I spent much of this afternoon perusing the materials available at Shakespeare’s Staging, after its director got in touch with Open Shakespeare. Amongst all the images of past productions, my favourite was one of the earliest: a drawing of Edward Kean as Bertram in All’s Well that Ends Well. I find you get a real sense of Bertram at a perhaps more unguarded moment, mouth closed, eyes set, yet also a little forlorn against the grey backdrop. 
These pictures and videos got me thinking about something I said about Open Shakespeare’s annotation tool at OKCON, that by allowing people to digitally annotate we would collect and preserve a continuously evolving catalogue of responses to Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare’s Staging has done something similar, but, whereas Open Shakespeare is concerned with the text, this site records the response of actors and directors to what Shakespeare wrote. Each performance is, after all, its own unique (re)presentation and interpretation of the text.
The overlap between our work is obvious, and the next step of the process seems clear. If we accept that Open Shakespeare should allow anyone to contribute and share their responses to Shakespeare, and if we decide that performance of a play is itself a response to Shakespeare, then our website should expand to allow records of performances to be included. Such records can exist in written form (I think of that Swiss doctor’s description of a performance of Julius Caesar in 1599), but also as images or videos. Each media in turn brings its own problems. A video recaptures the experience of one spectator, but is one spectator’s view representative of the whole audience’s experience? An image captures a moment, a mood, but gains its force through exclusion. Text can only appeal to the eyes and the ears via the brain.
Given the weaknesses of each medium as a record of responses to Shakespeare, the only reasonable conclusion is to adopt a composite approach. Discussion has begun on how best to do this given the current framework of Open Shakespeare, and if anyone reading this has anything to contribute, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
And because I cannot write a blog post without quoting Shakespeare, please allow me to point out one exquisite exchange between the Clown and the Countess worried about her son Bertram, lines which serve as hints for an actor’s behaviour, as much as recognition of the limitations of the written text.
> CLOWN Why, he will look upon his boot and sing; mend the ruff and sing; ask questions and sing; pick his teeth and sing. I know a man that had this trick of melancholy sold a goodly manor for a song.
>
> COUNTESS Let me see what he writes, and when he means to come.
Shakespeare’s Staging, and Open Shakespeare too, should let us see what Shakespeare writes in more ways than one.
Posted: July 29th, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Community, Musings, News, Publicity, Texts | No Comments »
The story of Lucrece, found in both Ovid and Livy, has inspired scores of famous depictions. Britten, Rembrandt, Chaucer, Titian, Gower, Dante, Raphael and Richardson all used the story in their work, but none as famously as Shakespeare in his long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece (1594).
The poem shares its theme with Venus and Adonis, but is a “graver labour”, lacking comedy and playfulness. Here, “Lust-breathèd Tarquin” succeeds in raping “Lucrece the chaste”, and the language is that of brutal military conquest: “She says her subjects with foul insurrection / Have battered down her consecrated wall”. A sense of conflict is also conveyed by the fact that the poem is structured around a series of stark absolutes – light and dark, male and female, guilt and innocence, purity and lust, “Beauty’s red and Virtue’s white”. Beauty is, in this poem, a dangerous thing, speaking louder than words of reason and restraint: “All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth”. Vision, however, is privileged, and the poem’s insistence on the language of sight has been linked by Christopher Tilmouth to Renaissance concepts of shame as a sensation that occurs when sins are witnessed. Guilt, shame, sight and voyeurism are all important concerns for the critical conversations that surround the poem.
The first section of the poem gives voice to Tarquin, as he contemplates an act which he knows will ruin him. He claims that no “excuse can my invention make” to justify “so black a deed”, and yet he still chooses to sneak into Lucrece’s chamber. Once the deed is done, the narrative then gives voice instead to the reaction of the innocent victim, as she considers whether she must share the guilt for the deed. After considering at length a painting of the Trojan war, she becomes sure that her only choice is, “To clear this spot by death”. Lucrece’s suicide has baffled such commentators as St Augustine who wish to argue for her innocence, but it is this action that constitutes the concluding tragedy of the poem. Tarquin has marred “the thing that cannot be amended”; Lucrece kills herself and her husband Collantine decrees Tarquin’s “everlasting banishment”. The poem has attracted particular attention from feminist critics such as Jane Newman, who is interested in the simultaneous eloquence and powerlessness of the wronged female.
This poem seems to be closely linked with a number of Shakespeare’s other works. The setting means that it is naturally compared to the other Roman plays, most obviously Titus Andronicus (because of this play’s interest in the powerlessness of words, especially as regards the raped and mutilated Lavinia). The theme of rape also sets it alongside Venus and Adonis and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Tarquin’s fears about the moral implications of his intended action are related to the monologues in Macbeth. The description of the innocent Lucrece as she sleeps is reminiscent of the descriptions of Desdemona in Othello and Imogen in Cymbeline. Shakespeare also mentioned Lucrece in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.
Contributed by Rachel Thorpe
Posted: July 18th, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Introduction | No Comments »
Wimbledon has begun, and I have fulfilled my promise of typing ‘Tennis’ into the dialogue box of the Open Shakespeare website as the prelude to another wander through the works of Mr William Shakespeare. Six examples come out, some from famous scenes, some less so. It would be hard, for example, to find a more important set of tennis balls than those sent by the Dauphin (the French heir to the throne) as an insult to Henry V. After taking one look at this desultory “treasure”, King Henry launches into an announcement that would be delightfully witty, were it not also a declaration of war:
HENRY V When we have march’d our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard…
The puns of this passage, on “racket” (the tool of tennis players, an uproar, and, perhaps even a type of catapult) and on “hazard”, suggest what remains constant between Early Modern tennis and our own version of the sport. However, historians quibble and call the earlier version of the sport, ‘real tennis’, since it was distinguished by always being played in a room off whose walls the ball was allowed to bounce. Maybe something of this is behind Pericles’ metaphor, in the play that bears his name:
PERICLES A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him;
He asks of you, that never used to beg…
Rather like a more tragic Dromio (kicked about, you will recall, like a football), Pericles spends this play wandering, and Shakespeare uses the sporting metaphor to capture the apparently equal senses of futility and of divine order inherent in a romance. Something similar, if darker, is going on when Gloucester, in King Lear, laments that “Like flies to want boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport“. The link with ‘real tennis’ behind Pericles’ words is simply that “the vast tennis court” is at once an unlimited space in which the Greek Lord is helpless, whilst at the same time being a defined space in which certain rules are in effect, just as one may play at tennis, but only in a specific arena.
Of course, as with football, the game of tennis does not always stay within neat bounds. The remaining passages from Shakespeare show off the less salubrious side of the sport: Polonius imagines gentlemen “falling out at tennis”, whilst Hal mocks Falstaff’s off-white shirt with comparison to those of foppish tennis players. Even if there is a similar disorderliness about tennis as we find with football, one distinction is still clear: tennis is a noble’s game, its indecorum taking place among the decorous, and, after all, played by Henry VIII.
There is one quotation left, which I admit to have been saving since it my favourite oddity of the old game of tennis, that its balls were stuffed with human hair. Thus Claudio describes the loss of Benedick’s beard in the following terms:
CLAUDIO No, but the barber’s man hath been seen with him; and the old
ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis-balls.
Posted: June 22nd, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Word of the Day | No Comments »
Lacking inspiration for a Word of the Day article on the day that it all kicks off in South Africa, I freely admit that I’m taking the obvious subject. Expect other articles in due course on ‘Tennis’, and any other seasonal events that come to mind. The word ‘football’ occurs only twice in all Shakespeare’s oeuvre, once in The Comedy of Errors and once in King Lear. In the latter, the term is Kent’s insult of choice when he attacks Goneril’s servant, Osric, calling him
you base football player
Before sending the man sprawling. The insult tells us a few things about what the Elizabethans understood as ‘football’, which was for them a far less decorous game that the one whose World Cup begins today.
So-called Medieval 'Mob Football', courtesy of Wikipedia
Kent’s insult may even pick up on puritan efforts to ban football, a campaign strengthened by the violence and damages of the sport. Around the same time as
King Lear’s first performance, the authorities in Manchester were complaining that
With the ffotebale…[there] hath beene greate disorder in our towne of Manchester we are told, and glasse windowes broken yearlye and spoyled by a companie of lewd and disordered persons …
However, football was saved from too much persecution by the pious James I, who wrote, in his Book of Sports that Christians should play football every Sunday afternoon after worship. But was it really a game involving feet only? After all, it would be difficult to cause all that damage in Manchester, even with the skills (and temperament) of a Zidane. The other use of the word in Shakespeare’s works, does, however, suggest that the sport was beginning to focus on the relationship between ball and foot by Shakespeare’s time:
DROMIO OF EPHESUS Am I so round with you, as you with me,
That like a football you do spurn me thus?
You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:
If I last in this service, you must case me in leather…
“Spurn” here means ‘to kick away‘ (this original, now obsolete, sense dates back to 1000AD, and survives in our modern ’spur’), thus hinting at the increasing importance of the feet. Other details here are also revealing: that the ball was spherical, and thus different from the rugby ball; and that the casement was made of leather, a material still used in many footballs, if not that of the current World Cup, which is made out of ethylene-vinyl acetate and thermoplastic polyurethanes – with a latex bladder.
Footballs are not the only spherical things in The Comedy of Errors: Antipholus of Syracuse describes his search for his long-lost family as the search of one water drop for another in an ocean, and there is also the memorable description of the nymphomaniac maid in search of Dromio’s heart:
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE In what part of her body stands Ireland?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.
…
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Oh, sir, I did not look so low.
Although football is not mentioned here, perhaps we have in The Comedy of Errors – with its many peregrinations, its cosmopolitan references to countries all over the world, its obsession with money, its hints that footballs were to be kicked and made of leather – the beginnings of the modern game, and, in Dromio’s kitchen wench, the earliest recorded WAG.
Posted: June 11th, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Texts, Word of the Day | No Comments »
Exam season is finishing, our free time is returning, and Open Shakespeare is coming back to life. We held a short meeting yesterday evening, and can now announce what we intend to do in the near future:
EXPAND: there will be an Open Shakespeare Party in Emmanuel Fellows’ Garden, Cambridge at 3pm on 14th June. Be there if you can, and if you can’t visit our newly refined ‘Get Involved’ page.
WRITE: the first round of introductions will soon be completed, but we want to welcome more submissions, especially if they build upon the work of previous writers.
BLOG: the Word of the Day feature will be back with us very soon, and will hopefully expand in terms of both writers and articles. The blog itself has already had a little bit of an overhaul, and some out-of-date material will be replaced over the coming weeks.
TEACH: following suggestions made at OKCON, we are proposing the use of Open Shakespeare as a classroom aid. Through this we help to raise the profile of the project, and offer a new way for school children to collaboratively engage with Shakespeare.
These are the main points of the meeting, whose minutes are available for perusal. It remains only for me to quote Nestor, in Troilus and Cressida, and say that this post is only a hint of what’s ahead, and yet…
in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.
Posted: June 4th, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Musings, News, Publicity, Releases, Uncategorized | No Comments »
A play of politics and prophecy, masques and magic, gods and ghosts, nightmares and nationalism, Cymbeline (c. 1609-11) resists categorization.
Like The Winter’s Tale it traces a fine line between comedy and tragedy; like Antony and Cleopatra it vacillates between the epic scale of the histories and the intimate focus of the romances. But perhaps speculations about genre have no place around Cymbeline. The words of Arviragus, a kidnapped prince raised in a cave, suggest that the play takes a less genre-directed approach to storytelling:
What should we speak of
When we are as old as you? When we shall hear
The rain and wind beat dark December, how,
In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse
The freezing hours away? We have seen nothing.
The whole action of the play is motivated by the desire to create a great story. Shakespeare seeks out the intrigue that creates narrative, and pursues complexities of genre and theme with abandon. Like the princes straining at their “pinching cave”, the play expands from the enclosed gardens of the English court circa AD 5 to 42, to the Welsh wilderness, via Rome – all in pursuit of a good story.
When the Roman Caius Lucius cannot wrest tribute from Cymbeline’s court, he tells the Britons, “The day was yours by accident”. Cymbeline relishes accident, chance, and hazard: bed-tricks, cross-dressing, and disguises lead to the birth of political Britain, resurrections, and a beheading.
Accidents create stories with which to “discourse / The freezing hours away”. The long-view of epic which, in Act III, sees Britain imagined as “a swan’s nest” in “a great pool”, zooms in, in Act V, on a lovers’ embrace. Posthumus, finally embracing Imogen, says, “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die”. The newlyweds have travelled far; they have mistaken each other for an adulterer and a headless corpse, but in the final scene they are reunited, and tell each other their stories.
Cymbeline is characterized by a fascination with dramaturgy. It often provokes elaborate staging, particularly when Jupiter descends from the heavens riding an eagle! Spectacularly elaborate productions have included Peter Hall’s (1988) and JoAnne Akalaitis’s (1989), while Mike Alfreds (2001) let the audiences’ imaginations negotiate the scope of the story, using only 6 actors and no scenery.
Since George Bernard Shaw’s description of Cymbeline as ‘exasperating beyond all tolerance’ (1896), the play as been considered difficult to stage. However, modern cinema is surely equipped to negotiate the twists and turns of the fantastical plot of Cymbeline. Considering the 21st century’s taste for epic tales like The Lord of the Rings and Avatar, a film which unleashes the diverse potentials of Cymbeline is long overdue.
Contributed by Hazel Wilkinson
Posted: May 9th, 2010 | Author: Rachel Thorpe | Filed under: Introduction, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Last weekend was OKCON, and I delivered a 15 minute introduction to Open Shakespeare there. Little of what I said was new, and the real interest for me came from the discussions I had with other conference-goers during the day. A few of these discussions, and one or two presentations, have given me a several ideas for Open Shakespeare, which I shall outline briefly here.
Sören Auer, speaking on ‘Linked Open Data’, mentioned the beneficial effect that a ‘pingback’ service had provided to the blogosphere, helping to foster conversations and build networks of opinion. This made me wonder at the benefit such a tracking service would have for Open Shakespeare: if you were told when text you had annotated was annotated by someone else, you would have the chance to both share in the new contribution as well as discuss it. The system could also cover the critical introductions and would foster a more personal involvement in the site, which can only be a good thing. There is one downside: such ‘pingback’ services are vulnerable to spam, and Sören Auer was unable to sketch out a suitable response to this threat.
Tom Morris gave a presentation on ‘Citizendium’, whose modus operandi may have something to teach us when it comes to the writing of critical introductions. On Citizendium there is a fixed front article, behind which is a more fluid draft text. Such an arrangement allows both a space for rapid alterations and heated discussion at the same time as it protects the front matter from too extreme a modification, well-meaning or otherwise.
Away from the presentation, I had long discussions about printing the Open Shakespeare Editions with Ben O’Steen. One suggestion was that the problem of incorporating the annotations into the printed text could be solved with a script similar to that which converts blog comment into a printable format. Whatever the solution, some kind of tagging and annotation management system would probably be a prerequisite.
The last idea to come from OKCON (so far…) concerned widening the audience for Open Shakespeare. Several people recommended that we try and get school children involved, since the website could be a useful teaching tool, and encourage a new engagement with Shakespeare. Again, one hesitates to open the website to such a large audience without more means of managing annotations in place…but, still, a trial with just one class and one scene of a play seems to me something we could try right away…
Posted: April 27th, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Community, Musings, News, Texts | No Comments »
There’s been a bit of a stir in the Shakespearian community recently, what with the release of a new play by the Bard. To be fair, it is not quite so sensational as it sounds: the possibility that part of Cardenio or, as the Arden edition entitles it, Double Falsehood might be by Shakespeare goes back to at least the 18th Century.
What’s new is that textual and historical evidence is now available that confirms this play to be from some time in the early 17th century. It contains, for example, the word “absonant”, which is found only in texts by Shakespeare…and by his successor as writer for the King’s Men, Fletcher. Thus the play is most likely a collaborative work between the two, as was perfectly normal for the period. Other Shakespeare/Fletcher collaborations include King Henry VIII, and possibly parts of Pericles.
I post this news here because such a claim was only made possible thanks to advances in technology dealing with texts. New databases of texts make searches for references to a play far faster and easier, whilst new stylometric algorithms make the most of such databases to pick up minute differences in vocabulary usage that allow an author’s DNA to be distinguished. For the curious, Shakespeare uses “thee” and “hath“, whilst Fletcher, being fifteen years his junior, uses the more modern “ye“.
Perhaps one day, The Open Shakespeare Project will contribute to such breakthroughs. Until then, we have a separate issue to deal with: do we add Cardenio / Double Falsehood to our site?
What do you think? Could you write an introduction to it?
Posted: April 15th, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Community, Musings, News, Releases | 3 Comments »
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is often euphemistically referred to as one of Shakespeare’s ‘early plays’. This phrase attempts to account for its relative immaturity; aesthetically and dramaturgically it is considered by many to be inferior to the ‘later plays’. The actual date of writing is not certain, but the first record we have of it is from Mere’s Palladis Tamia, published in 1598. Edward Malone proposed that it is the first work that Shakespeare ever wrote for the stage. Another theory, initially put forward by Clifford Leech, suggests that the play was composed in stages, accounting for some of the textual inconsistencies.
Borrowing from the Portuguese story of Felix and Felismena, the plot focuses on two friends, Valentine and Proteus. Each leaves home and travels from Verona to Milan. Proteus leaves behind his beloved Julia, having exchanged with her rings and promises of “true constancy”. On arriving in Milan, Proteus discovers that Valentine has fallen in love with the Duke’s daughter Silvia and that they have planned to secretly elope together. Unfortunately, Proteus also falls for Silvia, declaring that “the remembrance of my former love / Is by a newer object quite forgotten”. He decides to do whatever it takes to win her for himself. The ensuing drama concerns itself with the limits of male friendship and the foolishness of lovers. The action comes to a climax in one of the most controversial scenes in the canon of Shakespeare’s writing. Many of the most famous performances have gained their notoriety because of the way that they have creatively navigated it, prompting Stanley Well’s comment that the play “has succeeded best when subjected to adaptation”. In the depths of the forest, Proteus threatens to rape Silvia, uttering the infamous line “I’ll force thee yield to my desire”. However, moments later he is reconciled to Valentine, who, despite being fully aware of what his friend has done, seems to offer him Silvia: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”. The play closes with Proteus and Julia happily reunited, and a decree that both they and Valentine and Silvia shall be married on the same day, sharing “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness”.
Although the popular opinion is that this is one of Shakespeare’s least accomplished plays, it has enjoyed a rich stage history. Notably, Peter Hall chose it has his first production as artistic director of the RSC in 1960, and John Barton directed another important RSC production in 1981. The play has been set in almost every imaginable era – the medieval, the renaissance, the music-hall 1930s, the rock-and-roll 1950s, the fashion-obsessed 1990s – and is not always confined to Verona and Milan. It attracted further attention after being featured in the Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love (1998), despite never being explicitly named. The play is regularly admired for its spirited comedy. And for the fact that one of the characters is a dog.
Contributed by Rachel Thorpe
Posted: April 15th, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Introduction | No Comments »
Perhaps there will one day be a site called ‘Open Tolkein’. Until then, allow me to draw your attention to the occurences of the name of one of the Old Inkling’s most famous characters in the works of the Bard.
Although there are many fairies and spirits in Shakespeare’s works, and the occasionaly talking animal, there is a notable shortage of hobbits, let alone hobbit names. What then would ‘bilbo’ mean?
The word is quintessentially Elizabethan: its first recorded use in English is by Shakespeare in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and available examples decline rapidly after 1630, resurfacing only to add historical tone to such later works as Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock of 1826. In all these examples, ‘bilbo’ means a type of sword, or, as an extension of this, a swashbuckling bully, one wearing of a ‘bilbo’. This is the sense of the word in The Merry Wives of Windsor, used as Falstaff describes his ignonimous concealment in a laundry basket:
FALSTAFF…I suffered the pangs
of three several deaths: first, an intolerable fright to be
detected with a jealous rotten bell-wether; next, to be compassed
like a good bilbo in the circumference of a peck, hilt to
point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in, like a strong
distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own
grease: think of that
The word ‘bilbo’ comes from ‘Bilbao’ or ‘Bilboa’, a town in Northern Spain that was renowned for its ironwork during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such ironwork included swords that were, according to the OED, “noted for the temper and elasticity of its blade”, but also comprised other products, one of which finds its way into a very famous speech by Hamlet.
HAMLET Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep: methought I lay
Worse than the mutinies in the bilboes. Rashly,
And prais’d be rashness for it,–let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well,
When our deep plots do fail; and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
“The mutinies in the bilboes” are sailors or soldiers convicted of mutiny and punished by being attached to “A long iron bar, furnished with sliding shackles to confine the ankles of prisoners, and a lock by which to fix one end of the bar to the floor or ground”. Good quality spanish iron prevented any thoughts of escape, but was pliable enough to be shaped into shackles. Hamlet mentioning the word may also suggest that his thoughts are already turning towards his duel with Laertes, which may well have been conducted with bilbo-swords.
Thus concludes our tour of Spain, ironmongery, existentialism and laundry baskets. One final thought: Tolkein, as far as I know, never revealed the origin of his hobbit’s name, but, bearing in mind that Bilbo’s destiny is shaped first by the forged ring but also by the beautifully crafted sword, Sting, he bears, one might suggest that Tolkein, well-read academic that he was, was making a crafty little reference to a scarce-noted word in Shakespeare’s works.
Posted: April 8th, 2010 | Author: James Harriman-Smith | Filed under: Uncategorized, Word of the Day | No Comments »
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