Reading to Write / Writing to Read (Thoughts on teaching Shakespeare)

First Thoughts (Expositio)

    Last night I explained a composition idea for a Shakespeare class to a professor of Renaissance literature. “RCL [rhetoric, composition, and literacy] instructors love this idea,” I noted, “but Renaissance professors are skeptical.”
    “That's because Introduction to Shakespeare is a Renaissance course, not a composition course,” she responded.
    Is it? I didn't have a response to the professor at the time, but since then I've followed the research available to me to write a curriculum that may provide the best of both worlds. I came to this approach―gradually but graciously―after a lot of study of the sources in John C. Bean's Engaging Ideas. That book only arrived on my desk thanks to OSU's Writing Across the Curriculum reading group―a group that finally opened my eyes to the utility of writing to promote critical thinking and lifelong learning.
    Is Introduction to Shakespeare a Renaissance and not a composition course? I must slavishly quote from Bean's premise, that “writing is closely linked to thinking, and”
in presenting students with significant problems to write about―and in creating an environment that demands their best writing―we can promote their general cognitive and intellectual growth. When we make students struggle with their writing, we are making them struggle with the thought itself. Emphasizing writing and critical thinking, therefore, generally increases the academic rigor of the course. Often the struggle of writing, linked as it is to the struggle of thinking and to the growth of a person's intellectual powers, awakens students to the real nature of learning. [emphasis added] (Bean xvi)
In Introduction to Shakespeare, I want transform students' struggles with vocabulary and syntax; context and history; form and style; into real growth in critical thinking and meaning-making. And the most transformative meaning-making strategies all share one thing: writing.

Background (Narratio)

    What's worse, Shakespeare instructors have to pack so much of this into a term to prepare their students to write original research. This is a noble goal, and in principle, I like to give students genuine and significant problems. In order for the students to write original research, the typical instructor will guide them at breakneck speed past the well-trafficked paths and dead ends. The typical instructor delegates the task of secondary research to her students in the form of an annotated bibliography. This inadvertently cruel assignment asks students with a few weeks'  experience to enter into a critical conversation, evaluate expert critical positions, and then―probably on the final paper―write a complex but unified thesis that yields an integrated framework that can respond to the entire array of facts and values in the critical universe.
    After this breakneck rush to original research, what do students write? They write a pile of papers that intimidates everyone. Instructors feel they must evaluate extensively―correcting grammar, proofreading works cited, suggesting sources and counter-arguments―because there are so few opportunities to correct student writing, to shape them into young researchers. The students feel the instructor's frenzy, and struggle to cope with a page full of red ink or electronic mark-up. Students skip to find the essay's grade, because this ineffable assignment will only give way to another, more ineffable assignment with raised expectations and even more red text. When the students finally deliver their ultimate paper, the instructor marks everything in a mania: a solid week of extensive reading that produces a stack of unread responses, a monument to frustration. The students don't come back to receive their papers; the pile grows; the instructors despair.
    And yet, I propose to add even more writing to Introduction to Shakespeare. I can imagine my colleagues saying, “The students are terrible writers, grading kills me, and they never respond to feedback, anyway. Why should I assign more writing?” You should assign more of the right kind of writing to
·    promote critical thinking,
·    introduce students to disciplinary conventions, and
·    enforce progressive improvement throughout the semester.
This is hardly motivating to the skeptic, so I should outline exactly why such a plan would work.

My goals (Partitio)

    My proposed methods begin with my goals for the class, and working backwards from there, arrive at a different sequence of assignments for the Shakespearean classroom. My central conceit comes from the research of the combined National Survey of Student Engagement and Council of Writing Program Administrators. John C. Bean summarizes their findings as, “good assignments... give students opportunities to [1] receive early feedback on their work, [2] encourage meaning-making, and [3] clearly explain the instructor's expectations and purpose”  [numbers interpolated](1).
    In what follows, I'll outline what those qualities mean, and what they mean in relation to to Introduction to Shakespeare. Then I'll suggest some of the most pivotal assignments for Introduction to Shakespeare. I should return, then, to the common complaints I've heard about teaching Shakespeare, and respond to them before concluding.

Where to begin (Confirmatio)

Interactive components

    Interactive components, those that grant early and frequent feedback, “situate writing as a process of inquiry and discovery, promote productive talk about the writer's emerging ideas, and encourage multiple drafts and global revision” (Bean 97). In the Shakespearean classroom, this characteristic of good assignments forbids “the pile” of ungraded assignments: This is, of course, earlier said than done. The most effective strategies appear to be
a.    Task-specific rubrics to signal goals to students
b.    Generate ideas in groups or in class
c.    Identify struggling students with early assignments
d.    Require peer reviews on first drafts
e.    Use one-on-one conferences to respond to high-order concerns
f.    Comment on late drafts rather than final products
g.    Use models to comment on style, grammar, etc.
h.    Make revision-oriented comments based on high-order concerns
i.    Use a rubric on final products    (Bean 290-16)

Meaning-making assignments

    Meaning-making assignments place the student within a rhetorical context with (a) a  role and (b) an audience, and between those, (c) a generic or disciplinary format relevant to (d) an intriguing problem (Bean 97). In the Shakespearean classroom, a meaning-making assignment consists of
a.    The role of persuading a reader of some interpretation of the text
b.    An experienced and skeptical audience (who fail to immediately distinguish the student's claim from existing scholarship)
c.    A guided introduction to the chief debates in Shakespearean scholarship
d.    An intriguing problem generated from a series of imaginative doodles, reflections, and open questions

A clear explanation of the instructor's goals

    A clear explanation of the instructor's goals typically resembles a rubric, insofar as it presents the instructor's grading criteria in relation to the course goals (Bean 97). While rubrics seem anathema to the Shakespearean classroom, I find that they are actually a profound distillation of instructors' unspoken presumptions. While the implied precision of the rubric can discomfort instructors, I believe that instructor discomfort can indicate either a general numerophobia or the instructor's own inaccuracy in the design of the rubric. None of these implicate the rubric itself, as a method of assessment. A rubric should never be claimed to represent objectivity, but only consistency in the application of grading criteria. In the Shakespearean classroom, a rubric ought to show students the quality and preponderance of each criterion so that
a.    the instructor has a facile tool for responding to student papers
b.    the instructor has a clear explanation of priorities in the event of a disputed grade
c.    the students write to their audience
d.    the students can appreciate the consistency by which the instructor applies admittedly subjective judgments

Working Backwards

The extra twist in applying these three criteria is that Shakespeare wrote what we now call “difficult texts.” According to Bean's Engaging Ideas, students struggle with difficult texts due to

• poor reading processes,
• failure to reconstruct the text as they read,
• failure to assimilate the unfamiliar,
• limited understanding of the rhetorical context,
• failure to interact with the text, and
• unfamiliarity with cultural codes.

Students might expect to read Shakespeare superficially, at most to retain plot information. The cause and effect of superficial reading is that students don't commit enough time to read. When students do read, they don't adapt their reading strategies according to genre and purpose, even when they fail. Students may be too hurried or too inexperienced to identify each genre's “roadmapping” or rhetorical organization, as well as the rhetorical codes that the author needs them to employ. On a more basic level, students don't parse syntax or look up vocabulary. Consequently they don't associate the text with its rhetorical environment or see themselves as the target of a rhetorical communication from the author. Lastly, instructors try to overcome these failures by lecturing over the text. But teachers “deprive students of the very practice and challenge they need to grow as readers... [T]eachers should send the signal that becoming an engaged reader is part of a student's homework component of a course” (Bean 163-8).
The alternative simple: work backwards from the abstract goals to the concrete challenges.

Students have poor reading processes,	so introduce them to scholarly reading practices, collect and check marginal notes, or monitor a set of guided reading journals.
Students fail to reconstruct arguments while they read,	so assign summary writing, compile marginal notes and assign groups to summarize disagreements, or go through the text and distinguish “what it is” and “what it does.”
Students fail to assimilate the unfamiliar,	so assign a fake author interview in the guided reading journal or prompt the class to debate a controversial thesis about the text.
Students have a limited understanding of the rhetorical context,	so create reading guides that synthesize general history and critical debates, or compile profiles of each author's preferred poetic devices.
Students are unfamiliar with cultural codes,	so create reading guides or ask students to do something creative, like draw comics, in a guided reading journal.

Some assignments aid reading in multiple ways: guided reading journals, reading guides, and marginal markup fill a large number of student needs. The Comparison Table shows how such assignments might be integrated (p. 10). But these assignments may be so far removed from students' expectations that the instructor may have to have an explicit conversation about how course assignments relate to course goals. And furthermore, students can read about their expectations in a well-designed rubric.

Guided reading journals

Guided reading journals can prompt students to reflect on their reading practices, assimilate the unfamiliar, and practice with unfamiliar cultural codes. Many instructors introduce reading practices in Introduction to Shakespeare, from sentence-level parsing to strategies of note-taking. The guided reading journal instruct students to apply both outside of class hours. Furthermore, the guided reading journal could compare these methods with the students' past methods through double-entry journaling. That is, each student could begin the semester by describing her reading and note-taking strategies. Then, twice in the rest of the semester, she can write and compare the strategies she's learned with her old entry in the guided reading journal.

Otherwise, the guided reading journal can provide an opportunity for imaginative reflection on some of the cultural codes that dominated Shakespeare's England. Students could be prompted to:

• imagine our own world with strict class and gender divisions
• imagine that their own friends were transported back to early modern England and had to attend a play or perform some other task
• imagine that Shakespeare had arrived in the current day and had to be introduced to social changes
• imagine that a “dark ages” had fallen between the Renaissance and the current day, and that Shakespeare's texts were treated in the same way as Milton or Jonson treated the classics
• propose a rewrite to small parts of Shakespeare's plays to completely change their rhetorical effect
• propose original stagings of Shakespeare's play to make them relevant to an audience of their friends or college peers

Of course these exercises could be disastrous without a proper introduction to the context of each class. Therefore accessible reading guides are essential.

Reading guides

Reading guides should help students understand the rhetorical context and general history of Shakespeare. Sounds simple, but it's hard. Bean outlines five specific uses for these: “[1] define key terms with special disciplinary meanings, [2] fill in needed cultural knowledge, [3] explain the rhetorical context of the reading, [4] illuminate the rhetorical purpose of genre convertions, [5] and ask critical questions for students to consider as they progress through the text” [numbers interpolated] (174). A reading guide for Macbeth, for example, would:

1. Introduce students to the meaning of some key terms, like “tragedy,” “act,” “scene,” “folio,” or even “equivocation.”

• The guided reading journal could ask students to imagine breaking a story they love (eg, Star Wars) into act and scene breaks.

2. Summarize the Scottish succession, and in turn to the Tudor succession, and songs from Middleton's The Witches.

• The guided reading journal could ask students to imagine an equivalent staging for Macbeth in the context of President Obama's first inauguration.

3. Explain James Stuart's writings on witches, the relation of James to the King's Men, and the royal performance of the Scottish play.

• The guided reading journal could prompt students to draw a comic or make a series of image macros expressing the awkwardness of the situation.

4. Explain some of the key concepts for reading Mackers, such as Divine Right and regicide; hamartia and dramatic irony.

• In turn, the guided reading journal could prompt the student to write about the tragic flaw of herself or someone she knows.

5. Suggest that students read to understand gender roles as represented in Macbeth, or the distinction between tyrants and good kings

• This could be adapted directly into a guided reading journal.

Marginal markup

I have consulted with many people, and even though most agree with the proposed activity of student glossing, everyone vigorously disagrees about how to collect and compare marginal markup. As I like to say, the fighting is so fierce because the stakes are so low. Below, I'll outline the strengths and weaknesses for four possible methods for marginal markup.

Marginal Markup Method	Strengths (in no order)	Weaknesses (in no order)
Collaboratively-edited XML document	XML is the emergent mode of descriptive Shakespeare bibliography, with several important scholarly projects in TEI-compliant XML. Students will be in contact with cutting-edge scholarship.	XML documents bust be well-formed, and may need to be valid.
	Scholars have already produced scholarly XML editions of Shakespeare's folios and quartos, ready for markup.	Students would need access to an XML editor, such as <oXygen> or emacs.
	Students can produce their own systems of tagging and reference, customized to each project	Students would need access to a computer, at least in small groups.
	XML tags and reference have been suggested to promote meta-cognition.	XML is hierarchical, restricting the kinds of markup that students can perform.
	XML is easily converted into HTML, so students could claim a web publication with only a little elbow grease.
	The DMP has significant experience with XML in the composition classroom, and can provide semester-long support.	The instructor has to manage a Subversion revision control system.
	XML is non-proprietary
	In the future, grants may be available for higher-level classes like this.	Students may feel less accountability in a class-wide project.
	Instructors can supervise collaboration.
Class wiki	Wikipedia is the dominant reference site on the web. Students can edit Wikipedia once introduced to wikicode.	Wikispace is proprietary.
	Instructors can supervise collaboration.
	Wikipedia can be integrated into the research process.	Wikicode has limited markup capacity
	Wikicode is more accessible than XML.	Students may feel less accountability in a class-wide project.
	A class wiki can be made public so that students can claim a web publication.
Small-group MS Word comments	MS Word is the dominant text editor in industry and the academy. Introducing students to the extended functionality of MS Word would probably provide the greatest payoff for the average student.	MS Word is proprietary.
		Students would have to independently coordinate to collaborate on a single document.
	MS Word is more accessible than XML or Wikicode.	MS Word is not imminently publishable.
	Small groups provide more accountability and motivation.	Instructors would have to manage comment-merging
Literal notes in literal book margins	Pen and paper is more accessible than XML, Wikicode, or MS Word.	Extremely difficult comment-merging
		Possibly decreased motivation from lack of collaboration.
	Individual projects provide the greatest level of accountability.	Severely limited publication potential.
		No compatibility to other systems of writing or research.

At the time of composition, the best choice seems to be a combination of a few systems. First, students should be introduced to a few markup activities in class, followed by out-of-class practice with the guided reading journal (ie pen and paper). Second, this pair of activities should be repeated a few times until students know enough markup activities—eg, marking unfamiliar vocabulary, syntax, references, locations, etc. Third, students should be assigned into small groups to apply these activities to a part of single play. Each small group may gloss a scene, and in sum, the entire class will gloss an entire play. Any technology's accessibility may be irrelevant: I suspect that there should be enough STEM students in Introduction to Shakespeare to support each small group with at least one person familiar with HTML—a close relative to wikicode and cousin to wikicode. Fourth, the instructor or suppport system can combine each small group's output into a single file or webpage, and use this as the basis for future discussion.

Comparison Table

Reading to Write about Shakespeare		Writing to Read Shakespeare
Weeks 1-9	Read 4-5 tragedies and histories	Week 1	Read 6 sonnets with introduction to reading with markup
		Weeks 2-9	Read 3-4 tragedies and histories
	Read 2-3 secondary articles, chapters, or anthology excerpts		Read 3-4 reading guides, summarizing critical trends
	Write first short response / close reading paper of 3-4 pages		Write guided reading journal: 2 pages each week; 16 pages total
			Write class markup activity: approximately 2 pages per student, 10 pages per group, 90 pages total
Weeks 10-15	Read 3-4 comedies	Weeks 10-13	Read 1-2 comedies
			Write template paper, 5-6 pages
	Write second short response / close reading paper of 3-4 pages	Weeks 14-15	Attend paper conferences
	Write annotated bibliography of 3-5 pages		Attend revision workshops
Exam week	Write final essay of 8-12 pages, based on annotated bibliography	Exam week	Write final essay of 7-10 pages, based on continuous scaffolding
Total:		Total:
7-9 primary sources read 2-3 secondary sources read; Other secondary sources synthesized into annotated bibliography 17-25 pages written with no inherent scaffolding 3 pieces of instructor feedback 0 instances of peer feedback		10-12 primary sources read 9-12 secondary sources synthesized into reading guides Other secondary sources synthesized into markup activity 30-34 pages written with inherent scaffolding 4 instances of instructor feedback 3 instances of peer feedback

Expected problems (Refutatio)

    If you were to show a Professor of Renaissance literature the alternatives above (p. 10), I can guarantee that they would almost universally favor the “Reading to Write about Shakespeare” class on the left. Ironically, that more traditional class contains less “content” than “Writing to Read Shakespeare,” and furthermore, the more traditional class engages students in less critical thinking. But the activities on the right are not without their critics.
    I talked to another colleague lately who protested: If you give the students all of these resources, when are they going to learn on their own? Let me be frank: there's no guarantee that anyone's going to learn anything. On the most fundamental level, I think that students can only ever learn on their own: but I digress. On a more practical level, the truth is that learning is hard. It's hard to learn new methods for writing and reading: even when explicitly taught the best known methods in a classroom; even for our most talented students. Our most talented students arrive in our classrooms after twelve years of public-school conditioning: conditioning to excel at standardized tests and memorize facts. From memorizing facts to thinking critically―and at times, thinking radically―about literature, our students need a bridge.  Our students need a bridge to the original research that Shakespeare instructors crave.

Where's the paper?

The final paper is the ne plus ultra of college English classes. I can't explain why, but there seems to be an obligation for a 7+ page final paper in every English class hidden somewhere in the Constitution. The ubiquity of this assignment has two effects: first, the final paper seems more and more important; second, there are more and more values attributed to the final papers. In conversations with other instructors, I have heard final papers praised as being complex and unified; witty and straightforward; faithful to sources and adventurous; focused and wide-reaching. It's possible that all of these contradictions can be resolved, but regardless, they show that there is a sort of crisis surrounding the final paper.
Remember that the dream of a “Reading to Write” classroom is a piece of original research. That's the dream, but the reality typically follows the numbers 7, 5, and 3: a seven-page book report in five-paragraph format thrown together over a three-day weekend. As described above, the typical final paper leaves an instructor feeling frustrated and disappointed; students can feel completely stranded and desperate as they struggle to meet the minimum page-count requirements. And worst of all, this type of assignment is most vulnerable to plagiarism: there are oodles of this whole kit and kaboodle on Google.
And yet, none of this is to refute the importance of “the paper.” My counter-proposal adds three dimensions to this classic assignment: scaffolding, or progressive completion and feedback; templates, or suggested outlines; and repeated feedback in drafts, rubrics, and conferences.

“Scaffolding” assignments

Scaffolding metaphorically builds bridges from reading to writing. In more practical terms, it prompts students to practice skills that will be necessary for some ultimate task. Surprisingly, scaffolding provides an effective buffer against plagiarism. A plagiarized paper stands out in sharp relief from the scaffolded assignments that a student has already composed. Moreover, the scaffolded assignments should reduce the attitudes of fear and cynicism that typically lead to plagiarism.

More profoundly, scaffolded assignments can introduce students to nearly every aspect of academic writing. To name a few:

• Evidence and logical claims
• Grammar and clarity
• Structure and outlines
• Revision and feedback
• Rhetorical situation, genre, and disciplinary conventions

Ideally both of the assignments described above (guided reading journals, marginal markup) provides students with a base of evidence. Further exercises, such as a template paper, can provide students with rhetorical and generic models for composition.

Template papers

A template is as it sounds, a pre-packaged series of compositional moves that can be transformed into a rudimentary argument with the inclusion of some basic findings. The template can be more or less restrictive, ranging from cloze deletions to rough outlines:

Thesis templates

[A] and [B] seem like different [Y], but I'll show how they're both actually [Z].

Paragraph outline

Topic sentence. First thought / simple problem. Second thought / complication. New information / resolution. Comparison with first thought. Return to topic level.

Sentence-level outline

Based on yesterday's discussion, our class hasn't resolved the question of [A]. Several of my classmates argued that [B]. I agree with them that [C]. However, they are mistaken when they [D]. In contrast, I argue that [E]. (Bean 155)

I understand that these templates sound uninspired and mechanical. However, there are three advantages to templates, two of which are based precisely on the mechanical nature of these prompts. First, disciplinary conventions are much more mechanical than scholars will generally acknowledge. Any scholar after PhD exams knows how to skim an article or monograph based on standard scholarly roadmapping. Second, students can achieve a more complex kind of creativity by first acknowledging disciplinary conventions—in this case, through templates—and only after that, breaking from convention in an informed fashion. Third, students can easily evaluate each others' early drafts with mutual knowledge of these templates.

Draft evaluation

The scaffolded writing process demands early and frequent feedback. Again, this sounds like a nightmare to the instructor still facing a pile of uncollected papers that are bathed in red markup. But peer feedback solves the two root problems in this situation. The first root problem is the level of feedback that instructors feel obligated to provide. In-text comments, available through most word processors, enable instructors' bad habits of commenting on grammar, formatting, etc. This is not an effective application of the instructors' expertise. The most effective to provide line-by-line feedback is to ask students to collaborate. The second root problem is asymmetry: students so outnumber instructors that instructors cannot evaluate everything both quickly and fully. Peer feedback, obviously, has no such asymmetry.
The most effective way to conduct out-of-class peer review appears to be Calibrated Peer Review, a free web-based problem structured around a series of yes/no peer review question and supplemented with example student papers ranging from excellent, acceptable, and unacceptable. I must hazard that I haven't yet used this system, but it seems fundamentally promising.
There are, of course, alternatives based in class time and on class discussion boards. They should be equally effective, but require more legwork by the instructor.

Rubrics to comments

I am an avowed proponent of rubrics 3. Not only do rubrics effectively set the terms of the assignment, but they also enable fast and well-structured feedback that can make the best use of the instructor's expertise—with a little spreadsheet magic.
When I prepare to evaluate a large number of papers in a cursory manner, I set up a spreadsheet with three pages. On the first page, I have a list of student names along the side, and a list of the rubric criteria along the top, followed to the right by a repeated list of criteria listing the weight assigned to each. On the second page, I have the same list of criteria, but with each criterion expanded into three columns: the center column contains a fully grammatical explanation of a common type of problem with this paper, including references to the writing textbook and examples; the left column includes a “tag” to describe this feedback; the right column includes a score that relates the kind of feedback in the center to the weight of the criterion. On the first page, I can enter the “tag” next to the student name under the appropriate criterion. Then, under the repeated list to the right, an automated formula returns the appropriate grade from the second sheet to the first sheet, based on the tag supplied. That formula is something like,

=VLOOKUP($B3;$'Tags Feedback and Grades'.$A$2:$C$12;3;0)

Further to the right, another formula sums the grades assigned by this formula. This second formula is as simple as

=SUM(3*SUM(F3:H3);I3)

and a third formula translates this into a letter grade. That third formula looks like,

=IF(K3>93;"A.";IF(K3>90;"A-.";IF(K3>87;"B+.";IF(K3>83;"B.";IF(K3>80;"B-.";IF(K3>77;"C+.";IF(K3>73;"C.";IF(K3>70;"C-.";IF(K3>67;"D+.";IF(K3>60;"D.";"E."))))))))))

Then, on the third sheet, another formula looks up the tags listed on the first sheet and the discursive feedback defined on the second sheet and combines all of this with the final grade, described above, and a general header. This formula looks like this:=$A$1&$A2&", "&$B$1&" (a) "&VLOOKUP('Close Reading_2'.B3;'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$A$2:'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$C$12;2;0)&" (b) "&VLOOKUP('Close Reading_2'.C3;'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$D$2:'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$F$12;2;0)&" (c) "&VLOOKUP('Close Reading_2'.D3;'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$G$2:'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$I$12;2;0)&" (d) "&VLOOKUP('Close Reading_2'.E3;'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$J$2:'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$L$12;2;0)&$C$1&$'Close Reading_2'.L3&$D$1&$E$1
This final text field produces a paragraph of feedback in plain English, personalized to each student, that addresses the most common problems in a student's paper and creates a grade.
Obviously, this method doesn't address the entire paper. It's hard to set enough spreadsheet definitions to account for wit, invention, or the thousand natural shocks that grammar is err to. But in the final stage, the instructor can add more notes the old-fashioned way, and likewise adjust any grades that seem to be mis-calibrated by the spreadsheet.
I find this system extremely advantageous. First, it guarantees consistency in initial grades and feedback. Second, it saves instructors the intense labor of repeating feedback. Third, it allows instructors to maximize the quality of feedback provided to those most-common complaints: instructors are free to list textbook examples, explain a problem at length, etc., whether a problem appears once or a hundred times. Fourth and finally, this system saves incredible amounts of time. At its most extreme, I have graded upwards of 70 papers in two evenings with this system.

Last first thoughts (Peroratio)

    In sum, Introduction to Shakespeare ought to contain frequent, well-designed composition components. Those composition components are closer than the normal design to our shared goals of critical thinking. Critical thinking benefits from writing assignments that have interactive components, meaning-making activities, and clear statements of instructors' goals. To achieve these goals, I suggest scaffolded assignments based around guided reading journals, reading guides, in-text markup or glossing. To deal with this superflux of writing, I recommend that the assignments are scaffolded on each other, and sometimes are based around templates. I further recommend that students provide frequent peer feedback and that instructors use rubrics and spreadsheets to conserve their time in favor of expert-level judgments.

 

Real talk: Candidacy Exams (reply)

This afternoon I walked into a small room at Ohio State, talked about my passion to three people and another person on a screen, and then turned in a sheet of paper to a much bigger room. I just sat down to write this after coming home, and at this time the experience seems so small that it could be trivial. But that impression may be deceptive.

This is a partial response to my friend Kate's blog, "Real Talk." I'm writing this for her, for you, and for me. Even though the oral exam seems so small at this moment, its size may be hidden by its depth. So I'll take Kate's outline and plug in my own experience.

Opacity (and Foxes).

As Kate says, there's no certain methods for exam prep. I tried many. This may be a difference of personality. Alan Palmer says that academics are either hedgehoxes or foxes; they either persist, like hedgehogs, or they rely on trickiness, like foxes. I am a fox, and I tried to outfox the exam with methods including:

1. Detailed notes on every source, ranging from textual production and historical context to structure and critique.
2. Flash cards on fundamental facts, such as character names and year of production, for each source.
3. Frequent meetings with the committee members.
4. A reading group.
5. Synthetic drawings, comics, and diagrams.
6. Teaching the material, or sitting in on classes.
7. Mnemonics and memory palaces.
8. Frantic cramming in the hours before the exam.

Honestly, they all worked. Every one of these preparation methods facilitated a different kind of answer. Putting them together facilitated many kinds of answers. I didn't apply all of these to all texts. In fact, I think that I changed methods because my thoughts about big issues were changing.

I understand that this kind of change can be scary, especially when the test is so opaque. Kate wrote,

"The fact that I had no way of checking whether I was preparing sufficiently and correctly–that I didn’t know what others meant by ‘reading’ a work and they didn’t know exactly what I meant by it–was the hardest part of the whole exam process."

If you're like Kate, meaning if you're anxious about your mode of preparation, I encourage you to try something else. Switch it up. There are many ways to read a text, so try a bunch of different things. Then again, that's a fox speaking.

Nobody reads it all (but you ought to remember it).

Imagine an old-fashioned English professor. Imagine that professor scowling as he reads about my preparation methods. "Drawing comics?" he scoffs. "That's not reading!" Whatever, Professor Oldface. There are a lot of things I didn't close-read studiously in a leather-bound chair with a glass of scotch, but I did read everything in some fashion. Even better, I remembered it.

I prepared for this exam with two key beliefs about memory.

1. Imagination is a relative of memory. I tried the many methods above to make everything meaningful to me in some way. Sometimes that meant memorizing the spoken word of Milton, and sometimes that meant drawing a comic for the Faerie Queene. To wit: Make, then remember.
2. Repetition is memory. I am a complete convert to the notion of spaced repetition. It's a proven method, so I'll confine my remarks to my experience. In the candidacy exam, I used the program Mnemosyne to space the repetition of concepts, and I also allotted time to review material that I'd forgotten. I spent most of this morning reviewing things I'd already read, and I'm glad for it.

The else.

I haven't spoken yet about the emotional strain of the exam process. I've had a couple experiences like the exam, and each time I get really frustrated a week before. But one or two days before, I'm pretty damn beatific. A week out from the exam, I still had a broad range of preparations I could have chosen. It's a hard time to be a fox. But a day out, you've got to put your head down like a hedgehog. "Alea jacta erit" is a fun play on words I learned this semester: the die will have been cast. By the time that you're within striking range of the exam, you'll either be prepared or you won't. The die will have been cast.

Stress is not your enemy. Stress is your GPS: it can point you in a direction, but it isn't always right. Unless you have a diagnosed case of depression or anxiety, I believe the best solution is to journal or meditate on the causes of your stress, and try to apply that stress to your exam preparations. And most importantly, make sure that you evaluate your stress based on the best available facts, and that your evaluation reflects the values you truly hold.

The Shoemaker's Holiday by Thomas Dekker

PRIMARY SOURCE: THE SHOMAKERS Holiday. OR The Gentle Craft. With the humorous life of Simon Eyre, shoomaker, and Lord Maior of London.
Context

• Publication: Performed in 1599 by the Admiral's Men. Printed by Valentine Simmes in quarto for sale at the White Swan: publisher presumably Simmes. Reprinted in six more editions—five before the war. Printed with two prefatory "three-man songs" [A4r]. Held by the Wrights for 45 years. Transferred to William Gilbertson on my birthday!
• Scholarship: Scholars are interested in Dekker's representation of the Dutch as an ethnic Dutchman. Citizen protagonists reveal something of class struggle in England, though they're easily resolved by the arrival of the King. The City.
• Why I'm reading it: The canon, city comedy, butterboxes.

Content

• Form: Play in five acts.
• Genre: Comedy, city comedy.
• Conceit: Shoemaker Simon Eyre takes as apprentice the aristocrat Rowland Lacy, disguised as a Dutchman. Lacy is escaping military service required to redeem his value as part of his marriage to the citizen's daughter Rose. The shoemaker Ralph fights in France, while the gentleman Hammon woos his wife, Jane. She consents to an eventual marriage when she sees false proof of Ralph's death. Ralph returns, searches for Jane, and refuses to sell her to Hammon on reunion.  Throughout, Eyre ascends to Sheriff, then Lord Mayor. Rose and Rowland marry. The King upholds both decisions and knights Rowland. At the end, Eyre creates a pancake-based celebration on Shrove Tuesday for the apprentices of London.
• Other notes: Pancake holiday!

"Bishop's Bible Illustrations" by Margaret Aston

CITATION: Aston, Margaret. The Church and the Arts: Papers Read at the 1990 Summer Meeting and the 1991 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Ed. Diana Wood. Oxford, UK: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by Blackwell Publishers, 1992. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did the Elizabethan Church and Continental artists develop the illustrations in the Bishops' Bible?
• Answer: Archbishop Parker suffered frequent delay in the production of the '68 and '72 editions due to the Continental circulation of borrowed woodcuts; only after significant delay in '72 did Parker commission new illustrations.
• Method: Aston essentially composes a narrative covering the majority of editions between 1565 and 1576. Archivally, Aston connects the '68 and '72 editions to the Biblische Figuren des Alten und Newen Testaments, gantz künstlich gerissen by Virgil Solis.
• Assumptions:
• Sententiae: In the first place we might wonder whether the change of illustrations resulted from puritanical censorship. We know the view of some of the censors, for the Second Admonition to Parliament in 1572 included an acid comment on pictures in the 15688 Bishops' Bible. ... namely, when the Lord spoke from the fire in Mount Horeb, 'ye sawe no maner of image'; to which Bishop Alley's note read: 'Meaning that plagues hang over them that wold make any image to represent God by'. (271-2)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Aston's detailed examination of the illustrations is commendable--particularly for crossing language lines and investigating Virgil Solis' printed legacy.
• Synthesis: I haven't yet read much on the Bishops' Bible, but Aston's description of the interaction between English publishers and Continental toolmakers generally anticipates with the description outlined by Darnton in "What is the History of the Book? Revisited."
• Application: The application is pretty profound: the Established church is clearly involved with print ornamentation at the highest levels, and the relevant executives were willing to "play ball" with secular Continental books, even on a loaned basis. The arrangement seems to indicate a naive understanding of the Continental book trade. English authorities would be unlikely to make a similar deal after the Buckingham cartoons caricatured an English authority in the Continental print.

Edward II by Christopher Marlowe

PRIMARY SOURCE: The troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the second, King of England: with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer: Written by Chri. Marlow Gent
Context

• Publication:
  Published by bookseller William Jones (2) and printed by Robert Robinson in 1594. Registered to Jones in 1593, though later transferred to Barnes, Bell, and Haviland & Wright: four editions with a different publisher or printer each time. Printed in a quarto format that dropped from 48 leaves to about 40 in later editions. Performed by Pembroke's Men in 1591-2, though Greg lists Queen Anne's Men and the Red Bull theater.
• "As it was sundrie times publiquely acted in the honourable citie of London, by the right honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants."
• "Imprinted at London for William Iones, dwelling neere Holbourne conduit, at the signe of the Gunne. 1594."
• EEBO link.
• Scholarship: This is Marlowe's historical drama, drawing exact phrases from Holinshed. Formally, scholars appreciate the play's clarity and consistent characterization. Stylistically, there is less strutting and ranting than in Marlowe's antihero plays. The central homoerotic relationship exemplifies DiGangi's contention that transgressive class relations, rather than homoerotics, were seen as disruptive in early modern England. Despite Edward's failures as a king, he still draws significant sympathy in captivity.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon

Content

• Form: Tragic History in 5 acts. 
• Genre: History (annals), tragedy.
• Summary:
1. 
   
1. Gaveston returns to England against the objections of the lords. Though they threaten rebellion, Edward loves Gaveston. A priest threatens to drive Gaveston back to France.
2. The bishop is in the Tower & Queen Isabella leaves for the forest. The lords decide to eject Gaveston and thus provoke Edward into civil war.
3. Gaveston marks his enemies at Lambeth.
4. The conspirators seize Gaveston from the king's side. They take him away and plan to rebel. Instead of overthrowing the king outright, they plan either assassination or popular rebellion.
2. 
   
1. Spenser aligns himself with Gaveston.
2. Edward obsesses over Gaveston's return rather than French invasion. Mortimer wounds Gaveston. Edward bans Mortimer from court and so begins the rebellion. Just then, Mortimer learns that the Scots are holding his uncle for ransom, a ransom that only the king could pay. Spenser becomes Edward's minion.
3. The conspirators plan to ambush the king.
4. The king's company flees the ambush. Edward overlooks Queen Isabella, who commends Mortimer to slay Gaveston.
5. The conspirators refuse to return Gaveston to Edward.
3. 
   
1. Warwick takes Gaveston back.
2. Edward makes Spenser his new favorite. France retakes Normandy. Edward hears that Warwick killed Gaveston and swears vengeance. The lords request that Spenser be banned.
3. They fight.
4. Mortimer and Kent are captured.
4. 
   
1. Kent and Mortimer leave for Queen Isabella in France.
2. Kent and Mortimer meet Queen Isabella.  The French promise aid but the young prince believes Edward will win.
3. Edward's spy reports the events of the last act.
4. Queen Isabella and Mortimer give speeches for invasion.
5. The King's party flees for the Queen Isabella.
6. Queen Isabella captures Kent and Spenser's father.
7. Queen Isabella's men capture the last of the King's party, e.g. Spenser.
5. 
   
1. Edward is imprisoned and laments haughtily. He refuses to resign, then relents.
2. Mortimer sidles up to Queen Isabella's authority. He installs a puppet as successor. The prince knows they're liars. Mortimer orders his seizure, and so loses both Queen Isabella  and the Prince as his allies.
3. Captors torture Edward. The Prince is seized.
4. Mortimer gloats. He orders Kent murdered.
5. Edward endures imprisonment. He fears for his life. Lightborn kills him and Gurney kills Lightborn.
6. Edward III swears vengeance on Queen Isabella and Mortimer. He orders a lord to kill Mortimer and sends Queen Isabella to the Tower.
• Other notes:

“The Reformation of Images and Some Jacobean Writers on Art” by Karl Josef Holten

CITATION: Holten, Karl Josef. “The Reformation of Images and Some Jacobean Writers on Art.” Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on His Sixtieth Birthday. Ed. Ulrich Broich. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did Jacobean art writing bridge the needs of a culture and the development of a culture's institutions of knowledge (funktiongeshichte)?
• Answer: After the royal iconography of the Elizabethan era, Jacobean writers of art defended aristocratic art using Italo-philic/-phobic discourses and Tertullian's writings on church art.
• Method: Functionalism. As stated above, funktiongeschichte seeks to explain literary genre as a bridge between the needs of a culture and the developments of a culture's philosophy and institutions of knowledge. Erwin Wolff and Rudiger Ahrens think this is what Sidney developed in his apology.
• Assumptions: Obviously, the entire functionalist agenda relies on two atomistic poles of "the needs of a culture" and "a culture's philosophy." I expect that New Historicism struck functionalism like a ton of bricks.
• Sententiae: "To have a story painted, for memory's sake, we hold it not to be unlawful." (146)

Overstanding

• Assessment: An unusual essay from a field of research unfamiliar to me. It presents an opportunity for perspective to me, a person who values formal approaches to literature, to reconsider my formalist assumptions and their relevance in the aftermath of New Historicism.
• Synthesis: At least another contributor, Rudiger Ahrens, indicated that functionalism has a novel reading of Sidney's Defense. That is, Sidney bridged early modernity England's needs for poetry with the humanistic developments of the Renaissance.
• Application: I can't say I find much use in functionalism, but the article introduced me to several interesting details, such as a story about Elizabeth's crucifix disappearing from her chapter at intervals, or Peacham's defense of aristocratic drawing based on Tertullian.

Back from hiatus

I'm back and I'll stop posting silly things, I promise.

Art in the Age of Greasy Surfaces, Pt. 3

This is part of a three-part series relating contemporary aesthetic philosophy to early modern print culture. I freely admit that I have never taken a class in philosophy, art history, or multimodal composition. Please excuse my amateurish attempts at all three.

3. Everything New is Old Again

The medium is the message, right? In McLuhan's thought, media have certain agentic qualities that I'd like to relate to the preceding two blog posts.

I have a few propositions. First, the digital era is a subset of the alphabetical era. This comes from my limited understanding of McLuhan. Second and subsequently, digital networks are a subset of ontological networks. This comes from Harman. Third, networked ontologies--in the sense of Harman's OOO--express their depth through their inexhaustibility. Inexhaustible ontologies imply that technical collaborations are not unique to digital "collaborators," as Sterling proposes.

Let me explain.

The California job case, above, resembles the typecases used by early printers like Aldus or de Worde. These printers represented knowledge in a significantly different way than what had come before in European society--disconnected from either a time or an acoustic space (as in the bardic transmission of information), or a particular, identifiable scribal hand (as in the secretarial transmission of information)--and our contemporary digital technologies amplify print modes of signification--again, across time and space, and distinct from personal allographs (the same differences, as it were).The digital turn promotes the digits 0 and 1 to represent the rest of the case, provided sufficient encoding. That encoding provides the illusion of Sterling's "virtual buddies," but only because machines can "read" certain kinds of alphabets and digits. Yet I contend that this is a narrow view of both reading and human-machine interaction. "Translation" is Bruno Latour's term for any interaction between actants, which Whitehead might otherwise call "prehension."

Digital networks, touch-sensitive screens, internetworked computer systems--these strike contemporary first-worlders as technologies apart and above technologies like the printing press, yet none of these are infused with any magical, vital phlebotinum. Computers operate in meatspace, even though humans can't normally sense the electronic exchanges that occur in microprocessors. Microprocessors made of processed metals and plastics that come from conflict-ravaged resource-rich countries. Your iPhone connects you to Foxconn as materially as fox.com.

Both digital texts and print texts are, after all, inexhaustible. Humans can perceive them in a handful of ways (digital texts can be perceived in a few more, since they might interfere with the relay of interior sensory information: eg, a pacemaker interacts with pulmonary stretch receptors through electronic pulses), but we can also discover our own ignorance through the progress of technology. Radiography, for example, revealed elements of printed texts only visible as high-frequency light or magnetic topology--translated by our technologies into lower-energy light for ocular input. These modes of perception display interactions between texts and other objects not designed for functional purposes. If we impute agency to things whose interactions exceed our designs, and if we discover that the material print--just like Sterling's virtual buddies--exceeds our designed interactions, then we ought impute agency to the material print. Just as the depth, alienation, and inexhaustibility of digital texts led Bruce Sterling to treat them as "collaborators," so too can print technologies be understood as such.

What's the pay-off for this high-fallutin' argument that can be mis-read to say that books are people? First and most flippantly, this provides us a presentist sympathy to the early moderns who discussed printed books as people with souls, voices, etc. They were not cavemen, unprepared for their own technological creations. Second and more seriously, the theories discussed provide us a consistent materialist account of the interrelation between political or economic history and literary history, via bibliography. Third and most seriously, these posts suggest that we treat persons in the circuit of early modern book production and survival not only as collaborators with other humans, but also with materials. The archivalist cuts deals with paper: if the archivalist provides suitable climates, the paper will slow its acidification. Paper shows its agency in its depth of material interactions, namely, its oxidization in certain climates. Likewise, the printer collaborates with his greasy surfaces. A bad batch of paper can ruin an edition, and that paper can show its agency with high or low pliability, or overly smooth felting, or several other characteristics that only illustrate the inexhaustibilty of paper's being.

To copy-change Sterling,

The real issue now is this intimate participation of machinery in cultural production. Practically everything we did in the early modern era that was novel, and different, and challenging, had some kind of material flavor.Forms of creative practice have arisen that are co-discovery with matter. They’re brain-bibliography mashups and hybrids.

Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: Venus and Adonis (1593)
Context

• Publication: Probably composed between June 1592 and May 1594, during a plague closure. Entered with the Stationers' on April 18, 1593. Printed by Richard Field, a fellow Stratfordian.By 1600, Venus and Adonis became a widely quoted poem, integral to Shakespeare's transition from dramatist to poet. Venus and Adonis was positively noted by Gabriel Harvey and many Cambridge undergraduates. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Venus and Adonis to understand Shakespeare's Ovidian and Renaissance influences, and to treat the issue of erotic love in Shakespeare's poetry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon.

Content

• Form: Iambic pentameter in six-line stanzas, ABABCC
• Genre: Heroic romantic poem.
• Conceit: Adonis is a delight to all, but doesn't desire love. Venus goes to meet him during a hunt, and forces him to listen and recline with her. Adonis doesn't reciprocate her affection, and breaks away to go home--but his horse runs away in romance. Venus appeals again to him, but faints after he scorns her. He aids her, she recovers, and Venus forsees Adonis' death. Adonis refuses her advances again, and refuses earthly lust in favor of heavenly love. Venus follows the sounds of the hunt and comes upon a wounded dog and a dead Adonis. Venus then curses love, at which time Adonis evaporates and is replaced by a purple and white flower.
• Other notes: Most of the amorous arguments are recycled from the sonnets, especially the self-consuming waste and self-consuming selfishness.
  
  Written with notes.

The Reformation of the Image by Joseph L Koerner

CITATION: Koerner, Joseph L. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2008. Print.

Understanding

• Question: What did Protestant iconoclasts do with art?
• Answer: Protestants interject texts into visual representation, distancing the representation from its represented, just as they struggled with the paradox in Christ's broken-iconicity.
  "... I shift the focus from the iconoclasts' complaints to the images the iconoclasts themselves produce... I discern an iconoclasm in the Christian image itself." (80)
• Method: Koerner evaluates the underpinnings of German Protestant visual arts, especially those by Cranach the elder, through a litany of paintings, pamphlets, altarpieces and architecture.
  Koerner also briefly mentions a collaboration with Bruno Latour, invoking Latour's translational semiotics to highlight a paradox central to iconoclasm: the iconoclast believes in the fundamental connection between represented and representation, yet the representation never gets to the represented directly.
  In each chapter, Koerner moves from an ecumenical and established, but ultimately empty, site of iconoclasm outward to new sites of signification in society.
• Assumptions: Koerner responds to a view of the Reformation as antithetical to art, a view that is apparently a well-established as trope in art history. 
• Sententiae:
• Indeed the whole picture with its pairing of image and text, object and word, act and exegesis, reads like the key to such an exam [as the catechism]. here stand distinguished and explain the legal, social and doctrinal bases of the evangelical church. (21-22)
• In its profusion in Lutheran pictures, language itself reveals an opacity at odds with a hermeneutics of inner sense. Like the crosswords of letters common in early Lutheran school primers, the inscriptions in Reformation art, often illegible or abbreviated, recall that, for a culture of limited literacy, writing functioned as a token, rather than as a vehicle of sense. (36)
• [Franz von Sickingen] affirms an exclusive space where images can be appreciated for their 'art and beauty' alone. Church is for everyone but its seductive pictures belong in 'beautiful chambers' of nobles like himself. This has been a dominant story of the origin of the category 'art.' Transferred from church to collection, images become neutral objects of aesthetic experience. (59)
• People had long believed that harm or help could come from seeing a thing, that the eye either touched the object's surface through extramission or was intromissively touched by the eidola emitted by the object, and that the eye was itself the soul's window... Seeing the host achieved a Communion as effective as eating it. (71)
• Basil's formula, invoked by Christian iconophiles since the Byzantine image controversy, does not merely tell people how they ought to pray. It describes what prayers to images of Christ, the Virgin and the saints will always automatically do. Add to this the diagram of the semiotic circuitry of pictures, Emser and Eck add variations on the doctrine--as canonical as the image-prototype distinction itself--of the threefold function of church pictures, as Bibles for the illiterate, memory aids and incitements to devotion. This is what images do for Christians. Not the abomination of those perennial Others, the idolaters; the use of images is rule-bound and reasonable. Unfortunately, this rationality-conviction is challenged on two fronts. On the one hand, the abominable idolaters would surely also reply that they can distinguish between the gods and their statues. On the other hand, the iconoclast will know all these alibis and more, but not believe them. (97)
• Images are tautological. They show what they show--that a wound is there, not what the wound means. (139)
• The word 'mysticism' comes from myo, meaning 'to close the eyes.' ... In the language of Meister Eckhart, image 'de-image' [sic] (entbilden). They allow the mystic to encounter Christ negatively, in the blackness of death, and in the uncanny darkness of Christ's empty grave. (140)
• The premier image-maker of northern European culture in 1500, Durer recognized that pictures are, at best, mediators, affectincg without determining what their viewers see in them. Or as Bruno Latour puts it, 'Images count... because they allow one to move to another image, exactly as frail and modest as the former one--but different.' 
• The notion that thoughts are pictures is powerful and old. It stands suspended in the word 'idea,' which, deriving from the Greek 'to see,' is etymologically linked to eidolon or 'visible image.' Plato and Aristotle famously compared the mind to a wax tablet into which sensible objects impress their form; the Church Fathers used the word eikon to denote paintings and sculptures as well as thoughts, concepts, and analogies; and even the young Wittgenstein espoused a picture theory of meaning (which he later worked hard to dismantle). Pushed to an extreme, the theory that words make mental pictures suggests that pictures are the better medium. The eighth-century patriarch Nicephoros, writing against iconoclasts, argued that words and pictures were equally images of reality. But since words, to be understood, had to be translated into images (through a thought-process Nicephoros called analogismos), they were less direct and comprehensible than graphic representations which were images already. More so than sermons or writ, icons could offer unmediated knowledge of God. (162-3)
• When, in his 1525 treatise on measurement, Albrecht Durer showed how to make high-up inscriptions legible from the ground, the text he used for his illustration was the VDMIE motto in German... each element of which is sized relative to a positioned beholder. Words cannot 'remain eternal' if they are to stay readable from different points of view. Northern European art's first writer on perspective therefore teaches a method for writing in perspective. Erasmus evoked a similar condition of language as surface or inscription when he cited two types of illegibility: one where the alphabet is foreign and the letters do not 'look back at us'; the other, where the words are far off and eyeglasses are necessary. Although the text on Durer's monument affirms the absolute reference of the words--'the word [that] is Christ'--his perspectivist scenography, treating words as things, reveals the contingency of their inscription. (284-5)
• The founder of modern hermeneutics and the renewer of Luther's faith, Friedrich Schleiermacher, banned from poetry all verses 'that look like an axe or bottle.' In his view, picture poems conveyed messages through their external form; they therefore violated the primacy of inner sense that hermeneutics assumed--religiously--for language. (295)
• [Reactionary legal theorist Carl] Schmitt attributed to Protestantism the replacement of this realist politics [that the Church solely represents Christ] by a fiction of personal responsibility and impersonal representation. Displaced to the abstract principle of 'the people,' representation became empty: 'a plurality of copies' substituted for 'a unique existence,' as Walter Benjamin wrote from quite the opposite politics. (364)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Like Duffy's, this is a book so large I couldn't do it justice. Nevertheless, I can attest to Koerner's exhaustive research and effective inversion of "iconoclasm" as a trope among art historians.
• Synthesis: In my notes for O'Connelll, I had over-read a claim that the sight of Christ's suffering implicated the viewer: Koerner's introduction to the eidolon provides the means of visual empathy; the eidolon provides the limit. It seems that sacramental sight was in decline in the late middle ages, and it's highly doubtful that the same ideology could be transferred by early modern audiences to the play-house.
• Application: Koerner's treatment of the intra-Reformation feuds, especially between the Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Calvinists provides a provocative jumping-off point for analyzing and distinguishing the  Dutch refugee printers in early modern London. Did the Calvinists flee Geneva to maintain their craft of engraved printing? Did the Lutherans continue to proselytize with illustrated pamphlet covers?