The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0136 Wednesday, 8 March 2006
[1] From: Arnie Perlstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 7 Mar 2006 11:56:43 -0500
Subj: Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
[2] From: Stuart Manger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 07 Mar 2006 17:23:56 +0000
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
[3] From: John E. Perry <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 07 Mar 2006 20:01:25 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
[4] From: Robert Projansky <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 7 Mar 2006 21:31:24 -0800
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Arnie Perlstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 7 Mar 2006 11:56:43 -0500
Subject: Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
As to the comments about the comedy in Measure for Measure, it is one
thing to read it on the page, but quite another when you hear and/or see
it performed live. In the latter case, the comedy comes alive!
When I first heard an audio performance of the first scene in which
Lucio, Pompey and the bawds are gossiping about the Duke and Claudio, it
sounded exactly like Side Two of The Fireside Theatre's How Can You Be
In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All. The same
incredibly sophisticated combination of raunch and intellect, bestial
and angelic. I was not a sharp enough reader to have realized that it
would sound like that.
Arnie Perlstein
Weston, Florida
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stuart Manger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 07 Mar 2006 17:23:56 +0000
Subject: 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
Very many thanks for advice.
I fully accept that the assignment was ultimately do-able, but in 2500
words - that was partly what set me back. And as many pointed out I am
not convinced that a genre based study of this particular play is very
helpful given its complexity. Did the setter want a strict genre
analysis - so what did he mean by 'tragedy' 'comedy' or the firecracker
he put into the title of 'or something in between'? Well......thanks,
that narrows the field.....not.
I too was exercised about plagiarism. A panicking student is a
plagiarising student in my experience - not universally, but I imagine
you know what I mean. But to plagiarise on this topic - as set - very
quickly gets into semantics, literary history, cultural context,
relevance of such analysis - and for me, the play qua play simply goes
out of the window. And all that in 2500 words? I just don't think so.
The salvation lies in the insistence that a number of responses made
that the essay must show process of evaluation based on some evidence
and thought, a structured approach to evaluation.
I just wish my student friend had just gone for it and climbed into the
Duke all guns blazing. For me, one of the most insidious and unreachable
hypocrites in all Shakespeare, and if Isabella gives into him at the end
(certain? not certain?), then she is, if anything, even worse. Holding
out for a better prize / catch than Angelo, maybe? Using her beauty /
virginity as a bargaining counter? Yuk!. Did Shakespeare really intend
us to leave the theatre with that taste in our mouths? Or, as in Alls
Well / Hamlet and 12th Nt, is the sheer corrosive disgust at the world
and all its works and fancies what drives the piece?
Is MM just a brilliant series of bitter cartoons on human duplicity. And
WHY does Lucio get it so badly in the neck at the end? Shakespeare
inveighing against the cynical use of absolute power to crush utterly
the weak / insignificant / helpless? Pour encourager les autres? I just
wonder where we've seen that recently?
Once more, many thanks to all.
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: John E. Perry <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 07 Mar 2006 20:01:25 -0500
Subject: 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
Stuart Manger writes: "A university student of my acquaintance has been
set an assignment to comment as follows: 'Measure for Measure - a
tragedy, a comedy, or something in between?' ...........oh yes, and by
the way, complete this in 2500 words!!!"
After reading a number of immediately defeatist responses, I am reminded
of the comment of one of my department heads, when I made the same
complaint regarding describing my work to my kids. This guy is a
world-class physicist, investigating the deepest mysteries of subatomic
particle physics.
"If you can't describe your work in a few sentences, and make good sense
of it to any moderately educated person, then you don't know yourself
what you're doing."
John Perry
Well-Quashed Engineer
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Robert Projansky <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 7 Mar 2006 21:31:24 -0800
Subject: 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0127 Measure for Measure and a Puzzle
I am neither an academic nor a scholar, but it seems to me that what's
wrong with our exam Q is not that it's "undoable" but that it's absurdly
simple.
M4M is a comedy, period. It is funny throughout (even in the middle of
high drama), nobody in the play dies, and there's a happy ending with a
betrothal between the leads.
If I'm wrong, please, someone: where is the tragedy in M4M? The
unfortunate demise of Ragozine?
M4M is surely not a play that has survived and thrived for four hundred
years because WS created a fog of ambiguity and confusion to leave the
metadramatically sensitive guessing as to what the hell they are all
doing up there. Audiences went to see and still go to see M4M because
WS's high drama of sexual harassment is brilliantly and seamlessly mixed
with plenty of laughs. It's not a comedy just by academic definition;
it's a comedy because it's funny and it's fun.
Jim Blackie, applauds a production of M4M for highlighting the comedy,
>"which I'd never noticed in my readings, or the BBC TV production."
Now that's tragedy.
Bob Projansky
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