The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0693 Monday, 24 July 2006
[1] From: John Briggs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 16:05:32 +0100
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0676 Against All-Male Productions
[2] From: John Briggs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 16:47:04 +0100
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
[3] From: Martin Mueller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 10:48:15 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
[4] From: Donald Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 11:52:55 -0500
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
[5] From: Stuart Manger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 18:01:32 +0100
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
[6] From: Donald Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 14:26:20 -0500
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
[7] From: Robin Hamilton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 22:59:29 +0100
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
[8] From: Holger Schott Syme <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 18:59:36 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
[9] From: Charles Weinstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 22 Jul 2006 16:59:22 -0400
Subj: Against All-Male Productions
[10] From: David Lindley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Monday, 24 Jul 2006 10:01:28 +0100
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: John Briggs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 16:05:32 +0100
Subject: 17.0676 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0676 Against All-Male Productions
Charles Weinstein wrote, in his inimitable self-laudatory fashion:
>"When Shakespeare's greatest female character spurns the thought of
>viewing 'some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness' she is mocking the
>idea that she could be adequately incarnated by a male."
>
>That seems to me indisputable. Why did Shakespeare devise such a
>sentiment and make Cleopatra utter it (in her death scene, no less)?
>Metatheatrics notwithstanding, I think he shared her opinion of its
>justice.
Metatheatrics notwithstanding? Metatheatrics notwithstanding? Isn't
that the whole point of the reference? Can Charles Weinstein (or
perhaps someone with a greater knowledge of the texts) point to a single
example of a play by Shakespeare where there isn't a reference to plays
or playing?
Cleopatra is, of course, through the medium of William Shakespeare,
expressing understandable anxiety at being mocked in the context of a
Roman triumph. What she actually says is that she will be paraded
before unwashed groundlings, that hack poets will write bad songs about
her and that improvising actors will put on impromptu performances of
their lives. The sequence of ideas is remarkable, from comparing a
Roman triumph to a sequence of plays on pageant wagons (such as the
Corpus Christi plays - can Shakespeare have ever seen them?), to beadles
harrasing prostitutes (whether in the audience or on stage), to
balladeers and commedia dell'arte troupes. None of which, of course,
makes much sense without a knowledge of the theatrical conventions of
Shakespeare's day. Wouldn't it be much better to just cut the passage
for a modern production with female actresses?
John Briggs
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: John Briggs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 16:47:04 +0100
Subject: 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
David Bishop wrote:
>While I generally think, with Charles Weinstein, that it's reasonable
>to believe that Shakespeare would have used women if he could have,
That rather depends on how you you define "reasonable"! Here's a tip:
if Charles Weinstein thinks that something is "reasonable", the chances
are that it isn't.
>this line also supports the interpretation that Cleopatra did not
>want to be diminished by being represented on the stage at all, by a
>boy or a woman. Still, a boy would seem an even more obviously
>inadequate representation of her than an actress.
Cleopatra is objecting to being mocked, as I point out elsethread. That
she is represented by a boy is entirely according to the stage
conventions of Shakespeare's own day.
John Briggs
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Martin Mueller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 10:48:15 -0500
Subject: 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
>We also know that, after Will Kemp left the Lord Chamberlain's Men,
>Shakespeare chose in his next two plays (Henry V and Julius Caesar)
>not to include a large role for a clown. While we can never know how
>directly causal the chain of events, his next play is As You Like It, and
>Robert Armin, experienced mimic and clown, is now a member of the
>company......and Touchstone makes his appearance.
Paul Hebron's comments remind me of Mozart's practice. Unlike
Shakespeare, he left a fairly voluminous correspondence about his
practice. There is a wonderful letter to his father about the Abduction
from the Seraglio, and there is an extensive correspondence about
Idomeneo. The striking thing about this correspondence is how deeply
alert Mozart was to what his particular singers could or could not do.
For the Entfuhrung he had at his disposal a bass with a particularly
strong low register. The Archbishop thought this was vulgar, but Mozart
created the role of Osmin. No doubt the thought of annoying the
archbishop was pleasing to him.
The first Don Giovanni was a baritone with limited singing, but strong
acting, skills. Don Giovanni has no long or bravura aria. The tenor for
the Prague production was a virtuoso. The tenor for the Vienna
production was not: Mozart dropped the Prague aria and added a new aria
for Vienna. Today's tenors of course insist on both.
There is a moving example from Brecht's practice. I remember arguing
with a distinguished Germanist about the eloquence of Kattrina in Mother
Courage and pointed to the fact that she cannot speak but at the end of
the play puts an instrument of war (the drum) to a peaceful purpose
(alerting the citizens). My distinguished colleague brushed off this
interpretation as far-fetched and said, "Don't you know that Brecht
wanted to create a part for Helene Weigel, but she didn't know Swedish"
(The play was written in Stockholm and first performed in Swedish).
Indeed, but theatre is not only an art of make-believe, it is just as
much an art of make-do. Or as Hamlet put it, "Thrift, thrift, Horatio!
the funeral baked meats /Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables."
And if you're very good at this thrifty business you make an art of
necessity.
Since Shakespeare worked all his life with a single company, it is not
unreasonable to use evidence from later practice to illustrate what
seems to be prima facie plausible.
Did Shakespeare strain under the limitations of his stage--boy actors
and whatever? Beethoven thought that his pianos were pretty wretched.
The modern piano is a mid-nineteenth century and American invention.
Beethoven's pianos didn't have metal frames (Chickering in Boston in the
1820's) or overstringing (Henry Steinway in New York in the 1850's).
Some pedalling instructions in the Waldstein sonata--deliberate blurring
of chords--make more sense on an older instrument with its much more
rapid rate of tonal decay. If Beethoven had heard the Appassionata
played on an 1857 New York Steinway, would he ever want it played on
anything else? Probably not. Charles Rosen argues eloquently--I don't
quite recall where--that sometimes the music is ahead of the instrument.
Some archaeologists think that the theatre in Athens that saw the
original productions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was a much
more modest affair than the fourth-century theatres (Epidaurus) that
have shaped our sense of what a Greek theatre should look like. Perhaps
it is useful in this context to remember Shakespeare's metatheatrical
reflections in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the desire of the
performers greatly outstrips their performance and Theseus comments:
"The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if
imagination amend them." The audience's amending imagination is always
the most important variable.
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Donald Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 11:52:55 -0500
Subject: 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
My thanks to Paul Hebron for making a point that I feel is long overdue:
>"Is it not possible that this specific comment of Cleopatra's was not,
>in fact, a reference to the general practice of female roles being
>played by adolescent males . . . but was rather Shakespeare making a
>point about one of the most significant forms of competition he and the
>Globe shareholders faced at this time; that is the children's companies
>. . ."
We know from "Hamlet" what Shakespeare's general attitude toward these
prodigies was. My sense is that he considered them a gimmicky form of
entertainment that was undercutting the serious art of drama. That he
had an axe to grind doesn't make his remarks less true.
We go back to what creates the audience's response. Children are capable
of acting like (and as) children, some excellently, some poorly. Trying
to depict adults, however, whatever effect they may have on the
audience, I don't believe they can create the imaginative response that
a first-rate adult actor can. They are cute and funny-entertaining, but
not profoundly moving.
This brings us to adolescents, who are not children (in this sense) and
who often can act like (and thus as) adults. If your lead actress can
play Juliet in the fall, Rosalind in the winter, and Cleopatra in the
spring (or Gertrude, or Queen Margaret), I can't see any reason why she
couldn't be fourteen or twenty or forty or more. We assume they have to
be older because they almost always are, but that derives from social
conditions not (I believe) from inability. To my mind, if the boys could
do it four centuries ago the girls could do it now.
My intuitive response is that Charles is right, and that Shakespeare
would have much preferred women playing women-if for no other reason
than longevity. (Boys keep growing up.) But my rational response is that
we don't have concrete evidence, as Hardy notes. The "squeaking" boy is
surely one of the "little eyases" that Rosencrantz describes.
Cheers,
don
[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stuart Manger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 18:01:32 +0100
Subject: 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
I simply cannot buy the proposition that the boys couldn't cut it.
EVERY dramatist around at the time wrote for them, they were in demand
to the point of kidnapping and poaching, they were hot stage property,
and surely pro playwrights don't go on writing fantastic roles with
fantastic poetry and psychological insights and emotional complexity,
etcetc to have it all ripped to shreds by kids day after day in front of
legendarily critical audiences ! A lot of cold commercial logic,
reputation and naked self-interest here, wouldn't you say?
Come on, let's get down to the practicalities here!
[6]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Donald Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 14:26:20 -0500
Subject: 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
I hope I may be allowed a second post, since it's a query. Pursuant to
this on-going discussion, I began making a chart of the parts likely to
played by boys or youths in each of the plays and find myself perplexed
in several instances. I would thus like some guidance on the best
scholarly studies of this question. (The question of homoeroticism and
pederasty, I should mention, doesn't interest me.)
Cheers,
don
[7]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Robin Hamilton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 22:59:29 +0100
Subject: 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
I'm not sure if anyone has yet made the point that between maybe 1590
and 1610, there was a considerable evolution in the capabilities of boy
actors. Predominantly, in the earlier part of the period, female parts
were either old women or adolescent girls, the easiest parts for boy
actors to play. A mature female character like Cleopatra simply
wouldn't have been stageable twenty years before Shakespeare wrote it.
My contribution to unteasing the observations flying around this thread.
Please time-stamp your generalisations, ladies and gentlemen.
Robin Hamilton
[8]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Holger Schott Syme <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 18:59:36 -0400
Subject: 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
I know I should know better, but Charles Weinstein's most recent post
demands a reply. "Some people," he writes, "think that boys could never
have done justice to characters as complex, imposing and experienced as
Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra." None of those "people" were contemporaries,
or even near-contemporaries of Shakespeare. The Romantic and
post-Romantic notion of character _and_ of acting that informs such a
judgment has nothing to do with the conventions that governed early
modern playing. In fact, there is a good deal of evidence that 16th-
and 17th-century audiences found the acting of boys both convincing and
deeply moving (see, for instance, the well- known report of a
performance of _Othello_ at Oxford in 1610, or accounts of the
inadequacy of female actors in letters from English travelers).
In any case, the idea that "boys" were almost always "inadequate" simply
lacks any foundation in historical, or indeed contemporary reality. As
David Kathman has shown, a "boy" could be anywhere between 12 and 21
years of age, and one can readily think of many modern actors who, even
at that early age, possess the presence (there's a mythical concept for
you!), technique, expertise, and talent to pull of a moving and
effective performance (even of a member of the other gender).
I do think that Charles' main point -- that Shakespeare "imagined" his
women as women -- has been fully answered in this thread. I suppose he
also "imagined" his kings as kings, but didn't expect James to take the
stage. That there is a profound and irreducible distinction between
actor and role is the nature of the theatre -- no playwright can summon
his or her characters to play themselves -- and the example of the
all-male stage is merely a particular aspect of that basic principle of
theatrical representation.
Best,
Holger Syme
PS.: One more quick point. Sure, we can fantasize that Shakespeare
really hoped that one day his female characters would be played by
women. But it's the same sort of fantasy that makes people think Mozart
_must_ have hated his pianoforte with its limited range and lack of
sustain, and thus should be played on a modern grand. It sounds great,
to be sure, and has many aesthetic arguments in its favor -- but it has
little to do with what Mozart might have wished for or been able to
conceptualize (indeed, one might want to argue that a limitation only
appears as a limitation once one has a less restrictive option at one's
disposal). Would Shakespeare have liked the opportunities offered by
electric lights and fog-machines, not to mention cameras and editing
suites? Probably... Jonson certainly would have.
[9]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Charles Weinstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 22 Jul 2006 16:59:22 -0400
Subject: Against All-Male Productions
From Antony and Cleopatra, Arden 3, edited by John Wilder:
"boy my greatness: 'reduce my greatness to what a boy actor can manage'
(Jones). Shakespeare shows extraordinary boldness in giving these lines
to a boy actor, who must, presumably, have done justice to the role of
Cleopatra."
"Must" is an idealization, and not everyone subscribes to it.
Cleopatra's "boy" is comprehensive and unqualified. There is no
evidence that exempts the youngling who played her from its
implications. Has the memory of this youthful phenomenon come down to
us a la Burbage and Alleyn? Are there encomia in prose or verse to his
astonishing precocity? Tales of auditors enthralled by the uncanny
maturity of his genius? No, no and no. Could a boy in any era be
adequate to Cleopatra, the mature siren past her salad days, the Serpent
of Old Nile wrinkled deep in time, the tragic heroine soaring beyond
girlishness into transcendent womanhood?. I am not the only one who
finds this unbelievable.
Let's be real: the system of boys playing women was a bad one, and the
striplings must have fallen short in any number of respects. Only a
theater in which women play women has a prayer of matching Shakespeare's
conceptions.
--Charles Weinstein
"Shakespeare accepted the limitations of boy actors without confining
his imagination. This is shown by the many generations of actresses who
have inherited the boys' roles...there has been more than sufficient
material in the text of the plays to awaken their full talents."--John
Russell Brown
[10]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Lindley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Monday, 24 Jul 2006 10:01:28 +0100
Subject: 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0687 Against All-Male Productions
>Thus, one can reasonably believe that the roles were played
>by boys, and that the boys were probably inadequate.
Well, no doubt some were - but others probably were not - see Jonson on
Salomon Pavy, for example.
The argument that 'Shakespeare would have used female actors if he
could' is an impossible one to sustain. He knew he couldn't, and
therefore, presumably, wrote parts in a way he believed his available
actors could cope with. It's all a bit like the argument that Bach would
have used the saxophone if only he had known of it. It is a quite
different argument from the question whether it is possible to recreate
original performance conditions - in drama, or in music - whether
'authenticity' is possible or desirable, and therefore whether modern
all-male productions can reproduce what Shakespeare 'intended'. There
are a whole lot of problematic assumptions in such a supposition. But
there is simply no doubt that Shakespeare wrote for boy (or male)
actors, and that this must have, to some degree, conditioned the way he
composed his female roles.
David Lindley
[Editor's Note: I wish that I had days and days to think deeply and
write profoundly about what has disturbed me about this thread since its
inception, but I don't. This digest today contains some thoughtful and
incisive commentary, but that commentary is ultimately derived in
response to the outrageously flawed premise upon which this thread is
based, a premise founded upon a fantasy not terribly different from the
fantasies of authorship devotees. I learned a long time ago how
impossible it is to fight a "tar baby": I tried myself to point out how
Charles was using a context-shifting argument regarding Cleopatra's
"squeaking boy." Yet Charles still rejected my explanation of the
meaning of the lines in the context of the play in performance. When I
read Charles's comments today -- <Q>Let's be real: the system of boys
playing women was a bad one, and the striplings must have fallen short
in any number of respects. Only a theater in which women play women has
a prayer of matching Shakespeare's conceptions.</Q> -- I was reminded of
the Romantic Period's page-stage debate. No actor could possible
captured the grandeur of Shakespeare's characters; therefore,
Shakespeare's plays should not be enacted on the stage because all such
attempts are bound to failure. But this is nonsense. Isn't it? I
wondered if I should not just let this thread go on and on, over the
same grounds, perpetuating the same logically and reality flawed
arguments and then I read David Lindley's post above. David Lindley's
commonsensical statement is the last word in this thread:
The argument that 'Shakespeare would have used female actors if he
could' is an impossible one to sustain. He knew he couldn't, and
therefore, presumably, wrote parts in a way he believed his available
actors could cope with. It's all a bit like the argument that Bach would
have used the saxophone if only he had known of it. It is a quite
different argument from the question whether it is possible to recreate
original performance conditions - in drama, or in music - whether
'authenticity' is possible or desirable, and therefore whether modern
all-male productions can reproduce what Shakespeare 'intended'. There
are a whole lot of problematic assumptions in such a supposition. But
there is simply no doubt that Shakespeare wrote for boy (or male)
actors, and that this must have, to some degree, conditioned the way he
composed his female roles.
Once more for scholarly reality:
But there is simply no doubt that Shakespeare wrote for boy (or male)
actors, and that this must have, to some degree, conditioned the way he
composed his female roles.
There is NO doubt. Hardy]
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