Social Drama, Rites of Passage, and The Winter\u27s Tale

No matter how you explain it away, the jealousy of Leontes is a violent affair. When he blurts out Too hot, too hot!/To mingle friendships far, is mingling bloods we are surprised at both the suddenness of his onslaught of jealousy and at the vehemence with which he repudiates our expectations of seeing a happy family, set up in the first scene of the play. Before looking for explanations for this outburst -- for they range from psychological analyses of the king\u27 s fear of women to assertions that Hermione indeed appears guilty -- I would first like to consider the outburst as an event. A fact, something that happened, a phenomenon in society. Leontes\u27 outburst can be seen as the first motion in a complete and foregrounded social drama which is acted out in the stage society of the play and comprises a large part of the dramatic action. Social drama is anthropologist Victor Turner\u27s term for a sequence of events through which a society publicly plays out certain tensions and conflicts. Like several other terms in this paper -- rite of passage, communitas, liminality, and ritual symbol -- it is a metaphor drawn from anthropology (particularly Turner\u27s work) which I see as a useful way of looking at The Winter\u27s Tale. Turner says social dramas can be isolated for study in all societies at all levels of scale and complexity. In studying them, we consider social structure, or how people or characters interact based on their social status, as well as conflict. law and obligation. Structure as a metaphor for societal relations, however, is a dangerously limited concept because it produces an image of a rigid framework of social positions. Society and human interactions are not static. Social drama, which presents a social conflict as developing from the reconciliation of a previous social conflict, gives us a processual view of society and allows us to see social structure as fluid. It is a particularly rich metaphor for The Winter\u27s Tale for several reasons. It shows that the corruption, fall, qualification and rebuilding of patriarchal power, a central motif in the play, is fluid, processual and alive. Because the plot of The Winter\u27s Tale corresponds closely to Turner\u27s description of the sequence of events in a social drama, we can use it as a model to break down the action and power struggles within the society of the play. Finally, Shakespeare, by exploiting the ambiguities of playing a role in life/on the stage, the ambiguities in the concept of acting, and by blending stage reality with obvious artifice imbued the play with self-consciousness that it depicts a drama

Free Expression in America Post-2020 A Landmark Survey of Americans Views on Speech Rights

Free expression and the freedom of speech are cornerstones of American democracy. Yet the interpretation of the First Amendment continues to be a flashpoint in the 21st century as the nation debates how to apply these rights to our society. For the 2021 "Free Expression in America Post-2020" report, Knight Foundation commissioned Ipsos to conduct a survey with a nationally representative sample of more than 4,000 American adults, including an additional sample of 1,000 undergraduate college students. The Knight Foundation-Ipsos study provides a comprehensive look at American attitudes toward freedom of speech in a post-2020 environment, building on Knight Foundation's long-standing work studying free speech views among students since 2004. The findings described in this report cover many but not all of the rich insights possible from this complex dataset. We invite the public and researchers to explore this publicly available resource in further detail. This study finds that all Americans hold to the ideal of free speech, but putting free expression into practice reveals significant differences in experiences and attitude. It examines how Americans view free expression issues, events and the application of our First Amendment rights in an increasingly digital, diverse, and politically driven society.