Shakespeare Newsletter articles from March 2011

Shakespeare Newsletter archives from March 2011

Talking books with David Scott Kastan--II.(Interview)
March 22, 2011... The first part of my interview with David Scott Kastan was published in the last issue (60:3 [Winter 2010/ 2011], 82, 89, 92-94, 97). To recap just who Professor Kastan is for anyone who does not know, he is the George M. Bodman Professor of...

Abigail Rokison's Shakespearean Verse Speaking.(Book review)
March 22, 2011... Prince Pericles, shipwrecked on the coast of Pentapolis, is guided to King Simonides' court, where the princess Thaisa falls in love with him. Simonides plays the tyrannical father, feigning disapproval, while secretly favoring a match. With the...

Double, double twice in NYC.
March 22, 2011... Arin Arbus Shapes a Brilliant Macbeth John Douglas Thompson as Macbeth and Annika Boras as Lady Macbeth are the most believable and nuanced pair that I have seen in years. They are lovers and murderers--conscience-ridden and ultimately both...

Playing the moments: Macbeth at the Theatre for a New Audience.
March 22, 2011... The Theater for a New Audience's "Grand 2010-2011 Season" included splendid productions of Cymbeline and The Merchant of Venice and ended grandly indeed with Macbeth, starring John Douglas Thompson in the title role and Annika Boras as Lady...

Books for review.
March 22, 2011... We're always seeking reviewers for the review copies of works that we receive. If you are interested, contact us. Bradshaw, Graham. Tom Bishop, and David Schalkwyk, ed. The Shakespearean International Yearbook: 10: Special Section, The...

Katherine Hamlett, Hamletworks.org, and the Rhizomorphous database.
March 22, 2011... Katherine Hamlett is a spectral figure resurrected in the "Sources of Hamlet" essay that Nicholas Clary and I wrote and uploaded this year to the ever-expanding Hamletworks.org website. (1) On the website, Katherine is represented by the text of...

An interview with Arin Arbus of the Theatre for a New Audience.(Interview)
March 22, 2011... LM: What were the high moments of coming to direct at The Theatre for a New Audience and your teamwork with Jeffrey Horowitz, the founder and Artistic Director of TFANA? AA: Well, in a sense, Jeffrey introduced me to Shakespeare. I had read...

Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics.(Book review)
March 22, 2011... Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics. Cambridge UP, 2009. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CONTENTS: (1) Introduction: impure aesthetics. PART ONE A SHAKESPEAREAN AESTHETIC: INTO THE WOODS OUTSIDE ATHENS (2) A Midsummer Night's...

Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity.(Book review)
March 22, 2011... Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity. Cambridge UP, 2009. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CONTENTS: List of illustrations. Acknowledgements. PART I THE PROBLEM OF THE SPECTATOR 1....

Gurr, Andrew. Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company 1594-1625.(Book review)
March 22, 2011... Gurr, Andrew. Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company 1594-1625. Cambridge UP, 2009. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CONTENTS: Acknowledgements, Illustrations. 1. The company's unique features; 2. Disguise and travel; 3. Henslowe's...

Herder's Shakespeare essay: a retrospective and recent trends.(Johann Gottfried von Herder and William Shakespeare)(Essay)
March 22, 2011... The fitful German Shakespeare reception of the eighteenth century was given significant momentum by Wieland's translation of his works, Lessing's criticism, and the enthusiastic advocacy of Herder and Goethe as the principal figures of the...

Columbia Shakspeare seminar.
March 22, 2011... Meeting Date: 15 April 2011 Speaker: Jeremy Lopez (University of Toronto) Topic: "Collecting Early Modern Drama from Dodsley to Norton: Parables of the Canon" Chair: Corey Abate Rapporteur: Ashley Brinkman Streeter Anthologies of...

Everyone and no one.(Essay)
March 22, 2011... At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody.... Jorge Luis Borges, "Everything and Nothing" The town was an ocean of faces and noise. He stood in...

Linda Woodbridge's English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality.
March 22, 2011... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This is a remarkably erudite book (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Woodbridge refers to an enormous number of plays with a revenge motif, and she has a large number of discussion footnotes as well as a swelling...

David Ellis's Shakespeare's Practical Jokes: An Introduction to the Comic in His Works.
March 22, 2011... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Much work exists on what everyone knows to be Shakespeare's comedies--a grouping of plays with a more light-hearted tone and happier endings than his other works--but Shakespeare k Practical Jokes is different from the...

Irvin Leigh Matus, RIP.(Obituary)
March 22, 2011... Like most Shakespeareans, we were saddened to learn of Irvin Matus's death on January 5, 2011. He was only 69 years old and had spent most of his years living a kind of hand-to-mouth existence as an independent scholar, pursuing his interest in...

Branagh's Hollywood Hamlet.(Kenneth Branagh)(Essay)
March 22, 2011... Noting that Kenneth Branagh's "filmic practice is distinct from aggressively postmodern stylists like Baz Luhrmann or Julie Taymor" in its movie classicism, Jessica M. Maerz analyzes Branagh's incorporation of several of the "generic modes" of...

Shakespeare and nineteenth-century sonnet theory.(Essay)
March 22, 2011... Rhian Williams traces the evolution--or at least the changes--of nineteenth-century ideas about the sonnet with specific reference to pre-Victorian and Victorian literary theorists' comments on Shakespeare's sonnets. Williams describes how the...

Shakespeare's intentions.(Essay)
March 22, 2011... A dense summary of dense ideas about authorial intention (by people who are not dense but who like denseness) precedes Duncan Salkeld's discussion of Shakespeare's intentions. Salkeld ultimately is seen to favor the sensible idea that common...

How may I translate thee? Let me count the ways.(Essay)
March 22, 2011... David Lucking discusses the various Elizabethan meanings of "translate" and their relationship to the use of the word, or its derivatives, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night k Dream. The most famous such use occurs in Peter Quince's alarmed cry...

Merchant in DC.(Here and There)
March 22, 2011... Early in 2010, the Washington Shakespeare Theatre asked me to contribute an article on The Merchant of Venice to its annual Guide to the Season's Plays, which is sent to all subscribers. When the Guide appeared early in the fall of 2010, it...

Lear in Brooklyn.(Here and There)(Theater review)
March 22, 2011... When the Derek Jacobi production of Lear was broadcast live from London to movie theaters in the United States last January, I tried and failed to see it. When it came to Brooklyn this spring, I realized on the last weekend of the run that I had...

Julius Caesar on Park Avenue.(Here and There)(Theater review)
March 22, 2011... The RSC Julius Caesar, performed at the Park Avenue Armory, was a notably bleak and brutal interpretation. Director Lucy Bailey provided a pre-play wrestling match between Romulus and Remus, presumably to establish that Rome began and continued...

Bell ringing in Shakespeare.(William Shakespeare)(Reprint)
March 22, 2011... Though Shakespeare is famous for the depiction of all sorts and conditions of men and women, he is almost silent about bell fingers, though he must have heard them at their work in Stratford (at Holy Trinity) and from towers in London. The only...