The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0538  Friday, 29 November 2013

 

[1] From:        Harry Berger Jr <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

     Date:         November 26, 2013 at 10:55:15 AM EST

     Subject:    Re: SHAKSPER: Creating Reality

 

[2] From:        Michael Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

     Date:         November 26, 2013 at 3:29:15 PM EST

     Subject:    Re: SHAKSPER: Creating Realit

 

[3] From:        Gerald E. Downs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

     Date:         November 27, 2013 at 8:26:08 PM EST

     Subject:    Re: Creating Reality

 

 

[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------

From:        Harry Berger Jr <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         November 26, 2013 at 10:55:15 AM EST

Subject:    Re: SHAKSPER: Creating Reality

 

Egan, your boring conflicts with Urkowitz and others are preempting attention from more useful and interesting comments about, say, Shakespeare (to choose a random example). So Berger suggests that Hardy ask you to carry on offline (which is this case would be better than carrying off online).

 

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------

From:        Michael Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         November 26, 2013 at 3:29:15 PM EST

Subject:    Re: SHAKSPER: Creating Reality

 

To David Richman: And what reality is it that Shakespeare “invented,” according to you and Verdi? That “nothing is but what is not”? That “she must die, else she’ll betray more men”? That “The course of true love never did run smooth”? All these things are possibly true, sometimes true but never always true. Shakespeare sometimes describes reality, interprets reality  and occasionally hopes for an uncertain reality. The lover, the lunatic and the poet are of imagination all compact, remember, in seeing something when there is “in reality” nothing.

 

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------

From:        Gerald E. Downs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         November 27, 2013 at 8:26:08 PM EST

Subject:    Re: Creating Reality

 

When reading the notice of Anne Barton’s life in the LA Times I was also struck by an observation later cited by Michael Egan, of which he asks, “What does this mean?”

 

“. . . she argued that for the playwright, the stage, with its mirthful impersonations and flamboyant games, provided a buoyant symbol not of illusion but of reality itself.”

 

I suppose my response was more to the obituarist’s obiter dictum than to what Barton might have said. It is hard to take ‘modifier overload’ at face value when pondering reality (that’s hard enough already). Why must games be flamboyant to crank out symbols of reality? What is a buoyant symbol? Mirthful gives me the willies, and why can’t whining personations get real? Why couldn’t the symbol be of illusion? What is the difference between reality and reality itself?

 

Apparently the claim is that with the help of collected events the stage provides—not reality, but a symbol of reality. Respondents seem to skip the “symbol” part, which bypasses Egan’s “what does this mean?” Granting reality to symbols and other abstractions doesn’t mean they are equivalent to all kinds of reality. I believe thoughts, symbols, and illusions are real, each in their own ways, (therefore sharing reality). But it’s no good using these terms without some kind of separation. For example (the LA Times again): “What all this means is that bitcoins are real [not so in spell-check], in the sense of being units of value . . . but . . . not real currency because . . . (Hiltzik). It won’t do to say responses to theatrical events are more real than concrete realities unless one is content not to communicate.

 

The other day a dramatic moment was dredged from my memory (why, I don’t know): in Texas Across the River an Indian was knocked out of the saddle by a low-hanging limb. It was really funny—or so I thought in '66. In reality, the “Indian” mirthered in the impersonation was from the Bronx, whose real name was not Joey Bishop. But why not cast a real Indian, like Iron Eyes Cody? Well, in reality he was an Italian from New Orleans who became a symbol by crying in a TV spot, whose tear was really gelatin—an illusion if there ever was one. Why not note reality’s differences without labeling them symbols or mere reality, as if that has meaning. To me, the questioned citation is not very meaningful.

 

Gerald E. Downs

 

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