The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 21.0331 Monday, 2 August 2010
From: John F. Andrews <
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Date: July 30, 2010 3:15:36 PM EDT
Subject: The 2010 Gielgud Award Gala: A Salute to F. Murray Abraham
THE 2010 GIELGUD AWARD GALA
A Salute to F. Murray Abraham
Guests and Presenters: Actors ZOE CALDWELL, TOM HULCE, HOLLY HUNTER, and JERRY
STILLER, Filmmaker ETHAN COEN, Authors RAY BRADBURY, HAROLD BLOOM, and JAMES
SHAPIRO, and Others
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
Reception 6:30, Dinner 7:15, Program 8:30
NATIONAL ARTS CLUB
15 Gramercy Park South, Manhattan
BLACK TIE, with Tickets at $125, $250, and $500
All but $85 per Ticket Tax-Deductible
We hope you'll join us for a festive tribute to one of the most versatile artists of
our time, a man whose portrayal of Antonio Salieri in Amadeus earned him an Academy
Award for Best Actor in the 1984 film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's celebrated
drama. This evocative cinema garnered eight Oscars, among them trophies for Best
Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Director (Milos Forman), plus a Best Actor
nomination for Tom Hulce, who depicted Mozart as a frivolous lecher whose genius
drove an envious rival to murder.
Mr. Abraham has appeared in dozens of movies, among them Finding Forrester, Mighty
Aphrodite, The Name of the Rose, and Scarface. His stage work includes an acclaimed
Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot, directed by Mike Nichols, and a Merchant of
Venice that took his riveting Shylock to Stratford-upon-Avon as the culminating
attraction in the Royal Shakespeare Company's epic Complete Works festival. He has
performed twice at the White House, and his many Shakespearean credits are notable
for star turns in classics like King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much
Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard II, Richard III, and Twelfth Night. Concertgoers
will recall his narratives for conductor Gerard Schwarz at the Mostly Mozart
Festival and his associations with solo artists like Itzhak Perlman. And TV
audiences will recognize him not only his parts in series like Law & Order, but for
his much-admired persona on PBS as the voice of Nature.
For details about this and other attractions, as well as for information about
discounts available for members of the Shakespeare Guild, simply click on
www.shakesguild.org/Gielgud2010.pdf.
Meanwhile, for a response to Sarah Palin's recent claim to be a latter-day
Shakespeare, see the remarks below (an expanded version of a letter to
the editor that appeared last Sunday in The Washington Post).
Advanced Bardic Palinology
Unlike many of the commentators who've weighed in about recent twitterations from
Palin the Linguist, I come not to bury Sarah, but to praise her. She's absolutely
right about Shakespeare's many contributions to the English language. And thanks to
a long line of scrupulous editors, grammarians, and lexicographers, the usual totals
don't even count a significant number of the playwright's wittest inventions.
Near the end of Act 1, Scene 3 of Hamlet, for example, in the version of the script
that appeared in a 1604 quarto printing, Polonius warns Ophelia to beware of
"brokers" who employ deceptive phrasing "the beter to beguide." The 1623 First Folio
printing replaced beguide by beguile in this passage, and that substitution is what
a reader finds in most of today's editions, even in those which draw upon the
earlier rendering of the text as their primary source. The one exception I'm
familiar with is the Everyman Shakespeare, a paperback set which retains the
original version as a coinage that deftly combines such senses as beguile, misguide,
and beguild (overlay with gold).
I suspect that the poet who gave us Polonius would have delighted in refudiate, not
only because it enriches our language with a new word that communicates something
that couldn't be conveyed in any other way, but because it's the sort of naive
malapropism he puts into the mouths of other characters, among them such inspired
and irrepressible bumpkins as Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night's Dream and
Dogberry the Master Constable in Much Ado About Nothing.
To borrow a line from King Lear, then, I say "let copulation thrive." Fusing refute
with repudiate may result in bastard currency; but as a means of defining Sarah
Palin and the movement she embodies, it's just as apt as Bushisms like
misunderestimate. To certify a failed governor for a new position that would make
her appear a bit less "o'er-parted," moreover (to appropriate an expression from
Love's Labor's Lost), it's what Shakespeare's most endearing Keystone Kop would dub
"the eftest way."
Now for the question of the hour. Do I believe that some reference to refudiate
should be included in future guides to our political discourse? You betcha.
_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
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