Emily Griffiths Jones | University of South Florida (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Emily Griffiths Jones
British Catholic History, 2017
Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare
Like many of us, I learned Shakespeare as a student almost entirely from reading play texts edite... more Like many of us, I learned Shakespeare as a student almost entirely from reading play texts edited by Anglo-American scholars, and I spent my graduate school years teaching Shakespeare almost entirely from such books. Then, in 2013, I had the great good fortune of being hired as a postdoc affiliated with MIT's Global Shakespeares project. 1 Over the next few years, I first helped design an online module for teaching global performances of Hamlet-featuring annotated and searchable archives of full videos and video clips of parallel moments from numerous global cinematic and theatrical adaptations-and then spent a semester piloting it in an undergraduate classroom at MIT's sister institution in Singapore, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). My own original intention for the Hamlet module was to orient digital Shakespeare scholarship toward small-scale student learning, and I was broadly pleased that I was participating in Global Shakespeares' goals of "demonstrat[ing] the diversity of the worldwide reception and production of Shakespeare's plays" and "promot[ing] cross-cultural understanding," but I started with little notion of what these might mean for practical pedagogy. 2 Most of my Singaporean students, for their part, started with two things: an ingrained respect for the genius and general importance of Shakespeare, even if they knew little or none of his work, and a hesitancy to call too much attention to themselves and to the various cultural/ethnic/religious differences present within the classroom. Beloved as Shakespeare is for representing "universal" human experience, students often need reminders to read with an eye toward localized questions of identity, justice, and politics. I focus largely on Hamlet here, alongside a few other texts, partly because it has an entrenched Western interpretive tradition skewed toward the supposedly universalizing psychological realm, and so is ripe for global reconsideration; one of my
This essay argues for a reevaluation of the critical commonplace that John Milton abandoned roman... more This essay argues for a reevaluation of the critical commonplace that John Milton abandoned romance after 1649 because of the genre’s Royalist overtones. I read Paradise Regained against two postwar Royalist romances, Percy Herbert’s The Princess Cloria and Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, to illuminate Milton’s commitment to countering a uniquely Restoration-era phenomenon: the Royalist revision of romance into a secular genre in which the hero struggles to navigate the tides of fate. Paradise Regained embodies a struggle between this revisionary model, which forms the basis of Satan’s understanding of heroic romance, and Jesus’s equally (or more) romantic Puritan alternative, which rejects Satan’s innovative thematics in favor of a complex romance of providence.
Reading Hutchinson's Genesis epic Order and Disorder against John Dryden's panegyric to Charles I... more Reading Hutchinson's Genesis epic Order and Disorder against John Dryden's panegyric to Charles II, "Astraea Redux," this essay argues that Dryden's poem depicts the Restoration as the universalist telos to the turbulent romance of English history: God blesses all the nation's people equally in their spiritual marriage to the king, an ecstatic union that subsumes distinctions of gender and ideology by reinscribing all subjects as feminine in sinfulness, as masculine by marriage, and as royalist. Hutchinson resists this triumphalist and masculinist narrative: in her romantic treatment of her biblical protagonists, she insists that both teleological plot and redemptive eroticism are gifts reserved for the Puritan elect, and she suggests that male and female believers need not be divided by hierarchical narrative perspective, sharing equally in the promise of reproduction and in prophetic glimpses of the still-remote "full Restoration."
When James VI of Scotland became James I of England upon Elizabeth I's death, the foreign monarch... more When James VI of Scotland became James I of England upon Elizabeth I's death, the foreign monarch faced the double challenge of legitimizing and popularizing his claim to the throne long held by his distant cousin, who had been highly regarded, for the most part, by her subjects. Amid rumors that James secretly despised his predecessor for ordering his mother's execution, that he refused to attend her funeral, and that he discouraged any mention of her at Court, the new king took pains to construct an elaborate public bond between himself and Elizabeth. His strategy was twofold. First, James insisted on the kinship that designated him as Elizabeth's undisputed heir, explaining the delay of his triumphal entry into London and his absence from the funeral by claiming to be "so near of blood" to her "as we will not stand … upon the ceremony of our own joy" and disregard the "dignity which belongs to our dearest sister as long as her body is above ground." 1 Other portrayals of James and Elizabeth's kinship went further, such as Anthony Munday's pageant The Trivmphes of Re-Vnited Britania (1605), which elides the rifts between James and the late queen in favor of a felicitous but fictional rendering of their relationship:
British Catholic History, 2017
Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare
Like many of us, I learned Shakespeare as a student almost entirely from reading play texts edite... more Like many of us, I learned Shakespeare as a student almost entirely from reading play texts edited by Anglo-American scholars, and I spent my graduate school years teaching Shakespeare almost entirely from such books. Then, in 2013, I had the great good fortune of being hired as a postdoc affiliated with MIT's Global Shakespeares project. 1 Over the next few years, I first helped design an online module for teaching global performances of Hamlet-featuring annotated and searchable archives of full videos and video clips of parallel moments from numerous global cinematic and theatrical adaptations-and then spent a semester piloting it in an undergraduate classroom at MIT's sister institution in Singapore, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). My own original intention for the Hamlet module was to orient digital Shakespeare scholarship toward small-scale student learning, and I was broadly pleased that I was participating in Global Shakespeares' goals of "demonstrat[ing] the diversity of the worldwide reception and production of Shakespeare's plays" and "promot[ing] cross-cultural understanding," but I started with little notion of what these might mean for practical pedagogy. 2 Most of my Singaporean students, for their part, started with two things: an ingrained respect for the genius and general importance of Shakespeare, even if they knew little or none of his work, and a hesitancy to call too much attention to themselves and to the various cultural/ethnic/religious differences present within the classroom. Beloved as Shakespeare is for representing "universal" human experience, students often need reminders to read with an eye toward localized questions of identity, justice, and politics. I focus largely on Hamlet here, alongside a few other texts, partly because it has an entrenched Western interpretive tradition skewed toward the supposedly universalizing psychological realm, and so is ripe for global reconsideration; one of my
This essay argues for a reevaluation of the critical commonplace that John Milton abandoned roman... more This essay argues for a reevaluation of the critical commonplace that John Milton abandoned romance after 1649 because of the genre’s Royalist overtones. I read Paradise Regained against two postwar Royalist romances, Percy Herbert’s The Princess Cloria and Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, to illuminate Milton’s commitment to countering a uniquely Restoration-era phenomenon: the Royalist revision of romance into a secular genre in which the hero struggles to navigate the tides of fate. Paradise Regained embodies a struggle between this revisionary model, which forms the basis of Satan’s understanding of heroic romance, and Jesus’s equally (or more) romantic Puritan alternative, which rejects Satan’s innovative thematics in favor of a complex romance of providence.
Reading Hutchinson's Genesis epic Order and Disorder against John Dryden's panegyric to Charles I... more Reading Hutchinson's Genesis epic Order and Disorder against John Dryden's panegyric to Charles II, "Astraea Redux," this essay argues that Dryden's poem depicts the Restoration as the universalist telos to the turbulent romance of English history: God blesses all the nation's people equally in their spiritual marriage to the king, an ecstatic union that subsumes distinctions of gender and ideology by reinscribing all subjects as feminine in sinfulness, as masculine by marriage, and as royalist. Hutchinson resists this triumphalist and masculinist narrative: in her romantic treatment of her biblical protagonists, she insists that both teleological plot and redemptive eroticism are gifts reserved for the Puritan elect, and she suggests that male and female believers need not be divided by hierarchical narrative perspective, sharing equally in the promise of reproduction and in prophetic glimpses of the still-remote "full Restoration."
When James VI of Scotland became James I of England upon Elizabeth I's death, the foreign monarch... more When James VI of Scotland became James I of England upon Elizabeth I's death, the foreign monarch faced the double challenge of legitimizing and popularizing his claim to the throne long held by his distant cousin, who had been highly regarded, for the most part, by her subjects. Amid rumors that James secretly despised his predecessor for ordering his mother's execution, that he refused to attend her funeral, and that he discouraged any mention of her at Court, the new king took pains to construct an elaborate public bond between himself and Elizabeth. His strategy was twofold. First, James insisted on the kinship that designated him as Elizabeth's undisputed heir, explaining the delay of his triumphal entry into London and his absence from the funeral by claiming to be "so near of blood" to her "as we will not stand … upon the ceremony of our own joy" and disregard the "dignity which belongs to our dearest sister as long as her body is above ground." 1 Other portrayals of James and Elizabeth's kinship went further, such as Anthony Munday's pageant The Trivmphes of Re-Vnited Britania (1605), which elides the rifts between James and the late queen in favor of a felicitous but fictional rendering of their relationship: