November
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0529 Wednesday, 21 November 2013
From: Steve Urkowitz <
Date: November 20, 2013 at 1:48:13 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Anne Barton
“she argued that for the playwright, the stage, with its mirthful impersonations and flamboyant games, provided a buoyant symbol not of illusion but of reality itself.”
The Shakespearean wonder that is “reality” grows from the basic idea that we ourselves create and define “the real.” That is our power, our gift. The grumpies generate a grumpy, parsimonious reality that is every bit as real to them as the gracious and generous reality in which we, like birds in a cage, cherish our time with the mystery of things. By showing us profoundly generous fabricated worlds that display both horror and beauty, Shakespeare offers us examples of “reality-formation.” That’s playing, that’s civility, that’s the way to live with intensity and value. Music does this too. And Art. How can we tell the dancer from the dance? We can’t, and shouldn’t, so long as we can dance. Not by being nouns but by achieving the fluidities of verbs.
To understand how the reality of stage life might be something more real than “everyday” reality, Michael Egan might look at Cleopatra as an exemplar of one reality and look at Caesar as a formulator of a competing reality. And while they contend we are continually washed with the flux of creative achievement that leaves us cleansed, strong, and beautiful.
At least that’s how it looks from the Bronx, where realities are a dime a dozen. Or as my dad might have said, “Ye’ pays yer money and ye’ takes yer reality.”
Steve Epistemowitz
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0528 Wednesday, 21 November 2013
From: Charles Weinstein <
Date: November 20, 2013 at 6:09:55 PM EST
Subject: John Barton’s Hamlet
From Anne Barton’s memorial notice: “In the same year [1980], an RSC production [of Hamlet], directed by her husband and starring Michael Pennington as the Dane, featured benches around the side of the stage upon which actors would sit to watch the performance as it took place . . . ."
If memory serves, the only time this occurred was during the Play scene, when the actors were supposed to be members of the onstage audience. In other words, John Barton did not recycle the stale piece of meta-theatre referenced above. I suspect that the writer confused John Barton’s Hamlet with John Dexter’s Equus (1973).
--Charles Weinstein
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0527 Wednesday, 21 November 2013
From: Hardy Cook <
Date: November 20, 2013 at 2:38:09 PM EST
Subject: Ralph Cohen Honored by the Folger Shakespeare Library
Ralph Alan Cohen, Director of Mission and Co-Founder of the American Shakespeare Center, has been awarded the 2013 Shakespeare Steward Award, presented annually by the Folger Shakespeare Library in recognition of outstanding contributions to the innovative teaching of Shakespeare in American classrooms.
Folger Director Michael Witmore presented Cohen with the award on October 26, 2013 at the closing event of the Blackfriars Conference, the American Shakespeare Center’s biennial gathering of scholarship on early modern drama. “Ralph has a long been a leader in the community of Shakespeare scholars who see that there is much to learn from the practice of staging Shakespeare’s plays,” noted Witmore. “People think differently about Shakespeare and Renaissance drama because of what Ralph has done.”
Peggy O’Brien, the Folger’s Director of Education added, “Ralph is close to magical. All of his gifts—scholar, teacher, director, and entrepreneur—have driven work that has created lively and exciting Shakespeare experiences for hundreds of thousands of students and teachers. And the founding and growth of the American Shakespeare Center besides! It’s an honor for us at the Folger to honor him."
Past recipients of the Shakespeare Steward Award include the partnership between the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Chicago Public Schools; scholars Gail Kern Paster and Jeanne Addison Roberts; the Denver Public Schools Shakespeare Festival; Peggy O’Brien; and the inaugural recipient, Susan Biondo-Hench, a high school English teacher in Carlisle, Pennsylvania who founded a student Shakespeare festival in her community.
In 1988, Cohen and Jim Warren formed the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, a touring theatre company focused on bringing back the energy of early modern theatre by using their staging conditions. 25 years later, the company has been renamed The American Shakespeare Center, and has brought Shakespeare performances to hundreds of American communities and advanced an interest in Shakespeare and his times by building a re-creation of the Blackfriars Theatre and creating an American center for the performance and study of Shakespeare in Staunton, Virginia.
Cohen, Co-founder and Director of Mission at the American Shakespeare Center, is Gonder Professor of Shakespeare and Performance and founder of the Master of Letters and Fine Arts program at Mary Baldwin College.
He has directed 30 productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including America’s first professional production of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. He also directed the first revival of Thomas Middleton’s Your Five Gallants and co-edited the play for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Thomas Middleton.
He is the author of ShakesFear and How to Cure It: A Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare. He twice edited special teaching issues of Shakespeare Quarterly and has published articles on teaching Shakespeare as well as on Shakespeare, Jonson, and Elizabethan staging. ShakesFear will see its second printing in 2014.
He founded the Studies Abroad program at James Madison University, where he won Virginia’s award for outstanding faculty. He has frequently directed summer institutes on Shakespeare and staging sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001 he established the Blackfriars Conference, a biennial week-long celebration of early modern drama in performance.
In 2008 he won the Commonwealth Governor’s Arts Award along with ASC Co-Founder Jim Warren. In 2009 he was the Theo Crosby Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. He earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College and his doctorate at Duke University and has honorary degrees from St. Lawrence University and Georgetown University.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0526 Tuesday, 20 November 2013
[1] From: Arthur Lindley <
Date: November 19, 2013 at 4:12:53 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Anne Barton
[2] From: Stuart Manger <
Date: November 19, 2013 at 6:15:34 PM EST
Subject: Anne Barton
[3] From: Jeffrey Myers <
Date: November 19, 2013 at 8:27:13 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Anne Barton
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Arthur Lindley <
Date: November 19, 2013 at 4:12:53 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Anne Barton
A great, humane, endlessly useful critic.
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stuart Manger <
Date: November 19, 2013 at 6:15:34 PM EST
Subject: Anne Barton
A fine scholar, an excellent supervisor too.
We shall not see her lake again.
Stuart Manger
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jeffrey Myers <
Date: November 19, 2013 at 8:27:13 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Anne Barton
I remember seeing that Pennington Hamlet after having read her book as a young grad student. It’s difficult to think of any Shakespearean scholar who more greatly affected the next generation of scholars.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 24.0525 Tuesday, 20 November 2013
From: Steve Roth <
Date: November 19, 2013 at 8:33:28 PM EST
Subject: Hamlet: The Undiscovered Country, Second Edition and E-book
Fellow SHAKSPEReans: Many of you have been kind enough to support and help me with my Hamlet book, and I wanted to let you know that it's just been released in a second edition, and (finally) in an e-book edition.
It’s not hugely changed, but I have worked in many insights and corrections that have arisen since the first edition, many of them arrived at with your help. (Thanks!)
I’m especially pleased with the e-book version, which—because of the book’s many tables and other special text and graphic elements—was a challenging conversion. I think the e-book reading experience may be even better than print (something I rarely say about e-books). This not least because all the laboriously embedded hyperlinks to the play text, and to primary and secondary source materials, are working.
If you’re among those I address above and I haven’t written to you directly offering a copy of the e-book, or if you’d like to consider it for class adoption, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line; I’d love to send you one.
Thanks for listening,
Steve