The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0778 Friday, 8 September 2006
[1] From: Stuart Manger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 5 Sep 2006 18:38:46 +0100 (BST)
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0762 Lyrics for My Hamlet Opera
[2] From: Ruth Ross <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 5 Sep 2006 18:07:47 -0400
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0762 Lyrics for My Hamlet Opera
[3] From: John Crowley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 06 Sep 2006 20:15:05 -0400
Subj: Lyrics for Hamlet Opera
[4] From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 8 Sep 2006 12:14:52 +0100
Subj: Lyrics for my Hamlet Opera
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stuart Manger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 5 Sep 2006 18:38:46 +0100 (BST)
Subject: 17.0762 Lyrics for My Hamlet Opera
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0762 Lyrics for My Hamlet Opera
Please, NO! Gene, don't do it! Please!
Stuart Manger
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Ruth Ross <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, 5 Sep 2006 18:07:47 -0400
Subject: 17.0762 Lyrics for My Hamlet Opera
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0762 Lyrics for My Hamlet Opera
I think you mean "bear/The whips and scorns of life" instead of "bare. .
."
No?
Ruth Ross
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: John Crowley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 06 Sep 2006 20:15:05 -0400
Subject: Lyrics for Hamlet Opera
While everyone knows that the librettos of operas based on great plays
need not be great for the operas to be great, still this seems to require
a hell of a lot of great music to redeem it. Why would anyone not himself
or herself a composer, with compelling (at least to him/herself) musical
ideas, even begin to carve up the supine body of Hamlet in this fashion?
It's hard to know which is worse, the old stuff stripped down, the
misunderstandings of what was originally said, or the new stuff added in.
And not even to make easily sung rhyme and meter.
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 8 Sep 2006 12:14:52 +0100
Subject: Lyrics for my Hamlet Opera
Gene Tyburn's marvellous conceit, with Hamlet entering 'bedraggled reading
from a small book deep in thought', at last gives SHAKSPER the masterful
voice that colleagues sought. The superb metrical fluency of such lines as
'Despised love, the laws unjust
The mother I thought I could trust'
has an asperity that's truly impossible to match. I can recall only the
taut irony of Richard Curtis's 'The Skinhead Hamlet'. There Ophelia's
plangent discourse 'Here, cop a whack of this' takes all before it. And of
course it's followed by Claudius's cleverly adumbrated 'Get on with it,
slag', which makes all comment superfluous.
T. Hawkes
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