Distinguished International Visiting Fellowship 2017 Simon Palfrey ‘Demon’s Land: A Poem Come True’ As part of its international research collaboration, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions funds outstanding international scholars in the field to visit one or more of the Australian nodes for a period of between four weeks and two months, to work with members of the Centre on a research program of their choice. Visitors are invited to present their work in lectures or symposia, where they will receive feedback from and engage in discussion with members of the Centre, promoting collaborative research. Simon Palfrey held a Distinguished International Visiting Fellowship in 2017. He spent three weeks working with the Centre at The University of Western Australia, The University of Sydney and The University of Queensland. Simon Palfrey is Professor of English Literature at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. He is a founding editor of the Bloomsbury series ‘Shakespeare Now!’ and ‘Beyond Criticism’. His books include: Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Clarendon Press,
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Distinguished International Visiting Fellowship 2017
Simon Palfrey ‘Demon’s Land: A Poem Come True’
As part of its international research collaboration, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions funds outstanding international scholars in the field to visit one or more of the Australian nodes for a period of between four weeks and two months, to work with members of the Centre on a research program of their choice. Visitors are invited to present their work in lectures or symposia, where they will receive feedback from and engage in discussion with members of the Centre, promoting collaborative research. Simon Palfrey held a Distinguished International Visiting Fellowship in 2017. He spent three weeks working with the Centre at The University of Western Australia, The University of Sydney and The University of Queensland. Simon Palfrey is Professor of English Literature at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. He is a founding editor of the Bloomsbury series ‘Shakespeare Now!’ and ‘Beyond Criticism’. His books include: Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Clarendon Press,
1997); Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford University Press, 2007), with Tiffany Stern; Doing Shakespeare, rev. edn (Arden Shakespeare, 2011); Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Poor Tom: Living “King Lear” (University of Chicago Press, 2014). His most recent publications are Shakespeare's Dead (Bodleian Library, 2016), with Emma Smith, and the novel Macbeth, Macbeth (Bloomsbury, 2016), written with Ewan Fernie. Simon reflects on his experience as a Visiting Fellow with CHE, below. In September 2017, I visited Australia for three weeks as an ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Distinguished International Visiting Fellow. It was a memorable and very rewarding visit. The main purpose of my visit was to share, test and develop my project, ‘Demons Land: A Poem Come True’. This employs film, drama, paintings, sculptures, music and text to tell the imaginary history of an island in which a poem comes terribly to life. That poem is Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, perhaps the single greatest poetic work of the English Renaissance. What if a life, if history itself, were modelled upon such a poem? The imaginative premise of the project is that subsequent global history, a repeating mission of conquest, education and colonisation, has been a tale of this poem coming differently, imperfectly to life. ‘Demons Land’ explores art’s ongoing complicity in the dreams and crimes of empire. More specifically, ‘Demons Land’ finds its dark shadow as an allegory of Britain’s most notorious colony, the prison island of Van Diemen’s Land. For obvious reasons, bringing this work-‐in-‐progress to Australia was at once exciting, daunting, and very necessary. My project speaks very directly to the history of emotions. It has long been understood that The Faerie Queene, in its claim to change or to model lives, is an exemplary Christian humanist poem. In our project, it becomes the text of the unfinished modern world. Spenser was an active participant in the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, going as far as to advocate genocidal famine as a final solution. But as well as an apology for repression and savagery, Spenser’s most celebrated poem is a work of staggering, hallucinogenic beauty and idealism. It takes seriously the idea that emotions – in the form of longing, pride, lust, fear, envy, vanity, love, reverence – might literally make history. Emotions are not merely accidental or subjective: they are constitutive of what we and our worlds are or might become. I began in Perth, where Bob White was a welcoming host. I gave a talk titled ‘A Modern Seminary’, in which I spoke about how the world-‐historical questions raised by Spenser’s poem, and more broadly the question of the recursiveness of history – how it often seems to be patterned by predictions and repetitions – might find application in the apparent triviality of one’s own daily life: not ‘Big Name History’, but implicated all the same, as we
experience our own shames, evasions, exclusions. I then showed the first ‘Book’ (of three) from the film, which seemed to alarm and perhaps astonish in equal measure. The following day featured a ‘moved reading’ of a section of the original playscript at the replica New Fortune Theatre (an under-‐used treasure), organised and edited by Steve Chinna. At least 20 people participated in playing parts, with a good number more in the audience. The idea was that actors should have no knowledge of their parts beforehand, a variation on the part-‐practice of the Elizabethan theatre, where actors learnt separately their own cues and speeches, and a performance would be an ensemble of these discrete parts joining in a unique event, often necessarily unpredictable and semi-‐improvised (at least at first). I have written at length about this in my book Shakespeare in Parts (with Tiffany Stern), so it was good fun observing the process with my own words and roles. As ever, the simple fact of new styles of delivery and emphasis revealed unforeseen humour, piquancy and, indeed, political punch. It was nearly as satisfying as the wine tasting I was taken to afterwards by CHE Associate Investigator Clare Davidson. The next stage of my trip was my hometown of Hobart. A showing of the full 45-‐minute film was organised by Alicia Marchant at the Dechaineux Theatre in the University of Tasmania’s School of Art. I was a little nervous about bringing the film home in this way. I had been reminded of the potential political sensitivity of doing so when I tried to get permission to include in the film a sample from Fanny Cochrane-‐Smith’s haunting ‘Spring Song’ and ‘Corroboree Song’, recorded between 1899 and 1903. The original recordings are held in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), and it was important to get permission from TMAG’s Indigenous Advisory Council. I had very encouraging and friendly exchanges with Fanny’s descendant, Alison Overeem, but unfortunately left things too late to get permission before the screening. I hope to develop these conversations as the project goes on. As it was, the screening went off very happily, with penetrating questions from a range of people, some artists, some academics, some interested members of the public. When in Hobart I also enjoyed a sneak preview of TMAG’s ‘Derwent’ exhibition with Mary Knights, and a visit to MONA (Museum of Old and New Art), where I am hoping to take at least some of the ‘Demons Land’ project. There have been talks with Jane Clark of MONA about showing the film at Dark Mofo (the winter MONA music and art festival), which would be fantastic if it came off. Certainly there are strange echoes and resonances when showing the materials in Tasmania, and MONA has long been in our sights as the perfect destination. A few days later I did the same thing at The University of Sydney, organised by Juanita Ruys and Bastian Fox Phelan. Again, I introduced the film with a short talk, followed by a screening of the full film and very engaged questions. Earlier in the day I gave a well-‐attended ‘masterclass’ on Shakespeare organised by Huw Griffiths. This I called, intentionally provocatively, ‘The Truth of Anachronism’. It drew on materials in two of my recent books, Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds and Poor Tom, thinking about ways in which
dramatic form complicates and overlays questions of temporality, succession and the event. Drawing upon the dizzying metaphysics of Leibniz for a critical frame, I argued that Shakespeare embodies a quite different model of history than those familiar from conventional historiography and historicism. I suspect not absolutely everyone agreed with my methods, but the room was packed with both students and faculty and I hope there was plenty to chew on. The final leg of my trip was also the longest. I stayed in Brisbane for a week, where Peter Holbrook and Xanthe Ashburner (helped by Sushma Griffin) were extraordinarily generous and stimulating hosts, above and beyond the official tour of duty. The first few days coincided with the visit of my collaborator Ewan Fernie, and we took advantage of this to give a performed reading from our co-‐written novel, Macbeth, Macbeth, at the Bloodhouse pub. This was very enjoyable, immortalised by a photograph uploaded to the Twittersphere by the classicist Alastair Blanchard, in which my skull radiates with divine light like the very Incarnation. Equally happily, we sold every copy of the book that we had to hand. Never mind how many. My visit was timed to chime with Andrea Bubenik’s wonderful ‘Ecstasy’ exhibition at The University of Queensland Art Museum, of which the ‘Demons Land’ film was an unofficial part (a kind of cinematic fringe), playing for about six weeks from the beginning of the exhibition. It was fascinating to discover the many ways that my vision for the film rhymed with Andrea’s for her exhibition, and in particular the mutation of the baroque through the ages (again with Leibniz as a key thinker), offering a way of formalising ecstatic experience, not simply as excessive or irregular, but as exemplary of much of the most irresistible art, architecture, stories and, indeed, political action. As well as speaking at the public symposium on the first day of the exhibition, I showed and discussed the film in a special screening for Andrea’s MA Art students, who wrote very interesting commentaries which Andrea subsequently sent to me. And our conversations are continuing, with Andrea interested in developing the project (along with her own) for future Australian iterations. We have our eye particularly on the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s arrival, which could well prove a powerfully appropriate occasion for ‘Demon’s Land’ – we hope not just the film, but the larger exhibition of paintings and sculptures and, with luck, the full original play that is now being developed in the UK. The final event of my trip was another masterclass, this time a day-‐long exploration with postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, teachers, writers and scholars, titled ‘The Possibilities of Criticism’. I structured the discussions (immodestly enough) around examples of my own work, ranging from my formal experiments in literary criticism (for example, Poor Tom, Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds) to more frankly creative and collaborative works (Macbeth, Macbeth and ‘Demons Land’). The discussions were at once intense, frank, probing, wide-‐ranging and broadly shared around the large table. It was a particular
pleasure to hear what everyone else was doing – we began the day with everyone giving summaries of their own work and the challenges they are facing. This allowed everyone, I hope, to feel invested in the discussion. The aim of the day was – at least for this one day – to banish fears and presuppositions, and to think from the ground up about what we do when we think or write as ‘critics’, and what we might do. Like everything else I experienced in Brisbane (and once again, my thanks above all to Peter and Xanthe) the result was an unusually generous and open and creatively questing. A model of inventive intellectual enquiry.