Douglas died on a Tuesday, January 27, 2009, so I’m late with my copy but I’m sure Douglas wouldn’t mind.  He and I were late together on everything.

He delayed the collection Milton and the Jews for years until he was satisfied that he had all the contributions he felt the book needed to stand on its own. And it was the same story with all his projects: his book From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, his other scholarly collection Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England and the issues of Shakespeare Yearbook that he oversaw as that journal's general editor. No surprise then that he was late coming across my own work on Milton and Judaica but the thing with Douglas was--no matter how late he was, he always came through –at least for me.

Without Douglas’ assistance I would never have secured the publication of my scholarly book, nor would I have ever been granted tenure.  I always wanted to repay him, so eventually I proposed a special issue on Shakespeare after 9/11 (one among my handful of obsessions) and when he gave me the green light I promised him that together he and I would pull in the big names.  And we did! 

And then I checked my email one morning and saw that Douglas had cc’d me on a note to a very prominent British cultural materialist.  There I read that I was being tapped to handle working this late but brilliant addition into the volume because Douglas had just learned that he had stage 4 lung cancer.

After a brief search on the internet I knew my friend had been given a death sentence, and a quick and painful one at that. We continued to email and text but Douglas and I never spoke again.  I left messages but he never called me back. 

He was sick, nothing meant much to him anymore and he was not a believer in Jewish guilt (as he called it).  He explained that he wanted me to remember him how he was.  The nights drinking with him at some far flung professorial conference where we would sit and plot our take over of the profession.  The whiskey went on his tab as did the cartons of Malboro Reds that we smoked together while I listened (mostly) to his incredible tales and his vast erudition. 

Douglas was a throw back to the old days of the profession, where the professors had ties with national intelligence (because of their semiotic skills).  He was also a rabbinical school drop-out (lured away by the siren call of David Kastan and James Shapiro at Columbia).  Never again on this side of the great divide will I hear a voice zigzag from accounts of intelligence gathering in Afghanistan to blow by blow rehearsals of Derrida’s talks in New York City to intense philological disquisitions on Shakespeare’s first Folio.

But Douglas was more than that: he was the only friend in the profession I had who could look me in the face and tell me I AM HERE FOR YOU when I told him what I couldn’t tell anyone else.  The last time I reached out to him was when I was scheming to go see my rock idol, Paul Weller.  I ended up going to Boston, but my dream was to see Weller at the fabled 9:30 club in DC.  A harDCore Punk till his dying day, Douglas often talked about the bands that had made Georgetown a scene in the early 80’s: the Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and of course Fugazi. 

I emailed him and floated the vision I had where he and I would break out of his chemo hospital for one last trip.  But Douglas stayed firm:  He had seen the Jam back in their prime in Ann Arbor, and he didn’t want to ruin the memory—just as he didn’t want to ruin ours.  I texted him from the Weller concert ("Town Called Malice!").  He texted back much later: “cool” and that was it.

At some point you realize that all the stories you like to tell about your heroes involve people who are now dead (Beckett, Mailer, Vonnegut, Ginsberg, Derrida) and then a little time passes and you realize that all your best friends are joining them.

Douglas, who am I going to scheme with now?  I miss you.  I will always miss you.

 

NOTES

 

Shakespeare After 9-11

IN HONOR OF DOUGLAS BROOKS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

Introduction, Matthew Biberman and Julia Lupton

 

Creative Round Table

 

Tom Sleigh, “This Thing of Darkness” (poem)

Stephen M. Davis, “All Are Punished: Staging Romeo and Juliet in a post 9-11 World”

Cynthia White, “On 9-11 as a Concept for Shakespeare Productions”

Terry Bugler, “Thoughts on Shakespeare After 9-11”

Sidney Berger, “This Rough Magic”

Robert Polito, “The Great Awakening” (poem)

 

ESSAYS

Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, ‘Rudely Interrupted’:

                                                            Shakespeare and Terrorism

 

Linda Charnes, The Fetish of Character

 

Slavoj Zizek, Wicked Meaning in a Lawful Deed:

                        Shakespeare on the Obscenity of Power

 

Margaret Litvin, Explosive Signifiers: Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Post 9/11 Odyssey

 

Walter A Davis, “Beyond Humanism and Postmodernism: A Hamlet for the 21st Century”

 

Critical Round Table

Julia Reinhard Lupton, Introduction to Round Table

High Grady, Shakespeare and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Presentist Perspective

Scott Newstok and Harry Berger Jr., “Harry After VV”

Jonathan Gil Harris, “Shakespeare After 5/11”

Scott Maisano, “Whither Brutus: Rethinking Julius Caesar in the New American Century”

Christopher Pye, “Senseless Ilium”

Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Shakespeare—for the Long Haul”

James Kuzner, “And Here’s Thy Hand: Titus Andronicus in a Time of Terror”

Bryan Reynolds, “Contemplating Suicide: Shakespeare After the September 11 Attacks

Richard Burt, “Shakespeare’s Bare (Ruined) Choirs”

 

AFTERWORD

Ben Saunders, “Preposterous Violence”: Shakespeare after 9/11, 9/11 after Shakespeare"