November
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1955 Sunday, 27 November 2005 [1] From: Peter Bridgman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 25 Nov 2005 20:44:20 -0000 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters [2] From: John V. Knapp <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 01:01:02 -0600 (CST) Subj: Re: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters [3] From: C. David Frankel <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 20:13:25 -0500 Subj: RE: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Bridgman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 25 Nov 2005 20:44:20 -0000 Subject: 16.1946 Living Characters Comment: Re: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters Douglas Galbi writes ... >From 1535 to 1538, all Marian shrines in England were destroyed. >In 1538, Our Lady of Walsingham was burned in a formal ceremony >similar to that used to execute persons convicted of treason. Not quite. Heretics were burnt; persons convicted of treason were hanged, drawn and quartered. >Subsequently, a much higher share of English females began to be named >Mary. The frequency of this name among newborn girls rose from about >1% c. 1500 to about 13% c. 1600. It strikes me that these statistics can be interpreted in one of two ways. The obvious interpretation is that the good folk of England were registering a protest at the baptismal font against the hammers, chisels and whitewash of the reformers. But another explanation is that there had previously been something of a taboo in medieval England against naming girls after the Mother of God (like naming boys 'Jesus'), but now that Mary was just another saint, her name was available. Incidentally, Shakespeare's daughters may also have been named after the Virgin, since Susanna and Judith were both 'types' of Mary to medieval Christians. Susanna because she was chaste, and Judith because Joachim the high priest says to her, 'You are the glory of Jerusalem! You are the great pride of Israel! You are the highest honour of our race!'. These lines appear in numerous Marian prayers. The Virgin's father, St Joachim, also got his name from this high priest. It may be just a coincidence but Susanna and Judith are both names not found in Protestant Bibles. Daniel 13 and the book of Judith were among the books the reformers threw out. Peter Bridgman [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: John V. Knapp <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 01:01:02 -0600 (CST) Subject: 16.1946 Living Characters Comment: Re: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters Dear David Bishop et al., -- As a character in *Cool-Hand Luke* once said, we have here I think a failure to communicate. I will assume, for the sake of argument, that the failure is largely mine and so want to clarify a couple of points. 1) Of course it's only a play, and characters have not ontological status but are only representations; only in that sense can they be said to seem "real;" 2) I also doubt that Shakespeare knew much about contemporary criticism (and that's probably a very fortunate thing!); 3) Sure one could say that many of Shakespeare's plots were, as Abigail Quart pointed out, soapy, but we were discussing the relative ratios of how a critic could think about a character as either potentially separate from or irreducibly part of a given plot. 4) the "convoluted criticism" to which Prof Bishop suggests I practice I must here deny. My point was a (relatively) simple one: Shakespeare created characters in families like those in Hamlet with his intuitive feel for how, for example, two brothers might display levels of sibling rivalry, and how one persuaded his immature son into continuing the family battles. In practical terms, that display has not been as well-discussed as so much else in the play but is well worth exploring-as I did in *Reading the Family Dance* (2003). A critic with some understanding of family interactions could plausibly argue that looking at the play from the Ernest Jones' position ["The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive." The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (January, 1910): 72-113 ], has tended to shrink many critical responses to variations of Freudian dogma. I simply argued that by looking at these characters as interacting inside a family dynamic-as posited by a critic, not Shakespeare himself-one opened up a number of interesting critical alternatives to, for example, the plethora of dreary humping scenes in Gertrude's closet we've seen in so many recent film and stage adaptations. [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: C. David Frankel <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 20:13:25 -0500 Subject: 16.1946 Living Characters Comment: RE: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters Over the years, in my teaching of script analysis, in my directing, and in my teaching of plays in general, I've been developing a vocabulary for talking about plays that I think recognizes the different perspectives brought forth in this conversation. I'm still tentative about the actual terms, and they've changed over the years, but here goes: When analyzing a script, especially with an eye toward production, a useful method of analysis involves exploring three interrelated worlds: the fictive, the dramaturgical, and the theatrical. Separable for analysis, these worlds overlap and interpenetrate each other; nevertheless, each provides different insights into the play as whole, insights that carry implications for the translation of script into production and the subsequent experience of audiences. The fictive world concerns the story. In the fictive world, people (or people-analogs: animals, robots, etc.) do things to and with other people in particular places. Romeo loves Juliet. Engaging the fictive world allows audiences (which includes readers) the opportunity to speculate about human motivation: why does Romeo love Juliet. Yet all the while we engage in this speculation, we're aware that Romeo and Juliet are not people, but characters. That is, they are fictive, and have no "reality" outside the construct of the play. In that they are fictions, they belong to the dramaturgical world. In the dramaturgical world we ask how are Romeo and Juliet used - what function do they serve? The dramaturgical world is the world of plot, character, ideas, language, and so on. However, it is more than that. The dramaturgical world also includes the cultural context in which the playwright creates, including the genre conventions and those idiosyncratic conventions that shape the writing of the individual. The dramaturgical world also includes those theatrical conventions that shape the dramatic imagination of the playwright. Of course, the dramaturgical decisions manifest in the form of language, for that is the playwright's most immediate medium. The playwright offers a kind of model for action at a distance, however, in that the real medium for the play is the four-dimensional one of the theatre: that medium made up of actors, space, time, light, sound, scene design, and so on. The dramaturgical world, in short, embodies a sort of virtual theatrical world, one that may or may not appear in a given production of that play. The theatrical world, then, refers to the particular manifestation of a play in performance. Here we are concerned with actors, designs, and the nature of buildings and audiences. No matter how closely the playwright is connected to production, the virtual theatrical world in the text differs from the actual theatrical world of a production. Although Shakespeare knew his company and theatre space, every individual performance of Romeo and Juliet surely differed from the one (or ones) he staged in his head. Different plays (periods, styles, etc.) differ in the degree to which the fictive world and dramaturgical world are foregrounded, and that, I think, provides another way of talking about plays and theatre. _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1954 Sunday, 27 November 2005 From: Scot Zarela <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 09:57:58 -0800 Subject: 16.1923 Empty stage? Comment: Re: SHK 16.1923 Empty stage? The juncture of Prospero's exit and re-entrance doesn't require a void stage even for a moment. Before he exits, he is not alone: at least Ariel is with him, and possibly other spirits. He commands, "Follow me, and do me service," at which point, as master, it would be suitable for him to leave first: then Ariel (and other spirits, if present) would follow, still performing as they depart. This need not be very much performance in an absolute sense, but it can still be enough to give Prospero time to change, off-scene, into his magic robes, and re-enter, perhaps inconspicuously, through another door. When the spirits have concluded their departure, Prospero could then reveal himself and begin Act V. -- Scot _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1953 Sunday, 27 November 2005 [1] From: Peter Miale <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 25 Nov 2005 16:14:21 -0500 Subj: RE: SHK 16.1943 Modern Bowdlerizations [2] From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 11:23:43 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1943 Modern Bowdlerizations [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Miale <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 25 Nov 2005 16:14:21 -0500 Subject: 16.1943 Modern Bowdlerizations Comment: RE: SHK 16.1943 Modern Bowdlerizations Shakespeare censorship, or pity the poor director. >n a virtually uncut Othello >Stratford Festival Canada 1979) Othello's famous speech building to his >suicide was not interrupted by the brief lines from Lodovico and >Gratiano, a standard adjustment. In this instance, however, the two >interjections were not omitted to enhance the dramatic rhythm but >because, in a production that was to end its run with a series of >matinees for high school students, the director and her actors were >fearful of losing this climactic moment when Lodovico, in front of 2,000 >teenagers, exclaimed: "O bloody period!" (5.2.357). [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 11:23:43 -0500 Subject: 16.1943 Modern Bowdlerizations Comment: Re: SHK 16.1943 Modern Bowdlerizations The text of *Romeo and Juliet* we used in school (England, about 1961, public school [=private school for US SHAKSPEReans]) taught me an early lesson in scholarship and the energising virtues of the 'Note on the Text' at the start of an edition. It recorded that (the wording is not accurate but the sense certainly is) 'the text used in this edition is complete except for the excision of the following lines...' and following it with a brief list of references. I cannot have been the only one to have shot off to a complete Shakespeare, located the missing passages and then wondered what was obscene about poppering pears, etc. _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1952 Sunday, 27 November 2005 From: Kathy Dent <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 12:41:21 +0000 Subject: 16.1944 JC and Good Night, and Good Luck Comment: RE: SHK 16.1944 JC and Good Night, and Good Luck Richard Burt writes >Wow. What bizarre responses to my post. For the record, I simply described the film. Perhaps now is a good moment for Richard Burt to explain the purpose of his posts. What is the point of 'simply' describing a film if he has no comment to make upon it? Most of Mr Burt's posts seem to consist of describing any tangential reference to Shakespeare that he finds in popular culture, but to what end? He never explains to the rest of us why he wants to draw our attention to these references. So if he's not giving us his opinion in order to provoke discussion, what's the point? Kathy Dent _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1951 Sunday, 27 November 2005 From: Ward Elliott <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 13:40:55 -0800 Subject: 16.1933 Lions and Tigers and Wagers...oh my... Comment: RE: SHK 16.1933 Lions and Tigers and Wagers...oh my... It seems that the dust hasn't settled on the Woodstock controversy after all. William Davis (SHK 16.933, Nov. 23) wonders whether our stylometric data, though well enough validated for Shakespeare's "core" plays written "mostly at the height of his career," can tell us anything worthwhile about whether a play written "very early in his career," or "pre-career," could be identified as his. Mr. Davis doesn't specify what dates he means by "very early" or "pre-career," but his point of reference is our "near-wager" with Michael Egan, who last summer claimed to have proved irrefutably that Woodstock must have been written by Shakespeare by 1594-95, challenged us to a showdown on the question, but in the end declined our offer to put it to a vote by SHAKSPER's membership. The Woodstock reference is important for two reasons: (1) since there is no external evidence connecting the play to Shakespeare, the debate is entirely over internal evidence; and (2) Mr. Egan, like most scholars prior to 2002, strongly supports a date between 1592 and 1595, just the right time for a Richard II, Part I to have been written. We can only speculate whether and how much a hypothetical "pre-career" play or poem written by Shakespeare in his teens or early 20's might resemble works he wrote in his 30's and 40's. We discuss this point in detail in our "Oxford by the Numbers" (our 2004, pp. 382-396) with respect to the "pre-career" poems of the Earl of Oxford and conclude that it is implausible for many reasons that a stylometric sow's ear like Oxford would mature into a silk purse like Shakespeare overnight in his mid-40's. But Woodstock is hardly a "pre-career" play; in fact, it's probably not even a "very early" play. MacDonald Jackson notes that it's a 17th-century scribal manuscript loaded with 17th-century words in 17th-century meter and concludes that it probably was written in the 17th century when Shakespeare was in his late 30's or early 40's, and not by Shakespeare, but more likely by Samuel Rowley (Jackson, 2002). We think Jackson's arguments are persuasive but for now are willing to accept the older, conventional, Egan dating for argument's sake. This could make it, arguably, "very early" for a Shakespeare play, written just after Richard III (1592-93) and the Henry VI series (1589-91) when Shakespeare was nearing 30. So let's take Woodstock, Richard III, and Henry VI, Part II, thought to be the least co-authored of the H6 series and the one by which Woodstock was chiefly inspired. Let us suppose that no one had heard of any of these, and that all three were discovered as anonymous plays in Mr. Davis's time capsule. Is there any way you could tell from Shakespeare's remaining core plays which of the three manuscripts was Shakespeare's? We would expect Mr. Egan to say the three plays were indistinguishable from each other, under some variant of his past arguments from resemblances that Woodstock, at least, has to be Shakespeare's. He thinks it dovetails so perfectly with Richard II that it has to be the first part of a sequence, Richard II, Part I, and that its 1,600 "unique" Shakespeare "fingerprints" prove irrefutably that Shakespeare wrote it. Shakespeare spoke of "heads cut off," of "forfeiture of land," and of "nearness in blood;" so did whoever wrote Woodstock; therefore Shakespeare must have written Woodstock. We don't find such parallels persuasive because we doubt that they are unique, and we actually searched a couple of them - but not all 1,600 -- in contemplation of the later-rejected debate, and we found many parallels in other writers. To us, they are more like fingers, toes, eyes, and ears than like fingerprints or DNA. If you and Shakespeare both have ten fingers and two ears, we don't think it necessarily proves that you are Shakespeare. Our preferred approach is to look for differences from Shakespeare, not resemblances, because differences disprove common authorship a hundred - or is it a thousand? - times more powerfully than non-unique resemblances prove it. If you and Cinderella both fit a Size Four slipper, it doesn't prove you are she, only that you could be. But if you are a Size Eight, your claim is in real trouble. If there are only a few of such differences in a sample text, it could be Shakespeare's; if many, it is that much less likely. What would happen to our core Shakespeare baseline profiles if we had never heard of either R3 or 2H6? The short answer is "nothing." 2H6 is not in our core baseline because we wanted a clean baseline and were aware that most scholars suspect that the entire H6 series is co-authored. R3 is a gold-standard baseline Shakespeare play, but not one that sets any boundaries. On every test it scores within profile boundaries set by the other 28 core Shakespeare plays. For our time-capsule thought experiment that means that we don't have to change a single profile to test the three "anonymous" plays. The first and least important outcome of such a test is this: all three plays, like all our Shakespeare plays and most of our plays not by Shakespeare, would pass at least 28 of the 48 tests. They all have plenty of Shakespeare resemblances. But these piles of non-unique resemblances prove very little. Much more important is the second outcome, marked by stars (*) in Table 1 below: Woodstock fails all of the remaining 20 tests, while R3 fails none and 2H6 fails only three, with a Shakespeare composite threshold of two. The odds that Shakespeare could have written Woodstock are trillions of times lower than the odds that he could have written R3 or 2H6, no matter which of our two odds-calculating conventions is used. See our 2004, pp. 399, 402. In terms of composite distance from Shakespeare's normal ranges, our "very early" 2H6 is just outside our Shakespeare ballpark, and our "very early" R3 is in the infield just a yard or two from home plate- but the "very early" Woodstock is in a different statistical galaxy. These seem to us very powerful prima facie evidence that R3 certainly, and 2H6 possibly, are Shakespeare could-be's, but Woodstock is not. Table 1 Shakespeare Rejections, Richard III, 2H6, and Woodstock Shakespeare Test, Range R3 2H6 Woodstock Remarks Grade Level, 4 to 7 5 6 3* g, e Hyphenated Words, 52 to 180 85 82 8* e Feminine Endings, 8 to 17 16 12 18* t, p Open Lines, 11 to 23 17 14 32* t, p, e It(1st wd of sentence),7-18 9 9 4* e BoB1, 284 to 758 425 284 201* BoB3, -174 to 247 -109 -179* -202* BoB7, 278 to 779 358 514 32* Aggregate Buckets, -2 to +2 -0.95 -1.54 -5.1* Total 1, 0 to 9 0 1 28* On't per 20,000, 0 to 2 1 0 6* t i'faith per 20,000, 0 to 8 0 1 9* Ha' per 20,000, 0 to 5 0 0 22* 'll per 20,000, 31 to 90 41 55 136* 'd/'ld per 20,000, 0 to 2 0 1 11* t I do + verb, 5 to 28 13 11 2* -ish per 20,000, 1 to 22 12 8 23* -ly per 20,000, 98 to 161 155 108 194* Most + modifier, 8 to 32 18 17 34* t See per 20,000, 0 to 5 4 3 7* Whereas/whenas per 20,000,0 0 2* 0 e It,last wd/s per 20,000, 8-30 16 7* 17 Midl. sp. end.%, to 1594,1-3 3 1 8* t Table 1: Starred entries are Shakespeare rejections; unlike 2H6 and R3, Woodstock has far too many to be a Shakespeare could-be. In our regular 48 tests, Woodstock falls outside Shakespeare's 1590's range 20 times, 2H6 thrice, Richard III never. By contrast, none of our 28 other core Shakespeare baseline plays have more than two rejections. 13 have one rejection; 9, like R3, have none. Midline speech endings are not part of our regular test suite, but Woodstock also has twice as many of them as any Shakespeare play written before 1594. Source: our 2004, pp. 398-420. Remarks: * = rejection, sample falls outside Shakespeare profile. g = test is sensitive to genre; p = test is sensitive to prosody; e = test is sensitive to editing; t = test is sensitive to time of composition. For a description of each test, see our 1996, 196-203. These calculations, as indicated, presuppose that Mr. Egan's dating of Woodstock, and the Riverside Shakespeare's of the other two, are correct. They also presuppose that the Louis Ule/Tucker Brooke edition of Woodstock we used is roughly consistent in its editing with that of the Riverside Shakespeare, which we used for our Shakespeare baseline. Mr. Davis correctly observes that some of Shakespeare's stylistic habits changed over his writing lifetime. We believe that eight of our regular 48 tests are sensitive to time of composition, and that five of these are involved in our time-capsule comparison, the ones marked "t" in the remarks column. If, as MacDonald Jackson argues and we agree, the play was more likely written in the 1600's, most of these rejections, maybe all of them, would disappear. But the central pillar of Mr. Egan's arguments that Woodstock and Richard II were a sequentially written, dovetailed pair would disappear with it. Moreover, the play would still have 15 rejections and, hence, still have astronomically low odds of Shakespeare authorship. Four more Woodstock-rejecting tests, marked "e" in the remarks column, can be sensitive to the way the text was edited and may not reflect actual differences between one author and another. We have not tried to find whether this is actually so of our Tucker-Brooke Woodstock edition because it's a lot of work, for which others are better suited, and because it would make little difference in the final result. Even if all four editing-sensitive tests were ignored, along with all five time-sensitive tests, Woodstock would still have 11 rejections and would still test in a different galaxy from any play in our Shakespeare baseline. Stylometry, in essence, is a way of trying to predict what we don't know from what we do know. We know from years of testing that Shakespeare's known, single-authored plays and poems are remarkably predictable. Without exception, they all fall within a narrow range of composite probability, and they continue to do so, as we have just shown with R3, if you pull one out and test it against all the rest, and with no known false positives or false negatives. See our 2004, pp. 357, 365-368. Where the sample text is short, or possibly co-authored, or written before or after Shakespeare's writing lifetime, we cannot speak with such assurance, and we have made a special effort in recent years to tell our readers not just whether we think a text is or is not Shakespeare's but how well we think we know it and how much it differs from Shakespeare. In our SHAKSPER postings over the years we have reported many close calls, such as the "Shakespeare sections" of Edward III and Sir Thomas More, and some middling-close calls, such as A Lover's Complaint. 2H6, though technically just outside our ballpark, is a very close call and would fall within the ballpark had we defined it one rejection more loosely or had drawn one of our profiles a point wider. Both of these would be perfectly reasonable safety allowances for latent variability (our 2004, p. 366), and we suppose that 2H6, though not in our gold-standard baseline, could easily be Shakespeare's. But Woodstock is not a close call. It is more like The Funeral Elegy and the poems of Oxford, Bacon, and Marlowe, where the works in question tested in a different galaxy from our Shakespeare baseline. If Woodstock turned up in a time capsule along with R3 and 2H6, it would be not be at all hard to tell which of the three "very early" plays could be Shakespeare and which could not. We might not go so far as the path breaking Woodstock scholar, A.P. Rossiter, in saying "There is not the smallest chance that he [Woodstock's anonymous author] was Shakespeare (Rossiter, 1946, p. 73)," but it does seem to us that the odds of common authorship with Shakespeare are much lower than the odds of getting hit by lightning or of winning the lottery. The same cannot be said of either of our very early Shakespeare plays, the gold-standard Richard III, and the open-to-question Henry VI, Part II. Early though they are, they seem to us as clear, easy Shakespeare could-be's by our tests as Woodstock, whether early or late, is a clear, easy couldn't-be. If Mr. Egan had accepted our challenge and let the question be put to a vote, I would be surprised if SHAKSPER's membership thought otherwise. References: Elliott, W. E. Y. and R. Valenza (2004). "Oxford by the Numbers: What are the Odds that the Earl of Oxford Could Have Written Shakespeare's Poems and Plays?" Tennessee Law Review 72(1): 323-454. http://govt.claremontmckenna.edu/welliott/UTConference/Oxford_by_Numbers .pdf Elliott, W. E. Y. and R. J. Valenza (1996). "And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants." Computers and the Humanities 30: 191-245. Jackson, M. P. (2002). "Shakespeare's Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14: 17-65. Rossiter, A. P., Ed. (1946). Woodstock: A Moral History. London, Chatto and Windus. _______________________________________________________________ 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.