Stanford's Hoover Tower, from the main quad.
Every summer the OHS puts on a special summer program, so that our students can spend time together. Because our students are scattered all over the world, they LOVE taking advantage of this opportunity to spend time with their classmates in person. Instructors are asked to design "mini courses" so that students can take 4-10 day classes during the week. The longer classes are all lab classes in the sciences, and the shorter classes cover everything else: humanities, arts, non-lab sciences, math, etc. This summer, I partnered with one of my friends and colleagues, Dr. Katie Balsley to teach a course about law and drama: "Performing Justice."
Katie's background is in Classics and mine is in Early Modern English literature, so we divided our class time between Sophocles' Antigone and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The pairing of these two plays was really useful and productive--and I will be forever wanting to pair the two again after this fruitful summer class!
Katie's background is in Classics and mine is in Early Modern English literature, so we divided our class time between Sophocles' Antigone and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The pairing of these two plays was really useful and productive--and I will be forever wanting to pair the two again after this fruitful summer class!
Day 1: Antigone
In this Athenian vase painting, Antigone (second from the right) is brought before Kreon (left) by two guards. Dolon Painter c. 380-370 B.C.E.
Katie took the lead on the first day. Since we were not supposed to assign homework during the short class (a requirement we failed miserably at!), Katie gave a brief lecture on the "back story" of the Oedipus myth and an over view of the play. She then narrowed in on key passages, which we read in class. The passages which she focused on are as follows:
These close-reading question lead to a larger group discussion about human and divine law. The capstone discussion was centered on teasing out what "human" and "divine" law might mean. What are the traits of a good judge? Does Creon qualify as a good king or a good judge? Are these roles mutually exclusive? Which is more fair, divine justice or human justice? What is the different between justice and revenge? Who has greater authority behind their claims: Creon or Antigone? The play is called Antigone. Why not Creon?
- Creon and the Watchman, (ll. 233-330)
- Creon and Antigone, (ll. 450-580)
- Haemon and Creon, (ll. 631-780)
- Creon and Chorus, (ll. 1261-1353)
These close-reading question lead to a larger group discussion about human and divine law. The capstone discussion was centered on teasing out what "human" and "divine" law might mean. What are the traits of a good judge? Does Creon qualify as a good king or a good judge? Are these roles mutually exclusive? Which is more fair, divine justice or human justice? What is the different between justice and revenge? Who has greater authority behind their claims: Creon or Antigone? The play is called Antigone. Why not Creon?
Cover art for the DVD recording of PBS's 1974 televised adaptation of Jean Anouilh's play.
That evening we had an optional screening of the PBS made-for-tv movie of Jean Anouilh's stage adaptation of Sophocles' play. Anouilh adapts Sophocles by setting the conflict between Antigone and Creon in Nazi-occupied France. PBS removed the World War II setting, but retained the greatly augmented scene between Creon and Antigone. This performance vacillates between the sublime and the unintentionally hilarious: the actors playing Creon and Antigone are absolutely remarkable; however, the Chorus figure is a velvet-smoking-jacket wearing caricature of the 1970s, who lounges seductively on a marble staircase while he delivers a closing speech that serves at the play's denouement. On the one hand, the costume and staging of Stacy Keach (Chorus) take away from the stunning performances of Geneviève Bujold (Antigone) and Fritz Weaver (Creon). On the other hand, the campiness of the Chorus provides some needed comic relief after the tragedy has ended.
Day 2: Merchant of Venice
Shylock and Portia (1835) by Thomas Sully.
Whereas Katie took the lead on the first day, I took the lead on the second day. The background information I gave in my lecture was related to the history of antisemitism in Europe as well as a summary of the play. For my lecture on historical attitudes about Jewish people in early modern England and Venice, I drew heavily from M. Lindsay Kaplan's excellent Texts and Contexts edition of The Merchant of Venice. In particular, I drew from her sections on Usury and Finance, and Religion.
This image shows Jews in Medieval England wearing identifying clothing (the yellow patches are meant to resemble the stone tablets of God's law). They are being beaten. London, British Library, Cotton Nero D ii Fol 183 v.
The selections from the "Usury and Finance" sections helped students to conceptualize the double bind that Jews faced in Europe in the centuries leading up to Shakespeare's play: they were both excluded from most jobs and thus forced into money lending (a practice that Jews themselves debated in the Talmud), and they were alternatively seen as a "necessary evil" for Christian merchants and kings who needed to have lines of credit extended to them or as greedy, evil, and dangerous for charging interest on the loans they made. We might say that, in the long scope of history, Jews were in effect forced into a job that they didn't necessary want, an unpopular but necessary job that made them vulnerable to outbursts of violence and general, longstanding suspicion.
Detail showing the red hat that Venice would later require its Jewish citizens to wear from "The Sacrifice of the Jews" (c. 1483), by the unknown painter called the Master of the Manna Miracle.
The section on "Religion" in Kaplan's edition highlights how Jews could be seen in Shakespeare's England as a projection of the religious Other for both Catholics and Protestants while concomitantly serving as a mirror of the Self, particularly in any hardship that a Christian sect faced. This section was invaluable for students to think about as we investigated the performance of social justice on the stage.
After summarizing the play's plot, using the character chart above, I turned to the passages that I wanted my students to close-read. We focused on the following two scenes:
- 3.1: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (whole scene)
- 4.1.145-415: the trial scene (from the reading of Bellario’s letter to Shylock’s exit)
 | In preparation for our discussion of 4.1, I asked my student to consider this Early Modern emblem of mercy: “Mercy Overcoming Revenge,” from Richard Day’s A Book of Christian Prayers (London: Printed by Iohn Daye, dwellyng ouer Aldersgate, 1581). The text accompanying the image reads, “Mercy beareth with infirmities. Cruelty seeketh revenge.” Compare this image to Portia’s speech at 4.1.179: “The quality of mercy is not strained.” What is Portia saying in her monologue? In what way is Portia associated with mercy? Does Portia “bear with infirmity,” as the image suggests is necessary? How does Portia win the trial? In what way could Portia be associated with revenge? Although Shylock does “bear with infirmity,” can he be at all associated with mercy? Why or why not? When Shylock says that he “crave[s] the law,” does that mean that he represents justice? |
FYI: elsewhere Shylock says that he stands for “judgment” and “the law” (4.1.103, 142). Is he lying when he says he wants justice—does he really want vengeance? How do you know and why does it matter? What is the difference between justice and vengeance? Is Shylock meant to be pitied? Can this trial be understood as an allegory for the triumph of mercy over justice/revenge, or is this a sham trial? Is justice achieved in any way?
Al Pacino as Shylock in Michael Radford's 2004 The Merchant of Venice, © 2004 Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Once again we had an optional screening for our students. This time we screened the 2004 film adaptation directed by Michael Radford and starring Al Pacino as Shylock. Radford, who was also the screenwriter for the adaptation, does an admirable job of editing the play for film. He does a great job of preserving the moral ambiguity of Shakespeare's play, and he's able to maintain the pathos of the Antonio-Shylock story, while amplifying the comedy of the marriage plot. Because the film was open to students across the entirety of Summer Session (i.e., not just the students who were enrolled in our mini-course), the screening drew a large number of student unfamiliar with the play. Their audible reactions either in pity (to Shylock's utter heartbreak at his sentence) or laughter (to Bassanio's dumbfounded realization that the lawyer who saved his friend was really Portia in disguise) helped the students in our class to think about the role that genre was playing in this difficult play.
Day 3: Synthesis and Screenwriting
On our third day of class, we went backward in time instead of forwards. We started with Early Modern England and a discussion of Lorna Hutson's The Invention of Suspicion (2007).
In 1360–1, English Justices of the Peace were given power by statute to ‘arrest all they may find by indictment or suspicion’. Statutes passed in 1554 and 1555 forced a transformative refinement in the older legal concept by requiring Justices to take written examinations of those arrested to record the grounds on which they decided to detain a suspect in prison or, alternatively, to grant bail. In order to comply with these statutes, Justices of the Peace had to find ways of weighing likelihoods applicable to all kinds of cases. They had, effectively, to become experts in the ‘invention’, or finding, of arguments of suspicion: to do so, they turned, just as poets, dramatists, and other writers were doing, to Latin treatises in rhetoric, especially Cicero...
I asked my students to imagine that they were justices in England in 1555, facing the task of articulating suspicion for the very first time. I asked them to think about how they would draft such a document: what would they look to for "evidence"? We related these to elements in a play. We considered 1) motive as something that could affect both characters and suspects, 2) circumstance as something that could relate to both staging and means or opportunity, and 3) plot as both a sequence of events in any kind of narrative and the conspiracy or plan of a bunch of criminals. From this we segued into what Hutson calls a "legal fiction." I asked my students to consider what that might mean, which proved to be really useful for them. Twenty million seasons of television's Law and Order has trained them to think that there is an answer out there for who is "really" guilty. Thinking about the performative language that happens when a judge pronounces a person innocent or guilty helped students to think about justice as something that is performed instead of served.
[The] sixteenth‐century English [system] of judgment could… be said to be based on the participation of lay persons (justices, victims, neighbours, jurors) in deciding what was to count as knowledge. The English criminal justice system, as Barbara Shapiro writes, put ‘great faith both in witness observers and in jurors as “judges of fact” ’, that is, as evaluators of contradictory witness testimony. Sixteenth‐century developments in the participatory justice system involving the taking of written examinations by Justices, and the need for jurors to evaluate evidence at the bar, were directly engaging the very same questions of probability and likelihood with which dramatists were beginning to be concerned.
In breaking down this quote, I asked students to think about the new term that we are considering now in Hutson's argument: the jury. I asked my students to think deeply about how a jury is like an audience.
One outcome of this discussion helps to link Antigone and Merchant of Venice together. Hutson is basically arguing that changes in the legal culture in England contributed to a flourishing of drama during early modern period. That is, because suspicion was "socially pervasive" in legal culture, dramatists re-conceptualized the way they wrote characters. This was necessary in part because they had new ways to talk about character and in part because they had to meet the demand for new tastes in their audiences/juries. We can now imagine that characters can lie, either to other characters or to themselves; part of the thrill of being an audience member, or indeed a jury member, is trying to find out the hidden, secret truth behind the words and actions of a character or suspect. This is in distinction from Ancient Greek tragedy, where we see two philosophies brought into conflict with each other. Whereas Shylock might be lying to Antonio when he offers the bond as a sign of "kindness," Creon is never lying to Antigone when he explains his conception of justice to her. He is a complicated character and represent a complex philosophy, but with Creon (as with all characters in Ancient Greek tragedy) there is no secret agenda.
We then go back in time for a bit to consider the implications of Hutson's claim for Greek drama and modern pop culture in America:
From here, Katie and I gave our students the task of adapting the two plays into their own language, using their own scenarios. The screenings of the two films were really valuable contributions to this discussion. Antigone was particularly useful because the movie had been filtered first through Jean Anouilh and then again through PBS. We had four total performances this year: two of Antigone and two of Merchant of Venice. Students wrote their adaptations collaboratively in small groups outside of class time--alas, it was impossible for us to avoid homework all together.
One outcome of this discussion helps to link Antigone and Merchant of Venice together. Hutson is basically arguing that changes in the legal culture in England contributed to a flourishing of drama during early modern period. That is, because suspicion was "socially pervasive" in legal culture, dramatists re-conceptualized the way they wrote characters. This was necessary in part because they had new ways to talk about character and in part because they had to meet the demand for new tastes in their audiences/juries. We can now imagine that characters can lie, either to other characters or to themselves; part of the thrill of being an audience member, or indeed a jury member, is trying to find out the hidden, secret truth behind the words and actions of a character or suspect. This is in distinction from Ancient Greek tragedy, where we see two philosophies brought into conflict with each other. Whereas Shylock might be lying to Antonio when he offers the bond as a sign of "kindness," Creon is never lying to Antigone when he explains his conception of justice to her. He is a complicated character and represent a complex philosophy, but with Creon (as with all characters in Ancient Greek tragedy) there is no secret agenda.
We then go back in time for a bit to consider the implications of Hutson's claim for Greek drama and modern pop culture in America:
- How might democracy have trained people to be enthusiastic consumers of drama?
- Might drama have trained people to be more active participants in a democracy? How so?
- In your opinion, does our modern legal system in America train us to be critical consumers of culture?
- Conversely, does our culture train us to be active participants in the legal system?
- Are those ideas totally separate?
From here, Katie and I gave our students the task of adapting the two plays into their own language, using their own scenarios. The screenings of the two films were really valuable contributions to this discussion. Antigone was particularly useful because the movie had been filtered first through Jean Anouilh and then again through PBS. We had four total performances this year: two of Antigone and two of Merchant of Venice. Students wrote their adaptations collaboratively in small groups outside of class time--alas, it was impossible for us to avoid homework all together.
Day 4: Inside the Actor's Studio and Performance
On the fourth and last day of class, we had our students block their performances and then give dress rehearsals in class. This was in preparation for a school-wide performance that they gave later in the evening. After their in-class dress rehearsals, each group offered constructive criticism to the other group. Then we asked them to explain and defend the choices that they made in their adaptations, both in their writing and in their performances. Below are the questions that we asked.
These questions were essential for raising the bar for students. In each class, there was one group that paid closer attention to the language of the original play. One Merchant group changed the Jewish Shylock into a rich Muslim named Amir and set the play in post-9/11 New York City. They wanted to highlight how racial stereotyping would bring out the worst in any group. One Antigone group set the play in a gang-infested urban center; Creon has risen to power after the gang divided against itself. This group highlighted the misogyny in Sophicles' play by focusing on the violence that Creon threatens upon Antigone for calling his authority into question. Both of these groups closely followed key scenes in the play such as the "hath not a Jew eyes?" scene and the agon between Creon and Antigone.
- Why did you choose to adapt your play in this way? If you make allusions to a particular moment in history or pop-culture phenomena, explain what it is about this particular reference that seems enlightening to you.
- What was difficult to adapt in your original play? What was easy to adapt? Why do you think that somethings were easy to adapt and some things were hard?
- What did you learn about the original play through the process of adapting it?
- What did you learn about OUR culture through the process of modernizing the play?
- How have you performed justice? How is it different from revenge?
These questions were essential for raising the bar for students. In each class, there was one group that paid closer attention to the language of the original play. One Merchant group changed the Jewish Shylock into a rich Muslim named Amir and set the play in post-9/11 New York City. They wanted to highlight how racial stereotyping would bring out the worst in any group. One Antigone group set the play in a gang-infested urban center; Creon has risen to power after the gang divided against itself. This group highlighted the misogyny in Sophicles' play by focusing on the violence that Creon threatens upon Antigone for calling his authority into question. Both of these groups closely followed key scenes in the play such as the "hath not a Jew eyes?" scene and the agon between Creon and Antigone.
Rachel McAdams as Regina George in Mean Girls (2004), directed by Mark Waters.
With that said, the two groups who strayed further from the text still had reasons for their interpretive choices. One Antigone group told the story through a dark comedy using the characters of Mean Girls, so that Regina George took on the characteristics of Creon. Their purpose was to highlight the arbitrariness of power--they wanted to highlight that there is nothing "divine" about Creon's appeal to human law. Another group told a fairytale version of Merchant as the conflict between Antonio (an omnivore) and "Shymeat" (a vegetarian). They reasoned that there was no realistic way such a contract would ever be legally binding (even in the Venice that Shakespeare describes), and they didn't see any way to tell the story without offending anyone. Whereas the post-9/11 group interpreted Shakespeare's play as depicting antisemitism in order to critique it, this group saw Shakespeare's play as contributing to an antisemitic culture. The act of adapting the play, forced our students to develop an interpretation. The questions that we asked the groups helped them to explain their rationale to each other and to articulate the interpretations that they had been forming through their adaptations.
We wrapped up our course with a performance for all of the Summer Program. Because the movie screenings had drawn a number of students, people were interested to see how their classmates would adapt the plays. It was a really, really great way to end the course. The audience was engaged and lively. They audibly gasped at times--particularly during moments of racism or misogyny as depicted by the post-9/11 group and the gang group, respectively. They cheered when Amir (the revised version of Shylock) gave his defiant speech "don't Muslims have eyes too?" or when Antigone didn't flinch at all, even after Creon turned a knife on her. And they laughed along with the dark comedy of the adaptations--the ridiculous idea that a teenage "mean girl" could somehow cow her friends and family into covering up a murder and a festering body.
I would highly recommend this course--or an adaptation of it--to teachers working on a unit about law and literature. We crammed more into four days than most teachers could probably do (especially by holding screenings after "school" was out for the day), but the course could be expanded to allow for classes to read the full texts and screen the film in class. Katie and I had so much fun that we're already planning on what we'll do next summer!
We wrapped up our course with a performance for all of the Summer Program. Because the movie screenings had drawn a number of students, people were interested to see how their classmates would adapt the plays. It was a really, really great way to end the course. The audience was engaged and lively. They audibly gasped at times--particularly during moments of racism or misogyny as depicted by the post-9/11 group and the gang group, respectively. They cheered when Amir (the revised version of Shylock) gave his defiant speech "don't Muslims have eyes too?" or when Antigone didn't flinch at all, even after Creon turned a knife on her. And they laughed along with the dark comedy of the adaptations--the ridiculous idea that a teenage "mean girl" could somehow cow her friends and family into covering up a murder and a festering body.
I would highly recommend this course--or an adaptation of it--to teachers working on a unit about law and literature. We crammed more into four days than most teachers could probably do (especially by holding screenings after "school" was out for the day), but the course could be expanded to allow for classes to read the full texts and screen the film in class. Katie and I had so much fun that we're already planning on what we'll do next summer!
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