Sean Keilen’s Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts may be the best book about liberal education that I’ve ever read.
Keilen maintains throughout the book a double focus. Focus one is Shakespeare’s portrayal of scholars in three plays, and the lessons those characters must learn about the relationship between scholarship and life.
The first play considered is Love’s Labor’s Lost, in which we see four young men declare themselves emancipated from non-scholarly concerns – from politics, from marriage, from society altogether – and withdraw into a purely scholarly world. During the course of the play, they learn some difficult lessons about their own humanity. Keilen: “Love’s Labours Lost is a sustained reflection on obscure motives and intractable states of mind that lead scholars to believe they are, or must become, different from and better than everybody else – even though, as Shakespeare’s suggests repeatedly, this alienating belief is vain and foolish and exposes them to mockery.”
To be sure, our young men remain works in progress. Though they all find that renouncing the company of women is harder than they expected, they do not end by marrying – the play itself calls attention to this: “Our wooing does not end like an old play: / Jack has not Jill.” But they have gained the humility that puts them on a properly human footing — so that they might someday grow into persons worthy of marriage.
The second play features that formidable scholar of the University of Wittenberg, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Keilen’s argument here is a distinctive and fascinating one, and it centers on this passage — Hamlet’s response to the ghost who has appeared to him and cried “Remember me!”
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
Keilen argues that here Hamlet refers specifically to his commonplace book, in which he has “copied” the teachings of old books that now seem to him but “saws” — like the clichés that Polonius later spouts to Laertes. Hamlet here proves himself to be a poor student, even if he received high marks from his professors, because he has not understood his studies as source of wisdom. By renouncing what he has learned as irrelevant to the challenge he faces, Hamlet leaves himself dependent on his own internal resources — and those prove to be insufficient. He needed a better guide than his own whirling mind.
The third scholar that Keilen treats is Prospero in The Tempest, who is, Auden and I would say, both scholar and artist – a person of manifest intellectual power who does not know, when we meet him, how to exercise that power wisely and effectively. He doesn’t know how to exercise his power wisely because he doesn’t know himself. He’s not aware of how subject he is to his own passions, his own resentments, his own desires. And eventually he has to cast aside his powers: they are poor teachers. By a harder road he must travel to learn who he really is.
Auden understood this well, thus the words he gives to Prospero, speaking to Ariel, in The Sea and the Mirror:
Those three plays are one focus of Keilen’s book. But what is Focus Two?
Throughout the course of the book, Keilen puts an interesting question to his fellow professors of literature: What do these plays teach us about the benefits and the costs of the professionalization of our scholarship? There was a time when scholars of literature didn’t work in universities, didn’t have professional standards of criticism, didn’t have disciplinary guidelines and structures, didn’t have the system of (perverse) incentives that we now have. There’s no question that through professionalization literary studies gained a certain rigor, imitative of (if not actually equivalent to) the rigor of the Naturwissenschaften. But what price did we pay for that rigor?
Keilen believes that Shakespeare is the ideal guide to help us answer this question, first because of the abiding and generous humanity that radiates through all his work and draws so many people to his plays:
In a nutshell, the book is for people who find the touchstone of their own humanity in Shakespeare’s works, along with new modes of experience, new ways of understanding themselves and others, and the possibility of transcending their cultural biases. It gave Johnson pause that Shakespeare “makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked.” But in my opinion, that is the heart of his wisdom and its appeal: the nonjudgmental portrayal of human life, in all its ugliness and beauty, which close reading and listening, like close acting and directing, elucidates. Shakespeare invites his audience, no matter who they are, to empathize with both the just and the unjust in his works. We do not have to leave behind the characteristics that contribute to our individual identities (age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, religion) when we come to Shakespeare, but to read Shakespeare’s plays or watch them in performance is to be seen and recognized by those works of art for who we all are: proud, passionate beings who not only suffer but also cause suffering, and who therefore deserve censure as well as pity.
But it also matters that Shakeapeare was a playwright — a writer whose work is intrinsically and necessarily collaborative.
Keilen himself had, by his own testimony, a conventional typical professional career until he began working with a theatrical company in Santa Cruz, California. That experience led him to deploy his learning not for the approval of his disciplinary peers, but rather in service to a communal endeavor pursued by people who were not scholars and have no interest in being scholars — by the university’s definition of “scholar” — but do have a great interest in reading, discussing, and staging Shakespeare’s plays.
I also wrote Shakespeare’s Scholars for the audience I have the privilege of knowing as a scholar, dramaturg, and community educator in Northern California. The Saturday Shakespeare Club is a group of people from different walks of life who care about the future of higher education, because their experiences as undergraduates in small colleges at UC Santa Cruz were formative for them; or because they settled here and worked at the university; or because, without being affiliated with the campus at all, they cherish it as a cultural institution that enriches their lives through public programming. The club’s members have been attending professional productions of Shakespeare’s plays at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a local theater festival, for a very long time, in some cases for decades. Their knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare’s art changes and grows with each new production, and as they pass through life’s stages together, their bond of friendship deepens. Shakespeare’s capacity to respond to their existential concerns and to create a world for them to explore together — what Woolf, in an early essay about the common reader, called “a living place” — is one of the main reasons why they believe that higher education and the theater are intrinsically good things. This book is for them and for people like them everywhere: for people who love books and believe that Shakespeare’s works and the liberal arts matter to the ways we might live.
Keilen testifies that this experience reoriented his priorities and ultimately helped him to realize that what Shakespeare’s scholars needed to learn – the vital necessity of humility, wisdom, and self-knowledge – was not being taught within our profession. And so his book is a kind of plea for members of this quite rapidly shrinking profession to turn their gaze outward and spend less time seeking the approval of their disciplinary peers, and more time putting their knowledge in the service of the communities in which they live.
This is a wonderfully encouraging thing for me to hear. Among other things, it helps me to see that my own instinct – which has always been toward public-facing scholarship – is sound. When I was early in my career at Wheaton College, a distinguished poet and critic who visited campus told me that if I stayed at Wheaton and taught only undergraduates, there would never be any meaningful connection between my teaching and my scholarship, that I needed to have graduate students in order to forge that connection. I decided almost immediately — my late colleague and friend Roger Lundin was instrumental in helping me to this decision — that I would not accept that severance. I would find a way to connect the unconnectable. What that meant, in the long run, was that a great deal of my writing had to be more public-facing. I could, I discovered, take what I learned from teaching my bright and eager undergraduates and apply it to my scholarly writing – not all of it, but a good bit of it. Looking back, I am amazed and grateful that I even had that instinct, still more than I determined to follow it — since at the time I made that decision, I had neither humility nor wisdom nor self-knowledge. (Not that I’ve made a lot of progress in any of those arenas in the intervening forty years, but, you know, it is what it is and I yam what I yam.)
The subtitle of Keilen’s book is slyly misleading, because in an “Envoi” at the end he brings in a fourth scholar: Marina, daughter of Pericles and Thaisa, from Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Marina has been forced into prostitution, but — in a move worthy of Scheherazade but notably different — uses her time with clients to teach them virtue. (Says one visitor to the brothel, “But to have divinity preached there! Did you ever / dream of such a thing?”) She can’t escape the need to work for a living, but she can, as Keilen puts it, “transform the conditions where she works.” She says to a servant in the brothel,
If that thy master would gain by me,
Proclaim I can sing, weave, sew, and dance,
With other virtues which I’ll keep from boast;
And I will undertake all these to teach.
I doubt not but this populous city will
Yield many scholars.
It is noteworthy that Marina confines her boasting to familiar feminine skills: about the deeper things of the mind and spirit, the matters she is most devoted to, she is shrewdly reticent. But for Keilen the key point is this: “The success of Marina’s pedagogy locates the true home of the humanities in the populous city, not the academic grove. It also underscores why it is essential to define the purpose of literary education as human flourishing and the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues.”
Keilen implicitly treats Marina’s situation as a kind of allegory of the life that we academics have made for ourselves, or allowed to be made. We have, in a sense, prostituted ourselves to standards of scholarly productivity and achievement that have nothing to do with “human flourishing and the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues.” And so what we need to do is transform our understanding of our own work, to make it into something that matters to us and to the members of our community who are not scholars. It is because she does this so beautifully that Keilen says Marina is “the humblest and the wisest of all [Shakespeare’s] scholars.”
