July
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0596. Monday, 31 July 1995. From: Fiona C. Quick <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 31 Jul 95 02:08:25 CST Subject: Re: Automobile ad with the Bard It is *not* my intention to raise any debate regarding authorship, but as an advertising student, I found the recent campaign by an American car company intruiging. The advertisment begins with the question (this is not a direct transcription, but accurate in concept) "How open minded are you?" and flashes the litho of Bill and then asks "Would you consider that all the plays were not written by him?" The ad goes on to describe the car company and features of the car. I found it interesting that, although the authorship topic has previously been discussed in the mainstream, bringing it into advertising (if past cultural influences of advertising are any indication) certainly has implications for future discussion within American society. Again, this is simply an observation, and *not* an invitation to discuss authorship, but I would be interested to discuss *other* uses of the Bard and his likeness within the realm of advertising and it's possible cultural influence. Fiona C. Quick University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0595. Monday, 31 July 1995. From: Lisa Broome <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 18:38:05 CST6CDT Subject: Talbot's size in 1 Henry VI Hello to everyone; this is my first message to the SHAKESPER list. I'm interested in Talbot's appearance in productions of 1 Henry VI, particularly in regards to Act Two, scene 3. I've only seen the BBC version, in which Talbot is average in physical stature. Are there any performances which include a short or diminutive Talbot? I ask in order to better understand the Countess of Auvergne's repeated references to his appearance. Are her comments simply intended to anger or challenge Talbot, or is there a better way of reading/seeing this scene? If the original actor playing Talbot (forgive me, I haven't done my homework on the earliest production) _was_ short, it might explain some of the scene. Does Talbot have a (proto) "Napoleon complex" in his daring approach to the many battles of 1 Henry VI? Any discussion of this play, or of the trilogy, would be welcomed, as I am currently reading them with a reading group here in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Thanks, Lisa Broome
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0594. Monday, 31 July 1995. (1) From: Paul Nelsen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 10:36:12 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 6.0590 Qs: Playing Shakespeare Video (2) From: Joanne Whalen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 19:21:02 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 6.0590 Qs: Playing Shakespeare Videos (3) From: William H DeRoche <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 21:36:00 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0590; TV Shakespeare Series (4) From: Edward Friedlander <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 16:52:33 CST Subj: Shakespeare as Cultural Construct (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Paul Nelsen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 10:36:12 -0500 Subject: 6.0590 Qs: Playing Shakespeare Video Comment: Re: SHK 6.0590 Qs: Playing Shakespeare Video John Barton's PLAYING SHAKESPEARE series may be purchased in standard VHS format from Films for the Humanities, Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 08540 ( they have a toll free phone number as well but I do not have it at hand). Each of the eleven tapes in the series features insightful moments that demonstrate how actors interrogate and interpret Shakespearean text, dramtic moment, and character. Barton moderates the proceedings with intelligence and cuddly charm. My students have found the tapes very engaging. Regrettably, however, Films for the Humanities commands a daunting price for these tapes. The cost really does have to be rationalized as an "investment." Paul Nelsen Marlboro College (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Joanne Whalen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 19:21:02 -0400 Subject: 6.0590 Qs: Playing Shakespeare Videos Comment: Re: SHK 6.0590 Qs: Playing Shakespeare Videos The latest brochure from *Films for the Humanities and Sciences* (1-800-257-5126, PO Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 08543-2053) lists the entire Barton series--11 tapes--@ $89.95 per tape or $939 for the entire series. (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: William H DeRoche <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 21:36:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: 6.0590; TV Shakespeare Series Comment: Re: SHK 6.0590; TV Shakespeare Series I have a paperback "William Shakespeare" by John Mortimer, published in 1977. On the back it said "John Mortimer's witty, bawdy, irreverent look at the life Shakespeare might have led while he was writing his plays - now dramatised in a dazzling six part ATV series starring Tim Curry as William Shakespeare and co-starring Ian McShane as Christopher Marlowe ... Jane Spencer-Turner as the Dark Lady". Hope this helps. Bill DeRoche. (4)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Edward Friedlander <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 16:52:33 CST Subject: Shakespeare as Cultural Construct I have been lurking for the past month and enjoying what I've read. It's great to have an easy vehicle to remain in touch with what was once my primary focus. I'm a pathologist in Kansas City, with a focus on autopsy and classroom teaching. I graduated magna from the Honors program in English Lit at Brown in 1973. As a handicapped boy who liked to read, Shakespeare in particular had been the primary interpreter, for me, of human experience. And -- without apology to my postmodernist colleagues -- there IS a common human experience, across languages and cultures. Those of us in the sciences laugh (or cry) at our counterparts in the humanities who would make a political word-game of the experimental method -- the method of science which has brought us the unparalleled good health we enjoy, as well as a host of new problems. If Jacques Derrida is ever wrongfully injured by a physician, I will be happy to be his expert witness and present the best scientific case to bring him justice -- even if neither of us can really explain the relationship between words and the world of nature. But you don't have to be a scientist to be troubled by the "cultural relativism" ideology. Just look at the human heart. The more I hear about "multiculturalism", the more I see what people want, across cultural lines. People want to be healthy, and adequately fed. People want to be loved, and to be loved back. People seek meaning -- even if it means believing lies to make them feel intellectually and morally superior. People seek an answer for death, and Shakespeare's Hamlet is the first man to say on stage what most people, before and after, have felt in our hearts -- confused, but with a sense of.... After this, people want economic opportunity and security, personal dignity and self-determination, and so forth. Anybody with a heart realizes all this. Sure, there's politics in Shakespeare's plays, and anytime people start talking about "values". But worldwide, over 400 years, human beings in every condition have found The Bard to be the greatest expositor of what happens inside most people. I'm no philosopher or epistemologist, but I'm not blind, either. I've heard of the people who claim that math and physics are culture and gender-biased, and I'm comforted by having no reason to believe they, themselves, know any math or physics. I'd argue that anyone who finds Shakespeare to be a mere cultural construct knows nothing of the human heart as it really is Ed Friedlander, M.D.This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0593. Monday, 31 July 1995. (1) From: Robert Appelbaum <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 29 Jul 1995 12:50:01 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0589 Re: "To be or not to be" Speech (2) From: Paul Lord <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 29 Jul 1995 12:57:50 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: To be or not to be (3) From: W.L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 21:58:48 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 6.0589 Re: "To be or not to be" Speech (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Robert Appelbaum <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 29 Jul 1995 12:50:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 6.0589 Re: "To be or not to be" Speech Comment: Re: SHK 6.0589 Re: "To be or not to be" Speech In response to Sean Lawrence's post, I've noticed that a new full-length study is out on the fear of annihilation as an important motive in Elizabethan drama. I believe it's by Robert Watson. Anyone read it yet, and care to comment on it? (I know, that's cheating on my part, but what else is the 'net for?) If Hamlet is giving us a kind of post-scholastic version of *esse* perhaps this is related to the growing influence of mortalist doctrine via Calvinism? Although a previous poster gave a very convincing account of Hamlet's Roman Catholicism, I can't rid myself of the suspicion that on the person of Hamlet Shakespeare has inscribed a crossing of Roman Catholicism and Calvinism, with a few shakes of Pyrhonnism thrown in for extra body. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor.) --Robert Appelbaum English- UC Berkeley (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Paul Lord <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 29 Jul 1995 12:57:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: To be or not to be Some years ago, a good friend of mine, Scott Stevens, made the following observation about 'To be or not to be' which I must share. "Most people read it wrong. They pause after 'mind' in the first line, but that can't be right. If you pause after 'nobler,' you end up asking 'which of these is better:' 1. In the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (17 syllables) or 2. To take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them (17 syllables) It can't be coincidence; it's Shakespeare at his cleverest, contrasting two phrases of equal length, one of thought, one of action, summing up the entire play in the middle of one of the central speeches. Brilliant." I haven't heard this interpretation elsewhere; is it familiar to anyone on SHAKSPER? I don't doubt that Scott is correct; I get an intense word-geek glee imagining Shakespeare, chewing on his quill, trying to make the syllable counts match. Knowing all the while, of course, that nobody was ever going to count them during the performance, but putting it in there anyway, just because. paul (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W.L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 30 Jul 1995 21:58:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: 6.0589 Re: "To be or not to be" Speech Comment: Re: SHK 6.0589 Re: "To be or not to be" Speech The question is not existential. To be or not to be WHAT? We are breaking in (or hearing) after the thought process has begun. I think the answer to the WHAT is found in the next line: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind" to suffer or to fight. To be or not to be [noble] that is the question. And which is the nobler stance to take? Suffering or fighting? What think ye? Yours, Bill Godshalk
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 6, No. 0592. Monday, 31 July 1995. From: Marty Hyatt <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 29 Jul 1995 14:05:48 -0400 Subject: (fwd) 2nd CFV: humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare LAST CALL FOR VOTES (of 2) unmoderated group humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare *************************************************************************** * NOTE: This is the second CFV of two. If you have already voted and * * received an acknowledgement of your vote in email from the * * votetaker, you *DO* *NOT* need to vote again. If you have any * * questions, ask the votetaker, Michael Handler <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > * *************************************************************************** Newsgroups line: humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare Poetry, plays, history of Shakespeare. Votes must be received by 23:59:59 UTC, 2 Aug 1995. This vote is being conducted by a neutral third party. For voting questions only contact Michael Handler <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >. For questions about the proposed group contact Marty Hyatt <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >. RATIONALE Shakespeare has been discussed frequently in rec.arts.theatre.plays and occasionally in rec.arts.books. There is also a moderated listserv list, SHAKSPER, devoted to Shakespeare. But there is no Usenet newsgroup specifically for the discussion of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The new group humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare will be unmoderated. There are no plans to gate the new group to the listserv list. During the first discussion period, few or no objections were raised to the Charter itself. Comments focused on the group's name. As a result, the originally proposed name (humanities.literature.english.shakespeare) was modified to the present humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare, which was used for the second discussion period. During the second discussion period, there were very few comments (and all were favorable). CHARTER The unmoderated newsgroup humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare will be for discussion of: 1> the plays and poems of William Shakespeare and other English writers of the 16th and 17th centuries. 2> the life and times of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. 3> the production, staging, and acting of Shakespeare's plays, including current and past productions. 4> Shakespeare's influence and impact on subsequent literature and culture. 5> Shakespeare's authorship including his sources, allusions in his works, publication of his works, possible collaborations, and possible pseudonymity. DISTRIBUTION This Call For Votes (CFV) has been crossposted to the following newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups, news.groups, humanities.misc, rec.arts.books, rec.arts.theatre.plays After this Call For Votes (CFV) appears in <news.announce.newsgroups>, it will be sent to the following mailing list(s): *This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. HOW TO VOTE One vote counted per person, no more than one per account. Attempts at ballot box stuffing or vote fraud will not be treated lightly. ************************************************************************** *** IMPORTANT: _Addresses_ and _votes_ of all voters will be published *** *** in the final voting results list. UVV voting on Usenet is not done *** *** by secret ballot. If you don't like this, don't vote. *** ************************************************************************** Send email to: <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Just replying should work if you are not reading this on a mailing list. 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This is an automated function, so it does not matter what you say in this message. The text of the message will be discarded. IMPORTANT: If you give anyone copies of the CFV, the copies must be whole and unmodified. Distributing pre-filled in ballots or modified copies of this CFV is considered voting fraud. If this occurs on a large scale or causes voting problems or irregularities, the vote may be canceled. When in doubt, ask the votetaker. humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare Bounce List - No need to revote ------------------------------------------------------------------------------This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. -- Michael Handler <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Usenet Volunteer Votetakers (UVV) Usenet Volunteer Votetakers WWW page: <URL:http://www.amdahl.com/ext/uvv>