“What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?”

These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as a transmedia narrative—a story that plays out across many modes of expression, from historical documents, printed plays, and performances to graphic novels and games. We spent the semester framing Shakespeare as an idea we all participate in making.

The class was inspired by a 2019 episode of NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast that discussed Shakespeare and his plays’ racism, sexism, and antisemitism. “We have a narrative in the West that Shakespeare’s like spinach, right? He’s good for you. He’s universally good for you,” said ASU professor, theater practitioner, and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies director Ayanna Thompson. “We have to make that a more complex narrative.”

Thompson and the advocacy of the RaceB4Race community, a conference series and scholarly network galvanizing conversations about Shakespeare’s digestibility, particularly around race, challenged my students and me to build a more nuanced relationship to the Bard. We read plays by Shakespeare alongside adaptations of his work, approaching the materials as more than plots or settings or characters and changes therein—and instead as complex processes of belonging.

We spent part of our first meeting examining our own identities and interrogating the stories past classes and popular media had fed us about Shakespeare and his work. What were the sources—play texts, narratives or rhetoric (from parents, teachers, friends, the news), and media (movie adaptations, performances, YouTube videos, etc.)—that shaped our relationship to Shakespeare? How did we feel about him?

This framing can be deeply meaningful for students, who are navigating multiple spheres of influence: professional aspirations, societal or familial expectations, their own interests and passions. They are also grappling with knowledge—career content knowledge, self-knowledge, communal knowledge—and responsibility. To whom am I responsible? In what ways? Shakespeare and those who adapt his plays offer powerful opportunities for thinking critically about such epistemological and ethical questions.

To prime my students for questioning Shakespeare and their knowledge of him, our first unit didn’t start with a play; instead, we focused on Shakespeare’s biography and historical record. I sent them on a treasure hunt through the amazing resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection of archival documents around the Bard’s life. My students got to build out the gaps in history, wrestling with what we don’t know about the life of Shakespeare and his authorial connection to his plays. We then used movies to visualize these holes; we asked if two very different fictional biopics, 1998’s Shakespeare in Love and 2011’s Anonymous, would exist if the historical record had different documents in it.

Framing Shakespeare’s history in part as a narrative that is created and interpreted allowed my students to think more expansively about his literary authorship and cultural power.

Then, throughout the course, we treated each play and adaptation like a helix, where both texts twist recursively back upon each other. But the texts also connect to other authors’ lives and work. We know that Shakespeare relied on numerous source texts for his plays and that he influenced his contemporaries. And adaptations do not solely rely on Shakespeare either—they draw on many literary and cultural connections. We traced textual belonging as well as different types of thematic and material belonging—political, familial, racial, historical, gendered, peer group—across primary documents, play texts, and adaptations in various media forms. Studying adaptions in this way places Shakespeare in a larger world—or rather, worlds—both his own and ours.

Oxford professor Emma Smith attributes our ongoing engagement with Shakespeare to “gappiness,” which she defines as “all the things that we don’t know, the space there is for our creativity.” She says, “These plays are really incomplete, and the thing that they need to complete them is us and our sort of inventiveness, our world, our experience.” In the classroom, attention to “gappiness” gave my students a feeling of agency. With this intellectual space, they could wrestle with whether they hated, loved, felt indifferent to, or were curious about Shakespeare, all at the same time.

Romeo and Juliet—a favorite in high school curricula—elicited an interesting range of reactions. Despite initial grumbles about having to re-read a play, my students enjoyed exploring how their own maturation and life experiences shifted their relationship to the story. Juliet tended to rise higher in their estimation than previously, while Romeo fared worse. The students, having now had the experience of choosing a college and leaving home, felt the stakes of Juliet’s decision to defy her parents and make a choice for her own life.

We next read Ronald Wimberly’s 2012 graphic novel Prince of Cats, which focuses on the character of Tybalt and is set in what the author describes as an “alternate universe New York where dueling is part of the [street] culture” that led to the hip-hop of the 1970s and 1980s. The comic has a racially diverse cast and a Black protagonist in Tybalt, and samples an array of influences, of which Shakespeare is just one.

Wimberly speaks about how some audiences consume Black artists’ work through a tokenizing gaze—seeing it as valuable only because it makes them feel that they are being inclusive. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the hot-tempered Tybalt (whom another character calls “the prince of cats”) sets off the violence that ultimately leads to the tragedy of the two lovers. But by focusing on Tybalt and his relationships, Wimberly shifts how we understand death in the story. Where Shakespeare focuses on the “star-crossed lovers” and their tragedy, Wimberly attends to the bonds within families and among community members. He also suggests that Shakespeare himself tokenizes his minor characters in this play—stereotyping them as barriers for his main characters to rebel against but refusing to “get more into the price of violence for all involved.”

Tybalt and Prince of Cats led us to one of our most powerful meta-explorations of how we should engage Shakespeare at the college level. We can treat adaptations as texts that are intricately intersected with Shakespeare, but refuse a hierarchy where their import only comes through that relationship. We can even choose not to discuss Shakespeare when talking about these texts. And throughout, we can interrogate the roles of white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and xenophobia in the plays, and explore our own and others’ agencies as authors of Shakespeare.

Ultimately, these choices give students the power to refuse the deference we are trained to give to this author. Framing “Shakespeare” as a process of belonging—one that we can reject, look askance at, accept wholly or in part—means we all can choose whether we want to eat this particular literary spinach—and in what ways Shakespeare belongs to each of us.

The post Who Is Shakespeare For? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Suicide contagion is the term social scientists use to describe exposure to suicide or suicidal thoughts resulting in an increase of suicidal behavior. While media coverage has recently heightened concern about the phenomenon, it has been observed for centuries. One term for suicide contagion is the Werther Effect, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a Romantic German novel about a lovesick young artist who takes his own life. An international bestseller partly based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the book’s fame led to a rise in young people imitating Werther’s suicide, dressing in his trademark outfit or holding Goethe’s book for their fateful act.

Suicide contagion is a special case of the general phenomenon of social modeling or social learning, where humans follow examples more than rules. The initial exposure can come either directly (someone you know dies by suicide) or indirectly (media reports on suicide). Sometimes suicide is glamorized through its association with a successful, attractive, larger-than-life celebrity, like Robin Williams, Kate Spade, or Anthony Bourdain. Such exposure, especially with an emphasis on the cause and manner of death, makes suicide real, creating new ideas about suicide or triggering pre-existing thoughts, modifying a person’s understanding of typical social behavior, making it seem like an acceptable method of responding to stress, and loosening the restraint we usually exercise with harmful acts.

Once suicide is in the air, it can spread, disease-like. There might be an incubation period of days or weeks. There can be an outbreak or epidemic, a cluster of suicide-related behavior, especially for people with pre-existing vulnerabilities like mental illness, substance abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Some have access to good health care and receive help resisting the epidemic. Others are failed by poor oversight in institutions responsible for monitoring behavior.

The power of suicide contagion, and my experience with it, is one reason I hesitate to assign Hamlet, a play so obsessed with suicide that it’s hard to believe it’s one of the most commonly assigned texts in American high schools. It’s a bit shocking that the most famous speech in the most famous play by the most famous English-language playwright is about suicide—“To be, or not to be”—and we’re fine with that. With schools sending home warnings about suicide triggers like 13 Reasons Why and the “Momo Challenge,” Hamlet’s place in the curriculum merits scrutiny. Then there’s Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Othello—all frequent high school texts that involve suicide—plus less common texts like Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Rape of Lucrece. And that’s just Shakespeare. Why do we give these works so happily to our children?

“I am not talking about healthy people reading Romeo and Juliet,” epidemiologist Madelyn Gould, a leading expert on suicide contagion, explained in a 2001 workshop on the subject. But what are the odds that every young adult in a classroom of 25 is mentally healthy? In a lecture hall of 300? I’ll admit that I’ve never felt triggered by Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. But I never read a play by Shakespeare until I was a senior in college and five years sober (to be sure, I was assigned to read many before then). I’m pretty shaken now by the thought of me at age 16 reading, “To be, or not to be.”

Suicide contagion evokes a classic debate in literary theory tinged with the rhetoric of infection. The Greek writer Gorgias thought language could be so powerful as to exert a drug-like control over an audience’s actions: Who could blame Helen of Troy, he asked, when Paris’s seductive words were so strong? That’s one reason Plato banished literature from his ideal state—“poetry deforms its audience’s minds, unless they have the antidote”—and one reason some sought to outlaw theater in Shakespeare’s England. According to the first anti-theatrical work published in England, John Northbrooke’s A Treatise against Idlenes, Idle Pastimes, and Playes (1577), “Satan hath not a more speedy way and fitter school to work and teach his desire, to bring men and women into his snare of concupiscence and filthy lusts of wicked whoredom, than those places and plays, and theaters are.” In the language of epidemiology, Northbrooke concludes, “Beware of such contagiousness.”

Responding to charges that literature is “the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires,” the most famous work of literary theory from Shakespeare’s time, Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, acknowledged the force of literary contagion: “Poesie [can] infect the fancy with unworthy objects.” But, Sidney continued, “whatsoever being abused, doth most harm, being rightly used … doth most good.” If literature can create suicide contagion, it can also, “being rightly used,” dispel it. That shifts the ethical burden from the text to the teachers and critics who discuss it.

The 2012 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention called for coordination across multiple sectors and settings, including schools. It identifies teachers as key gatekeepers, able to refer at-risk people to specialists. Gatekeeper training can improve knowledge about suicide, attitudes toward it, and strategies for recognizing and intervening in cases. And suicide prevention training in schools significantly reduces suicide ideation and attempts in students. Yet teachers, most of whom have directly encountered at least one suicidal student, often receive little or no suicide prevention training, and feel unequipped to recognize and respond to students at risk.

That’s why guidebooks, such as David Schonfeld and Marcia Quackenbush’s The Grieving Student: A Teacher’s Guide, have been published. Education researchers, notably Kristine E. Pytash, have suggested that teachers should themselves read young adult literature involving suicide, and ask how they will respond to crises. In 2017, English Journal, the National Council of Teachers of English’s journal for junior and senior high school educators, published an issue on Death in the English Classroom. In 2018, the education scholars Michelle M. Falter and Steven T. Bickmore edited two companion collections, When Loss Gets Personal: Discussing Death through Literature in the Secondary ELA Classroom and Moving Beyond Personal Loss to Societal Grieving: Discussing Death’s Social Impact through Literature in the Secondary ELA Classroom. As they wrote, “Talking about death head on, rather than tangentially, in the English classroom isn’t easy to do, but it is important.”

English teachers are rarely qualified to provide counseling to suicidal students. But teachers can use suicide texts like Hamlet to better perform the mental health monitoring they are already asked to do.

Suicide contagion is especially associated with adolescence because, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “In the morn and liquid dew of youth, / Contagious blastments are most imminent.” Teens are “contagious” because their actions exert great influence on one another. Shakespeare invented the word “blastments” from the earlier blasting, “withering or shriveling up caused by atmospheric, electric, or unseen agency.” Blastments are dangerous because they are forceful yet ephemeral, and unavoidable in youth (“most imminent”). The same is true of the circulation of the idea of suicide in society today, making parents everywhere jittery, especially at night when, to quote Hamlet, “hell itself breaks out / Contagion to this world.”

One way Shakespeare conveyed suicide contagion was to fill Hamlet’s suicidal thoughts with water and plant imagery that reappears in his girlfriend Ophelia’s death by suicide. The first line of Hamlet’s first soliloquy points forward to the last moments of Ophelia’s life: “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.” The soliloquy is filled with “tears,” which water the “unweeded garden” that Hamlet compares his country to. Water imagery rushes back into Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be,” which flails in his “sea of troubles” and barrels toward suicide until “currents turn awry.”

But Shakespeare represented suicide contagion even more directly. As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet, at least in the example of Ophelia, the one death by suicide in the play: She only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.”

It’s easy to forget that Ophelia is onstage during this famous soliloquy, and can hear what Hamlet is saying. Her father, Polonius, and King Claudius are using her to spy on him. They call Hamlet to a room where she is walking about, as if by accident, then hide to observe the interaction between Hamlet and Ophelia. That’s the set-up for “To be, or not to be.”

What happens if we hear that soliloquy from Ophelia’s perspective? She’s a young woman in a man’s world. Whip-smart, confident, courteous, caring, kind, a little deferential. Pretty. She’s in love with Hamlet, or thinks she is, or was, but isn’t anymore. It didn’t end well. Now he’s being an asshole. She’s been dismissed, degraded, domineered, and abused by all the men in her life: her father, Polonius; her brother, Laertes; and her lover, Hamlet. Her mother isn’t around. The queen, a surrogate mom, is cagey with her. Ophelia doesn’t seem to have any friends; or at least doesn’t have an author even remotely interested in exploring her personal life. She’s doing her best to stay afloat. But it’s frustrating. Her father cares more about his job and the national news than her. Her brother, whom she was close with, went off to college. Her ex is playing manipulative mind games. She doesn’t have anyone to talk to. And no one to turn to. The authorities—in this case, Shakespeare—aren’t interested in hearing what she has to say. She’s alone, yet has to perform the monotony of daily responsibilities. The weight is heavy. She’s trying.

So imagine Ophelia hearing Hamlet—“To be or not to be—that is the question”—and what she might be thinking: Never thought of that. Suicide. A new option. Ending it all. Hamlet’s thinking about it, though Lord knows he’s got plenty going for him. Rich, powerful, male. What about my sea of troubles? God, don’t even think about it. But it’s too late. Can’t unthink suicide as a possibility. It burrows in your mind.

Surprisingly, Hamlet and Ophelia don’t appear onstage together until immediately after “To be, or not to be.” That first contact is a moment of contagion. “I’ll give you this plague,” he says to her. Hamlet is sick, and it’s contagious—his mental illness spreads to others.

The contagion of suicide is first registered, symbolically, at the end of this scene, with Ophelia’s first soliloquy. As the Shakespearean vessel for suicidal thoughts, the soliloquy marks Ophelia’s entrance to the realm of Hamlet’s melancholy. The plant imagery of Hamlet’s “unweeded garden” is echoed in Ophelia’s description of him as the “rose of the fair state.” The wind imagery of “contagious blastments” imminent in “youth” is echoed in Ophelia’s lament for “blown youth, / Blasted with ecstasy.” Just as this scene flows from Hamlet’s soliloquy to his dialog with Ophelia to her soliloquy, suicidal thoughts follow a path in Hamlet discoverable through contact tracing.

Ophelia is the epicenter of plant imagery in the second half of the play, handing out flowers to the king’s court as she sings songs about death. That’s a warning sign. She doesn’t talk about wanting to die, or look for ways to kill herself, or say she’s a burden to others. Not all suicides display all warning signs. But she’s feeling helpless and hopeless. She’s anxious, agitated, reckless, displaying extreme mood swings. “I will not speak with her,” says Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, trying to avoid an awkward situation.

The first thing today’s experts on suicide say: Don’t leave a vulnerable person alone. Claudius gets it. He orders Hamlet’s friend Horatio to follow Ophelia. But clearly someone was negligent. How else did she get out on a tree branch over the brook? Don’t leave the person alone, yes, but also have the vigilance to uphold that commitment amidst the day-to-day grind of time.

As Marlena Tronicke argues in one of the few readings of suicide in Hamlet that centers Ophelia, her act of drowning herself is a reclamation of agency in a misogynistic world that has stripped her of autonomy. That line of thought must be cautious, however, not to romanticize suicide as a valiant response to injustice. How can we think creatively about different ways Ophelia’s story could have gone, about different ways our stories could go when we feel the world is too much?

There is some ambiguity as to whether Ophelia’s death is a suicide. It reminds me of when they found my uncle’s body, and we didn’t know if it was suicide or not. Shakespeare’s gravediggers say Ophelia can’t have a Christian burial because “her death was doubtful.” Yet Gertrude’s famous narrative of Ophelia’s death makes it sound like an accident.

Reporting on suicide can create contagion. Media guidelines—not putting suicide on the front page, shrinking the size of the headline, not describing the details of the death, not sensationalizing the suicide, including suicide crisis hotline numbers, showing examples of successful help-seeking—mitigate suicide contagion. Contrasting this conscientious approach with the Werther Effect, researchers have dubbed it the Papageno Effect, after a character in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute who is suicidal until three boys offer suggestions for better ways to deal with his stress.

In this context, Gertrude’s famous speech, in which she dramatically narrates Ophelia’s death, is very problematic. One of its memorable features is the repetition of “drowned”: The water imagery established in Hamlet’s “too too solid flesh” soliloquy is recalled. Gertrude details the “brook” that Ophelia drowned in, and its “glassy stream.” The plant imagery returns in the “willow” that grows over the brook, with its “hoary leaves.” Ophelia climbed out on its “pendant boughs” to hang her “crowned weeds” recalling Hamlet’s “unweeded garden.” With this imagery, Shakespeare is asking us to remember Hamlet’s earlier suicidal thoughts when we hear of Ophelia’s end.

An “envious sliver” on the willow snapped, and down fell Ophelia and her “weedy trophies” into the “weeping brook,” nature personified with suicidal emotions. Gertrude’s sentimentalized Ophelia floats on the water “mermaid-like” for a moment, “like a creature native and endued / Unto that element.” But that moment of oneness with nature is belied by the “muddy death” that follows.

How Gertrude knows all this is unclear. If she saw it, why didn’t she try to save Ophelia? If she only heard about it later, why is her account so flowery? If the latter, Gertrude looks very much like a journalist who gathers facts second- or third-hand and embellishes them with narrative gusto.

Reality is less flowery. The day after my suicide attempt, my parents took me to a psychiatrist. I kicked and screamed. Things got worse before they got better. It was a long road to recovery, but I figured out how to ask for help. I learned how to use the medical system. Became a writer. Met my wife. Had some kids. Shakespeare scholar. College professor. Life is good.

After a crisis, it’s awkward. No one wants to talk about it. No one knows what to do. How are people going to respond? There’s even a sense of re-contagion at Ophelia’s funeral. Her despondent brother, Laertes, expresses suicidal thoughts, jumping in her grave, telling the gravediggers to “pile your dust upon the quick and dead.” Hamlet also becomes manic, vowing to Laertes that he, too, would willingly die for Ophelia: “Be buried quick with her and so will I.”

As with Ophelia earlier, Claudius tells Gertrude to “set some watch over your son.” Hamlet soon develops a fatalism that feels resigned to death: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.” His murder by duel isn’t suicide, but that tragedy causes contagion in his friend Horatio, who tries to drink from the poisoned cup. Hamlet intervenes, an important moment of containment of suicide’s spread: “Give me the cup.”

Sometimes you have to save a suicidal person from themselves. You might feel like it’s not your place. But in crisis moments it’s your responsibility. “Absent thee from felicity awhile,” Hamlet says in seeking to convince Horatio not to kill himself, “And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.”

The play leaves us, therefore, with Horatio as the author of the Hamlet legend, and with Horatio’s narrative of suicidal thoughts, suicide contagion, and suicide prevention as one method of resistance to the pull of despair. All suicidal people have a story to tell. Storytelling, Shakespeare suggests, is one strategy of coping with intense pressure.

Properly framed, Hamlet could be an introduction to the idea of suicide contagion, generating a self-consciousness that might counteract the danger of the phenomenon. When you know what suicide contagion is and how it works, you’re less likely to succumb to it, or perpetuate it. And Hamlet provides, in the final example of Horatio, an example of successful resistance to suicide contagion.

Yet, if hearing Hamlet talk about suicide planted the seed in Ophelia’s mind, could the same happen with Hamlet in our classrooms? Could the text be damaging to someone who has a pre-existing vulnerability?

Some months ago, I was going to invite my teenage niece to a performance of Romeo and Juliet, but decided against it. One of her friends had recently died by suicide. It shook the whole community. Parents were hyper-vigilant about the possibility of contagion. Better not to take any risks with Romeo and Juliet, I thought. It might be an opportunity for a healthy conversation, but I had absolutely no confidence that it would be a positive experience for her. The uncertainty froze me. I went to the play alone.

The production was old-fashioned. Tights and ruffs. In the opening acts, the highlight was the sword fighting. I wouldn’t realize its full significance until later. Romeo’s guttural yell—eyes closed, fists clenched in frustration—before killing Tybalt showed someone with what we now call an anger management problem. Lord Capulet’s possessive anger toward his daughter cut deep. Another angry expression of frustration in the form of misogynistic violence. The contagion of suicide seeped through Acts IV and V. It hit hard. It’s easy to forget—when we hear Taylor Swift’s “Love Song” popping, “Marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone”—that this is a play about two kids killing themselves. I don’t even want to think about it. It’s brutal. Easier to pretend we’re all fine.

Romeo’s yell again; he kills Paris. He can’t control himself. It’s only now that I recognize the thesis of this production: The hyper-masculinity of this culture, symbolized by those magnificent sword fights, leads to violence and suicide as appealing forms of emotional problem-solving: “These violent delights have violent ends.” I didn’t fully appreciate that line until tonight, though we see it every day—the pain and suffering that some days falls like rain. Our children trying their best to navigate the world we’ve made. Sometimes they fail. It’s devastating when they do. We’ll try to do better. But we won’t be whole again.

We’ll never get rid of suicide. Or Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. These texts are going to be assigned, and suicides are going to happen and be reported on. And you can’t simply cut the theme of suicide from these texts. Hamlet without suicide isn’t Hamlet.

But you can adopt media guidelines. You can pick your points of emphasis. Maybe a 10th-grade classroom doesn’t need a close reading of Gertrude’s speech about Ophelia’s death. Emphasizing the location and manner of death can create contagion, as can visual representations of the location. Experts would advise using visuals from Ophelia’s life, or the logo of the suicide prevention hotline, rather than John Everett Millais’s famous 1852 painting of Ophelia. Avoid saying suicide is senseless or happens “without warning.” Include up-to-date local and national resources to promote help-seeking behavior. Invite a mental health expert into the class to speak about suicide prevention. Encourage a high schooler’s parents to read Hamlet with their child. Perhaps they’ll have conversations they otherwise wouldn’t.

You can cover the warning signs in Ophelia’s case. You can emphasize that, today, Ophelia’s mental health issues are very much treatable because of a massive health care system that didn’t exist in her Denmark. You can use Hamlet to carry, Trojan Horse-style, information to students about the causes of suicide, treatment options, and recent research on rates and advances in prevention. And, just as psychotherapy can help vulnerable individuals learn to recognize their thought patterns and adjust behavior when suicidal thoughts arise, Hamlet can be used to train students to recognize warning signs and respond effectively.

Some culture warriors will feel this is “snowflake” Shakespeare. When I was in school, we didn’t tiptoe around suicide. Some students will likewise feel such a careful approach to suicide in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet is unnecessary. It doesn’t apply to them. Hopefully, that is the clear majority. For such students, discussion of Shakespearean suicides can expose them to strategies for recognizing warning signs in others and responding to crises. In fact, the National Institute of Mental Health’s five steps for suicide prevention can be adapted for teaching suicide texts like Hamlet:

1. Ask: It’s a difficult question, especially in a classroom, but when teaching Hamlet, ask students to come speak with you, and to speak with others, if they are having suicidal thoughts. Research suggests that asking about suicide does not increase suicidal thoughts. Ophelia didn’t really have anyone to talk to.

2. Keep Them Safe: When teaching Hamlet, send a note home to parents, and ask any students who may be vulnerable to reduce access to lethal items or places. Ophelia shouldn’t be climbing trees over the brook. Don’t let Horatio have the cup.

3. Be There: When discussing Hamlet, listen to what students say about suicide, and acknowledge their feelings. Research suggests acknowledgement reduces rather than increases suicidal thoughts. Consider Hamlet acknowledging Horatio’s suicidal thoughts, then keeping him safe.

4. Help Them Connect: Give students of Hamlet the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255), and the Crisis Text Line: 741-741. Have them save these numbers in their phones. Help any vulnerable students connect with a trusted individual like a family member, friend, or mental health professional. Train them to help others who are vulnerable connect to suicide prevention resources.

5. Stay Connected: Stay in touch after a crisis. Research shows a follow-up from a trusted individual reduces the chance of suicide. Horatio was assigned to keep Ophelia safe, but didn’t stay connected. Take a moment to check in with students a few weeks after you’ve finished Hamlet.

If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.

The post <i>Hamlet</i> Is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach It Like One appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the time, the New York Tribune expressed disbelief that so many people could be killed or injured because “two actors quarreled!” But the conflict was about so much more than which actor was better: it was a watershed event, signaling the growing penetration of celebrity culture into the national zeitgeist—and into the individual identities of everyday Americans.

Even before the Civil War, celebrities—their appearances, behaviors, expressed attitudes, their biographies, their failings, their scandals—were becoming a structuring force whose influence would increase with each new medium and communications technology, leading to the ever-beaming, constantly beckoning celebrity-driven media engulfing us today. In this light, we can see that the infamous Astor Place Riot was a flashpoint in a larger battle about class identity, resentments over economic and cultural privilege, and manhood and national pride, expressed through two Shakespearean actors: the British performer William Charles Macready and the American Edwin Forrest.

While Macready had quickly met with professional acclaim for his controlled performances in London and Paris, Forrest had played small, rough theaters in the South and West as he honed his more melodramatic style and worked his way towards bigger theaters. By the time they met in New York, Forrest was hailed as the country’s first great tragic actor, an extravagant performer deemed to embody the “American” style of acting.

Today, we associate Shakespeare with “high art” and culture, but in the nineteenth century his plays were performed in venues from opulent theaters to saloons, and many audience members knew key lines so well they would recite them along with the actors. These theaters were rowdy places where the audiences (mostly men) were spatially segregated by income, line of work, class, and race. The expensive boxes above and to the side of the stage were reserved for the wealthy.

Below the boxes (what we would today call the orchestra) was “the pit,” where the emerging middle class of manual laborers, sailors, mechanics, tradesmen, and, in New York, the Bowery B’hoys sat. Known for their boisterous (and often drunken) behavior, bright clothes, and love of the theater, the b’hoys were single, working-class men, mostly firemen and mechanics.

Above and behind the pit were the cheap gallery seats (today’s mezzanine) occupied by newsboys, apprentices, and other lower wage workers; segregated from everyone in the upper third tier were African Americans (assigned the very worst seats), and prostitutes and their clients. Those in the gallery were known to pelt actors who displeased them with rotten fruit, eggs, peanuts (hence the peanut gallery), and pennies. Those in each sector of the theater resented the others. So the theater was both a producer of celebrity and a tinderbox of class resentment.

This segregation within theaters began to give way to segregation between theaters. When the new, luxurious Astor Place Opera House opened late in 1847, it was meant for the rich. In May 1849, Macready, known for his restrained, intellectual style, was slated to perform Macbeth there.

At the same time, Forrest was also to portray Macbeth at another theater just a few blocks away. A feud had begun between them, and Macready had already denounced Forrest’s “deficiency in taste and judgement” and especially “the facetious applause of his supporters, the ‘Bower lads.’” In retaliation, Forrest, still smarting from having been hissed when he performed in England, declared that Macready “should never be permitted to appear again upon the stage” in New York City. The “penny press,” tabloid-style papers that had risen to prominence along with the theaters, fanned the conflict to increase circulation and sales.

Hundreds of Forrest’s supporters, many of them the b’hoys, bought tickets to Macready’s first performance on May 8, stoked in part by broadsides—provocative posters—signed by “The American Committee” that asked, “Working Men, Shall Americans or English Rule in this City?” The handbills urged them to “express their opinions” at the “English Aristocratic Opera House,” which indeed they did. As Macready sought to perform, Forrest’s supporters shouted him down and threw rotten eggs, potatoes, and other vegetables.

Macready tried again to perform on May 10. The b’hoys were ready, and so were Macready’s supporters—and the police, all 250 of them. But in addition to those in the Astor Place Opera House, an estimated 10,000 fans of both actors had gathered outside the theater. By the fourth scene, Macready could not proceed given the hissing, booing, and the hurling of more rotten vegetables—including a bottle containing the Indian spice asafetida, which “diffused a most repulsive stench throughout the house.”

The police burst in to eject the culprits, and Macready rushed through the play to finish. But the b’hoys outside were not having it, and began hurling bricks and paving stones at the theater. The police called in the state militia, 350 of them. But they were unable to calm or break up the group, some of whom were throwing bricks and paving stones at the police.

So the militia fired a volley over the crowd, and then one into the crowd, and then more.

The next day, the Astor Place Opera House gained the monikers “Massacre Opera House” and the “Disaster Place.”

But of course, this was not really about Macready and Forrest; conflicts about celebrities are never only about the celebrities. This one was over national pride and identity, class position and resentments, and different versions of masculinity. Macready personified Britain’s sense of its cultural superiority. His fans were the growing elite in New York City who embodied upper-class snobbery. The b’hoys, through their identification with Forrest, were rebelling against such cultural hierarchies and the special privileges of elites. Through their jeers and their rotten fruit, they sought to project onto Macready—and then exorcise—a needling sense of cultural inferiority, of not having “class,” and of not being the “right” kind of “cultured” men.

The Astor Place Riot was an exemplar of how popular culture is rarely “just entertainment,” and that battles over which entertainments and stars are worthy of admiration are always battles about larger norms, values, attitudes, and the social order itself. And while the riots were an extreme example, they demonstrated that fans had become active and participatory meaning makers, key players in the production of celebrities and their significance.

WWE wrestlers Dolph Ziggler and Charlotte give high-fives to fans Danny and Manny Gomez, ages six and nine, at a New York mall. Image courtesy of Stuart Ramson/Associated Press.

This was a crucial precedent, but it was not the only instance of the transformation of how Americans related to entertainers in those times. Possibly the greatest maestro of celebrity production during this era, P. T. Barnum, saw a growing market among urban audiences with more leisure time for entertainment, especially sensational and eye-catching acts. In 1842, he opened his “museum” in downtown Manhattan and filled it with oddities like the infamous “Fiji mermaid,” which was in reality the torso and head of a small, mummified monkey sewn onto the bottom half of a fish.

Barnum was also one of the earliest and most wildly successful creators of celebrities. Dubbed “the Shakespeare of advertising,” he used newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, press releases, and provocative broadsides to publicize his shows.

Barnum “discovered” Jenny Lind, a successful and famous Swedish opera singer who was unknown in the United States. To promote her, Barnum launched an unprecedented press campaign extolling her virtues as a charitable and benevolent woman who spent most of her time engaged in philanthropy, tending to “the afflicted and distressed;” he believed that most Americans would be unfamiliar with opera music but would be charmed and attracted by her morality. Indeed, Barnum understood that for certain types of people to become admired stars, they had to be connected to certain values that resonated with the aspirations of their audiences. Thus he cast Lind as an unparalleled talent who regarded her “artistic powers as a gift from heaven” yet was so selfless that she gave benefit concerts for orphanages and hospitals.

Billing Lind as “the Swedish Nightingale,” Barnum auctioned off tickets to see her. By the time she got to the United States in 1850, tens of thousands turned out to greet her ship. She performed before sold-out crowds, her 95 concerts grossing $712,161, the equivalent of $21 million in 2016 dollars. “Lindomania” resulted, with a host of products named after her, from gloves to hats to paper dolls.

By midcentury, the penny press, Barnum, and theatrical producers had established the mechanisms by which individuals became famous, and promoted certain ideological visions that celebrities represented. Meanwhile, a distinctive sociological change was occurring in American life, especially in the cities and larger towns, as people learned to assume the role of a mass audience, witnessing spectacles with hundreds and even thousands of other people they did not necessarily know.

People began to feel that allegiances to certain stars, and animosity towards other ones, were tied into their own individual and group identities. They were appreciating that publicity would help them be an informed, with-it person by promoting certain experiences they really should not miss—such as a particular, well-hyped theatrical performance. And they were coming to expect that publicity would frame how they were meant to receive such a major event.

Americans were picking up the new, publicity-driven language of celebrity, acquiring a new vocabulary about who and what should be celebrated and why. Crucially, people were learning how to inhabit a new, mass mediated persona: that of the fan.

The post When Did Americans Go Crazy for Celebrities? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As an American arts journalist living in London, I have always appreciated what a luxury it is to have access to a repertory company whose government funding means I can go to stellar productions at reasonable ticket prices. But since it is funded by taxpayers from all over Britain, the National Theatre also has had a challenge: how to be truly national, accessible to audiences around the United Kingdom, not just those within easy reach of its base in the capital.

The NT has amply repaid the public’s investment with financial blockbusters (and artistic landmarks) such as War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The History Boys, and One Man, Two Guvnors. Its productions range from canon stalwarts like Shakespeare and Ibsen to collaborations with groundbreaking experimental companies like Complicité, Kneehigh, and DV8. It’s also where, thanks to long-standing relationships, theatrical luminaries like Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, David Hare, and Mike Leigh premiere their latest works.

For all its successes, the NT has been acutely aware of the need to expand audiences beyond its middle-class base. The NT first experimented with touring productions in 1979, sending out a stripped-down version of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle to 20 arts venues around the country, with no costumes, sets, or props beside those provided by the venues. (Full-fledged productions now go around the world.)

And thanks to state-funded subsidies (which are generous by U.S. standards, but subject to considerable cutting depending on the government of the day), top prices for productions on the two mainstages hover around £65, or $103. An ongoing sponsorship arrangement with Travelex means selected productions offer a limited number of £15 tickets.

There has also been outreach to new audiences both in terms of non-traditional casting and in commissioning new works by playwrights from diverse backgrounds. But the NT’s most successful scheme for broadening its audience has been the NT Live simulcast.

The National Theatre’s production of War Horse was one of those broadcast to cinemas around the world. Photo courtesy of Peter Trimming/Flickr.

NT Live began in 2009, the brainchild of then-artistic director Nicholas Hytner, who started with a screening of Racine’s Phèdre starring Helen Mirren that was beamed live-by-satellite to some 50 UK cinemas, where it was seen by approximately 50,000 people.

“The objective is greater access,” Hytner told The Guardian at the time. “It will be a relatively expensive operation [the cost of those first broadcasts was £50,000] but we need to see whether there is a call for this. I keep thinking that if Olivier’s National Theatre had been available in a cinema in Manchester when I was a teenager I’d have gone every time and it would have been fantastic.”

It wasn’t an entirely new concept, of course. As long ago as 1964, a performance of a modern-dress Hamlet directed by John Gielgud with Richard Burton in the title role was filmed during its run at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne theater and distributed to movie theaters, but the visual quality left something to be desired.

The as-live performance concept was truly pioneered by the Metropolitan Opera—which began simulcasts in 2006 (by 2008 more people had seen the Met in a movie theater than in the opera house). The Met inspired other arts institutions like La Scala, The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, The Bolshoi Ballet, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (which started a simulcast program in 2011 but sadly had to cancel it two seasons later) to follow in their footsteps. It was in fact a Met cinema simulcast that convinced the National Theatre top brass the concept would work, although they still had their doubts whether an art form that didn’t involve music would be equally successful.

To avoid a static, overly-stagey feel while maintaining the immediacy of the theatrical experience, the NT Live broadcasts are multi-camera shoots in front of a live audience. Two fixed cameras, two tracking cameras, a crane and a Steadicam plus 16 microphones are positioned carefully throughout the auditorium, so the screen audience, as they would in person, looks at the stage from different angles (with guaranteed excellent sightlines). To create a fully-integrated experience, the camera script is devised in tandem with stage rehearsals. Sound levels, makeup, and even wigs (built-to-last theater wigs can look artificially stiff on camera) are tweaked.

Initially it was estimated that NT Live would need to reach 500 screens worldwide to cover average costs of £200,000 per broadcast. Since that first year, when the project lost £30,000, the NT Live broadcasts have been seen by over 6.5 million people and the number of venues has grown to 2,500, with 700 in the UK alone, representing one-third of the country’s movie theaters. The rest are in 60 other countries (international distribution is handled in partnership with BY Experience, a company that specializes in “live cinema events”) and the screenings now realize what the NT calls “a modest profit.”

The international expansion initially focused on English-speaking territories, but screenings are now offered with local language subtitles in almost 10 languages. And while venues initially were limited to arthouse and independent cinemas, the roster has grown to include multiplex screens. Ticket prices are set by the venues themselves, with pricing seeking a balance between the cost of a local cinema ticket and the cost of a live ticket for the same production. UK NT Live prices are currently around £20.

The growth in venues has been fueled by a combination of the National’s outreach to exhibitors and vice-versa. The commitment to live broadcasts (or “as live” for venues in other time zones or for encore screenings) has been maintained, with the NT resisting the siren call of a VOD or streaming model because, as an NT spokesperson said, “We are passionate about preserving the live, communal experience and the sense of event through these big screen exhibitions.”

While recent live television broadcasts in the United States have tended toward family-friendly musicals like Hairspray and Newsies, the National is dedicated to providing more serious, challenging fare as well as the crowd-pleasers, new plays as well as war horses (or indeed War Horse). Hytner declared that, “Playing dangerous, keeping grit always in the oyster, seems to me absolutely essential,” so productions have ranged from Coriolanus, Hedda Gabler, and Yerma to Peter Pan and Amadeus. The biggest draws have usually involved some element of star power, whether Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch in Frankenstein, Ralph Fiennes in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, or Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

As early as 2011, when it broadcast Complicité’s A Disappearing Number from the Theatre Royal Plymouth in the south of England, the NT partnered with other theater companies and regional theaters. Co-productions have included A Streetcar Named Desire starring Gillian Anderson from the Young Vic and Les Liaisons Dangereuses starring Dominic West and Janet McTeer from the Donmar Warehouse. NT Live’s biggest single broadcast to date, seen by more than 550,000 people, was Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch, a Barbican Theatre production. It even occasionally ventures into the commercial theater, broadcasting Peter Morgan’s The Audience and Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen from the West End, London’s equivalent of Broadway.

Fears that the digital broadcasts would reduce the incentive to see live performances proved unfounded. Research commissioned by Arts Council England showed that more people are likely to visit their local theater after seeing an NT Live screening.

The same study found that, far from reducing actual theater audiences, NT Live has generated larger audiences for live performances at regional repertory theaters and reached new audiences who have never previously attended a live National Theatre production. (The full study with further conclusions relating to pricing, marketing, development, and production can be found here.)

The success of NT Live has shown that digital technology need not drain audiences from live theater but, harnessed properly, can enhance them.

The post Bringing Shakespeare and Shaw Live from the Stage to the Screen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In some ways, it makes sense that Shakespeare’s plays stage many legal situations. Renaissance London, like America today, was full of widespread popular interest in legal goings-on. Moreover, law and literature were far more intertwined. The Inns of Court, which were the law schools of Shakespeare’s day, were also the training grounds for all kinds of writing, and many well-known Renaissance authors—including Sir Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, and John Donne—passed through their doors. The young men at the Inns acted in scripted and improvised festive holiday performances. Members of professional acting companies performed there. Law students sometimes took roles alongside the professional actors. Some early-20th-century biographers even theorized that Shakespeare had been a law clerk or a lawyer himself.

Few today believe that to be true. But even for his era, Shakespeare—who wrote trial scenes about twice as often as his contemporaries—seems particularly attuned to legal culture. Measure for Measure troubles over the interpretation of statutes and the consequences of both rigid enforcement and laxity. Much Ado About Nothing and Othello dramatize the damages done by slander, and the ease with which persuasive evidence can be fabricated. A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes delightful comedy of marital laws. King Lear, Richard II, and As You Like It explore and critique laws of property ownership and inheritance. The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, and the three Henry VI plays dramatize the era’s pervasive fear of treason.

Shakespeare’s ability to probe juridical issues by putting imaginary persons in legal situations has been a part of the U.S. legal system for a century now. The early-20th-century law and literature movement incorporated history and fiction into the law school curriculum to help re-humanize the profession. Today, many well-known authors appear in law school syllabuses. Unsurprisingly, though, Shakespeare occupies the central place. And during the past several decades, literary scholars also have brought more attention not only to the presence of law in the plays but also to the ways literature shapes legal ideas.

What, for instance, can Shakespeare tell us about our Supreme Court’s division over how to interpret the Constitution? The Merchant of Venice offers one possibility. Shylock, a Jewish moneylender in 16th-century Venice, has a notarized written contract with Antonio, a wealthy merchant. The terms are admittedly odd—if Antonio fails to repay Shylock within three months, Shylock may take a pound of flesh from anywhere he chooses on Antonio’s body. When Antonio defaults, the characters battle in court over the meaning and authority of the contract. Antonio’s lawyer, Portia (a woman disguised as a male lawyer), strives to find some loophole in the contract that will prevent Shylock from taking his pound of flesh. Finally, after rereading the document, Portia grants Shylock what he was asking for—rigid interpretation. Since there is “no jot of blood” expressly mentioned, Shylock can take Antonio’s flesh but not his blood—which is, of course, impossible. The argument anticipates innumerable legal disputes. Here is our modern American debate about the Constitution: What it means and includes “literally” is not at all self-evident, as centuries of interpretation show us.

The play’s conclusion also anticipates another issue that came before the Supreme Court earlier this week: the status of non-citizens. Before Shylock is allowed to leave the court, Portia cites a statute that indicts any “alien” who attempts harm to a citizen of Venice: He may lose his property and even his life. Shylock’s status makes him vulnerable to extremes of punishment not inflicted on citizens of Venice. Though he is allowed to live, he is required to forfeit his goods and renounce his religion. The scene requires audiences and readers to confront the brutal, inequitable, but “legal” treatment of the non-citizen.

Ultimately, Shakespeare’s works are knowledgeable about law but skeptical about lawyers and legal proceedings, often depicting them as flawed, corrupt, or simply incapable of addressing at the most significant level the deep desire of a society for justice. Nonetheless, justices still invoke his works as though their legal concerns were unambiguous. Sometimes, they’ll cite Shakespeare to add rhetorical flair and finesse to a ruling, and sometimes to bolster a decision by referring to works that have cultural authority. But sometimes, significantly, the quotations are doing central judicial work—as when the late Justice Antonin Scalia quoted Richard II while defending the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to confront witnesses against him: “Then call them to our presence—fact to face, and frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear the accuser and the accused freely speak.” Or when, in a dissent in an Eighth Amendment case on the meaning of “fines,” former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cited Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet: “I have an interest in your hate’s proceeding. / My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding; / But I’ll amerce you with so strong a fine. / Then you shall all repent the loss of mine.”

In these cases, and many others, Shakespeare becomes not only a writer about law but also a voice within it. Shakespeare’s plays don’t just reflect legal culture but also help to shape it. Meanwhile, legal and literary studies continue to bring to light new insights into the legal role of the Shakespeare canon—as an antique repository of early modern English law and a modern necessity through which we continue to imagine and reimagine a just society.

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When all aloud the wind doth blow
   And coughing drowns the parson’s saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
   And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                        Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

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