California native Geoff Aggeler has taught Shakespeare at the University of Utah for 30 years. Yet, he says the Oscar-winning film "Shakespeare in Love" marked the first time Shakespeare the man has been embraced by popular culture.
An Academy Award? C'mon.Although Aggeler considers the historical aspects of the recent popular movie "Shakespeare in Love" to be inaccurate in several respects -- he was "appalled" at the way John Webster, an aspiring writer 10 years younger than Shakespeare, was depicted as "a sadistic little kid" -- he is still glad the film was made.
"It's a wonderful sign -- a rediscovery," Aggeler said. "All of us who have lived in Renaissance literature for so long are tempted to say, 'I told you so.' It's such an exciting world.
"It just puzzles me as to why they don't do their homework. In 'Elizabeth,' for instance, they have Walsingham poisoning Mary, Queen of Scots. Walsingham was quite capable of doing that. He was ruthless and head of the Elizabethan CIA, and he was determined to see that she died. In any case, he did not poison her. He managed to get her tried for treason, sentenced to death and beheaded in 1586. That's what happened."
On the other hand, Aggeler was happily surprised to see two different film versions of Christopher Marlowe's "Edward II," and when he was in London last spring, he saw a comedy called "Bartholomew Fair," by Ben Johnson. "I thought no one would have the guts to do that one, and it was wonderful."
Aggeler's most recent book is "Nobler in the Mind," published last year, a scholarly study of English Renaissance tragedy, but his agent is now shopping his latest manuscript, a novel about Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's main rival. "It focuses on Walsingham, because Marlowe was a spy for the Elizabethan government. He missed so much school at Cambridge that they were going to withhold his master's degree, and the Privy Council, notably Walsingham, forced the Cambridge authorities to give him his degree, because he had been in her majesty's service. This is exciting stuff! It was an amazing time to be alive. I'm just delighted that the period is being rediscovered."
Aggeler has published journal articles on most of Shakespeare's contemporaries. "What people don't realize is that even if Shakespeare hadn't lived, it would still be the greatest period in Western drama since the Greeks -- because of writers like Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, George Chapman, Ben Johnson and John Webster."
His first book was a critical biography of Renaissance novelist Anthony Burgess. But he also wrote his first novel, "Confessions of Johnny Ringo," as a fictional memoir of Johnny Ringo, a real guerrilla and outlaw of the American West. Aggeler loves to cross back and forth over the boundaries that separate fiction from scholarship. "I'll do a scholarly book, then I'll do a novel. Right now, I'm working on a new novel, based on the life of my uncle, who was a prosecutor and judge in Los Angeles. I'm having fun with that. My attorney daughter has helped me a lot with it."
His colleagues are often mystified about his propensity for variety. "They think you are either a fiction writer, a poet or a scholar. People who range between them make some people in the English department nervous. But I don't care. I find them synergetic activities. I don't find that one inhibits the other. If I had committed my whole career to scholarship, I think I would feel creatively deprived. If I had written only fiction, I would have deprived myself of an exposure to the great literature that provides us with the models we need."
Great writers, in Aggeler's opinion, are those who "read everything."
After 30 years of teaching, Aggeler, who just turned 60, is retiring from the U., so he can move with his wife, Sondra, a cancer survivor, to the southern Utah community of Kayenta, where he plans to get involved in environmental causes and continue to churn out books and articles.
"We aim not to waste any time," he said.
His three children are grown and living productive lives in law, the foreign service and teaching English.
Aggeler grew up in Catholic parochial schools, and so he has related easily to his Mormon students. "I remember the shock of transferring from the sheltered Catholic atmosphere of the University of Santa Clara to the University of California, Davis, where I found myself virtually the only believer in the dormitory."
He wishes now that he had taken a course like the one he teaches at the U., on the history of ideas, "tracing liberalism back to Socrates and conservatism to Aristotle, analyzing the assumptions of those who have shaped Western thought." He sees teaching as "the art of engaging students in an ongoing process of discovery."
And he has loved trying to turn students on to Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers. Many of them come to his classes thinking Shakespeare wrote "in a vacuum," so he delights in showing them how vast the field is and how favorably that world "mirrors our own."
"You have the same types of conflict," Aggeler explained. "I'm now teaching 'Much Ado About Nothing,' in which Shakespeare represents the relationship between the sexes. You have a world that is dominated by men, who essentially impose conventions upon women to control them, and in the process, inflict a lot of pain on women, and for the most part they are oblivious to it. Students, especially female students, relate to that right away. They feel things have not really changed that much, in spite of all their supposed liberation."
Aggeler has loved helping his students discover the worlds of the writers he teaches. He has also regularly taught the history of ideas and creative writing at the U. He always tries to get his students to "stretch their wings and get completely out of themselves," to imagine they are members of the opposite sex, race or class. "Most find it a stimulating exercise."
As a prolific writer all his professional life, Aggeler thinks of it as similar to the Greeks -- almost a mystical experience. While working on his current novel, "A Curious Magistrate," his daughter, a lawyer, told him about a case of a murdered woman who left a journal entry that pointed to her killer, a man who was not initially a suspect. "I was able to write a journal for this woman," said Aggeler, "and I could hear her voice very clearly. In this case, I gave the victim a voice. Those are moments of grace -- an epiphany.
"Something comes to you, and you don't know where it comes from. It summons you. Plato said the poets were 'possessed,' and they don't know what they're talking about. But you do feel 'taken over' sometimes. I tend to relate creativity back to the Gospel of John -- 'In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.' I see all creativity stemming from Christ himself."
Aggeler believes that "something chooses you. You don't choose it. You would give anything if you could summon this creative force." In his writing, characters tend to come first, "and they assume a life of their own. As with the Marlowe novel, they came to life. They prompted me, beckoned me, saying, 'When are you going to let us live?'
"It is the opposite of what Aristotle said: 'Plot is the soul of tragedy.' Yeah, you need a coherent plot and a sense of logic. But this essentially comes from the characters and the conflicts they create."
Aggeler said that a writer may even have a moral or a message he would like to see his readers glean, "but you can't impose it on the characters or you deprive them of life. You make them wooden if you do. As with students, you have to help them along. Chances are, your message will be conveyed one way or another, but you may undercut your own message if you subvert your characters."
Which is why many authors lovingly refer to their books as their "children."