December
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.565 Thursday, 17 December 2015
From: Helen M. Ostovich <
Date: December 16, 2015 at 2:07:22 PM EST
Subject: Erika Gaffney, Formerly of Ashgate
For those of you who haven’t seen Erika’s letter on Facebook, here’s part of the letter she sent me about her new job, which sounds fabulous! She’ll have AAUP up there at the top of the publishing world in no time at all, after her extremely successful Ashgate career. Quoting Erika below:
I want you to be among the first to know – as of January 1, I will be acquiring books in early modern and late medieval studies for a three-press consortium: the Medieval Institute Press, Arc Medieval Press, and Amsterdam University Press. I guess it is more or less official; there is still one contract left to sign, but the Director has already posted this announcement: http://arc-humanities.org/index.php/news/
In some ways it won’t be too different from working at Ashgate; in others, it will be quite different (not least in that 2 of the presses are university presses, and belong to the AAUP). I still have a lot to learn about how it will all work, but I am excited about working with these presses, and hopeful.
Best,
Helen
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.564 Thursday, 17 December 2015
From: Hardy Cook <
Date: December 17, 2015 at 9:18:38 AM EST
Subject: Online Re-Creation of 1796 Boydell Show
[Editor’s Note: From The New York Times. -Hardy]
A London gallery exhibition of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, a sensation in its time, goes on digital display.
For a Shakespeare Anniversary, an Online Re-Creation of a 1796 Show
By Jennifer Schuessler
Dec. 16, 2015
The coming year promises to bring global Shakespeare mania, as the 400th anniversary of his death prompts a cavalcade of performances and exhibitions around the world.
In advance of that deluge, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are offering a more unusual view of the playwright’s early celebrity: a meticulous online re-creation of the long-vanished, and wildly popular, first museum dedicated to Shakespeare.
The three-room Shakespeare Gallery, opened by the publisher John Boydell in 1789 on the fashionable Pall Mall in London, closed in 1805. In its day, it was a sensation, attracting emotional crowds who came to gawk at enormous canvases depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies and history plays, commissioned from Britain’s leading painters and hung cheek by jowl on the pale blue walls.
“It was the Georgian equivalent of binge-watching Shakespeare,” said Janine Barchas, an English professor who led the project.
The digital re-creation — the first detailed visualization of the gallery, scholars say — gives a glimpse of a high-water moment of Bardolatry, not long after the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon that had helped cement the playwright as a defining national figure.
The re-creation also captures a crucial moment in the birth of modern museum culture, with its democratic appeals to the culture-hungry middle class.
“Today, museums live or die by their ability to engage the public,” said Rosie Dias, an art historian at the University of Warwick and the author of “Exhibiting Englishness,” a recent book about the Shakespeare Gallery. “That’s something you can really trace back to Boydell.”
[ . . . ]
But during her research, Ms. Barchas — who is also a curator of the exhibition “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” opening at the Folger Shakespeare Library in August — realized that the building that housed the Reynolds show had earlier been home to Boydell’s perhaps even more influential exhibition.
“It was an amazing coincidence,” she said.
While Ms. Barchas had already recreated the gallery space of the building (now demolished) for the Austen exhibition, figuring out exactly how Boydell had filled it was a challenge. More than half of the 86 works in the gallery in 1796, the year chosen for the reconstruction, had been lost. While a surviving watercolor of the gallery gave its general look, and engravings provided reduced black-and-white copies of the artworks, a catalog for the show did not indicate the size or wall location of the paintings.
To figure out the sizes of the missing paintings, Ms. Barchas created a rough algorithm based on a handwritten list of fees paid to the painters, which showed, unsurprisingly, that more famous artists like Reynolds and George Romney earned more per square inch than lesser lights.
[ . . . ]
The gallery was part of Boydell’s larger entrepreneurial effort to promote a distinctly English school of art to middle-class consumers. The real economic engine wasn’t the admission fee of one shilling, but the high-quality engravings by Boydell that were sold in the museum’s shop and by subscription.
[ . . . ]
It remains to be seen if the digital resurrection will have the same appeal to the Shakespeare-mad public in 2015 as it did in 1796. But Ms. Barchas said she was gratified by an emailed reaction she got from Ms. Brylowe, who wrote simply: “Dude. I am literally weeping.”
Ms. Barchas said, “That sets a new standard for success in a scholarly project.”
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.563 Wednesday, 16 December 2015
From: Mark Mannette <
Date: December 15, 2015 at 2:02:24 PM EST
Subject: Bear Death
One slight comment to the Complete Deaths. I did not see a category for mauled by a bear. In The Winter’s Tale we often refer to the famous exit of Antigonus, but there is also a descriptive account of his death. If they are including Ophelia’s drowning, which also occurs offstage and through description, then they should include the death of Antigonus as well.
Just a thought for what is worth. If it is in fact “Complete Deaths,” then it should be complete.
Thanks,
Mark T. Mannette
Associate Professor
Director of Theatre
Newman University
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.562 Wednesday, 16 December 2015
From: Ellen Moody <
Date: December 14, 2015 at 11:54:50 PM EST
Subject: Pericles at the Folger in DC—West Side Story at Signature in Arlington
This production of Pericles ought to be noticed here:
And West Side Story is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
*********
Theater en rapport: the Folger Pericles & Signature West Side Story speaking to our time
Any one who comes to this blog regularly could come to the conclusion that here in the Washington DC area we’ve had a spate of politically-atune, actuated, effective films and stage plays from Antigone to Trumbo, or this blogger is obsessively seeking these out and writing about them. Where I went has of course not been pure serendipity, nor do I deny enjoying telling others what I’ve seen and recommending what’s significant. Nevertheless I have here mirrored without making any effort the reality that the last few months in DC and Virginia have seen staged and screened as many or more relevant, pertinent, and grounded as deeply in human psyches and family and socially pressured-dramas as in any time I’ve been here over a few years (or in New York City, where I came from in 1980).
This year’s Pericles and West Side Story are en rapport too. Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre was not written with the refugee exodus from the Middle East into Europe of 2015 in mind; Sondheim and Bernstein’s West Side Story was written and a stupendous hit more than 40 years before the endless war abroad, spread of guns with daily massacres, whipped up hatred for “the other” in the last year or so of the Republicans running for President. But effortlessly the first was made to speak to us about powerless wandering individuals in a vast world of treachery, betrayal, exploitation and nature’s indifference, and the second couldn’t help but show us the same violence intrinsic to American male culture as is found in the Oxbow Incident (for example), or city streets then and movie theaters (or agencies, stores, malls, wherever today), the power of the gun to kill so easily, and ethnic hatred.
[ . . . ]
Ellen Moody
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.561 Monday, 14 December 2015
From: Ward Elliott <
Date: December 13, 2015 at 8:23:04 PM EST
Subject: #ShakespeareanLivesMatter
Shocking data:
http://www.improbable.com/2015/12/13/totting-up-the-deaths-by-this-and-that-in-shakespeares-plays/
Totting up the deaths by this and that in Shakespeare’s plays
This pie chart shows the relative numbers of deaths — due to different causes — that happen on stage in William Shakespeare’s plays. In this tallying, death by being-baked-into-pie is as frequent as death-by-hanging. (The pie death occurs in Titus Andronicus.)
The chart was, reportedly, assembled in connection with a new play in which all those deaths — 74 in total — are re-enacted in a single play written by persons other than Shakespeare. The play, called “The Complete Deaths“, produced by the British company Spymonkey, is scheduled to premiere in May 2016. (Thanks to Alice Dreger and Deborah Blum for bringing this to our attention.) One critic professes to be full of huff about this.
Others have attempted to compile and to some extent analyze some of the death-by-Shakespeare data. One effort is documented in this medical study:
“Faints, fits, and fatalities from emotion in Shakespeare’s characters: survey of the canon,” Kenneth W. Heaton, British Medical Journal, 333(7582), December 26, 2015, pp. 1335–1338.
Additional Information:
Shakespeare's 74 death scenes in a single play more gory than Game of Thrones
Alice Vincent
3 December 2015 • 4:10PM
There may have been five “droppers” – a theatrical term for fainting audience members – overcome by the fake bloodshed at Titus Andronicus at The Globe last year, but one new play is promising considerably more than the nine brutal on-stage deaths in Shakespeare’s first tragedy.
The Complete Deaths will detail all of the Bard’s 74 scripted deaths in one play, from early rapier thrusts to the more elaborate viper-breast-application adopted by Cleopatra. The total makes Shakespeare’s complete works more gory than notorious HBO TV show Game of Thrones, which has scripted 61 deaths in 50 episodes, including the controversial burning of a child at the stake.
Tim Crouch, who is directing the play for Spymonkey production company, told The Times he had spent “a lot of time going through each play” to find all 74 human deaths – he has excluded that of a fly that meets a sticky end in Titus Andronicus.
The Complete Deaths will open at the Northampton Royal and Derngate Theatre in May 2016, before heading to the Brighton Festival for its official premiere and touring the country. On the show’s website, the play is described as “a solemn, sombre and sublimely funny tribute to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death”, and will be performed by just four actors.
http://www.spymonkey.co.uk/the-complete-deaths.html
The Complete Deaths
There are 74 onstage deaths in the works of William Shakespeare - 75 if you count the black ill-favoured fly killed in Titus Andronicus.
They range from the Roman suicides in Julius Caesar to the death fall of Prince Arthur in King John; from the carnage at the end of Hamlet to snakes in a basket in Antony & Cleopatra; from Pyramus and Thisbe to young Macduff. There are countless stabbings, plenty of severed heads, some poisonings, two mobbings and a smothering. Enorbarbus just sits in a ditch and dies from grief. And then there’s the pie that Titus serves the Queen of the Goths.
Spymonkey will perform them all - sometimes lingeringly, sometimes messily, sometimes movingly, sometimes musically, always hysterically. The four ‘seriously, outrageously, cleverly funny clowns' (Time Magazine) will scale the peaks of sublime poetry, and plumb the depths of darkest depravity. It may even be the death of them.
Directed by Tim Crouch (I, Malvolio, An Oak Tree, Adler & Gibb) and designed by Spymonkey regular Lucy Bradridge, THE COMPLETE DEATHS will be a solemn, sombre and sublimely funny tribute to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
THE COMPLETE DEATHS will premiere at Brighton Festival in May 2016, with preview performances at Royal & Derngate Northampton, and then on tour from May 2016.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/12032270/Shakespeare-doesnt-deserve-this-monstering.html
Shakespeare doesn’t deserve this monstering – Telegraph
Once upon a time – 200 years ago next June to be exact – Mary Shelley wrote a story in which a man built a monster from a medley of body-parts. The monster took on a life of his own, and so did the story. Frankenstein – originally the name of the creator and not of his creature – walked out from between the covers and into the movies, where he was refashioned in the shape of an automated grandfather clock with a bolt through his neck. In most films he starred alone, but in some he teamed up in a medley with Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. As Frankenstein’s fame increased, Mary Shelley – who had foretold the future – found her fame forgotten.
The phenomenon in which characters break away from their creators and take on a life of their own might be called the “Frankenstein effect”. It will be at work over Christmas in Dickensian, a new series from the BBC in which Dickens’s best-known characters all live together on the same cobbled street – so Fagin will meet Scrooge in the Queen Vic, having passed the laundrette where crabby Miss Havisham is doing a service wash for dotty old Mr Pickwick.
The scriptwriter, Tony Jordan, describes his show as a freeing of Dickens’ iconic characters from the narrative of the book, with the aim of bringing a new generation of readers to the author. Really? In the same way that Bride of Frankenstein brought a new generation of readers to Mary Shelley, or Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, increased interest in the works of Bram Stoker?
[ . . . ]