April
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.1202 Tuesday, 30 April 2002 From: Helen Ostovich <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Tuesday, 30 Apr 2002 09:54:45 -0400 Subject: Last Call: The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England FINAL CALL for conference papers on THE MYSTERIOUS AND THE FOREIGN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND October 4 & 5, 2002 This conference at McMaster University will explore representations of foreignness in English writing c1550-c1650 arising from travel to remote and exotic places as well as representations of mysterious regions of intellectual and spiritual quest. As the conference invites a wide range of perspectives and approaches, so we encourage participation by academics from different disciplines such as history (social, political, economic, medical, technological), art history, literary studies, drama, women's studies, music, etc. Possible topics include *encounters with other peoples (whether Irish, Jew, Moor, African, East Indian, American Indian, Eskimo) *exotic food, clothing and the importation of foreign art and artifacts *the development of museums and antiquarian collections to study and house the foreign and mysterious *the intellectual endeavour to uncover scientific and medical mysteries *the realms of the supernatural, of miracles, of mystical paradox, including witchcraft and fairy realms *the early modern loss of or debunking of mystery Proposals for further related topics are welcome. 3 copies of the papers (reading time 20 minutes) plus abstracts are requested by the deadline date, Friday, May 31. Abstacts alone (approx 300-500 words) are also acceptable, though complete papers are preferred. Abstracts AND papers may be submitted in the body of an email letter --NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE! We expect that a volume of papers will result from the conference. Papers from the most recent early-modern studies conference at McMaster, "Expanding the Canon", were published in _Other Voices, Other Views_ (AUP, 1999) eds. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox and Graham Roebuck. Papers and abstracts (hard copy) to: Dr Graham Roebuck Department of English McMaster University Hamilton, ON, Canada L8S 4L9 Electronic copy should be sent to all of the organizers:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Further information on conference travel, accommodation, hospitality, conference fees and keynote speakers will be posted on http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/%7Etaylor/index.html Helen Ostovich Editor, EARLY THEATRE / Professor, Dept of English McMaster University _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.1201 Tuesday, 30 April 2002 From: Charles Weinstein <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 29 Apr 2002 21:28:55 -0400 Subject: Apologia Pro Sententia Sua Brian Willis recently opined, apropos of my comments on the title performances in Romeo+Juliet: "Claire and Leo are totally lost, but there is no need to get offensive about it." To which I belatedly answer: That depends on what you believe to be at stake. To show that much may be hanging in the balance, let me quote two passages from a neighboring field of criticism. Both were written by the art critic and historian Robert Hughes. "Memories of Edward Hopper underlie [the painter Eric Fischl's] work, but Fischl didn't have the benefit of Hopper's extensive training. He had the misfortune to go to art school at the California Institute for the Arts in Los Angeles in the early 1970s....Cal Arts epitomized the frivolity of late modernist art teaching, Fischl would recall. The only serious life classes were reserved for the animation department of the film school, because if a student wanted to follow in the footsteps of great cartoon animators like Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote, he needed, at least, to draw competently. No such restrictions applied to would-be painters. Art education that has repealed its own standards can destroy a tradition in a generation or two by not teaching its skills, and that was what happened to figure painting in the United States between 1960 and 1980. Fischl was badly hampered by it, and though he aspired to a way of drawing that was tense, dramatic and full of body, he only achieved it episodically. He wanted an overall look that was not too finished, consistently 'imperfect,' with an air of unconcern for its own pictorial mechanisms. But this required a mastery over the detail and frequency of brushstrokes, and a certainty about the drawing embedded in them, which he cannot consistently manage...." American Visions (1997). "The results of this [slippage of standards] began to be not only felt but quite painfully seen when a revival of realist painting got under way in the early 1970s. A century before, every educated person drew as a matter of course. (Even the critics could draw: John Ruskin was, in his own right, one of the best architectural draftsmen since the time of Palladio.) Drawing was an ordinary form of speech, used as a pastime or an aide-memoire, without pretensions to 'high' art. Nevertheless, this general graphic literacy was the compost from which the great depictive artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were able to grow--Degas, Eakins, Picasso, Matisse. It was gradually abolished by the mass camera market. Nowhere was the decline of depictive drawing more evident than in America." The Shock of the New (1980). I have a series of audio tapes consisting of 60-minute versions of Shakespeare plays broadcast over U.S. radio during the 1930s. The leading roles are played by well-known movie stars of the period. The most interesting performances are those of Edward G. Robinson as Petruchio and Humphrey Bogart (yes) as Hotspur. Robinson is very good indeed. One cannot say the same of Bogart; but, mirabile dictu, he is never less than competent. These actors learned their craft in the legitimate theater of the early twentieth century. In those days, performing Shakespeare adequately was one of the standard accomplishments of a dramatic actor. He was expected to know how to do it; so he did. Genius was not required; proficiency was; and there was a basic level of skill below which one was not allowed to fall. The cinema-driven erosion of these minimal standards of competence, a process celebrated and encouraged by Academia and exemplified by Al, Claire, Leo and others, may prove to be a momentary aberration in the history of the performing arts. I hope it may. But while the outcome is still in doubt, complacency is not in order, and the only watchword is <<Ecrasez l'Infame>>. --Charles Weinstein _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.1198 Tuesday, 30 April 2002 From: Jack Heller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 29 Apr 2002 17:19:05 -0400 Subject: Tailors and Stage-Plays Somehow the reply I wrote for Clifford Stetner got lost in cyberspace. I'm sorry about the delay. Clifford Stetner asked me below about the use of "first cut" and "breaking-up" further below in a quote from Middleton's "The Ant and the Nightingale." I have not reflected on those terms before, and I, too, would like suggestions especially about "breaking-up." Is that a tailoring term? I quit the quotation at the point of the mention of the Blackfriars theater, but if one reads more of this pamphlet, what happens is that a naive country youth is being advised in the best sights of London. If he goes to the Blackfriars, he will find a nest of boys able to ravish a man (with all the homoerotic connotations that implies). Immediately after this advice is a given, a tailor ingratiates himself to the youth, working on the fall of his breeches. I wish that I had been more alert to the "first cut" of the tragedy because in Middleton's epistle to The Roaring Girl, he uses an extended metaphor of tailoring for the creation of plays in what is one of his most homoerotic comedies. And Michaelmas Term, with another homoerotic situation, features a cloth merchant as the villain. I hope that comes close to addressing the question. I'd welcome other comments on tailors and the theater. Jack Heller >Jack Heller: > >I'm curious how you would translate "breaking-up" and "first cut" in >this quote. The latter seems to me to imply that plays (particularly >tragedies?) were customarily revised like a suit of clothes by a tailor. >Would playgoers then follow the tailoring process, returning to the same >play periodically, or would they prefer just to wait for the finished >product? Does "breaking-up" mean breaking down the set after a final >performance, or does it refer to revelry? > >Clifford > >> Then after dinner he must venture beyond sea, that is, in a choice pair >> of nobelmen's oars, to the Bankside, where he must sit out the >> breaking-up of a comedy, or the first cut of a tragedy, or rather, if >> his humour so serve him, to call in at the Blackfriars . . . _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.1200 Tuesday, 30 April 2002 From: Joanne Gates <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 29 Apr 2002 17:12:23 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Shakespeare and Jane Eyre In the new novel by Jasper Fforde entitled _The Eyre Affair_, Thursday Next is the female, first person narrator, a female sleuth who is employed as a special operative in the LiteraTecs division of a U.K. set in a futuristic version of the year of 1985. The main plot revolves around the hijacking of Thursday's uncle's Prose Portal machine. Thursday has to enter the plot of _Jane Eyre_ to return Jane and correct the vandalism. List members may be interested in the book's rich allusions to the Works of William Shakespeare and his place in the culture. (Yes, there are militant Marlovians -- who have firebombed the Baconians --but they, as well as some who make references to a certain Earl, are the bad guys; each time Thursday is confronted with new evidence of the Shakespeare- didn't-write- Shakespeare variety, she is able to successfully dispute or deflect it.) It is now obligatory that the Complete works by Shakespeare --along with a number of secular and religious texts-- be placed in every hotel room. My page listing of the novel's list of Shakespeare references is available at: <http://www.jsu.edu/depart/english/gates/shak/shakeyre.html>. Caution: some plot details are revealed. The best use of Shakespeare is the audience-participation _Richard III_ (Shakespeare meets Rocky Horror). Joanne Gates Jacksonville State University _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.1199 Tuesday, 30 April 2002 From: Jacob Goldberg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Date: Monday, 29 Apr 2002 17:36:28 EDT Subject: King Lear's Daughters How old are King Lear's daughters? The two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, are married, have no children, but are of child-bearing age, as we learn when Lear brings that famous curse down on Goneril's thankless head. At the time of the curse, Lear is 80. Assuming that Goneril was 25 when Lear implored Nature to "dry up in her the organs of increase", Lear would have been in his middle 50's when he fathered her, and several years older when he fathered Regan and Cordelia. Does this ever pose a problem for a director? Jacob Goldberg _______________________________________________________________ S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List Hardy M. Cook,This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net> DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the editor assumes no responsibility for them.