May
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.241 Monday, 25 May 2015
From: Bo Bergstrom <
Date: May 22, 2015 at 8:44:30 PM EDT
Subject: ‘The Millionaire and the Bard,’ by Andrea E. Mays
[Editor’s Note: From The New York Times. –Hardy]
The Millionaire and the Bard,’ by Andrea E. Mays
By Stephen Greenblatt
May 22, 2015
“The Millionaire and the Bard,” by Andrea Mays, is an American love story. It is the engaging chronicle of a sober, hard-working, respectably married industrialist of the Gilded Age who became obsessed with the object of his desire. Though generally frugal and self-disciplined, he was willing to pay extraordinary sums in order to put his hands on his mistress, to gaze at her lovingly and longingly, to caress her. To possess her only once was not enough for him; he craved the experience again and again, without limit.
To the lover’s dismay, this mistress was promiscuous; she would give herself to the highest bidder. And though in the course of his career he became fabulously wealthy, he had rivals, some of whom were equally obsessed and a few of whom were even wealthier than he. But that only intensified his desire. He hired confidential agents; he wired money into private bank accounts; he wrote pleading letters; he devised cunning strategies. Perhaps his most cunning strategy was to initiate his wife into his obsession, so that the pursuit became their shared endeavor. Childless, they lived modestly in a rented house in Brooklyn, while they poured out vast riches in order to get their hands on what they had both come to crave. And each time they succeeded, they locked the beloved away in a vault.
I am, as readers have probably surmised, speaking of the peculiar passion of book collecting. The lover in question was Henry Clay Folger, who made his fortune as one of the presidents and, by 1923, the chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New York. And the beloved, which he pursued with unflagging ardor, was a single book: “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, Published according to the True Originall Copies.” Printed in London in 1623, seven years after the author’s death, it is the book known to all lovers of Shakespeare simply as the First Folio.
[ . . . ]
The First Folio was for its time an expensive book; at the price of £1 for the unbound pages and more for the binding, it would have been a serious purchase, even for someone of means. But, like the house in Stratford that the successful playwright bought for himself, it was substantial and handsome rather than palatial. And it was precisely not one-of-a-kind. The volume opens with a flowery dedicatory letter to William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, and his brother, Philip, the Earl of Montgomery. But the printer, William Jaggard, was hardly counting on their aristocratic largess to defray his costs. He decided to make 750 copies.
Jaggard was no fool. At more than 900 pages in length, the book was a significant capital venture. Too few copies, and the price would have to be astronomical in order for him to make a profit; too many, and he might well be stuck for years with an unsold inventory. This was no Bible, with a guaranteed market. Shakespeare was a known quantity, but his plays had been hitherto sold in small-format quartos, the equivalent of cheap paperbacks. The printer was gambling that the time was right to market an edition of the collected works, presented not as ephemeral popular entertainment but as serious literature fit, as Ben Jonson wrote in his dedicatory poem, to be compared with the achievements of “thund’ring Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles.”
Fully half of the plays in the First Folio had never before been printed. And herein lies its importance and glory, the underlying source of Folger’s obsession and the reason that anyone who cares about literature is in its debt. The volume’s two editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, were Shakespeare’s friends, fellow actors and members of his theater company. Hunting down the best copies they could find, they paid for the necessary permissions and brought together the whole of his theatrical achievement. They were not perfect: failing perhaps to obtain the rights, they missed out on the jointly written “Pericles,” “Two Noble Kinsmen” and “Cardenio,” along with several other plays in which Shakespeare may have had a hand. But if it had not been for their editorial labors, the world might never have known such masterpieces as “Julius Caesar,” “Twelfth Night,” “Macbeth,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest.”
There was every reason, then, for book collectors to prize the First Folio, particularly after the 18th century, when Shakespeare’s reputation surged far ahead of his rivals and the public began to crave as holy relics any traces of his existence. The First Folio is by far the greatest of these traces, and its fascination is enhanced by the fact that the printing house practice in Jaggard’s time — a kind of rolling proofreading and corrections process — meant that each copy is in small but significant ways unique.
By the time Henry Folger came on the scene, in the late 19th century, some two-thirds of Jaggard’s original print run had vanished, thoughtlessly discarded, burned up or otherwise consumed by the teeth of time. Many of the surviving copies were damaged. But that still left a large playing field, and as Folger’s wealth steadily increased, he made himself an ever more significant player.
[ . . . ]
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.240 Monday, 25 May 2015
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: May 22, 2015 at 6:23:43 PM EDT
Subject: Michael Fassbender on Making ‘Macbeth’: ‘The Scottish Film’
Michael Fassbender on Making 'Macbeth': 'The Scottish Film'
By The Associated Press
May 22, 2015, 7:21 A.M. E.D.T.
CANNES, France — Michael Fassbender doesn’t know if the “Macbeth” curse carries over to movie adaptations, but he’d rather not test it.
“The Scottish film” is what Michael Fassbender calls his “Macbeth” adaption, which is set to premiere Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. He’s maintaining the theatrical superstition of not speaking the name of Shakespeare’s play — at least he wasn’t in an interview ahead of the festival.
“Sometimes I say it, sometimes I don’t,” Fassbender said. “It depends on the day.”
“Macbeth,” usually referred to by the euphemism “the Scottish play” by actors wary of its legendary spell, will be the final film to screen in competition at Cannes. Directed by Australian director Justin Kurzel and co-starring Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth, it has been eagerly awaited as the blood-soaked finale of the French Riviera festival, which concludes Sunday with the presentation of the Palme d’Or top prize.
Although interpreting Shakespeare is a traditional rite of passage for any British Isles actor of ambition, it wasn’t a priority for Fassbender, the Oscar-nominated actor of “12 Years a Slave,” “Shame” and the “X-Men” films. The film marks the first entry into Shakespeare, on stage or screen, by the German-born, Ireland-raised Fassbender.
But the “Othello” villain Iago is his favorite Shakespeare character and “Macbeth” his favorite Shakespeare play.
“(‘Macbeth’) wasn’t necessarily on the list, but when the opportunity came up, I felt like I couldn’t turn it down,” said Fassbender. “I guess it wasn’t always something I felt naturally comfortable, but I always thought that I could find something in it that I would have a relationship to it.”
However difficult it was for Fassbender to work up to "Macbeth," he was more impressed with his French co-star, Cotillard.
“For me to take it on, it was, ‘OK, Shakespeare.’ But she’s French-speaking,” said Fassbender. “I just thought it was incredible bravery.”
No release date has yet been set for “Macbeth” in the U.S., but the Weinstein Co. will release it sometime this fall.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.239 Monday, 25 May 2015
From: Michelle Assay <
Date: May 24, 2015 at 10:22:12 AM EDT
Subject: Call for Panel Presenters: ‘Shakespeare and Nordic Music’ as a part of ‘Shakespeare and Scandinavia’ Conference
Call for Panel Presenters: ‘Shakespeare and Nordic Music’, (deadline for abstracts 1 July, 2015)
International Conference 'Shakespeare and Scandinavia', Kingston University, 8-11 October, Kingston-upon-Thames
http://blogs.kingston.ac.uk/ssku/calls-for-panel-presenters-deadline-for-abstracts-1-july-2015/
From the songs of Christoph Ernst Friedrich Weyse and Peter Arnold Heise to Finnish folk-rock group Apulanta (‘Today Shakespeare was born and died’) Shakespeare has figured in many branches of Nordic music without ever gaining the kind of prominence that major operatic settings accorded him in other European cultural centres. Probably the most significant contribution is Sibelius’s score for The Tempest (1925-26) consisting of more than an hour of some of his finest music. But lesser-known contributions by Sibelius’s compatriot Aulis Sallinen (King Lear opera, 2000), his Danish contemporary Carl Nielsen (incidental music for Shakespeare celebrations, 1916), Norwegian Arne Nordheim (a Tempest ballet in 1979, incidental music to King Lear in 1985, various vocal/ensemble settings with electronic background), and even Grieg (‘Watchman’s Song’ from Macbeth, c. 1867) begin to suggest a more significant picture than has been passed down to us.
Papers are invited on any aspect of Shakespeare and Nordic Music, covering all genres, styles and historical periods, and techniques of reworking, not excluding musical responses less concrete than text-settings or tone poems directly on Shakespearean themes. Questions of national temperament may also be addressed: is it mere essentialism to propose, for instance, that Nordic artists are instinctively drawn to those dramas that stress elemental natural forces and emotional bleakness – as the examples cited above would seem to indicate – rather than to, say, Shakespeare’s ‘Southern’ subjects?
Panel conveners: Michelle Assay (Universities of Sheffield and Paris Sorbonne) and David Fanning (University of Manchester)
Please forward abstracts of no more than 500 words, and a brief bio (2-3 sentences), to
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Michelle Assay
Université Paris Sorbonne, University of Sheffield
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.238 Friday, 22 May 2015
From: Kenneth Chan <
Date: May 22, 2015 at 6:46:04 AM EDT
Subject: Re: Deconstruction
As David Schalkwyk mentions, a philosophical discourse over the existence of a center can be found in Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. In that famous paper, Derrida argues for the absence of a center in an abstract philosophical manner, and cites the works of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger as major contributors to this idea of decentering. This all eventually leads to a key point in deconstructionist theory, which is the absence of a center in language.
What is introduced in my previous post, however, is not an abstract argument. It, instead, specifically points out a concrete real-life “center” in language, in the form of the mind that imputes meaning onto words. All the abstract philosophical arguments (for the absence of a center) will have no value in the real world if it cannot be shown how this actual specific real-life “center” can be removed from language. And if we cannot logically remove this mind that imputes meaning onto words (the real-life center), the entire deconstructionist argument must be in jeopardy!
Kenneth Chan
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.237 Friday, 22 May 2015
From: David Basch <
Date: May 22, 2015 at 11:59:09 AM EDT
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Lifetime Portrait?
The discussion concerning the uncovering of an alleged new portrait of Shakespeare on the cover of a book about plant life is most interesting. The question is whether it is indeed a portrait of the poet.
In his discussion on our list, John D. Markel, who is familiar with the book by John Gerard on botany, accepts that the two figures on the left side of the cover of Gerard’s book represent Gerard and his mentor, Rembert Dodoens, another great botanist. But then, when John shifts his gaze to the two figures on the right side of the cover, he thinks, unlike the two others, they are possibly earlier historical or allegorical personalities.
The right side figure above, John assays is possibly Dioscorides or Pliny, ancient compilers of plant life, although John acknowledges that it may be pictured with the face of Burghley, the queen’s senior minister. Perhaps, as John tells us, it was because Burghley had greatly assisted in making Gerard’s book possible. This is suggested since Burghley was the first one listed in the book as dedicatees.
This would make three of the figures shown on the book cover as representations of real persons. If so, why conclude that the fourth figure is purely allegorical, allegedly Apollo, as John proposes?
Since the Burghley figure is rendered in classical garb, connoting an allusion to historic earlier botanical compilers, why not conclude that this is the mode through which the fourth figure is represented, a contemporary garbed in symbolic attire? Accordingly, the second right hand figure could very well be another contemporary personality.
Thus, classically dressed and with the laurel about his head, the figure could allude to an earlier man of letters or even to Apollo, a god of poetry. And if so, why not, as in the case of the Burghley figure, a representation of Shakespeare who was contemporaneously acknowledged as a great poet? The case is made stronger by the fact that, as Mark Griffiths alleges, the decoded cipher on the pedestal below this figure indicates that it reads W. Shake-speare.
The question then is why was the poet considered so relevant that he was worthy of representation on the cover of a book on botany?
Could it be that Gerard was grateful to the poet because he helped in the writing of passages in the book? Or maybe it was because the poet had conspicuously mentioned the names of flowers in his narrative poems and plays, focusing public attention on the beauties of plant life?
Also, what changes when we learn what the poet might have looked like in his youth? Why would this be ruled out as unworthy of representation, unless those who would speculate that another writer had written his work would find themselves checkmated by the new finding?
Along with John Markel, I too await for more information “identifying Shakespeare as the model for the fellow at bottom right, look forward to reading the argument, including why a fritillary and an ear of corn (maize) appear together.”
David Basch