Paper Session 4

That was a nice little lunch break, and now we reconvene for the fourth paper session of the conference, which will be moderated by Mary Baldwin (and St. Lawrence University, gotta get my shout out to the 315 in there) Emeritus Dr. Tom Berger.

Ann Thompson: "Know you this ring?"

A ring may take up little space on the finger, but they occupy great symbolic spaces. Thomson notes that Hamlet produces his father's signet ring to save his own life, the resolution of All's Well that Ends Well being brought about by the presence of the ring, and others. She has provided a handout (which I'm not taking the time to read right now) with examples of the use of rings in various early modern play texts.

Similarly to the presence created by skulls that Dr. Paster mentioned in her keynote, rings are a presence of an other. They establish identity and authority, and are symbols of promises.

Stage rings, of course, need to be larger than rings most wear in life. Even on the Blackfriars stage, the rings that the presenters wear are barely visible. This is a noteworthy staging issue as the rings can be so important in the texts.

Jeanne Roberts: The Female Shakespeare

If Cavendish is right, and Shakespeare does indeed become every character he writes, this same verisimilitude carries over to the women. The schism between critics who hold Merry Wives of Windsor in high regard and audiences (whom Roberts suggests may have been predominantly female) is thus due to differing perspectives: male critics see the "violence" visited on Falstaff; audiences see the intelligent and capable female characters.

Roberts poses the question of an inversion of Merry Wives into Merry Husbands. Would male chicanery visited upon a female Falstaff be more pallatteable to male critics? I think (and Roberts seems to suggest) the answer is probably not. She turns to examples of Cavendish's work; Shakespeare can imagine women rejecting men and deceiving their husbands, but Cavendish seems to not be able to imagine an ending to marriage that leaves women in a position of strength. "Perhaps it takes a man" to envision women finding a "happy" place within marriage.

Roberts concludes that Shakespeare had to have a hermaphroditic mind to envision female protagonists and villains who are recognizeable "as real to audiences of later times."

And then came the bear, and Roberts was deprived of her paper.

Stephen Booth: "A" Should Follow, But "O" Does

Shakespeare is as alike in microcosm as he is at large. "He delighted in making and breaking promises to the audience." The example of King Lear and its ending that deviates from the well known story is immediately cited, along with Loves Labor's Lost, which does not end in the expected outcome of the wooing: "Jack hath not Jill," and "a twelvemonth and a day is too long for a play." Viola's "do not embrace me" speech at the end of Twelfth Night is offered as another example.

A microcosmic example of this is offered in Much Ado about nothing 1.3.27 "I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his _____. Booth claims that the missing word, in keeping with the metaphor (rose and hedge place canker in the sense of a blight of leaves) would be "garden." Of course the actual concluding word to this line is "grace."

Dr. Booth presents other examples, but I couldn't capture them all here. Apparently terrified of the bear, he concluded before the two minute warning.

Evelyn Tribble: Writing for Boys

Boys on the early modern stage apparently played boys into their late teens when they attended university. Tribble argues that, by the time boys played the "weighty female roles" they were highly skilled actors. She suggests three aspects of enskillment that would bring the boys to the point where they were able to play roles such as Cleopatra.

The apprentice system was a far reaching system based on the London livery system. They could legally bind apprentices even if the training was unrelated to the particular guild. Early two stage models of skilled/unskilled apprentices are flawed: we cannot isolate a single element of the system and expect to understand it. "One can embed a novice who has social skills but not computational skills in a system," and they can learn the computational skills necessary by imitation without understanding exactly what they are doing. Thus an apprentice does not need to be "skilled" to perform important duties with skill. Contemporary apprentices learn more than just the technical skills required to perform a task, but also the social and philosophical skills necessary to perform the task. "Skill is primarily social," and is obtained in a system that "scaffolds" behavior to guide them to the steps that are just beyond their cognitive reach. Thus the apprentice receives aid in practicing the skills that are cognitively beyond their reach.

Young apprentices (boys playing boys) are almost always accompanied by adults, and Tribble argues that certain textual cues ("Speak you," "come boy," "go boy") would assist the young apprentice in gaining the basic skills necessary for an actor at an early age before they would be asked to hold their own in a more independent female role. Placing boys in dumb shows teaches them the basics of situational awareness and learning to enter; accompanied with prompting cues that beg a question serves in the training of these boys.

The role of Arthur in King John was apparently re-written from the source for a younger boy, and Tribble sees certain scaffolding devices in play, but the bear has now deprived her of her paper, and so we'll have to email her (or read her book) to find out what those are.

George Watson Williams: Reading Lady Macbeth's Line

The line in question is Lady Macbeth's "I pray you speak not" addressed to Ross at the banquet following the disappearance of Banquo's ghost. Williams cites the ASC performance where the line was not addressed to Ross, but to Macbeth, which he found "unfamiliar and startling." A reading which only first manifested in the final dress rehearsal.

Williams "cannot honestly say that punctation or lineation in the folio" supports a division of the line in this way. Williams cites Booth's suggestion that there was no evidence that Shakespeare intended that reading of the line, but also that there was no evidence that he didn't. Williams goes on to suggest that there are two readings of Lady Macbeth's swoon at the revelation of the murders. We are used to seeing the swoon as a device to draw attention from Macbeth (who is now being interrogated), but it might also be genuine (as it was in the recent University Wits production directed by Glen Schudel). There are intriguing parallels between the two.

If the act 2 swoon is contrived, than perhaps in act 3 she takes a more active role in "taking control of the disaster that th banquet has become." By asserting her will directly over her husbands, she furthers the inversions of the world of the play.

James Keegan: "Change Places": Playing King Lear with the Blackfriars Audience

Keegan seeks to examine three key moments of audience contact that can be found in King Lear using early modern staging practices versus a more traditional proscenium staging. Keegan first presents Lear as may be done in a proscenium environment. This may be the only time in the history of the Blackfriars that the lights have been turned off in the audience while someone is performing. We're making all kinds of history here today. The proscenium result is entirely predictable, and I suspect will serve as an excellent control for the original practices approach that will follow.

Of course the ASC/OP approach is far more engaging to the audience. Keegan, as he performed the role, engages the audience directly. The performance is far more powerful the second time around, but not only because of the audience contact, but also because Keegan is trying harder. Well... this is theatre, not rocket science, after all.

Keegan asserts the proscenium setting forces Lear to deliver the line to Gloucester. The "that" of the "I pardon that man's life" is thus also directed toward Gloucester. "Making an audience member guilty of adultery has comic possibilities," citing that men he selected were sometimes playfully hit by a spouse or significant other, were personally amused, or sometimes gave Keegan a look that "thought [he] had hit a nerve."

Similarly, Keegan is in a proscenium environment forced to wipe his hand on Gloucester, but using the ASC staging practices, he is able to wipe his hand on an audience member. The ensuing line about mortality provides another comic moment, and playfully brings to mind the mortality of everyone in the audience.

Herein the bear comes to escort Keegan off, and Keegan apologizes for never having heard the thunder. He was Lear, after all.

Well that was a fantastic paper session. Given the caliber of the scholars we saw this time around, I think they can be forgiven for going a little bit over their time. I certainly found these papers to be some of the best I've heard so far (I'm saying that a lot today), but we have a lot of time left to go at the conference for others to top it. Next up is a staging session, and I'll be back around quarter after three with an update on that. Go take a moment to powder your noses until then.