The • Vpstart • Cr.Ow
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Vol. XV THE • VPSTART • CR.OW Editor James Andreas Clemson University Founding Editor William Bennett The University of Tennessee at Martin Associate Editors Michael Cohen Murray State University Herbert Coursen Bowdoin College Charles Frey The University of Washington Marjorie Garber Harvard University Walter Haden The University of Tennessee at Martin Maurice Hunt Baylor University Richard Levin The University of California, Davis John McDaniel Middle Tennessee State University Peter Pauls The University of Winnipeg Jeanne Roberts American University Production Editors Tharon Howard and Irfan Tak Clemson University Editorial Assistants Kim Bell, Laurie Brown, Pearl Parker, Judy Payne, Heather Pecoraro, and Jeannie Sullivan Copyright 1995 Clemson University All Rights Reserved Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile Vol. XV About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong. - T. S. Eliot What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions. -Walter Pater The problems (of the arts) are always indefinite, the results are always debatable, and the final approval always uncertain. -Paul Valery Essays chosen for publication do not necessarily represent opin ions of the editor, associate editors, or schools with which any contributor is associated. The published essays represent a diver sity of approaches and opinions which we hope will stimulate interest and further scholarship. Subscription Information Two issues- $12 Institutions and Libraries, same rate as individuals- $12 two issues Submission of Manuscripts Essays submitted for publication should not exceed fifteen to twenty double spaced typed pages, including notes. Follow journal format for notes. Quotations should be single spaced in typescript. When submitting manuscripts, send two copies-the original and one xeroxed copy-and SASE. Allow six months for readers. If at all possible, along with hard copy, please also submit floppy disk. Mail to James Andreas, Editor, Upstart Crow, Department of English, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634-1503. ii Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile Vol. XV Contents Lear in the Country Near Dover.......................... 1 by Peter Cummings Shakespeare on Film and Television ...................... 4 by H.R. Coursen Mother's Word and The Comedy of Errors: Notes Toward a Constitution of Shakespearean Patriarchy .............. 17 by Douglas Green The Psychology of Primacy and Recency Effects Upon Audience Response in Twelfth Night . ................... 26 by James Lake Measure for Measure and Law Reform in 1604 ............. 35 by Alan Powers Chaucer in Shakespeare: The Case of The Nun's Priest's Tale and Troilus and Cressida . .................. 48 by Lewis Walker Anti-Theatricalism and Revolutionary Desire in Hamlet ....... 61 by Grace Tiffany "The Heart of the Mystery": Emblematic Revelation in the Hamlet Play Scene . 75 by Walter L. Barker Othello's Bianca: Climbing Out of the Bed of Patriarchy ....... 99 by Nina Rulon-Miller Suppressed Design in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Toward Envisioning the Lost "First Folio" . ................. 115 by Roy Neil Graves Montague or Capulet? Romeo and Juliet: III. i. 84 ............. 136 by Robert W. Witt iii Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile Vol. XV William Kemp as "Upstart Crow" ....................... 140 by Winifred L. Frazer The "Upstart Crow" Reclawed: Was it Kemp, Wilson, Allyn, or Shakespeare? ..................... 143 by Robert F. Fleissner "For There Is an Upstart Crow" ..................... 150 by D. Allen Carroll The 1995 Alabama Shakespeare Festival Production of Henry VI, Part 1 ...................... 154 by Craig Barrow iv Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile Vol. XV Lear in the Country Near Dover by Peter Cummings "You are a spirit, I know; when did you die?" King Lear, IV. vii. 48 Wind in the whitethorn and the knobby scrub whines like a badger cub snagged in the hedge. Low scudding clouds coil up and out to sea like the dark project of my vanity. No, stay. I dry my eyes of tears and rain, lest shame for anger be a new excess. Slow dawn is creeping through the stubble corn the little ones, the little ones, to me. She was my least; she was my last pure joy. Sweet face, Cordelia .... I do attend, most grave and eyeless sir. I know you well; you are my Gloucester; we are kin in grief and rage for children. More, we were in sin and wrong past seeing we could fail, and so we wandered heartless through our days. But see, look there, the wind abates its press, and morning strikes a ray against the night, and we'll be warm. Must I remember? It must be said at last; I was misled by power and by awe. Who cared what bond we broke or what convention we transgressed? It was enough that what we spoke was law, what we desired supplied, what dreamed of, got. So we assumed as fiat that our strength was fast as earth, as long as time itself, and now I am grown old. Ha-ha! you parrot, think you to bandy with a jest? How's that? He was just here, the silly ape. He must be put down truant in the master's roll, 1 Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile Vol. XV The Upstart Crow lo, even without the walls. We're in the school of nature now, and she's a stern demand. Call Fool again, I pray. I am a proof of time and tears, of eat or be the food of history ... and still I would be free from this to see her once again at last, a while released from that last debt I owe, a weak and weary breath given up for all. What meant the sway and size without her love? What scent of smoke? The foot-tramp of marching tremors the earth and makes me recollect. Pull down that vanity, I say, pull down! What have I wrought? My powers now could help, had I the way or will to muster troops. Call in the mounted pikesmen! Cook the pitch! Curdle the blood with warhoops, flare the nostrils with the lust of the charge! Now Gloucester, hear. Lift your keener sense, and smell me out the enemy, which way he mires the ground with sin and death. It is past all remorse that I can feel or force. This sorrow fails to heal my grief or wash away the stain of my ingratitude for her dear life, who sought alone to check my angry will. I shall be gentle, tame, and meek; I will do anything to have her in my eye, to ask her on my knees what she forgives, and what she asks as penance or as pay for debts against the heart. Old Gloucester, sir, your ·wisdom was my counsel many years; now counsel me, in ruin and in age- upwards of yours-that now I feel full well. 2 Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile Vol. XV Lear in the Country Near Dover He's here again? My boy, come sing a song to cheer my mind, a merry ballad verse. "Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full of rye ...." Gone again? Tell me, my wiser mind, how best to seek, how best to find what now is all my life, that dearest daughter whom my sin outcast with nothing, and with no one of her own. I will be patient .... Yes, that is the thing, there is no other way, but to await how power will seek out the former power, and come to where we are, without our stir. We have some voice as long as breath abides, and she will be my constant suit and term, in every strategem they might devise to wrest from me what yet they might conceive. I'll yield it all for her. You are a spirit ... come boy, be well; I'll keep your courage up. All pain subsides in time. We learn to brace our sides against the terrors of our hearts, as to that mindless battery of the wind. No, stay! She waits for us, and you must cheer her temper, which I know must turn awry, discordant with my abuses, with my wrath. In boy, go first. See, here she comes, look there! You gods, pray fool me not so much to think I have much time. None to squander, or repeal. 0 every syllable she speaks, a world of stunning grace come down upon my head, here, brightest angel of my bursting heart! Hobart and William Smith Colleges 3 Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile Vol. XV Shakespeare on Film and Television by H. R. Coursen This commentary, delivered at the Clemson Shakespeare Fes tival in March of 1995, accompanied a sequence of snippets from several productions: the strangling of Desdemona by Othello in the 1922 silent film with Emil Jannings; the transformation of Bottom (James Cagney) in the 1935 Reinhardt/Dieterle Midsum mer Night's Dream; the entrance of Romeo (Leslie Howard) into the Capulet courtyard in the 1936 Thalberg/Cukor Romeo and Juliet; the transition from the oration of Brutus (James Mason) to that of Antony (Marlon Brando) in the 1953 Houseman/Mankiewicz Julius Caesar; three television sequences: the opening of Trevor Nunn's 1974 Antony and Cleopatra (with Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson), the condemnation of Bushy and Green by Bolingbroke (Jon Finch) in David Giles' 1979 Richard II, and the transition from the first scene in King Lear to Edmund (Michael Kitchen) in Jonathan Miller's 1984 production for BBC-TV; two contrasting versions of Lear and Cordelia going off to prison in V. iii (the Kozintsev and Brook films); two contrasting Agincourts (the Olivier and the Branagh films); and the rejection of Falstaff in Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight.