October
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.2101 Friday, 18 October 2002 [1] From: Bill Arnold <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 08:55:44 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamle [2] From: Edmund Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 12:22:21 -0400 Subj: Haunted By The Ghost In Hamlet [3] From: Annalisa Castaldo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 12:25:57 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet [4] From: Claude Caspar <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 12:34:48 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet [5] From: Martin Steward <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 18:30:52 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet [6] From: Maria Concolato Palermo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 18 Oct 2002 16:32:44 +0200 Subj: R: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bill Arnold <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 08:55:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet Claude Caspar quotes me, "Can someone answer the significant question: why would an evil ghost try to spur Good?" Then, he asks, "Is this a hinge upon which Christianity closes in upon itself? What Good? Revenge? What would Jesus say to that?" First of all, let's make a distinction between Christianity and Jesus. And: who said it was "Revenge" that Hamlet was seeking? I have maintained all along that he was attempting to ascertain whether or not the throne had been usurped by an Evil man? As to Jesus: do not forget that He was visited by the Devil and offered the whole world in exchange for His Soul [my capitalizations, throughout, again, intentionally] and told the Devil where to park his arse. I believe they spell it H*ll. Secondly, Jesus appeared as a Spirit [I dare not say ghost or apparition] walking on the waters to His disciples in a boat tossed at sea, and we know what He said on the matter of their expressed Fear. For those in doubt, I will refresh memories. More anon, if queried. Thirdly, let us stop calling it a "ghost" and call it a Spirit. Fourthly, the Bible de jour was Elizabethan and later Jacobean (the KJV) and all these Spiritual visitation in the OT and the NT in the English Bible were "read aloud" [to quote the intention of King James I in authorizing a new translation, among other reasons] in all the churches of England. And lastly, it is a foregone conclusion, from the above, that it was perfectly Christian doctrine to have visitations from Spirits: some bad aka the Devil and some good aka Jesus, and therefore I cannot follow some of the rationalizations away from textual criticism of the Bible itself by some invoking the text via the isolated word: "Christianity." Let us not forget that Shakespearean scholars have isolated no less than 1300 Biblical referents in the plays of Shakespeare alone, not including his other accepted works, for instance, the sonnets. Will S was well-read in the Biblical text. Bill Arnold http://www.cwru.edu/affil/edis/scholars/arnold.htm [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Edmund Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 12:22:21 -0400 Subject: Haunted By The Ghost In Hamlet David Bishop writes: "The play follows Hamlet's long and winding road from the revenge command to the eventual just, yet still partly vengeful, killing of Claudius." Yes. There's still room for doubt about Hamlet's damnation/salvation, but yes, this is about as right as anyone can be about this play. --Ed Taft [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Annalisa Castaldo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 12:25:57 -0400 Subject: 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet >"A question I have been pondering along this thread is if in >fact it was actually Banquo's ghost, or simply a figment of a maddening >imagination--two very different things." Since we (the audience) see Banquo's ghost (it has exits), but not the dagger, I think we are meant to assume that the ghost is actually there. A more interesting question, in terms of this discussion of Hamlet's ghost, is whether or not this is meant to be an evil ghost. Macbeth is certainly headed for Hell in Christian terms, so I suppose the ghost of Banquo could be an evil spirit come to point that out to him. But what has Banquo done to deserve resurrection as a force of evil? I would also like to through another ghost, or ghosts, into the mix. In act 5 of Richard III, both Richard and Richmond are visited by the ghosts of everyone Richard has ever killed. Since each one of these ghosts blesses Richmond - the future grandfather of the current monarch - it is hard for me to believe that the audience sees them as necessarily evil. Are they supposed to be angels instead, or does this use of ghosts suggest that theatergoers/Christians in the 16th century were more flexible in their perception of ghosts than we are giving them credit for? Annalisa Castaldo [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Claude Caspar <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 12:34:48 -0400 Subject: 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet >>>The issue that I previously referred to is that Old Hamlet seems to be the only Catholic in the play because he implies the reality of Purgatory.<<< >He doesn't say it because he's Roman Catholic, he says it because he's been there and he knows.< Well, he wouldn't be there if he wasn't, in life, a practicing Catholic-non-believers could not gain access. A sinner who went to Hell would still "know" Heaven though he never went there, if he was a believer in the faith. What makes this word-play worthwhile, and it is admittedly amusing & paradoxical to those of us who have no dog in the hunt, is that the audience was composed partly of Catholics who could no longer practice openly or had given up their belief one way or another. More interestingly for the underlying meanings, the recent scholarship on Shakespeare's Catholic associations makes every reference as political as theological-just for starters, that his dad was a "secret" Catholic. As Bloom iterates Shakespeare knew personally colleagues branded, flogged, tortured, disemboweled before being drawn & quartered (Burgess has a riveting description of such a public punishment) , disgraced, let alone murdered [Marlowe?], for openly contradicting the Church of England, i.e., King, the powers that be. That WS could get away with what he did, after all his thought is still shocking to us moderns, is what makes Old Hamlet's reality important not just to Hamlet, but to everyone in the theatre. Imagine the emotions that went through those seeing heresy on the stage... [5]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Martin Steward <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 18:30:52 +0100 Subject: 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet Comment: Re: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet "Protestants were pretty unanimous in rejecting all visitations as being from heaven. Even among Catholics, visitations by angels were considered to be extremely rare." I've been watching this strand for the last week or so, and the contributors seem to have forgotten, missed, overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant my earlier reference to Richard Field's entertaining account (after Pico, interested readers may recall) of a perfectly orthodox ghost. He's so orthodox, in fact, that he comes back from the dead to tell a Pope who had "denyed the immortality of the soule" that, by his own visible example, he was dangerously in error. The extract above was what finally spurred me to this reiteration. Of course I make no claims for Field's orthodoxy over Shakespeare's (although I assume his education in Divinity was a little more thorough), and by the same token it is perfectly possible to argue that Field-Pico's ghost is just as much a literary or rhetorical device as the playwright's. But the ghost is there, whatever his function, he is a real ghost, and his message is an orthodox one. I won't type it out again as it's in the archive somewhere, but the full reference is: Richard Field, *The Fifth Booke of the Church, Together with an Appendix, containing a defense of such partes and passages of the former Bookes, as have bene either excepted against, or wrested, to the maintenance of Romish errours* (London 1610) Chapter 51, "Of the assurance of finding out the Truth, which the Bishops assembled in General Council have", p.404 Thanks for your patience, m [6]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Maria Concolato Palermo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 18 Oct 2002 16:32:44 +0200 Subject: 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet Comment: R: SHK 13.2092 Re: Haunted by the Ghost in Hamlet Sorry, but I couldn't follow the whole discussion. May be I' m only repeating something that has already been said. David Bishop's remarks remind me of Miriam Joseph's position on the argument where she points out the difference between 'revenge' and 'justice'. Her observations are forty years old, but, in my opinion, still very suggestive. Maria Concolato _______________________________________________________________ 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 Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.2100 Thursday, 17 October 2002 From: Anna Kamaralli <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2002 16:42:36 +1000 Subject: 13.2078 Re: Naught's Well Comment: Re: SHK 13.2078 Re: Naught's Well >>"That he fails to do so [escape the forced marriage], and that we are >>meant to celebrate the failure, makes All's Well as repugnant to men as >>Shrew is to women." >[Charles Weinstein] But not all women, or even all feminists. Germaine Greer adores "Shrew" and it's loads of fun to read her (really very convincing) reading suggesting that Bianca's marriage is the model that society's constraints most often produced (as society forced women to be deceptive if they wished to have any control over their lives), and that Petruchio and Katherine are looking for something better than that. It's in "The Female Eunuch". Not too comfortable, though, with this division of expected responses into men and women. Shouldn't we react the same way to injustice whether or not we share the gender of the victim? >And yet, despite that, I would have to say that productions of Shrew >always seem to end with a lighthearted, upbeat feeling of romance, while >All's Well tends towards darker productions that highlight the lack of >union and the irony of the title. >[Annalisa Castaldo] True on the whole, though a production is mentioned in "Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?" in which, when Katherine offers her hand on her last line, she drops the shawl she has been holding to reveal that she has slit her wrists, and has been bleeding to death throughout the speech. Anna Kamaralli _______________________________________________________________ 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 Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.2099 Thursday, 17 October 2002 From: L. Swilley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 16 Oct 2002 22:29:52 -0500 Subject: Questions about "Julius Caesar" My friend Tom and I return again and again to - as we see them - problems in "Julius Caesar". In one of our differences of opinion on the matter, Tom says that one should bring his knowledge of the historical figures to the play, whereas I hold that the characters, however historically named, must be defined principally by what is established about them in the play and dressed with history only to the degree that it underlines what is already there in the *characters'* remarks and actions and in the remarks and actions offered by other characters about them (the latter, of course, modified by our understanding of reasons for the other characters' approval or disapproval of any character under consideration). In my way of viewing "Julius Caesar," we observe that Caesar is indeed *called* "great," and evidently has great power already; he would be king and now depends on the Senate to give him that absolute power. Further, if the crowd is fickle and dangerously unsettled during Caesar's last days, they are marvelously much worse after his death, and a civil war breaks out in the power struggle that follows it, suggesting that this character, as bad as he may be, has been somehow the means of holding the country together. But Shakespeare does not show us a character who is great in any way that suggests he should have greater power; quite the contrary, Caesar is a crowd-pleasing, self-puffed fool, vulnerable to flattery, greedy for power for himself rather than for the good he might be able to perform with it. (Is it not exactly this characterization that makes us understand though not approve Brutus' determination to remove him?). Having seen what we have of this Caesar of the play, we ask ourselves, "where is this 'great' man whom Antony and Brutus celebrate? He is not the character we are shown here." But, long ago, I saw a production of the play in which Gielgud played Caesar and showed us briefly a man possibly worthy of such praise as Antony and Brutus give him: while delivering "Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look, etc.", and surrounded by an attentive crowd, Caesar sat leaning back vulnerably on a fountain ledge and delivered those lines directly to Cassius, who stood meekly before him like a child being corrected by an adult. Marvellously, under these public circumstances, Caesar's "but I tell you rather what to fear than what I fear, for always I am Caesar" established the power of the man - a point lost in the usual private aside-delivery of those lines to an attentive Antony, as Louis Calhern's Caesar to Marlon Brando's Antony. (Unfortunately, the Gielgud moment was but that - merely a moment; it was not followed up with any like interpretation in the rest of the production.) Friend Tom maintains that although such is the picture of Caesar that Shakespeare gives us, he also gives us a Caesar who, if considered in his historical image is one of the greatest men who ever lived, and who, even as only a character within the play, is wisely aware of his enemies ("Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look"), who properly puts matters of state before matters concerning himself (pushing aside Apollodorus' warning note on those grounds), and who will not be swayed by mere begging to alter a political judgement he has made and considers sound (the issue of Cimber). These notes, Tom says, are what everyone should see, but that are ignored, because of Caesar's "unhappy rhetoric," particularly as employed in the Senate scene. And seeing them, we should concede that Caesar would make a effective king - or at least not oppose that on the shallow grounds of his questionable motives, or his arrogance as displayed in his "unhappy rhetoric." It is evident that Shakespeare means to bring his audience to this very point of crisis, then leave us without answers, except in the "answer" that havoc follows the murder of Caesar - but we cannot know what might have followed Caesar's kingship. However those issues may be disposed, there remains for both of us the problem of Caesar's arrogant outburst in the Senate immediately before his murder. His "unhappy rhetoric," especially delivered as it usually is, is of such a vitriolic nature and so full of self and so rich with contempt for the surrounding senators, the very audience finds itself strongly moved to join the conspirators in their stabbing him. Tom and I reason that there must something wrong in the usual interpretation in the productions of this critical scene: here is a Caesar who has come to the Senate, hoping that the senators will name him absolute king, yet his conduct here before them is nothing like the crowd-pleasing character we have seen before in the play; quite the contrary, for not only does he deny their plea for the repeal of their friend's banishment, but he delivers his refusal in the most insulting of all possible terms ("cur...base fawning spaniels...") then arrogantly announces his superiority to them ("if I were like you...but I am as constant as the Northern Star...etc."). I can only suppose that the senators' remarks are to be made in such a way as to cause Caesar to forget why he has come to the Senate, and to lose all control of his persuasive, political self, showing suddenly and uncontrollably what he would be if he were indeed to be made absolute king - but I cannot imagine how a director or his actors could make this clear. On the other hand, without *some* creative explanation in production of this crucial scene, something as inventive here as that enlightening Gielgud presentation of the earlier scene, this scene remains a puzzle, for we have never seen a Caesar quite like this in the play up to this point, nor do his hopes, dependent as they are on the good will of the senators, make such a reaction at all likely. Your comments are solicited - especially if you have seen a production in which these usually missing values have been present. L. Swilley _______________________________________________________________ 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 Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.2098 Thursday, 17 October 2002 From: Dennis Taylor <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 16 Oct 2002 16:54:02 -0700 Subject: Shakespeare Lecture, Boston College Lecture next week at Boston College. John Murphy, "Purgatory and Wittenberg at the Court of Elsinore", Oct 23, 7:30 PM. Cushing 001, Boston College. Murphy is a noted Shakespearean and the author of the landmark book, 'Darkness and devils: exorcism and King Lear.' _______________________________________________________________ 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 Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.2097 Thursday, 17 October 2002 From: Peter Greenfield <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 16 Oct 2002 14:31:16 -0700 Subject: RORD Deadlines Extension With apologies for cross-posting: Since I took over from David Bergeron as editor of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama (RORD), the journal has not been published until midsummer (rather than earlier in the year). It appears this will be the case for the foreseeable future, so I wanted to let potential contributors know that submission deadlines are being set back accordingly. Articles should reach me by December 15 to be considered for publication the next summer. (RORD publishes articles on medieval and non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama, especially those concerned with theatre history, textual editing and other research topics, rather than with critical readings of plays. Articles which open up research opportunities, in addition to presenting the results of research, are particularly welcome. Electronic submission is encouraged.) There is still room in the 2003 issue for additional material. Reports/reviews for the censuses of medieval and Renaissance dramatic productions should reach me by January 15 for the next summer's issue. I regret to announce that Elizabeth Schafer is not able to continue her wonderful work on the Renaissance census. Reports for that census should be sent to me (preferably electronically) until a successor is identified. Contents of previous issues and subscription information can be found on the RORD web site: http://www.ups.edu/faculty/greenfield/rord.html Peter Greenfield, editor, RORD Department of English, CMB 1045 University of Puget Sound Tacoma, WA 98416-1045 _______________________________________________________________ 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 Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.