December
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.1305 Wednesday, 16 December 1998. [1] From: Hugh H. Davis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 12:22:44 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: TV Tempest [2] From: Sally Schutz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 16:44:50 PST Subj: Re: T.V. Tempest [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hugh H. Davis <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 12:22:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: TV Tempest Now that it's aired, I assume it will be open season on "Gone with the Tempest," NBC's latest "literary special." When I first heard plans for this production, I assumed this would be in the "classics illustrated" mode of Gulliver's Travels and The Odyssey, but, while it, like Merlin, was a special effects wonder, this really was the most radical attempt NBC has offered yet. "Based on Shakespeare's Classic Story" (as the Press Kit details), this telemovie was an interesting, if failed, adaptation. On the surface, I have no qualms with transformations of the text. Carol Barton asked why bother to call it Shakespeare at all, but I find I am most interested in the more divergent Shax films we receive. The Tempest has been particularly vulnerable (if that's the right word) to rewrites, with science-fiction, western, and modern versions already (not to mention some highly stylized versions which play with text and meaning as well), and the Civil War Tempest is, I think an idea ripe with potential. That said, I fear this version fails to match that high potential, although there were several interesting moments in which it tried (or failed) quite fascinatingly. Obviously, this is the Tempest in story alone, with no lines transplanted for the actors to try in their faux Southern accents, but I felt some of the performances, particularly Peter Fonda's and John Glover's, were quite solid. The casting of Fonda was an intriguing one, and it allowed NBC press to highlight his recent success in -Ulee's Gold-. However, I felt the casting of Harold Perrineau as Ariel was most interesting, for, while this is clearly a male and very masculine Ariel, the androgyny commonly associated with the character is evoked through Perrineau, whose most high-profile role has been as the cross-dressing Mercutio in Luhrmann's R&J. I found some of the earlier moments with Prosper to be the most interesting. An intriguing (and at times, both awkward and complicated) balance was struck between good and evil within him. Yes, he is a slave owner, but he is the good master, yet he just walks away when he is asked to free the whipped Ariel. He studies are in black magic, with all of its dark connotations. Ariel demands his freedom several times, only to have Prosper look at him in silence. These moments, I felt, made the Prospero-figure stronger, and less typically a Hollywood hero (Merlin moved South). However, my disappointment grew as the film progressed, as Caliban became first a silly comic Gator Man figure, then snapped for a scene to be "more brute than man," then went back to silly escapades in the swamp. Grant and Sherman seemed in the way. It seemed that for every moment that aimed for clever transformation of the original-such as the slight transmogrification of Ariel with Caliban, as Ariel's mother Ezeli, a Mambo priestess, provides Prosper with the magics which let him control the island (although her appearance as a spirit, ala Obi-Wan Kenobi or the wizard Shazam, was a little disconcerting)--there was moment which turned this into a rather standard tv movie, devoid of the complications inherent in the Tempest-such as the move at the end to discard all the problems in Prosper's character, and have him help the North when their battles against the racist south. I think, had the pc overtones (where our one easy villain these days is the old Confederate) been left out, this would have worked as entertainment. As it is, this is a complex mix of literary text, literary transformation, cinematic spectacle, and moral tale. Dropping in one of these elements and tightening it up a bit would surely have helped, although, as it is, we do have yet another Tempest which refuses to spin its storm in the "standard" setting. --Hugh Davis [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sally Schutz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 16:44:50 PST Subject: Re: T.V. Tempest I couldn't agree more on Ms. Barton's views of the Tempest. To rip out Shakespeare's language, one of his most important gifts to the world, is to destroy his work. The life is taken out and I cannot on any level advocate this impending monstrosity. -Sally Schutz
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.1304 Wednesday, 16 December 1998. [1] From: Takashi Kozuka <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 12:50:07 PST Subj: Re: SHK 9.1294 Re: Ghost from Purgatory [2] From: Tom Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 17:39:27 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.1285 Re: Ghost from Purgatory [3] From: Roger Schmeeckle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 15 Dec 1998 10:56:40 -0800 (PST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.1285 Re: Ghost from Purgatory [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Takashi Kozuka <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 12:50:07 PST Subject: 9.1294 Re: Ghost from Purgatory Comment: Re: SHK 9.1294 Re: Ghost from Purgatory Robin Hamilton says: >However, if an answer could be arrived at simply by piling up the >weight of secondary discussion and seeing which side of the argument >massed the heavier, the question wouldn't arise in the first place. However, a list of secondary sources and discussions on a subject can be helpful for those who are interested in the subject, whether they are experts of Shakespeare or lovers of the Bard. Takashi Kozuka PhD Student in the Renaissance Studies [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tom Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 17:39:27 -0500 Subject: 9.1285 Re: Ghost from Purgatory Comment: Re: SHK 9.1285 Re: Ghost from Purgatory Regarding the fictional license Elizabethan audiences would tolerate, it's significant that, as James Marino and Larry Weiss point out, there were plenty of supranatural beings that were -clearly- not credible to Christians, whatever they might think of Purgatory, which audiences were perfectly comfortable with. Andrea's description at the opening of "The Spanish Tragedy" of his ghostly assignment to the classical underworld is probably the most familiar, and comes with the full pagan apparatus of "churlish Charon", "Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanth", and referral to Pluto himself, with a "passport". The gods Diana and Jupiter in Pericles and Cymbeline are also relevant; let alone the plethora of obscure deities who turn up at court masques. The Ghost in Hamlet turns the heat up a bit, being a piece of semi-defunct Christian rather than (or as well as) pagan mythography, but its unexceptionability seems to me to point to a similar response-that this is an exploratory fiction rather than a piece of theological position-taking. Shakespeare seems to take some pains to conjure up an old-Catholic aura to face the Wittenberg student-not only in the Purgatory reference, but in the Ghost's lament at being done in "unhouseled, disappointed, unanneled" which alludes to Roman practices. Yet, as Roy Battenhouse insisted, a Christian ghost, unlike pagan/Spanish Andrea, would hardly be let out of Purgatory at night to cry "like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, Revenge". So the signals are a deliberate mixture- as Hamlet also interprets them. Nor am I convinced by the recent critical narrative according to which "a great deal of spiritual power was being evacuated from the Catholic Church only to be reinvested in the theater". This seems to me greatly to overstate the importance of the theater in Elizabethan culture (no doubt something drama critics are prone to do!). Art always interprets its culture, and religion was a vital part of Elizabethan culture to be interpreted, by the theater as much as by epic poetry, lyric poetry, and painting, but to twin the Church and the theater in this way, as though a kind of hydraulic (or "bank-account") homeostasis balanced out their fall and rise, doesn't seem right to me. It was the Puritan polemicists who saw it thus, which is perhaps why we are also urged that those costive gentlemen "often describe a general sense of what was going on". But neither court nor popular audiences saw it this way, and I don't think we need to. (Are our own radical polemicists "describing a general sense of what is going on" when they inveigh against Hollywood? That's not my impression.) Tom Bishop Associate Professor of English Director, Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities Case Western Reserve University [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Roger Schmeeckle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 15 Dec 1998 10:56:40 -0800 (PST) Subject: 9.1285 Re: Ghost from Purgatory Comment: Re: SHK 9.1285 Re: Ghost from Purgatory > As Roy Flannagan admits in his entry, he has missed the long history of > the scholarly discussion on the Ghost in _Hamlet_. The Ghost is not so > 'clearly Roman Catholic' as Flannagan expects it to be. > > Dover Wilson, in his _What Happens in Hamlet?_ (1962), argues that it is > a Catholic ghost from purgatory. On the other hand, Eleanor Prosser, in > her _Hamlet and Revenge_ (1967), claims that it is a devil from hell. > Roy W. Battenhouse, in his 'The Ghost in _Hamlet_: A Catholic > "Linchpin"?' (1951), argues that Shakespeare created a pagan ghost 'with > some superstitious touches of nominal Christianity' (p. 192). Roland > Mushat Frye, in his _The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in > 1600_ (1984), says that the Ghost's identity is ambiguous. Walter N. > King, in his _Hamlet's Search for Meaning_ (1982), proclaims that its > identity does not matter; what matters, according to him, is its effects > upon Hamlet. Many thanks for the excellent references. There is no conflict between interpreting the ghost as the devil and as an apparition of a soul in purgatory, assumed by the devil in order to tempt Hamlet. The ambiguity concerning whether the ghost is real or a deception of the devil is early established, and, to the best of my knowledge, never resolved. It makes a great deal of difference in how we interpret the play. The most common interpretation seems to be that the ghost is really Hamlet's father, that his charge to Hamlet produces an obligation, and that Hamlet is wishy-washy in executing the ordered revenge. However, on the assumption that Hamlet is being deceived by the devil, Hamlet is being tempted to the dreadful sin of revenge, he succumbs, o what a noble mind is there oe'rthrown, and when he wishes Claudius to suffer eternal punishment in hell, he has reached the nadir of corruption, resulting in the murder of Polonius, Hamlet's flight, and, by the time he returns, a complete change of heart, a divinity having shaped his ends, howsoever he willed. A study of Shakespeare's reaction to the revenge plays popular in his day might shed light on the viability of the second interpretation. Roger Schmeeckle
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.1303 Wednesday, 16 December 1998. [1] From: David Hale <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 98 11:43:42 EST Subj: re: SHAKSPER: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism [2] From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 08:33:37 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism [3] From: Michael Ullyot <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 17:38:16 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism [4] From: Sally Schutz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 16:25:15 PST Subj: Re: Plagiarism [5] From: Franklin J. Hildy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 15 Dec 1998 16:50:35 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism [6] From: Sally Schutz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 15 Dec 1998 14:57:19 PST Subj: Re: Plagiarism [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Hale <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 98 11:43:42 EST Subject: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism Comment: re: SHAKSPER: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism Just a brief note on plagiarism, this being the time of year when borrowed leaves do hang upon the boughs. I just had my first experience with an essay lifted from an internet source, in this case an MA thesis on Spenser. When I wrote the essay in "Shakespeare and the Classroom" (which Eva McManus summarized some weeks ago), only colleagues and friends had been presented with material from the web. The student is presently unable to explain the essential identity of her paragraphs with the thesis. Putting in a few sentence fragments didn't disguise much. Some observations: 1) posting work by students (including graduate students) may not be a very good idea; 2) assignments which are wholly or partially directed to close readings of texts help avoid plagiarism; 3) awareness of the web as a possible source of plagiarism may speed up one's detective work. Some students are still dim enough to copy from the Cliffs Notes, but more of them turn first to the internet. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 08:33:37 +0000 Subject: 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism Comment: Re: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism > Lisa Hopkins wrote: > > > It is certainly true that a student can far outshine their own previous > > work. > > Does syntax count? Not in this case. I applaud Lisa Hopkins for the courage to join the effort to reform the present male-oriented "syntax" (whose "syn" I might ask?) that forces us to chose among 1) male or female, 2) awkward he/she or him/her, or 3) plural, every time we use a pronoun. After banging my head against this hardwired sexist grammatical construction, eventually I opted for the far less obtrusive "themself," and damn the grammarians. If they don't like it they can come up with something that works better. Stephanie Hughes [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Ullyot <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 17:38:16 +0000 Subject: 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism Comment: Re: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism Sometimes Hardy's arrangements of randomly-arriving emails can be rather fortuitous. First comes Larry Weiss's correction of Lisa Hopkins' "a student can far outshine their own previous work," closely followed by Linda Stumbaugh's well-timed comment: >Look at the >quality of our own e-mails, many written in haste. How many of us >would like to be judged on these? Indeed. Larry's correction was duly noted, I'm sure, but cluttered the list with petty marginalia. Michael Ullyot [Editor's Note: For anyone who is interested, I organize postings into digests generally in the order in which they appear in my mailbox. The order in which the digests arrive at your site is completely a function of how those packets are transported across the Internet. HMC] [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sally Schutz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 16:25:15 PST Subject: Re: Plagiarism I am a 16-year-old student and here is some useful insight on the mind of students that I have forever yearned to levy on a teacher. This isn't about plagiarism; it is however about the mentality of students. Due to lack of interest or passion on my own part for the subject on which I am writing, my papers in these situations turn out bland and generic. However, given a topic I feel strongly about or wish to find new insight into, I can write witty, thoroughly researched, original papers. This seems to have become the source of intense animosity on the part of several teachers I have had in the past. I also have a system of selective participation when it comes to school. I refuse to do "busy work" on subjects which I require no further instruction on (at least up to the capabilities of those doing the instructing). Hmm...looking at what I just wrote, it sounds incredibly pompous, but I assure you, as I assure my teachers, I do not mean it in that way. It's simply the way I feel. I'm not trying to incite a mass rebellion against the school system; I just play it the way that works for me and for my acquiring of knowledge. -Sally [5]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Franklin J. Hildy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 15 Dec 1998 16:50:35 -0500 Subject: 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism Comment: Re: SHK 9.1297 Re: Plagiarism For all of you who are worried about plagiarism you might be interested in this note I received via another list. Curses! Foiled again. A new Internet site has been developed to help professors sniff out plagiarism in term papers and research reports. For a fee, the new IntegriGuard site checks the text of a submitted paper against the text of all the papers in its database. No points off for grammatical errors, the service issues only a "pass" or "fail" grade to the tested paper. According to the developers, IntegriGuard's database includes about 600 papers, most of which were purchased from so-called term-paper mills. All papers submitted will also be added to the database. Universities around the world have reported a significant rise in plagiarism in connection with the more wide-scale accessibility of the Web. Franklin J. Hildy [6]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sally Schutz <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 15 Dec 1998 14:57:19 PST Subject: Re: Plagiarism Okay, I feel like a filthy bugger, doing this, but as a high school student, I am fully aware of the sites on which one can download ready-written papers on almost any topic. I want everyone to be aware that I am doing this only in reference to Shakespeare and other Renaissance writing because I believe that it is insane for students in college to take a course that they are not willing to do the work themselves for. But I feel like I'm betraying the foundations of my being by doing this, so please, any professors that are in need of these site listings, contact me off list. but in order to satisfy my own personal code of morals, principles, and ethics, I will only give this to college professors, and not high school teachers. Sorry. -Sally Schutz
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.1302 Wednesday, 16 December 1998. [1] From: Carol Barton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 09:47:46 EST Subj: Re: SHK 9.1296 Re: Questions on R&J [2] From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 10:25:10 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.1296 Re: Questions on R&J [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Carol Barton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 09:47:46 EST Subject: 9.1296 Re: Questions on R&J Comment: Re: SHK 9.1296 Re: Questions on R&J Mercutio calls Tybalt (or is it the other way 'round?) King of Cats, the latter word of which is a corruption of the Italian slang for penis. Not surprisingly, my Italian dictionary doesn't give me the correct spelling of the word "cazzo" (which, pronounced, sounds enough like "gatto" to allow the sly "corruption"). Carol Barton [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 10:25:10 -0500 Subject: 9.1296 Re: Questions on R&J Comment: Re: SHK 9.1296 Re: Questions on R&J Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare's Sexual Language, gives several references for "cock" and speculates on the origin of the identification of the penis with a cock. Yours, Bill Godshalk
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.1301 Wednesday, 16 December 1998. [1] From: Jeffrey Myers <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 09:16:22 -0500 Subj: Peabody; was RE: SHK 9.1293 Re: "Shakespeare in Love" [2] From: Stephanie Cowell <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 11:07:31 -0500 Subj: Re: "Shakespeare in Love" and My Novels [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jeffrey Myers <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 09:16:22 -0500 Subject: RE: SHK 9.1293 Re: "Shakespeare in Love" Comment: Peabody; was RE: SHK 9.1293 Re: "Shakespeare in Love" > I find myself irresistibly reminded of the cartoon "Peabody's Improbable > History" in which Peabody and Sherman journey in the Wayback machine > just in time to suggest to Shakespeare that he might like not to > entitle his new play Romeo and Zelda. My favorite lines: Bacon: It's Bacon, with eggs! [Throws them in Shakespeare's face.] Shakespeare: You'll fry for this, Bacon! Jeff Myers [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Cowell <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1998 11:07:31 -0500 Subject: Re: "Shakespeare in Love" and My Novels I wanted to thank Richard Nathan for his kind words about my novel "The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare." I am hoping Norton will re-release it now. For those of you who are interested, it's available through Amazon.com and most other online sellers. My other novel with Shakespeare as major character "Nicholas Cooke" is out of print, but a lot of copies are available through http://www.bibliofind.com Now, to revise my opinion on Ben Afflect. His hot shot, wise guy, no time for anybody portrayal was probably more Elizabethan than a lot of the other actors...it was his Americanism which seemed to stick out in such an English cast. Actually when I see young guys around New York jiving to headsets, I feel, "Now there's the Elizabethan energy.." Fiennes I did not find cold, but highly romantic. What a great thing is the web where one can "print" an opinion on Tuesday and amend it on Wednesday. By the way, I saw the film in preview in September and honorably did not breathe a word about it to the list until it was released, though it took much moral stamina!