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Very interesting, Ken. In terms of the Great Chain of Being, I wonder if we're really so far removed from Tillyard's picture of the Renaissance after all? Doesn't our language and thought have a built-in sense of this kind of chain, or hierarchy, or food pyramid, or whatever you want to call it? Despite the development of environmental awareness, there is still an automatic association of certain kinds of mean human behavior with the animal, or even vegetable, just as we think of the best behavior as pointing upward along the chain. I'm not sure what's still up there, but apparently more Americans believe in angels than climate change. And then there's the nebulous category of the "spiritual." There's even a residual popular belief in astrology. During the Reagan years, astrology was apparently helping govern the country, and horoscopes are still published in many papers. But some of this is stuck in our language, in terms of "disasters," things in or not in our stars, and so forth. I like Germaine's analogy about markets, but our habits of thought still include much that would be familiar to Elizabethans, especially religion. Our public discourse is packed with religious ideas, from providential events, good and bad, to praying for all and sundry in times of trouble, to "In God We Trust" (not the invisible hand) on our money. Every presidential candidate has to at least talk (generally Christian, Protestant) religion, if not practice it.

Back to Tillyard, isn't part of the problem that scholars today shy away from writing the kind of general introductory guide that he did? Whatever it's limitations, there isn't really a good replacement, unless you go for a shelf full of books and articles generally pitched beyond the general educated reader. Interesting along these lines, perhaps, that the website "Five Books" has Mark Girouard selecting 5 on Elizabethan Art and Culture -- no Tillyard, but Lewis's English Lit in the Sixteenth Century, Yates's Theatre of the World.

Hannibal


Hannibal



On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 11:18 AM, Kenneth Gross <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

One response to Ryan Paul’s worry about what actors learn:   Acting teachers who work with Tina Packer of Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox MA, make use of Tillyard and the idea of “great chain of being” not simply as ciphers of historical truth but as frames for an acting exercise.  Something like this:  You stand in open space, and try to imagine yourself—within your limbs, muscles, breath, and mind—moving from being an angel or spirit downward to the states of being human, lion, horse, dog, snake, fish, vegetable, stone.  And they you imagine yourself back up again.  It’s a slow process, done rightly, you keep still or you move as seems right, with a strong sense of surprise in the connections and shifts between different phases, things felt deep inside your nerves.  Or at least that’s what I remember from doing this exercise in the 90s, when I studied with S & Co.  And you’re in a room full of other actors doing the same thing, so what you observe of them becomes part of the lesson too.   It’s very remarkable preparation for performing moments in the plays when characters give themselves over suddenly, often unexpectedly, to other, not entirely human states of being.  

 

best,

 

Ken


On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 10:41 AM, Catherine Butler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
On 29 January 2018 at 15:34, Herron, Thomas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Ah, but is Troilus and Cressida, with its famous speech on "degree", a "history play"?


Arguably it has been since Schliemann.  But that's not to say that it was for WS.

Cathy 





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Hannibal Hamlin
Professor of English
The Ohio State University
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