March
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0258. Thursday, 30 March 1995. From: Sally Greene <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 22:34:28 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Woolf & Renaissance: Call for Essays *Virginia Woolf: Renaissance Woman* As a follow-up to a special session on Virginia Woolf and the Renaissance at the 1994 Modern Language Association conference, I am editing a collection of essays on Woolf and any aspect of the Renaissance, English or Continental. That all three MLA panelists are primarily Renaissance scholars reflects the fact that Woolf studies have expanded beyond twentieth-century British and American specialization. To complete the collection, I am searching for the best of the new work being done in this emerging area. Send detailed abstracts or completed essays to me by September 15, 1995, together with a brief biography emphasizing relevant work. If you'd like to chat about the project before then, please do so!This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Sally Greene Department of English CB 3520 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599-3520
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0257. Thursday, 30 March 1995. (1) From: Christine Mack Gordon <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 95 09:55:13 -0500 Subj: Shakespeare & Co Training (2) From: Pawel Rutkowski <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 26 Mar 1995 23:16:51 +0200 Subj: Devil (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Christine Mack Gordon <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 95 09:55:13 -0500 Subject: Shakespeare & Co Training Dear fellow SHAKSPEReans: I'm going to be a participant in Shakespeare & Company's month-long intensive training program for theater professionals this May-June. Despite the fact that I haven't done any theater work since high school (except a bit of dramaturgy), my statement was persuasive enough to the director of training that he called to talk with me and admitted me on the basis of our conversation. I just wondered if any of you have participated in this program. It's _very_ intense: 6 days a week, 13 hours a day, and covers multiple aspects of text analysis, perfomance (voice, movement, stage combat, dance, etc.), the place of theater in the contemporary world, and on. I'm very excited about going, but would love to hear from anyone who has worked with this group in a training program like this or any of their other programs. Post to me directly (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) unless you think the information would be of interest to the rest of the list. Many thanks, Chris Gordon University of Minnesota (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Pawel Rutkowski <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 26 Mar 1995 23:16:51 +0200 Subject: Devil [SHAKSPEReans, Requests like the one below arrive every now and again. If anyone feels so moved as to respond, please do so directly to Pawel Rutkowski at <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >. --HMC] Dear Dr. Cook, I am currently writing my M.A. thesis on "The Devil's Metamorphosis in English Renaissance Drama". My work is well under way, but I thought that perhaps you might have some interesting comments or suggestions concerning the topic in general or a good choice of reading materials. The thesis is, among other things, concerned with changing attitudes towards the Devil (or rather Satan) himself; from Satan feared to Satan admired and, eventually, ridiculed. I will be grateful for any help you can give. Best regards, Pawel Rutkowski.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0256. Thursday, 30 March 1995. (1) From: Don Foster <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 08:47:11 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Re: Blacks in London (2) From: Frances Helphinstine <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 95 14:48:35 EST Subj: Re: SHK 6.0246 Re: Reading Clues in the Verse (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Don Foster <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 08:47:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Blacks in London A follow-up to the recent discussion of blacks in London: My Vassar colleague, Gretchen Gerzina, has written a book not to be missed. *Black England* will be published this September in the UK by John Murray Publishers. *Black London* (same book, re-titled) will be published by Rutgers University Press about Feb. 1996, with a paperback edition in '97. For inquiries contact Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina Vassar College, Maildrop 466 Poughkeepsie, NY 12601This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Don Foster (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Frances Helphinstine <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 95 14:48:35 EST Subject: 6.0246 Re: Reading Clues in the Verse Comment: Re: SHK 6.0246 Re: Reading Clues in the Verse 30 Mar. l995 Last Thursday, at the Shakespeare Association of America, in Chicago, at the ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA rehearsal demonstration, the director says that caesura ends speed up the movement to the next statement in contrast to emphatic pause for end of line closure. Fran Helphinstine
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0255. Thursday, 30 March 1995. (1) From: Scott Shepherd <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 00:29:05 -0500 Subj: Killing Duncan (2) From: Don Foster <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 09:17:18 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Re: Killing Duncan (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Scott Shepherd <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 00:29:05 -0500 Subject: Killing Duncan Who said anything about a morality play? Don Foster has pitted himself against the "conscience" interpretation, which is fine, but he will have to admit I never mentioned it. I agree! Macbeth's cosmic predicament and his attitude about it comprise a manifest paramount forefront concern of the play. Now let's concentrate on the actual contention: in the richly metaphysical speech that includes and follows the dagger hallucination, isn't it true that Macbeth is working up his courage for the looming event, and isn't it true that he does it by attributing responsibility to anything at hand, in fact the universe itself? How does that fit into a theory that says the universe being responsible is exactly what Macbeth is afraid of? And what do we do with these observations: that he explicitly invokes the cosmos to assist him ("stars hide your fires" "thou sure and firm-set earth hear not my steps" et al); that he eventually abandons his human accomplice in favor of supernatural alliance; and that he believes and hopes his life is charmed until his last seconds onstage? What Foster says (with a nod to Kenneth Burke) is true: >...murder...is a crime that...dares the metaphysical order to assert itself but this dare takes a different (less willful) shape in a man who thinks the metaphysical order is on his side. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Don Foster <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 09:17:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Killing Duncan A quick p.s. to my last posting on *Macbeth* (which was a rejoinder to Scott Shepherd): I seem there to imply that Scott's reading of *Macbeth* represents "reductive thinking" (Sorry, Scott!). Those who have read Scott's work know that his work is richly nuanced. It is not Scott's remarks, but a whole tradition of oppositional thinking re: *Macbeth* that I find inadequate to account for Macbeth's layered and conflicted subjectivity. It has been tempting to read the tragedy as a simple morality play in which Lady Macbeth plays the evil angel and Macbeth's Christian conscience the good angel, struggling for his soul. Don Foster
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0254. Thursday, 30 March 1995. (1) From: <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 11:38:56 +0100 (BST) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0251 Re: Early Modern Subjectivity (2) From: Michael Friedman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 19:18:04 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0251 Re: Early Modern Subjectivity (3) From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, March 30, 1995 Subj: Early Modern Subjectivity (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 11:38:56 +0100 (BST) Subject: 6.0251 Re: Early Modern Subjectivity Comment: Re: SHK 6.0251 Re: Early Modern Subjectivity Wes Folkerth recommends Jonathan Dollimore's _Radical Tragedy_ on early modern subjectivity. Dollimore's anti-essentialist reading of the period now seems to be widely accepted as axiomatic. Wes may be interested in a forthcoming article by Tom McAlindon challenging Dollimore's evidence and assumptions ('Cultural Materialism and the Ethics of Reading: or, the Radicalizing of Jacobean Tragedy', _MLR_, 90 (1995), Part IV (October). Dollimore's evidence is also discussed in my own _Elizabethan Mythologies_, Cambridge University Press, 1994 (Introduction, chap 5 and conclusion). (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Friedman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Mar 1995 19:18:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: 6.0251 Re: Early Modern Subjectivity Comment: Re: SHK 6.0251 Re: Early Modern Subjectivity Bill, Having been honored to be asked by you at the SAA about the concept of subjectivity and not having done a very good job of answering, I'll follow up by pointing you towards Alan Sinfield's chapter entitled "When Is a Character Not a Character? Desdemona, Olivia, Lady Macbeth, and Subjectivity" in his *Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading*. I just finished reading it again and found that it cleared up the issue very effectively for me. Michael Friedman University of Scranton (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, March 30, 1995 Subject: Early Modern Subjectivity Making no claims whatsoever to expertise on this topic, nevertheless, whenever I think of the issue of Early Modern Subjectivity, I recall one of the most interesting cultural exchanges of my life. About twenty years ago, between one of my various incarnations as a graduate student, I had the privilege of tutoring a visiting Japanese scientist in English. She was born in the late thirties, being eight or nine during the American occupation after the war. She was a professor at the University of Tokyo and a leading expert in a particular form of liver cancer endemic to Japan, yet she was thoroughly traditional: I learned that she husband did not address her by her first name and that a "bad" wife leaves tea leaves in the sink drain. However, what struck me the most from our conversations was our completely different notions of personal autonomy -- subjectivity if you will. She was intrigued that I would see a psychiatrist. No, not intrigued -- she apparently had no concept of my need to devote such attention to myself. In turn, I learned about her deep, abiding sense of duty to her family, her society, her group identity. These conversations have made a lifelong impression on me. I learned first hand that my -- and by extention my culture's -- sense of self was only one of many ways of perceiving one's self and one's relations to others. There were alternatives to my childhood images of John Wayne sitting on a split rail fence and smoking a Camel cigarette, my emblem for "western" individualism. The developing of this "western" sense of self constitutes part of my understanding of what is meant by the development Early Modern Subjectivity, the changing, substituting, transforming one concept of self with another.