========================================================================= Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 12:56:25 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0001 [was 9.001] Re: Dreams; R2 & MND MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.001 Friday, 2 January 1998. [1] From: David Small Date: Monday, 29 Dec 1997 13:02:33 -0500 Subj: Such stuff as dreams, etc. [2] From: Chris Stroffolino Date: Monday, 29 Dec 1997 13:54:52 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 8.1261 Re: RICHARD !! and MND [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Small Date: Monday, 29 Dec 1997 13:02:33 -0500 Subject: Such stuff as dreams, etc. My errant rendering of "such stuff as dreams are made on" as "made OF" drew an interesting and all too accurate observation from Michael Yogev on the underlining anxieties about woman so often found in our myths and literature. When I pushed the SEND button, realizing that I had just mistyped the quote, my Homer Simpson-like "DOE!" resounded through the corridors of my office building like a gunshot. Fortunately, most people were at lunch. I am reminded of the move, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, based on the Ray Bradbury novel. When it was released several years ago, I was working for a local television news show. Our movie and theater critic had a review of it. The anchorman read the introduction to the review from the Teleprompter, and, unfamiliar with the passage from MACBETH, stopped, looked puzzled, and then improvised: "-and now here with a review of the new movie, Something Wicked. . . Comes This Way---" I suggested later that perhaps he was referring to a little known version which begins: "By the bailing of my hay-" [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Chris Stroffolino Date: Monday, 29 Dec 1997 13:54:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 8.1261 Re: RICHARD !! and MND Dear Marilyn A. Bonomi-Well, yes and no. I agree that the connections between R2 and MND are not as blatantly there as they are between MND and RJ-and when I have taught undergrad Shakespeare I have not found it extremely useful to suggest comparisons between these two plays as paper topics, but this doesn't mean that there AREN'T points of similarity between the two plays, aside from the much touted "lyrical" style, it is arguable that BOTH plays have a metadramatic fifth act. James Calderwood investigates some of these comparisons in his 1972 book and some recent critics have taken this further (John Blanpied, for instance and though I'm blanking on the name there was an article in ELR a couple years back about "the lamentable comedy of Richard II" which raised some important genre bending questions. I would also like to mention my as-yet-unpublished piece on THE DUCHESS OF YORK as comic heroine (though I maintain she's more like Portia than any of the women in MND, who are not yet comic heroines in the sense of the middle comedies, although Helena has certain "tragic hero" qualities). By the way, WHY isn't Richard an adolescent? And why isn't Richard's belief in "divine right" (in the first couple of acts) so different from Hermia dn Lysander's reductive version of "true love" which they adhere to (in words at least) for the first acts. Both are challenged by their respective plays, and perhaps in ways that can be fruitfully compared rather than simply contrasted. Chris Stroffolino ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 13:03:00 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0002 [was 9.002] Costner's the Postman MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.002 Friday, 1 January 1998. From: Richard A Burt Date: Monday, 29 Dec 1997 16:53:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: Costner's the Postman Some subscribers may be interested to know that The Postman thematizes Shakespeare. (Costner's character is nicknamed "Shakespeare.") The film is awful, to be sure. Best, Richard ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 13:17:12 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0003 [was 9.003] Re: Postmodern MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.003 Friday, 1 January 1998. [1] From: Ira Abrams Date: Monday, 29 Dec 1997 17:52:34 -0500 Subj: SHK 8.1264 Postmodern [2] From: Michael Yogev Date: Wednesday, 31 Dec 1997 01:25:03 +0200 Subj: Re: SHK 8.1264 Postmodern [3] From: Norm Holland Date: Wednesday, 31 Dec 97 11:35:25 EST Subj: Gift from an ex-wise-man [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ira Abrams Date: Monday, 29 Dec 1997 17:52:34 -0500 Subject: SHK 8.1264 Postmodern I just received what I am tempted to interpret as a second, almost unbearably verisimiliar installment to the satire on post-modernism circulated by Norman Holland. If only T. Hawkes were a pseudonym and his letter intended as a send-up. Unfortunately, I suspect this is not the case. Even more unfortunately, though I think there would be few on this e-circuit so bold today as to make the sorts of claims and criticisms articulated in T.'s letter, there are even fewer of us who are willing to say exactly why we forebear to embrace post-modernism. This threatens to leave the impression that the waning of post-modernism means, inexorably, the rise of stupidity and simpleton conservatism in the Humanities. To let T.'s letter pass threatens to suggest that those of us who enjoyed the humor of the NYT satire and who do not proudly wield the forensic tool of deconstruction... ...believe that << there are genuine material historical certainties>> ...believe further that <> ...do not read <> ...are <> Christians who believe that <> ...refuse to consider that << that there are other and maybe better ways of doing and running things, that what we have now>> ...<> ...fail to perceive that << the sort of thinking lurking at the back of spoof titles like "The End of Manichean, BipolarGeopolitics Turned My Boyfriend Into an Insatiable Sex Freak (and I Love It!)." is really a bit sinister.>> ...endorse (and understand) the bi-partite claim that <> Without confronting each of these peculiar possibilities, I think it is very important that the record of exchanges such as this one reflect the fact that not everyone participating is willing to grant the premise that if you're not with post-modernism you're against the things it is supposed to be for. In a world in which the status quo carries no more cachet than the borders and bridges of Bosnia, it is hard to see how post-modernism's opposition to the way things are is in any distinctive way noteworthy. As for the detailed charges in T's letter-all of us, as I would hope, read philosophers with funny names, accept that things can change, work to make change, have <> (though perhaps this ought to be regarded as an ambiguous good, allowing us to rationalize the pain we cause to others and to ourselves), and exercise due scholarly skepticism with regard to assertions of <>. There is a certain youthful-if myopic-bravado evident in the sweeping moral claims and the self-exculpatory rhetoric of the discourse of post-modernism, there is also a dark side to the absence of emotional perspective that it entails. If the post-modernist claim to be bringing about a better world is not justified, then how does one justify the personal harm wrought by this mode of discourse? I remember a few years ago listening to the very intelligent post-modernist in the office next to mine try to persuade a bewildered freshman composition student that he had committed a crime tantamount to rape by "forcing" a female character to use the word "bitch" in a creative writing assignment. Is this sort of textual criticism judiciously administered and justified medicine? or is it a sophisticated mode of causing harm? If the claim that post-modernists want to make is that their method and their thought is morally superior-or rather, that those of us who do not wave the post-modernist standard are morally inferior-then it is at least time for some evidence on this point to replace the habit of insinuation and facile, world-historical self-congratulation that all too often gets a bye in our professional conversations. Ira Abrams [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Yogev Date: Wednesday, 31 Dec 1997 01:25:03 +0200 Subject: Re: SHK 8.1264 Postmodern Dear Terry Hawkes, Thank YOU for the lovely Hannukah gift--Hannukah has been less than thrilling this year, and your contribution to its spirit is much appreciated. Cheers for a Happy New Year, Michael Yogev [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Norm Holland Date: Wednesday, 31 Dec 97 11:35:25 EST Subject: Gift from an ex-wise-man Dear Terence Hawkes, To quote the immortal Sherlock, This "shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data." I cannot, of course, speak for the author of the spoof, but as for myself, your inferences about my politics, my religious beliefs, and my attitudes toward postmodernism, "eternal verities," and Xmas are quite wide of the mark, not to say downright fatuous. I cannot imagine how you arrived at your conclusions, except to guess that you may have had too much-or too little-Xmas punch. You are right about two things, however. I do enjoy Handel's _Messiah_, and I was sitting in an armchair while listening to it. Neither fact (and of course I write that word _sous r^ature_) prevents me from being, at least selectively, postmodern in outlook. --Best, Norm ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 13:34:22 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0004 [was 9.004] Re: Shakespeare's "Artifice"; Spanish Tragedy MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.004 Friday, 1 January 1998. [1] From: Abigail Quart Date: Tuesday, 30 Dec 1997 02:20:40 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 8.1263 Q: Shakespeare's "Artifice" [2] From: Jacquie Hanham Date: Tuesday, 30 Dec 1997 11:41:30 +0000 (GMT) Subj: Spanish Tragedy [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Abigail Quart Date: Tuesday, 30 Dec 1997 02:20:40 -0600 Subject: Re: SHK 8.1263 Q: Shakespeare's "Artifice" May I recommend Frankie Rubenstein's book, "A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance," as a likely place to look for what Partridge dare not say? To quote her introduction, "One purpose of this dictionary is to identify the hundreds upon hundreds of still unnoted puns...to extend the Act of Partridge to cover those many acts usually ignored in textual footnotes-the erotic practices of heterosexuals and homosexuals (including lesbians), perverts, castrates, and the impotent; to illustrate that the scatological puns appeared usually in a context that was also sexually bawdy, and that the ethnic puns were as sexually snide then as now." Check out "dulcet," "lark," and "twelve" just for starters. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jacquie Hanham Date: Tuesday, 30 Dec 1997 11:41:30 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Spanish Tragedy [Editor's Note: I received the posting below from someone who appears not to be a member of SHAKSPER; however, in that Kyd has been a recent topic of discussion, I am sending it out to the membership. You certainly may respond to the list, but I would also recommend that you copy or write directly to J.HANHAM@drama.hull.ac.uk. -HMC] I've just written my MA dissertation on the 20th century stage history of "The Spanish Tragedy". Would you be interested in a copy? There have been three major productions, Glasgow Citizens 1978, National Theatre 1982 (revived in 1984) and RSC 1997. There have also been several other less well-known productions most of them by amateur companies. All the productions had mixed reviews. Violence was prominent in all of them, especially the Citz' version. In all cases reviewers remarked that the play worked well on stage, despite some difficulties they had with some of Kyd's verse. Each production tackled Revenge in different ways. Michael Boyd's production was particularly interesting in this respect, he altered the ending so that Revenge, who was hooded throughout, revealed himself to be Hieronimo. The production certainly had an impact on audiences, especially Robert Glenister's splendid Lorenzo, and of course the sensationalism of the tongue episode - it didn't raise a laugh though, so from that point of view it worked very well. Please let me know if you'd like any more information. I think it's a wonderful play with huge performance potential. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 13:40:39 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0005 [was 9.005] Qs: Price Check; Unveiling Allegory MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.005. Friday, 1 January 1998. [1] From: Steven Marx Date: Tuesday, 30 Dec 1997 12:07:06 -0800 Subj: Price Check [2] From: E. H. Pearlman Date: Thursday, 01 Jan 1998 17:40:37 -0700 (MST) Subj: [Unveiling Allegory] [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Steven Marx Date: Tuesday, 30 Dec 1997 12:07:06 -0800 Subject: Price Check Does anybody know or know how to find out the original cost of a First Folio and an approximate cost from book dealers or at auction today. I'm also looking for an original and present day price for the King James Bible first edition. I'm not shopping for anything but information. Steven Marx [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: E. H. Pearlman Date: Thursday, 01 Jan 1998 17:40:37 -0700 (MST) Subject: [Unveiling Allegory] Query: in Titus Andronicus, Tamora pretends to be the allegorical figure of Revenge, but Titus sees through the disguise and recognizes that she is the queen of the Goths. Can anyone recall other instances in which allegory is similarly unveiled? Off-list replies welcomed. Thanks. EP (ehpearlman@castle.cudenver.edu) ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 13:48:10 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0006 [was 9.006] REview of Vendler's Book on the Sonnets MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.006 Friday, 1 January 1998. From: Skip Nicholson Date: Tuesday, 30 Dec 1997 12:33:04 -0800 Subject: Re: SHK 8.1224 Vendler's Book on the Sonnets Mona Simpson's review of Helen Vendler's *The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets* appeared in Sunday's Los Angeles Times Book Review. It's on line at: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/BOOKS/t000117871.html and here is the text (clean, I hope. I sometimes have trouble with word processor codes that don't always strip out of a file as I would have them) Skip Nicholson South Pasadena (CA) HS ----------------------- Los Angeles Times Book Review Sunday, December 28, 1997, pp. 3-4 O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS. By Helen Vendler . Harvard University Press: 672 pp., $35 By MONA SIMPSON Copyright Los Angeles Times Though I never attended Harvard College, I consider Helen Vendler to be one of my teachers. I came across one of her books in the stacks of the UCLA research library when I was in high school and just learning to read. At that time, she helped me contend with Wallace Stevens. Later, I depended on her foundations for my own readings of Keats. I'm particularly grateful for her patient delvings into Seamus Heaney's lexicon and for her introduction to A.R. Ammons, whom I first encountered in an anthology of hers. That was a case in point of her almost invisible brilliance. She chose "Easter Sunday," arguably Ammons' most haunting poem, and cut it to a perfectly resonant page. I don't always agree with her judgments of contemporary poets, and I'm sure she'd drive me crazy if I were a poet. (Along with Marjorie Perloff, she's considered a bit of a St. Peter, deciding who gets in.) While she can open a poem and organize it, take apart the strands and lay it out neatly in stacks like a good mother helping her child with homework, I find some omissions in her taste. She lacks appetite for the stark, the Shaker in poetry. But then, compatible verdicts are not what I read scholarship for. I didn't always agree with R.P. Blackmur, and no one in their right mind could agree with Nabokov or Henry James' assessments even half the time. I read Helen Vendler's prose for the reason I read any prose. I'm persuaded by the voice; I feel the presence of a sympathetic sensibility and-as she has said of the speaker in Shakespeare's Sonnets-I believe she has created a "credible" intellectual self. In her essays, one feels a mind constantly working at the old questions of how to live and feel through the reading of poetry. And after a while, one holds a common body of reference. (Granted, yours is always a subset of hers. She sang the liturgy in Latin in seventh grade. Growing up, she wasn't allowed movies or TV; her parents thought of those as "unimproving ways to spend time." I worked high school nights at a California Ice Cream Parlor, reading Proust and straining to make out Grateful Dead lyrics from the radio.) And now Vendler has taken on Shakespeare's Sonnets, the cycle of 154 poems that has riveted and intrigued readers for the nearly 400 years since they were published. They begin with an older poet giving advice to a beautiful young nobleman. The tone of the poems changes from fond paternal interest to infatuation, intimacy, passion, as the poet continues to address the young man who seems at first to "lead him on." Finally, the poet reckons with his own life for what it is: a solitary passion. Then the Young Man takes up with the poet's girlfriend, a promiscuous Dark Lady toward whom the poet voices a full range of love and rage. Shakespeare comes late in the sonnet tradition, and his linguistic transmutations imply a panoply of human moods with complex accuracy. They animate the almost smug comfort of even imagined reciprocity; the raw pain of jealous suspicion; the wintry admission that the beloved, though reassuring, does not feel the same way; and the older poet's subsequent endless accommodations, his scaling down of expectation. Part of the poems' lasting appeal is just how "real" they feel. The unlikely nature of the protagonists (an Older Poet, a Young Man, a promiscuous Dark Lady, a Rival Lady) makes them more striking and has given rise to volumes of speculation about the work, which, according to John Bayley, falls into two critical camps: Those scholars on the hunt for the real story behind the Sonnets, and those who read the sequence, as they would a novel, assuming invention, not only linguistic but also in terms of "plot" and "character." Vendler wisely reminds us the "feelings attached to fetishistic or anomalous sexual attraction are identical to the feeling attached to more conventional sexual practice, and it is essentially feelings, not love-objects, which are traced in lyric." Which is to say that the feelings are true, whether or not there ever was a Young Man in Shakespeare's life or a Dark Lady. Written over nine years, "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" prints the poems in their 1609 Quarto version and in a modernized version of Vendler's own (for which she seems to have picked and chosen from G.B. Evans' 1996 edition and Stephen Booth's comprehensive commentary.) Each sonnet is followed by her commentary. In her introduction, Vendler says she is mainly interested in the poems as verbal contraptions, and she creates her own technical apparatus to look at their overlapping structures. She catalogs the words in the couplets that also appear in the body of the sonnet and labels them "Couplet Ties." (She counts a word and its family of variation as one word for this purpose.) She charts enjambments, anagrams, phonemic and graphic patterns and considers the structural units of meaning, whether they are Italian, Petrarchian or one of Shakespeare's many variations. Though intricate and technical, Vendler's analysis of the Sonnets is never boring. Even the conceit of the Couplet Tie, which at first annoyed me with its other-sonnet-another-couplet-tie monotony, had me convinced of its power by Sonnet 67, in which every quatrain contains a variation of the word "live" except the couplet. There, Shakespeare refrains from offering the word, and this disappointment contributes to the ominous feeling one is left with at the sonnet's end, emphasizing "that the young man does not 'live' in the present, rather, he is a preserved relic of the past." As the Poet reconciles himself to the nature of the Young Man's somewhat shallow affections, he backs away from his early hopes for reciprocity and concentrates his devotion on the building of the linguistic monuments to him. Commenting on sonnet 55, Vendler notices that the speaker scales down his hyperbolic suggestion of an audience suggested by "all posterity" to "the more probable audience for the Sonnets, lovers." It's hard to imagine many contemporary American lovers reading either the Sonnets or any commentary about them, but the Vendler book can be read by all lovers of poetry. It's not only for academicians. Though my copy of the galley is full of technical words, such as "epideictic," "commination," "proleptically" and "aureate," underlined and looked up, it is, in fact, easy to read. Though meticulous, Vendler is consistently, reassuringly sensible. She stays in the poem. She's interested in corners of feeling, new positions, new hues on the spectrum of daily passion we may recognize but not know to name. (The way Degas, for instance, may introduce a physical position one has bent over into many times but never seen depicted.) The tone of her discourse reminds me of what English classes in college used to be, when students took them because they loved books and words. Now, English departments are often animated and divided by minds passionate about historical context, sociology, psychology, gender politics or some other kind of politics. Vendler writes in the introduction: "In the past I have often wished, as I was reading a poem, that I could know what another reader had noticed in it; and I leave a record here of what one person has remarked so that others can compare their own noticings with mine." Her meticulous structures of analysis are a gift: They quietly allow one's own interpretive faculty to rise. By clearing up all the mechanical obstacles to understanding, your own apprehension of the poem emerges whole, and you've only to recognize it. Sometimes reading the Sonnets before and after the commentary gives me back the feeling of learning to read again. The teacher would ask a question, and I knew the answer before I could really commit to it. I knew in some feeling way that the letters on the board said "truck," but I couldn't get it out. My answer seemed too internal, murky, too my own, maybe too easy to be true. Later, of course, I could read, but the moment of learning itself-like the moment the leaf grows in those photosynthesis films-is always missed, never experienced. Vendler's myriad attentions to the minute patterning of words and sounds yield just such mysterious glories. She diligently, even stringently, employs her technical surveys, and what emerges from beneath their grid is surprising, substantial, evanescent. II She couldn't care less who the "real" (dead) subjects of the Sonnets are (the closest she comes to speculation is to say, after sonnet 82: "the use of the word hue . . . suggests once again that it may have been some occult reference (now lost) to the young man's name.") She's a subdued commentator. She's not the kind of critic who says of sonnet 73's Bare ruined choirs: "Wow!" Or of sonnet 30: Sessions ("Sessions!") of sweet silent thought. She is interested in the inner life of the speaker and refuses any political judgment of content. Yet she's amazingly big-minded; Shakespearean in her own voice, in the sense that it's hard to feel exactly where she is located. With so many critics, you can tell just what they're looking for and from what angle. She seems more or less to take what's there. There's no strict agenda to her noticings. She's nimble imaginatively. "It is true there is irony in the Sonnets . . . but there are also, I believe, Sonnets of hapless love-intended as such by the author, expressed as such by the speaker. . . . Judging the presence or absence of authorial irony is a matter of poetic tact in reading." At one point, she asks rhetorically, "Is irony, lover of proverbs, a better state than hopeful attachment and anguished loss?" Vendler strongly suggests that the answer is no. But she's not dippy about passion either. Her vantage isn't the love-is-the-only-high-road air sometimes evinced by people who've recently left long-time spouses. When Michael Silverblatt asked her on his radio program, "Bookworm," if there were any ignored Sonnets she particularly liked, she cited sonnet 50, in which the speaker is riding a horse. She finds the speaker's obsession unsympathetic. "Nowhere is the obsessiveness of love better exemplified in the Sonnets than in the speaker's response to his bloodied horse's groan. . . . We are meant, I think, to wince at this tenacity in private grief in the presence of the horse's pain." This is as close as she comes to political correctness. She intends us to believe Shakespeare, separate from his speaker, sides with the horse. Though her tone is maternal (one longs for an adverb to imply a kind of female avuncularity), her emotional temper is expansive and worldly. She prefers the Sonnets to the young man to those to the Dark Lady. Only occasionally, she lets her own language soar, as in her assertion that the last five lines of sonnet 15, "sung under the sign of the sullying scythe, remain a hymn to the human love-syllable, you." She has many ways into a poem. She observes of the beautiful nocturne, sonnet 29, that "Nothing much happens by way of events; but there is an inexhaustible supply of fresh scenes (a characteristic of lyric from Petrarch on, as we see the lover on horseback or sleepless in bed.)" In sonnet 61, she puzzles together a ghost poem ("indecorous, shaming, accusing") beneath the more "sayable" poem. The tone begins gently, with the speaker wondering whether he's being kept awake by the young man's spirit from afar prying "To find out shames and idle hours in me." Then he sadly recognizes that it is not the Young Man's jealousy but his own, tormenting him. "Oh no, thy love, though much, is not so great; / It is my love that keeps mine eye awake." After identifying several Sonnets as reply poems, she goes ahead and writes out dialogues between the young man and the speaker, which could have taken place just before the sonnet begins. III A factor in all her interpretations is her deeply oral conception of poetry. She first heard these Sonnets as a child, recited by her mother. She herself learned all 154 by heart. Her ear training is profound and often yielding. The book is accompanied by a CD onto which Vendler has recorded the Sonnets. It's a relief to hear a reader, rather than an actor, read the poems. When asked by the Paris Review whether teaching helped her criticism, she replied, "Oh, it would have to, if only because you learn more poems by heart every year from teaching them. They work on you, then in a different way they work on you when you're reading them off the page. . . . Out of the depths of my heart will come a quotation completely unbidden. And then I will think: Oh, so that's what I am feeling today. On any occasion when a response is called for, what usually comes to my lips is a line from some poem or other. My son laughs about this and says, 'A quotation for every occasion, Mom.' " What first struck her about Wallace Stevens was hearing his voice on a record. IV Like the best teachers, she's willing, at times, to seem dumb and a little goofy. "There is no return to a closing statement by the poet," she says, referring to sonnet 32, "e.g. (with my apologies) 'If thou wilt read me thus, I'll not repine / For all I think and all I write is shine.' " Talking about sonnet 42, she resorts to charts. YM-via S-M M-via S-YM S loses YM S loses M [Note: in the diagram, the YM and the M in the two previous lines are bracketed together with the notation "they find each other."] She's willing to tell us "the gist of" a quatrain. When she damns Shakespeare, she damns gently. "Sonnet 7 has little to recommend itself imaginatively . . . ," and sonnet 26 "is not notable for imagination." My only impatience with the book is that sometimes I think she displays too much evenhandedness. There's a relentless fairness that makes me want to go out and shout, dance, sing Bruce Springsteen lyrics, live in the language now. For my taste, she's occasionally one degree too reverent of writers. Sometimes I feel she's a little cowed by Shakespeare. She's a believer in the contradicting, antithetical mind, but she doesn't grant him ample mental range to admit one simply uninspired outpouring, one true dud. V In a way, a straight-through reading of the book seems false, as one would more naturally leaf through the Sonnets, according to mood. At first, her responses feel like individual essays, but about halfway in you realize huge orchestral movement is being made from the resonating phrases. Her argument about the speaker's hope for and delusion of reciprocity in the early Sonnets is like the prelude in a long novel, such as "Swann in Love." She persuasively demonstrates how Shakespeare creates a "credible self," in the form of the speaker, by following his fast, contradictory thoughts in "this portrait of a mind plunging among its categories to find resemblances as it does in the creation of multiple temporal phases." In addition to the gathering force of her major, binding thematic arguments and persuasions, there are the smaller pleasures of her erudite asides, her deep, easy knowledge of church Latin, liturgy, of Keats lore (he remembered sonnet 97 in his ode "To Autumn") and Chapman lore (Chapman believed he was in communication with Homer.) The volume is sprinkled with pertinent references to Keats, Hopkins, Stevens, Heaney, Yeats, Frost and fewer than I personally would have expected to Marlowe. VI Vendler argues that the couplet in the Sonnets should be taken not as a resolution to the poem but as a coda, with many possible relations to the body of the work (summarizing, reinforcing, refuting, ironic.) As my coda, I want to mention one aspect that I admire in Vendler's work, which she may not even like. I accord her the same stature I accord Joan Didion and Alice Munro-contemporary artists of prose fiction, women and personal icons. She's someone of genuine intellectual stature who also writes seriously about motherhood, from both sides, without sentimentality. "My mother was the first person to introduce me to Shakespeare's Sonnets. She quoted them often, and had memorized many of them. Her last pieces of writing (which we found after Alzheimer's disease had robbed her of memory) were fragments of the Sonnets which, either from fear of forgetting or as a means of self-reassurance, she had written down on scraps of paper. It is no mean tribute to the Sonnets that they, of the hundreds of poems she knew by heart, were the last to fade." ------- Mona Simpson Is the Author of "Anywhere But Here," "The Lost Father" and "A Regular Guy." Copyright Los Angeles Times ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 14:12:23 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0007 [was 9.007] "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.007 Friday, 1 January 1998. From: Martin Green Date: Wednesday, 31 Dec 1997 19:38:08 -0800 Subject: "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" Since (unless I have missed something) there has so far been no discussion in this forum of Helen Vendler's recently published book, "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets," I will attempt to initiate such a discussion by setting forth some of my thoughts, mostly negative, about that book, in the hope that others will bring to my attention the good things about the book which either I fail to appreciate or have not read. (And I have not yet read the commentaries on all of the Sonnets; what I have read are the prefatory pages, the introduction, and about 20 of the commentaries, focusing so far on those sonnets which are of particular interest to me.) Dr. Vendler states (in the prefatory material, p. xiii, and in the Introduction, p. 13) that she will not attempt to arrive at the "meaning" of the Sonnets, but will attempt to disclose the techniques or strategies which make the words of the Sonnets, and the arrangement of those words, convey so well emotions of all kinds. (This she calls a "mimetic aesthetic result," which she defines, on p. xiii, as the "enact[ment], by linguistic means, [of] moves engaged in by the human heart and mind.") It can come as no surprise, considering how lofty is the goal Dr. Vendler sets for herself, that she fails to accomplish it; what does come as a surprise is how profoundly she fails - - by which I mean that the techniques she uses, and the conclusions she reaches, are not only unconvincing, but also, often, bizarre and inane. Most obvious among these, and meriting very little attention, because Dr. Vendler herself concedes (at p. xvii) that they may be ignored with no detriment to her discussion, are the diagrams accompanying some of her commentaries. These diagrams are offered as visual depictions of significant relationships between and among words, or of the structure of a sonnet, but to me they are, at the very least, completely useless, and at the very most, completely incomprehensible. Here are examples of two completely useless diagrams (please make allowances for the inability to make in an e-mail format exact reproductions of the diagrams): "Structure of Sonnet 26. [ ] [ ] [ Apology ] 6 [lines] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ Hope ] 7 [lines] [ ] [ ] [ Apology ] 1 [line]" And here is a diagram from the commentary on Sonnet 77 (Q stands for Quatrain, C stands for closing couplet; the lines should be seen as arrows, with the arrowhead to the right of the horizontal lines, or at the bottom of the vertical or slanting lines): "Q1 1 line: Glass - - - - 1 line: Dial - - - 2 lines: Book | | | Q2 2 lines: Glass - - - -2 lines: Dial | \ | Q3 4 lines: Book C: [2 lines: Summary}" Those diagrams which I find completely incomprehensible defy transmission by e-mail; I refer the curious reader to the diagrams for Sonnets 34, 69 and 87. Another of Dr. Vendler's odd techniques is identifying what she calls "anagrammatic play." For an example of this, I quote a paragraph from her commentary on Sonnet 20 ("A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,/ Hast thou the Master Mistris of my passion," etc.; the asterisks on either side of a word or phrase delimit material which in the original is italicised): [BEGIN QUOTE] There are some difficulties in the language, notably the climactic emphasis on *hues* (line 7) and the odd *-eth* endings on verbs (*gaze, amaze*) that could apparently have ended as well in *-es.* Bizarre as it may appear, the poem seems to have been created in such a way as to have the individual letters of the word *h-e-w-s* (the Quarto spelling) or *h-u-e-s* in as many lines as possible (I have not checked all the Sonnets, but the random checking of a few has not turned up another sonnet of which a comparable assertion could be made.) The list of available letters (not words) in each of the fourteen lines (Quarto spelling) is as follows: hews, hues, hews, hews, hews, hew[z], hews, hews, hews, hews, he[ ], hues, hews, hues (with a phonetic pun on use). The *h* needed for *hews* is contributed in line 8, by *amazeth,* thereby perhaps explaining the *-eth* endings. *Hew* is climactic in line 7 because it is the word by which the master/mistress controls almost all other lines. The high proportion (2.7 percent) of *w*'s in the total of letters in this sonnet is also explicable by the necessity of making *hew* as often as possible. Though neither *hew* nor *hue* can be found complete in line 11, which contains only an *h* and an *e*,there are of course two *hew's* in line 7, preserving the proportion of one *hew* per line, all *in his controlling.* If this anagrammatic play is in fact intended, the sonnet becomes even more fantastic than its theme suggests. [END QUOTE] Now, there are three things dreadfully wrong with what is set forth in the foregoing paragraph. The first is, that the letters h, e, u, w and s are so common in the Shakespearean word-horde (to say nothing of English in general), that when I myself checked to see what the chances were of finding the phenomenon so marveled upon by Dr. Vendler (I made not a random check, but very sensibly focused on sonnets beginning with "when," of which there are many), I immediately found, in Sonnet 2 (and I checked no further), that each and every line contained the letters h-e-w-s or h-u-e-s - - and, indeed, one of the lines contains the letters twice over. So the occurrence of letters spelling "hues" or "hews" in every line of Sonnet 20 is NOT some kind of fantastic intended anagrammatic conceit, but an inevitable consequence of the extraordinary commonness of the letters h, u, e, w and s in English words. Now, it MAY be that the unusual phenomenon of which Dr. Vendler claims she could find no comparable example is not the mere presence of a lot of h's, u's, e's, w's and s's in the lines of the sonnets, but rather the presence in the lines of a sonnet of words providing letters with which to anagrammatize one word which in the sonnet is especially emphasized, as is *Hews* in Sonnet 20. So I checked on that. Noticing that in Sonnet 91, the words "Horse" in line 4 and "Horses" in line 11 are both capitalized, and therefore, perhaps, important or significant, I looked for "available letters (not words)" with which to anagrammatize them, and - - eureka! - - found in each of the fourteen lines letters which spell "horse"! In fact, in line 4, there is ANOTHER "horse" in addition to the plainly spelled-out "horse" - - and over and above (or perhaps behind) that, in both lines 4 and 11, which each contain the un-anagrammatized horse, appear also the letters a-s-s (or, if you prefer, a-r-s-e), bringing satisfying closure to the "horse" theme of this Sonnet - - strangely ignored by Dr. Vendler. One could go on like this forever (or at least through the 154 sonnets), and, to tell the truth, I enjoy playing the games which Dr. Vendler has invented, although I do not think they add anything to our understanding or appreciation of the Sonnets. Frinstance: I happen to think that the word "Rose" has a special significance in the Sonnets. The word appears, capitalized and italicised, in the second line of the first sonnet, and, always capitalized, in eight other sonnets (all this, of course, in the Quarto text). Now if, as Dr. Vendler suggests with respect to "Hews," Shakespeare intentionally writes his sonnets using words which supply letters designed to anagrammatize important words, then maybe, using the Vendler approach, I can confirm the importance of "Rose" by finding that the words in each line of Sonnet 1 contain letters which lend themselves to spelling out this possibly important word. Sure enough, I find that letters available to form the word "Rose" appear in every line of of Sonnet 1 (Quarto spelling; that word in line 7 has to be spelled "aboundance"!), except line 6 - - but then, as it turns out, there are TWO "roses" in line 9, so this gives us our full complement of 14 roses (one for each line). Does this by itself prove that I'm right about the significance of "Rose"? I doubt it. And maybe the words are not "Rose," but "Eros," or "sore." In fine, it's not likely that these anagrammatic diversions mean anything. So the second thing which is dreadfully wrong in this approach is its suggestion that lurking in the rearranged letters of the words of the Sonnets, could they but be correctly read, are messages from William Shakespeare: a "Sonnet Code," perhaps. If Dr. Vendler's book, which has been so highly praised, countenances this approach, what shall we say to those who find "Herbert Hoover" anagrammatized in line 9 of Sonnet 31? What has happened to REAL (aka "old-fashioned") scholarship? The third "dreadful error" is really not so dreadful. In the above-quoted paragraph, Dr. Vendler writes that "*Hew* is climactic in line 7 because it is the word by which the master/mistress controls almost all the other lines." However, *Hews* is not that which controls, but that which is controlled: the master/mistress, "a man in hew" has "all *Hews* in HIS [emphasis supplied] controwling." I leave this subject with the observation that Dr. Vendler makes similar claims with respect to the significance of letters as letters in her commentaries on other Sonnets (and I repeat that I have not read all of her commentaries). She sees (perhaps only out of deference to her "erudite copy-editor" (p. ix)) the word "car" anagrammatized in the words "gRACious," "sACRed" and "tRACt" in other lines of the Sonnet. She believes that the word "widdow" in the first line of Sonnet 9 fascinated Shakespeare, which accounts for the existence in every line of that Sonnet of w's, v's, or u,s, which letter she describes as being mirror-images of themselves, and she calls Sonnet 9, which has a total of 39 u's, v's and w's, a "Fantasy on the Letter W." What, then, is Sonnet 48, which has a total of 40 u's, v's and w's?: why does not Dr. Vendler note here the phenomenon which seemed so significant in Sonnet 9? And is counting letters, and their infinite possible permutations, literary criticism? Sounds, of course, receive attention. Of Sonnet 126, Dr. Vendler notes its "extreme felicity of diction" - - the "extraordinarily dense texture of alliteration and assonance joining almost every word to one or several other words." This is a good description of one of the most remarkable qualities of almost every one of Shakespeare's sonnets, and both of his long poems: their mellifluousness. In the commentary on Sonnet 126, Dr. Vendler lists the words in the sonnet by their consonants and vowels, to show their interrelations: "quietus," for example, appears in the column of "k" words, of "i" words, of "e" words and of "s" words - - which may, I suppose, afford some insight into the liquid diction - - except that also to be considered is how the words are placed in sentences vis-a-vis each other, for that is equally important in determining with what felicity the lines roll off the tongue. The commentary on the sounds in Sonnet 109 contains a curious misstatement: Dr. Vendler notes the existence of long A sounds in the three quatrains of this sonnet (in the words: say, ranged, exchanged, stain, reigned, stained), and writes that "only in the [concluding] couplet is the 'stain' of long A . . . wholly absent, suggesting that it has been removed by love . . . ." But long A in fact IS present in the concluding couplet, in the word "save": "For nothing this wide Universe I call, Save thou my Rose, in it thou art my all." (There's that pesky Rose again! Need I point out to those who have read this far that although lines 2, 6, 7 and 9 of Sonnet 109 are devoid of "Roses" formed by anagrams, the other ten lines have so many atomized roses that, not even counting the capitalized Rose in the couplet, there are in the Sonnet the requisite complement of fourteen roses, thus proving . . . ?) Well, I could go on, discussing, say, what appear to me to be the inadequacies, both in concept and utility, of "key words" (which is what Dr. Vendler calls words which appear in each of the three quatrains of a sonnet); the presumption of the identification of "defective key words" (words which Dr. Vendler thinks should have been in a sonnet, but which aren't), and the unhelpfulness of "couplet ties" (words in the first 12 lines of a sonnet which are repeated in the concluding couplet - - such as, for Sonnet 1, the one word, "world," which tells us absolutely nothing about the theme(s) of Sonnet 1). In some sonnets, the "couplet tie" does encapsulate significant themes - -but in at least as many others, it doesn't. Noting in conclusion that the book does not have a subject index - - a major defect in any scholarly work - - I shall here end this no doubt too-long posting. It's New Year's Eve, and I see that in line 3 of Sonnet 28 one can find the letters (but not the words) which spell out Shakespeare's wish for all his devotees: Happie New Year! ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 14:18:08 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0008 [was 9.008] Re: *Twelfth Night* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.008 Friday, 2 January 1998. [1] From: Marilyn Bonomi Date: Thursday, 01 Jan 1998 10:48:40 -0500 Subj: SHK 8.1266 Re: *Twelfth Night* [2] From: Carl Fortunato Date: Thursday, 01 Jan 98 14:06:00 -0400 Subj: Re: *Twelfth Night* [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Marilyn Bonomi Date: Thursday, 01 Jan 1998 10:48:40 -0500 Subject: SHK 8.1266 Re: *Twelfth Night* Safe versus risky productions, hmm... How about the Yale Repertory Theatre production, I think about 6 years ago-maybe less, but at my age I've long since lost track of time. Staged as a 1960's piece-Feste as a lounge crooner (one of the few things that worked for me, actually), excessively cruel punishment for Malvolio at the end (bloody flogging!), the dissolute nature of the characters making virtually all of them more or less despicable. Olivia as the European nobility breezing in and out. Taking student audiences to see it was an embarrassment. Seeing it as an adult was an embarrassment of a different sort. Anyone else remember this one and willing to comment on it? Happy New Year! Marilyn B. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Carl Fortunato Date: Thursday, 01 Jan 98 14:06:00 -0400 Subject: Re: *Twelfth Night* > Just to correct a small inaccuracy... > I think the version of "Twelfth Night", produced by Renaissance Films, > currently being discussed was directed by Trevor Nunn, rather than by > Sir Peter Hall. > Possibly the best casting in the piece was the county of Cornwall as > the scenery, but Renaissance are good at that - Blenheim Palace in > their Hamlet far outclassed any of the actors. I thought Ben Kingsley as Feste was rather wonderful. He played him as some sort of a holy fool - almost a mystical figure, and I like it very much. The rest of the casting I didn't much care for. Sir Toby was so unimpressive that only don't I remember his name - I don't remember what he looked like. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 19:52:22 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0009 [was 9.009] Re: Price Check MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.009 Saturday, 3 January 1998. [1] From: Stephen Orgel Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 11:43:44 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 9.005 Qs: Price Check; [2] From: R. Thomas Simone Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 15:03:13 -0500 (EST) Subj: FIRST FOLIO prices [3] From: Jim Harner Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 20:40:53 -0600 (CST) Subj: Price Check [4] From: Paul Werstine Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 11:10:43 -0500 (EST) Subj: Price Check [5] From: Leslie Thomson Date: Saturday, 03 Jan 1998 11:37:55 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 9.005 Q: Price Check [6] From: Andrew Murphy Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 17:03:02 +0000 (GMT) Subj: Re: SHK 9.005 Q: Price Check [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephen Orgel Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 11:43:44 -0700 Subject: Re: SHK 9.005 Qs: Price Check; In reply to Steven Marx's price check, the folio sold for 15 shillings unbound; binding in plain calf would have been an additional 3 shillings. As for recent prices, I'm not aware of one that's come on the market for a long time, but last summer a London bookseller had a 4th folio for 37,500 pounds. Peter Blayney's Folger Library pamphlet THE FIRST FOLIO OF SHAKESPEARE has some interesting history about the book's price. Happy shopping. s.o. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: R. Thomas Simone Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 15:03:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: FIRST FOLIO prices Steve Marx asks for current value of a First Folio copy. While note an exceptionally rare book (1000 or so copies), the FF is highly prized. I believe recent sales are rather scanty, but a price in the $750K to 1 Million might do. 3rd edition Folios are available for around $75K. I'm not sure that we have any exact initial price of the FF, but I seem to recall Greg mentioning 30 shillings as an approximation for a price in 1623. A call to a major rare book dealer like Hertiage Books in LA would lead to more accurate information. A very knowledgeable Leo Biondi is the resident expert at Heritage. Happy New Year. Tom Simone [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jim Harner Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 20:40:53 -0600 (CST) Subject: Price Check The best sources for current auction prices of rare books are +Book Auction Records+ and +American Book Prices Current+ (which, despite the title, includes British and Continental auctions). Jim Harner Editor, World Shakespeare Bibliography [4]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Paul Werstine Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 11:10:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: Price Check The Sh. 1st Folio is traditionally said to have cost a pound in 1623; Peter Blayney has noted that there's a copy in the Folger marked on the flyleaf as 15 shillings ({The Shakespeare First Folio} Washington, DC: Folger, 1991, pp. 25-28.) Good luck with the Bible. [5]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Leslie Thomson Date: Saturday, 03 Jan 1998 11:37:55 -0800 Subject: Re: SHK 9.005 Q: Price Check The answer to the question about the original price of the First Folio can be found in Peter Blayney's book, *The First Folio of Shakespeare* (Folger Library Publications), pp. 25-9. The Webster copy, sold in the early 1990's by Sotheby's, fetched $650,000--Peter does not think this has been exceeded. Leslie Thomson [6]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Andrew Murphy Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 17:03:02 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Re: SHK 9.005 Q: Price Check As far as the original price of F1 is concerned, the most frequently quoted figure is #1, but for a very good guide to the possible range of prices (which depended on the state and kind of binding), see Peter Blayney's excellent short book on F1, published by the Folger. Regarding a possible present-day price, it seems hard to say, but I gather when the National Lottery was launched here in the UK, a copy of F1 was brought into the studio and was represented as being worth #1m. I don't think they were offering it as a prize . . . . Hope this is useful Andrew ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 19:59:30 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0010 Re: The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0010 Saturday, 3 January 1998. [1] From: Peter C. Herman" Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 11:34:38 -0800 (PST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.007 "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" [2] From: Chris Stroffolino Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 03:53:14 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.007 "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter C. Herman" Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 11:34:38 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.007 "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" Bravo to Martin Green for articulating (finally!) a critical perspective on Vendler's book. Admittedly, I too have only "grazed" through it, as Vendler suggests, yet I found the contents remarkably thin. I agree with Martin Green that the diagrams don't really help (but I assumed that was because I'm not a structuralist). What bothers me most of all, however, is Vendler's utter disregard for history. Whether or not one is a new, middle, or old style historicist (I tend to align myself with the former), I think that we can pretty much agree that words have particular meanings in particular circumstances and eras (somehow, I think the line "I am tired of poets who are gay") would be interpreted to mean something very differently than what Yeats had in mind), but Vendler seems to think that she doesn't have to know any history. Certainly, her bibliography lacks any contextual works. To give but one example, her comment on "profiteless usurer" in Sonnet 4: Only the third covative, *profitless usurer*, is a true homiletic vocative-to-the-sinner, in which both essence *and* accident are reproved." Well, OK, but this completely misses the fact that during the period Shakespeare wrote these poems, "usurer" was a dirty word and that there was a raging pamphlet war against it. Also, the anti-usury statute of 1570 was debated at least a couple of times. But because Vendler seems to think that the Sonnets can be looked at without regard to their historical contexts, she misses all of this, hence misses the multivalences and complexities of invoking usury. In addition, it is worth noting that the Oxford English Dictionary is missing from her bibliography, leading me at least suspect that she didn't consult it. Finally, Vendler completely sidesteps the important question of dating and authorization. All told, I think that Vendler's book will have limited utility, but not no utility at all. At least we have an academic getting positive attention in the press, which is worth something. Oh, also, the copy I purchased has the cover upside down. Anyone else have the same thing? [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Chris Stroffolino Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 03:53:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.007 "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" Would anybody who's been able to find the Vendler book be willing to share with me (and us) what she has to say about sonnet 8? I would be very curious to see what she does with it. I think the introduction's claim that she is not interested in the MEANING of the sonnets is dubious to say the least (didn't Booth make a similar argument?) chris ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 20:03:58 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0011 Q: Haymarket Theatre MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0011 Saturday, 3 January 1998. From: Patricia Palermo Date: Friday, 02 Jan 1998 16:59:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: Haymarket Theatre Can some kind soul please tell me how to search the holdings of the British Library? I am trying to locate the ledgers, or account books, of the Haymarket Theatre, and I believe they may be held there. Any help gratefully received, Patricia Palermo ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 20:10:38 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0012 Re: *Twelfth Night* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0012 Saturday, 3 January 1998. [1] From: Bernice W. Kliman Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 18:06:06 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.008 Re: *Twelfth Night* [2] From: Peter Hillyar-Russ Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 18:24:27 -0000 Subj: Twelfth Night [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bernice W. Kliman Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 18:06:06 -0500 Subject: Re: SHK 9.008 Re: *Twelfth Night* I recall the production Marilyn Bonomi mentions; it was indeed awful. The imprisonment of Malvolio high up in a wire cage was excellent, though, if you like the idea of cruelty in the play. It was about three years ago; I recall because I went with a granddaughter's class when she was 11. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Hillyar-Russ Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 18:24:27 -0000 Subject: Twelfth Night Recent discussion of Twelfth Night in this forum has observed a tendency to produce this play in a "safe" way, making the whole thing into a "lark". This tendency extends to this season's new production (by Adrian Noble) at the RSC, which (in my opinion) is strong on humour and weak on emotion. Surely the heart of this play lies in the bereavement which both Olivia and Viola suffer for their lost brothers (in Viola's case, of course, mistakenly). Viola and Sebastian are twins, and twin bereavement tends, I understand, to be particularly grievous. One documented feature is a compulsion often experienced by the survivor to assume the identity of the dead sibling. This is, in fact, what Viola does by dressing in man's attire (an action having no clear alternative explanation, beyond its convenience to the dramatist). It is perhaps significant that Shakespeare may have witnessed the effects of twin bereavement, for he was the father of twins, one of whom died. The survivor (Judith) may be imagined as being of about Viola's age - in her mid to late teens - when the play first appeared. Judith's brother, Hamnet, had died when they were eleven, at which pre-pubescent age they might well have been far more confusible than a seventeen year old pair of twins would be. Like Viola, Olivia (why are these names near anagram's?) is also bereaved by a brother's death, but in her case the slightest touch of eroticism dismisses her grief - though her brother actually is dead. Viola's falling in love results in increased sadness, which, when focused by Feste's "Come away death" song becomes almost unendurable. When she tells her story to her new love Orsino, in its misleading terms - "My father had a daughter loved a man, as it may be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship". She becomes so caught up in emotion that her grasp on the normal vocabulary of family relationships slips into the, to my mind, overwhelming sentence: "I am all the daughters of my father's house, and all the brothers [we would expect 'sons'] too, and yet I know not." When Sebastian does return to resolve the tensions in Viola's story we seem to be getting little more than a rewrite of "Comedy of Errors" material - a play written when both of Shakespeare's own twins were alive and certainly young enough to be confusible. In this play the role of the male twin is not really developed - but the next play could well have been Hamlet, and James Joyce, through his character Stephen Dedalus (in Ulysses, in the chapter commonly called "Scylla and Charybdis"), presents a case for seeing Hamlet as a work in which the playwright's own grief for the dead Hamnet is expressed. Here, in Twelfth Night, we may perhaps see something of Shakespeare's observation of his daughter's coming to terms with her brother's death; and her simultaneous developing adult sexuality. When people refer to the "dark" side of this play I suspect they are referring to the iniquitous treatment of Malvolio - certainly most of the examples recently cited refer to Malvolio. This is indisputably true, but I think there is much darkness in the main plot too. The play shows a very clever use of the sub-plot by Shakespeare to "reflect" the opposites of the main plot. The main plot is, I believe, one in which really agonising emotional turmoil is resolved into a perfect happy ending: but Shakespeare is not so simplistic - in the subplot jolly "larking" comedy prevails, but ends in hideous cruelty; enough to blight the happy ending of the main plot, and it is unresolved (as almost all happy endings turn out to be unresolved in real life). Feste links the plots by focusing the drama in both. Peter Hillyar-Russ peter.hruss@lineone.net ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 20:16:49 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0013 Re: Postmodern MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0013 Saturday, 3 January 1998. [1] From: Paul S. Rhodes Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 13:55:08 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 9.003 Re: Postmodern [2] From: Laura Fargas Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 23:09:59 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.003 Re: Postmodern [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Paul S. Rhodes Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 13:55:08 -0600 Subject: Re: SHK 9.003 Re: Postmodern Lord what fools these post-modernists be! There, I hope I established a link, however tenuous, between this current thread and the topic to which this list claims to be dedicated, the works of Shakespeare. I really do not think that this discussion should take place on this list, but since Mr. Hawkes seems intent upon making my sense of humor look bad, I feel compelled to defy my deeply held cyber-conviction that a mailing list should stay on topic and respond. Yes, I did find the Jenny Jones piece hilarious, and, yes, Mr. Hawkes, I found it funny precisely because I think post-modern thought is inherently ridiculous and deserves all the ridicule it gets. Yes, Mr. Hawkes, I believe that Bach is objectively better than, say, Journey or Alice Cooper or the Spice Girls. I believe that Shakespeare's writing is objectively better than say the writing of, say, Andrea Dworkin. Oh, I also think that what he says about the sexes is objectively more profound than what she says. None of this means that I think that the status quo is hunky dory, as you do explicitly suggest. No, no, Mr. Hawkes, that isn't the case at all. Because I also believe in high ideals that man (oh, I know I'm gonna really get it now for using "man" to mean "human being"-that's a crime against the Holy Correct Ghost) must always try to realise, I can look at the status quo, see how woefully short it falls of the lofty ideals of peace, harmony, and love, and, thus, say quite objectively that the status quo is entirely the opposite of hunky dory. This does not mean, Mr. Hawkes, that I have the tendencies of an oppressive tyrant, as you would suggest. No, I would suggest that it is a precisely the post-modernist that has these tendencies. Because the post-modernist denies the very possibilities of transcendent verities, he is attempting to rob humanity of hope. For quite simply the one who denies transcendence condemns, whether he knows it or not, humanity to the prison of time with no hope of liberation. Well, that's my two-cents. I hope I haven't wasted anyone's time. Paul S. Rhodes [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Laura Fargas Date: Friday, 2 Jan 1998 23:09:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.003 Re: Postmodern T. Hawkes to the contrary notwithstanding, "post-modernist" does not inevitably equate with "humor-impaired." I thought the sendup was hilarious, and I simultaneously remain grateful for what, I agree, is the genuinely moral project of deconstructive analysis of literary texts, political institutions, and any other unfortunate subject that happens to attract our attention. Laura Fargas ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 20:21:05 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0014 TransAtlantic Theatre Company MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0014 Saturday, 3 January 1998. From: TransAtlantic Theatre Company Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 18:24:10 +0100 Subject: TransAtlantic Theatre Company TRANSATLANTIC - BILINGÜE A new style of theatre The TransAtlantic Theatre Company is the first English/Spanish bilingual theatre company operating in Spain. Its purpose is to reflect and to help bring together two cultures that are increasingly influencing each other. In the United States the largest ethnic group is rapidly becoming the Hispanic population, the majority of which is bilingual. As a result, "Spanglish" is increasingly being accepted as a viable form of communication. On this side of the Atlantic however, Spain is attempting to reach the level of proficiency in English that other European nations already enjoy. With the globalisation of communications and business, English has emerged as a necessary tool for success in Europe. The TransAtlantic Theatre Company celebrates the mixture of these two rich and important cultures. The TransAtlantic Theatre Company is comprised of bilingual artists from the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Their professional theatrical preparation is based firmly on the English and American theatrical traditions and histories. This permits them to have an intrinsic knowledge of the multiple cultural references that appear in plays written by English speaking dramatists. Ramón Camín and Steve Emerson are at the forefront of the company in Spain. Ramón, General Manager, is a Spaniard whom received his professional training in New York, Boston and Chicago. He returned to Spain in 1995 to make this ambitious project a reality. Steve, Artistic Director, is an American and has considerable professional experience as an actor and a director. Trained in Chicago, Steve has been in charge of directing TransAtlantic's last two projects. Mike Cordina and Nicole Kastrinos represent the company overseas. Mike, based in London, is an Associate Director and the company's Technical Director. Having worked extensively in London's West End, around Britain and internationally as a Technician and Designer, he travels between London and Madrid providing technical assistance to the company as well as designing both lights and sound for each of the productions. Nicole, in New York, represents our interests in The United States. The TransAtlantic Theatre Company also has it's own team of translators, linguists, graphic designers, stage management and fight choreographers. Vanities, an American comedy written by Jack Heiffner, was TransAtlantic's first production in early 1996. Following the lives of three women's from 1964 to 1974, it is an acerbic comedy that reflects each woman's personal evolution from adolescence to adulthood as well as their society's evolution from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the Watergate scandal. It was included in the Semana De La Mujer 1996 theatre festival in Madrid, Spain. Sexual Perversity In Chicago, by David Mamet, was the first production with which TransAtlantic experimented with the phenomenon of bilingualism. Performed in repertory, a Spanish version alternating with the original English version on different days using the same cast of actors, Sexual Perversity In Chicago closed the Festival Dos De Mayo 1996 and opened the Festival De Primavera 1996 in the Sala Tríangulo. However The Tempest, Una Isla, Dos Idiomas, by William Shakespeare has been TransAtlantic's most ambitious and spectacular production. It marked a change in the way that bilingual theatre is perceived in Spain. The Tempest opened in April 1997 at the newly named Teatro Tríangulo with a cast of 23 actors. Combining both English and Spanish within the same production it played to sold -out houses. In this one hour and forty-five minute version of Shakespeare's last play, the natives of the magical island speak in Spanish. The foreigners that are shipwrecked on the island speak in English. Magical characters such as Prospero, Ariel and Caliban speak both, as does Miranda. This use of language highlights the differences and similarities of two cultures that need not be mutually exclusive geographically or emotionally. Romeo y Juliet: amor en 2 lenguas, a bilingual version of the Shakespeare classic is TransAtlantic's current project. Featuring only eight actors and using a similar language format to The Tempest, it is designed as a touring show. With the emphasis on the Spanish language and only 40% English, it allows our audience to understand more of the story. With the use of masks and many costume changes, all the characters are portrayed within it's small company structure. Although all characters are bilingual, Romeo, his family and friends are predominantly Spanish and Juliet's, English. The Nurse, Priest and Prince speak in both languages. Aimed at University and College students studying English, it is a small, compact show with very little set and only a few props. It's use of light and sound create the atmosphere and environment necessary for this hour and a half adaptation. Romeo y Juliet, amor en 2 lenguas opened to the general public at Teatro Tríangulo on the 26th November 1997 to a full house and a standing ovation. If you would like further information on the company, please don't hesitate to contact me on any of the following: e-mail: transat@bitmailer.net phone: 011 34 1 420 13 52 fax: 011 34 1 420 13 52 (please call first) snail mail: TransAtlantic Theatre Company c/Ventura de la Vega 4, 4A 28014 Madrid, Spain ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 14:33:19 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0015 Re: Haymarket Theatre MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0015 Monday, 5 January 1998. [1] From: Michael A. Morrison Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 22:52:17 EST Subj: Re: SHK 9.0011 Q: Haymarket Theatre [2] From: Harry Hill Date: Sunday, 04 Jan 1998 07:59:18 +0000 (HELP) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0011 Q: Haymarket Theatre [3] From: Moray McConnachie Date: Sunday, 04 Jan 1998 09:15:39 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0011 Q: Haymarket Theatre [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael A. Morrison Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 22:52:17 EST Subject: Re: SHK 9.0011 Q: Haymarket Theatre The Haymarket has an on site archive of production records and so forth, which can be visited by appointment. It's in the general offices upstairs. Also, the archivist, Steve Atkinson, is very helpful, though he is rarely at the theatre itself. I used some of the Haymarket materials in my book, John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor (Cambridge '97). I'll see if I can find Steve's address and number for you. All best, Michael A. Morrison [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Harry Hill Date: Sunday, 04 Jan 1998 07:59:18 +0000 (HELP) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0011 Q: Haymarket Theatre I can't help with Haymarket ledgers, but I do have a nice thing above my fireplace; given to me some years ago by the Canadian writer John Metcalf as payment for writing the "bad poetry" for his two novels *Going Down Slow* and *General Ludd*, it is a 2'x 2' lifetime admission ticket to the King's Theatre in the Haymarket, as the theatre was called in 1797, the date on the document. It is signed on the reverse by the then "Stage Manager" who was also its fundraiser, Laurenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist who had left the composer and gone to London to seek greater fortune. The owner of the ticket, who had paid L150 for it, sold it to an opportunistic Scot the following year for L75. Harry Hill [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Moray McConnachie Date: Sunday, 04 Jan 1998 09:15:39 +0000 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0011 Q: Haymarket Theatre The usual way to search the BL via the Web is through the address http://opac97.bl.uk. *However*, the manuscript catalogues are not online (indeed, I don't believe they're computerised at all), so, if you can't visit, I suggest you write to the Keeper of Western Manuscripts at the BL inquiring about these items, and they will have a look for you. I suspect the folk at the current Haymarket Theatre might also have some idea of where things have gone - most big theatres have an archivist. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 14:39:58 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0016 Re: The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0016 Monday, 5 January 1998. [1] From: Laura Fargas Date: Sunday, 4 Jan 1998 05:41:36 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0010 Re: The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" [2] From: Curtis Perry Date: Monday, 05 Jan 1998 09:45:11 -0700 (MST) Subj: The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Laura Fargas Date: Sunday, 4 Jan 1998 05:41:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0010 Re: The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" Peter Herman wrote: > What bothers me most of all, however, > is Vendler's utter disregard for history. Whether or not one is a new, > middle, or old style historicist (I tend to align myself with the > former), I think that we can pretty much agree that words have > particular meanings in particular circumstances and eras (somehow, I > think the line "I am tired of poets who are gay") would be interpreted > to mean something very differently than what Yeats had in mind), but > Vendler seems to think that she doesn't have to know any history. > Certainly, her bibliography lacks any contextual works. I can't comment on the book because I haven't yet been able to lay hands on a copy; however, I do (or at least think I do) know enough about Vendler's intention to say that Peter Herman's perception sounds correct to me, but is also irrelevant to the project of this book, based on what I have heard of Vendler's intentions, as articulated in lectures given while it was being written and answers to questions I raised at those lectures. Thus, as I understood it, she was very much engaged in giving an ahistorical close reading of the text; she was pre-eminently interested in giving the sonnets a strictly textual, poetic reading, and one that was more focused on the presence of a word in a poem than on the exact nuance the word was meant to have at the moment of composition. (Certainly we can debate whether her intended kind of close reading is even theoretically possible, as well as whether she has pulled it off in this book.) She was interested in rhetorical devices, the realms of discourse invoked or dragged into any one poem, the variations on theme and the degree and manner of variation. To say it more plainly, if she had wanted to talk about shift or slippage in nuanced meanings over a period of centuries, she would have done so; her omission to do so here has to do with that subject being well outside the scope of her approach to the sonnets in this book. Moreover, that approach had a closely defined project which she called "Reading for Difference" (in fact, I thought that was the intended title of the book). What she sought in each sonnet was the element that would make it unique, that would *most* differentiate it from all other poems ever written in English, including, most of all, from all of the other sonnets. Through that method, I had the impression she was seeking the poet's compositional hand, attempting to penetrate to the decisions that made each poem. We don't (do we?) have foolscap or definitely Shakespearean variora for any of the sonnets; instead we have printers' errors, which are not quite as good when one seeks the poet's intention. Thus, again as I understood it from the lectures, the presence of "usurer" in a sonnet would be interesting to her more for not being "coiner" or "coneycatcher," having once entered the poem into the realm of insult or corrective, rather than for the current state of the law or public opinion on usury or any real-world usurers of the day, or the precise denotative meaning of the word in current London usage. Then there is the rhetorical device of the ironic, funny, and homiletic adjective "profitless" to think about, and cast around inside the same poem for echoes/contrast. The object is to find the poet's mind *as* poet, to find traces of the poem-building process. Let me emphasize that this could be an incorrect statement of her plan; this is my impression. This concept of "reading for difference" struck me as a fascinating effort to bring to bear on so large a group of poems, known for centuries in an accepted sequence that may or may not have any actual relationship to the poet's design, the order in which they were written, or the way in which they were transmitted to readers-there was talk about the "sugar'd sonnets" being circulated, but apparently not of how many or how they were organized. (Correct me please, anyone who knows better.) I had the impression that Vendler was also seeking to take an unworshipful and unromantic approach; I saw that one reviewer has said she failed of this in failing to condemn any of the sonnets as stinkers, but again, remembering that her intention was to read for 'difference,' not 'goodness' or 'importance,' I think this objection misreads her project. The value, appropriateness, etc. of the project-and the degree to which she altered her project in the finished book-are all valid questions, but I don't mean to address them here. I'm simply saying that Peter Herman's perception of an ahistorical reading, even with respect to the meanings of the words used, is a correct one, but that such was her intention as I understood it. The complete absence of any contextual works in her bibliography strongly suggests that she has adhered to this intention, since the NYT review mentioned some eleven pages of bibliography. To suggest that Vendler has never consulted the OED is ... well, highly implausible. I mean, I would bet *large* sums of genuine American currency against it. Personally, I am looking forward very much to reading this book- clearly, there will be plenty to chew on. The issue one writer addressed here-the use of h-u-e in one poem, whether as possibly encoded meaning or as ruling sound permutations-is exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in. It is perfectly possible for a poet at work to think that the current poem is mainly about two sounds of the letter 'o,' and to subordinate content decisions in the poem to that aural obsession-the way Picasso would say he had green indigestion and paint only green things -- green oranges, green harlequins, green bulls-for a little while. The paintings might be awful, but the obsession with green was served. If that's the sort of thing Vendler has gone after in this study, reading it is going to be fun. I confess, I find the prospect of diagrams daunting, but I struggled through them in the GREs and expect I'll survive this exposure as well. Laura Fargas [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Curtis Perry Date: Monday, 05 Jan 1998 09:45:11 -0700 (MST) Subject: The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets Like others who have posted on Vendler's book, I've only read her comments on about 20 of the sonnets. I'll reserve judgment on the whole until I've read more. I do find some of the ground-clearing in the introduction reductive, however. And nasty in one important instance, which I'll quote: "Some feminist critics, mistaking lyric for a social genre, have taken offense that the women who figure as _dramatis personae_ within sonnet sequences are 'silenced,' meaning that they are not allowed to expostulate or reply. In that (mistaken) sense one would have to see _all_ addressees in lyric as 'silenced' (God by George Herbert, Robert Browning by E. B. Browning) since no addressee, in normative lyric, is given a counter and equal voice responding to that of the speaker" (19). The reduction of feminist criticism to whining and taking offense seems mean spirited here, and of a piece with Vendler's other published attacks on feminist criticism. But more importantly, this condescending remark ignores the sophisticated arguments offered by Nancy Vickers and others about the ways in which the Petrarchan sonnet sequence as a genre thematizes the silencing of women. The point isn't simply that Laura doesn't speak because she's not the speaker. The point is that the SPEAKER in Petrarch's sequence constantly harps on anxiety (in the use of the Acteon myth, for example) about the way Laura's response might disrupt him and his sequence. The speaker - in such an account - is shown to use various strategies to distance the love object and defer such disruption. This is part of what makes Petrarch's sonnets rich and engaging as poetry; similar issues are taken up by Petrarch's many imitators. If you accept this reading, then it follows that the silencing of women is part of the thematic content of the genre - not just some vulgar PC invention that the overly-sensitive decide to get huffy about! Even if one does not accept the argument, it's certainly strong enough to warrant direct and non-reductive engagement. And I note that Vickers, for one, does not even appear in Vendler's bibliography. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 14:45:56 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0017 Re: Price Check; Postmodernism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0017 Monday, 5 January 1998. [1] From: Stephen Orgel Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 20:01:28 -0700 Subj: Re: SHK 9.005 Qs: Price Check [2] From: Gabriel Egan Date: Sunday, 4 Jan 1998 14:33:15 +0000 (GMT) Subj: Postmodernism [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephen Orgel Date: Saturday, 3 Jan 1998 20:01:28 -0700 Subject: Re: SHK 9.005 Qs: Price Check; Addendum to the folio price check: Quaritch's latest catalogue has 3 plays extracted from the first folio for sale: MM 6500 pounds, R3 4800, Cor 5500. Now if you could put together the whole volume that way, at, say, an average of 5500 per play, it would come out costing you only about 200,000 pounds...of course you wouldn't have a titlepage or prelims, but it's a bargain. cheers, s.o. [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan Date: Sunday, 4 Jan 1998 14:33:15 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Postmodernism Paul S Rhodes wrote > I believe that Bach is objectively better than, say, Journey or > Alice Cooper or the Spice Girls. I believe that Shakespeare's > writing is objectively better than say the writing of, say, > Andrea Dworkin. [snip] > Because the post-modernist denies the very possibilities of > transcendent verities, he is attempting to rob humanity of > hope. For quite simply the one who denies transcendence > condemns, whether he knows it or not, humanity to the prison of > time with no hope of liberation. Atheists and heretics might be likewise accused of promulgating ideas which threaten to rob humanity of hope of a future paradise. Such hopes are, of course, terribly debilitating to sufferers of oppression who are more apt to find, in textual works at least, calls to action. A hierarchy of art which places Shakespeare over Dworkin and Bach over the Spice Girls is ripe for deconstruction. An age-old bugbear of cultural elitism is the seeming preference of the masses for dross, but Rhodes's hierarchy is ambivalently structured. His `objectively better' art is doubly burdened with having to surpass comparable works (other music, other poetry, other drama) and unalike works such as feminist theory. Might I further Rhodes's line of argument? What need have we of particle physics and quantum theory when we know that Time is like a fashionable host, That slightly shakes his parting guest by th' hand And, with his arms outstretched as he would fly, Grasps in the comer. Albert Einstein? I wouldn't give him house-room. Gabriel Egan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 14:48:49 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0018 Stratford Course MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0018 Monday, 5 January 1998. From: Joanne Walen Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 13:24:42 EST Subject: Stratford Course This one-week course might be of interest to those planning to travel in England this spring. Joanne Walen Shakespeare in Stratford: Text and Theater June 21-28, 1998 US$945 Plan your summer travel now. Attend a week of Royal Shakespeare Company plays in Stratford-upon-Avon, meet and talk with actors from those plays, and discuss the performances with scholars from the Shakespeare Institute. The plays include choices of *Twelfth Night,* *Merchant of Venice,* *The Tempest,* *Measure for Measure,* *Two Gentlemen of Verona,* *Bartholomew Fair* (Jonson), a collection of Irish plays (Synge and Yeats), and some newly commissioned works. Fee covers lodging, breakfast and dinner, all tickets, entrance and class fees, but not airfare. Further information and registration available at or by phone or fax to Joanne Walen, 602-807-5114. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 10:07:00 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0019 New Shakespeare web site MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0019 Tuesday, 6 January 1998. From: Susan Brock Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 12:28:27 +0000 Subject: New Shakespeare web site I hope SHAKSPER members and their students will find the site of interest. On 6 January 1998 the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust will launch the first phase of its official web site providing information on all aspects of its work in fulfillment of the objectives set down in the 1961 Act of Parliament which outlines the Trust's responsibilities to promote 'in every part of the world the appreciation and study of the plays and other works of William Shakespeare and the general advancement of Shakespearian knowledge'. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's site includes sections on The Historic Houses: The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust maintains the five houses in or near Stratford-upon-Avon directly concerned with the dramatist and his family, including Shakespeare's Birthplace, Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Mary Arden's House, New Place and Hall's Croft The Library: A comprehensive research library specializing in Shakespeare's life, work and times, it holds the archive of the Royal Shakespeare Company The Records Office: It holds Shakespearian material of national importance and functions as a local and family history centre for Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwickshire. Guides to its collections are included. Museums: The department is responsible for the care and display of the historic items owned by the Trust and displayed in the houses. Education: The department offers to schools, colleges and everyone interested in Shakespeare, an opportunity to study Shakespeare in the town where he was born. Detailed information about its courses is listed. Diary of Events: The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust organizes special events throughout the year, including leisure courses, day schools, exhibitions. You will find here an up-to-date listing of events. For further information email info@hakespeare.org.uk. Susan Brock Head of Academic Resource Development Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Stratford-upon-Avon CV37 6QW UK Tel. (+44) 1789 201802 Fax. (+44) 1789 294911 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 10:17:23 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0020 Re: *Twelfth Night* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0020 Tuesday, 6 January 1998. [1] From: Mike Jensen Date: Monday, 05 Jan 1998 20:08:55 +0000 Subj: SHK 9.008 Re: *Twelfth Night* -Reply [2] From: Carl Fortunato Date: Monday, 05 Jan 98 20:18:00 -0400 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0012 Re: *Twelfth [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mike Jensen Date: Monday, 05 Jan 1998 20:08:55 +0000 Subject: SHK 9.008 Re: *Twelfth Night* -Reply Dear Marilyn and others interested, Marilyn wrote: >Safe versus risky productions, hmm... How about the Yale Repertory >Theatre production, I think about 6 years ago-maybe less. She then went on to describe something that sounds dreadful. Risky and bad are not necessarily the same thing. In this case, perhaps they were. I doubt Marilyn meant to imply that risky is always bad and safe is always good, so please don't read this as a corrective, rather as a further comment. Here are one lad's ramblings on the subject of safe and risky theater: I am about to make a generalization. Since it is a generalization, it is inaccurate. I acknowledge that. I also think that generalizations are sometimes useful. I hope that proves to be true here. People who like safe theater, seldom like risky theater. They want the feel good factor. People who like great theater, seldom like safe theater. I'm a bit odd. I can like both. Some people consider safe to be bad. See Peter Holland's comments about Ian Judge's productions in his very enjoyable book *English Shakespeare*. I have thoroughly enjoyed every Ian Judge production I have seen. Yes, it is feel good Shakespeare. Yes, his Twelfth Night really missed the point. It was also one of the most entertaining afternoons of theater I have had. So much for my claim to be a real Shakespearean. I complained about The Utah Shakespearean Festival production because it scored a 3 on my entertainment meter, where Judge scored a 10. If you are going to miss the point of a play, at least make it as fun as possible, not a series of missed opportunities. When I see a safe production, I ask myself: Was it so charming that I liked the production despite the anti-textual decisions? Did it so miss the point that the director should have chosen a different text if he/she wanted to say those things? I do not pretend that these are the only questions worth asking. This is a top on the noggin message, and I am leaving out the quality of the acting and costumes and such questions for now. I prefer risky Shakespeare when the risks shed light on the texts and make for thrilling theater. I am told Peter Brook's Dream did all of this. On the other hand, I'd much rather see Ian Judge's Twelfth Night than the production Marilyn described. Some risks are not worth taking. Danny Sheehe's (sp?) production of Comedy of Errors in Santa Cruz was considered risky and brilliant. By the time he directed The Tempest, and was still using his homoerotic/cross dressing clichés, his work was considered boring. A risky production is just that, a risk. When I works, it more than pays for itself. When it crashes, it burns everyone who sees it. Of course, I suppose a feel good Lear would be risky. It is a risk that would burn us all. (One critic said that Ian Judge could find the feel good factor in Oedipus Rex, which is brilliant.) Best to all, Mike Jensen [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Carl Fortunato Date: Monday, 05 Jan 98 20:18:00 -0400 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0012 Re: *Twelfth I hadn't thought of equating the events of the play with the events of the author's life. That's a very interesting insight, and I think you may have something there. PHR> Like Viola, Olivia (why are these names near anagram's?) And don't forget "Malvolio." Malvolio, of course, means "bad will," and Viola and Olivia are near-anagrams of the second half - "will." Could Shakespeare be referring to his own name, or, perhaps, punning on its multitude of meanings (some of them sexual) as he does in the sonnets? PHR> She becomes so caught up in PHR> emotion that her grasp on the normal vocabulary of family relationships PHR> slips into the, to my mind, overwhelming sentence: "I am all the PHR> daughters of my father's house, and all the brothers [we would expect PHR> 'sons'] too, and yet I know not." I think that here Viola almost gives herself away with "I am all the daughters of my father's house", realizes that she has, and clumsily tries to cover it up. - Carl (carl.fortunato@moondog.com) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 10:51:05 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0021 Re: Postmodernism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0021 Tuesday, 6 January 1998. [1] From: Laura Fargas Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 16:11:26 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0017 Postmodernism [2] From: Dale Lyles Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 17:42:56 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0017 Re: Postmodernism [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Laura Fargas Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 16:11:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0017 Postmodernism > Paul Rhodes wrote > > I believe that Bach is objectively better than, say, Journey or > Alice Cooper or the Spice Girls. I believe that Shakespeare's > writing is objectively better than say the writing of, say, > Andrea Dworkin. > > Because the post-modernist denies the very possibilities of > transcendent verities, he is attempting to rob humanity of > hope. For quite simply the one who denies transcendence > condemns, whether he knows it or not, humanity to the prison of > time with no hope of liberation. Since I picked on T. Hawkes, it seems only fair for me to say that this equally humor-free remark by P. Rhodes is in itself an elegant and sufficient demonstration of the need for post-modernist thinking. Perhaps also for historicism, new, old, and parboiled. The most cursory knowledge of the era-which is exactly all I can claim -- teaches that in his plays Shakespeare was not trying to write transcendent material. He was trying to get a show on the boards. Moreover, his plays _were_ the Spice Girls of their day: terrifically successful popular entertainments that also attracted the glancing interest of royalty at its leisure. After all, the Spice Girls were recently photographed with Princes Charles and William, no doubt to the greater glory of them all. The Globe, Rose, and Swan stood in a precinct with the brothels and the bearbaiting ring, not uptown with the palaces; they were railed at alike as corrupters of apprentices. There was a great deal of standing room at penny-a-head, but only one or two lords' rooms at twelve pence, at the old Globe. Any respectable deconstructionist of the late Tudor era would have been attempting to argue that as a text, Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream' was at least as literally valuable as something by Seneca or Plautus, let alone a Platonian dialogue. And any respectable literary scholar of the time would have laughed 'til his garters unbuckled and his stockings downgyv'd at the mere concept. (I would love to say, "or until her points unlaced," but the advent of respected female literary scholars still awaited the definitive deconstruction of the concept that the female mind was biologically incapable of serious ratiocination.) What's more, I'm pretty sure Ben Jonson would have been laughing right along with my hypothetical scholar, and I suspect Shakespeare might have done, too. After all, it was his long poems, not his plays, that Shakespeare (at least initially) regarded most seriously, and that he took care to see into print. One era's trashy entertainment becomes another era's gate to the sublime. Why? At least in part because the people of the second era have been given, or have developed, "eyes to see with." Whence cometh that gift or development? From the precise kind of interrogation of value judgments, both explicit and so implicit as to be nearly invisible, that is the manifest project of post-modernism. On the other hand, if we are to speak of post-modernism robbing an identifiable segment of humanity of all hope... what drives me to despair, or at least nuts, about deconstruction is that poems and plays become 'texts,' and the author disappears. It's enough to make a poet want to cry 'alas, alack, and fie!' and simply wait for someone else to write one's books. Alackingly yours, Laura Fargas [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dale Lyles Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 17:42:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0017 Re: Postmodernism Once again I step in over my head into waters muddied by far finer minds. The "eternal verities" argument goes around in circles, but this just struck me. I'm mulling over on a [post-modern, even] performance piece for our community theatre's Reading series later this month, and the theme I've been mulling over suddenly jumped out as me as what seems to be an undeniable eternal verity: Every fair from fair sometime declines. I don't think it matters whether we are staunchly paternalistic, feminist, postmodern, deconstructionist, whatever. Those moments we treasure, based on whatever values system we've elaborated or inherited, cannot stay. And there is an inescapable human sadness to that fact. Comments by the deconstructionist [as long as you don't get bogged down in jargon, which tends to the circular] would be more than welcome. Dale Lyles Newnan Community Theatre Company Newnan, GA ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 10:58:33 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0022 Qs: Oth E-Texts; Actors' Sides; RSC Tour; Thucydides MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0022 Tuesday, 6 January 1998. [1] From: David Evett Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 16:44:48 -0500 Subj: Electronic texts, early [2] From: David Evett Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 16:54:14 -0500 Subj: Actors' Sides [3] From: Mike LoMonico Date: Monday, 05 Jan 1998 19:51:21 -0500 Subj: RSC Tour [4] From: Harvey Roy Greenberg Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 21:48:05 EST Subj: Thucydides and epic pathos [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 16:44:48 -0500 Subject: Electronic texts, early Can anybody direct me to a source of electronically available quarto and folio texts of *Othello*--not the facsimiles of the Arden, but text-file texts (ideally in RTF format) that can be downloaded and then edited? (I know that Michael Best called attention to such texts of other plays available from Internet Shakespeare Editions, but *Othello* is what we're working on.) Dave Evett [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 16:54:14 -0500 Subject: Actors' Sides Thinking about early modern stage practice, short rehearsal times, etc., I am moved to wonder whether an actor might have helped another actor pick up cues by passing the verbal ball in some relatively obvious way-the cocked head and raised eyebrows of somebody expecting an answer, etc. Query 1: did actors' sides contain following as well as leading cues, so an actor would know from the side who spoke next? Query 2: are the surviving sides reproduced anyplace accessible? All cued up, Dave Evett [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mike LoMonico Date: Monday, 05 Jan 1998 19:51:21 -0500 Subject: RSC Tour I know that the RSC is bringing Hamlet, Cymbeline, Henry VII, and Everyman to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in May, but does anyone know where else in the U.S. they will appear? Thanks, Mike LoMonico http://www.shakespearemag.com [4]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Harvey Roy Greenberg Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 21:48:05 EST Subject: Thucydides and epic pathos On a non-Shakespearean topic -- although the theme is distinctly Bardic - In connection with a review on the defects of TITANIC, I plan to cite a number of past and modern descriptions of epic catastrophic events charged with a particular species of pathos (outstanding contemporary example, radio announcer as the Hindenberg blew up-"Oh the humanity, the humanity...." ) . Not having my Thucydides at hand, I do remember a battle between the Athenians and Spartans in which the Spartans had forced their adversaries into a pitched battle at a riverside; the Athenians, as I recall, were caught between two forces, propelled into the water, slaughtered en masse drowned slaughtered even more grievously when the survivors attempted to gain the shore. I do not think I am cobbling this together from other sources. Would anyone be able to give me the appropriate reference? many thanks Harvey Roy Greenberg ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 11:05:01 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0023 Re: Price Check -- First Folio MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0023 Tuesday, 6 January 1998. From: Andrew Walker White Date: Monday, 5 Jan 1998 19:12:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: Price Check -- First Folio Best wishes to those who wish to own the real thing; as for the monetarily challenged on the list, I can recommend the Edward Hamilton catalog (they have a web page too), which offers the recently reissued Norton for all of $100. Not exactly cheap, but compare it to a whole shelf-full of Folger editions, and it starts to look reasonable. The Hamilton catalog is a real find for bibliophiles, very dangerous for those on a budget like yours truly. Their address is: Edward Hamilton Falls Village CT 06031-5000 They also ship quickly, another real virtue. Best wishes, and on a more somber note, here's hoping Frank Muir finds an equally appreciative audience for his wonderful shaggy-dog stories in the next life. His humor was a most welcome part of my Sundays here. "My Word" won't be the same without him. Cheers, Andy White Arlington, VA ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 11:01:54 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0024 Wednesday, 7 January 1998. From: Ira Abrams Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 10:57:50 -0500 Subject: Query: Scenes in Parliament To All: I am trying to find scenes from English plays through the Stuart period which are set in parliament or some similarly _formal_ deliberative body-specifically the Houses of Lords or Commons as opposed to the informal "Council", though I am interested in representations of more or less equivalent institutions attributed to foreign nations. (Shakespeare's Roman and Greek plays already noted.) With gratitude for any help or helpful speculation on this subject, Ira Abrams ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 11:30:31 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0025 Re: TN; Moon; Vendler; RSC; circummured and cised MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0025 Wednesday, 7 January 1998. [1] From: Moray McConnachie Date: Tuesday, 06 Jan 1998 16:19:44 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0020 Re: *Twelfth Night* [2] From: Brad Morris Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 15:09:32 EST Subj: Re: SHK 8.1261 Re: The inconstant moon [3] From: Christopher Warley Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 98 15:32:33 EST Subj: Vendler [4] From: Mike LoMonico Date: Tuesday, 06 Jan 1998 16:18:06 -0500 Subj: RSC Tour Correction [5] From: Syd Kasten Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 23:49:00 +0200 (IST) Subj: circummured and cised [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Moray McConnachie Date: Tuesday, 06 Jan 1998 16:19:44 +0000 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0020 Re: *Twelfth Night* ]At 10:17 06/01/98 -0500, Carl Fortunato wrote: >I think that here Viola almost gives herself away with "I am all the >daughters of my father's house", realizes that she has, and clumsily >tries to cover it up. I haven't been following this discussion closely, so excuse me if this is off the point, but isn't this sentence a classic dramatic irony? 'I am all the daughters of my father's house', to a character in the play, means that my father's house has no daughters, it's a joke. To the audience it's ironic because it hears Viola cast off her disguise briefly in a way that cannot be penetrated by the other characters. 'And all the brothers too' ought to be delivered pensively, because it is, for the audience, a reference to the death of her own brother (and therefore a further speaking out of disguise), and indeed to her familyless state (as she perceives it - of course it is a further stage of irony for an audience, which knows that her brother is not dead, nor she familyless): this would be quite lost on the characters in the play, who would take it only to mean 'I am an only child'. [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Brad Morris Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 15:09:32 EST Subject: Re: SHK 8.1261 Re: The inconstant moon In a message dated 97-12-29 10:43:31 EST, Marilyn A. Bonomi writes: > Brad Morris suggests adding RII to the MND/R&J mix. While I can see > pairing the comedy/tragedy duo, I don't see the connection otherwise. > Richard is no adolescent, nor is Bullingbrook. There are no parallel > feud/love pairings, no fairies nor flights. Divine right of kings does Perhaps it's too late to continue this thread (the holidays bogged me down), but let me clarify what I meant by "adolescent play." I did not mean to imply that Richard was a teenager (and after I read my post, I thought to myself, "Brad, you weren't very clear"). Rather, the word "adolescent" refers to Shakespeare himself-though not a teenager, he was in his adolescence as a playwright, no? This adolscence, at least in my mind, accounts for the rash actions that tie these three plays together. Thanks for listening (reading, whatever). Brad [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Christopher Warley Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 98 15:32:33 EST Subject: Vendler I want to respond briefly to the excellent discussion of Vendler's book, and particularly to the responses by Peter Herman, Laura Fargas, and Curtis Perry. I thoroughly agreed with Fargas' description of Vendler's project, that it is not intended to be historical, but at the same time it is precisely this position which opens up Vendler to the charge of a historical critic like Herman. In claiming to read "ahistorically," Vendler (in Fargas' defense) is being extremely "historical" by employing a conception of "the poet's mind" which dates from the 19th, if not the 20th, century. The claim to ahistory, in other words, is a particularly modern, and modernist, one. I wonder whether such a conception of the "poet" is really applicable to someone writing in 1609. This position also opens up a consideration of Curtis Perry's timely objection that Vendler is unfairly dismissing feminist criticism. Perry cites Nancy Vickers hugely influential article" Diana Described," which subtly argues that Petrarch's use of the Actaeon myth functions to silence the female object. I like Vicker's reading very much, but it is, after all, a reading of Petrarch alone. To suggest, somehow, that poems written over 200 years later in radically different circumstances function necessarily in the same way seems unlikely at best. The invocation of "the Petrarchan sonnet sequence" as a genre only begs the question of what a "Petrarchan sonnet sequence" might be, and it tells us very little about Shakespeare's sequence since it may or may not be "Petrarchan" (I would say probably not) and may or may not be a "sequence" (I would say yes with the qualification that "sequence" and "narrative" are not the same thing). Perry's use of Vickers and Petrarch functions similarly to Vendler a la Fargas' use of the "poet," as a claim to ahistoricity, or at least trans-historicity, which again sounds suspiciously modern, and historical, to me. Christopher Warley Rutgers University [4]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mike LoMonico Date: Tuesday, 06 Jan 1998 16:18:06 -0500 Subject: RSC Tour Correction The RSC Tour is bringing Henry VIII not Henry VII (as I previously wrote) to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in May. More information is available at 800.223.7565. By the way, the Hamlet on the tour is Alex Jenning's which got so much praise last year. Mike LoMonico, editor Shakespeare magazine http://www.shakespearemag.com [5]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Syd Kasten Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 23:49:00 +0200 (IST) Subject: circummured and cised On Dec. 1 (SHK 8.1211)John Velz wrote: "As for *circummured*, Sh had a lot more Latin than is needed for this neologism. There are some hundreds of such words in the canon, most of them surviving today, that he seems to have been first to use. This one did not survive, or at least I have never seen it outside this play. It is orotund, and maybe that is why it never got used in later years. Syd does not approve of the sound of "walled 'round". This is because the phrase as printed does not scan. Try "walléd 'round" or "walled around" and it will sound better prosodically. But no matter for that, as no one is ever going to use it in context." First let me say that having found John Velz's postings to be consistently informative, concise and considerate, I have hesitated these long weeks in composing this response to his of 1 Dec. (SHK 8.1211). In going at three aspects of his letter I feel I might be construed as being argumentative. I consider him along with several others on the list to be my teacher, and his comments compliments. That having been said, let's get back to Shakespeare. First of all, "circummured". I saw this word in context as something that makes this part of Isabella's speech explosively expiratory. Otherwise I think the suggested "walled around" would indeed be a reflection of Shakespeare's simplicity of phrasing. However, in any of the configurations suggested by John the "d" in the first word acts as an interruption of the outward breath without allowing the inward gasp. To explain what I mean, take the phrase "well drowned". The "ll" of the first word leads into the the "d" of the second, which is itself the opener of the second word's vowel rather than a closer just as the "m" of "circum" leads seamlessly into the "m" of "mured". The vignette of John's wife's slip of the tongue is cute. However, the version of the play that I have (no notes), has Isabella telling only the Disguised Duke about the garden etc. She tells Mariana out of sight and earshot of the audience. I prefer this version as it reflects a measure of consideration on the part of the playwright for his creations(creatures?), which I believe to be part of his magic in general. I would compare the nature of Isabella's task of putting Mariana in the picture to that of a physician who has to tell a loved one of the patients death. Mariana has to swallow the fact that the man she is doting on has changed his character, that the person telling her this is the object of his lust, and that she is being asked to prostitute herself to save the life of her rival's brother. It may be merely that the difficulty for even a good actor or actress to accomplish the required emotional changes in front of an audience led Shakespeare to have the ladies' conversation off stage. I choose to believe that it was simple tact. In the past, this list has witnessed some tension regarding the provenance of the play's title. There apparently are those who see "Measure for Measure" as part of the series "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth etc." "Measure for Measure" is in fact not to be found in the Five Books of Moses. The "eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, (an Angelo for a Claudio) etc. deals with damages, placing a limit to them. The person who has caused the damage cannot be penalized to an extent greater than the the assessed value of the injury. John Velz has referred us to the Gospels, and the Sermon on the Mount. The "measure" in the Gospels refers to an operational attitude taken by an individual, and the results that one can expect as for example Matthew vii, 2: "For the way you judge, you will be judged, and by your standard of measure it will be measured to you" (Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure). Although it is implicit, in none of the other versions do we find the phrase "Measure for Measure". Since Jesus must have spoken Hebrew and the phrase is indeed part of the talmudically literate Jew to this day, it seems justified to do a search in Jewish sources: The Mishna is an oral tradition of the Law that was put into written form in the second century of the commom era. Paragraph 7 of the first section of tractate Sota begins with words "With the kind of measure that a man measures they shall mete to him". This is followed by by a number of biblical episodes illustrating this principle in the light of punishment and of reward. (Mishnayot, Judaica Press, edited by Philip Blackman, offers an English translation, along side of the Hebrew). Here too the phrase "Measure for Measure" isn't to be found. The Gemarra is an elaboration of and a commentary of the Mishna, made up, in part, of oral traditions not included in the parsimonious text of the Mishna. On page 32, side 'a' of Tractate Nedarim (vows)the Gemarra gives the phrase "measure for measure" as connecting the form or quality of a consequence to the form or quality of the transgression (or of the good deed). The Soncino Talmud has the English translation interleaved with the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Gemarra. Now prepare yourself for an amazing coincidence! The Mishna to which this section of Gemarra is a commentary deals with aspects of a vow which will invalidate it. The mishna examines the standing of circumcised Israelites and circumcised Gentiles, uncircumcised Israelites and uncircumcised Gentiles. The search for "measure for measure" has brought us around to a source relating to "circumcised". Don't accept my word for it - check it out. To imply that Shakespeare studied the Talmud during the lost years when he purportedly learned matters military and nautical would be going to far. But how about one of the greater stylists of the English language being part of the anonymous team that produced the King James Version? Would it not be necessary for such a one to have some acquaintance not only of each Hebrew word that had to be expressed in English but the "subtext" assigned to that word by tradition as well? But to impute that the author was so subtle as to embed a private joke that would wait four hundred years to be stumbled on unwittingly by Mrs. Velz??? This has got to be those monkeys hacking away at their keyboards that will, by the laws of chance, eventually to come up with the Complete Works!!! Or perhaps Shakespeare grew up with a joke concerning Francis Drake's circumcising the globe, that offered him a wordform that could serve more than one use in the context of his play. I had hoped to have finished in time to offer season's greetings. Have a good year all. Syd Kasten ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 11:36:11 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0026 Re: New Shakespeare web site MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0026 Wednesday, 7 January 1998. [1] From: Richard Nathan Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 16:42:12 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0019 New Shakespeare web site [2] From: An Sonjae Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 14:19:05 +0900 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0019 New Shakespeare web site [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard Nathan Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 16:42:12 +0000 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0019 New Shakespeare web site The posting about the web site of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust did not give a URL. I wonder if the post was referring to the site at www.stratford.co.uk, which has already been up for quite some time. There is a glaring error at one of the sites of the Birthplace Trust. In their site with their biography of William Shakespeare, they say, "His only son, Hamnet died when still a child. He also lost a daughter Judith (twin to Hamnet), but his third daughter Susanna married a Stratford Doctor, John Hall...." This implies Judith died during William Shakespeare's lifetime. I'd always heard that Judith survived her father. Does the Birthplace Trust have any new information lacking to the rest of us? Richard Nathan [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: An Sonjae Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 14:19:05 +0900 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0019 New Shakespeare web site Could the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust not trust us with the address of its new Web site? That would be helpful. An Sonjae. Seoul ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 11:43:18 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0027 Re: Oth E-Texts MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0027 Wednesday, 7 January 1998. [1] From: Michael Best Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 15:46:36 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0022 Oth E-Texts [2] From: Sean Kevin Lawrence Date: Tuesday, 06 Jan 1998 09:56:45 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0022 Q: Oth E-Texts [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Best Date: Tuesday, 6 Jan 1998 15:46:36 -0800 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0022 Oth E-Texts David Evett asks for electronically available quarto and folio texts of *Othello*. The Folio text is currently available from the site of the Internet Shakespeare Editions in a draft version (); the Quarto, alas, is still being drafted. You can retrieve the Folio _Othello_ as RTF files from . The ISE site now offers draft transcriptions of the Folio texts of _The Comedy of Errors_, _Julius Caesar_, _Measure for Measure_, and _The Winter's Tale_. All these texts are freely available for educational use. If you do use them, please let me know, especially if you find any problems or errors. Michael Best Coordinating Editor, Internet Shakespeare Editions [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Kevin Lawrence Date: Tuesday, 06 Jan 1998 09:56:45 -0800 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0022 Q: Oth E-Texts You can get an electronic version of the folio text, from Neil Freeman, who's done some work on using early texts in performance. The address to reach him at is Folio Scripts, 2515 Caledonia Avenue, Deep Cove, District of North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V7G 1T8. I'm not sure the format, but pretty much anything can be converted into anything else these days. Cheers, Sean ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 11:52:29 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0028 Wednesday, 7 January 1998. [1] From: Simon Malloch Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 01:01:24 +0800 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0017 Re: Postmodernism [2] From: Simon Malloch Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 01:54:41 +0800 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0021 Re: Postmodernism [3] From: Mike Jensen Date: Wednesdayy, 07 Jan 1998 01:05:51 +0000 Subj: SHK 9.0013 Re: Postmodern [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Simon Malloch Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 01:01:24 +0800 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0017 Re: Postmodernism > A hierarchy of art which places Shakespeare over Dworkin and Bach over > the Spice Girls is ripe for deconstruction. However, this not something about which we should all be praising God. More often than not it is just another excuse to exercise Resentment. > An age-old bugbear of > cultural elitism is the seeming preference of the masses for dross, Yes, "dross"; in other words, the Spice Girls. > Rhodes's hierarchy is ambivalently structured. His `objectively better' > art is doubly burdened with having to surpass comparable works (other > music, other poetry, other drama) and unalike works such as feminist > theory. I would argue that the canonical status of those mentioned in Rhodes' hierarchy as "greater" is already assured. There is no burden: those on his list do not have to "compete" with feminist theory, nor with any artistic piece that follow. Rather, I imagine, it would be the other way around, and hence the success of Rhodes' examples: the Spice Girls can never compete with Bach for an eminent position in the western musical tradition. It's a sad day if, ideology aside, anyone believes that they could. Art is not a game played on a level field, despite what some may think (though the "game" analogy would surely appeal to some peoples' critical tastes). There are fixtures on the landscape, Shakespeare in literature being one, Bach in music another. The Spice Girls and Dworkin have not yet proved themselves artistically to warrant inclusion into any sort of canon. >Might I further Rhodes's line of argument? What need have we >of particle physics and quantum theory when we know that [etc.] > Albert Einstein? I wouldn't give him house-room. As far as I can see, this is not a logical or even a reasonable extension of Rhodes' argument: he was not insinuating that we should do away with the Spice Girls just because he feels that Bach is better. Rather, no doubt, his preference was based on taste: it was not some deliberate ideological exercise in canon-building. I am with Norm Holland and his Messiah, and Rhodes and his Baby Spice-free Bach. Simon Malloch. [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Simon Malloch Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 01:54:41 +0800 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0021 Re: Postmodernism > The most cursory knowledge of the era-which is exactly all I can claim > -- teaches that in his plays Shakespeare was not trying to write > transcendent material. He was trying to get a show on the boards. > Moreover, his plays _were_ the Spice Girls of their day: terrifically > successful popular entertainments that also attracted the glancing > interest of royalty at its leisure. After all, the Spice Girls were > recently photographed with Princes Charles and William, no doubt to the > greater glory of them all. The Globe, Rose, and Swan stood in a > precinct with the brothels and the bearbaiting ring, not uptown with the > palaces; they were railed at alike as corrupters of apprentices. There > was a great deal of standing room at penny-a-head, but only one or two > lords' rooms at twelve pence, at the old Globe. It is one thing to say that Shakespeare was the Spice Girls of his day, another to actually compare them on an artistic level (which is what Rhodes was objecting to). I think that you blur the lines here. The Spice Girls cannot sneak into eminence because they share the same sort of popular appeal as Shakespeare attracted in his own day, nor is this common-ground a justification for a comparison. Artistic merit does play a role. When, in say 400 years time, people are listening to the latest remastering of a Spice Girls CD on the Deutsche Gramphon "Originals" label, meanwhile thumbing enthusiastically through their virtual copy of The Riverside Dworkin, and I say "thumbing" because by that stage reading will be considered defunct in the same way that the term "text" today is preferred to such scandalous words like "novel" or "play", then perhaps there will be a case for comparison. But, I feel warmed by the thought that there will never be such a time, that the Spice Girls will disappear, as did bear-baiting. Indeed, the former is a sort of "baiting" too, evidently. Art with aesthetic merit survives; dross doesn't. As for the royalty-Spice Girls connection, this is probably less a case of "leisure," and more a case of pressure for the Windsors to be more accessible. No doubt Shakespeare attracted royalty through *merit* (what else??), whereas as the Spice Girls have the *popularity* with the younger generation which the Windsors want. > One era's trashy entertainment becomes another era's gate to the > sublime. Why? At least in part because the people of the second era > have been given, or have developed, "eyes to see with." Whence cometh > that gift or development? From the precise kind of interrogation of > value judgments, both explicit and so implicit as to be nearly > invisible, that is the manifest project of post-modernism. This vastly overrates the supposed achievements of post-modernism. I fail to see one good example of an artist - across the spectrum of art forms - who has been resurrected (and that is virtually what it takes) and who now sits amidst the very popular and gifted likes of Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, and Beethoven. More probably, transmission comes less from ideology, but from artworks (and art forms, if you like) influencing subsequent pieces. It is this process of influence that turns what passed as common entertainment into great pieces of art; some pieces - the real trash - clearly did not and do not last, and it seems that it now takes a theoretical, rather than an artistic, lifeline to bring them to the fore. I tend to see post-modernism in a far more negative light than the above description, which makes the cause sound like a mission from God. The belittling of tradition in order to elevate marginalised artists does not appeal to me, nor does the current atmosphere that dictates that one is an Enemy for not placing the Spice Girls/Dworkin and Bach/Shakespeare on equal footing. > On the other hand, if we are to speak of post-modernism robbing an > identifiable segment of humanity of all hope... what drives me to > despair, or at least nuts, about deconstruction is that poems and plays > become 'texts,' and the author disappears. It's enough to make a poet > want to cry 'alas, alack, and fie!' and simply wait for someone else to > write one's books. I fully and gladly agree. And I am glad that you included this; esp. considering earlier comments about Shakespeare's decisions about what material of his would or would not be transcendental. With good humour, Simon Malloch. [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mike Jensen Date: Wednesdayy, 07 Jan 1998 01:05:51 +0000 Subject: SHK 9.0013 Re: Postmodern -Reply I am heartened at the current hue and cry about Terence Hawks nasty little attack. He has frequently gotten away with flaming members of this list with his little hit and run messages. Since he does not use the words usually associated with flaming, no one has taken much notice-until now. I don't care how many books he has published, or his stature in the Shakespeare community. It is high time his tricks were exposed. Let us continue to band together to teach Mr. Hawkes civility. If he will not learn it, I hope he will be banned from this list. Most sincerely, Mike Jensen ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 14:24:28 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0029 Re: Scenes in Parliament MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0029 Thursday, 8 January 1998. [1] From: John Cox Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 11:34:39 -0500 Subj: Parliament [2] From: Helen Ostovich Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 11:25:52 -0500 (EST Subj: Re: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament [3] From: Michael Ullyot Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 15:20:30 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament [4] From: Dale Lyles Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 21:19:55 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament [5] From: Sean Kevin Lawrence Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 12:06:09 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Cox Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 11:34:39 -0500 Subject: Parliament In response to Ira Abrams' inquiry about scenes in parliament, the opening scene of *3 Henry VI* is set in parliament, as implied in the dialogue. For Shakespeare, this would have been Westminster Hall, as Bevington's note indicates. John Cox [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Helen Ostovich Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 11:25:52 -0500 (EST Subject: Re: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament Check out Act 4 of _Cataline_ by Ben Jonson: it's set in the Senate. Part of Act 3 of _Sejanus_, also by Jonson, is set in the Senate too. [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Ullyot Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 15:20:30 -0500 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament The most famous scene-of Richard's deposition-in Shakespeare's _Richard II_ is set in the House of Commons, and undoubtedly a number of other histories (esp. the Henry VI cycle) have this setting as well. The stage directions can be nebulous but good editors (particularly those of the New Penguin series) will note a scene's historical setting, if not Shakespeare's intended one. Michael Ullyot [4]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dale Lyles Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 21:19:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament Doesn't Henry VI, Part 3 begin in Parliament? Or is that Westminster? The York boys are hanging out and scratching themselves, wherever it is. Has anyone ever avoided getting a laugh on Henry's line about getting the hell out of there when he hears Margaret's on her way in? We just rolled with it, because it is pretty funny, actually. Dale Lyles Newnan Community Theatre Company Newnan, GA [5]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Sean Kevin Lawrence Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 12:06:09 -0800 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0024 Query: Scenes in Parliament What about the trial of Katherine at Blackfriar's in Shakespeare's _Henry VIII_? Cheers, Sean ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 14:45:50 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0030 Re: Postmodernism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0030 Thursday, 8 January 1998. [1] From: Mary Jane Miller Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 13:02:15 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism [2] From: Robert Dennis Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 15:14:56 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism [3] From: Ira Abrams Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 22:45:21 -0500 Subj: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism [4] From: Tiffany Rasovic Date: Thursday, 08 Jan 1998 10:25:11 +0000 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism: Mr. Jensen [5] From: Jacqueline Strax Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 12:40:4 8 -0 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism [6] From: David Evett Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 13:10:51 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mary Jane Miller Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 13:02:15 -0500 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism Why would anyone want anyone else banned from this often informative and occasionally inflamed list? We are all grownups and can look our for ourselves -as amply demonstrated by the current dust-up. Mary Jane Miller Director of Dramatic Literature, Drama in Education and Theatre Studies Brock University, [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Robert Dennis Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 15:14:56 -0500 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism On Mon., 05 Jan 1998, Laura Fargas wrote: >The most cursory knowledge of the era-which >is exactly all I can claim -- teaches that in >his plays Shakespeare was not trying to write >transcendent material. He was trying to get >a show on the boards. Doesn't this pronouncement itself violate the principles of post-modernism under whose banner Ms. Fargas has charged forth? To suggest that Shakespeare was trying to write something equivalent to a weekly Seinfeld episode, concerned _only_ with getting the show on the boards appears to be a modern interpretation of an era about which Ms. Fargas by self-admission knows little. With regard to putting his show on the boards, I would agree that Shakespeare probably faced numerous hassles doing that; but is it not possible that he was doing _more_ than that? One might say he was "doing just that", but not "doing _just_that". Claiming that Shakespeare intended nothing more than the play's action itself to be communicated to the viewer is perilously close to the opinion, "[..any writer..] was only doing what _I_ am capable of understanding". There is an appropriate milieu for this type of assault on literature and literary theory from the standpoint that, whatever one does not understand is, _ipso_ _facto_, not available to you in the work, regardless of whether the writer intended for it to be there. But such a claim is quite different from a claim that the author actually never had any intentionality at all. The claim of no intentionality is as weak as the opposite claim of specifically detailed intentionality. Neither critic has priority for reading the mind of the dead author. My experience in reading and in watching plays and movies, has taught me that if literary material lends itself to a larger-scope interpretation, it pretty much was the intent of the author to put it there. In fact, most, if not all, writers appear to be putting more than just the words on paper; some writers are much better at sugar-coating the pill than others. Yes, there are interpreters whose extremes of self-accommodation and self-appropriation should clearly put us off their evaluations and pronouncements. But because one person might abuse critical license, does it therefore mean that we must put aside all intellectual exercises with respect to literature? In a recent mathematics book the writer, Shaughan Lavine, after re-telling a commonly reported an erroneous account/interpretation in the recent history of mathematics states: "There are three main philosophical purposes for telling the story just sketched. The first is to counteract the baneful influence of the standard account, which seems to have convinced many philosophers of mathematics that our intuitions are seriously defective and not to be relied on and that the axioms of mathematics are therefore to a large extent arbitrary, historically determined, conventional, and so forth. The details vary, but the pejoratives multiply." While Lavine intended his sentiments only for his description of the development of Cantor's theory of the infinite and subsequent developments in set theory, it struck me as I read his words, that we might easily and sensibly re-read the paragraph substituting terms appropriate to recent theory of literature and literary criticism: Some post-modernists have attempted to convince us that the institutions of literary achievement are "seriously defective and not to be relied on" and that the axioms of literary quality and literary analysis are "to a large extent arbitrary, historically determined, conventional ..." I stand with the crowd (?) who think the extremists among post-modernists are wrong: that literary institutions retain a great deal of validity, and that the axioms of literary quality are neither arbitrary nor necessarily historically determined. Sincerely, and with great respect for professional critics and theorists, Bob Dennis rdennis@nesdis.noaa.gov [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ira Abrams Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 22:45:21 -0500 Subject: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism > Let us continue to band together to teach Mr. Hawkes civility. If he will not >learn it, I hope he will be banned from this list. As one of the people who responded unfavorably to T. Hawkes' last message, I would like to be counted out of the lynch-mob now forming on the right. If I thought my only alternative to suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous deconstruction had been to <> with wounded political animals, I would have shuffled off my academic coil long ago. Ira Abrams [4]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tiffany Rasovic Date: Thursday, 08 Jan 1998 10:25:11 +0000 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism: Mr. Jensen Dear Mr. Jensen, Your assertion that Prof. Hawkes' reply to the Jenny Jones' spin-off was an 'attack' is itself an overstatement. I saved and re-read the messages in question and I find them to be quite civil. Your message reads much more like a 'flaming' attack than what Hawkes' wrote. In actuality, Hawkes was defending a position which-God prohibit it!--he feels strongly about. He did not merely huff and puff about it, rather he gave coherent and compelling reasons for his position. I think that the academic community, even in undergraduate courses is being paralyzed and dehumanized by people caring so much about civility. Let's get passionate about something-after all, this is drama we're talking about. I like to think that Mr. W. S. was not a cold fish, and I envision him getting drunk while running new verses with his actors and getting out-of-hand and carried away by the emotions-which, I suspect we have all done at one time or another. A teacher of Italian who lives in my building bemoans the apathy of his students-I bemoan the dry-intellectualism of my colleagues at Boston College's English department-and they are Masters students who will teach! But with what fervor!? (Perhaps I should run away and join a theater troupe.) The only time I can get a real discussion going is with my husband, but he's not an American, he is a Yugoslav and they allow a much broader range of emotions socially and professionally than we do over here. This can be a real headache, yet it can also be great fun. I'm not bashing 'pc' nor am I advocating the Spice Girls be canonized fact, I hide behind Socrates-"I know that I know nothing." Let's get passionate (but not 'flaming' or too personal)-However, let's get passionate about the matter we are here to discuss. Someone wrote that we are getting off the topic, Shakespeare, and I fully agree. Take your comments to a postmodern discussion list, or make them private. Cheers, Tiffany Rasovic [5]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jacqueline Strax Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 12:40:48 -0500 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism > > One era's trashy entertainment becomes another era's gate to the > > sublime. Why? At least in part because the people of the second era > > have been given, or have developed, "eyes to see with." Whence cometh > > that gift or development? From the precise kind of interrogation of > > value judgments, both explicit and so implicit as to be nearly > > invisible, that is the manifest project of post-modernism. I wish I could (still) write like this because maybe then I would have finished my dissertation and been hired by a Canadian university and made a lot of money and had a pension plan. Instead I got a precarious life and read more deconstructionists than anyone needs (only a few of them are truly sublime) and along the way thought some more about what makes Shakespeare's plays so wonderful that even a fourteen-year-old girl in a messed up family in post-war Britain could, simply by reading them in a classroom next to a factory, start claiming at least one key to the freedom of her own mind, heart, and soul. Reader, that girl was me, c. 1955/6. Now would the Spice Girls have done it for me? Well, sure, I liked Little Richard, The Diamonds, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, and Ray Charles singing See that Girl With the Red Dress On. Not (at that time) Doris Day. Some of that era's "trashy entertainment" was one of my gate's to the sublime right then and there. And this is part of what Shakespeare, Blake and the Gang affirmed (why not say, told me?): you always have eyes to see with. Keep them open. Your body can tell as well as your mind; your mind can tell as well as your body. Let's consider the belatedness of: >> the precise kind of interrogation of > > value judgments, both explicit and so implicit as to be nearly > > invisible, that is the manifest project of post-modernism. Where would I be now if I'd had to wait for my future, temporary academic self to give me the gift of theorizing everything I was already registering and sorting out about what was rotten and what I valued in the state of my self, my family, Britain? What I really enjoyed, who I really loved, how I could hate and love the same person, etc. Where would I be if, before valuing them, I'd waited for the future to explain why I believed ("on my life") that Jayne Mansfield, Ray Charles, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong & Co, Picasso, Karl Marx, and Shakespeare when he put Hamlet out there crying "A rat! a rat!" as he lunged with his rapier - all were letting valuable stuff into the world? Stuff, data, information, put into play ( I might say now) in such a way that uncontaminated feelings and rank phoniness, truth and lies, honesty and trickery danced before my eyes. I might *say* something like this now (in the slack style of an OBD); and being able to reflect on and analyze past experience may save one's sanity. But I experienced it then and there. Which is why it seems to me now that this specific postmodernist account I'm reacting to of how Dross Turns to Gold through the alchemy that is "the manifest project of postmodernism" really is bad science. It is bad science, and it looks like freezedried Levis-ism. It posits a necessary Higher (future) Criticism without which ApparentTrash has no value. But nothing will persuade me against this: an infant registers the difference between sublime and disgusting. That's how it gets to stay alive, by rooting for mother's milk and glomming on when it finds it. And a child can tell when something *suppresses* something else (and has inklings of all that that implies). Human beings (till we're all clones) come with varying degrees of sensitivity, robustness, eagerness and patience, etc. But they really do have a set (is it five or seven?) of facial expressions (happiness, disgust etc). These really are *for* something - registering Telling Food from Poison, etc. And this usually works. Art is made by human beings (and maybe a few other animals). Human beings cannot help asking "is this any good?" (for me and mine, for other people, for future generations, for animals and plants, for the planet, for the universe.... ). Deconstructionist criticism is good when practiced as an art, even as a medicine. But so far, to the extent it aspires to science, or meta-science, it often seems to turn out (like a good bit of Freud and most of Marxist-Leninism) to be practiced in a vacuum constructed to keep science out for the sake of one or other pseudo-scientific Authority. This is too far from Spice Girls and Shakespeare. Sorry. But I would argue, only a science that likes art can explain how human beings make the kinds of judgments postmodernism extols when it makes them on all our behalves. As for banning Terence Hawkes, I'd leave this list if any such nonsense occurs. Ban Falstaff, ban Falstaff, ban T Hawkes? Get real. Jacqueline Strax [6]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 13:10:51 -0500 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0028 Re: Postmodernism In one idiomatic use of the term, "hawk[e]s" is usually followed by "spit[e]s." This cheers me. But I want to defend Mr. T. H. against Mike Jensen's proposal that he be banned from the group-the incivility of his Red rags ("Tory! Tory!") has spun off some of the liveliest threads in the history of the site (including this one), in ways that more courteous but more diffuse provocations might not. We'd be poorer without him. Dave Evett ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 14:52:47 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0031 Re: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust web site MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0031 Thursday, 8 January 1998. [1] From: Susan Brock Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 17:44:39 +0000 Subj: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust web site [2] From: Peter Holland Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 15:53:59 GMT Subj: Re: SHK 9.0026 Re: New Shakespeare web site [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Susan Brock Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 17:44:39 +0000 Subject: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust web site Apologies to all members of the list who tried to find the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust web site after the announcement of its appearance on January 6. In transmitting the file the crucial URL was lost. The site is at www.shakespeare.org.uk Please let me know off-list if you have any problems accessing it or have any comments and suggestions for improvements. Susan Brock Head of Academic Resource Development Shakespeare Birthplace Trust [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Holland Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 15:53:59 GMT Subject: Re: SHK 9.0026 Re: New Shakespeare web site I'm sure Susan Brock will reply as well but the URL for the new Shakespeare Birthplace Trust website is www.shakespeare.org.uk. This is the first and only official Shakespeare Birthplace Trust site and, judging from the preview I saw here in Stratford on Twelfth Night, will be an excellent and exciting resource - without the kinds of errors other websites have had and to which Richard Nathan drew attention. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 15:02:49 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0032 Re: Vendler MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0032 Thursday, 8 January 1998. [1] From: Curtis Perry Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 10:07:44 -0700 (MST) Subj: Vendler & Christopher Warley [2] From: Nicholas R Moschovakis Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 12:37:06 -0600 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0025 Vendler [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Curtis Perry Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 10:07:44 -0700 (MST) Subject: Vendler & Christopher Warley Just a quick reply to Christopher Warley's response, which I'll reproduce here: " I like Vicker's reading very much, but it is, after all, a reading of Petrarch alone. To suggest, somehow, that poems written over 200 years later in radically different circumstances function necessarily in the same way seems unlikely at best. The invocation of "the Petrarchan sonnet sequence" as a genre only begs the question of what a "Petrarchan sonnet sequence" might be, and it tells us very little about Shakespeare's sequence since it may or may not be "Petrarchan" (I would say probably not) and may or may not be a "sequence" (I would say yes with the qualification that "sequence" and "narrative" are not the same thing). Perry's use of Vickers and Petrarch functions similarly to Vendler a la Fargas' use of the "poet," sounds suspiciously modern, and historical, to me." In citing Nancy Vickers on Petrarch, I was using a bit of shorthand perhaps, but not eliding 200 years into one. My argument is this: since Sonnet sequences in England - including Shakespeare's - cite, parody, imitate, and otherwise comment upon Petrarch, it seems fair to say that whatever is thematically central in Petrarch MAY BE at stake in these other, later sequences as well. An argument of the kind Vendler objects to, about the "silencing" of women in Sidney or even Shakespeare, is likely to draw upon the Petrarchan tradition to frame the case. And upon Vickers's work in particular. The arguement is not that Petrarch and Shakespeare live together in some timeless poet's elysium and so are identical, but that Petrarch was in various ways an influential model for writers of love poems - especially sonnet sequences - and that this influence is part of the feminist account of the sonnet tradition in England. I was only objecting to Vendler's dismissiveness in my first post, not really making any claim about Shakespeare, the sonnets, or the dark lady. But I do think that the extent of Petrarch's influence upon Shakespeare is an interesting question. I don't want "to beg the question of what a Petrarchan sonnet sequence might be," and in fact I'd be curious to hear opinions, either on or off the list. Hope this clarifies, Curtis [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Nicholas R Moschovakis Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 12:37:06 -0600 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0025 Vendler If the "poet's mind" is a concept we get from the 19th century, then the 19th century got it from Shakespeare, though of course in mediated forms. Historical contingency is all well and good, but let's please remember who wrote that "the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,/ Doth glance..." etc. Vendler is a brilliant critic who, unlike some early modernists I know, considers poetry a living art NOW. Her aim is obviously to bring novelty, not pedantry, to our reading of the sonnets, and she does so in a way which brings objective clarity to some formal features that have generally gone unnoticed - for instance, the frequent proliferation of what she calls "key-words" and related morphemes in embedded forms (not usually anagrams) throughout individual sonnets. These are revelations which I, at least, would rather save from the deck of a sinking ship than even the most sophisticated book of historicist criticism. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 15:11:42 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0033 Three Questions MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0033 Thursday, 8 January 1998. [1] From: Mary Jane Miller Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 13:05:45 -0500 Subj: Two Unrelated Qs [2] From: John Cox Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 13:09:07 -0500 Subj: Measure for Measure and Luther [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mary Jane Miller Date: Wednesday, 7 Jan 1998 13:05:45 -0500 Subject: Two Unrelated Qs Having finally seen (out of season) the new Globe this Christmas, as far as I could make out from walking around the lower gallery and the pit no scene could be fully staged in the 'within' . A scene could begin there but the sightlines are really dreadful and I assume the scene would have to move out onto the stage quite quickly - or am I missing something which seeing a performance would demonstrate? Has there been any discussion on the list about Bates' new book on Shakespeare's Genius? [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Cox Date: Wednesday, 07 Jan 1998 13:09:07 -0500 Subject: Measure for Measure and Luther I was reading Luther yesterday and came across this "analogue" (to use Geoffrey Bullough's term) of *Measure for Measure*: There is a story told of Duke Charles of Burgundy. A nobleman captured his enemy. The wife of the captive came to ransom him. The nobleman said he would give the man back to her if she slept with him. The woman was virtuous, but wanted her husband released, and so she went and asked her husband whether she should do it to get him freed. The man wanted to be free and to save his life, and permitted it. But the day after the nobleman had slept with the woman, he had her husband beheaded, and gave him back to her dead. The woman complained of this to Duke Charles who summoned the nobleman and order to take the woman as his wife. After the wedding day, he had the man beheaded, placed the woman in possession of his goods and restored her honour. Bullough does not include this story in *Narrative and Dramatic Source*, though he does include one from St. Augustine that bears some similarities to Luther's story. I don't have time at the moment to check other lists of sources (I read the Luther while preparing for a class). Does anyone know if this analogue has been noticed before? John Cox Hope College ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 15:17:40 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0034 Re: Shakespeare at BAM; *Twelfth Night* MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0034 Thursday, 8 January 1998. [1] From: David P. McKay Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 13:25:54 EST Subj: Shakespeare at BAM [2] From: Parviz Nourpanah Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 12:25:58 -0800 (PST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0012 Re: *Twelfth Night* [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David P. McKay Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 13:25:54 EST Subject: Shakespeare at BAM I just received the Spring schedule from BAM, and while I'm sure that everyone who has been following this list lately is aware of the fact that the RSC is doing a residency there in May and June, there are a number of other productions being offered which will probably be of interest to SHAKSPERians. In fact, BAM's Spring season (the most extensive in my memory) actually looks like a Shakespeare season. In March & April, Check by Jowl is bringing a production of , followed in April by Sam Mendes' production for the RNT of . In addition to these, and also in April, La Societa dell'Opera Buffa is doing a production of Salieri's . There are quite a number of other interesting, non-Shakespeare related productions being offered as well. Here's looking forward to some good theater. Best, David P. McKay PS. The flyer I received says that Subscriber priority seating ends Jan. 31. [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Parviz Nourpanah Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 12:25:58 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0012 Re: *Twelfth Night* Hello, If I might further the Twelfth Night debate, we are running into a problem evaluating Viola's character in class. Some of think she has a disruptive, dual personality, who disturbs the normal order of the day by running around in disguise. She says as much herself : "Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness". *She* sees herself as "Patience on a monument" etc., and apparently believes in it strong enough into making other characters believe so as well, esp. Orsino. That doesn't mean the readers (or audience) have to see her in this light as well. She lives in an unhinged, fantasy world. On the other hand, some of us think she really *is* Patience on a monument, she is wonderfully deep and not superficial like Olivia or Orsino. I personally think that Olivia has a much more balanced and realistic character than Viola, -even when she rushed Sebastian into marriage, she believed she was marrying the man she loved, not a complete stranger who looked like him, whereas Sebastian acts rather strangely in completely accepting the strange situation, without asking any questions. I would be very glad to hear your views Cheers, S. Nourpanah ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 07:13:51 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0035 Re: Vendler MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0035 Friday, 9 January 1998. [1] From: Lee Gibson Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 14:29:53 -0600 (CST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0032 Re: Vendler [2] From: Peter C. Herman Date: Thursday, 08 Jan 1998 13:54:30 -0800 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0032 Re: Vendler [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lee Gibson Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 14:29:53 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0032 Re: Vendler I have only recently returned to the, so I have missed some of this dialogue. The following from Robert Frost may be of some interest here. A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do. Lee Gibson Department of English Southern Methodist University [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter C. Herman Date: Thursday, 08 Jan 1998 13:54:30 -0800 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0032 Re: Vendler >Vendler is a brilliant critic who, unlike some early modernists I know, >considers poetry a living art NOW. Her aim is obviously to bring >novelty, not pedantry, to our reading of the sonnets, and she does so in >a way which brings objective clarity to some formal features that have >generally gone unnoticed - for instance, the frequent proliferation of >what she calls "key-words" and related morphemes in embedded forms (not >usually anagrams) throughout individual sonnets. These are revelations >which I, at least, would rather save from the deck of a sinking ship >than even the most sophisticated book of historicist criticism. Some responses to Professor Moschovakis's post. First, if we are enjoined to remember "who wrote that 'the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,/ Doth glance...' etc.," we ought to also remember than in its context, Theseus' lines are no compliment to the poet, the lover, or the madman. He is dismissing "These antic fables, [and] these fairy toys." All three misperceive, thanks to the "tricks" of the "strong imagination." And he concludes this speech by exclaiming "How easy is a bush supposed a bear," a line that again does not exactly exalt the power to create. Theseus, in context, is no friend of the imagination. And furthermore, Hippolyta begins her response as a rebuttal to Theseus's clear contempt for what's transpired: "BUT all the story of the night told over . . . . " In other words, we need to read this speech contextually. And (I would argue) we need to read this speech within the context of the antitheatrical and antipoetic prejudices that Theseus is alluding to. Which leads me back to Vendler's book. First, I reject the notion that insisting upon reading historically entails importing pedantry rather than novelty into our reading of the sonnets. Second, while I have no doubt that there are important insights scattered throughout, I still think that we ought to situate these insights within the multiple discourses of the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century. To do otherwise risks coming up with an interpretation as wrong and as anachronistic as to say that when Yeats writes, "I am tired of poets who are gay," he is being homophobic. Peter C. Herman ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 07:18:23 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0036 Re: Parliament; BAM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0036 Friday, 9 January 1998. [1] From: Werner Habicht Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 22:27:40 +0100 Subj: SHK 9.0024 Scenes in Parliament [2] From: Kevin J. Donovan Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 15:13:11 -0600 (CST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0034 Re: Shakespeare at BAM [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Werner Habicht Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 22:27:40 +0100 Subject: SHK 9.0024 Scenes in Parliament For the Roman Senate, see also Massinger's *The Roman Actor*, especially I,3. W.H. [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kevin J. Donovan Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 15:13:11 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0034 Re: Shakespeare at BAM Okay, I'll bite, though no doubt I'll appear the worst sort of rube: What is BAM? ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 07:24:55 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0037 Hamlet as Renaissance anti-prince; Mercutio's Mab Speech MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0037 Friday, 9 January 1998. [1] From: Stuart Manger Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 22:32:58 +0000 Subj: Hamlet as Renaissance anti-prince [2] From: Paul S. Rhodes Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 00:45:56 -0600 Subj: Mercutio's Mab Speech [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stuart Manger Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 22:32:58 +0000 Subject: Hamlet as Renaissance anti-prince Hamlet seems obsessed with the theme of honour: he admires it in is father, Horatio, Young Fortinbras, the anonymous Captain leading the troops to Poland. He even seems to admire the 'rugged Pyrrhus' in a paradoxical way - despite the latter's savage ways with old men. And yet, and yet, everything he does - Ophelia's despair, his own behaviour in striking bargains with pirates, secret killings, killings he shrugs from accepting as guilty burdens - all these lead one to wonder if Shakespeare intended us to see Hamlet as a young man broken by the attempt to be what he can never be, namely the delicate and tender prince his father would have wished him to be? Where can I find the notion of Hamlet as Renaissance Prince - or its antithesis - best set out? I am searching for critical names and ideas. Thank you. Stuart Manger [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Paul S. Rhodes Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 00:45:56 -0600 Subject: Mercutio's Mab Speech Greetings all, I could comment on the various responses to my post on the heresy of postmodernism, but just because I can do something does not mean I should. Therefore, I will let the post-modernists deconstruct themselves. They are very good at doing just that. For years I have been going into high schools and performing Queen Mab before freshmen. I tell them before I perform that every performance is an interpretation and as such stands or falls by how well it squares with the text. I hope by telling them this that in the discussion that follows they will challenge my reading and offer alternative interpretations. But that never happens. The freshmen are too dumfounded by the strangeness of the language to be able to do such sophisticated hermeneutics of it, I suppose. So, I wind up having to lead them through what I just performed line by line, which is fine, but they end up swallowing my reading hook, line, and sinker, a result exactly opposite of what I intend (or, more precisely, hope for). Now, if any of you have any suggestions as to how I can get the freshmen to respond a little more critically, I would be most obliged. There is probably nothing I can do. I usually only have about fifty minutes and that is just enough time to explain what Mercutio is saying and to make sure that freshmen understand the explanation. I should tell you that after I perform, I try to do as little of the talking as possible. I figure that after I have inflicted the students with my hamming, it's best that I be as taciturn as possible. So, I employ the Socratic method of question and answer, starting with the students' opinions. But, invariably, I have to point out what a benefice is and other such things (the student usually read the Folger's or Signet editions with their abundant glosses but never seem to avail themselves of the glosses-sigh), and that takes time. Also, I have to explain my interpretation because either my performance is lousy or they just don't understand it. By the time I've done all that, there's no time left for the critical discussion that I had hoped for. I could do more, I suppose, if I were allowed to teach the whole play, but because I want certification, I am deemed unqualified to teach-but that's a grumble that has no place on this list, sorry. But what I would really like this list to consider is my interpretation, which lately I have come to doubt. I have read Mab as essentially Mercutio's description of his own descent into cynicism. I hang this reading on his line about the wind, "who woos even now the frozen bosom of the North; being angered, puffs away from thence, turning his head to the dew-dropping South." Mercutio, according to my reading, has given up trying to soften the heart of this, cold, cruel world where all professed idealism is nothing but banal hypocrisy (the parson, for instance, cares only about getting more money, not for the salvation of his flock) and turns to dissolute dandyism. But this seems to me now to be reading far too much into the metaphor. Besides, would a cynical dandy stand up so boldly for the honor of his friend? I doubt it. A much more plausible reading of the Mab speech, I think, is this: it is Mercutio's attempt to wean Romeo from his mad obsession with an idealistic concept of Love. The Mab speech depicts a world where only narrow self-interest prevails and the high ideals that Romeo yearns for are in no way realized. Mercutio is hoping to persuade Romeo that because the world is thus, trying to impose upon it utopian dreams of love is as futile as the wind's attempt to warm up the North. Or, in other words, Mercutio is aggressively opposing to Romeo's romantic zealotry, which ultimately leads to frustration, the calm, practical philosophy of resignation. This fits in nicely with the Friar's line about "Adversity's Sweet Milk" but still is at odds with Mercutio's fighting for Romeo's honor. If any of you would share with me her thoughts on the matter, I'd be, as I stated earlier, greatly obliged. Thank you. Sorry if this posting is too rambling. Too much thought about post-modernisn could very well have soften my head. Paul S. Rhodes ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 07:33:54 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0038 Re: Postmodernism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0038 Friday, 9 January 1998. [1] From: Laura Fargas Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 22:12:06 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0030 Re: Postmodernism [2] From: Laura Fargas Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 03:01:15 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0030 Re: Postmodernism [3] From: Laura Fargas Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 03:24:15 -0500 (EST) Subj: Re: SHK 9.0030 Re: Postmodernism [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Laura Fargas Date: Thursday, 8 Jan 1998 22:12:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0030 Re: Postmodernism The mere suggestion of banning T. Hawkes is very unappealing. The actual deed would be, well, beneath us. I wish I could think of a funny way to say this, but really-let him speak. Rudely, if need be. Laura Fargas [2]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Laura Fargas Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 03:01:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0030 Re: Postmodernism Ira Abrams wrote: > I'm not bashing 'pc' nor am I advocating the Spice Girls be canonized > fact, I hide behind Socrates-"I know that I know nothing." Yeah, but he was also the sly old fellow who advised "gnothi s'auton"- most commonly translated 'know thyself.' Partial as I am to psychoanalytic readings of nearly everything, I can't help but like Goethe's retort best: "If I knew myself, I'd run." [3]------------------------------------------------------------- From: Laura Fargas Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 03:24:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 9.0030 Re: Postmodernism J. Strax wrote: [quoting my 'one era's trashy entertainment is another era's gate to the sublime' passage] > Which is why it seems to me > now that this specific postmodernist account I'm reacting to of how > Dross Turns to Gold through the alchemy that is "the manifest project of > postmodernism" really is bad science. Did someone argue postmodernism was "science"? I certainly didn't mean to, and didn't notice the post that did. It's not science at all, to my way of thinking. It's not art, either. It's literary criticism, literary theory, cultural theory, whatever. It's an *idea.* And it's not how dross becomes gold; it's how gold is recognized or explained or assayed or whatever. It's a query into the nature of "gold" as a judgment or metaphor instead of a metal from the periodic table. > But nothing will persuade me against this: an infant registers > the difference between sublime and disgusting. That's how it gets to > stay alive, by rooting for mother's milk and glomming on when it finds > it. Well, since nothing will persuade you... But etymologically, 'sublime' is 'beneath the threshold [of conscious attention],' whereas 'disgust' is 'bad taste, repellent to the appetite.' Etymologically, at least, these things are not opposites, but somehow they have traveled forward in time to a point where they can be plausibly used as such. There was a joke when I was in grade school that seems like an illustration of where postmodernism starts.-Teacher: there are two words you should never use. One of them is 'swell,' and the other is 'lousy.' Kid: Yeah? What are they? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 15:01:20 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0039 Re: Mercutio's Mab Speech MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0039 Monday, 12 January 1998. [1] From: AEB Coldiron Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 08:04:15 -0500 (EST) Subj: Rhodes' Mab [2] From: Andrew Walker White Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 11:13:18 -0500 (EST) Subj: Mercutio's Speech [3] From: David Evett Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 15:49:45 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0037 Mercutio's Mab Speech [4] From: Marcia Tanner Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 21:31:34 -0500 (EST) Subj: Paul and Mercutio's Mab speech [5] From: Marilyn A. Bonomi Date: Saturday, 10 Jan 1998 12:31:26 -0500 Subj: SHK 9.0037 Mercutio's Mab Speech [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: AEB Coldiron Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 08:04:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: Rhodes' Mab A few suggestions: 1. Arrange in advance with teachers in schools you will visit to have students read that speech and understand its basic meaning, including, ahem, words like "benefice." 2. Begin not with your performance but with a quick review of exactly what the speech means; ask them to volunteer to put the speech, line by line, into their own words, and as you go you'll quickly see where the gaps in comprehension are; these you (also quickly) fill in, still letting the students "own" the passage. 3. Then explain that you're going to do an interpretation; that while you've all just agreed on a basic "meaning" (whatever that is), Meaning is made in performance, in interpretation (you might also point out that even your collective "basic meaning" involves interpretation, that any approach to a text includes interpretive intervention and implies a theory; yet that might get you too close to some unwanted po-mo). Tell them that yours is ONE WAY to interpret/perform it, and that you want them to think about alternatives, for you'll be asking afterwards. 4. Then perform, and then ask for their responses. 5. Thus they'll be equipped, or better equipped, to think critically. One hopes. Good luck, A. Coldiron [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Andrew Walker White Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 11:13:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: Mercutio's Speech Depending on how many students you have, Mr. Rhodes, you may try a Xerox of the speech, either translated in some way or with definitions for the old Liz-speak. Elizabethan is a foreign language for many of us, and I can sympathize with your difficulties getting the students to interact with you. Might I suggest something I tried in Illinois, which seemed to work for those in the audience who were total strangers to Shakespeare: try to transliterate selectively, by which I mean take only the words which are obscure, old or false friends, give them a modern rendering-preferably one which doesn't change the meter or the sequence of sounds in the original (i.e., rhymes, assonances, etc.). Give this to the students to read, and even though they hear you speaking the original, they'll see what you're trying to say more clearly. As for the interpretation, unfortunately I'm in the cynics camp who thinks the whole Queen Mab business is a tease, intended to show what a naive boy Romeo is, not entertain him, just show how ridiculous he is. Andy White Arlington, VA [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 15:49:45 -0500 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0037 Mercutio's Mab Speech A cynical view of the Mab speech is that Shakespeare drafted it in his teens as a grammar school assignment, and has been carrying it around in his briefcase ever since looking for someplace to plug it in, so that putting a lot of thematic or characterological weight on it is like using an ornamental bracket to hang the pulley on by which the piano is to be hoisted to the ballroom. As for Paul S. Rhodes getting those freshers to take a fresher look-why not do it twice, first as though M. had been educated by Andrew Lang, taking it as though it had come from a late Victorian production of *Dream*, then in the more psychologically complex way described in Rhodes' post? Phantasmagorically, Dave Evett [4]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Marcia Tanner Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 21:31:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: Paul and Mercutio's Mab speech This is mainly to Paul, but I thought it should probably be sent to the list. I don't want to discuss your particular interpretation, but rather your approach to the high school presentations. (The interpretations of Shakespearean lines, scenes, etc. are beautifully ambiguous, obviously.) What if you stipulated that all teachers who bring students to the assembly must have taught R&J, at least past the Mab speech, before bringing their kids to the assembly. Perhaps even provide them with some discussion questions beforehand, so that the students would come with a mindset and a little knowledge. (One problem I just thought of with this is that many of the anthologized versions eliminate or cut the Mab speech!) Anyway, that would prime the pump and take care of having the teach the scene after your presentation, and would leave you time, then, for the responses. Marcia tannerm@scnc.okemos.k12.mi.us [5]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Marilyn A. Bonomi Date: Saturday, 10 Jan 1998 12:31:26 -0500 Subject: SHK 9.0037 Mercutio's Mab Speech Once we get beyond the simplistic: that the Mab speech was one of Shakespeare's crowd-pleasers written especially for a member of the playing company and having therefore no essential purpose beyond entertainment, I believe the key to the speech comes, as for all of Shakespeare's communication, from the surroundings in which we find it. What impels the speech? NOT Romeo's besottedness, but rather his insistence on external forces driving his life: (I quote from memory; pardon any minor errors and the lack of appropriate end punctuation... ) R: "An we mean well in going to this masque,/But 'tis no wit to go." In other words, not romance but premonition is taking center stage here. The dialog continues: M: "Why, may one ask?" R: "I dream'd a dream tonight." M: "And so did I." R: "Well, what was yours?" M: "That dreamers often lie." R: "In bed asleep, while they do dream things true." Mercutio IMMEDIATELY responds, "Ah, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you." He proceeds to show the personality-defining nature of dreams, mocking in the process everyone from parsons to courtiers to lovers of all stripes, courtly to whorish. But what he's really mocking is the belief in dreams, in the power of anything outside oneself to define that self and its destiny. When Romeo finally cuts Mercutio off (I always have resented the Zefferelli version for making Mercutio look like a madman here-I don't find the speech hysterical at all), he does so by saying, "Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talkst of nothing." And the key, to me, to the entire speech is in Mercutio's next line: "True. I talk of dreams...begot of nothing but vain fantasy...." For me, this line clarifies his intent, and the poet's. It is this "vain fantasy" or useless escape from reality such as Romeo is guilty of that is "as thin of substance as the wind..." and not Mercutio himself. Incidentally, I teach the play to 1-3 classes of sophomores in the fall of each year. We read all of Acts I-III aloud in class, then gallop apace through the last two acts. And I find that doing so allows the students to find Shakespeare a living breathing force. That you are limited to one 50 minute period means that you have to rely on the classroom teacher to have prepared the classes to be receptive to you. And that's always an iffy project. I've done bits on R&J for my colleagues, and I am always amazed afterwards at what the kids say to me in the halls. So many of them thank me b/c they'd never seen anything of value in the play... they'd been watching/sleeping through the movie, or droning through the text w/o any discussion. I make the characters come alive, which in my humble opinion is the only way to make Shakespeare live. Maybe the best way to approach those 14-15 year olds is to begin w/ dreams... set the stage *before* performing through some dialog w/ them: called in pedagogese "anticipatory set." Actually, there are quite a few teaching strategies and techniques that make a difference in the classroom and that a good teacher preparation program (I've taught methods classes) makes available to prospective teachers. Which is why I still believe strongly in requiring people to prepare before they enter the classroom. Teaching is an art and a science; it can no more be practiced by anyone w/ a college degree and a passion for his/her subject than medicine, law, or engineering. To imply that it can is to insult those of us who have made their lives of polishing and practicing our art/science/passion. And now I'll step down off my soapbox, since I also value highly those skilled in poetry and performance who voluntarily share their talents and sciences with my students even though they are not professional educators. Thanks for sharing YOURS! Marilyn B. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 15:08:32 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0040 Job Announcement MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0040 Monday, 12 January 1998. From: Andreas Schlenger Date: Friday, 09 Jan 1998 14:52:40 +0100 Subject: job offer Excuse me if this should be too off topic, but I couldn't think of any better place to send this to. If you know of any other mailing lists or web sites where this announcement might be appropriate, please let me know! Thank you! Andreas Schlenger andreas.schlenger@uni-koeln.de ******** The postion of a "Lektor" is to be filled as of April 1st, 1998 at the Englisches Seminar of the University of Cologne. Applicants should possess a postgraduate qualification in English or German and/or (Applied) Linguistics. A good working knowledge of German is essential. Duties: 12 hours teaching per week (language and literature) plus administrative and examination responsibilities. The contract will be for one year initially with the possibility of a renewal up to a maximum period of five years. Gross salary, depending on age and family status, is in the region of DM 4.500. More information can be found at: http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/lectors.html Applications by February 20th, 1998 to Dr. Gottfried Krieger, Englisches Seminar, Universitaet zu Koeln, D 50923 Koeln, Germany. Tel.: +0221/470-2793 Fax.: +0221/470-5109 e-mail: manfred.jahn@uni-koeln.de ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 15:27:11 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0041 Re: Shakespeare at BAM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0041 Monday, 12 January 1998. [1] From: David P. McKay Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 09:13:10 EST Subj: Re: BAM [2] From: John Walsh Date: Friday, 09 Jan 1998 11:38:33 -0500 Subj: Re: SHK 9.0036 Re: BAM [3] From: Mike LoMonico Date: Friday, 09 Jan 1998 17:38:43 -0500 Subj: Shakespeare at BAM [1]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: David P. McKay Date: Friday, 9 Jan 1998 09:13:10 EST Subject: Re: BAM To Kevin J. Donovan: BAM is The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Best, David P. McKay [2]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Walsh Date: Friday, 09 Jan 1998 11:38:33 -0500 Subject: Re: SHK 9.0036 Re: BAM Kevin J. Donovan asked: >Okay, I'll bite, though no doubt I'll appear the worst sort of rube: >What is BAM? Aw, don't be so hard on yourself, Kevin. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is a world-class performance venue, but it keeps a pretty low profile. Of course, their location in a striving, but nonetheless crummy, neighborhood might have something to do with that. Among BAM's spring offerings is the RSC Hamlet I inquired about not long ago. But there's loads of other great stuff coming up. Check out their site: http://www.bam.org/ Enjoy! John Walsh, Senior Editor TV Guide Entertainment Network http://www.tvguide.com/sci-fi [3]----------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mike LoMonico Date: Friday, 09 Jan 1998 17:38:43 -0500 Subject: Shakespeare at BAM I want to assure Kevin Donovan that he is not a rube, but rather I must be a New York City snob. BAM is the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the best place to go in Brooklyn since the Dodgers left. In addition to the occasional RSC visits they run a Next Wave Festival each year which presents cutting edge dance, music, and drama. While visiting New York, Kevin might want to stop in to see Macbeth at the Public Theatre starring Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett. Mike LoMonico http://shakespearemag.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 15:32:01 -0500 Reply-To: editor@ws.bowiestate.edu Sender: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference From: "Hardy M. Cook" Organization: Bowie State University Subject: SHK 9.0042 The Fair Youth MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 9.0042 Monday, 12 January 1998. From: Lee Gibson