A Blog review -- 365 Shakespeare

I found a very interesting blog, that I would like to highlight -- 365 days of shakespeare.
Despite her apparent aversion to capital letters, the author of this blog has taken upon herself the challenge of reading the entire works of Shakespeare in 365 days.  She started on January 1, 2011, so she just two months into her project, but has already read:

Comedy of Errors
Venus and Adonis
Henry VI, part 1
Rape of Lucrece
Henry VI, part 2
The Phoenix and the Turtle
Henry VI, part 3
A Lover's Complaint
Richard III


That's pretty impressive.  Since January I have read Hamlet, Richard II, King Lear, Taming of the Shrew, and The Winter's Tale.  Not nearly as impressive.

But the interesting thing about this blog is the way in which she rewrites the scenes in modern language, putting her interpretation on it as well.  For example, here she takes the scene from Richard III where Richard meets and woos Lady Anne.

I will definitely be following this blog, reading her thoughts and experiences as she takes on this ambitious project.  It will also be interesting to see her reactions to plays that I have read and enjoyed.

Hamlet and Germany

In 1848 the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath wrote a poem in which he wrote that "Germany is Hamlet", referring to the famous Shakespearean play, which toured Germany within five years of Shakespeare's death.  It seems that play never left.  
Ever since his famous poem, scholars have debated back and forth, looking for and finding or not finding themselves within the text.  Freiligrath's original poem describes Hamlet as being serious, and overly thoughtful, yet inactive.  He thinks too much and does too little, which Freiligrath saw in Germany of the 19th century, though he later wrote, "To the German Shakespeare Society of Weimar, Representative of a People  Whose Recent history has proved Once for all that "Germany is Not Hamlet."  (Look for a future post where I take a look more closely at that poem)

Digital Shakespeare

After hearing Gideon talk about digital mediations, I did some quick Google searching about Digital Shakespeare to see what I could find. 

1.  The Shakespeare Standard has a post about Digital Shakespeare, where they highlight a few new things that are happening.  One that interested me is Yoza Cell Phone Stories in South Africa.  It looks like they make texts available on mobile phones, and then allow people to text their comments to be posted on the webpage.  My favorite comment was:

"26 Aug. 2010
7. fluffy!! says

King lear may b a shaksperien buk bt its actually quite a gud buk, think 0f a m0dern day thriller with l0ads 0f family feuds nd a killer ending"

(Translation: "King Lear may be a Shakespearean book but it's actually quite a good book, think of a modern day thriller with loads of family feuds and a killer ending" )

2.  Open Source Shakespeare  --  Full text of the plays online.  But what I think is really fascinating is that you can choose a play and then choose a character and see all of their lines in the play at a glance. This was interesting as it shows you which characters are in which scenes, who dies early, who survives at the end, etc.
 It also has a concordance, where you can look up individual words and see how often and in which plays they occur.  (For fun I looked up Germany, which occurs six times in five lines in five different plays, including King Lear.)  What a cool resource, that is simple to put together once the texts of the plays are digitized, but would be tedious if it had to be put together by hand.  

3. Such Tweet Sorrow-  This one I find particularly fascinating.  Based on the article in the New Statesman about this project, it looks like they teamed up with the Royal Shakespeare Company to do a modernized Twitter performance of Romeo and Juliet.   You can see the Twitter feed, which was live last April it looks like.  It is interesting so far.  Fun to see how they have used Twitter to develop characters and plot based around a familiar story.

  

Where do we go from here?

LONow that we are halfway through the semester and we have read through quite a few plays, it is time to slow down a bit and think about where things are going.  Since we are no longer reading a play every week, I will have more time to reread some of the plays and go more in depth with a textual analysis and applying literary criticisms.
I will also start doing more research into Shakespeare and Germany.  I don't really know where I'm going with this, but there are quite a few resources out there, almost as many as there are in English.

Hamlet in English and German

1. Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft -- The German Shakesepeare Society is the oldest Shakespeare society in the world, founded in 1864.  They hold conferences and publish articles.  This could be a great resource not only for Shakespeare within Germany, but for Shakespeare in general.  (Their webpage is also translated into English, for those of you who don't speak German)

Ken Larson

2. Ken Larson --Ken Larson is a professor of German at Wells College in Aurora, NY.  He has written some papers on Shakespeare's reception in Germany.  Once I get a better idea what specifically I want to study about Shakespeare in Germany, I may contact him and ask a few questions, see what he has already researched and what further resources he knows.

Not a pretty cover, but I'll read it

3.There is a book I found that I would like to get my hands on and see if I find it interesting.  The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich.  I know that Hitler and the Nazis used Richard Wagner and Norse mythology to buoy up their ideals of the Aryan Nation and the Teutonic ideal, but I had no clue that they used Shakespeare as well.  I have read several articles written about The Merchant of Venice as it has been performed in Germany, with it's portrayal of Jews.





This is a start.  As I do some more cursory research into the topics of Shakespeare and Germany I will form a more clear idea of what specific topic I would like to pursue.

Any thoughts, suggestions, comments?

Peer Blog Evaluation -- Jessica Vavrinec

1. Peer Blog Evaluation -- Jessica Vavrinec
   
1. Number of Posts
   16
2. Quality of Posts
   There are at least two substantial posts per week, with a few shorter one thrown in.
3. A Strength
   There are a couple of posts (Henry V and Macbeth) where she just writes her thoughts, in bulleted list form, about these plays as she reads them. This is very interesting.  There are also a few great posts with video comparisons of different movie versions of speeches.  (Hamlet and Macbeth).  I also really enjoyed this post about YA literature based on Shakespeare, drawing on her personal interests.  I am looking forward to a follow up post where she explains how she enjoyed those YA novels.
4. Suggested Improvement
   One thing I noticed, just glancing through the history of the posts, is that she could benefit from point 2 of this post, and add jump breaks to her posts.  There could also be a little more in depth analysis of the plays, as most of the posts seem to be more cursory.  It's a good blog, but with some good room for improvement.

Progress Report on Personal Learning

1. Learning Outcomes -- The learning outcome I have accomplished the most is LO 1a, the breadth requirement: I have read a play a week, as well as writing about other plays that I have read prior to this semester.  I have also tried to fulfill LO 1d by making connections, looking into the history of the plays and their modern meanings and interpretations, as well as putting my personal spin on it by talking about German texts of the plays as well as German productions.
2. Reading and Research --I have read Hamlet,Richard II, Taming of the Shrew, King Lear and The Winter's Tale, as well as parts of Richard III and Henry VI.  There have been a few articles that I have read that have lent insight into the plays I have read, the one that I would most like to pursue further is the one I mention in this post about The Winter's Tale that draws a parallel between the play and Anne Boleyn's life and death.    I have also begun, as I mentioned before, a cursory research into the history of Shakespeare in Germany, the translations and performances and why they are so popular even when translated.  

A Sad Tale's Best for Winter

I have finished the play The Winter's Tale, and I rather enjoyed it.

It seems to me that Shakespeare is continuing themes he addressed in Othello, with jealousy and irrationally reacting to perceived wrongs.  I feel sorry for poor Leontes, but in this play he has no Iago to blame, his jealousy is all his own.  His reaction to what he sees is all his own.

I found an interesting thin on Wikipedia when doing some cursory research.  I will have to look up the source that is cited and follow up on this, but on Wikipedia it says :

Eric Ives, the biographer of Anne Boleyn (1986),^[4] believes that the play is really a parallel of the fall of the queen, who was beheaded on false charges of adultery on the orders of her husband Henry VIII in 1536. There are numerous parallels between the two stories – including the fact that one of Henry's closest friends, Sir Henry Norreys, was beheaded as one of Anne's supposed lovers and he refused to confess in order to save his life – claiming that everyone knew the Queen was innocent. If this theory is followed then Perdita becomes a dramatic presentation of Anne's only daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.

( Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn 2004:421: in spite of other scholars' rejection of any parallels between Henry VIII and Leontes, asserts "the parallels are there", noting his article "Shakespeare and History: divergencies and agreements", in Shakespeare Survey38 (1985:19–35), p 24f.)

Pursued by a Bear

Last year, for New Play Project's Bad Play Project, where playwrights were encouraged to write purposely bad plays, I wrote a play based off of that famous (infamous?) stage direction in The Winter's Tale.   Since I am reading that play again, I thought I'd share that (bad) play with you here:


Pursued by a Bear

Scholar: Good evening and welcome to tonight's scholarly look at The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare.  I'll be your scholar and host, Professor Geoffrey Spencer Hall.  We begin tonight where we left off yesterday, with Act III, Scene 3, the sea coast of Bohemia: a shipwreck.
This scene is possibly one of the more famous of this somewhat less than famous work by the Bard.  Here we met Antigonus, a lord of Sicilia, carrying the infant daughter of King Leontes, who has been banished by the mad king who suspects the child of being the issue and evidence of adultery on the part of his wife and queen.  Antigonus cannot bear to see the young innocent child killed, so he has a plan: he will leave her on the shore in the hopes that someone will find her.  And just as he is abandoning her we have the most famous stage direction ever written:  "Exit, pursued by a bear."

(Enter Antigonus, running, pursued by a bear)

Kill Shakespeare?

I found this blogpost today, that does a review of a new book, a graphic novel called Kill Shakespeare, that apparently pits Shakespeare's heroes against his villains in some strange universe where all of Shakespeare's characters live side by side.

It actually sounds like an interesting concept.  I will definitely have to see if I can get my hands on a copy.

Here's the trailer:

Looks like fun!

German Theatre and Lear

I am certainly not the first, nor will I be the last, to admit that German theatre is strange.  I am a big fan of all things German and all things theatre, but German theatre??  Even I don't understand all of that.

As I was cruising YouTube looking for German versions of King Lear (I just did a search for "König Lear" and found 46 results), I found a few trailers for theatre productions done in various cities in Germany, like Köln, Cottbus, and Hamburg.

From these trailers we get a feel into the staging, costuming, and direction and I repeat : The Germans are Weird.

In two of these productions that I found, Lear was a woman, one had her with three sons, completely reversing the traditional gender roles. An interesting directorial choice, I wonder how that would change the meaning or effect of the play?

Two productions had an Oriental feel to them, with actors running around with wooden kendo swords. ???  Though I was impressed with the rotating, slanted stage that they had, that would certainly be fun to play around with!

Some thoughts to King Lear

As I read King Lear, one thought kept occurring to me:  Lear is a man full of contradictions. He doesn't know what he wants, but he wants it all the same.

An appropriate quote for a poster about King Lear.

1. At the beginning he says that he has a plan to divide his kingdom and give the largest part to the daughter that loves him most.  Yet, after Goneril has spoken he immediately assigns her her portion, without hearing from either of his other daughters.  The same thing happens after Regan speaks, he gives her her portion without hearing from Cordelia.  So it would seem that he already knew how he was going to divide the kingdom.  If he were really waiting to hear what his daughters thought, he would have heard them all, and then divided the kingdom.  As it is, Lear says he wants to give the largest portion to the daughter that loves him most, but it appears that he has already decided that it should be Cordelia.  Which is what makes her refusal to play his game all the more crushing for him.

Shakeseparean YouTube video of the day

I found this and just had to share.  If Abbott and Costello were Shakespearean actors, this is what it would sound like.

And because I am currently reading King Lear and watching Slings & Arrows season 3:

"When all has been said and all have been slain
It’s good to take a walk in the rain
For several hours
Helps to have a howl in the rain
Without your clothes on
Nice to take a walk in the rain"

Shakespearean Sonnets about Shakespeare

I used to write a lot of Shakespearean sonnets in high school. I really enjoy the structure of the format, for me it is the challenge of trying to say what I want, but in such a way the it fits the rhyme scheme and the meter.  Then I found it fun, and sort of metaphysical, to write Shakespearean sonnets with the text of Shakespeare's plays as the basis.


Macbeth's Lament

O Dagger that I see before my face,
Let fall the blade and pierce my guilty soul
I was not happy with my lowly place,
Instead the kingship was my lofty goal.
The witches gave ambition hope to try,
Yet planted they suspicion in my mind.
"Macbeth thou shalt be king hereafter, aye,
But Banquo's sons the crown in turn shall find"
It drove me mad, the guilt and the mistrust,
I ordered my best friend, Banquo, be killed.
But now I beg my swords to gather rust,
That no more blood on my poor hands be spilled.
And thus it was that pride did damn my soul
To hell, but raised my head upon a pole.

King Lear / König Lear

Once again I am reading this play in both English and German, but this time it's a little easier.  I have a copy of this play that has the original English text on the left side of the page and a German translation (from Raimund Borgmeier, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Bernd Santesson, and Dieter Wessels).  This makes it easier to go back and forth and see just how the German text compares to the English.

The first thing I noticed is that the German translation abandoned the poetic structure of the English text, not even attempting to have a meter or a rhyme.  This is most evident in Lear's opening speech, which looks organized and separated by lines on the left hand of my book, but is a big, long paragraph of text on the right.

The other thing I noticed is the many footnotes in my German text.  Most of these, especially in the opening scene with Gloucester and Kent, explain the wordplay and puns which do not translate well, as anybody who has tried to tell a joke in a foreign language knows.   One of my favorite German jokes makes absolutely no sense in English.

Zwei Jäger treffen sich im Wald.  Beide sind tot.

The joke here is in the double meaning of 'sich treffen' which can mean either to meet or to hit (as in with ammunition). Thus the joke is that two hunters meet or hit each other in the forest.  Both are dead.  As I said, it doesn't work well in English, but there you go.

Taming of the Shrew and Shakespeare's Comedies

In class we discussed the traditional elements of Shakespearean comedies.  As we talked about these I tried to associate each one with Taming of the Shrew.  I found that most of them fit, but I had a hard time finding a few of these elements in the play.  Let's go through each one, shall we?

Standard elements of Shakespearean comedies:

New thoughts to Taming of the Shrew and Gender Roles

I just finished reading the play, and though I rather enjoyed it, laughing at the wordplays and the puns, I find myself rethinking what I thought about how Katherina is treated by Petruchio.


Until this latest reading of the play, my strongest connection to it was acting in a production in high school.  The actress that we had playing Kate played her very well, in my opinion, but mostly it seemed like she was humoring Petruchio the entire time.  Especially in Act 4 Scene 5, when they are travelling and Petruchio calls the sun the moon and gets Kate to agree that it is the moon, only to ridicule her for her mistake. In our production of this scene, the actress playing Kate said the lines as they appear in the script:

"Then, God be bless'd, it is the blessed sun; But sun it is not, when you say it is not; And the moon changes even as your mind. What you will have it nam'd, even that it is, And so it shall be so for Katherine."

But as she said these lines there was overt sarcasm in her voice.  And later, as she apologizes to Vincentio for calling him a woman, she glared at Petruchio, blaming him silently for making her look foolish.


That is how I have always read this play, as Kate simply playing along with Petruchio and his madness, because she got tired of fighting him and suffering the consequences.  Which I guess means that Petruchio did indeed tame her. But even as she recited the last speech, there was still a little hint of defiance.  And maybe it helped that our Petruchio (one of the nicest, kindest guys I have ever met) did not play the part as mean or as angry as he could have, from the text alone. I have never seen this play as oppressive to women, but this latest reading I was struck by just how blatant the spousal abuse really is.

I have tried to justify Petruchio's behaviour in light of his line, "This is a way to kill a wife with kindness",

The Authorship question, thanks to Twitter

There was a fun thing going on yesterday on Twitter, the hashtag #askshakespeare being sponsored by Blogging Shakespeare.  Some prominent Shakespeare scholars were answering questions about Shakespeare.  This is fun, and I got involved as well, asking a few questions that I have been thinking about, and I got some great responses.

One of the biggest things that I have always had a problem with when people discuss Shakespeare is the Authorship question.  For me, it doesn't really matter.  I am very much of the school of thought that "the author is dead."  Once an author has written the text, and released it to the public, his involvement with it is over.  At that point, all meaning that can be found in the text must be found in the text.  If an author makes a statement about anything, I usually ignore it, unless it can be found in the text.  For example, J.K. Rowling has said that Dumbledore was gay.  I'm sorry, but I find no textual evidence for that, so I do not believe it.  If Ms. Rowling wanted Dumbledore to be gay, then she should have put something in the text that would lead to that.

So, with all of this in mind, and seeing that several people had asked about who really wrote Shakespeare, I asked, "#askshakespeare Does it really matter who wrote the text, if we can find deep themes and enjoyment in the plays themselves?"

Taming of the Shrew Act 1 / Erste Akt

I have read the first act of the play, including the induction.  I really like the induction, and I'm sad that it's cut out of most productions as unnecessary.  Partly this is because, when my high school did this I played the part of Christopher Sly, but mostly because I think it sheds light on one of the main themes of the play:  Identity and how  people act when they are treated a certain way.  
Sly is a drunkard found asleep in the streets, and a passing Lord decides to have some fun and dress him up and pretend that he's noble.  The servants take him and dress him and serve him as if he were a Lord, until Christopher Sly believes he is a lord.  The line is "Would not the beggar then forget himself?", "Würde der Bettler nicht sein selbst vergessen?" and the servant says, "he shall think by our true diligence he is no less than what we say he is."  "er soll es glauben daß er nichts anders ist, als wir ihn nennen".


I see the same theme played out in the play, with Katherina.  She is a shrew and as others keep calling her a shrew she continues to be a shrew. But when Petruchio treats her like a lady, like a respectable wife, she begins to believe that she can be that.  For me, the play is not about "taming" a woman, making her subservient. but allowing her to be something more than others allow her to be.  It's the medieval version of Johnny Lingo -- he calls her an 8-cow wife so she begins to believe that she is worth 8 cows.  More on this as I continue to read the play and find lines that speak to this point.

Kate and Petruchio in the Polynesian islands?