May
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0968 Friday, 5 May 2000. From: Justin Drewry <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 04 May 2000 12:45:10 -0400 Subject: Hamlet's "draw" There is an ongoing debate between myself and a colleague as to what Hamlet's definition of the word "draw" is in 3.iv.239 & 4.1.25 of the folio. Hamlet addresses Polonius's dead body while dragging it from the stage: "Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you." And his mother replies to Claudies in the next scene that he has gone. "To draw apart the body he hath killed," Is Hamlet actually cutting the body to pieces in these quotations? Thanks, Andy Drewry The Webb SchoolThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0967 Friday, 5 May 2000. From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 04 May 2000 09:13:06 -0700 Subject: 11.0955 Old Bill Comment: Re: SHK 11.0955 Old Bill Terence Hawkes writes: >Its participants may now be interested to learn that in London today the >police have agreed to a declaration in the High Court that a number of >their actions on that occasion were in fact 'unlawful'. The clear >presumption is that they were acting in accordance with instructions >received from the government. Some leap of logic seems to be made in this paragraph. Are you saying that because the police actions were unlawful, they must have been ordered by the government? That's not exactly a logical necessity. In fact, such a leap seems doubly odd coming from a man possessed with a widely-admired critical intellect. Cheers, Se
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0966 Friday, 5 May 2000. [1] From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 17:04:07 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0958 Re: Bardic Ignorance [2] From: Kevin De Ornellas <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 04 May 2000 16:37:35 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 11.0958 Re: Bardic Ignorance [3] From: Jean Peterson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 15:42:16 -0400 (EDT) Subj: Ignorance? [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 17:04:07 +0100 Subject: 11.0958 Re: Bardic Ignorance Comment: Re: SHK 11.0958 Re: Bardic Ignorance Arthur Lindley asked >I may be misremembering, but doesn't Carol Vorderman have a fairly >brilliant-as these things currently go-degree from Cambridge? A colleague from Cambridge who just left the room claimed to know that she couldn't handle the Cambridge maths course and so settled on engineering, in which she got a third class degree. Being unable to do a maths degree is nothing to be ashamed of. Vorderman's television celebrity is founded on an ability to factorize in her head numbers up to 1000. I believe Wordsworth knew of a horse who could manage the same trick, but only up to 25. Gabriel Egan [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kevin De Ornellas <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 04 May 2000 16:37:35 GMT Subject: 11.0958 Re: Bardic Ignorance Comment: Re: SHK 11.0958 Re: Bardic Ignorance >I may be misremembering, but doesn't Carol Vorderman have a fairly >brilliant-as these things currently go-degree from Cambridge? > >Arthur Lindley I heard that she had been awarded a Michelle Fowler (a Third). [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jean Peterson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 15:42:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Ignorance? >Just a small corollary to that, on Tuesday's American celebrity version >of "Millionaire", Dana Carvey was asked "In the 1998 film, Shakespeare >In Love, at which theater does Romeo and Juliet premier?" He didn't >know, so he polled the audience and they of course responded "the >Globe", which was wrong. I would quibble at calling this "ignorance." For an audience of non-specialists, referring to a film that opened close to 2 years ago, "the Globe" is a pretty reasonable guess. Jean Peterson Associate Professor of English Bucknell University
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0965 Friday, 5 May 2000. [1] From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, May 05, 2000 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com [2] From: Simon Malloch <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 04 May 2000 23:37:09 +0800 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com [3] From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 17:40:47 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com [4] From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 21:09:56 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, May 05, 2000 Subject: 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com Comment: Re: SHK 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com The time has come for me as moderator to intervene in this thread. This discussion has in my opinion moved so far away from anything in the purview of this list that I am calling a halt to it. If members are interested in continuing this conversation, do so off-list. Hardy [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Simon Malloch <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 04 May 2000 23:37:09 +0800 Subject: 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com Comment: Re: SHK 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com With all this talk about Amazon.com and censorship, I am surprised that no one has mentioned the Mein Kampf incident. According to Robert Spector's Amazon.com (HarperCollins, 2000), the title was in Amazon's top 10 books sold to Germans. But Amazon stopped shipping it (nor is it listed, the last time I checked, on www.amazon.de) after an article in the Washington Post, a complaint from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and an investigation from legal authorities in Germany. I had first read briefly about this in the English press. On asking Amazon for an explanation in December of last year, I got this reply: 'In regards to the question in your other email, we currently do not ship "Mein Kampf" to Germany or Holland because of legal concerns. Our policy is to follow the laws of all the countries in which we operate, and the sale of this title in Germany and Holland is subject to various local laws. Should you want a copy, due to the German laws against Nazi memorabilia, there are no German-language editions of "Mein Kampf" available. The only editions available from us are in English.' Currently, Mein Kampf is ranked 8,704 on the US site, has an average customer rating of 3.5 stars out of 5, and has 83 reviews, the first two of which are positive, 5 star reviews. Amazon.com has no disclaimers, unlike the Protocols of Zion catalogue entry. Apparently BarnesandNoble.com still supply it to Germans, which makes one wonder about Amazon's legal concerns. Simon Malloch. [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 17:40:47 +0100 Subject: 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com Comment: Re: SHK 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com Kevin De Ornellas writes >this casual spreading of hyperbolic rumours by outsiders >is incredibly unhelpful. Can we - the Irish - be left alone >to heal the scars of our traumatised society? This comment betrays ignorance of email's anonymity and of post-colonial theory. Given only my name and a virtual email address, I might, for aught De Ornellas knows, be in real life the head of the school of English at Queen's University, Belfast. I read "Can we - the Irish - be left alone" as a coded reference to the phrase Sinn Fein ("ourselves alone") and have already reported this to the appropriate authorities in Gower Street. I'm glad that De Ornellas finds that the content of this list >could - if taken seriously - undermine confidence in the parties >(including the larger part of the British State) that are still >committed to the fragile Irish peace deal. Undermining such naive confidence is essential war work. Gabriel Egan [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 21:09:56 +0100 Subject: 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com Comment: Re: SHK 11.0957 Re: Amazon.com I neglected a glaring contradiction in Kevin De Ornellas's posting. I beg Hardy's indulgence for pointing this out in a separate message: >casual spreading of hyperbolic rumours by outsiders is >incredibly unhelpful. Can we - the Irish - be left alone >to heal the scars of our traumatised society? Let us mask any collective wincing at the de-politicized ethnic purity of "we - the Irish" (our intellectual visas having been duly scrutinized) and move in dignified silence past the bad poetry of "heal the scars of our traumatised society", so as better to appreciate how the above clashes with >I do not subscribe to see insensitive splutterings that >could - if taken seriously - undermine confidence in the parties >(including the larger part of the British State) that are still >committed to the fragile Irish peace deal. Senator George Mitchell, a notable American, brokered the peace deal which De Ornellas supports, so clearly not all "outsiders" are unwelcome. I can think also of at least one British politician hoping to put this deal on his curriculum vitae. De Ornellas ought not to assume that everyone shares his support for the current peace deal. There is a significant body of republican opinion that the situation cannot be resolved until the British Army agrees to lay down its weapons and negotiate. Not one British bullet nor one ounce of Army explosives has been handed over and the British government (the political wing of the British Army) should not expect a long-lasting peace on this basis. Gabriel Egan
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0964 Thursday, 4 May 2000. From: Syd Kasten <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 4 May 2000 16:56:49 +0300 (IDT) Subject: Hamlet German Once again I ask your forgiveness. This has been rattling around in my head for ever so long and the only way I can exorcise it is by putting it into print. It all begins with the German tendency to put participles at the end of subordinate clauses, so when I read the lines: " How stand I then, That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd," I come up with an association to the previous major scene in which H. kills a father (Ophelia's). A mother stain'd? his own? Which brings me to tell myself "No,no! - the "have" is the have of possession, not of the perfect tense." And yet, I remember through a glass darkly a 1964 joint production of BBC & Denmark Radio with Christopher Plummer as Hamlet. I am probably wildly distorting, but I seem to remember the closet scene as so redolent of sexuality that I had to avert my eyes. (This was before the revolution in cinema that made sex an every day commodity). The cast (courtesy ofThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) had some familiar names: Michael Caine ..................... Horatio Alec Clunes ....................... Polonius Jo Maxwell Muller ................. Ophelia Christopher Plummer ............... Hamlet Robert Shaw (I) ................... Claudius, King of Denmark Donald Sutherland ................. Fortinbras, Prince of Norway June Tobin ........................ Gertrude, Queen of Denmark Best wishes, Syd Kasten