The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1955 Sunday, 27 November 2005
[1] From: Peter Bridgman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 25 Nov 2005 20:44:20 -0000
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters
[2] From: John V. Knapp <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 01:01:02 -0600 (CST)
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters
[3] From: C. David Frankel <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 20:13:25 -0500
Subj: RE: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Peter Bridgman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 25 Nov 2005 20:44:20 -0000
Subject: 16.1946 Living Characters
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters
Douglas Galbi writes ...
>From 1535 to 1538, all Marian shrines in England were destroyed.
>In 1538, Our Lady of Walsingham was burned in a formal ceremony
>similar to that used to execute persons convicted of treason.
Not quite. Heretics were burnt; persons convicted of treason were
hanged, drawn and quartered.
>Subsequently, a much higher share of English females began to be named
>Mary. The frequency of this name among newborn girls rose from about
>1% c. 1500 to about 13% c. 1600.
It strikes me that these statistics can be interpreted in one of two
ways. The obvious interpretation is that the good folk of England were
registering a protest at the baptismal font against the hammers, chisels
and whitewash of the reformers. But another explanation is that there
had previously been something of a taboo in medieval England against
naming girls after the Mother of God (like naming boys 'Jesus'), but now
that Mary was just another saint, her name was available.
Incidentally, Shakespeare's daughters may also have been named after the
Virgin, since Susanna and Judith were both 'types' of Mary to medieval
Christians. Susanna because she was chaste, and Judith because Joachim
the high priest says to her, 'You are the glory of Jerusalem! You are
the great pride of Israel! You are the highest honour of our race!'.
These lines appear in numerous Marian prayers. The Virgin's father, St
Joachim, also got his name from this high priest.
It may be just a coincidence but Susanna and Judith are both names not
found in Protestant Bibles. Daniel 13 and the book of Judith were among
the books the reformers threw out.
Peter Bridgman
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: John V. Knapp <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 01:01:02 -0600 (CST)
Subject: 16.1946 Living Characters
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters
Dear David Bishop et al., --
As a character in *Cool-Hand Luke* once said, we have here I think a
failure to communicate. I will assume, for the sake of argument, that
the failure is largely mine and so want to clarify a couple of points.
1) Of course it's only a play, and characters have not ontological
status but are only representations; only in that sense can they be said
to seem "real;" 2) I also doubt that Shakespeare knew much about
contemporary criticism (and that's probably a very fortunate thing!);
3) Sure one could say that many of Shakespeare's plots were, as Abigail
Quart pointed out, soapy, but we were discussing the relative ratios of
how a critic could think about a character as either potentially
separate from or irreducibly part of a given plot. 4) the "convoluted
criticism" to which Prof Bishop suggests I practice I must here deny.
My point was a (relatively) simple one: Shakespeare created characters
in families like those in Hamlet with his intuitive feel for how, for
example, two brothers might display levels of sibling rivalry, and how
one persuaded his immature son into continuing the family battles. In
practical terms, that display has not been as well-discussed as so much
else in the play but is well worth exploring-as I did in *Reading the
Family Dance* (2003).
A critic with some understanding of family interactions could plausibly
argue that looking at the play from the Ernest Jones' position ["The
Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in
Motive." The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (January, 1910): 72-113
], has tended to shrink many critical responses to variations of
Freudian dogma. I simply argued that by looking at these characters as
interacting inside a family dynamic-as posited by a critic, not
Shakespeare himself-one opened up a number of interesting critical
alternatives to, for example, the plethora of dreary humping scenes in
Gertrude's closet we've seen in so many recent film and stage adaptations.
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: C. David Frankel <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 26 Nov 2005 20:13:25 -0500
Subject: 16.1946 Living Characters
Comment: RE: SHK 16.1946 Living Characters
Over the years, in my teaching of script analysis, in my directing, and
in my teaching of plays in general, I've been developing a vocabulary
for talking about plays that I think recognizes the different
perspectives brought forth in this conversation. I'm still tentative
about the actual terms, and they've changed over the years, but here goes:
When analyzing a script, especially with an eye toward production, a
useful method of analysis involves exploring three interrelated worlds:
the fictive, the dramaturgical, and the theatrical. Separable for
analysis, these worlds overlap and interpenetrate each other;
nevertheless, each provides different insights into the play as whole,
insights that carry implications for the translation of script into
production and the subsequent experience of audiences.
The fictive world concerns the story. In the fictive world, people (or
people-analogs: animals, robots, etc.) do things to and with other
people in particular places. Romeo loves Juliet. Engaging the fictive
world allows audiences (which includes readers) the opportunity to
speculate about human motivation: why does Romeo love Juliet. Yet all
the while we engage in this speculation, we're aware that Romeo and
Juliet are not people, but characters. That is, they are fictive, and
have no "reality" outside the construct of the play. In that they are
fictions, they belong to the dramaturgical world.
In the dramaturgical world we ask how are Romeo and Juliet used - what
function do they serve? The dramaturgical world is the world of plot,
character, ideas, language, and so on. However, it is more than that.
The dramaturgical world also includes the cultural context in which the
playwright creates, including the genre conventions and those
idiosyncratic conventions that shape the writing of the individual. The
dramaturgical world also includes those theatrical conventions that
shape the dramatic imagination of the playwright. Of course, the
dramaturgical decisions manifest in the form of language, for that is
the playwright's most immediate medium. The playwright offers a kind of
model for action at a distance, however, in that the real medium for the
play is the four-dimensional one of the theatre: that medium made up of
actors, space, time, light, sound, scene design, and so on. The
dramaturgical world, in short, embodies a sort of virtual theatrical
world, one that may or may not appear in a given production of that play.
The theatrical world, then, refers to the particular manifestation of a
play in performance. Here we are concerned with actors, designs, and
the nature of buildings and audiences. No matter how closely the
playwright is connected to production, the virtual theatrical world in
the text differs from the actual theatrical world of a production.
Although Shakespeare knew his company and theatre space, every
individual performance of Romeo and Juliet surely differed from the one
(or ones) he staged in his head.
Different plays (periods, styles, etc.) differ in the degree to which
the fictive world and dramaturgical world are foregrounded, and that, I
think, provides another way of talking about plays and theatre.
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