November
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 294. Monday, 2 November 1992. (1) From: Tad Davis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, Oct. 31, 1992, 09:58:01 -0500 Subj: RE: SHK 3.0287 Re: Hero's Mother (2) From: John Drakakis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, Nov. 2, 1992, 16:51:00 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 3.0290 Much Ado About . . . (Was Hero's Mother) (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tad Davis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, Oct. 31, 1992, 09:58:01 -0500 Subject: 3.0287 Re: Hero's Mother Comment: RE: SHK 3.0287 Re: Hero's Mother Without questioning John Drakakis' excellent basic point -- that silence can signify much -- I'm not sure I understand how it applies to Innogen. She says nothing, she does nothing, and the other characters never even refer to her (except for one oblique reference in I.1 -- "I think this is your daughter." "Her mother hath many times told me so."). Did I miss a significant exchange about her? It seems unlikely that Shakespeare could have piled such a load of meaning on a character whose identity might easily have escaped many in the audience. Simple dramatic economy suggests that this would have been wasted effort, especially since the point of her silence, if there is one, is made by other prominent characters (as Drakakis points out). There is no question that too much emphasis is sometimes given to the words of the text, and not enough to the visual impact of the staging. (Though I've found that to be less of a problem with comments on this list than elsewhere.) But characters in a play are fundamentally agents, and if any importance is to be attached to their presence, can't we at least expect that they DO something (or that something be visibly done TO them)? Tad DavisThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Drakakis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, Nov. 2, 1992, 16:51:00 GMT Subject: 3.0290 Much Ado About . . . (Was Hero's Mother) Comment: Re: SHK 3.0290 Much Ado About . . . (Was Hero's Mother) I'm fascinated by Tom Bishop's response to my response to his response to the status of "Innogen" in Much Ado. My original doubt about what he now calls "a cancelled gambit" was -- and I thought that I had made this clear -- was that it presupposes a particular theory of dramatic composition: one which begins with an "idea" then translates into dramatic practice . The Q/F SD at I.i. reads "Innogen his wife" and at II.i. "his wife". We suspect that Q may have been set, as is well known, from an authorial manuscript, but that there may also be other forms of scribal interference. To be sure that the inconsistencies are consistent (which Bishop's argument seems strongly to imply) we would need to examine the precise status of all of the problematica entries/exits to which he alludes. My orginal response was to the general tendency to excise Innogen from the play, and I sought to suggest some reasons why I think she should not be, and then was prompted to speculate about why her presence at the end of the play may have been unnecessary. At no point did I suggest that I wanted to "construct a detailed..account of the centrality of Innogen to the play". The character may as easily represent a recognizable thematic strand which is taken up in a number of areas of the action in different ways, and I wanted to propose that we should at least give these issues some thought before opting for a romantic theory of composition, even one that Bishop now seeks to dress up in the jargon of a pseudo- materialist criticism. The case that he cites of Don John's entry at I.i.203 is interesting, and I don't have a ready answer to the problem it raises, but I remain sceptical that it has the same status as the one we are discussing. I'm not sure what his comment that we should see the text "not at the level of action finished and presented, but at the level of action in process and struggle between competing possibilities moment by moment" actually means in this context. Is he saying that here we really DO have an insight into Shakespeare's pre-dramatic thought processes, or that the text is somehow so self-conscious that it comments on its own processes of construction as it goes along. To see these two examples as evidence of "a historically contingent difficulty in plot-making generated by the very pressures of the action" also seems to me to obfuscate rather than to clarify the issue, I'm afraid. I want to assent to the view that Bishop seeks to identify a text "radically unstable, still bearing the traces of its historical moment" but the real problem here is that we may be looking at a palimpsest rather than a "text" in any unified sense, so that it would be more appropriate to talk about "histories" in the plural rather than "historical moment". My own suggestion vis-a-vis Innogen does nothing to challenge the text's instability at that level at all. If Bishop's only solution to what he calls "the material historicity of the processes that generated the only record that we have" is to support an argument resting on an unstated theory of Shakespearean composition, then I'm afraid his allusions to material practice amount to little more than critical postures. If, on the other hand, he really is serious about material practice, then the case of Innogen may really be the tip of the iceberg in relation to this play.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 293. Monday, 2 November 1992. From: Stephen Orgel <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, Nov. 1, 1992, 21:16:52 PST Subject: Bishop v. Drakakis Our system has been down, so I seem to have missed a round from John Drakakis, but since Tom Bishop has so kindly invoked me parenthetically, it's only fair to say that I agree with both of them, though I'm now rather inclining toward Tom. (I am a feather for each wind that blows....) Stephen Orgel
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 292. Monday, 2 November 1992. From: Tom Loughlin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, Nov. 1, 1992, 9:25 pm EST Subject: Claudius/Ghost Kay asks about the doubling of Claudius and the Ghost of Hamlet's father. That's a doubling that is very probable and done quite frequently in profes- sional productions. Directors of the play seem to feel that doing that makes the physical resemblence more evident, and as in all doubling, it saves a salary. The other probable doubling in that show is Polonius and the First Gravedigger. Can't say whether Shakespeare himself actually did it, but I posted my opinion on the theatrical probabilities of doubling a while back. I think it's very likely, but I can't say I have any evidence beyond my thea- trical instincts and experience. --------------------------------------------------------------- Tom Loughlin * BITNET Dept. of Theatre Arts * loughlin@fredonia SUNY College at Fredonia * INTERNET Fredonia NY 14063 *This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Voice: 716.673.3597 * Fax: 716.673.3397 * "Hail, hail Freedonia, land of * the brave and free." G. Marx ---------------------------------------------------------------
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 291. Sunday, 1 November 1992. (1) From: Patricia Gallagher <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, Nov. 1, 1992, 16:46:12 -0600 (CST) Subj: ASTR-L (2) From: Kay Stockholder <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, Nov. 1, 1992, 09:45:16 PST Subj: SHK 3.0289 Qs: ASTR-L; Hero's Mother (1)--------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Patricia Gallagher <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, Nov. 1, 1992, 16:46:12 -0600 (CST) Subject: ASTR-L According to my notes, the BITNET address for ASTR-L is as follows: ASTR-L (or LISTSERV) @UIUCVMD.BITNET I don't have the current Internet address. Patricia GallagherThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (2)--------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kay Stockholder <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, Nov. 1, 1992, 09:45:16 PST Subject: Qs: ASTR-L; Hero's Mother Comment: SHK 3.0289 Qs: ASTR-L; Hero's Mother If so, it rather changes the significance of her silent presence. I have a question on another subject for those who are expert in the doubling of actors. Would it have been likely that the same player might play the ghost and Claudius?
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 3, No. 290. Sunday, 1 November 1992. From: Thomas G. Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, Nov. 1, 1992, 12:43:57 -0500 Subject: Re: Much Ado About . . . John Drakakis and I seem to be engaged in playing out yet another version of _Much Ado_'s many games of "now you see it, now you don't." But where Mr. Drakakis adopts the position of Claudio that there is no name without a body attached, I prefer Benedick's that "the body of [our] discourse is sometime guarded with fragments." Let me put it this way: the Quarto of _Much Ado_ did not simply materialize on the bookseller's stall in 1600. Various cultural agencies jointly were responsible for getting it there as it is. Some of these are given names on the title page (but the meaning of a name on a page is what's at issue here). Many commentators (Stephen Orgel among them) have argued that "what a text is" is a question much more riven by doubt and the contrary pull of different impulses than we often want to believe. Mr. Drakakis assumes fundamentally that a name on a page translates into a character on a stage (even if only an imaginary stage), and proceeds accordingly to construct a detailed and very convincing account of the centrality of Innogen to the play. I have no quarrel with this expert delineation of Innogen's importance except that its first premise is dubious. Not every indicated stage direction in the early acts of this play as Q gives them can be taken to record a "character on stage", the leap Mr. Drakakis wishes to make. The text is less stable than that, its ongoing processes of struggle still visible. Innogen is not an isolated case, nor is it women only who are so affected: the text is also unclear over entrances by Don John, Borachio, Leonato, Beatrice and others at various points. A particularly good example of how one _cannot_ simply accept the names as given is the entrance in both Q and F1 of Don John WITH Don Pedro at I.i.203. Here Claudio first tells of his "liking" for Hero, yet in I.iii Don John knows nothing of this and is incredulous when Borachio tells him the overheard news. Are we to suppose he has forgotten? Was he not listening? Has his recollection been somehow ideologically "silenced"? To argue that he was somehow there but unconscious is an absurdity at the level of stage or plot practice but explicable if we see the text as a series of tentative moves encountering especial uncertainty over the management of certain characters in the opening of a play that turns out to be charged (as Mr. Drakakis rightly says) with concern about who was where, who gets to speak and when. There are other similar instances, as a fully collated text reveals. My point is a simple one: the marginal status of Innogen (and of Don John) to the dominant ideology of Messina, which the play in part subscribes to and in part criticizes, can be seen not at the level of the action finished and presented, but at the level of the action in process and struggle between competing possibilities moment by moment. "The text" is uncertain what to do with, where to include, Don John and Innogen. Innogen disappears from the action as Don John's entrance is clearly rethought two scenes later. Innogen's absence does indeed signify - _either way_, but in different ways. Mr. Drakais wishes to interrogate the process of her exclusion by presuming a staging with her at first seen and then withdrawn. But would he also insist on Don John's entrance at I.i.203 and thereby deeply confuse any conceivable audience, or are such considerations to be waived? One can also respond to the difficulty by seeing Innogen's abrupted textual traces as evidence of a cancelled gambit, a historically-contingent difficulty in plot-making generated by the very pressures on the developing action Mr. Drakakis so well describes. Fully to take the latter option is even necessarily to have taken the former already, and found it inadequate. What might have seemed the "familiar" view yields a text more radically unstable, still bearing the traces of its historical moment. I prefer this latter because I believe it does more justice to the material historicity of the processes that generated the only record we have. -- Tom Bishop Dept of English Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH 44106. (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )