July 5th

     After getting plenty of rest on Wednesday I thought I would be less exhausted today, but my brain is at that full and tired state where it feels like there might not be room for any more.  This could be a problem since there are three and a half more weeks to go!  Today's morning lecture was by summer scholar, Margaret Maurer, professor of Literature at Colgate.  She spoke on "Duplicity in The Comedy of Errors", mostly through research into the etymology of certain words, such as "Duplicity", which means both double and to dupe.  She made a convincing case that both these words would have been in Shakespeare's lexicon.  She referred to a fascinating-sounding text by Putnam which assigns character roles to all the figures of speech, some of which are not in usage today, but others which are familiar, such as "Allegory," which he calls "The ringleader of figures of speech," and "Hyperbole," which is referred to as "the loud liar."  Maurer spoke of the joy of confusion, and pointed out how sometimes the designations for the two pairs of same-named twins are unclear.  She also talked about the different performance options, as to whether one actor should play both twins, and how the reveal at the end is really meant as a "See the magic we can perform, or Look at how well we have done it," sort of moment.  She then touched on Johnson's distaste for Shakespeare's "quibbles," and disagreed with him, stating that "the nature of theatre is duplicitous and doubling or punning.
     In seminar we continued the talk about confusion, and puns, and talked about the different productions we had seen of the play.  I also brought up the pun about "Doubling" as a pun for punning, from Romeo and Juliet, and so we all began talking about the multitude of puns in that play.

     At lunch we had a lunchtime lecture on locating images from the library's collection, and then my performance group when up to the theater with Caleen Jennings.  We did some warm-ups which utilized boxing and kicking moves and then we got very deeply in to creating physicality for words, working with the text of The Comedy of Errors.  The idea is that you attach a physical action and a vocal delivery to each word in the line, creating almost a dance, and linking the word to the action.  What was hardest, for me, was the little words like "of," "and," etc.  We were paired up and each pair got a scene to work on, to be continued tomorrow.

     Then we went to tea (I love this tradition) for 15 minutes and then to a lecture by Barbara Mowat, editor of The Folger Editions of all four plays we are studying this summer, and of the other plays as well.  She described her process and premises, and spoke to the fact that Othello was her most challenging work since there are so many variations between the quattro and the folio.  Mowat  mentioned a kinship she feels to editors from the past and was asked what kinship she might feel to Shakespeare.  She said, in part, "The language is so amazing and it is beyond me... but there is something in his insight into character... and his deep compassion (one reason I have trouble believing Timon of Athens, is that compassion is missing.) I think you find it running through all his plays.