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Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 129. Friday, 10 May 1991. Subject: 2.0121 Query: American Acclimatization Society Comment: Re: SHK 2.0121 Query: American Acclimatization Society Date: Thu, 9 May 91 11:17:24 CDT From: Michael Dobson (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) To: Edward Z. Kellogg, via Ken Steele and any interested SHAKSPERians Dear Sir -- You have probably gathered by now, as I have, from the National Union Catalogue that The American Acclimatization Society published its Charter and By-Laws in New York in 1871; there's a copy in the New York Public Library. If you succeed in obtaining access to this doubtless fascinating document, I should be delighted to hear about it, although I must say that the cultural dimensions of the phenomenon interest me rather more than do the biological ones. (The idea that all the starlings in the U.S. are metaphorical deputies for the offstage one imagined saying 'Mortimer, Mortimer' in *1 Henry IV* is a very striking one...and what were they planning to do about the Phoenix?) If it's of the remotest interest, while we're on the subject of ecologically dubious expressions of American bardolatry, what claims to be the first 'Shakespeare garden' in the States was established on the campus at Northwestern University as part of the 1916 tricentennial celebrations; lots of plants mentioned in the plays, a vague simulacrum of a knot-garden, and a fetching memorial complete with suitable quotations from *MSND* and *W'sT*. It's a very pleasant place (at this time of year), if inevitably totally unlike any possible English garden due to the horrors of the Chicago climate. The same impulse to cling to some degree of referentiality for the American Shakespeare, to prevent American readers always feeling that the details of his texts are preoccupied with a never-never land somewhere else, seems to fuel the (continuing?) project of nurturing such gardens as presumably drove the Bardolatrous element in the American Acclimatization Society. Curious to hear more about the whole strange business, I remain yrs ever Michael Dobson c/o Dept of English Northwestern University
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 128. Wednesday, 8 May 1991. [I was flattered by the recent cross-posting of my review of Peter Blayney's *The First Folio of Shakespeare* from SHAKSPER to FICINO, and still more pleased that the cross-posting brought a few new SHAKSPEReans among us. The following response was generated on FICINO, and it seems appropriate to redistribute it here. I repeat my invitation to others to describe, however formally or informally they wish, their own recent reading in and around Shakespeare... -- k.s.] FROM: Ficino, 6 May 1991: Blayney on booksellers Date: Sun, 5 May 91 16:01 -0300 From: Daniel Woolf <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: Re: Ficino: review Those interested in Peter Blayney's work might be interested in the tour de force paper he give at the recent Shakespeare Association of America meetings in Vancouver last March. Using an impressive array of colour coded maps, he presented his case for knowing exactly where in Paul's churchyard all of the late 16th early 17th c. booksellers were, and the dimensions of their shops, using information about them from reconstruction plans after the Great Fire. This is to appear in print in the not too distant future. Daniel Woolf
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 127. Monday, 6 May 1991. Date: Sun, 5 May 1991 20:28:14 -0400 From:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (Hardy M. Cook) Subject: Statistical Authorship Study Last year, I responded to a query on HUMANIST about Ward Elliott and his project. Below is part of that response. I recently read two articles in the Washington Post on Professor Ward Elliott of Claremont McKenna College. I've misplaced the first, which concentrated on Professor Elliott himself, but I have the other: "Computer Test Authenticates Shakespeare" by Michael Miller of Reuter, April 21, 1990: C3. The article begins, "A computer program that was fed more than 3 million words by William Shakespeare and other Elizabethan authors had shown the Bard alone wrote his works, a university professor said yesterday. In addition, the computer may have found eight poems previously not attributed to Shakespeare that were written by the great playwright and poet." Elliott claims to have "fed the largest collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean texts ever put into a computer." Elliott is quoted as saying, "We've got the King James Bible, every poem written by Shakespeare and material from 30 or so claimants [to Shakespeare's works]." Elliott used a program devised by Rob Valenza, which "runs a battery of eight tests on every word. The main test, known as modal analysis, or the Valenza test, looks for interrelationships between words. . . . Those authors who did pass the Valenza test were subjected to seven more tests looking for word frequency, words used to begin lines, metrical ways of ending lines, whether the line was punctuated at the end, relative clauses, compound words, hyphenated compound words, and frequency of exclamation marks. These were then compared to Shakespeare's characteristics." Both Louis Marder of Shakespeare Newsletter and Charlton Ogburn, an Oxfordian, are cited as dismissing the study. The article concludes by noting that Elliott nevertheless, "is convinced someone other than Shakespeare is the true author," citing the elitist argument that no one from the "rustic backwater" of Stratford could have been sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to write the plays and poems attributed to him. Hardy M. CookThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. PS: Elliott's work has only been with the poetry not the whole canon. There have been several articles in the Shakespeare Newsletter (Spring 1990 and Fall 1990) on Elliott's project. I would be glad to scan these most recent pieces and email them to anyone who is interested.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 126. Sunday, 5 May 1991. Date: Sat, 4 May 1991 13:22:40 -0400 From: Roy Flannagan <FLANNAGA@OUACCVMB> Subject: The death of Fredson Bowers I have just heard through another email list (C18-L) that Fredson Bowers died April 11th, just before he was to address a distinguished gathering of bibliographers at a conference in New York. As his pupil at the University of Virginia in the early Sixties, I will miss his advice, his wisdom, his intellectual toughness and his great common sense, both publicly, in his editorial work and his writing, and personally, in his letters to me. He is one of the few human beings for whom I would use the French adjective *formidable*. He was feared, sometimes hated, sometimes mocked in fear, always held in awe. He was a legend, his name enough to invoke hushed tones on buses at the MLA convention. He singlehandly re-built the English Department at the University to the national prominence it enjoys today, hiring only the best, seeking and obtaining endowed chairs, knowing to the penny what his budget was at the same time he never ceased looking for talent and supreme intelligence. In his private life, he lived an Horatian ideal, in an open neoclassical house that overlooked a vista that would have made Capability Brown proud to have designed it. In his versatility, he judged dog shows and wrote books about show dogs, he wrote for many years a classical music column for the best newspaper in the state, and he could talk on any subject, usually with authority. He was a great debater. He had the sharpest mind and the strongest intellect of any academic I have ever known. His classes were sharply focused, taking the whole semester to cover ten Donne poems or three acts of *Hamlet*. In his course on Shakespeare's tragedies, I needed to be so sharp for the examination I stood on my head in the hall outside the classroom, just in order to get the blood circulating in my brain, only to get the second-highest grade in the class (after Barbara Mowat): that was the kind of peformance he inspired. Though Mr. Bowers was legendary also for his ruthless culling of people whom he did not think measured up to the best standards, I have never had reason not to think him fair and unemotional in all his most important decisions. Mr. Bowers (it was the reverse snobbery of "the University" to call all those who had PhDs "Mr." or "Mrs.") had not only the strongest intellect I have ever seen, he had a keen sense of elegance and decorum, even of beauty, all of which were personified in the wife he wooed very late in life, Nancy Hale, herself a fine writer, a kind of American Simone DeBeauvoir in her manner and bearing. Mr. Bowers abhorred sentimentality. When I wrote him expressing sorrow for his loss of Nancy Hale, he wrote back but never mentioned his bereavement. Life was for the living and for work, which gave meaning to life. His not mentioning what he felt was characteristic, because his feelings were not as important to the world as his ideas. Mr. Bowers admitted some of his compromises in letters to me in his normalizing usage in some texts. The compromises were humane rather than intellectually lazy. They represented decisions on behalf of the reader's understanding, never compromises with quality. He never compromised in questions of quality. He would not have wanted to be wept over, but he would have wanted the enormous scope of his achievements appreciated. I am afraid that I have failed him, in that I have done both today. Roy Flannagan
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 125. Sunday, 5 May 1991. Date: Sat, 4 May 1991 10:55:26 -0400 From: Roy Flannagan <FLANNAGA@OUACCVMB> Subject: Variorum good deal I did order all three of the variorum volumes (and no, I have no connection with MLA) and will attest to the fact that they are invaluable as references for day to day teaching of Shakespeare. In teaching AYLI last week, for instance, the Variorum helped settle the problem of why the character is *Sir* Oliver Martext (like the Italian "Ser"; a translation of "Dominus" indicating that Oliver had taken only the first degree of Bachelor of Arts and hence might well be rather ignorant). This particular volume reflects scholarship through 1975 and is admirably and clearly organized; it is very easy to use and seems terse but thorough, with very high standards of accuracy in reproducing both texts and annotation. Roy Flannagan