Representing Shylock: The Performance History of Shakespeare’s Jew as an Indicator and Instigator of Cultural Change

Since its earliest performances, The Merchant of Venice garnered attention for its depiction of Shylock, the greedy Jewish moneylender who takes the protagonist of the play to court, demanding a pound of flesh. Over the centuries, depictions of this character have varied as much as the critical and popular reception to him. In the hands of each actor who newly embodies the character, Shylock can take the shape of a grotesque antisemitic caricature or a sympathetic anti-hero speaking truth to power. While Shylock began as a comic villain whose defeat allows the comedic resolution, almost all modern directors, actors, and audiences are forced to reckon with the cruel antisemitism voiced by the play’s protagonists. In tracing the performance history of this character from the turn of the 17th century, to the Third Reich, to his most recent incarnations, this research resists reducing Shylock to any single interpretation. Instead, this essay argues that Shylock serves as a reflection of the place and time in which he is performed, both an indicator of cultural attitudes and a potential instigator of cultural action towards oppression, justice, and representation of those deemed outsiders.

History of one’s own performance modulates evaluative processing of another’s action outcomes, but not vice versa

In action monitoring, i.e., evaluating an outcome of our behavior, a reward prediction error signal is calculated as the difference between actual and predicted outcomes and is used to adjust future behavior. Previous studies demonstrate that this signal, which is reflected by an event-related brain potential called feedback-related negativity (FRN), occurs in response to not only one's own outcomes, but also those of others. However, it is still unknown if predictions of different actors' performance interact with each other. Thus, we investigated how predictions from one’s own and another’s performance history affect each other by manipulating the task difficulty for participants themselves and their partners independently. Pairs of participants performed a time estimation task, randomly switching the roles of actor and observer from trial to trial. Results show that the history of the other’s performance did not modulate the amplitude of the FRN for the evaluation of one’s own outcomes. In contrast, the amplitude of the observer FRN for the other’s outcomes differed according to the frequency of one’s own action outcomes. In conclusion, the monitoring system tracks the histories of one’s own and observed outcomes separately and considers information related to one’s own action outcomes to be more important.

An Unorthodox Voice: The Rise of Female Qinshi, Their Challenges, and Their Pursuits

(English/Chinese)Jinghu is the lead accompaniment instrument in the Peking opera ensemble. Qinshi are the accompanists who play jinghu. Traditionally, jinghu was regarded as a male instrument; female qinshi first appeared in educational institutions subsidised by the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Nevertheless, till now, the-all-male jinghu performance history and standards influenced by the virile ethos have deeply influenced contemporary female qinshi’s performances and recognition of their musicality and contributions to jinghu performance. In this article, I explore the rise of female qinshi, their challenges to jinghu performance conventions, and their contributions to contemporary jinghu performance.

Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville surveys the opera’s fascinating performance history, mapping out the myriad changes that have affected the work since its premiere, exploring many of the personalities responsible for those alterations, and taking into account the range of reactions that these changes have prompted in spectators and critics from the nineteenth century to the present. Opening with a wide-ranging overview of the types of alterations that have been imposed on Rossini’s score for the past two centuries, the first chapter addresses the mechanics behind these changes as well as the cultural forces that both fostered and encouraged them. The book next looks at some of the earliest revivals, drawing attention to alterations that were made to the score and to individual singers who were responsible for the changes, especially those who appeared in the roles of Almaviva and Bartolo. An entire chapter is devoted to Rosina, examining the wide array of creative liberties that prima donnas have unremittingly and unrepentantly taken with their interpretations of this character. The final sections turn to the opera’s recent history, observing how the Rossini Renaissance brought with it a new dedication to the “work concept” and to shedding the types of alterations that had long characterized performances of this work. The book closes with a consideration of operatic consumerism from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring the myriad ways that one can now experience The Barber of Seville in all its recorded, digitized, and commodified glory.

Zur Poetik und Interpretation des offenen Schlusses

This article reviews the long historical process and changing significance of open endings in music from Haydn's mid-period symphonies of the 1760s to Helmut Lachenmann. Taking two case studies by Alban Berg (Lyric Suite, Wozzeck) as its starting point, the article demonstrates that open endings are often linked to ideas of cyclicity and the permanence of "objective time" as well as to a critique of social or political situations. Therefore, open endings challenge the aesthetic difference between the musical art-work and everyday experience, a tendency, that can be traced back to the emergence of self-reflexivity in early 19th-century music and aesthetics and even to Haydn's earlier listener-responsive musical writing. In later 19th-century and early 20th-century music, large-scale forms increasingly posed the problem of an inability to achieve closure. Further key examples elaborate the tendency of open endings toward musical self-reflexivity and the appearance of the composer-persona at the end of a cyclic work: Schubert's Der Leiermann from Winterreise, Schumann's Der Dichter spricht from Kinderszenen, Schoenberg's concluding piece from Six little Piano Pieces op. 19 as well as Lachenmann's "music with images" The Little Match-Girl. Finally, Schumann's and Schönberg's closing pieces are considered from the perspective of performance history and analysis, highlighting th performer's substantial impact on creating (or limiting) the impression of "openness".

Reconsidering the Boredom of King James: Performance and Premodern Histories

The royal entry of King James I into London in 1604 serves as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between public, urban performance and the primary sources that ostensibly document it. The author revisits his own past study of this occasion, revising and expanding previous conclusions about early modern English performance in light of new research and theory. The article deploys new thinking about performance historiography, arguing that such perspectives unsettle the easy placement of an event in historical chronology, disrupt archival logic, and insist on a degree of historiographical ambiguity. The legacy of new historicism is considered in tandem with current theories of performance history, and a hybridization of new historicism and performance theory is considered in relation to historiographic practice.

Plautus’s Curculio

Plautus’s shortest play Curculio has not drawn the same attention from scholars, authors, and performers over the centuries as his Menaechmi, Amphitruo, Pseudolus, and Miles Gloriosus, yet the play offers a set of dramatis personae that encompasses all the main stock characters of Roman comedy (with the exception of mother and father figures), a plot that ties together three common Plautine storylines (erotic, deception, and recognition), and an unparalleled metatheatrical monologue from a truly unique character, the Choragus. The young citizen man Phaedromus desires Planesium, enslaved to the sex-trafficker Cappadox, who is asking for more money than Phaedromus has. Phaedromus’s parasite Curculio, sent on a journey to Caria in search of a loan, comes back instead with a ring stolen from the soldier Therapontigonus, who has contracted with Cappadox to purchase Planesium. Using the ring to forge documents and an eyepatch disguise, Curculio (under the pseudonym Summanus) tricks both Cappadox and Lyco the banker into handing Planesium over. Therapontigonus arrives, enraged at being tricked, but soon learns that Planesium, who has recognized Therapontigonus’s stolen ring on Curculio’s finger, is his long-lost sister. They are reunited, Planesium is acknowledged as a citizen, the two of them agree to a marriage between Planesium and Phaedromus, and Cappadox is physically abused and forced to repay Therapontigonus. The title character influences Terence’s Phormio and Catullus’s erotic persona, as well as the stock character Ligurio in Italian commedia dell’arte; meanwhile, the recognition and reunion of the soldier Therapontigonus with Planesium, his sister and erstwhile object of erotic desire, inspires similar plot twists in Molière, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and more. The play’s concision and nonstop action have made it a popular choice for student productions, particularly at North American colleges and universities. This article comprehensively catalogues scholarship on Curculio, beginning with overarching works (general studies, editions, the manuscript tradition, commentaries, translations) and then moving into the major topics of scholarly interest in the play: Greek original and Plautine adaptation; plot, staging, and music; themes and characters; social and historical contexts; humor and language; and reception and performance history. For other surveys of Plautine scholarship, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles Plautus, Plautus’s Amphitruo, and Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on the main surviving playwright of Greek New Comedy, Menander of Athens, and Plautus’s Roman comedic contemporaries Terence and Caecilius Statius.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Decadence, an unhealthy deviation from an undefined norm, is necessarily in the eye of the beholder, and this was never more apparent than in theatrical representations of the modern woman. Through analyzing the performance history and reception of two fin-de-siècle plays centered on a rebellious woman—Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891) and Sudermann’s Magda (1893)—this article examines the instability of the notion of decadence as applied to the heroines of avant-garde drama. As professionals, themselves negotiating assumptions about their sexual and moral status as public performers, the actresses who chose to perform these roles were well aware of the artistic and moral debates that surrounded them. Their performances can thus be understood as active interventions in debates about literary, cultural, and social notions of decadence and the role of women within them.