Looking Back – The Shakespeare Newsletter 1991-2019

We almost made it, Tom Pendleton and I, to an even thirty years of print publication for The Shakespeare Newsletter. But forced economies since my retirement in 2014 made the switch to digital publication inevitable. I know both Tom and I are grateful to our successor as Editor, Dr. Thomas J. Moretti, for holding on to print for as long as he has. As the newsletter transitions from print to digital, it seemed a good opportunity to reflect in this final print issue on the Iona years so far.

Professor Louis Marder began publication of The Shakespeare Newsletter in 1951; he always liked to point out that Shakespeare Quarterly was founded at around the same time. From the start, the newsletter was Louis’ private operation: he never sought or obtained support from the several academic institutions where he worked over the years. Subscriptions and advertising paid for publication. In the fiftieth anniversary issue (50:1, Spring 2000), we reproduced the first four-page issue of the newsletter: how far we have come!

Professor Marder decided in 1991, when he reached 80, to transfer ownership of his newsletter to another academic, primarily because he wanted to devote his energy to his Shakespeare Data Bank. In his “look back” elsewhere in this issue, Professor Hardy Cook tells the story of the SDB and of the curious way in which Marder decided to alert the world that he wanted to sell the newsletter.

The newsletter’s first home at Iona was in the office of the Chairperson of the English Department, which was mine at the time. I can still hear Susan Raffa, our first Editorial Assistant, typing copy for the early issues in my office. Within a few months, we were able to move SNL, as we always called it, to its own office. The Speech and English Departments had shared the house at 32 Hubert Place for almost twenty years but, just before the newsletter arrived on campus, Speech acquired its own house. They were in the process of moving when the newsletter arrived. The Chairperson of the Speech Department had occupied an office just across the hall from that of the English Chair; that office now became the headquarters of SNL.

From the beginning, Tom Pendleton and I published two of the regular features in Marder’s journal, “Review of Periodicals” and “Table of Contents.” We refused to publish Marder’s other regular feature, the “Shakespeare Oxford Page,” which Louis printed as an ad paid for by the Shakespeare Oxford Society. The Oxfordians threatened to sue the newsletter to force us to honor their arrangement with Louis, but two of my lawyer brothers-in-law navigated us through these treacherous waters and the threatened suit never materialized.

Very quickly we began to publish more pages in each issue (Marder never published more than 60 pages a year), until now we publish 120 pages a year. Unfortunately, frequency of publication has decreased, from four issues a year to three (for many years) and now two. The “newsletter” aspect of the journal, which included an annual listing of Shakespeare productions scheduled during the summer across the country, became less important as the Internet became more ubiquitous and we published fewer issues annually. When T.J. Moretti joined Tom and me as an editor of the journal, he encouraged us to consider making space for peer-reviewed articles—we created an advisory board of scholars who could evaluate such submissions. So far we have managed to publish one such article, designated the Thomas Pendleton Article in honor of our recently deceased co-editor. I’m hopeful that with online publication we will be able to publish more peer-reviewed scholarship.

From the start, as an innovation on the Marder SNL, we published a picture on the front page and, always in the lower right-hand corner of the front page, an image of the Iona seal with the motto of the College, “Certa Bonum Certamen.” In the first issue the picture showed the St. Columba statue at the center of campus, with the Administration Building and a classroom building in the background. The picture on the front page of this issue features a new sculpture near St. Columba, Edmund Rice, founder of the religious order that founded Iona, chatting with today’s students. Color photographs came along in the Summer of 2003 (53:2), on the front and back pages, and since the very next issue (53:3, Fall 2003), color photos have also appeared on the inside front and back pages. This last printed issue of the newsletter features full-color pages throughout, in anticipation of how SN (as it is now called) will look online from now on.

To browse through all of the Iona issues of the newsletter is to realize just how well we covered movements in Shakespearean production and scholarship. Most issues have included several scholarly articles, such as George Walton Williams’ piece on “Invocations to the Gods in King Lear” and John Velz’s “On Bards, Bibles, and Bears.” As a newsletter, we could provide material not found in more strictly scholarly journals like Shakespeare Quarterly. For example, we ran a front-page interview with Sam Wanamaker during the construction of Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside, and of course we featured the opening of the new Globe on our front page. We interviewed Garry Wills when he published Witches and Jesuits, his book on Macbeth, and Lynn Redgrave when she was touring Shakespeare for My Father in the States, including a stop in Stamford, CT, where I live and where I interviewed her. And I developed a regular feature of photographs of Shakespeare monuments taken when I visited various cities, London, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco (with its Shakespeare Garden in Golden Gate Park). One such monument, the Shakespeare Monument in New York’s Central Park, appeared twice in the newsletter, originally as the first of the series of monument-pictures (in the Summer 1992 issue), and then again in the Winter 2004-2005 issue, when Shakespeare was “front-man,” so to speak, for The Gates, the site-specific artistic project of Christo and Jeanne-Claude that brought bright orange color into the park in wintry February. I should take another picture of that monument for the first online issue of SN!

There have been two “Extra” issues of SNL, paid for by two of our loyal subscribers, Robert McDonald and Troland Link: Bernice Kliman’s The Enfolded “Hamlet” in 1996 and a collection of three classic essays on the romantic comedies by Harold Jenkins in the following year. There was one 4-page special issue, March 30, 2012, published in-house only for distribution on campus: “A Tribute to Dr. Thomas A. Pendleton” on his eightieth birthday.

Memorable cover-stories include:

• Shakespeare and the Lincoln Assassination (42:2)
• The Bard in Brixton (45:4)
• Dame Judi Dench Sweeps the Field (49:1)
• Shakespeare and His Interpreters: Al Hirschfeld’s Caricature of Shakespeare Surrounded by Some of His Greatest Interpreters, Gielgud, Ashcroft … (50:1)
• Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius: a review by Robert Macdonald (50:3)
• Is the Sanders Portrait Genuine? (51:4)
• The Quality of Mould in Henry V (53:4)
• “Now is the winter…/ Made glorious summer …”: The “Gates” in Central Park (54:4)
• Infinite Variety: Antony and Cleopatra X 2  (56:1)
• Louis Marder, SNL Founder, Dies at 94 (59:2)
• Ladies’ Day on the Magical Island: Taymor’s Tempest (60:2)
• Marvin Spevack on “The Order of Shakespeare’s Plays” (62:2)
• The Great New Shakespeare Theatre in Gdansk, Poland: A Vision Realized (64:2)
• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon and Network Analysis in Early Modern Studies (67.2)

More memorable for its headline than for its contents was “Hooker Conference in Washington,” an article that I wrote totally oblivious, in my earnest attention to the writing of the piece, to the double entendre in “hooker.” I’m quite sure my co-editor and the grad student Editorial Assistant at the time saw the problem but let a sense of fun allow the blooper to get by! To my everlasting embarrassment!

Inside each issue, Hardy Cook and then Karoline Szatek kept “Table of Contents” going for many years until Caroline had to give up her role. Grace Tiffany has kept “Review of Periodicals” thriving until now and intends to continue this witty and wise column indefinitely. This issue includes her reminiscence, typically perceptive and witty, of her experience so far as a Contributing Editor.  From 2000 (50:4) for several years, we published a regular “Electronic Shakespeares” column by Michael Best, one of the first Shakespeareans to specialize in digital editions of the plays.

In the fall of 2001 (51:3) we published for the first time Michael Jensen’s “Talking Books” column. Eighteen years later we are still enjoying his wonderful email interviews with eminent Shakespearean authors. I have not polled our subscribers, but I am sure most of them would rate this ongoing column near the top of the list of favorite features issue after issue. Few eminent Shakespearean authors have failed to be guests for Michael’s column. Michael’s first guest, Stanley Wells, set the standard for all who have followed, including the guests for “Talking Digital”—“Talking Books” transformed for our last issue (67:2, Spring/Summer 2018), focused on digital aspects of the Shakespeare world. These digital-issue guests included such eminences and previous guests as Andrew Gurr, Lukas Erne, Virginia Mason Vaughan, MacDonald P. Jackson, and yes, Michael Jensen himself, who has certainly become an eminence over the years. Note that this issue includes two “TB” columns, a traditional one and a tongue-in-cheek one in which Michael Jensen interviews himself as he reminisces about his experience as a Contributing Editor.

For many years we published abstracts from seminars at the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, as well as accounts of the papers and discussions of monthly meetings of the Columbia University Shakespeare Seminar. I haven’t had time to review these features in detail, but I am confident that our readers found material in these pages that later became books in the field.

We often published articles by scholars who would later publish books.  For example, I am especially happy to recall that the newsletter published the first work of Clare Asquith, an analysis of The Phoenix and the Turtle as an example of Shakespeare the closet Catholic writing in code for his fellow believers (50:1, Spring 2000). This approach to Shakespeare’s plays and poems as religious allegory works well, I think, for a poem that has never been explained, and for phrases like “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” in Sonnet 73.. But in analyses of more transparent works of the Bard, Ms. Asquith, like Peter Milward and others, gets a bit carried away. Catholic as I am and Catholic as I think Shakespeare was, I am not persuaded by most of these heavy-handed allegorical interpretations of Shakespeare’s work.

At least once we published an article by John T. Noonan, Jr. (1926-2017), an eminent jurist with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a remarkable polymath who wrote many books, including several studies of Roman Catholic moral theology and its relationship to the law. His piece for us in the Winter 2000/2001 issue (51:4) was a reading of “The Mermaid on the Dolphin’s Back,” words in Oberon’s speech to Puck in Act Two of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Noonan demonstrates that the mermaid is almost certainly Mary, Queen of Scots, especially when we consider that Shakespeare used the word dolphin to represent a fish in some instances, the French heir in others.  Noonan notes that the OED explains that for many years the English thought the French heir was spelled dolphin in English. Here he uses it for a wonderful pun, as Noonan explains in his closing sentences:

Shakespeare’s spelling is not eccentric.  .  .  .  In Mary’s case a pun was irresistible; she was a mermaid who appeared on the Scottish scene having been married to the Dauphin of France and carried forward on the back of France. At the beginning of Mary’s great literary legend, her quiet champion is Shakespeare.  (88)

In fact, Noonan published in 2011 Shakespeare’s Spiritual Sonnets, where he argues that some of the sonnets refer to various Catholics of Shakespeare’s time. Here is part of the blurb for the book on Amazon.com:

Noonan’s interpretation sets 22 of the sonnets firmly in the context of religious controversy and compelled conformity in Queen Elizabeth’s Britain and in the larger context of continental currents of theology. Shakespeare, Noonan notes, was a man of his time, and the time extends back to Pope Gregory’s dispatch of missionaries to England a thousand years earlier. Noonan offers a spectrum within which he suggests that Shakespeare fits. At one end is William Byrd, composer for Queen Elizabeth and composer of masses and motets for the Catholic underground. At the other end of the spectrum is Robert Southwell, S.J., sought, caught, and hanged as a priest criminally present in the country. Between them, Noonan places Shakespeare, who borrowed ideas and inspiration from Southwell’s poems and who emulated Byrd in his ability to please the queen and to enhearten his own disfavored community. Noonan’s book is likely to lead many lovers of Shakespeare to look at the Sonnets afresh.

I have not had a chance to read the book, but I plan to do so and to review it at last for The Shakespeare Newsletter. Given his impeccable argument that Oberon’s words refer to contemporaries, I am willing to bet that he does not fall into the trap of extreme allegorizing that I complained about earlier.

Stay tuned for a review of Noonan’s book, and for so much more—in our new online edition, of course!