January
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0157 Wednesday, 24 January 2001 [1] From: Graham Bradshaw <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 24 Jan 2001 01:08:09 +0900 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare [2] From: Pat Dolan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 13:31:26 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare [3] From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 19:26:38 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare [4] From: Steve Schroer <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 24 Jan 2001 00:42:41 -0600 Subj: SHK 12.0132 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare [5] From: Simon Malloch <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 24 Jan 2001 19:42:17 +0800 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare [6] From: Don Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 24 Jan 2001 07:49:21 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Graham Bradshaw <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 24 Jan 2001 01:08:09 +0900 Subject: 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare Comment: Re: SHK 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare I'm mildly intrigued by Professor Hawkes's final sentence: "Johnson's criticism is probably more valuable for what it tells us about the 18th century than for anything it has to say about an entity called 'Shakespeare'. Not that this view is unfamiliar, or arresting: its diagnostic confidence is Leavisian, and its cultural confidence (evolution=progress) is, well, Johnsonian. Still, what is in question is the assumptive basis for either kind of confidence, or for the seemingly judicious but obscure (refined? bogus?) distinctions implied by that phrase "probably more": just what is being weighed against what? And what are these other "entities", called "the 18th century" and "us"? Doubtless, my doubts would vanish if only Professor Hawkes undertook to explain how and why his final sentence would be less true of (say) Leavis's criticism, or Greenblatt's, or indeed his own. But I think he won't do that, because I'm sure he can't do that. Wait and see. But don't hold your breath. Graham Bradshaw [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Pat Dolan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 13:31:26 -0600 Subject: 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare Comment: Re: SHK 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare >Johnson's criticism is probably more valuable for what it tells >us about the 18th century than for anything it has to say about an >entity called 'Shakespeare'. Exactly. And Johnson's continued currency is, as is Shakespeare's, an index to our century/centuries, millenium/millenia. Cheers, Patrick [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 19:26:38 -0800 Subject: 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare Comment: Re: SHK 12.0141 Re: Johnson's Shakespeare Pat Dolan writes: >I thought that was Prof. Hawkes's point. Whatever "moral purpose" >Shakespeare may or may not have had has certainly been long occluded by >the moral purposes--royalist, libertarian, Victorian, post-modern, >democratic, Catholic, Protestant, aristocratic or emergent >bourgeois--that we (and our students) have found in/read into his work. True enough, but Terence didn't write that the graduate students' views were merely 'different' or 'alternative' but 'better'. This is itself a judgement, and sound to my ear slightly moralistic. >Johnson's criticism is probably more valuable for what it tells >us about the 18th century than for anything it has to say about an >entity called 'Shakespeare'. By a corollary, your work is more valuable for what it tells us about post-Thatcherite Britain than anything else. Since I claim fairly little interest in the subject, am I to take it that I shouldn't read your work? Does anything make your own work "better" than Johnson's, rather than just typical of something else, equally tangential to our study? Cheers, Se
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0156 Wednesday, 24 January 2001 [1] From: Manuela Rossini <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 16:46:44 +010- Subj: Re: SHK 12.0138 Re: Welsh in Henry IV [2] From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 12:27:29 -0500 Subj: SHK 12.0138 Re: Welsh in Henry IV [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Manuela Rossini <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 16:46:44 +010- Subject: 12.0138 Re: Welsh in Henry IV Comment: Re: SHK 12.0138 Re: Welsh in Henry IV Dear Ann Carrigan You write that >Shakespeare, of course, used the language barrier between Katherine and >Henry V in a more comic-romantic vein. Maybe films like SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE and Branagh's HENRY V (with its close-up of the kissing ex-spouses) might have led you to this assessment about the Bard's intentions. My reading is less charming. Throughout the scene Henry speaks "plain soldier" - and we know what this means not only since the atrocities committed in ex-Yugoslavia. Like all colonizers, he speaks his native tongue (although - historically - he mastered French). Katherine is clearly at a linguistic disadvantage and already in the scene of her English lesson she learns "how to translate her body into language accessible to the English", as Sinfield/Dollimore observe. That the wooing-scene is framed by the rape threats to the Harfleur "maidens" doesn't help to make the private encounter with the French princess more "comic-romantic". Kind regards, Manuela Rossini [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 12:27:29 -0500 Subject: Re: Welsh in Henry IV Comment: SHK 12.0138 Re: Welsh in Henry IV Jack Heller tells of a memorable 'Shakespeare session at the MLA, when Philip Schwyzer of Oxford presented a good paper on Welsh in Henry V'. Very short too, presumably. T. Hawkes
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0155 Wednesday, 24 January 2001 [1] From: Curt L. Tofteland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 10:38:54 EST Subj: Shakespeare in the Prisons [2] From: Monica Chesnoiu <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 14:07:02 -0600 Subj: RE: SHK 12.0152 Hamlet in the Prison [3] From: Douglas McQueen-Thomson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 24 Jan 2001 11:26:43 +1100 Subj: Shakespeare in Prison [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Curt L. Tofteland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 10:38:54 EST Subject: Shakespeare in the Prisons Greetings, I noted with interest the posting regarding the performance of Hamlet in a prison. Those of you who are interested in such activities might like to know about my program at the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival in Louisville, Kentucky ... Shakespeare behind bars . . . I work two days a week through the year at the Luther Luckett correctional complex (a medium security adult male prison) in Lagrange, Kentucky I started the program four years ago and to date we have produced: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, Othello and are currently working on Titus Andronicus that plays in may for those interested in information or those who do similar work, please respond offline. Regards, Curt L. Tofteland Producing Director Kentucky Shakespeare festivalThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Monica Chesnoiu <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 14:07:02 -0600 Subject: 12.0152 Hamlet in the Prison Comment: RE: SHK 12.0152 Hamlet in the Prison Maybe Lucia Setari might like to know that there was an interesting performance of HAMLET in a court martial prison in Romania during the war (1942). I am currently working on Romanian productions of HAMLET for the Valencia conference and I discuss this interesting production from the perspective of the subversive undercurrent of revenge. It was a definitely anti-Nazi production. The inmates directed and performed the play, but there are no official records, only some sketches made by one of them. In spite of the poor quality of the pictures, they are available in electronic format, if anyone is interested. This is part of my paper and people in the seminar on "Revenge as a Mediterranean Phenomenon Before and After Hamlet" will certainly view them. I'll be glad to share the pictures with members of this listserv, if interested. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu Romania [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Douglas McQueen-Thomson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 24 Jan 2001 11:26:43 +1100 Subject: Shakespeare in Prison After hearing of the prisoners' Hamlet in Trieste, Lucia A. Setari might be interested to compare that production to a performance of Macbeth to prisoners by the Bell Shakespeare Company in Mulawa Maximum Security Prison for Women, Australia, in April 1997. One commentator describes how this production took advantage of 'the therapeutic value of drama for substance abusers'. I'm sure that the porter would have provided an instructive example of alcoholic excess. Johnson must have been wrong to suggest that Shakespeare lacks moral purpose! For more information, see Philippa Kelly, 'Shakespeare in Prison', _Meanjin_ 58:4 (1999), pp. 122-130. Cheers, Douglas McQueen-Thomson
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0154 Wednesday, 24 January 2001 From: R. A. Cantrell <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 09:20:12 -0600 Subject: Hendiadys I may be late to the party, but F. Kermode takes a pretty good look at hendiadys in S. in his SHAKESPEARE'S LANGUAGE, 2000. A partial list of the fools suffered by Claudius would include: Hamlet Polonius Gertrude Laertes Ophelia Rosencrantz Guildenstern Osric Has anyone tried to make hay of the name affinity between Cornelius/Voltemand and Cornelius Agrippa/Voltemar (a sometimes associate of the historical Dr. Faustus of the lower Germanies) or of the collision between Hamlet out of Wittenberg and Laertes out of Paris?
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0153 Wednesday, 24 January 2001 [1] From: Karen Peterson-Kranz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 07:16:36 -0800 (PST) Subj: Re: SHK 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note [2] From: Diana Price <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 14:25:37 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note [3] From: Robin Hamilton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 21 Jan 2001 15:48:41 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Karen Peterson-Kranz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 07:16:36 -0800 (PST) Subject: 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note Comment: Re: SHK 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note Hardy says we can make a final comment on what appears today, and then the plug is pulled...a decision I commend. But one more flippant comment based on today: Some of you may want to check out Martha Grimes's delightful little murder mystery, *The Dirty Duck*. The great conspiracy against Marlowe figures prominently, and Grimes's use of it is probably the most appropriate one that particular conspiracy theory could possibly have. The rest is silence. Cheers, Karen Peterson-Kranz [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Diana Price <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 23 Jan 2001 14:25:37 -0500 Subject: 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note Comment: Re: SHK 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note Since Prof. Cook has permitted a few further comments on the matter of Shakespeare's educational training, I hope he will also allow these responses. William Sutton wrote | I counted to ten, ate something and counted again. I agree, Diana, that | the documentary evidence is not there. However as seen in previous posts | it isn't there for a number of his contemporaries either. Shakespeare is one of the odd men out. There is documentary evidence of educational training, books, or access to books for Jonson, Nashe, Massinger, Harvey, Spenser, Daniel, Peele, Chapman, Drummond, Marston, Middleton, Lyly, Lodge, Greene, Watson, Marlowe, Beaumont, and Kyd (among others). | Diana seems to | be suggesting some kind of conspiracy by Orthodox authorities while | subtly (?!) defending (I presume) he who must not be named. Although I am anti-Stratfordian, I am not an Oxfordian and I do not propose any conspiracies. I am proposing that the types of documentary evidence generally used to support the genre of literary biography -- including records of education and training -- are missing from Shakespeare's. | Her statement that Baldwin based his curriculum on speculative | compilation is false. John Brownsword, schoolmaster recorded the | curricular instructions for the grammar school at Witton in Cheshire. | (Jonathan Bate -'the Genius of Shakespeare' p. 8-9). Brownsword was schoolmaster in Stratford for two years (1565-67), so he left the school when Shakespeare was about three years old. Bate introduces his discussion of Shakespeare's grammar school education with the qualifier "We may assume...", but by the time Bate gets to pages 157 or 328, his conjecture has solidified into fact. He refers twice without qualification to "the rhetorical training [Shakespeare] received at school" and builds his argument on the unproven assumption. | Also the higher | salary of the Stratford schoolmaster, to me, highlights a paying for the | best teacher approach rather than Stratford is such a backwater we have | to lure them in approach. From 1564, when Shakespeare was born, to 1579, when he was 15, there were six different schoolmasters. The higher salary may indeed have been necessary to "lure" someone to take the job. For a differing opinion concerning that "higher" rate of pay, I quote biographer Peter Levi, who wrote that "this swift succession of schoolmasters does not create confidence in the school" (30). Sean Lawrence wrote: | Diana Price's logic escapes me. If there is no record of Shakespeare's | attending a grammar school, then surely this makes it *less* likely, not | *more*, that he attended a university, since he'd also lack the | prerequisites. Yes, but that misses my point. It is one thing to acknowledge that there are no records to account for Shakespeare's education. It is another to claim he did not need an advanced education in the first place. Such a claim seems to me to be an attempt to justify the absence of documentation or to deflect unwelcome questions. | Let me put it this way: either our man went to university or he | didn't. If he didn't, he still learned how to write and some number of | classical allusions somewhere, so it was probably in school and on his | own. If he did, then he went to school anyway. Your suppositions illustrate my earlier point. The majority of literary biographies of Elizabethans cite at least some shred of documentary evidence to account for education and training. They do not rely entirely on guesswork. In that sense, Shakespeare's biography is unusual. | In any case, missing evidence is generally a license to substitute what | seems most likely--that Shakespeare went to a school where he had free | tuition--rather than inventing unlikely scenarios out of whole cloth. I thought that missing evidence meant that one is not supposed to make unsupported statements and then build on them, or rely on them, as though they were fact. My own conjectural scenario is that Shakespeare probably did attend grammar school for several years. Stephanie Hughes wrote: | Despite the impressively thorough research Nicholl gave this event, and | the fact, obvious to anyone who reads the book with some attention, that | every bit of evidence he presents points directly to Cecil, Nicholl | himself concludes that it was the Earl of Essex who engineered Marlowe's | elimination! Nicholl's theory has been challenged. See Paul E.J. Hamner's "A Reckoning Reframed: The 'Murder' of Christopher Marlowe Revisited" in ELR (1996). Hamner presented new research on some of those (Skeres and Cholmeley) presumed by Nicholl to be in Essex's service. Diana Price [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Robin Hamilton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 21 Jan 2001 15:48:41 -0800 Subject: 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note Comment: Re: SHK 12.0137 Re: Literacy with Editor's Note >informed than I may like tell us where-abouts this MARLIN (Marlowe?) >fellow said that Christ was a seducer and deceiver of the people). >Marlowe himself said nothing of the sort in any text we have today. It may not be (to say the least) the most reliable of sources, but what about the Bates Deposition? Difficult to avoid in this context ... Robin Hamilton.