Alison
I wasn't trying to be dismissive of Kott, as you say, the question is the
problem of a multiple text, as the whole of Shakespeare is. I can recall
encountering King Lear for the first time and being overwhelmed by its
scope, I also recall encountering The Merry Wives of Windsor and going away
in dismay thinking all this is saying is that wealthy bourgeoisie should
feel proud to let their daughters marry indigent aristocrats.
Perhaps the 'problem' with Shakespeare is analogous to the 'problem' with
Bach. In his case a number of letters survive, as well as a book of
shockingly bad poetry, including The Thoughts of a Tobacco Smoking
Christian, which give the impression of someone with the intellectual
capacities of a garden gnome, all he ever talks about in his letters is
money, booze and smokes, and, while the Cantatas are undeniably praising
tin-pot German princelings, and also require a belief in the Lutheran Church
(eighteenth century variety) they also have scoring and expression for voice
that at their best are among the highest achievements of European culture.
Bach was, I guess, a 'music machine'.
And, if anything, I suspect so was WS re poetry.
There is too the question of recovering intentions, you know as well as I do
that the theatre is a collaborative process, despite say Shaw or Ibsen's
desires to spell everything out, so I can see WS as a provider of raw
material which would be worked on during rehearsal etc. The original texts,
as they are transmitted to us via Folio or Quarto, are somewhat chaotic, and
much of the stage directions are the work of later editors. There are very
few contemporary descriptions of Eliz/Jacobean performances, the few that do
survive seem to suggest that the plays were performed at breakneck speed and
were rather sensationalist in style, there's one of Macbeth somewhere by a
Dutch visitor that gives the impression that it was played rather like a
Hammer horror film.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 12:37 PM
Subject: Re: Shakespeare the Radical?
It's Jonathan Dollimore, _Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and
Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries_ (London,
1984).
Kott wrote from a personal understanding of what a totalitarian state
was, which underlines his analysis of the subversion in Shakespeare's
texts. He was very much a writer of the 20C, and his work influenced
some of the most interesting theatre artists of the past decades
(Mnouchkin, Brook, &c). The assertion that Shakespeare merely
"supported the status quo" is, well, a matter of interpretation;
shallow interpretation, I would suggest, merely skimming the surface
of the text. One way to read it, of course; people can be very keen
on literal interpretations of metaphor, it's much more obedient. The
problem with a multiple text, which Shakespeare's seem to me to be
par excellence, is that it can be lit through a single facet. I've
seen some shocking Shakespeare productions, and they're bad because
that's precisely what they try to do. Productions on the other hand
that can handle the multiplicity are something else.
I can't imagine that the Nazi interpretations of Coriolanus were any
better than other Nazi art. But they're certainly not the fault of
Shakespeare.
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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