The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.2296  Wednesday, 29 December 1999.

[1]     From:   Clifford Stetner" <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Thursday, 23 Dec 1999 12:34:30 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.2274 Re: Henry V (and Branagh)

[2]     From:   Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Thursday, 23 Dec 1999 10:26:58 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.2281 Re: Henry V (and Branagh)

[3]     From:   Allan Blackman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Thursday, 23 Dec 1999 15:58:32 -0500
        Subj:   Art & Money


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Clifford Stetner" <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Thursday, 23 Dec 1999 12:34:30 -0500
Subject: 10.2274 Re: Henry V (and Branagh)
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.2274 Re: Henry V (and Branagh)

Judy Craig

>I have to respectfully submit that I believe Shakespeare wrote
>for other motives than money.

It may be that money was not so ignoble a motive in the age of incipient
social mobility.  It was, after all, the only alternative to birth as a
measure of social status, and as such could be taken as a God given sign
of true noblesse, one of the overriding principles of secular humanism
to be opposed to the principle of primogeniture, increasingly seen
throughout the Renaissance as a source of decay.

Incidentally, I believe that the argument against primogeniture (and by
implication, in favor of the pursuit of money) was analogized and
encoded into the ideology of the Reformation (i.e. the titled Roman
Church vs. the true noblesse of emergent Anglicanism).

Clifford

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Thursday, 23 Dec 1999 10:26:58 -0800
Subject: 10.2281 Re: Henry V (and Branagh)
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.2281 Re: Henry V (and Branagh)

Tom Reedy asks:

>And I have to respectfully submit that I believe that those who write
>for the cinema today also write for other motives than money, although
>money is certainly one.  Shakespeare was a human being, not a god, and
>therefore had mixed motives for his actions, as all humans do.

And I would respectfully submit that Judy Craig didn't suggest that
Shakespeare had no economic motivations at all, only that they weren't
exhaustive, that he might, in her words, have written "for other motives
than money."

>This
>art/money motive argument tries to force Shakespeare into the role of
>either a tin Jesus or an idiot savant, and is made by those who would
>have him a much less complicated person than any of the characters he
>created.

The inverse, of course, is represented by people who try to force
Shakespeare into being a completely economic animal, something like the
horrible writer played by Kenneth Branagh in Woody Allen's Celebrity or
perhaps a tobacco executive.  I'm not sure if this is more or less
complicated than, say, Richard III, but it strikes me as rather inhuman.

Cheers,
Se     

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