The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 8.0854.  Friday, 15 August 1997.

[1]     From:   Tanya Gough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Thursday, 14 Aug 1997 08:34:06 -0400
        Subj:   Music at the New Globe

[2]     From:   John Cox <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Thursday, 14 Aug 1997 10:10:37 -0400
        Subj:   Music at New Globe

[3]     From:   Martin Jukovsky <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Thursday, 14 Aug 1997 23:47:41 -0400 (EDT)
        Subj:   Re: SHK 8.0837  The Yank Invasion, Via Southwark


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Tanya Gough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Thursday, 14 Aug 1997 08:34:06 -0400
Subject:        Music at the New Globe

>I may have missed it but the debates on the new Globe have not-so
>far-mentioned anything about music, authentic or otherwise, in any of
>the productions.

The Phillips label has already begun to issue a CD series of
performances by the Musicians of the Globe - the first two titles are
out and available from your local music store (contact me off the list
if you are having trouble finding them).  They are: "Ben Jonson's The
Masque of Oberon" and "Shakespeare's Musick: Songs and Dances from
Shakespeare's Plays." Future titles for the next few years include:
"Purcell: Masque of Cupid and Bacchus," "Nutmeg and Ginger" (spicy
ballads from Shakespeare's London), "The Enchanted Island" (music from
Restoration revivals of The Tempest), "A Shakespeare Ode" (from the work
of Thomas Linley), and "Shakespeare at Covent Garden" (based on 19th
century revivals).

I still have not been able to get out to see the new Globe myself, but
the first two discs are well produced and solidly played.

Tanya Gough

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           John Cox <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Thursday, 14 Aug 1997 10:10:37 -0400
Subject:        Music at New Globe

Ron Ward's question about music and cannon firing at the New Globe is
easily answered.  Both H5 and WT used lots of music, all played by a
live consort in the raised area behind the stage.  H5 began with "music"
of another sort:  the entire cast beat the stage with staves in rhythm
for ten or fifteen minutes while the audience was assembling.  The
actors were out of sight, so the steady throbbing simply emanated from
the back stage area, with no clue as to how it was being produced.  I
thought it was very effective.  They resumed this "music" at the end of
the play, briefly, before the curtain call, or perhaps during the
curtain call.  (I don't remember precisely, having seen the plays in
early July.)  H5 also used cannon fire twice, though I don't recall just
when.  The cannon was located at the very top of the theater, where the
flag pole is.  I could see the cannon mouth from where I was sitting in
the center of the middle gallery.  They put a firework of some kind in
the cannon's mouth.

In general, I thought H5 was much the more effective of the two
productions in part because of the director's willingness to work with
the theater.  I don't mean that his production was better because it was
more "authentic"; I mean that he used what the theater gave him, while
David Freeman (who directed WT) resisted the theater.  An example is
Freeman's decision about how to produce a storm in WT.  Actors came
running onto the stage waving bath-towel sized pieces of camouflage
cloth while they danced around.  Since the theater offers a "heavens,"
why not produce a "storm" there, rather than resort to a distracting
gimmick?  Richard Olivier (who directed H5) was willing to give the
cannon a try, and it was effective, especially in a play about war.  No
doubt directors and actors will learn by experiment in the Globe, as
they do in any theater, and the result will depend in part on how they
respond to the challenge of this particular acting space.

John Cox
Hope College

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Martin Jukovsky <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Thursday, 14 Aug 1997 23:47:41 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: 8.0837  The Yank Invasion, Via Southwark
Comment:        Re: SHK 8.0837  The Yank Invasion, Via Southwark

Andrew Walker White <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.> wrote:

>P.S. -- So far as I know, Marx himself loved Shakespeare.

Indeed he did.  Eleanor Marx, in an 1895 memoir of her father, wrote
that he would read to his children.  "As to Shakespeare, he was the
Bible of our house...By the time I was six I knew scene upon scene of
Shakespeare by heart."

Martin Jukovsky
Cambridge, Mass.

Subscribe to Our Feeds

Search

Make a Gift to SHAKSPER

Consider making a gift to support SHAKSPER.