January
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0097 Thursday, 18 January 2001 [1] From: Tanya Gough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 09:39:47 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0089 Re: World Shakespeare Congress Progr [2] From: Richard Burt <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 10:20:44 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0089 Re: World Shakespeare Congress Program [3] From: Susan Brock <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 15:02:17 +0000 Subj: SHK 12.0089 Re: World Shakespeare Congress Prog [4] From: Susan Brock <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 15:02:17 +0000 Subj: SHK 12.0089 Re: World Shakespeare Congress Prog [5] From: Hugh Grady <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 18:37:41 -0500 Subj: RE: SHK 12.0089 Re: World Shakespeare Congress Program [6] From: Peterson-Kranz Karen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 23:38:48 -0800 (PST) Subj: Re: SHK 12.0089 Re: World Shakespeare Congress Progr [7] From: Vicente For
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0096 Tuesday, 16 January 2001 [1] From: Mari Bonomi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 15 Jan 2001 12:59:13 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0065 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare [2] From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 06:45:18 -0500 Subj: SHK 12.0051 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mari Bonomi <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 15 Jan 2001 12:59:13 -0500 Subject: 12.0065 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare Comment: Re: SHK 12.0065 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare Charles Costello writes, >That presumption of past-sucking seems to cling to Shakespeare, who was >a good playwright (with respect to a particular kind of drama), better >than many before, during and after his time (with respect to drama in >general), but will never have his boots cleaned with the spit of any of >the majestic drama of 14th-15th c. England (or any other time). I'd be curious to know from Mr. Costello what majestic drama he holds to be so enormously superior to Shakespeare's drama that he'll never have his boots spitshined? Or am I misreading the analogy? Thank you. Mari Bonomi [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 06:45:18 -0500 Subject: Re: Johnson's Shakespeare Comment: SHK 12.0051 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare The notion that 'Johnson was not only remarkably learned but had tremendous insights' still strikes me as pious nonsense. How many of SHAKSPER's contributors would endorse the following? 1. Shakespeare seems to write 'without any moral purpose . . . he makes no just distribution of good or evil'. This is a very serious fault (the source of 'most of the evil in books or in men') for which 'the barbarity of his age' is no excuse. 2. 'In his comic scenes he is seldom very successful when he engages his characters in reciprocations of smartness and contests of sarcasm.' Indeed, the jests made by these characters are 'commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious' and neither his gentlemen nor his ladies 'have much delicacy nor are sufficiently distinguished from his clowns by any appearance of refined manners'. 3. His 'declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak'. 4. 'A dramatic exhibition is a book recited with concomitants that increase or diminish its effect'. 5. 'A play read affects the mind like a play acted'. To excuse Johnson on the grounds that he was blinkered by his time obviously undercuts the claims made for his scholarship and perception. 'Remarkable'-even 'tremendous'-capacities in these areas ought to enhance awareness rather than the reverse. In fact, Johnson had a poor grasp of the nature of the society from which early modern plays derived and to which they spoke. As a result he was, and remains, a very limited critic of Shakespeare. My graduate students could do better. Terence Hawkes
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0095 Tuesday, 16 January 2001 From: Celia Maddox <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 15 Jan 2001 19:30:22 EST Subject: Editorial Cartoon I can't find this cartoon. Is the address (http://globeandmail.com/series/cartoon/10wededcar.html) correct?
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0094 Tuesday, 16 January 2001 From: Sophie Masson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 16 Jan 2001 07:21:43 +1100 Subject: 12.0066 Re: Orlando Comment: Re: SHK 12.0066 Re: Orlando I agree in some ways with what Don says, but think the right word for the feeling Rosalind has is not 'maternal', but 'tender'. Tenderness is perhaps something that boys and men express less easily than girls and women (yes, I know, I'm being horribly generalised here)but it doesn't have to be maternal, or paternal for that matter. It may be absolutely part of a sexual and romantic feeling. Sophie Masson Author site: http://www.northnet.com.au/~smasson
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0093 Tuesday, 16 January 2001 From: Richard Burt <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 15 Jan 2001 15:05:05 -0500 Subject: Webster's White Devil Review This is a positive review (the second) of The White Devil now playing at BAM. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/15/arts/15DEVI.html I met up yesterday afternoon with Jean Howard to see it. By a fluke, Steve Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff were also there, as were Phyllis Rackin, Tom Cartelli, and Jackie Miller. I thought it was well worth it--get orchestra seating. Tickets at: http://www.bam.org/asp/bam_frameset.asp January 15, 2001 'The White Devil': Going for the Gold in an Olympics of Evil By BEN BRANTLEY As stylish modes of murder go, you must admit that it's hard to top a poisoned portrait. This method of assassination, in which a woman kisses a painting of her beloved and falls dead, is what most people who have read "The White Devil," John Webster's extra-gory revenge tragedy, seem to remember from it. It's "the play with the poisoned portrait," the way Webster's other best-known work, "The Duchess of Malfi," is "the play with the severed hand." Although some scholars argue that Webster's blank verse rivals Shakespeare's, it's those whimsical touches of bloodiness that stick to the memory, retrospectively conferring on the dramatist the mantle of a Jacobean Wes Craven. So it should probably come as no surprise that the Sydney Theater Company's crowd-courting production of "The White Devil," currently visiting the Brooklyn Academy of Music, trades heavily on the image of that death-dealing portrait. It looms, huge and logolike, in full view of the audience entering the Howard Gilman Opera House, where the production runs through Saturday. The picture is at least 10 feet tall, and it represents the head of a surly young man with the "I'm gonna hurt you, and you're gonna love it" gaze of a rough but oily rock star. It is perfectly understandable if you at first mistake the picture for a billboard of an Interview cover. Thus is the tone set for a "White Devil" in which everything - emotions, gestures, line readings and of course scenes of sex and violence - comes in extra large. The production was part of the Olympics Arts Festival in Sydney last year and has corresponding qualities of ceremonial stateliness and heavy-breathing athleticism, as though the characters were going for the gold in their own Olympics of Evil. What the show doesn't have is an ounce of psychological credibility. And unless you can identify Webster's unscrupulous, ambitious ghouls as real people, with plenty of latter-day counterparts, their gleeful bashing and dispatching of one another starts to seem like a very long episode of "The Itchy and Scratchy Show," the ultimate in mayhem cartoons, watched by children on "The Simpsons." "The White Devil" has been staged by Gale Edwards, the director who recently gave us both an excitingly energetic version of Schiller's "Don Carlos" for the Royal Shakespeare Company, seen at the Brooklyn Academy last spring, and an annoyingly garish "Jesus Christ Superstar" on Broadway. Her current offering falls loudly between the two. To her credit, Ms. Edwards has swept away any obscuring period remoteness. Her interpretation is clear to a fault, with actors who illustrate their words, especially the lewder bits, with the annotative gestures of a dumb show. The pace is fast and brusque. Unfortunately, the production also manages to sweep away any layers of characterization. There is a reason that the devil of the play's title is white. It's the same idea as a whited sepulcher. Veils of propriety and hypocrisy are worn by Webster's vicious aristocrats, who inhabit an Englishman's idea of a corrupt Italian Renaissance court, when the dress code requires it. Not, however, in Ms. Edwards's version, where everyone is so baldly cruel and lustful that all that duplicity seems merely pro forma. When the play's adulterous heroine stands trial here for the murder of her husband, she doesn't even pretend to be virtuous. Instead, she delivers her proclamations of innocence as if she were saying: "Nyah, nyah, nyah! You can't get me!" This arrogant taunter is Vittoria Corombona (played by Angie Milliken), and like the comparatively virtuous title character of "The Duchess of Malfi," she is the pivot of a plot that has more corkscrew twists than a bowl of fusilli. Here's the movie-pitch pr