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Women Edit Shakespeare
- Edited by Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 12 October 2006, pp 136-146
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Summary
Between the years of 1903 and 1913 two remarkable women, Charlotte Endymion Porter and Helen Armstrong Clarke, published three editions of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Before that they had already edited the complete works of both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and founded a literary journal still in existence called Poet-Lore. Throughout their careers they were extraordinarily productive. The Library of Congress catalogue lists sixty-nine titles for Porter and sixty-seven for Clarke.
The publishing careers of these two amazing women began in Philadelphia. In 1875 Charlotte Porter had been one of the graduates of Wells College in Aurora, New York (illustration 4) where she had created scale models of Shakespeare’s stage (illustration 5) and planned to write a series of essays on ‘Staging Shakespeare’s Wit’. She had studied briefly at the Sorbonne and then settled in Philadelphia. There, in 1883, with the encouragement of Horace Howard Furness, she became editor of a new periodical called Shakespeariana (begun by the Shakespeare Society of New York). Among the articles she published in the journal was one on Shakespeare’s music by Helen A. Clarke, a young scholar with a certificate in music from the still all-male University of Pennsylvania. Porter and Clarke formed a life-long friendship.
The two women lived unconventional lives. The best source of information about them is a long account of their friendship written by Porter and published in their journal Poet-Lore after Clarke’s death. The Wells College archive contains not only the early photographs, but also some letters and poems; and the Folger copy of the women’s First Folio Shakespeare has, pasted into A Midsummer Night’s Dream (vol. 8), three fascinating photographs of the two women (illustration 6). One shows them in a study with a reproduction of Shakespeare’s epitaph among the pictures on the wall.
Revenge Tragedy and Elizabeth Cary's Mariam
- Edited by Christopher Cobb, North Carolina State University, M. Thomas Hester, North Carolina State University
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- Book:
- Renaissance Papers 2003
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 28 April 2004, pp 149-166
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Summary
Revenge tragedy flourishes in periods of social, political, and religious change, when the new law challenges the old, and problems emerge to which there are no clear religious or legal solutions. Revenges multiply, and sometimes audiences become sympathetic to revengers trapped in situations which seem to offer no other recourse. The protagonists of Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (1587-89) and Shakespeare's Hamlet (1602) elicit such sympathy. The theatre becomes an arena in which audiences examine ethical problems and perhaps move slowly toward new attitudes. But as change becomes more threatening to society, in the later revenge tragedies the revenger threatens established order and is depicted as a villain. In the struggle between old and new the old almost always wins.
Twentieth-century critics have weighed in with theories of revenge tragedy and its ambiguities. A. C. Bradley, speaking generally, says that the tragedy shows “two sides or aspects which we can neither separate or reconcile.” And Robert Ornstein follows his discussion of the authors of revenge tragedy with the conclusion that “Embodied in their plays is an awareness that familiar ways of life are vanishing and that traditional political and social ideals are losing their relevance to the contemporary scene.” Mary Beth Rose argues that tragedy in general occurs at times of change and “By clearly defining and finally immobilizing the destructive ambiguities of suffering and injustice … tragedy provides an affirmation that a future is possible.”
‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ as a Hallowe’en Play
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 19 October 1972, pp 107-112
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In trying to define the mood and the artistic movement of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, it is provocative to imagine what the season of the setting ought to be. Since much of the action takes place out of doors, the season is important to the realist; and if any symbolic or ritual progress is to be discerned, the season is significant in establishing the tone and in possibly indicating the occasion.
The text of the play itself is not very helpful. 'Birding' is a sport which can be indulged in at any season; and laundry might conceivably be sent to the Thames any time, though certainly spring, summer, and fall are more likely than winter. The reference by Simple (i, i, 211)1 to the use of a Book of Riddles on 'Allhallowmas last' is interesting but inconclusive. And Mistress Page's reference to the fact that Herne the hunter wanders in the winter forest (i, iv, 30) does not necessarily set the season for the current action.
Traditionally The Merry Wives has been thought of as a summer play. William Mark Clark, for example, in 1835 spoke lyrically of the 'sylvan splendour of its enchanting scenes' with special reference to Herne's Oak, immortalized 'fresh and green' for succeeding generations. Charles Cowden Clarke in 1863 refers similarly to the visions conjured up in the play of 'leafy nooks' on the Thames, with 'barges lapsing on its tranquil tide'. John Middleton Murry finds the play' redolent of early summer', with 'the air . . . full of May or June'.