August
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0610. Saturday, 5 August 1995. (1) From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 4 Aug 1995 14:08:44 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0607 Re: Hamlet (2) From: Mickie Mosley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 04 Aug 95 11:52:56 pst Subj: Cardenio or The Second Handmaiden's Tragedy (3) From: J.I.Stuart <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 4 Aug 1995 17:14:04 -0600 Subj: Nick Bottom and the Mechanicals (4) From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 4 Aug 1995 21:16:29 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0604 Re: Shakespeare as Cultural Construct (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 4 Aug 1995 14:08:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 6.0607 Re: Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 6.0607 Re: Hamlet Thank you, Bill, for recommending the Levin book. I'll take a look. I would disagree with saying that "In Hamlet's Christian world, there is no non-being" but I suppose it's better to just leave the disagreement as disagreement. Cheers, Sean. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mickie Mosley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 04 Aug 95 11:52:56 pst Subject: Cardenio or The Second Handmaiden's Tragedy Folks: I received some old postings today regarding Cardenio and I am truly grateful. On one of those postings there was a statement "This play was registered by Humphrey Moseley as authored by Shakespeare and Fletcher, so you've got the best proof going that it existed and actually was written Shakespeare and Fletcher". Who is the world was Humphrey Moseley? A Registrar for the Court - a censor - who? Any information would be most appreciated. Mickie (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: J.I.Stuart <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 4 Aug 1995 17:14:04 -0600 Subject: Nick Bottom and the Mechanicals Further to your heavy metal group- you will never rival Billy and the Theatricals (Robby Greene on bass guitar, Chris Marlowe on drums (later died in a freak drinking accident) and Benny Jonson on vocals (later left to form Benny and the Cynics) If you go a bit further on you get Johny Donne and the Metaphysicals ( with wee Georgie Herbert on Hammond organ)- they had a hit with "Johny be not proud, though some have called thee..." Or what about Wee Willie Wordsworth and the Romantics, the super-group of the 19th century- ST Coleridge on synths ( he later went on to form Sammy T and the Love Reaction) Johno Keats on rhythm guitar and Thomas de Quincey on everything. However, none of them can hold a candle to the Sisters of Mercy - Emily, Charlotte and Ann. Best wishes Ian Stuart (4)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 4 Aug 1995 21:16:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: 6.0604 Re: Shakespeare as Cultural Construct Comment: Re: SHK 6.0604 Re: Shakespeare as Cultural Construct Perhaps we "think" in some kind of language, English, French, math, music, but we also do something else with our minds, probably with our right brains. While our left brain is "thinking", our right brain is doing something else, something for which we have no word, since the function of the right brain is not to label things. Perhaps "listen" is the closest we can come to what we do with our minds when we meditate, daydream, listen to music, remember the past. We share with humans of all languages this basic mental activity, and perhaps with animals as well, certainly with babies. Yet I would have to say that the language that we are taught in childhood does mold to a very great extent our thinking. Those words that cannot be found in other languages are a key to what makes our own language unique. For instance the word "sympatico" in Spanish can't really be translated as "sympathetic". It means much more than that. Sympathetic is a pallid word compared to sympatico. When a Spaniard says that someone is "sympatico" it is the highest of compliments. This little difference can be seen as symbolic of the great difference between the two cultures. Another word that shows the difference between the English culture and the Roman cultures is "home". Home has a sweet sound, like the call of a horn. It is almost "om", the Sanskrit word meaning the center of things. To say I am "at home" has a much different feeling than the French "chez moi", "by me", or "en casa" in Spanish, "in the house". It is a paradox, when we are alone we "cognate" like every other being on the planet, but when we think and try to communicate, we are forced into separate channels. That is, unless we spend a very great deal of time learning other languages.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0609. Saturday, 5 August 1995. (1) From: Ron Macdonald <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 04 Aug 1995 11:46:02 -0500 (EST) Subj: Salvini (2) From: Stephen C. Schultz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 04 Aug 95 11:39:19 EDT Subj: Re: SHK 6.0607 Re: Salvini (3) From: Julie Dubiner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 5 Aug 1995 00:44:24 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0607 Re: Salvini (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ron Macdonald <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 04 Aug 1995 11:46:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: Salvini Martin Green asks if it is possible that Tomaso Salvini acted the part of Othello in Italian. He did indeed, according to Henry James, who wrote in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for March of 1883: The famous Italian actor, Tommaso Salvini, giving us an opportunity to admire him in far too small a number of performances, has played to us under conditions very similar to those with which the actors of the last century had to struggle.... Salvini's triumph-- a very great triumph-- is therefore, like that of Garrick and Mrs. Siddons, a proof of extraordinary power.... His fellow actors were of a quality which it is a charity not to specify; unmitigated dreariness was the stamp of the whole episode, save in so far as the episode was summed up in the personality of the hero. Signor Salvini naturally played in Italian, while his comrades answered him in a language which was foreign only in that it sometimes failed to be English. It was in this manner that _Macbeth_, _Othello_, _King Lear_, were given. Signor Salvini uttered the translated text, and the rest of the company recited the original. James goes on to called such an arrangement "grotesque, unpardonable, abominable," but he adds that Salvini was "well aware of his offence, and he is equally well aware that, unpardonable as it is, he induces us to pardon it." James' views of Salvini both in Boston (the current instance) and in London may be consulted in _The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872-1901_ , ed. Allan Wade (Rutgers U. Press, 1948), pp. 168-91). --Ron Macdonald <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephen C. Schultz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 04 Aug 95 11:39:19 EDT Subject: 6.0607 Re: Salvini Comment: Re: SHK 6.0607 Re: Salvini Because acting is such an ephemeral art, there's something sort of touching about a flurry of interest in someone like Salvini, once so celebrated and now so seldom remembered. So-- Yes, Salvini played Othello (and his other roles) in Italian while the supporting actors performed in whatever was the local vernacular. This was not TOO uncommon in his time; Edwin Booth did the same. And, in light of occasional criticisms of "Stanislavsky acting" for fostering small scale and ignoring technique, it's interesting that one of Stanislavsky's two favorite actors was Salvini, lauded in his time for titanic emotional display and remembered in ours--when at all--for saying that the three requirements of an actor are "Voice, voice, and voice." (Stanislavsky's other favorite was Fyodor Chaliapin, best known for the overwhelming emotional effect of his Boris Godunov.) It would be nice if an actor who once so dominated his profession had left a souvenir in the form of a sound recording--but I don't think it's so. (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Julie Dubiner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 5 Aug 1995 00:44:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: 6.0607 Re: Salvini Comment: Re: SHK 6.0607 Re: Salvini There is documentation of Salvini's Italian and English Othello - in fact at least once in Brooklyn at the Opera House he played the Moor in Italian to Edwin Booth's English speaking Iago.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0608. Friday, 4 August 1995. From: Peter Scott <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 04 Aug 1995 06:05:55 -0600 (CST) Subject: Richard III Society, American Branch Linkname: Richard III Society, American Branch Filename: http://www.webcom.com/~blanchrd/gateway.html
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0607. Friday, 4 August 1995. (1) From: W.L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 03 Aug 1995 16:03:19 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0601 Re: Hamlet (Was "To be or not to Be") (2) From: Martin Green <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 4 Aug 1995 08:55:52 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 6.0602 Re: Salvini (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W.L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 03 Aug 1995 16:03:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: 6.0601 Re: Hamlet (Was "To be or not to Be") Comment: Re: SHK 6.0601 Re: Hamlet (Was "To be or not to Be") For Sean Lawrence: In Hamlet's Christian world, there is no non-being. Hamlet's father is dead, but he still exists. The existential world is, basically, a world without god. (I have a difficult time understanding the position of the Catholic existentialists.) In Hamlet's world, death is a transition to another state of being, where angels sing the protagonist to his rest, and where his father is still in existential torment. Thus, I see Hamlet's "2 B r 0 2 B" speech as beginning with a contemplation of nobility, and then considering the consequences of certain possibly noble actions. Harry Levin has a good analysis of this speech in THE QUESTION OF HAMLET, near the end of Chapter 2 (pp. 68ff. in the Viking paperback), which supports your position more strongly than mine! But Levin points our how the binary oppositions work in the speech. Yours, Bill Godshalk (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Martin Green <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 4 Aug 1995 08:55:52 -0400 Subject: 6.0602 Re: Salvini Comment: Re: SHK 6.0602 Re: Salvini G. L. Horton's reference to Salvini's former fame: in "The Othello of Tommaso Salvini " (1890) E. T. Mason wrote: "The aim of this book is to describe, fully and accurately, a great theatrical performance - perhaps the greatest of our time. As Shakespeare is to other dramatists, so is Salvini to other actors - etc." High praise! And I believe I read somewhere that Salvini acted the part only in Italian - is that possible? M. Green
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0606. Friday, 4 August 1995. From: Thomas G. Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 3 Aug 1995 10:16:50 -0400 Subject: August Follies: A call for musicians In a moment of Folly brought on by the August heat, a friend of mine and I are forming a Shakespeare Heavy Metal band, to be known as "Nick Bottom and the Rude Mechanicals". We are hoping to replace the long-breathed "Hey Nonny Nonnies" at the Malone Society Dance next year. Our repertoire will include our signature tune "Sleepin' with the Faerie Queene", along with such staples as "The Bee SUCKS!" (a hard-hitting number about the commercialization of the modern vacation industry), "Fancy Bread" (a blues about ill-gotten gains), "Little, Tiny Boy" (a gut-ripper about child exploitation), "Duck Dame" (about a woman with unusual erotic appetites) and "No more Ladies" (a woeful ballad). If you have any interest in joining this group, either as musician or songwriter, please reply by private email. Snug and I will reply pronto. Knavishly, Tom