Hurricanes and Hampton Court

Authors

Susannah Brietz Monta University of Notre Dame

Abstract

This essay thinks about Hurricane Katrina and the play Henry VIII together, a conjunction shaped both by the author's schedule in the late summer and early fall of 2005 and by her training. The play characterizes political turmoil through images of tempests; it both celebrates and undermines its title character's assertions of conscience; it uses carnivalesque discourse as a solvent on the pieties of political ceremony; and it asks whose historical narratives, finally, will prevail, and at what cost. Hurricane Katrina too may be thought about in these terms. It was a phenomenon combining nature with a political neglect both systematic and acute; it exposed the frailties of our nation's conscience; south Louisiana carnival skewered the attempts at all levels of government to put a brave face on the terrible ineptitudes that rendered an already-devastating hurricane catastrophic. Finally, though, this essay raises (but does not definitively answer) questions about the propriety of personal narratives proffered from the academic sidelines. Whose stories get told, whose repressed? May we think about Katrina through and with Shakespeare, without subsuming the hurricane's terrible material effects into comfortable academic modes of analysis, without rendering ourselves the academic equivalents of the play's gossiping gentlemen, trivializing commentators on a moment that forever divides then from now?

Author Biography

Susannah Brietz Monta, University of Notre Dame

Susannah Monta is John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. and Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor of English and editor of Religion and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. From 1998 to 2007, she was Assistant and then Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her book Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press 2005; paperback 2009) won the Book of the Year award from the MLA-affiliated Conference on Christianity and Literature. With Margaret W. Ferguson, she edited Teaching Early Modern English Prose (MLA 2010), and is preparing an edition of Anthony Copley's A Fig for Fortune (1596), the first published response to Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, for Manchester University Press. Her current project examines the devotional and aesthetic uses of repetition in early modern prayer, poetry, and rhetoric. Her published articles focus on history plays, early modern women writers and patronesses, martyrology, hagiography, devotional poetry and prose, and providential narratives.