The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0391 Thursday, 4 May 2006
[1] From: Edward Brown <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 03 May 2006 15:34:27 -0500
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0377 Characters
[2] From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 03 May 2006 17:42:51 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0385 Characters
[3] From: Mathew Lyons <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 04 May 2006 01:20:39 +0100
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0385 Characters
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Edward Brown <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 03 May 2006 15:34:27 -0500
Subject: 17.0377 Characters
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0377 Characters
I would argue for "Coriolanus" as a play in which Shakespeare actively
encourages his audience to construct a back-story for the protagonist.
Otherwise he is just an arrogant mommy's boy and where is the tragedy?
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 03 May 2006 17:42:51 -0400
Subject: 17.0385 Characters
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0385 Characters
I am beginning to suspect that the question so vigorously debated in
this thread is what we lawyers call a "false conflict": i.e.,
apparently conflicting and irreconcilable principles that turn out to be
perfectly harmonious once we understand that one of the principles
applies in certain circumstances and the other in different situations.
Backstories and questions of psychological characterization that cannot
be answered by the text are of limited interest (if any at all) to the
literary scholar, but may be crucial to the performance artist. To take
an obvious example: It has been a long time since I have seen an
article addressing the question of whether Hamlet and Ophelia had a
sexual relationship, and I hope not to see one for an even longer
period. That question is meaningless to a literary scholar as it cannot
be answered, and isn't even mooted, by the text. But it may be
essential to the actors (even those not in the Chicago company), as it
informs their performances. I am told that it is now customary for the
actors playing Hamlet and Ophelia to go off privately at the first
read-through and decide for themselves whether their characters had been
intimate. The answer they reach has no effect on the text of the play
but it does affect their performances and the appreciation of their
characters by the audience.
Put somewhat differently: I suspect that Hardy would not look with
favor on a thread that attempted to answer the question of whether
Hamlet and Ophelia had an affair; but posts discussing performance
trends in this regard would meet a different fate.
I suspect that Hardy's last post was intended to make a similar point.
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Mathew Lyons <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 04 May 2006 01:20:39 +0100
Subject: 17.0385 Characters
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0385 Characters
I think there are really two main points here.
The first has been stated before but clearly needs stating again. This
is Hardy's list, not ours. We may disagree with his criteria for
appropriate posts, but if so, we should post our comments elsewhere. To
argue with him seems particularly ungracious, given the effort it
demands from him, like an uninvited guest at a party taking offence at
being escorted to the door.
The second is that any discussion of character surely has to be rooted
in the text. Perhaps this is a reductive and reactionary position, I
don't know. But how can the words we have not be the starting point for
any discussion, as opposed to words that Shakespeare might have written
but didn't?
Schoenbaum in Shakespeare's Lives (I think) relates the anecdote about
the biographer of Shakespeare who stands in front of Shakespeare's
portrait, which is hanging behind glass in a gallery. The biographer
stares and stares, probing, straining for some sense of the man as he
really was. Slowly, the biographer sees the portrait become alive, the
eyes seem to glint, the flesh softens, the mouth parts in a smile... And
then the biographer realises that he is looking at his own reflection in
the glass and not Shakespeare at all.
I think the same problem is often at play when Shakespeare's characters
are discussed. Yes, we all carry round our idea or ideas of these
characters in our heads; to that extent we think we know them. But that
knowledge is insubstantial, slippery, impressionistic, something that we
ourselves have rounded out and invested with a kind of reality from the
moments of insight that Shakespeare actually affords us. The more we
talk about them, these characters, the more we are actually talking
about ourselves.
Similarly, it is true that contemporary actors - unlike the actor
Shakespeare - find the process of establishing a back story for their
parts a useful exercise in preparing for performance. But does
discussion of that process belong in a forum that is at heart textual
and scholarly rather than performative?
L Swilley writes: "If the "manufacture" of the possible events Claudius'
childhood help us to a better understanding of the *character's*
function in the play, I cannot see how it can be disallowed... We must
be as cautious in the addition of psychological information about the
character as we should be about the addition of historical/biographical
information"
The manufacture of Claudius' childhood cannot help us to a better
understanding of the character because by the very act of manufacture,
you are modifying that character. If I posit a particular childhood for
Claudius, which is not contradicted by the text but which has no
explicit basis in it either, then it may well be the case that I might
read "Hamlet" again and find some fresh resonances. But those new
resonances would be the product of the fiction, the notional childhood,
that I have imagined, and nothing else. Of course the play would look
different - possibly even clearer: I would have added new information
into it. It would be a different play. We shouldn't be cautious about
the addition of any kind of information, any more than we should be
cautious about the addition of new speeches or scenes. We should resist
both wholeheartedly. [Have I imagined an early Hollywood Shakespeare
'with additional dialogue by Sam Smith', by the way?]
'Back stories' sound all well and good. But what we are talking about is
fictions. Or, to be crueller, fantasies. There is no intrinsic
difference between reading a play in the context of a fiction of my own
creation - however plausibly it intersects with the text(s) that
Shakespeare wrote - and reading a play with the idea that it was, in
fact, written by Francis Bacon. Neither can be the subject of critical
discussion because both are predicated on subjective positions and/or
presumptions which are not susceptible to argument or debate.
Oh, and did someone mention a moratorium on "Hamlet"?
Mathew Lyons
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