The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0164 Tuesday, 11 March 2008
[1] From: Carol Morley <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 11 Mar 2008 12:53:06 +0000
Subj: RE: SHK 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
[2] From: Nicole Coonradt <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 11 Mar 2008 14:42:52 +0000
Subj: Re: SHK 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
[3] From: Ronan, Cliff <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 11 Mar 2008 13:32:45 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Carol Morley <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 11 Mar 2008 12:53:06 +0000
Subject: 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
Comment: RE: SHK 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
Many thanks to everyone who has contributed information on and off the
list. I've been suffering from Hotmail's mistaken spam epidemic and been
in Shaksper exile for quite some time. Today they must finally have read
my many complaints and reinstated the connection.
Looking forward to catching up on eveyone's more recent comments.
Best wishes,
Carol
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Nicole Coonradt <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 11 Mar 2008 14:42:52 +0000
Subject: 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
Dear Members,
I apologize for jumping into this thread belatedly, but I've only just
surfaced from finals week (quarter system) and was able to revisit these
posts.
My own interest in this thread is somewhat personal. As an MA student, a
fairly pompous professor (a Victorian scholar by area), told our class
one day that he "could no longer abide Shakespeare given [WS']
anti-Semitism." Two of us found this surprising. We'd been discussing
"the canon"-- broadly speaking of all lit-- and the professor had shared
his annoyance (he was frequently voicing his displeasure with something)
with us about how while the canon was being broadened and rewritten (ala
Greenblatt's "Redrawing the Boundaries"), Shakespeare is still a
mainstay at most universities, generally, and still claims his own
courses at most, specifically. This prompted me to rethink MoV. I ended
up writing a thesis chapter on the play, which was later published, see
"Shakespeare's Grand Deception: _The Merchant of Venice_--
Anti-Semitism as 'Uncanny Causality' and the Catholic-Protestant
Problem." _Religion and the Arts_, 11.1(2007): 74-97.
I note this because the article first reviews the critical heritage and
the debate about the play's anti-Judaism (anti-Semitism was not a term
in the Bard's day) highlighting the key arguments of both camps: the
one condemning the Bard vs. the one defending him. I also give the
pertinent history of Jews in England (or not) when the play was penned
(primarily via James Shapiro's salient study that anyone revisiting the
play ought to read first ). A similar recent article that predated my
own, and of which I learned somewhat belatedly in the process, is by
John Klause, also Relarts 7.1./2 (2003): 65-102) that explores Shylock
as a militant Puritanical figure in the play. My study references Klause
but reads the play differently. Basically my take is that the Judaism in
the play is a trope of sorts used to examine not Venice, but England, to
offer a critique of the hypocrisy in Christianity, mainly the Protestant
variety.
What I find problematic is that so many people are apt to read the play
anachronistically, most understanding very little about it. A close
reading of it, situating it within the playwright's own historical
context, offers far more than most people realize whether they are lay
readers or scholars. I think the anti-Judaism in the play actually works
as a device to *effect* our responses (yes, with an "e"), that the play
in fact forces us to react in a certain way.
From the abstract about this conversion play: Through the lens of
Dissident Theory, "This reading offers a measured departure from most
existing scholarship by exploring the play _poststructurally_ as the
site of a metaphoric, performative conversion where Shakespeare employs
the trope of anti-Semitism ironically to convey a coded message about
the moral incoherence in popular Christianity-- specifically the aroused
anxieties about _Christian_ identity as seen in forced conversions and
the complete violation of the basic tenets of mercy and justice which
highlight the hypocrisy in Christianity as Shakespeare saw it practiced."
Best wishes,
Nicole
[3]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Ronan, Cliff <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 11 Mar 2008 13:32:45 -0500
Subject: 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0159 Untouchable Shakespeare
>"The telos of The Merchant . . is clearly (if awkwardly)
>anti-Semitic but the play exposes[,] for us . . . to 'read'[,]
>its contours." How can John Drakakis "'read' . . . contours"
>and thereby expose and decode the playwright's "telos" or
>thematic/emotional goal?
If John's 'read[ing]' is based on a work's external "contours," who is
to say whether they reveal-or conceal-inner structures? Contour, even
the end-point of a contour, is as much a problem as a solution. Even
when a play's title invites attention to the work's ending, will there
be a teleological 'one-size-fits-all' meaning? What message and/or
effect is on Shakespeare's mind when he gives Feste his charming song
about external and internal weather at the conclusion to Twelfth Night?
Or why does Shakespeare compose for Bertram the final couplet of
qualified surrender to his king and bride in All's Well That Ends Well?
As Joe Egert suggests, why shouldn't Shakespeare be a 'polysemite,'
whether or not he was the lover-hater of an ethnically Jewish woman? Can
any of us avoid being sporadically confused, unsettled, or conflicted
about even the shifting elements within our own selves? And even if it
be argued that we moderns possess a Pavlovian consistency, such typical
early modern geniuses as Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Pico did not think
they did.
Shakespeare purveys neither the whole truth, nor a rigidly balanced
truth, about such matters as religion, politics, gender, sexuality,
class, charity, or material goods.
He exploits, rather than cuts off, discussion of most issues-just as he
unleashes numerous meanings in the words he employs. It is therefore
reductive to think that literary "contours" can be universally
identified to the satisfaction of the 'beating mind' of each spectator
or reader during every moment of his/her subsequent life. Cliche as it
may be to have to say it, the polysemous perspectives and fruitful
indeterminacy in Shakespeare works are important sources of the plays'
perennial interest and challenge.
Cliff Ronan
Texas State University
_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the
opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the
editor assumes no responsibility for them.
|
