Books, Films, Adaptations, & Reader Responses 3/8
These are a few of my favorite things!
Note: Not surprisingly, this post is, Substack informs me, “too long for email,” and that some email programs (especially the one beginning with G) “clips or truncates” messages over 102KB.
If that’s the case, you may have to click through to my Substack to wade through the whole thing. Since KB means nothing to me, I did a quick check, and the post seems to be 7700 words long. You have been warned!
Part 1 of this series links to two great posts on adaptation and Tolkien (one on the Jackson film, one on the Rings of Power series) that I highly recommend reading and which inspired this series!
Part 2 of this series describes my journey (completely unplanned until Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyen kicked me out the door of Bag End) from falling in love with the film, which brought me back to my earlier adoration of Tolkien’s legendarium, all in a fannish mode (seeing it 45 times before it left the theatres definitely counts) and then switching my academic specialization and “research agenda” to ALL Tolkien, Jackson, and related topics (including reception and fan studies).
Oh, yeah, and Shakespeare too!
The Centuries-Long Tug’o’war over “Shakespeare”
I originally planned for this post to be about “Shakespeare” *and* “Tolkien,” in order to compare how similar the historical debates and conflicts over the two authors are, and to map out some of the implications of two on-going battles of the “culture war.”1
Then I fell deep into the fascinatingly complex internet rabbit hole of essays and books about some of the debates over “Shakespeare.” I read some of these years ago, but others are much more recent and, while I’ve not read them, they sound fascinating! In addition, seeing the more recent work highlights some useful differences between “Shakespeare” and “Tolkien” scholarship.
After pulling all of the following references and sample quotes that I list below together, I had to accept that this post is about “Shakespeare” and his position in the 20th-21st century “culture war” that continues to play out in the context of Tolkien’s legendarium, adaptations, and the changing nature of contemporary Tolkien scholarship since the release of Peter Jackson’s live-action films.
The next post will be about my personal response(s) to Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (Jackson’s 'The Hobbit has be another series; puts on list for later!). The timing is nifty because we’ll be seeing the three expanded and remastered versions of the films in the theatres this coming weekend (Saturday, Sunday, & Monday!) which I am sure will inspire all sorts of squee and maybe actual thoughts as well.
First, a sort of relevant digression as to just how Shakespeare became part of my life.
When I was an undergraduate student majoring in English (at Western Washington University), I took All the Shakespeare courses on offer, and every other British literature course I could cram in (and the only Irish literature course) they offered, and almost no American Lit courses (with the exception of the Mark Twain class because I *loved* Mark Twain).2
The British faculty (all two of them) both taught Shakespeare; they also taught the other earlier British literature classes (up to the Romantic period which was covered by one of the creative writing faculty members). I remember taking a class on Milton, on Donne, and on “Renaissance playwrights who were not Shakespeare”). There was one lone medievalist, but he was the Director of Composition as well, something that apparently happened a lot during the 1970s to medievalists (apparently demand for their courses dropped). There weren’t many novels courses (at least in the British Lit course offerings; American Lit was apparently different, but I only took the Twain, and there was also one “women writers course” [taught by the department feminist] which satisfied half of a university “minority culture requirement”). So my undergraduate coursework involved lots of poetry and plays, plus one Japanese literature course in translation, mostly fiction, as I recall, that satisfied the other half of the “minority culture requirement.” It was a typical New Critical/Great Books/Western (meaning Anglophone) Literature department at the time, meaning that Dead White Men filled the curriculum. I remember fondly when one of the department radicals got permission to teach a course in contemporary British novelists on the graduate level: I took it the last year of my master’s degree. He told us his motive was so he could teach some actual WOMEN writers, right alongside men, like, you know, they were equal or something.3
Reading Tolkien religiously from age ten on turned me into an Anglophile, a nature poet, an animist, but not a medievalist (I tried one Chaucer class and bounced hard off Middle English; I don’t think there were any Beowulf or Old English classes taught in that department, or else I missed them totally). I also took all the creative writing classes I could. It was great. If I had kept on going, I’d have probably done a Ph.D. on something Early Modern, with a heavy emphasis on Shakespeare, etc., although I have to admit when I finally got to William Blake in one of my poetry classes, he darn near pulled me in!
But as often happens Life Interferes with Plans (that’s a whole other story which I am not going to get into at the moment, if ever)4 But I definitely immersed myself in all things Shakespearean during my undergraduate years.
And, given how much “Shakespeare” was yanked around during the 1980s/1990s with much yelling about how he was the poor victimized Great Dead White Male Artist who had to be defended from the harpies of what was then called “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” (terms which had exactly the same function as “woke” does today albeit more syllables), even after I was no longer taking Shakespeare classes, I paid attention to what was going on in the media tracking the “culture wars.”5
I got my doctorate (1992) and then was lucky enough to get a tenure-track job in 1993 in spite of telling the department that my research agenda was going to focus on feminist speculative fiction.6 So that’s what I did for ten years (moving from Shakespeare to feminist sff), but the Tolkien pivot was a complete surprise to us all including me.
But I still love Shakespeare (attending plays, watching recorded productions of plays, and films), and thus this post. I think that how “Shakespeare” has been fought over is very similar to what I see happening to “Tolkien” in recent years.
I’ll start with a story about her class from a colleague who was the medieval studies and Shakespeare teacher (it was a small department; most of us covered a fairly broad range of courses like my critical theory/creative writing/multicultural literature courses). I hung out with her because she liked sff as well. She came to my office one day to tell me about what happened in her Shakespeare class: she always taught a mix of the plays and sonnets, along with some great lectures on the historical context and what was known of Shakespeare’s life and time.
One of her students came to talk to her after her introductory lecture on the sonnets: he was very upset to learn that the love poems were about a threesome (the [male] poet-persona, the “fair youth” [also male] desired by the “poet,”, and the Dark Lady, and oh, yeah, she’d explained All the sexual imagery.7 Her student had no idea because the individual sonnets he’d read in high school were all edited into heterosexual sonnets (and probably included at least some of the hundred or so ones that ones John Benson edited by changing the masculine to feminine pronouns back in 1640. Her student told her that if Only He Had Known the shocking truth about the Pervert Shakespeare earlier, he would not have bought his younger sister a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets for Christmas (although neither my colleague and I ever knew if the version he’d bought was edited, or not!).
Now to specifics about the “culture war” issues.
Here is an article that does a pretty good job of summing up the Great Books/ Classics / Western (meaning Anglophone) side of the debate: a bunch of this article could be slightly edited, replacing “Shakespeare” with “Tolkien” and it would fit right in with the far-right backlash against the Tolkien Society’s Summer Seminar on “Tolkien and Diversity.”
To Defend Shakespeare Is to Defend the West8
One of the biggest targets of these postmodernist efforts was and remains the grand work of William Shakespeare. Understanding this ongoing phenomenon and what it all means is the subject of R.V. Young’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization.
The sustained attack on Shakespeare should not be surprising. He is, Young observes, “the consummate expression of the Western literary and cultural tradition.” Young arrives at this judgment by a distillation of the essence of Western civilization: “its solid adherence to profound and substantial tradition blended with the leaven of an inquiring, critical spirit.” Shakespeare “embodies” Western culture with his plays, which demonstrate the West’s “deepest commitments of its moral and spiritual vision” while also “continually subjecting them to scrutiny.” Scrutiny, that is, not denial, evasion, or the outright refusal to acknowledge the West’s grand tradition.
This witch’s brew of literary study is, Young argues, nearly incomprehensible. Its insanity only deepens because of the status that Shakespeare has obtained not only as “the principal poet of Western civilization” but also because he has “transcended his origins in the West” with study and performance of his work occurring in China, India, Japan, and many other non-Western countries. Shakespeare’s work is lauded by artists in other civilizations as a tremendous achievement, speaking to them directly and poignantly. This means that Shakespeare contradicts one of the theories of postmodernism: that literary work is a direct product of social ideology. Could a work limited by ideology and confined by its cultural conditions be met with such a cross-civilizational reception?
My Shakespeare prof told me back in the early 1980s that she thought some of the best scholarship on Shakespeare being currently published was coming from Japanese scholars who were writing in English, and, apparently, reading Shakespeare in the original (unlike the “Japanese literature in translation” that my department taught. The monolingualism of the U.S. is yet another topic). But somehow the way she presented it had nothing to do with “Shakespeare’s” transcending anything: she admired the work they were doing. P.S. I should note that the definition of “postmodernism” that “literary work is a direct product of social ideology” the writer uses is a rather limiting (purposefully) one!
The idea that Great Art/Literature “transcends” its culture and achieves some sort of vaguely “Universal” status was pretty strong back then (when I was an undergraduate, and during my first Master’s) though, again, not as overtly tied to far-right extremist rhetoric.9
Here’s a brilliant essay that I kept handy for decades to haul out anytime fellow academics (especially NON-literature academics in the other departments on campus-ya know, I never tried to lecture them about *their* field of scholarship!) would inform me solemnly that “Shakespeare is universal”:
Not surprisingly, the author, Laura Bohannon, is an anthropologist! And the first paragraph is hilarious because her English friend thought Americans get Shakespeare wrong because we are ignoring/misunderstanding the “particular” of what an “English” poet is:
Just before I left Oxford for the Tiv in West Africa, conversation turned to the season at Stratford. “You Americans,” said a friend, “often have difficulty with Shakespeare. He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.”
I protested that human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over; at least the general plot and motivation of the greater tragedies would always be clear—everywhere—although some details of custom might have to be explained and difficulties of translation might produce other slight changes. To end an argument we could not conclude, my friend gave me a copy of Hamlet to study in the African bush: it would, he hoped, lift my mind above its primitive surroundings, and possibly I might, by prolonged meditation, achieve the grace of correct interpretation.
The major focus of the essay is what happens when she tries to tell the story of Hamlet to the elders of the West African village she was living with/researching for her degree. It’s interesting to read because they tell her all the ways in which she is getting the story wrong!
I protested that I was not a storyteller. Storytelling is a skilled art among them; their standards are high, and the audiences critical—and vocal in their criticism. I protested in vain. This morning they wanted to hear a story while they drank. They threatened to tell me no more stories until I told them one of mine. Finally, the old man promised that no one would criticize my style, “for we know you are struggling with our language.” “But,” put in one of the elders, “you must explain what we do not understand, as we do when we tell you our stories.” Realizing that here was my chance to prove Hamlet universally intelligible, I agreed.
The old man handed me some more beer to help me on with my storytelling. Men filled their long wooden pipes and knocked coals from the fire to place in the pipe bowls; then, puffing contentedly, they sat back to listen. I began in the proper style, “Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them.”
“Why was he no longer their chief?”
“He was dead,” I explained. “That is why they were troubled and afraid when they saw him.”
“Impossible,” began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor, who interrupted, “Of course it wasn’t the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on.”
After the elders interrupt her story a number of times by telling her how wrong she is, the essay concludes with their summary to her:
“But it is clear that the elders of your country have never told you what the story really means. No, don’t interrupt! We believe you when you say your marriage customs are different, or your clothes and weapons. But people are the same everywhere; therefore, there are always witches and it is we, the elders, who know how witches work. We told you it was the great chief who wished to kill Hamlet, and now your own words have proved us right. Who were Ophelia’s male relatives?”
“There were only her father and her brother.” Hamlet was clearly out of my hands.
And (the last paragraph):
“Sometime,” concluded the old man, gathering his ragged toga about him, “you must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom.”
So that’s one example of how people in another culture approach (adapt? translate? interpret?) a Shakespeare play to fit the beliefs of a different culture. I wonder if Mr. Defender of the West up above ever went and actually read any of the scholarship or saw any of the performances in those “non-Western” countries! (I would bet a real nickel he didn’t.)
But even in the U.K. and U.S. people have been changing the plays to suit themselves all along, as this article shows:
"King Lear Had a Happy Ending for 140 Years"11
For reasons that’ll soon become clear, I’ve been on a deep dive about eighteenth-century literature lately. Along the way, I’ve gotten fascinated by the ways that people rewrote Shakespeare’s plays for the stage—not just to sanitize the dirty bits, but to add more female characters and give them happier endings.
Basically, people did to Shakespeare’s plays the same thing he did to his source material: reshaped it to fit the needs of the moment. And this helped make Shakespeare more popular and ensure his status as the most important English playwright. I feel like this sheds some light on the current debates over rewriting authors like Roald Dahl and others.
The sanitized Shakespeare is probably still taught today (although I gather from what I’ve heard from my students who taught in the local secondary schools while getting their Masters in English that all the Shakespeare plays in the textbooks (in Texas, they had lists of approved textbooks, and if schools didn’t use them, they had to pay for the ones they did use themselves. If they chose from the lists, the state paid for them) are drastically cut for length (and probably to remove the dirty jokes). This is the cleaning-up effort that became famous enough to become a general concept:
The Bowdlers Wanted to Clean Up Shakespeare, Not Become a Byword for Censorship12
The result: a book that’s sort of shaped like Shakespeare, plot-wise, but which is missing key phrases and plot events. The 1807 edition, which Henrietta pioneered, only dealt with 20 of the 37 extant Shakespeare plays, Kitzes writes. The 1818 edition, which Thomas led, included all 37.
Things that were removed in the first edition included about 10 percent of the original text, the dictionary records. “...To avoid blasphemy, exclamations of ‘God!’ and ‘Jesu!’ were replaced with ‘Heavens!’ or omitted altogether,” the dictionary writes. ‘Some of the changes were more drastic: the prostitute character in Henry IV, Part 2 is omitted, while Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet becomes accidental drowning.”
In some cases, as with Othello, material that was perceived to be inappropriate was impossible to remove from the play. In those cases, Bowdler advised that the plays should either be read aloud only in parts, or be transferred “from the parlour to the cabinet, where the perusal will not only delight the poetic taste, but convey useful and important instructions to the reader.”
This advice is ironic, Kitzes writes, because The Family Shakespeare was meant to allow the playwright’s works to be read out loud. That’s because the Bowdlers actually liked Shakespeare. Thomas Bowdler, who is credited with writing the prefaces in later editions of The Family Shakespeare, voiced great fondness for the playwright's work. He just thought it was frequently inappropriate. In the case of one play which he struggled to edit satisfactorily, Measure For Measure, Thomas Bowdler wrote that “its great beauties . . . are closely interwoven with its numerous defects.”
I spent a lot of years explaining to people who want to talk about “Shakespeare’s: “intentions” that he didn’t publish his plays which has resulted in a great cottage industry for Shakespeare scholars who publish what they think are the best versions!13
“Shakespeare in the Head”: Review of William Shakespeare-The Completed Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. 14
Shakespeare saw none of his plays through the press; any printed in his lifetime were incompetently done; in the year of his death Ben Jonson came out with a handsome collected edition of his own plays, a change of fashion which probably inspired Shakespeare's ex-friends and editors to begin work on the First Folio, though it did not appear till seven years later.
. . . .
However that may be, the editors of this new edition have done a superb job, and produced a handsome text that can be read easily, with effortless concentration, and perpetual slight surprise. They have, in a sense, rewritten Shakespeare on the basis of their own declaration that since we do not know what Shakespeare wrote, someone has to decide.
This principle produces a more effective text, to be heard in the head, than any variorum or note-riddled margin can do. The editors indeed press their principle with remorseless logic, pointing out that even the two long poems - Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucece - which are dedicated and prefaced by the author himself, come to us none the less through the distorting medium of the prestigious stationer who printed them as soon as they were written.
How distorted can be seen from the fact that the same printer, Richard Field, brought out Sir John Harrington's poems, and of these we still possess the manuscripts, which differ from the printed text in a thousand features of wording and spelling.
Except for a highly dubious fragment of Sir Thomas More no Shakespearean manuscript survives, and it is ironical that the only words he certainly wrote - the dedications of his poems to the Earl of Southampton - are not included in any concordance.
Speaking of which, the extent to which J. R. R. Tolkien was quite unhappy about all the errors that were introduced into The Lord of the Rings in the various printings and reprintings and editions during his lifetime has been covered by a number of sources, often those striving to correct those errors, as Douglas Anderson discusses in his “Note on the Text” which is available online (and which was written for in the centenary edition).
Now that we’ve looked at all the various ways in which “Shakespeare’s” work has been changed (by people who were not and are not “Shakespeare,”) on to the Terrible Evil Bad No-Good Very Mean Postmodernists that so worry the Defenders of the West (I snark, but a lot of the rhetoric against us TEBN-GVMPs is hateful and violent).
Queer “Shakespeare” and Queer “Tolkien”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (30th Anniversary edition) and The Epistemology of the Closet Updated with a New Preface15
One of what I call my “Theory Goddesses” (yes, it’s sorta ironic but not really), Sedgwick challenged traditional ideas of the “canon” throughout her career. One of my favorite quotes is from the Epistemology (first published in 1985) pointing out what a lot of the Western Canon High Priests never wanted to acknowledge:
It is with these complications that the relation between lesbian and gay literature as a minority canon, and the process of making salient the homosocial, homosexual, and homophobic strains and torsions in the already existing master-canon, becomes especially revealing.
It’s revealing only, however, for those of us for whom relations within and among canons are active relations of thought. From the keepers of a dead canon we hear a rhetorical question—that is to say, a question posted with the arrogant intent of maintaining ignorance. Is there, as Saul Bellow put it, a Tolstoi of the Zulus? Has there been, ask the defenders of a monocultural curriculum, not intenting to stay for an answer, has there ever yet been a Socrates of the Orient, an African-American Proust, a female Shakespeare? (51)
. . . .
From the point of view of this relatively new and inchoate academic presence, then, the gay studies movement, what distinctive soundings are to be reached by posing the question our way—and staying for an answer? Let's see how it sounds.
Has there ever been a gay Socrates?
Has there ever been a gay Shakespeare?
Has there ever been a gay Proust?
Does the Pope wear a dress? If these questions startle, it is not least as tautologies. If these questions startle, it is not least as tautologies. A short answer, though a very incomplete one, might be that not only have there been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust but that their names are Socrates, Shakespeare, Proust. (51-52).16
And a lot of work on queer approaches to Shakespeare’s work have been written between then and now! I haven’t read this next one, but may keep an eye out to see if I can get it at a library or used bookstore for a fun summer read and to think about in comparison with the anthology which we’re (two medievalists and me, the postmodernist, are the editors) preparing to send off for peer-review in the next month or so: "There are many paths to tread": Queer Approaches to Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare 17
Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory. This innovative anthology reveals an early modern playwright insistently returning to questions of language, identity, and temporality, themes central to contemporary queer theory. Since many of the contributors do not study early modern literature, Shakesqueer takes queer theory back and brings Shakespeare forward, challenging the chronological confinement of queer theory to the last two hundred years. The book also challenges conceptual certainties that have narrowly equated queerness with homosexuality. Chasing all manner of stray desires through every one of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors cross temporal, animal, theoretical, and sexual boundaries with abandon. Claiming adherence to no one school of thought, the essays consider The Winter’s Tale alongside network TV, Hamlet in relation to the death drive, King John as a history of queer theory, and Much Ado About Nothing in tune with a Sondheim musical. Together they expand the reach of queerness and queer critique across chronologies, methodologies, and bodies.
And finally, a recommendation of book that I I adore, written by another of my personal pantheon of Theory Goddesses. This book has nothing to do with Shakespeare (or Tolkien!) but uses a sort of case study of how Sedgwick’s Epistemology acquired its Library of Congress catalog number when it was first published (despite authorial concerns!) and what that number meant and means, as an introduction to the history of the Library of Congress system of cataloging materials (including the definition of “Obscenity” that was used to create The Delta Collection).
My summary and quote from Adler below is copied from one of my earlier Substack posts (SO handy to be able to grab it and not have to retype!) about a project of mine which is still on the backburner: Cruising the Archive of Our Own: Mapping Perversions in Saffic Tolkien Tagging.
In Cruising the Library, Melissa Adler analyzes the extent to which the Library of Congress's cataloging system created and continues to create difficulties in accessing books about gender and sexuality by humanities scholars. Specifically, the cataloging and shelving of these humanities texts using categories created for medical scholarship that historically defined "perversion" as criminal and aberrant behavior has resulted in the diffusion and marginalization of more recent works. Adler’s opening example, or inspiration for her project, is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, a book I taught a number of times in my gender theory graduate course. Adler’s introductory chapter, “A Book is Being Cataloged,” focuses on Sedgwick’s book in the context of the Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings which “were designed when the LoC moved into its new home, the stately Jefferson Building, in 1897” (p. 15).18
Adler denaturalizes and deconstructs the classification system through historical analysis of the system itself, how it changed over time, and how the system “contributed to the construction of a national history and identity of the United States, and [she suggests] that the subjects were not only arranged in relation to one another but in relation to an imagined nation and its interests” (p. xi).
A key part of this approach is that her analysis is on the systems, not the people who work (and change!) them:
I use examples of library classifications in their applications to specific texts to make sense of such tensions and to assess the performativity of these systems. To be clear, the examples that appear throughout this study are not intended to be an indictment of any individual or group of catalogers. Cataloging is hard work, guided by excruciatingly detailed rulebooks on how to describe and categorize bibliographic texts. Like many rules, the Library of Congress’s are open to interpretation, and every cataloger arrives at a text from a particular point of view. Given the options set by the Library of Congress standards, any two catalogers are likely to disagree about where to put a book. What is important to register is that the subject cataloging standards produced by the Library of Congress and deployed in libraries of all types designate possibilities for where works can be placed and how they can be described. The Library of Congress and its systems direct conversations and connections by setting the rules for ranking and ordering works, distributing them across the disciplines within the library space, and providing authorized terms for subjects. For this book I’ve collected and cataloged some of the ways in which library subject cataloging standards inform the history of sexuality and the processes by which norms and authority over reading and research practices have taken hold. The production of “perverse” subjects in library classifications has mapped and indexed normal and abnormal sexualities and bodies (Adler, Preface, pp. xi-xii).19
TL;DR, there’s nothing “objective” or neutral about categories human beings create!
And the debate over whether “Shakespeare” is universal or particular is relevant to some threads in the recent debate over “diversity” issues in interpreting (or adapting) Tolkien’s legendarium, especially it comes to claiming that “Tolkien” said his work was a “mythology for England,” which, as Luke Shelton notes in an excellent blog post, is inaccurate.20 Luke cites Jason Fisher’s entry in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia:
As Jason Fisher points out in his entry for “Mythology for England” in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: “This must surely be the most-often cited quotation that Tolkien never actually said” (445).
The “quote” (misquote) comes from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography. Using the quote to claim that “Tolkien” intended his work to be purely for the “English” (and “English” is not a synonym for “British”) and that there is a single “correct” (or universal) meaning echoes the conflict over “Shakespeare” and is much more political than “literary” in purpose.
One of the most fascinating (and beginning to grow) topics in Tolkien scholarship is how many different languages parts of his Legendarium have been translated into over the years (and continues to be: I just read a nifty article about the first translation of The Hobbit into Welsh! And Tolkien’s work (like Shakespeare’s) is apparently popular in China as Eric Reinders discusses in his recent publication, Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation.
I have a hard time understanding some people’s monomania for a certain “universal” monomyth and the accompanying desire for the “Author” to have a single pure intentional meaning in the text. The world is not that simple. We are not that simple.
Instead, I find Verlyn Flieger’s GOH presentation, “The Arch and the Keystone,” makes a stronger and more appealing argument for understanding how the conflicting interpretations about the Legendarium exist, and how a complex human being created all the multiple and multiplying contradictions (plus one of the best metaphors in literary criticism ever!)
What holds a keystone in place is not cement but friction, the grinding of the two sides against each other that only the middle prevents from destruction. It is the pressure of competing forces not against each other but against what keeps them separate—the keystone that holds the arch. It is these same forces that generate the curious power of Tolkien’s work. And it is these same forces creating this same friction that invite the disagreeing and debating Tolkien scholars and critics to find in Tolkien’s work what they are looking for. I am not saying they’re wrong. I’m saying they’re right. What they see is there, even when they’re seeing contradictory things. So instead of wrestling with Tolkien’s contradictions, instead of trying to reconcile them or harmonize them, I propose that we take them as they are for what they are, two opposing and conflicting sides of one person whose contention makes him who he is as well as what he is, the keystone that creates the arch (17-18).
And, building on Flieger’s insights and work, at this stage in my life, I have realized I have decided ideas about just what the process of “canonization” (of a literary text) actually involves (and it’s not the lockstep agreement of everybody about The Meaning!). From my response to a presentation that presented a reductive, even allegorical, reading of Tolkien:
I have seen major changes in literary studies/criticism during my lifetime, as has Flieger and, perhaps, Williams. Those changes are likely part of the reason for the differences, disagreements, and contradictions in Tolkien studies.
Fragmentation is, I think, inevitable, if Tolkien scholarship is going to continue to grow, although I do not see fragmentation as inherently negative. Polarization does exist, but I hope that it is not inevitable and that some of the most negative aspects of polarization can be avoided although I admit the state of affairs in the United States in 2021 offers me little hope for such an outcome. My impulse is to celebrate the potential of the current state of Tolkien studies, one of fractal growth and chaos of opinion, rather than condemn it, in part because I think such chaos is related to the process of canonization of his work. Tolkien scholarship lacks any group consensus on the “correct” meaning of Tolkien’s legendarium, but I doubt such a consensus ever existed, either in fandom or in academia.
I will note one area of widespread consensus in the field: specifically, the idea that Tolkien’s work, and (perhaps less agreed-upon) the associated aspects of the global phenomenon of translations, films, videos, and fan creations that have grown up around Tolkien’s legendarium, is worth teaching and analyzing. I suspect that sort of consensus, rather than agreement on what “label” best fits an author, or their work better serves the process of canonization. What does not seem be required is unified academic agreement on the essential author or meaning of the work. The process instead seems to involve many readers arguing for many years as well as a churn in the development of new and, yes, controversial, theories being applied to the work. Since the process of literary canonization requires many years, inevitably, the process will require multiple generations of readers and critics whose lives and experiences will lead them to apply very different meanings to a work over time.21
After all, that’s apparently what worked for “Shakespeare”!
Click here for Part 3.5 of this series!
I put the author’s names in quotation marks to indicate I am talking about what Dallas Jean Baker calls one of the “four Tolkiens” who exist today, specifically, the four different “Authors.” I must confess that that my habit of scare quoting was picked up in the 1990s, when I was finishing my doctoral program, and it may not be that effective a rhetorical effect. However, I think it’s worth noting that a lot of criticism about the Legendarium does not distinguish between claims made about the work being analyzed and claims made about the personality/beliefs/ideologies/etc. of the human being who wrote the work, and I think that’s a problem not only in Tolkien scholarship but literary scholarship generally. It leads to too much slippage and confusion over whether the claims are about “the work” or “the Author.”
Given that Tolkien is internationally renowned and profoundly influential, why then is he a subject for a chapter in a book on forgotten lives? This is because there is now more than one Tolkien. At the very least there are four Tolkiens. There is the Tolkien of history, the actual person who lived and wrote and died. Then there is the subject of the numerous biographies based on that actual person. There is the Tolkien as imagined by the, perhaps millions, of people who have enjoyed his novels or the film adaptations. This Tolkien is perceived as akin to Gandalf, a kind of wizard genius, who created a world that many of his fans feel more at home in than the real world. Finally, there is the Tolkien as constructed in the scholarly research about his writing" (125).
"This [fourth] Tolkien is a contested figure, precisely because he is a _discursive_ figure, a figure that emerges from Text. The meanings of text or discourse are dependent on the subjective position of the reader [long list of relevant reception theory dropped]. Text is open to interpretation and changeable and often, if not always, ambiguous...In other words, texts are always multi-modal." (125) "Writing Back to Tolkien: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in High Fantasy," in Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives.
I started at WWU in fall 1976 and graduated with my B.A. in 1979, then got my M.A. in English/Creative Writing there in 1981. That department no longer exists in the sense of the department culture, or the faculty, none of whom I will name, not even the ones who were mentors and incredible teachers and a huge influence and inspiration to me. Obviously there is still an English department at Western Washington University, and it looks amazing (speaking as Ye Olde Alumna). From what I’ve read online, it seems clear that the department reflects the changes in “English” as a discipline in the U.S. that have taken place over the last mumble mumble decades! Obligatory memoir type of disclaimer: memory is slippery thing, a story we tell ourselves over the years and decades, and I have no doubt that mine has done so.
My claim to sort of radicalism in my undergraduate years was being an unrepentant sff fan who would happily read ALL the “Great Books” (and quite loved some of them—my favorites being Shakespeare, Byron, and Blake) but who insisted on spouting off about how sff could be Great Literature Too! I remember realizing that some of the profs who claimed sff was ‘trash’ had never, in fact, read anything in the genre. There was one lower-level sf class which was taught occasionally but focused, our prof explain, on those sf novels that he thought were most well along the way to finally achieving the canonical status of Literature (instead of “genre” or “popular”). That process, he said, took at least 100 years. I remember Wells and Verne, and that’s about it — oh, and he specifically identified Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein as too popular to ever become canon. That was…interesting. As some sf scholars have pointed out, the critics/academics who tried to apply New Critical theories of analyzing poetry or realistic literature to sf generally made a lot of bloopers because they didn’t understand genre conventions. I didn’t become a feminist until after I’d been in graduate school a while. Something about having professors make passes at me, and my friends, driving at least one woman out of the program, plus the favoritism clearly offered the men just did it. As Joanna Russ says, “we wuz pushed.”
Except to say that my favorite Shakespeare teacher and mentor who had a son who loved SFF and who let me come autism monologue at her about my SFF loves met with me off campus before I started the master’s program to warn me about which of her male colleagues were likely to target me for sex; there were exactly two tenured women in that department of (I think) something like eighteen faculty. I also realized why her office door was always locked when she was working after business hours or weekends (I was her student aid/grader/research assistant as an undergraduate and often met with her at odd hours and always had to knock and identify myself). That was just the top level of the misogynistic shit that was rife in 1970s academia (and probably before, but I wasn’t in academia then). I remember being told by two different (male) department heads that they couldn’t do anything about The Problem (male faculty targeting female graduate students in a variety of ways) because there were no policies against that kind of behavior. Plus, the men all said they were liberal, so . . . . . .
I stomped out of academia and went to live as an activist poet (and make my living doing crummy clerical work) which lasted only a few years when I realized that, compared to the crummy jobs I could get, academia wasn’t the worst thing, and stomped back to do a Ph.D. (You might ask, with two master’s degrees in English why I didn’t teach: I tried. But in the early 1980s a whole bunch of tenured faculty got shoved out of various state systems because of financial exigencies, so I was competing with people who had 15 years experience and were probably, at that time, mostly men).
When I stomped out of academia, I started a five-year reading program based, at first, on Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing (meaning reading every writer she talked about, then reading all their books, then reading all the other books by women I could get my hands on, everything from The Book of the City of Ladies to all the Women Poets never taught in any of my poetry classes, especially the lesbian ones! Then I went on to read all the books by women and/or feminist fiction and criticism including but not limited to sff [overlapping but not totally the same categories] I could find. As a result of that reading program, when I stomped back into academia, I did my doctoral coursework in gender/feminist/queer theories, focusing as much as possible on intersectional Black and Chicana feminist theories, plus some applied linguistics (trust me, it all made sense at the time — I still remember the feminist rant I wrote in one linguistic class about the sexist nature of lexicography vs. Mary Daly’s Mary Daly's Wickedary, and how kind and constructive my professor’s criticism was). The feminist faculty (there were more than one!!!!!!!!) taught a lot of contemporary feminist and intersectional literature (but none of it was sff!). So I was still spouting off in my English classes about how wonderful sff was to my prof’s confusion! I used Foucault in my dissertation which gave me incredible official Theory justification for throwing feminist sff fiction into the cauldron with a lot of other feminist texts; I will always be grateful my doctoral advisor and committee let me do it. So that reading program (which kept going after the first five years) and the impact of all the speculative fiction by women starting with the lesbian separatist dystopias/utopias of the 1970s that I was reading is why I didn’t get a my doctorate in Shakespeare!
The Reason Lynne Cheney Had 300,000 History Booklets Destroyed describes the sort of shenanigans that the earlier GOP got up to in attacks on humanities (especially but not limited to literature and history): this was back when they tried to keep the fascist rhetoric better hidden.
By “lucky,” I mean that I applied to 103 advertised positions in English, Gender, Composition, and Women’s studies programs, had a handful of interviews at MLA or by phone, and was invited to three on-campus visits, one of which resulted in a tenure-track job offer. I learned when I got there that my search committee had received something like 180 applications for that one job. Things have gotten even worse in academic hiring since then.
When I taught a Shakespeare play in my sophomore introduction to literature class (which I usually did with a filmed adaptation of it which we analyzed), I always made sure the edition I ordered (besides being the cheapest I could find) had notes that explained the dirty jokes. My students were often shocked because the versions of Shakespeare they teach in Texas high schools at least had been cleaned up. I never taught Shakespeare in majors or graduate classes because, well, so not my field. But we had a lot of flexibility in our sophomore intro classes, and despite the fears of George Will and others, nobody in any literature department I’ve ever known would complain about somebody teaching Shakespeare (of course, I also taught Alice Walker and a number of other Black women writers!).
This link, unlike the rest, leads to an archived copy of the article which is my standard practice when citing far-right extremist websites. Richard Reinsch, “To Defend Shakespeare is to Defend the West.” Heritage, 1 Aug. 2023.
I was such a pain back then: when the “Great Literature is UnIvERsal!” came up in my classes which it invariably did but almost entirely, if not totally, in relation to Great White Male (usually) Dead writers, during the 1970s/1980s, I’d point out that we hadn’t even gotten out of our solar system yet, and had not met any aliens, so how could we, here on this tiny little planet in one galaxy, presume to consider our cultural productions UNIVERSAL? [I got a lot of nasty looks back then, fun times, fun times. And most of the nasty looks were from my fellow-students — my profs were amazingly tolerant.]
Laura Bohannon. “Shakespeare in the Bush,” Natural History, Aug.-Sept. 1966.
Charlie Jane Anders. “King Lear Had a Happy Ending for 140 Years.” Reactor, 22 May 2024.
Kat Eschner. “The Bowdlers Wanted to Clean Up Shakespeare, Not Become a Byword for Censorship.” Smithsonian Magazine, 7 July 2017.
And of course productions of Shakespeare plays are often cut and edited by directors for various reasons! In fact, on some college campuses I gather there are academic wars between the English/literature faculty and the Theatre faculty over whether “Shakespeare” is best read or viewed. I enjoy both myself.
Bayley, John. “Shakespeare in the Head.” The Guardian , 31 Oct. 1986.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Columbia UP: first ed. 1985; 2015, and The Epistemology of the Closet. U of California P, 2008.
There are several decades and counting of debates over whether using the word “gay” in this context is appropriate. For now, while I’ll acknowledge nobody in Shakespeare’s, Socrates’s, or, probably, Proust’s time (don’t remember his dates!) would have used “gay,” neither would they have used “homosexual” or “heterosexual” which are much later coinages. If this piece wasn’t already running way long, I’d toss in the OED etymology of the words (in English!), but you can check it yourself if you wish! But keep in mind that same-sex love, bonding, and sex (by a whole variety of names in different languages) long preceded the coining and defining of the words we use today which is another thing that makes these discussions complicated.
Menon, Medhavi, editor. Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Duke UP, Feb. 2011. Review: Lambda Literary Review by Kestryl Cael Lowrey, 24 Mar. 2011.
Melissa Adler. Cruising the Library: Perversities In The Organization Of Knowledge. Fordham UP, 3 Apr. 2017.
The summary and quote from Adler is copied from an earlier Substack post (SO handy to be able to grab it and not have to retype!) about an earlier project of mine which is still on the backburner: Cruising the Archive of Our Own: Mapping Perversions in Saffic Tolkien Tagging.
Luke Shelton, “Why Calling Tolkien’s Work ‘A Mythology for England’ is Wrong and Misleading,” 12 Feb. 2022, https://luke-shelton.com/2022/02/12/why-calling-tolkiens-work-a-mythology-for-england-is-wrong-and-misleading/.
Robin Anne Reid. "A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds to Donald Williams's "Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged 'Conflicting Sides' of Tolkien's Singular Self"," Mythlore, vol. 40:, no. 2, article 14. https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol40/iss2/14