July
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.1446 Friday, 16 July 2004 [1] From: Pat Dolan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 08:18:44 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 15.1437 Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc [2] From: Bill Arnold <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 06:23:34 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 15.1437 Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc [3] From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 12:42:49 -0400 Subj: SHK 15.1427 Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Pat Dolan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 08:18:44 -0500 Subject: 15.1437 Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc Comment: Re: SHK 15.1437 Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc On Jul 15, 2004, at 6:41 AM, Bill Arnold wrote: >Bright students can move on, and those who have >weaknesses in their skills can be red-lined, noted, by prof and student, >and they too can move on at their own pace. If such a methodology began >in grammar school we would have readers and writers at an earlier age. I realize this isn't Shakespeare, but I can't let it go unchallenged. I can think of no better way to make a person stop writing than to 1. Force him/her to write and then 2. Punish his/her errors. It would, however, convince the child that writing is simply a matter of grammar and spelling. (I assume that the teacher occasionally attends to the meaning of what's written, but it's not in the formula. Nor is positive reinforcement for doing things right, especially thinking well on the page.) This would be inconvenient if, later, we wanted to show the person the worth of reading Shakespeare, whose spelling was notoriously unstable and whose solecisms abound. (We argue all the time about what we imagine motivated Shakespeare to write. I'm 100% sure he didn't write to avoid errors.) I think having students, especially beginning writers, keep a journal is a wonderful idea. I think Bill Arnold is correct to suppose that doing it young helps them become engaged writers and readers, but unless I'm misreading him, he and I diverge on when, where and how teachers should attend to grammar. Cheers, Pat [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bill Arnold <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 06:23:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 15.1437 Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc Comment: Re: SHK 15.1437 Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc Bruce W. Richman writes, "Six letters in this thread today, without so much as a single mention of Shakespeare. Generic grumblings about the state of world literacy can find audience in cigar stores, pool halls, and taverns on every street corner. Could we please, please, reserve this site for advanced and sophisticated contributions to world Shakespeare scholarship?" OK: Shakespeare it is. Up front. But Sir, I am pleased as punch you are *not* Hardy and Hardy does not share your views. Inasmuch as SHAKSPER has a millennium and a half followers, it behooves us to answer the title of this thread, "Teaching Shakespeare, etc." and I assure you *etcetera* means *a lot*! OK: when I was a youngster growing up on Martha's Vineyard, our Pulitzer-Prize winning Vineyard Gazette editor Henry Beetle Hough had an Emily Dickinson poem about reading above the Masthead of the Letters to the Editor column. And, yes there was poetry above the front-page banner by every poet in the world, including Will Shakespeare. You might say I was an elitist kid, because he published something I wrote when I was twelve. Imagine: Bill Arnold was a published author and journalist as a child. Maybe that is why I am still a child at heart. OK: the point is clear, is it not? If children were taught to read and write what they thought about, their own thoughts, from day one, then by the time they reached frosh classes they wouldn't be still reading and writing at eighth-grade level. If that is not the fault of education systems and their administrators and teachers and the parents en masse, then who is to blame? Under whose rug do you wish to sweep this thread? OK: you want people to keep Shakespeare taught in the schools [and not just for "sophisticated" elitists like you suggest SHAKSPER should be aimed at], then you must have students who can read and write. And the elitists among us must wake up, as we are producing a world class of eight-grade level readers and writers graduating our school systems. And the majority of them have a difficult time as frosh readers and writers. So, how can you teach THAT majority Shakespeare? And if you doubt my take on the notion of *majority*, then you need to check the facts. Go ahead, TEACH some frosh classes! Bill Arnold http://www.cwru.edu/affil/edis/scholars/arnold.htm [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Terence Hawkes <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 12:42:49 -0400 Subject: Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc Comment: SHK 15.1427 Harold Bloom on Teaching Shakespeare, etc Let's not get sentimental. Most of Shakespeare's original audience -the people who made the plays possible-- never read a book in their lives. T. Hawkes _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.1445 Friday, 16 July 2004 [1] From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 11:32:18 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada [2] From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 19:25:35 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 11:32:18 -0400 Subject: 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada Comment: Re: SHK 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada >I think the answer to these questions is a resounding YES. If we want to >be agents of change, then we should attempt to use language that most >people can understand. If our jargon merely puzzles our constituencies, >we can achieve little of value. > >Bill Godshalk HOW TO SUCK EGGS According to Bill Godshalk's logic, we all ought to be advocates for those simplified texts of Shakespeare that spare students the pain of trying to master unfamiliar words and unfamiliar grammar and unfamiliar metaphors. The key is in his word "constituencies." A modern term for that is "speech communities"; most of the folks on this list operate in several, and it has been a generally accepted assumption within the discipline of rhetoric for two-and-half millennia that each speech community has its own appropriate speech modes, which include things like levels of lexical and syntactic complexity. Speech communities are sometimes professional or vocational - auto mechanics, physicians, critical theorists. All such communities develop specialized vocabularies; if you want to belong to the community you learn the lingo. The specialist whose call for submissions unleashed this thread was addressing other members of a particular critical community on a professional level. The rest of us are free to decide whether or not we want to join in. If in participating we learn something we think might be of value to others outside the community - to members of another community, to which we might also belong - then we can work at the problem of finding language for the new understanding appropriate to the second community. We often discover, however, that for the sake of efficiency the process sometimes involves teaching the second community some of the specialized language of the first. Grandpaternally, David Evett [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 19:25:35 +0100 Subject: 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada Comment: Re: SHK 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada R. A. Cantrell is quite right to direct readers to Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's _Fashionable Nonsense_, which is as good as their other book _Intellectual Impostures_. The proper uses of Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem are especially well treated by them, and its abuses highlighted. However, it is not reasonable to dismiss all that Kristeva has written because bits of it are faulty. (If that's the rule, who'll 'scape whipping?) David Bishop thinks that we don't need Kristeva's term 'intertextualite', for it duplicates terminology we already have: >Why not say that all actors, for example, are >signifying systems, in the use of which casting >directors are supposed to be particularly adept? Indeed, but surely the phrase "signifying systems" itself would have been rejected by many as obfuscating jargon a few decades ago. Also, just to be clear, it's not the actors that are signifying systems, it's their casting histories. >I can understand the point about Tom Cruise without >this, as it seems to me, pretentious overlay of abstraction. I respectfully suggest that once we have a convenient term for a phenomenon (and 'intertextuality' surely is, once you know what it means, virtually self-glossing) we are better equipped to examine the world with it. I'm not sure, but I suspect that Kristeva's theorizing preceded and made possible certain discoveries that only now, after they've been made, can we put into other terms. >The question of castration anxiety provides a more >specific example, in my opinion, of how jargon can >mislead. I think one important thing about Shylock's >intention to cut away a pound of flesh "nearest the heart" >of Antonio is that, unlike castration, it would be >immediately fatal. Death seems to be the issue here, >not castration. I'd be tempted to agree were this "nearest the heart" stipulation part of Shylock's original description of the deal. It isn't: SHYLOCK . . . let the forfeit Be nominated for an equal pound Of your fair flesh to be cut off and taken In what part of your body pleaseth me. (1.3.147-50) That it's to be left to the Jew's pleasure must, I suggest, raise the question 'what part would he choose?' As James Shapiro pointed out, ". . for Elizabethans, no less than for modern audiences familiar with theories of castration anxiety, the phrase 'cut off' [rather than 'cut out'] could easily suggest taking the knife to a male victim's genitals".* >That Gabriel sees no problem in this castration anxiety >he speaks of belonging to no one in particular--maybe >the audience, or Shakespeare, or one of the >characters--startles me. Oh all right, I confess: it's just my anxiety! I'm foisting this castration stuff onto a play that has nothing to do with it. Looked at aright, Antonio is not "a tainted wether" (a castrated ram), Jessica has not her father's "stones upon her", and the "young clerk's pen" is not like to be "marred". I apologize for distracting SHAKSPERians from 'the play itself'. Gabriel Egan * James Shapiro "Shakespeare and the Jews" in Martin Coyle _Shakespeare: 'The Merchant of Venice'_ New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) pp. 73-91 (p. 81) _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.1445 Friday, 16 July 2004 [1] From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 11:32:18 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada [2] From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 19:25:35 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 11:32:18 -0400 Subject: 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada Comment: Re: SHK 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada >I think the answer to these questions is a resounding YES. If we want to >be agents of change, then we should attempt to use language that most >people can understand. If our jargon merely puzzles our constituencies, >we can achieve little of value. > >Bill Godshalk HOW TO SUCK EGGS According to Bill Godshalk's logic, we all ought to be advocates for those simplified texts of Shakespeare that spare students the pain of trying to master unfamiliar words and unfamiliar grammar and unfamiliar metaphors. The key is in his word "constituencies." A modern term for that is "speech communities"; most of the folks on this list operate in several, and it has been a generally accepted assumption within the discipline of rhetoric for two-and-half millennia that each speech community has its own appropriate speech modes, which include things like levels of lexical and syntactic complexity. Speech communities are sometimes professional or vocational - auto mechanics, physicians, critical theorists. All such communities develop specialized vocabularies; if you want to belong to the community you learn the lingo. The specialist whose call for submissions unleashed this thread was addressing other members of a particular critical community on a professional level. The rest of us are free to decide whether or not we want to join in. If in participating we learn something we think might be of value to others outside the community - to members of another community, to which we might also belong - then we can work at the problem of finding language for the new understanding appropriate to the second community. We often discover, however, that for the sake of efficiency the process sometimes involves teaching the second community some of the specialized language of the first. Grandpaternally, David Evett [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 19:25:35 +0100 Subject: 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada Comment: Re: SHK 15.1436 CFP - Shakespearean Intertexts in Canada R. A. Cantrell is quite right to direct readers to Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's _Fashionable Nonsense_, which is as good as their other book _Intellectual Impostures_. The proper uses of Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem are especially well treated by them, and its abuses highlighted. However, it is not reasonable to dismiss all that Kristeva has written because bits of it are faulty. (If that's the rule, who'll 'scape whipping?) David Bishop thinks that we don't need Kristeva's term 'intertextualite', for it duplicates terminology we already have: >Why not say that all actors, for example, are >signifying systems, in the use of which casting >directors are supposed to be particularly adept? Indeed, but surely the phrase "signifying systems" itself would have been rejected by many as obfuscating jargon a few decades ago. Also, just to be clear, it's not the actors that are signifying systems, it's their casting histories. >I can understand the point about Tom Cruise without >this, as it seems to me, pretentious overlay of abstraction. I respectfully suggest that once we have a convenient term for a phenomenon (and 'intertextuality' surely is, once you know what it means, virtually self-glossing) we are better equipped to examine the world with it. I'm not sure, but I suspect that Kristeva's theorizing preceded and made possible certain discoveries that only now, after they've been made, can we put into other terms. >The question of castration anxiety provides a more >specific example, in my opinion, of how jargon can >mislead. I think one important thing about Shylock's >intention to cut away a pound of flesh "nearest the heart" >of Antonio is that, unlike castration, it would be >immediately fatal. Death seems to be the issue here, >not castration. I'd be tempted to agree were this "nearest the heart" stipulation part of Shylock's original description of the deal. It isn't: SHYLOCK . . . let the forfeit Be nominated for an equal pound Of your fair flesh to be cut off and taken In what part of your body pleaseth me. (1.3.147-50) That it's to be left to the Jew's pleasure must, I suggest, raise the question 'what part would he choose?' As James Shapiro pointed out, ". . . for Elizabethans, no less than for modern audiences familiar with theories of castration anxiety, the phrase 'cut off' [rather than 'cut out'] could easily suggest taking the knife to a male victim's genitals".* >That Gabriel sees no problem in this castration anxiety >he speaks of belonging to no one in particular--maybe >the audience, or Shakespeare, or one of the >characters--startles me. Oh all right, I confess: it's just my anxiety! I'm foisting this castration stuff onto a play that has nothing to do with it. Looked at aright, Antonio is not "a tainted wether" (a castrated ram), Jessica has not her father's "stones upon her", and the "young clerk's pen" is not like to be "marred". I apologize for distracting SHAKSPERians from 'the play itself'. Gabriel Egan * James Shapiro "Shakespeare and the Jews" in Martin Coyle _Shakespeare: 'The Merchant of Venice'_ New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) pp. 73-91 (p. 81) _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.1444 Friday, 16 July 2004 [1] From: Susan St. John <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 10:59:03 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 15.1433 Sonnet 89 [2] From: Alan Horn <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 16:56:23 -0400 Subj: RE: SHK 15.1433 Sonnet 89 [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Susan St. John <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 10:59:03 -0700 Subject: 15.1433 Sonnet 89 Comment: Re: SHK 15.1433 Sonnet 89 Why does the world report that Kate doth limp? It seems to me that WS used the idea of lameness quite often...whether that indicates his own lameness or simply that at the time it was NOT so "unusual to select this from the imagination's menu of potential set-ups." as Stephen Rose suggests. Is there no evidence that lame could have also meant 'stupid and pointless', as it is used in today's vernacular? Or is that a lame interpretation? Susan. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Alan Horn <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 16:56:23 -0400 Subject: 15.1433 Sonnet 89 Comment: RE: SHK 15.1433 Sonnet 89 A possible cause of Shakespeare's lameness: as we know from Sonnet 130, "black wires" grew on his mistress's head in place of hair. These wires probably fell out from time to time the way normal hairs do and Shakespeare may very well have stepped on them in bare feet. If these stray, possibly rusty, wires underfoot ever happened to puncture the skin it is easy to surmise that the resulting infection could have rendered him lame, at least temporarily. Alan _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.1443 Friday, 16 July 2004 From: Norman Hinton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 15 Jul 2004 11:21:05 -0500 Subject: 15.1435 Use of Word 'actor' Comment: Re: SHK 15.1435 Use of Word 'actor' I don't want this misinterpreted as a criticism of Ged Bentley -- I was a (very junior) colleague of his for 4 years in the 1950's and have a great respect for his scholarship and for him personally. But Ged is not consistent in his use of "player" and "actor" even in his own book -- for instance, on p. 21 "....everyone remembers that Ben Jonson fought a duel with his fellow actor Gabriel Spencer and killed him, in 1598...." I don't regard this as a fault, nor do I think there is any evidence that suggests that one is wrong in using the word "actor" in regard to 16th century players -- Bentley also notes, in the same Introduction cited a few notes back, that "...the few casts or lists in the quartos and folios before 1642 all use the word "actor" except Ben Jonson's early editions, which use either "Tragedians" or "Comedians"...." I see no reason to be fussy about the usage. _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.