David Haley Professor Department of English University of Minnesota 310C Lind Hall 207 Church St SE (612) 625–6615 dbhaley@umn.edu

Scene from Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe (1675)

Central Interests

• History, literature, and politics from Machiavelli and Shakespeare to Hegel and Jane Austen

Background

• Education
  • Harvard,  A.B.,  Ph.D
• Academic Appointments
  • Harvard University, Teaching Fellow
  • University of Minnesota,  Assistant Professor,  Associate Professor,  Professor

Publications

• Books:

  Dryden and the Problem of Freedom: The Republican Aftermath, 1649–1680.  Yale University Press, 1997. “Accurately described as a ‘revisionary’ study, this important book defamiliarizes our sense of Dryden and his major poems, serious plays, satires, and critical prose.” Choice “An important and unusually sophisticated contribution to our view of Dryden.” RICHARD KROLL “In the great tradition of modern Dryden scholar-critics from Earl Miner and Phillip Harth.” Studies in English Literature “His sure knowledge of the period allows Haley to set forth the diverse cultural contexts—intellectual, literary, political, or religious—in which Dryden lived, to ascertain more precisely his views, and to chart the development of his career that took a decisive turn after the Rose Alley beating. ” Etudes Anglaises “Opens the way for a large variety of future new readings of Dryden’s poetry.” SANFORD  BUDICK “David Haley’s book is the most extensive and ambitious attempt so far to dismantle the familiar Dryden, and present one whose commitment to the royalist cause was belated, ambiguous, and insincere even in 1681.” JEGP

  Shakespeare’s Courtly Mirror: Reflexivity and Prudence in All’s Well That Ends Well.  University of Delaware Press, 1993.  “An original and impressive study of All’s Well That Ends Well.   Haley’s interpretation of the text is always perceptive and frequently brilliant.  He has illuminated the play more brightly than any of his predecessors.” JOSEPH PRICE “Shakespeare’s Courtly Mirror has a character of real individuality, at once powerful and delicate.  Fine and original readings are struck out, again and again, merely in the process of argument, without pretension or noise.” BARBARA  EVERETT  “Probably the most probing, detailed, and subtle examination yet to appear of a play that nearly everyone regards as one of Shakespeare’s most challenging dramas.   Moreover, Haley’s work is of a kind that possesses an ongoing applicability.  I learned from his book.” CHARLES FORKER “Whenever Haley investigates a subject, he discovers something new about it.  For instance, the subject of  alchemy, obscure and notoriously difficult, is here lucidly expounded and shown (convincingly, to my surprise) to be highly relevant to the play’s otherwise very unscientific because courtly concerns.” EMRYS JONES“ An in-depth and lucid reading of All’s Well.  The book is not only an interesting discussion of the specific play, it contributes to the general area of Renaissance studies.” HELEN BONAVENTURA “This impressively learned book has opened up many fascinating byways and offered new interpretive approaches to this ‘problem’ comedy.” MARGARET LOFTUS RANALD “This is scholarship of the highest caliber.” DAVID BEVINGTON

• Edited Collection
  
  
  • "A Certain Text”: Close Readings and Textual Studies in Shakespeare and Others in Honor of Tom Clayton.  Edited with Linda Anderson and Janis Lull.  University of Delaware Press, 2002. Includes essay on Hamlet's notorious “dram of eale” speech (see “Articles,” below).  PRESS REVIEW:  “An interesting and, it would seem, valid investigation of a crux over which too much ink has been spilt.  Now something, at least, can be said with some assurance”
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• Articles and Reviews
  
  
  • “Dryden, John.” Article entry in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 271–74
    
    
  • “Dryden's Emergence as a Political Satirist.” Chapter 5 of Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian Novak ( Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2004), 111–26
    
    
  • "Was Dryden a 'Cryptopapist' in 1681?" Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 32 (2003):277–96
    
    
  • "Forum" (reply to Edward Saslow), Restoration 27 (Spring, 2003):51–53
    
    
  • "'The Cause of This Defect': The Dram of Eale," in "A Certain Text" (above), 29–49
    
    
  • Review of Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, by Paul Hammond.  In Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001):449–52
    
    
  • Review of Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis.  In Albion 32 (2000):640–42

Teaching

• Goals and methodology:
  I’m interested in the development of early modern self-consciousness and particularly in how we think about our participation in a changing civic polity—a community subject to time.  For literary study, this means relocating the image of the autonomous self in a wider, social mirror by correlating introspection (psychology) with extrospection (politics).  My guiding premise is that history gives us a fuller and more complex reading of human relations than theory can provide.  Just like epic or dramatic mimesis, recorded history reflects our experience:  “all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of thoughts from within” (Milton).

• Graduate seminars:
  With a new series offered under the rubric, “POLITICS, HISTORY, AND LITERATURE,” I’m updating some of our seminars in individual authors such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Sidney, Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Pope.  Topics in the series to date have included “Shakespeare and the Reformation,” “Women Historians before Wollstonecraft” (including Lucy Hutchinson, Mary Astell, and Catherine Macaulay), and “Killing the Tyrant: Milton, Marvell, Dryden.”  Graduate students from political science and history are welcome to these new seminars.

• Courses for undergraduate majors:
  My two basic, 3-level courses in Shakespeare and in the Bible have been restructured.  (For EngL 3007, see below.) The two-quarter course in “THE KING JAMES BIBLE AS LITERATURE” has become a pair of semester courses, both of them numbered EngL 3132 and taught either as “THE JEWISH BIBLE” or as “THE NEW TESTAMENT.”  The semester format, with fifty per cent more classes, allows us to read all of Isaiah, “a book of poetry from beginning to end” (Coleridge).

  EngL 3007: The 3-level Shakespeare is now offered in alternative versions: “SHAKESPEARE’S EARLIER PLAYS” (comedies and histories) and “SHAKESPEARE’S LATER PLAYS” (tragedies and romances). These divisions by genre, which are explained on the Shakespeare web page, make it easier for a student to follow Shakespeare’s artistic development.

• Current offerings (2001–2007):
  • EngL 3007,    SHAKESPEARE'S EARLIER PLAYS (Fall 2007)
  • EngL 3141,    EARLY MODERN BRITISH COMEDY, 1660–1780 (Spring 2006)
  • EngL 3132,    BIBLE AS LITERATURE: THE JEWISH BIBLE (Fall 2007)
  • EngL 3134,    MILTON (Fall 2008)
  • EngL 3122,    SHAKESPEARE II—THE MAJOR THEMES (Spring 2007)
  • EngL 3007,    SHAKESPEARE’S LATER PLAYS (Spring 2005)
  • EngL 3960w,  POETRY AND POLITICS IN THE RENAISSANCE (Fall 2004)
  • EngL 1181w,  INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE (Spring 2002)
  • EngL 3132,    THE  BIBLE  AS  LITERATURE: THE NEW TESTAMENT (Fall 2008)
    
    
• Assignments and Study Questions
  
• Paraphrasing
  
• Shakespeare

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