27 November 1582

William Shakespeare, his father’s eldest son, was meant to learn a trade through an apprenticeship, like his father. He would have been indentured at age 17 to serve seven years in training. Local lore suggests that he was apprenticed to a butcher. However, early modern apprenticeship indentures indicated that the apprentice was prohibited from marrying, and Shakespeare wed in 1582 at age 18. This chapter conjectures that a main purpose of the marriage was to break his covenants. What other biographies have described as ‘lost years’ may for him have been ‘found years’, years he was able to spend learning the craft of playwriting rather than that of butchery. The wedding is usually depicted as a shotgun affair, forced upon him because Anne Hathaway was pregnant, requiring a special marriage licence and a marriage bond, and performed outside Stratford-upon-Avon because of the shame of it all. In the late sixteenth century, however, as many as one-third of brides were pregnant, and by marrying they avoided social disgrace. Shakespeare may have wed outside Stratford because this made it possible for his father, who was hiding from local officers charged to arrest him for debt, to attend the ceremony. The chapter also tells the story of William Trowte, Shakespeare’s biographical cognate and an object lesson in the sort of life Shakespeare might have lived if he had remained a butcher in Stratford.

Object Lessons: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sturm und Drang of Race Childhood

While originally referring to the use of material objects to convey abstract ideas, “object lesson” took on a second meaning at the turn of the twentieth century. This particular connotation—denoting a person and leader as moral exemplar—reveals fault lines between the thinking of W. E. B. Du Bois and G. Stanley Hall on young people. Through his own adoption of the German ideals of sturm und drang and bildungsroman, as well as “aftershadowing”—a recalibration of ideas and reflections on his own family genealogy, childhood, and intellectual lineages—Du Bois made ideological claims that were a counter-narrative to Hall’s recapitulation theory.

Foreign Assembly Toshiki Okada’s Time’s Journey through a Room in the US

Okada is one of the most internationally produced contemporary Japanese playwrights. American directors approach his work both as uniquely Japanese and as a synecdoche for the world. The story of Okada’s web of institutional, professional, and personal relationships is an object lesson in the foreign assembly of international works.

The Role of Public Parks in Telling the Nation's Story

In this paper, we discuss the role of public parks in telling the nation’s story via statues, memorials, and monuments. We ground our discussion in affect theory, which addresses the affective responses statues, memorials, and monuments elicit in visitors. Of particular note is affective dissonance, which suggests that a statue, memorial, or monument may evoke a variety of conflicting affective responses. The way in which visitors reconcile these conflicting affective responses shapes their public memory of significant events in our nation’s history. As more is learned about the checkered past of individuals venerated in statues, memorials, and monuments, how should public park administrators respond? We provide several examples of statues, memorials, and monuments that are controversial in nature, and discuss how public park administrators have responded to the challenge of telling the nation’s story through the reinterpretation of events. We also consider the complexity of the management implications, focusing in particular on who should be driving the decisions made. We then discuss the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as a good object lesson in how to deal with the affective dissonance involved in recasting public spaces. In so doing, we underscore the importance of frame theory in educating visitors about the preservation, modification, or removal of existing statues, memorials, or monuments.

JEREMY DALE ROBERTS (1934–2017)Spoken to a Bronze Head (2008)

This chapter describes British composer Jeremy Dale Roberts’s Spoken to a Bronze Head (2008). This moving song is commissioned for a special celebratory album of settings of poems by Ursula Vaughan Williams. It is an object lesson in skill and economy, and subtly captures the rarefied atmosphere of ancient culture implicit in the text, while demonstrating an assured expressive range. The flexible musical idiom is an attractive mix of the old and the new. Carefully moulded vocal phrases, glowing with natural colours, mirror the stresses of the words and are complemented and supported by a resonant piano part, with slow, full chords redolent of ritual. Meticulous attention to balance and the tiniest nuances of accent and dynamic ensure verbal clarity throughout. The piece will suit a warm-toned singer, possessing a secure low B flat, yet able to pare down vibrato to achieve some clean-edged parlando.