July
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0708 Thursday, 30 July 1998. From: Jonathan Hope <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 30 Jul 1998 12:44:29 +0000 (GMT) Subject: 9.0696 Re: Shakespeare's Pronunciation Comment: Re: SHK 9.0696 Re: Shakespeare's Pronunciation > I've been consulting Helge Kokeritz's Shakespeare's Pronunciation. I am > mainly interested in word forms and usage (not pronunciation) and it > seems to me the book rests on some questionable assumptions. Can anyone > tell if this book is a reliable source of information; has it been > supplanted or discredited? This, and related, questions seem to come up every now and then, so here is what Charles Barber has to say in the 'Further reading' section at the end of the chapter on 'Phonology' in his *Early Modern English* (1997, Edinburgh UP): "The standard work on English phonology in the period is Dobson (1968), a work of prodigious scholarship. Dobson demonstrates the great variety of pronunciation that existed even in St[andard] E[nglish], and also has a good deal to say about non-standard pronunciations. He attaches great importance (rightly, in my view) the evidence of the orthoepists of the period, and analyses it with great care. This kind of evidence, however, does tend to give prominence to formal and conservative styles of speech, and what Dobson presents as StE pronunciation at any given date is often a very conservative brand of it. In a subject so complex, and with evidence often susceptible to different interpretations, there are inevitable points of controversy, and Dobson's work has encountered criticisms [...references to reviews omitted...] But, despite the points of controversy, the work will undoubtedly remain for many years the indispensable handbook on the subject. Dobson's book, however, is a work for the specialist, not for the general reader: it is enormously detailed, and moreover presupposes in the reader a considerable knowledge of the phonology of Old English and Middle English. Other works in the field include Zachrisson (1913), Wyld (1923), Kokeritz (1953), and Cercignani (1981). Kokeritz's book has long been popular with students of English literature, but some of it rests on rather shaky evidence, and it should be treated with great caution." Dobson, EJ (1968) *English pronunciation 1500-1700* (2 vols, 2nd ed.:Oxford) Cercignani, F (1981) *Shakespeare's works and Elizabethan pronunciation* (Oxford) Kokeritz, H (1953) *Shakespeare's pronunciation* (Yale) Wyld (1923) *Studies in English rhymes from Surrey to Pope* Zachrisson (1913) *Pronunciation of English vowels 1400-1700* Most people will find everything they need on this subject in Barber's own chapter - reliable, and very clearly written. I've just written a chapter on Shakespeare's language for a forthcoming Blackwell's Companion to Shakespeare, and the section on phonology borrows heavily from Barber - he's the Top Man. Jonathan Hope Middlesex University
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0707 Thursday, 30 July 1998. [1] From: John Ramsay <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 98 18:44:42 EDT Subj: Re: SHK 9.0698 Re: Shakespeare and the Bible [2] From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 30 Jul 1998 14:03:42 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 9.0698 Re: Shakespeare and the Bible [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Ramsay <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 98 18:44:42 EDT Subject: 9.0698 Re: Shakespeare and the Bible Comment: Re: SHK 9.0698 Re: Shakespeare and the Bible Hi, for a radically different view of Shakespeare and the Bible see the Anthony Burgess novel "Shakespeare's Dark Lady'. In it he has Shakespeare and Ben Jonson writing the King James' Version. Is there any evidence that Shakespeare could have been a member of the translating team? John Ramsay Welland Ontario Canada [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 30 Jul 1998 14:03:42 GMT Subject: 9.0698 Re: Shakespeare and the Bible Comment: Re: SHK 9.0698 Re: Shakespeare and the Bible I know it doesn't help people who want to read work on this topic now but I thought SHAKSPERians might like to know that Steven Marx's book on *Shakespeare and the Bible* will be published by Oxford University Press in the first group of titles in a new series designed for undergraduates called Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Stanley Wells and I are the General Editors for the series.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0706 Thursday, 30 July 1998. [1] From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 10:59:46 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0700 Tempest and Faust [2] From: Stuart Manger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 21:34:47 +0100 Subj: SHK 9.0700 Tempest and Faust [3] From: Marilyn E. Bonomi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 23:17:32 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0700 Tempest and Faust [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 10:59:46 -0700 Subject: 9.0700 Tempest and Faust Comment: Re: SHK 9.0700 Tempest and Faust The parallels between Faust stories and The Tempest have been noted for some time. I seem to recall this being mentioned in the introduction to the Arden 2. By the way, in some of the German tales, the magician's familiar is named "Ariel." I think this rather destroys the schematic division between neo-Platonic 'white' magic and 'black' magic that various early historicists liked to hark on. Prospero's work is dangerous. It represents power over his adversaries, a power he has great difficulty in giving up, and which, except for the intervention of Ariel, would have been unleashed in the most vengeful way. Cheers, Sean [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stuart Manger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 21:34:47 +0100 Subject: Tempest and Faust Comment: SHK 9.0700 Tempest and Faust It has long been my own contention that at one end of the spectrum lies Marlowe's 'Faustus' and at the other Shakespeare's 'Tempest'. Both contain species of megalomaniacs -'over-reachers'- but there is of course a major difference: Faustus is allowed the privilege of exercising the staggering power he is offered and simply fritters it away, not matching early rhetoric of mastery with action. Instead, conjuring tricks, illusionist stuff, cheap and sometimes cruel jokes, rabble-rousing anti-papist knockabout - all very meretricious stuff. Until he sees Helen: the saddest moment in the play. For the first time, he is confronted by beauty. BUT it is an illusion, for this is NOT actually Helen of Troy at all that he has fallen in love with. It is closer to a typical man-fantasy renaissance bimbo, supremely beautiful maybe, but a devil merely impersonating Helen as a trick on Faustus himself to keep him form repenting. Faust allows himself to be deceived into accepting her reality. The big speech is fine, but is there not an exquisite irony that at one of the truly memorable moments in the play's poetry, Faustus is making love to an illusion? But then he drives on to self-destruction, warned, prayed for, begged and tugged towards a salvation he will not bend his will to accept. He goes to Hell, because he does not know where the brakes are, or if he does, he simply will not activate them to arrest his headlong progress. The power he wills at the start of the play rules him, and finally sweeps him away. Nietzschean will to power to destruction perhaps? Maybe that's OTT. Lots more to say, but this is an e-mail posting, not a seminar paper! And Prospero? He really has the kind of power that even Faustus would dream about: total power over the proximate elements, power over even life and death (God's privetee?), he makes beauty, he makes torture, he has servants who obey his every whim, a daughter who worships him and who is only just second to his books, AND he is unchallenged - maybe even unchallengeable within his sphere. BUT then he does have challenges, ironically of his own invitation: the Milanese / Neapolitan Wedding party are made to crash, made to come on shore, preserved and then drawn to a final showdown with the man they have collectively and individually wronged years before - a grudge that has gone on hurting and festering. But Prospero has awesome power, and is manifestly seen in the play to exercise it spectacularly - at the very edge of what the current stage machinery could encompass, one speculates. The wonderfully innocent stage direction - he claps his wings upon the table and the banquet disappears. Crumbs!! The theatre is littered with the corpses of stage managers hanging gibbering and screaming from the flies in their desperation in interpreting THAT! And that is only one such of a series of stipulated stage procedures indicating just how far the play required demonstrations of astonishment, beauty and power. But it is no hassle for Ariel. Indeed, nor is it difficult for Propsero to imagine them: he utters salvoes of such commands in the total confidence that all will be executed - even to opening graves and letting forth the spirits of the dead? BUT what does Prospero do then? He stops. Can I say that again - he STOPS. How many in history accoutered with such devastating power have ever simply put it down and walked away, satisfying himself with stern words, secret whisperings, and the gift of love and humble reconciliation? And is that not the point? Prospero demonstrates that man has the potential for limitless devastation, moral duplicity, cruelty, beauty, tyranny, fatherhood, friendship and moral virtue, and that in the end, he at least can simply see the path to destruction when Ariel has those amazing words at the start of Act 5: 'mine would, sir, were I human' So simple, but they stop Prospero in his tracks along their primrose path, turns form the Faustian way with the antidote to all the tragedies - particularly Lear - with 'The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance' - easy words, no great surprise in them, we think in the darkened theatre. BUT then the man actually turns the pious platitude into action before our eyes: he simply drops plans for a stored vengeance. He breaks his staff, buries his books certain fathoms, deeper than did ever plummet sound. Why? so no one else can ever get them. It is always said that whether we ban nuclear weapons or not, the stark truth is that we can never un-learn how to make them, we cannot disinvent them. Prospero does: he releases Ariel, he ensures that no one who follows him will ever have access to that truly universal sovereign sway and masterdom that most tragic heroes crave / boast / abuse. He apparently had the power of life and death in some form or other, but he renounces it. I cannot think of anyone in history who has done that, and been totally and indivisibly human? Certainly not in literature. So at one end, a man who destroyed himself through greed for power, and at the other, a man who finds himself by renouncing what is more than a dream, but a reality for him. He discovers that to be truly human is to renounce, not to possess. Uncomfortable lesson for the mighty? For anyone? And for kings who may have watched the play in London? Very uncheery stuff indeed, I'd say. [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Marilyn E. Bonomi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 23:17:32 -0400 Subject: 9.0700 Tempest and Faust Comment: Re: SHK 9.0700 Tempest and Faust Re Shattuck's > reading Shakespeare's<<The Tempest>> as a modified Faust play Modified in that unlike Faustus, who cannot bring himself to repent, Prospero throws away his book? Is this text offering the suggestion that Shakespeare has Prospero reject rationalism, humanism, etc. to realign himself with the medieval logocentric view of the universe? Marlowe seems to me to be deconstructing the traditional Christian view by presenting a protagonist who is trying to construct himself, having discovered what James Rhodes has called the "awful presence of God's absence" to be reason enough for the choices he makes. (And I'd argue that Faust does not repent b/c he cannot ever accept that there is a god to forgive him. Part of him never believes either in Hell OR in Heaven.) Prospero on the other hand does "repent" of his necromancy, if we are to maintain the parallel between the two plays. He abjures magic, he frees those spirits over whom he had maintained control. He takes up again the temporal roles he had rejected. Are we to read the last scene of this play as a reconciliation with the Christian divinity? As an abjuration of the hell awaiting those who seek knowledge not outlined (or ordained) in church-sanctioned texts? I'd like to see additional discussion of this topic, from the many SHAKSPERians who are far more knowledgeable than I on both Marlowe and Shakespeare (Stevie Simpkin, where are you?) Marilyn B.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0705 Thursday, 30 July 1998. [1] From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 10:51:56 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0701 Q: MND [2] From: Ed Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 14:09:52 -0500 (EST) Subj: MND [3] From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 19:06:04 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0701 Q: MND [4] From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 30 Jul 1998 11:48:25 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 9.0701 Q: MND [5] From: Fran Teague <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 30 Jul 1998 11:05:26 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0701 Q: MND [6] From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, July 30, 1998 Subj: Re: MND [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 10:51:56 -0700 Subject: 9.0701 Q: MND Comment: Re: SHK 9.0701 Q: MND > Does anybody know of a play which tackles similar subject matter as MND > which appeared around the time MND first appeared? Is it singular in > what it tackles or were there others like it? I have searched but seem > to think that the play may be on its own. Is this odd considering the > amount of repetition that occurred in the repertories of the main London > companies? > > Scott Crozier I don't know of anything similar to MND at its time, but it does seem to have spawned a series of derivatives. There's a terrible late sixteenth-century novel, in black letter in the Early Modern English books collection of microfilms, called Theseus and Titana. The author, though, seems to have borrowed almost nothing except names and location. There's also something from the mid-17th century called "Orlando, King of the Faeries", or something like that. Cheers, Sean. [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ed Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 14:09:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: MND Scott Crozier asks if there are other plays similar to MND that appeared at around the same time. John Lyly's *Gallathea* (1588?) and *Endymion, or the Man in the Moon* (1588?) and George Peele's *The Old Wive's Tale* (1591?) come to mind. They share with MND fantastic characters, romantic settings, an emphasis on madness and the forest, madness and love as similar (Peele), courtly compliments, etc. Peele, especially, seems to have been a major influence on Shakespeare's comedies and on MND in particular. The best article on Peele's *OWT* is still Gwenan Jones, "The Intention of Peele's *Old Wives Tale*,* *Aberystwyth Studies, 1925,* 79-93. --Ed Taft [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 19:06:04 -0700 Subject: 9.0701 Q: MND Comment: Re: SHK 9.0701 Q: MND "James IV", attributed to Robert Greene, written sometime in the late 1580s or early 90s, has many elements similar to those in MSND. It also has a last act that's almost identical to the last act of AYLI. Theseus and Hippolyta appear in much the same roles that they play in MSND in "Two Noble Kinsmen" attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher. Although orthodox dating puts it late, it seems clear to me from the style to be the same period as James IV. (If Fletcher was involved, it was only to modernize it.) Anyway, you might want to take a look at these two plays. Stephanie Hughes [4]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 30 Jul 1998 11:48:25 GMT Subject: 9.0701 Q: MND Comment: Re: SHK 9.0701 Q: MND Try Munday's *John a Kent and John a Cumber* which may be 1590 or 1596 (the date on the MS is unclear). [5]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Fran Teague <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 30 Jul 1998 11:05:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: 9.0701 Q: MND Comment: Re: SHK 9.0701 Q: MND There is a potential analogue to MND in Calderon's La vida es sueno (a tilde should go over that "n" but my computer is as Anglo-centric as can be). While it's tempting to believe that Sh knew the work of the Golden Age Spanish dramatists, chances are slim to none, I'm told. Fran Teague New e-mail address:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. [6]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, July 30, 1998 Subject: Re: MND *Romeo and Juliet*
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0704 Thursday, 30 July 1998. [1] From: Roy Flannagan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 12:41:11 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0702 Re: Incest [2] From: Paul S. Rhodes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 17:52:23 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0702 Re: Incest [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Roy Flannagan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 12:41:11 -0400 Subject: 9.0702 Re: Incest Comment: Re: SHK 9.0702 Re: Incest >I'm afraid we're still scarcely doing justice to the complexities posed >by Satia Testman's question. Textual evidence, indeed! Such pedantry >merely obscures the issue. I blame the parents. In fact, call me a >suspicious old sod, but the silence, nay absence of Mrs Polonius has >always struck me as deeply significant. Not that we ever got on. > >T. Hawkes I have always assumed that Ms. Polonius was bored to death by her husband. Roy Flannagan [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Paul S. Rhodes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 1998 17:52:23 -0600 Subject: 9.0702 Re: Incest Comment: Re: SHK 9.0702 Re: Incest The good Mr. Hawkes wrote: >In fact, call me a >suspicious old sod, but the silence, nay absence of Mrs Polonius has >always struck me as deeply significant. Not that we ever got on. You didn't get on? But I would think that you would be Mrs. Polonius' type. No, I could not resist. But, to the point. Following this interesting discussion of whether of not Polonius or Laertes ever got wise with Ophelia, I was reminded of a post to this list a long time ago in which the claim was made the herbs that Ophelia mentions in her mad scene constitute an abortifacient when taken together. Does anyone know if this is true? I for one think it is clear from Ophelia's dirty songs that someone knew her in the Biblical Sense. The question is who. Branagh, as we all know, thinks it was Hamlet. I think there is much more textual evidence to suggest that it was either Polonius or Laertes. I will agree that this evidence is scant but is still much more than the evidence supporting Branagh's take. Paul S. Rhodes