May
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.1117 Monday, 14 May 2001 [1] From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 11 May 2001 23:06:29 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 12.1109 Re: Seminars [2] From: Florence Amit <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 12 May 2001 02:24:34 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 12.1109 Re: Seminars [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 11 May 2001 23:06:29 -0700 Subject: 12.1109 Re: Seminars Comment: Re: SHK 12.1109 Re: Seminars Yes, let's be serious. >I'm not suggesting for a single moment that academics imitate fictional >mafia characters, although I think there is much more displaced violence >in the groves of academe than most academics are prepared to admit. You picked a rather odd metaphor then, didn't you? >My concern is that we don't accept uncritically a notion of 'ethics' that >is ideologically loaded. It's by no means clear that we should use ideology to judge ethics (why the scare quotes? do you actually have a reason, or are you just trying to cast aspersions on a concept without providing any argument?) and not the other way around. To say that ethics should be judged on the grounds of ideology seems to imply justifying evils committed in the name of a cause, whereas, conversely, if we allow ideology to be judged on the basis of ethics, we can question whether the cause is a good one. >Saying that a particular argument is deficient is not quite the same (nor >should it be) as saying that the individual who advances it is 'deficient'. Indeed. Hence we ought to follow Messers. Cox and White and value very highly what John called "the civility everyone showed and the evident attention people paid to each other's comments", then do our utmost to mimic it in our online forum. Your comment on the fourth of this month that "Messrs Cox and White can retire to the senior common room if they wish" would seem to declare such notions irrelevant, and I take issue with that assertion. >While I favour controlled >speculation I draw the line at the position, advanced by one contributor >to SHAKSPER recently, which says that I haven't read what you are >referring to, I haven't thought about this problem, but I intend to have >my say on it anyway. I see no reason why we should tolerate this kind >of professional behaviour. We are not talking here about being 'polite' >to our colleagues on a day-to-day basis but about informed intellectual >exchange. Here ego should take a back seat. Your use of the term 'ego' seems ambiguous here, since it's a palpable ego-boost to trash someone. That said, no, we shouldn't tolerate this sort of professional behaviour. Nothing says that we have to be nasty about it, or that civility either in tolerating disparate opinions or in maintaining professional standards would be a surrender to "the touchy-feely world of sustaining each other's fragile egos." Nor would it be a retirement "to the senior common room". There are, I am assuming, other alternatives than malevolence or irrelevance. >As a counter-example, we might take Terence Hawkes' recent and quite >proper intervention to correct Andrew White's spectacularly wrong >assertion. I would compare it with my own intervention to Mr. White's assertion. I hardly see why we should abandon argument, as Terry so egregiously did, or to simply accuse people of being "spectacularly and exquisitely wrong". To do so is not only to abandon academic criteria--since any idiot can call someone wrong--but also to indulge our egos. >I suspect, Sean, that the ethics that you are advancing gives a high >priority to the freedom of anyone to say what they like. Actually, you're wrong. I'm much more worried about our responsibilities to one another than our rights. Insofar as we aren't respecting other people or the social contract of our academic community, we're failing such responsibilities, and should limit our own freedoms. Just because something is possible doesn't mean that it should be permitted. >I have a rather more socialist ethic that demands that there should be no >freedom without responsibility, and that before you (not 'you' in the >personal sense: we would say 'one' on this side of the pond) fire off >your impressions to the world then some attempt ought to be made to, at >least, acknowledge their accuracy or otherwise. These are academic >protocols, not ethics, and even these carry a political charge. They are ethics, insofar as protocols list and delimit our responsibilities to each other and the material which we are treating. >I speak as some members of the list seem now to have Peter Blayney in >their sights. Would it be very un-American of me to suggest that before >Peter is accused of saying things that he has not, then they familiarise >themselves a little more closely with what he HAS said? I haven't followed this argument, don't care, and please don't call me American. You'd think that my Canadian nationality would be abundantly clear by now. Cheers, Se
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.1116 Monday, 14 May 2001 From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 12 May 2001 04:09:48 -0400 Subject: 12.1099 Re: Color-Blind Casting Comment: Re: SHK 12.1099 Re: Color-Blind Casting >Isn't all of this rather like opera's use of overweight performers in >romantic roles? After the initial shock and amusement, the audience >tends to forget everything but what they paid to see and hear: the >story, the voices, the interpretation. It is fallacious to compare the conventions of one art form with that of another. We attend the dramatic theater to be caught up in the action on stage and, therefore, willingly suspend our disbelief that it is all a fiction. We attend operas, on the other hand, to be enthralled by the music and thrilled by the spectacle. It is almost impossible to surrender enough disbelief to swallow the improbable libretti of most operas. In the U.S. and U.K. we do not even understand most of them, even if they are sung in English. -- How many opera fans can pick out the words sung by four singers in mixed quartets, or even catch most of the words of a G&S patter song. As Gilbert noted in Ruddigore, "This particularly rapid unintelligible patter isn't generally heard, and if it is it doesn't matter." -- Therefore, while a dumpy overweight Violetta would be a hindrance in a dramatic version of The Lady of the Camellias, she does no harm at all in La Traviata, provided she can sing well enough. _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Webpage <http://ws.bowiestate.edu>
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.1115 Monday, 14 May 2001 [1] From: Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 11 May 2001 16:59:13 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 12.1094 Re: Time in Hamlet [2] From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 12 May 2001 03:58:54 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 12.1105 Re: Time in Hamlet [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 11 May 2001 16:59:13 -0400 Subject: 12.1094 Re: Time in Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 12.1094 Re: Time in Hamlet I'm just trying to point out some of the problems with the question "how old is Hamlet." It is impossible to answer Steve Roth's question: "do you think the four items were just missed or messed up by the Q1 reporter, or that they were added at some time after the creation of Q1?" Not only for these four items but for every word in the texts. If we have three different versions, the "true" age must reside in an ideal text that hovers in the Platonic world of ideal literary forms. I might perceive one ideal text as being consistent with all the textual evidence while others may call it psychobabble. I tend to assume that there's a good chance (though not certain) that what remain cruxes after four hundred years of close reading do so because the textual evidence supports no unambiguous conclusion. To theorize about a "true" reading in these cases is simply to make assertions about our own sense of what the author would or would not be writing about. It will always remain impossible to say what of F1 represents Shakespeare's intention and what is editorial emendation of texts in seven years since his death. If the same author that gave Hamlet sixteen years in an early performance gave him thirty in a later rewriting, it's unlikely that he was unaware of the ambiguity. If a later editor inserted the grave digger's speech, he may have been. There is no way to choose between these two possibilities. Either would account for the attention the question has attracted. I base my reading on the sense that the texts themselves call Hamlet's age into question, and the texts then confound a choice between younger and older alternatives. The graveyard scene is not simply a clue we have discovered in seeking to answer a question that the play seems to demand of us; it goes to some length to give us a mathematical formula. Oh, here's the guy's skull I used to ride on his back when I was in my Oedipal stage. By the way, how long have you been here? Sixteen here thirty years man and boy. Why do we even ask? Isn't it because, even if we miss the implication of the gravedigger's math the first time through, and didn't happen to be present at Burbage's performance twenty years before the publication of the folio, the news that Hamlet, the glass of fashion, the temperamental and passionate lover of little Ophelia, is fat and scant of breath comes as a shock and forces all of us back to look for clues which we happily find, but which grow more ambiguous the further back we look until it seems that Hamlet occupies two different ages simultaneously? But mostly, what is the point of looking back past the first folio to locate an imagined point in the transmission of the texts where the "true" version must stand which presents an unambiguously aged character? Such a version never existed, or at least no longer exists, in a series of evolving texts which were never frozen in their development by the people most intimately involved in their production and performance until the folio. My tongue may brush my cheek a little, but I am dead serious about Shakespeare as a remarkably gifted psychoanalyst. He lived at the dawn of empirical positivism, and he had an ideal laboratory to work in. A discourse relating an Oedipal conflict to an unconscious cohabitation of two different ages is supported by the existing texts of the play. The texts call attention to the question of Hamlet's age; the specificity of the query and response as to the length of the gravedigger's service followed by the reference to young Hamlet serves no other function. While I can not disqualify the possibility that the ambiguity is purely the product of incompetent piracy, I can neither disqualify the possibility that the texts that we have were engineered to render Hamlet's age ambiguous in the literal sense. To do so can only be a matter of prejudice based on the assumption that Shakespeare or his editors could not have had insights into the human psyche that we associate with a much later period. As they would not be the first, be they pre-Socratic philosophers or Leonardo da Vinci, who tried to express ideas far beyond their age in the terms that their age afforded them, I have no such prejudice. The question then is not what is the true age of Hamlet, but which of the possible readings supported by the texts can be safely disqualified, and my psychobabble, as far as I can see, can not. What I suspect is that Hamlet from the lost version alluded to by Greene to the F1 version is a single play undergoing a process of development across almost forty years of performances. At every performance, the dramatist may arrive at new insights which he can pen into the next performance. At some point the question of the ambiguity of Hamlet's age occurred to him, and he realized a greater value in its ambiguity than in erasing it. Taken together with the many other intimations of a psychoanalytic discourse in the play, and given our knowledge of Freudian theory, the connotation of such ambiguity seems to me a clear incorporation of the theme of regression in Hamlet's character study. I do not claim that this can be demonstrated to be the authentic reading of Hamlet's age, and I suspect I have been intentionally prevented from such a demonstration, but my reading must be disqualified to accept Steve Roth's, and I don't either believe that such a disqualification can be demonstrated on the basis of the existing evidence. Clifford [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 12 May 2001 03:58:54 -0400 Subject: 12.1105 Re: Time in Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 12.1105 Re: Time in Hamlet Steve Roth comments on my speculation that >>The two references to Hamlet's age in V.i >>are not in Q1 and seem to have been added to assure the audience that >>Burbage was not miscast. > >This is the position I came to as well, and that I argue in my Chapter >One and Appendix A, with some qualifications. (I don't claim to be the >first one to arrive at this surmise, though like many others I came to >it independently.) -- As did I -- >Problem is, this contradicts the currently accepted textual histories of >the play. According to Dover Wilson, Wells/Taylor, Blakemore Evans, >etc., both F1 and Q2 are ultimately based on a single, pre-Q1, >auctorially authoritative source. By this theory, the four oddly >obtrusive items that cast Hamlet as an adult are all missing from Q1 as >a result of the reporter's error. Another possibility is that the "error" was a deliberate deletion of unnecessary information. Gwynne Evans repeats the fairly common notion that Q1 is "based most probably on a much shortened text prepared by Shakespeare's company for provincial touring" (Riverside 2d Ed. p. 1234). If so, and Burbage was replaced on tour with a younger actor, the speeches could have been deliberately deleted to eliminate an incorrect impression as to the character's age in the provinces. I was aware of the now generally accepted view that all substantive texts have a common forebear in the foul papers, and I was less than precise when I used the word "added"; it would have been more accurate to say "included." On the other hand, Evans also notes that "Recently, a few critics ... have resurrected the long outmoded theory that Q1 represents Shakespeare's first draft" (ibid.). Steve Roth adds a post script to his comments: >P. S. Your statement that "the character is precisely as old as the >actor playing him appears to be" agrees completely with Dover Wilson: >"Hamlet is an actor made up to represent a certain age, which they >[audience members] accept without question." But this strikes me as a >tautology. Me too, and that is my point. _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Webpage <http://ws.bowiestate.edu>
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.1114 Monday, 14 May 2001 From: Nicolas Pullin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 11 May 2001 15:51:40 -0500 Subject: Re: Peter Brook's Hamlet Comment: SHK 12.1095 Re: Peter Brook's Hamlet HR Greenberg commented that "the ending as beginning [in Brook's Hamlet] is about as far from the original as one could get". But in many revenge tragedies, Hamlet included, the da capo endings of cyclical vengeance are often suggested. For Hamlet, the repetition suggested is metatheatrical, since Horatio calls for a new audience and a new "stage" for his retelling of Hamlet's story. To have Horatio frame the action makes perfect sense to me. I must confess that this framework only confirmed my own ideas. I am about to direct Hamlet myself, in Fort Worth TX, and have cut down the script mightily (to about the same length as Brook, though there will be an intermission--and many fewer lengthy pauses), but have reversed Brook's frame, taking Horatio's final audience address and repeating it at the beginning. _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Webpage <http://ws.bowiestate.edu>
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.1113 Monday, 14 May 2001 From: Toby Malone <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 12 May 2001 00:25:57 +0800 Subject: Branagh's Textual Choices Hi everyone - I am in the final throes of my thesis at the moment on Branagh's Hamlet, and have almost completed my chapter on the texts that were used for his screenplay and film (interestingly enough, varying texts between these two). Although I am top-heavy on my own theories, I am still searching in vain for journal material on Branagh's choices. I have had some help from Prof. Russell Jackson, which will prove invaluable, but in addition I was wondering whether anyone on the list knew of any articles or material written on Branagh's justification for using a primarily F-based screenplay, as well as his other textual choices? There was an article that Prof. Jackson wrote for Shakespeare Bulletin in 1997 called something along the lines of 'Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet: the textual choices' - however I am stumped in finding a copy - my inter-library loans have proved fruitless and I was unable to get hold of the editor in the USA. Would anyone have any leads on anything like this? Thanking you all profusely in advance, and apologising for such a plaintive request at a point (about a month) scarily close to submission date... Thanks again. Toby Malone University of Western Australia _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Webpage <http://ws.bowiestate.edu>