July
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.1351 Friday, 30 July 1999. From: Steve Urkowitz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 29 Jul 1999 22:44:08 EDT Subject: 10.1326 Dating and Revision Comment: Re: SHK 10.1326 Dating and Revision Some bleary-eyed suggestions, smarting in our sweaty heat wave: Jean Brink asks: >Could I get some recommendations on the most important studies updating >Taylor and Wells' Textual Companion on the charts used to establish a >chronology of the plays? On dating, try Don Foster's slouching-towards-completion work in Shakespeare Newsletter and the material he has on file here in the SHAXPERE archives. Foster, Donald W. "SHAXICON 1995." Shakespeare Newsletter 45 (1995): 28, 30, 32. >Revision seems to be an increasingly popular idea. Has anyone tried to >sort out or draw distinctions between authorial revision and the >interventions likely to have been made by compositors who wanted to >impose the style of a particular printing house? Here one must stumble through the foggy mists of bibliographic studies. Moxon's guide or advice to printers (later in the 17th century) gives an idea of what styling changes were expected. They're not much like what authors do. A way (I think) to go about sampling the differences between authorial and compositorial changes would be to work through alternative texts of the Ben Jonson plays that we know he revised, and then look at later editions of those texts set in another printing house. When I was working through the LEAR texts I clocked the changes made by the compositors when they set the 1619 second Quarto from the 1608 First. B-o-r-i-n-g. Sort of thing that made "textual studies" synonymous with dietary bran. Necessary but not amenable to normal discourse. >Has anyone responded to Prof. Maguire in defense of memorial >reconstruction? Kathy Irace's work tries to support the memorial reconstruction stories, but I think she's building on no foundations.(and her book was published before Laurie Maguire's). She also more recently edited the Cambridge U P volume of the Hamlet First Quarto. I don't know if she answers Maguire in it. Irace, Kathleen O. Reforming the "Bad" Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Jay Halio pushes the memorial reconstruction case for the texts of Romeo and Juliet in a collection of essays he recently published. The major glaring problems that the memorial reconstruction folks have to blink away from are raised by Peter Blayney and others who look at the economics of publishing, the regulations of play licensing, and the practices of playwrights observable in extant manuscripts and printed plays. What is most fun is to look at chunks of variant material bigger than a line or two. Then you see that if those were pirates at work they were exciting pirates. Fine playwriting pirates. "Romeo Q1--1597" by William Shakespeare and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter. That Ethel deserves a monument. Ever, Steve Ethelwitz
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.1350 Friday, 30 July 1999. From: William Sutton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 29 Jul 1999 09:03:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Can anyone supply a title? Hello Everyone, Especially those interested in rhetoric and the lang. lit. problem. I have the list of contents photocopied and no title page for a 20th C. book. Please assist if you can. Introduction 0.1 The lang.-lit. problem 0.2. A descriptive rhetoric 0.3 Poetic language and 'ordinary' language 0.4 A possible misgiving 1 Poetry and the Languages of Past and Present 2 The Creative Use of Language 3 Varieties of Poetic Licence 4 Foregrounding and Imitation 5 Verbal Repetition 6 Patterns of Sound 7 Metre 8 The Irrational in Poetry 9 Figurative Language 10 Honest Deceptions 11 Implications of Context 12 Ambiguity and Indeterminacy Plus all their chapter subheadings. A great book explaining the nuts and bolts of poetic language by the way. If anyone recognises the author could you save me hours checking possibilities. Many thanks. Yours in the name of Will, William S.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.1349 Friday, 30 July 1999. From: Marti Markus <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 29 Jul 1999 15:39:30 +0100 Subject: 10.1341 TIMON OF ATHENS Comment: Re: SHK 10.1341 TIMON OF ATHENS > I have found something that is either a glaring error, or I have been > misreading a scene for the last two months. > > The plot summary I found says that in act 3, scene 5: > > "At the Senate house, the senators decide Timon should die for his > debts. The captain Alcibiades valiantly plead's for Timon's life, but > is ignored by the senators. Eventually, they tire of his pleadings and > banish him from Athens, effective two days hence. Alcibiades decides > privately to muster his armies and attack Athens." > > The way I read it, Alcibiades is defending a fellow soldier for > committing murder. > > What say you all? You are quite right, of course, although there have been attempts to see Timon as the accused. In 19th century adaptations this scene was sometimes changed in that direction, e.g. Timon being accused of having murdered his daughters [sic] fianc
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.1348 Friday, 30 July 1999. From: John Velz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 29 Jul 1999 18:20:38 -0500 Subject: Bears I Have Known Melissa Aaron and others have been interesting in comments about how the Bear Scene might have been done in Sh's time. One possibility is what was done in the production of WT that starred Ian McKellen as Leontes in 1974 (unless I am remembering some other WT). Bear was a shaman who wore a long robe and a bear mask carved totemically for a headpiece. He took Antigonus by the arm and led him gently off into the wings. Later the shaman came out as Father Time with the bear totemhead under one arm and an hourglass in the other hand. A rousing success; as an emblem of "tempus edax rerum", the doubling linked the two parts of the play, the two generations, the things dying and things newborn, winter and spring. Time (Sh's source was called *Pandosto: Or the Triumph of Time*) is where the play is focused. A quite different, very mimetic bear was my first role in a Shakespeare play. They rented a very realistic grizzly bear costume made of nylon and insured it for $750, and this was in the mid-nineteen-sixties, so multiply by about 4 to get $3000 in our dollars. Open red mouth, very awesome fangs, about 7' tall when erect (I saw through two holes in the neck.) The Antigonus was built like a linebacker, but was not one. Very gentle spirit with a bushy red beard. He and I were told first day of rehearsal to try blocking our scene. Director adopted it with a few touches of his own. Antigonus put Perdita down on the stage stage-right, a realistic doll swaddled, and then delivered his lines about Hermione over the footlights with his back to the baby. Bear came out of the wings stage right on all fours went up to baby and snuffed it. Audience gasped. Antigonus sensed something behind him and instead of rescuing the child or running for his life he turned around and went up behind the bear who was still snuffling with his back to the audience and gave the bear a mighty kick in the butt that left me bruised after every performance. The audience stopped the show with wild laughter. Before it died down the bear reared up on his hind legs for the first time and attacked Antigonus claws first. Claws were about twice the length of an adult's fingers. Audience gasped. Antigonus screamed and ran all the way across the stage and into the wings stage left. Bear lumbered in hot pursuit. Audience gasped. Antigonus screamed from the wings as the bear got him and the theater was as silent as a tomb for a count of about 3; and then Antigonus put two fingers down his throat and uttered a belch that reverberated off the walls of the theater. I have never seen anyone able to do this since. Audience reacted with wild laughter. Stopped the show every night. This bit of byplay mirrored the play as a whole. Alternation between laughter and horror, between tragedy and comedy. I have seldom played a Sh. role that I enjoyed more, but under those lights the bear costume was like a steambath. Thanks for bearing with me. John Velz
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.1347 Friday, 30 July 1999. From: Judith Craig <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 29 Jul 1999 16:10:29 -0500 Subject: New Shakespeare URL Like most late twentieth-century Shakespeareans, I have had to create my own web page. It is not prize-winning, but if you are interested, my email address is available with my scholarly (and as yet unpublished) article defending the view that Anne Hathaway's infidelity caused Shakespeare's poetic career. I defend this view with a close reading of The Tempest. If you are interested in receiving a copy of a close reading of The Tempest, offering the critically unpopular view that Shakespeare was a victim of Anne Hathaway's infidelity, you can receive one by snail mail at the following URL: http://homepages.msn.com/LibraryLawn/je-mc/Shakespeare.html Thanks, and I will try in the future to get the whole paper online. Judy Craig