Course – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

Literature of the English Country House (Course on Future Learn)

I’d not intended to overlap courses on Future Learn, because I thought it might end up feeling like it was taking up too much of my time. I was right, but I’m still glad I took the Literature of the English Country House course even tho it has overlapped with two courses that I’d already signed up for. And to be honest it was part of why I found the Portus archaeology course so disappointing in the end (post), because this one was much more to my tastes!

This course was an 8 week course run by Sheffield University about, as you might expect, English literature that deals with or takes place in country houses. All the videos were filmed in country houses so that we could see the sorts of places the texts were talking about. The first seven weeks each looked at a particular aspect of country house literature, roughly moving forwards in time as we went. And then the last week was a review of the previous weeks, and a test to see if you’d got the right idea.

The first week also introduced us to the concept of close reading – it was a course pitched as being for everyone, so this made sure we were all aware of the technique. Whilst it wasn’t something I’d ever been formally taught I’ve been reading a few in depth analyses of books and book series online over the last few years so the concept was familiar to me. The general point is not just to read for the surface meaning, but once you’ve done that to go back and read more closely paying attention to word choice and the broader context of the piece. This doesn’t just show you how the author built up your impression of a scene, but might also give you greater insight into what they are saying (intentionally or unintentionally).

The texts we read were mostly excerpts from longer works tailored to demonstrate the points the course was making. In week one, as well as the skill of close reading (illustrated using a scene or two from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night), we also looked at modern misconceptions about country houses and country house literature – namely that they were only places of harmony between the elite and the rest of the countryside, and that women didn’t write literature in the 17th Century. These were illustrated by a poem by Ben Johnson (To Penshurst) which by praising one place (and family) for its harmonious perfection also lets one know what normality really was. And we also read an excerpt from a work by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.

Week two focussed on entertainment in 17th Century country houses – both the amateur (illustrated by a poem written by a servant to celebrate a child’s 2nd birthday) and the professional (illustrated by the scenes from Hamlet where the travelling players visit Elsinore). In week three we looked at politeness in the 18th Century – which they explained was a bit of a broader concept than it is now. It wasn’t just about whether you said “please” and “thank you” in the right places, but also the way you spoke, the clothes you wore and whole sum of your public behaviour & presentation. Personally, I think we might still stretch politeness as a term to cover all of that sort of thing, but perhaps I’m not understanding the nuances here. This week was illustrated first with an excerpt from the Spectator, a humorous piece about the differences between country & town manners. And also by an excerpt from a novel by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire featuring a husband who was polite in the mode of the town but very much not nice.

Week 4 was devoted to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. The passages we read were about Elizabeth Bennet’s visit to Darcy’s house – which is thought to be modelled on Chatsworth. And these passages were used to illustrate a narrative technique which Austen used that was revolutionary at the time. This is “free indirect discourse” where the boundaries between the narrator and the thoughts of the character are blurred. In week 5 we turned to the darker side of country house literature – the country house as a sort of malevolent presence or with a weird or reclusive owner. This was illustrated with a gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe (Mysteries of Udolpho) and also by Dickens’s Great Expectations. The latter was also used to look at points of view within the story – because the story is told by Pip when he’s much older so you get a mingling of the young boy’s reaction to Miss Haversham and the older man’s more considered view.

The 6th week was all about childhood and the literature devoted to it, which was rather fun. So we had some of Lear’s nonsense rhymes, and an excerpt from Alice in Wonderland. And the final week of reading brought us up to the end of the country house era – the 19th Century, and Oscar Wilde. The excerpts this week included a couple from The Canterville Ghost, which started out as a witty look at the trend of wealthy Americans buying up old British country houses from impoverished aristocrats. But by the end (our second excerpt) seemed to’ve turned into a rather saccharine piece of sentimental Victorian religiousness!

I enjoyed this course a lot. It’s a shame I had so many other things on at the time, I’m not sure I entirely did it justice while I was working through it – but the stuff is all still there to go back over again if I want to in the future 🙂

Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome (Course on Future Learn)

The third course I’ve done on Future Learn was about archaeology & the Roman port Portus. And sadly I found it a bit disappointing. The course was run by Southampton University, whose archaeology department are one of the partners in the excavation of the site at Portus. Portus is in Italy, near Rome & to the west of it. From the 1st Century AD it was the main port serving the city of Rome, remaining in use until the 7th Century. Since then the coastline of Italy has changed and the whole site is now inland. Portus was one of the sites that featured in Rome’s Lost Empire which we watched over a year ago (post) and that’s part of what drew me to this course.

Over the first 5 of the 6 weeks that the course ran they had three strands of information. One of these was following the development of Portus from its foundation by Claudius in the 1st Century AD through to its use by the Ostrogothic rulers of Rome after the Western Roman Empire had fallen. The second strand was putting the port in context with the wider Roman (and post-Roman) world – looking not only at things like what sorts of goods & from where passed through the port but also at what was going on in historical terms at the time. The third strand was about archaeological methods – ranging from really basic stuff covered on any archaeology documentary, through to descriptions of cutting edge techniques. The final week was intended to pull the whole thing together and to get us involved with actual work going on right then at the site. It had a section where you could ask them to photograph things on site or answer questions about particular things. And the assignment was to look at some actual data & try and draw some conclusions.

As I said at the beginning I was rather disappointed, and in fact I never finished the final week. In part this was because it didn’t feel like it was pitched at people like me. I found the way the material was presented somewhat patronising on more than one occasion, and over all I felt they were interacting with us as pupils rather than as fellow adults (if that makes sense). This is in contrast to the other Future Learn courses I’ve done (or am doing) – the two Shakespeare ones and the English literature one I’m currently doing have managed to present technical terminology and explain details of their subject without resorting to phrases like “Well, I seem to be using a lot of big words in this one!”. I’d hesitate to say that to a primary school child for fear of offending them, let alone to a large group of adults.

I found the material in the course itself felt somewhat repetitive, and thus a bit shallow. I think that was an artifact of the way it was presented rather than actually being the case. Most sections had both a short video and a short article, with a lot of overlap in the material but some unique pieces of information in each. So to get all the information you had to watch the video and read the article, hence the feeling of repetition. Some videos were better than others – the ones where one of the educators was talking to camera on their own were the best. The ones where a student was conducting a very staged feeling interview with the educator in question were the worst – it was a good idea, I just think they failed to pull it off.

On the positive side they did give a lot of links to further information in each section. I confess I rarely followed them, because I wasn’t feeling particularly engaged with the course. There were also extra “Advanced” sections where they explained some techniques in more detail, and some of those were the more interesting parts of the course.

Overall, a rather disappointing experience. I was too put off by the tone and the feeling of repetition to ever really get properly into the subject matter.

Shakespeare and His World (Course on Future Learn)

Shakespeare and His World was a 10 week course on Future Learn which finished just a couple of weeks ago. The course was run by Warwick University and presented by Jonathan Bate (with Jennifer Waghorn as moderator). And in the 10 weeks it covered a huge amount of ground! Each week focussed on a particular theme and there were 6 or 7 video lectures, each of which featured an object from Shakespeare’s time – most of these were from the collections of the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, and most of the videos were filmed there. And eight of the weeks featured a particular Shakespeare play, which also illustrated the weekly theme. We were looking at both what the plays told us about the time they were written in, and what contemporary events & things influenced the writing of the plays. As well as this we also looked a little at the plays as plays rather than historical items – their themes & characters and so on. Obviously in the time available all of this was covered at a fairly superficial level – an overview rather than anything in depth, but there were normally links to places to find out more about the featured objects and some ideas for further investigating the plays.

Week 1 was an introductory week which looked at what we know of Shakespeare’s life story and also set him in context as an Elizabethan playwright and poet. We also read Venus and Adonis, one of Shakespeare’s poems. The second week was the first one with a play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The theme was Shakespeare’s time in Stratford, in particular his schooling, and this was a good play to illustrate it because although the town in the play is Windsor there’s internal evidence that suggests Shakespeare was actually basing it on Stratford. And he made use of the sorts of people he would’ve known growing up to provide characters for the play – in particular there’s a small part for a schoolboy called Will which is generally assumed to be an author-insert.

Week 3 used A Midsummer Night’s Dream to focus on the theatre in Elizabethan England – chosen because of the play within a play sequence. Week 4 was about war, using Henry V as the illustrative play. Bate made the point in this week that Shakespeare was a war poet for the first half of his career – England was at war with Spain in this period – so Henry V isn’t just looking back to former glories but is also saying something about contemporary events in particular the defeat of the Armada. Week 5 moved on to look at finance, using the Merchant of Venice. As well as the obvious use of Shylock the moneylender to think about how Elizabethan money & finances worked, we also looked at how Shakespeare often used Venice as a mirror for London. And of course we also covered Elizabethan attitudes to Jews, as well as looking at how Shylock has been portrayed through the ages since the play was written. Shakespeare himself seems to be making a more nuanced point than some later stagings of the play.

I’m afraid this is turning into a bit of a laundry list, but I’m trying not to go into too much detail otherwise this post will go on forever!

Week 6 used Macbeth to look at witches and medicine. Because of studying the play at school around 25 years ago I was expecting the bits about witches, but I hadn’t really thought about what the play tells us about medicine of the time before. Sadly the discussion section for this week (about similarities and differences between modern & 16th Century medicine) got over-run by people enthusing over herbal remedies being better than “all those chemicals” and misplaced nostalgia so I stopped reading it before my blood pressure rose too much. The seventh week used Othello to look at the interactions between Christendom and the Islamic world. Again Shakespeare is more nuanced than some later stagings of the play – the villain of the play, after all, is Iago who is a white Christian (although notably with a Spanish name). Othello the Moor is basically a good man who is led astray by Iago’s playing on his insecurities.

The eighth week looked at what Classical culture meant to the people of Shakespeare time, and also to look at how “the East” was regarded. The illustrative play chosen was Anthony and Cleopatra which obviously gives us an image of orderly moral Rome vs the opulent decadence of Egypt. And it was also a play designed to appeal to James VI & I by implying he occupies the place of Augustus in his own time, seen in the play as unifier and peacemaker. Week 9 was the last week with a play – fittingly this was The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last solo authored play. This was used to illustrate the “Brave New World” of the Americas that the Stuart age was beginning to successfully colonise. And also to think about how the art of the theatre was similar to the art of magic in The Tempest so Prospero’s final speech retiring from his art can be seen as Shakespeare’s final speech too. And the last week was a brisk trot through Shakespeare’s legacy looking at how he grew from being regarded as one of the Elizabethan playwrights into “the Greatest Playwright of All TIme”.

I’m glad the information, including videoes & links, is still available on Future Learn for those of us that did the course – I’m not sure I got everything out of the course that I could and some weeks I definitely skimped on due to lack of time. Even tho by the end I was thinking it had out stayed its welcome a bit (8 plays in 8 weeks is a lot to read and contemplate) I’m glad I did it 🙂

Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Course on Future Learn)

As you might’ve noticed from the piece of whimsy I posted a few weeks ago I’ve been doing a course on Hamlet with Future Learn. This is my first foray into the world of massive online courses, and also the first non-science course I’ve done since 1990. All in all I think it was rather successful – I learnt stuff, I enjoyed it and I only had a couple of moments where I thought to myself “ah, yes, this is why I did science instead” 😉

The course described itself as follows:

This course introduces the many ways in which Hamlet can be enjoyed and understood. Six weekly videos discuss the play’s fortunes in print, and its own representations of writing and theatre; its place in the Elizabethan theatrical repertory; its representation of melancholia and interiority; its fortunes on the modern stage; its appeal to actors; and its philosophy.

And had no pre-requisites other than an ability to read Hamlet, so that seemed a good one to jump in on. I’m not quite sure I got what I was expecting – part of which is down to me: I’d expected more about the text or play itself, and the course was more about the meta level of how it’s been performed since. Which it does say in the description really, so my failure there. However it was also very focussed on Hamlet the character, rather than the play in a broader sense and I really don’t think that Hamlet is the only interesting thing in the play even based on my own meagre knowledge.

The technical set-up for the course is that each week had a list of steps, say a dozen of them. Some of these would be short video lectures and some would be articles (or links to external content). And there were also discussion steps, and assignments. You could add comments to all but the assignment steps (which were more formally peer reviewed). So each video and article would have a few comments which I looked at or not depending on how interested I was. And the discussions would have a few hundred comments (mostly on topic) and I made sure I always commented on these and read a reasonable number of them – basically made sure I participated (otherwise what was the point of doing a course rather than read a book). The final step was always a short multiple choice quiz meant to primarily be a review of the week (but see the end of this post).

The first week of the course was an introduction to the course itself, and to the text of the play. I’d not realised before that there were three versions of Hamlet that survive from the 17th Century. There’s the First Quarto, which has different names for people and feels like it’s a “pirate” copy poorly transcribed from notes taken in a performance or from an actor’s memory. The Second Quarto is much better quality (in terms of the flow of the lines and so on) and has all the right names for people – it’s pretty much unstageably long though, as it would take 4 hours to do it all. And finally there’s the Folio version, which is a cut down version of the Second Quarto one. We were encouraged during this week to think about which of the versions of the text might count as “the real one”, and whether any particular performance might consititute the definitive version. And also whether the play as performance or the play as text was the more important.

The second week was a bit disappointing for me. It was billed as being about the Elizabethan audiences for the play, and the context the play was written in. However it felt very shallow, with most content being provided by a link to the Shakespearean London Theatres Project (which was interesting, but it felt a bit like cheating for them to point us there rather than provide content themselves). And the bulk of the time I spent on that week was taken up with trying to plough through The Spanish Tragedy, which is a play by Thomas Kyd who may’ve written a version of Hamlet before Shakespeare did. We were encouraged to discuss the reactions of Elizabethan audiences to Hamlet (and to write a review as if we were there, hence my little bit of whimsy) – sadly if you followed the steps linearly that discussion happened before we got the links to ShaLT and information on the audiences. The other discussion that week was on what we thought Kyd’s Hamlet might’ve been like, and what if anything we thought might’ve been surprising about Shakespeare’s Hamlet to audiences that knew the earlier play. My conclusions were that Kyd’s Hamlet would probably’ve been more straightforward and more like an action film, but Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one that gives you something to discuss afterwards. And it’s the plays/books/films/stories that you discuss or want to talk about that you remember.

The third week picked back up in quality, and was the start of a three week exploration of Hamlet’s psychology which felt like the core of the course. This week focused first on the theories of the mind of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. We learnt about the four humours, and what Hamlet meant when he talked of himself as a melancholic. Towards the end of the week Freud’s ideas were introduced, and we were told a bit about how Hamlet has been used as a fictional case study by several psychologists. In the discussions we were encouraged to think about what (if anything) is wrong with Hamlet and whether or not he was faking his madness. We were also invited to talk about how much sense it makes to use Hamlet as a case study for psychological theories that were constructed centuries after Shakespeare died. I was astonished how divisive this subject was. Some people couldn’t move past a literal viewpoint: “you can’t psychoanalyse or diagnose a fiction person because they don’t exist”. Which just strikes me as orthogonal to the point. Obviously you can’t really diagnose them with anything, but thinking about the theories in relation to the character can tell you something about the character and also about the theory. In both directions it’s a tool for shining light on something in a way you might not’ve considered before.

Week four moved on to thinking about modern stagings of the play, with an emphasis on how the Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet’s relationship with his mother came to dominate 20th Century stagings of the play. Even if the production doesn’t interpret it that way, there’s still always a bed in the closet scene (which is just Hamlet and Gertrude) and it’s choosing to not be Oedipal about it rather than just not being so, if that makes sense. There was an assignment during this week, for peer review, that asked us to look at a particular scene that’s only in the First Quarto and we had to decide if we would include it if we were staging the play. The scene itself has Gertrude receiving news of Hamlet surviving the attempted murder on Claudius’s instructions (which happens off stage). This changes the feel of the end of the play – she knows more, and she’s unambiguously on Hamlet’s side after this scene. I rather enjoyed thinking about this assignment, and I would’ve liked more of the course to be like this. I decided that I wouldn’t want the scene included, because I felt it was a bit out of character for how I see Gertrude – to me it reads almost like Hamlet’s wishes for how his mother would react. It’s full of things like “For murderous minds are always jealous.” which I could see Hamlet saying about Claudius, but not Gertrude (who I see as somewhat more pragmatic and possibly even aware of Claudius’s initial murder of Hamlet Sr.). I’d quite like to read a story of the events in Hamlet from Gertrude’s point of view, I bet they’d look quite different.

The fifth week was the one where I had my “oh yes, this is why I did science” moment. The focus of the week was on an interview with Jonathan Slinger who played Hamlet recently, recorded when he was about halfway through the run. And we were invited to consider such weighty questions as whether or not the role of Hamlet was seeping into his interview persona. And I really don’t care. The other half of the week was another theory of Hamlet’s psyche – Slinger’s director had a view that Hamlet had bipolar disorder, and Slinger played him as someone who didn’t know they had it rather than knowingly. My exasperation with this bit was because part of the discussion after this was about “would tragedy have been averted if Hamlet had been diagnosed and medicated?”. Perhaps? But then it would’ve been a boring play, so that just felt like a daft question. Not an illuminating question like considering if bipolar disorder fits as a diagnosis could be (and to be fair we were invited to discuss that too) but just rather daft. Also bipolar disorder doesn’t mean “crazy person” and the questions and discussion thread veered rather closer to that than I was comfortable with. The assignment for the week was comparing the “different versions of Hamlet we’ve seen” to say which best fit Hamlet’s own advice to actors in Act 3 Scene 2. Which is difficult to do when you’ve not seen one full production let alone more … I wasn’t the only person commenting on that in the weekly feedback section. I did do my little 500 word essay on the subject and peer review a couple, but really all I learnt from that was that I can successfully waffle for 500 words even when I don’t have much to say. Looking at the length of posts I write here on a regular basis, that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me (nor anyone else, I’d guess)!

The sixth and final week returned to more of a highpoint. The theme this week was the soliloquy “To be or not to be”. We’d had a practical exercise at the end of week 5 to read it out loud ourselves, and this week started with Pippa Nixon (who played Ophelia in the same production that Slinger played Hamlet) reading the soliloquy. We were then asked to think about the meaning of it (and to paraphrase it ourselves, quite a fun exercise) and in particular to discuss how it fit within the Christian context of the time it was written and how it transcends that context. I would’ve liked more of this sort of consideration of the text in the whole course. The second half of the week was thinking about women playing Hamlet – Pippa Nixon talked about how she’d like to play Hamlet, and how she thought the changing of the central family relationships to a father-daughter and a mother-daughter one would change our perceptions of the play. There wasn’t a discussion section for this which I think was probably just as well – I read a few of the comments on the video & article sections and some of them made me roll my eyes quite hard (and there were even comments that can be paraphrased as “but if Hamlet’s a girl then you have to make Ophelia a man otherwise how can they have a relationship??”). I do think it’d be interesting to see a female Hamlet done straight – just changing the pronouns and no other textual alterations. And see how that changes how you see the character, or doesn’t change it. In the same way that staging the play with different dress can interestingly change the feel of it (from clips I’ve seen, anyway).

Overall this was an interesting course, even if I’d’ve preferred a slightly different one! It was run by a team from the Institute of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University, and I thought that most of the material was well thought out and well presented. They also responded very well to any criticism. For instance at first there were no places to leave feedback, but after people started to say things in one of the discussions each week had a dedicated feedback section added. And not only that, but if something came up that was easily fixable on the fly it was done – the quizzes at the end of each week included material not in the course which was disconcerting and confusing to several of us at first. But it was by design and the description of the quiz was changed to make it clear that we weren’t supposed to know all the answers, it was a) for fun and b) supposed to point you to other things you could think about.