On Friday, April 25, Jean Howard delivered the English Department’s annual Collins Lecture at the Old Chapel. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Columbia University, and is a scholar of William Shakespeare and other literary figures of the Renaissance.
The Collins Lecture is held in honor of Dan S. Collins, who served as a professor in the University of Massachusetts’ English Department from 1957 to 1987. Howard’s lecture, titled “Shakespeare’s Maimed Rites of Hospitality,” explored the facets and limitations of hospitality in Shakespeare’s works, and how that theme can potentially be applied in the present day.
Marjorie Rubright, associate professor in the English department and director of the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, spoke of the significance of the lecture and Howard’s attendance.
“Our undergraduate students as well as graduate students training and Renaissance studies often attend and learn a great deal from these lectures year after year as we do also, as faculty,” Rubright said.
Jane Degenhardt, Department of English professor and lead editor for English Literary Renaissance, was advised by Howard as a graduate student and introduced Howard before the lecture.
Howard spoke about hospitality in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “King Lear.” In the latter, the titular king faced rejection from his daughters, who inherited his kingdom. As a result, he suffers grave mental decline. Lear’s status as a king, Howard explained, did not spare him the hardships of homelessness and the horrors that came with it.
“Critics often speak of what Lear learns as a result of his harrowing time on the heath, but these scenes remain […] a searing representation of the precarity of the human body and the human mind when denied the accommodations our creatureliness requires,” Howard said.
Howard also noted that in the context of Renaissance England, Shakespeare was a “foreigner” – a term used to describe a Briton not from the capital city of London. People from outside of England were described as “aliens” or “strangers” at the time. Those categories also included people from the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain, along with “a significant Black African presence.”
While in London, Shakespeare himself lived with a French Huguenot family, the Mountjoys. Having moved there in search of work in the theater industry, his experiences in a diverse setting shaped the tone of his plays.
“In his daily life in London, Shakespeare, therefore, would have been inescapably aware of the human flows that brought foreigners like himself, into London; sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently,” Howard said.
After discussing “King Lear,” Howard turned her attention to “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” one of the primary focuses of her talk.
“‘Merry Wives,’ though a comic play, is not, in my reading, a sentimental one in its probing of the adequacy of hospitality to address creaturely precarity.” Howard said. “While, especially through the Page household, the play shows hospitality’s value, it also shows its limits, how fear of risk stifles generosity, and the conditionality that nearly everywhere constricts hospitality’s reach.”
Where hospitality is concerned, Howard discussed characters including Sir John Falstaff, who was a “foreigner” in the context of the time, and how his treatment by other characters reflected his status.
Howard spoke of how Falstaff, as an unfamiliar person in the town of Windsor, is met with hostility when he makes advances towards the two titular wives. Falstaff is subjected to “purgatorial,” humiliating treatment by the women, “… first by being piled in a basket of dirty laundry and dumped in the Thames; then being dressed as the old woman of Brentford and cudgeled from the house,” Howard explained.
According to Howard, while the town of Windsor appears to be hospitable at the outset, that hospitality is complicated by people and societal norms who make it conditional. She highlights the Page household as an example, describing Master Page as a “very careful gatekeeper.”
The man of the house screens guests before they enter and argues with the people who come to visit him, including Falstaff. “Under certain conditions, it is clear [that] the open door could be slammed shut,” Howard said.
The Ford household is described, meanwhile, as even less hospitable. Master Ford meets outsiders with hostility, which he demonstrates when he attacks Falstaff, believing him to be the old woman of Brentford.
“Ford shows a flagrant disregard for hospitality’s imperatives. This figure [the old woman] is exactly the kind of person – old, poor, single, and from an adjoining village – to whom charity and hospitality should be extended,” Howard said, placing the circumstances in the context of the time.
Towards the end of the lecture, Howard established that in the play, the prospect of hospitality is never secured. She said that while hospitality might be a principle that many hosts would value, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” consists of characters to whom this principle seems alien. A lot of the time, this aversion towards hospitality stems from the fear of outsiders and the view that accepting them into one’s home is a risk.
“‘Merry Wives’ does suggest to me that the Shakespeare who lived among immigrant communities in London, and moved often between Stratford and the metropolis, was acutely aware of the problems that arose from itinerancy and … cultural difference,” Howard said.
After concluding her lecture, Howard opened the room for questions. Josh Smith, a sophomore English major, asked about the significance of regional dialect in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
“There are certain elements that … as an English person, I look into that may not be seen so clearly and yet within giving herself that self-relation she produced a fantastic answer, you know, and, to frame the Welsh struggle within the early 15th century in such a way where you can still tell in a work that was published towards the end of the 15th century,” Smith said.
Kalana Amarasekara can be reached at [email protected].
