The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0269 Monday, 3 April 2006
[1] From: Sophie Masson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 1 Apr 2006 07:58:29 +1100
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0257 Shakespeare in Time Magazine (Europe)
[2] From: Jack Heller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 31 Mar 2006 16:16:00 -0500 (EST)
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0257 Shakespeare in Time Magazine (Europe)
[3] From: Will Sharpe <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 01 Apr 2006 13:18:04 +0100
Subj: Shakespeare in Time Magazine
[4] From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Monday, April 03, 2006
Subj: Taylor on Shakespeare in Time (Europe)
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Sophie Masson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 1 Apr 2006 07:58:29 +1100
Subject: 17.0257 Shakespeare in Time Magazine (Europe)
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0257 Shakespeare in Time Magazine (Europe)
Re the idea of genius coming 'in clusters' as it were--to me it seems
clear that some times are much more conducive than others not so much
at producing geniuses as at encouraging them. Challenge is an important
aspect of any artist's development and for a genius, to be operating at
a time when other really good writers have already started producing
great works, sharpens the skills and intelligence and quickens the
development. This is so in any art form, including literature (and
indeed I'd say in science as well). There are isolated geniuses such as,
say, John Milton, operating in far less congenial times--but it seems to
me that in fact the greatest geniuses have come out of remarkably
intellectually and artistically rich times, times of great excitement,
when artists constantly have to measure themselves against other really
good artists around, and are both stimulated and challenged by the
competition. Shakespeare's was just one such time. As well, those times
have responsive audiences/readers whatever--everyone is infected by that
spirit of excitement and possibility.
This in no way diminishes the genius of the individual, which is there
en herbe to begin with--but its flowering is hugely helped along by the
prevailing atmosphere. Without it, the genius would still flower, just
more slowly.
What's interesting too, to me, is just how such an atmosphere is
created--it's not anything officials do--it seems more like an alchemy
of people all being in the same place at the same time.
Sometimes a highly gifted individual kicks off a whole chain
reaction--for instance, right now, to talk about something I know quite
a bit about (I'm a novelist who writes principally for children) there's
a 'golden age' in children's literature which can be attributed in very
large part to JK Rowling and the fact that the success of her books
amongst the reading public(a success that at first was totally
grass-roots and not hyped at all)has actually given heart to a lot of
good writers who have then presented more challenging ms to publishers
who heartened by the huge success of HP are prepared to take a punt and
publish things that in the past they might've derided as old fashioned
or unsaleable. Of course in good modern style the hype machine has now
gone into overdrive about it all, too much published, which could lead
to a suffocating of what was a genuine trend. We need time for things
to 'shake down' naturally--which is what happened in Elizabethan
times--but whether that will be allowed in our marketing-mad age, I
don't know.
Sophie Masson
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jack Heller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 31 Mar 2006 16:16:00 -0500 (EST)
Subject: 17.0257 Shakespeare in Time Magazine (Europe)
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0257 Shakespeare in Time Magazine (Europe)
I suppose that most of this TIME magazine discussion is in response to
Gary Taylor's own article in the European edition. We might as well post
the link again just in case some are not following this thread:
http://www.time.com/time/europe/html/060327/viewpoint.html
Marcus Dahl has written twice this week:
>But once again I say - play cards WITH WHAT WE HAVE
>- and see. Line for line, play for play, Shakespeare wins. Shakespeare
>has more. Shakespeare encompasses.
>
>And Bach invents Mozart. etc. This is the way of the world sorry.
Others have blamed the tendency to re-evaluative Shakespeare's career on
postmodernism. I would remind them to review Samuel Johnson's complaints
about how unbearable KING LEAR is.
I enjoy Shakespeare's works, even those plays that some would rank less
highly. But whose name sells tickets to the co-written plays? Does
Shakespeare or Middleton sell TIMON OF ATHENS? Shakespeare or Wilkins
for PERICLES? Shakespeare or Fletcher for HENRY VIII? Would those plays
get the time of stage if his name were secondary (as his contribution,
in some cases, was indeed secondary).
I don't think Shakespeare necessarily wins, play for play. I have no
problem concluding that almost any contemporaneous Jonson play is better
than Cymbeline. Let me shuffle and deal the cards:
Shakespeare: Henry VI, Part 1; Comedy of Errors, All's Well that Ends
Well, Timon of Athens, Cymbeline
vs
Others: Edward II; Volpone; The Duchess of Malfi; A Chaste Maid in
Cheapside; The Changeling
If anyone thinks any one of those Shakespeare plays is better than any
one of the others' plays, please explain why.
Jack Heller
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Will Sharpe <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 01 Apr 2006 13:18:04 +0100
Subject: Shakespeare in Time Magazine
Jonathan Bate, quite rightly, I think, points out that this argument is
'strictly circular':
"why is Shakespeare a site of greater cultural authority than Ben
Jonson? Because people have made a greater investment in making meaning
out of him. Why have people made a greater investment in making meaning
out of him? Because he is a site of greater cultural authority. Etc."
(The Genius of Shakespeare p. 322)
But I suppose what Gary Taylor is saying in the article takes us back
further than this i.e. how is there anything to turn into a site of
cultural authority in the first place? Because two men called Heminges
and Condell walked to William Jaggard's printing shop carrying a pile of
manuscripts which were given to a group of compositors who set the
corresponding letters into type (not always accurately, to be sure),
bound the type-pieces in formes, inked them, and printed them off,
making the works of Shakespeare (if we assume the print run was around
750) 750 times more likely to survive. This is cultural selection in
truly Darwinian terms i.e. the survival of any species is contingent on
its ability to reproduce. It is also an irrefutable argument. However,
it also precludes what John Jowett calls the "more frail and subjective
considerations such as literary judgement and common sense", which, as
we all know, can't really be used as criteria for explaining the
cultural status of certain works of literature, even though we all know
that the two things exist. If one thing can be stated empirically, while
another can only be expressed subjectively, then, obviously, the former
will always win out. Why can't I say that I know Shakespeare to be great
because when I read or see his works I just feel it in my gut, so we
should just stop all the pointless academic naysaying? Because it's the
same thing as saying 'when I read the Bible or hear a sermon I just know
that God made the world, so we should stop all this scientific
naysaying'. The sentiment regarding Shakespeare's greatness described
above is deeply felt on my part; in fact, I'd go so far as to call it my
own 'knowledge', just as religious ideas are deeply felt and taken as
'knowledge' by others. Any attempt to argue these points, however, will
only be frustrating to both parties as they hinge upon a leap of faith.
On the other hand, I am also aware that I know Shakespeare is great
because my teacher told me so, making me, as my teacher was before me,
the inheritor of a cultural idea that can be traced back to the
eighteenth century, a time when it was decided that a great British poet
was needed to act as as the emblem of the Great British Empire and
Shakespeare's name was snatched out of the air. Not something I happen
to wholly agree with, but I cannot hope to offer resistance with my
straw lancets of literary judgement and common sense.
Gary Taylor has a very interesting article, '1623 Making Meaning
Marketing Shakespeare', in the latest Routlege collection edited by
Holland and Orgel called (I think) From Performance to Print, in which
he discusses this first attempt at cultural selection regarding
Shakespeare (if we take the criteria for cultural selection outlined in
his book of the same name as being attempts made by the living to ensure
the survival of the memory of the dead). He argues, among other things,
that the commendatory poems are there to 'rescue Shakespeare from his
fans', to assert that Shakespeare beat his lines out on the Muses' anvil
and therefore disassociate the works contained within the Folio (plays)
from ballads, both linked in this case through the common medium of
print and of being both designed for ephemeral outdoor performance. The
connection is interesting, especially when we consider that Thomas
Percy, 142 years later, ensured the survival and repopularisation of a
number of antique ballads, partly by publishing them, and partly (if we
believe the story) by wresting them out of the hands of his maid, who
had been using them to light fires.
Best,
Will Sharpe
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Monday, April 03, 2006
Subject: Taylor on Shakespeare in Time (Europe)
http://www.time.com/time/europe/html/060327/viewpoint.html
March 27, 2006 / Vol. 167, No. 13
True Is It That We Have Seen Better Plays
Shakespeare was a great writer - but it's wrong to assume he was the
greatest
BY GARY TAYLOR
Where is it written "I am the bard thy god, thou shalt have no other
bards before me"? Shakespeare is one of England's, Europe's, the world's
greatest writers. If you asked me to name the best play of 1596, I would
say, without hesitation, A Midsummer Night's Dream; the best of 1597
would be Henry IV, Part One; the best of 1600, Hamlet. But these
confessions would not satisfy the jealous guardians of the cult of
Shakespeare. Lovers of classical music can prefer Mozart, or fancy
Beethoven; a predilection for Handel is not necessarily perverse. But in
the world of English literature, everyone's supposed to swear undying
allegiance to the One True Bard.
Why? Shakespeare's widely proclaimed Global Aesthetic Supremacy (gas)
disappears if you actually try pinning it to anything specific.
Shakespeare was undoubtedly London's dominant playwright from 1594 to
1600. But he did not write the best play in any of the years before
Christopher Marlowe was murdered. There's nothing in Shakespeare's early
work that competes with Marlowe's Tamburlaine or Doctor Faustus. And if
you asked me to name the best play of 1610, I'd have to concede that Ben
Jonson's The Alchemist out-classes Shakespeare's Cymbeline or The
Winter's Tale. For 1613, Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
would certainly beat The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Suppose that you extend this game to include works outside the theater.
From 1603, as your representative sample of the best that our
civilization can produce, would you choose Othello - or the first
English translation of Montaigne's Essays? Most scholars and critics
would agree that King Lear is the greatest play of 1605 - but is it
better than Don Quixote, published the same year? If you could save only
one of them from the fires of oblivion, which would it be? Notice that
these choices are not about "political correctness." All these writers
are (like me) white males, raised as good Christians. None of these
texts advocates gay marriage or women's rights. I'm looking at these
texts simply as exemplary works of art, and asking you to make the
"aesthetically correct" choice.
Worshippers of Shakespeare usually wriggle out of specific comparisons
like this by appealing to the totality of Shakespeare's achievement, his
Absolutely Incomparable Range (air). True, Shakespeare wrote
masterpieces of comedy, history, tragedy and lyric poetry. Only an
exceptionally capacious talent could have composed Romeo and Juliet
within 12 months of A Midsummer Night's Dream. But was Shakespeare the
world's only literary switch-hitter? You don't have to have read the 425
surviving plays of Lope de Vega to question such claims. Shakespeare
isn't even unique in modern English.
Most specialists in Renaissance drama now agree that Thomas Middleton
wrote masterpieces of comedy (The Roaring Girl, A Chaste Maid in
Cheapside) and tragedy (The Revenger's Tragedy, The Changeling, Women
Beware Women). His history play, A Game at Chess, was the greatest
box-office hit of the period. Middleton also wrote successful masques
and indoor entertainments, and the most ambitious dramatic pageant of
the period (The Triumphs of Truth). He wrote political and theological
nonfiction. He wrote experimental literary works that we call
"pamphlets," because they mix prose and verse, and don't fit our
conventional generic labels at all - works like The Black Book (where an
exuberant Satan comes up to London to help out a starving writer) and
The Owl's Almanac (where a learned female owl makes satirical
predictions about the coming year). There's at least as much variety in
Middleton as in Shakespeare.
So why do comparisons like this irritate or infuriate Shakespearian
fundamentalists? Arguing with the Shakespeare industry is like trying to
reason with the Inquisition. They know you're wrong before you open your
mouth. It's easy to see why Shakespeare attracts so many intolerant fans
(who believe that the world is too small to support more than one great
artist). Shakespeare is the poet laureate of zero-sum games. His
romantic plays dramatize the winning (or losing) of one true love; his
political plays dramatize the struggle to become the one true king. He
revels in superlative hyperboles ("the most unkindest cut of all") and
in stark binary choices ("To be or not to be"). One of his most
idiosyncratic tricks of style is to declare that something can be
compared only with itself ("Then should the warlike Harry, like himself
..."). He loves proper names so much that his protagonists often speak
of themselves in the third person. His favorite word is the singular
definite article "the," as in The Tempest - as though there were only
ever one tempest. Middleton's favorite word, by contrast, is the
indefinite article ("a" or "an").
Zero-sum games are an unavoidable slice of life. Shakespeare is right:
sometimes "one fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail." But
zero-sum games are not all that life has to offer. Nails, after all, can
bind, rather than drive apart. Go to church, if you're looking for
monotheism. In the temples of literature, there has always been more
than one god, and the only true faith is polybardolatry.
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