January
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 12. Thursday, 7 January 1993. From: Jean Peterson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 1993 15:27:59 -0500 Subject: hamlet/ophelia First a belated reply to Kevin Berland's comment on Jacobi's reading of the line "they HAVE made me mad"; I thought the point was his recognition of his brutal treatment of Ophelia, the horrified realization that he had been driven to behave with such viciousness to, yes, this nice and rather naive young woman he loves or at least thought he loved. "Strong" Ophelia's do indeed have to play very hard against the text-- although that's not impossible (I think Diane Venora--is that the name?--in the Kevin Kline production managed it effectively). Still, by the time the poor girl has been driven to mutter "I think nothing, my lord," I think she has little personal strength left in reserve. But her situation does parallel Hamlet's in ways that are significant. She succumbs to the demands of corrupted authority, while Hamlet agonizes over precisely that problem (what if the "father" asking him to kill is "a goblin damned"?); she goes mad in earnest, though he only pretends to, and, if the gravediggers are to be believed, she really kills herself, while Hamlet only talks about it...
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 11. Thursday, 7 January 1993. (1) From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, January 7, 1993 Subj: Electronic Shakespeare at the MLA (2) From: John Lavagnino <LAV@BRANDEIS> Date: Monday, 4 Jan 1993 21:09 EST Subj: Electronic Shakespeare at the MLA (3) From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, January 7, 1993 Subj: THE PUBLIC DOMAIN SHAKESPEARE by Ian Lancashire (1)--------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, January 7, 1993 Subject: Electronic Shakespeare at the MLA Dear SHAKSPEReans, About eighteen months, there was a lively discussion on SHAKSPER about the possibility of creating a Public-Domain, Old-Spelling Electronic Shakespeare. For that project, I offered a transcription of the 1609 Quarto of the Sonnets in an untagged and a minimally tagged version (available on the SHAKSPER Fileserver as SONNETS 1609Q and SONNETS TAG1609Q). One of our members, Dr. Ian Lancashire, Director of the Centre for Computing, University of Toronto, envisioned this project as a part of work already going on at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities. Some months ago, I began working with him on fully encoding the 1609 Quarto of the Sonnets and Lovers Complaint as a prototype electronic edition for a long-range project of developing accurate, scholarly electronic editions of Shakespeare's original texts. As we get close to the time that the Q1609 text will be ready to be released, Professor Lancashire reported on his vision of the entire Public Domain Shakespeare project at the Electronic Archives session at the 1992 MLA Convention. What follows is a summary of Professor Lancashire's presentation that was made by Michael Sperberg-McQueen and submitted to SHAKSPER by John Lavagnino. I did not believe that the summary conveyed as accurately as it could have the substance of Professor Lancashire's remarks, so I asked him if he would share his paper with us. He has agreed and the next posting contains excerpts of the MLA presentation. The complete paper with appendices is available of the SHAKSPER Fileserver as LANCSHIR PD_SHAKE. SHAKSPEReans can retrieve LANCSHIR PD_SHAKE by issuing the interactive command, "TELL LISTSERV AT UTORONTO GET LANCHIR PD_SHAKE SHAKSPER." If your network link does not support the interactive "TELL" command (i.e. if you are not directly on Bitnet), or if LISTSERV rejects your request, then send a one-line mail message (without a subject line) to LISTSERV@utoronto, reading "GET LANCSHIR PD_SHAKE SHAKSPER." (2)--------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Lavagnino <LAV@BRANDEIS> Date: Monday, 4 Jan 1993 21:09 EST Subject: Electronic Shakespeare at the MLA I pass along an item from another list that you might want to post, on a discussion of electronic Shakespeares from the MLA. This is an excerpt from C. M. Sperberg-McQueen's "Trip Report: Modern Language Association," 30 December 1992, from the TEI-L list at uicvm.bitnet; this is from the account of the panel discussion on Electronic Archives, chaired by James Sosnowski, which took place at the MLA. (The entire text of the report is available as EDW34 DOC from listserv@uicvm.) John Lavagnino, Brandeis University Ian Lancashire spoke next, on "The Public-Domain Shakespeare," in which he reviewed the various versions of Shakespeare available in electronic form, including numerous versions of the Folio and early Quarto texts --- which however include only 64 texts of the canon, leaving 133 early printings yet un-electrified. He drew attention to the commercially available texts (some based on well known reputable editions, some not) as well as the many texts available from the Oxford Text Archive, and dwelt some time on the various methods adopted by encoders in handling such things as textual variation, archaisms of spelling, and corruption in the text. Many available texts contain editorial emendations, which IL curiously contrasted with "Shakespeare" pure and simple, to the detriment of the emenders. The opposition struck me as very odd, since "Shakespeare" pure and simple is precisely what the editors, by emending, are claiming not to be represented by the early printings. Unless IL wished to claim that the early printings of Shakespeare all represent the author's ipsissima verba, it seems dangerously misleading to refer to the early printings as "Shakespeare" and attempts to correct their defects as merely "editors". Phrased differently (the e-texts contain editorial interventions instead of simple reproductions of the sometimes dubious early printings), the point is valid and important but ceases to prejudice the case against the editors. IL's talk was supplemented by a handout, of which I was unable to secure a copy. This in itself signaled a happy turn of events: though he came prepared with a number more than ample for the usual turnout at sessions on electronic text, IL rapidly ran out of handouts in a crowd of over fifty people. The talk provided a usefully concrete supplement to the broad, sometimes vague, generalities of the other speakers. --- C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (3)--------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, January 7, 1993 Subject: THE PUBLIC DOMAIN SHAKESPEARE by Ian Lancashire THE PUBLIC DOMAIN SHAKESPEARE by Ian Lancashire Department of English University of Toronto Modern Language Association New York 29 December 1992, 10:15-11:30 a.m. Riverside Suite, Sheraton New York 1. What should a Public-Domain Shakespeare be? In his dedicatory poem to Shakespeare in the First Folio, Ben Jonson said, `He was not of an age, but for all time!' Despite this -- and after more than thirty years of electronic scholarship -- the 1623 and three later folio editions, and all the quarto versions, of Shakespeare's plays and poems are still not available in un-copy-protected electronic texts on the network. Instead, we have texts that either vary (without warning) from these early texts or that, although old-spelling copies, do not faithfully capture the bibliographical details of the originals. Shakespeare's works, altered silently or emended on explicit grounds, may be obtained commercially or freely in electronic form, but not the originals from which every one of these editions must flow. Trevor Howard-Hill's old-spelling versions in the Oxford Text Archive come closest to these originals, but a charge is still made for them, their copyright status is unclear, and they do not render the typography of the originals. See Appendix A for a list of these editions. For this reason, the editor of the SHAKSPER file-server, Hardy Cook, assisted by myself with encoding and proofing, is producing a prototype `public-domain' edition of Shakespeare's sonnets and `A Lover's Complaint' (1609). This edition records the fonts, including ligatures, of the original quarto and declines to introduce emendations, even of probable typos. We have encoded only non-interpretive features of the text such as signature, catchword, running-title, indentation, forme, sonnet number, rhyming scheme, etc. in both COCOA and SGML tagging syntax. We have not collated a variety of copies of the 1609 edition but rather just two quartos at the Folger Shakespeare Library, one as sold by Aspley and the other by Wright. Version 1.0 of `Shake- speares Sonnets' (1609) will be distributed from SHAKSPER and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at the University of Toronto. Anyone may copy, use, alter or store this public-domain edition anywhere in the world. The only restriction is that it be not sold commercially. The COCOA- and SGML-encoded files are being made available with some ancillary files: word-frequency lists (alphabetical, reverse alphabetical and descending frequency), tables of repeated phrases and of node-collocate pairs (with associational z-score), type-token statistics for word-and-letter frequency and length, and finally an interpretive dictionary of all word-forms that includes part-of-speech, lemmatized form, and normalized form. These ancillary files have been generated by the TACT system. With TACT, it is possible to obtain other displays with the COCOA-tagged version, as well as to tag words in the text by part-of-speech indicator, lemma and normalized form so as to produce other versions of the text for text analysis, for student editions, etc. 2. What Electronic Shakespeares are there? . . . 3. Why not to Trust Electronic Shakespeares . . . 4. Why Tag? and How? . . . 5. Conclusion A series of Shakespeare editions conceived along these lines should assist in the study of the language of Early Modern English by recording accurately the orthography, vocabulary and syntax of Shakespeare's works from the 1590s to the mid-17th century. This lexical database would contribute to the history of the language, specifically in light of the plans of Oxford University Press to issue a third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary within the next two decades. Each generation will make its own contribution to the study of Shakespeare. A carefully-prepared, conservative electronic series of texts, which is by no means an undoable task -- consider the work of Ted Brunner in his Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, or the astonishing Full-Text English Poetry Database from Chadwyck-Healey -- will provide a uniform foundation for new research, some of it hard to imagine at this time. I hope that the prototype electronic edition of the Shakespeare's sonnets and `Lover's Complaint' will be rigorously assessed by textual scholars of Shakespeare, because, like any electronic text, it will be `alive,' capable of being revised with relative ease, as long as the Internet or its successor networks are in place. Because corrections and additional encoding information may be added to an electronic text incrementally, and everyone contributing an improvement to the text is recorded in the TEI `history' of the file, these editions would increase in authority over the years. Hardy Cook will be undertaking further editions of Shakespeare's poems. We hope that other scholars will join us in this enjoyable, useful project. Appendix A. Draft List of Electronic Editions of Works by or Ascribed to Shakespeare Appendix B. Six Electronic Editions of Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-2: A Comparison
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 10. Wednesday, 6 January 1993. (1) From: Thomas G. Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 93 12:46:23 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 4.0007 Q: *Two Gentlemen of Verona* (2) From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, January 6, 1993 Subj: RSC *Two Gentlemen* (3) From: Jay L Halio <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 1993 13:51:23 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 4.0007 Q: *Two Gentlemen of Verona* (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Thomas G. Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 93 12:46:23 -0500 Subject: 4.0007 Q: *Two Gentlemen of Verona* Comment: Re: SHK 4.0007 Q: *Two Gentlemen of Verona* >Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 7. Wednesday, 6 January 1993. > >From: Adrian Kiernander <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > >Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 1993 12:54:09 +1300 >Subject: TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA > >I am curently directing a production of _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ >outdoors in Wellington, New Zealand (which to anybody who knows the climate >in Wellington might seem foolhardy, but this is the 11th consecutive annual >production and the weather hasn't been too much of a problem so far). I'd >be interested in hearing any ideas anyone has on the play, and any >references to any little-known published material would also be helpful. >Jonathan Goldberg's work in _Voice Terminal Echo_ has been useful to us so >far. I dont know if this really counts as "little known," but you might want to look at the Appendix to Robert Weimann's "Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater" which has some useful remarks on Launce and his relation to the audience. Good luck with the weather. -- 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. ) (2)--------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, January 6, 1993 Subject: RSC *Two Gentlemen* Robert Smallwood reviews David Thacker's "irresistible production" of *The Two Gentlemen of Verona* for the RSC at the Swan Theatre in the Fall 1992 *SQ* (43.4: 350-353). Smallwood maintains that "Setting the play in the 1930s, with an eight-piece band and singer upstage throughout the performance, Tacker achieved what seemed to me a legitimate and revealing relationship between social and verbal elegance and moral shallowness of the play's characters, and the same qualities in his chosen period." Smallwood thoroughly approved of Thacker's treatment as his concluding remarks reveal: In the silence that followed his [Proteus's] quiet and deliberate speech -- "I do as truly suffer / As e'er I did commit" -- one was aware of Sylvia looking very hard at Valentine, willing him to accept this apology; after that moment of understanding between them she moved across to the kneeling Proteus and put her arm round his shoulder, the first to forgive him. The notorious "All that was mine in Sylvia I give thee" thus came to mean something like "the mutual love and trust between Sylvia and me is something in which you can now share," and even as we were taking this in, Julia collapsed and we were into the mechanical unwinding of the plot that concludes the play. It was a daring and in many ways brilliant solution to what has so often been regarded, on the page, as an intractable problem; from seeming to many readers merely a property, a chattel, in the scene, the silent Sylvia was made its motor, and comic form was thus preserved. One could argue, of course, that from the character being the chattel of the dramatist's chauvinist vision the actress had become chattel of the director's sentimental invention, but that would be another essay. The scene made sense as directed, and Shakespeare's so- called failure, his apprentice work, his unplayable flop, became the hit of the season. I hope this helps. Hardy M. CookThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jay L Halio <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 1993 13:51:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: 4.0007 Q: *Two Gentlemen of Verona* Comment: Re: SHK 4.0007 Q: *Two Gentlemen of Verona* I saw the RSC performance at the Swan a couple of years ago (if that is the one referred to as a "Brideshead Revisited" setting), and it worked fine with torch songs sung between each act! See reviews and especially Tom Clayton's excellent analysis of the ending in *Shakespeare Bulletin* last year. Jay Halio
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 9. Wednesday, 6 January 1993. (1) From: Peter Scott <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 06 Jan 1993 06:09:16 -0600 (CST) Subj: Re: SHK 4.0006 SHAKSPER LOGS on Gopher (2) From: Peter Scott <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 06 Jan 1993 06:18:53 -0600 (CST) Subj: Complete Shakespeare on Gopher at "World" Public Access Unix (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Scott <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 06 Jan 1993 06:09:16 -0600 (CST) Subject: 4.0006 SHAKSPER LOGS on Gopher Comment: Re: SHK 4.0006 SHAKSPER LOGS on Gopher >The SHAKSPER logs are now available on Gopher, which offers an alternative >to ordering logs from LISTSERV. I would like to thank SHAKSPERean Ann >Miller, who suggested the idea to me, and Steve Younker, the LISTSERV >Manager at the University of Toronto, who mounted the logs on Gopher. > >If you do not know how to use Gopher, contact your Academic Computing >Service for details. A quicker way to get to the Toronto gopher is to use your gopher client (if, of course, one is installed on your system). At your system prompt type: gopher vm.utcs.utoronto.ca 70 This will take you directly to Toronto's gopher. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Scott <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 06 Jan 1993 06:18:53 -0600 (CST) Subject: Complete Shakespeare on Gopher at "World" Public Access Unix To access the Complete Works of Shakespeare on the Online Book Initiative at std.com, point your gopher client to: world.std.com 70 1. Information About The World Public Access UNIX/ 2. OBI The Online Book Initiative/ 3. Book Sellers/ 4. Electronic Frontier Foundation/ 5. FTP/ 6. Libraries/ 7. News/ 8. Other Gopher and Information Servers/ 9. Phone Books/ 10. Sun Managers/ 11. University of Minnesota Gopher Server/ Select item 2 OBI The Online Book Initiative 1. About The Online Book Initiative. 2. The OBI FAQ. 3. About The OBI Mailing Lists. 4. The Online Books/ Select item 4. Then select Shakespeare (currently item 115) Shakespeare 1. Comedies/ 2. Glossary/ 3. Histories/ 4. Shakespeare.complete. 5. Tragedies/
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 8. Wednesday, 6 January 1993. (1) From: Vint Cerf <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 93 00:23 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 4.0004 R: Jacobi Hamlet; Q: Burton Hamlet (2) From: Vint Cerf <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 93 05:12 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 4.0004 R: Jacobi Hamlet; Q: Burton Hamlet (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Vint Cerf <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 93 00:23 GMT Subject: 4.0004 R: Jacobi Hamlet; Q: Burton Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 4.0004 R: Jacobi Hamlet; Q: Burton Hamlet Leo, If you discover any extant copies of the Burton Hamlet video, please let me know. This is a prime candidate for closed captioning if we can identify the copyright holder. Many thanks, Vint Cerf (2)--------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Vint Cerf <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 6 Jan 93 05:12 GMT Subject: 4.0004 R: Jacobi Hamlet; Q: Burton Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 4.0004 R: Jacobi Hamlet; Q: Burton Hamlet Leo, From the book: Shakespeare on Screen by Kenneth S. Rothwell and Annabelle Henkin Melzer, Neal-Schuman Publishers, 23 Leonard St., NY, NY 10013 page 70 117. Hamlet USA, 1964 Recorded at Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York City, June 30/July 1, 1964. Directed by John Gielgud. Hamlet played by Richard Burton. Publisher: Classic Cinemas Copy location: Library of Congress, Motion Picture Division Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC Restrictions: Archival use