- Title:
- "Active Macbeth"
- Author:
- O'Connor, Matt.
- Type:
- Journal Article
- Year:
- 2013
- Publication Information:
- Teaching Shakespeare 4 (2013): 15.
- Annotation:
Describes how he uses a "freeze frame" activity in teaching Macbeth.
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Describes how he uses a "freeze frame" activity in teaching Macbeth.
Examining the Stratford Festival Archives and its record of almost all of the dresses made since 1960 for Juliet to wear during the Capulet ball, discusses productions of Romeo and Juliet directed by Des McAnuff, Robin Phillips, Douglas Campbell, and Michael Langham (all q.v.) which illustrate the "range of contexts in which Juliet's costumes were significant."
Analyzes how Nahum Tate in History of King Lear and Elaine Feinstein in Lear's Daughters reworks King Lear by highlighting silence and invisibility as effective forms of self-expression.
Contends that Shakespeare, by making metaphoric substitutions or resorting to acoustic effects in Venus and Adonis, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Antony and Cleopatra in order to simultaneously evoke and evade sexual fantasy, creates a "space for erotic representation."
Discusses the stage-managerial collection of the Stratford Festival Archives and how, through the assistance of the archivist Nora Polley, a "set of prompt-book milestones" was established which "tracks the Stratford stage managers' developmental chronology;" also discusses the Stratford Composite Scripts, suggesting that the scripts present possibilities for future scholarly study.
Traces the superimposition of the Ovidian myths of Pyramus and Thisbe and of Hero and Leander in Romeo and Juliet, suggesting that the erotic mythologies allow a "renewed representation of eros onstage."
Illustrates how the tension between fertility and obscenity is incorporated in Midsummer Night's Dream and Pericles though Shakespeare's reshaping of the contradictory figure of Priapus, a god of both fertility and of lust.
Draws on Shakespeare to argue that early modern English drama uses the relationship between whoredom and chastity to construct women's subjectivity as multifarious and partially autonomous.
Relocates Titania and Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream by contending that "polymorphous passion" is reincarnated in the myth of "Pasiphae enamoured of the Bull;" suggests that this Ovidian subtext and possibly that of Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili allow the play to invoke images of "female bestial sexuality" while still "retaining its safely comic element of parody because of the compound allusion."
Explores why Winter's Tale associates "statuaphilia--unnatural attraction to statues--and homosexuality" by analyzing how Shakespeare's allusion to Pygmalion's statue and its invocation of the idea of perfect womanhood work in context with Ovid's Metamorphoses.