April
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0716 Wednesday, 5 April 2000. From: Peter Holland <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 16:47:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Dench A and C David Levine is not the first (and won't be the last) to be slightly confused about video holdings in Stratford. The Shakespeare Institute Library has a fine collection of commercially available recordings. But it is the Shakespeare Centre Library, which is part of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which holds archive videos of all RSC productions for the last few years. The Shakespeare Centre Library does not, therefore, have a video of the Antony in which Judi Dench was Cleopatra since that was at the National Theatre, not the RSC (though looking at the cast-list for any RNT production these days one could be excused for thinking one was at an RSC show). Peter Holland
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0715 Wednesday, 5 April 2000. From: Laura Blankenship <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 04 Apr 2000 12:31:31 -0500 Subject: Edition of Twelfth Night Can someone suggest a good recent edition of Twelfth Night with a good introduction? I have the Arden Edition (1968?) and The New Cambridge Edition (60's, I think). I also have The Riverside Shakespeare and would be willing to purchase another collected works if the introductions are worthwhile. I've looked at a few individual editions on the Internet, but I can't sort through the good and the bad without looking at the intros-and the local Barnes & Noble is lacking. Thanks, Laura Blankenship University of Arkansas
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0714 Wednesday, 5 April 2000. From: Erika Lin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 4 Apr 2000 17:49:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: CFP: UPenn Medieval/Renaissance Conference Apologies in advance to those of you who may receive this CFP more than once. We're trying to reach as many graduate students in medieval and Renaissance studies as we can, so please feel free to forward this post. Many thanks for your time and attention! Best, Erika Lin *************************************************************************** Call for Papers WRINKLES IN TIME: RUPTURES AND CONTINUITIES IN THE WRITING OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE October 7, 2000 A Graduate Student Conference at the University of Pennsylvania This conference will explore both the writings produced during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the ways in which those periods have themselves been written to meet a variety of subsequent historical and cultural concerns. We are particularly interested in papers relating specific topics to larger theoretical questions, especially those posed by recent historicist scholarship. Potential topics may come from, but are not limited to, the following areas of interest: * periodization: historiography, terminology, cultural fantasy * literal "wrinkles" and other objects: material culture in its temporal dimension * religious reformations: innovation and conservation * transformations in gender, sex, and identity * performance: actual practices and theoretical frameworks * the genres of history-writing: chronicles, lives, history plays * marginal, "unwritten" histories * reception and revision of medieval forms in Renaissance literature * manuscript matrix / print culture * communities constructed in space and over time * monarchic regimes and dissenting forms of power Single-page abstracts for twenty-minute papers should be sent to:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (no attachments please) by May 31, 2000. Questions about the conference may be directed to the same address. Questions and abstracts can also be sent via regular mail to: Wrinkles in Time Conference 119 Bennett Hall Department of English University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6273
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0713 Wednesday, 5 April 2000. [1] From: David Lindley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 4 Apr 2000 20:35:08 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 11.0674 How Shakespeare Invented History [2] From: Judith Matthews Craig <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 4 Apr 2000 18:49:53 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0674 How Shakespeare Invented History [3] From: Brother Anthony <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 05 Apr 2000 09:08:57 +0900 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0697 Re: How Shakespeare Invented History [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Lindley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 4 Apr 2000 20:35:08 GMT Subject: 11.0674 How Shakespeare Invented History Comment: Re: SHK 11.0674 How Shakespeare Invented History Just in case anybody's interested, I hear today that Richard II - which those who have seen it seem to think wonderful - is totally sold out for the whole of its run in The Other Place. David Lindley [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Judith Matthews Craig <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 4 Apr 2000 18:49:53 -0500 Subject: 11.0674 How Shakespeare Invented History Comment: Re: SHK 11.0674 How Shakespeare Invented History To comment on the Daily Telegraph article outlining the RSC history project: <Any presentation of the plays in chronological rather than <compositional <order provides a fascinating and politically provocative <challenge. To <put it simply, the Shakespearean world we will be <presenting will be a <progression to the past, an advance to barbarism. I am afraid that I do not understand why viewing Richard II, is "an advance to barbarism" when, written later than plays depicting later and supposedly less barbaric times, it is described in the article in glowing terms as a "precise manicured text" "sheer political dynamite-for its subject was deposition and usurpation." Apparently, Essex and his followers including Southampton wanted to see it before their rebellion but as Schoenbaum assures us, the play was performed against the players' better judgments. Augustine Phillips testified that the play was "'so old and out of use' that the players felt 'that they should have small or no company at it' " (A Compact Documentary Life 218). The upshot of this comment is that Southampton, having known Shakespeare around ten years ago in his youth (Southampton was 27 at the time of the plot), dredged up Richard II to " 'satisfy his eyes with the sight of that tragedy which he thought soon after his lord should bring from the stage to the state' " (218-19)--in other words the deposition of the Queen Elizabeth. However, that presumption seems to have been in Southampton's mind, not Shakespeare's and the Chamberlain's Men amused the Queen with another play on the eve of Essex' execution (219). In contrast to the writer of the article, I do not see that Shakespeare is developing a "much more sophisticated political mind" (Telegraph review) or that he was unclear about what prevents the rise of barbarity-it is not culture. Richard II is simply better written "captured like an ostentatiously coloured butterfly in a formal, precise, highly sophisticated world (Telegraph review). It is stunning on the stage (I saw it last weekend), and hard-hitting in its portrayal of Richard's indecisiveness as a ruler and penchant to prefer flattery over character in his choice of friends. The consequences for the state are ruthlessly drawn out-John of Gaunt's dying lament for England in the first part of the play is contrasted with the family violence that rips everyone apart in the last act. I do not see that Shakespeare is any less moral in his vision than he was at the beginning; moreover, I believe that the "theatrical orthodoxy" Telegraph review) that maintains that the two trilogies are "remarkably homogeneous" (Telegraph review) is correct. He may have developed as an artist, but I do not believe that his vision became more chaotic "fragmented kaleidoscopic, highly complicated, [or] even random at times" (Telegraph review). His vision to me is always moral, peppered with incisive vignettes of human frailties and moments of courage and insight. The fact that he was not true to the facts of history should not bother anyone who shares his moral and spiritual vision of the triumph of courage and sanity over baseness and violence at any level-familial, political or spiritual. In short, I think the writer of this article (I don't know who it is) is confused himself. Judy Craig [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Brother Anthony <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 05 Apr 2000 09:08:57 +0900 Subject: 11.0697 Re: How Shakespeare Invented History Comment: Re: SHK 11.0697 Re: How Shakespeare Invented History But what a pity that the RSC schedule does not allow those wishing to to view this year's 4 history plays in proper order on consecutive days until well into September, since Henry V only starts playing late in August. Ah well... Not everyone lives on the other side of the globe. By-the-way, the Royal Shakespeare Company's URL is http://www.rsc.org.uk/ in case anyone did not know. Br Anthony Sogang University, Seoul, Korea
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0712 Wednesday, 5 April 2000. [1] From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 04 Apr 2000 11:26:34 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0695 Re: Oxymorons [2] From: Judith Matthews Craig <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 4 Apr 2000 20:22:49 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0695 Re: Oxymorons [3] From: David Bishop <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 5 Apr 2000 01:15:25 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0695 Re: Oxymorons [4] From: Allan Blackman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 5 Apr 2000 07:28:14 -0400 Subj: "oxymorons" [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 04 Apr 2000 11:26:34 -0700 Subject: 11.0695 Re: Oxymorons Comment: Re: SHK 11.0695 Re: Oxymorons Ed Taft writes, in an interesting and informed reading of Hamlet: > Why does he do this? I would suggest that, as always in Hamlet, the > plot tells us at least as much as the soliloquys, and so what Hamlet is > doing is putting his own life on the line in a courageous and brilliant > attempt to interrogate Providence, to put Providence itself on trial, as > it were. IF the Ghost represents the will of heaven, then Hamlet will > be saved from his adder-fanged "friends" and brought back to Denmark to > finish the job that Providence has assigned to him. IF the Ghost > represents God's will, then Providence will give Hamlet the means, the > motive (he already has that!), and the opportunity to effect revenge. This is interesting, but I have two quibbles: 1. Hamlet seems to reserve his most Providentialist statements for after his return from England. Relying on Providence here seems prescient. 2. Testing Providence sounds a lot to me like tempting God. Which isn't to say that this isn't what Hamlet does, but it doesn't strike me as entirely orthodox. Saying that he's testing Providence would, in other words, open up a whole new set of problems. Cheers, Se