Friends, Tampa Bay residents, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to give you a party…
USF St. Pete is celebrating the release of Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid, by Professor Lisa S. Starks-Estes, in style. A launch party will be held today, from 4:30-6 p.m., at Harbor Hall, on the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus. The celebration is free, open to all, and will include a short performance, followed by a book talk.
The book’s author, Dr. Starks-Estes, is a prolific and respected Shakespeare scholar who has published extensively on sexuality and violence in Renaissance drama and on Shakespeare in movies. She joined the USFSP faculty in 1999 and teaches in the Department of Verbal and Visual Arts, where she directs the MLA Liberal Arts Studies Program. Her latest book, Violence, Trauma, and Virtus, examines Shakespeare’s use of the Roman poet Ovid and links between trauma, aggression, sexuality and the body in Renaissance England.
As a former USFSP grad-student with a delinquent financial account, I gained unprecedented access to the personal world of St. Pete’s own Shakespeare scholar, Dr. Starks-Estes, and had her play a little game of, “Finish this Sentence,” with me. Here’s a generous sample of how it went:
I first fell in love with Shakespeare… when I was a little girl growing up in Michigan. I loved everything theatrical — ballet, acting, and singing; and I was truly passionate about reading. […] My strongest memory is of a class bus field trip to Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. The production was Hamlet — and I feel in love, right then and there! I recall that the production was done in Elizabethan dress, with black and gold set and costumes. I can still picture Gertrude’s red wig on a stand in a bare black and gold trimmed background. I remember quivering because I was so excited. At that moment, I knew that I would be devoting my life to Shakespeare somehow.
When I became a teacher… I was thrilled to share my love of literature and interpretation with students and, of course, I was especially excited to teach Shakespeare and other literature of the English Renaissance.
I've never quite learned to… brush off mistakes I make in my writing or teaching. I know that mistakes are part of the process of both and that without them there is no real growth. I reiterate that point to my students and peers when they’re troubled with stumbling along the way when working on a project. […] I have a tendency to let the smallest error or imperfection in my work overshadow what is great about it. I have to work very hard at not doing so.
The best Shakespeare quotes… I have to pass on this one. There are too many! The mind reels.
Anybody can criticize… a place like Tampa Bay, which, of course, lacks a permanent Shakespeare theater like that in Washington, D.C. However, I have seen amazing productions in this area, and I believe that Shakespeare is for everyone. A former student of mine, Veronica Matthews, and I are collaborating on a Shakespeare festival to help bring even more Shakespeare, with an emphasis on education, to St. Pete.
Ovid, in today’s society… is thriving more than ever, at least in literary and cultural studies. Many creative writers have recently found inspiration from Ovid’s myths and his poetic method of transformation in his Metamorphoses. […] Ovid really did inspire a whole movement in Europe during the Renaissance, one that provided common stories, a provocative point of view, and an inventive artistic method. When you study the influence of Ovid in that time period, you really capture the essence of the momentum that drove these artists to create — or, rather, to re-create or transform — stories of the past.
Reading sonnets… helps you connect with literary traditions […] The sonnet tradition is also crucial in Shakespeare’s plays, as so many of them […] parody conventions and simultaneously infuse them with new meanings.
The most heroic… figures in Shakespeare, in my view, are those characters whose “bounty,” or capacity for love, exceed and challenge traditional ideals of masculinity and heroism.
For more information about Violence, Trauma, and Virtus, check out the publisher’s website.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2014.