Shakespeare Newsletter articles from March 2005

Shakespeare Newsletter archives from March 2005

Double vision: Kiss Me, Kate.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... With great exuberance, Kiss Me, Kate opened on Broadway at the end of 1948. (1) Exploring the roles of women in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, this musical employed song, dance, and plot to present a woman's dilemma of marriage versus...

Frailty, thy name is wanton widow.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... In his first soliloquy, Hamlet broods about his mother's hasty remarriage so soon after his father's death and concludes that "Frailty, thy name is woman!" (1.2.146), which had already attained proverbial status. (1) It is the most frequently...

Shakespeare and Puppets.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... In a rich essay full of engaging historical detail, Frances K. Barasch shows two things: first, that from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance and beyond, city puppet shows disseminated high culture to the illiterate classes, and...

Those Dolls are Human.(A Midsummer Night's Dream)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... Robert Lublin tells how he taught A Midsummer Night's Dream in a way that enhanced his students' sympathy for the women of the play, particularly Hermia. These students, in a special summer class at Brown University, were talented...

Much Virtue in "If".(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... Elizabeth Watson's discussion of Catholic atavisms in Hamlet is marred. or stretched beyond the bounds of plausibility, by her speculations that even the most mundane words and stage properties are charged with Catholic or Protestant...

The West Indies as Shakespeare's Green World.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... Michael Harrawood's article is less about Shakespeare than about the uses to which Shakespeare was put by nineteenth-century British imperialists, and in fact is not mainly even about that, since Harrawood and the Englishmen he cites pay...

On the sources of the Pyramus and Thisbe Playlet.(CUM NOTIS VARIORUM)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... [SNL has, over the years, frequently published what are in effect progress reports by a number of New Variorum editors. The present piece is the work of Judith Kennedy, who with her husband Richard Kennedy, is editing Midsummer Night's Dream...

Talking books with: Anthony B. Dawson.(Interview)
March 22, 2005... Anthony B. Dawson is the co-author of one of me most novel scholarly books in recent years, if only because of the way it makes its arguments. The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England : A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge 2001) stages...

Canadian Shakespeare.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Shakespeare in Canada: 'A World Elsewhere'? Eds. Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk, University of Toronto Press, 2002. Robert Cushman, Fifty Seasons at Stratford. Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 2002. Richard Ouzounian, Stratford...

Mary Janell Metzger's Shakespeare Without Fear: Teaching for Understanding.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Shakespeare Without Fear: Teaching for Understanding. Mary Janell Metzger. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004. A blurb-writer at Heinemann has done Mary Janell Metzger's new book a serious disservice by promoting a work unlike the book Metzger...

The Battlefield at Shrewsbury: John W. Velz (University of Texas at Austin).
March 22, 2005... In 1974 when I lived in Birmingham for a summer, British Rail was offering very cheap fares for day-trips to cathedral cities. My family and I took advantage of the fares to visit several cathedrals. We decided to go to Gloucester the long...

Shakespeare in Performance II.
March 22, 2005... Between 28 and 30 June 2005, Professor Frank Occhiogrosso directed a second conference focused on performance criticism and scholarship at Drew University in Madison, NJ. Participants were treated to three days of excellent presentations from...