July
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 442. Wednesday, 21 July 1993. (1) From: Fran Teague <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 93 09:26:54 EDT Subj: Re: SHK 4.0438 Boys Playing Women (2) From: Timothy Bowden <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 93 08:55:17 PST Subj: Re: SHK 4.0438 Boys Playing Women (3) From: Kay Stockholder <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 93 12:19:44 PDT Subj: SHK 4.0438 Boys Playing Women (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Fran Teague <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 93 09:26:54 EDT Subject: 4.0438 Boys Playing Women Comment: Re: SHK 4.0438 Boys Playing Women At the Shakespeare Association meeting in Kansas City, Bruce Smith presented a very interesting paper on this very subject of voices, gender, and age. As for the age of the boys, I believe that while a few of the boy actors were 12 or 13, the great majority of them were in their late teens and early twenties. The books by Harold Hillebrand and Michael Shapiro would be useful here. Re Cardenio again, a student sends me note that Hamilton will publish his "edition" of Cardenio with Glenbridge Publishing Ltd. of Lakewood, Colorado. And re the foreign languages, I've always found it interesting that in H5 the Frenchmen speak English and the Frenchwomen speak French. (In the current Georgia Shakespeare Festival production, the Katherine-Alice scenes are really wonderful, better than other parts of production. The Shrew they're doing is astonishing and worth a trip to Atlanta.) (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Timothy Bowden <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 93 08:55:17 PST Subject: 4.0438 Boys Playing Women Comment: Re: SHK 4.0438 Boys Playing Women I have to confess a bit of perplexity of my own when I try to imagine the orientation of an audience to any drama wherein the greatest love scenes in the language are played out by a man to a young boy. I recall also the discomfiture of the various profs who attempt to explain away the dynamics of the finest love poetry in English written from an aging poet to his young lord. Begs the question, I suppose; was the actual, rather than the mock, gender makeup onstage a part of the emotional involvement of the audience? I'm assuming somewhere this point has been taken up by the scholars, but don't know precisely where... =========================================================This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (Timothy Bowden) uunet!scruz.ucsc.edu!clovis.felton.ca.us!tcbowden Clovis in Felton, CA ========================================================= (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kay Stockholder <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 93 12:19:44 PDT Subject: Boys Playing Women Comment: SHK 4.0438 Boys Playing Women Since the womanliness of female characters in the comedies is called to audience attention by the text, I would suppose that Shakespeare would expect his boy actors to to convey a feminine impression even when dressed as boys. In these plays I think that the boy dressed as girl who plays a boy does deliberately flirt with the audience awareness of the male actor and play on the conssequent complextity of gender relationships. I don't think that this is so in the tragedies, where nothing in the text calls attention to the fact that the woman are played by boys. To suppose that the fact of boy actors is always relevant to the significance of the play rests on the assumptions of cultural materialism. That is, it assumes that the material reality must have signiicant reverberation in literary works, and that the imagination cannot function independently. I think that this is a mistaken view.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 441. Wednesday, 21 July 1993. From: James Harner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 1993 13:37:29 -0500 (CDT) Subject: 4.0439 Q: Shakespeare's Knowledge of Languages Comment: RE: SHK 4.0439 Q: Shakespeare's Knowledge of Languages Try George Watson, "Shakespeare and the Norman Conquest: English in the Elizabethan Theatre," +Virginia Quarterly Review+ 66 (1990): 613-28. Jim Harner
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 440. Wednesday, 21 July 1993. From: Mary Jane Miller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 93 09:12:22 -0400 Subject: Reply to Film and Videotape Tad Davis questioned the differences in film and video tape -- what follows, Tad, is a quite technical answer of potential interest to the Conference. Tape, until very recently, was characterized by bright flat lighting, fewer colour gradations and was shot the multiple camera technique (several cameras simultaneously). Film has been much more sensitive to lower levels of light and has thousands more colour shades and is shot by the master shot/reverse shot technique (single camera, reshot from many angles, etc). With the new tape technology, the two are converging. Re radio: Each acoustic space has its own sound ambiance which your ear detects and which a mike recording "wild sound" picks up. Sound mixes for movies may involve 16 or more separate sound tracks all overlayed. Radio plays are seldom that elaborate, although superb radio plays like those of Pinter, Beckett and Cooper use music sound effects and silence itself in ways impossible to an experience overlaid with theatricals, filmed or taped images. Note that with the new technology, most TV post production, and archiving is done with digital tape and the master for broadcast is on tape, even if the original was filmed, but this is quite a recent development. P.S. Does anyone remember when Peter Brook compared the clumsiness of film imaging to the overlays and disolves of a line of Shakesperian dialogue. I can't find the article in my files anywhere. Mary Jane Miller Dept. of Film Studies, Dramatic and Visual Arts Brock University St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. L2S 3A1 Phone (416) 688 5550, ext 3584, FAX (416) 682 9020, e-mailThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 439. Tuesday, 20 July 1993. From: Zip Kellogg <ZKELLOGG@PORTLAND> Date: Monday, 19 Jul 93 16:57:45 EDT Subject: Shak's use of foreign languages Can anyone direct me to a book chapter, article, or similar item in which Shakespeare's knowledge and use of foreign languages is discussed? Thanks for any assistance. Zip Kellogg, U. of Southern Me.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 438. Tuesday, 20 July 1993. From: Jie Gao <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 20 Jul 93 15:20:21 EST Subject: 4.0436 Re: Boys Playing Women Comment: Re: SHK 4.0436 Re: Boys Playing Women >Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 4, No. 436. Monday, 19 July 1993. > >From: Phyllis Rackin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > >Date: Sunday, 18 Jul 1993 21:52:55 +22306256 (EST) >Subject: Re: Boys Playing Women > >> When boy actors played the parts of women, did they use their natural voices >> or did they act feminine voices? Any info on this is appreciated. > >How would a boy's "natural" voice differ from a woman's? Then it must have been very young boys that the companies hired. I am still trying to imagine what effects a significant discrepancy in the ages of the actors (as men and women) would bring to the performance, and how would that affect the audience's gender perception. In Chinese Qun-qu, the cast is always all-female by default; actresses playing men's parts try to feign male voices to the degree of clear gender distinction. Of course costumes also help in this highly symbolic drama. But when we consider boy playing woman playing man in Shakespeare, we would expect the actor to be distinctively manly or womanly (not just in costumes) as the occasion requires? Jie Gao Australian National University