‘#DifferenceMakesUs’: Selling Shakespeare Online (and the Commerce Platform Etsy)

Predominantly Female ◽

The Many ◽

The mission statement of the online creative commerce platform Etsy declares its commitment to “using the power of business to strengthen communities and empower people”. Among the many handmade and vintage items sold on Etsy are 3,811 items quoting Helena’s description of Hermia from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“and though she be but little, she is fierce”). This journal paper will examine the relationship between Shakespeare and the predominantly female crafts people who operate through platforms such as these as well as Shakespeare’s own depiction of female craft and handcrafted items. It seeks to explore the processes at work in Shakespeare-inspired merchandise and the relationship they claim to the play texts they adapt. The paper will continue by situating ‘female’ oriented creative work within the current political climate and exploring both the possibilities and limitations of craft as a vehicle for political resistance.

In Search of Eden

Experiment ◽

10.1163/2211730x-12341265 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 260-296

Author(s):

Lynn Garafola

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Monte Carlo ◽

Southern California ◽

The United States ◽

Creative Work ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

Professional Careers ◽

Approach To Teaching ◽

The 1960S

Bronislava Nijinska spent the last thirty-two years of her life in Southern California. Beginning with her first visit to Hollywood in 1934 to choreograph the dances in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this essay examines her activities in California both as a teacher and a choreographer. It looks closely at her Hollywood bowl season of 1940, when she staged three of her ballets, all new to the United States; the dancers she trained who went on to distinguished professional careers, and her approach to teaching. It briefly summarizes her activities in the 1940s, when she choreographed for Ballet Theatre, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and Ballet International; the 1950s, when she worked for the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas; and the 1960s, when the revival of Les Noces and Les Biches by the Royal Ballet brought her most celebrated works back into repertory. Finally, it speculates on the reasons she settled in California, given the limited opportunities it offered her for creative work.

The Humours in Humour

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198727682.013.13 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 219-235

Author(s):

Matthew Steggle

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

Humoral Theory ◽

Mind And Body ◽

Did Shakespeare believe in the four humours? And did he write ‘humours comedy’? To address these questions, this chapter suggests that humoral theory is intimately bound up with early modern ideas of selfhood, not merely as a metaphor, but as a literal understanding of the processes at work in cognition, emotion, and selfhood. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular, is taken as a case study for how Shakespearean comedy understands the relationship between mind and body. Next, it re-examines the idea of ‘humours comedy’, arguing that we should see the true Shakespearean ‘comedy of humours’ in plays that celebrate not the fixity of identity, but its fluidity within a sentient body conceived of in terms of humours theory. The chapter takes as its closing case study The Comedy of Errors, suggesting that it, and Shakespearean comedy more generally, engages through the humours ideas of selfhood as mutable, communicable, and liquid.

Shakespeare and the Demonization of Fairies

Text Matters ◽

10.1515/texmat-2017-0011 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 194-213

Author(s):

Piotr Spyra

Keyword(s):

William Shakespeare ◽

Early Modern ◽

Thomas Hobbes ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

The Tempest ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

The Many ◽

Historical Reflection

The article investigates the canonical plays of William Shakespeare - Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest - in an attempt to determine the nature of Shakespeare’s position on the early modern tendency to demonize fairy belief and to view fairies as merely a form of demonic manifestation. Fairy belief left its mark on all four plays, to a greater or lesser extent, and intertwined with the religious concerns of the period, it provides an important perspective on the problem of religion in Shakespeare’s works. The article will attempt to establish whether Shakespeare subscribed to the tendency of viewing fairies as demonic agents, as epitomized by the Daemonologie of King James, or opposed it. Special emphasis will also be put on the conflation of fairies and Catholicism that one finds best exemplified in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The article draws on a wealth of recent scholarship on early modern fairies, bringing together historical reflection on the changing perception of the fairy figure, research into Shakespeare’s attitude towards Catholicism and analyses of the many facets of anti-Catholic polemic emerging from early modern Protestant discourse.

Victorian Fairies and Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream in England

Nineteenth-Century Music Review ◽

10.1017/s1479409800000069 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 53-79 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Marian Wilson Kimber

Keyword(s):

Visual Arts ◽

Musical Work ◽

Incidental Music ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

The Tempest ◽

Theatrical Performances ◽

Predominantly Female ◽

To Receive ◽

British Nationalism

In art, literature, theatre and music, Victorians demonstrated increased interest in the supernatural and nostalgia for a lost mythic time, a response to rapid technological change and increased urbanization. Romanticism generated a new regard for Shakespeare, also fuelled by British nationalism. The immortal bard's plays began to receive theatrical performances that more accurately presented their original texts, partially remedying the mutilations of the previous century. The so-called ‘fairy’ plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, were also popular subjects for fairy paintings, stemming from the establishment of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in 1789. In such a context, it is no wonder that Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream was so overwhelmingly popular in England and that his style became closely associated with the idea of fairies. This article explores how the Victorians’ understanding of fairies and how the depiction of fairies in the theatre and visual arts of the period influenced the reception of Mendelssohn's music, contributing to its construction as ‘feminine’. Victorian fairies, from the nude supernatural creatures cavorting in fairy paintings to the diaphanously gowned dancers treading lightly on the boards of the stage, were typically women. In his study of Chopin reception, Jeffrey Kallberg has interpreted fairies as androgynous, but Victorian fairies were predominantly female, so much so that Lewis Spence's 1948 study, The Fairy Tradition in Britain, includes an entire section on fairy gender intended to refute the long-standing notion that there were no male fairies. Thus, for Mendelssohn to have composed the leading musical work that depicted fairies contributed to his increasingly feminized reputation over the course of the nineteenth century.

‘Love is proved in the letting go’

10.1093/oso/9780198828556.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Charlotte Scott

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

Much Ado About Nothing ◽

Institutional Structures ◽

The Status ◽

Letting Go ◽

Maintaining the focus on the role of the child in relation to figures of authority, and the thresholds between dependence and independence outlined in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 analyses some of Shakespeare’s comic children. Turning to the relationship between socialization and marriage and the institutional structures through which the young people of these plays are ushered, it explores the role of marriage in the stratification of emotional authority. Concentrating on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing, Chapter 4 examines the tensions between the sociable and gendered body. Analysing contemporary attitudes to marriage as transference of power from the father to the husband, it explores the status of the woman between child and wife. Thinking about the terms of agency that these plays deploy, the spaces in which women are shown to ‘grow up’, and the extent to which Shakespeare’s comedies complicate the representation of marriage as socialization, this chapter positions its focus on the child as social commodity.

Introduction

EU Powers Under External Pressure ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198785545.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-14

Author(s):

Christina Eckes

Keyword(s):

The Political ◽

Political Climate ◽

Apparent Contradiction ◽

Member States ◽

Division Of Powers ◽

Mode Of Operation ◽

The Many ◽

The Relationship ◽

Organizational Principles

The Union, while externally trying to assert the role of one single international actor, remains internally a complex and compound legal order in which numerous actors, that is, Member States and different EU institutions, participate and struggle for visibility. The apparent contradiction between the Union’s ambition to create one uniform international presence and the many internal actors and complex structures is not new but tensions have significantly increased as a result of the Union’s extended powers and ambitions, as well as the political climate within and beyond the Union. These tensions not only influence the Union’s external capacity and actions; they also have an impact on the Union’s internal constitutional structures. Some of the Union’s external actions profoundly change its internal mode of operation and transform the relationship between the Union and its Member States. They influence the settled understanding of certain organizational principles and the Union’s division of powers. The role of the EU institutions changes as a result of the EU’s external actions. The resulting changes cannot easily be translated into an overall extension or reduction of powers but have more nuanced implications. More importantly, these changes also affect the relationship between the Union and EU citizens. They offer opportunities for justification and bonding. This Introduction sets out the objectives, relevance, and the structure of the book.

The Terminal Comma

Turn-taking in Shakespeare ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198836353.003.0007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 189-220

Author(s):

Oliver Morgan

Keyword(s):

King Lear ◽

The Other ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

Other Hand ◽

Turn Taking ◽

The One ◽

This chapter investigates the relationship between turn-taking and punctuation. On the one hand, punctuation seems to offer a way of resolving precisely those ambiguities over timing with which the second half of this book is concerned. On the other hand, the punctuation of Shakespeare’s texts is notoriously unreliable. No firm set of typographical conventions had yet evolved for the presentation of plays in print, and the punctuation they contain is more likely to be compositorial than authorial. In spite of these problems, the chapter argues for greater attention to punctuation at the ends of speeches and, in particular, to what it calls the ‘terminal comma’ in the early quartos of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear. Although largely ignored by editors and critics, these commas are often employed with a purpose and subtlety that is hard—but not impossible—to attribute to a compositor.

The Director and the Playwright: Control over the Means of Production

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x00015189 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 3 (11) ◽

pp. 207-217

Author(s):

Peter Holland

Keyword(s):

Russian Society ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

Cambridge University ◽

University Of Cambridge ◽

The University ◽

The Relationship ◽

Means Of Production

In this wide-ranging article. Peter Holland explores the relationship between the director and the playwright from contrasting historical and artistic perspectives. A typical film-contract, as recently signed by Trevor Griffiths with Warner Brothers, is thus made to shed retrospective light on the less overtly proprietorial assumptions which governed Stanislavski's approach to the plays of Chekhov – and which, in effect, sanitized them of their political insights into pre-revolutionary Russian society, creating instead bourgeois tragedies about flawed individuals. Acknowledging the difficulties of creating a framework within which the role of the playwright could be introduced more authoritatively into the theatrical structure, the author nonetheless stresses the importance of recognizing the nature of the hierarchy, which gives pre-eminence to the directorial ‘reading’. Peter Holland, University Lecturer in Drama in the University of Cambridge, is currently writing (in collaboration with Vera Gottlieb) a study of Stanislavski for Cambridge University Press, and is preparing the Oxford Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The impact of cultural factors on attachment dynamics: a view from Irish society

Attachment New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis ◽

10.33212/att.v13n2.2019.207 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 207-223

Author(s):

Michael O’Toole

Keyword(s):

Significant Role ◽

Emotional Development ◽

Cultural Factors ◽

Seamus Heaney ◽

Irish Society ◽

Irish Context ◽

Key Points ◽

The Many ◽

The Impact ◽

In this article I examine aspects of the relationship between mothers and sons from an attachment perspective in an Irish context. Through the works of Irish writers such as Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, and Colm Tóibín, I focus on particular aspects of this relationship, which fails to support the developmental processes of separation and individuation in the many men who come to me for psychotherapy. I illustrate key points concerning this attachment dynamic through the use of clinical examples of my work with two men from my practice. While acknowledging that many other cultural factors play a significant role in the emotional development of children, integrating the work of our poets, novelists, and scholars with an attachment perspective

John Cranko's Antigone (1959): A Ballet Lost and Found

Dance Research ◽

10.3366/drs.2015.0120 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 1-15

Author(s):

Henrietta Bannerman

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Jean Racine ◽

World War ◽

Martha Graham ◽

Detailed Consideration ◽

Lost And Found ◽

The Many ◽

Tragic Drama ◽

John Cranko's dramatic and theatrically powerful Antigone (1959) disappeared from the ballet repertory in 1966 and this essay calls for a reappraisal and restaging of the work for 21st century audiences. Created in a post-World War II environment, and in the wake of appearances in London by the Martha Graham Company and Jerome Robbins’ Ballets USA, I point to American influences in Cranko's choreography. However, the discussion of the Greek-themed Antigone involves detailed consideration of the relationship between the ballet and the ancient dramas which inspired it, especially as the programme notes accompanying performances emphasised its Sophoclean source but failed to recognise that Cranko mainly based his ballet on an early play by Jean Racine. As Antigone derives from tragic drama, the essay investigates catharsis, one of the many principles that Aristotle delineated in the Poetics. This well-known effect is produced by Greek tragedies but the critics of the era complained about its lack in Cranko's ballet – views which I challenge. There is also an investigation of the role of Antigone, both in the play and in the ballet, and since Cranko created the role for Svetlana Beriosova, I reflect on memories of Beriosova's interpretation supported by more recent viewings of Edmée Wood's 1959 film.