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Maurice Charney

Auteur de Classic Comedies

23+ oeuvres 230 utilisateurs 2 critiques

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Maurice Charney is retired from Rutgers University as a distinguished professor and was president of both the Shakespeare Association of America and the Academy of Literary Studies.

Œuvres de Maurice Charney

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Some Facets of King Lear (1974) — Contributeur — 9 exemplaires

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From Library Journal: This commentary on all of Shakespeare's plays and poems, arranged according to genre, is "designed as a series of minilectures" for the undergraduate student and general reader. Concerned mostly with Shakespeare as a poet and dramatist rather than as a Renaissance thinker, Charney (Rutgers Univ.) aims for accessibility, avoiding footnotes and bibliographies. He does not discuss all relevant topics but pursues a few of them thoroughly, which makes his book a useful supplement to the standard introductions available in most editions of the plays. One of the book's most pleasing aspects is the way Charney makes fresh and unexpected connections between the different plays, often by highlighting some less well known passages. This adds weight to his belief that Shakespeare's works "really do constitute a single comprehensive imaginative unit."-- Bryan Aubrey, Fairfield, Ia.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
mmckay | May 9, 2006 |
Unlike Maurice Charney--and I am criticizing no one here---but, unlike many of you, I was never blessed to be able to study the bard, until I was much older, when I took a make up course at Universidade de Letras in Lisbon one summer--two week's to read and absorb Hamlet...and I loved it!

Being a Portuguese born and bred, the only exposure I received to Shakespeare, in 12 years of high-school education as I grew up, was one viewing of "Romeo and Juliet" in, I think, 1986, with a mob of other students, in a crowded cinema, with absolutely no introduction...they put us on the buses, we queued up and paid for our tickets, sat in the cinema seats, and then we had to sit through several minutes of hearing the loud giggles and twitters of oversexed teens (or was that undersexed), as the opening shots were of close-ups of the men's codpieces. We were bused home at the end, and the next day given a book called "Romeo and Juliet" to read. The end.

So why, many years later, did I find myself sitting in my downtime at work, reading “Hamlet”? Why at the tender age of my 20s, pass up a western by Louis L'Amour, and buy a copy of “Hamlet”, instead? Was I trying to show the world how trendy or intellectual I was? Nope. I hope someone shoots me dead, if I ever try to be trendy, and if someone ever thinks me an intellectual, they don't know me very well. I just wanted to help my friends milk cows, and go to Colombo to do “gal-watching”--hardly intellectual pursuits, hey? No, it wasn't me trying to be something I'm not. What drew me to Shakespeare wasn't the stories. It wasn't even curiosity, really. It was the words. Oh my god, what beautiful words! The flow and rhyme and sound of them, tripping over my lips as I sat under a pine tree and read out loud to my dog. And partly, it was the stories, too. I mean, the history may be gone, but what the characters feel, the essence of the characters themselves--they are still around today, those feelings, those human frailties and foibles and courage.

I had a real hard time figuring out "Hamlet"--and, seriously, it really did take me 20 years to read the whole thing through. In the mid-80's, at a used book stall, I found an old paperback called “The Age of Kings”, that was based on some television programmes of Shakespeare's plays, put on by the BBC in the early 60's, I think. It had a wonderful introduction, which explained what the story was about in clear modern English, therefore enabling me to plunge into the story of Richard II, without too many pauses to figure out what the hell the characters were nattering on about in their Elizabethan tongues. So, maybe it's not so much that you find it boring, but that some of you are jaded by it, or blinded by the easy life of the instant gratification of the modern world, and you don't like having to work at enjoying yourselves....or maybe, you just find it boring. I find reality television, sunbathing and celebrities rather boring, quite frankly.

Crackpot academic fashion seems to have done its work quite well. The "historical" explanation of Shakespeare's reputation, with the "critique" of the work itself following hard upon it traveling the same Royal Road to inanity, could come only from a person whose brain has been saturated by the field that passes for politics in so many trendy campus enclaves.

As for me--well, just by virtue of channel-surfing, I happened to catch Branagh's "Hamlet" on the tube many eons ago. There's a lot to criticize in the film's conception. But The Man's language grabs hold of you, no matter how often you've heard it, and compels you to partake of the deepest insight any artist has ever produced. Sure, there are flawed works in the canon, especially the early plays, where Shakespeare was just learning his trade and was eager to pander to the vulgar tastes of the crowd. But note that in "The Merchant of Venice", he just couldn't bring himself to do it--Shylock towers over that play and its other, necessarily feeble, characters; its main fault is that, apart from Shylock, nothing keeps our attention.

Shouldn't wonder if Shakespeare wouldn't have done the same to his own texts were he alive today. He relished the contemporary 'common' turn of phrase, and he intended his plays to be a jolly good night out without 'preciousness'. But a key part of Shakespeare at his best is precisely his use of language; not just meaning, but sound and rhythm and interplay. One doesn't need to get too Eng.Lit. to enjoy these. And I don't know if it would be feasible to train actors to carry off an Elizabethan accent (however that sounded) in the course of staging a play. And even actors' accents have changed since the last century: The way Olivier or Richard Burton learned to speak these parts can't be heard today.

What I'm opposed to is the kind of thing we see in opera, in which directors try to place themselves on an equal footing with the creators by, for example, setting Tosca in Nazi Germany in a bid to make it 'their' work. Shakespeare used particular words; why should they be changed because people are too lazy to look them up? That's the trouble with the 21st century; if we have to engage with something that takes a little effort, then fuck it. We have no respect for the past any more, no patience, no depth and all we care about is convenience. I'm not advocating absolute purism, I'm advocating depth of engagement, and fighting against the crassness, commercialism and laziness of modern society in relation to the arts. A Shakespearean text is like an orchestral score. You should cut sections, perhaps - but not mess about with it. The integrity of its rhythmic structure should be maintained, as you would maintain tempo in a score.

What some call Shakespeare’s Style I just call Shakespeare. Charney does give us his impressions on each one of the plays. I've done the same myself.

Bottom-line: Glenn Gould claimed to despise Mozart, but at least he could play the piano a little (when he wasn't mauling Mozart, that is).
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
antao | Sep 16, 2018 |

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