The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.1827  Tuesday, 26 October 1999.

[1]     From:   Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Monday, 25 Oct 1999 13:04:15 -0700
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.1815 Re: Old Bill

[2]     From:   Judith Matthews Craig <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Monday, 25 Oct 1999 19:57:43 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.1815 Re: Old Bill


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Monday, 25 Oct 1999 13:04:15 -0700
Subject: 10.1815 Re: Old Bill
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.1815 Re: Old Bill

Terence Hawkes writes:

>His visit raises the much more complex question of the social and
>political use to which both plays and Bard are currently put in
>Britain.  The events indicated a clear opposition between dissidence on
>the one hand (from which it was felt that  Mr. Jiang Zemin should
>shielded by vigorous police action)  and non-dissidence on the other (to
>which it was assumed he could he could be safely exposed by a visit to
>the new Globe Theatre).

I'm wondering how much these assumptions proved to be correct.  After
all, a number of people commented on the irony of showing Julius Caesar,
and there were, a correspondent to this list informs us, protests at the
Globe.

Could we see other things to which Mr. Zemin was subjected on his
travels in a similar light?  He had lunch with Chirac, so is a French
dining room assumed to be an anti-dissident setting?  What about a TGV?
And of course he visited my university campus, where protesters were
pepper-strayed by the mounted police.  Were Canadian universities, like
the Globe, incorrectly assumed to be non-dissident settings?

I suppose we could say that any setting ceases to be a locus of
dissidence if it's heavily secured.  Both the French presidential dining
room and the Globe qualify, in which case, we're no longer discussing
the perception of Shakespeare as dissident or anti-dissident, any more
than we're discussing the perception of Roquefort as dissident or
anti-dissident.  The readiness is all.

Cheers,
Se     

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