ENGLISH 235 SHAKESPEARE: PERFORMANCE HISTORY, 1660 TO THE PRESENT Professor Mazer Spring 1996 Bennett Hall 305, x8-7382; cmazer@english.upenn.edu Office Hours: Tu 2:00-3:30, Th 1:30-3:00, and by appointment) January 16: Intro: Shakespeare, Meaning, and Performance: Reading (read after class): Terence Hawkes,"By," Meaning by Shakespeare, pp. 1-10 (bulkpack). January 18: Elizabethan Stage Conditions: Staging, Casting, Multiple texts: Reading: Alan C. Dessen, "Shakespeare and the Theatrical Conventions of his Time" (bulkpack). BRING A COPY OF KING LEAR TO CLASS. January 23: Restoration "Improvements" I: Reading: Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, pp. 7-51; Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (bulkpack); Nancy Klein Maguire, "Nahum Tate's King Lear: `The King's Blest Restoration'" (bulkpack). BRING THE SCRIPT TO CLASS. January 25: Boy Actors, Actresses, and Cross-Dressing, before after 1660: Reading: Jean Howard, "Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England" (bulkpack); Katharine Eisaman Maus, "`Playhouse Flesh and Blood': Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress" (bulkpack); Beth H. Friedman-Romell, "Breaking the Code: Toward a Reception Theory of Theatrical Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century London" (bulkpack). January 30: Restoration "Improvements" II: Reading: Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, pp. 52-99; Colley Cibber, Richard III (bulkpack); Albert E. Kalson, "Colley Cibber plays Richard III" (bulkpack). February 1: Garrick at Drury Lane I: Reading: Joseph R. Roach, "Garrick, the Ghost, and the Machine" (bulkpack); excerpt from Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (bulkpack). February 6: Garrick at Drury Lane II: Reading: Garrick's version of Romeo and Juliet (final scene) (bulkpack); David Garrick, Catherine and Petrucchio (bulkpack). Report: Garrick's Stratford Jubilee ______________ [February 8: TBA (Tom Stoppard in residence with the Theatre Arts Program)] February 13: The Kemble Era: Acting and Dramatic Structure. Reading: Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, pp. 100-162; Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (1970): Part III: "Shakespearean Character in the Romantic Age," pp. 189-279 (RESERVE); Mrs. Siddons's "Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth," as they were first printed in Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834) (bulkpack); Pat Rogers, "`Towering Beyond her Sex': Stature and Sublimity in the Achievement of Sarah Siddons," (bulkpack) February 15: The Kemble Era: Theatre and Politics. Reading: Elaine Hadley, "The Old Price Wars: Melodramatizing the Public Sphere in Early-Nineteenth- Century England"; Gary Jay Williams, "The Scenic Language of Empire: A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1816" (bulkpack). February 20: Romanticism: Edmund Kean: Reading: William Hazlitt, reviews of Edmund Kean, from Hazlitt on Theatre, pp. 1-16, 20-54 (bulkpack); George Henry Lewes, "Edmund Kean," from On Actors and the Art of Acting, pp. 1-11 (bulkpack). [APPROXIMATE DUE DATE: FIRST TAKE-HOME ASSIGNMENT] February 22: America's Shakespeare I: Reading: Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, pp. 196-204; Bruce A. McConachie, "The Theatre of Edwin Forrest and Jacksonian Hero Worship" (bulkpack). Reports: Charlotte Cushman ______________ Ira Aldridge ______________ The Astor Place Riot ______________ February 27: America's Shakespeare II: Reading: Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, pp. 13-81 (bulkpack); Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, pp. 231-257 (bulkpack). Reports: Charles Shattuck, The Hamlet of Edwin Booth ______________ John Wilkes Booth (as an actor) ______________ February 29: TENTATIVE: session with director-author-physician, Jonathan Miller (combined with Advanced Directing class). March 5: Victorian Shakespeare I: Pictorialism: Reading: Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, pp. 30-59 (bulkpack). March 7: Victorian Shakespeare II: Character: Reading: Mary Cowden Clarke, "Katharina and Bianca: The Shrew and the Demure," and "Juliet: The White Dove of Verona," from The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (bulkpack); Lady Martin (Helena Faucit), "Juliet," from On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters (bulkpack). [Spring Break] March 19: Victorian Shakespeare III: Acting Reading: George Henry Lewes, "Charles Kean," Macready," and "On Natural Acting," from On Actors and the Art of Acting, pp. 12-22, 32-50, 109-125 (bulkpack); essays on acting by Constant Coquelin, Henry Irving, and Joseph Jefferson (bulkpack); G. Bernard Shaw, two reviews, rpt. in Our Theatres in the Nineties (bulkpack); Michael R. Booth, "Pictorial Acting and Ellen Terry," in Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, pp. 78-86 (bulkpack). March 21: Victorian Shakespeare IV: Values: Reading: Virginia Mason Vaughan, "`Something Rich and Strange": Caliban's Theatrical Metamorphoses" (bulkpack); Ralph Berry, "The Imperial Theme," in Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, pp. 153-160 (bulkpack). March 26: Victorian Shakespeare V: Test Cases: Reports: Henry Irving's The Merchant of Venice ______________ Irving's Hamlet ______________ Irving's King Lear ______________ Mary Anderson's The Winter's Tale ______________ Johnston Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet ______________ Beerbohm Tree's A Midsummer Night's Dream ______________ Tree's The Tempest ______________ Tree's Twelfth Night ______________ [APPROXIMATE DUE DATE: SECOND TAKE-HOME ASSIGNMENT] March 28: Elizabethanism: Reading: Cary M. Mazer, "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Revival, from Shakespeare Refashioned, pp. 49-84 (bulkpack). April 2: The New Stagecraft: Reading: Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare (RESERVE), pp. 43-79; Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, pp. 231-297. April 4: The Twentieth Century: The Director I: Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream: Reading: J.L. Styan, "Shakespeare, Peter Brook and Non- Illusion," from The Shakespeare Revolution, p. 206-231. Report: David Selbourne, The Making of A Midsummer Night's Dream ______________ [April 9, 12: TBA] April 16: The Twentieth Century: The Director II Reading: Charles Marowitz, Recycling Shakespeare, pp. 1-42 (bulkpack); Jonathan Miller, Subsequent Performances, pp. 95-164 (RESERVE). April 18: The Twentieth Century: The Actor: Reading: Richard Paul Knowles,"Interrogating the Natural Voice: Shakespeare, Voice, and Ideology," unpublished seminar paper, 1993. Reports: Players of Shakespeare 1, ed. Philip Brockbank: Patrick Stewart--Shylock in The Merchant of Venice ______________ Michael Pennington--Hamlet ______________ David Suchet--Caliban in The Tempest ______________ Players of Shakespeare 2, ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood Ian McDiarmid--Shylock in The Merchant of Venice ______________ Daniel Massey--The Duke in Measure for Measure ______________ Ben Kingsley--Othello ______________ David Suchet--Iago in Othello ______________ April 23: "Intercultural" Shakespeare: Reading: Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, pp. 266-311 (RESERVE); Adrian Kiernander, "The School of Shakespeare," from Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, p. 106- 122 (bulkpack). April 25: Shakespeare Festivals and the Ideology of Production. Reading: Alan Sinfield, "Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology," in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, pp. 158-181. (bulkpack) You are responsible for ONE short (10 minutes) in-class presentations on the subject and dates specified above (with the blanks). There will be TWO take-home essay assignments, plus ONE final research project, due at a date to be announced, on a topic that MUST BE APPROVED IN ADVANCE. Attendance in class is crucial; CHRONIC ABSENCE OR LATENESS WILL BE COUNTED AGAINST YOU. The following book can be purchased at the Penn Book Center, 37th and Walnut: Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare. You can use any modern edition of Shakespeare that you have at hand (but BE AWARE OF THE EDITOR'S HAND IN SHAPING THE THEATRICAL SIGNALS OF THE TEXT). The bulkpack can be purchased at the Campus Copy Center, 39th and Walnut. Books marked "RESERVE" (Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age; Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare; Miller, Subsequent Performances) are in Rosengarten; there are probably also non-circulating copies of these books on the shelves in the Furness Collection, sixth floor, Van Pelt library, which is open ONLY Monday through Friday, 9-5. I have set up a listserv for this course on e-mail, to which you have been automatically subscribed (if this is not so, contact me via e-mail). You will be sent a copy of every e-mail message posted to the listserv, and any message you send will be distributed to everyone who signs up (including the professor). Important announcements about assignments and due dates, notices about local theatre events, etc., will be posted regularly, so CHECK YOUR E-MAIL EVERY DAY. The listserv can also be used by you and your classmates as a clearing house for thoughts and impressions about the readings and the class discussions. Just send a note to Mazer235@english.upenn.edu, or reply to any message you receive over the listserv. (But remember: everything you post can be read by everyone; if you have any private comments, or any private replies to a query you read on the listserv, you should respond privately to the individual's own e-mail address, rather than replying through the listserv). If you are not yet on e-mail, you might consider getting an account, which you can access at any computer hooked up to the network.