May
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 22.0095 Friday, 27 May 2011
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Friday, May 27, 2011
Subject: SBReview_15: Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
SBReview_15:
MacFaul, Tom. Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 222 pp. ISBN: 978-0-521-86904-1.
Reviewed by Anthony Guy Patricia, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
The representation of friendship among males in the works of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights, poets, and prose writers is the subject of Tom MacFaul’s study, Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. According to MacFaul, during the medieval era, friends were to be found among a close circle of neighbors and familial relations, all of whom mostly knew their place, and their purpose, within the highly stratified milieu of feudal society. With the advent of the Renaissance, however, the recognizably modern notion of friendship of affection—or, friendship with people who were not primarily either neighbors or family members—became prevalent. But, by Shakespeare’s time, friendship of affection, as an important social institution for men, was in an acute state of crisis. As MacFaul explains it, this was because the Humanistic ideal of friendship between men that came to dominate in the early modern period was supposed to be something it, like all ideals, never really could be, which was “the most important thing in the world,” superseding all other possible human associations, including those connected with family, courtship, romance, marriage, sexuality, service, fellowship, and politics (1). Such ideal friendship was threatened from without by a number of factors, including the inequities of age, lived experience, social status, political allegiance, and economic circumstances; the inherent rivalries among siblings and masters and servants; the unruliness of hetero- and homoerotic desires; the inadequacy of utopian notions of fellowship; and the hidden agendas of one or both of the participants involved in a friendship. In other words, the increased disparateness between older and younger people, between siblings, between masters and servants, between lovers and friends, between generals and their subordinates, and between kings and their subjects fostered problematics in male friendships of affection that Humanistic ideals could not hope to overcome.
Though MacFaul makes no explicit statement of his methodology, his approach to the topic of male friendship in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is broadly New Historicist and, with its repeated mentions of identity formation within the context of one-to-one and group relationships between males, somewhat psychoanalytic. In Chapter 1 of the book, “True Friends?,” MacFaul traces the history of the philosophy of male friendship from Aristotle to the Humanists of the Renaissance. He uses the next seven chapters of Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries to present close readings of a range of early modern plays and poems in which the difficulties associated with male friendship are either dramatized or narrated. Thus Chapter 2, “Momentary Mutuality in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” looks at the relationship between the older male speaker of the Sonnets and the younger “fair youth” to whom the bulk of the 154 poems are addressed. Chapter 3, “Friends and Brothers,” explores friendships between male siblings, while Chapter 4, “Love and Friendship,” covers the well-trodden ground of male friendships disrupted by one of the friend’s romantic attachment to a woman. Chapter 5, “Servants,” considers the inevitable inequities that attend male friendships between masters and their servants; Chapter 6, “Political Friendship,” analyzes male friendships in the political realm, particularly those between kings and their closest associates. “Fellowship,” Chapter 7, examines friendships among groups, rather than only pairs, of males; and “False Friendship and Betrayal,” Chapter 8, investigates friendships that involve one duplicitous, self-serving member and the effect of his machinations on the other partner in the relationship. In Chapter 9, “Conclusion: ‘Time Must Friend or End,’” MacFaul offers his final thoughts, such as they are, on the subject of male friendship and its corresponding representation in literature during Shakespeare’s time.
MacFaul directs his critical attention first to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in which, he claims, the friendship between the young man and the poet’s persona is, essentially, “an unequal one” and, thus, doomed to failure (30). Although the social superior of the two, the young man “can never quite live up to the ideal standards by which he is judged” by the older and more experienced speaker who repeatedly attempts to idealize him in words that always, somehow, seem to fall short of their mark (31). Meanwhile, in a society governed by primogeniture as England was in the sixteenth century, the relationship between brothers was especially fraught with difficulties. Brothers, MacFaul writes, “get in each other’s way more than friends do. There is therefore a natural competition or even enmity between brothers, even if there is also a natural similarity and affinity” (48). Dramatic representations of conflicts of the former type are to be found in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy, Webster’s The White Devil, and many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Richard III, As You Like It, King Lear, The Tempest, The Comedy of Errors, and Cymbeline.
As has long been recognized by scholars of early modern literature, a man’s romantic love for a woman was particularly disruptive to the ideal of male friendship. Not surprisingly, MacFaul finds the tension between romantic love and friendship “expressed in the narrative and dramatic form of the jealousy plot—in which two friends love the same woman—a plot that is sufficiently common in this period for us to call it a genre” (65). Two male friends cannot, after all, share a woman, and the resolution of such a conflict between love and friendship “tends to leave the friendship compromised, and certainly the friends will no longer see each other as the most important thing in life. Love of women has in these cases superseded friendship” (65). Scenarios of this type are legion in the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, as evidenced by Lyly’s Euphues, Webster and Rowley’s A Cure for a Cuckold, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, and Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Winter’s Tale, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, among many others of the Bard’s dramas. If nothing else, MacFaul argues, what these plays show again and again is the failure of the Humanist ideal of male friendship when it is placed in direct competition with a force like heterosexual romantic love. Friendship is always the inevitable loser in such contests.
After considering the inevitable failure of ideal, affective friendship between males when it comes to masters and servants such as Lear and Kent in King Lear; monarch and subject like Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V; like Macbeth and Duncan and, later, Banquo in Macbeth; and groups of men like the trio of scholars in Love’s Labour’s Lost in loose fellowship with one another, MacFaul interrogates what he terms the “false friend,” a character type ubiquitous in the literature of the period. There can be, arguably, no more false a friend than Shakespeare’s Iago in Othello, who callously betrays Roderigo, Cassio, Desdemona, Emilia, and, most especially, his beloved general, Othello, all in his larger quest to be revenged for having been passed over by Othello for promotion to the rank of lieutenant. “A soldier,” MacFaul writes, “trusts in his general and puts a considerable amount of his self-worth into his leader. The relationship is therefore a powerful one and betrayal of it on either side has as much force as the betrayal of a private friendship” (190). The more disquieting implication of the collapse of Othello and Iago’s relationship is that no affective friendship between men is ever safe from destruction when one of the parties harbors a hidden agenda.
In an extremely brief concluding chapter to Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, MacFaul notes that, in the Humanist conception, ideal, affective friendship between males in the Renaissance is both possible and desirable. In the fictions of the time, however, “friendship is presented as fleetingly impermanent, fragile, illusorily existing in the moment; its value is only fully recognized when it has passed. To be fully realized in a plot it must end” (196). And so ends this study of how friendship works, or, rather, how friendship does not work and ultimately fails, in the literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
It is unfortunate that MacFaul’s Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries does not cover any ground that seems altogether new, nor does it add anything substantial to the collective understanding of relationships between men and how they are represented in the works of Shakespeare and his colleagues that already exists. The book often comes across as derivative of its predecessors, including Lorna Hutson’s The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (1994), Laurie Shannon’s Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (2002), and Alan Bray’s The Friend (2003), to name but three. Furthermore, scholars working on Shakespeare and his contemporaries from a queer theoretical perspective may find themselves frustrated with MacFaul’s skittishness as regards the potential homoerotic nature of the friendships between the characters of Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, or Antonio and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. But, as a critical text that looks at, and provides insightful readings of, how male friendship operates in the prose, dramatic, and poetic works of Shakespeare and his fellow writers—in contrast to how male friendship was supposed to operate in the material world according to the ideals of early modern Humanist philosophy—MacFaul’s Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries fulfills its purpose.
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SHAKSPER: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
The SHAKSPER 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 22.0096 Friday, 27 May 2011
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Friday, May 27, 2011
Subject: SBReview_16: English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality
SBReview_16:
Woodbridge, Linda.English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvi + 332 pp. $95.00. ISBN:0521884594.
Reviewed by Harry Keyishian, Professor of English at FDU and Director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
We have known for a long time that revenge was very much on the minds of early modern dramatic audiences. In 1903, Ashley H. Thorndike delineated the revenge tragedy genre for us to note that in writing Hamlet, Shakespeare was refining materials much used by his contemporaries. Fredson Bowers gave the topic magisterial treatment in his 1940, acknowledging that playwrights held a variety of attitudes toward theatrical revenge, but concluding that audience opinion generally opposed revenge on religious grounds. This viewpoint was carried forward in well-researched studies by Eleanor Prosser (1971) and Charles and Elaine Hallett (1980), for whom the desire for revenge represented evil and/or madness. The counter case—the idea that revengers could be portrayed and perceived as heroic—was taken up by such writers and Ronald Broude (in a series of important articles in the 1950s) and J. W. Lever (in The Tragedy of State, 1987), who argued that audiences responded differently to theatrical performances than they did to church sermons. John Kerrigan (in Revenge Tragedy, 1996) has shown that revenge and retribution have been crucial themes throughout history of Western culture. More recently Lorna Hutson, in The Invention of Suspicion (2007), a study of forensic technique in early modern law and theater, concluded “the passion for revenge expressed in late sixteenth-century drama it not different in kind from a passion for justice.” (This hasty summary omits much excellent writing on the topic, for which I offer apologies to many scholars.)
Linda Woodbridge’s extensively documented, energetically argued volume carries the point home and advances our understanding considerably by linking the early modern obsession with revenge to developments in contemporary economic, political, and religious thought. Defining “revenge drama” across traditional genres, as works that include a revenge plot, whether comic or tragic, she offers a stunning array of examples, ranging from Seneca (popularized through translation) through to the Civil War and Interregnum. For her, the frequent appearance of revenge on stage was no mere theatrical fashion, but a product of social conditions, fleshing out her thesis that “The Renaissance taste for revenge was largely a response to grievances: inflation, an unfair judicial system, economic inequity” (p 222). Observing that revenge was the most popular theme in early modern drama, and that plays about revenge tended to run longer, sell more copies, and be quoted from and revived more often than any other form of drama (p. 4), she suggests that “The prevalence of revenge in plays can be ascribed partly to the frequency with which the Tudor pursuit of justice ended in disappointment” (p. 110). (“Unfairness was like the weather: everybody talked about it” [6].)
What a cauldron is the period she evokes! The populace is enraged by the prevalence of social and economic injustice; major rebellions engage thousands in acts of insurrection throughout the sixteenth century; religions clash on the deadliest terms; resistance writers—including Catholics, Puritans, radical playwrights, printers, and (even) translators of Seneca—condemn tyranny and, indirectly, monarchy itself. People are infuriated by all forms of injustice—unrewarded merit, unmerited reward, unpunished guilt, undeserved punishment. They want justice. And they want revenge. And in plays, they find that these are sometimes identical.
In characterizing revenge plays as manifestations of a hunger for justice, Woodbridge builds on her previous work in early modern economics, citing the period’s growing interest in bookkeeping, accountancy, inventories, and the regulation of trade. Stage revengers are good at these arts and sciences; they are consumed with equivalencies. As Woodbridge amply demonstrates, “Revenge speaks a language of debt and obligation” (p. 93) and stage revengers are obsessed with lending, making even, being indebted; about profit and loss; about foreclosures, defaults, and inflation. Debt and revenge are both “all about paying back” (p. 96). “The language of owing pervaded life” (p. 105). “What punishment/Shall we invent sufficient to inflict/According to the height of our revenge?” (p. 110), asks a calculating revenger from Swetnam The Woman-hater.
Woodbridge argues vigorously and wittily against the view that acts of dramatic revenge were condemned by early modern audiences, noting that the confusion of plays with sermons has produced many distorted readings of plays by assuming that a dramatic character’s act of, or even desire for, revenge automatically stamped him or her as a villain or a madman. She, instead, finds glee in the antics of stage revengers and sees audiences celebrating them rather than being repelled.
Woodbridge distinguishes between vendetta plays, in which characters of equal rank feud, and “individual grievance” plays, in which the dispossessed take on tyrants (p. 165). Shakespeare’s first historical tetralogy is an example of the former sort, while The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus represent the latter, which interest her more because they reinforce the revolutionary potential of revenge plays. The plays were frequently sensational, she admits, but the playwrights were not “cheap sensationalists.” They were often sincere and committed dissidents: “Many revenge plays stage violence in the service of resistance” (p. 185).
Woodbridge ties revenge plays into a tradition on resistance writing that included Jean Ponet (who toted up the many tyrants lawfully killed in the The Bible: page 141); William Baldwin, whose collection The Mirror for Magistrates dwelt on the “vices . . . punished in great princes” (p. 154); and the Scot George Buchanan, who proposed electing kings for merit (p. 158), anathema though that position was to his former student, James I of England. Even the study of mathematics had a leveling influence, its severe impartiality discrediting the legal proposition that social class was a factor in allocating punishment in criminal proceedings.
Does she sometimes overplay her hand? Possibly. The connection between revenge plays and revolution may be less direct than she suggests. But hear her out. The range and detail of her references is astonishing, whether to primary and secondary sources or contemporary theoretical positions. She writes enlighteningly about Arab mathematics, English law, the history of translation, Puritan polemics, religious controversies, piling on her evidence thickly and overwhelmingly, with energy, gusto, and humor. This is a bracing read.
A specialist in English Renaissance literature, Linda Woodbridge began her academic career in the Department of English at the University of Alberta after finishing her studies at UCLA (B.A., 1966, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1970). While there, she wrote one of the very first feminist essays on Shakespeare, “Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1977), among many other periodical publications, as well as the first of her seven books, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984), which is still her most cited study. Like much of her work, Women and the English Renaissance explored little-known or under-studied texts, and authors and characters that were often undeservedly passed over. She also co-edited True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in the Age of Shakespeare (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992) and produced her second sole-authored book, The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994), which traced the impact of folk superstitions and folk medicine on the works of major authors of the time.
_______________________________________________________________
SHAKSPER: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
The SHAKSPER 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 assum
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 22.0094 Friday, 27 May 2011
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Friday, May 27, 2011
Subject: SBReview_14: Arden3 MV
SBReview_14:
The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis. The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Methuen Drama, 2010). pp. xx + 460. $100; $17 pb.
Reviewed by Jay L. Halio, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Delaware.
John Drakakis has labored long and hard to deliver another compendious edition for the new, i.e., third series of the Arden Shakespeare. Like the other Arden 3s, it has a long introduction; a heavily annotated, modernized text; a selected collation (now produced below, not above, the commentary); several appendices preceded by ten pages of "longer notes"; a list of references and abbreviations (which does double duty as a bibliography), and a detailed index. It competes with somewhat comparable editions in the New Cambridge Shakespeare and the Oxford Shakespeare. (In the interests of full disclosure, let me state here that I am the editor of the latter.)
One is sometimes asked, why do we need so many Shakespeare editions? The simplest and shortest answer is that no two editions are entirely alike. Each editor brings something new or at least different to the work. The reader pays his money and takes his choice, as the saying goes. But on what basis should the buyer or the reader make a choice? A question to be asked.
Much depends on the use to which the edition will be put. I shall address myself here only to those who may be interested in a full scholarly edition, one suitable for other scholars or for advanced undergraduates, as opposed to a more selective edition, however scholarly (like the Folger and Bantam editions), suitable for schools and some undergraduate courses. All three of the editions mentioned—Cambridge, Oxford, and Arden 3—fall into the first named class. All are heavily freighted with the best scholarship available at the time of publication, though none can claim to be complete. Only the New Variorum Shakespeare editions come anywhere close to making that claim, and then only in a relative sense. Given the amount of Shakespeare scholarship produced in any given year, "complete" will always be a relative term.
In his Introduction, Drakakis begins by citing Harold Bloom's contention that The Merchant of Venice is "a profoundly anti-Semitic work," a criticism to which I take strong exception, although Drakakis does not. In fact, elsewhere he refers to the play as "racist" (p. 30) and does little to extenuate that criticism. Granted, the play does contain anti-Semitism, but is it itself anti-Semitic? Here I agree with John Barton and others who have directed The Merchant of Venice that despite its anti-Semitic characters who, like Graziano, spew virulent racist comments, the action of the play as it unfolds does not promote anti-Semitism.
The issue centers directly upon the character of Shylock. If he is made to appear as a typical Jew, a stereotype of the villainous Hebrew, such as Marlowe's Barabbas is in The Jew of Malta, then clearly the play promotes anti-Semitic attitudes and reactions. But the play does not, I believe, support this contention. Without question, Shylock is a bad man and a bad Jew. Whatever compels him to revenge himself upon Antonio, nothing justifies his murderous intent. Shakespeare makes this quite clear, not only in Portia's eloquent speeches on mercy. But even before that, Shylock's entrance in act 4, scene 1, speaks volumes about how he is regarded by his fellow Jews. If Tubal is typical, note that neither he nor any other Jew appears with Shylock as he enters the Duke's court. Shakespeare's stage direction is simply "Enter Shylock."
But Drakakis exercises the editor's privilege to alter that significant stage direction. His edition reads: "Enter Shylock [the Jew]." In fact, throughout his edition, Drakakis alters the speech ascription for Shylock—traditional in all modern editions since Nicholas Rowe's in 1709—to simply "Jew." None of the early editions of the play—Quarto 1 (1600), Quarto 2 (1619, falsely dated 1600), the First Folio (1623)—use this speech heading throughout the text, although occasionally it does appear. But a quick reference to the chart in the appendix to my edition of the speech headings in all three editions shows that while none of the editions is altogether consistent either with itself or with each other, the preponderance of speech headings, and therefore the preferred one, is "Shylock" or some abbreviation of the name. (See my discussion on p. 89, which Drakakis overlooks, like almost everything else in my edition and the Textual Companion to the Oxford Complete Works edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.)
Unfortunately, "Jew" generally is not a neutral term, though Drakakis may justify its use on the basis of its functionality (see his essay published elsewhere) and hope its pejorative connotations do not predominate. To use this term throughout his edition for not only speech headings but also stage directions where Shylock appears, however, must make his edition appear more racist than I can believe the editor intends. But there it is.
That is not the only innovation Drakakis makes in speech headings. I note that he alters Lancelot's traditional family name, "Gobbo," to Giobbe, used also for his father. He derives this innovation from the spelling in Q1, "Iobbe" and "Jobbe" (2.2.3-5), and the Folio's consistent use of it. In his long note following the list of dramatis personae, he explains that it comes from the Italian name for Job, and he cites the parallels from the Old Testament, such as Job's blindness, which John Dover Wilson long ago identified. While I see no advantage to using Giobbe over the traditional (and more humorous sounding) Gobbo, I cannot say that the change does any great harm—unlike Drakakis's preference for "Jew" over "Shylock."
Regarding the name "Shylock," I am grateful to Drakakis for pointing me to Stephen Orgel's essay, "Imagining Shylock," which argues that the name is not of biblical derivation, but an English name. Orgel traces the name "Shylok" to Englishmen in Hoo, Sussex, as early as the fifteenth century. (This essay came out well after my edition, or I certainly would have noted it, as Drakakis does.) Nevertheless, given many of the other biblical references from the Old Testament, including the names Tubal, Leah, and Chus (or Cush), Shakespeare could have been reminded of Shelah, or Shelach, Shem's grandson, and then Anglicized it. All the names derive from descendants of Noah, including Jessica, or Iscah, although Orgel disputes that derivation as well.
Drakakis is at his best in the Introduction in the section he calls "The Historie of the Merchant of Venice" (pp. 51-63). There he tackles another vexed issue among critics and stage directors: the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio. Is it a homosexual one, latent or otherwise? In some recent productions, it is made to seem so, though there is scant evidence in Shakespeare's text to warrant it. As Drakakis says, "The love that Antonio and Bassanio share is mutual, but the power of wealth to subjugate also accompanies, but cannot simply be reduced to, the libidinous drive for sexual satisfaction" (p. 55). He goes on to explain how the tensions that afflict Antonio account for his unease as expressed in the first line of the play. Later on he astutely observes what might be regarded as a "symbolic revision" of the New Testament crucifixion narrative, wherein the Christ-like Antonio is released and his role as sacrificial victim is transferred to "the felon" Shylock (p. 58). On the whole, Drakakis's analysis of the structural and thematic development of The Merchant of Venice is excellent, if somewhat encumbered with current critical jargon. He rightly emphasizes that the play is a comedy, "even though we may be uncomfortable with some of the laughter the comic action generates" (p. 49).
Drakakis offers a very full stage history of the play in his Introduction (pp. 112-59), depending heavily upon the work of Charles Edelman (whose book unaccountably does not appear in the bibliographical list of works cited), John Gross, and others. I have only spot-checked the commentary notes, and they seem quite ample as well as informative. The first two of the three appendices have charts relating to the casting of the play and type shortages in the production of Q1, while Appendix 3 concerns the "instabilities" of Q1 (including discussion of the copy for Q2 and F), and editorial practice.
_______________________________________________________________
SHAKSPER: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
The SHAKSPER 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 22.0093 Wednesday, 25 May 2011
From: Pete McCluskey <
Date: May 25, 2011 7:49:44 AM EDT
Subject: Re: SHK 22.0085 Arden3 Sir Thomas More
John Briggs strongly registers his complaint that Jowett's edition of STM "is supporting 165 *lines* at most (at most!) which might be by Shakespeare." The works in the following bibliography reveal that Mr. Brigg's reservations are rather old news, and that the critical consensus supports Jowett:
Essential studies of dating and authorship include the critical edition prepared by Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori (1990); Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Booke of Sir Thomas More (1987); T. H. Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearean Interest (1989); and A. W. Pollard, ed., Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More (1923). The foremost investigation of aesthetic matters is McMillin's monograph; other important studies include his article "The Book of Sir Thomas More: A Theatrical View," Modern Philology 68 (1970): 10-24; Judith Doolin Spikes, "The Book of Sir Thomas More: Structure and Meaning," Moreana 11 (1974): 25-39; Charles R. Forker and Joseph Candido, "Wit, Wisdom, and Theatricality in The Book of Sir Thomas More," Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 85-104; and G. Harold Metz, "The Master of the Revels and The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore," Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 493-95.
I accept McMillin's well-supported argument for the identification of Shakespeare's revisions to the play and offer further support for it in my essay:
“Sir Edmund Tilney, Sir Thomas More, and the Dutch,” in Shakespeare and the Low Countries, Douglas A. Brooks and A.J. Hoenselaars, Editors, Shakespeare Yearbook 15 (2005): 49-64.
Pete McCluskey
Middle Tennessee State University
_______________________________________________________________
SHAKSPER: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
The SHAKSPER 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 22.0092 Wednesday, 25 May 2011
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Subject: Cook’s Tours
I have finished re-editing the Two Cook’s Tours: Quartos (BL and Folger) and Book of Common Prayer. I have several ideas for other Tours and welcome suggestions, but first I would like to get the Pedagogy section in order. I’ve outlined what I want to include there and I am exciting about this section providing me the opportunity to share some of my teaching resources with others.
You may read the Cook’s Tours online at http://shaksper.net/scholarly-resources/cooks-tour or you may download a pdf version of each. I have been using the pdf format as the de facto format for documents on the site. These pdf files may be read online or downloaded for future reading. For those of us who use Firefox in Macs, you need to install the Firefox pdf app since the Adobe Reader does not as yet work properly in the Mac Firefox environment.
Also, the more I work with Joomla, the more confident I am becoming with using its features and with tweaking the site. For example, currently the opening page of the About section and the Scholarly Resources section include a Table of Contents list with links of the other pages/articles within each section. Also, I have gradually been adding images throughout the site to make it more visually appealing.
If you find any typos or have any problems, please let me know at
Finally, I offer my profoundest thanks to all who have contributed to the work of SHAKSPER with the DONATE button. Some folks have had difficulties using it or do not have PayPal accounts; if you would still like to make a donation, you may send it directly to me:
Hardy Cook
7505 Citadel Drive
College Park, Maryland 20740
Thanks,
Hardy
PS: Several months ago, I asked about recommendations for colleges/universities for my younger daughter Rebecca to consider. Becca using some of the books that were recommended to me began with a list of 125 colleges/universities she was considering. She ended up applying to eleven and was accepted at all but a few. A few weeks ago, she made her final choice and will be attending Bryn Mawr in the fall.
_______________________________________________________________
SHAKSPER: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
The SHAKSPER 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.