This Week: Shakespeare and the Law, panel at the University of Texas with scenes from The Merchant of Venice, September 28

From the on-line magazine from UT Law:

Shakespeare and the Law:

Scenes and a panel on legal issues in The Merchant of Venice, September 28

Actors from Spirit of Shakespeare, a University of Texas student organization; the University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre and Dance, under the direction of Fran Dorn; and Hidden Room, an Austin-based original practices company under the direction of Beth Burns, will perform versions of the courtroom scene from The Merchant of Venice as part of a panel discussion titled “Is that the Law?: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” on Friday, September 28, 2012, in the Eidman Courtroom at the University of Texas School of Law from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

The event, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas School of Law.

A reception will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the Jamail Pavilion adjacent to the Eidman Courtroom in the Law School’s John B. Connally Center. (See Maps and Directions.) The panel, which includes the performance, starts at 7:00 p.m.

This year, four panelists will discuss legal and related issues central to The Merchant of Venice. They are:

• Alan Friedman, professor of English, coordinator of Actors from the London Stage, and faculty advisor for Spirit of Shakespeare at the University of Texas at Austin
• Angela Littwin, Assistant Professor at the University of Texas School of Law
• James Loehlin, director of Shakespeare at Winedale and professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin
• James Shapiro, Larry Miller Professor of English, Columbia University

Spirit of Shakespeare (SOS) is a group of University of Texas students involved in promoting Shakespeare programs on campus and in the community. For several years now, the SOS players have performed scenes from the annual Actors from the London Stage (AFTLS) play and have helped to augment and elucidate the Shakespeare and the Law panel discussions.

Shakespeare and the Law grew out of the AFTLS residency, a familiar and regular part of the University’s Shakespeare offerings since 1999, and a conference on “The Law and Other Performing Arts” held at the Law School in 2002. AFTLS, a London-based theatrical touring company, brings its unique educational and theatrical program, which features a troupe of five classically trained actors from major English theaters, to this campus and city for week-long residencies every year.

Robert Faires Interviews Shakespeare Scholar James Shapiro, Austin Chronicle, March 23

In a lengthy Q&A Austin Chronicle arts editor Robert Faires draws out Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro about his methods and discoveries about Shakespeare's life, especially during the process of writing 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

Unraveling Shakespeare's Life

by Robert Faires, Fri. Mar. 23, 2012

Forget cradle to grave; get to know Will just one year at a time

Whether or not you believe William Shakespeare really wrote all those plays, you can probably concede that writing his life story is a challenge all its own. But Columbia professor of English James Shapiro has devised a cunning approach, one he's laid out in his acclaimed history, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

Austin Chronicle: I've read enough biographies and partial biographies of Shakespeare to know that it's a particularly tricky pursuit. How did you choose which strand to pick up in writing about Shakespeare from a historical or biographical standpoint?

James Shapiro: "Strand" is exactly the right word, and it led me to the idea of unraveling. I even got curious when the word "unraveling" came into use in English. Turns out to have been a Dutch word introduced almost surely by Shakespeare's contemporary playwright, Thomas Dekker, and in Shakespeare's day it had a much stronger meaning than, say, unraveling the sleeve of a sweater. It had the sense of really undoing, and my talk is really about undoing what has been done, untangling various strands.

I've been practicing since 1988 a different kind of biography -- some people call it micro-biography, that sounds too close to micro-beer for me. It's studying a smaller but significant moment in a life. And one of the things that has long struck me is that there are a lot of great writers who had extraordinary moments of creativity or transformative moments in their writing careers and had them fairly early on, like Wordsworth at the beginning of his career and in the wake of the French Revolution, around 1800.

Click for a corrected .doc transcription of this 3250-word text at ALTcom . . . .

Click to read at the Austin Chronicle website

Reviews from Elsewhere: James Shapiro's 'Contested Will' reviewed by Cass Morris for the American Shakespeare Center

Coincidentally just before the March 22 lecture at the Harry Ransom Center by Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, publishes in the ASC blog a lengthy but entertaining view of his Contested Will (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), a history and rebuttal of those who have asserted that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays:

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Book Review:

'Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?' by James Shapiro

by Cass Morris, American Shakespeare Center, Staunton , Virginia

One of the greatest challenges for a modern historian is to remove the filter of Romanticism and Victoriana when we look backwards through time. Modern society has inherited a lot of inaccurate notions about the pre-Industrial world from our more immediate forebears, creating an assumption that the medieval and early modern worlds shared the same values, the same culture, the same societal structures, the same goals as the Victorian world – an assumption that is, in many ways, far off the mark. To achieve greater understanding of anything early modern, a historian – professional or recreational – must first clear her eyes of the haze which the nineteenth century imposed on them.

Lifting this veil is, to my reading of it, the major triumph of James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?. Both history and historiography, this book examines the case both for and against Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to his name – and comes down, quite definitively, on the side of Shakespeare. Shapiro notes, in the opening pages of the book, his interest, which lies "not in what people think – which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms – so much as why thy think it. No doubt my attitude derives from living in a world in which truth is too often seen as relative and in which mainstream media are committed to showing both sides of every story."

[image from cover of the hardback edition, © Simon & Schuster, via the American Shakespeare Center blog]

Read full text (3,058 words) at the blog of the American Shakespeare Center

Extra: read the Economist's anonymous review of the book, March 25, 2010 (614 words)

Shakespeare Scholar James Shapiro Speaks at the Ransom Center, University of Texas, on Thursday, March 22

James Shapiro, Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University and author of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 [click for ALT review], speaks Thursday night, March 22, at the Ransom Center about Shakespeare’s “life” as currently written. The program will be webcast live at 7 p.m. CST.

Shapiro specializes in Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture and is also the author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare.

The Harry Ransom Center is at 21st St. and Guadalupe on the University of Texas campus (click for map). Please be aware that the Ransom Center's Charles Nelson Prothro Theater has limited seating. Line forms upon arrival of the first patron, and doors open 30 minutes in advance.

Click to read a brief interview of Shapiro by Kelsey McKinney, published by the Ransom Center's website Cultural Compass, March 19

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, by James Shaprio

James Shapiro opens his narrative with the close-up, confidential tone of a detective novel. In his first paragraph he establishes the scene as snow-covered London on December 28, 1598 and continues,

As the snow fell, a dozen or so armed men gathered in Shoreditch, in London's northern suburbs. Instead of the clubs usually wielded in London's street brawls or apprentice riots, they carried deadly weapons -- "swords, daggers, bills, axes, and the like." [. . .] The Chamberlain's Men were in trouble, and the only way out was to get in a bit deeper.

You'd be hard put to situate your story any more in medias res than that. Headed by master carpenter Peter Street, this gang is about to disassemble a theatre building and haul every bit of it away to a warehouse facing the frozen Thames. Two days earlier the Chamberlain's Men performed at Elizabeth's court at Whitehall Palace and they were expected there again on New Year's Day. In the interval their laborers were reappropriating the timbers, lumber and fittings from the site where their lease had expired and storing the dismantled theatre for later use on a south bank property with a newly signed 31-year lease.

Given the dispute over the ownership of the building that would become the Globe, the enterprise had the makings of a conspiracy. It was also a new type of business venture. Richard Burbage had convinced five company members to invest the enormous sum of 70 pounds each for the new construction. In exchange, each was to receive ten percent of the profits of the new venture. Among those investors were Will Kempe, the company's renowned clown and jig-maker, and William Shakespeare, its principal playwright.

The theatre raid isn't the only developing story available to Shapiro with his choice of the final year of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare was at mid-career, of course, and in the following twelve months he and the company would be premiering Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It. At the end of the year Shakespeare would be writing Hamlet, a remarkably different type of play both for him and for the English stage. In addition, intrigue and politics at Elizabeth's court would be deeply marked by the mercurial Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, who had ambitiously courted the queen. Elizabeth would send him off to Ireland with the assignment to put down Tyrone's rebellion; Essex would fail, negotiate ineptly with the adversary, and then abruptly sail home and ride back in haste to burst in upon Elizabeth in her private quarters. By Easter of 1601 he would be dead -- executed for conspiracies against the queen.

Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Book Recommendation: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare by James Shapiro (courtesy of the Ransom Center and Penelope Lively)

In its "Cultural Compass" blog entry of September 21, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas passes along the responses of its prominent supporters to the invitation, "Name the book of the decade."

Novelist Penelope Lively, whose archive resides at the Ransom Center, responded,

I like books that leave me better informed, that surprise me, that change my view. James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare did all that. I suppose that I held—vaguely—the Coleridgean view that Shakespeare transcends his age "as if of another planet." Shapiro demonstrates with elegance and authority how the work of that year—Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, first draft of Hamlet—sprang directly from the action and the anxieties of the age: the war in Ireland, the fear of the Spanish, the question of the succession, and the possibility of Elizabeth's assassination.

[1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro, Harper Collins, Harper Perennial Library, 2005, ISBN 978-0060088743]

Book: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare by James Shapiro

The daily ArtsJournal on-line signals this review of James Shapiro's history/investigation of the question, published March 25 in The Economist:

William Shakespeare

Hero or hoax

The man and his pen

Mar 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro. Simon & Schuster; 367 pages; $26. Faber and Faber; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

[ . . . ] “What difference does it make who wrote the plays?” someone asked the author wearily. Mr Shapiro (for whom Shakespeare was definitely the man) thinks it matters a lot, and by the end of this book, his readers will think so too.

The authorship controversy turns on two things: snobbery and the assumption that, in a literal way, you are what you write. How could an untutored, untravelled glover’s son from hickville, the argument goes, understand kings and courtiers, affairs of state, philosophy, law, music—let alone the noble art of falconry? Worse still, how could the business-minded, property-owning, moneylending materialist that emerges from the documentary scraps, be the same man as the poet of the plays? Many have shaken their heads at the sheer vulgarity of it all, among them Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, his brother William, and Sigmund Freud.

Mr Shapiro teases out the cultural prejudices, the historical blind spots, and above all the anachronism inherent in these questions. No one before the late 18th century had ever asked them, or thought to read the plays or sonnets for biographical insights. No one had even bothered to work out a chronology for them. The idea that works of literature hold personal clues, or that—more grandly—writing is an expression and exploration of the self, is a relatively recent phenomenon. [ . . . ]

Read full text at www.economist.com . . . .