From:     Arnie Perlstein <arnieperlstein@gmail.com

Date:      June 5 at 8:25 PM EDT

Subject:  Shakespeare scenes in alternative, very different ways

So, this is a question that I imagine that at least some of you who’ve seen a variety of Shakespeare performed many times on stage and screen will have an interesting reaction to.

Those of you who’ve seen David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive will recall the memorable pair of scenes when Naomi Watts (Betty) and Laura Harring (Rita) rehearse Betty’s audition scene playing it one way (basically, with no erotic charge or irony whatsoever, just as a straightforward, ominous verbal confrontation between Betty and her father’s best friend), but then, at the actual audition, the next scene in the film, Betty and Clu Gulager (Jimmy) play it with a huge erotic charge, with Betty undercutting her threatening dialog with sexualized physical contact and non-verbals.

It made me wonder, what memorable scenes in Shakespeare plays have been played in alternative, very different ways over the centuries, but (important caveat) without changing any of the dialog or putting the scene in an anachronistic setting, etc.? The first example that came to mind is the final scene of Measure for Measure, when Isabella is silent, when the Duke shocks everyone by proposing to her.

I’ve read that Isabella’s reaction, especially in recent years, has been played in many different ways, from grateful acquiescence to cryptic silence to angry negation, and everywhere in between. The same with Katherina at the end of Shrew when she delivers her famous speech about the husband as the ruler in marriage.

When I raised that question two months ago in the Shrew seminar at the SAA conference in Denver, pretty much everyone in the seminar, as well as several auditors, all chimed in with a similar wide range of different ways of Katherina being played consistent with the play text.

So, I am sure that there must be a number of other memorable Shakespeare scenes which have, in performance, been played in alternative, very different ways, with claims to equal textual authority and validity for each alternative choice.

I am sure there have been articles/chapters on this very topic, including some I’ve read but now cannot recall, so I figured I’d get some pretty good responses here.

Arnie Perlstein

From:     Mike Jensen <jensensh@hotmail.com>

Date:      June 4 at 5:52 PM EDT

Subject:  Shakespeare Newsletter 75:1

The new issue of Shakespeare Newsletter is now online with three performance reviews and two special features.

Performance Reviews

• Henry IV at TFANA by Laura Kolb
• Richard III at the Globe by M. Tyler Sasser
• Romeo and Juliet at The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck by Kim Paffenroth

Newsletter Features

• Talking Books Update by Michael P. Jensen
• Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2025 by Michael P. Jensen

Non-subscribers, please note that Sasser’s performance review of Richard III is open access, available to all.

https://shakespearenewsletter.com/newsletters/75-1/

All the best,

Mike Jensen

From:     Kenneth Chan <kc231157@gmail.com>

Date:      June 2 at 8:28 PM EDT

Subject:  Hamlet’s lack of remorse

The scene after Hamlet kills Polonius (Act III Scene 4) is theatrically distressing and a source of dismay to the audience because Hamlet displays a callous lack of remorse after accidentally stabbing Polonius, the elderly Councillor of State. Hamlet even proceeds to ridicule the slain man:

Hamlet: I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.

Mother, good night indeed. This counsellor

Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,

Who was in life a foolish prating knave.

Someone who can react in this way hardly fits the image of an ideal hero. Surely Polonius deserves some measure of compassion. Why then does Shakespeare not spare Hamlet even a single word of kindness for Polonius? This would have greatly helped to redeem him and would have been simple for Shakespeare to implement. Shakespeare, instead, does the opposite. The next three scenes continue with Hamlet’s bizarre and disgusting antics over the body of Polonius, as though Shakespeare wants to assure us Hamlet’s lack of remorse is no oversight. It is deliberate. Why?

Let us return to Act III, Scene 4, and picture the drama. The scene opens with Polonius indulging in his petty court intrigues by concealing himself behind the curtains to spy on the coming encounter between Hamlet and his mother. Hamlet arrives, having already worked himself into a fearsome state of mind. We know his state of mind from the two preceding scenes. At the end of Act III, Scene 2, after confirming for himself that his uncle—the current king—had indeed murdered his father, as the ghost informs, Hamlet prepares himself for revenge. So wild has he become that even the thought of killing his mother enters his mind, but he suppresses it:

His state worsens in the next scene (Act III, Scene 3) when he stumbles on the King praying. He rejects this opportunity to kill the King because the act of praying may help redeem him. Hamlet’s motive for revenge has gone beyond merely the establishment of justice in this world. It is a darker motive of pure malice; he decides to postpone his revenge to a more “opportune” moment, so that he can unleash an eternity of suffering upon his victim. Thus, in this fearsome and malevolent state of mind, Hamlet now appears before his mother in Act III, Scene 4. His mother quickly perceives his mood after a short exchange of words and tries to end the meeting by leaving. Hamlet prevents her, causing her to cry for help. Polonius, behind the curtains, echoes her cry, and Hamlet summarily kills him by thrusting his sword through the arras, thinking he is the King. Now the real dramatic point begins.

Picture the scene. Polonius lies dead on the stage, newly slain by Hamlet. The Queen cries: “Oh what a rash and bloody deed is this!” What is Hamlet’s response? “A bloody deed. Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king and marry with his brother.”

This response is a study of Hamlet’s mind in a nutshell. His initial reaction spares no compassionate thought over the death of Polonius. He is fixated on condemning his mother and his uncle. Hamlet then appeals passionately to his mother to realize the error of her hasty remarriage. The anguished Queen eventually cries out for Hamlet to stop. She does this repeatedly, but Hamlet nonetheless persists in chastising her. All this is almost commendable, a measure of Hamlet’s intense mourning for his lost father, except for one glaring fact. The body of Polonius is lying on the stage in full view of the audience.

Now the ghost of Hamlet’s father enters, and Hamlet expresses his guilt at having delayed the revenge he promised. Again, Hamlet’s expression of a deep filial bond with his late father is almost commendable—but the body of Polonius still lies in full view. This almost unbelievable scene reveals Shakespeare at his most sublime.

We witness an impassioned, almost moral, appeal by Hamlet to his mother to realize the error of her hasty remarriage while he blatantly contravenes all sense of compassion to a fellow being, newly slain by his own hand. We also witness his filial guilt for the delay in avenging his father while he totally neglects and even mocks the death of another. When the ghost of Hamlet’s father arrives to remind him of his “almost blunted purpose,” we may wonder why the ghost of Polonius does not get up and reprimand the other ghost.

The whole episode is surreal, its dramatic impact nearly unbelievable. There is no doubt that Shakespeare deliberately set it up as an alarming portrayal of what the path of vengeance has done to Hamlet. It has transformed him into a brutal and callous angel of death with little room left for compassion.

Not only does Shakespeare frame the whole episode between two passages of Hamlet taunting the man he has slain, but he also has Hamlet then commit the gruesome act of hiding the body and making macabre jokes about it. It demonstrates how the course of vengeance directly contradicts the spiritual path of love and compassion. That is the problem with seeking revenge.

Kenneth Chan

From:     Richard A. Strier <rastrier@uchicago.edu>

Date:      June 1 at 4:33 PM EDT

Subject:  Announcement

I am happy to report that The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press) is now—finally!—out on paperback.

Richard Strier

From:     Edward Gieskes <GIESKESE@mailbox.sc.edu>

Date:      May 28 at 1:57 PM EDT

Subject:  Call for Submissions: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Call for Submissions: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England (MaRDiE) is an annual volume committed to the publication of essays and reviews related to premodern English drama and theater history. An internationally recognized board of scholars oversees the publication of MaRDiE. The journal welcomes submissions that represent various theoretical and methodological perspectives and that offer wide-ranging discussions of plays and early performance history as well as topics pertaining to cultural history, manuscript studies and the history of printing.

Please see https://mardie.sites.utk.edu/ or contact the editors with questions about submissions:

Edward Gieskes gieskese@mailbox.sc.edu

Heather Anne Hirschfeld hhirschf@utk.edu

From:     Mike Jensen <jensensh@hotmail.com>

Date:      May 28 at 12:20 PM EDT

Subject:  Query

I am editing an anthology and trying to help one of my authors find some information that extensive internet searches by both of us have failed to locate.

Do you have the BBC audio CDs of Kenneth Branagh’s 1992 Hamlet? If so, please check one of the discs and post the RC number here. It will be three digits.

Please note, the audio cassettes have a different RC number and CDs from other parts of the world have a different numbering system. Only the UK CDs have the number needed. Thanks.

All the best,

Mike Jensen

From:     Robert Shaughnessy <r.shaughnessy@gsa.surrey.ac.uk>

Date:      May 28 at 6:24 AM EDT

Subject:  Peter Thomson

Dear friends and colleagues,

I am reposting below Chris Baugh’s tribute from the DramaHE mailing list, as I know that some of you will remember Peter and wish to mark his passing.

I knew Peter from the days when he was my PhD examiner—a brisk viva followed by the serious business of a more leisurely conversation in the pub—and then and always he was a brilliant and generous mentor and guide, a scholarly polymath, hands-on practitioner, cricketer, and a man with a ready wit, sense of mischief and an enormous appetite for life. As external examiner of the Shakespeare MA programme he led at the University of Exeter, I had the privilege to witness that he was also a dedicated and inspiring teacher. As much at home with eighteenth-century actors as with Brecht, his interests were prodigious and wide-ranging; for members of this list he will be best known for his Shakespearean scholarship, which included a spell as reviewer for Shakespeare Survey in the 1970s, his books Shakespeare’s Theatre and Shakespeare’s Professional Career, and much else. The phrase ‘he had a good innings’ has never been more apt.

I owe Peter a great deal and will miss him. May his memory be a blessing.

Robert

Hello

Many of you will have now heard that Peter died suddenly over the weekend following a nasty fall. Peter was my friend for over half a century, beginning as my 2nd year tutor at Manchester in 1964. Since then he has been mentor, referee, external examiner, and pub quiz companion (our team was ExGold—when he was at Exeter and I at Goldsmiths’.)

Importantly for us all, aside from his research, publications, and teaching practice, he was an absolutely committed and passionate believer in our subject within the university. Wherever he worked (Manchester, Swansea and Exeter) he fought long and hard for its importance and integrity as a subject. Importantly, he loved and promoted our work as colleagues, and he was consistently excited and energised by the expanding community of scholars and artists that emerged since university drama and theatre study began in the 1950s. He was a founder member/ initiator of SCUDD during the 1970s and he thought its annual conference to be an important diurnal highlight. During the 1980s he very much saved our subject that was threatened with closure in many universities. He initiated a transfer scheme when Bangor was under threat whereby staff were re-located to other departments (Kent, Exeter and Swansea). During the 1990s, SCUDD was accepted by the then Higher Education Funding Council to be so energetic and representative of the discipline that its thoughts and statements about research and practice were fed verbatim into the documentation for the first rounds of research assessment in RAE1996, 2001, and 2008.

As a teacher and curriculum planner there was never a distinction between scholarly study and artistic practice: history was rigorously dramatized—David Edgar made a splendid Fielding when the project wrote and performed the 1737 Stage Licensing Act. When Peter got the Chair at Exeter the final year ‘Practical Essay’ rapidly became a hallmark of experimental learning (and a great joy for the external examiner). Peter would never allow a distinction to be made between studio learning and the most sophisticated scholarly practice and research.

Peter was a great cricketer and was latterly occupied with writing a history of county cricket. Some of this was in autobiographical form. He sent me an early chapter about his teenage years in Sheffield which he discovered we both shared. Peter’s father was the minister of a Methodist Chapel in Nether Edge, and he was intrigued by the lurking effects of Methodism in both of us. Earlier this year he sent me some recent writing including a long and brilliant chapter on ‘Shakespeare’s Womenfolk’—not characters in the plays—but Anne, Joan, Susanna, and Judith. The dour and reserved puritanism (Joan and Judith?) brought methodism to mind.

But I must conclude with a word about the sheer conviviality of Peter whether playing marbles on the carpet (each favourite marble named after an English Cricketer—his favourite being a vicious little marble ‘opening batsman’ called Cyril Washbrook), or in heated Dr. Johnson-like debate in the bar at a SCUDD conference. Few could sustain his intake of beer alongside his crystal-clear radical thinking.

I am desperately sad to lose Peter but we must all be glad that we have had such a terrific and passionate patron.

Christopher Baugh FHEA FRSA

Emeritus Professor of Performance and Technology

University of Leeds

c.l.baugh@leeds.ac.uk