November
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.2113 Friday, 17 November 2000. From: John Robinson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 14:22:55 EST Subject: 11.2088 Re: Adams' Essay on Desdemona Comment: Re: SHK 11.2088 Re: Adams' Essay on Desdemona >Thank you for your post. I am sorry that I was too tame in my >condemnation of Adam's view. I was thinking of it solely from a >performance point of view.... Clearly Adams' ideas are not >politically correct, nor were Thomas Jefferson's or many other American >presidents. Clearly Adams moral is racist itself. What I wish is that >more of our current leaders took an interest in Shakespeare and formed >any opinion on Shakespeare's work. I am sorry for any offence that was >taken by putting Adam's essay out there. Oh, please, could we stop all the hand wringing and apologizing about things other people said and did before we were all born. Why should you, or anyone, feel guilty about, or apologize for, something someone else said or did. Just because you unapologetically quote Adams doesn't mean you are advocating his ideas. I don't know what finger-wagging post you are responding to, but apparently it pointed out that the past was as bad as everyone already knows that it was. Thanks, John Robinson.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.2112 Friday, 17 November 2000. [1] From: William Proctor Williams <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 11:58:36 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" [2] From: David Schalkwyk<This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 17 Nov 2000 09:25:29 SAST-2 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" [3] From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 08:55:18 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: William Proctor Williams <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 11:58:36 -0500 Subject: 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" Comment: Re: SHK 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" I hope I have not missed anything in this exchange, but I believe the original question was about the use of the term in the Early Modern period in England. During this time, at least in the Stationers' Company, but probably in the other craft guilds, or companies, the term "stranger" seems to have been usually applied to those coming from the Continent and "foreigner" applied to those from the British Isles who were not freemen of the City of London. However, as I read the records the real distinction with either word was freedom of the City vs. the rest of the planet. See Arber and Greg & Boswell for more. Those on the list with greater knowledge of the other companies (Merchant Taylors, Goldsmiths, Grocers, etc.) than I have may know more. William Proctor Williams [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Schalkwyk<This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 17 Nov 2000 09:25:29 SAST-2 Subject: 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" Comment: Re: SHK 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" This information is not apposite to the question of whether the English are strangers in Britain, but it might nevertheless interest members of the list to know that the English carpetgbaggers who flooded into the old Transvaal Republic in the late nineteenth century after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand were derisively known as "uitlanders"--"strangers" or "foreigners". The Kruger government's attempts to disenfranchise them are given as one of the reasons for the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), by which the Transvaal and its gold became part of the Empire. A contingent of Irish volunteers fought against the Empire on the side of the Boer Republics, so it is not unusual to have the Irish flag flying alongside those of the old republics at Boer-war memorials in South Africa. As an Afrikaans-speaking boy in the predominantly English-speaking, white areas of Natal my father was made to feel a stranger because his forebears a generation earlier had called English-speaking people "uitlanders". David Schalkwyk Chair English Department University of Cape Town [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 08:55:18 +0000 Subject: 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" Comment: Re: SHK 11.2108 Re: British "strangers" Before James I "unified" the two nations, wouldn't Scots have been rightly considered foreigners? And wouldn't most Irish as well, those who lived outside "the Pale"? Stephanie Hughes
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.2111 Friday, 17 November 2000. [1] From: Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 10:49:25 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2102 Re: Fops [2] From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 13:07:01 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2102 Re: Fops [3] From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 08:35:02 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2102 Re: Fops [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 10:49:25 -0500 Subject: 11.2102 Re: Fops Comment: Re: SHK 11.2102 Re: Fops Bill Godshalk says: >Dr. J.'s kicking the stone was an interesting comment on ontology, not >epistemology. I agree that epistemologically be know literary characters >and real people (like Sean Lawrence) in the same way. But they surely >have different ontological statuses. I think it has been argued, perhaps by Wittgenstein, that the ontological status of "other minds" is problematic. Certainly, my own mind has an ontological status different from the mind of Hamlet, but the only existence it can possess for anyone else is one that they must project from their own experience of themselves. When they speak to me, therefore, they can only address a projected image of their own minds, continually modified by my responses, but never identical with my experience of myself. The only mind that has any ontology in my ontological universe is therefore my own, and the ontological status of the Other is something I must construct according to essentially literary principles. That is: I use a set of roles and statuses, constructed and defined by my cultural environment, and put together a Frankenstein's creature with whom I may discourse. Furthermore, the Other has no qualities for me, but those I can recognize according to these predefined categories. There is, therefore, as you say, no difference between the way we construct real people from the sparse evidence of a dramatist's dialogue, and the way we construct the real people that inhabit our world. The difference lies in the point that Sean reiterates concerning the reason we do not come to the aid of Desdemona. But even Sean assumes that we would do so, if she were a "real" rather than a "fictive" character. Why, if this is so, do we not come to the aid of all Others we find in distress? Why do we come to the aid of a horse whipped in the street and then calmly walk by a McDonald's? We must place the fictive characters that surround us in the world into literary categories by which we decide whom we are compelled to aid and whom we are not. Tony Burton says: >with respect to humans themselves, they come to >our consciousness as inner experiences - as noumena - while the rocks >and trees come to our consciousness through our outward-directed sense >organs - as phenomena. The noumenal and the phenomenal co-exist in the >human being. Humans come to our consciousness through phenomena, just as do the rocks and trees. We see someone crying, we hear their sobs, we feel the tears are wet, we decode the text of their verbal complaints, we recognize the similarity of these sensory images to our own outward phenomenal expressions of particular inward emotions, and we therefore project our memory of these emotions into an imagined inner realm of the human before us. It requires an epistemological intervention to remind ourselves that the tears of an actor are "not real" in order to withdraw our perception of his emotional state. It is because the world we live in is peopled with dramatic characters of our own construction, that Shakespeare's characters have the power to become real people in our perception. It is the intervention of the third parties of player and dramatist that creates the only ontological difference between real and dramatic characters in the worlds we individually inhabit. That any other minds but our own exist in the world must remain a working hyposthesis. Don Bloom says: >discussions of that sort >always seem to disappear into an area that has nothing to do with >literature -- that is, with the experience of other thoughts and >emotions through fictions. But is there some other way of approaching >literature as literature? >With honest curiosity, I suspect that there are a number of ways, but one I would like to suggest is literature as literature according to its function. The function of literature can be approached from several different directions: its function for the writer, for the reader, for the culture, for the state, etc. Why was Hamlet written? Is it adequate to reduce it to a lucrative property produced by a creative genius to the end of producing beautiful art and making a killing for his partners and himself? Hamlet as dramatist clearly has other ends in view, and I find a reading of Shakespeare the dramatist as Hamlet the dramatist the most interesting approach. Bertrand Russel says: >When you have taken account of all the feelings roused by Napoleon in writers and >readers of history, you have not touched the actual man; but in the case >of Hamlet you have come to the end of him. If no one thought about >Hamlet, there would be nothing left of him; In fact, you have not come to the end of him, as Hamlet was already a commonly recognized mythological character when Shakespeare wrote his version of the myth, and would have remained so with or without Shakespeare. As a mythological, rather than a dramatic character, he already stood as a cultural icon, linking the Elizabethan English to their Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian heritage. Shakespeare did not breathe life into him like Adam, but merely co-opted the life that he already possessed in the collective consciousness of his audience. >. A robust sense of reality is very necessary in framing a >correct analysis of propositions about unicorns, golden mountains, round >squares, and other pseudo-objects." It's interesting that Russel had to resort to round squares as the analogy for unicorns. What about square squares? As none such exists in nature, is not a square of any stripe a "pseudo-object?" Brian Vickers says: >.the reason why one can state that Iago is lying - not only >in what he allows Othello to infer from his own insinuation, but in his >self-presentations to Roderigo and to the audience - is derived not from >some reader's intuition but from noticing changes in the language he >uses, which becomes blustering or evasive. These linguistic markers lead us to the supposition that Iago is lying, but they can not lead us past supposition to certainty. Why should I not conclude that the sense of uncertainty as to the honesty of honest Iago is encoded in the text in order that I might more completely share Othello's world shattering loss of certainty? Could not Shakespeare have removed this pronounced indeterminacy had he wished? Is not Iago as capable as the actor that portrays him of faking evasiveness, to enlist our sympathy perhaps or simply out of motiveless malignancy? >Of course, dramatists have >many ways of signalling when characters' utterances are not to be >trusted, including gesture and movement, but in Shakespeare, one might >argue, falsehood or insincerity is rendered directly in the language. >Consider, for example, Claudius's first speech to the assembled court on >his brother's death and his own o'er-hasty marriage (Hamlet, 1.2.1-16), I could (and have) argued that Shakespeare constructs a subjective reading of the events of the play that mirrors Hamlet's, who, of course, despises Claudius as his Oedipal rival, and so hears nothing from him but lies and deceit, but perhaps Claudius is innocent? Perhaps the play only presents us with the delusional perceptions of a paranoid or a severe neurotic unable to overcome his own Oedipal conflicts. Perhaps it is the ghost that is lying concerned only with his own jealousy or as a disguised evil spirit. Is the evidence of Claudius' chapel confession clear enough to remove all doubt? Is Claudius' reaction to the Mousetrap conclusive evidence of his guilt, or is it perhaps true that he is deeply offended at what he recognizes as an affront to himself and to Gertrude? Is there any way to absolutely dismiss any possibilities that the text supports? Can even the events onstage (let alone offstage) not be read as the momentary lapse of the viewer into the delusional state of the protagonist? How could a stage full of lying actors in deceptive disguises ever tell the truth about anything? Was not Shakespeare obsessed with this very idea of noumenal versus phenomenal indeterminacy as evidenced in his dressing boys as girls as boys? >or his hypocritical rebuke to Hamlet for his prolonged mourning No possibility that we are coerced into sharing Hamlet's paranoiac misreading of sincere filial affection and concern? Bill Godshalk again: >Or do you buy this one? That handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give; She was a charmer, and could almost read The thoughts of people. . . . Being a product of cynical post Machiavellian modernism, I am skeptical. I find it more credible that he is trying to scare D by hinting that he can read her thoughts. I also suspect that it is the impossibility of doing so: on the part of Othello, of Cassio, of Roderigo, of Emilia, and of the audience that creates the tragic theme that makes the play so powerful. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . there's magic in the web of it. A sibyl, that had numbered in the world The sun to course two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sewed the work. But who is lying here, Othello or his mother or the sibyl? >If you so, later Othello says: "It was a handkerchief, an antique >token/My father gave my mother." Some of my students believe the first >description, and read the second without considering that it may >contradict the first. I am sorry that they are deceived in him. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Sean again: >But more importantly, the question of volition seems indicative of the >wrong way to go about the problem in the first place, since it's a >matter that can only be answered from an internal point of view. We >can't tell that other people have volition--we can only tell that we >ourselves do, by a process of introspection. From an internal point of view, we have an actor who we assume is not speaking his true thoughts. Moreover, how certain are we that what appears to us as our own volition is not an illusion projected after the fact? Is this not the question that vexed Sophocles and returned to vex the Calvinists? Bill Godshalk again, quoting Sean: >"as people approached in the second person"? >Does this mean that "I" have to call myself "he"? I think the Lacanian model of the ego implies that "I" is already a third person pronoun. >. And the way I understand or try to understand Sean Lawrence is the same >way I try to make sense of literary characters or historical figures. >But that does not mean that people, literary characters, and historical >figures should be lumped willy-nilly into the same ontological >category. Perhaps they should not be, but to make distinctions is an epistemological phenomenological process. We must write a script distinguishing between the various ontological statuses of the characters that people our world. When we talk about our friend dying of AIDS, we construct a different ontology than when we talk about "a third of the population of Africa" dying of AIDS. We may acknowledge that there is no ontological difference, but both are purely literary constructions the "appropriate" response to which depends upon the ontological status we choose to project on them. >From Shroedinger's box Clifford [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 13:07:01 -0500 Subject: 11.2102 Re: Fops Comment: Re: SHK 11.2102 Re: Fops Sean Lawrence writes: >And my point is precisely that he doesn't have to have agency to make a >claim upon us. Lavinia's claim upon those around her is strongest when >her agency is weakest. And I think that Sean is misusing the word "claim." When I make a claim, I actively make a claim. I work with my students helping them to word their claims more precisely and carefully. I think Sean means something like "sympathize" or "empathize." We and "those around her" may sympathize with Lavinia's plight -- raped and mutilated. Or some of us may laugh -- one of the recorded responses to a performance. In any case, Lavinia cannot actively step from the pages of the script and actively make any claim upon ME. You, maybe, but not me. Paul Doniger, I think, misunderstands my point. WITHIN the fiction, Hamlet makes many decisions, but Hamlet cannot make a different decision every time you read the same script (though you could read a different script, e.g., Q1). Shakespeare the playwright has made all the decisions for Hamlet. I think David Schalkwyk is raising the problem of persons (like Napoleon) who are used as literary characters as in Kundera's Immortality, wherein Napoleon stops to give nonexistent photographers a photo op. Kundera, it would seem, relies on his readers' knowing something about the historical figure. But I would make a firm distinction between Napoleon as historical figure and Napoleon as a literary character in Immortality -- wherein Goethe and Hemingway are buddies! Yours, Bill Godshalk [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 08:35:02 +0000 Subject: 11.2102 Re: Fops Comment: Re: SHK 11.2102 Re: Fops > Well, I assume that dead persons did (in the past) exist materially in > the world, and, if they were not disabled in some way, had agency. > Fictive characters like Hamlet do not and did not have independent > agency. (One might argue that they have some kind of fictive agency.) > For example, Hamlet has never and will never defecate in Shakespeare's > play. > > Yours, Bill Godshalk Nor will Abraham Lincoln in any of the dozens of books we read about him. No doubt he did in life, but we don't know any more about it than we know about Hamlet (thank God!). The two beings occupy the same kind of place in our minds, the only difference being that one is labeled "fictional" while the other is labeled "real." But these labels can be overlooked by a mind in search of facts about human nature. When I ponder the reasons for the Vietnam War, more than any history of the war the document that has meaning is the novel, "The Ugly American." In his sensitive portraits of the two primary fictional characters, Graham Greene came closer to explaining the war than anything else I've ever read about it. Gatsby, so romantised that he has hardly any substance ( he was based on a real figure with whom he seems to have nothing at all in common), yet even so he is far more likely to "explain" the roaring twenties than any of the real figures we can conjure up. Stephanie Hughes
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.2110 Friday, 17 November 2000. [1] From: Milla Riggio <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 10:16:23 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS [2] From: Douglas M Lanier <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 10:22:05 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS [3] From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 08:32:35 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS [4] From: Billy Houck <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 13:46:47 EST Subj: Re: SHK 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS [5] From: Tanya Gough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 15:25:15 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS [6] From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, November 17, 2000 Subj: Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Milla Riggio <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 10:16:23 -0500 Subject: 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS Comment: Re: SHK 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS Dear all: May I echo Brian Walsh's praise of TITUS, and add a word or two. I also believe that this is easily one of the best film adaptations of Shakespeare, and I teach many of them in my Shakespeare on film courses. I thought Taymor got an acting performance out of Jessica Lange that was beyond my imagining, and Anthony Hopkins was brutally moving and powerful. The eclecticism of the period is little more than the freedom to stage the plays as they were writing, for the stage not the costume museum, and the jokes were indeed delicious. I saw it twice in the same week and will see it many, many more times. What I want to add to Walsh's comments is two-fold: 1) Fellini. This film was heavily indebted to SATYRICON, with wonderful results. I have seldom seen a filmmaker pay more direct homage to a master with such an original product (there was even a hint of La Strada underlying bits of the film, with Satyricon tones and modes). 2) On another note: Aaron. I admire the straightforward, non-pc way in which Taymor had the nerve to portray the villainous Aaron, letting the extraordinary power of his final recognition of his child emerge from a portrayal that pulled no punches, though for sure he was not one of the fools. What surprised me most, perhaps, was the natural playability of the language. I have taught the play many times and had always assumed that the only really moving language was, in fact, in the Aaron/son recognition scene, where there are lines that continually surprise me as having been written of a miscegenational child in the 1590s. But I thought that, given the stylization of the production, the text played as well or better than almost any Shakespeare film I have seen. Amazingly apt and convincing, I thought. I fully agree with the judgments of the other films named by Walsh (though I thought there were some quite good effects in the Ethan Hawkes Hamlet). It is too bad, indeed, that imaginative, recreative efforts with the complexity and clarity of focus that Taymor brought to TITUS are beyond the grasp of the ordinary reviewer, or audience. Milla Riggio [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Douglas M Lanier <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 10:22:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS Comment: Re: SHK 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS Those interested in putting TITUS in the context of Taymor's theater and art work might be interested to know that the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., will be opening an exhibit today on Taymor's work: "Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire." I've not seen the exhibit, but it is said to include set designs, puppets, costumes, video, special effects and music. It runs through February 4. Those in Washington, D.C., for the MLA convention might want to include it in their itinerary. If this has already been noted by someone else, please excuse the duplication. Cheers, Douglas LanierThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 08:32:35 -0800 Subject: 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS Comment: Re: SHK 11.2105 Re: Julie Taymor's TITUS Overall, I enjoyed Brian Walsh's take on Titus, but the following paragraph caught my eye: > Remember the famous drawing by Henry Peacham of a staging of Titus, no > less (reproduced in the Norton Shakespeare, page 3291). We can see from > this that in Shakespeare's time there was no attempt to rigorously > adhere to a consistent sense of place or time--why should we try to do > that now? Does anyone else think it a little ironic to appeal to the author's time in order to move away from the idea of authenticity? Cheers, Se
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.2109 Friday, 17 November 2000. [1] From: Tim Brookes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 09:45:24 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions [2] From: Hope Greenberg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 11:06:14 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions [3] From: Mike Jensen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 11:29:15 -0800 Subj: SHK 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions [4] From: Eric I. Salehi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 14:45:13 -0500 Subj: Re:SHK 11.2091 Far-fetched Stage Directions [5] From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 08:51:07 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tim Brookes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 09:45:24 -0400 Subject: 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions Comment: Re: SHK 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions Isn't there a Shaw play that calls for a lightning bolt to bounce around the stage and strike one or more of the characters? Tim [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hope Greenberg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 11:06:14 -0500 Subject: 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions Comment: Re: SHK 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions Paul E. Doniger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > wrote: > I don't know ... it seems to me that, although it certainly is possible, > biting one's own tongue off would be quite a challenging (not to mention > repugnant and excruciatingly painful) task. How sharp are our teeth, > anyway? Challenging, perhaps, but as a literary image it seems to remain in vogue. I believe Thomas Harris has his Dr. Lechter convincing a prison mate to do the same in 'The Silence of the Lambs.' - Hope Greenberg, U of Vermont [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mike Jensen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 11:29:15 -0800 Subject: Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions Comment: SHK 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions A nice man named Paul Doniger wrote: > I often wonder how this absurd play > ever managed to be such a smash hit An understandable point of view. Recent productions of Pericles show us that unpromising texts can make good theater. I'm actually writing about the play Paul mentioned, The Spanish Tragedy, but I assume more of us have read and seen Pericles than have read and seen ST, so I offer Pericles as an analogue. I saw ST in the smallest house in what is now called The Royal National Theatre in London many years ago. They fiddled with the text a bit, but not overwhelmingly. The biggest change was to put Revenge on stage in many scenes where the script does not call for him. I thought it was a very good production, mostly marred by a few lightweight actors in supporting roles. The critics liked it even more than I did. The RSC did the play about 2 years ago to much acclaim. I did not see that production and do not know if they tinkered with the text. If we accept that it can be stage worthy in our time, then I don't think it is too much of a stretch to imagine it could be popular over 400 years ago. Make sense? All the best, Mike Jensen [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Eric I. Salehi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 14:45:13 -0500 Subject: Far-fetched Stage Directions Comment: Re:SHK 11.2091 Far-fetched Stage Directions One of my favorites is the opening direction from _Othello_ I.iii. Q1 reads: "Enter Duke and Senators, set at a table, with lights..." I remember Leonard Barkan conjuring an image of the actors wearing hanging sandwich-board props. [5]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 16 Nov 2000 08:51:07 +0000 Subject: 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions Comment: Re: SHK 11.2107 Re: Far-fetched Stage Directions When Hieronymo bites off his tongue and spits it out it seems to us today like pointless violence. It's original audience, much more attuned to symbolism than we are, would probably have understood it right away as not so much real as symbolic; in this case of the fact that he cannot speak (the truth). Stephanie Hughes