August
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 5, No. 0677. Sunday, 14 August 1994. (1) From: Christine Gilmore <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 12 Aug 1994 16:39:42 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 5.0675 Re: Character (2) From: Diana Akers Rhoads <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 13 Aug 1994 15:36:44 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 5.0671 Re: *Shrew* and the Rule of Thumb (3) From: Andrea Austin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 12 Aug 94 18:41:47 EDT Subj: Re: SHK 5.0675 Re: Character (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Christine Gilmore <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 12 Aug 1994 16:39:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 5.0675 Re: Character Comment: Re: SHK 5.0675 Re: Character In reference to W. Godshalk's response to my comment on the need to look closely at one's source: This may well be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. I certainly don't think my comment was meanspirited at all. Certainly Hoff Sommers is welcome to her conclusions; however, if her conclusions are wrong, well . . . you may certainly accept them, but I will not. Certainly we would all like to believe that some students are not discriminated against in classes; however, sometimes reality does not match our beliefs. Further, I note that you insinuate that my comment is political correctness. If political correctness means that I want to see the world as it is and not as I might like it to be, so be it. In any case, I'm not certain why my remark should prompt a comment from you, but I will take in the spirit of all your responses on SHAKSPER. Ciao! cg. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Diana Akers Rhoads <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 13 Aug 1994 15:36:44 -0400 Subject: 5.0671 Re: *Shrew* and the Rule of Thumb Comment: Re: SHK 5.0671 Re: *Shrew* and the Rule of Thumb I mentioned Sommers' argument about the rule of thumb because I truly am curious about the origin of the idea. If the idea occurred to two Southern judges, where did they get the idea? The last two sentences of my previous communication mention parts of Blackstone which suggest that physical chastisement of wives had been acceptable in law before the seventeenth century. I'd be interested in suggestions for following up on the question. Diana Akers Rhoads (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Andrea Austin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 12 Aug 94 18:41:47 EDT Subject: 5.0675 Re: Character Comment: Re: SHK 5.0675 Re: Character It's interesting to find the subject of Hoff Sommer's _Who Stole Feminism_ cropping up on this list, esp. since a fascinating debate about the work was recently played out on WMST-L. Of course, she, like anyone else, has a right to draw her own conclusions, and if others don't like them, then they certainly don't have to read, or continue reading, the book. True, she has come under attack for a political position that is unpopular with many feminists (actually, I detest the term "political correctness," since it is so often used these days as a catch-phrase meant to belittle the gains and goals of feminist movements; note please that I don't accuse Bill Godshalk of using it this way, I only wish to point out that there are people who do.) As I understand it, though, quite apart from the issue of political viewpoint, the work contains inaccuracies, and so its scholarship has come under suspicion (I will leave it to those far more knowledgeable than I to continue to demonstrate where, and why.) I don't intend this as an impolite and personal attack on the author, and I hope it is not taken so, but I do think that we have a responsibility to alert others when there is a possibility that a work presents certain things as fact that are not. After all, by way of example, what would the rest of us say if a Victorianist asserted as fact, without providing us with supporting evidence, that Charlotte Bronte had a torrid love affair with Thackeray? Andrea Austin Dept. of English Queen's UniversityThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 5, No. 0676. Friday, 12 August 1994. From: Douglas M Lanier <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 11 Aug 1994 16:03:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Spinoffs SHAKSPERians in search of some light, entertaining summer reading might enjoy the collection of short stories entitled *Weird Tales from Shakespeare*, ed. M. Greenberg (and others), which just appeared in paperback. In it a number of fantasy and science fiction story writers make very crative adaptations of Shakespearian plots and biography; some of the stories are quite good. A great vacation book, but don't expect the sequel to Charles Lamb. [Disclaimer: I have no connection with the book, its publishers, or contributors.] Cheers, Douglas LanierThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 5, No. 0675. Friday, 12 August 1994. (1) From: Stanley Holberg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 11 Aug 94 22:38 EDT Subj: Henry V (2) From: Chris Kendall <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 11 Aug 1994 14:10:17 -0600 (MDT) Subj: Thumb and Chevy (3) From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 11 Aug 1994 22:46:14 -0500 (EST) Subj: People! (4) From: Pat Buckridge <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 12 Aug 1994 12:32:22 +1000 (EST) Subj: Character (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stanley Holberg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 11 Aug 94 22:38 EDT Subject: Henry V Certainly Bill Godshalk's view of Henry V is completely on target. Doesn't the process of "blaming this war on everyone (including God) but himself run through the entire play, starting with Henry's supposedly asking the Archbishop of Canterbury if his claims against France are legitimate? --stanley holbergThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Chris Kendall <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 11 Aug 1994 14:10:17 -0600 (MDT) Subject: Thumb and Chevy >Will we never get over thinking dramatic characters are real people living in >our time? I doubt anyone on this list is guilty of such a gross fantasy. On the other hand, if we cannot compare the characters in these plays to ourselves, of what value or interest, other than drily academic, are they to us? If Shakespeare drove no Chevy, he did cast a keen eye. You may say that I cannot borrow it to make sense of my world, but I say I can. I can reject Petruchio's stick or Hal's war club without rejecting the author's work. By the same token, I can compare Fluellen to my theatre history prof without having to dress him up in a tweed jacket. Cheers, Chris Kendall (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 11 Aug 1994 22:46:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: People! William Free asks if we will ever get over (his words -- like getting over a cold?) thinking of dramatic characters as real people living in our time? My answer: of course not. I have no desire to be cured. I thought Christine Gilmore's attack on Christina Hoff Sommer was a bit mean spirited. I don't know Hoff Sommer's work, and I do not remember hearing her on NPR. But she, as a scholar, certainly has a right to her own conclusions, even if those conclusions are not politically correct. In fact, I would like to believe that young girls and young women (well, all young people) are not discrimated against by their teachers. I can't quantify this observation, but I believe, in my classes, women answer my questions more often than men. And, in terms of grades, I can make the case that women are consistently my best students. But, then, I don't teach grade school. Yours, Bill Godshalk (4)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Pat Buckridge <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 12 Aug 1994 12:32:22 +1000 (EST) Subject: Character Re-enter Ben Schneider, with all guns blazing! A few points in reply: On social types/social roles. Ben is right, I think, that these two concepts are distinct, and that David Evett was using the latter, not the former in his comments on _Lear_. In associating him with John Drakakis, whose comments on the Manningham description *were* about social types, I was making a broad distinction between literal and metaphoric representations of persons. The way I see it, types and roles are both literal; emblematic representations are metaphoric. That's not to say they don't come together in practice. I suspect that most examples of emblematic characters one could think of, even from the morality plays proper, and certainly from the later Elizabethan drama, are literal as well. Emblematic effects, it seems to me, are very much a matter of isolated tableaux and passing resonances, at least in Shakespeare, and it would seem odd for an actor or director to attempt to articulate a whole major character in terms of one or another such effect. With playwrights like Jonson and Tourneur, I guess the emblematic effects are more systematic and pervasive than they are in Shakespeare, and the choice might make more sense. On 'universalism'. Ben should reread some of the responses to his earlier assertion about how we moderns all agree that war is a bad thing, and how Shakespeare's apparent approval of Henry V's warmongering marks the great gulf between him and us. This really is a bit much. Forget about the Tudor pacifists; does Ben's modern 'we' include Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Al Haig, Oliver North (need I go on) and their millions of admirers? I think the currently fashionable insistence on the radical alterity of the past is actually a kind of Orientalism, a discovery (but not really a discovery) of an exotic otherness in the past which is precisely analogous to the European 'discovery' of exotic otherness in the mysterious East. It has little interest, finally, in finding out what these other cultures are, or were, really like since it has its own models of desirable otherness to which it will insist they conform. The truth is, of course, that the past (like the East) is open to investigation and at least partial understanding. What puzzles me about the opponents of so-called 'universalism' is how they explain to themselves the fact (I presume it's a fact) that they *are* able to understand and identify with so much of what goes on between people in a Shakespeare play. Surely the statistical probability of our being able to project hundreds of anachronistic understandings onto the text without producing total incoherence (since the 'misreadings' are presumably not systematically related to the 'true' readings, whatever they might be) would be somewhat less than that of Washo the chimp and his friends writing *Hamlet*. One final point. I'm currently reading Patricia Fumerton's book _Cultural Aesthetics_(Chicago, 1991), a fascinating exploration of the Renaissance aristocrat self and its cultural construction of 'privacy' in terms of the trivial ornaments of court life. I have no difficulty with, or resistance to, the degree of otherness she is able to evoke. The sorts of adjustments to our reading that her investigation would suggest are not difficult to accommodate (and quite important, since it is hardly deniable that Shakespeare spent most of his career dramatising aristocratic characters). On a related point, her analysis of the way of representing the elusive private self (in miniatures, sonnets, and masques) through a series of 'public' frames, might usefully be applied to Shakespeare's way of representing major characters. Just a thought. Pat Buckridge.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 5, No. 0674. Thursday, 11 August 1994. (1) From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 10 Aug 94 16:59:52 EST Subj: [Reponding to Request] (2) From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 10 Aug 94 17:00:37 EST Subj: [Re: Generic Expectations] (3) From: John Gardiner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 10 Aug 1994 15:41:24 -0700 (PDT) Subj: [*Merchant of Venice] (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 10 Aug 94 16:59:52 EST Subject: [Reponding to Request] To those kind SHAKSPEReans who looked up and reported the reference to <H8> sought by Orlando Paboloy, I propose this question: would it not have been more truly educational to have sent him on his own to pursue his Angelica through the pages of one of the concordances? And in general, to take that approach to requests on the net for factual information of a relatively accessible kind? Furiously, Dave Evett (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 10 Aug 94 17:00:37 EST Subject: [Re: Generic Expectations] We can develop generic expectations on the basis of experience and on the basis of prescription; that's one of the differences between popular and learned culture. Bill Godshalk's son may not have been sure what to expect from <Shr>, but if he watches commercial TV I bet he could identify most particular shows as action-adventure or sitcom or soap on the basis of one-minute or even 30-second samples. On the other hand, the poets I know who use strict forms usually do the first couple of sestinas or whatever with somebody's codification at their elbow. They can then, like Sidney, experiment with hexameter sonnets and double sestinas. For, despite Rick Jones' warnings against imposing late C20 notions of genre on early modern texts and his doubts that playwrights of the period were much concerned with it, there is plenty of evidence that both experiential and prescriptive notions of genre were active in early modern English theatrical culture. On the prescriptive front, Shakespeare himself uses the term "comedy" 10 times, if my Spevack is to be trusted (ll if you count Sly's "comonty"), and the term "tragedy" 12; some of the uses are clearly reflexive. It's true that the concept gets mocked when Polonius spouts his list, and perhaps mocked in another way when that old-fashioned instrument <The Murder of Gonzago> creaks onto the stage identifying its genre in its prologue. But parody, as we know, is a form of love, and the presence of the terms on all those title pages, up through the Folio, surely testifies to a conviction that they have some kind of value. As to experience, in an article that attracted admiration while still a conference paper but that editors have so far failed to approve, I argue that those Shakespearean plays that have pairs of lovers in their titles work with generic expectations in ways that come close to establishing a new genre, the comi-tragedy. <Romeo and Juliet> most obviously and <Antony and Cleopatra> most subtly start off acting like comedies--I speak here not just of the presence of funny-ha-ha jokes and character-types but of the activity of essentially improvisational views of the world--and struggle on in that mode long after causality begins to overwhelm improvisation and things go sour; I am persuaded that for early modern audiences as well as for us the sustaining of hope that strict causality will in the end be suspended is an important part of most viewers' response to the works. (I also share with John Drakakis and others a conviction that the two genres are in important ways structured by conceptions about gender--in the case of these works summarized in the male-female pairings of the titles.) The problem with analysis along these lines, of course, is that it can prove merely reductive. But intelligent criticism, like the work of Susan Snyder on <Rom> that got me thinking about these things, can remain informative despite the attempts of some poststuctural theorists to dismiss genre as just another patriarchal straitjacket. Comi-tragically, Dave Evett (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Gardiner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 10 Aug 1994 15:41:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [*Merchant of Venice] I am picking up this thread late, so please forgive me if these ideas have been previously expressed. The title of "The Merchant of Venice" is purposely vague. It begs the question: who is the merchant? Both Antonio and Shylock both trade upon the Rialto and are in the literal sense the most obvious merchants. Yet the play's other figures also engage in various merchandising. Bassanio seeks Antonio and Shylock's help in his endeavor to wive and thrive. Lorenzo seeks his own romantic and financial betterment by eloping with Jessica and her father's fortune. The themes of love and commerce are both juxtaposed and interchangable in the play. "The Merchant of Venice" is as a title ironic in that there is no one merchant in the play, but many who employ means of trade to obtain their goals. The name also leads us to question what it is that is being merchandised. Is it merely love that Lorenzo is after? Or is love the means to his desired financial ends? When Shylock cries "My daughter, my ducats", which loss does he lament the most? Or are they for him one in the same? In "Merchant", the world is a perfect market in which love is exchanged for money, money is used to obtain love and love and respect are gained and lost as financial ventures succeed or collapse.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 5, No. 0673. Thursday, 11 August 1994. (1) From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, August 11, 1994 Subj: Winchester Correction (and Apology) (2) From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 10 Aug 1994 21:29:58 -0500 (EST) Subj: True Believer, Henry V, and so on (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, August 11, 1994 Subject: Winchester Correction (and Apology) As I edited Tom Dale Keever's posting (SHK 5.0668) of yesterday, I miss read what Tom had written. Tom's first line should have read this way: The two June posts regarding the character of the Bishop of Winchester in the *H6* Plays raised some interesting issues about Shakespeare's uses of history. My apologies to Tom Keever. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 10 Aug 1994 21:29:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: True Believer, Henry V, and so on It's nice to be called a true believer by Ben Schneider, especially since my fifth wife once told me that I didn't truly believe in anything. I rather think of my self as an empiricist. I don't believe that Tudor culture is entirely different from ours because it goes against my experience of the existing artifacts, i.e., books, manuscripts, paintings, clothes, etc., as well as my experience of twentieth-century American culture. For example, the Jehovah's Witnesses believe in the same theological heresy as John Milton. And I could draw a number of other parallels, which I am sure would not be accepted as parallels at the deepest level. Concerning HENRY V (4.1.128ff.), I think Williams does indeed have the best questions, and I think Henry's arguments by analogy are worthless. He argues that there is an analogy between a father sending a son on a trip "about merchandise" (Bevington, revised ed., 154-55) and a king leading an army into a battle. I (old empiricist) see and felt a difference between going on a trip and going into battle. I don't expect to die because I go traveling; I do expect to die when going into battle. Actually Williams's argument is about a just war -- "if the cause be not good" (140), and about the king's guilt if he gets men killed in an unjust war. Check what he says -- really. Henry does not argue that he is fighting a just war. In fact, Henry is at some pains to blame this war on everyone (including God) but himself. And Henry does not directly respond to Williams's question about the justice of this offensive (in both senses) war. This is not a war that defends the integrity of England. Even pacifists believe in defending themselves -- or at least some do. I don't see Shakespeare writing a play about an heroic monarch taking responsibility for his political actions. He doesn't even take responsibility for negotiating the peace at the end of the play. And a parting shot: I don't think Shakespeare had much use for power mongers no matter what their stamp: Bolingbroke, Falstaff, Hal, Hotspur, each is willing to give up a piece of his humanity for political power, and each has at least a touch of rot at the core. Yours, Bill Godshalk