Source: BBC Radio Wales
URL: N/A
Date: 28/05/2013
Event: Shakespeare through the "lens of sustainability"
Attribution: BBC Radio Wales
People:
Louise Elliott: Last Thursday the Hay Festival saw three academics from Aberystwyth University deliver a lecture that shed new light on the work of The Bard - Shakespeare - exposing him as the bad boy of Elizabethan England. Dr. Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Jane Davidson, former Environment Minister for Wales, join me now to tell me a little bit more about it. Hello Jayne, hello Jane.
Jayne Archer: Hello.
Jane Davidson: Hello. [They laugh.]
Louise Elliott: I thought I'd go "Dr. Jayne" with Dr. Jayne Archer, and sorry, Jane, you're just "Jane".
Jane Davidson: Oh, right...
Louise Elliott: Is that okay?
Jane Davidson: Absolutely fine.
Louise Elliott: So we'll start with Jane. Tell me a bit about the research competition. How did it all come about? What was the idea behind it?
Jane Davidson: Well, at the University of Wales Trinity St. David, we're trying to take a sustainability lens to everything we do, and trying to make sure that the students who we teach, the graduates of the future - you know, really think about the issues of the day. And I was approached by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, for the UK and Ireland, who said "Can we hold a conference in Lampeter?" - one of our beautiful campuses - and I thought "Yeah! This is a really nice idea." If we actually look at sustainability in the context of literature, let's not just hold a conference, let's hold a competition to give literary scholars the chance to engage with the idea of sustainability.
So I contacted the Hay Festival - because I'm doing four events there this year, and I've been speaking in the Hay Festival for a number of years - and said "If we have a competition to have a public lecture to pursue literary study in the light of sustainability issues, would you be prepared to host the winning lecture?"
And, of course, the Hay Festival not only looks at literature but looks at politics - and there's a very, very strong programme called "Hay on Earth" that looks at sustainability as well. So they were delighted to host the lecture. And then Jayne and her colleagues wrote this absolutely magnificent lecture, which they gave in Hay on Thursday.
Louise Elliott: Dr. Jayne, this was - what was it about this challenge that particularly inspired you? Why did you want to get involved?
Jayne Archer: I think this is exactly what Jane Davidson said - it's the sustainability lens. Academics use particular terms for a green approach to literary studies, and they will talk about environmental criticism or "eco-criticism". But sustainability specifically asks you, invites you, compels you to look at aspects of the use of material resources, natural resources, within the context of a literary text, and those bigger political issues, like education, like the household economy and, in the case of where I and my colleagues - which is Professor Richard Marggraf Turley and Professor Howard Thomas - came into this, from the point of view of food security.
And the challenge was to marry up the textual criticism - you know, the stuff we love about Shakespeare, those evocative lines - with the other stuff that we happen to know about him, but hasn't, I don't think, fully been communicated to a wider, non-academic audience, which is the documents we have about Shakespeare's life and help fill in those gaps, to present a - exactly what Jane Davidson said, which is a reading of Shakespeare through the lens of sustainability. And that's so interesting in the contemporary world, where issues of food security - how you manage your taxes, for example - are key to current debates about morality and ethics.
So that was the challenge. And then- the really important thing, also, talking to a general audience, we all know a bit of Shakespeare. And I think I come, even as an academic, as late to Shakespeare as anybody else, but to communicate that the scholarly stuff, the stuff that is cutting-edge, and in some cases it is actually to do with plant science - and to communicate those in a popular, accessible way was something that all three of us, as academics, are absolutely committed to.
Louise Elliott: So, are you going to dish a bit of dirt for us, Dr. Jayne about -
Jayne Archer: Absolutely not! [They laugh.]
Louise Elliott: - about the research and what it uncovered? So just tell us about Shakespeare, his character and how that, sort of, played into what you've already discussed about the, sort of, fragility of the food chain and the politics of food production.
Jayne Archer: Surely. Well, one thing we know, and climate scientists in particular know, about Elizabethan and early Jacobean England is that it was one of the really quite critical moments of what we now know as the Little Ice Age. So there was a succession of failed harvests, no understanding of plant science to attempt to arrest or deal in a pseudo-proto-scientific way with a collapse in food supply. The government attempted to regulate the way in which food, and particularly bread and ale, as the two staples that kept people's bellies full during the Renaissance - they attempted to throw a series of proclamations to regulate the price, who could sell, when they could sell, what they could sell.
And one thing was absolutely illegal, throughout this period, and that was hoarding food. Shakespeare we know did this, in different ways, throughout his life, throughout his writing career, and one of the things that we wanted to do was to look at Shakespeare's plays and see what evidence is there for this as a political concern - should people be hoarding food? After all, we all know that as soon as any snow hits the UK, we all go - we all go to Asda and - sorry, there are other supermarkets -
Louise Elliott: Indeed. [They laugh.]
Jayne Archer: - you can buy your bread from, and we go and stockpile food. Of course, it was illegal at the time but it's a very human instinct to have, I think. It didn't stop him from making profits from food-hoarding, because we know that he sold to people for over a good 15-year period, the food supplies that he had, and trying to integrate - you talk about his character, he's very much, therefore, a man of his age, who's responding to the need to feed a family, who sees his play-writing as a way to invest in food-producing land, and therefore - and here's where the word "sustainability" comes in - create a sustainable future for himself and his family, because play-writing is not going to feed a family, in the long term, but being able to channel the profits of writing plays into purchasing food-producing land is going to create a longer-term and sustainable legacy for his family.
Louise Elliott: Jane, were you surprised by the findings of Dr. Jayne and her colleagues?
Jane Davidson: I was really excited by them, because I've always thought that if you apply a sustainability lens to any subject, you actually find new nuances, you get new ideas. And I think that when you look back at Shakespeare - and I'm an English Literature graduate myself, so I'm particularly interested in Shakespeare - but when you look back at Shakespeare, and you see the kind of ground-breaking work these three Aberystwyth scholars are producing, and Jayne and Richard both come from the English Literature background, but Howard Thomas - Sid - is a plant scientist, and it was also that partnership between non-traditional partners that have thrown up this kind of ground-breaking work.
And I think it also shows us how historically we have engaged with the environment in which we live, and those new insights can help us move forward into a more sustainable future. So we're actually going to run the competition again, and I hope that the publicity from this year, and the excitement - because, you know, this has gone across the world, it's all the way through from starting from the first interview that Jayne did with the Sunday Times - but, you know, just about every major developed country has run this article somewhere.
And I think that that interest in Shakespeare has also sparked a greater interest in those issues around food. Food now, its availability, its scarcity, who controls food supplies - its as much an issue now, and it's as much an issue in the Hay Festival this year as it has ever been, as we've seen things like the corn harvest in Iowa go down to half its amount last year, and I was listening to one of the Hay contributors only yesterday talking about the hunger season in Africa and telling me that the Iowa corn season this year will be far worse than last year, and what that does to the price of bread, what that does to the price of meat across the world.
So these issues are completely contemporary now, and I - the most exciting thing for me, and I hope Jayne doesn't mind if I say it and she can comment on it, was when we were told, as part of this lecture, that effectively, if you look at the distribution of Britain through the three daughters of King Lear, and you then find out that Cordelia's been given England, [they laugh] and the other two effectively have been given Scotland and Wales, which are not grain-growing, you start to see that there can be all sorts of other reasons for the way in which discontent in a family can be manifested.
So, I think that these issues about resources are right at the heart of our literary traditions, as well, and to do some really new exploration about the effect of those resources - on what people write, on the readership and what we know about those ages - means that I am now with renewed enthusiasm ready to look at launching the next competition, which we'll be doing in January, once again with ASLE-UKI, so that we could put another lecture next year on at the Hay Festival, and actually, I'm sure, look at an entirely different issue. But it will be equally relevant.
Louise Elliott: I started the show today chatting about the prospect of eating insects, you know, insects becoming a good source of protein -
Jane Davidson: Louise, I've done it!
Louise Elliott: Have you?
Jane Davidson: When I - having been brought up in Africa, you know, when I used to go to the cinema in Africa, we used to eat chocolate ants. [They laugh.]
Louise Elliott: Did you?
Jane Davidson: We did!
Louise Elliott: Gosh -
Jane Davidson: We did!
Louise Elliott: How many of those would you need in a bag? I mean, you wouldn't get many of them, would you? It depends on how thick the chocolate was, I suppose.
Jane Davidson: It was really interesting, because of course this was at a time - it was, I mean, I grew up in what was then called Rhodesia, and we had sanctions from the UK, and so there weren't any of the normal provisions. And in the dark of the cinema, I remember watching Sound of Music and eating a box of chocolate ants. [They laugh.]
Louise Elliott: I'm more of a Butterkist girl, myself, to be honest.
Jane Davidson: We didn't have that choice.
Louise Elliott: What about you, Dr. Jayne? I mean, do you think that's - would you try that?
Jayne Archer: I'm a vegetarian, so I'm going to honourably exempt myself from this.
Louise Elliott: Yes, I think you should, too. It might be enough to send me vegetarian, as well. It's been good talking to you both - thank you so much. Many congratulations, Dr. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, on your work - it really is fascinating. And Jane Davidson, all the best with next year's competition - I look forward to seeing what comes out of that. Thank you again, Dr. Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Jane Davidson, thank you.