Belated Review of MC's Chicago

Taming of the Shrew

  To prepare for Prof. Eckert's talk on Monday March 24, "'Our lances are like straws':  Irony, Rhetoric, and The Taming of the Shrew," I'd like to post a little information about The Taming of the Shrew.  Otherwise, as much as it would be interesting to have another perspective on drama, we won't get as much as we should out of the talk.

The picture above is from a recent local production of Taming at the Shakespeare Theater.  Here is a link to the web site for that production.  As you'll see, it is a very full website with not only a synopsis and reviews but also interviews, a photo gallery, scholarly articles, and even a video trailer!

http://www.shakespearetheatre.org/plays/details.aspx?id=110&source=l

See this link for an audience member's response:

http://twohourstraffic.blogspot.com/2007/10/shakespeare-theatres-taming-of-shrew.html

Or this summer we could go to Utah to see Taming.    Actually, you may find the articles on this site useful.

http://www.bard.org/plays/shrew.html

Here are pictures from other recent productions all over the world:

http://www.cambridgeshakespeare.com/

http://www.chicagoshakes.com/main.taf?p=2,17,5

Even better, the University of Victoria, a Canadian univiersity, has a series of links to performances from 1908 to just last year!  Most are in English, but there are some in German!

http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Theater/sip/play/Shr/main.html

In the late 19th and early 20th century, The Taming of the Shrew was quite popular as this page from Emory University shows:

http://shakespeare.emory.edu/playdisplay.cfm?playid=27

A professor at Virginia Military Institute has put together a number of links on the play's performance history:

http://academics.vmi.edu/english/shrew.html#Performance

But here are some videos from You Tube.  The first contains scenes from a 1960s version of Taming of the Shrew starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.  I showed this movie to my Shakespeare on Film class at Purdue University, and they really enjoyed it--even though it was "old."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmOQh5RNveQ

This video shows Kate and Petruchio's wedding:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K2gb9BZcSE

I think that my EN 102 students at Purdue would have preferred this version done by high school students a la Jerry Springer (do you remember him?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej4ojXbxy2g

Or would you prefer John Cleese's Petruchio?  (Hmm...how would Steve Carrell be in this role!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2NnhBNq6h8

In the UK, The Royal Shakespeare Theater staged both The Taming of the Shrew *and* John Fletcher's sequel (in which Petruchio is tamed!):

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre/reviews/the-taming-of-the-shrew-royal-shakespeare-theatrebr-the-tamer-tamed-swan-theatre-stratforduponavon-594449.html

Here Professors Lisa Jardine (an expert on Shakespeare) and Gordon McMullan (an expert on John Fletcher) and actor Alexandra Gilbraith discuss the two plays and Shakespeare's attitude towards women:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2003_23_sat_01.shtml

To see what The Tamer Tamed looks like, here is Shakespeare and Company's collection of pictures from its 2005 production:

http://www.shakespeare.org/gallery/tamer

Acting throughout the Ages

More on Brecht

  The picture above is from the recent production of Threepenny Opera (the most famous play by Brecht) with Cyndi Lauper and Nellie McKay.  Here is the video preview for that production--direct from You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A3CR5K8-ys

YouTube also has audio recordings of Lotte Lenya's versions of songs from the Threepenny Opera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo7LpEkkAk0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_iLXkx1Uo

Bertolt Brecht sings here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QXJ3OXWaOY

Although I've posted this blog from the dramaturg of Villanova's production of Mother Courage, I think that it's worth reposting for the information about Brecht:

http://villanovatheatretalk.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

I've posted this article on epic theater and Brecht's biography elsewhere as well, but I'm sure that you'll find it useful here:

http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesf/goodwoman/brecht_epic_theater.html

http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesf/goodwoman/brecht_bio.html

Deustche Welle, the German broadcasting service, has put together a picture gallery on Brecht and his work.  One picture is of Helene Weigel, his second wife and the most outstanding Mother Courage:

http://www.dw-world.de/popups/popup_imagegalerie/0,2172,2128266_page_1_lang_2,00.html

Here is a biography of Ms. Weigel.  Again, she is pictured as Mother Courage although she portrayed many other roles in her husband's plays.

http://www.artsalive.ca/en/thf/histoire/comediens.html#weigel

Brecht spent some time in the US while he was in exile from Germany.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2125885,00.html

Here is an article about the Brecht-Weigel House in East Berlin.  It includes some information about Ms. Weigel's work after her husband's death when she led the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company that they had founded together.

http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/chnn/CHNN17HOU.html

In 2001, a movie was made about a day in Brecht's life:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,531391,00.html

Let's finish with some articles on Brecht's influence on later theater.  The first is from Brandeis University's production of The Good Woman of Setzuan.

http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesf/goodwoman/brecht_influence.html

The next is from Deutsche Welle:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2127719,00.html

Prof. Edward Isser of the College of the Holy Cross discusses Brechtian influence on the performance of Shakespeare!

http://www.holycross.edu/departments/theatre/eisser/BrechtianShakespeare.html

Midterm Study Guide -- Spring 2008 -- plays (A Doll's House)

  At this point, our unit on drama is not yet finished.  (After break, we will read Mother Courage and The Love Suicides, a German play and a Japanese play respectively.  If you saw Chicago, you may find some of Brecht's techniques in Mother Courage a little familiar.)

This study guide will focus on A Doll's House and an overall discussion of drama and theater.

-- Drama refers to the author's play script as it is published.  Theater, on the other hand, refers to the performance of the play and all the "extra-textual" elements: casting, costumes, sets, mise-en-scene, the reading of lines, sound, lighting, music, and venue.  For example, a performance of A Doll's House at the Theater Arts Arena will be very different from a performance of the same play in a park or in a classroom.

-- An important element of theater is the central idea of a performance.  This central idea will determine casting, staging, costuming, and even reading of lines.  The central idea will also affect the audience just as much as an audience may determine a play's central idea.  Audiences who see many plays and are willing to experiment will accept a more adventurous production and central idea.  Audiences who see fewer plays will probably be more conservative.

-- A Doll's House (1879) is one of Ibsen's problem plays.  In other words, in this play, Ibsen (1829-1906) explored a pressing issue and encouraged his audience to think about it.  He guides his audience rather than telling them what to think or entertaining them.  The problem play relies on a proscenium arch stage, which frames the action and distances it from the audience.  (Did you know that in Aphra Behn's day wealthy theatergoers could sit on the stage--and leer at the actresses & smirk at the audience?!) Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and wrote in that language, but his plays were quickly translated into English and became popular for more intellectual audiences.  Ibsen's advocates in English included the great novelist and would-be playwright Henry James, theater critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw, and the actor Elizabeth Robins.  Another advocate was our anthology's translator, William Archer (1856-1924).

-- The BBC version of A Doll's House that we saw in class dates from 1992.  There Juliet Stevenson plays Nora, and Trevor Eve plays Helmer.  This version is fairly conservative: it is set in the 1870s, and the scenes that we saw were indoors.  Other noted  versions of A Doll's House on film were theatrically-released movies from the 1970s: one starring Claire Bloom and another starring Jane Fonda (see above).

This is It! The Entry with the Midterm Prompts Is Now Up!!

  The picture above is of Senegalese singer/actor Youssou N'Dour who played author Olaudah Equiano in the 2007 movie Amazing Grace.

Below are the prompts.  I will be going over them in tomorrow's class.

1.  Discuss life writing as a genre of literature.  Given your definition of literature, how is lifewriting (not only autobiographies and memoirs but also biographies, letters, and diaries) literature?  How is it NOT literature?  Could life writing be a more personal form of history? Consider The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as your main examples, but feel free to include other examples from your reading (The Diary of Anne Frank, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Black Elk Speaks, Into the Wild).


2.  Discuss film as a genre of literature.  Given your definition of literature, how is film literature?  How is it NOT literature?  If you were to teach a film and literature course, which films would you include?  Why?  In this type of course, is it more important for a film to be a groundbreaking film (like Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now) or for a film to be based on an important work of literature (like Jane Eyre or A Doll's House)?  Why? 


3.  A number of our works so far this semester were originally written in English although not every author was a native English speaker.  How does the presence of these works affect your definition of world literature?  How does the presence of works NOT originally written in English (A Doll's House, So Long a Letter) change your definition of world literature?  Consider Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo's arguments about the language one writes in.  Keep in mind that our class' common language is English, but could some of us branch out in EN 202?  Take a look at the blog entries and see that A Doll's House was translated into English fairly quickly and has remained a staple of the Anglophone repertoire.  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano were translated into other languages.  Does this mean that Joseph Conrad should have written in Polish and relied on translators for his English or French audience?

4.  Consider the novel as a genre.  What do the works we've read have in common?  Where do they differ?  How has the novel developed if we start with Oroonoko and move on from there to Heart of Darkness and So Long a Letter?  Consider other novels that you've read (novels by Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, or J.R.R. Tolkein) as well.  Feel free to discuss elements such as narration, point of view, the protagonist (who may be a protagonist, for example), plot, setting, character, and mimesis (attempt to depict reality or realism in art).  Have contemporary literary critics feminized the novel?!  

Good luck!

Sample Midterm from EN 201 (With Image from the Odyssey)

Here is the format for the midterm.  Just plug in information from the study guides.

EN 201 – Objective Essay Questions (40 pts) – This part of the exam is closed-book/closed-notebook.

 

Match-up (pts) (10 pts – 5 pts. per section)

 

Match the god with the identifying characteristic.  (1 pt. per correct answer)

 

1.             Athena                            a.             Escorted Priam to Achilles.

 

2.             Poseidon                         b.             Borrowed the Bull of Heaven from Dad.

 

3.             Ishtar                              c.             Helped both Odysseus and his son

 

4.             Hermes                      d.             Was the mother of one of Homer’s heroes.

 

5.             Thetis                         e.             Tried to avenge his son, Polyphemus

 

 

Match the work with an identifying characteristic.  (1 pt. per correct answer)

 

1.             Book of Job                    a.             Was recently translated by Seamus Heaney.

2.             Gilgamesh     b.             Does Ian McKellan have more cultural capital than

                                                                                                Al Pacino?

 

3.             The Iliad            c.             Seeks immortality but loses the herb.

 

4.             Beowulf              d.             The poet sings of the hero’s wrath.

 

 

5.             Richard III           e.             Begins with a bet between God and the Devil.

 

 

Multiple Choice (15 pts – 3 pts. each)

 

1.             Which of these qualities apply to the epic?

a.             Must have no known author.

b.             Retells actions of national or cosmic importance.
c.             Must have been written in Greek or Latin originally.

 

2.             Which of these heroes has a goddess for a mother?

a.             Gilgamesh                              b.             Odysseus

c.             Hector

 

3.             Which author accompanied Dante through the Inferno?

a.             St. Augustine                       b.             Homer

c.             Virgil

 

4.             Which of these works dates from stories told during the Early Middle Ages?

a.             Beowulf                 b.             The Divine Comedy           c.             The Aeneid

 

5.             According to Daniel’s presentation, could the Sirens in The Odyssey have been….
a.             monkeys                                b.             monk seals           
c.             Odysseus’ maids

 

 

 

 

Short Answer (15 pts. -- 5 pts each)

1.                    List videos that we have seen or web sites that we have listened to. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2.                     List five characteristics of the epic, based on what we have read for this class.

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.                    List five facts or opinions that you have learned about world literature from your classmates’ presentations or the Power Points at WebCT so far.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Extra Credit (up to 10 points—5 points each): 

 

a.             List up to five ways that your journal or blog has helped you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

b.             List up to five ways that my blog has helped you.

 

 

----------------------

EN 201 – Subjective Exam Essay Prompts (60 pts)

Please answer one of the prompts below.  This is an open-book test, and you may consult your notebook (including prewriting for this exam) as well.  You may also use a dictionary, a thesaurus, and correction fluid.  Be sure to double space this exam, leaving one-inch margins on all sides and numbering each page.  You may use both sides of the paper, however.  Take your time.

1.                  Twentieth-century thinker Joseph Campbell has encouraged us to see ourselves as the heroes of our own lives and our own quests.  How is this viewpoint compatible with the epic’s attitude towards the hero?  How is this viewpoint compatible with that of a contemporary novel like The Penelopiad?  Or that of a contemporary movie?  How is it incompatible?  Discuss up to three heroes from our readings so far.  Consider which tradition each hero and his epic belong to.  Consider the distinction between an epic’s hero and a novel’s protagonist.  (Would you call Penelope the heroine of Atwood’s novel?  Why?  Why not?) To which extent does genre affect depiction of character?  Feel free to bring in ideas from your classmates’ presentations, the excerpts we saw from Campbell’s video and Upstairs, Downstairs, our blogs and/or journals, and class discussion.  Remember that Joseph Campbell’s work did not focus on literature or even world literature but on world mythologies and that Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell at a time when Americans vividly remembered the conflicts surrounding the Vietnam War.

2.                  In the introduction to What Is World Literature?, David Damrosch passes judgment on contemporary critics’ attempts to downplay older works in world literature.   He, in fact, argues:  “All too often, students of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization do indeed define their topics in such a way as to restrict their investigations to just the last five hundred years of human history, or the last hundred years, or even the last few years.” He then goes on to describe this critical trend as “presentism” (italics his), a quality that leads to intellectual superficiality.  Discussing up to three works that we have read so far, argue for or against the importance of reading earlier works of world literature, both Western and Eastern.  Why is it important to read The Ramayana alongside Gilgamesh or The Mahabharata alongside The Iliad?  On the other hand, in order to give readers a stronger sense of world literature’s global qualities, should we emphasize geography and culture over history?  Would it be better to read the excerpts from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana alongside a modern work from India?  Or should we be reading more works from Ancient Greece and Rome?  How can we avoid superficiality in a world literature course?  Feel free to bring in ideas from Joseph Campbell’s video; Michael Wood’s videos (In Search of the Trojan War); the excerpts we saw from Looking for Richard, etc.; your fellow students’ presentations; and class discussion of the epic’s orality and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad.  Consider that EN 201 fulfills one of the requirements for your degree.  Consider that this course’s reading list includes a novel from 2005 and that we began the course by watching two films from the 1990s. 

3.                  Discuss the roles that women and goddesses have played in up to three works that we have read.  Ought we consider goddesses like Ishtar, Athena, Hera, and Thetis women in literature? Ought we consider Grendel’s mother in this category as well?  (And why must Beowulf fight Grendel’s mother and not his brother or father?)  Furthermore, are these women represented fairly? Feel free to bring in ideas from class discussion about The Penelopiad and other reworkings of classic literature as well as from my blog entries.  Consider the portrayal of women in the excerpt of Upstairs, Downstairs that we saw.  Consider the role that class or genre may play in the depiction of women, especially in The Odyssey and The Penelopiad but also in the films that we’ve seen. 

4.  At this point in the semester, all of the works that we’ve been reading are epics (or, in the case of Job,) have been considered epics.  An epic is a long verse narrative about a deed of national or cosmic importance, which a hero, often of divine parentage, accomplishes.  The epic is a prestigious genre: Gilgamesh was written down by a priest, Homer’s epics were taught in the Greek schools, and the emperor Augustus strongly supported Virgil’s writing of The Aeneid, an epic that we won’t be reading.  The epic is often grounded in history, as the search for Troy has revealed, although, as Richard III’s example shows, other genres are grounded in history as well.  In addition, many epics began as tales told to their audiences.  Given these elements, how has beginning with the epic shaped your view of world literature?  Which qualities of literature have been obscured? Which types of characters and experience are being obscured? [Recently literary scholar Margaret Anne Doody has examined the novel’s origins in Greek and Roman literature.  Previous histories of the English-language novel began much later, and Doody links their unwillingness to go back as far as she has to classical scholars’ disdain for the novel.]  Could one write an epic today?  Why?  Why not?  Alternately, can we speak of epic films?  Or is the epic strictly a literary genre?  Why?  Why not?

5. Inspired by his reading of Homer’s epics, the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann trained as an archaeologist and traveled to Turkey and Greece to find the site of Ancient Troy.  The American academic Carl Blegen continued Schliemann’s excavations, and Project Troia, in turn, carries on this task.  To look at another example, even today, The Richard III Society defends the historical king against Shakespeare’s depiction of him, and a statement by this group appears in the program of the Shakespeare Theater’s current production of Richard III.  Why does literature’s grounding in historical fact matter?  Why do literary representations of the past matter?  Should either continue to matter?  Or does the search for the historical Troy or the debate over Richard III get in the way of our appreciating literature? 

6.                  Discuss the roles that power has played in the literature we’ve read and the movies we’ve watched in class.  Do these roles change from genre to genre (epic to novel to film to television program) or from culture to culture?  Who holds power in each of the works we’ve read or watched?  Who does not?  What does power allow one to do?  Also, is there a gap between who is *supposed* to hold power and who actually does?