When I was a kid, my father wrote a weekly column for the student newspaper at Michigan State University, where he taught. “The Doctor’s Bag” ran in the State News for six years, from 1969 through 1975. It was eventually syndicated and ran in 50 campus newspapers, with a circulation of around 600,000. What this means, in part, is that when I was little people used to ask me if my dad was “The Doctor’s Bag.” (That’s how they used to phrase it: Is your dad “The Doctor’s Bag?”) I had no idea what the column was; I just knew he wrote it. At some point, I gathered that it was a medical advice column answering students’ questions about all things health related. It wasn’t until I was an adult and Dad sent me copies of the entire run of the column that I sat down and read them.

I can hardly begin to describe how much I love those columns. I love them for what they reveal about college life in America in the early 70s. The questions students asked! They’re what you imagine—a lot of questions about sex and drinking and drugs. But there’s more to them, too, like the struggle of living in a dorm that has more people than your home town. The overwhelming impression you get, reading them all through, is how much they didn’t know, and the pent-up longing to ask someone who will take them seriously and give them real answers. I suppose if I’d read them as a kid I would have been horrified that my dad talked about this stuff, but you know, he was a psychiatrist, so it’s hardly like I didn’t expect him to talk about everything under the sun. As an adult, I’m impressed with how deftly he answers their questions.¹

I love them, too, for the window into my father’s personality. They are both funny and earnest, just like he was. They lecture sometimes and joke at other times.

And they’re amazing for the controversies they raised. Honestly, reading the columns now, it’s hard to appreciate what the scandal is. But people wrote letters in complaining about them. The head of Albany’s Student Health Services complained:

In June 1970, a couple of Michigan legislators attacked his columns on the House and Senate floors for being “almost indescribable filth” and were outraged that they were being published at a public university. Think of the taxpayers! In 1973 the editor of a student paper was suspended for having printed both disrespectful pictures of Santa Claus and for running my dad’s column. Apparently a mother of a student once sent a letter to my dad chiding him to “think of your own mother before you put these letters in;” little did she realize that Dad did think of his mother and often mailed his column to my grandparents. (They were only disapproving when he appeared in the National Enquirer.)

Today is the 5th anniversary of my father’s death. I miss him. I’ve written before, glancingly, about him in a post on the intangibles of books. I have some of his childhood books, complete with his name carefully inscribed on the inside cover, and I cherish those books, even when I have no desire to read them. Those books are a connection to him. And when someone you love is gone, you need to find connections.

The last years of his life were not good ones. He had cerebral palsy, and while it didn’t really interfere with the bulk of his life—he was an avid biker, faithfully doing the DALMAC ride from Lansing to Mackinaw, even once as 4 days of 100-mile trips—it made his old age miserable. Well, I say old age, but I really mean his 60s, which is not very old. He was only 68 when he did, both much too young and after too much pain and suffering.

I am glad his death has receded enough that I can remember the joy of his life rather than the pain of its end. And I am glad that there are traces of some of that life still online. The digitization of college newspapers means that some of my dad’s columns are available for all to see, along with this Parade magazine piece about the youth of 1974, and, weirdly, a 1996 Weekly World News piece on “how to blow your stack without looking like a butthead!” I’m glad, too, that you can find some of the results that came out of a workshop on cerebral palsy and aging that we held in his honor. There’s a piece from Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology and, if that’s too long, a slide set on the subject.²

There’s much of his life that isn’t out there—his photography, his hobby of rebuilding old cars, his bicycling, his woodworking. And his other psychiatric work, the stuff that got published in academic journals, is locked up in their hands (though your library might have a copy of the psychiatric glossary he edited for the APA in 1980). His columns, too, are probably still owned by the syndication company (someday I’ll retrieve his papers from the lawyers and see what his contract stipulated). The bits and pieces of the online traces of my dad add up to someone who is kind of him, but who isn’t all of him. And there was so much of him when he was alive.

It wasn’t until he died that I began to appreciate the staggering challenges of all the stuff we leave behind. There are his newspaper columns, thousands of photographs and negatives, the records of his life. Dad was a pack rat, which makes the task more challenging. And he was enough of a public figure that it’s hard to resist the feeling that someone somewhere might find this material interesting. Not for what it says about him, but for what it says about the times he lived through. Those Doctor’s Bag columns are full of nuggets. At some point, I’ll do something about that. If I was a researcher in the history of medicine, or the culture of mid-twentieth-century America, I’d find useful material in there. And there’s more, too. Maybe someone would want to know this story: My dad volunteered for the Vietnam War after he’d completed med school, but the army wouldn’t take him because of the cerebral palsy—he limped and certainly couldn’t run. And what happened a few years later? They tried to draft him, but he said no: you didn’t want me then, you can’t have me now. I have all that documentation, because that’s the kind of thing he saved. What do I do with that? Is that just family history, or does that mean something to someone else?

I don’t know what the answers to those questions are. Maybe I’ll just hang onto everything until it’s my kids’ turn to deal with it. Is that what happened to all those old books we have in libraries? The immediate family couldn’t bear to get rid of them and so they hung onto them until finally they because old enough to be wanted beyond the family? Maybe. At some point, I suppose, these things either won’t mean anything to anyone, and they can be tossed, or they will be become interesting through sheer survival through the ages. Maybe it doesn’t matter which.

I’m grateful that he wrote these columns and that I can still read them. I’m grateful that he had enough pride in them to save them and to pass them on to his daughters. I’m grateful that he loved us as much as he did, and that when it was time for him to die, that we were there by his side. He taught me how to write, how to use a camera, develop negatives, and print film. We argued about my curfew, butted heads because we were both stubborn, and watched Battleship Potemkin together. I loved him dearly. And I miss him a little bit less when I come across the traces of his life that have been scattered across the world.

1. These are crappy images: screenshots of pdfs of microfilmed papers. Sorry.
2. This is a bit of an aside, but the cerebral palsy is a bit of a touchy subject for me: most research has focused on kids with CP, but you know what happens to a lot of those kids? They grow up, and then you’ve got adults with CP. As my dad grew older, his mobility decreased and the pain increased. There was no clear research to give him answers as to why this was happening, and the big CP foundation was not particularly interested in his overtures. He was just alone in his pain with no clear sense that any lessons were going to be drawn from it. So if you’re a CP researcher, or someone who has CP, or someone who knows someone who has CP, think about this and support researching into aging and CP.

I am thrilled to announce that the special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly that I guest edited on Shakespeare and Performance is now finally in print! That issue went through an open peer review at MediaCommons, and I will be writing something more about that process and experience.

But for now, I want to share that there’s some really wonderful, smart, and interesting stuff in the issue and I hope you’ll take a look at it; the issue includes pieces by W.B. Worthen, Ramona Wray, Zeno Ackermann, Mark Thornton Burnett, Daniel L. Keegan, and Todd A. Borlik. Abstracts are online at the Folger and the articles and abstracts will soon (tomorrow!) be are now up at Project Muse for those who have access.

Even more thrillingly, I want to share with you one section to which I have the author’s rights, “Rethinking Academic Reviewing: A Conversation with Michael Dobson, Peter Holland, Katherine Rowe, Christian Billing, and Carolyn Sale.” You can find it linked in this post and in the sidebar on the right.

And, just because I can, here’s my brief introduction to the issue, which I hope will convince you to go check the whole thing out!

Copyright © 2011 Folger Shakespeare Library. This article first appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 62, Issue 3, September 2011, pages 307-8.

This special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly presents a wide range of writing on Shakespeare and performance. They look back to early modern understandings of Henry VIII and forward to the growing genre of performances of Shakespeare in prison. They range geographically in interest from South America to Northern Ireland and from Germany to Japan, and they examine performances mediated by print, stage practice, filmic techniques, and modern closed-circuit video surveillance. They consider the ongoing debate about the relationship between literariness and performativity, propose a shift away from hauntings to prophecies, and argue that the act of performance and the recording of performance in our written work shape both our understanding of early modern drama and the relationships we forge with other scholars and communities.

In calling for papers for this special issue we hoped to gauge the present state of the field and announce our intent to make SQ a home for a wider range of writings on Shakespeare and performance. The breadth of responses to that call confirms the continued growth and transformation of  the study of performance and its centrality to the larger world of Shakespeare scholarship. This vitality is further reflected in the depth and intensity of conversation in the comments on our open peer review of submissions.

We are eager to expand beyond the boundaries of what we formerly referred to as “Shakespeare Performed.” This issue’s “Rethinking Academic Reviewing” signals our desire to rethink the subject and practice of reviewing, while the issue as a whole represents other forms of engagement with the issue of Shakespeare and performance that might suggest patterns for future contributions.

A note about the process of putting this issue together: as is now SQ practice, we issued an open call for papers for this special issue. In response to the CFP, we received about twenty-five submissions. Of those we selected the strongest six pieces to put up for an open peer review, held online at MediaCommons. There each piece was commented on by a group of self-selected peer reviewers over a period of six weeks. At the end of the review period, authors revised their essays and resubmitted them to SQ. We are publishing four of those pieces here, along with two other essays that came in to SQ outside of the call for papers and that went through SQ’s usual double-blind review process. We are extremely grateful to Kathleen Fitzpatrick and MediaCommons for being our partners in this. We also want to thank the authors who participated in this open review, which might have felt at times like an overly exposed one. Finally, we wish to acknowledge publicly the readers who took the time to participate and comment in this evaluation. The work of reviewers is often invisible, but in this case, the open nature of the review means that we can thank them by name: Andrew Bonnell, Alex Huang, Anita Hagerman, Carolyn Sale, Thomas Cartelli, Chris Fahrenthold, Christian Billing, Daniel Keegan, Jami Rogers, J.B. Cook, James C. Bulman, Jeremy Lopez, John Gillies, Karl Steel, Katherine Rowe, Linda Charnes, Matt Kozusko, Michael Dobson, Pascale Aebischer, Paul Menzer, Peter Kirwan, Peter Holland, Lois Potter, Romana Wray, Robert Tierney, Todd Borlik, Tom Magill, W. B. Worthen, and Zeno Ackermann.[i]

A quick update for those of you who have missed my online promotions: I am now in charge of a new blog at work, The Collation: a gathering of scholarship from the Folger Shakespeare Library. It is what it says it is, a blog authored by staff and scholars at the Folger that shares research and resources at the Library in terms that are accessible to the general public and of interest to scholars. If you’re interested in the early modern aspects of what I write here, you’ll like The Collation, too. But it’s not all early modern! We’ll be touching on aspects of librarianship, digital curation, theatre history, and humanities research.

I wrote the introductory post on the word “collation” as well as a later post about my tweeting the @FolgerResearch #wunderkammer series. There are also posts so far from Steve Galbraith, the recently departed Curator of Books,¹ about the Folger’s official count of 82 First Folios and from Erin Blake, the Curator of Art and Special Collections, on a new acquisition of an artists’ book of The Tempest. Upcoming posts will introduce some of the Library’s digital resources, feature key staff members, highlight items in our collections, and focus on academic programs at the Library. I am, of course, not neutral about this, since it was my brainchild and I’m now spearheading the effort. But if this sounds like the sort of thing that might tickle your fancy, I hope you’ll check The Collation out. There will be posts twice a week and we’ll do our best to entertain and educate you!

I hope that this won’t slow me down more on the slow schedule I’m already posting over here. Some of what I might write here will end up over at The Collation. (There’ll be a post in the next few weeks on a mid-sixteenth-century printer’s specimen sheet, for instance.) But I’ll continue to blog here, too, especially because I have greater flexibility to indulge in my sassiness when I’m not at work and because there’s so much more that I need to spout off about than early modern books!

In the meantime, if you can’t get enough of my craziness, I’m also writing over at The Idler, doing a column on Netflix Instant with Tim Carmody and Sarah Pavis and a rotating cast of other characters. I’m up once a month, on Wednesdays–I think I’m the third Wednesday of the month. It’s got nothing to do with books or libraries and it’s good fun. My first piece was on why Paul Newman is hot. I’m not sure why that’s a question anyone would ask–who cares WHY he’s hot, he’s Paul  Newman!!–but it gave me an excuse to catch up on some of his early movies I’d missed. Tim definitely brings the smart to “In the Queue” and Sarah brings the funny. I haven’t figured out my niche yet, but I like to think of myself as the one who connived to get everyone else to provide movie recommendations for my enjoyment.

More soon from me here. I’m thinking about starting an iPad app review series focused on early modern and library stuff, so stay tuned!

1. “recently departed” here not as in “dead” but as in “moved on to a great new job”

As some of you might have seen in the most recent Shakespeare Association of America Bulletin, Pascale Aebischer and I are directing a seminar on non-Shakespearean Drama and Performance. Both of us have a strong interest in shifting away from early modern performance studies’ dominant interest in Shakespeare to thinking about performance in relationship to drama by other early modern and modern playwrights. Since the Bulletin text is so necessarily brief, we thought it might be helpful to share our longer seminar proposal so that folks interested in participating can get a sense of the questions that are driving our seminar.

If you’re looking for an SAA seminar to participate in next year and you’re interested in these questions, please consider ours. We’d be happy to see position papers alongside seminar papers; review essays surveying the field might also be helpful contributions. Mostly, we are eager to have a conversation about what is at stake in defining performance studies beyond the terrain of Shakespeare and welcome anyone interested in that discussion. More information about SAA, membership, and the conference is at their website.

A quick aside on the seminar title: Pascale and I struggled to come up with a title and phrasing to use that conveyed our interest in moving beyond Shakespeare without defining those other playwrights and plays in terms of Shakespeare. “Non-Shakespearean”, alas, does just that, but it is really the only shorthand available. “Shakespeare’s contemporaries” runs into the same problem—defining everything in terms of Shakespeare—while introducing an emphasis on contemporaneity that excludes too much of interest. With some reluctance, then, we stuck with describing our interest as lying in the non-Shakespearean, hoping that recognizing the inadequacy of the phrase might open up avenues for moving through the challenges of this field. A further aside: when I went looking for some image to illustrate this post (all blogs should be beeyooteefull as well as stimulating), I couldn’t find something that worked to my satisfaction? Choosing one non-Shakespearean playwright just seemed to privilege that writer over others; replacing Shakespeare with Middleton or Jonson isn’t really adequate for our conversation. Instead, I took the Droeshout portrait and erased his face. In addition to being satisfying, it gives us a blank canvas on which to try new approaches.

Non-Shakespearean Drama and Performance: critical implications

Seminar Leaders: Sarah Werner (Folger Shakespeare Library) and Pascale Aebischer (Exeter, UK)

Brief description:
Shakespeare’s contemporaries have begun to compete with him for dominance in theaters, films, editions, and the study of Renaissance drama. This seminar explores how studying non-Shakespearean productions affects Renaissance performance studies, cultural studies, and editorial practices. What impact do such performances have on our understanding of Renaissance dramaturgies—including Shakespeare’s? Papers are also welcome that consider issues of methodology and terminology that arise in these studies. The aim is to explore new critical directions beyond a focus solely on Shakespeare.

Further description:
This proposal arises out of recent responses to the expansion of the canon of Renaissance drama in present-day performance. The methodologies and approaches established in Shakespearean performance studies do not unproblematically map onto the study of performances of plays by other early modern dramatists. The upsurge in performances of these plays and the performance traditions that are emerging prompt the need for a reassessment of our critical approaches to the performance of Renaissance drama. This involves a re-situation of Shakespearean performance in the context of performances of plays by his contemporaries, of present-day drama and of ‘the Renaissance period’ in plays and films. Books by Roberta Barker (2007) and Kim Solga (2009) and essay collections by Sarah Werner (2010), Greg Colón Semenza (2010), Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete (forthcoming, 2011) and Kathryn Prince and Pascale Aebischer (forthcoming, 2011-12) are beginning to explore the changing landscape of Renaissance drama in performance and to reassess performance studies and cultural studies methodologies in the light of this. Our objective is to take stock of these critical developments and explore new directions in performance studies that reach out beyond Shakespeare, giving us a fuller understanding of the impact of present-day performance on the study of Renaissance drama.

Our seminar reaches out to graduate students, junior and senior scholars, inviting them to join us in reflecting on the impact of performance and of thinking in terms of performance on their critical practices, whether in the fields of performance studies and cultural studies or as editors and readers of Renaissance drama. Specifically, we will ask contributors to address the following questions:

• How does the study of performances of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, precursors and successors impact on our understanding of Renaissance drama and dramaturgies?
• Conversely, how does the study of plays by Renaissance dramatists other than Shakespeare change our understanding of what performance is and how it works?
• What methodological and terminological issues arise from a focus on Shakespeare’s contemporaries in performance?
• How does embedding Shakespeare’s plays in a wider dramatic context (Renaissance and present-day) contribute to our understanding of the role of Renaissance drama in present-day performance?
• How can awareness of actual or potential performance impact on editorial and reading practices?

Academic biographies of seminar leaders:
Sarah Werner is Undergraduate Program Director at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Associate Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. She is the editor of New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies (2010) and author of Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (2001). She is currently guest editing a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly on Shakespeare and performance and is textual editor of The Taming of the Shrew for the 3rd edition of the Norton Shakespeare. She has been a member of SAA since 1994, and has been to every conference since then except for the 1996 world conference. She has directed two SAA seminars, “Editing Performance Decisions / Performing Editorial Decisions” (1998) and “The State of Performance Criticism: Where Are We Today and Where Are We Headed” (2001); co-directed one workshop, “Editing for Performance” (2004); and has been an invited respondent for seminars in 2007 and 2009. She was also a presenter at a paper session on performance practices in 1995.

Pascale Aebischer is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. She is co-editor, with Kathryn Prince, of Performing Early Modern Drama Today (CUP, 2011-12) and is guest editing an issue of Shakespeare Bulletin dedicated to films of plays by Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Webster and Ford (Winter 2011). She is also writing a book, Beyond Shakespeare: Screening Early Modern Drama, which reflects on the often tense relationship between the Shakespeare industry and independent film adaptations of early modern drama. Pascale Aebischer is the co-editor of Remaking Shakespeare (2003) and author of Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies (2004) and Jacobean Drama (2010). In 2010, she was an invited speaker in Francesca T. Royster’s SAA seminar on ‘Shakespeare’s Female Icons’. With Roberta Barker and Kathryn Prince, she is co-chairing a session on ‘Counter-Shakespeares’ at the World Shakespeare Congress in Prague in 2011.