July
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1223 Wednesday, 20 July 2005 From: Mike Jensen <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 19 Jul 2005 18:01:56 -0700 Subject: Credit Where Due Three or four years ago a member of this list was kind enough to check the 1946 Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for me (that edition not available on my campus or at local libraries) to see if a number of quotes from Shakespeare were there, and they were, solving a minor mystery. I am getting ready to publish this, but can not find the name of the woman who was kind enough to do the leg work. If my helper sees this message, please contact me atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. I very much want to credit you. If she does not see this message, this will go to the SHAKSPER archive as a record of my gratitude. All the best, Mike Jensen author site: http://www.geocities.com/mikejensen16/michaelpjensen.html _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1222 Tuesday, 19 July 2005 [1] From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 11:45:53 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1213 Shylock as Suffering Servant [2] From: Joachim Martillo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 13:12:58 EDT Subj: Re: SHK 16.1213 Shylock as Suffering Servant [3] From: Florence Amit <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 19 Jul 2005 08:21:33 +0300 Subj: 16.1204 Shylock as Suffering Servant [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 11:45:53 -0400 Subject: 16.1213 Shylock as Suffering Servant Comment: Re: SHK 16.1213 Shylock as Suffering Servant >I look forward to the day >when a production does NOT cast an Olivier, a Pacino or whoever as >Shylock and makes him a subordinate character, The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival did just that a few seasons ago and it was very refreshing. Shylock was played by the same actor who played Friar Lawrence in R&J that season, with about equal centrality. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Joachim Martillo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 13:12:58 EDT Subject: 16.1213 Shylock as Suffering Servant Comment: Re: SHK 16.1213 Shylock as Suffering Servant When I try to hear the name Shylock as a 16th century Londoner or someone from Stratford might have heard it, I hear a name something modern German abscheulich, scheusslich or Scheissloch, which all existed in variants in Friesian and English and Scottish dialects of Shakespeare's time. These words mean things like terrible, horrible or shithole. I have certainly heard shite for shit in England and Scotland and some rural dialects in the USA (including among Pineys and Clamdiggers in NJ). With the propensity of many dialects in England and Scotland to convert a /t/ to a glottal stop before /l/, Shylock may have subconsciously suggested "lake of shit" of the audience. Joachim Martillo [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Florence Amit <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 19 Jul 2005 08:21:33 +0300 Subject: 16.1204 Shylock as Suffering Servant Dear forum members, Colin Cox asks "How far into the future do you propose that to be?" "when the audience will be free of anti-Semitism." Who can answer that? The future that I look forward to is when the audience will be presented with the play that Shakespeare wrote - which is a compliment and gift to the Jewish people in the way of George Elliot's "Daniel Deronda". Mr. Cox also says that "I always thought it was "shallach" meaning cormorant. The cormorant, as a symbol of greed, would have struck a chord with the Elizabethans." Yes, Sir Israel Gollancz points out in his book "Allegory and Mysticism in Shakespeare" (George Jones, London, 1931), that Shylock comes from the Hebrew word `shallach' meaning 'cormorant' which according to the Elizabethans meant usurer, "in the same way that we use the term vampire". Shakespeare in his placing of multiple meanings was never afraid to be the devil's advocate to show a complete picture. It is for the reader to choose the right casket, here too. I like Stuart Manger's choice of cast. and his wanting to put the play into the right historical perspective - which implies an expression of the Jim Crow period of relationships between Venetians and Jews due to the Inquisitional attitude of Pope Paul IV and the paranoia connected with the confrontation in South- Eastern Europe with the Ottoman Turks. I wish to add to Michael Egan's statement about act 5 that the gala expressed there includes a kind of repertoire of the plays being produced by Shakespeare's company. It is an agreeable kind of reminder that this is theater and not reality. Mr. Weiss, the reason why I did not send my essay before is because the old web site for "shaksper" did not include the means for showing Hebrew characters. The essay will be sent shortly. Bill Arnold probably knows by now that I do not agree with the simplistic depiction of Shylock that he puts. From my point of view the character cannot be defended with the attitudes he is presumed to possess. I defend another Shylock. A very great difficulty that is emphasized by the confrontation of Antonio with Shylock is that the truths of one religion as they are expressed and developed in sacred writings do not equip the bearer of those truths to communicate with the bearer of truths of another religion. So either you look at the play as a sociological study - which indeed it is, or you suspend judgment and accept the stranger's truth for the duration of the play. However, I believe that the milieu of the play is that of the Jews and crypto Jews. Florence Amit _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1221 Tuesday, 19 July 2005 [1] From: D Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 11:11:22 -0500 Subj: RE: SHK 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems [2] From: Bruce Young <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 16:28:47 -0600 Subj: RE: SHK 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems [3] From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 20:31:12 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems [4] From: Kareen Klein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 19 Jul 2005 12:41:41 +0200 Subj: Less said the better, it seems [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: D Bloom <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 11:11:22 -0500 Subject: 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems Comment: RE: SHK 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems Terence Hawkes quotes me: "Don Bloom concludes 'WS has lasted through the centuries because there remain plenty of us who simply love reading and watching and talking about and teaching his work.' and then remarks: "Oh dear. At such moments, am I the only person into whose mind words such as 'sentimental', 'simple-minded' and 'codswallop' gently drift? So does the word 'circular', but perish the thought." I knew there was a risk when I wrote what I did, but I meant it and believe it, so there we are. As to my remarks being sentimental, I fail to find that either insulting or critical. There is bad (inappropriate, forced) sentimentality, but there is also good. It is not infrequently found in the work of WS. I am not sure whether by "simple-minded" TH means "simplistic" or "stupid." If the former, then I simply plead guilty. I knew that I had already gone out on a limb in speaking so sentimentally. Having gauged the quantity of alligators in the swamp below I did not wish to go any farther. If he means that it is stupid to love Shakespeare's work -- well, I leave him to explain that. I cannot. As to "codswallop," it is a delightful word but I am unclear as to its precise meaning. Obviously negative. Perhaps suggesting "sentimental effusions." Avoiding the limb and the alligators as best I can, I will say that I have thought a great deal off and on about what identifies some literature as great. As near as I can tell, it is so because enough people care enough about it to devote their lives to it. I have my own ideas about what causes this devotion in these people-but that is another swamp, another set of gators. If I have sounded rather like Florence Gertrude Margaret Taylor, the sentimental, overly dramatic and intellectually contemptible drama teacher in my junior high school, so be it. Sometimes the Mrs. Taylors of the world are right, and it can't be helped. Cheers, don [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bruce Young <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 16:28:47 -0600 Subject: 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems Comment: RE: SHK 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems I'm going to analyze Terence Hawkes's astonishment at Don Bloom's words and then offer an assertion. Hawkes wonders if he is "the only person into whose mind words such as 'sentimental', 'simple-minded' and 'codswallop' gently drift." "Sentimental"=I suspect this is a reaction to the thought of people "simply lov[ing]" doing things; perhaps the word "sentimental" betrays an embarrassment at emotion, especially enthusiastic or positive emotion. Cerebration in its various forms is certainly safer, less potentially embarrassing, and more respectable in academic discourse than enthusiastic emotion. A side note: Because much recent work on Shakespeare has ignored or distanced itself from emotion, I look forward with interest to the seminar on "Emotion and Affect in Shakespeare" at next year's World Shakespeare Congress. (The seminar description begins as follows: "Recent tendencies to view literary texts as the effects of impersonal forces of history or structures of language and ideology have occluded the place of emotion and affect. Can these concepts be returned to critical view within current historicist or presentist projects, or is a new theoretical or philosophical framework required?") "Simple-minded"=Perhaps this is a reaction to Don Bloom's argument that "WS has lasted through the centuries because there remain plenty of us who simply love reading and watching and talking about and teaching his work." Rather, many would more sophisticatedly argue, WS has lasted because he has become the vehicle for cultural values or power circulation or perhaps, more genially, because Shakespeare's oeuvre is so sizable and complex that it has offered plenty of material for centuries of interpretation and analysis. (But, it is sometimes added, the work of any number of other writers could have had the same fate if the same cultural energies had chanced to latch on them instead of on the work of Shakespeare.) "Codswallop" (i.e., "nonsense, drivel")=I take this as simply a redundant combination of the preceding two epithets. "Circular"=This deserves further thought, but my initial reaction is that Don Bloom's statement couldn't be both "simple-minded" (not an adequate explanation of WS's lasting power) and "circular" (an overadequate and obvious explanation of WS's lasting power). My assertion: I think Bloom is right. His explanation is not a complete or tremendously nuanced one. But I think it might be possible to prove that, yes, people's love of "reading and watching and talking about and teaching [Shakespeare's] work" is indeed the main reason (and certainly the sine qua non) for his lasting power. I don't believe cultural energies attach themselves simply by chance to a body of work. The body of work needs to be large enough and of sufficient complexity that it can do the cultural work it is called on to do. (For instance, not every playwright could sustain the dozens of festivals, with many weeks of performances repeated year after year, that Shakespeare has managed to sustain.) But more important even than bulk and complexity is the love-the enthusiastic emotion, the affect-that motivates thousands of people to direct, act in, watch, write about, think about, talk about, teach, and otherwise be involved with this particular body of work. Some portion of those thousands may have the enhancement of their own power, prestige, or self-image as a stronger motive, but I think it could probably be demonstrated, with the proper tools, that for most people love of the material itself (in its multifaceted incarnations) is a stronger motive and that, unless it were so, Shakespeare's popularity would not have lasted so long and at such a high level. In other words, from that love issues most of the energy that, year after year, inspires and carries the various activities, including analysis, criticism, and scholarship, along with it. The question that remains is why so much enthusiasm for Shakespeare has arisen. I think the answer has to be something in the work itself as well as in the various cultural accretions that now accompany it. Bruce Young [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 20:31:12 -0400 Subject: 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems Comment: Re: SHK 16.1211 Less said the better, it seems >Children's literature, including the works of Dodgson, Lewis, Baum, >Geisel and Rowlings, have legs largely because children who are >enthralled with them grow up to become parents and then want to share >the experience with their own children. True enough, but begging the question why only a few of the thousands of books for young people published every year show up library shelves for decades thereafter. That's a version of the question, of course - Terence, is this stupid stuff? - why Shakespeare rather than Heywood continues to occupy you and me and others. David Evett [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kareen Klein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 19 Jul 2005 12:41:41 +0200 Subject: Less said the better, it seems Interestingly, the "favourite movie" of the Genevans is "The Merchant of Venice" at the moment: http://geneve.cinemas.ch/home.php So Shk does still sell ... _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1220 Tuesday, 19 July 2005 [1] From: Tanya Gough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 12:33:28 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1212 All in the Family [2] From: Lea Luecking Frost <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 12:30:47 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1212 All in the Family [3] From: Charles Weinstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 18:12:27 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 16.1212 All in the Family [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tanya Gough <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 12:33:28 -0400 Subject: 16.1212 All in the Family Comment: Re: SHK 16.1212 All in the Family >While married, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh played a number of >Shakespearean spouses: the Macbeths, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and >Lady Anne. They also played Antony and Cleopatra, a common-law couple. > On one occasion, they incestuously played Titus Andronicus and his >daughter Lavinia. And of course, Joan Plowright, his third wife, introduces a clip of Olivier's Hamlet in Last Action Hero, remarking that the school children might remember him from "Clash of the Titans" Tanya Gough The Poor Yorick Shakespeare Catalogue www.bardcentral.com [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lea Luecking Frost <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 12:30:47 -0500 Subject: 16.1212 All in the Family Comment: Re: SHK 16.1212 All in the Family Charles Weinstein said: >while >father-and-son actors Brian and Jamie Glover played King >Henry and Hal in both the Arkangel and BBC audio >recordings of 1 and 2 Henry IV. Just a brief correction there: it's Julian Glover who played Henry, not Brian. Incidentally, in the BBC recording, married couple Timothy West and Prunella Scales appear as Falstaff and Mistress Quickly, who aren't an item in the play *exactly*, but close enough! Along similar lines, West has also played Falstaff opposite his son Samuel as Prince Hal, though I don't remember the details of the production offhand... Regards, Lea [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Charles Weinstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 18:12:27 -0400 Subject: 16.1212 All in the Family Comment: Re: SHK 16.1212 All in the Family >"... father-and-son actors Brian >and Jamie Glover played King Henry and Hal in both the Arkangel and BBC >audio recordings of 1 and 2 Henry IV." Sorry: I confused my Glovers. (Thanks to Stuart Manger for pointing this out). *Julian* and Jamie are the father and son who played King Henry and Hal. Brian Glover has done Shakespeare--he played Bottom in the BBC Midsummer--but he doesn't look a thing like Julian and he hasn't a son named Jamie. _______________________________________________________________ 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 16.1219 Tuesday, 19 July 2005 From: Larry Weiss <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 18 Jul 2005 11:30:41 -0400 Subject: 16.1208 Productions of Pericles Comment: Re: SHK 16.1208 Productions of Pericles >The Globe just has a really exciting production of *Pericles* going on. It would be more accurate to say that the production is "based on" Pericles. It may be imaginative and fun, but it ain't Shakespeare. The entire season is a disappointment. Actually, the Pericles is the best of the Shakespearean productions on offer. The Winters Tale, while staged in traditional Globe fashion, was just flat and insipid. I have seen many WTs performed traditionally, and they almost always move me. This one was just a bore. As for The Tempest, performed by Mark Rylance and two other actors playing all the roles, the less said the better. I have no idea what Rylance thought he was accomplishing, but it didn't include dramatic theatre. _______________________________________________________________ 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.