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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0468  Friday, 15 August 2008

From:       John Briggs <john.briggs4@ntlworld.com>
Date:       Wednesday, 13 Aug 2008 23:00:51 +0100
Subject:    Re: Arden Shakespeare's Termination of Patricia Parker

While we are at it, does anyone know what has happened to Barbara Hodgdon's "The 
Taming of the Shrew," confidently announced for 15 September 2005?

John Briggs

[Editor's Note: Arden has just released the Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. 
Minton _Timon of Athens_, the Keir Elam _ Twelfth Night_, and the Katherine 
Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen _Shakespeare's Poems_ -- the first modern 
edition to include the variant reading I discovered in Q1 _Lucrece_ -- see _N&Q_ 
250 (2005): 193-195. Arden sponsored the opening reception at the International 
Conference to plug these three. While I was in Stratford, I saw, in addition to 
the WONDERFUL, Sci-Fi _Hamlet_ (David Tennant as Hamlet, Patrick Stewart as 
Claudius, perhaps the best Claudius I have seen), yet another modern attempt to 
stage _Shrew_, and again to my tastes, another execrable rendition of it. I 
considered this version's attempt to use the drunken, hooligan-on-the-town, Sli 
Induction as pornography -- the audience is complicit in condoning abuse against 
women in general and Kate in particular for all but the last five minutes, the 
"socially redeeming" section, in which the hooligan gets his comeuppance by 
being denied his raping Kate whom he had apparently put into a state of shock in 
which she appeared incapable of resisting his having his way with her. I still 
believe that it is impossible to stage _Shrew_ in the twenty-first century. (See 
my comments at http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2007/0667.html --Hardy]

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