May
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0468 Friday, 15 May 1998. [1] From: Justin Bacon <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesdayyy, 12 May 1998 23:39:10 -0700 Subj: Elizabethan Staging [2] From: Ildiko Solti <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 15 May 1998 05:07:15 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Elizabethan Staging [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Justin Bacon <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesdayyy, 12 May 1998 23:39:10 -0700 Subject: Elizabethan Staging Richard Dutton wrote: > The intriguing question remains: if piracy was not, in fact, the threat > it has often been claimed to be, why did some acting companies have > reservations about allowing *some* of their plays into print - 'think it > against their peculiar profit to have them come in print', as Heywood > put it in the Epistle to 'The English Traveller' (1633). I had a stab at > this question in an essay called 'The Birth of the Author' included in > both 'Elizabethan Theater', ed Parker and Zitner (1996) and (somewhat > revised) in 'Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England' ed. > Brown and Maiotti (1997). But I'd welcome any further views. I am afraid I must profess ignorance of your work in this field, but let me offer a relatively uninformed hypothesis. Today we believe that simply reading a play and actually going to see the play are two completely different things. Would the same hold true for Elizabethans? We already know that they did not *see* a play, they *heard* a play. Hearing words and reading words are very closely related. Might it be that Elizabethan audiences-having read a play-would not go to see the play? Even if such were not true, would it be possible for producers such as Heywood to *believe* it to be true-and therefore prevent the publication of their plays in order to preserve the theatrical profits? Justin BaconThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ildiko Solti <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 15 May 1998 05:07:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Elizabethan Staging Dear Mr. Longstaffe, Thanks very much for your remarks about playing Petruchio. This kind of "direct" contact with the audience is my favourite. We're going to play in the open-air courtyard of a historic building, complete with a tree and a well. The building itself is going to be the set, with three entrances and windows to talk from. We'll play to three sides, with the audience mostly on our right and left, slightly raised. Could you perhaps mention some of the traps you encountered in the role or the play? What was your interpretation? Who was the winner in this game and how did you feel about it? Thanks again Ildiko Solti
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0467 Wednesday, 13 May 1998. [1] From: Jodi Clark <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 07:51:11 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0464 *The Sandman* Shakespeares [2] From: Evelyn Gajowski <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 12:12:56 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0454 Qs: Bedford Texts [3] From: Ed Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 10:17:05 -0400 (EDT) Subj: William in As You Like It [4] From: Grant Smith <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 15:54:22 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0463 Re: Autolycus, Hamnet, and others [5] From: Louis Marder <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 12:02:51 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0384 Macbeth Web Site [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jodi Clark <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 07:51:11 -0500 Subject: 9.0464 *The Sandman* Shakespeares Comment: Re: SHK 9.0464 *The Sandman* Shakespeares I just wanted to concur with Hardy that these are rather fascinating and that I second his recommendation. Jodi Clark Emerson College Theatre Education [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Evelyn Gajowski <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 12:12:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 9.0454 Qs: Bedford Texts Comment: Re: SHK 9.0454 Qs: Bedford Texts To Nicholas R Moschovakis: I have used Fran Dolan's edition of *Shrew* in upper-division courses in Shakespeare's comedies with wonderful results. (I would not hesitate to use this edition in lower-division courses because other Bedford/St. Martin's editions have been successful at that level). Ch. 2, "Marriage," was required reading; this fall, Ch. 4, "Shrews," will be, as well; other documents in other chapters were optional reading. Using this edition enabled us to position the Katherine/Petruchio relationship in the con-text of early modern English marital prescriptions/practices with greater precision than we had been able to accomplish in earlier versions of the same course with different editions. I hope to accomplish something similar with regard to constructions of "shrewness" next time around. Students not only find it sobering to read in *The Law's Resolutions* that "women have no voice in Parliament; they make no laws; they consent to none; they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to be married, and their desires subject to their husband" (198), they also can readily see these ideologies circulating within the dramatic world of *Shrew*. The marriage documents ended up providing a touchstone for the entire course, given the comedies' concern with courtship and marital matters. My own inclination is that these matters are of greater significance than some of the matters to which you devote class time. At the very least, some kind of compromise between traditional and historical materials would seem to be possible. Evelyn Gajowski University of Nevada, Las Vegas [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ed Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 10:17:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: William in As You Like It Dear Fran Teague, There is a long tradition of the author appearing in pastorals, as is evidenced by Colin Cloute (Spenser) in Book Six of Faerie Queene, and the same character in The Shepherds' Calendar. But they are often alter egos of the author, which means that they may be graceful parodies or ironic reversals of the real self of the author. William is clearly a foil for WS, it seems to me. The William who loses Audrey to Touchstone is inarticulate in the extreme, just the opposite of the master of words who wrote the play. On the other hand, William is a loser in the game of love, and, alas, Shakespeare may have lost that game too! For other examples of "William," consider 2H4, H5, and Merry Wives. All are extremely interesting and, in my view, "thematic" characters. --Ed Taft [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Grant Smith <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 15:54:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 9.0463 Re: Autolycus, Hamnet, and others Comment: Re: SHK 9.0463 Re: Autolycus, Hamnet, and others For those interested in Shakespeare names, personal &/or literary, I would like to put together a panel on the program of the American Name Society. We meet this year in San Francisco, 12/27-30, same time and place as MLA. Two of our 12-15 panels are a part of MLA (already filled). Abstracts of 150 words should be sent by September 1 to me <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Submission should be part of an email message (not an attachment). All proposals will be blind refereed, and presenters will be notified by September 20. Presentations should be timed for 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for discussion. The American Name Society is an interdisciplinary organization with members from 25 countries. Grant W. Smith, Vice President American Name Society Professor of English Eastern Washington University [5]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Louis Marder <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 12:02:51 -0500 Subject: 9.0384 Macbeth Web Site Comment: Re: SHK 9.0384 Macbeth Web Site Dear Ed Friedlander: May 13, 1998: Where have you been all my life? Most SHAKSPERIANS know that I have been working on a Shakespeare Data Bank for about ten years. I have over ten megabytes of data on Macbeth and am not finished yet. Help is difficult to find. What do you have? How can I see what you have done? How can we cooperate? RSVP Louis Marder 847-475-7550'This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0466 Wednesday, 13 May 1998. [1] From: Ed Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 11:04:24 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Iago [2] From: Jamie Brough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 16:07:50 EDT Subj: Re: Iago [Paul Smith's response] [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ed Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 11:04:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Iago Dear Paul Smith, You may be right that Iago feels inferior to others and hates them for it. That his motive revolves around his own lack of "beauty," either interior or exterior, seems revealing. At the 1997 Ohio Shakespeare Conference, Janet Adelman gave a paper on Iago that reinforces your view by suggesting that Iago sees himself as excrement and therefore decides to make the world into a replica of himself. I usually don't like psychological explanations, but this one seems to fit. (I might also add that Adelman's analysis of Coriolanus is brilliant and depends on the same sort of psychological approach.) Without becoming too obscene, I might add that the color of excrement may also play a major part in explaining why Iago goes after the black Othello and tries to turn his "inside" into a replica of his "outside." I hasten to add that this may be what Iago thinks, but it is not the normative position espoused by the play, at least as I read it. --Ed Taft [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jamie Brough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 16:07:50 EDT Subject: Re: Iago [Paul Smith's response] I had a similar idea in a recent essay exploring Iago's motivation from reading the first act: Iago's false-self might not be simply a shroud to a motiveless evil [Coleridge]. "In following him, I follow but myself", he says. It is true that his character appears empty of all goodness, but it may be his lack of moral value which creates a desire to 'replace' Othello (as may be seen from the expression of love towards Desdemona latter in the play). By projecting his vice upon the Moor-exploring and extinguishing it-he may become the person he sold to the "three great ones of the city", adding depth to the front and becoming a man of honour. Either that or he's the Devil personified.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0465 Wednesday, 13 May 1998. [1] From: David J. Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 12 May 1998 19:29:36 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0459 Re: Female Roles [2] From: Thomas Larque <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 00:07:21 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0459 Re: Female Roles [3] From: Ed Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 10:36:55 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Female Roles [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David J. Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 12 May 1998 19:29:36 +0100 Subject: 9.0459 Re: Female Roles Comment: Re: SHK 9.0459 Re: Female Roles Ed Taft wrote: >Dear David Evett, > >Your point that expert young actors exist (and existed 400 years ago) is >uncontested. As an example of how right you are, consider the fact that >*Bussy D'Ambois,* George Chapman's impossibly difficult (and also >brilliant) play was acted by the Children of the Queen's Revels! But you >miss two key points: (1) Would sharers have let "apprentise" actors play >key female roles? Probably not. (2) Is there evidence that men actors >played and specialized in female roles? Yes, there is. Put it in >commonsense terms: Leonardo DiCaprio probably could play Cleopatra very >well, but would Janet Suzman let him if she were a sharer and he was >not? Of course not! Yes, but Leonardo DiCaprio and Janet Suzman are living in the late 20th century, not the late 16th century. You can't just take our modern attitudes and export them back to Shakespeare's day without some evidence that they held back then. There is no evidence of any sharers playing female roles in Shakespeare's day; there is, however, evidence of numerous teenage boys between age 10 and 18 playing female roles and specializing in such roles. As I recall, there are a few references to such things as "the queen shaving", but these are all consistent with teenage boys going through puberty. Dave KathmanThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Thomas Larque <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 00:07:21 +0100 Subject: 9.0459 Re: Female Roles Comment: Re: SHK 9.0459 Re: Female Roles > But in the phrase 'boy actor', what ages are we talking about here? I am > just teaching Duchess of Malfi, and we have been speculating about > exactly the problem of boys playing so erotic, tangled, defiantly > feminine a woman as the Duchess. How old was Richard Sharpe when he > played? How old did they go? Since I don't have the source of this one to hand, and am writing from memory, I can't vouch for its accuracy, but I do remember reading a passage from one of the Puritanical attacks on the sinfulness of theatre (perhaps in Phillip Stubbe's Anatomy of Abuses?) which cast a light on the age of the boy actors in adult companies. As I remember the writer denounced the use of boys in female parts as a thing which provoked "unnatural lusts" in their audiences, and then complained that some of the boys were not even young enough to be feminine in appearance. The phrase that sticks in my mind was something about men kissing "big bearded boys". I wondered, reading this, whether this might be a result of acting companies holding actors famed for female parts in these roles until the last possible moment - when their breaking voices, and sprouting faces were finally so far advanced that they *had* to be moved into adult (male) roles. This might also explain Flute's distress in MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM - "Nay, faith, let not me play a woman : I have a beard coming" (1.2.44). Both of these sources suggest that the female parts were expected to be played by young beardless boys, and that - while there were occasional deviations - women played by "big bearded boys" were an exception to the rule, and something that actors and audiences commented upon. It has been suggested that MND's Pyramus and Thisbe is a joking reference back to Shakespeare's own ROMEO AND JULIET - which is often considered to have been performed just a little before MND. If it was, then I wonder whether there might be a more personal reference to an actor from the older play in this line. In HAMLET, Polonius refers back to a time when he played Julius Caesar and was "killed in the Capitol" - something which has been interpreted as an actorly joke, referring back to the time that the *actor* portraying Polonius had played Caesar in Shakespeare's earlier play. Could it be that the reference in MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM was also a joking reference to an actor's previous role? Perhaps the voice of the boy actor who played Juliet had now broken, and his beard had grown to such an extent that he could no longer - or would soon be unable to - convincingly play female parts? If so, then perhaps writing Flute for him was a way of delaying his final transfer to adult male roles. Giving him a chance to play an adult male with "a beard coming", but at the same time allowing him one last chance to play the female romantic heroines for which he had previously been known (and admired?). Given the comical nature of the Mechanicals performance, it would not have mattered whether he could no longer pretend to be a woman, since a "big bearded" Thisbe would be quite funny. Thomas Larque. [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ed Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 13 May 1998 10:36:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Female Roles Dear David Kathman, I appreciate your erudition on the subject of female roles, but I must say that I suspect that you protest too much. Quoting Jim Forse, as I have done, seems to have pushed your buttons. I say this because you obviously have not read Forse's article. The statistical evidence that you claim is pure specualtion does in fact exist in his essay. GO LOOK AT IT before labeling it as pure speculation. And look up the meaning of the word *speculate,* too. The evidence that certain members of Shakespeare's company might have played female roles derives from Forse's article but is clearly meant to be speculative and based on the argument he sets forth in his essay. He doesn't claim truth for his suggestion, just possibility. He is trying to open up an old question because the old answers don't seem to fit. I agree with his effort and think that, at least in part, he may be right. Enough said. --Ed Taft
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0464 Tuesday, 12 May 1998. From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, May 12, 1998 Subject: *The Sandman* Shakespeares This weekend I got the opportunity to visit one of the Washington, DC, area's Borders bookstores and was able to buy the two Sandman collections that contain the Shakespeare-related stories that we discussed last week. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is included in the collection *A Dream Country* (ISBN 1-56389-016, $14.95 US) and "The Tempest is in *The Wake* (ISBN 1-56389-279-0, $19.95 US). In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the Lord Strange's Men on a provincial tour because the London theatres are closed by the plague perform on a Sussex down for Auberon and Lady Titania and their attendants at the request of Dream Shaper, who has made an arrangement with Will Shekespear. Dream Shaper is to give Will Shekespear what he thinks he wants in return for writing two plays. MND is the first. During the performance, Lady Titania takes a fancy to Hamnet Shekespear who plays the Indian Boy and whom she meets at the interval. Also, at the interval, Will promises to deliver the other play celebrating dreams at the end of his career and learns of Kit Marlowe's death. As "The Tempest" opens, Will having returned to Stratford in 1610 starts writing the second commissioned play and gets in trouble with his wife for telling their daughter Judith that "Scottish Jimmy" is called at court "Queen James." At the Quiney Inn, while discussing with the Mistress her son Tommy's infatuation with Judith, the two are interrupted by visitors who charge a shilling to reveal the corpse of a death "Indian." Ben Jonson pays a visit as does Dream Shaper who has come to check on the progress of the new play. There is even an episode in which Shakespeare discusses his version of Psalm 46 with one of the translators of the KJV. Fascinating, these two stories, I recommend them to all. Hardy