Ideas - The Theatre of News: Lessons from Elizabethan England

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Theatrical plays in Elizabethan England set the stage for our modern news culture, argues Stephen Wittek in his post-doctoral work. He says the cross-pollination between theatre and news developed the norms for our contemporary public conversations. The updated episode of Ideas from the Trenches was originally broadcast in 2014. 

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

For 10 years, this program has brought you Ideas from the Trenches, a series highlighting the brilliant but unsung minds of Canadian academic research, PhD students. In this episode, we're going back to the beginning. There's kind of this assumption, I think, that news has sort of always been out there and that the ideas that are fundamental to news have always been out there. But that's not the case. In 2014, the Trenches team spoke with Stephen Wittig, then at McGill University. His research was on the origins of the idea of news. Breaking news. Canada's prime minister confirming what Fox News has been reporting. We're following some breaking news from New York. A judge has ruled the FBI cannot...

News culture is a turbulent, roiling ocean of information. A monster that never sleeps. I just want to bring you some breaking news. And Harry, what is the breaking news? So in the last few minutes, I've just got a statement from the Labour Party. 624, welcome back to this day after the election. But at 625, we have multiple breaking news events, so I'm glad we had a little bit of fun. The news never goes away. But the idea of the news was itself something new once upon a time. These things had a beginning and an origin, and things weren't always obviously the way they were now.

Stephen Wittig went looking for the origins of news culture in an unlikely place. The theatres of Elizabethan England. From 2014 with an update on the rapidly changing world of news media, here are Tom Howell and Nikola Lukšić with The Theatre of News. Looking through the latest batch of submissions we received from PhD students across the country, we discovered Stephen Wittig. The media players Shakespeare, Middleton, Johnson, and the idea of news builds a case for the central formative function of Shakespeare's theatre.

He's now doing postdoctoral work at McGill University in Montreal, and he actually finished his PhD last July. Space created by commercial theatre helped to foster the conceptual framework that made news possible. Stephen is one of the more lucid scholarly writers we've come across, but even so, it took us some time to get a handle on exactly what his work was about. The distinctly modern notion of ephemeral, narratively structured, ostensibly truthful discourse standing in relation to a continuous public presence. All we really knew at the beginning was this.

Stephen spent his PhD years looking into the connection between English theatre in Shakespeare's time and the birth of what he calls modern news culture. Shakespeare's time and the birth of what he calls modern news culture. Stephen likes to talk about his work with everybody, not just with other scholars. We named William after this guy. He lived a very, very long time ago. I caught up with him here at his son William's kindergarten class in Montreal. Stephen was giving a group of about 20 enthusiastic kids some basics on Shakespeare. One of the most famous authors today. Yeah, do you have a question? Is this famous book still for sale like in stores? Sure, everywhere. Any store you go to in the world has to have Shakespeare books.

450 years ago, they didn't have Netflix. I love Netflix. I had those all the movies. And they didn't have movie theaters. When people wanted some entertainment, or if they wanted to watch a show, they would go to this place. He shows them a slide of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. The people are really there, right?

So these are actors on the stage, right? They're acting out a play. And all these people would come and you get to stand around the stage and watch them act the story out. It's really exciting and really fun. So in Shakespeare's time, it would cost one penny to go visit the theater. Do you know how much money one penny is? Is that a lot of money or a little bit of money? He underscores how Shakespeare's audience was made up of everyone, from the hoi polloi to the hoity-toity. Anybody in the whole town, in the city of London, which is in England, right? Anybody, doesn't matter who you are, whether you're the king or whether you're a guy who just fixes shoes or a guy who looks after pigs, right?

after pigs, right? Whatever your job is, you can probably afford to go across the river and visit Shakespeare's theatre and everybody gets to gather together and you can spend the afternoon watching a play. Stephen's definitely not an ivory tower type of guy. In fact, the place where he works at McGill University wants to open up the conversation between academia and the broader public. He took me there after his kindergarten presentation. Okay, where to now then? Now to the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas. Does it sound a little bit like an academic cult? Yeah, it's got this great acronym and this long name, but what exactly goes on at the Institute, nobody knows.

Stephen's the first person in his family to attend university, let alone go all the way to getting a doctorate. So academia wasn't something that came to him just because he was surrounded by academics. It came to him through a driving passion. It was in grade 10 that Stephen started reading Shakespeare. It was great. I remember liking it right away. And I remember thinking, you know, it didn't seem tough to me. And so I liked it because it was something that I just sort of felt that I was naturally good at.

And so I liked it because it was something that I just sort of felt that I was naturally good at. He went to college for journalism and started writing for an alternative weekly newspaper in Vancouver. But he eventually made his way to university and he began thinking about the connections between his love of Shakespeare and his interest in news culture. Which led him to his PhD. Mm-hmm. Which led him to his PhD. There's kind of this assumption, I think, that news has sort of always been out there. And that the ideas that are fundamental to news have always been out there. But that's not the case. These things had a beginning and an origin.

And things weren't always, always obviously the way they were now. So it gives us a better understanding of the media in Shakespeare's time, and I think also the media in our own time. If I were someone, say, in the 1500s in England, how would I be thinking about things going on in my world? Well, there are far fewer opportunities to get a wide sort of macroscopic sense of what's going on. Now, there's all sorts of little exceptions to this, but by and large, information's not reaching an average person on a regular basis. So by the time you get something or anything, sort of the default assumption is it's in the past, right? You don't have this idea of a steady stream of continuous information constantly being updated of this big grand conversation that's out there that

people are talking about stuff and you in a present that you share with them. And that's why theater in the early 1600s would have been so exciting. I guess on a really simple level, it was also just a place to go and do people watching. Because like Stephen was saying to the kindergarten kids, there wasn't much of an online scene in those days. In a more sort of complex way, the theater acts as a de facto news network. Because remember, the drama that Shakespeare's company produces isn't only occurring at the Globe Theater, right? They are also at court and they're travelling around England. There is this transmission of discourse

happening through that structure as well, right? Travelling companies that are putting on these plays that sort of obliquely touch on topical issues and invite people to come together and think and engage imaginatively with topical issues, are sort of spreading those conversations. I'm listening to all of this for the first time too, and I think I get the gist. Stephen's trying to make a case for when the news emerged as an idea.

And for him, theatre culture is key. We'll catch up with Stephen Wittig a bit later, but we figured we should do a bit more research on how other scholars are explaining the birth of news. So, we read a book. I'm Andrew Pettigree. I'm Professor of Modern History at the University of St. Andrews. In Scotland.

Andrew Pettigree wrote a book called The Invention of News, How the World Came to Know About Itself. And in this exclusive interview with Ideas from the Trenches, Andrew Pettigree tells the world his story for the first time. Well, you can find beginning points in the story. I mean, there is a date in 1605 when the first newspaper is published. There's a time in the mid-1450s when Gutenberg perfects the art of printing. And these are seismic moments.

And as long as you understand the world doesn't change in a moment, then it all makes sense. So let's rewind even a little bit further. What would it have meant to be in the know during the 1200s in Europe? Wow, that's a long way back. And at that point, the only people who could have expected to be in the know were people right at the apex. And it would have meant that you'd have been sitting somewhere and people would come by your monastery or your court or your merchant house. And they tell you things. And these might be interesting or they might be vital for your survival, commercial health, or your future. But it wouldn't really be possible to know whether what you'd been told was indeed true. That was the main problem of news.

Why is this a European story? Because the development of printing by movable type is a unique experience of Europe. The Chinese had mastered the technology of printing by all sorts of means, but the difficulties of creating a commercial infrastructure, which allow you to make up to a thousand copies of an identical text and then distribute it. That was a profoundly European experience. So it's a story we can only tell with printed news and therefore a commercial culture of news for Europe. I just want to underline something here. Andrew Pettigree identifies Gutenberg's printing press in Germany as one

point of origin of the news, but that's not his only starting point. He told us about another pivotal invention, this one from Italy, a hundred years later, and it didn't use the printing press at all. We get a form of news, a commercial news service, which has virtually disappeared from view altogether. And that is a manuscript newsletter, which was circulated to a small number of subscribers. And this is very different. This was just a series of very clipped news reports, one sentence long, which had no context or explanation or opinion. They simply said, the Duke of Urbino has arrived home from the campaign. Or, it is said that the Cardinal of Tarento has left Rome. So they're almost like headlines.

That's right. It's almost like a tick-a-tick news service. And it's this form of very clipped news reporting that becomes the origin in the 17th century of the newspapers. I guess this isn't that complicated, but we've got two inventions from two countries. Printing catches on, meaning there are thousands of copies of books and pamphlets and government propaganda sheets. And while that's going on, the first newspapers crop up and they start catching on across Europe as well. But they were handwritten newsletters, no printing press involved.

At first they were handwritten. Obviously they also got printed starting later in the 1600s. What were the first newspapers like? Well, the first newspapers are really, really dull because they're attempts to put these manuscript news services into print. From Rome, we hear. From Antwerp, it is reported. It is reported from Lyon, and then so on and so on and so on. For that reason, newspapers don't really take off at all well. It's about 200 years between the first newspaper in Strasbourg in 1605 and the point at which newspapers become real actors in

major events. Our PhD student Stephen Wittig talks about the relationship between the Elizabethan theatre scene and the development of the modern idea of news. How do you think theatre could have contributed to the news culture of the time? Theatre is an important form of public communication because it's one of the ways you get large groups of people together in one place. church. And theatre really has its roots in impromptu performances of a religious nature, which extend the celebrity appeal of travelling preachers going from town to town preaching sermons to great crowds. Now, a commercial theatre develops beyond that only sporadically, and in most cases is confined to Europe's's major cities and mostly major northern cities. So what we get there is people who've paid to come and sit together or stand together and listen to a performance. And so they're generally speaking quite politically aware, politically active, and there for an evening of fun.

It's really in these theatres that you get arch-topical references and satire and the first political jokes, if you like. But it's all very controlled. Bear in mind that the Elizabethan theatre is closely regulated for all sorts of reasons. Bear in mind that the Elizabethan theatre is closely regulated for all sorts of reasons. When you gather that many people together, there's always the danger of riots and some form of anti-government demonstration. So they're extremely careful what they allow to be shown.

So you can't really do much which is regime unfriendly in that sort of a context. That was Andrew Pettigree, Professor of History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and the author of The Invention of News, How the World Came to Know About Itself. And our recent PhD grad, Stephen Wittig, is back with us. He's been listening to all of this. Hi again, Stephen. Hi. So Andrew Pettigrew suggested that theater was under the control of the monarchy at the time. What's your take on that?

What he said, actually, Tom, is that the theater's closely regulated and very controlled. Okay, so, and I mostly agree with this. I think I just have a slightly different point of view. Oh, good. I love it when academics fight. I don't. There's there's not a fight here. There's just I think I maybe have a closer view of the situation of particularly Elizabethan Jacobean theater.

There is an official called the master of the rebels. And his name around the turn of the century is Edmund Tilney. Now, he is often referred to by modern scholars as a censor. I don't think that is quite the appropriate term. When we think of a censor, we think of a government official who's in charge of controlling what people can and can't say, which is part of his job. But he gets paid a licensing fee from the theatrical companies for every play that is produced in London. So if you want, you know, if you are a sharer in a theatrical company, as Shakespeare was. You bring the manuscript version of a play to the master of the revels. He reads through it and he says, OK, yes, this is OK. You may perform this play and you pay him a fee. Right. So he is part he's an important part of the business model.

Right. He's getting part of the revenue that's coming in through the playhouses. He's getting part of the revenue that's coming in through the playhouses. This means that he is very, very interested in the playhouses doing well and in lots of plays being produced. His job, it's really kind of a loose form of censorship. And there's lots of give and take and lots of wiggle room, I suppose you could say. Do you have any examples of a play that might encourage conversations that otherwise wouldn't happen? Okay. So Shakespeare's Richard II is a play about deposing a king.

Richard II is the rightful heir to the throne. There is no question that he is the person by birthright who ought to be on the throne. He's the king. It opens up this, and Richard II was a real king. He's long dead by the time Shakespeare's play is put on, right? But the question that the play asks people to think about is, what happens if you just get a lousy king? What are people supposed to do? Are there ways to shuffle them out?

And how do we get rid of them? And what might the arguments look like? And how do we think this through? BBC News, we are in the middle of discussion with our three guests. What are people supposed to do? What happens if you just get a lousy king? You just get a lousy king. Richard II walks you through all of those arguments, and it's a very even-handed sort of play, right? There are defenses of the monarchy on one side and also very, very complex, sophisticated arguments for deposition on the other side.

And just is basically saying, well, what do you think? And this, by the way, is a conversation that's also going on in early modern London in regard to Elizabeth I and also in regard to James. You know, what are the possibilities? What do the dynamics of deposition look like? The only thing that is different is that they're saying Richard II instead of saying James I or Elizabeth. So this would have been super exciting at the time to be exposed to this. Right. Well, just to feel as though you have a stake in the conversation, you're being invited to think about these things. Because what the official proclamations are telling people at the time is these matters are none of your business.

And they're mentioning the play, at least Elizabeth mentions the playhouse specifically. You know, you guys should not be talking about this stuff. What jumps out at me about that proclamation from Queen Elizabeth is that plays used to be called interludes. The Queen's Majesty forbids any interludes to be played where matters of religion and the state are to be treated. If any attempt to do the contrary, they are to be arrested. So there.

But the players are finding very sort of subtle ways to bring people to the conversation anyway. Right. I agree, by the way, with what Andrew said. You know, he said you can't do much that is regime unfriendly. I would just add in there you can't do much that's obviously regime unfriendly. Because they also have to perform these plays at court, right? And they have royal patrons to keep happy. But the medium is dangerous. But the medium itself is dangerous.

I think it has this long-term effect of bringing people into the conversation and making, helping to create this idea that ordinary people can have a say in political matters. Hello, Ideas listeners. I'm Tom Howell, and you're listening to a rebroadcast of an episode of Ideas from the Trenches from way back in 2014. And as you listen to this decade-old episode, you might think, wait a second, traditional news media? Is that really a place where ordinary people have their say in political matters? one of the ways the world has changed since 2014 is there is a lot more cynicism out there about the role of media, especially when it comes to including so-called regular folks, whoever they are. Presumably some sort of non-expert, non-politician, non-interest group type of person, sort of person who would make a very good spy. Anyway, to update this idea of the public conversation and what's changed since those simple days of the mid-2010s, I brought Stephen Wittek back in for a checkup.

Hello, Tom. It's good to be with you. Thank you for having me. Bring us up to speed. Tell us where you are now. What have you been up to since your doctoral research in 2014? I got a job. I am now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I'd been since 2017. Fancy. Did you get the job because of your celebrity after being on Ideas from the Trenches? I think that's what clinched it.

Absolutely. It was an important item on the resume. I'm sure it was. Anyway, your research was published. And I think after that was when we all became familiar with the term fake news. First, it was a concern that there was too much of it on social media. And then there became a line of attack against traditional news media, like me and this cherished institution I

work for. What was the Elizabethan equivalent of fake news? That's good. I'm so happy that you asked me that, Tom. My book came out in 2015, based on my doctoral research. And right around that time, if you will recall, was the run up to the 2016 presidential election when fake news became one of the most common bywords or buzz terms of political discourse. And I had just written this book on news and people started asking me about fake news all the time. And people started asking me about fake news all the time. And my most common answer has been, well, fake news is by no means a new thing. In fact, fake news is really just as old as the news industry itself. In fact, one might even go as far as to argue that fake news predates the idealized form, the sort of idealized notion we have of a golden age of news and, you know, of news and truthfulness, that distrust and the news industry have always gone together.

So would you say there is an Elizabethan equivalent of fake news? Where would we have found it? Yeah, absolutely. So in the Elizabeth, or actually we would say the early Jacobean era, so we're talking around 1610 up to around 1620s, when a news industry is starting to develop in early modern England. By news industry, I mean there's the regular production of these pamphlets that are gathering news from around the world and reporting them on a regular basis. One of the most popular writers was a guy by the name of Nathaniel Butter, notoriously unreliable, and he's satirized by— maybe he's distrustful as well. Sorry, I

misspoke. And he's satirized by dramatists. And this is part, you know, so this confluence between what's going on on the early modern stage and what's happening in news books is helping to build what we think of now as a news culture. I see. So the theater was also operating as media criticism right from the very beginning. Yes. Right. Right from the very beginning. Yeah. One of the plays that I write about in my book called Ben Johnson's The Staple of News. This play is, I think, deserves the title of the first, you know, he's doing a little bit more than anybody else at the time insofar as he's acting as a media watchdog. And he is satirizing or parodying these early news forms and early news writers such as Nathaniel Butter. So Johnson writes this play called The Staple of News, where he building or a place where you could go where reporters would gather. But Johnson imagines exactly such a place, a we just used to share as sort of our, our,

you know, neighborly duty with each other information now is something that's being bought and sold. He didn't like that idea. So he would have been a big fan perhaps of public radio. I want to give you one last little turn at the mic before we, uh, move back to the second half of this show from 10 years ago.

Uh, just if you were to, you know, if you were, this is a nightmare. Imagine you woke up and your PhD wasn't done tomorrow. And you had to, you know, write it again. Is this where you think you might have added something new or this thing about how the decentralization was, you know, sort of in vogue at the time? Or is there anything else that you think, you know, would change that you would add, that you would build on what you had said before, given the events of the last 10 years? Yeah, well, I wish I had seen the whole explosion of discourse around fake news coming.

And, you know, it had an opportunity to capitalize on that. That would have been fun and is something fun to think about. You know, I've since in the past 10 years, you know, now after you finish a book, every play I read, I can, you know, I'm much better able to see where there's news criticism and that sort of thing. So there's certainly a lot of other plays that I would have liked to have talked about. But, you know, that said, I'm very happy with the way the book turned out. I think the answer to those sorts of questions are,

well, just write another book on news, I suppose. There you go. And you can, because you're a fancy professor now. Good for you. Well, a professor anyway. It's really great to catch up with you again and to see you doing so well. Thanks for chatting.

Thank you, Tom. I'm Nala Ayed, and you're listening to Ideas. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy.

Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to a rebroadcast of an episode of Ideas from the Trenches. an episode of Ideas from the Trenches.

That's where we highlight some of the intriguing, exciting, fascinating, and sometimes perplexing work of PhD students in Canada or sometimes Canadian students working somewhere else. If you are a PhD student and you'd like your doctoral thesis to be featured on Ideas from the Trenches, send us an email to ideas at cbc.ca and put ideas from the trenches in the subject line. Please include a brief paragraph telling us about yourself and the crux of your thesis, and also mention some of the scholars, living or dead, who've had the biggest impact on your thinking. I'll hand it back to Tom Howell and Nikola Lukšić as they learn more

from Stephen Wittig about Ben Johnson's 17th century play, The Staple of News. The Staple of News is a story about a type of grocery store where you go and you buy the news. It doesn't really matter what the news is about. You just go there and you buy a whole bunch of it. It's a fictional place. Ben Johnson made it up and he found the idea hilarious. The main character of the play is a guy called Penny Boy. And Penny Boy gets a huge inheritance and he goes to this staple

of news to purchase news by the yard. So what Johnson is doing is he is equating Pennyboy's frivolous fashionability with news, right? And this is an important point because it shows here that news is not just something that people buy for business purposes or for purely informational purposes. It is making you feel good about yourself and it is something that enables you to show off a little bit. He doesn't like the idea of this ongoing present conversation that goes on regardless of whether there's anything. And he's wary about just the hoi polloi, just anybody and everybody having access to news.

And also, he thinks it's all just a big scam. And what they should be paying attention to is me, Ben Johnson, and to the immutable truth of poetry. The staple of news doesn't get performed in theatres today because the jokes are topical and were meant for an Elizabethan audience. Though there is the occasional flatulence joke that does hit the mark. They write from Leipzig, reverence to your ears, the art of drawing farts out of dead bodies

is by the brotherhood of the Rosy Cross produced unto perfection in so sweet and rich a tincture. The staple of news was a big show in the late 1620s. And the point was that news is trashy and dangerous and that all the social hierarchies should really remain just as they are. Stephen wasn't the only one who told us about how important the staple of news is. Everybody talks about it.

Andrew Pettigrew writes about the play in his book. And this is true of Ben Johnson in particular. He mocked mercilessly credulous people who hungered after the news. And we also heard about Ben Johnson from Stephen's boss and PhD supervisor, Paul Yachnin. Sure. My name is Paul Yachnin. He is the director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, where Stephen works in Montreal. And he pointed out that Ben Johnson's scorn for the news

had something to do with his own lowly background. Johnson himself is a commoner. He worked as a bricklayer as a young man. He was very, very talented, and he got a good education. And he kind of squirmed and wormed his way into the circle around the court because of his great talent. So then he didn't want anyone else to be able to climb up? That's right. He didn't want to open the floodgates. And he certainly didn't like practices such as theater or early modern news that were creating new spaces for people to have a kind of social prestige and to have a public

voice. He had achieved public voice through his connections with the court, and he was very wary of its spread to others. Over the past 10 years or so, Paul Yaknin ran something called the Making Publics Project in Montreal. It brought together different scholars to talk about a field known as public sphere theory. The scholars put their brains together to expand on the idea of what public is. What Ben Johnson objected to could be called

the expanding public sphere, meaning that he didn't appreciate news culture opening up to commoners. But the modern scholars like Yachnin prefer to talk about publics, as in there are lots of different ones. When we talk about the public, we're actually projecting an ideal

of an inclusive space in which we all can talk to each other. There is no such space. We thought we might have something like that when we invented the web, but all we did was to multiply the number of publics out there. That's what Shakespeare, for example, created. A place where ordinary people could go to the playhouse and watch a play like Julius Caesar, watch a play like Richard II,

and collectively think about matters of state that they were formerly not allowed to do. So they actually rehearsed the democratic political culture of modernity. So one of the things that we've developed and that Stephen is developing in his work is a broader understanding of public making practices. It's not just rational critical debate. The theater is not directly political. It's first of all a form of entertainment. And one of the reasons it's allowed to flourish by the authorities is because they see it as a form of entertainment for commoners. And really, who cares what the commoners are doing on their day off? It doesn't matter. They don't matter. But of course what

they're doing is talking about what do you do if the king actually doesn't have a legitimate right to the throne. That's a remarkable thing that happens. An ongoing current conversation about political matters among ordinary people. And the news, as you at the CBC know very well, is perhaps the primary form of knowledge for modern culture. Paul Yachnan runs the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas at McGill University. Development of a new form of knowledge that changes the face of society. And watch a play like Julius Caesar.

Watch a play like Richard II. You may my glories and my state depose, but not my griefs. Still am I king of those. It was Habermas that we had on the table. Predominance of rational, critical debate. He's missing the affect of the emotional dimension. Now, one thing old school theorists don't like to talk about is feelings. When they tell the creation story of democracy, it's a tale of laws

and lead type and a rational, critical debate. Today, scholars like Paul Yaknin tell a slightly different kind of story, one that acknowledges feelings. There's a scholarly movement afoot here, a move to accept feelings as an important and serious topic to consider, whatever the story is that you're trying to tell or analyze. It's a kind of fuzzy concept for the uninitiated. So for help, we're turning to one of the movement's pioneers. My name's Anne Svetkovich, and I am a professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. As part of an effort to take feelings seriously, feminists have also challenged the distinction between the private and the public spheres and actually looked at the history of the divide between the

private and the public in an effort to suggest that what we think of as private, including the realm of emotion and feelings, the confinement of feelings to the domestic sphere, to romance, to private life, it's been important to bring the private, as it were, into the public. And so that is what brought a lot of feminists, myself included, to work on the public sphere, including Habermas's. Is that a bit like saying the personal is political? Oh, indeed. That has been an important watchword for me for most of my academic career, yes. So that old adage remains one that's quite inspiring for a range of different scholarly projects. What does a public feelings scholar do in a day-to-day way? We're very interested in thinking about how we might get at people's public lives through the ways that they feel. So one way I sometimes think about my work is that I like to ask big questions like,

how does capitalism feel? What is the relation between how people feel in their daily lives and larger systemic issues like histories of capitalism, racism, colonialism, you name it. So one of the other intersections between publics and feelings for feminist and queer scholars is a desire to bring other voices into the public sphere. And often that has entailed taking seriously subjective points of view, ones where people can talk about their life stories and have those be considered important information about the way that the world works. And this is a pretty big movement in modern thinking, right? Like there was something called, we came across called the turn to affect. For some of us, affect is not a word, it's kind of a jargon word.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So scholars have been referring to the affective turn as an umbrella where the somewhat jargony term affect is an umbrella term that encompasses what we might in the vernacular think of as feelings and emotions. affect our feeling that are part of our apparatus as not just human beings, but sensory beings who are tuned into the world around us in ways that don't always translate immediately into language or conscious expressions of something that we might call emotion. So going back to the work of our PhD student, what do you think of revising the history of news by considering how people felt in a theater space? I think it's a great project. And one of the things that's really fun about getting to have this conversation with you is that I didn't know about Stephen's work. I'm deeply honored that he finds my work to be useful for his.

I'm deeply honored that he finds my work to be useful for his. And we seem to be posing some of the same kinds of questions and then coming up with interesting answers by virtue of being able to expand the notion of the news via a category like the public to be able to take seriously the theater as a place that is not just about entertainment, but also about the circulation of ideas and information and the creation of new forms of knowledge that involve

not just ideas, but also feelings, affect, the body, different ways in which people come together in a space in order to share information and generate ideas. Stephen's work is important because it's not just giving us a new understanding of certain theater producers. I think in his case, maybe Ben Johnson, is that one of the people he's working on? So we might have a revised understanding of those writers as not just cultural producers, but also as producers of the news. So that I find very useful to put in contact with arguments that I'm wanting to make for contemporary culture, where the personal voices, the voices that you find in visual arts performance, the creative world, continue often to be marginalized, to not be taken seriously as real knowledge and as a source of the news. I was wondering, how do you convince an old school scholar who has pushed aside feelings and emotions as being insignificant to scholarship. How do you convince them that it's important to include that? My short answer is you don't. That is that these will continue to be frictions within the academy.

And that's just, again, part of the work of bringing different kinds of knowledge to the academy as it's going to be contested, it's going to be messy, people aren't necessarily going to agree. But I also think that what we were describing earlier as the affective turn, which sounds kind of fancy and serious as a subject of scholarly inquiry, and its connections to something like the feminist political slogan, the personal is political, is a very interesting moment of crossover. So I also take it as a good sign that scholars like Stephen are doing this work that seems quite unimpeachable with respect to scholarly protocols. That is, he's obviously doing a very serious scholarly project

that has a lot of backing behind it. But his scholarship is connected to these other very fringy, very radical kinds of ideas that have gravitated or made their way into the academy. So it's quite exciting to operate at those different crossroads and also to live with the messiness. I wonder if we could quickly deal with a specific example of an emotion that comes up in theatre. Paul Yachnan spoke about the role a clown can play on the stage when he's sort of subtly mocking a

powerful figure on the stage, and then the audience all gets to laugh together. Could you talk about the kind of things that are going on there? What role is that clown playing in the public culture of the theater? It's interesting to think about the shared experience of laughter, or it could be the shared experience of tears as well. I think that in and of itself is an example of a kind of public that is organized not around cognitive or rational ideas, but around the body, around a form of expression that is not necessarily verbal. And what's important, I think, about work like Stevens is that it takes seriously that form of communication as one where people might be working through a range of

different responses to the social order. What's been really important in my work, too, is to think about the very complicated relation between sadness and joy or between what we call negative affects and positive affects and to see that they're in fact quite mixed up together. So in moments of humor, there's also often ways in which forms of sadness, forms of aggression, forms of discomfort, all kinds of complicated social dynamics are getting played out in the register of laughter or joy or entertainment. Well, Anne Spetkovic, it's been lovely speaking with you.

Thank you. It's been a real pleasure to be able to lend my ideas to the mix. Thanks, Anne. Anne Spetkovich is a professor of English as well as women's and gender studies at the University of Texas in Austin. And it's time to bring back our PhD student, Stephen Wittek, who happens to be in the city of York in England at a BBC studio. Hello, Stephen. Hello. So, do you think of your work as being part of a radical movement? Is that what Anne said?

She said that it was interesting that you were drawing from... I think she used the word fringy more. In the way that Anne described it, yes. But I don't think of myself... I mean, I'm not Che Guevara, nor am I a surfer. You know, I think she's right. My work is at a very interesting crossroads. Well, I find it interesting anyway, and I endeavor to marry it with a more traditional style of scholarship, I suppose. There's nothing particularly radical about Shakespeare studies, although it certainly

has its radical dimension. And what do you make of Anne Sveckovich's thoughts at the end there on the role of laughter in a theatre setting? Did anything jump out at you? Yeah, and laughter, of course, is a very, very important part of theatrical performance and the theatrical experience. So how does this acknowledgement of laughter and humor relate to news culture today? in the epilogue to my project is the role that late-night talk shows such as you know letterman and uh leno and and fallon and those sorts of people play in the overall news culture yes toronto mayor and intrepid intoxicant aficionado rob ford yesterday appeared before

the mighty toronto city and often in many, they're also making news themselves. And they are telling people what news is. So the title of the epilogue is News is What They Say It Is. And the idea behind that is anybody with a public voice who's making a statement and has attention and is saying, here you are, here's the news, regardless of what that message is, that then becomes news. So are you drawing a connection between the late night talk show and the Shakespeare theater? Well, I don't want to go as far as to suggest Shakespeare's theater was some sort of a prototype for late night talk shows. That's maybe a step

too far. But I do think that the two forms are working in a similar way, just in as much that they are offering people another way to engage with public life, and they're offering another perspective. And, you know, enabling laughter is a very, very powerful way of presenting the news to people and opening up a window and a perspective onto current events that has a richer and more varied emotional dimension. And given all that we've covered in this episode, and we've covered a lot, what do you want people to think about the next time they log on to their Facebook feed or flick on the television news? I don't want to say something like, you know, when you log on to Facebook, you should be thinking about Shakespeare. One thing that I think is helpful

when people are thinking about modern news culture is, or that my work brings, is this notion of exactly what news is and who has a stake in making the news. So there is this idea that was around in Shakespeare's time. round in Shakespeare's time. And I think, if anything, is even stronger today that news is something that comes to us from some sort of a tower and is projected on and on down. And we are all passive receivers of the news. And I guess one of the things that my work suggests is that regular people who, by engaging in public life, actually have a stake in creating the news as well. I think of that sort of join-the-conversation style of news as fairly recent and sort of internet-based, but you've connected it all the way back several hundred years, it seems. Yes, that reflexive dimension to news, the ongoing, continuous conversation that I refer to that is an important push the steady stream of discourse and narratives across.

Through? Is through a better word? Push it through. Through. But we're adding in the theater here. We're adding in the theater into a mix. Right, and theater is one of those forms that's, you know, adding drops into the stream of information. And feeling drops, not just rational, critical drops. It is increasing and enriching and intensifying the emotional dimension of your connection to that stream of information. I argue that the unique discursive space created by commercial theatre helped to foster the conceptual framework that made news possible.

The distinctly modern notion of ephemeral, narratively structured, ostensibly truthful discourse standing in relation to a continuous public present. You're listening to Ideas and to an episode of our series Ideas from the Trenches, now celebrating its 10th year. The Theatre of News was originally broadcast in 2014, produced and presented by Tom Howell and Nikola Lukšić. If you are a PhD student and you'd like your doctoral thesis to be featured on an upcoming episode, send us an email to ideas at cbc.ca and put ideas from the trenches

in the subject line. Please include a brief paragraph telling us about yourself and the crux of your thesis. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas.

And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.