Revision as of 16:39, 1 October 2017

General

• ways to expand/articulate stakes:
  • link to Houston 2014 - the digital shows us the complexities of print networks and can send us back to the archive to better understand the cultural dynamics around it, as I do here. Check.
  • Respond to Laurel's critique: it is content driven, but the content of the Reader is understudied and using periodicals to understand the social dynamics of Victorian reprint culture is a contribution. Check.

Commemoration/Monumentality Addition Source Notes

Edinburgh Companion Shakespeare/Arts

The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts. ed. Mark Thornton Burnett et al. Edinburgh: UP, 2011.

Balz Engler, "Shakespeare, Scultpure and the Material Arts," pp 435-444

• 435: These monuments, which often served as models for smaller representations, can tell us a great deal about the cultural status of the person depicted by them.
• Sculptures arrest the flow of time and freeze a person in a significant image; they call it back to life, as it were at the same time as fixing it in rigor mortis, those who put up the sculpture publicly associating themselves with the person or the event commemorated. They are therefore elements in a culture of memory.
• 436 In the second half of the nineteenth century [there was a] veritable monument-craze. Public spaces were adorned with the statues of historical personalities, statesmen, generals, poets, but also allegorical figures, meant to represent the cultural and political values of the community.
• 438 In 1734 it was suggested that the acting profession and theatre audiences should collect money for a Sh monument and the plan came to fruition in 1739. Its erection also had political implications. It was promoted by opponents of Walpole's corrupt regime; Shakespeare was claimed "as both a foe to tyranny and a genuinely national hero, above the reach of bribery or invidious patronage."
  • quotes Dobson 1992, The Making of the National Poet
• Soon the statue [from above quote] appeared on the stage in an enterainment at Goodman's Field, Harlequin Student, or the Fall of Pantomime by David Garrick, and it became a popular icon for later representations, including china figurines. As Sidney Lee complained in 1906, this "set a bad pattern for statues of Shakespeare. Posterity came to invest the design with some measure of sanctity." As such it could serve those who wanted to enhance their status by associating themselves with Sh.
  • Sidney Lee, "the commemoration of Shakespeare in London," 1906
• 439: [The quote from Malvolio "There is no darkness but ignorance," on Leicester statue in 1874] Again the words have been isolated from their context and reproduced as a statement of general truth, now expressing a Victorian belief in improvement
  • the practice isn't new or isolated to statuary, but the ideology might be

Mark Thornton Burnett, "Shakespeare Exhibition and Festival Culture"

• 445 the extent to which this seminal movement [Stratford Jubiliee 1769] in the reification of Shakespeare spawned a dialogue about the Bard that brought national and international forces into play.
• the role of the text in the celebratory Shakespearean impulse: arresting is the fact that it is not so much the sanctity of the word that is privileged as a looser set of meanings precipitated by the Bardic name.
• Shakespeare emerges from celebration as inspiring and transcendent, even as an instrument of moral and educative improvement.
• 446 ...Garrick's paean to the Bard helped inaugurate the dominant conception of Shakespeare in the popular consciousness
• Garrick's discovery of Shakespeare is a pastoral one and serves to forge a lasting idea of the dramatist as a creature of the bucolic world. [his poem includes the "lov'd spot" of Stratford]
  • London Terc. committee comes into conflict with this deeply embedded cultural discourse
• 447 ...What distinguishes Sh is his claim to perpetuity. By recollecting Sh, and by contemplating the past, we might better confront the present, the argument runs, the associated idea being that memory and the Bard are customary bedfellows.
• 454 The "book," writes Barbara Hodgdon, "remains the clearest channel for Shakespearean evangelism." From the evidence of Shakespeare exhibitions and festivals, however, a less centralized conception of text comes into view.
  • no plays performed in 1769 - at least the Victorians were more text focused at Stratford and in the West End
• If there is a constant [across the course of "Shakespearean festive history"], it is that the text - or simply text - comes in and out of focus. At times, this is prioritized, as befits the particular occasion, but, at other times, this is subsumed within, and mediated by, other forms of cultural representation.
• In these manifestations of Shakespeare exhibition and theatrical culture, at least, the book yields up to a late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century investment in the plethora of mass media.
  • but I would argue that this happens too in 1864 but the mass media is still the codex, pointing up the technologically mediated cultural investment in mass reproduced cultural objects
• 460 Shakespeare as a "place of convergence - contacts across time and space. ...A constant, too, is Shakespeare as a cult and Shakespeare as culture[.]
• Sh exhibited and celebrated, then, is not a bookish phenomenon; rather, the emphasis is on the ways in which his corpus of meaning signifies. According to this logic, Shakespeare is an instrument for keeping in touch with important truths. Exhibitions and festivals dedicated to him enable an experience of authenticity and they allow for an idealization of universality. Invariably, these processes take place in denial of informing material contexts, which include the relation between symbolic capital and [461] economic capital and the purposely obfuscating operations of memory. Yet, even inside the obvious mystification of Shakespeare in festival and exhibition culture, responsiveness to the complexities of the moment can be detected. History is bodied forth in Shakespeare exhibitions and festivals to the extent that new histories to emerge into view. The loss of empire, the role of nation, the situation of English, forms of domination and the question of relativity - these and other developments and considerations are enshrined in the festive Shakespeare in ways that have reflective value and purpose. Celebrating Shakespeare offers us an insight into the past at the same time as it invites us to contemplate alternative bonds of association and as yet untested commemorative possibilities.
  • new communities and publics offered through Shakespearean mass print

Rigney/Leerssen Commemorating

Rigney, Ann and Joep Leerssen. "Fanning out from Shakespeare." Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation Builiding and Centenary Fever. ed. Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

• Use Benedict Anderson to connect monuments to periodicals in "imaginative communities"? Does Mary Shannon have something useful for BA -> periodicals?
• impt not to flatten that the 1864 tercentenary wasn't very successful (certainly not as much as Garrick's in 1769) - this is one of the reasons why there was no civic monument to Shakespeare in London until later

• 1 originary point in Johnson's 1765 ed of Shakespeare for "canonization of the bard"
• look up Quinault, Roland, "The Cult of the Centenary," Historical Review 71.176 (1998) 303-23.
• 1916 anniversary of his death during WWI: "This gave a material shape to the historical links btwn Sh, Tudor England, colonization, and the British Empire by including a reduced-scale Tudor village (designed by Edwin Lutyens, architect of New Delhi and later of the Cenotaph)... alongside a replica of the first Globe Theatre, at which excerpts from Eliz and Jacobean plays were performed three times a day"
  • Kahn 2001
• 2 [busts, statues, and paintings] augmented his textual legacy by visual and plastic representations that were displayed in and on buildings, as well as in parks and streets.
• At the 1864 celebrations at the Crystal Palace a bust of Shakespeare presided over events, whith a permanent public 'national monument' following in 1871 at Stratford.
• These various ways of cultivating Shakespeare's memory often worked together in a multimedia layering of text and image.
• profusion "all feedback loops in the self-amplifying multimedia perpetuation of an author's celebrity and canonicity."
• Carlyle in On Heroes: "He is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English household, what item is there that we would not surrender rather than him?" (Carlyle 1870, 132)
  • goes on to say he'd give up the empire rather than Sh
• 3 ...the link made by Carlyle between a writer and an empire as both a form of collective capital and a mark of international honour is striking, and indicates that much more was at stake in the public celebration of literature than a mere matter of aesthetics.
• internationality of this canonicity - "London had no outdoor statues dedicaated to him to match the one placed in New York's Central Park in 1872. The tercentenary of his birth saw the foundation in 1864 of the first Shakespeare society - in Germany."
  • what about the early literature societies? Those are earlier by a bit...
• It has been shown how the cultivation of Sh's memory helped to consolidate his position at the very pinnacle of the English literary canon and as part of an international hyper-canon - a champion's league of European classics if not indeed paradigmatic for world litearture.... As this volume will show, the public celebration of literature on the occasion of the centenary of a writer's birth and death was by no means unique, either to Sh or to England. [A Europe-wide phenomenon btwn 1769 and 1916]
  • the canon isn't stable in the way that Empire isn't either: it looks it but isn't, it's always in the process of being formed - by watching this during the 1864 tercentenary we have a micro-history of canon formation