October
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1750 Friday, 14 October 2005 [1] From: John W. Kennedy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 12:36:11 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption [2] From: Bruce Young <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 14:14:50 -0600 Subj: RE: SHK 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption [3] From: Peter Bridgman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 14 Oct 2005 00:11:40 +0100 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: John W. Kennedy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 12:36:11 -0400 Subject: 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption Comment: Re: SHK 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption Edmund Taft <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > >I've read with interest the posts in this thread and tend to agree >with those who think that Isabella finally takes the Duke's hand >in marriage. But two points are worth considering: > >1. To what extent does she feel trapped into accepting his marriage proposal? The shadow of King Cophetua is a long one, indeed, as all fans of Lord Peter Wimsey know. But the Duke's proposal is just about as politely indirect as it can be while remaining unambiguous. >2. To what extent have either Isabella or the Duke demonstrated >that they are ready to value and care for the children that, presumably, >will ensue after marriage? To what extent have either [woman] or [man] in [insert comedy here] demonstrated the same? To ask such a question is (to refer again to Sayers) inquiring into the subsequent careers of X, Y, and Z after they have finished digging their famous ditch. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bruce Young <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 14:14:50 -0600 Subject: 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption Comment: RE: SHK 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption Here are my thoughts, in response to Ed Taft's thoughtful questions about Isabella and the Duke: [Ed Taft's questions:] >1. To what extent does she feel trapped into accepting his marriage >proposal? >2. To what extent have either Isabella or the Duke demonstrated that >they are ready to value and care for the children that, presumably, will >ensue after marriage? I wonder, first of all, whether Shakespeare or his audience would have worried much about such questions, especially the one about children. Even many modern viewers wouldn't think to ask the questions-though some, obviously, would. We could presumably ask the same questions of any number of couples in Shakespeare. But, though the degree of willingness, enthusiasm, or happiness the characters are feeling about the proposed marriages may sometimes enter into our thoughts, I doubt most of us wonder what child raising will be like for Rosalind and Orlando, Viola and Orsino, Portia and Bassanio, Beatrice and Benedick, or any number of other couples. IF (and it's a big "if") Isabella feels trapped, then Shakespeare would be drawing on a common human emotion: Bertram feels that way in All's Well, for obvious reasons; George Bailey feels that way in It's a Wonderful Life (think of the scene where George and Mary are talking on the phone with Sam Wainwright); and, if I may add autobiographically, before I started dating the woman who would become my wife, I stupidly gave as a condition, "As long as you do not engage in entrapping behavior." (People ask why she kept seeing me after I said that. All I can say is that it was an act of grace.) But if Shakespeare is drawing on that emotion at the end of Measure for Measure, he doesn't do anything with it, so far as I can tell. In answer to the second question (are they ready to value and care for children), I would answer, now that I've thought about it, that they would probably be better prepared than Romeo and Juliet and perhaps as well prepared as my wife and I were 20 years ago when we started out on the challenging adventure of family life. But I think I know what Ed is getting at: do the characteristics and habits (whether good, bad, or indifferent) of Isabella and the Duke as we've learned of them in the play suggest that they're well or ill prepared for children? I'll leave that to others on the list to argue and speculate. Bruce Young [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Bridgman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 14 Oct 2005 00:11:40 +0100 Subject: 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption Comment: Re: SHK 16.1742 Isabella's Redemption Edmund Taft writes ... >I've read with interest the posts in this thread and tend to agree >with those who think that Isabella finally takes the Duke's hand >in marriage. But two points are worth considering: > >1. To what extent does she feel trapped into accepting his marriage proposal? The Norton Shakespeare has a very good MFM article by Katherine Eisaman Maus. In it she writes, "skeptical critics see the Duke as a schemer who foists his dirty work onto political subordinates and meddles impudently, even sacrilegiously, with the lives of his subjects". For such critics (and I must be one) MFM is a problem play simply because the Duke does not deserve Isabella's hand in marriage. He is unworthy of her. Maus writes: "Isabella remains mute in the face of the Duke's unexpected proposal of marriage, leaving it an open question whether she is overwhelmed with joy or gripped with horror, whether the Duke provides her with a socially and personally satisfying alternative to religious abstinence or merely recapitulates Angelo's harassment". I must disagree with Edmund Taft and others. While live performances can obviously play it either way, on the page it reads more like harassment. Peter Bridgman _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1749 Friday, 14 October 2005 [1] From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:02:46 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells [2] From: Philip Eagle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:18:12 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells [3] From: Holger Schott Syme <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 23:05:49 -0400 Subj: RE: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:02:46 -0400 Subject: 16.1741 Clocks and Bells Comment: Re: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells Alan Jones asks >Can anyone who has attended a performance in the New Globe >tell us how audible and disturbing they found the church bells >and other local noise such as traffic? Aircraft, obviously and >horribly: but I wonder whether much else at a lesser height >penetrates the walls. I have attended both day and evening performances since the official opening. I have not noticed any ambient sounds except for the helicopters (which are horridly annoying) and other aircraft. Do not recall ever hearing a church bell. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Philip Eagle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:18:12 -0400 Subject: 16.1741 Clocks and Bells Comment: Re: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells After attending many performances at the Southwark Globe I can say that there is no problem with traffic noise as the theatre is not close to any busy road and shielded by surrounding buildings on the land side. Loud music, horns and engines from river boats, though, are occasionally audible inside the theatre to a disruptive degree. As is, on occasion, the conversation of bored school kids who have fled to the surrounding piazza. Philip Eagle [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Holger Schott Syme <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 23:05:49 -0400 Subject: 16.1741 Clocks and Bells Comment: RE: SHK 16.1741 Clocks and Bells I've spent considerably less time than Michael Egan thinking about the play he refers to as _1 Richard II_ and I got to know (and like) as _Woodstock_, so I can't claim his depth of knowledge or persuasion; having said that, from all we know about touring, a play conceived exclusively for outdoor performance seems "wildly unlikely" or at least extremely unusual in the mid-1590s. If Egan is right that the play was written for the provinces while the theatres in London were closed because of the plague, does he assume that Shakespeare (to humour him) _anticipated_ the prolonged closure of the theatres? How could he have done that? And if he didn't, why on earth would he write a play that would have been unstageable at the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, or wherever Pembroke's Men thought they'd play once theatres reopened? Andrew Gurr (and many other theatre historians) has argued that most plays up to 1594 would have been conceived as touring plays-because touring was what companies _did_. How could Pembroke's Men predict what sorts of venues would be open to them in any given town? Would they only perform _Woodstock_ in places where large innyards that also offered easy access for horses were available, whereas towns that opened their guildhalls to them did not get to see that play (a play which thanks to its novelty must surely have been an attractive commodity)? As Gurr has suggested, touring brought with it a preference for _indoor_ venues that made the outdoor theatres in London somewhat unattractive; he rightly points out that Burbage's initial instinct was to replace the Theatre with an indoor playing space (the Blackfriars) when the lease was about to expire in 1596. From all we know, then, we ought to assume that players (and playwrights) had to produce plays with a wide variety of venues in mind, even as they displayed a preference for indoor stages. The list of outdoor spaces Egan imagines (and I quote from his informative and useful website: "market squares, tavern yards, streets, village greens, even vacant fields") is largely anachronistic. We have very little evidence for the staging of plays by professional troupes in open spaces after the 1570s-for obvious economical reasons (how do you charge admission in a market square or an open field?). Inns, both their outdoor yards and indoor spaces, became the main venue when the players weren't allowed into the guildhall, and remained highly desirable as performance sites even after companies established permanent homes in London. The point of all this is that it would have been economically bizarre to conceive a play in such a way that it required not merely a very specific kind of stage, but more importantly, the most problematic kind; a kind that would have made production in London and (perhaps crucially) at court particularly difficult if not impossible. The idea is made even more unconvincing by Egan's insistence on the pageantry of the play: _Woodstock_ would have required a massive cast for a touring company, large props, and an unusual number of beautiful costumes; it would thus have been a major financial investment, and one would expect it to be designed for performance in the widest possible variety of sites and circumstances. To limit artificially the range of venues for such an enterprise would have made no economical sense whatsoever, and making money was a playing company's main objective. All of the above in turn suggests to me that the horse, just like the bear, probably wasn't a live animal. The scene doesn't really require the horse to come on stage at all-the "spruce courtier a horsebacke" could dismount before he comes on, and I can imagine a staging of the scene with simply a horse's head and front legs sticking out from either door or from behind a central curtain; there are many, many far more baffling scenes in early modern drama. The play certainly does not require a live horse for Woodstock's conversation with the animal to work dramatically-that is entirely the actor's responsibility. The general point about venues also raises questions for Steve, but I suppose most of the plays he references are from the late 1590s, when the Chamberlain's Men had found a permanent home and Shakespeare could rely on a more or less stable environment. I do want to reiterate, though, that Michael Egan's point about _Macbeth_ has very little to do with early modern staging methods or conditions, and I think it is revealing that he doesn't address my objections to it at all. I might also add that the notion of a space "spookily lit by candlelight" is a little hard to maintain given a culture where candles were the main source of night-time illumination-the idea of candlelight as "spooky" strikes me as a distinctly modern perception (but I'd be happy to be corrected on that one-perhaps a single ["brief"?] candle produced a more frightening atmosphere than whole candelabra-full?). I remain happily stuck in my own paradigm (which, I'd like to note, was formed on the basis of research conducted in the last 10 years-I wonder whose paradigm is shifting more "glacially" here...) Holger _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1748 Friday, 14 October 2005 From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 12:47:33 -0400 Subject: 16.1740 A Shrew Comment: Re: SHK 16.1740 A Shrew Stephen Miller's conjecture that by 1623 >The Shrew may have acquired its sequel. If the players produced >the two plays together, it would be logical for them to omit the >Sly conclusion to The Shrew with its apparent closure of the >thread to be taken up afresh by The Tamer Tam'd. is intriguing. But if that were the case, wouldn't it be more logical to omit the Sly frame entirely? Presumably, the intention would have been to make the interior action stand on its own, so any implication of a play within a play would be inapt. Do we know if Shakespeare's company ever performed The Tamer? In any case, I assume that Mr. Miller's best guess is that Shakespeare wrote a continuation and completion of the Sly story and for some reason it fell out of the text (probably a prompt book) used to compose F1. I wonder if he has any idea of how close to the Shakespearean original A Shrew comes to reproducing the lost scenes, especially the hilarious epilogue which makes the entire play one extended joke. _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1747 Friday, 14 October 2005 From: Bill Arnold <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 20:29:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Hamlet: Revenge or Justice? Hamlet is inarguably the most quoted play in literature and Hamlet is the most "argued about" hero in the world of drama. Was Hamlet only out for revenge in the eyes of Shakespeare's audience and therefore, hardly heroic? Or was he a hero who sought justice in the fullest meaning of the word as defined by Socrates, in Plato's Republic? Did Shakespeare's contemporaries, frankly, give a damn about this philosophical question? Bill Arnold http://www.cwru.edu/affil/edis/scholars/arnold.htm _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1746 Friday, 14 October 2005 From: Jack Heller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 13 Oct 2005 13:48:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: Performances of the Second Henriad Listmembers: I will be teaching a short course on Richard II to Henry V in January. I would like to know if any theater in the midwestern US or Ontario will be performing any of those plays in January. Anywhere within 8 hours of Fort Wayne, Indiana is preferable. Jack Heller _______________________________________________________________ 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.