March
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0119 Tuursday, 19 March 2009 From: J. Lucinda Kidder <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, 13 Mar 2009 14:39:39 -0400 Subject: Great Hall Panel Announcement RENAISSANCE CENTER CONVENES INTERNATIONAL PANEL ON EARLY ENGLISH PERFORMANCE SPACES UMass Amherst - The role of the 16th-century English country Great Hall in the history and development of Early Modern dramatic performance will be the subject of an international panel convened by the Center on Tuesday, April 7, at 4:30 pm. The event is a collaboration with the University of Toronto's Records of Early English Drama institute (REED), the organization engaged for the last thirty-one years in collecting and publishing information about provincial performance gathered county by county from all over England. This event is sponsored by the UMass Office of the Provost. It will be held in the Rand Theater in the Fine Arts Center and is open to the public at no charge. The panel, chaired by UMass English Professor Adam Zucker, will feature several pre-eminent scholars in the field, including Sally-Beth MacLean, director of REED and Barbara Palmer, emeritus professor of literature from Mary Baldwin College and specialist in great hall performance. Lawrence Manley, William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English at Yale will speak as will Paul Werstine of the University of Western Ontario, general editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare and Kate McLuskie, Director of the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute. Gail Kern Paster, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will serve as respondent for the panel. This event is made possible through the generous support of the Provost of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and by 88.5 FM/WFCR, Public Radio for Western New England. The Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies is an internationally known center for the interdisciplinary study of the culture and achievements of the Renaissance period (1400-1700). The Center contributes to the field of Renaissance studies through research, teaching, and outreach to the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, the Amherst community, and beyond. For more information about the Center and a full calendar of activities, visit the Center's web page at www.umass.edu/renaissance. _______________________________________________________________ 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 20.0118 Tuursday, 19 March 2009 From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009 Subject: FYI Sorry for the interruption; one again I had computer problems. Hardy M. Cook Editor of SHAKSPER _______________________________________________________________ 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 20.0117 Friday, 13 March 2009 [1] From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 9 Mar 2009 22:54:50 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0108 Middle School Drama [2] From: Louis Swilley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 11 Mar 2009 11:33:13 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: SHK 20.0108 Middle School Drama [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 9 Mar 2009 22:54:50 -0400 Subject: 20.0108 Middle School Drama Comment: Re: SHK 20.0108 Middle School Drama SHAKSPERians who don't routinely see the NYT might look at Frank Rich's meditation on the current NY revival of *Our Town*: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08rich.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=frank Rich our town&st=cse Dave Evett [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Louis Swilley <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 11 Mar 2009 11:33:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 20.0108 Middle School Drama Comment: Re: SHK 20.0108 Middle School Drama No. "Our Town" is one of the dullest plays in the American repertory. It has been oversold to us - like the Rolex, the ugliest watch in the world. _______________________________________________________________ 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 20.0116 Friday, 13 March 2009 [1] From: John W Kennedy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 09 Mar 2009 17:29:58 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0107 50 Best American Plays [2] From: Bob Grumman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 09 Mar 2009 16:58:37 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0107 50 Best American Plays [3] From: Scot Zarela <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 11 Mar 2009 13:18:20 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0107 50 Best American Plays [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: John W Kennedy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 09 Mar 2009 17:29:58 -0400 Subject: 20.0107 50 Best American Plays Comment: Re: SHK 20.0107 50 Best American Plays Mari BonomiThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >(And I'd include The Crucible, Raisin in the Sunday, Long Day's >Journey and Moon for the Misbegotten, Picnic, Our Town, and so >many, many other wonderful plays . . . along with such musicals as >South Pacific. But my taste for the most part seems to hover around >the middle third of the 20th century, which is an injustice to all the >fine playwrights both before and after.) I believe Kerr remarks somewhere that, for everyone, the Golden Age of Theatre is "right before I became a professional". Yet I am disturbed to see that, here, of all places, I seem to be the only person aware that American theatre existed before late O'Neill. Folks, it wasn't all Shakespeare and "Bertha, the Sewing-Machine Girl". [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bob Grumman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 09 Mar 2009 16:58:37 -0500 Subject: 20.0107 50 Best American Plays Comment: Re: SHK 20.0107 50 Best American Plays >I agree with Charles Weinstein, too. I doubt that there are as many >as fifty good American (published) plays. One reason for that is their >obsession with family. There are four levels of playwriting, in my view: >child-, adolescent-, adult- --and Shakespeare-. The child-level playwright >writes entirely about himself. The young Frenchwoman who had a >success with a very autobiographical play in, I think, the sixties would >be a good example. Can't think of her name or the title of her play >although I was involved in a college production of it years ago. The >adolescent-level playwright's world is enlarged to himself and his family. >The Glass Menagerie, for example. The adult-level playwright has a >bigger world. The few Americans caring about this world fall short of >greatness because too propagandistic and concerned too much with >third-raters (like Miller's Loman). I'm with Aristotle in believing in the >need for kings as main characters (except that I'm indifferent to political >figures, preferring the equivalent of kings in the arts or sciences, and I'd >want my kings in comedies as well as in tragedies. No American is >Shakespeare-level (though I'd put Shaw, Wilde, Stoppard, Jonson, Fry >and other English playwrights in that class, as well as Moliere, Aristophanes >and others who wrote in other languages). You don't need to be a poet >to reach this level, but it helps. No American (whose plays have been >staged) that I know of has written successful verse drama except Eliot, >once, and he did so as an Englishman. (Maxwell Anderson was only >technically a poet.) For a reference point, I consider American poetry world-class because of Stevens, Frost, Roethke, Cummings, Pound, Eliot (if considered American), Jeffers, and a number of contemporaries whose names, I'm sure, are unknown to just about everyone linked to Shaksper, and who do not include Merwin or Ashbery. On the other hand, I don't think much of American novelists, either. --Bob G. [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Scot Zarela <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Wednesday, 11 Mar 2009 13:18:20 -0400 Subject: 20.0107 50 Best American Plays Comment: Re: SHK 20.0107 50 Best American Plays Mari Bonomi writes: "I understood and passed by Charles Weinstein's comment, having experience of Charles's jaundiced eye. But I would like to know why Mr. Zarela feels the same, that there are no 'Best American Plays.'" I simply meant that such lists are absurd --- 'fifty best' plays (or books, movies, wines, cities ...) when the excellencies of individual works are incomparable! Or, if it happens that comparison fits some handful of the plays, it's on grounds irrelevant to the forty-odd others. Then the numerical ranking, never justifiable, casts a fake nimbus of precision around the undertaking. 'Fifty best' list-making can be a trivial amusement --- or if you like, a serious game, provided we remember that it is a game ... and that there's no such thing as the fifty best plays. These are my own, I don't claim to know Charles Weinstein's reasons; only that, whatever they may be, we come out at the same place. --- Scot _______________________________________________________________ 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 20.0115 Friday, 13 March 2009 [1] From: Bruce Young <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 9 Mar 2009 13:45:22 -0600 Subj: RE: SHK 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare [2] From: Carl Fortunato <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 10 Mar 2009 22:15:08 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare [3] From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, March 13, 2009 Subj: Re: SHK 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare [4] From: Jeff Rufo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 12 Mar 2009 14:50:05 -0500 (CDT) Subj: Cobbe portrait history (a query) [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bruce Young <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 9 Mar 2009 13:45:22 -0600 Subject: 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare Comment: RE: SHK 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare I am eager to learn what Stanley Wells and Alec Cobbe have to tell us, but I want to put in my two cents' worth in anticipation. Three years ago, the portrait issue was widely discussed. Dr. Tarnya Cooper, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery, said at that time that the claim of the Chandos portrait to authenticity, though not "watertight," was the best among the contenders--apart perhaps from the Droeshout engraving in the first folio. (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/mar/02/arts.books and http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5242000 ) For various reasons, the Sanders, Grafton, Souest, Flower, and Janssen portraits were discounted--the Janssen portrait because it had "been painted over to make the sitter look balder, and more 'Shakespearean'" and "had also been given a fake inscription." The recent discovery--what we're calling the "Cobbe portrait"--probably has a better claim than the Janssen, but to my eye, it still doesn't look much like the man portrayed in the Droeshout engraving, the one depiction (perhaps along with the bust in Holy Trinity Church) we know to have been accepted as resembling Shakespeare by those who knew him. Though I'm not at all an expert on such matters, of all the contenders, the Chandos portrait looks to me the most like the Droeshout engraving. Bruce Young [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Carl Fortunato <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 10 Mar 2009 22:15:08 -0400 Subject: 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare Comment: Re: SHK 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare Am I crazy? I keep reading claims that the Droeshout might have been taken from this, and to me they look NOTHING alike - not in so much as a single feature. And why would Droeshout decide to make him bald? And remove the beard? In fact, the "authentic" pictures - Droeshout, Chandos, and the Stratford Monument - all show someone with considerably less hair. Isn't that odd if the Cobbe is authentic? What is the actual evidence for its authenticity? Carl Fortunato [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Friday, March 13, 2009 Subject: 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare Comment: Re: SHK 20.0104 New Portrait of Shakespeare I can understand the reluctance of many to embrace the Cobbe Portrait as genuine, painted in Shakespeare's lifetime. Within the past ten years, there have been the announcement of the Sanders Family Portrait and Tarnya Cooper's pronouncement of the authenticity of the Chandos Portrait. When I looked that a picture of the portrait the was taken from an extreme low angle http://www.abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=7039535&page=1 I could see more clearly the features resembling those of the Droeshout and the Holy Trinity Monument. The low angle flatten out the features, aging as it were the image. A few days ago, I was talking with my older daughter, who happens to have been born on Friday the thirteenth twenty-eight years ago, Melissa Lauren Ralph, I mentioned the apparently absence of balding on the Cobbe portrait. She responded by quoting Peter Quince from Midsummer Night's Dream (Gee, didn't I do a good job raising her and her sister): "Some of your French crowns have no hair at all" And then she said doesn't this refer to how syphilis could be a cause of balding. She insisted that she was not claiming that Shakespeare had a venereal disease, only that there could be many reasons for someone's rapid loss of hair in the six years between when the painting is claimed to have been undertaken and Shakespeare's death. Since many of the portraits that have been at one time or another attributed to being Shakespeare, I thought that I might make available for a limited time a copy of my PowerPoint presentation on Shakespeare's Life, a presentation in which I attempted to include as many portraits of Shakespeare as I could. I need to say up front that this PowerPoint is one of the many that I used in teaching and that I put it together exclusively to pedagogical uses. Thus it contains images that found from a variety of sources, some of which were copyrighted. Because I was using them then and making this available now for instructional and illustrative purposes, I considered that any of the materials that were copyrighted were being used under the "Fair use" provisions of the copyright law. My presentation can be viewed at http://www.shaksper.net/~hcook/Life.ppt I have several more of these, PowerPoint presentations, presentations that I have been developing and polishing for countless years as part of my teaching. Other presentations deal with the transmission of the text, with the theater, with the dominant ideology, and so forth. I constructed one from images of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs and historical persons associated with their reigns that were in a book I donated to the Folger Shakespeare Library for a substantial tax deduction after I paid a consultant to provide me with an estimate of its worth. If anyone would like, you can see it at http://www.shaksper.net/~hcook/Chronology.ppt A warning to those who wish to view these, the first contains more than 240 slides of high quality images, so depending on the speed of your Internet connect, it may take several minutes to download. Just be patient. You will be presented with a prompt or two asking you to open the file, then you will need to wait again. Be sure not to touch the esc key. When the file opens in PowerPoint, hit the Slide Show icon and press the space bar or arrow keys --> to move forward and <-- to move backward through the presentation. If you would like to view others, contact me atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . I spend untold hours developing these and I genuinely hope that after I officially retire I might be able to teach Shakespeare by the course at some of the colleges and universities in the Baltimore-Washington-Northern Virginia area and use these again. Hardy Cook Editor of SHAKSPER PS: Another reason I mounted these files on the SHAKSPER fileserver was to be able to show them to my dissertation advisor Sandy Mack, whom I have not until recently kept up with much in the past thirty years. [4]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jeff Rufo <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Thursday, 12 Mar 2009 14:50:05 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Cobbe portrait history (a query) Hello all, I'm curious to learn more about the Cobbe and Southampton connection through the Nortons. The following passage, from an article in The Times (July 10 2006), is all I have at the moment on this topic: "The Cobbe pictures were brought to Ireland from Hampshire in 1717 by Charles Cobbe, later Archbishop of Dublin, and almost exclusively came from his Norton inheritance. His father and uncles had been heirs to the childless Nortons, one of whom, Lady Elizabeth Norton, was the 3rd Earl of Southampton's great-granddaughter." Do we know why the Norton inheritance fall to Charles Cobbe's father? And what do we know about Lady Elizabeth Norton? I'm fascinated by this whole story and am looking forward to a spirited debate about the "authenticity" of the Cobbe portrait, whether or not we believe that this is, at last, "the real Shakespeare"! Perhaps this is simply "a new Shakespeare" for us all to consider?...He's certainly been on my mind the past few days. -Jeff Rufo _______________________________________________________________ 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.