we've come to the end, and now i'll evaluate.

This semester with Shakespeare has gone by far too quickly, and now it's time for me to evaluate my blog. I will be using the same criteria for my blog as I used in the peer evaluation.

peer evaluation: joanna barker.

I've evaluated Joanna Barker's blog, All The World's a Stage, which focuses on women and Shakespeare.
Listed below are the criteria for our class's blog evaluations, and my comments for each item.

making changes: victorians channeling shakespeare.

The nineteenth century was a time of expansion and development. It was also a time when poets and artists revived medieval and Renaissance ideals. They turned to Arthurian legends, tales of chivalry, and Renaissance masters for inspiration. There were even circles of Victorians who sought through spiritualism to revive ancient rituals and mysticism. In addition to all of these explorations of past cultural ideals and societies, the Victorians also turned to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's works never required a revival because they had never died out since the Elizabethan era, but the Victorians thought that they could raise the Bard to the level of success they thought he had desired during his own time. Because of the many artistic liberties the Victorians took with Shakespeare's work, and because of the ever-changing ideals and inventions of the nineteenth century, they created several interesting interpretations of Shakespeare's plays. The Victorians saw Shakespeare as a conduit for transmitting the new ideals of the upcoming twentieth century. They also saw him as a way to voice drastic changes in society and in the world. 

Through the actress Sarah Bernhardt, Victorian ideals on womanhood were explored and challenged. Because of Shakespeare's unorthodox gender roles in his works, Berhardt was able to channel male characters, her most famous role being that of Hamlet. This unconventional representation of actresses taking on the roles of male characters helped the society of the time see that women's roles inside and outside the home were changing, and that women were capable of all that men were capable of. Shakespeare's works helped promote the New Woman of the Victorian era, and aided in feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Ellen Terry's passion for Shakespeare created a fan following through her many discourses and lectures of her beloved Bard. Terry had a romance with Shakespeare and his works, and encouraged others to have a similar relationship with him. Terry became so involved as a Shakespearean actress that she lived her parts, and got so deep into the characters and the stories that she knew she was serving her lover's cause by playing the parts of such strong female characters.

Charles Kean was a different sort of a Shakespearean actor. He not only played the most prime Shakespearean roles, but he produced the most spectacular of the Bard's plays by creating the scenery, and re-creating the history of the tales. Kean, as the actor-manager of the Princess's Theatre, supplemented Shakespeare's plays with all the missing historical facts that he felt Shakespeare left out due to time restraints. Kean felt that he was fulfilling Shakespeare's mission through this re-creation of history, and through his elaborate, and thoroughly produced, productions of the Elizabethan playwright. 


For the Victorians, Shakespeare proved to be the perfect way to express all the new ideals and the new directions that society was headed at the turn of the twentieth century.

pre-hub.

Over the past few weeks, I have had the chance to research how Shakespeare's works were received and adapted on the Victorian stage. This particular era holds a lot of interest for me as far as literature and art go, so I thought it would be worthwhile to research Shakespeare during the evolving time of the Victorian period.
There were several items of interest I found out while reading up on the actresses Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt, and the actor/manager Charles Kean. I think that I will continue to research Shakespeare appropriations in the Victorian era as I hope to conclude that Shakespeare's works acted as a perfect conduit for the changing social structure as well as the Victorian values. Although I had initially hoped to focus on Victorian revival of ritualism through Shakespeare, I soon realized that I was falling flat with that particular route. So I will pick up where I left off last week with my research this upcoming weekend. I intend to focus on Shakespeare themes in Victorian art, as I think this will give me a good background on Victorian values.

neglecting shakespeare.

Last night I failed to post a blog on Shakespeare. Rather than fulfilling my student obligations, I chose to see/hear Michael Ondaatje read at the Salt Lake City Library. Although this was completely unrelated to Shakespeare, I do feel like it aided in my life-long learning, and I dragged my husband with me, and although he has never read Ondaatje's work, last night prompted him to do so. I plan on buying him Anna's Shadow, from which Ondaatje read from, and I know my hubs will absolutely love it.
Anyway, once again, although I don't feel like Ondaatje and Shakespeare have much in common other than being beautiful poets and writers, I think that what I've learned from this class, as far as social learning and life-long learning go, I was able to implement those techniques into an event that turned out to mean more to just me, as I initially thought my husband would think it was a bore, but because I shared a social learning event with my husband, he is expanding his interests in literature beyond the Beats, and was able to really enjoy the experience. And being able to share an author that I admire and respect with my husband was a wonderful experience in itself.
And maybe, if I keep thinking about it, I will find some common occurrences between these two authors.

the tempest!

So yesterday I noticed that Julie Taymor's The Tempest was playing at the Broadway in Salt Lake, so my husband took me to see it, and it was incredible. Again, incredible.
The movie followed the play to script, except for when Prospera (Helen Mirren) told Miranda how they came to be on the island, they had to add a story so that there was a justifiable reason behind Prospero being Prospera, a woman. But the screenwriters were able to make that bit of dialog sound Shakespearean, so it wasn't as distracting, but still...you knew it wasn't part of the original.
And the best part of the whole movie had to be the spectacle scenes with Ariel. There were many interesting things they did with that character, and I was blown away with the visual effects. At some points in the play, Ariel was shown with a woman's breasts, which was interesting considering how ambiguous a character Ariel has been throughout history.
My husband, who isn't normally a Shakespeare film fan, loved this film. So, if he loved it, maybe you could too.

staging antiquities.

I have been reading "Shakespeare's Victorian Stage" this week, and today I was focusing on a chapter titled "The prince of theatrical antiquaries," which is an allusion to the Shakespearean actor-manager Charles Kean. This man was quite famous in his time, and even now you can find many images of Kean in his Shakespearean costumes. Kean was also largely invested in making Shakespeare on stage as historically authentic as he could. Now, before I read too much of the chapter, I thought I would find that Kean tried to recreate the Elizabethan stage as close to how it was when Shakespeare plays were produced on it, but I of course was wrong in that assumption. Instead I found that Kean wanted to make Shakespeare's plays as accurate to the historical time that they were set in as he could. This involved a lot of money, and a lot of artistic freedom with Shakespeare's works. I find that Kean's goal particularly fascinating because while he was trying to be as authentic to history as he could, he was not showing Shakespeare, also a historical figure, in a very historically accurate light.

Before I get into Kean's productions of Shakespeare, I wanted to just add a little background information on Kean as a person. He was the son of a famous actor, Edmund Kean, and Kean junior just couldn't match up to his father's acting presence or ability. His father even denounced his son since he was such a poor actor. But, that didn't stop Charles Kean. In fact, as the book mentions, mid-Victorians "admired nothing so much as a man who had the courage and resolve to overcome the obstacles which beset him," and being an actor was very much an obstacle for young Charles Kean, so that's what made him famous and what made him stand out, that he kept trying even though he wasn't very good.

After growing up a bit and marrying an actress by the name of Ellen Tree, the both of them went into the business of being theater owners and stage managers. The purchase of the Princess's Theatre is what aided Kean in fulfilling his desires to create plays in an entirely historically accurate way, and after the Theaters Regulation Act of 1843, the Keans could perform Shakespeare without having to gain access and permission before hand. And Charles Kean's pursuit of historical accuracy began right away with the purchase of medieval furniture of high quantities, so much so that the Princess's Theatre was named "Mr Charles Kean's furniture warehouse on Oxford street (27)."

Kean went all out as far as new stage technologies and elaborate settings and scenery, and he was very much questioned for his actions by many critics, but by the time the Princess's Theatre had been open and running for a while, the costs and intricacies of his stage were no longer scrutinized, but were mentioned and praised for being so very accurate. In fact, because of Kean's attention to detail on the stage, many other actor-managers were expected to have their plays at the same level of accuracy as did the Kean's stage.