Thomas A. Pendleton, 1932-2013

Transcription

63:2 No. 290
Fall/Winter 2013
“Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnished me. . .”
Thomas A. Pendleton, 1932-2013
Remembering Tom:
A Shakespearean Life
J.W.M.
The basic facts of Tom’s life can be recalled in two paragraphs:
Thomas A. Pendleton, Professor Emeritus of English at
Iona College and Co-Editor of The Shakespeare Newsletter, died
unexpectedly at his home in Norwalk, Connecticut, on December 31,
2013. He was 81 years old. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on March
30, 1932, he graduated from Regis High School, the all-scholarship
Jesuit school in Manhattan. He served in the United States Army in
Shakespeare Filmography:
A Suggested Deletion
T.A.P.
[We have just begun to sort through T.A.P.’s files, which seem
to contain hard copy of several unpublished papers, for Shakespeare
Association seminars, etc. This brief article is the first piece we
discovered and, as far as we can tell, it has not been published. It
had been typed on a typewriter, so it must date from the 1980s at
the latest. We asked Sam Crowl, who is an authority on Shakespeare
on film, to vet Tom’s work. He responded:
Tom Pendleton and Bernice Kliman celebrate her front-page story in 52:3, Winter 2002-2003.
Photo courtesy Merwin Kliman.
the 1950s. He earned a B.A. in English from St. Michael’s College
of the University of Toronto and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from
Fordham University. He taught English at Iona from 1959 until his
retirement in 2012, and also served as chairman of the department
and as a member of many college-wide committees. From 1991
until his death, he co-edited The Shakespeare Newsletter. He
was a longtime Associate Member of the Columbia Shakespeare
Seminar, known for his perceptive and probing contributions to
discussions at seminar meetings. He also served for many years
as an Academic Advisor to the Shakespeare Society of New York.
Although his primary scholarly interest was Shakespeare,
Tom also taught and wrote about W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and
several modern American writers. He had interests in many other
(continued on page 42)
Inside
A Tribute to Dr. Thomas Pendleton....................................Page 59
Talking Books with Ian Donaldson....................................Page 69
[F]rom what I see it should be published. Bernice Kliman
supports Tom’s case (in a Shakespeare on Film Newsletter
article) that Broken Lance is not a true Lear spin-off but does
not go on to make the case Tom does about House of Strangers
and neither does Bob Willson in his book Shakespeare in
Hollywood: 1929-1956. So I’m all for publishing Tom’s piece
as it plows some new ground and is a sound example of his
distinctive critical voice.
With this encouragement, we have decided to publish Tom’s short
piece in this memorial issue of The Shakespeare Newsletter. - Eds.]
Although the topic might seem to call for one, I have no
definition of the Shakespearean film to campaign for. If one wishes
to include in his filmography (as Charles W.
Eckert does) the 1963 Gordon Scott beefcake
epic, Coriolano, Eroe senza Patria, or to
exclude from it (as Peter Morris does) Welles’
magisterial Chimes at Midnight, I have only
one mild objection. Neither accepting Scott nor
(concluded on page 45)
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 42
Remembering Tom
(continued from previous page)
areas, including film, comic books, and baseball—and he had assistant had to work for several days not covered by our budget.
a gift for drawing as well. In addition to many essays, articles, Tom paid the student for the “overtime” out of his own pocket.
and book and film reviews, he wrote I’m Sorry About the Clock: Year in and year out, at Tom’s suggestion, he and I have personally
Chronology, Composition, and Narrative Technique in The Great given graduate assistants generous Christmas and farewell checks. In
Gatsby (1993), and he co-edited, and contributed to, “Fanned retirement for the last eighteen months of his life, he continued to
and Winnowed Opinions”: Shakespearean Essays Presented participate actively in editing the newsletter, without compensation.
to Harold Jenkins (1987). He also edited, and contributed to,
As a scholar, Tom was productive to the end. When he died,
Henry VI: New Critical Essays (2001), and he edited Richard most subscribers were receiving the Summer 2013 issue of The
the Second for the New Kittredge Shakespeare (2012). He is Shakespeare Newsletter, which includes his last book review,
survived by his wife Carol, whom he married on March 30, 1964. characterized by one friend as so very much Tom, full of insight
Such a recitation of the basic facts leaves so much unsaid. As and appreciation of excellence and, at the same time, according
I write this remembrance of Tom in March, 2014, I look back over to another friend, full of humor. His sense of humor informed a
several months of such remembrances, beginning with a homily scholarly style marked by fluidity, quiet intelligence, sheer quality.
for his funeral Mass
He had a real gift for
on January 7 and
scholarship.
including presentations
His Ph.D. thesis
at a Memorial Service at
studied “The Reciprocal
Iona on February 27, as
Relation Between
well as at the Columbia
t h e Wo r k s o f J o h n
Shakespeare Seminar.
Marston and William
And I have heard and
Shakespeare.” He
read the remembrances
discussed his analysis
of others. What all of
of the relationship
these presentations
b e t w e e n M a r s t o n ’s
demonstrate is that the
The Malcontent and
man beneath the basics
Shakespeare’s Hamlet
was a loving husband
with a distinguished
and loyal and generous
colleague, one of
friend; a teacher of
the pre-eminent
rare excellence; a
Shakespeareans of the
gifted scholar not just
later twentieth century,
of Shakespeare but of
Harold Jenkins, whose
literature in general.
greatest achievement
And a man whose ironic,
was the monumental
indeed sardonic, sense
Arden edition of Hamlet
A picnic in Central Park before a performance of
of humor (described by
(1982). Tom arranged
Shakespeare in the Park, Circa Summer 1998.
a colleague as his “sly
for Harold to receive
Left to right, Robert Macdonald, Tom Pendleton, John Mahon, Ellen Mahon,
and often sharp wit”)
an honorary doctorate
Diane Griece, and Fritz Link.
always lay just beneath
from Iona at the Fall
the surface. Attempting to capture Tom’s essence in a few Honors Convocation in 1983. In tandem with the convocation, Tom
words, I would call him an exemplar of the just man, witty and organized an academic conference, “Hamlet at Iona,” with Harold
smart, generous and kind. Remembering Tom, I will always Jenkins as the keynote speaker. Harold returned to Iona for further
think of Hamlet’s comment on his father, “He was a man, lectures and inspired another scholarly project, the festschrift in his
take him for all in all: / I shall not look upon his like again.” honor that Tom and I co-edited in 1987. Tom’s contribution to that
As a husband, Tom always placed Carol’s well-being volume, “Shakespeare’s Disguised Duke Play: Middleton, Marston,
ahead of his own. Carol would be the first to tell us how and the Sources of Measure for Measure,” typifies the excellence of
steadfastly he helped her with many allergies and illnesses, his scholarship. Over the years, Tom’s gift for friendship attracted
always putting her welfare ahead of his own. This is the other distinguished Shakespeareans to Iona—including Bernice
kind of “long love” that we applaud as love at its best. Kliman, George Williams, Irvin Matus, and Donald Foster—to
As a friend, he was ever the just man, loyal and generous with all share their insights with our students.
his friends. He had deep and lasting friendships because he loved his
Tom’s collection of commissioned essays on the Henry VI
friends, in one instance compromising his own comfortable position plays features his Introduction, regarded as an important overview
in his professional life in order to defend a friend and colleague of the critical and performance tradition for these plays. He also
against false charges. He was the best of editors because he gave as contributed an interview with the actor Stephen Skybell, “Talking
much time as needed to help contributors to SNL present themselves with York.” During his twenty-two years as an editor of this journal,
at their best. His generosity showed itself one year when our graduate he contributed many articles and review essays—a listing of some
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 43
Letters to the Editors
Talking Books
Corrections
The Quest for Cardenio:
A Response to Adam Kitzes
There were three mistakes in my parts of the most recent issue
(Summer, 63:1), but one and a half of them are mine.
The half-mistake is that the important word “it” was left out
as I was revising the third paragraph on page 2: “Perhaps the most
glaring difference between the performers is that Willis is the nastier
king. Winters says mean things because he is inconsiderate of others
while expressing his rage. His feelings are the point, not the damage
his words may do. He seldom thinks about it. Willis thinks about
it. He uses words like a knife, aimed to slash, carve, and pierce the
bone. He almost seems to wait for the blood to gush before delivering
the next line. His Lear is just mean.”
Unfortunately, the copy editor did not understand what I was
trying to say and removed a couple of sentences. My comments
about Jack Willis using words like a knife, aimed to slash, carve, and
pierce the bone became an inaccurate description of Mike Winters.
Perhaps readers will want to copy the above paragraph as an erratum.
Changing circumstances have invalidated a portion of note 4
on page 4. AudioGo bought Blackstone Audio books. It was a done
deal when I wrote the note that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
King Lear will be available from that company in early 2014, but
my wife, who works for Blackstone, tells me that things have since
fallen apart, people are talking to lawyers, and Blackstone Audio
is again independent of AudioGo. CDs of the production will be
available from Blackstone Audio, and downloads of the play will
be available from their Downpour website, which I last accessed on
21 December 2013 (http://www.downpour.com/). There are other
Lear products on the site, so be sure to look for the Festival’s name
to differentiate it from the others.
Finally, in note 8 of my interview with Stacy Keach, on page
37, I wrote DVDs when I meant to write CDs. These Twilight Zone
programs are audio, not video. I hope that your SNL readers will forgive me for my mistakes.
I hope to do better next time.
In his review of The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare,
Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play, Adam H. Kitzes devotes
a few sentences to my attempt to distinguish between the possible
contributions of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Theobald to Double
Falsehood. He writes: “Jackson based his analysis on a method
of neurological research developed for author identification by
Robert Matthews and Thomas Merriam” (Shakespeare Newsletter,
Summer 2013: 20). This is false. Within the twenty-nine pages of
my essay I summarize evidence adduced by previous scholars and
take thirty-one lines to outline the results obtained by what I call “the
clearly unreliable” methodology used by Matthews and Merriam
for one particular study. But my own approach, reported on in
considerable detail, was mainly through systematic Literature Online
searching of sample passages of Double Falsehood for phrases
and collocations used by one of the three authors, Shakespeare,
Fletcher, and Theobald, but not the other two. The findings are
displayed in several tables and discussed at length. I conclude that
“Theobald probably did work from a manuscript (or manuscripts)
descended from a Cardenio written jointly by Shakespeare and
Fletcher.” In an essay in The Creation and Re-Creation of Cardenio:
Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes, edited by Terri
Bourus and Gary Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),
Taylor demonstrates that I was a little too pessimistic in adding that
“scarcely a line of Shakespeare’s verse survives intact into Double
Falsehood.” There are not many wholly Shakespearean verse lines,
but there are some. And in Creation and Re-Creation, John V. Nance
brilliantly confirms my suggestion that there is probably a good deal
more Shakespeare in Double Falsehood’s prose.
~MACDONALD P. JACKSON
~MIKE JENSEN
Staff
Published by the Department of English - IONA COLLEGE
New Rochelle, NY 10801
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: (914) 633-2061
Web-site: www.iona.edu/snl
Fax: (914) 637-2722
Advisory Editor
John W. Mahon
Three Issues Annually
One-Year Subscription: $20 (U.S.A.), $25 (Outside U.S.A. & Institutions)
Two-Year Subscription: $35 (U.S.A.), $40 (Outside U.S.A. & Institutions)
Please Send Renewal Before the
Expiration Date Printed on Address Label
63:2 No. 290 Fall/Winter 2013
Founded by Louis Marder for Shakespeareans in 1951
Edited by Thomas A. Pendleton, 1991-2013
Editors
Amy D. Stackhouse and Thomas J. Moretti
Contributing Editors
Michael P. Jensen
Karoline Szatek, Curry College
Grace Tiffany, Western Michigan University
Editorial Assistant/Layout Design
Katie Persechino
Two-Year Subscriptions and Renewals Preferred
Contributions—Editorial or Financial—Always Welcome!
Visual Consultant
Jason Kattenhorn
Find us on Facebook: The Shakespeare Newsletter
and Twitter @ShakespeareIona
Production Manager
William White
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 44
Remembering Tom
(continued from page 42)
highlights appears on page 64 in this issue. One of our contributing
editors, Grace Tiffany, wrote to me recently of her pleasure whenever
she saw the initials T.A.P. on an article or review in the newsletter,
because she knew that his work would be “pithy, witty, and wise.”
Although matters Shakespearean dominated his scholarship,
he also wrote about modern literature, about Yeats, Joyce, and
Fitzgerald. His perceptive critique of the problems with the timescheme in The Great Gatsby angered professional Fitzgerald
scholars, who felt that Tom’s deadly-accurate analysis didn’t cut the
novelist enough slack. What mattered to Tom was doing it right, so
his sense of justice exposed Fitzgerald’s carelessness with details.
Sorry about the clock, indeed! With regard to the intellectual interests
that extended well beyond literature, Tom’s skill as a draftsman
shows up in several drawings—at one point he worked on a literary
comic strip entitled “English Man” which, unfortunately, languished
unfinished in a desk drawer and seems to have disappeared. His
whimsical take on Antony, whom he drew complete with a speechballoon adapting the opening words of the famous funeral oration
into an appeal for subscription renewals and donations (“Friends,
remand currencies; send me arrears”), appears on page 79.
Speaking of Tom after his death with one of my Iona
colleagues, an accomplished Professor of History, I was startled
when she observed that “Tom is the reason I’m here.” The
historian explained that, in her first year as a student at Iona, Tom
taught her in Freshman Comp. She came to college assuming that
her future lay in a law degree, but when she experienced Tom’s
excellent teaching she decided that she would like to become a
teacher as inspired as her writing professor. Smart students took
both of his Shakespeare courses, although only one is required
for the English major. My faculty colleague Helen Bauer recalls
an advisement session with an English major who wanted to take
one of Tom’s courses. Helen pointed out that the student had
already taken Shakespeare, and the student replied: “I want to
take anything Professor Pendleton teaches; he knows everything.”
Indeed, Tom’s range as a scholar was matched by his range as a
teacher. He taught writing and sophomore survey courses, as well
as upper-level courses on Joyce and on Shakespeare on Film,
throughout his long career. Look closely at the picture on page
79 and you will find that Tom is holding a copy of Oedipus Rex.
Michael Palma, one of our colleagues in the English
Department, who was Tom’s student before he was his friend,
observes that, “in addition to the deep background knowledge
and interpretive insight that he brought to every work he
taught, Tom’s classroom performance was notable in several
areas: his analysis of literary forms and structures, his use
of apt and often surprising comparisons to illuminate his
points, and especially his constant emphasis on literature as a
meaningful commentary on life, illuminating the reasons why
we do what we do and the moral significance of our actions.”
Tom demanded that his students read the plays he taught,
that they write coherently about the plays, and that they base
their term papers on serious research. The only complaints I
ever heard about Tom were from students who wouldn’t do
the work and then protested low grades, as if their grades were
his responsibility, not theirs. It was no surprise that, when Iona
asked its best teachers to mentor younger colleagues, Tom spent
several semesters as a Master Teacher. Several times over the
course of our overlapping careers, I would follow Tom into a
classroom, and the blackboard suggested his skill in the classroom.
Tom’s productivity in all the areas usually examined for
promotion—teaching, scholarship, and service—explains his
relatively quick rise to full professor status, as well as his success in
winning Merit Pay in every year of the four years (2000-2003) the
program ran. Of course he was named Professor Emeritus immediately
upon retirement in 2012. He pooled his talents as scholar and teacher
by serving as dramaturg on a number of Shakespeare productions
at Iona, offering helpful coaching to the student performers. On at
least one occasion, he himself acted, taking on the role of Gower
in an Iona production of Pericles. It can be said of Tom, as of
Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford, “gladly did he learn and gladly teach.”
Tom was an associate of the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar
for many years, always very much engaged with speakers and
their presentations. He almost never failed to contribute to
the discussion that followed delivery of a paper and, although
he could be blunt about what he thought was wrong-headed,
his comments balanced his sense of humor with a focus on
constructive criticism. Always, his learning was lightly worn.
His greatest professional legacy, surely, is The Shakespeare
Newsletter. When I told him my idea of acquiring the journal from
its founder and editor, Louis Marder, who sought in his eightieth
year to transfer the forty year-old publication to younger hands, Tom
readily agreed to join me in bringing SNL to Iona. Tom inspired us
to reorient its focus from news of the Bard that included summaries
of scholarship into a more complex publication that continued the
newsletter’s best features (“Table of Contents” and “Review of
Periodicals”) but also published original, virtually peer-reviewed
scholarship and detailed reviews of books and productions. Marder
alone had written most of each issue; Tom’s global network
of colleagues enriched every issue with their contributions.
Perhaps our colleague Laury Magnus, a member of the
Columbia Seminar and a regular contributor to this journal, offers
the most accurate summing-up of Tom’s life when she writes of his
“true gentilesse,” a term so meaningful in Chaucer’s lexicon. When
I remember Tom, I will remember a talented, generous colleague
and friend. I pray that, like his namesake doubting Thomas in the
passage from John’s Gospel (14:1-6) proclaimed at both the funeral
and the Iona memorial service, Tom has found his way to the Father’s
house, where he is making many new friends. May he rest in peace.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 45
Shakespeare Filmography
omitting Orson is helpful to my
own study and teaching of the
Shakespearean film.
From the same point of
view, I suggest that treating the
1954 Twentieth-Century Fox
western, Broken Lance, as an
adaptation of King Lear—and
it appears in filmographies quite
often—is also unhelpful, if not
misleading. Some facts about
the film may demonstrate.
Broken Lance tells the
story of a cattle baron of the Old
West—granitically portrayed
b y S p e n c e r Tr a c y — w h o
tyrannizes his three weak, evil
sons—Richard Widmark, Hugh O’Brian, and Earl Holliman—and
dotes on his energetic, good son—Robert Wagner—his offspring
by Katy Jurado, his Comanche second wife.
After he demolishes a mine infringing on his ranch lands, Tracy
finds himself in criminal jeopardy, from which Wagner rescues him
by claiming responsibility for the raid and going to prison. The bad
sons, however, wrest control of the ranch from Tracy, who suffers
a stroke and dies. Wagner returns from prison to avenge his father,
and after the worst of the bad brothers—Widmark, of course—is
semi-accidentally killed, the survivors live happily ever after.
The degree and the limitation of the resemblance of Broken
Lance to King Lear are immediately apparent, and need not be dwelt
on. What is interesting to note, however, is that Broken Lance is
the second of three versions by Fox of the same portion of Jerome
Weidman’s 1940 novel, I’ll Never Go There Anymore.
The first version, which used Weidman’s characters and setting,
was the 1949 melodrama, House of Strangers. The father—Edward
G. Robinson—was a banker in New York’s Little Italy; the evil
sons who wrest the family business from him were (in contempt
of genetics) Luther Adler, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and Paul Valentine;
Richard Conte was the good son, an attorney who goes to prison
for bribing a juror at his father’s trial.
Like Broken Lance, the third version, 1961’s The Big Show,
also transposed the story, now to a European circus setting.
Nehemiah Persoff is the tyrannical father, an ex-trapeze artist turned
impresario; Robert Vaughan, who like Widmark dies at the end, is
the most villainous son, and European actors Franco Andrei and
Kurt Fecher, the others; Cliff Robertson played the good son, whose
love affair with a non-natant Esther Williams is actually emphasized
more than the familial drama.
The Big Show is hardly worth remarking; it was apparently
conceived to utilize color footage of actual trapeze and wild animal
acts that are quite poorly matched to the scenes shot with the cast
and that further obscure the considerable power of Weidman’s story.
But House of Strangers is a more than respectable film, and a good
deal more defensible an analogue of Lear than Broken Lance.
Like all the versions, it is told in flashback, beginning with
the newly released Conte in the deserted family home, standing
under a portrait of his father
and contemplating his revenge.
The dominance of the father,
even after his death, is far
stronger in this version, as is
the familial sense, although
it must be admitted this is
established by rather obvious
Hollywood techniques: ethnic
meals prepared by Esther
Minciotti, Conte snapping his
thumb-nail off his front teeth
at Adler, Robinson’s Mustache
Pete’s accent. And since Conte
ultimately decides his father’s
dominance was vicious, and
eschews his vendetta, the Learlike elements in Robinson’s relation to his sons are also strongest in
this version, although, of course, the parallel is by no means exact.
Broken Lance is not only further from the original; it is further
from whatever elements of Lear Weidman may have had in mind
when he wrote his novel. The Western setting is colorful, but
distracting from the basic dramatic situation. Making the good son
a half-Indian is provocative in an obvious way, but undercuts one
of the most valid parallels the story shares with Lear: that good
and bad inexplicably may come from the same stock. And finally,
Tracy’s cattle baron does not, like Robinson’s banker, brood over
the destiny of his sons after his death; as Broken Lance’s director,
Edward Dmytryk once said, “When Tracy dies, he’s gone… and
that’s all there is to it.” Lessening the sense that the children’s moral
natures are to be defined by their relations to their father is clearly
moving away from Lear.
House of Strangers has never to my knowledge been suggested
as a Shakespearean adaptation. I doubt it should be, but it is certainly
more closely analogous to Lear than its remake is. The suspicion
is unavoidable that Broken Lance has appeared in Shakespeare
filmographies because of Spencer Tracy—the fifth face for Mt.
Rushmore, “Ay, every inch a king!”
Admittedly, Tracy looked immeasurably more like we might
imagine Lear than Edward G. Robinson did, but if the study of
Shakespearean film is to be reputable, it really should proceed
on more analytical and more investigative bases than the case of
Broken Lance suggests.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 46
FROM THE EDITORS
Staff Update
You will note changes in the editorial box on page 43 in this issue.
Professor Amy Stackhouse, a Miltonist who has taught English
at Iona for ten years, replaces John Mahon as an Editor, joining
Thomas J. (T.J.) Moretti in that role. John Mahon has officially
retired from teaching at Iona, but he will remain involved with the
newsletter, on a voluntary basis, as Advisory Editor. Tom Pendleton
remains in the editorial box, now joined to Louis Marder.
~Summer 2013 Erratum~
We wish to correct and express regret over a missing sentence
portion in Catherine Rockwood’s review of Shakespeare’s
Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography.” The penultimate
paragraph on p. 38 should read as follows, with the added portion
in bold:
“Probably the most controversial entry in the collection is (or will
be) Douglas Bruster’s Chapter 6, “Shakespeare the Stationer.”
Bruster contends that Shakespeare retained a personal interest in
the sales of his plays in print and trimmed his writing style to the
winds of the playbook market. Elizabethan and Jacobean readers
seem to have preferred to buy verse rather than prose, and,
Bruster argues, Shakespeare’s return to verse from the prose
experiments of the late 1590’s and early 16-aughts demonstrates
his marked attention to what book buyers were willing to purchase.
I don’t want to venture to guess whether this particular essay will
produce a bang or a whimper, but it would be irresponsible not to
note that Bruster is making a set of very large claims.”
We apologize for the error, and we look forward to Dr. Rockwood’s
future contributions.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
T.A.P.’s First Article (Winter 1991 41:4 No. 211)
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 47
Table of Contents
Karoline Szatek (Curry College)
CONTENTS: Mulryne,
J.R., ed. The Guild and Guild
Buildings of Shakespeare’s
Stratford: Society, Religion,
School and Stage. Surrey:
Ashgate, 2012. Contributors.
List of Abbreviations. List
of Illustrations.
Preface
and
Acknowledgements.
Introduction – J. R. Mulryne.
(1) The Guild of the Holy
Cross and Its Buildings
– Mairi Macdonald. (2)
Reformation: Priests and
People – Sylvia Gill. (3)
‘Where one is a scholemaster
of grammar’: The Guild
School and Teaching in
Stratford-upon-Avon c. 1420-1558 – Sylvia Gill. (4) ‘More polite
learning’: Humanism and the New Grammar School – Ian Green.
(5) The Guildhall, Stratford-upon-Avon: The Focus of Civic
Governance in the Sixteenth Century – Robert Bearman. (6) The
Stratford Court of Record 1553-1601 – M. A. Webster. (7) The
Archaeology of the Guild Buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratfordupon-Avon – Kate Giles and Jonathan Clark. (8) Professional
Theatre in the Guildhall 1568-1620: Players, Puritanism and
Performance – J. R. Mulryne. (9) The Queen’s Men in Stratford
and The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England–Oliver
Jones. (10) Repertoire of the Professional Players in Stratfordupon-Avon, 1568-1597 – Margaret Shewring. Index.
[Contributors to The Guild and Guild Buildings of
Shakespeare’s Stratford include independent scholars, archivists,
historic building consultants, archaeologists, research fellows
and associates, and former administrators of Renaissance Studies
organizations. The volume is therefore a multi-disciplinary
effort not simply to study the largely unchanged set of buildings
in Shakespeare’s Stratford and the guild that gave rise to them.
Rather, this collection provides a comprehensive account of the
religious, educational, legal, social, and theatrical history of the
Bard’s hometown. The essays themselves interweave with one
another to provide a map of the complex relationships between the
buildings and their history. Mairi Macdonald opens the collection
with a history of the Guildhall, which served as the headquarters
of the Guild of the Holy Cross until the Tudor Reformation,
when the once prosperous guild dissolved. Despite the guild’s
decline, its buildings continued to function as a center of local
government and community law and as a place of entertainment
and education. In the next two chapters, Sylvia Gill traces the
correlations between the Reformation and the economic, cultural,
and curricular changes in mid-sixteenth century Stratford. Among
other noteworthy essays is Mulryne’s piece, which observes that
the hall and the town both took advantage of touring professional
theatre in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, despite increasing
pressures from Puritans. Margaret Shewring focuses more
narrowly on performances in Elizabethan Stratford—from the
moral interludes, classical dramas, and historical-political plays
of professional troupes to the amateur performances during
civic and religious events. Kate Giles and Jonathan Clark offer
archaeological and documentary research—which uses up-to-date
analysis and new dendrochronological investigations to locate
the site of particular buildings, to examine those buildings, and
to investigate such discoveries as the buildings’ medieval wall
paintings. Add this research to M.A. Webster’s archival research
into the town’s Court of Record, and one can conclude that this
collection brings us closer to life as it was lived in Shakespeare’s
Stratford.]
CONTENTS: Loxley, James and Mark Robson. Shakespeare,
Jonson, and the Claims of the Performative. New York: Routledge,
Taylor & Francis, 2013. Notes on Editions. Acknowledgements.
Introduction: Sea Changes. 1. Promises 2. Excuses 3. Libels 4.
Declarations 5. Animation 6. Seriousness 7.Theatre. References.
Index.
[For four decades, a range of such important thinkers as Jaques
Derrida, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell have studied, critiqued,
revised, adapted, and extended the concept of performativity.
This book explores the implications of this history, and suggests
what has been misread, overlooked, or ignored in the process—a
daunting task. Regarding Shakespeare and Jonson specifically,
this volume shows how a renewed attention to those elements
in the concept of performativity that either resist theorization or
mark its difficulties can newly illuminate both its critical potential
and the familiar work of two celebrated poets and dramatists. The
introduction examines the work of J.L. Austin, Emile Benveniste,
John Searle, Mary Louise Pratt, Stanley Fish, Derrida, Butler, and
others who made “sea-changes” in the meaning of performance
and performativity. It then pivots to the book’s focus on “the
performative in motion, as the force within its own transformation”
(10). The first four chapters aim to examine “what it is in the
performative that provokes its questioning, that poses and resists
the limits of taxonomy, concept or theory” (11). The final three
chapters look at “aspects of the condition of the performative:
not the force of its aberrant systematicity or conventionality, but
the matrix of its taking place, the world in which it happens.”
Primarily theoretical in its makeup, the volume relies on both
Shakespeare and Jonson because they in particular indicate the
possibilities and the limits that inhere in the relationships between
speech-act and body, performance and text. The book is loosely
structured as a dialogue; the chapters are written by either Robson
or Loxley, with the latter having composed the majority. The plays
considered in this volume include Richard III, The Winter’s Tale,
Epicene, Volpone, Eastward Ho, Measure for Measure, Julius
Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice,
and others. No one play is examined in full to determine how the
performative performs throughout a work. On the whole, the book
is crammed with information and might be a tad intimidating for
young scholars, but it is an important contribution to theory and
early modern literary studies.]
CONTENTS: Thompson, Ayanna. Passing Strange:
Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2011. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction: The Passing
Strangeness of Shakespeare in America 2. Universalism: Two
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 48
Table of Contents
Films that Brush with the Bard, Suture and Bringing Down the
House 3. Essentialism: Meditations Inspired by Farrukh Dondy’s
Novel Black Swan 4. Multiculturalism: The Classics, Casting,
and Confusion 5. Original(ity): Othello and Blackface 6. Reform:
Redefining Authenticity in Shakespeare Reform Programs 7.
Archives:
ClassroomInspired
Performance
Videos on YouTube 8.
Conclusion: Passing Race
and Passing Shakespeare
in Peter Sellars’s Othello.
Notes.
Works Cited.
Index.
[Ayanna Thompson’s
Passing Strange may take
its cue from Othello, who
observes “’twas passing
strange” that Desdemona
became
attracted
to
him, but it focuses on
Shakespeare and race in
contemporary America. It
has an approachable style
for her target audiences –
secondary school teachers,
theatre practitioners, community activists, and Shakespeare
scholars. She unpacks the multiple, even contradictory meanings
of terms like “race,” “passing,” and “Shakespeare” without
resorting to academic jargon. It is easy to see how “passing” can
mean “to identify oneself as another race,” to create “‘new stories
out of old ones,’” and to move “between historical, cultural,
national, and racial borders.” More noteworthy is Thompson’s
attention to the debate concerning whether race studies and racial
activism benefit from Shakespeare, or vice-versa. To analyze how
well and how comfortably Shakespeare and race fit together in the
American imagination, Thompson examines material as disparate
as contemporary film, at-risk youth programs, and academic
scholarship. In examining the instable relationship between
Shakespeare and race in American popular culture, she goes so
far as to claim that Passing Strange “might just be a manifesto
advocating for the maintenance of that instability.” In this effort,
Thompson attends to questions like, “Is there a value to claims to
an essentialized racial identity for Shakespeare (e.g., Shakespeare
was black, a woman, a Jew, etc.)? Of what benefit is the promotion
of Shakespeare and Shakespearean programs to incarcerated
and/or at-risk persons of color?” As Thompson addresses such
questions, she examines not just black and white America, but
Hispanic and Asian America as well. Thompson adopts a cultural
studies approach to destabilize both race and Shakespeare, but
she has aimed not to destroy, vilify, or denigrate; rather, her aim
has been to “shift the foundation so that new angles, vantages,
and perspectives are created.” Her hope is that this book begins
a conversation and that this discussion will continue “after the
covers of the book are shut.” My hope is that hers has been realized
since the publication of her book in 2011.]
Vincentio As A Lovely Maid In The Taming
Of The Shrew
Geoff Ridden (Southern Oregon University)
According to the actor Brian Cox, the most significant scene
in The Taming of the Shrew is 4.5: “the world is not as we would
like it to be and so therefore we have to [...] turn the world on its
head. We have to make the sun the moon and the moon the sun.”1
Cox does not comment on the second part of this scene, in
which Petruchio tries to convince Katherina that Vincentio is really
a ‘lovely maid’, but I think that this is no less pivotal. This by-play
is more obviously comic because Vincentio is involved in it and
must react to this “strange encounter.” The sun has no interest in
whether or not Petruchio thinks it is the moon, but Vincentio has
to be confused or even angry at being labelled a girl, and suddenly
Petruchio and Katherina have the opportunity to share in a joke at
the expense of this innocent bystander, a joke in which they have
a common vision of a world turned upside down, and one which
is not open to Vincentio.
Elizabeth Shafer has made a detailed study of productions of
this play, and charts the various possibilities used by directors in
presenting Katherina’s infamous final speech (5.2).2 One possibility
which does not seem to have been explored is to have Katherina
deliver this speech, at least in part, to Vincentio. If, for example, the
line “Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth” is addressed
to Vincentio, who became a “lovely maid” just a few scenes earlier
during a more private joke between Katherina and Petruchio, then
the whole tenor of this more public speech changes, and its potential
misogyny is defused.
1 Brian Cox, ‘I Say It Is The Moon’, in Living with Shakespeare,
ed. S. Carson (New York, 2013) 205.
2 Elizabeth Shafer, The Taming of the Shrew (Cambridge, 2002).
SNL ADVERTISING
Full-Page Ad
RATES
Dimensions: Height: 9.75 in. Width: 7.50 in.
Price for 1 issue: $210
Price for 2 successive issues: $300
Half-Page Ad
Dimensions (vertical orientation):
Height: 9.75 inches
Width: 3.75 inches
Dimensions (horizontal orientation):
Height: 4.75 inches
Width: 7.50 inches
Price for 1 issue: B&W $125 Color: $175
Price for 2 successive issues: B&W: $210 Color: $250
Quarter-Page Ad
Dimensions: Height: 4.75 in. Width: 3.75 in.
Price for 1 issue: B&W: $75 Color: $100
Price for 2 consecutive issues: B&W: $125 Color: $150
Rates for more than two successive issues are negotiable
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 49
Mark Thornton Burnett’s Shakespeare and World Cinema
Colleen E. Kennedy (The Ohio State University)
At the commencement of his scholarly and vital study, Mark
Burnett cites critic Greg Colón Semenza: “World cinema is likely
to be the next, if not the final, frontier for Shakespeare on film
scholarship” (2). Mark Thornton Burnett’s Shakespeare and World
Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) offers a
comprehensive and conversant analysis of contemporary cinematic
trends in non-Anglophone Shakespeare films, and though his
work may not be the “final frontier” of Shakespearean cinematic
scholarship, it staunchly explores uncharted territories. Burnett’s
book offers a nice cinematic counterpart to the burgeoning field of
global Shakespeare studies, but can appeal even more broadly to
film scholars, Shakespeare scholars, and those who study modern
mediascapes.
Burnett’s book offers a corrective to and expansion of his
exciting Filming Shakespeare in the Global
Marketplace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
which covers thirty Shakespeare films
of the 1990s and after, and which forms
the theoretical foundation for this present
study. While most of the focus of Filming
Shakespeare, however, was on the films
of American and British filmmakers,
Shakespeare and World Cinema develops
the previous focus on Shakespeare as
lingua franca, on the tensions between
local and global, and on the globalization
and commercialization of Shakespearean
film as international commodity, all while
expanding the Shakespearean film canon
to include prominent and lesser-known
international filmmakers.
The book is divided into three roughly
even sections. The first section, “Auteurs,”
explores the films of specific filmmakers
and the idiosyncratic tendencies of the
“individual craftsperson possessed of a
distinctive vision” (5). In these initial
chapters, due to Burnett’s interwoven
readings of larger themes of these films with unfamiliar character
names and altered plot points, the reading can be a bit dense and
disorienting, and clearer initial summaries could better foreground
the section on “Auteurs.” Despite this, Burnett focuses on these
understudied filmmakers and offers strong close readings of these
directors’ stylistic signatures and distinctive takes on Shakespeare’s
works. Together, these chapters expand the canon of contemporary
cinema to include these three visionary auteurs: Alexander Abela,
Vishal Bhardwaj, and Jayaraaj Rajasekhara.
The first chapter covers the work of the French-based filmmaker
Alexander Abela, whose Makibefo (1999, Macbeth) and Souli
(2004, Othello) are films—performed in French and Malagasy—that
create “a new imagined history of Madagascar” (47). Each film
contrasts white ethnographic practices and colonial powers—the
English narrator of Makibefo or the French trader/Iago figure of
Souli—with the day-to-day lives of the indigenous actors. Art, of
course, imitates life as the “gaze of the ethnographer,” and Abela’s
own anthropological interests inform his style of “documentary
realism” (27), from his preference for black and white to his
penchant for extended establishing shots of the shoreline.
In the second chapter, Burnett compares and contrasts two
Indian directors: the more commercially successful Northern Indian
Vishal Bhardwaj and the less-globally recognized Southern Indian
Jayaraaj Rajasekhara. Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (Macbeth, 2004, set
in Mumbai) and Omkara (Othello, 2006, set in Uttar Pradesh)
reflect the director’s own birth region (Uttar Pradesh) and current
locale (Mumbai), but also extend beyond India’s urban issues by
incorporating stock characters from both American and Mumbai
mobster films, and by referring to Wild West tropes and Indian
bandit stories. Jayaraaj’s films—Kaliyattam (Othello, 1997) and
Kannaki (Antony and Cleopatra, 2002)—are more rooted in
indigenous imagery and regional rituals,
such as cock fighting and religious dancing.
Burnett argues for the different international
trajectories of these two directors, but he
also highlights their commonalities—issues
of caste and race, political conflicts, the roles
of dance and ceremony, the importance of
family, and “women’s attempts to redress
imbalances” (57).
In the second section of his book,
Burnett moves from individual filmmakers
to “regional configurations” in Latin
America and Asia. In his chapter on Latin
American adaptations of Shakespeare,
Burnett offers complex post-colonial
readings of the settings, Catholic imagery,
and female characters of Sangrador, a surreal
black and white Venezualan adaptation of
Macbeth (dir. Leonardo Henríquez, 2000);
As Alegres Comadre, a tourist’s fantasy of
19th century Tiradentes as the setting for
Merry Wives of Windsor (dir. Leila Hipólito,
2003); and the Northern Mexican Othello,
Huapango (dir. Iván Lipkies, 2004), with
artifacts of conquest overshadowing the setting. Burnett connects
these disparate regional films with such theoretical foci as animal
studies. Burnett argues that these films demonstrate “complimentary
relations to Shakespearean language, and nowhere is this evidenced
more strikingly than in the films’ utilization of a bestial discourse”
(100). In Macbeth, the witches have intimate connections with
their bestial familiars, Huapango’s Porter buggers a donkey, and
the language of Othello’s “beast with two backs” is transferred to
scenes of horseback riding. Such “bestial discourse” leads Burnett
to make larger connections between the female body, the nationstate, slavery and colonization, and ethnic divisions that persist in
contemporary Latin American history.
Turning to Asia, Burnett covers four works based on
Shakespearean tragedies, two versions of Hamlet—The Banquet
(dir. Xiagong Feng, Chinese, 2006) and Prince of the Himalayas
(dir. Sherwood Hu, Tibetan, 2006)—as well as a Malaysian skinhead
take on Julius Caesar—Gedebe (dir. Nam Ron, 2002)—and a
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 50
Shakespeare and World Cinema
metafilmic and media-savvy Romeo and Juliet from Singapore—
Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah, 2000). In the case of all
four films, Burnett argues that “a Shakespeare presence is felt not
so much through citation but via revision: Prince of the Himalayas,
for instance, becomes a tragedy of forgiveness rather than revenge”
(127). Both Gedebe and Chicken Rice War highlight contemporary
linguistic pluralities, and Burnett offers an especially strong and
concise reading of Gedebe’s gendered politics. Likewise, for Prince
of the Himalayas, there is a brilliant analysis of the Buddhist
resonances and the current cultural-political landscape of Tibet.
In the final third of Shakespeare and World Cinema, Burnett
explores at length two plays and their filmic adaptations: Macbeth
and Romeo and Juliet. Macbeth is “perennially reinvented. …
Because it is a play that revolves around tyranny and absolutism,
… Macbeth speaks volubly to filmmakers and artists invested in
challenging forms of cultural and linguistic hegemony” (164-165).
Burnett returns to several of the Macbeth adaptations he discussed
in previous chapters as well as the critically lauded (and one of the
few non-Western canonical Shakespeare films) Akira Kurosawa’s
Throne of Blood (1957, Japan). Burnett then turns to three lesser
known works and argues for the inclusion of these three politically
astute, culturally aware, and linguistically recuperative films into
the canon.
Yellamma (dir. Mohan Koda, 1999), set in rural Warangal
during the mid-nineteenth century, allows for a new exploration of
the Indian Rebellion, represented as unsuccessful due to internal
betrayals, divine retribution (in the form of the goddess Kali),
and the destruction of noble and familial hierarchies. Someone is
Sleeping in My Pain (dir. Michael Roes, 2001) creates a palimpsest
of medieval Scotland and modern day Yemen, and creates a
framework narrative of an American filmmaker’s desire to film
Macbeth in Yemen. Yemeni tribal warriors play the cast, and
multiple actors present a fragmented portrayal of the ‘Macbeth’
figure due to the lead actor’s extended illness. In Macbeth (dir. Bo
Landin and Alex Scherpf, 2004), the Ice Globe Theatre, located
north of the Arctic Circle, becomes the desolate and luxurious
setting for this tragedy. This Macbeth represents the Sámi people,
who by living across several borders—Norwegian, Finnish,
Swedish, and Russian—are linguistically and culturally bound,
even if historically and politically relegated to a geographical state.
In his readings of the different depictions of the Lady Macbeth
figure in these films, Burnett revisits a key issue—the portrayal of
female characters, whether during moments of sexual autonomy
(as in The Banquet), among subjugated wives and mistresses (as
in Souli), or with the many complex depictions of Juliet and Lady
Macbeth figures.
The last chapter, instead of offering the types of extended close
readings of particular films offered in early chapters, embraces
the comparative approach quantitatively. Surveying twenty-eight
adaptations of Romeo and Juliet from the mid-1980s onward,
Burnett deftly claims that this tale of star-crossed lovers “inhabits a
world cinema niche” and notes the commonalities across the many
adaptations—xenophobia; interracial, interethnic, and interfaith
marriages; diasporas; and “societies caught on the cusp of transition,
arguably because the play itself is concerned with a coming of age”
(196). Even though Burnett covers so much here, he is still able to
create fascinating mini-theses about recurring tropes: for instance,
how Mercutio represents “alternative lifestyles” (often queer) in
contrast to the staid Paris (209), and how the denouement for certain
films augments, cancels, or otherwise challenges Shakespeare’s
ending.
Burnett’s work is fascinating, challenging, and at times,
astoundingly beautiful in its vivid descriptions of scenes and
performances that many of us might never see. Far reaching in
scope, Burnett offers Shakespeare and film scholars the opportunity
to explore and acknowledge these international films, some of
which, he laments, are all but unavailable. Fully integrating
Arjun Appadurai’s different ‘scapes,’and looking ahead to more
accessibility through digital archives, such as MIT’s Global
Shakespeares, Burnett’s erudite work will only gain in importance
over the next decade as the emerging field of global Shakespeare
studies forges ahead.
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Burnett, Mark Thornton. Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. 2ndedn.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012.
Donaldson, Peter S. and Alexa Huang, eds. MIT Global Shakespeares: Open
Access Video & Performance Archive. MIT, 2010. Web. Dec. 2013.
“Interview with Professor Mark Burnett, Queen’s University, Belfast.” Interview
by Colleen Kennedy. The Shakespeare Standard.Web. 22 Dec. 2012.
Semenza, Greg Colón. “Introduction.” Shakespeare Studies 38 (2010): 19-25.
All clipart images used in
The Shakespeare Newsletter
are copyrighted by the following:
© Corel Corporation, 3G Graphics Inc.,
Image Club Graphics Inc.,One Mile Up Inc.,
Archive Arts, Cartesia Software, Techpool
Studios Inc., 1996.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 51
Love’s Labour’s Lost Once; Love’s Labour’s Lost Once Again:
What Happens When Plays Move House
Iska Alter (Professor of English, Emerita, at Hofstra University) & W.B. Long (Independent Scholar)
Lyn Gardner, writing for The Guardian on July 14, 2007, described the Globe’s production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s
Lost (directed by Dominic Drumgoole) as “walk[ing] a fine line
as it makes bare-faced cheek with bare-cheeked bottoms.”1 Some
fifteen days later, her colleague Matt Wolf at The Observer would
characterize the action as dominated by “blokishness appropriate
to a play about testosterone on parade.”2
A little over two years later in December, 2009, Ben Brantley of The New York Times entitled his review of the company’s
touring production of this very same comedy, staged at the Martin
Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University in New York
City, “Pledge Week at that Elizabethan Animal House,’ asserting
that Love’s Labour’s Lost may well be the […] best example of a
genre that would flourish in less sophisticated forms five centuries
later: the college comedy.”3 As if to emphasize the rude collegiate
humor which suffused the production, Andy Probst in an on-line
interview for Theatre Mania would describe the four aristocratic
young men at the center of the comic plot, one of whom is the King
of Navarre, as “madcap and immature frat boys.”4 That these critical
assessments reflected self-conscious directorial choices is made
abundantly clear in a 2009 interview with an insistent Dominic
Drumgoole who explained that his Love’s Labour’s Lost must be
“relentlessly, remorselessly, deliberately, explicitly, ostentatiously,
gloriously filthy.”5
Whether as compliment or condemnation (and there was condemnation aplenty to be sure),6 two sets of reviewers, more than
two years apart, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, commented in
much the same way about this particular production, stressing not
the play’s verbal elegance, which has been the critical hallmark of
commentary on Love’s Labour’s Lost, but its often crude slapstick
physicality and its raucous bawdiness, action, and language ordinarily assigned to the range of clowns who appear in the text. Does
this mean, then, that the audiences who saw the production in the
outdoor venue of the Globe and those who saw the touring version
in the enclosed theatrical space of the Schimmel Center saw the
same play as the critical consensus supposes? Well, not exactly,
as these two spectators can attest. If it can be said that there are
felt as well as observed discrepancies between two like stagings
of the crude, the raucous, and the bawdy, these two productions
exemplify such variant comic possibilities. Particularly, we would
like to argue that the disparities which emerge are the direct result
of the shift from outside to indoor performance environments, the
indoor proceedings, surprisingly perhaps, being the more broadly
enacted and experienced.
Finally, a confession and a caveat. The writers of this essay
viewed the Globe Love’s Labour’s Lost as groundlings during an
afternoon performance whose memories were refreshed by examining the filmed rainy-day version held in the Globe’s archives. These
same spectators were members of the audience at the Schimmel
Center at an evening performance, seated in relative comfort in the
balcony of the theatre. Had we gone to the Globe of an evening, or
sat anywhere in its galleries, or in the orchestra in the Schimmel,
some of these observations would, of course and by necessity, be
different. Such, after all, is the nature and art of the play.
I.
Stage – Action – Audience
The physical circumstances of each theatre—the shape and size
of the stage; the relation ofthat surface to the audience, whether
standing or seated; the movement of actors across or within the
playing areas; and the acoustic determinants thereby established—
help to explain the consequent affective differences in the two
productions. Given the more spacious-seeming presentational
conditions of the Globe compared with the smaller enclosed stage
of the Schimmel Center, the London offering was better able to
suggest an outdoor world of picnics and playfulness. As shaped
by the designer Jonathan Fensom’s attachments of “large book-illustrations of tress to the pillars and an Elizabethan knot-garden
[sent] out into the courtyard—an elaborate double-hexagon that
heightened a sense of the formality of the sparring between the
young noblemen and the visiting ladies who distract them from them
doomed attempt at self-denial,”7 the set dispersed action and energy
over a wider theatrical landscape, ultimately softening (or perhaps
neutralizing) the growing rowdiness of the characters’ behavior. The
Schimmel area was a far more traditional space—a thrust stage,
without a proscenium arch, where the large platform was several
small steps up from the theatrical floor level on each of the three
sides, allowing easy entrance and exit through the audience. The
all-seated spectators surrounded the stage on the same three sides.
Although the actors moved through the audience to reach and leave
the stage and attempted to interact with the spectators before the
play began, the audience remained seated for the most part; so the
effort to engage the viewer merely underscored the artificiality of
the experiment to create a pseudo-Globe indoors. This diminished,
more or less orthodox, plating space located within a conventional
walled auditorium held, even trapped, voice, gesture, and movement, thereby intensifying the slapstick disorder, making it seem
increasingly contrived in its effects.
At the outdoor Globe, the reconfigured stage extending the
complex geometry of the knot-garden out into the groundlings’
domain generated clusters of spectators who encompassed the
moments of action rather than merely observing the proceedings
frontally as did the audience at the indoor Schimmel. The standees,
therefore, were physically able to follow the shift and swerve of
the debate-like dialogue with the shifts and swerves of their own
bodies, fashioning an interactive, nonverbal conversation with the
actors, unlike the immobilized, passive watchers at the Schimmel
who were positioned as distinct judges apart and away from the
unfolding comedy, instead of as participants. Such an evaluative
perspective asks the players to work harder to collapse the interpretive distance between viewer and performer.
The relative absence of such an issue at the Globe, at least for
those who choose to stand, is further emphasized in Love’s Labour’s
Lost when an actor moves from a standing to a kneeling, crouching,
or sitting position, and so confronts the audience before him or
her at near eye-level. This change establishes an almost physical
equality linking player to spectator, the effect of which is to invite
the onlooker to enter directly into the immediate performative instance. Whereas in the Schimmel, once the play begins, attempts
to establish an unmediated connection with the audience often fails
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 52
Love’s Labour’s Lost Once; Love’s Labour’s Lost Once Again
not only because it has been kept at a physical distance, but also
because for the audience in the orchestra at least, the visual locus
ostensibly closest to the performers, consistently has been situated
below the actors’ sightlines.
Another factor which seems to us to temper the turbulent
comedy of the London production relative to its noisier New York
counterpart is the more substantial width and depth of the Globe
stage itself. The larger playing area these dimensions provide encourages greater space between and among the performing bodies
of the actors as they are deployed over the stage. The enhanced
presentational distance serves to dilute the clamor of misrule invoked by the director. The felt muting of the unruly is especially
evident during the explosive food-fight sequence (yes, we did say
food-fight) which occurs just before Mercade enters with the dark
news of the French king’s death, as most of the cast is ranged in
an elongated diagonal from front to back across the stage. In the
more cramped quarters of the Schimmel, as witnessed from above,
the space between the actors is necessarily diminished, allowing
bodily closeness to increase the comic tension and broaden into
slapstick gestural humor.
II.
Light and Sound
Other elements that change the nature of each production’s
representation of the unruly have to do with the nature of light and
sound as they function in an outdoor space and an indoor venue,
and how they help to constitute the differences between bawdy and
raucous and raucous and bawdy.
In the Schimmel Center, the performance occurred ina fully
lit auditorium as if in imitation of a daylight performance at the
Globe. But, unfortunately, “imitation” here is the operative word.
And the effect is anything but naturalizing or normative. Because
the interior technical circumstances cannot replicate the mutable
variations of natural light, the stable and undifferentiated brightness
in which one comic action takes place serves to heighten both the
theatrical and the artificial. And at the Schimmel Center, the pretense of performers interacting with the soon-to-be-seated audience
underscores a much more contrived relationship between actors and
audience that smacks of “Renaissance-Faire” reconstructions. By
the time the play reaches the climactic food-fight, these spectators
felt caught in the local college cafeteria imagined by the critics
instead of being in the garden of the King of Navarre.
Finally, there are the variant acoustic domains generated in the
outdoor Globe and the indoor Schimmel Center.8 It is not simply
that the absence of walls and roof at the Globe circulate performance sounds differently, or that the standing and seated bodies
do not absorb sounds as they would in the more enclosed world
of conventional inside theatre spaces where voices, music, and
the attendant noises of staged activity seem to ricochet stridently
throughout the house. It is rather that the amphitheatre that is the
Globe is filled with a range of ambient sounds that co-exist with
the voices of the actors, the language of the play, and the physical
components of stage activity: birdcalls, jet planes, the maddening
helicopters, gusts of wind, the shifts and shuffles of the audience
itself, and with some frequency, the splash of raindrops.
Although it is obvious enough to say that in an open-air world,
the actors must project their voices in order to overcome those
ambient sounds that are an inevitable part of the urban landscape,
it does not seem as if the acoustic terrain resonates in quite the
same clamorous fashion as it did with the voices of the actors in
the New York version. The architectural restraints mandated by this
particular indoor auditorium made it seem as if we were trapped
inside a larger ever berating bell.
III.
Reverberations
We have been discussing a number of aspects of two-venue
staging in the early-twenty-first century, but it is an important facet
of our investigation that it not be forgotten that the multiple-venue
production problem was one that constantly faced Elizabethan-Jacobean-Caroline playwrights and players. Many assumptions have
been made and too much written about them by scholars who wish
to attach the writing and performing of various plays to particular
theatres. It seems to us that a little such speculation can go a long
way—probably too far. It is all well enough to determine that a
play was written, say, for the Globe or the Blackfriars, but what
happens when, for opportunity or for necessity, such plays were
performed elsewhere? Such occurrences surely happened much
more frequently than often is acknowledged.
Since most Elizabethan-Jacobean-Caroline plays written for
public playhouses can be adapted—functionally if not ideally—to
the space available to players performing in other appointed spaces, the openness of contingency rather than the restrictiveness of
spatial certainty needs more investigation. It long has been known
that plays were performed at various royal palaces, at the Inns of
Court, and in Oxbridge halls; now the explorations of the Records
of Early English Drama project reveal a world of performance venues—mostly just largish rooms not especially adapted for playing.
Exactly what the players did when they moved to different
venues and what the results were for the audience may be irretrievable, but the Love’s Labour’s Lost experience here examined may
provide some clues not only to what may have been done, but also
to how audiences might have perceived them. Necessity breeds
adaptation. Many things are possible because theatre, in whatever
venue, creates an imaginative world for its audience. Players do not
need a purpose-built hall (let alone a theatre), however profitable
and “better” such a space may be. (Even scenes that “demand” an
upper playing area of some sort can be re-staged horizontally rather
than vertically, with the “upper” players merely off to one side of
the available playing area.)
The inevitability of differing performance geographies merely
emphasizes the fluidity of theatre and its effects on an audience.
That is to say, while these productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost are
assuredly the same, they are with equal certainty different. When
considering the exigencies of staging in the late-sixteenth and
early-seventeenth centuries, it is well to keep in mind the numerous problems and feasible solutions as well as the experience of
twenty-first century theatergoers.
(Notes on page 54)
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 53
Anne Barton Dies at 80
Photo by: Ramsey & Muspratt
latimes.com
Anne Barton, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who was
one of the most eminent Shakespearean commentators of the past
fifty years, died on Monday, November 11, 2013. Before going to
press with our last issue, we had received word from our colleague
Michael Jensen of her death, but we held off on publishing a notice
so that we would have enough space to reflect on her importance to
the lives of many Shakespeareans. There has long been no better
way to prepare classes on the comedies than to review Professor
Barton’s introductions in The Riverside Shakespeare (now The
Wadsworth Shakespeare). I regularly taught such plays as Dream,
Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado in sophomore survey courses,
and invariably re-read Barton’s concise and comprehensive
commentary before the first class. In recent years, when students
in Iona’s major course on the comedies seemed less and less able to
find good secondary sources for their research papers, I have urged
them to search Barton’s gem-like essays for insights that might be
quoted in their papers.
Two obituaries of Barton are available on Wikipedia, one by
Charles McNulty from The Los Angeles Times on November 14,
the other by Peter Holland for The Guardian on November 25.
McNulty’s obituary offers a perceptive and attractive evaluation
of Barton’s contribution to the field. Peter Holland, the esteemed
British Shakespeare scholar who edits Shakespeare Survey and
teaches at Notre Dame University, remembers Anne Barton as a
personal friend.
It certainly came as a surprise to learn that Professor Barton
was an American, born Barbara Ann Roesen in New York City in
1933 and brought up in Westchester County, NY, a graduate of Bryn
Mawr College in Pennsylvania. (Actually, I should not have been
surprised, since Michael Jensen provides a brief biographical profile
of Barton for his “Talking Books with Anne Barton,” published in
the Winter 2002-2003 issue of this newsletter [52:4: 105, 124].) She
went to England after college and stayed there for the rest of her life.
She completed a doctoral degree at Cambridge and later became
the first woman to hold a fellowship at New College, Oxford; she
taught at several other institutions before returning to Cambridge
to take up a fellowship at Trinity, where she spent the rest of her
life. She was a fellow of the British Academy.
Charles McNulty reports that her first marriage, to William
Righter, ended in divorce. Her second marriage, to the Shakespearean
director John Barton, who was a founder of the Royal Shakespeare
Company and achieved eminence in his own right with memorable
productions for the RSC, would seem to be a match made in heaven,
given their similar intellectual interests. Peter Holland writes:
The result of their marriage was a series of productions
highly informed by critical analysis. They shared a passion
for plays they felt had always been undervalued and for
ways in which the theatricality of production could be
emphasised, as in John’s Richard II for the RSC in 1971.
Anne’s analysis of Hamlet as a play overwhelmingly
self-conscious of its own status as a play, set out in her
introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare edition in
1980, was fully reflected in John’s RSC production in the
same year.
John Barton survives his wife of forty-four years.
Her range of intellectual interest reached beyond Shakespeare,
and she published books on Ben Jonson and Lord Byron. Holland
reports that in 1984
she published Ben Jonson, Dramatist, a book of vast
scope and imaginative sympathy in its understanding of
what makes Jonson so unlike Shakespeare, and a rescueact in its astonishing demonstration of the successfully
experimental nature of Jonson’s last plays, works till then
dismissed as failures. It was her prompting that led the
RSC triumphantly to produce The New Inn (1987) and
Sejanus (2005), neither works that most thought worth
staging.
Holland also reports that Byron was always a special enthusiasm;
Barton regarded Don Juan as “the greatest English long poem since
Paradise Lost.”
Most Shakespeareans know her as the author of several
important works, including Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play
(1962, as Anne Righter) and Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (1994).
The 1962 book, based on the doctoral dissertation she wrote
under her Cambridge mentor Muriel Bradbrook, grew out of the
closing paragraph of her essay “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which she
published in Shakespeare Quarterly (1953) when she was still an
undergraduate. Indeed, she published in SQ as Bobbyann Roesen.
Barton is rather unusual in having published work under three
different names, and it has not always been clear to readers that
Roesen, Righter, and Barton are the same person, although her “gift
. . . of pinpointing a moment perfectly, the elegance of her prose and
accuracy of her perception combining to bring out the playwright’s
brilliance and humanity” (Holland) was already apparent when she
wrote as Bobbyanne Roesen at Bryn Mawr.
The essay on Love’s Labour’s Lost, reprinted in several
anthologies of criticism and in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean,
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 54
Anne Barton Dies at 80
is regarded as a classic and often cited as a “must-read” for
understanding the play. Her teacher at Bryn Mawr, Arthur Colby
Sprague, helped get the essay published in SQ. Here is the closing
paragraph, which Barton described as the seed for Shakespeare
and the Idea of the Play:
For us, however, knowing how Shakespeare’s later
work developed, and how the play image itself took on
another meaning for him, there is a strange poignancy
in [the] closing moment [of the play], with its confident
assertion of the concrete reality of the world into which
the characters are about to journey, the necessity for them
to adjust themselves to that reality. Later, in As You Like It
and Hamlet, Shakespeare would begin to think of the play
as the symbol, not of illusion, but of the world itself and
its actuality, in Macbeth and King Lear as the symbol of
the futility and tragic nature of that actuality, “that great
stage of fools” (Lear 4.6). Yet he must always have kept in
mind the image as it had appeared years before in [LLL],
for returning to it at the very last, he joined that earlier idea
of the play as illusion with its later meaning as a symbol of
the real world, and so created the final play image of The
Tempest in which illusion and reality have become one and
the same, and there is no longer any distinction possible
between them. The world itself into which Berowne and
his companions travel to seek out reality will become
for Shakespeare at the last merely another stage, a play
briefly enacted:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
.........................
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.152-158)
Yet her greatest legacy will probably be those brilliant
introductions to each of the comedies collected in The Riverside
Shakespeare. Just a glance at my edition of the Riverside confirms
how thoroughly I have studied most of these introductions. All of
them justify McNulty’s characterization of her approach to the plays
as “holistic.” Such an approach meant that her short essays on each
of the comedies provided provocative and original readings. Peter
Holland comments that
the generations of students who read her introductions
to Shakespeare’s comedies [in the Riverside edition] not
only learned about the plays but also how one might write
about them, and how critical writing can make the familiar
startlingly unfamiliar in all its complexity. In this way
she taught her readers exactly what Shakespeare (or Ben
Jonson or Byron) achieve and how they do it.
These introductory essays, along with those she wrote for
editions of Hamlet and The Tempest, should be published together
in a separate volume for the benefit of all students of Shakespeare,
fulfilling a function similar to that played by Mark Van Doren’s
classic collection of short essays, Shakespeare (1939).
Perhaps no better tribute could be paid to her than to quote
just two of her most helpful insights in the Riverside introductions.
On The Comedy of Errors, she observes that “death is never a
serious possibility in the Menaechmi, or in most of Roman comedy.
Shakespeare, even at the beginning of his dramatic career, seems
to have been wedded to the idea that happy endings must, to carry
conviction, be won from a serious confrontation with mortality,
violence, and time” (pp. 80-81 in the1974 Riverside).
Writing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Barton comments
on the “Pyramus and Thisby” performance in Act 5:
Without meaning to do so, Bottom and his associates
transform tragedy into farce before our very eyes,
converting that litany of true love crossed which was
rehearsed in the very first scene by Hermia and Lysander to
laughter. In doing so, they recapitulate the development of
MND as a whole, reenacting the movement from potential
calamity to an ending in which quick bright things come
not to confusion, as once seemed inevitable, but to joy.
(Riverside 1974, p. 220)
In one answer for the “Talking Books” interview, Barton says
that her mentors for her academic study of Shakespeare, Arthur
Sprague and Muriel Bradbrook, “influenced me a lot, but less for
any books they actually wrote than for themselves as people and
scholars. Sprague taught me the importance of Shakespeare as
performed on the stage, and Brad the importance of casting one’s
net as widely as possible in Renaissance literature generally.” Anne
Barton’s own achievement suggests that she took their advice and
used it to provide her own students and readers with memorable
insights into Shakespeare.
May she rest in peace. [JWM]
“Love’s Labour’s Lost Once;
Love’s Labour’s Lost Once Again”
1. July 14, 2007.
Notes
2. July 29, 2007.
3. December 1, 2009.
4. December 11, 2009, http://www.theatremania.com
5. Jill Phillips Ingram, “Interview with Dominic Drumgoole,” The
Shakespeare Newsletter, 61:2 No. 284 (Fall 2010), 57.
6. Among those who disapproved or were at least skeptical of the
production were Charles Spencer writing for The Telegraph and
the unnamed critic in the Financial Times; in New York there were
Marilyn Stasio commenting for Variety and Frank Scheck for the
New York Post.
7. Paul Taylor, The Independent. July 12, 2007
8. Anyone interested in the acoustic environment of the Globe could
do no better than to become acquainted with Bruce R. Smith’s
ground-breaking work, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 55
“Precious Friends Hid in Death’s Dateless Night”
Over the years since 1991, The Shakespeare Newsletter
has tried, with more or less success, to report the deaths of
notable Shakespeareans. In the past few months, at least eight
Shakespeareans worthy of notice have passed away. In separate
articles we have reported on the deaths of our editor Tom Pendleton
and of Anne Barton. Here we report in briefer fashion on six others.
As indicated, two of these memorial notices were prepared by JWM,
two by June Schlueter of the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar, one
by James Harner for SHAKSPER, and one by Grace Tiffany, one
of SNL’s Contributing Editors.
R. A. Foakes
Reg Foakes was 90 when he died in January, 2013. Reporting
on his death in The Guardian for 17 January, Grace Ioppolo writes
that “he was an eminent theatre historian, literary scholar and
editor. His research on Shakespeare’s original playhouses helped
to shape understanding of English theatre history. He was also a
brilliant teacher and lecturer.”
His student days were interrupted by the Second World
War, in which he served as a radar operator in India, but in 1946
he resumed his studies at the University of Birmingham and
completed a PhD under the direction of Allardyce Nicoll. In 195l he
joined two others as a founding fellow of the Shakespeare Institute
in Stratford-upon-Avon, now part of the U of Birmingham. He
taught at various institutions in the UK, Canada, and the United
States and was Professor Emeritus at the U of California, Santa
Barbara, at the time of his death. Ioppolo reports that “In 1963, he
founded the department of English at the new U of Kent, where
he later became dean of humanities. He oversaw the introduction
of programmes in film studies, drama and the history of art, and
raised substantial funding to build the university’s Gulbenkian
theatre.”
Foakes edited, with R.T. Rickert, Henslowe’s Diary (1961),
and this work, Ioppolo reports, “led Reg to further groundbreaking
research on Shakespeare’s playhouses.” He was, in addition, “a
major contributor to the Henslowe-Alleyn digitization project,
which aims to conserve priceless material related to theatre in the
period.”
Foakes also published Illustrations of the English Stage:
1580-1642 (1985), Hamlet Vs Lear: Cultural Politics and
Shakespeare’s Art (1993), Shakespeare and Violence (2002), and
editions of several plays, most notably the Arden Three King Lear
(1997). I have not read widely in his work, but my hunch is that
his book on the relative popularity of Hamlet and King Lear and
his edition of the latter play will be his most important legacy to
future generations. The Arden Three edition is a worthy successor
to Kenneth Muir’s highly-regarded Arden Two edition of Lear.
Foakes’ edition offers a comprehensive introductory essay of 150
pages that examines the play from every conceivable perspective.
Its opening pages make a cogent argument for the equal importance
of the written text and the performed script:
Plays have a double life, in the mind as read and on the
stage as acted; reading a play and seeing it acted are two
different but equally valid and valuable experiences.
Shakespeare’s fellow actors provided in the First Folio
of his works a text for readers, and all later editors have
had readers in mind; even acting versions have first to be
read. There has been a fashion in criticism for claiming
that “the real play is the performance, not the text,” or
that the play is a “communal construct” and “exists in
relationship to scripts we will never have, to a series of
revisions and collaborations that start as soon as there is
a Shakespearean text.” It seems to me rather that that the
“real play” is as much the text we read, and perhaps act
out in the mind, as the performance we watch; and scripts
are what directors and actors make for the stage out of
the reading texts provided for them by editors. (4)
The opening paragraphs of the Introduction offer an
eloquent and persuasive view of the play as “a colossus at the
center of Shakespeare’s achievement as the grandest effort of his
imagination” (opening sentence of the Introduction, 1).
Professor Foakes was married twice. His first marriage,
to Barbara, endured from 1951 until her death in 1988. There
were four children. He subsequently married a librarian at the
Shakespeare Institute in Stratford, Mary White, who died in 1996.
He dedicates the Arden Three Lear: “For my beloved Mary—
‘Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never.’”
God willing, the heartbreaking bleakness of this dedication has
vanished in a joyful reunion with Mary now that Reg Foakes has
reached the “undiscovered country.” May he rest in peace. [JWM]
Anthony Ellis
Anthony Ellis, associate professor at Western Michigan
University and associate editor for the journal Comparative Drama,
died on January 7, 2014, after a battle with leukemia that began
in 2012. He was only 46 years old. A beloved professor who had
served at Western Michigan University from 2005, he was also
an esteemed scholar of Shakespeare and early modern drama. He
authored the well-received Old Age, Masculinity and Early Modern
Drama(Ashgate, 2009). He also wrote a number of scholarly
articles on such plays as John Webster’s The White Devil (Journal of
Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2006) and Ben Jonson’s Alchemist
(Ben Jonson Journal, 2005). He was the recipient of many grants
and fellowships, including the Folger Shakespeare Library Maccioli
Fellowship for his work on early Venetian drama. His scholarly
originality and his warmth and humor will be missed by all who
knew him. [Grace Tiffany]
Paul Bertram
Paul Bertram, a longtime member of the Columbia
Shakespeare Seminar, was born in Buffalo, earned his Ph.D. at
Harvard. He taught at Rutgers for over forty years and, for a time,
served as Associate Dean of the Graduate School. He was the
author of Shakespeare and The Two Noble Kinsmen and White
Spaces in Shakespeare, and, with Bernice Kliman, he edited the
immensely useful Three-Text Hamlet. Paul served on the editorial
board of Shakespeare Bulletin and on the executive committee of
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 56
“Precious Friends Hid in Death’s Dateless Night”
the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar. He loved opera and ballet,
and when he retired he moved to the upper west side, right next to
Lincoln Center. Paul was 85; there was a memorial service for him
in Manhattan on January 5, 2014. [June Schlueter]
William Green
A member of the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar, Bill
Green passed away in mid-November 2013. He had taught at
Queens College- CUNY for fifty-two years. He is the author of
Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, editor of an edition of that
play, and co-editor, with John Gassner, of Elizabethan Drama. He
also has a number of technical credits in the theatre, including
lighting director, stage manager, and production assistant. Bill,
who was 87, lived on the upper west side. He is survived by a
son, Jonathan; a daughter, Nathalie; a sister, Betty; and three
grandchildren. A service was held on November 15 in Manhattan.
[June Schlueter]
Sankalapuram Nagarajan Professor Sankalapuram Nagarajan, one of India’s finest
academicians, passed away in New Delhi around noon on January
6th, 2014. He leaves behind his wife, Srimathi, and three children
and their families. Nagarajan—‘Nag’ to his close friends—was
regarded as one of the most eminent Shakespeare scholars of
India and an original voice in the world Shakespeare community
of scholars.
Born in 1929 in Bangalore, he did his B.A (English Honours)
at the University of Mysore and his M.A. in English Language
and Literature at the University of Nagpur where he was awarded
the University Gold Medal. After teaching at various colleges in
India, he completed the doctorate at Harvard in a record time of
two years (1959-61), and held the distinction of being India’s first
Harvard Ph.D. in English. For his doctoral study he was awarded
a Smith-Mundt/Fulbright fellowship, a Harvard University
fellowship, and a Folger fellowship.
At Harvard he worked with eminent Shakespeare scholars
such as Professors Alfred Harbage and Herschel Baker. He
finished his coursework with distinction under scholars like
Walter Jackson Bate, Reuben Brower, David Perkins, and I.A.
Richards. His dissertation on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies
resulted in an invitation to edit Measure for Measure for the Signet
Classic Shakespeare. This edition has been in print continuously
for over 45 years in spite of severe competition from later and
more generously edited editions. In 2013, he published an edition
of King Lear, a study he started as a Folger Shakespeare Library
Fellow in 1998.
Dr. Nagarajan’s scholarly articles on a wide-range of
subjects, including comparative studies (the influence of Advaita
Vedanta on Isherwood, for example) appeared in prestigious
international journals like Shakespeare Quarterly, Comparative
Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Ariel, and the Oxford Essays
in Criticism. He was the Indian Correspondent of the World
Shakespeare Bibliography for about three decades. As many of
his former students and colleagues have remarked, Nagarajan was
a keen supporter of literature in Indian languages. Thinking about
literature in more than one language, he insisted, was a singular
strength that Indian scholars could bring to the world stage.
Professor Nagarajan is also remembered for his outstanding
contribution to higher education in India. After he returned to India
from Harvard in 1961, he was appointed Chair of the University
Department of English and Chairperson of the Board of Studies in
English at the University of Poona (now Pune). He taught there till
1977 when he moved to the University of Hyderabad to assume
the position of Professor of English, a position he held until he
retired in April 1989. At the University of Hyderabad, he was
Dean of the School of Humanities for six years and also served for
some time as Vice-Chancellor of the university.
Although Professor Nagarajan will be remembered for his
many scholarly accomplishments and his role in advancing higher
education in India, above everything, it was Nag’s students who
always brought an unstoppable sparkle and tenderness to his eyes.
Their success and achievements evoked in him a parental pride.
He gave his everything to students. Every student came away
inspired and all felt deep love and respect for him. On hearing the
news about Dr. Nagarajan, one of his former students (who now
teaches in Belfast, Ireland) wrote, “[Dr. Nagarajan] conveyed to
us brilliantly the disturbing power of poetry to teach us what we
often did not know of ourselves. It is something we will never
forget.”
Professor Nagarajan wrote late into his life. Commenting on
his masterful edition of King Lea,r which was published recently
in 2013, Professor Sylvan Barnet, the eminent Shakespeare scholar
said, quoting from As You Like it: “O wonderful, wonderful, most
wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that,
out of all whooping!” Professor Barnet went on to describe the
book: “[Nagarajan’s] King Lear is not only for Indian students--it
is for all students--yes, and for all readers, including professors-who want a thorough yet judicious, readable commentary on
the play.” [Abridged version of James Harner’s obituary for
SHAKSPER]
Charles R. Forker
Professor Emeritus at Indiana University when he died on
February 15, 2014, Charles Forker had taught at Indiana since
1959 and over the years had also taught at other universities as
a visiting professor. He was born in Pittsburgh, PA on March 11,
1927. He majored in English and music at Bowdoin. At Merton
College, Oxford, he earned a second B.A. as a Fulbright scholar,
as well as an M.A. He completed a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1957.
According to the anonymous obituary on the website of the
funeral home in Indiana responsible for his funeral, he particularly
enjoyed teaching “a large lecture class for undergraduates called
Introduction to Shakespeare in which the students read fourteen
plays (a new one every week), and where rigorous examinations
required them to identify passages by speaker and dramatic context
and to comment critically on their relationship to the plays from
which they were drawn. He loved the language of Shakespeare,
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 57
Mark Bayer’s Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London
John Ladd (Washington University in St. Louis)
Mark Bayer’s Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement
in Jacobean London (Iowa City: U. of Iowa Press, 2011) makes
use of the latest insights into early 17th-century theatre history to
offer a thorough account of two Jacobean outdoor theaters, the
Fortune and the Red Bull. Bayer’s assertion that “the London
theatre of the Tudor and Stuart era was an important community
institution” is a strong basis for a book that gives attention to
topics that are often overlooked by scholars more interested in
theaters and companies that performed Shakespeare’s plays:
namely, he focuses on the popular outdoor theaters in London’s
northern suburbs and the communities that patronized them
(2). He gives attention to both the people who lived in the
neighborhoods surrounding the theaters and to those audiences
attracted to a particular theater’s style—groups that often
overlap. The insight that outdoor theaters especially have unique
characteristics determined by their surrounding communities
allows Bayer to develop new approaches to old questions
about stylistic differences among companies and playhouses.
In part Bayer attempts to dispel the notion that the Fortune
and the Red Bull were centers for downmarket entertainment
simply because their owners and companies were inferior to those
of the Rose or the Globe; he correctly ascribes these differences in
theatrical style to the needs of particular communities and to the
audience’s expectations. Early on, Bayer provides a framework
for understanding the relationship between theaters and their
communities using Bourdieu’s notion of social capital, but I must
agree with Malcolm Smuts who wrote in Renaissance Quarterly
that as the book goes on Bayer doesn’t reinforce the connection
to social capital enough for it to continue to be a compelling
argument. Regardless of this theoretical framework, Bayer’s
skill is in the way he combines insights from early modern social
history with readings of plays (and their corresponding companies
and playhouses) that are often overlooked, like Heywood’s
Ages. He reconfigures our idea of what might be worthy of the
attention of literature scholars, particularly those interested in the
relationship between plays and their London milieu. While past
studies of plays in conjunction with London, like Jean Howard’s
Theater of a City, have focused on city comedy, Bayer champions
the notion that plays need not be immediately or explicitly about
London in order to address the concerns of local communities. In
doing so, he makes bold claims about what such local audiences
may have responded to, particularly in terms of religious and
spectacular content. Though there is not always enough evidence
to completely substantiate such claims, these suppositions point
scholars of London’s lesser-known playhouses and playwrights
in the right direction. Namely, he shows that “theatres intimately
engaged with specific social communities throughout the city who
witnessed their productions” (3). Bayer constructs this argument
in five parts, beginning with the nature of community in Jacobean
London generally and moving to readings of particular productions
and historical moments.
In the first chapter, “Rethinking City and Suburb,” Bayer
counters a claim he ascribes to “many recent historians and
literary scholars” who “draw a firm divide between the city within
the walls and the suburbs” (34). While he is right to dismantle
this notion, it may go too
far to say that the prevailing
critical opinion is toward a
strict division, when scholars
such as Joseph Ward in
Metropolitan Communities
have been complicating
the borders between city
and suburb for some time.
Bayer recognizes Ward and
others in the notes, and the
conclusions he draws about
the city’s communities
are consistent with past
scholarship, so it seems that
this claim could have been
developed more quickly to
make room for the more
captivating parts of Bayer’s
argument.
The second chapter gives detailed, well-researched accounts
of the establishment of four major theaters: the Rose, the Globe,
the Fortune, and the Red Bull. While the work on the Fortune
and the Red Bull is the newest and most interesting, I found his
accounts of the Rose and the Globe fresh, and his focus on the
surrounding communities rather than just the big personalities,
like Henslowe, was especially useful for thinking about the
character of each theatre and the plays produced there. He firmly
establishes his main point, that “Londoners chose what theatres
to attend based on the type of drama staged there and the types
of people they tended to attract,” and he provides evidence from
all four theatres to back it up (68). Bayer manages to do this
without throwing out previous scholarship on London audiences
when he asserts, “The playhouses took on some characteristics
of their local neighborhoods while still drawing a larger pool of
spectators based on audience tastes” (75). He is particularly deft
in showing how his insights into local community add to what
we can know about audiences rather than totally replacing or
refuting previous claims.
Chapter 3 examines how plays staged at the Fortune and
Red Bull “adapted material from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to
address matters of local religious significance, seeking to spread
the tenets of the Reformation in neighborhoods and parishes where
religious allegiance was especially fraught” (116-7). Though Bayer
makes a strong case that the adaptations of Foxe he examines were
of importance to Londoners, it sometimes becomes unclear how
the adaptations gain traction particularly in the suburbs north
of London. The main piece of evidence he uses seems to be the
Catholic history in these neighborhoods, but evidence of religious
issues having particular weight here rather than elsewhere in the
city and suburbs is a bit thin. Nonetheless Bayer’s assertion that
Foxe’s work was adapted into an idiom that Fortune and Red Bull
patrons could understand is quite convincing.
In the fourth chapter Bayer provides a well-researched
account of the spectacular staging of Heywood’s Ages at the Red
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 58
Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London
Bull which establishes that spectacle staged there had a different
character than it would elsewhere. However, his reasoning that
spectacle about classical heroes was especially suited to the
“gloomy social environment” of Clerkenwell leaves too many
questions open about plays with classical subject matter at other
playhouses (149-50). Bayer establishes that plays had a particular
character based on the theaters in which they were performed, and
that individual London neighborhoods also had certain attributes,
but he sometimes has difficulty developing a clear correspondence
between the two.
The drawbacks of Chapters 3 and 4 call into question Bayer’s
decision not to include city comedy in his analysis of the way plays
and playhouses engage with specific communities. His avoidance
of sustained engagement with these plays is initially obvious:
much has already been written about them and the playhouses in
which they were performed, and few of Middleton’s, Jonson’s, or
Fletcher’s city comedies, if any, were performed at the Fortune
or the Red Bull. However, establishing the explicit connections
that the writers of these plays made with London’s neighborhoods
might have helped Bayer to build up to his arguments about the
implicit connections made in Heywood’s Ages and If You Know
Not Me You Know Nobody.
Chapter 5, Bayer’s most compelling effort to establish
a relationship between a playhouse and its surrounding
neighborhood, concerns the Queen Anne’s Men’s move from the
Red Bull to the indoor Cockpit and the Clerkenwell riot in 1617.
Though he observes that “by 1617, in the wake of some kind of
apprentice uprising every year since 1604, mild altercations on
Shrove Tuesday had become so commonplace that authorities
had come to expect some kind of mild disturbance” (181), Bayer
quickly establishes that this particular riot is of a different kind:
more focused on a specific target (the Cockpit) and brought about
by a particular event (the company’s decision to move). The riot
makes clear Bayer’s point that the community was particularly
invested in the Red Bull and the plays performed there, and that a
change in venue was perceived as a slight against the community
that would no longer be able to attend. More than the previous
two chapters, Bayer’s insights here help the reader “to consider
the operations of theatrical companies not only as autonomous
firms in a competitive marketplace but as fixtures in the local
community” (178).
These are relatively small complaints about a book that on
the whole makes a convincing claim: that “an accurate sociology
of the theatre of this period requires us to treat each of these
playhouses and their communities discretely” (210). Bayer
successfully refocuses critical attention toward playhouses that
are often overlooked, and his attention to a detailed history of
their surrounding communities provides a much-needed new
perspective. Though it can be difficult to provide a detailed
analysis of Jacobean audiences given the lack of available
evidence, Bayer shows that evidence about city communities more
generally can, with care, be applied to playhouses, companies, and
the dramas themselves. The book puts him within a long history
of conversation about the intersection of high and low culture. He
asks scholars to reconsider their dismissal of the Fortune, the Red
Bull, and the plays performed there in terms of the ways that these
plays successfully engaged with their supportive surrounding
communities. It is no longer a matter of these plays being simply
“not as good” as those performed at the Globe or the Blackfriars,
but of how the plays meet the needs of their distinct community
audiences. Bayer’s book successfully imagines a theater history
that emphasizes London’s individual communities and their
influence on the playhouses in distinct neighborhoods.
~Poets’ Corner~
Hippolyta’s Goodbye
This is no country for an old woman—
a nation of strangers unknown
to themselves. I cannot wait
for death locked between unyielding
laws and columns. Against Athens
imagination breaks like a water balloon
dropped from Olympus. I sensed this
decades ago on our wedding day,
filled with the antics of rustics
attempting to fill beer steins
with champagne. Always themselves,
they failed to find ecstasy
in play—providing a glimpse
of this bleached kingdom
we would oversee. Yet now
children grown, my tether gone,
it is time to hunt again—
head out west, where
women need no himaton
and men still worship the moon.
~Noel Sloboda (Penn State York)
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 59
Remembering Tom Pendleton
T.J.M.
James Lake (Louisiana State University)
Tom was the person whose retirement and endorsement led me
to Iona College in 2012. He furnished me with books and more. He
was a class act: witty, brilliant,charming. During one of my first
meetings with Tom and John in Fall 2012, the two men who had
run the newsletter for more than two decades welcomed me with
kind faces and sound observations about the challenges that they
had faced and that I would have to tackle. In lieu of parting advice,
Tom offered Shakespeare: “I wish you all joy of the worm.” A sign
of death, maybe sex, the clown’s gift to Cleopatra was for Tom
renewable comic material. Tom’s cackle was contagious, but we
would have laughed anyway. Months earlier,
just after I interviewed for the position that
he opened with his retirement, he pulled
me aside to ask, “What does Iden bring to
Henry VI in Part 2?” My answer—news of
Cade’s death—was too vague. “He brought
the king Cade’s head!” Tom exclaimed with
a chuckle. Perhaps death had been on Tom’s
mind, but only for a chance to laugh about it.
Other questions that he asked me during
my interview and during my first year and
a half I answered just as honestly and
matter-of-factly. “Yes, Shakespeare, not
Oxford.”“Yes, I have read all of Shakespeare’s
extant writings, but I am not an expert on
everything.”“Yes, I can help you fix your
computer.”My answers now sound dull,
finalizing, immaterial. With another chance,
I could have fed Tom some material: “No,
Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. Mark
Twain did.” “Yes, I have read all of Mark
Twain’s extant writings.” “That depends. Is
your computer getting spayed or neutered?”
Tom had enough comic skill to salvage any
of my tries at wit, and even if my jokes
flopped, at least I would have shown him
what I have taken away from his jestful liveliness: knowledge and
scholarship are worthy pursuits, but wit and humor make a scholar.
His passing has hit me hard. I have told other mourners that
Tom opened a position for me, but that I would never think of
trying to replace him. In January, just days after his funeral, I
went into his office. Room 16. Books cluttered the shelves and his
desk, where two half-full coffee cups sat near a copy of Harbage’s
Annals.The 3rd Arden Coriolanus rested atop one of two or three
piles behind his monitor. His green office chair—worn and
squeaky—sat empty near a bookshelf with more books stacked
haphazardly, as if Tom was in the middle of reading a few dozen
of them. In our last conversation together, I stood near him in
that office as he scoffed at a new annotated Shakespeare that was
hardly annotated. “Feel free to take any books you need, but this
one isn’t worth it,” I remember him saying. He sat in his chair,
and it squeaked as he turned to face his work. I thanked him.
His body lies in a powder blue coffin near Stamford, CT. During
John’s burial prayer, our toes froze as the coffin hovered above the hole
on the coldest day of the year, when a polar vortex hardened the ground
and everything in it. I imagine Tom would have found humor in that.
Tom Pendleton’s sudden death was a loss not only to readers
of this journal but to the full academy as well. Shakespeareans
will always remember Tom’s editorial skills, fine scholarship, and
devotion to The Shakespeare Newsletter. We will long recall and
prize his books on Shakespeare, his articles, reviews, lectures, and
contributions to professional organizations and seminars. Less
familiar perhaps is the degree to which Tom Pendleton epitomized
the true “renaissance man,” for his interests extended forward into
the modern era, with significant publications that encompassed
such authors as W. B.
Ye a t s , J a m e s J o y c e ,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Tom Pendleton’s far
ranging scholarship is
enviable. But many of us
will remember him not
solely for his contribution
to the profession but for his
generosity of spirit, typified
by repeated acts of kindness,
as when Tom would offer
to have a newcomer ’s
book reviewed or would
provide suggestions for
publication elsewhere or
would encourage a beginner
by gentle correction or
suggestion. I for one can
remember a time twentyodd years ago, when Tom
spontaneously mailed me
a book to review for The
Shakespeare Newsletter,
with the request that I
complete it “as soon as
possible” or at least “in
the fullness of time.” And I learned later from my colleagues
how many others had benefitted from such kindnesses. Needless
to say, Tom Pendleton himself was the consummate reviewer,
seeming always to find the positive, without ever failing to
note what wasn’t. And as an editor, he was of course flawless,
as his recent edition of the New Kittredge Richard II attests.
Most of my personal memories of Tom are quick flash backs
from our meetings at the Shakespeare Association, over many years.
I can recall for instance seeing Tom in the book exhibit rooms,
talking with admiring students and young scholars. I remember that
he always had a prodigious memory and that it served us well in
seminars, when there were no internet connections. But most of my
memories are simply comfortable images of long chats at conference
receptions or sitting together in hotel lobbies, watching the crowds
as they passed. Tom and I corresponded periodically, up until a
few months before his death. But my last and most vivid personal
memory is from the SAA conference we both attended in New
Orleans, at the Fairmont Hotel, just before Katrina, where we had a
last drink together in the Sazrac Bar, a memory never to be forgotten.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 60
Remembering Tom Pendleton (cont.)
Robert Macdonald
Cedric Winslow (Iona College)
I first met Tom in the early 1990s shortly after he and John
became co-editors of The Shakespeare Newsletter. A friend of mine,
Fritz Link, and I had heard from the Astor Foundation that SNL was
looking for funds. Fritz was a Partner at Davis Polk Wardwell, a big,
prestigious law firm, in New York City, and we invited Tom to their
offices at 450 Lexington Ave. to talk matters over. Picture this: Tom
in his wrinkled khakis and crumpled tweed jacket shuffling through a
marble hall the size of Grand Central Station’s with straight-backed,
black-suited lawyers whizzing back and forth. Tom was unfazed. Maybe even amused. Fritz and I couldn’t decide if his request was
going to be for under or over $100,000. When it turned out to be
a total of $1,000 — not enough for the Astor Foundation to even
sneeze at — we each wrote a check for $500 and sighed with relief. As we became familiar with the newsletter, we suggested
various ways to modernize the printing, distribution, and
subscription lists. We felt a subscription cost too little. We
couldn’t imagine that subscribers would determine on their own
when their subscriptions were up and sign up, not wanting to miss
an issue. Little did we understand. We thought the print should
be larger and the paper glossier. Tom, in his unfailingly polite
way, resisted all our overtures. There was one more request
for money, as I recall, not as large as the first. SNL was going
to devote an extra issue in 1996 to Bernice Kliman’s laborious
and complex rendering of the Enfolded Hamlet. Fritz’s and my
name were to appear on the cover as did the painted portraits of
the donors in the religious works of Giotto or Piero. We were
quite certain that this would make us famous to all Shakespeare
scholars. It won’t surprise you that it didn’t quite work out that way. Tom encouraged me to write a few articles for SNL. He
and I had dinner together, attended plays. My son took a course
from him: Shakespeare on Film. He became associated with
New York City’s Shakespeare Society. I began to understand
that The Shakespeare Newsletter was not in fact a publication but
the presentation of character, Tom’s character and John’s. The
newsletter spoke to its readers as Tom spoke: with brilliance
and simplicity, with directness and conviction, with humility and
kindness, with humor, a Catholic outlook and a Jesuit shrewdness. Freud said that the two qualities needed for a good life are
love and work. No one exemplified that better than Tom. A loving
fifty year relationship with his wife Carol was the foundation
of his life and his many close friends, colleagues, and students
testified to his capacity for friendship. I worried sometimes that
he worked too hard, putting his health in jeopardy, especially
as he reached his seventies. I wondered if the newsletter was
costing him his life. I should have known better. The hard
work was not a duty but an expression of his love for his labors.
Despite his achievements, his genuine niceness and kindness
never diminished, but it had limits. For example, he would
not tolerate what he saw as malicious, self-serving ways of
reinterpreting history. His attacks on the Oxfordians were withering. This was not a subject of humor for him: “Oh, well, who cares
who wrote the plays so long as we have them.” He saw such
attitudes as deeply narcissistic and undermining the humanistic
tradition. This is but one of the many times Tom stood up for
what he believed, even if it caused discomfort to the establishment. Tom had a good life, and he deserved it. His luck
held to the end. He was as sharp the day before he died
as he ever was. He died peacefully in his sleep at age 81.
It seems to me that to say Tom Pendleton has passed away is
somewhat akin to saying that the George Washington Bridge has
disappeared. For the forty-seven years that I knew him, Tom was a
significant presence, a great force, in both the English department
and the College. One of the keys to his character was his sense
of obligation, the need to stand up for principles and do the right
thing. He was fiercely loyal and unafraid, prepared to fight for
academic standards, for the rights of the professorate, and for
wronged colleagues.
It is perhaps no accident that he served in the army as a military
policeman. Though not at all self-righteous, Tom was committed
to imposing moral order. An early episode that stands out in my
memory as so representative of Tom occurred over forty years
ago, when Tom and I were young instructors at the College. I have
sometimes recounted this episode for comedic effect, but here I
will present it in all its seriousness.
Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers have been invited to
speak on the campus by an Iona student group. Their appearance
attracts a rather large audience, including a number of conservative
Iona students and, as well, many young African-Americans from the
local community. As Cleaver begins to speak in front of Spellman
Hall, a Christian Brother from the math department, standing on the
hill overlooking Spellman, starts to heckle Cleaver. At that point,
the crowd divides into two angry segments, one pro, one anti.
Tom Pendleton, the ex-military policeman, turns to me and
says, “Ric, we have to interpose ourselves,” and he immediately
places himself between the two groups. Fortunately, the New
Rochelle police soon calm the situation, and we do not have to
discover just what interposition might ultimately mean.
If I had to find a phrase that would sum up Tom’s essential
character and legacy, I think I could do no better than “we have to
interpose ourselves.” Thank you, Tom.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 61
Aaron Rosenfeld (Iona College)
Ernest Menze (Iona College)
Never in my life have I met a man so passionately knowledgeable
about a subject as Tom Pendleton. Of course I am talking about
his knowledge of baseball. I would see him on the porch smoking
after my last class, and say, “Hey, how about the Red Sox?” “You
know what’s interesting about the Red Sox…” he would respond,
and several missed trains and piles of ungraded papers later, the
conversation would still be going strong. Tom knew his baseball
history upside down, he knew his stats, he knew the moral center
of sports – what makes it matter. It was a joy and a privilege I will
never forget having Tom explain why Tim Wakefield didn’t belong
in the Red Sox rotation or why J. D. Drew really was a worthy
player, or why A-Rod was deserving of scorn.
But it was his genius as well that Tom should possess this vast
store of knowledge and be such a generous partner in conversation.
Though my knowledge was but a puddle compared to his ocean,
talking to Tom made me feel smart. I think it was because he himself
was such an enthusiastic student – of baseball, but really of so many
things – that he wore his learning so lightly, so generously. Tom
taught me that in order to be a teacher, you have to be a student.
He liked Chipper Jones and the Atlanta Braves. Jones, a player
who spent his entire career with the Braves was a model of loyalty,
consistent production and leadership as he put together a Hall of
Fame worthy career; the Braves, a contender every year, a good
farm system, a culture of quiet professionalism and winning. I think
it is obvious that these attributes were Tom’s as well.
Tom had a gravitas, leavened with wit, that anchored our
department. As a new faculty member speaking up at Department
meetings for the first time, it was Tom to whom I would quickly
glance, out of the corner of my eye, looking for some sign of
approval. Throughout my time here, it was Tom to whom I turned
for his judgment and advice about sensitive professional matters,
from teaching to scholarship to campus politics. And of course, any
question about Shakespeare, Tom had literally chapter and verse at
the top of his mind, as if he had just been reading it when you asked.
But just as much, it was Tom who was a model for me of the
academic life well-lived. Engaged, wise, funny, rigorous in learning
but relaxed in spirit, generous to colleagues and students, an office
filled to bursting with books, notes, enthusiasms, projects. Even as
Tom’s health was clearly declining, his clear voice and luminous
intelligence never flagged. It seems like only yesterday I was
texting my wife to say “will be late” because I was talking to Tom,
wishing I could stay even longer. She understood though – once,
after describing one of my conversations with him that had made
me late, she said, “You really think a lot of him.” I do.
I come into the English house and I still habitually look toward
his office at the rear of the building to see if his door is open and
he is in. My memories of talking with Tom about baseball, about
books, about politics, about teaching and Iona, about whatever else
seemed interesting that day, are vivid and strong, and will always be
among my fondest. My world, all of our worlds, are poorer without
him—there is less wisdom, less good sense, less wit. He will be
missed…I will miss him greatly.
For Tom’s Memorial Service, I sat down and quickly
translated a German Volkslied that was dear to Tom. He sang it
for me, in German, shortly after we became acquainted in the
early sixties, and his performance touched me. He knew text and
melody by heart and smiled contentedly as he sang. Over the
fifty years of our friendship he brought it up now and then, as the
words were appropriate to the occasion. It has become, over the
past two centuries, a symbol of academic freedom, and it was
part of my upbringing.
“Die Gedanken sind frei!”
[“Our Thoughts are Free!”]
Text: Southern Germany (around 1790).
Melody: Swiss Volkslied (around 1815)
Translated by Ernest A. Menze.
1.
Our thoughts are free! Who may divine them?
They pass us by like nightly shadows,
no one may know them, no hunter may shoot them.
Let it ever so be, our thoughts are free!
2.
I think as I will of matters that please me,
But outwardly still, with proper decorum,
My wish and my longing no one may deny me.
3.
Should I be locked up in the darkest cellar,
Such efforts will always remain in vain,
For my thoughts tear down barriers and break the walls.
4.
So, I will forever dismiss all cares,
And never again be troubled by worry,
For within one’s heart one may laugh and say:
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 62
Cathleen Moore McNulty
(Iona Class of 1981,
Harvard Law Class of 1984)
Paula Glatzer
(New Variorum Shakespeare,
Columbia Shakespeare Seminar)
It is an honor to offer remembrances of Dr. Tom Pendleton on
behalf of those fortunate Iona students who, over a span of more
than fifty years, had the opportunity to be his students. At the risk
of sounding like an apostate, I begin my remarks by referring to
an observation, not from the Bard, but from Oscar Wilde, who was
purported to have asserted that “sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”
Those fortunate enough to have known Tom Pendleton, as
teacher, colleague, and friend, understand the fallacy of Wilde’s
assertion because Tom Pendleton was both the wittiest—and the
most sarcastic—person I ever met. Tom Pendleton delighted in
skewering the pompous, the unworthy, and the unprepared. His
wit was so razor-sharp that many of his unfortunate victims did
not even realize that they had been mortally wounded, but his
many devotees delighted in his brilliant ripostes. As entertaining
as Tom Pendleton’s sarcasm was to kindred spirits, I believe that,
in a very real sense, Tom used his sarcasm as a shield to deflect
attention from his better nature. He preferred to be seen as an
ornery curmudgeon, but those of us who were lucky enough to
see the man behind the armor knew that he was a true mensch.
Tom Pendleton did what all the great teachers do: he taught
by example. So, his students included not only those individuals
who took his classes, but also his colleagues and friends. Tom
taught us so much. His loyalty stands out foremost among those
important values he demonstrated so memorably. His devotion
to his wife, Carol, was unparalleled, as was his loyalty to his
scholarship, colleagues, students, and the mission of Iona College.
(Administrators were not admitted into the protected sphere of his
loyalty!) Tom was willing to tilt at windmills and take extraordinary
personal risks on behalf of colleagues and students who he felt
were treated unfairly. An administrator once referred to Tom as
a “shop steward” in an attempt to disparage him, but I feel that
Tom viewed such a designation as a badge of honor, rather than an
insult, because he devoted so much of his time to helping others.
As a recipient of one of the coveted, limited edition miniature
Shakespeare heads that Tom bestowed upon selected students
and colleagues, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to close my
remarks by quoting Tom’s beloved Bard: “How far that little candle
throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”
Tom Pendleton’s good deeds and witty ripostes continue to light
up our world in innumerable ways. He is already sorely missed.
John Mahon said that Tom Pendleton had catholic taste in
literature, in the sense of an encompassing appreciation. I can
testify to that. I was a subscriber to The Shakespeare Newsletter, but
I did not know T.A.P. until I sent something in over the transom. I
knew it was a long shot. I had written a children’s magazine about
Shakespeare, and I wanted a review. Kid-lit wasn’t a staple of the
Newsletter, but I knew our work was acceptable because I had asked
Bernice Kliman to serve as our expert reader.
Tom loved it. This serious Shakespeare scholar, whose work
we know from books like the collection of essays he edited on
Henry VI, was able to enjoy a good children’s magazine. He
called the designers to discuss which pictures to use and wrote the
review himself. He subsequently sent me several children’s books
on Shakespeare to review, and he was always a gracious, and very
accepting, editor.
Much later, John and Tom accepted my offer to review Al
Pacino’s Merchant on Broadway, mostly because the Newsletter
couldn’t get a press pass and I had a ticket. I’m sure this was on
Tom’s head, because John didn’t know me. I was a little stressed,
but lucked out when the dramaturg, instead of answering all my
questions about cuts and transpositions, simply sent me a copy of
the script.
This is my story with Tom Pendleton, but it honors a teacher,
scholar and editor who graciously welcomed an independent scholar
into the fold.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 63
Michael Palma
As a college sophomore almost exactly fifty years ago, in a
world without cell phones, computers, or cable television, I added
an elective course to my core-curriculum schedule in order to get
a head start on my English major. The course was English 334:
History of the British Novel. It was usually taught by Professor
Raymond Porter, who happened to be on sabbatical in Ireland
researching his book on Padraic Pearse. The person teaching the
course in his place was Tom Pendleton, whose literary intelligence
and classroom skills would have qualified him to teach just about
any course in the departmental catalogue, but he was especially
well suited to this one. Those who know Tom only through his
close association with Shakespeare may be surprised to learn that
he originally intended to write his doctoral dissertation on Ulysses.
That course was a stimulating and satisfying experience in itself,
and it began a relationship that was to affect and even shape many
aspects of my life.
Many things about Tom’s classroom performance impressed
me greatly, and would later strongly influence my own approach
to teaching. One was the close examination of the text, particularly
the use of relevant passages to back up the larger points of
interpretation. Another was his knack for using comparisons and
examples, often from other texts and authors but sometimes from
far outside the field of literature, to illustrate a point (as Robert Frost
says in “Snow,” “Was ever such a man for seeing likeness?”). And
while his discussions quite properly encouraged us to recognize
and appreciate the greatness of the novels we were reading, I was
delighted by his often irreverent humor. In the introductory lecture
on The Ambassadors, he said that “I’ve always found that the hands
of the clock move much faster than the pages of Henry James” and
defined “the quintessential Jamesian moment” as an aristocratic
young man pulling on his gloves as he observes the sunset on
a European veranda and tries to decide whether the appropriate
response is “Rather!” or “Quite.”
It’s almost impossible to think about Tom without hearing
his full-bodied and thoroughly unselfconscious laugh. He had the
robust sense of humor, strongly spiced with irony, that is the mark
of a deeply serious person. As his wit often demonstrated, he had
the most highly developed aversion to phoniness and pretension I
have ever encountered this side of Holden Caulfield. When I told
him that, according to the reviews of the 1991 movie Robin Hood:
Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner’s incarnation of the title character
gave lectures to the Merrie Men about the subjugation of women
and the evils of racial prejudice, his immediate response was: “What
does he say about people who park in handicapped spaces?”
In that course on the British novel and the two Shakespeare
courses that I later took with him, I learned from Tom’s example
that the study of literature is the most comprehensive of all the
areas in the humanities, engaging not only literature itself but also
history, sociology, theology, philosophy, and especially psychology.
He emphasized that the principal end of serious literature is the
presentation and exploration of human experience and human
personality, that through our encounters with great writing we
not only come to understand ourselves more fully but also gain
access to and understanding of people whose natures are very
different from our own. Crowning all of this was his emphasis
on moral considerations—the ethical dimensions of the situations
that protagonists are faced with, the ways in which their individual
natures influence the choices that they make, and the things those
choices say about them and about the larger human condition.
The emphasis on such concerns was the direct manifestation
of Tom’s own individual nature, because his actions both in
and out of the classroom were marked by an integrity that was
uncompromising—and, as in his judgments on various of my poems,
often unsweetened: his insistence on my striving to do the best work
I was capable of made that work much better than it would otherwise
have been, and on those occasions when he did praise something
of mine, I valued his response because I knew it was sincere. Over
time I internalized his standards, and to this day I ask myself What
would Tom think of this? in connection with everything I write. That
integrity of his was the hallmark of the man, and it showed itself in
the smallest matters and in the greatest ones. Over his long career, he
was the faculty’s most zealous spokesman and the tireless scourge of
a series of administrations. Many of his colleagues, and I more than
any, are indebted to him for his fierce advocacy on their behalf. After
he had exhausted himself in my cause, one that we later surmised to
have been lost from the start, I felt guilty about all the effort I had
caused him to waste, but, knowing Tom, I’m sure that, even if he
had known the outcome to a certainty, he would have worked just
as hard. I also believe that he would have been just as untiring on
behalf of a stranger, and I admire him all the more for it.
After I was gone from the faculty, my full-time job in Manhattan
meant that we saw one another only occasionally. My move to
Vermont made those happy occasions even rarer. Yet every time I
saw him he seemed absolutely unchanged, as fresh and energetic as
ever. I would tell people that he was my hero, rolling blithely along
with no exercise on a steady diet of bacon and eggs, cheeseburgers,
and fettuccine alfredo. It was only at our last meeting, two years
ago, that I saw worrisome signs that he was slowing down. Still, like
some absurdly pure empiricist, I thought he would be there forever,
just as he always had before. And so we carry on.
My friendship with Tom was deepened by several shared
interests that were not widespread among our colleagues, including
baseball, television shows, comic strips, and crossword puzzles. On
many Monday mornings we would discuss a particularly challenging
puzzle in the previous day’s New York Times, and on many Sundays
in the years since then I have wondered how well he did on this or
that particularly difficult one. In fact, I can’t do a puzzle without
thinking of him, and since I do the Times crossword every day, I can
honestly say that I will think of him every day for the rest of my life.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 64
T.A.P. — A Sampling from SNL
Animated Shakespeare on HBO, 42:3
Harold Jenkins Special Tribute, 49:4
Uncovering Shakespeare on VisNet, 42:3
Michael Williams Tribute, 50:3
Approaches To Teaching Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” And
Other Late Romances, 42:4
Shakespeare in Gramercy Park, 50:3
New “Shakespearean” Novel, 43:2
Approaches To “Lear”; Mystery of “Macbeth,”43:3
Will’s Will and Other Wills, 43:3
Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 43:4
Irvin Matus’s Shakespeare, In Fact, 44:2
Harold Bloom: With the Best Will in the World, 44:3
Shakespeare in the Golden Age of Television: Orson Welles’
King Lear, 44:3
Something is Written in the State of Denmark, 45:2
Kids Discover Shakespeare, 50:4
Stage vs Screen at the Shakespeare Society, 51:3
Nicholas Grene’s Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays, 53:1
Shakespeare on Screen: Richard III, 55:4
An Authorship Primer, 56:2
McKellen’s Lear, 57:2
How Many Children Had William Shakespeare?, 58:1
Frank Occhiogrosso’s Shakespearean Performance: New
Studies, 58:2
Brit Crit: Wittily Twitting Branagh’s Hamlet, 46:4
All the World’s a Cage: Propeller’s Merchant at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, 58:3
Shakespeare at St. Bernard’s, 46:4
Harry, Larry, and the Kid: Oliver’s Soldiers, 58:3
Will (almost) Meets Oscar: The 69th Academy Awards, 46:4
Introduction to the Comic Hamlet, 58:3
Pegasus Shakespeare Bibliographies, 47:2/3
Russell Jackson’s Shakespeare Films in the Making, 59:1
“Lear” From Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, 47:4
James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?,
59:3
Who Was That Woman, 47:4
Professor Fired for Teaching Shakespeare! (Sort of), 48:1
Shakespeare Society of America: “Hamlets on Film”, 48:2
Ladies’ Day on the Magical Island: Taymor’s Tempest, 60:2
Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, 61:2
Tony Randall and the Greatest Actor Who Ever Lived, 48:3
Paul Barry’s A Lifetime with Shakespeare: Notes from an
American Director of All 38 Plays, 61:3
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human: Love for
Shakespeare, Bloom’s, 48:3
Laury Magnus and Walter Cannon’s Who Hears in
Shakespeare?, 62:2
H.R, Coursen’s Shakespeare: The Two Traditions, 49:1
Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, 63:1
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 65
Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, and Identity
Nicholas Utzig (United States Military Academy, West Point)
“Seize Shakespeare! He is ours as well,” Yamato Yasuo urges
readers of his 1942 anthology of English literary works (qtd. in
Minami 163). With this exhortation Yasuo, a professor of English
in wartime Japan, captures some of the tumult and violence of
the twentieth century’s most destructive
conflict. For students in Imperial Japan,
Shakespeare is not a subject of academic
inquiry but an object of conquest, a site of
wartime cultural appropriation. Seventy
years after Yasuo’s imperative, Irena
Makaryk and Marissa McHugh have
assembled an international collection
of essays covering Shakespearean
performance from across every theatre
of conflict during the Second World War.
In her introduction, Makaryk notes that
Shakespeare and the Second World War
(Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2012)
“focuses on the way in which Shakespeare
– ‘recycled,’ re-viewed, and reinterpreted
– is illuminated by and simultaneously
illuminates the war in various countries
around the world” (6). In keeping with this
objective, the collection brings together
varied perspectives, each firmly rooted in a
localized historical moment. The resulting
mosaic of fifteen new essays invites
a variety of unexpected connections,
enticing the reader to challenge the role of culture during wartime.
While most of these essays focus on historical accounts of various
performances at the expense of focused critical examination, the
volume will certainly become an initial point of departure for
future investigations of Shakespearean performance in wartime.
It seems as though no corner of “the great globe itself” is left
uncovered by these essays – a macabre tribute to both the appeal
of Shakespeare and the totality of the war. Sleepy Warwickshire,
like the rest of England, found its routines upended by the
conflict. Simon Barker’s essay, “Shakespeare, Stratford, and
the Second World War,” examines the multi-purposed roles of
Shakespeare’s West Midland home during the War years. Barker
chronicles some of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre’s efforts
to maintain its annual Shakespeare Festival, “alongside the kinds
of wartime morale boosting and fund-raising activities that were
common in Britain during the war” (208). Beyond such financial
and propagandistic efforts, however, Barker notes that Britain’s
wartime government selected Stratford as the target of “Operation
HK,” an invasion contingency plan in which the House of Lords
would evacuate London for the presumed safety of Warwickshire’s
Stratford (205).
While wartime necessity pressed Stratford into national
service, similar material shortcomings proved an opportunity for
theatric innovation in China. Alexander Huang’s essay documents
Jiao Juyin’s 1942 production of Hamlet. Wartime shortages limited
available performance spaces, and as a result, Jiao staged his
Hamlet in a rural Confucian temple. Huang remarks, “The temple’s
architectural structure and allegorical space provided a ready site
for such a performance and was used as a makeshift stage” (188).
With the audience aware of the presence of both the shrine and
statue of Confucius during the performance, Jiao’s Hamlet was
forced to negotiate simultaneously the
fictive Denmark and the physio-spiritual
attributes of the temple itself. “Buried in his
thoughts” during the production, “Hamlet
appeared to be heading toward the shrine
– a space that existed outside both the
Danish setting and the stage set – as if he
was now seeking advice from the Chinese
sage.” Huang continues, “If nothing else,
the shrine’s accidental intrusion into the
dramatic world signalled [sic] an emotional
investment in the Chinese tradition” (192).
If the war disrupted the theatrical business
world of wartime Stratford, the conflict’s
privation produced some unexpected
dramatic opportunities in rural China.
Mark Bayer’s contribution to this
volume examines the ideological impact of
place on performance. In his essay “Shylock,
Palestine, and the Second World War,”
Bayer studies two wartime performances of
The Merchant of Venice, “one Zionist and
one Arab” (63). Recognizing a persistent
and troubling uneasiness in these conflicting
ideological positions, Bayer’s essay retains its focus on “the issues
that animated Middle Eastern politics during this period,” while
exposing “the plasticity of Shakespeare’s plays as propaganda”
(64). Shylock is alternately the Jewish usurper of the Palestinian
homeland and “an allegory of the long-suffering Jewish people,
[one] highlighting their perseverance, suffering, and contempt
for their Christian aggressors” (65). Ultimately, Bayer concludes,
“Thinking about The Merchant during the Second World War
in the Middle East alerts us to the fact that Shakespeare’s play
poses different questions that vary with time and place and are not
reducible to broad moral, political, or ideological categories” (80).
Shakespeare’s malleability, the use of his plays to support
radically opposed ideological positions, sounds a constant refrain
throughout Shakespeare and the Second World War. The competing
ideologies of Zionist and Arab Shylocks in Bayer’s essay intrude
into some of the most ideologically-charged performances
of Merchant during the war—those in Nazi Germany. Zeno
Ackermann’s “Shakespearean Negotiations in the Perpetrator
Society” explores the contemporaneous reception of a play whose
legacy has been forever shaped by the Holocaust. Of Shylock,
Ackermann writes, “as a figure of difference he simultaneously
unsettled and ratified the fantasies of the Nazis” (46). To the Nazis,
Merchant was an object of anti-Semitic agitprop, an artifact of high
culture ready for repurposing into a staged justification for moral
depravity; however, Merchant’s uneasy and often unflattering
representation of Christian Venice created opportunities for
sympathy with Shylock that defied Nazi propagandist aims.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 66
Shakespeare and the Second World War
With such varied interpretive possibilities, Merchant retained its
capacity for both containment and subversion. The director and
playwright Tibor Egervari would force Merchant closer to the
site of the Holocaust in his 1993 play The Merchant of Venice in
Auschwitz. In an essay of the same title for this volume, Egervari
describes the complications from staging Merchant inside the
space used to carry out the Final Solution. Egervari’s play pushes
the ideological considerations described by Ackermann to their
most terrible conclusion, the Nazi Lager.
Shakespeare’s privileged place in the cultural canons of nonEnglish countries found itself under assault during the War. In
“German Shakespeare, the Third Reich, and the War,” Werner
Habicht notes that, in spite of “a ban on performances of plays by
enemy dramatists [...] Shakespeare was to be treated as a German
author” (22). Shakespeare’s integration into the German canon
facilitated the Bard’s acceptance by other Axis powers, including
Japan, as Ryuta Minami’s work describes. Minami notes “a marked
tendency to identify Shakespeare as part of German culture” (169).
Such cultural conquests remained a component of almost every
belligerent power’s war efforts. The resultant clash of cultures
that accompanied military hostilities found in Shakespeare a
frequent battleground. “Not surprisingly in propaganda terms,”
Peter Billingham argues, “the war against Germany in particular
was presented as a war and struggle for the hearts and minds
between the traditional values of a Christian-oriented Western
civilization and a similarly defined English cultural history
against an ideology that was violently opposed to such cultural
and historical narratives” (223). Billingham’s fascinating study of
the all-female Osiris Players provides some evidence that even
when appropriated to serve a nationalist agenda, Shakespearean
performance might still challenge traditional societal norms.
While the troupe of traveling Osiris Players used Shakespeare
subtly to challenge gender norms in England, Mussolini’s
followers worked to reinforce their fascist ideology by portraying
Il Duce as the modern incarnation of Caesar. Nancy Isenberg
points out that the first two years of Mussolini’s reign saw “at least
thirteen new translations of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” and
over 40 editions of the play survive from fascist Italy (85). In spite
of the appropriation of Shakespeare to support an Italian fascist
ideology, the Italian and German armies of occupation sought
to censor productions of Shakespeare in occupied Greece. Tina
Krontiris’ contribution explores the uneasy negotiation between
artists affiliated with the Greek resistance and theatre-managers
who occasionally collaborated with occupying powers. Krystyna
Kujawińska Courtney’s work on performances of Shakespeare
in occupied Poland references several performances of Hamlet
in the Warsaw ghetto. “Unfortunately,” Courtney notes, “there
are no extant documents describing this intriguing theatrical
event” (126). Her essay presents Polish wartime productions
of Shakespeare’s plays as acts of resistance against the Soviet
occupation and against the German army in the Murnau POW
camp. Occupied Greece and Poland were far from the sole places
of wartime Shakespearean censorship. Aleksei Semenenko’s
essay contours some of the challenges faced by Boris Pasternak
during his wartime translations of several of Shakespeare’s plays.
Like the production of Twelfth Night in occupied Poland that
Courtney describes, so too were Pasternak’s translations subject
to the caprice of party officials.
Semenenko’s work reveals some of the challenges posed
by centralized campaigns of ideological conformity, while Anne
Russell’s essay on the American army adaptation of Hamlet
illuminates a bit of self-censorship. Russell traces the work of
Maurice Evans, a professional stage actor who produced a unique
adaptation of Hamlet for American soldiers in the Pacific war
theater. Russell cites Evans’ own justification for cutting lines
“dangerous for a soldier audience,” along with the entirety of the
graveyard scene (238, 242). Although Evans sought to present
an inspirational and (surprisingly) resolute Hamlet to soldiers,
Paweł Passini’s 2008 play, Hamlet ’44, impels the Shakespearean
masterpiece into the chaos of the failed Warsaw Uprising of
1944. Like Jiao’s Hamlet in the Confucian temple, real-world
spaces intrude into Hamlet ’44. In her study of the play for this
collection, Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams notes, “The play was
staged outdoors, in the park surrounding the Warsaw Uprising
Museum, located in the city district (Wola) where the fighting
had been particularly fierce and where mass executions once took
place” (292). A group of young Polish insurgents deliver Hamlet’s
“To be or not to be” soliloquy in Passini’s production, only to be
shot to death by a Nazi death squad (289).
Representations of the war intrude into both Passini’s and
Egervari’s adaptations, and in a similar manner, the Second World
War is a crucial focus of the mid-twentieth-century Canadian play
Star Crossed. Marissa McHugh’s essay examines this little known
work about the forbidden romance between a Dutch woman and
a German officer in the context of early efforts to form a postwar
mythology. As the first global wars of the twenty-first century
strain toward an impossibly slow and ambiguous conclusion,
our own society will begin the process of acculturating their
conflicted legacies. McHugh’s timely essay provides an excellent
opportunity to examine the role of performance in understanding
and constructing our own recent past.
In the collection’s introduction, Irena Makaryk writes,
“Usually instantly recognizable, infinitely referential, but
frequently shifting in meaning, Shakespeare’s works offer a
prismatic lens through which to view – and sometimes replay
on the cultural plane – the ideological and military clashes of
the Second World War” (7). Indeed, Shakespeare and the Second
World War’s greatest strength may be the breadth (both geographic
and thematic) that its essays cover. While the project’s scope
prevents significant depth in any single area, the collection invites
further research into the intersection of war and culture.
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 67
Review of Periodicals
Grace Tiffany (Western Michigan University)
Iago and Autism
Sadly, in the pages of Shakespeare Quarterly, the usually
illuminating Paul Cefalu now misrepresents and demeans people
with autism to support a cognitive-psychological reading of Othello.
I feared he was heading that way when the word “mindblindness”
appeared in the first paragraph of his essay, but my jaw dropped
when he actually got there. It seems Iago’s malicious plots and
jaundiced interpretations of human nature are “symptoms” that
place him “along the autism spectrum.” Cefalu argues that what’s
been called Iago’s uncanny mind-reading ability is actually a form
of“mindblindness,”an inability to understand others’ and one’s own
mental states born, paradoxically, of“intense world blindness,”
which is the “high-functioning autistic[’s]” hyper-attention to
“selected fragments” of people’s behaviors. We should take all
this with a large helping of salt. Both “mindblindness” and “world
blindness,” pseudo-clinical terms of the sort some psychologists
admire, express a theory about autistic people that has no basis in
neurology or anything that could legitimately be called science.
“Theory of mind” (basically, the idea that autistic people don’t
have whole minds) is, rather, a product of non-autistic people’s
own inability to understand folks who don’t express themselves in
typical ways. If we don’t understand them, they must understand
nothing, runs the logic. Yet, even if the theory were a credible
account of autistic thinking, what help would it give us in explaining
Iago -- or Othello, who is in his own way “mindblind,” according
to Cefalu – since both Iago and Othello are dramatic constructs
whose characters owe nothing to this new theory, and everything
to Shakespeare’s own culture’s notions of the corrupting power of
untrammeled passion? This, indeed, is the question Edward Pechter
puts to Cefalu in a response to the essay, which follows Cefalu’s in
the same issue of SQ. We all try to understand each other’s minds,
and we all succeed imperfectly, Pechter says. Iago’s interesting
quality is not that he obsessively “reads” others, but that he makes
malicious use of the information he thinks he’s acquired. Why?
That mystery, sealed by his own final silence on the subject, is also
part of the play’s frightening gestalt. (For I like psychology-speak,
too.) Whence comes evil? The question is raised, but not answered.
“What you know, you know,” says Iago, and shuts up, forever.These
two essays are obviously meant to be read in sequence, but if I
had to choose the one which leads us to a better understanding of
Othello – and of our own moral predicaments – I’d choose Pechter’s.
[“Iago’s Theory of Mind,” Shakespeare Quarterly 64:3 (Fall, 2013):
265-296; “‘Iago’s Theory of Mind’: A Response to Paul Cefalu,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 64:3 (Fall, 2013): 296-300]
The Jailer’s Daughter as Ariadne
In a short essay, Nichole DeWall credibly argues that the Jailer’s
Daughter subplot of Fletcher’s and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble
Kinsmen derives from a source older than that which inspired the
main plot (that having been Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale”). She sees
the subplot continuing the exploration of Theseus’ history which
Shakespeare began in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both Dream
and Kinsmen make use of “the good, the bad, and the ugly elements
of Theseus’ mythic past.” DeWall shows us that the Theseus
story would have sprung readily to the minds at least of literate
audience members, since it had been given ample treatment in the
work of Ovid, Plutarch, Thomas Elyot, and Chaucer. Moreover,
Theseus’ sexual treachery had been explicitly alluded to not only
in Shakespeare’s Dream but in his The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
both plays which thematically link Theseus’ betrayal of Ariadne
with that of early-modern feminine heartbreak. Now The Two Noble
Kinsmen joins this list. Like Theseus’ Ariadne, the Jailer’s daughter
forsakes – or swears she’ll forsake – her father in order help a man
she loves escape from imprisonment. Ariadne helps Theseus escape
from the maze of the Minotaur; the Jailer’s Daughter frees Palamon;
both women go mad when the men subsequently reject them.
DeWall finds in the Daughter’s mad seafaring idiom – she thinks
she’s on a ship -- an echo of the myth of Theseus, who is longingly
watched by Ariadne as he departs by sea. Rather than just present
an additional source for this play, DeWall makes a novel argument
about the enhancement of the story’s meaning. The Jailer’s Daughter
tale presents a spot of unruly pain in a story otherwise devoted to
self-consciously theatrical “symmetry.” The “heavenly design” of
the plot of the Emilia, Arcite, and Palamon is “purchased with” the
daughter’s pain. There are damages that art can’t fix.
[“Like a shadow, / I’ll ever dwell”: The Jailer’s Daughter as Ariadne
in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern
Language Association (Spring, 2013, 46:1): 15-23]
No Particular Reason To Watch My Own Private Idaho or To
Read This
One of Nemanja Protic’s arguments about Gus Van Sant’s 1991
My Own Private Idaho is that it’s a verbally lifeless adaptation of
both Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Orson Welles’s film conflation of
Shakespeare’s Falstaff scenes, Chimes at Midnight. Most who have
seen all three dramas already knew this, and indeed this is not the
main part of her argument, but I cannot decipher her larger point
because she writes like this: “Because of his place in the symbolic
order and the fissure that is the constituent part of his subjectivity
(what Slavoj Žižek, via Jacques Lacan, calls objet petit a, defined
as the little piece of the Real ‘which should be excluded from the
framework of reality . . . [and] whose exclusion [at the same time]
constitutes and sustains the frame of reality’ [The Ticklish Subject
xiv]), Mike belongs to what Žižek calls the ‘part of no-part’ of the
symbolic whole: he belongs to a ‘social group which, on account of
their lacking a determinate place in the ‘private’ order of the social
hierarchy, stands directly for universality’ (First as Tragedy 99).”
If you’re still reading – why? Protic also says Bakhtin, dominant
cultural order, subject-position, subversiveness, socio-political, and
hetero-normative capitalism. This last one makes a bizarre pairing.
It’s the first I heard that capitalism was “hetero-normative.” There
are plenty of gay capitalists. In fact, as Protic also says, quoting
someone named Brian Massumi, “”The loosening of normalcy is
part of capitalism’s dynamic. . . Produce variety and produce a niche
market.” I think that’s true. Just ask Gus Van Sant. The entertainment
industry has always harbored plenty of niche markets. What are we
talking about? I don’t know. Does it have to do with Shakespeare?
Not really, no more than does My Own Private Idaho.
[“Where is the Bawdy? Falstaffian Politics in Gus Van Sant’s My
Own Private Idaho,” Film Literature Quarterly 41:3 (2013): 184-93]
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 68
Review of Periodicals
(continued from previous page)
Cervantes’ Elizabeth
Eduardo Olid Guerrero doesn’t mention Shakespeare in his
fine study of Cervantes’ “Elizabeth” novella, La espaῆolainglesa
(1613). Yet his account of Cervantes’ fictional English queen casts
light on the limits that constrained Shakespeare in representing his
own monarch. In sixteenth and early seventeenth century England,
Elizabeth could be represented only as a perfect quasi-goddess or
else obliquely, reflected indirectly in the images of other monarchs,
“Like perspectives which . . . / eyed awry, / Distinguish form,”
to quote Richard II’s queen (Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.2.18-20).
Spanish literature, however, was full of direct descriptions of the
bitch-queen Elizabeth, enthroned in that “templode herejía” (temple
of heresy) which was England, Catholic Spain’s great enemy.
Cervantes was unique among Spanish authors in his presentation
of a human, complicated, fallible and yet sympathetic Elizabeth,
Guerrero shows. In La espaῆolainglesa, the English queen tempers
practical statecraft with human sympathy and religious tolerance,
helping Catholic Spanish exiles first thrive at her court and
ultimately escape to their homeland. Cervantes’ queen is “a lonely
figure in a vulnerable situation where she must govern fervent
Protestants and dogmatic Catholics in her own court and country.”
She may be profitably compared to Shakespeare’s lonely monarchs
– Henry IV, Henry V, Richard II – who are not only themselves,
but refracted images of her, whose human frailties could not be
staged. Elizabeth saw this, of course. (I’m sorry. I must say it. “I
am Richard the Second. Know ye not that?”) Cervantes’ work not
only contains Shakespeare’s lost Cardenio, but the Elizabeth whose
humanity Shakespeare could never directly explore.
[“The Machiavellian In-Betweenness of Cervantes’ Elizabeth I,”
Cervantes 33:1 (Spring, 2013): 45-80]
Books for Review
Ancona, Francesco Aristide and Mary Ives Thompson.
He Says/She Says Shakespeare. Lanham, Maryland:
University Press of America, Inc., 2008.
Burt, Richard and Julian Yates. What’s the Worst Thing You
Can Do To Shakespeare? New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013.
Cousins, A.D. and Alison V. Scott, eds. Ben Jonson and the
Politics of Genre. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009.
Craven, Kenneth. Hamlet of Morningside Heights. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
Edmondson, Paul, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, eds. A
Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare
Festival. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013.
Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender
on the Shakespearean Stage. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2013.
Frankel, Aaron. Shakespeare for American Actors and
Directors. Milwaukee: Limelight Editions, 2013.
Groves, Peter. Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare: A Guide
for Readers and Actors. Victoria: Monash University
Publishing, 2013.
Hoenselaars, Ton, ed. The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Holderness, Graham. Nine Lives of William Shakespeare.
London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013.
Ichikawa, Mariko. The Shakespearean Stage Space. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica. Early Modern Drama and the
Eastern European Elsewhere: Representations of Liminal
Locality in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries.
Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
2009.
Werstine, Paul. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the
Editing of Shakespeare. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012.
Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra
c. 1600
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
We’re always seeking reviewers to review
copies of works that we receive. If you are
interested, please contact us at
[email protected].
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 69
Talking Books with Ian Donaldson
Michael P. Jensen
Ben Jonson once suffered from false compare. Critics found
the differences between Jonson and Shakespeare as Jonson’s
deficiencies. Regarding anyone who was not Shakespeare as
unworthy by definition is problematic. Ian Donaldson knew this
was wrong and held a conference in Canberra, Australia, in 1979
to do something about it. Many of the papers compared what each
achieved without assuming that difference implied inferiority.
Selected conference papers appeared in Jonson and Shakespeare,
published in the US by Humanities Press in 1983. Jonson’s
reputation has been on the rise ever since.
Donaldson’s interest in Jonson began earlier. The World
Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford University
Press, 1970) does not cover all comedy writing in these eras, but is
play-centered until the final chapter in which Fielding’s plays share
space with The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (first published
1743, corrected edition 1754), with some mention of other Fielding
prose works. Donaldson asserts that the trope of a world upsidedown is important in the comedies of this era (23), then proceeds
to show the flipped world in the work of several writers.
In The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations
(Oxford University Press, 1982), Donaldson looks at the
Lucretia myth in art, Augustine, and other moral writers, studies
Shakespeare’s version, analyzes how the myth influenced Samuel
Richardson’s Clarissa or, the History of a Young Lady (1748),
examines humorous treatments from Madeleine de Scudéry to Jean
Giraudoux, and closes with an account of another classical figure,
Cato of Utica, whose character underwent a similar, subsequent
questioning and revaluation. Donaldson edited Transformations
in Modern European Drama (Humanities Press, 1985), a book of
papers that grew from another conference in Canberra. It considers
what happens when modern European plays are performed outside
their nations of origin or in translation, an interesting subject not
in our purview.
Then there is all that Jonson. Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays
in Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1997) is that rare thing
in modern scholarly publishing, a book of lectures, previously
published, revised essays, and a couple of new pieces. Donaldson
edited Jonson’s complete poems for the Oxford Standard Authors
series in 1975. This edition became the basis for the Oxford Authors
edition in 1985, which also included Volpone, The Alchemist,
Timber, and William Drummond’s notes on his conversations with
Jonson.
Donaldson became Jonson’s most noteworthy biographer with
the publication of Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press,
2011). It is superb, drawing on newly discovered material as well
as the old to contextualize Jonson’s pleasures and anxieties amid the
political and legal climate in which he wrote. Writing a biography is
always an interpretative act, but a quibble or two aside, Donaldson’s
interpretations seem sound and most of the time, even wise.
By now you may have seen the 2012 Cambridge Edition of
the Works of Ben Jonson, which Donaldson co-edited with Martin
Butler and David Bevington, and about which I’ll try to ask some
intelligent questions (though handicapped, due to Cambridge
University Press declining to send a review copy for me to study).
There will be an electronic edition with lots of extras not in the
print edition, which should be available by the time you read this
interview.
Ian Donaldson is Professor Emeritus at the University of
Melbourne, where he graduated in 1957. He taught at Oxford,
Cambridge, Edinburgh, Cornell, and the University of California at
Santa Barbara, in addition to the Australian National University in
Canberra. He held directorships or sat in endowed chairs in many of
these posts. Donaldson is a Fellow of the British Academy and the
Royal Society of Edinburgh, as well as a Fellow and Past President
of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Ian will have my
undying gratitude for showing once and for all that Jonson’s “Not
without mustard” is not mocking the Shakespeare coat of arms (Ben
Jonson: A Life, p. 159-164).
MPJ: The World Upside-Down begins with Jonson’s wonderful
Epicoene. You could have used other of Jonson’s works for their
upside-downness, couldn’t you?
ID: Yes indeed, The World Upside-Down might well have been
focused entirely on Jonson’s work, and I did for a time toy with
the possibility of shaping it in just that way. I’d not yet then
encountered Mikhail Bahktin’s writings on carnival when I began
writing the book, but I’d been very struck by C. L. Barber’s
arguments in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton University
Press, 1959) about the influence of traditions of holiday misrule on
Shakespeare’s comic writing, and by John Holloway’s suggestive
linking (in The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare’s Major
Tragedies, Routledge, 1961) of the Birnam Wood scenes in Macbeth
to traditions of May-time revelry in Shakespeare’s England. I
thought that such connections might also be traced in the writings
of Jonson, who often figured scenes of political or social disorder
in terms of festive misrule. So instead of dealing just with Epicene
and Bartholomew Fair, as I did, I could well have looked more
broadly at Jonson’s work: at comedies such as A Tale of a Tub,
with its trail of St Valentine’s Day reversals and misadventures, at
Cynthia’s Revels, with its courtly games, and at The New Inn, the
comedy in which Prue the chambermaid is given special powers
for a day, as if she were a May Queen. I might have thought too
about Jonson’s lost pastoral, The May Lord, and about the way in
which Saturnalian traditions (“Where men might do and talk all
that they list, / Slaves of their lords / The servants of their masters
/ And subjects of their sovereigns”) are explicitly remembered in
a masque such as Time Vindicated, as they are in a graver political
context in Catiline His Conspiracy. Concentrating on a single author
would certainly have made for a more unified and perhaps, who
knows, a better book. But I was also interested at that time in the
way in which Jonson’s influence could be traced throughout the
seventeenth century and beyond, even into the early eighteenthcentury novel. So I finished up with a book of the kind you’ve
just described: not a thorough-going account of comic writing in
England over that long period of time, but a kind of necklace of
my favourite comic writers. I chose Epicene for that early chapter
because the tormenting of Morose – the man who hates noise, and
lives in a house off the Strand with double walls and treble ceilings
– by revellers playing cacophonous music so strongly reminded
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 70
me of contemporary traditions associated with the skimmington
and charivari: thoroughly unpleasant rituals (I confess), devised
to persecute social deviants and misfits.
MPJ: Many years have passed and I know your thinking has
evolved. Tell me about the world that helped shape this book and
what you might do differently now.
ID: Well, the idea of mundus inversus tends to come easily to you
if you happen to be an Australian, and I was particularly intrigued
by the cluster of received ideas about the antipodes you find
(for example) in Richard Brome’s play of that name, where the
inhabitants of that strange land walk on their heads, and the swans
are not white but black. When Brome wrote that play in 1638 he
didn’t know that black swans actually existed in the antipodes, and
had been sighted for the first time by Europeans at Bernier Island (off
the Western Australian coast) just two years earlier. But I realize now
that the whole trope of the world upside-down fascinated me then
for other reasons too, as it touched on ideas about social disruption
that were very much in the air around 1967-8, as I was writing the
book in a variety of places: in Santa Barbara, where anti-Vietnam
protests were in full voice; in Oxford, as chanting students marched
passed by my College windows calling for academic reform; and in
Paris later in 1968, where eager revolutionaries were busy tearing
up the cobblestones, along with many established customs and
traditions. I thought that early modern festive ceremonies served in
much the same manner as the partial concessions that were being
offered to protestors in the 1960s – as when a “ladies’ night” (to
cite a mild example) was introduced once a term at all-male Oxford
colleges, in order to quell more radical demands for gender equality
– and that these rites, like that of officers serving the men at table
on special nights in the army mess, were basically conservative in
tendency. They allowed a community to enjoy a temporary respite
from the everyday state of affairs, then revert immediately to the
status quo. I now think that this thesis, though largely plausible,
doesn’t tell the whole story. I learnt much from conversations in
Canberra with two historian friends, Christopher Hill of Oxford,
whose study of radical ideas during the English revolution, the
almost identically titled The World Turned Upside-Down: Radical
Ideas During the English Revolution (Penguin Books, 1984), had
appeared just a few months after my own book, and Natalie Zemon
Davis from Princeton, who’d looked closely at the operation of
“rites of violence” during festive occasions in sixteenth-century
France (Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford
University Press, 1975), and who had shown how these periodical
rituals sometimes triggered more lasting forms of social adjustment.
If tackling this subject again today, I’d be reading less theory and a
lot more history. And that answer indicates, I suppose, the general
direction in which my interests have shifted over the years.
MPJ: My friend Ed Taft tells me that his students like Venus and
Adonis, but really dislike The Rape of Lucrece. You mention that
it “never quite adds up to a coherent whole, or a totally compelling
human drama” while noting its “remarkable yet sporadic brilliance”
(40 and 55). How would you make the case for the poem in an era
when the brutality of rape is rightly noted, rapists are shunned, rape
victims are given the greatest possible sympathy, and the general
population is uncomfortable with a beautiful poetic exploration of
the subject?
ID: Lucrece is a poem of extraordinary power and delicacy, as
I was reminded recently when listening to Camille O’Sullivan’s
intensely moving performance of the musical version of the
work created for the Royal Shakespeare Company by Elizabeth
Freestone, Fearghal Murray, and herself. Yet for all the poem’s
intriguing beauties, it presents (I believe) two issues that might
trouble a modern reader. The first of these, fundamental to the
ancient story, was alertly spotted by Augustine and much debated
in Shakespeare’s day: if Lucrece was truly without guilt as she
protests she is, then why does she take her own life? By so doing,
isn’t she technically killing an innocent person? You can’t have it
both ways, Augustine insists: either she’s an adulteress or she’s a
murderer, and neither of these roles makes her much of a heroine.
“Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so, / To slay herself,
that should have slain her foe,” says Lucius Junius Brutus in
Shakespeare’s poem, and his words hang uneasily in the air as the
poem moves to its conclusion. The second difficulty I noted in the
book – which led to an interesting response from Annabel Patterson
in her 1984 book, Censorship and Interpretation: the Conditions
of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984) – was that Shakespeare is struggling to
present a classic republican myth, the story of the expulsion of the
Tarquin kings, while seeking simultaneously to maintain, through
many subtle conceits and metaphors, the dignity and necessity of
the monarchy. These tensions in the poem make its underlying logic
at times, I believe, quite difficult to understand. I see Lucrece as a
powerful, riddling, but ultimately unresolved poem that – despite,
or perhaps on account of, these factors – should attract the interest
of modern readers, schooled by half a century of feminist debate
on the issues it incidentally raises.
MPJ: In these Shakespeare-centric times, those who think of early
modern poetry in terms of Shakespeare or Shakespeare and Spenser
and Milton will be surprised when they turn to Jonson.
ID: Perhaps it’s Jonson’s easy, conversational tone that surprises
you most as you read him after the poets you’ve just mentioned.
“Tonight, grave sir, both my poor house and I / Do equally desire
your company. . .” “Do what you come for, Captain, with your
news, / That’s sit and eat; do not my ears abuse. . .” He talks to
you as if you were just there in the room, in words you might use
across the table, with subtle syntactical shifts and inversions and
small and enchanting metrical surprises. He thought that his friend
John Donne, “for not being understood,” would perish, and for
his metrical harshness “deserved hanging,” and that Spenser, with
his studied archaisms, “writ no language.” Jonson drew much of
his own poetic language from everyday encounters. “Purity of
diction” was Donald Davie’s apt phrase for this rare gift, which
happens to have been shared by two of Jonson’s modern admirers,
the late Thom Gunn (who wrote a good introduction to his selected
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 71
edition of Jonson’s poems for Faber in 2005) and Geoffrey Hill, a
poet always alert to the nuances of Jonson’s language. “To judge
of poets is only the faculty of poets,” wrote Jonson, “and not all
poets, but the best.” This has certainly been the case in relation to
his own poetry, where the practitioners have often proved to be his
best critics.
MPJ: Your introduction to the Oxford
Authors edition of Jonson’s poetry
vexes me. Obviously, early modern
dedications and a few other pieces are
autobiographical poetry, but I tend not
to think there was much autobiography
in the poetry of the period. I thought that
Jonson was a partial exception in that so
much of his poetry is written to flatter
people who can help him, his screeds to
denounce those who have disappointed
him, and his moving epigrams to mourn
his dead daughter and son. Yet, you write
on page xii, “The pronoun ‘I’ in Jonson’s
writing has thus at times an oddly plural
or impersonal force. Even when he seems
most vigorously and unquestionably
himself, Jonson may be gathering to
himself the attributes, or voicing the
sentiments, of other writers from other
ages.” This seems right as well. How
might I think this through?
Poems for Oxford University Press (2002), has also edited Jonson’s
poems for the Cambridge volumes, and his work once again (if
I’m allowed to speak boastfully about a colleague) is quite superb.
His commentary is learned and acute, while his textual labours –
he’s examined and collated readings from more than six hundred
manuscripts in archives in Britain, North
America, South Africa, and Japan – have
been little short of astonishing. Jonson
has traditionally been regarded as a writer
devoted primarily to the culture of print,
but as Colin’s analysis shows, he was also
fond of circulating his work in manuscript
amongst chosen friends and patrons; and
his poems were in turn much copied. His
poetic habits were, in short, rather more
like those of (say) Sidney and Donne than
is usually supposed. Colin’s findings tend
to validate the more general arguments
of scholars such as Harold Love and
Arthur Marotti, that print and manuscript
cultures continued to flourish side-by
side in England throughout much of
the seventeenth century. The references
for these are Harold Love’s Scribal
Publication in Seventeenth-Century
England, Clarendon Press, 1993, and
Arthur F. Marotti’s Manuscript, Print,
and the English Renaissance Lyric,
Cornell University Press, 1995.
ID: My comment of course relates only
MPJ: For the next few questions, I
to certain parts of Jonson’s writing, not
would ordinarily go through my beloved
Oxford University Press, 2011, 2013
all. Most of the time in his work, needless
Herford and Simpson (Oxford University
to say, the pronoun “I” means just what it seems to mean, Ben Jonson Press, 1925-1952) and find some really telling differences between
himself. But there are those odd passages in Discoveries which it and your edition, then ask you about those. I would ask why you
look as if they’re autobiographical utterances and then turn out to take a new approach and what published scholarship backs that up,
be straight transcriptions of remarks by classical or Renaissance but I don’t have your edition. What led you and your colleagues to
writers. Jonson must have admired these observations if he took plan the new Jonson edition?
the trouble to write them out, but they weren’t strictly speaking his
own. The word “invention” at this time still had its Latinate sense ID: The new edition’s great predecessor, the Oxford Ben Jonson
of “finding,” and some of these passages are, as you might say, edited by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, took half
pensées trouvées, sentiments that Jonson has somewhere stumbled a century to prepare, from the signing of the contract in 1902 to the
upon and wanted to remember. Swinburne was fooled by these, and publication of the final volume in 1952. It’s a monumental edition,
probably indeed by the basic notion of a Renaissance commonplace Victorian in scale and conception, one of the great scholarly feats of
book. There are poems too by Jonson of apparent self-revelation the last century, but by the time this splendid work was completed
and apparent romantic attachment for which, as we now know, it was already badly out of date, and decidedly cumbersome to use.
there are classical prototypes. Jonson enjoyed modeling himself To study any one text you needed to have several different volumes
on people he admired, such as Martial and Horace, and imitating on the desk before you, as the introductions, commentaries, texts,
traditional forms. This is all very tantalizing, as you can imagine, stage histories, and supplementary notes were scattered between
for an intending biographer, and I spend a few moments at the start several different volumes. The editors had assumed in their readers
of Ben Jonson: A Life picking over the problems.
an advanced knowledge of the ancient tongues, and passages in
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew therefore went untranslated. They’d
MPJ: I first want to ask how the poetry is treated in The Cambridge presented an old-spelling text based largely on the 1616 folio, whose
Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson.
authority as a copy text had been for some years under challenge,
ID: Colin Burrow, who edited Shakespeare’s Complete Sonnets and and whose typographical quirks and oddities they chose faithfully to
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 72
mimic. The edition had never been properly revised, and presented
numerous inconsistencies and statements in need of amendment.
In the early 1990s Martin Butler and I, soon to be joined by David
Bevington, organized a couple of small conferences in Oxford
and Leeds to review the problems the edition presented, and to
decide whether it was simpler to resolve these through revision,
or to prepare an entirely new edition from scratch. The vote went
overwhelmingly in favour of the latter option.
MPJ: How does it basically differ from its Oxford predecessor?
ID: The Cambridge Edition has two distinct and complementary
components – a print and an electronic edition – as well as a
great deal more textual and contextual material than the Oxford
edition. The seven-volume Print Edition, published in 2012,
presents the entire Jonsonian canon in modernized format with
extensive introductory material, commentary, illustrations, and
textual collations. Its contents are arranged in chronological order,
as those of the Oxford edition are not. This gives you an (often
surprising) sense of the many different tasks upon which Jonson
was simultaneously working throughout his long career: masques,
plays, civic and aristocratic entertainments, scholarly essays,
letters, occasional poems, and so on. The second component is
the Electronic Edition, now being finalized for release in 2014.
This contains the entire contents of the Print Edition, together
with a number of huge databases, including a textual archive with
transcripts and digitized versions of all of the early Jonsonian
texts, both print and manuscript, and textual essays on all Jonson’s
surviving works; a performance calendar recording details of all
known performances of his plays up to 2010, and essays on the
stage history of individual works; an edition of music associated
with Jonson (upwards of fifty songs and dances); a full chronology
of Jonson’s life and works; a detailed account of Jonson’s literary
reputation to 1800; a bibliography of writings about Jonson, up to
2009; an edition of letters written to Jonson; an annotated account
of surviving books from Jonson’s own library; a collection of
records relating to Jonson’s masques; essays on portraits of Jonson;
essays on works dubiously attributed to Jonson; and much else
besides. This massive swag of information – amounting to nearly
ten million words in length – is fully tagged and searchable. No
comparable edition of materials relating to Shakespeare or any
other Renaissance dramatist, so far as I’m aware, has ever been
assembled.
MPJ: You have impressed me. There are texts not in Herford and
Simpson as well as texts excluded that were falsely attributed to
Jonson. Tell us about both.
ID: The edition does indeed contain a few texts you won’t find in
Herford and Simpson, including an entertainment called Britain’s
Burse, written by Jonson to celebrate the opening of Robert
Cecil’s grand new shopping mall in the Strand, the New Exchange,
in 1609. This was discovered a few years ago in the National
Archives by one of our contributors, James Knowles, who has
also written more extensively in the Edition about Jonson’s lost
entertainments, including one written for the Merchant Taylors’
Company, from which three previously unidentified songs from
the Hatfield archives have now been identified as Jonson’s. The
story of these and other discoveries is fully told in the Print Edition.
The Dubia section of the Electronic Edition looks in detail at a
number of works thought at some stage to have been written by
Jonson. I argue here (for example) that Jonson may well have been
partly responsible for drafting some of the preliminary material
in Shakespeare’s first folio, including the address “To the Great
Variety of Readers;” while Hugh Craig proposes that Shakespeare
rather than Jonson may have written the surviving “additions” to
The Spanish Tragedy, an identification recently independently
advanced, on somewhat different grounds, by Sir Brian Vickers
(“Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twentieth-First
Century,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 62:1, 2011). One thrilling recent
find that we’re delighted to include in the Electronic Edition is the
diary discovered by James Loxley in the Chester and Cheshire
archives, kept by a hitherto unsuspected and still unidentified
young man who walked with Jonson all the way from London to
Edinburgh in the summer of 1618, noting in detail the names of
the places they passed through and the people they encountered on
the way, along with other highlights of the journey. Loxley and his
colleagues Anna Groundwater and Julie Sanders have now edited
this diary for the Cambridge Edition, and in rather different format
for separate publication by Cambridge University Press; and have
been providing this summer a “virtual” re-enactment of the walk
which you can follow on James’s University of Edinburgh website.
MPJ: I suppose that Martin Butler and David Bevington need no
introduction, but introduce them anyway.
ID: It’s been a huge pleasure over the past twenty years to work
with two such devoted and gifted colleagues. David is perhaps the
most experienced editor of Renaissance dramatic texts we have.
He works with unbelievable energy and dispatch, and has fired and
illuminated the entire project. Martin has been an equally brilliant
and dedicated colleague, who during the final stages of the enterprise
in particular has been its central inspiring figure. I imagine your
readers will know Martin’s classic work on Theatre and Crisis
1632-1642 (Cambridge University Press, 1984), but they should
also look at his more recent impressively detailed study of The
Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge University
Press, 2009) – and watch out for the new book about Ben Jonson
on which he’s currently working.
MPJ: It sounds good, but for classroom purposes we’ll want to
use an anthology or single volume works. Can you suggest some
outstanding editions of Jonson’s plays?
ID: Well, of course there are some excellent editions of individual
works by Jonson available, most notably in the Revels series, and
there are small collections, such as Helen Ostovich’s Ben Jonson:
Four Comedies (Longmans Annotated Texts, 1997), that are ideal
for classroom use. But David, Martin, and I hope very much that
CUP will eventually be persuaded to develop a series of inexpensive
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 73
derivative editions of single Jonsonian texts or small groups of
texts – of the poems and the prose, for example, or writings that
represent, let’s say, “Late Jonson” or “Roman Jonson.” Now that
we’ve captured the entire canon electronically, such smaller-scale,
less costly editions that you can use in the classroom or rehearsal
room or simply slip into your pocket and read on the bus could be
easily generated and commercially attractive, and help boost the
current revival of interest in Jonson’s work.
MPJ: Maybe CUP will take the hint. I know you were working on
Jonson’s Magic Houses while writing the biography. Tell the story
of why you put together the essay collection.
ID: While working on the Cambridge Edition I was trying
simultaneously (indeed) to write the Life of Jonson for Oxford
University Press, and moving, unsurprisingly, at glacial speed. My
wonderfully patient and encouraging OUP editor thought it might be
wise to send out a signal that I was actually still alive, and that the
biography was indeed in progress, and that’s partly why Jonson’s
Magic Houses was published when it was. The book also gave me
a chance to think in a somewhat more public way about the kind of
biography I was trying to write, and about the relationship between
Jonson and Shakespeare, and about Jonson’s Catholicism: all central
topics I discuss in this collection.
MPJ: A burgeoning field is Shakespeare the Catholic. A few
scholars are very sensible, but many use pseudo-scholarly
techniques reminiscent of those employed by people who deny
Shakespeare’s authorship. Jonson actually was a Catholic, at least
for several years, and your biography covers this well. Do you
find an over-zealous Catholicism over-embracing Jonson as well?
ID: Well, no, on the contrary: what indeed surprised me in the 1990s
as I was working on this topic was that so little attention had been
paid to what seemed to me a major problem – a whole set of major
problems – in Jonson’s life. Why did Jonson convert to Catholicism
at such an acutely dangerous time as 1598? How did he manage
to establish and advance his career as principal masque writer at
the (Protestant) Stuart court while simultaneously consorting with
radical elements in the Catholic community: supping for example
with the Gunpowder conspirators just a few weeks before their
planned coup on 5 November 1605? How, throughout this intensely
divided period in his life as a Catholic from 1598 to 1610, did he
manage to produce some of his greatest works? Curiously these
were questions that hadn’t really been pursued or even posed, so
far as I could tell, by previous scholars, but they swiftly became
central now to the biography I was writing. I was stimulated by
fine recent work on the Catholic community in late Tudor and early
Stuart England by such historians as John Bossy (The English
Catholic Community, 1570-1850, Oxford University Press, 1975),
Eamon Duffy (The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion
in England 1400-1580, Yale University Press, 1992); Michael
Questier, (Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 15801625, Cambridge University Press, 1996), Alexandra Walsham,
(Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional
Polemic in Early Modern England, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 1993)
and Stefania Tutino, (Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early
Modern England, Ashgate, 2007). Curiously however, – as your
question may imply – literary scholars were more absorbed by
Shakespeare’s (somewhat hypothetical) Catholic sympathies than
by Jonson’s undoubted association with the Roman church. Now
the situation has altered somewhat, and there have been good recent
essays on Jonson and Catholicism by Robert S. Miola ( “Ben Jonson,
Catholic Poet,” Renaissance and Reformation, 25:4, 2001), Richard
Dutton (Ben Jonson, Volpone, and the Gunpowder Plot, Cambridge
University Press, 2008), Peter Lake and Martin Butler (both in The
Ben Jonson Journal, 19.2, 2012) amongst others. But this is still a
world that’s gradually being explored, and where more is no doubt
waiting to be discovered.
MPJ: Shakespeare biographies are often flawed by authors making
assumptions that are then treated as facts. Aside from the identity
of Jonson’s step father—and you make it very clear that you are
assuming his identity—you do very little of that.
ID: A few years ago I wrote a piece called “Biographical
Uncertainty” (Essays in Criticism, 54:4, 2004) which stirred a
few responses – including one by David Ellis, on Shakespearian
biography, in the same journal the following year. I suggested that
biographers tend often to be over-confident in their assumptions
about matters concerning which we can only hope to possess, at best,
quite imperfect and dubious kinds of knowledge. There are limits to
what we can ever hope to know about people whom we see every
day, let alone those who lived four hundred years ago. We know
(or so we imagine) quite a lot about Ben Jonson, compared with
what we think we know about Shakespeare, but there are still many
gaps in this supposed knowledge, and much room for interpretation
and dispute. The most speculative part of Ben Jonson: A Life is my
discussion of the possible theme of the now-lost play by Jonson
and Nashe called The Isle of Dogs, which in 1597 so outraged
the Privy Council that it led to the closure – and very nearly, the
complete destruction – of all the London playhouses, as well as the
imprisonment in Marshalsea Prison of Jonson and two of his fellow
actors. In connecting this play with a contemporary quarrel between
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the Cecils, father and son,
concerning possible strategies to be taken against Spain I may well
be entirely mistaken. But I advance it as simply a guess. I believe
it’s part of a biographer’s duty to make such guesses – provided it’s
also made clear that what you’re offering isn’t reportage, merely
an attempt to understand a dark corner of the past.
MPJ: And you clearly label that as a guess. This is a good place
to ask about the whole war of the theaters idea, receiving its most
recent long treatment in Shakespeare and the Poets’ War by James
P. Bednarz, published by Columbia University Press in 2001. The
idea has been circulating since the nineteenth century that Jonson
did not get on with John Marston and Thomas Dekker as seen by
the way that the three of them threw verbal barbs at each other from
the stage. I remain somewhat skeptical, suspecting that some of the
people who have written about this read more into some plays than
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 74
is really there. What is your take on the poets’ war?
ID: I admire James Bednarz’s book and learnt much from it. But
I’ve also been impressed by Roslyn Knutson’s caution (in Playing
Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time, Cambridge
University Press, 2001) that the concept of theatrical warfare in
this period needs to be viewed with a measure of skepticism.
While rivalry between individual companies and individual
dramatists certainly existed, the commercial practicalities of the
day demanded that squabbles between them quickly be set aside.
Jonson indeed ridiculed John Marston on several occasions, but that
didn’t stop the two men collaborating soon afterwards on Eastward
Ho!, or deter Marston from praising Jonson fulsomely – as “the
most discriminating and weighty poet” – in his dedication to The
Malcontent, where he signed himself Jonson’s “frank and sincere
friend.” The notion that some kind of “warfare” existed between
Shakespeare and Jonson was really invented in the eighteenth
century – there’s little evidence for such an idea – and it achieved
quite ludicrous proportions a century or so later in works of pseudoscholarship such as Robert Cartwright’s Shakespeare and Jonson:
Dramatic, versus Wit-Combats of 1864. Traces of this myth are
still to be found in modern scholarship. In the Life, I suggest that
the relationship between Shakespeare and Jonson was closer and
more affectionate than is often supposed, and creatively stimulating
to both men.
MPJ: What book helped direct your career?
ID: F. W. Bateson’s The Scholar-Critic: An Introduction to Literary
Research (Routledge and K. Paul, 1972). The teaching I had as an
undergraduate in Melbourne in the 1950s was largely formalist
in nature, dominated by New Critical approaches and the latest
news from Cambridge. We had “dating” classes based on I. A.
Richards’s “practical criticism” experiments, in which students
were required to comment on poems of undisclosed authorship,
about which no contextual information whatsoever was supplied.
We were obliged to write a critique of the anonymous poem we
were handed, and guess its possible date of composition, and, if we
dared, its authorship. All too aware of the pathetic limitations of my
own literary knowledge and of the acerbity with which Richards
had commented on his own students’ feeble attempts to deal with
these challenges, I found these exercises stressful in the extreme.
Later in Oxford, largely through Freddy Bateson – with whom,
together with Christopher Ricks, I had for some years the privilege
of editing Essays in Criticism – I discovered that literary criticism
was enhanced rather than diminished by the exercise of historical
scholarship. It was absurd, Bateson maintained, to cut oneself off
from any potential source of contextual knowledge and focus merely
on “words on the page,” as Richards had encouraged his students
to do. “Desert island criticism” was his scornful phrase for these
exercises. Bateson had just established his series of Longmans
Annotated English Poets, for which Ricks – nowadays Co-Director
of the Editorial Institute at Boston – was then preparing his superb
edition of the poems of Tennyson. These contacts taught me the
immense attractions of editorial work, with which I’ve been more or
less continuously occupied since that time. The Scholar-Critic is the
book in which Bateson most succinctly stated many of his literary
beliefs and principles, which are more expansively and colorfully
elaborated in the pages of the journal he founded.
MPJ: Any favorite reference books?
ID: I was lucky enough to have been a Consulting Editor for
the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, with general
responsibility for all entries relating to literary people who lived
between 1500 and 1779. The ODNB is an amazing work, which
involved more than ten thousand contributors from all over the
world. Watching the whole thing come together was immensely
exciting. Even before its publication, it had become my most
frequently consulted source for the work I was then doing on Ben
Jonson: A Life, though I was also, needless to say, ceaselessly
ransacking The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson
while it too was still being painstakingly assembled. I still spend
much of each day roaming around in these two big electronic
wonder-palaces.
MPJ: Who isn’t read anymore who should be?
ID: John Aubrey. Watch out for Kate Bennett’s forthcoming Oxford
edition of Brief Lives, which will at last make this marvelous
gallimaufry of eccentric and untrustworthy gossip available for
your delight.
MPJ: Any favorite books from the past five years?
ID: I regard Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver
Street as a quite remarkable piece of literary sleuthing. Nicholl is the
liveliest chronicler I know of this general period. Those unfamiliar
with his writings might care to dip into his wonderful recent
collection, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations (Penguin,
2011).
MPJ: Whose works do you greatly admire?
ID: I admire everything written by the late great Frank Kermode,
whose intellectual range and perspicacity were (I think) unrivalled
amongst literary critics in recent times. From that remarkable early
edition of The Tempest (Arden 2, 1958) through to his late book on
Shakespeare’s Language (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), he was
an outstanding commentator on the writings of Shakespeare, and
on so much else besides.
MPJ: What is next for you?
ID: Every year we have a new crop of biographical studies of
Shakespeare, some excellent, others telling us what we already
know, still others advancing some theory that’s hard to believe. Most
treat their subject in relative isolation, viewing him as an exceptional
figure, a kind of a divine freak, and following his life through a
narrow biographical lens from cradle to grave. But Shakespeare
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 75
wasn’t an isolated genius: he spent most of his professional life
working in company, in collaboration, or in competition with others;
and he lived in a time of remarkable creative activity. I’d like to
write about him in relation to his major contemporaries, viewing
him as part of an extraordinary cultural group. What I hope to
attempt, if will power and stamina hold, is a multiple biographical
study that looks not merely at Shakespeare himself but at that larger
phenomenon which, many years ago, Patrick Cruttwell called The
Shakespearean Moment.
MPJ: The compete reference is The Shakespearean Moment: And
Its Place in the Poetry of the 17th Century (Chatto and Windus,
1954). Thanks, Ian. I appreciate this interview, and thanks
especially for suggesting some of the questions for your new
Cambridge Jonson since that part of our talk was so difficult for
me to navigate.
TALKING BOOKS UPDATE
In the update are six books with several past guests represented,
though two of the books are edited by Peter Holland and the other
four have chapters by Tiffany Stern. Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts
and Presents was edited by Holland with Ruth Morse and Helen
Cooper for Cambridge University Press, and published in 2013.
The book is divided into four sections: looking back to the Middle
Ages from Shakespeare’s time, medieval books and language in the
early modern era, early modern writers looking at medieval history,
and the relation of early modern theatre to medievalism. Holland’s
chapter, “Performing the Middle Ages,” studies the way that stage
and film productions over the centuries tried to take audiences back
to the Middle Ages in their presentation, then more recently used
the Middle Ages to comment on today. The argument and the choice
of productions to make the argument is brilliant.
Holland in a different sense edited the 2013 Arden 3 Coriolanus.
It differs from most Arden Shakespeares in that “there is no single
substantial section devoted to the play itself and its major concerns,
no chronologically ordered narrative of Coriolanus performance
history, no extensive survey of the history” (xxviii). Most of these
are discussed anyway in Holland’s extensive coverage of the plays
sources, language, the inspiration it has been to other artists, and
the historicizing of the politics in the play. I picked up the book to
get acquainted one morning and ended up reading this fascinating
introduction right through.
Tiffany Stern’s “Middleton’s Collaborators in Music and
Song” is in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by
Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley and published by Oxford
University Press in 2012. It looks at how Middleton used songs
in four of his plays, A Mad World, My Masters (1605), A Chaste
Maid of Cheapside (1613), The Witch (1615, with comments about
Macbeth), and The Widow (1615). Middleton’s practice of finding
or writing songs and carefully placing them in his plays receives
tentative observations.
Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts is edited
by Russ McDonald, Nicholas D. Nace, and Travis D. Williams. The
book presents 39 close readings of early modern texts, including
four by former “Talking Books” guests. Tiffany Stern writes on
“The Dumb Show in Hamlet.” Lukas Erne’s essay is entitled,
“Editorial Emendation and the Opening of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream.” Stanley Wells, with frequent collaborator Paul Edmondson,
contribute “at heaven’s gate,” a look at the twenty-ninth sonnet.
George T. Wright’s “Unmuffling Isabells,” examines the end of
Measure for Measure, finding the Duke’s behavior sloppy, but
“entirely benign” (246). There is little unity in this book, but many
of these essays fascinate.
Though not a guest, Cary M. Mazer’s chapter in Shakespeare’s
Sense of Character: On the Page and from the Stage (Yu Jin Ko and
Michael W. Shurgot, eds., Ashgate 2012) locates spontaneity as the
goal of actors giving a performance in Stanislavsky’s system, and so
when modern Original Practices actors try to produce spontaneity,
they are really working towards a modern goal, not an early modern
goal. In her answer to Mazer, “(Re:)Historcizing Spontaneity:
Original Practices, Stanislavski, and Characterization,” Tiffany
Stern finds spontaneity discussed by the ancient writers Aulius
Gellius and Quintilian, whose ideas about acting were influential
on early modern theories of the art. Stern then supplies generous
quotes from several early modern writers to prove her point. In
focusing on the most expansive part of both chapters, I have skipped
smaller points supporting this difference of opinion. Both essays
are well worth your time.
Adam H. Kitzes reviewed The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare,
Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play, edited by David Carnegie
and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press, 2012), in SNL 63:1,
Summer 2013. I shall not rereview it here, but I do want to correct
errors made by Professor Kitzes in his comments about two of my
former guests, Tiffany Stern and MacDonald P. Jackson.
He writes, “Tiffany Stern raises the intriguing theoretical
possibility that Shakespeare’s contributions may have been at the
level of plot design rather than dialogue . . . It is unconvincing, since
Stern acknowledges that Shakespeare tended to borrow plots rather
than write them himself, and Fletcher liked to compost them” (20).
Kitzes writes this as if Stern supports the idea when she actually
demolishes it (118-121). Much of her chapter gives reason to doubt
that Lewis Theobald had a manuscript by Shakespeare that he
adapted into Double Falsehood (1727, hereafter, DF when not in
quotes). Professor Kitzes thus does not mention this real point of
Stern’s chapter. There is more about Theobald and the manuscript,
below.
On the same page, Kitzes correctly writes that contributors such
as Jackson “prove [it is] far easier to tease out Fletcher’s presence
than Shakespeare’s.” Unfortunately, he adds that Jackson and others
“take pains not to overstate Shakespeare’s presence in Double
Falsehood.” If Stern is correct in the part of her chapter that Kitzes
ignored, then any claim is overstated. Jackson makes the case for
Shakespeare’s participation several times in his implications and
twice directly, stating that evidence for Fletcher’s participation is
certain and Shakespeare’s “though less conclusive, is nevertheless
strong” (159), and, “Theobald probably did work from a manuscript
(or manuscripts) descended from a Cardenio written jointly by
Shakespeare and Fletcher, but scarcely a line of Shakespeare’s verse
survives intact into Double Falsehood” (161).
If I may make a plea for skepticism, the main reason for
attributing a play entitled Cardenio to Shakespeare and John
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 76
Talking Books
with Ian Donaldson
“Precious Friends Hid
in Death’s Dateless Night”
Fletcher is a Humphrey Moseley entry in the Stationers’ Register
in 1653 for a play of that title “by Mr. Fletcher. & Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare had been dead 37 years and Fletcher 28 when Moseley
made the attribution. Moseley was a serial misattributer, claiming
The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The History of King Stephen, Duke
Humphrey, and Iphis and Iantha, or A Marriage Without a Man to
be written by Shakespeare, and Henry 1 and Henry 2 were written
by Shakespeare and Robert Davenport. All but The Merry Devil of
Edmonton are lost, but nobody believes these plays were written by
Shakespeare with or without Davenport. In light of Mr. Moseley’s
history of misattribution, it is astonishing that anyone would take
Shakespeare’s participation in a lost Cardenio seriously, but many
do, including me until I studied Moseley in context.
Some feel the attribution is given credibility by the King’s
Men being paid for performing a play called Cardenno in May of
1613 and a play called Cardenna in July of that year, probably the
same play. There is no indication of the content of this play (or of
these plays), nor of the author(s). We only know that Shakespeare’s
company performed something(s) with a title very similar to
Cardenio, but the King’s Men performed a lot of plays by many
different playwrights. Nothing indicates Shakespeare, Fletcher, or
Shakespeare and Fletcher. There is also Lewis Theobald’s claim
to have one or more manuscript copies of Cardenio, that it was
by Shakespeare, and that it is the basis for his uninspired Double
Falsehood (DF), a claim widely doubted during Theobald’s life.
Cardenio studies were long on the fringe of Shakespeare
scholarship with most who commented intrigued by the attribution.
Now Cardenio is a cottage industry with this book and several
Cardenio plays staged since 1992. One by Gary Taylor aspires
to drill deeply into DF and present the play that Shakespeare
and Fletcher supposedly wrote—an impossible task. In her 2011
Shakespeare Quarterly article (64:4), Tiffany Stern expands on
the chapter in this book, showing that it is nearly impossible that
Theobald had one copy of a Shakespearean Cardenio, let alone the
three or four copies he sometimes claimed to possess. Theobald
had trouble keeping his story straight. Perhaps he had a Fletcheronly Cardenio, as most of the positive stylometric evidence of DF
suggests. Some, but not all, of Stern’s case against goes away if
Theobald had a Fletcher solo manuscript. To me, Stern has made
such a strong case against the Shakespeare manuscript(s) that the
burden of proof is on the other side.
My mind is open, however. No doubt people are writing articles
and papers answering Stern, and Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor
have edited a new book on Cardenio that Palgrave will publish by
the time you read this. Bourus tells me that multiple contributors
address Stern’s concerns both directly and indirectly.1 Theobald
could not have adapted a text he did not have, so looking for the
fingerprints of Shakespeare in DF will be beside the point until
Stern’s opposites have met that burden of proof.
wanted his students to share that love, and was notorious on the
platform for imitating famous actors such as Laurence Olivier and
John Gielgud, the latter having actually met and befriended him.”
Professor Forker published ten books during his career, and
more than a hundred articles and reviews in scholarly journals.
Skull beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (1986)
won him wide praise and a secure place as a leading expert on
Renaissance drama. A collection of his essays appeared as Fancy’s
Images: Contexts, Settings, and Perspectives in Shakespeare
and His Contemporaries (1990). His four critical editions-Shirley’s The Cardinal, Marlowe’s Edward II, Shakespeare’s
Richard II, and Peele’s Troublesome Reign of King John—were
all recognized as major contributions to the field. John Drakakis
writes that the edition of Edward II “is the best one available.” The
Arden Three Richard II (2002) is widely regarded as a definitive
edition of the play. The obituary reports that “in Shakespeare:
The Critical Tradition (1997), he published an extensive and
analytical historical anthology of writings on Richard II, tracing
the reception history of the play from its initial appearance in
1591 to modern times.”
Charles Forker contributed four pieces to The Shakespeare
Newsletter. Simply listing the titles suggests the range of his
Shakespearean interests:
Notes
1. Live on-line chat with Terri Bourus, 6 September 2013.
“Regime Change at Shakespeare’s Globe” 53:3 No. 258, Fall
2003
“Marlowe’s Edward II and The Merchant of Venice” 57:2 No.
272, Fall 2007
“Tom Macfaul’s Male Friendship in Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries” 59:3 No. 279, Winter 2009/2010
“From Romeo and Juliet to Letters to Juliet: Elizabethan Tragedy
Re-envisioned as Romantic Comedy” 60:3 No. 282, Winter
2010-2011
Forker’s recent essay on Shakespeare’s religious allegiance
was not yet published when he died. “Was Shakespeare a “Church
Papist” or a Prayer Book Anglican?” (Shakespeare The Man:
New Decipherings, ed. R.W. Desai [Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2014]) will soon be recognized as the best
study ever on this controversial question. He offers a judicious,
carefully considered analysis of all the evidence available before
reaching his conclusion, that Shakespeare was probably a Prayer
Book Anglican. Throughout, he emphasizes that, in a field forever
doomed to conclusions hedged with “possibly” and “probably,”
in which certainty can never be achieved, the alternative is also
a strong possibility. In the end, the Anglicans “win” because
Forker argues cogently that Shakespeare does not come across as
someone who would be comfortable with a kind of double life,
professing one position and holding another: “If Shakespeare
disguised himself so consistently in this way [attending Anglican
services but holding to Catholic belief privately] over a long and
varied career in the theater, he would have had to do so at the
expense of spontaneity and emotional intercourse with others
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 77
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 78
“Precious Friends Hid
in Death’s Dateless Night”
in a way that seems
wholly
inconsistent
with his power to recreate such relationships
convincingly on the
stage” (250).
Forker
concludes
with quotations from
Sir Thomas Browne’s
Religio Medici (1642):
“If he had lived a
generation later and been
so inclined, Shakespeare
might have written of his
religious commitment in
the manner of Sir Thomas
Browne.” He concludes:
“Shakespeare’s religious
sentiments, if they were
at all like Browne’s,
Photo from: guildofscholars.org
would
make
him
reasonably comfortable
with Prayer Book Anglicanism and probably more so, we are
entitled to imagine, than with the stifled hostilities and unfulfilled
longings associated with ‘church papistry’” (251).
Interestingly, we learn from the funeral home’s obituary that
Forker himself was “an observant Anglo-Catholic who never
missed Mass at Trinity Episcopal Church, where he was once a
chorister and where he served for over half a century as acolyte,
chalice bearer, thurifer, epistler and crucifer. One of his several
friends in the priesthood observed that he remained an altar boy
into his eighties. He was a loyal member of the Guild of Scholars
of the Episcopal Church, a group of lay Anglicans who meet
regularly at General Seminary in New York City, and which for
six years he led as president.”
Professor Forker suffered from cancer for several years before
his death, welcoming remissions but calm in the face of his final
illness. He was 86. May he rest in peace. [J.W.M.]
Upcoming Performances
Summer 2014
Canada
Vancouver
‘Bard on the Beach’
For tickets call: (604) 739-0559
Also visit: bardonthebeach.org
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Directed by Dean Paul Gibson
11 June- 20 September
The Tempest
Directed by Meg Rose
12 June-18 September
Cymbeline
Directed by Anita Rochon
4 July-17 September
Ontario
Prescott
St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival
Also visit: stlawrenceshakespeare.ca
The Tempest
Directed by Craig Walker
12 July-16 August
Two Gentleman of Verona
Directed by Ian Farthing
16 July- 16 August
Stratford
Stratford Festival
For tickets call: 1 (800) 567-1600 or
Email: [email protected]
Also visit: stratfordfestival.ca
King Lear
Directed by Antoni Cimolino
5 May-10 October
Directed by Chris Abraham
16 May-11 October
King John
Directed by Tim Carroll
21 May-20 September
Antony and Cleopatra
Directed by Gary Griffin
3 August-20 September
A Chamber Play
Directed by Peter Sellars
11 July-20 September
Fall/Winter 2013
Page 79
Iona College Mourns
Photo by T.J.M.
Tom Pendleton version of Marc Antony
At Work for The Shakespeare Newsletter
Tom Pendleton at Columbia University
before a meeting of the Shakespeare Seminar.
Photo courtesy of Harry Keyishian
Fall/Winter 2013
NON-PROFIT ORG.
U.S. POSTAGE
PAID
Permit No. 3919
WHITE PLAINS,
N.Y.
Page 80
Upcoming Performances
Summer 2014
California
Los Angeles
Independent Shakespeare Company
For tickets call: (818) 710-6306 or
Also visit: independentshakespeareco.org
Romeo and Juliet
3 April-3 May
Richard III
Summer 2014
Twelfth Night
Summer 2014
Department of English
IONA COLLEGE
715 North Avenue
New Rochelle, NY 10801-1890
Address Service Requested
The Taming of the Shrew
Summer 2014
Orinda
California Shakespeare Theater
Also visit: calshakes.org
The Comedy of Errors
Directed by Aaron Posner
25 June-20 July
Directed by Shana Cooper
3-28 September
Fresno
Woodward Shakespeare Festival
Also visit: woodwardshakespeare.org
Macbeth
Directed by Greg Taber
19 June-12 July
Taming of the Shrew
Directed by Aaron Spjute
24 July-16 August
The Tempest
Directed by Julie Anne Keller
San Diego
The Old Globe
Also visit: theoldglobe.org
Othello
Directed by Barry Edelstein
22 June-27 July
Two Gentleman of Verona
Directed by Ian Farthing

Thomas A. Pendleton, 1932-2013

Transcription

Similar documents

Why Shakespeare

July 2013

WRITING PLAYS - Shakespeare`s Globe

shakespeare competition 2014-2015

Say You Saw it in The Monadnock Shopper News 7

Book of Songs - The Lute Society

`Discover` issue 31, part two

we love a challenge