Shakespeare Newsletter articles from March 2002

Shakespeare Newsletter archives from March 2002

Shakespeare Summer Festivals 2002.
March 22, 2002... ALABAMA SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL, 1 Festival Drive, Montgomery, AL 36117-4605. 1-800-841-4273 or (334) 271-5300. Much Ado About Nothing May 21-July 27, Hamlet June 11-July 28, and more. Visit on the web: <www.asf.net> or e-mail: bedwards@asf.net...

SAA Presidential Address.(President's Page)
March 22, 2002... I begin with thanks to outgoing trustees (Meredith Skura, Stephen Orgel, and Lois Potter), to members of this year's program committee (chaired by Jeff Masten, with Doug Lanier, Lynne Magnusson, and Susanne Wofford), to the Local Arrangements...

Nota bene.(Correction Notice)
March 22, 2002... Although designated issue No. 250 as published, the Winter 2001-2002 issue (51:4) was in fact No. 251. This Spring 2002 issue (52:1) is, therefore, No. 252.

Furnivall, Gervinus, and the Germanization of the New Shakspere Society.(F. J. Furnivall )(Georg Gottfried Gervinus)
March 22, 2002... With characteristically contentious vigor, F. J. Furnivall in the founder's prospectus of the New Shakspere Society (1873) dismissed more than a century of English biographies of Shakespeare: "It is a disgrace to England... that no book by...

The Shakespeare Collection.
March 22, 2002... Shakespeare for seven-year-olds forces you to make up your mind: Do you think his plots are good? Are they worth retelling as very short stories? Or have you always suspected that the greatest play in the English language is a plotless wonder...

Some Amens in Shakespeare.(William Shakespeare)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... The amens in Shakespeare, some 85 all told, have been much neglected by scholarship, so far as I am aware. A look at some of them may throw minor light on Shakespeare and religion; a handful of these amens may be of special interest. ...

Petruchio's priest-beating and Marino Faliero.(criticism of 'The Taming of the Shrew')(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... It would appear that few (if any) editors of The Taming of the Shrew comment on the fact that Petruchio's disorderly behaviour at his wedding extends to anti-clerical violence: I'll tell you, Sir Lucentio, when the priest Should...

"Othello": New Critical Essays.
March 22, 2002... On the cover of Philip C. Kolin's recently released "Othello": New Critical Essays (Routledge, 2002) is a still from Sir Laurence Olivier's production of Othello, performed at the National Theater in 1964. With his blacked-up face, arms,...

Books for review.(Review)
March 22, 2002... Boehrer, Bruce. Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England. Palgrave, 2002. De Sousa, Geraldo U. Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters. Palgrave, 2002. Fantasia, Louis. Instant...

Performing Shakespeare in Japan.
March 22, 2002... (The book is an outgrowth of a seminar at the 1996 World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles. It is edited by Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers, and John Gillies.) The editors' introduction to this book (Cambridge UP, 2001) is a revealing and...

Talking books with: Jill L. Levenson.(Interview)
March 22, 2002... Jill L. Levenson has made her mark on the way we think about Romeo and Juliet. I first read her book on important productions of the play in Manchester University Press's Shakespeare in Performance series. There is a second edition coming...

Fifty Years of Milward.(Shakespearean critic Peter Milward)
March 22, 2002... On 25 March 2002 at Boston College, Peter Milward, S. J., gave a lecture entitled "Fifty Years of Shakespeare, 1952-2002." A member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), Milward, originally from England, has spent a half century teaching at...

Appraising Shakespeare in the New Century "looking before and after" meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association in Launceston, Tasmania.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Tasmania is more, much more, than the cartoon image of the furious Tasmanian Devil many will associate with it. The island is one of the great scenic resources of the planet and nourishes a character that combines a rugged tradition with...

The Pegasus Shakespeare Bibliographies general editor Richard L. Nochimson: Shakespeare and the 'Renaissance Stage to 1616' and 'Shakespearean Stage History 1616-1998'.
March 22, 2002... Hamlet These are the fifth and sixth volumes in the Pegasus bibliography series; twelve titles are planned. Having already reviewed the earlier four publications, my expectation was that these would equally well demonstrate the virtues...

Minutes of the Columbia University Seminar.
March 22, 2002... December June Schlueter introduced our speaker, George Walton Williams (Duke U), to discuss "From Folio Indirections, Finding Directions Out." Williams began by discussing the change in the practices of Shakespeare editors by noting the...

No magic in the web.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Back in the bad old days of tragedy, before all moral judgement became relative, heroes were admirable if excessive and villains were evil by intent. By that rule, the recent Othello at the Public Theater is--well, it's hard to say what it...

Session proposals for "Elizabeth R," an interdisciplinary conference commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth, March 21-23, 2003 at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.
March 22, 2002... Performing the Elizabethan Queen Elizabeth's court used performance to define and aggrandize the Elizabethan era, while her subjects used performance to comment upon her policies, her person and the state of England during her reign....

"Standing in rich place": Electrifying the multiple-text edition. (Multiple-Text Plays: Reading, Editing, Marketing and Teaching).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... In 1996, W. Speed Hill listed eight different kinds of editions being created by current editors, one of which was the hypertext edition. In the six short years since then, the hypertext edition has blossomed to the extent that it includes...

Bifold Authority: Two texts for Henry 4, Part Two? (Multiple-Text Plays: Reading, Editing, Marketing and Teaching).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... Establishing a text for Henry IV, Part Two is difficult to do. Its editorial cruxes are among the most notorious in the canon. There are two (arguably three) different versions of the play, but for various reasons none of them provides a...

Cutting it out: editorial policy and the length of Hamlet's texts. (Multiple-Text Plays: Reading, Editing, Marketing and Teaching).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... This paper takes as its starting point Stephen Orgel's recent comment that "it is a commonplace to remark the discrepancy between the performing time always given the Elizabethan plays--`the two hours' traffic of our stage'--and the actual...

Multiple-text plays in the Arden Third Series: a publisher's viewpoint. (Multiple-Text Plays: Reading, Editing, Marketing and Teaching).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... This paper is intended to air some of the purely practical and commercial issues that vex the publisher in costing, producing, marketing and selling multiple-text plays. The Arden Third Series of single-volume editions of Shakespeare, like...

Addressing adaptation: Measure for Measure and Sir Thomas More. (Multiple-Text Plays: Reading, Editing, Marketing and Teaching).
March 22, 2002... This paper discusses two editorial projects. The first is my editing of Measure for Measure for the forthcoming edition of Thomas Middleton's Collected Works. The play makes it appearance there on the grounds that the Folio text is based on...

Shakespeare quiz.
March 22, 2002... To take this not very serious quiz, simply match the anecdote with the name of the actor. Sinead Cusack Julia Marlowe Judi Dench Sir Peregrine Plinge David Garrick Eric Porter Joyce Grenfell Sir Laurence...

Enter stage middle? (Or, discover this!). (Review of Periodicals).(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... In Theatre Notebook Andrew Gurr resumes his tireless and welcome attempt to correct misapprehensions about the structure of Renaissance playhouses. This time Gurr does cordial battle with Tim Fitzpatrick, who has argued for a"minimalist"...

More perverse sex in A Midsummer Night's Dream. (Review of Periodicals).(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Rodney Edgecombe's concise article proves to my satisfaction that in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare is accusing the seasons of sexual perversion. Closely reading some lines from Titania and Oberon's quarrel in 2.1, Edgecombe shows...

Is the rectum a grave? (Review of Periodicals).(review of an essay on Troilus and Cressida)(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Daniel Juan Gil's essay on Troilus and Cressida begins with lucid promise, but within a few pages becomes bogged in jargon, at the same point at which Gil begins to make dubious claims. As an example of the latter, he argues that Troilus'...

Don't act up on Shakespeare's stage. (Review of Periodicals).(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2002... Jonathan Gil Harris delves into the history of Herod's cycle-drama representation to advance a compelling thesis. He suggests that Petruchio's taming of shrew Kate, specifically his order that she and their wedding guests "look not big, nor...

"That would be scanned": Reader response as a factor in multiple-text editions. (Review of Periodicals).(Brief Article)
March 22, 2002... In my use of the phrase "reader response," I include a number of different kinds of reader. My particular interest is in the extent to which textual or presentational decisions made by editors of multiple-text editions of multiple-text plays...

From the editors.
March 22, 2002... As editors of SNL, perhaps the task we perform least well is dunning our debtors; even Mistress Quickly is somewhat better at it than we are. In largest part, we have ta'en too little care of this because many other concerns are of more...