February
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.0306 Tuesday, 23 February 1999. [1] From: Ron Dwelle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 12:55:05 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet [2] From: Lois Feuer <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 10:29:41 -0800 (PST) Subj: Re: SHK 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet [3] From: Francois Laroque <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 20:04:50 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ron Dwelle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 12:55:05 -0500 Subject: 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet Vince Cheng has a good book on Shakespeare and Joyce; it includes a great deal about Hamlet and Stephen. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lois Feuer <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 10:29:41 -0800 (PST) Subject: 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet May I immodestly mention my paper on "Joyce the Postmodern: Shakespeare as Character in Ulysses" forthcoming from Fairleigh Dickenson UP in *The Author as Character* edited by Paul Franssen (fellow SHAKSPER member) and Ton Hoenselaars? The standard reference on your topic would be William M. Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses, (1957), which itself was anticipated by William Peery in "The Hamlet of Stephen Dedalus," Univ. of Texas Studies in English, 31 (1952), 108-19. I would also recommend Vincent Cheng, *Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of "Finnegans Wake"* (Penn. State UP, 1984), as well as the standard works on Ulysses. Best regards, Lois Feuer California State University, Dominguez HillsThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Francois Laroque <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 20:04:50 -0600 Subject: 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 10.0295 James Joyce and Hamlet You can always look up Rene Girard's Shakespeare: Theater of Envy which includes a whole chapter on this question. I think that Helene Cixous also wrote an article about it (in the 1970's) Best of luck, Francois Laroque
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.0305 Tuesday, 23 February 1999. [1] From: M. W. McRae" <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 11:07:13 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie [2] From: Tom Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 13:51:17 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie [3] From: Ray Lischner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Feb 1999 05:58:46 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: M. W. McRae" <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 11:07:13 -0600 Subject: 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie Comment: Re: SHK 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie >In a college production I'm working with, the actor playing Touchstone >asked a really good question: what's the difference among the lie, the >lie circumstantial, and the lie direct? A quick survey of notes in >various edition (including the Variorum) discovered little help. I >welcome any efforts to explain why saying "you lie" (the fifth degree) >doesn't lead immediately to a challenge. > >And, by the way, our actor is finding Touchstone to be very funny. So >are the rest of the cast. > >Bill Kemp >(not, as far as I know, related to the actor who quit Shakespeare's >company to perform a publicity stunt). You should find Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth to be helpful. The various ways in which a gentleman could lie are one of Shapin's topics in this fascinating, richly-detailed, and provocative analysis of the connections between veracity and social status in early modern Europe. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tom Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 22 Feb 1999 13:51:17 -0500 Subject: 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie Comment: Re: SHK 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie Bill Kemp, of all people, asks us, apropos of Touchstone: >to explain why saying "you lie" (the fifth degree) >doesn't lead immediately to a challenge. The fifth degree does not actually involve saying "you lie". It says "If you were to say x, I would say 'you lie' " (The Countercheck Quarrelsome). The Lie Circumstantial, though not explicitly detailed, presumably involves some similar loophole, perhaps a change of mood ("If you say, I will") . As Touchstone himself explains, you may avoid even the Lie Direct, both parties being willing, with an "If". Romeo's attempt to evade Tybalt's insults offers one instance of this kind of avoidance behaviour. Not that it does any good, one of the parties pointedly not being willin'. [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ray Lischner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Feb 1999 05:58:46 GMT Subject: 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie Comment: Re: SHK 10.0299 Touchstone on the Lie >In a college production I'm working with, the actor playing Touchstone >asked a really good question: what's the difference among the lie, the >lie circumstantial, and the lie direct? Take a look at modern politicians. They are masters of the various levels of lying. "I never slept with that woman." "I am not a crook." Look at what they say to each other and how they say it. It's quite remarkable how closely politicians hew to Touchstone's categories. Ray Lischner (http://www.bardware.com) co-author (with John Doyle) of Shakespeare for Dummies
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.0304 Monday, 22 February 1999. From: Daniel Traister <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 21 Feb 1999 15:01:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: Thomas Kyd, *The Spanish Tragedy*, in New York Professors Jean E. Howard and Barbara H. Traister having provided them a cautiously and tepidly enthusiastic preliminary report after seeing, last weekend (February 14), Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Professors Steven Urquartowitz and Phyllis Rackin, the undersigned, and three students saw this production last night (Saturday, 20 February). The play runs only one more weekend: the one coming up (25-28 Feb, at 8 PM Thurs, Fri, Sat; 2 PM Sun). It's performed at Collective Unconscious (a Jung company), 145 Ludlow Street (two blocks east of First Avenue and about two-and-a-half blocks south of Houston Street), New York City. Tickets cost $10 if reserved in advance at 212 254 5277; an additional phone number you must call comes at the end of the long taped message you will hear. They cost $12 at the door; it's probably worth the two bucks not to have to listen to the message. Howard and Traister shared the theater last weekend with about eight others; we saw it this weekend with about fifty. (Good word-of-mouth?) There were seats available both nights (the space probably seats close to 65-70 altogether). The theater looks like a former garage or an opium den from a Sergio Leone movie; it is not well-heated; and if I remark that, in contrast to Professor Urquartowitz (see below), I was on the edge of my seat for much of the performance, that is a comment on the seats, not on the production. Come equipped. On the other hand, the chance to see so rarely-performed a play does not often come up; cautious and tepid though the enthusiasm of our informants may have been, this production seems worth recommending, even at this late date, to others in the New York area able to get to it. The price is certainly worth it. In view of current New York theatrical prices, one might even say that the production is worth every penny. Professor Urquartowitz, who recently reported here on the snooze factor at a Kabuki Shakespeare production, spent the first third of the production intently studying this phenomenon once again, and chose to absent himself from the felicities of the latter two thirds of the performance; his assessment would no doubt differ from mine. I found the production watchable, even moving, despite faults. Bel-Imperia (Jeff Bear) is played by a good actor, but he is simply too big for the role (he is a fine Revenge, however). Isabella, by contrast, worked better (Gianni Baratta). (The students remarked their interest in seeing what they have only heard about in Elizabethan theater: male actors in female roles.) Jason Kaufman, the best actor on the stage, gets offed earliest: he's Horatio. Too bad. Moses Morales opens as Don Andrea. A good actor, he has an accent that does not enhance his understandability. Jason Reynolds is a very decent Lorenzo/Viluppo. Other actors also have real virtues, even Caleb J. Sekeres (Hieronimo), although a stronger Hieronimo than he would have been desirable. Dan Nichols, directing his first stage production, must love the play: why else would he have done it? But he neither uses the constricted space of his venue imaginatively nor has a clue about how to use his actors; the production, as Professor U. noted, is static -- ALL rhetoric, no action; and the lines of the speeches are all end-stopped (whether they need to be or not). By no means an "ideal" Spanish Tragedy, this is one we've got right now. If you can get to it I don't think you'll regret it too much at all. Dan Traister Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.0303 Monday, 22 February 1999. From: Jack Heller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 21 Feb 1999 14:26:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: Early Reception of Venus and Adonis I am new to this list, so if this repeats any previous inquiry, please excuse me. In Thomas Middleton's play A Mad World, My Masters, a husband, Harebrain, forbids his wife to have a copy of Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander because, he thinks, those poems will incite her lust. So, Mistress Harebrain hides copies of these poems in her skirt (with all puns and bawdy implications intended). I am curious about other references which suggest that these poems had a particular erotic appeal to women readers, especially if such references come from early modern women writers themselves. Any suggestions? Jack HellerThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.0302 Monday, 22 February 1999. From: Richard A Burt <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 21 Feb 1999 13:05:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: High School Shakespeare I saw Jawbreakers last night. There is a brief mention of Shakespeare in an English class. The play under discussion is Macbeth, the character is Lady Macbeth. Surprisingly, three out of the four trailers also had Shakespeare references. Never Been Kissed (with Dru Barrymore playing a nerdy 24 yr old who returns to high school pretending to be 17) has a scene in an English class about As You Like It, and The Rage: Carrie II has a similar scene in which Romeo and Juliet is being discussed (shots of a girl jumping to her death from a school building are intercut with shots of the class discussion). The other trailer was for the adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew entitled Ten Things I Hate About You. It's set in high school.