—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies
A LIBRARY OF FOLDED CORNERS
At one point in the essay, she remarks that she cannot remember any instance in the course of her reading where two women were depicted as friends until Jane Austen's day, which is to say, until female authors did so. Had she completely forgotten Hermia and Helena, Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Hero, Desdemona and Emilia, Hermione and Paulina? I couldn't believe that. Woolf read Shakespeare obsessively throughout her life and alluded to his plays throughout her novels. Were we meant to contradict here again? To wave our arms and say, "Well, what about Shakespeare?" And if she considered the depiction of female friendships characteristic of a woman's authorship, the Shakespeare . . .
We reached the town of Wilton, parked, and made our way up toward the house. Wilton house is majestic, a grand, Palladian-style manor set on a vast expanse of carefully landscaped grounds and gardens. It put me in mind of Pemberley, Mr. Darcy's fictional country estate in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Actually, the Pemberley scenes for the 2005 movie adaptation starring Kiera Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen were filmed here.
—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies
Conceived as a replacement for religion, English was institutionalized at the height of the Victorian deification of Shakespeare, swapping the old Judeo-Christian God for one that Britain had ready at hand. "An institution," Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "is the lengthened shadow of one man." And the Academic institution of English literature, as the scholar Nancy Glazener writes, can be understood as a shadow cast by Shakespeare, though this shadow is "an effect of Shakespeare's having been positioned and lit retrospectively."
—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies
Stratford lies two hours northwest of London in the British midlands. Fittingly, this is more or less the heart of England. For the truly devout, there is a waymarked footpath between London and Stratford, "Shakespeare's Way," intended to approximate the route he might have taken to and from his hometown. Passing up the opportunity to squelch my feet in Shakespeare's hallowed footsteps, I caught the train from London's Marleybone Station.
—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies
Like other theological disputes, the authorship dispute is over origins: Where did these works come from? What circumstances, influences, and qualities of mind made them possible? What was this genius from which they emanated? Seeing the origin of the works in the man from Stratford, traditionalists are, in the terminology of the dispute, Stratfordians—defenders of the faith; orthodox believers in the one true church. The heretics banging their ninety-five theses against the church door are anti-Stratfordians—against Stratford as the origin—but their quest for truth has splintered them into sects, sometimes warring but loosely affiliated under the sign of their dissent from orthodoxy: Baconians, Marlovians, Oxfordians, Sidneyans, Nevillians, and others, each named according to their god.
—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies
Around the mid-nineteenth century, however, the field began to professionalize. A discipline called English literature arose, founded on and formed around Shakespeare. It arose, first and foremost, as a substitute for religion. For centuries, Christianity had exerted a pacifying influence on the population, encouraging values of meekness and self-sacrifice, and unifying all classes, from the richest congregant to the pious peasant, under a single ideology. But by the Victorian period, religion was threatened by scientific discovery and social change. Church attendance among the working classes was falling. Social unrest seemed to be building. The church was losing its hold on the masses, and the Victorian ruling class worried that, without religion to encourage morality and restraint, something like the French Revolution could happen in Britain. A new religion was needed; a discourse that could provide the unifying, pacifying function formerly provided by Christianity. As the scholar Terry Eagleton writes, "If one were to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than to reply: 'the failure of religion.'"
—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies
At the 2016 summer Olympics Elaine Thompson of Jamaica won gold with a time of 10.71 seconds. In the same games, Usain Bolt, also of Jamaica, won with a time of 9.81 seconds. Although there was less than a second's difference between these two athletes, if men and women had been running in the same event, then Thompson wouldn't even have made it into the final race. In fact, she would have been easily out-run by Jamaican boys competing in the under-seventeen category, just as the United States women's national football team in 2017 were beaten by the Dallas under-fifteen boys' team, composed of boys who had just crossed the crucial puberty line and so had begun to develop the strength and power of adult men. The women's category has traditionally been protected in elite sports because, if it were not protected, there would be no women in elite sports—men would outcompete them every time.
—Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
When Consumer Reports rates and compares cars, it measures them on the basis of categories such as performance, safety, reliability and value. It tries to measure "outputs"—in short, what the car does. U.S. News mostly looks at "inputs" (money spent, class size, test scores of students, degrees held by faculty), rather than assessing what the college or university actually accomplishes for students over the lives of their enrolment. If Consumer Reports functioned like U.S. News, it would rank cars on the amount of steel and plastic used in their construction, the opinions of competing car dealers, the driving skills of customers, the percentage of managers and sales people with MBAs and the sticker price on the vehicle (the higher, the better).
All administrators agree that "exit" data are much better than "entry" data. But schools have this information! The magazine would use it if it could. Why can't they get it? The schools in the study will often not let the information become public. Why? They say that such student information cannot be made public because it's confidential.
Balderdash! If the students were told the information was going to be made public, they wouldn't bat an eye. In fact, they would want the information made public. They could have used it themselves when they were planning to go to college. Clearly, the elite schools don't release this information because it would have a profound effect on the top twenty schools rankings. The better the students, the harsher the comments. I've taught the same course to random undergraduates and to honor students. The honor students invariably complain more. They have higher standards not only for themselves but for me.
—James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld
The answer was surprising. The impediment to family faith was, in a word, men. They balked. Here were the common refrains: "Churches are always asking for money." "Church services are boring, predictable, routine, and irrelevant." "All you do is stand up and sit down." "I don't like being shamed." When he could speak just to men, he really found out the secret: men don't like being religious in public. It's not that they are not eager for the epiphanic experience; it's that they prefer it not to be displayed. Promise Keepers, the fundamentalist Christian group that fills football stadiums with men, has been hectored for its sexist policy, but it has understood male reticence. In the company of women, men don't want to be told to sing, to say stuff, or to give anything. They don't like losing control. They like the sense of voluntary activity, of doing something, of questing, exploring the edge on their own.
—James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld
It's no happenstance that the advertising men, or "attention engineers," who helped bring about the rise of Consumer Culture were steeped in the Protestant tradition. They understood both the nature of yearning and how to franchise it. They knew the language of sincerity. They knew the power of promise—large promise. They knew how to make a sale and close the deal. Marketing was a white upper-middle-class Christian endeavor, in part because most of the educated population was Protestant and in part because the procedure for selling manufactured resolution to life's present problems was so similar to what religion had developed to sell future redemption. Above all, they knew the power of story.
—James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld
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