

Sometime in the 19^th century, some scholars who attended Oxford, started up a campaign to divorce Shakespeare from the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare, and instead crown Edward de Vere, earl of, astonishingly, Oxford, as the Immortal Bard. Their claims largely rotated around a notion that someone who did not have access to the highest level of education (for instance, that available at Oxford) could not possibly have written such terrific plays. Therefore, the Earl wrote the plays and used Shakespeare as a sort of patsy to get the works published. The Earl didn’t want to publish his plays because noblemen didn’t do such low-class things as write plays.

Fig 1. Another alternate authorship theory.

Okay, so, here’s the thing – where I come from, a THEORY requires EVIDENCE. The evidence that asserts Shakespeare as the author of the plays is, I admit, murky – all we have is that Shakespeare was identified as the author of the plays at the time, and was rewarded materially for his contributions to English culture by the monarchy. We don’t know very much about Shakespeare. However, we do know that lots of famous playwrights of the day did not have a formal education. And we do know a LOT about Edward de Vere, including the fact that he was a prolific playwright all on his own, noble restrictions notwithstanding. So although the evidence that Shakespeare authored his plays is really no stronger than, say, the evidence that Caryl Churchill is writing her plays, the evidence against the Oxford “theory” and the other alternative authorship “theories” is actually pretty solid, except, of course, for the Klingon theory [Fig. 1].

However, let us be careful not to be like the Hell Housers and miss the big picture. First of all, theatre is a collaborative art. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, truly, and probably worked out a lot of stuff in rehearsal. We know he wrote specifically for particular actors, that his work was very topical and dramaturgically rich, and that he was able to take advantage of improvements in stage technology. It seems very possible that Shakespeare would have collaborated with other folks in his circle – Kit Marlowe, Emilia Bassanos, Ben Jonson, even Edward de Vere. Why not? All playwrights do this. The virtue of the alternative theories of the authorship of Shakespeare is that, if we are open to them, they knock us out of our complacency about Shakespeare, and, let’s be honest, our worship of him. Considering Shakespeare’s sexuality, for instance, helps liberate our ability to see the homoeroticism in the plays – we don’t have to conclude that he was gay to gain the benefits of that observation. Considering his past, his birth, his education, his religious affiliation – these can be very fruitful for our ability to read him, even if we don’t come to any particular conclusions. Anything that gets us thinking in multiple ways about important moments in our history, considering alternatives, testing our conclusions, shaking our convictions, is good. We don’t have to agree with them – but it’s good practice for us to really investigate them periodically. This is a mental practice that Lessing would later call fermenta cogitiationis: brewing thought.

Personally, my favorite take on this is in Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love, when Viola asks Will “are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?” and Will replies, “I am.” I saw that movie in the theatre with a bunch of fellow PhD students, and we laughed ourselves sick – what a brilliant answer! So yeah, I’m going to see this movie, and I’m going to laugh and celebrate how the spooky monsters from our shared history find such weird ways to surface and trouble us in the present, and what is more Halloweeny than that?

In the News for Halloween

A little while back I was interviewed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for an article on Halloween. As is always the case with such events, I feel a little bit misquoted and misinterpreted, but that's the price of the ticket, and I think it's a pretty good piece. The truth is I'm thrilled to be mentioned in the same article as Tom Savini!

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11300/1185243-55-0.stm

Fig 1. Sasha.

General Theory and Practice of Pantomime is the first English translation of Обща Теория И Практика На Пантомимата, by Dr. Alexander Iliev. Dr. Iliev, who is a master mime and teacher of mime, acting, directing, and movement, studied with the legendary mimes of the 20^th century, including Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau, both of whom endorsed the original publication. Dr. Iliev is an accomplished anthropologist and ethnographer with an international profile, and has over four decades of professional experience as a performer. Dr. Iliev is highly sought-after as a teacher by institutions across the globe, and I am very proud to number him among my friends.

I met Sasha in 2008 when I was invited by what was then called the Rhodopi International Theatre Collective (now called the Leon Katz Rhodopi International Theatre Laboratory), which is headquartered in Smolyan, Bulgaria, to join them as a Visiting Scholar-Artist. My trip to the Collective was preceded by several months of work in collaboration with dramaturgs Sergio Costola of Italy and Ben Nadler of New York City, along with Sasha, researching and adapting Leonardo Da Vinci's folktale La virgine e l'unicorno (The Virgin and the Unicorn) into a performance text. When I traveled to Smolyan, which is high in the mountains that separate the fertile plains of ancient Thrace from the hills and coasts of Greece, I had no idea that I was taking, to steal a phrase from Obi-Wan, my "first step into a larger world." It was a kind of mystical journey, or perhaps I should say a journey through time and space. Smolyan looks a great deal like Park City, Utah - my favorite place when I was growing up in nearby Salt Lake -- except of course that it is riddled with sites like the Devil's Throat, a cave that is generally agreed to be the place where Orpheus descended the Underworld. You have conversations with people that include phrases like "oh, yes, this road follows the track Alexander the Great took when he conquered this region" and "oh, yes, this rest stop was built on the site of the battle of Gaugamela," and "if you turn right, you'll get to the mall, and if you turn left, you will go to the place where Prince Paris of Troy was visited by Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite."

Frankly, my work as a theatre historian made it seem more mystical than it probably was. It felt like being suddenly and repeatedly smacked in the face with the total gestalt reality of all the things I have only read about for the last thirty years, and along with that the humbling realization that I have only scratched the surface, and that with all my life devoted to learning more I can still hope for nothing more than a slightly deeper scratch. That said, the eye of the historian compresses time and space - when you experience in real life something you have been studying for a long time, you have the impression that you are experiencing it on multiple levels, all at once; past and present, distant past and present, here and there, they all collide in the mind.

The following year Sasha asked me to collaborate with him on the translation of his book, which in Bulgarian is now a standard text for actors and directors all across Bulgaria and Eastern Europe. It is a magnum opus - five volumes, including 181 descriptions of pantomime scenarios. I jumped at the chance. This work was already translated magnificently by Milena Dabova, a native of Plovdiv whose English is probably better than mine. Where I came in was just doing a little fiddly makeover of Milena's work - cleaning up the language a bit, bringing some stuff more in line with standards and practices of publishing, and struggling with the fascinating issue of the poetic floridness of the Bulgarian language (or at least, of Sasha's). You see, Bulgarian is a remarkably idiomatic language. It's hard to get Bulgarians, of my acquaintance in any event, to give you a straight answer. If you say "I promise to get you this by Thursday" they might say "a word doesn't make a hole" (duma dupka ne pravne). If you say "wow, I don't want to talk to that student but he keeps coming to my office" they might say "a black coin doesn't get lost" (cheren gologan ne se gubi). I once asked Sasha if he was troubled by the rainy weather in Pittsburgh and he said something like "the one-eyed pigeon never asks the rainbow if it has enough sweaters." I'm exaggerating, but my point is that the language is absolutely festooned with a certain innate poetry. Add that to Sasha's immense learning, his propensity towards mysticism, and his sterling command of many many languages alive and dead, and sometimes you find yourself wandering around a sentence like Theseus in a Labyrinth of words, waiting for the lexical Minotaur to --- see, now he's got me doing it.

I have many stories to tell about this process, but suffice to say that it took the better part of two years, during which time I was enchanted, edified, education, enlightened, entertained, and came away with a deeper sense not only of pantomime defined in its broadest sense as nonverbal communication, but also a deeper sense of my  own place in the universe. Like the shamans he studies and probably also is, Sasha leads his readers on an expedition of the mind, the body, and one's place in history and the cosmos. It's been an astonishing adventure.

So, you know, buy the book when it comes out.