Volumen IV
Romeo and Juliet
Volumen V
Julius Caesar
Editado por
MANUEL ANGEL CONEJERO
This issue of En Torno a Shakespeare gathers two volumes in one book for the first time since this collection first saw the light in 1980. Three different editions of this series have been since published bringing together a selection of the critical studies which Shakespearian scholars from all over the world contributed to the Encuentros Shakespeare from 1972 to 1985. These essays, although centered on the poet whose name we honour in these pages, cover a great variety of subjects and approaches to his work which range from theory of translation to performance.
Now and this is another novelty each volume is limited to one theme,
or (to be more specific) to one single play: volume IV focuses on Romeo
and Juliet, whilst volume V is devoted to Julius Caesar. The
monographic nature of this new En Torno is due to the fact that
the IX and X Encuentros Shakespeare had each play respectively
as the main theme of the meeting: "Words and Theatricality in Romeo and
Juliet", in Valencia in 1987; and "The Roman Plays: Julius Caesar", in
Madrid in 1988. Furthermore, these conferences counted on the
felicitous coincidence that each play was being performed at the
time.
In the first case, the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers was staged
by "TeatreJove", a group of young actors created by the Shakespeare Foundation
of Spain as a permanent workshop for the training of actors. The production
was directed by Edward Wilson, director of the National Youth Theatre ol
Great Britain, with design by Brian Lee. The following year it was the
National Theatre of Spain, directed by Lluís Pasqual (now director
of Theatre de l'Europe), that accompanied the Encuentros in Madrid
with a production of Julius Caesar starred by leading actors of
the Spanish stage.
The contents of both volumes are a selection of the contributions made by the Shakespearian specialists at the conferences. As they were orally delivered their style and tone are closer to that of the spoken discourse rather than to the texts which are purposely written for publication. However we thought it more desirable to preserve the vigour and freshness of the oral delivery.
VOLUME IV, under the general topic of Romeo
and Juliet, contains seven essays with as diverse
approaches to the play as their authors:
INGERBORG BOLTZ is director of the
Shakespeare Bibliothek of Munich. She discusses the
tragic stature of the lovers' figures and investigates their dramatic
construction leading to self-slaughter in terms of theatrical likeliness
bearing in mind various aspects such as stagecraft, language, hibliotextuality,
history of the play's mise-en-scènes, etc.
MURIEL C. BRADBROOK is Professor Emerita at the University of Cambridge
and a Fellow of
Gritton College. She is a customary contributor to En Torno a Shakespeare
and her extensive work on the Elizabethan theatre has placed her on one
of the highest in Shakespearian scholarship. In her article, with the liveliness
and originality we are accustomed to, she gives an account of three
adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: one in the Elizabethan times drawing
on the Bad Quarto of 1597 with comparisons to other
Elizabethan love tragedies; the second, a Restoration «improvement»
wrought by Otway that turns the Capulets and Montagues into Roman families;
and the third, those adaptations of Garrick's in mid XVIIIth Century.
Professor Bradbrook carefully examines the stagecraft and language of these
versions (scenes added, parts which remain constant, parts reshaped, scenes
added, developments, cutting out of lines, etc.) and finally vindicates
the appeal of the play as a lyric tragedy to audiences from Shakespeare's
times, despite attempts (even in the XXth century such as that of "the
Irish bogtrotter with a Russian pseudonim") to "deglamorize"
it.
RUSSELL JACKSON is Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute
(University of Birmingham).
His contribution gives an exhaustive account of an independent professional
production of Romeo andJuliet -directed, acted and produced by a
young actor, Kenneth Brannagh to which he himself was literary
adviser. His survey goes from a kind of rehearsal diary, in which he writes
the discussion that give shape to the final product; then he analyses the
treatment of the text, how lines and words needed to be added or cut according
to the demands of the production; and concludes with an assesment and criticism
of the production itself and the reaction it provoked.
BARBARA ARNETT MELCHIORI is Professor of English Literature at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". She has recently collaborated with the Fundación Shakespeare by writing the introduction to bilingual edition of Twelfth Night-Noche de reyes. In her research she highlights the connections of the play with the Interlude tradition and argues on the Friar's bearing on such figures as the pedagogue and the pedant.
GIORGIO MELCHIORI, CBE, is Professor of English Literature at the University
of Rome "La
Sapienza". His erudition and vast work (ranging from the Elizabethans
to Joyce) have given him a pre-eminent place among Shakespearian specialists.
He is general editor of a bilingual edition of Shakespeare's
complete plays which constitutes an invaluable point of reference for the
translations made by the Fundación Shakespeare. In his study Professor
Melchiori shows the reader Shakespeare's use of rhetoric in the construction
of characters in Romeo and Juliet. Without forgetting the essentially
dramatic nature of the play, Professor Melchiori uses a linguistic
approach that explores the rhetorical devices wrought in the language
of the characters, paying special attention to the sonnet form.
CANDIDO PÉREZ GÁLLEGO
is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Madrid
since 1968; vice-president of the Shakespeare Foundation of Spain; Member
of the Harvard International Seminar of Politics and Humanities and Fellow
of the "Mathiessen Room" of "Eliot House" in Harvard University, as well
as author of more than twenty books and over eighty articles. Following
a psychosemiotic approach, Professor Pérez Gállego unfolds
his interpretation and understanding of the symbology of time, of characters'
behaviour and tragical construction that surrounds Romeo and Juliet.
With a careful and attentive analysis of data extracted from the surface
of the play, he makes the reader plunge into the deep currents that flow
under the succesion of dramatic events and interweave the cosmological
structure of the tragedy.
PURIFICACION RIBES TRAVER is currently lecturer in English Literature
at the University of
Valencia. She is member of the Fundación Shakespeare of Spain
and, along with Dominique
Keown and Professor Conejero, is author of two volumes of translations
into English of poems by Ausiàs March. She has written the Introduction
to the bilingual edition of Romeo and Juliet made by the Fundación
Shakespeare. In her study she examines an important feature in the construction
of the tragedy such as the contrast between the lovers and the rest
of the Veronese in terms of character evolution.
VOLUME V under the general topic of Julius Caesar, contains again seven essays with as diverse approaches to the play as their authors, some of whom have been presented in the previous paragraphs:
SABINE U. BÜCKMANN DE VILLEGAS presents the only contribution of this issue that deals with translation. As she touches upon some theoretical points in translation practice, she discusses some of the difficulties a translator of Shakespeare has to face up, paying special attention to lexical problems.
ANN J. COOK, from Vanderbilt University, is chairman of the International Shakespeare Association, and has written extensively on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Theatre. In her paper she explains how Shakespeare dealt with the conventions of courtship and matrimony in the Romam Plays by discussing the transposing of these social codes and customs across centuries and cultures.
M.T.JONES-DAVIES is Professor of English Renaissance Language, Literature and Civilization at Paris-Sorbonne and director of the «Centre de Recherches sur Ia Renaissance», as well as President of the Societé Française Shakespeare. She has contributed to other volumes of En torno aShakespeare, and has written several essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan times. In this article, Professor Jones-Davies surveys two contradictory visions of Caesar a deified hero or as monstrous human being- that are woven into the structure of the play. As she finds echoes throughout the play, she develops a symbiology that emerges out of both conceptions of the Caesarean figure.
BARBARA MELCHIORI, in this essay, sheds new light on the interpretation of the play in general and of its main character, Brutus, in particular. As she retraces the transformation and blending of three Plutarch's lives that Shakespeare might have had in mind in order to characterize Brutus, she discloses new possibihties in the role and hints at difficulties of its actability.
GEORGIO MELCHIORI, seeing Julius Caesar against the background of the previous history plays and of the Elizabethan notion of the "antique" Roman moral, presents us a Shakespeare's view of Rome surrounded by images of death and suicide and overtones of honour and nobility. With his acute and minute observation, he reveals new interpretations ol the underlying theme of the Roman Plays which bears on man's complex nature as he explains the influence of Julius Caesar on the conception of Hamlet.
PURIFICACION RIBES TRAVER demonstrates Shakespeare's appreciation of the power of rhetoric by analysing and contrasting the two famous speeches after Caesar's death. It is worth mentioning that she has written a PhD thesis on the rhetoric functionality of theatre and its relationship with translation applied to Julius Caesar.
MARVIN SPEVACK is Professor of English at the University of Münster. He is best known for his concordance to the Works of Shakespeare providing us all with an invaluable tool for the study of Shakespeare. His analysis of Julius Caesar centres on two important key points for a more acute appreciation of the play: on the one hand, Professor Spevack stresses the overlapping and synchrony of the private and the public, both in matter subject as in intent and implication, as a decisive feature in the structure and style of Julius Caesar; on the other hand, he points out the omnipresence of change in the construction of scenes, in references, in almost every action and situation and its strained hearing on the concept of constancy that lies at the bottom of the characters' motivation.
MANUEL ANGEL CONEJERO OBE, is Professor of English at the University of Valencia where he teaches Drama and Rhetoric. He is director of the Shakespeare Foundation of Spain and has published numerous works, the most important of which are Shakespeare, orden y caos, Eros Adolescente: La construcción estética en Shakespeare, and La Escena, el sueño, la Palabra: Apunte Shakespeariano. He is general editor of the series En torno a Shakespeare, and is engaged on the translation of the Complete Works of Shakespeare into Spanish. He has so far translated King Lear, Macbeth (also translated into Catalan), Othello, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, The Tempest and Richard II. Professor Conejero has also translated for the stage several plays by other authors, such as Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and is co-author of the translation into English of two volumes of Ausias March's poems.
We hope this En Torno a Shakespeare will have as much appeal for the general reader as for the specialist. The contributors are all experts in their subjects and their critical studies widen the scope of Shakespearian scholarship. Students will get useful hints for their own understanding of Shakespeare through studying these articles and anyone with little more than a casual curiosity about Shakespeare will find both pleasurable and profitable reading in the volumes.
VOLUMEN IV
The Dramaturgy of the Lovers' Suicides in Romeo and Juliet, by
Ingeborg Boltz
Romeo and Juliet: Three Adaptations, by Muriel C.Bradbrook
Work on a Performance Text: Romeo and Juliet, August-September
1986, by Russell Jackson
Notes on Romeo and Juliet, by Barbara Melchiori
Romeo and Juliet: The Rhetoric of Love, by Giorgio Melchiori
Verona en Stratford: Psico-semiótica de Romeo and Juliet,por
Cándido Pérez Gállego
Los habitantes de Verona: Dinamismo vs. Inmovilismo,por Purificación
Ribes Traver
VOLUMEN V
Translating Shakespeare: The example of Julius Caesar, by Sabine
U. Bückmann de Villegas
"My true betrothèd love, and now my wife": Courtship in Shakespeare's
Roman Plays, by Anne J. Cook
Shakespeare's Caesar: a god or a monster?, by M.T. Jones-Davies
"A brute part to kill so capital a calf", by Barbara Melchiori
I am more an Antique Roman, by Giorgio Melchiori
"For I have neither wit, nor words.., to stir men's blood",
by Purificación Ribes Traver
Julius Caesar: Public and Private, Constancy and Change, by
Marvin Spevack
Bibliografia, seleccionada por Juan V. Martínez Luciano