October
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.1946 Tuesday, 17 October 2000. From: Hardy Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 11:25:06 -0400 Subject: Speaking of Shakespeare UPCOMING "SPEAKING OF SHAKESPEARE" EVENTS Over the next several weeks, The Shakespeare Guild will be hosting three programs in its "Speaking of Shakespeare" series. One will take place in New York, at the Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street), and the other two will take place in Washington, at the National Press Club (529 14th Street NW). All three are open to SHAKSPERians at the Guild-member rate of $25. On Monday, October 23rd, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at the Algonquin, we'll be chatting with the couple a New York Times reporter once dubbed "Mr. and Mrs. Theater" -- producer ROBERT WHITEHEAD and his wife ZOE CALDWELL. An acclaimed director as well as a remarkable stage actress, Ms. Caldwell has worked with such legends as Dame Judith Anderson, Dame Edith Evans, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Charles Laughton, Christopher Plummer, and Paul Robeson. She holds no fewer than four Tony Awards, including one for the title part in "Medea" (1982) and another for the role of Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's "Master Class" (1993). In 1998 she received the Guild's third annual Gielgud Award in a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Mr. Whitehead's half-century on Broadway has enriched our culture with original productions or major revivals of classics by such playwrights as T. S. Eliot, Jean Kerr, William Luce, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams. As partner of the late Roger Stevens, Mr. Whitehead brought Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson to New York and Washington in 1976 in Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land." Other performers who've appeared in Whitehead-Stevens productions include such luminaries as Hume Cronyn, Lynn Fontainne, Lillian Gish, Julie Harris, Helen Hayes, Katherine Hepburn, Dustin Hoffman, Alfred Lunt, Jason Robards, and Jessica Tandy. The Algonquin will be offering accommodations at steeply discounted rates ($299) for Sunday and Monday nights, October 22-23. The hotel will also make its specially priced pre-theater menu ($30 for a three-course meal) available for guests who'd like to have dinner in the famous Rose Room after Monday night's proceedings. As you probably know, the Algonquin was the setting in which "The New Yorker" was created, and it was here that the wits who called themselves the "vicious circle" -- among them Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, George S. Kaufman, Ring Lardner, and Dorothy Parker -- gathered for lunch around their immortal "Round Table." As a tribute to these and other Algonquin traditions, the Guild will be referring to its "Speaking" engagements there as "Nights at the Round Table." Meanwhile, the Guild is now in its third season at the National Press Club in Washington. Our next guest there, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 30th, will be E. R. BRAITHWAITE, the inspirational teacher whose "To Sir With Love," a moving account of the trials he faced in a troubled east London school, provided actor Sidney Poitier with one of his most memorable film roles and pop singer Lulu with one of her most lyrical recordings. On Monday, December 11th, again from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., we'll talk with reviewer MICHAEL DIRDA, whose engaging commentary for the Washington Post's "Book World" earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1993. To place orders for any of these gatherings or to seek further information, please get in touch with Guild president John Andrews by phone (202 483 8646), fax (202 483 7824), or e-mail (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ).
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.1945 Tuesday, 17 October 2000. [1] From: Scott Oldenburg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 07:33:37 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 11.1939 Re: Fops [2] From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 10:41:33 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 11.1939 Re: Fops [3] From: Jadwiga Krupski <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 10:54:26 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 11.1939 Re: Fops [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Scott Oldenburg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 07:33:37 -0700 Subject: 11.1939 Re: Fops Comment: Re: SHK 11.1939 Re: Fops "You can, of course, get so close to a painting that you see only the daubs of paint (and it's quite interesting to do so), but it is evident that the artist's intent was for you to see the dead duck not the daubs. I know this because other people see the same dead duck or Madonna and Child or vase of flowers that I do." I'm not sure that we all see the same Madonna and Child. Doesn't it seem that an atheist might see a very different Madonna and Child than a devout Catholic would? A mother might see a different Madonna and Child than her child might, and someone who has lost a child might see a still a different Madonna and Child (not to mention what Madonna fans see)? Don Bloom says that when he reads, he sees "people doing and saying things." What do these people look like? Are they not based on your personal experience? How could I possibly see the same imaginary people you see? . . "they [words on a page/texts] create images in our minds." Do texts do that, or do readers do that with texts? We share a common language and culture, so our readings of texts are similar. But there is a great deal of language, culture, and personal experience that we do not share, and so our readings of texts differ. Well, this hasn't much to do with fops exactly, so I'll leave it at that. Best, Scott Oldenburg [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 10:41:33 -0400 Subject: 11.1939 Re: Fops Comment: Re: SHK 11.1939 Re: Fops Don Bloom is >still baffled . Aside from the fact that I never said a still-life >of dead duck IS a dead duck, I wonder what he thinks the words on paper >(or spoken aloud) do. As I see it they create images in our minds, some >of them more or less concrete, others more abstract or relational. Well, actually, the words on the page DO nothing. They certainly do NOT create images in our minds. We readers do the creating; words on a page do not act. If the images are "concrete" in our minds, then we readers are responsible for making them concrete -- though how a mental image can be said to be "concrete" taxes my mind. Texts do not read themselves, and a literary character does not have an inherent sexuality. Readers PROJECT sexuality onto literary characters. For example, half of my graduate class believes that Iago is a homosexual, while the other half believe that he's heterosexual. Thus, fops are not inherently gay or straight. We readers project sexuality onto them. That was my original point, I think. Yours, Bill Godshalk [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jadwiga Krupski <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 10:54:26 -0400 Subject: 11.1939 Re: Fops Comment: Re: SHK 11.1939 Re: Fops A big "Hear, Hear" to Don Bloom!
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.1944 Tuesday, 17 October 2000. [1] From: Fran Teague <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 10:15:16 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Re: SHK 11.1942 Re: Titus Double Dactyl [2] From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 13:54:29 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 11.1942 Re: Titus Double Dactyl [3] From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 14:34:46 -0400 Subj: Double dactyls [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Fran Teague <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 10:15:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: 11.1942 Re: Titus Double Dactyl Comment: Re: SHK 11.1942 Re: Titus Double Dactyl The rules for a double dactyle are these: A light verse form with two quatrains. The last line of the first quatrain and the last line of the second quatrain rhyme; each is a single dactylic foot. The other lines are d. d., i.e., two dactylic feet. The first line of the poem is a nonsense phrase, usually "Higgledy piggledy"; the second line is a proper name; the second line of the second quatrain is usually a single word. So the really fine verse Dale sent in is a double dactyl except that it lacks the single-word line. The form is a recent invention: P. Pascal and A. Hecht invented d.d. in the early 1950's; in the 1960's Hecht and J. Hollander pubd. the first collection. Fran Teague <http://www.arches.uga.edu/~fteague> [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 13:54:29 -0400 Subject: 11.1942 Re: Titus Double Dactyl Comment: Re: SHK 11.1942 Re: Titus Double Dactyl Dale Lyles' Titus poem is missing some elements; the form customarily has eight lines in two stanzas, each containing three lines of regular dactylic dimeter and one of catalectic dactylic dimeter (dropping the last two unstressed syllables): "Went to my head." The last lines of the quatrains rhyme. The first line uses nonsense syllables to set the meter: "Higgledy-piggledy." One of the lines must consist of a single proper name, like Titus Andronicus, and one of a single double dactylic word, such as "antediluvian." Ideally the name and the long word ought not be in the same stanza, but exceptions are allowed. Hobbledy-gobbledy, Titus Andronicus paterfamilially chopped off his hand. "I serve the state," he said. "Oh. The state cheated me? I can still bake with one. Isn't death grand?" Double dactylically, Dave Evett [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Oct 2000 14:34:46 -0400 Subject: Double dactyls Further on double dactyls--there is a splendid collection on classical topics (both names and polysyllables apparently easier to come by if you have a good hold on Latin and Greek) at http://www.txclassics.org/exrpts7.htm compiled and edited by the very funny Douglass Parker (some of you may know his delightful translation of *Lysistrata*.) Dave E
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.1943 Friday, 13 October 2000. From: David Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 12 Oct 2000 19:10:01 -0600 Subject: 11.1929 Re: Henry VIII Query Comment: Re: SHK 11.1929 Re: Henry VIII Query Upon reading my post, I realized that I had foolishly omitted a sentence which explicitly stated some important information. See below. >Sam Small wrote: > >> Drew Whitehead wrote: >>> In an 1850 Notes and Queries article on the authorship of Henry VIII, >>> Samuel Hickson quotes four lines which he claims are by Shakespeare >>> though he does qualify the matter by adding that he had met with these >>> lines "in no other edition than Mr. Collier's." The lines are: >>> >>> Crowns have their compass; length of day their date; >>> Triumphs, their tomb; felicity her fate; >>> Of nought but earth can earth make us partaker, >>> But knowledge makes a king most like his maker. >>> >>> A thorough search of several versions of Henry VIII has failed to turn >>> up these lines. Does anyone know where they come from? Was Collier in >>> the habit if inserting extra poetry into his editions? >> >>I would bet my last shirt that Shakespeare didn't write those lines. > >And Brian Vickers further wrote: > >>Hickson's 1850 essay on Henry VIII was posthumously reprinted in the >>Transactions of the New Shakspere Society in 1874, together with >>Spedding's essay of 1850. To it Spedding added a note:" These >>lines...are engraved under Simon Passe's print of James sitting on his >>throne; which formed the frontispiece to the collection of his works, >>printed in 1616. Whoever wrote them ought to have the credit of the true >>reading of the third line: >> >> Crounes haue their compass ; length of days their date ; >> Triumphs, their tomb ; felicity her fate ; >> Of more then earth, can earth make none partaker, >> But knowledge makes the KING most like his maker. " (20*) > >Spedding made a few mistakes in his transcription, but he was correct >about the source of the lines, or rather about the source of the >earliest datable text of them. Here I should have noted that the text in question is the 1616 folio edition of King James' "Works", where these lines appear beneath a portrait of James on the frontispiece. Sorry for any confusion. >These lines exist in many 17th-century >manuscript commonplace books, usually without any attribution. In three >cases (all from the 1630s or 1640s at the earliest) there is an >attribution: two manuscripts (Folger MS V.a.160, p.2, 2d series and >Folger MS V.a.262, p.131) attribute the poem to Shakespeare, while one >(Bodleian MS Ashmole 38, p.39) attributes it to Robert Barker, the royal >printer under King James and the co-publisher of the 1616 Workes. The >attribution to Shakespeare was first noted by James Boswell in his 1821 >Variorum edition of Shakespeare, and that's probably where Hickson got >it from. > >For what it's worth, many of these MS copies of the poem appear to >derive not from the 1616 Folio of James' Workes, but from a series of >broadside portraits of King James and his family printed in 1619 by >Compton Holland, brother of the poet Hugh Holland. [snip rest of post] Dave KathmanThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.1942 Friday, 13 October 2000. From: Dale Lyles <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 12 Oct 2000 15:19:28 EDT Subject: 11.1930 Re: Titus Double Dactyl Comment: Re: SHK 11.1930 Re: Titus Double Dactyl How about: Higgledy, Piggledy Titus Andronicus Wanted to cook up a Mother's Day meal. He turned up the fire on Demetrius, Chiron, Till bubble and squeak somehow lost its appeal. Isn't there supposed to be a second line rhyming with Andronicus? My memory of the form is hazy. Dale Lyles Newnan Community Theatre Company http://newnantheatre.com