dagblog - Comments for "Shakespeare 400"

Thanks for responding to the

Oxy Mora — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 16:19:50 +0000

Thanks for responding to the questions. I didn't know about the first book, sounds fascinating.

The second book, the changing scripts study is intriguing and sounds awfully complex. Do you think you might infer, from analyzing the changes, anything about the interaction between players and playwright? Could it ever rise to the level of "collaboration"? (wouldn't a certain group love this?) And what might the interaction have contributed to in the development of drama, including the modern stage and even modern practices?

One thing I left out of my

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 15:01:01 +0000

In reply to I'm wondering how popular

One thing I left out of my answer to ocean-kat: versions of nearly all these plays also circulated as ballads, cheesy popular songs sung to standard tunes (so no one had to read music), whcih got printed up and sold widely.

So there were people in England who might never have seen Romeo and Juliet, but might sing the Ballad of Romeo and Juliet off a printed sheet posted up on a tavern wall somewhere.

As for popular music: people

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 14:58:30 +0000

In reply to Since it's also a competition

As for popular music: people always sing. And the orchestras are smaller and simpler than what we see today. (Even a generous classical musical survey starts at least a century later; no Bach or Vivaldi yet.)

Theater was a big draw for foreigners, because it was something that the English were especially known for, and the London theaters (which only started being built in Shakespeare's lifetime) were a huge novelty, unique in Europe. I'm sure they wanted to hear some nice madrigals, too, but the plays were a tourist highlight.

There's one Venetian ambassador, late in Shakespeare's life, who would just go off by himself to the playhouses all the time. (Not that he understood English; apparently he didn't need to.) And when a German prince comes to marry James I's daughter, he gets shown endless amounts of theater, at least two shows a week for months on end. And he doesn't speak English either, but seems to have had a good time.

(Fun fact: the current British royalty family are all descended from that daughter of James and her German husband Frederick.)

Anyway, really expensive one-time-only entertainments, like tilts and court masques, took precedence over plays. But plays seem to have taken precedence over other downscale entertainments, like fencing and bearbaiting. For a while plays are forbidden on Wedesdays so the bear-baiting can have a day to itself.

And plays never competed with public executions, which were held on Sundays when plays were forbidden. Yes, executions on Sundays, because they were supposed to be morally instructive. If you're following along: Hamlet and Julius Caesar = morally suspect; public hanging = educational.

Believe me, breaking up the

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 14:39:26 +0000

In reply to Shakespeare was yuge. The

Believe me, breaking up the big banks was not a problem yet. When you go through the business documents from early theaters, everything is financed through personal loans: person-to-person. Sometimes I just long for them to get some banking infrastructure.

They spelled it "banque", and

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 14:16:24 +0000

In reply to Shakespeare was yuge. The

They spelled it "banque", and the Brits were always more attuned to breaking in than breaking up. Picture the Great Train Robbery.

Shakespeare was yuge. The

Michael Maiello — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 12:32:03 +0000

In reply to Since it's also a competition

Shakespeare was yuge. The only more popular entertainment for Elizabethans was breaking up the banks.

The Polonski is a gorgeous

Michael Maiello — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 12:30:17 +0000

In reply to You aren't the first to

The Polonski is a gorgeous space, no doubt. But I am a little surprised that a new theater was built without wing space, given what they were going to do with it. I do prefer more minimalist productions, though. Maybe my problems with Pericles were really problems with Nunn.

Since it's also a competition

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 03:18:17 +0000

In reply to Good questions, o-k.

Since it's also a competition between entertainment choices (e.g. in the 20s movies were the huge status in-thing), any idea how huge theater was compared to music - popular and orchestra - and any other options in London and surrounds at the time? E.g. a visiting ambassador would likely go to X first, then Y, then maybe just maybe Z, aside from the usual banquets and receptions, and presuming public hangings not high on the list.

You aren't the first to

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 03:08:23 +0000

In reply to That's an interesting point

You aren't the first to imagine that the parts you don't like aren't Shakespeare's. When people say he had a collaborator, that's usually what they're saying: we don't like parts of this play, so those parts were written by someone else.

The only Shakespeare favorite that people talk about as a possible collaboration is Macbeth, and then only because the one printed version is so messed up. We basically only talk about a collaborator when we feel like there's some problem. No one wants to talk about Shakespeare co-writing Hamlet or Lear or Much Ado.

As for the Polonski: the space isn't designed for set changes and neither is the play, really. As always, Shakespeare's "sets" are characters saying things like, "Look! Here we are now!"

As for my own research

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 03:02:08 +0000

In reply to Doc, I was curious about your

As for my own research project:

My first book was about Shakespeare and intellectual property (which means in practice about a lot of early printing history, early theater history, and the problem of Shakespeare plays that turn up in more than one early version).

One book is an attempt to turn Freudian criticism of Shakespeare around and come at it from another direction, emphasizing paternal violence (like Laius's violence against his son Oedipus) and paternal fantasies about Oedipal sons.

The other book in progress, which grows out of my first book in some ways, is about the acting scripts that Shakespeare's actors used (which were pretty limited, really just the actor's own lines) and about how many of the changes we see between different versions of Shakespeare plays can be explained by changes to those working scripts.