Showing papers in "Shakespeare Quarterly in 1995"

Nancy G. Siraisi. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice.

Abstract: Western Europe supported a highly developed and diverse medical community in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. In her absorbing history of this complex era in medicine, Siraisi explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.

Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism

Abstract: La parodie politico-religieuse de Falstaff dans Henry IV de Shakespeare marque l'entree de la figure puritaine dans la litterature populaire - largement illustree dans les pamphlets de R. Waldegrave

Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham.

Abstract: Part 1 of this book provides an annotated edition of Samuel Harsnett's famous attack on the practice of exorcism, which had a profound influence upon Shakespeare's conception and writing of King Lear. Part 2 explores the context of Shakespeare's reading of Harsnett's book.

The masculine romance of Roman Britain : Cymbeline and early modern English nationalism

Abstract: JT IS SOMEWHAT MISLEADING TO PUT THE ABOVE QUOTATIONS TOGETHER, l since the first describes the birth of nationalism in England at a specific historical moment (the sixteenth century), while the second invokes the (usually imagined to be) ancient origins of something that has come to be called a nation. Ijuxtapose them here not simply to imply a wide divergence of scholarly opinion but also ,to suggest that any discussion of nationalism and early modern England necessarily involves both ways that these quotations read the phenomenon they describe: one places the origins of English nationalism (and perhaps of nationalism more generally) in the early modern period; the other recognizes early modern England's own perception of its national origins in antiquity. The quotations do nevertheless represent opposite poles in theories of nationalism. The first introduces Liah Greenfeld's recent study of early modern England as the world's first nation; assuming the causal primacy of ideas, Greenfeld argues for the idea of the nation as the constitutive element of modernity. The second quotation virtually concludes the last appendix to Benedict Anderson's influential Imagined Communities, a study that famously rejects ideological definitions of nationalism, considering it instead alongside anthropological terms like kinship or religion, and arguing strongly for its emergence in the eighteenthcentury Americas. Both works participate in the new social, political, and historical interest in nationalism that developed during the 1980s, just as its subject seemed about to become obsolete.2 My own approach emphasizes the interplay between historical obsolescence and continuity with the past in the recovery of national origins. I am

Falconer to the little eyases: a new date and commercial agenda for the 'little eyases' passage in Hamlet

Abstract: Les implications commerciale et politique de la reecriture d'un passage d'Hamlet («The humour of children» devenu «the little eyases»): comment cette nouvelle interpretation fut l'illustration du conflit entre theâtre public et theâtre prive

The First Quarto of Hamlet: Reforming Widow Gertred

Abstract: CRITICS WHO COMPARE THE FIRST QUARTO'S GERTRED WITH GERTRARD of the Second Quarto and Gertrude of the Folio have for the most part found Gertred more "sympathetic."' Once informed that her new husband is a murderer, she commits herself unequivocally to Hamlet's cause, promising to keep up connubial appearances only to deceive Claudius. Rather than another variation on the Shakespearean category "woman with divided loyalties," like KingJohn's Blanche, Antony and Cleopatra's Octavia, or Hamlet's Gertrard/Gertrude, Gertred is now all mother. Moreover, throughout the play she has been pious, reserved, passive, unexceptional; who would not have his widow so? Although the First Quarto does not resolve questions about Gertred's sexual behavior or erase the story's inherent misogyny, it does present a queen who differs so significantly from her counterparts that she impresses critics as the site of greatest difference between the variant texts.2 Of the three texts, Q1, first discovered in the 1820s, is the most enigmatic, retaining its notorious distinction as the best known of the "bad" quartos, even as that term is challenged.3 To adumbrate the most problematic features of Q1: signs of proofreading are few and many passages are

Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis

Abstract: The painter Zeuxis excelled in the art of trompe-l'oeil , a mode of painting that is capable of deceiving the eye by its simulation of nature. Zeuxis portrayed grapes with such success that birds flew towards his picture. His younger rival, Parrhasius, however, challenged Zeuxis to a competition to decide which painter's work was more true to life. Parrhasius won – by depicting a curtain so convincing that Zeuxis begged him to draw it and reveal the picture behind. In his seminar ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a ’ Jacques Lacan makes a distinction between the two pictures: only the curtain that Parrhasius painted is a true trompe-l'oeil , because its effect depends on what is missing, the possibility of a secret concealed behind the veil. For Lacan it is not deception alone that defines the trompe-l'oeil : on the contrary, its determining characteristic is the promise of a presence that it also withholds. Trompe-l'oeil tantalises. At a critical moment in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis , when the goddess has succeeded in manoeuvring her reluctant suitor into a likely physical position, but without the consequence she seeks, the text compares Adonis to the painting by Zeuxis: Even so poor birds deceiv'd with painted grapes Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw: Even so she languisheth in her mishaps, As those poor birds that helpless berries saw. The warm effects which she in him finds missing She seeks to kindle with continual kissing.

Shakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story

Abstract: PERHAPS THE MOST PROLIFIC OF THE SEVERAL SCHOLARS WHO have written detective fiction is J.I.M. Stewart, who produced forty-four classic detective stories under the pseudonym "Michael Innes." The second of these, Hamlet, Revenge!, recounts what happens when a lord chancellor of England is murdered while playing Polonius in an aristocrats' amateur production of Hamlet. According to Stewart's autobiography, long after he became a reader at Christ Church he learned that Sir Walter W. Greg "had read Hamlet, Revenge! again and again, submitting it to 'the same kind of scrutiny he gave to the variants in the first quarto of King Lear'."' Even allowing for hyperbole, I am intrigued by the question of why a mere mystery novel, what Stewart himself calls "purely recreational reading,"2 so engaged a great scholar, a scholar who codified rules that governed the editing of Shakespeare texts for decades. Of course, the reasons behind one editor's fascination with one murder mystery are unknowable, depending as they well may on a peculiar conjunction of desires and anxieties. I can, however, propose some reasons for any Shakespeare scholar to ponder classic detective stories in relation to Shakespeare.3 Elsewhere I have dis-

"O, let him marry her!": Matrimony and Recompense in Measure for Measure

Abstract: Since 1970, when the Isabella of John Barton's RSC production of Measure for Measure shocked audiences by silently refusing to acquiesce to the Duke's offer of marriage at the end of the play, Isabella's response (or lack thereof) to the Duke's proposal has become a recurrent topic of Shakespearean performance criticism.' However, attention to this issue has tended to overshadow a related ambiguity: why the Duke asks Isabella to marry him in the first place. It is generally agreed that the text provides no evidence to suggest a romantic attachment to Isabella on the Duke's part until the moment of his proposal, but the play's stage history reveals a pattern of attempts to supply what the text lacks, either through stage business or interpolated declarations of love.2 These attempts, based on a culturally specific concept of matrimony as prompted by erotic desire, disregard other textually prominent motivations for marriage grounded in Renaissance moral, social, and financial concerns.3 Most important, such productions overlook the idea of matrimony as a form of recompense offered by the husband to his future wife to atone for sexual offenses committed against her. Duke Vincentio's proposal to Isabella, who has publicly renounced her chastity at the Duke's request, can be seen as a self-imposed form of the same type of recompense he demands of the play's other "virgin-violators": Claudio, Lucio, and Angelo. At the Duke's first appearance after having delegated his power to Angelo, Vincentio allays Friar Thomas's suspicion that his secretive retirement is intended to facilitate a romantic tryst: "No. Holy father, throw away that thought; / Believe not that the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom" (1.3.1-3).4 Given that such other Shakespearean heroes as Valentine, Berowne, and Benedick deride love only to be overmastered by it, such a statement sets up the expectation that Vincentio

The Jailer's Daughter and the politics of Madwomen's language

Abstract: T HE JAILER S DAUGHTER IN SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER S The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) is a pivotal figure in Jacobean drama. More than any other character in Shakespeare's late plays, she embodies changes in both dramatic representation and the larger culture of early modern England. As if testifying to the social and dramatic difference of this important character (who is absent, it should be pointed out, in the source materials from which the play's more familiar main plot derived), Shakespeare and Fletcher work to isolate her from the rest of the drama's action and characters. ' Grounded in a pathetic madness, she stands outside the play's self-definition of the social and is not recognized as politically significant by any character in the drama. As I will argue, however, it is precisely in the mad language of this otherwise disempowered character that we get the richest picture of the arrangements of power in the play, of social relations in the early modern playhouse, and of transformations in the Jacobean culture that produced The Two Noble Kinsmen. The play came into existence as a collaboration of two dramatists and two dramatic traditions at a transitional moment in the early modern theater. On one hand, the rise of melodrama and courtly plays was augmenting the power of female roles; on the other, folk strains in the drama were dwindling as both urban and courtly plots and characters replaced the rural. As a result, it became increasingly difficult to imagine community, folk and otherwise; indeed the attempt to do so in The Two Noble Kinsmen is awkward and tense. The play both coincides with and, through the Jailer's Daughter, voices truths about this twofold transition in the history of London's stage.

"And Gladly Teach": Books, Articles, and a Bibliography on the Teaching of Shakespeare

Abstract: FACT IS, THOUGH THE MAN'S PLAYS ARE PERFORMED more frequently on more stages than those of any other writer, most people meet Shakespeare in school. The teaching of Shakespeare, particularly in high school, where every student sojourns ever so briefly in Verona or Rome, can make or break-for life-the creation of future scholars, readers, audience members, and subscribers tojournals like this one. Fact is, not a few teachers have been trying to puzzle out the best way to teach Shakespeare for nearly a century. A review of literature specific to teaching Shakespeare reflects our developing ideas about how people learn and the progression of scholarship. The literature offers the story of a collective struggle, the long tale of generations of teachers coming to terms with, as one has written, the reality that "igniting the flame of lasting interest in and appreciation of Shakespeare [in students] is actually a more demanding, complicated, and elusive undertaking than most of us would like to admit."' This scattershot body of work is short on quantity, uneven in quality, and utterly fascinating. It is a literature woven almost entirely from the lives of teachers-autobiographical anecdote, individual points of view, some generalizable theory, and many contradictions. It was created chiefly by teachers-secondary-school and college-generalist variety-until about 1970, when scholars, directors, and others whose first interest was Shakespeare finally began to think about and to write about teaching. The earliest reflections on teaching Shakespeare in American schools appear at the turn of this century with writers acknowledging-as they have in each subsequent decade-Shakespeare's preeminence in the American school curriculum. Many applauded the uplifting nature of Shakespeare study which, according to Allan Abbott, enabled a student "to establish his feet on a road that climbs high and far."2 This kind of righteous road is mentioned throughout the literature and the century. The plays were thought to affect students more than other subjects; as late as 1984 Homer Swander described Shakespeare's works as "incredible and ... awe-inspiring."3 Perhaps because of this attitude, or maybe in spite of it, we have fretted

An intertextual approach to teaching Shakespeare

Abstract: THE IDEAS DEVELOPED IN THIS PAPER ARE AN ATTEMPT to apply to the field of Shakespeare studies the experience gained through working for the past two years with graduate students at Tel-Aviv University in a colloquium on intertextuality in the theater. This exploratory approach was initially developed with graduate students in mind and was enthusiastically received by the participants. With minor modifications it should have similar success with students on all levels. The intertextual approach insists on the uniqueness of every act of reading that places the text in a new web of relationships with other texts. From this point of view, understanding a text means being able to see it through other, already familiar texts. This approach is in contradistinction to the lesson of New Criticism, which regarded each work as autonomous and interpreted the internal relations between its different parts. In shifting the focus from the single text to the dialogue between texts, this pedagogical method follows Roland Barthes's famous dictum "Tout texte est intertexte."'I Instead of seeking within the work itself for structure and meaning, this methodology goes outside the individual work to create a context for it. The play is no longer a self-contained unit, "delimited and coherent."2 Rather, it is enmeshed in an ever-growing web of intertextual relations from which it can no longer be extricated in some ideal form. For the student the intertextual approach to Shakespeare can offer a liberating experience, assuring him or her of the potential for saying something new in a field in which so much has been researched and written already. In the space of the world-as-text, the canonical critical corpus loses its hegemony and makes way for the haphazard collection of texts to which each of us has had access and from which we choose those we associate with a given Shakespeare play. The intertextual approach is also useful in convincing cautious students to loosen their grip on the notes they have collected and let themselves react to and interact creatively with what they have read. Admittedly, this uninhibited approach may give rise to very personal and even bizarre associations, but these can be judged against

Using films to teach Shakespeare

Abstract: I N TEACHING SHAKESPEARE, I TRY TO DIRECT THE attention of my students to the ways in which a play comes to life on the stage, to the various choices it offers actors and directors, and to the effects their specific choices might have on an audience's understanding of the play in performance. To enable students to experience for themselves the openness of the plays to interpretation by actors and directors, I ordinarily begin my Shakespeare course with a short workshop that integrates films of the plays with four practical exercises. After discussing and demonstrating the choices particular lines and scenes might offer actors, I distribute to the students, lightly punctuated and without stage directions or footnotes, seventy to eighty lines of script. First, all the students stand together and each reads aloud, one after the other, a roughly complete syntactic unit, sometimes a line, sometimes more or less than a line. Once they have read their units a second time, again one after another, the students sit. Then each student stands and reads his or her unit twice, this time, however, doing the second reading immediately after the first and making it sound in some way--tone, emphasis, inflection-different. (While some units are inevitably more elastic than others, even the least promising will ordinarily allow some variation). Finally, the students all stand again, and each reads (or by now says) his or her unit once more, this time addressing it to and making some physical contact with the person who speaks next. By this time, if all has gone well, each unit, particularly when addressed to another person, has taken on the sound of actual conversation.' Second, I break the students into groups of three or four and ask them to imagine the various ways the lines might look and sound onstage and then to choose the precise way they would want the lines to look and sound. I provide a list of questions designed to help them do so. Included here as Appendixes A and B are examples for Othello, 3.3.257-330, and Macbeth, 1.7.2 When the class reconvenes as a whole, each group offers answers to at least some of the questions. Two members from each group then walk through the lines to demonstrate the tones, movements, and gestures they have chosen. Usually they go through the process twice, working on half the lines at a time.

Shakespeare's Pluralistic Concepts of Character: A Study in Dramatic Anamorphism.

Abstract: This book studies the changing dualities and polarities of Shakespearean characterization as a way of examining the playwright's basically pluralistic concept of character and of its function in his art. Illustrated.

Revision Awry in folio Lear 3.1

Abstract: Etude des variantes entre les versions Folio et Quarto du King Lear: l'A. suppose que le texte Quarto est le plus ancien, probablement derive d'une premiere ebauche, et que certains passages ont ete omis, supprimes ou bien censures lors de la redaction de la deuxieme version - selon la volonte de l'editeur ou de Shakespeare lui-meme

A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library: "As Imagination Bodies Forth."@@@Shakespeare in American Painting: A Catalogue from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present.

Abstract: The Folger Shakespeare Library is said to contain the finest collection of Shakespearean art ever assembled. This catalogue of the collection traces the development of literary painting, of Shakespearean criticism and portraiture and changes in approach to stagecraft.

Jacobean Muscovites : winter, tyranny, and knowledge in The Winter's Tale

Abstract: M i USCOVY MATTERS TO THE ENGLISH IMAGINATION in ways that have scarcely been remarked. To some observers in Jacobean England, mention of the place would have conjured up stories of wintry exploration and icy imperialism, beginning, no doubt, with the image of Sir Hugh Willoughby, frozen along with his company in a Lapland river. Sailing north for Cathay in 1553, Willoughby gave new meaning to the telling of tales in winter. The note detailing his final ice-bound days in the month of September, discovered in one of his two ships, inscribes the event: "Thus remaining in this haven the space of a weeke, seeing the yeare farre spent, & also very evill wether, as frost, snow, and haile, as though it had beene the deepe of winter, we thought best to winter there."'I Here is a story of winter coming before winter, of winter as fate and alien world, a narrative that breaks off because no one survives to finish it. The cold destruction of this winter's tale meshes in fascinating ways with the narrative of Richard Chancellor, who, having become separated from Willoughby in a tempest, voyaged on to make contact with Ivan the Terrible, emperor of Russia and the embodiment of rough, cold extremes. Chancellor, it was said, had discovered Russia.2 A flourishing trade developed alongside fragile diplomatic ties. Russian ambassadors visited London in 1557, 1569, 1582, and 1600. A little group of Muscovite students came in 1602 to study at Winchester, Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford.3 And tales proliferated, so that the mere mention of Muscovites would have brought to mind a picture of this terrible Ivan IV,4 the burly ruler who proposed marriage to one of

Shakespeare Goes to High School: Some Current Practices in the American Classroom

Abstract: T TIS PROBABLY FAIR TO SAY THAT MOST regular readers of Shakespeare Quarterly are unfamiliar with the way Shakespeare is now being taught in the American secondary school. College and university teachers habitually deplore the failure of their high-school counterparts to teach college-bound students how to write, and in general professors tend to lament the death of learning in the public schools. It might also be said that many high-school teachers are ignorant of pedagogical practice in the university. High-school teachers once attended college, and college teachers high school, but neither group seems to remember much about its experience. And times and modes of instruction have changed so much that one's own experience is probably outdated. Regrettably, little commerce occurs between the secondary school and the university, at least as far as English is concerned, and this is so because there are very few thoroughfares to promote communication. I present this piece in the hope that some barriers can be broken down and intellectual traffic encouraged. The four teachers who here describe their pedagogical practices have all participated in the Teaching Shakespeare Institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Three of the four returned, after their initial term as participants, to serve as "master teachers," or coordinators of exercises and discussions about pedagogical and extracurricular means of making Shakespeare accessible to students. As a regular faculty member and, with Peggy O'Brien, a coordinator of that institute over the past decade, I have come to know dozens of talented, curious, industrious, articulate high-school teachers. Attention to the experience and views of four of these teachers can not only enlarge awareness of how students encounter Shakespeare before they get to college but can also improve university instruction by giving entering students a clearer identity. It is clear from our work in the Folger program that energy, imagination, and talent are to be found in abundance in the high-school classroom. With help from the editor of this special teaching issue of SQ, I have devised a series of questions designed to illuminate the assumptions, choices, and practices governing the pedagogy of four superior high-school teachers of Shakespeare. The assemblage that follows is unscientific, impressionistic, tilted, partial, and, by the usual measures of scholarship, probably indefensible. To one who hated As You Like It in the tenth grade and loved Twelfth Night in the twelfth, it is also fascinating. Unscientific or not, this survey of responses opens a window onto the high-school class-

The Question of the One and the Many: The Globe Shakespeare, The Complete King Lear, and The New Folger Library Shakespeare

Abstract: A FTER SLAYING THE MINOTAUR, THESEUS RETURNED TO ATHENS in a ship that for centuries afterwards commemorated his triumph with an annual voyage to Delos. Over time the rotten planks were replaced with fresh ones until none of the original timber remained. As Plutarch and others recount, the ship became a famous subject of debate among philosophers: was the renovated ship the same ship in which Theseus had sailed? a different one? or even a number of different ones-as many as there were new planks?' In other words, was Theseus's ship One or Many? Shakespeareans have been asking themselves for the past generation a similar question with regard to some of Shakespeare's plays. Is a play in which numerous lines and words differ from one edition to another the same play or a new play altogether? Consider the case of King Lear. It was printed in a 1608 quarto as The True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and in the 1623 Folio as The Tragedie of King Lear. Three hundred lines in the former have no equivalent in the latter; one hundred lines in the latter have no equivalent in the former. In addition, the two texts give different readings for over eight hundred words. Is one then a version of the other? Or is each a discrete work? Have we one text of Lear or many? If limited to speculation, the question of one versus many could remain moot, as indeed Plutarch claims it did among the philosophers. But practical matters compel an answer. Suppose the need arose to duplicate Theseus's ship. What would serve as model? The ship in its present state? A reconstruction of the ship as it was in Theseus's time? Numerous ships representing the ship as it variously appeared through time? A composite of those numerous ships? When does something cease to be itself and become something else? Socrates tackles this philosophical question throughout the Platonic dialogues. (Perhaps that is why Theseus's ship looms over the final dialogue, its return to Athens delaying Socrates's execution.2) In the Republic discussion of the problem focuses not on ships but on tables and beds. How can we know that a table is identical with itself when it looks different from different

Hamlet and "A Matter Tender and Dangerous"

Abstract: I OFFER THIS ESSAY AS A CONTRIBUTION TO A DISCERNIBLE MOVEMENT in Shakespeare studies which is once again raising the question of the relation of the plays to early modern religious discourse. For a long time this relationship was addressed in the context of biographical criticism, with the texts being read as cryptic testimonials to Shakespeare's Catholicism, his royalist Anglicanism, his agnosticism, his hostility to Puritanism, and so on. In the new assessment of Shakespeare's work and religion, biographical concerns have been displaced by a focus on the texts as part of a broad cultural order and on the great variety of contemporary discourses that nourish the plays and the dramatic conflicts they represent. The interpretive process is complicated by the issue of censorship, a force difficult to assess but undeniable, and, in the case of Hamlet, by the existence of three different texts with their vast number of variants. Religious discourse is integral to Hamlet, but Shakespeare's representation of religion in the play is oblique and inconsistent, and critics have come to many different conclusions about Hamlet's religious content. The play's inconsistent representation of religion is interesting in itself, and I would argue that to a certain extent the forces producing this instability and the role of religion in the play's ideological drama are accessible to historicist criticism. We can, for example, illuminate the representation of religion in the play by viewing it in relation to Hamlet's subjectivity, which is a principal site of ideological contention. We can also engage with specific religious discourses in the text, among them Roman Catholicism, neo-Stoicism, and Protestantism, and with Shakespeare's representation of their historical and institutional affiliations. To classify Stoicism as a religious discourse is arguable, but it clearly functions as an important constituent in the contemporary synthesis of humanism and Christianity. Considering Stoicism within a religious context illuminates Hamlet's involvement with comprehensive ideological systems and helps to prepare the way for an analysis of his subjective transformation at the end of the play. The language and theology of Roman Catholicism emerge most clearly in Hamlet in the prince's encounter with his father's spirit, where the Christian and specifically purgatorial context that Shakespeare creates for the Ghost is rather surprising. The play contrasts sharply in this respect with The Spanish Tragedy, where the ghost of Don Andrea inhabits a classical underworld derived from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, a strategy that allows Kyd to avoid the ideological pitfalls of representing a Christian afterlife. The spirit of old Hamlet explicitly identifies his situation beyond the grave, speaking of the "sulph'rous and tormenting flames" to which he must render himself, and of the "certain term" of penance he must endure until "the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away"

The Textual Politics of Troilus and Cressida

Abstract: T HE PRACTICAL QUESTION EDITORS OF TROILUS AND CRESSIDA MUST ANSWER is: which text, Quarto (Q) or Folio (F), should be used as the control text when preparing an edition of the play? The editor's choice will depend on his or her answers to two other questions: what is the relationship between the two texts; and which, if either, is more authoritative?' Luckily, an accident of printing history provides a degree of consensus on this issue. For some reason the printing of F was mysteriously interrupted after a few pages of Troilus and Cressida had -been set; when printing resumed, two of these pages were reused. Philip Williams argued convincingly in 1950 that the pages set before the printing hiatus were composed from an unedited copy of the 1609 Quarto, while those set after the hiatus were set from a quarto annotated from a separate manuscript.2 Despite general agreement on this point, other questions-including the status of Q's original manuscript and the reliability of the separate manuscript behind F-have resisted resolution. The Quarto-Folio conundrum cannot be isolated from a series of other questions about the play's early history. When was this play written? Was it really performed "by my lo: Chamberlens Men," as the 1603 Stationers' Register entry suggests, or was it "never stal'd with the stage" as the Epistle that prefaces the 1609 Quarto insists?3 Why are there two separate Stationers' Register entries, one in 1603 and the other in 1609? Did this double entry have anything to do with the printing delay in Jaggard's work? Lastly-a question of a slightly different sort but one that nevertheless is always at the heart of the confusion about this play-is Troilus and Cressida a history, as the 1603 SR entry lists it; a comedy, as the 1609 Epistle describes it; or a tragedy, as its placement in the First Folio suggests?4

Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1994-95

Abstract: The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1994-95 season at Stratford-upon-Avon began, like the previous one, with the transfer of two productions from London. Adrian Noble's Macbeth, with Derek Jacobi and Cheryl Campbell as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, first seen at the Barbican in December 1993, played in the main house for six weeks beginning in March. In the Swan for four weeks was Alan Ayckbourn's grim comedy Wildest Dreams, also transferred from London, though less obviously appropriate for Stratford or the theater in which it was staged. Macbeth was an odd experience. Noble had directed the play at Stratford in 1986, with intense performances from Jonathan Pryce and Sinead Cusack and a lowering black-walled set that imprisoned Macbeth at the end. The 1994 production was hardly as compelling, although it began strikingly. A curtain rose to reveal the sisters, who seemed to hover in midair on a bridge that sank to stage level and then rose again, so that they presided over the short scene in which the captain reports to Duncan. The drum they heard was played by Macbeth, who reeled onto the stage with Banquo, both of them boyishly elated by their success in battle. The platform bearing the sisters descended again on cue for Banquo to notice them, and they vanished simply behind black curtains at the rear of the stage. The light, smoke, and music were impressive enough, but the witches, with their amplified voices and standard pronunciation, seemed more like BBC newsreaders than women in communion with spirits, and clarity prevailed over any passion or enthusiasm. They were neither withered nor weird in their attire but dressed and behaved with decorous formality. The tenebrous lighting, with shafts of light cast from slits and doorways in the high walls of the set and the constant use of follow-spots to pick out the principals, gave the production a general portentousness. After the blandly regal Duncan had been escorted off to meet his host at the end of 1.6, curtains closed across the proscenium arch, and Macbeth emerged from them for the soliloquy that begins the next scene. As Macbeth finished speaking, the curtains parted again to reveal Duncan and the guests seated at the banquet table, on a platform that was drawn upstage before a blackout. In other productions Noble has shown a penchant for grand, quasi-operatic effects: this preference may be a consequence of working in the company's two large theaters. As is typical in Noble's staging of the tragedies, this Macbeth located the play's power in dreams and visions shared by the audience and the protagonist. Such an approach places a heavy burden on the two principal actors. In 1986 Jonathan Pryce conveyed the impression that, with enough adrenalin coursing through him, he might indeed create strange images of death on the battlefield and elsewhere. Derek Jacobi's Macbeth carried none of this conviction. Always an eloquent and resourceful actor, a master of nuance, Jacobi delivered a Macbeth who seemed intelligent and sensitive but out of his depth, a man dismayed by the nightmare in which he was living. He articulated his visions and sensations with discrimination, but there was nothing of the daemon. Jacobi can be dangerous in a feline, calculating way (as here in the scene with the Murderers), but savagery or possession-two important options for the part-seem out of his range. There was a suggestion that the character of Macbeth hardened as events took their course, so that his invocation in 3.2, "Come, seeling night ...," seemed the equivalent of Lady Macbeth's appeal to the spirits in 1.5. Confronted with the Messenger's report of English soldiers, Macbeth brutally cut

The Pictorial Image of the Jew in Elizabethan Secular Books

Abstract: NMIt ARLOWE'S AUDIENCE, WE KNOW, HAD HEARD IT ALL BEFORE. Over and over again, from the pulpit and in texts, medieval myths were perpetuated: the Jew poisoned wells and so caused the Black Death; the Jew committed ritual murder; the Jew was the devil.' And the audience could have seen it all before, seen in books a picture of a Jew as a poisoner allied with the devil. It is this image, its career and the company it kept, that is the subject of this note. We see (Fig. 1) on the left a man in what Elizabethans would have identified as eastern-looking dress; he is putting a bag into a well, the same well into which a statue of a devil is urinating; on the right we see the lacerated body of a child on a cross. For the contemporary reader the parallel actions of the man in alien dress and the devil, together with the image of the crucified child, would combine to identify the man as a Jew. That this identification is visual and not dependent on reading a text is what differentiates this image from others of Jews in illustrated secular books printed in Elizabethan England.2 First printed in Pierre Boaistuau's very popular Histoires Prodigievses by Jacques Mace in Paris in 1567,3 it was one of 62 cuts acquired by the English printer Henry Bynneman for his publication in 1569 of Edward Fenton's English translation, Certaine secrete wonders of nature, containing a descriptid of sundry strange things, seiing monstrous ... Gathered out of diuers authors (STC 3164.5). Bynneman reused the cut in

Text, Eyes, and Videotape: Screening Shakespeare Scripts

Abstract: U SING VIDEOTAPED EXCERPTS FROM FILM AND TELEVISION versions of Shakespeare's plays has become standard practice in many if not most Shakespeare courses. It is still worthwhile, even for those teachers who are convinced that the rewards of Shakespeare on video greatly outweigh its problems, to review both the gains and the losses that derive from the ways in which we use videotaped excerpts. The practical problems are considerable: instructors have to negotiate issues ranging from the availability of performances and the expense of equipment to the demands on time and the almost inevitable decrease in the number of plays covered in a course. More important, however, are some very real pedagogical risks. Screening an excerpt from a production of each assigned play can result in a cumulative experience of seeing and hearing Shakespeare that for many students is revelatory. The possibility remains, though, that some students will accept a given production's take on the scene as the "right" one. As many instructors realize, comparing two versions of the same scene not only helps to offset this danger but also builds on the differences between students' understanding of plays from initial reading and their understanding of scenes from viewing. Whether only one version is available on video or a number of alternatives can be screened, adding published versions of the screenplays for Shakespeare productions to the textual mix opens up a fruitful interpretive space. When instructors ask students to compare alternate versions of plays, including movements from stage to screen or from screenplay to actual film release, they alert students to the range of interpretive opportunities offered by a Shakespeare playtext. As long as the instructor refrains from giving a particular version uncritically preferential treatment and students are discouraged from privileging present-day cinematic conventions, nearly any version-especially a problematic or uneven one-can be explored and appreciated both for what it brings to the text and for what it derives from it. When an instructor establishes this kind of openness in the classroom, he or she effectively exorcises the goblins of definitive Shakespeare performance and definitive Shakespeare reading, both of which can seriously curtail the discovery of meaning in the plays. Beginning students rightly