The other (non-Shakespearean) thing I learned in my college Shakespeare class.

I've already mentioned that the tests in this class were unusual; the way I studied for them was a bit odd as well and though it wasn't a method that I'd recommend for wide usage, in this context it worked well.

I was, in my younger days, something of a procrastinator (a trait I've outgrown, of course, -- ask anybody). Papers were generally started at the last minute but I did, at least, make an effort to keep up with my reading (I was earning a BFA in creative writing so writing and keeping up with my reading was pretty much all that was asked of me).

Shakespeare was the exception with reading assignments being pushed back to marathon sessions the weekends before the tests. I wasn't that I didn't enjoy the material -- I did -- but the plays required a commitment and a focus that made them easy to put off.

I would therefore find myself with three or four plays that I had to know in considerable detail forty-eight hours after I cracked open my copy of the Riverside Shakespeare (which I still have, by the way). It's difficult to imagine a worse approach to studying but in this case it worked out surprisingly well.

I would spend the first couple of hours cursing myself for being an irresponsible moron and calculating how much sleep I'd be able to get if I continued reading at that glacial pace. After that, though, something changed: the rate at which I was reading increased; it became easier to focus; the characters became more vivid and the stories more coherent.

It wasn't until after the second test that I realized what was going on. Shakespeare is one of the most and least accessible writers most of us will ever read. He wrote in language that hasn't been used for centuries but if you can get past those centuries of linguistic drift, you find someone who could hold the interest of intellectuals like Ben Jonson while keeping what we would now call the cheap seats cheering and stomping instead of throwing rotten eggs.

If I would have shown some discipline and diligently put aside an hour a night to study for that course I would have devoted more time to it but I strongly suspect I would have done worse and gotten less out of it. I doubt that an hour, even an hour every night would have been enough time to acclimate myself to the language; I would have spent my time translating instead of reading. It took two or three hours to forget the plays weren't in the everyday vernacular.

It's important to note that waiting till the weekend before a test then doing a marathon study session would have been, in almost every other context, a horrible idea. Even in cases where language is a barrier (which includes math), you'd generally be better off working your way through in bite-sized chunks, but the plays were written to be experienced in a single sitting (or standing) and that's probably still how they work best.

So my experiences in that one class shouldn't suggest a general approach to studying but it is another reminder of the often made point that the "best" pedagogical methods are context sensitive, varying from student to student, teacher to teacher and subject to subject to subject. Beware of blanket solutions.

"Of course, Shakespeare was much newer at the time"

Back when I was an undergrad I took a class in Shakespeare. I'm mentioning this because a couple of aspects came back to me recently while thinking about education. The first was the format of the tests the teacher used. They consisted of a list of quotes from the four plays we had covered since the last test. Each quote had a pronoun underlined which came with a two part question: who was the speaker and who was the antecedent?

I've never seen that format used in another class (even by the same teacher) and I always thought it was an interesting approach. I wouldn't necessarily recommend using it widely but I'm glad I had it in at least one course. It was a method that encouraged attentive reading (particularly useful with Shakespeare).

Experiencing different styles of teaching and evaluation are part of a well-rounded education. I've seen a wide range approaches. Some were successful. Some were not. Some successful as one-shots but weren't models I'd suggest routinely following, like the number theory class I took that didn't allow mathematical notation (all proofs had to be written out in grammatical sentences without abbreviations or symbols -- more or less the way Fermat would have done it). That pedagogical diversity has been of immense value.

A book on quality control I read a few years ago said that quality in a QC sense was equivalent to a lack of variation; quality meant all parts came out the same. Sometimes I'm afraid that the some in the education reform movement are starting to think of uniformity as an end to itself.

Alex Tabarrok's literary leverage

There's a very good discussion about superstars and the winner-take-all economy over at Economist's View. Alex Tabarrok argues that the winner-take-all effect in literature can be explained by factors like technology and venue size:

J.K. Rowling is the first author in the history of the world to earn a billion dollars. I do not disparage Rowling when I say that talent is not the explanation for her monetary success. Homer, Shakespeare and Tolkien all earned much less. Why? Consider Homer, he told great stories but he could earn no more in a night than say 50 people might pay for an evening's entertainment. Shakespeare did a little better. The Globe theater could hold 3000 and unlike Homer, Shakespeare didn't have to be at the theater to earn. Shakespeare's words were leveraged.

Tolkien's words were leveraged further. By selling books Tolkien could sell to hundreds of thousands, even millions of buyers in a year - more than have ever seen a Shakespeare play in 400 years. And books were cheaper to produce than actors which meant that Tolkien could earn a greater share of the revenues than did Shakespeare (Shakespeare incidentally also owned shares in the Globe.)

Rowling has the leverage of the book but also the movie, the video game, and the toy. And globalization, both economic and cultural, means that Rowling's words, images, and products are translated, transmitted and transported everywhere - this is the real magic of Ha-li Bo-te.

But it's possible to look at these examples in an entirely different way.

There's no question that technology and the ability to leverage creative works has a tremendous effect on the economics (and therefore the content) of popular culture, but how well does this particular account support that conclusion?

Homer is a bad example partially because he probably never existed, but mainly because the model Prof. Tabarrok describes, traveling performers working small venues, didn't really apply to writers at all. These minstrels were simply repeating stories that they had accumulated. The closest analogy today would be a cover band working bars and small clubs. (Hesiod throws in a bit of a monkey wrench here, but that's a topic for another day.)

If you skip ahead two or three hundred years you do have successful writers like Sophocles having their works performed in large venues. Though it's difficult to draw an analogy between forms of compensation then and now, they were certainly well rewarded for their work. Go on to the Roman era you have successful writers producing book length poems and even novels despite the lack of printing presses.

As for Shakespeare sticking to the stage, this had little to do with the relative cost of books and actors. There were the equivalent of cheap paperback versions of Shakespeare's plays published during his lifetime. There were also productions of his plays away from the Globe. Shakespeare's words were widely leveraged. The problem wasn't technology or venue; it was the lack of modern copyright laws. The revenue went to other people.

Tolkien is a bad example for other reasons. His body of work is small. His books were difficult to translate into other media. Significant sales didn't start until years after the books were written (prompted, in part, by the mistaken belief that the copyright was limited to Britain).

A better example would be Erle Stanley Gardner who had a large body of work, sold more books than Tolkien and was, during his lifetime, adapted into movies, TV, radio, comic books and probably a few other media. Was Rowling better leveraged than Gardner? Sure, but not by as much as you might think.

There is obviously more behind the rise of the superstar author than technology and the ability to leverage words, more than I have time to address now, but if I were to pursue it, I think I'd make the case for this being a story of lobbying and government regulation of the market in the form of copyrights. Technology has changed, but so has the law.




And now, just in case any of the above might be read as a slight against Rowling, I'll let Stephen King have the last word with his comparison of Harry Potter and the Twilight books:

Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.