Shakespeare Newsletter articles from September 2006

Shakespeare Newsletter archives from September 2006

A traveller's tale of Shakespeare in India.(Travel narrative)
September 22, 2006... In October, 2005, R.W. Desai, a distinguished retired Professor of English at the University of Delhi and, for twenty-five years, founder/publisher/ editor of Hamlet Studies, wrote to me on behalf of the Shakespeare Society of India, of which...

The two-hours' traffic of our stage George Walton Williams (Duke University).(Theater review)
September 22, 2006... How many minutes in two Elizabethan hours? When the Prologue before the performance of Romeo and Juliet announced that the play would last two hours, what exactly did he mean? I suggest that he and the audience before him understood "two...

An authorship primer.
September 22, 2006... Doug Stewart's "To be or not to be Shakespeare" is featured in the September 2006 issue of The Smithsonian Magazine, and, initially, seems unexceptionable in its commentary on the near universal curiosity about the human being behind the...

Miranda at Middle Age.(Poets' Corner)(Poem)
September 22, 2006... Miranda at Middle Age Wine-sotted, Ferdinand returns from bowling, promises to mow the lawn in the morning. Night-web of day, lame tied and moth dust. This island, the prosaic slouch of stone, no longer a glory...

The effects of primacy and recency upon audience response to two film versions of Othello.
September 22, 2006... Cognitive psychologists studying primacy and recency effects upon human memory report that first and last impressions are the most memorable in sequential experiences and that last impressions can even block those immediately prior to them....

Books for review.
September 22, 2006... Buccola, Regina. Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. The Sonnets. New York: Cambridge University Press,...

Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Gonzo journalism has come to Shakespeare studies. Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist whose day job is as a columnist ("The Edgy Enthusiast") for The New York Observer has entered the arena, picked up some dirt, spat on his hands and produced a...

Video recordings of stage performances.
September 22, 2006... I first became aware of the great value of video recordings of stage productions when thinking about the performances of Alan Howard, to my mind one of the greatest British Shakespearean actors of the 20th century. Howard joined the Royal...

More matter with less art: The Tempest and Macbeth at Shenandoah Shakespeare.
September 22, 2006... A so-so Macbeth put on by Shenandoah Shakespeare during its summer/fall 2006 season prompted me to wonder what makes Shenandoah's productions so consistently accomplished and yet so seldom exceptional. And then, the evening of the same day I...

Stuart Sillars' Painting Shakespeare.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720-1820. Stuart Sillars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Although Shakespeare illustrations may have originally been based upon performances of the plays, with prominent actors...

Columbia Shakespeare seminar.(Conference notes)
September 22, 2006... Meeting Date: 8 September, 2006 Chairs: Katharine Goodland and William Long Speaker: Carole Levin, Willa Cather Professor of History, University of Nebraska Respondent: Cristina Alfar, Hunter College Topic: "Converting the...

When was Shakespeare at Blackfriars?
September 22, 2006... Leeds Barroll has painstakingly researched "the historical documents that deal with Blackfriars," the Shakespeare company's indoor theater, "bearing in mind... that such documents do not themselves 'reveal' events," but only "present...

Macbieito.(Theater review)
September 22, 2006... Even reading about the "Shakespeare" productions of the contemporary Catalan director Calixto Bieito will make you feel like you've been beaten over the head with a blunt instrument. I pray you, avoid it. Once embarked on the description I...

Romeo, Juliet, and love melancholy.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... In his reading of Romeo and Juliet, Douglas Trevor reviews early modern humoral theory with particular regard to that theory's debt to Galen and its descriptions of love melancholy. In Jacques Ferrand's 1610 Treatise on Lovesickness, Trevor...

Something about theory and religion in Shakespeare studies.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... Julia Reinhard Lupton's short article about religion and Shakespeare has a wild beginning. Of The Winter's Tale, we read that its final scene "unfolds in a space arched by several theologies, with vectors borrowed from a cancelled...

Mermaid-like: the tragedy of Ophelia.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid-like a while they bore her up; Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and endued Unto that element....

Student assignments and the electronic media (1).(ELECTRONIC SHAKESPEARES)
September 22, 2006... As we read, study, and teach Shakespeare, we are surrounded lay ways that the electronic media enhance, and sometimes obtrude upon, our experience. We use word processors with their built-in spell-checkers, and sometimes use their outliners,...

Henry the Sixth at Stratford 2006.(Theater review)
September 22, 2006... In recent years many Shakespearean enthusiasts, I included, have believed that the three parts of King Henry the Sixth (as the plays are generally now known) deserve a higher ranking in the canon. True, they are early Shakespeare. The action...

Fabian as Quintus Fabius Maximus in Twelfth Night.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... There is a long-standing crux involving the introduction of the character Fabian into the plot against Malvolio. When Maria introduces her plan, she says that Aguecheek, Toby, and Feste will make a good audience for the trick on the steward....

Roof? What roof?: Titus Andronicus and the Globe in 2006.(Theater review)
September 22, 2006... On the wall outside the Globe is a blue plaque; it reads, "London Borough of Southwark / Sam Wanamaker / 1919-1993 / Visionary who recreated Shakespeare's Globe / Voted by the People." On page v of the general program for this year's season...

Hamlet in Boston: conversations and production.(Discussion)
September 22, 2006... Two weeks prior to seeing the Actors' Shakespeare Project's production in the historic Strand Theater in Boston in early November, I had the good fortune to catch "Hamlet Conversations." This was an evening of discussion and scenework...

Talking books with MacDonald P. Jackson.(Interview)
September 22, 2006... Attributions are common. Convincing attributions are rare. That fact makes MacDonald P. Jackson one of the few important attribution scholars of our time. For decades and in dozens of books and articles, he has presented evidence that lends...

The art of oblivion: Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama.(Book review)
September 22, 2006... In Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006), Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., argues that forgetfulness is a powerful source for subjectivity, in early modern...

Richard II: every inch a king.(New York Performance)(Theater review)
September 22, 2006... Michael Cumpsty is a strong, powerful-looking man with a big voice, commendable features for an actor playing big roles--Hamlet, Richard the Second, both for the Classic Stage Company. His handsome physical presence created an impressive...

Shakespeare Society's Kenneth Branagh retrospective: consolations and reflections.(Conference notes)
September 22, 2006... On November 6, the Shakespeare Society presented a retrospective of the Shakespeare films of Kenneth Branagh; well deserved, of course, in view of the amount and quality of the work and of the fact that his 1989 Henry V resuscitated the form...