Minded Like the Weather

Shakespeare Theatre productions that are successful, such as Much Ado and As You Like It, are striking in that they regularly provoke new insights into familiar characters (as with Kelly McGillis's Beatrice) or expand the overall suggestiveness and scope of the play itself (as with the bittersweet atmosphere in Arden). And the triumphs, such as Measure for Measure, last season's King Lear, or the 1989-90 season's Twelfth Night, often strike a viewer as the definitive production of a play, the one that you will find yourself holding up as the standard for all subsequent productions you may see. This season was a real gift to the Washington community, and with the move to the new Lansburgh building, Michael Kahn and The Shakespeare Theatre have truly come into their own. In addition to providing high-quality theatrical productions, The Shakespeare Theatre has been exemplary in its commitment to public service, and, through its many outreach and special education programs, it continues to expand and diversify the classical theater audience in Washington. The Shakespeare Theatre's productions during the last two years have rivalled and in some cases surpassed anything that I have seen in New York or Stratford, Ontario. And although I can't help but miss those wooden galleries at the old Folger theater, or the unicorn that bears a scroll reading All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players painted on the ceiling, it is thrilling to see The Shakespeare Theatre at long last established in a facility that adequately reflects its stature as one of the principal Shakespeare companies in the country.

It is my great pleasure to introduce this special issue in honor of Gail Kern Paster, who provided field-shaping leadership of Shakespeare Quarterly and its home institution the Folger Shakespeare Library, and whose scholarly work has given us a powerful language and methodology for thinking about the relation between mind, body, and environment in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I am grateful to Bruce R. Smith, Evelyn Tribble, Paul Yachnin, and Julian Yates for accepting my invitation to contribute to this issue and for producing a set of vivid, imaginative essays that demonstrate the range and depth of Gail’s influence. Most broadly, the aim of Gail’s work is (as she puts it near the beginning of Humoring the Body) “to look for traces of a historical phenomenology in the language of affect in early modern drama in order that readers of that drama and other texts of the period may begin to recover some of the historical particularity of early modern emotional self-experience.”1 It is a testament to the success of this project that, in reading a sentence like the one I have just quoted, we now barely register its staggering ambition. Gail’s scholarship has made the excavation of affect in a distant historical moment—the recovery of “lived practices of early modern cosmology” (20) and the assessment of Shakespeare’s “idiosyncratic understanding of contemporary psychophysiology” in relation to the “intellectual framework of his cultural moment” (23)—not only a locally productive form of cultural archaeology, but a pervasive, vital methodology for the interpretation of early modern literature in relation to our own historical moment and our own sense of ourselves. As Gail would be the first to point out, her scholarship has not accomplished this feat on its own; rather, it has flourished in sustained dialogue with a vast array of historians and theorists of the emotions, the body, and the theater who have inspired her and been inspired by her. At once skeptical and receptive in its approach to the texts it encounters, Gail’s work is consistently generative to those who encounter it. The dialogic quality of her scholarship, and its continuing ability to push early modern studies in new directions, is everywhere on display in this issue’s four essays: from Bruce Smith’s listening for the sound of early modern “complexion,” to Lyn Tribble’s description of the atmospherics of magic circles, to Paul Yachnin’s anatomy of bodily shame in the Sonnets, to Julian Yates’s discussion of the intersection between affect and apocalypse in King Lear and some of its distant descendants.

In 2008, Singapore audiences were treated to two large-scale King Lear productions: the internationally acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company's production, directed by Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellen in the lead role, and Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia's The King Lear Project: A Trilogy. The two productions are drastically different in that the former is a production of King Lear proper, while the latter is an experimental project that uses Lear as a frame to explore, discover and critique the nature of stagecraft and audience perception through a series of notable Lear essays. The King Lear Project is not an adaptation of Lear, but a three-night performance about the play. Ho and Borgia's work questions if it is possible to stage Lear, and if there is in fact a ‘right’ and ‘proper’ way to do so. For local audiences, these questions are immensely provocative for several reasons, especially since the Nunn–McKellen Lear has since been declared – by way of critical reviews – the definitive King Lear. The metatheatricality of the Lear Project implicates audience members and demands an understanding from them through active engagement that is otherwise not required in conventional productions. Ho and Borgia's assumptions of audience perception are strikingly accurate and telling, and they consider the complex negotiations between literary and theatrical experiences, or what Ho calls ‘Word and Flesh’. By turning to the history and the processes of staging what is believed to be Shakespeare's most ‘unstageable’ tragedy, the Lear Project also questions the future of Shakespeare's modern theatre. This dossier, which includes an in-depth review of the play, a commentary by an actor in the play, and an interview with the author/director of the Lear Project, hopes to construct a critical and insightful understanding of the making and reception of this original and ambitious piece of work.

According to traditional histories of European medicine, ideas of how blood circulates around the body changed radically in the first half of the seventeenth century with the publication of William Harvey's De Motu Cordis (1628). However, a number of English vernacular texts predated Harvey's magnum opus, including Nicholas Gyer's The English Phlebotomy (1592), Helkiah Crooke's Mikrokosmographia (1615), and Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Mind (1601), which focused on the circulation and balancing of sanguine spirits and passions, and further evidence of cultural conceptions of the circularity of bodily functions in early modern drama. This chapter argues that there was a central congruity between the passions and the humoral body fluids in early modern scientific thought, and that ideas of circular sanguinity were in fact widespread in medical as well as in cultural conceptions of the body before the introduction of Harvey's thesis. It draws on William Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear and early modern English medical texts, as a means of conceptualizing ideas of animacy, spirit, and circulation in theories of early modern blood.

Emotions play a very vital role in human life. Emotions originate in human brain due to biological, neurological and psychological effects and influence our behavior and decision-making. This study explores the effect of environment on human emotions and behavior using questionnaire data and by applying multi-output regression. Situation based script questionnaires have been prepared to collect the responses from the participants. Questionnaires collect the demographic information, Age group, gender, and their current work in the hand at the time of responding the questions. For every question, participants have to choose one of the suitable emotions classes out of the five classes. After collecting the responses from 95 participants on five emotional classes, analysis has been conducted using three techniques i.e. descriptive analysis, single class using support vector machine and multiple classes using multi regression algorithm. Experiment results of the proposed system achieved 80% accuracy in SVM for a single class. In multi classes, results compare with different classes like emotions class with environment, emotions with age and with demographic data for multi-output regression, random forest and decision tree classifiers. Experimental results show that the proposed system performs well as compared to the entire existing system available in literature.

This chapter contextualizes Shakespeare’s theater in relation to the decline of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism in England and beyond during the early modern period. The exploitation of lower-class people and the accumulation of capital that occurred at that time are clearly seen in Shakespeare’s work, including in his many representations of class tension and in the dramatization and interrogation of new forms of exploitative economic behavior that capitalism encouraged and disseminated. After providing an account of how Shakespeare became an early capitalist himself and how the London theater of his day embodied the transition between a medieval economy (feudal patronage) and an early capitalist (the joint-stock company), the chapter then focuses on the representation of long-distance commerce and class conflict in readings of The Comedy of Errors, King Lear, and 2 Henry VI. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors provides an example of how a dramatic plot—the movement of characters through the imaginary world of a play—is inflected by the expansion of transnational trade and shaped by the logic of commercial exchange. In both King Lear and 2 Henry VI, Shakespeare uses the past to provoke thought about class struggle, the suffering of commoners, and the potential for lower-class resistance to Elizabethan and Jacobean rulers in England.

Reviewed by: William Shakespeare’s King Lear by William Shakespeare Patrick Maley and Richard Halpern WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Sam Gold. The Cort Theatre, New York City. May 11, 2019. The term “gender-blind casting” is always something of a misnomer, and never more so than in Sam Gold’s King Lear. There was nothing “blind” about it; Glenda Jackson’s gender was precisely the point—a banked-on novelty if not quite a gimmick. The part of Lear is one that few women actors have thus far chosen to take on. And yet there’s a way in which the scarcity of female Lears is puzzling. Advanced age has a way of softening binary gender distinctions anyway. Once the flow of sex hormones slows to a trickle, old men can sprout breasts and old women facial hair. Men’s voices grow higher and women’s, sometimes, lower. Lear is convinced he’s possessed of a womb at one point, and the aging Falstaff is replete with maternal qualities. Shakespearean theater made full use of the ambiguities of the prepubertal state, casting young boys as grown women. So why not take equal advantage of the post andro- and menopausal? Admirably if somewhat programmatically diverse casting was a trademark of Gold’s production. Female Lear and Gloucester? Check. Black Kent, Albany and Burgundy? Check. Latinx Edgar and Edmund? Check. (Edgar spoke his lines in Spanish at one point.) Deaf actor to play Cornwall, complete with servant who signed for him and translated his signings back to English? Check. (Russell Harvard’s Cornwall was a particularly compelling performance.) In Gold’s view, the gods may kill us for their sport, but they’re apparently woke as well. Gold’s impulse toward heterogeneity extended less compellingly to dialect. Cordelia inexplicably spoke with an American, Goneril with an English, and Regan with an Irish accent. Perhaps these three sisters were sent to different boarding schools. For the most part, the play’s diverse casting worked well and was also thematically appropriate. Lear is King of Britain, not of England. And the disunity of Britain was a burnng issue for King James I when Shakespeare penned his play. Casting an Irish actress as Regan and clothing Cornwall in kilts reminded us of that. And this is a play more generally about the dangers of division, after all— dangers that haunt contemporary America as well. The Trump-y resonance of Gloucester’s line “’Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind” provoked a collective shudder in the audience. The casting of Cornwall and Oswald also brought out important, related questions of social communication and its breakdown. When Cornwall’s servant balked at enucleating Gloucester, he also stopped translating, and so there was a period in which he and Cornwall both signed furiously with no explanation for the audience. In the context of Gloucester’s imminent loss of sight, this was powerful. On the question of talent, casting was uneven. Unfortunately, on the night I saw the performance an understudy, Therese Barbato, subbed for Ruth Wilson in her duel casting as both Cordelia and the Fool. Barbato gamely played a somewhat Chaplain-like Fool with effective notes of menace but fell flat as a pancake in the part of Cordelia, especially in the play’s first, crucial scene. Pedro Pascal was an exuberant, Vice-like Edmund but Sean Carvajal proved strictly meh as Edgar. And then there’s the all-important question of Glenda Jackson, which will require some setting up before I address it. First, though, some other matters. Goneril and Regan were made into more than the brittle masks of hypocrisy they can sometimes be reduced to, and this was refreshing. Elizabeth Marvel as Goneril was anguished at betraying her father—but did it—and lusty in the presence of Edmund (the two actually had brief, comic intercourse on stage). Aisling O’Sullivan was more problematic as Regan. She teetered on the edge of hysteria throughout, and her delivery was consequently so choked as at times to be almost indecipherable (though I suppose this fact fits into the larger motif of miscommunication). The [End Page 81] Click...

From the end of World War II through the late 20th century, the Shakespearean vision of apocalypse—of King Lear as harbinger of the Holocaust—predominated in intellectual culture. Whereas postwar critics could speak of “Shakespeare our contemporary,” the 21st century has carried us beyond the world depicted in his drama. Drawing vocabulary from Marxist literary historian, Raymond Williams, this essay offers an epochal analysis of Shakespeare’s early modernism, drawing contrasts with Emily St. John Mandel’s postmodernism. Shakespeare’s Lear and Mandel’s Station Eleven both depict world-shattering catastrophe, though through different literary-cultural lenses. Writing as an early-modernist, Shakespeare continues to mirror aspects of our current lifeworld. But he could not anticipate the technocultural developments that have reinvented the structures and machinery of capitalism, communication, transportation, information, and energy supply, and how these have reshaped and enhanced the embodied human subject. For late 20th century readers, Shakespeare’s Lear prefigures the terrors of Auschwitz and nuclear Armageddon. But the play fails to envision the biological and technoscientific forces that have transformed us in the 21st century, carrying our species into realms of the posthuman. As cyborg assemblages, our lives are electrified and “plugged in” to a global energy grid. And, as a biological corollary to the cyborg, the human body has been reconceived as an “interspecies” organism, “a transversal entity, fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations” (Braidotti 193). Hence, King Lear fails to anticipate our current lifeworld in its advanced technologies, bodily enhancements, and emerging crises. A viral pandemic—Mandel’s fictive version as well as our own COVID-19—gives the proof.

Reviewed by: Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company Michael Flachmann (bio) Tim Fitzpatrick . Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiv + 314. $124.95. As its title implies, Tim Fitzpatrick's compendious Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance offers a detailed analysis of the intricate relationship between Renaissance playwrights and the semiotics of received spatial conventions in theaters like the Globe, the Rose, the Red Bull, the Fortune, and the Cockpit. Building on the work of such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Alan Dessen, Leslie Thompson, Mariko Ichikawa, Bernard Beckerman, and others, the author argues convincingly that most early modern stages had two double doors, each approximately six feet wide, that opened onto the stage and hinged back against the tiring house wall. He posits further that instead of a third door, assumed by some scholars to be centrally located, most of these theaters had a concealment space upstage center, cloaked by a curtain, in which characters could hide temporarily, but without access to and from the tiring house. Linking his conclusions to an exhaustive survey of over fifty playscripts ranging from Macbeth and King Lear through Cupid's Whirligig, Hengist King of Kent, The Battle of Alcazar, and A Knack to Know an Honest Man, he moves smoothly through three sequential subdivisions: "Onstage and Offstage Resources in Early Modern Performance," "Establishing a Sense of Place and Fictional World," and the somewhat inelegantly titled "A Spatially-Based Stage Management and Meaning-Making System." Based on what Fitzpatrick calls a "triangular division of the fictional world" (195), each theatrical moment is split into three separate areas: "here," "outwards," and "inwards." That is, the stage represents where the action is currently taking place; the first of the two doors usually leads to the outside world; and the other door generally ushers characters into an interior locus such as a study, bedroom, council chamber, or similarly cloistered environment. Although the author makes concessions based on the extent to which rapid changes of location depend on an audience's ability to "wipe and reset" the spatial connotations of the stage (235), he proceeds to identify the "outwards" and [End Page 241] "inwards" binary doors with a number of intriguing symbolic correspondences. Using, for example, Viola's "Then westward-ho!" in Twelfth Night (3.1.134) and Celia's "West of this place" in As You Like It (4.3.78), Fitzpatrick identifies the stage-left door, which usually leads outward, with fictional west, while the stage-right door points inward toward the east, where "Juliet is the sun" (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.3).1 Similarly, the stage-left "outward" door is most often identified with stereotypical male activity (going off to war, for example), while the stage-right "inward" door, leading frequently to interior domestic spaces, is usually aligned with females. Likewise, he provides evidence that the stage-left door would have reminded audiences of the medieval Hellmouth, while the stage-right door was associated with St. Peter's gate and Heaven ("the elect on the right hand, and the damned, cast into 'outer darkness,' on the left"), thereby identifying the stage-right door with the "high status" locus of "authority, power, and royalty" (222) and designating the stage-left door as the lower-status entrance and exit used more frequently in comic situations. Sequestered oddly in an appendix, Fitzpatrick's most persuasive point is that "early modern playwrights, actors, and audiences shared a sophisticated sense of space and place in performance" (247). In other words, he postulates that the foregoing staging conventions were well known to the authors of these plays (who wrote their scripts based on this shared global shorthand), but also to the actors (who instinctively knew which entrances and exits to use according to their characters' status in the plays and whether they were making an "inward" or "outward" journey from the "place in the middle") and the audiences (who had been tutored by dramaturgical tradition to recognize and decode such signifiers within their theatrical experiences). Especially interesting are the author's contentions about the vast size of most early modern stages: the Fortune, for...

<i>Thinking through Place on the Early Modern English Stage</i>. Andrew Bozio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+213.

This essay explores the materiality of air in three forms: Global Winds, Embodied Breath and Nothing. Each of these three representations appears in different source texts, including Shakespeare's King Lear, early modern scientific writings, cartography, meteorology and classical philosophy. Searching for places in which invisible air pushes back against human perceptions and conception, the essay explores what air has to offer early modern ecocritics.

The Earls of Derby and the Early Modern Performance Culture of North-West England Elspeth Graham This issue of Shakespeare Bulletin is concerned with the 3rd to 7th Earls of Derby, their patronage roles, and other involvements in performance cultures in the early modern period. This forms one central strand of research into the early modern theatrical history of the small town of Prescot (now in Liverpool City Region's Borough of Knowsley; formerly in south Lancashire). It is this history, and the connections between Knowsley and Shakespearean theatre which it evidences, that inform the current Shakespeare North Playhouse Project, a major, heritage-based, urban regeneration initiative that has been developing for over a decade and which is now coming to fruition. The project commemorates Knowsley's early modern theatrical heritage by building the Shakespeare North Playhouse, a replica of Inigo Jones's/John Webbs's Cockpit-in-Court theatre enclosed in a modern wraparound building housing community and education activities, and surrounded by a performance garden. Construction of the Playhouse began in 2019 and it will open in 2022 with a program of retained and associated companies performing both Shakespeare's plays and other forms of drama in the Cockpit-in-Court theatre, as well as educational programs based in the surrounding modern building but extending into the wider community and its schools, colleges, and universities. The project overall takes its impetus from knowledge of the littlerecognized—and perhaps surprising—level of Knowsley's Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic activity and interests. Retrieval of historical understanding of theatrical activity in Knowsley has, over recent decades, revealed two centrally-intertwined stories. There is, firstly, that of the Lancashire-based Earls of Derby: courtiers, local magnates and theatrical patrons, one of whose major residences, Knowsley Hall, bordered the [End Page 311] town of Prescot (as it still does today, as the Merseyside home of the 19th Earl and Countess of Derby). Then, secondly, there is the history of the "play howse," "lusorium," or "theatrum" in Prescot itself—the earliest known Elizabethan, purpose-built playhouse outside London. The intersection of these two narrative strands also brings north west England, as a specific regional locality, into dialogue with the royal courts of the period and London as England's burgeoning metropolis, embodying national concerns and cultures. A similar dialogue between region and metropolis also relates to our contemporary world and the Shakespeare North project. While the significance of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Earls of Derby, for whom dramatic patronage was, as Sally-Beth MacLean has put it, "a family tradition," has been relatively well established in the past, recent research has enriched, extended, and reconfigured perception of their roles (MacLean, "Family"; Manley and MacLean). Such research informs the articles included in this issue. The story of the Prescot playhouse is perhaps less generally-recognized than that of the Earls of Derby. But it has been known since the 1950s, when the local historian, F. A. Bailey, brought its existence to light, that a purpose-built theatre existed from the 1590s to the early 1600s in the small (both today and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) town of Prescot (Bailey, "Playhouse"). While David George, both in his work as editor of the Lancashire volume of Records of Early English Drama, and in a separate essay, has directly considered the significance of this early theatre, and others have mentioned the Prescot playhouse in passing, little dedicated research into its existence, other than that related to the Shakespeare North project, has been published (REED. Lancashire; George, "Playhouse"; Graham and Tyler). Knowledge of the existence of this Prescot playhouse derives largely from town records: the Prescot Court Leet records; the accounts of its Grammar School; and some miscellaneous letters and notes. And, since a particular feature of Prescot's history was (and still is) its relationship to King's College, Cambridge—as the town's advowson was held by the College—further information is found in its archives. (Henry VI had gifted the Manor and Rectory of Prescot to King's College as part of its endowment in 1447, so that the town was under the College's governance and paid rents to it both in...

Journal Article Music in King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Get access F. W. Sternfeld F. W. Sternfeld Faculty of Music, University of Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 14, Issue 4, Autumn 1963, Pages 486–487, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868203 Published: 01 October 1963

Contents: Preface Introduction: the emergence of discourses: early modern friendship, Daniel T. Lochman and Maritere Lopez Part I Conventional Discourses Re-Imagined: Bound by likeness: Vives and Erasmus on marriage and friendship, Constance M. Furey Triangulating humanist friendship: More, Giles, Erasmus and the making of the Utopia, Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski Friendship's passion: love-fellowship in Sidney's New Arcadia, Daniel T. Lochman. Part II Alternative Discourses: Friendship in the Margins: Guzman de Alfarache's 'other self': the limits of friendship in Spanish picaresque fiction, Donald Gilbert-Santamaria The courtesan's gift: reciprocity and friendship in the letters of Camilla Pisana and Tullia D'Aragona, Maritere Lopez The 'single lyfe' of Isabella Whitney: love, friendship and the single woman writer, Allison Johnson 'Friendship multiplyed': Royalist and Republican friendship in Katherine Philips's coterie, Penelope Anderson. Part III Friendship in Ethics and Politics: 'My foule, faulce brest': friendship and betrayal in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, Sheila T. Cavanagh The friendship of the wicked in Novella 12 of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, Marc D. Schachter 'To plainness is honour bound': deceptive friendship in King Lear, Wendy Olmstead Politics and friendship in William Cartwright's The Lady-Errant, Christopher Marlow Milton against servitude: classical friendship, tyranny, and the law of nature, Gregory Chaplin From civic friendship to communities of believers: Anabaptist challenges to Lutheran and Calvinist discourses, Thomas Heilke Afterword, Lorna Hutson Works cited Index.

The portrayal of emotions by virtual characters is crucial in virtual reality (VR) communication. Effective communication in VR relies on a shared understanding, which is significantly enhanced when virtual characters authentically express emotions that align with their spoken words. While human emotions are often conveyed through facial expressions, existing facial animation techniques have mainly focused on lip-syncing and head movements to improve naturalness. This study investigates the influence of various factors in facial animation on the emotional representation of virtual characters. We conduct a comparative and analytical study using an audio-visual database, examining the impact of different animation factors. To this end, we utilize a total of 24 voice samples, representing 12 different speakers, with each emotional voice segment lasting approximately 4–5 s. Using these samples, we design six perceptual experiments to investigate the impact of facial cues—including facial expression, lip movement, head motion, and overall appearance—on the expression of emotions by virtual characters. Additionally, we engaged 20 participants to evaluate and select appropriate combinations of facial expressions, lip movements, head motions, and appearances that align with the given emotion and its intensity. Our findings indicate that emotional representation in virtual characters is closely linked to facial expressions, head movements, and overall appearance. Conversely, lip-syncing, which has been a primary focus in prior studies, seems less critical for conveying emotions, as its accuracy is difficult to perceive with the naked eye. The results of our study can significantly benefit the VR community by aiding in the development of virtual characters capable of expressing a diverse range of emotions.