SHAKSPER 1999: Re: Acting, Feeling and Meaning, and Writing

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 03/19/99 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 10.0493  Friday, 19 March 1999.

[1]     From:   Karen Peterson-Kranz <tlb@kuentos.guam.net>
        Date:   Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:36:27 +1000
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0483 Re: Acting from Experience

[2]     From:   Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 09:30:10 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0481 Re: Feeling and Meaning

[3]     From:   Laura Fargas <lf@chele.cais.net>
        Date:   Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 10:42:11 -0500 (EST)
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience

[4]     From:   Mike Jensen <mjensen@mayfieldpub.com>
        Date:   Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 09:57:22 -0800
        Subj:   SHK 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience

[5]     From:   Ed Taft <TAFT@MARSHALL.EDU>
        Date:   Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 13:28:22 -0500 (EST)
        Subj:   Writing from Experience

[6]     From:   Stephanie Hughes <paradigm@SpiritOne.com>
        Date:   Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:50:10 +0000
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0462 Re: Writing from Experience

[7]     From:   Christine Mack Gordon <cgordon@sass.cla.umn.edu>
        Date:   Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 16:17:41 CST6CDT
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience

[8]     From:   Karen Peterson-Kranz <tlb@kuentos.guam.net>
        Date:   Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:20:45 +1000
        Subj:   Re: SHK 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Karen Peterson-Kranz <tlb@kuentos.guam.net>
Date:           Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:36:27 +1000
Subject: 10.0483 Re: Acting from Experience
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0483 Re: Acting from Experience

Todd Lidh wrote,

> After all, would there even be an authorship question if
>Shakespeare were known to have been well-educated and a visitor at
>court? I doubt it.

The matter of being "well educated" depends on how you define that
term.  No, he didn't go to university, but from what evidence exists of
grammar schools, such as the one in Stratford, I doubt that many of my
current crop of undergraduates would have been able to hack it in that
educational environment.  Also, like many other intelligent people, then
and now, Shakespeare seems to have read widely (as has been noted in
some other recent postings).  Reading need not occur only in the
classroom.

About visiting at court: check out Alvin Kernan's very enjoyable
*Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court,
1603-1613.*  As the subtitle indicates, this concentrates on the later
years, but there is much that addresses Shakespeare's literary
production in the 1590s as well.

And about whether there would be an authorship question...you're
probably right.  No one argues about whether Marlowe or Sidney wrote
those works which have been attributed to them.  Or maybe they do and I
just am not aware of it?  Information, anyone?

Karen Peterson-Kranz
University of Guam

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 09:30:10 -0800
Subject: 10.0481 Re: Feeling and Meaning
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0481 Re: Feeling and Meaning

David patiently explains:

>My (Wittgensteinian) view is that words mean what they do because of the
>way in which human beings use them.  Such use is public, shared,
>imbricated in human "forms of life" which include feeling and reason.
>It's when 1) emotion and reason are reduced to inner feelings and images
>which are supposed to animate words in a philosophical theory, and 2)
>opponents in reaction abstract words from their use in everyday life in
>an attempt to get away from theory 1) that the debate becomes
>misleading.  My principle a) is meant to counter 1), while principle b)
>points out the problem with the opposing position 2).  They are in a
>sense both symptoms of the same philosophical problem.
>
>Hope this helps.

Actually, your response helps quite a lot.  And I do want to apologize
if my response seemed particularly barbed.  I also want to avoid the
scylla of Romanticism without falling into the charybdis of rationalism,
and was curious how you managed it, especially as discussion of "what it
means to be human" still seems largely informed by this dyad.

Would you agree that the whole reason/passion dispute relies on a
humanism that starts with the individual, either as Cartesian thinker or
Wordsworthian feeler?  And that if we locate the human in shared "forms
of life" the problem is overcome, though without turning language into
an inhuman mechanical system?

Cheers, and thanks for your response.
Seán.

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Laura Fargas <lf@chele.cais.net>
Date:           Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 10:42:11 -0500 (EST)
Subject: 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience

M. Aaron wrote:

>If I remember my Peabody and Sherman, it's only thanks to Mr. Peabody
>that we don't have Romeo and Zelda.  Mr. Peabody is pretty subversive,
>come to that; most of the "great men" of history turn out to be
>incompetent idiots and have to be put right by a dog, so the history
>books will come right.  Three cheers for Peabody, World's Most
>Teleological Dog.

I stand corrected.  Or actually, I recline corrected.

>Melissa D. Aaron
>Whassamatta U.

        tenure track?

Laura Fargas
From a deck chair on the Ruby Yacht

[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Mike Jensen <mjensen@mayfieldpub.com>
Date:           Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 09:57:22 -0800
Subject: Re: Writing from Experience
Comment:        SHK 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience

I am sorry this is degenerating into the matter of authorship, but I
just can't let some of these statements go.

Stephanie Hughes quotes me as saying:

>>I understand why she holds to this so tenaciously.  She is an
>>Oxfordian.  The case for Oxford is in part built on what the true
>>believers fancy are correspondences between the plays of Shakespeare and
>>the life of Oxford.

Then she responds:

>Rather the other way around. It is because I find numerous and profound
>correspondences between the lives of all great artists and their works,
>and can find none with Shakspere of Stratford and the works of
>Shakespeare, that I am inclined to see the Oxfordian's point that every
>play reflects one or more aspects of Oxford's life.

As I said in Thursday's post, I realize you are not a very careful
reader.  What you say you are doing is pretty much what I said you do.
There is nothing here that is the other way around.

My point, which you did not substantively address, is if you gave up
your dependence on literary biography the case for Oxford is greatly
weakened.

After claiming that the correspondences between Shakespeare's plays and
Oxfords life are not fanciful, you add:

>as anyone who studies the matter with an open mind will soon see.

Note the elegance of the rhetorical device.  The clever turn of the
line.  The complete lack of substance.

I could equally point out the fact that all documentary and anecdotal
evidence supports Shakespeare as the author, and that none supports
Oxford.  I could point to the testimonies of those who knew Shakespeare,
the three pages from SIR THOMAS MORE in a hand usually identified as
Shakespeare's and say that anyone with an open mind must conclude that
Shakespeare is the true author.

Invoking the chant of the open mind, and there by tarnishing those who
disagree with you by implying they have closed minds, does not impress.

> I was raised to have an interest in the connections between humans and what
>they do.

And you consider yourself open minded on this issue?  Well, maybe I
misunderstood you.  If so, please set me straight.

The central point of discussion is to what extent those connections are
recoverable.  You find them very much so.  Many of us do not and you
have continually failed to address our rebuttal.  Instead you have tried
to redefine the issue in such a way that you can not be wrong.  Invoking
the open mind and "I was raised to" are just the most recent attempts.

>The issue, however, is whether Shakspere could have... gotten the necessary
>education someplace, we would certainly have evidence of it.

Pently false and a typical Oxfordian line.  It is well know that 1) the
school in Stratford was one of the best in the countryside, 2) the
school was founded to educate the children of Shakespeare's social
class, 3) the school records from that period are lost.  Shakespeare is
not the only apparently educated person from his time with no record of
an education, nor is the Stratford school the only public institution
which has lost records.  By focusing so narrowly, you give a very false
impression.  The lack of a record today does not mean a record never
existed.

The rhetorical device of saying CERTAINLY we would have evidence of his
education is empty and wrong.

>(Please note that it was not I who raised this issue, and that I am
>simply responding to the quoted poster.  All further thoughts please
>address to me offline as Hardy doesn't want this subject discussed
>here.)

I call this a hit and run.  Beatrice called it a jade's trick.  You get
to make your points then hide behind rules to try and insure you have
the last word on this list.  Because this list is not intended to
discuss the authorship issue, I decided not to respond to this post -
until I came to your last paragraph.  I expect the esteemed Dr. Cook to
pull the plug on this topic, but whether he uses my rebuttal or that of
another, I hope he will not let you get away with this trick.

Mike Jensen

[Editor's Note: I have not "pulled the plug" on this discussion because
for the most part it is not about "THE AUTHORSHIP QUESTION" but about
theoretical issues surrounding the connection between "authors" and the
creation of their "works."  The speculations of Edward Young in
Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) and Wordsworth in the
"Preface" have so profoundly changed the way that many think about the
relationship between a work and its creator that it is very difficult
for those persons to imagine any other paradigm. I find this connection
so interesting that I have been willing to tolerate a variety of
contributions. -Hardy]

[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Ed Taft <TAFT@MARSHALL.EDU>
Date:           Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 13:28:22 -0500 (EST)
Subject:        Writing from Experience

I've followed with interest this thread and would have responded earlier
except that writing a paper intervened.  It seems to me that the belief
that one should "write from experience" has 20th-Century roots (whatever
the merit of "the romantics as origin" argument).  On the one hand,
Hemingway surely felt that "to write truly," the writer had to
experience first-hand what he/she wrote about. And there's a lot of
evidence that latter writers feel this way too. For example, it's
generally recognized that Updike, even in his Bech books, is really
writing "disguised autobiography," and the same is true of Fitzgerald.
In fact, even though T. S. Eliot wrote that art was an "escape" from
personality and hence, by definition, "impersonal," recent scholars have
discovered that his poetry is highly autobiographical!

So those who argue that experience must inform art surely have a point.
Moreover, recent new historicists argue that Troilus and Cressida is
really about Essex and Elizabeth's court, that Henry V is really about
Ireland, defining experience as first- or second-hand, but experience,
nonetheless.

But there is a kind of counter argument to this line of thought. Some
people seem to have the capacity to empathize with and understand
others, to guess what they are thinking even without direct experience
of them. I wonder if this isn't a differential capacity within all of us
(some of us have a lot of it, others just a little-or none), and that
writers are the same?  We know very little about the mind, actually, but
this capacity, if it does exist, would be very useful in an evolutionary
sense, and we do seem now on the brink of discovering that the mind has
many more facets than just IQ and raw emotions.

I suspect that this power-call it imagination, if you will-does exist
and is one reason why, say, Shakespeare or Chaucer or Milton is better
than, say, Hemingway or Eliot.

Ed Taft

[6]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Stephanie Hughes <paradigm@SpiritOne.com>
Date:           Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:50:10 +0000
Subject: 10.0462 Re: Writing from Experience
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0462 Re: Writing from Experience

>I would venture that the only deep feelings we can reliably ascribed to
>any "great" artist are the feelings she feels for her work.  But the
>same can be said of any pursuit, the great artist being no different
>than the great mother, in this respect.
>
>Otherwise, we must admit to the fact that art is essentially
>metaphorical.  If the artist's emotions enter into the work at all, they
>will necessarily undergo a metaphorization.  We cannot therefore
>reliably identify the thematic expression of "feelings" in the art with
>any emotions in the artist.

The poster's kindly use of the feminine pronoun reminds me of a painting
I've been thinking about lately, the Judith Slaying Holofernes by
Artemisia Gentileschi. She painted it in 1612, not long after she was
raped by her painting instructor. She defended herself in a public trial
in which she, though not the man who raped her, was put to the
thumbscrews to make her admit she was lying. In the painting, Judith is
grimly slicing off the immense head of Holofernes as he lies naked in
bed.  Although this was a popular subject, no one up till then, or
later, ever painted it with such gruesome relish, or endowed Judith with
such stern purpose.  I'd say there was more in that painting than just
great technique.

>This is extraordinary.  This mistress of willful ignorance calls me
>willfully ignorant.  The world is a strange place.

 snip

>P.P.S.  This underwent a lot revision, and I am still far from
>satisfied.  That aside, the revision introduced several tense
>conflicts.  I hope I have caught them all, but please forgive if I
>missed any.  I have looked at these words for so long that I see what I
>expect more than what is really there.

Sorry, Mike. I didn't mean you or anyone specifically, and it was smart
alecky of me, that bit about willful ignorance. (I should have given it
a once over before posting. I usually do.) Of course technique is
important. As for great art, I wouldn't attempt to go further in my
argument than those works that have been chosen by the popularity
contest of Time, although I personally may respond to many that aren't
included in Everyman's Canon.

Was it e. e. cummings who said that he knew it was poetry when it made
the hairs on his face rise up while he was shaving? I don't think that
sheer technique can invest a handful of lines with that kind of power.
You, of course, are welcome to your opinion.

>Unfortunately, too much SF is deep, dark, dismal, dreary existential
>garbage. That's why I've stopped writing and reading much SF after 30
>years as a major fan. What is it about people these days that makes them
>seem to revel in depressing and hopless drivel?

Actually I agree with you about SF writing and in fact just about all
recent fiction. (And is it people who revel in drivel, or just
editors?)  Anyway, thank God for comedy. If it makes you laugh, it's
good. If it makes you laugh till you cry, it's wonderful. That is all ye
know and all ye need to know.

Stephanie Hughes

[7]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Christine Mack Gordon <cgordon@sass.cla.umn.edu>
Date:           Thursday, 18 Mar 1999 16:17:41 CST6CDT
Subject: 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience

With regard to this fascinating, if somewhat fractious, on-going
discussion, I would also direct readers to Jorge Luis Borges's parable,
"Everything and Nothing," which is his imagined image of Shakespeare. It
is quite beautiful and moving, and I often share it with students when I
teach Shakespeare's work. In my own creative work, I draw on personal
experiences and emotions, but I certainly don't consider most of my
fiction autobiographical, though some of my poetry is; in both genres,
imagination and reflection are always essential components.

Chris Gordon, convinced that body/mind/emotion/spirit are all part of my
being.

[8]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Karen Peterson-Kranz <tlb@kuentos.guam.net>
Date:           Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:20:45 +1000
Subject: 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience
Comment:        Re: SHK 10.0482 Re: Writing from Experience

I, too, wished to thank Laura Fargas for her refreshing comments.  And I
was fascinated by Michael Yogev's contribution of the Keats letters-a
wonderful prototype for much (supposedly contemporary and original)
theory.  Moreover, with regard to Wordsworth in this context:
occasionally I think that many of us-myself included-compose our
postings to this and other lists while in the throes of a "spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings." Perhaps we may all think and write more
productively if emotional responses are "recollected in tranquillity".

(P.S. -- I had not thought of "Romeo and Zelda" for years!  Thanks,
Melissa!)

Cheers,
Karen Peterson-Kranz
Podunk U (aka University of Guam)


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