December
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 326. Sunday, 15 Dec 1991. Date: Sat, 14 Dec 1991 12:45:55 -0500 From: Steve Urkowitz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: [Variant Texts and Unstaged Scenes] Weeks ago, an electronic eternity, I offered an example of an action that is described in one text and rather-much-in-detail enacted in an equivalent passage: they were the alternative forms of Clarence's return to the York camp in 3H6. And the question comes up again, which version is "preferable?" In the world of art it seems that there is an emotional economy of largesse. Here's one version! And here's another! Wheee! When I've worked with professional actors, showing them the textaul aleternatives of KING LEAR or HAMLET, they've all gone gigglyabout having the different scripts to try out. Then they've settled on one or another version, sometimes conflating as the editors do, sometimes remaining "pure and faithful" to one text. I prefer having multiple versions to look at. I'm most puzzled by recent claims put forward by editors who argue that Since We Don't Know For Certain That Shakespeare Certified Q2 HAMLET or F HAMLET As Genuine, Then The Globe Edition, Or MY edition Has a Claim Equal to Any Early Text. When A.L.Rowse plays this game noses wrinkle with disdain, but more respectable editors seem to be playing similarly. Ah well. Xeroxes of facsimiles still can be made, and they remain economical and useful. Steve Xeroxowitz, (SURCC@CUNYVM)
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 325. Sunday, 15 Dec 1991. Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1991 22:53:04 -0500 From: Nate Johnson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: Prospero's Books Well, I finally saw _Prospero's Books_ and I thought I'd toss in my two cents. Taken as a whole, as an adaptation of _The Tempest_, I didn't like it. The director took quite a few very good to brilliant cinematic/literary/historical/visual/aural/dramatic ideas and decided to put them in a movie. Along with some stupid ideas. Using _The Tempest_ as a framework -- why not, after all? It was like fast forwarding your VCR through a very good 6-month documentary series on Renaissance humanism while listening to a Gielgud-Frank Zappa-Max Headroom audio collaboration based on _The Tempest_. Wow! That looks interesting, can you hold it just a . . . Boatswain Boatswain Boatswain Boatswain Boatswain There were some really spectacular images in the movie. I liked what they did visually with books, although the Walt Disney voice narrative on the metaphysics of the Renaissance book didn't jive with the visual effects. If you're going to make a completely overwhelming, surreal, and frustratingly inexplicable movie, don't compromise. I did like what the director did with Ariel(s) and the Ariels themselves. Have other productions used multiple actors for the part? The overall thrust of the adaptation/interpretation seemed to be: Prospero was Shakespeare, who had a wild imagination and did things with words, and _The Tempest_ is about that. Very deep: B-. But I would see the movie again, perhaps even teach it in connection with _The Tempest_ because it is so visually effective and brings to life so many (too many) interesting facets of Shakespeare's literary and historical context.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 324. Friday, 13 Dec 1991. From: Ken Steele <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: 1991 Scholarship Retrospective Date: Fri, 13 Dec 91 16:40:47 EST Dear Fellow SHAKSPEReans; As we approach the end of 1991, I'm wondering what you think were the most interesting, revolutionary, or important works of Shakespearean scholarship or criticism published this year. Obviously our impressions will still be too fresh to reach any fully objective, time-proven conclusions, but I also hope we can think about it without turning the subject into some sort of popularity contest. One theory which springs to mind is Winifred L. Frazer's argument that "ne" in Henslowe's *Diary* might actually mean "Newington Butts" rather than "New" (*Notes & Queries* 38:1 March 1991, 34-5). This short item makes it difficult to look at the *Diary* in quite the same way. The other is Donald Foster's work on "Reconstructing Shakespeare" in the *Shakespeare Newsletter*. His argument that the parts Shakespeare memorized for performance might influence the plays he wrote at that time or later seems irresistible. Are there any other nominations? What should we be *sure* not to miss from this year's mountain of criticism? Ken Steele University of Toronto
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 323. Wednesday, 11 Dec 1991. From: Ken Steele <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: Blayney's Review of Otness's *Census* Date: Wed, 11 Dec 91 22:10:52 EST I just received the Winter 1991 *Shakespeare Quarterly*, which includes two items by our fellow SHAKSPEReans: "The Poetics of Incomprehensibility" by Stephen Orgel (a version of the paper presented at the Vancouver SAA this March), and a review of Naseeb Shaheen's *Biblical References in Shakespeare's History Plays* by John D. Cox. This number of *SQ* also includes Peter Blayney's devastating review of Harold Otness's *The Shakespeare Folio Handbook and Census*, which Thomas G. Bishop warned us about in June (SHK 2.0169 and 2.0185). Not only is this review required reading for anyone considering buying the book (unfortunately the Toronto library has had it for some time now), but it is also a valuable *caveat* for would-be bibliographers and a savagely witty review. (I think it's sure to cheer anyone who thinks they've had a bad time at the hands of reviewers...) Blayney laments the limitations of Otness's census, summarizing that his interests seem to lie "in Folios only as expensive and prestigious objects collected by rich Americans and donated to American institutions." The book is evidently riddled with typographical errors (dozens are marked "sic" in Blayney's quotations alone), and Blayney catalogues some of the many inconsistencies in form and spelling of names, some of the many oversights and inconsistencies in cataloguing information, and the inexplicable and inexcusable neglect of almost the entire Folger Shakespeare Library collection: "instead of the expected copy-by-copy listing of the nearly two hundred Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library, all that Otness offers is the number of copies of each edition and a nineteen-line note.... The implication seems to be that if the Folger Library catalogers have not yet condensed the desired facts into convenient form for him, Otness can hardly be expected to have done the job himself." The result, as Blayney observes, is that "he omitted more than a third of the institutionally owned Folios in the United States from what he claims is a `census' of them." Blayney goes on to outline Otness's many blunders in attempting to summarize Shakespearean bibliography, "a subject in which he is hopelessly out of his depth," and compares Otness's sources in Hinman and McKerrow to the garbled misinformation in the *Census*. Blayney quotes Otness's declared intention to provide a quick reference tool, as an alternative to "digging through the erudite but bulky tomes that characterize the literature on Shakespeare," and to avoid repeating the background material which "has already been elegantly expressed in a great number of works." Blayney quips: "Some of these goals have indeed been achieved. His tome is not bulky and has successfully avoided both elegance and erudition--but it is hardly efficient, and I question whether it is needed. Does `the academic community' need two thirds of a census of American-owned Folios that limits itself to provenance and bindings?" Blayney's final paragraph deserves a wider audience, too: "Anyone unlucky enough to acquire a copy of this book in future--any who achieve Otness or have Otness thrust upon them--would be well advised to thrust it back forthwith. Those who have already purchased one, and can no longer obtain a refund, may wish to remember the name of the press that accepted it for publication. For future reference, it was Greenwood Press (New York; Westport, Connecticut; London). *Caveat emptor.*" [Peter Blayney, rev. of *The Shakespeare Folio Handbook and Census* Compiled by Harold M. Otness. Bibliographies and Indexes in World Literature, Number 25. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. pp. xii+136. $37.95 cloth. in *Shakespeare Quarterly* 42.4 (Winter 1991): 493-7.]
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 322. Wednesday, 11 Dec 1991. Date: Mon, 09 Dec 91 18:07:01 PST From: Michael Best <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: Shakespeare graphics--and an announcement I read with interest the comment about graphics on Shakespeare, by Tad Davis, in which he mentions the HyperCard program from Intellimation, *Shakespeare's Life and Times*. Some members of SHAKSPER will remember that I announced the program several months ago, and offered a demo disk in exchange for a blank disk. [Ed. Note: See SHK 2.0136 and SHK 2.0175 in the May and June 1991 Logbooks for details -- k.s.] Tad Davis was kind to mention that there is a copyright notice. There is indeed, though the copyright is held not by the company but by the author. I will be happy to give permission to use graphics, so long as the usual attribution is made (the hours I've spent scanning, editing, enhancing. . . deserve *some* recognition!), but I should warn that I had to get copyright for some of the graphics myself--the obvious ones like the Titus Andronicus drawing, or the sketch of the Swan, where the copyright is held by the owners of the MSS. SHAKSPERians may be interested to know that Version 2.0 of *Shakespeare's Life and Times* will be released early in the new year. The main improvement is a substantial file of sound resources (also copyright, I fear), which allow samples of renaissance music (Byrd, Weelkes, Johnson. . .) and passages from the plays read in a reconstruction of Shakespeare's original pronunciation. There are also several additions, notably to the section on the exploration of specific plays. For the record, here is an abbreviated version of the original announcement. The offer of the demo disk is still good. -------------------------------------------------------------- I have recently completed a computer program intended to supplement the teaching of Shakespeare: *Shakespeare's Life and Times*, published by: Intellimation, PO Box 1922 130 Cremona Drive Santa Barbara CA 93116-1922 phone 1-800-3INTELL) It's a HyperCard (2.0) program, and runs on any Macintosh from the Mac Plus on, so long as it has a hard drive (the basic program takes up about 5.2 megabytes, the sound resources 5.5 Mb). The program is designed to allow students to guide themselves as they explore the background to ShakespeareUs life and works. It is a supplement to the teaching of Shakespeare, rather than an attempt to teach his works directly -- although there are many references to the plays, there is no extensive treatment of the texts themselves. It is not intended to be a critical discussion of Shakespeare;; it is an introduction to what we know of his life, the stage his plays were first acted on, and the various influencesQ social, political, intellectual, and literaryQthat lie behind the words on the page. The program consists of nine interlinked modules (stacks). There is an Introduction, which also serves as on-line "help," and seven stacks dealing with different areas: ShakespeareUs life; the Elizabethan stage (including staging, the acting companies, and so on); the social background (country, city, court live, the role of women); the political and historical background (including a section on the history of the history plays); the intellectual background (the Medieval world view, Renaissance new knowledge, religion); the literary background, concentrating on earlier and contemporary drama; and there is a reference section, with a detailed chronology, maps, and a bibliography. Throughout there is an attempt to use illustrative passages not only from Shakespeare but from many other contemporary sources. There is one further module that looks in some detail at issues in various well-known plays that the program can provide historical material on. I'm especially anxious to have the program used by Shakespeare specialists and teachers, because I'm sure that there is a great deal to improve -- it has pretentions to the encyclopedic, but I'm no encyclopedist. I can send a demo disk if you are interested and send me one to copy it onto (Department of English, University of Victoria, Victoria B.C. V8W 3P4, Canada). Michael Best