February
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0326 Monday, 12 February 2001 From: Ron Dwelle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 11:39:42 -0500 Subject: Hamlet Spy Caught Spying I just saw a videotape of Hamlet (apparently taken from a television show, maybe early 1970s), with Richard Chamberlain. In Act 3, scene 1, the director has Claudius and Polonius hide behind a curtain and thus hear Hamlet's soliloquy. But after Ophelia enters, Hamlet spies a pair of eyes (presumably Polonius's), at which point he goes bonkers (and turns quite vicious toward Ophelia). I don't see much textual evidence for it (the spy caught spying), but it did work nicely (though obviously it changes the scene significantly). I'm wondering if there's any history of the scene being played in such a way, or if anyone has seen a similar interpretation staged. Incidentally, the video was not too bad (maybe low-expectations--I never thought of Richard Chamberlain as being a real actor). It was heavily cut (to fit within 2 hours and still leave time for commercials), but otherwise quite good. I can't find the video listed for sale. Is it? Thanks, Ron Dwelle
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0325 Monday, 12 February 2001 [1] From: Abigail Quart <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 11:40:49 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night [2] From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 09:08:12 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night [3] From: Kit Gordon <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 13:38:38 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night [4] From: Paul E. Doniger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 19:41:35 -0800 Subj: Fw: SHK 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night [5] From: Gareth M. Euridge <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 2001 13:01:50 -0500 Subj: we three [6] From: Richard Regan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Sunday, 11 Feb 2001 23:49:05 EST Subj: Re: SHK 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Abigail Quart <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 11:40:49 -0500 Subject: 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night Comment: Re: SHK 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night I may be the only one here who loves Nunn's Twelfth Night. Film is a different language from stage. It's visual more than spoken. Shakespeare used words to convey what is now doable with a visual flashback, a panoramic scenery shot, or a close up. In Henry V, Branagh reduced a long verbal duel to a moment with a glove and it was a perfect translation. His film of Hamlet uses the entire script and I loathe it, maybe because it fails to translate the text into the visual medium but tries to have the visual language running alongside. Like any director, Nunn picks and chooses what to emphasize. He highlights the brother/sister relationship. I still feel his Twelfth Night is an excellent translation of the play. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 09:08:12 -0800 Subject: 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night Comment: Re: SHK 12.0319 Nunn's Twelfth Night Just a brief note to Todoroko before I run off to jog in the (unseasonal) snow. I enjoyed elements of Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, but what struck me most forcefully was the ending, where just about everyone was sent packing, and the society of Illyria becomes (we assume, is restored to) some sort of familiar Victorian shape. This seems to explain the title, since twelfth night was the last night of festivities in Christmas. The carnival is ending, and perhaps it's been going on a little too long. Cheers, Se
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0324 Monday, 12 February 2001 [1] From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 10:40:55 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0257 Re: Branagh [2] From: Richard Nathan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 16:21:59 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Branagh [3] From: David Maier <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 08:38:39 -0800 Subj: RE: Branagh [4] From: Bob Haas <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 11:44:29 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Branagh [5] From: Mary-Anne King <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 14:21:32 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Branagh [6] From: Susanne Collier <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 15:10:23 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Branagh [7] From: Charles Weinstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 12 Feb 2001 08:40:06 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Miscasting--Heston [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 10:40:55 -0500 Subject: 12.0257 Re: Branagh Comment: Re: SHK 12.0257 Re: Branagh Thank goodness! Now Shakespeare can be drawn safely back into the academic realm, away from the garlicky breath and sweaty underarms and linguistic shortcomings of actual citizens. Timely, too--I read in the Times that there's a big caviar crisis along the Volga. I am pretty sure that the people who "hate" Branagh's work hate almost all the Shakespeare performances they see because they attend them with an idealized conception of the play already in place to which no actual production could ever correspond, and which the particularities of a production, no matter how rich the base of reading, reflection, and experience from which they have arisen, will never or at best rarely be able to affect. David Evett [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard Nathan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 16:21:59 +0000 Subject: 12.0315 Re: Branagh Comment: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Branagh In response to Kristen McDermott, I was not referring to the Los Angeles "morons" who loved the plays Branagh directed. I thought the plays were bad, but they didn't offend me, and I wouldn't call someone a fool for loving the plays. In any event, when I saw the plays, the audiences definitely did not love the plays; they were at best indifferent. The only time the audience responded enthusiastically was during the big musical number that ruined the end of "Pyramus and Thisbe." It was the MUSICAL NUMBER that offended me, and I was disgusted at how much the audience loved the musical number. And it was NOT the bergamasque after "Pyramus And Thibe" - at least not in the production I saw -- it replaced the end of "Pyramus And Thisbe" itself. I still remember, with horror, the cast dancing around the stage singing, "Those lily lips, that cherry nose, those yellow cowslip cheeks, are gone, are gone!!!" It is possible that they may have changed the number later in the run. I bought tickets to see "Lear" twice. (I bought them in anticipation of it being great, before I'd seen it.) The first time I saw it Emma Thompson as the Fool was encased in a shell that made her look like a human spider. The second time I saw it, there was no shell. [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Maier <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 08:38:39 -0800 Subject: RE: Branagh As an idiot and a moron who happens to appreciate Branagh's contribution to the interpretation of Shakespeare, my disappointment with his LLL has nothing to do with the concept or the goal of the production or, in fact, anything Shakespearean. His LLL effort failed for me because of what I feel is his failure to grasp the genre of the Hollywood movie musical which his movie attempted to emulate. The beauty of the Hollywood movie musical is the absolute precision of the dance, the exquisite articulation of the song, the attention to the nth degree of detail in the set and the choreography. By comparison, Branagh's LLL felt like a cheap knock-off. I honestly wasn't sure if Branagh was also intending it to be a parody of some sort. It's the same feeling I have watching most community theatre productions of Chicago or West Side Story or 42nd Street. If the cast doesn't have the dance or the vocal chops, it's just not going to be good. Had Branagh populated his movie with singer-dancer-choreographer participants with the quality of Gene Kelly/Fred Astaire/Esther Williams, and had paid the requisite attention to the non-Shakespearean details, I think his movie would have been a major hit, and a major artistic achievement. In fact, I'd love it if he'd call the thing back and try to do it again. LLL the movie wasn't a failure as Shakespeare; it was a failure as a movie musical. And, for the record, I found his Much Ado and his Henry V to be raw, vital, alive, vivid and tremendously exciting. For those who would label me an idiot or a moron, I can only, in return, call them repressed effetes who prefer to sit in the dusty corners of their own gray, dismal worlds. With a tip of the hat to Mike Jensen, Dave Maier [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bob Haas <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 11:44:29 -0500 Subject: 12.0315 Re: Branagh Comment: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Branagh It's one of those interesting quirks of fate that most filmgoers know McDiarmid best for his role as Senator and Emperor Palpatine in George Lucas's STAR WARS films. I wish I'd seen this production, even though I enjoyed Derek Jacobi's Chorus in the film version very much. [5]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mary-Anne King <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 14:21:32 -0800 Subject: 12.0315 Re: Branagh Comment: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Branagh I am not a Shakespearean scholar-so I try to not say anything and just absorb and enjoy this list-but would anyone knocking Branagh like to step outside? I loved Shakespeare as a teenager and drifted away as a young adult-Henry V brought me back- Branagh brought me back. There are defects but the pleasure outweighs the defects. I just want to feel the emotions and hear the words, and be entertained. It would be a shame if he stopped making Shakespearean movies. Mary-Anne King [6]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Susanne Collier <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 15:10:23 -0800 Subject: 12.0315 Re: Branagh Comment: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Branagh Stuart Manger was particularly harsh on the stage version Henry V in which Branagh starred. I and a fellow Shaksper member, Carol Morley, saw the Branagh/Noble Henry V many a time from its first preview throughout the Stratford season, as we were standing-room-only RSC addicts from the Shakespeare Institute at the time. As that season's debut production, Henry V was billed as Branagh's RSC debut in part because he was a fairly recent graduate of RADA. Part of the impact of that production WAS that the Henry was so inexperienced and that Brian Blessed et al characters were so much more seasoned than he. It made the transition from Henry's wilder days to his "first" kingly gamble all the more poignant. I've published a comparison of it with the film in essays in theatre/etudes theatrales May 1992 if your interested in more observations. I agree that Ian MacDiarmid was staggeringly good but Mr. Manger is wrong in ascribing the delightful Princess to Emma Thompson Katherine was played by a french actress, who was a TV name from a popular Jersey detective TV show, Bergerac (starring John Nettles). Remembering those sore feet, Susanne Collier [7]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Charles Weinstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 12 Feb 2001 08:40:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: 12.0315 Re: Miscasting--Heston Comment: Re: SHK 12.0315 Re: Miscasting--Heston The First Player is an emotive actor. Heston was granitic. He spoke his lines with dignity and sobriety, but that does not amount to a performance. Hamlet is moved, not by recitation, but by incarnation.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0323 Monday, 12 February 2001 [1] From: Don Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 09:24:54 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0266 Re: Wittenberg and Paris [2] From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 07:49:22 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0308 Re: Wittenberg and Paris [3] From: Frank Whigham <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 09:56:53 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0312 Re: Wittenberg and Paris [4] From: Marcus Dahl <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 2001 15:46:19 EST Subj: Re: SHK 12.0308 Re: Wittenberg and Paris [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Don Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 09:24:54 -0600 Subject: 12.0266 Re: Wittenberg and Paris Comment: Re: SHK 12.0266 Re: Wittenberg and Paris I lack the inclination to spend much time replying to Graham's furious rejoinder. Most of it lacks relevance to what I was talking about, which is the way in which one's view of things influences one's emotional response to and subsequently one's rational judgments about passages of text. I will, however, offer a few comments. He pounces on my phrase, "essentially Christian," but I can never figure out what is wrong with it. Admittedly, Christianity varies from denomination to denomination and even from believer to believer -- but so do all other faiths. You can find out what a given sect asserts as its Credo, then find that the words mean slightly different things to everyone who says "I believe." We're only human, after all. By essentially Christian, however, I meant -- as context -- holding certain beliefs about God and Jesus Christ that are common to virtually all who claim the name Christian. I won't enumerate them here. In times of intense denominational conflict, your identification with a particular sect may make a great deal of difference -- to the church(es), the state, later biographers, the public executioner, all sorts of people. But that is a political matter. Neither the changeableness of Donne or Jonson, nor Izaaak Walton's uneasiness about Donne's unchurched period, makes any difference to this viewpoint. (We both seem to agree on this point, so that I am left a trifle puzzled as to why he uses it to attack my use of the phrase). Thus, when I said that "nobody gave a damn about where the ghost came from" (not, I confess, noticing the joke at the time of writing), I meant simply that it was not a political concern at the time -- as, for example, the use of the word "God" on stage was -- so Shakespeare could use any kind of ghost he wanted. By the ghost's own testimony, he used a Catholic ghost. By an atheistical viewpoint I meant not merely a hazily unbelieving one but the kind of intensely anti-religious one that he displays in his rejoinder. Nietzsche, whom he cites, is another good example. Perhaps the key to our different viewpoints can be found here: "Don is quite right to suspect that I don't find any 'source of consolation' in Hamlet's line about 'providence.' What has this 'providence' delivered by the end of the play?" I like that word "delivered." It has a nice op-ed or sports page sound to it. If God can't deliver what you want, fire him. Or perhaps kill him? Cheers, Don [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Lawrence <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 07:49:22 -0800 Subject: 12.0308 Re: Wittenberg and Paris Comment: Re: SHK 12.0308 Re: Wittenberg and Paris While I've appreciated the arguments for and against notions of purgatory, and the idea of an 'essential Christianity', I would like to point out that it's the atheist position, rather than a Christian position, that is most open to criticism as "essentializing". If you don't define something discretely, if you don't limit it, it's pretty much impossible to reject. "In the end," Nietzsche admitted, "it is only the God of morality who has been overcome". In fact, I would argue that it was first necessary to construct a god out of 19th-century morality in order to have something to overcome. Cheers, Se
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0322 Monday, 12 February 2001 [1] From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 11:31:09 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time [2] From: Kit Gordon <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 12:15:07 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time [3] From: Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 2001 08:46:21 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time [4] From: Steve Sohmer <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 2001 10:56:45 EST Subj: Re: SHK 12.0296 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time [5] From: Paul E. Doniger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 2001 09:36:13 -0800 Subj: re: self-correction & clarification [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 09 Feb 2001 11:31:09 +0000 Subject: 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time Comment: Re: SHK 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time >I don't think severe psychological trauma is at all necessary to distort >the perception of time. When I worked as an interlibrary loan >librarian, I found the usually precise engineers, who were my customers, >were routinely mistaken about when a conference had occurred or when a >journal article was published. Perplexity has been expressed over Hamlet's hazy sense of time. I was merely suggesting that it was perfectly solid psychology, and tossed in that I didn't think such knowledge was available through books. No big deal. >Say I accept your assertion that trauma causes a loss of one's sense of >time. Now I know it, and only because you told me so; it's not part of >my personal experience. Why do you think an email discussion list can do >this and books can't? I don't expect you to accept it, not unless your personal experience corroborates my "assertion." I don't believe a writer could get such a true picture of this sense of time standing still as Shakespeare shows so beautifully with Hamlet without either experiencing it or seeing someone go through it. That's not a "theory," merely a personal observation. >because his model of >communication tells him that you simply don't understand what he's >saying". I suggest that Hughes's model (a community of personal >experience) likewise posits an excessively impermeable boundary. Impermeable for someone who hasn't seen or felt it. Not for someone who has. >Do you also claim that when he made time mistakes (actually, I think of >them as paradoxes) in Othello, Merry Wives, Twelfth Night, and several >other plays, that he was writing from personal experience? That would depend on the context, of course. A deeply moving piece might well be written on the trauma of losing the bit of paper on which the due date for the return of a library book is noted. That's a model I think we can all permeate. Stephanie Hughes [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kit Gordon <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 9 Feb 2001 12:15:07 -0500 Subject: 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time Comment: Re: SHK 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time In his response, Larry Weiss mentions that after Hamlet: >Interestingly, WS never wrote another major lead for a young man. I would suggest that certain roles (Macbeth, Coriolanus) don't specify an age, and could be played by (and as) men in their twenties. Chris [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 2001 08:46:21 -0500 Subject: 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time Comment: Re: SHK 12.0313 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time Alex Houck asks: >Has anyone seen a production of ROMEO > & JULIET that was unedited and ran two hours? Isn't it the case that, before the invention of accurate clocks, hours were divided into twelve daylight and twelve night hours regardless of the change of seasons, so that an hour of daylight in midsummer was much longer than an hour of daylight in winter? Paul E. Doniger observes that > b) Regarding Hamlet's age, much has been written. Few critics have > accepted the "thirty years" without comment or question. Hamlet is > apparently much younger at the opening of the play I have speculated on this list that Shakespeare the dramatist was a psychoanalyst by temperament. If so, the confusion regarding Hamlet's age which, it seems to me, the text goes to some lengths to create, may reflect the discovery that the neuroses emerging from unresolved Oedipal conflicts constitute the unconscious conflation of traumas occurring at much earlier ages with present conflicts. Clifford Stetner CUNY http://phoenix.liu.edu/~cstetner/cds.html [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Steve Sohmer <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 2001 10:56:45 EST Subject: 12.0296 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time Comment: Re: SHK 12.0296 Re: Hamlet and the Passage of Time Dear Friends, I don't know if I can contribute much to this very livelyand learned discussion. But perhaps these few points would be useful: 1. It was not uncommon for students at Wittenberg to 30years old, having turned to the Lutheran confession out of mature dissatisfaction with the Catholic. William Tyndale was thirty or somewhat older when he matriculated in Wittenberg in 1524. 2. Hamlet's time confusion is already present in 1.2.138ff when he can't quite remember how long his father has been dead: "two months dead -- nay not so much, not two ... within a month ... a little month... within a month . . . "I think one might attribute this to his recent return from Wittenberg (where the Julian calendar prevails) to Denmark (where the Gregorian calendar prevails). 3. In 1.2 Claudius and Gertrude try to talk Hamlet out of mourning longer for his father: "the survivor bound In filial obligation for some term To do obsequious sorrow, etc." The familiar term to which a survivor was bound was the Trental, i.e. "the month's mind." One might conclude from this that Old Hamlet has been dead at least 30 + 1 days. If Claudius is seizing his first opportunity to disabuse Hamlet of his grieving, and if this scene takes place on 2 November (see point 4 below), then Old Hamlet was murdered on 2 October. 4. Granville-Barker noticed that "Hamlet" is divided into three 2-day-long sequences. These sequences are 1.1 to 1.5; 2.1 to4.4; 4.5 to 5.2. Elsewhere I've suggest that Shakespeare links each of these sequence to a Catholic holy day which was much diminished in importance (or altered in focus) in post-Reformation England, respectively All Souls (2 November), Candlemas (2 February), Corpus Christi (which fell on 2 June in 1518 and 1602). I think this conjecture is supported by Ophelia's insistence that Old Hamlet has been dead "twice two months" on 2 February. Four months before 2 February is 2 October. Hope this helps. [5]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Paul E. Doniger <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 2001 09:36:13 -0800 Subject: re: self-correction & clarification I must correct something I recently posted to the list. I said that Hamlet corrects himself in Act 3; scene 2 about the "twice two months" since his father's death. Of course, it is Ophelia who corrects him. What was I thinking! This correction, I have to add, does not mean that I have changed my opinion: I still do not think that Hamlet errs in his awareness of the passage of time. He is corrected by Ophelia when he says that his mother looks cheerful with his father less than two hours dead. He is clearly in the "antic disposition" mode when he says that. His toying with Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius throughout the inner-play is no indication that his sense of time is faulty. Paul E. Doniger