My dreams presage too true (in honour of Andrzej Zurowski)

The Shakespeare Institute Review, 2012

Masculine rage, violence, and vengeance have an honorable forum in Shakespeare: straightforward physical combat. Hal defeats Hotspur on the battlefield, Romeo challenges Tybalt to avenge Mercutio, and Mowbray and Bolingbroke prepare for a royally sanctioned duel. Shakespeare’s women, however, enjoy no such outlet. Instead, they turn to an indirect weapon: poison. While poison is the method of choice for women committing or attempting murder in Shakespeare, it is consistently framed as an indirect, dishonorable tool in opposition to straightforward violence. This paper considers Shakespeare’s emphasis on poison as a female weapon, gives some historical and critical context regarding its use, addresses contemporary medical texts association of poison and the female body, compares Shakespeare’s use of poison as a plot device to other early modern revenge drama writers’, and explores how Hamlet’s Claudius, the outlier in this pattern, is dishonored by choosing poison as a weapon.

A truly groundbreaking collaboration of original theatre history with exciting literary criticism, Shakespeare in Parts is the first book fully to explore the original form in which Shakespeare's drama overwhelmingly circulated. This was not the full play-text; it was not the public performance. It was the actor's part, consisting of the bare cues and speeches of each individual role. With group rehearsals rare or non-existent, the cued part alone had to furnish the actor with his character. But each such part-text was riddled with gaps and uncertainties. The actor knew what he was going to say, but not necessarily when, or why, or to whom; he may have known next to nothing of any other part. Starting with a comprehensive history of the part in early modern theatre, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern's work provides a unique keyhole onto hitherto forgotten practices and techniques. It not only discovers a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but a new Shakespeare.

Making Shakespeare offers a lively introduction to the major issues of stage and printing history, whilst also raising questions about what a ‘Shakespeare play’ actually is. It reveals how London, the theatre, the actors and the way in which the plays were written and printed all affect the ‘Shakespeare’ that we now read. Concentrating on the instability and fluidity of Shakespeare’s texts, the book discusses what happened to a manuscript between its first composition, its performance on stage and its printing, and identifies traces of the production system in the plays that we read. It argues that the versions of Shakespeare that have come down to us have inevitably been formed by the contexts from which they emerged, being shaped by, for example, the way actors received and responded to their lines, the props and music used in the theatre, or the continual revision of plays by the playhouses and printers. Allowing a fuller understanding of the texts we read and perform, Making Shakespeare is the perfect introduction to issues of stage and page. A clear, accessible read, this book allows even those with no expert knowledge to begin to contextualise Shakespeare’s plays for themselves, in ways both old and new.

Critical Survey, 2009

Beliefs acquired from authoritative sources and maintained over time, tend to achieve the status of truths. As a result, though there are many possible ways of interpreting historical data, consensus beliefs are so powerful a determinant of interpretive outcomes that new interpretations of historical evidence will tend to be rare. In addition, any evidence that conflicts radically with a belief that has achieved the status of a truth will logically be dismissed. Such, historically, has been the status of the Shakespeare authorship question. Since we know who wrote the Shakespeare canon, there is no apparent point to research. Evidence from the late 16th and early 17th century that there was any doubt, at that time, about those things we take to be certainties – Marlowe’s death, for example, or the authorship of Shakespeare’s works – are therefore quite naturally overlooked. But in overlooking evidence and interpretations that conflict with the prevailing consensus belief system, we can miss valuable insights that are uncovered by adopting a different perspective: insights into the period, into the nature of authorship, and into ourselves as authors and interpreters, constructors of our own realities.

It is relatively known that the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603), the first text ever printed in which the tragical history of the Prince of Denmark is related to the playwright William Shakespeare, presents a version notably different from the one commonly known, from the standard version which is reflected in the texts of the Second Quarto (1604/5) and the First Folio (1623).

This paper reads Shake-speare's Midsummer Night's Dream in light of (i) Lacan's comments on comedy in the Seminars, and (ii) the formidably difficult "Agency of the Letter", on metaphor on metonymy. It argues that Puk gives imaginary-poetic figure to the 'agency of the letter in the unconscious,' presiding as the sprite does over the identity shifts and errant loves of the dreaming lovers in the central Acts. The paper concludes by reflecting on Shakespeare's preromantic notion of love as, in Lacan's words, "essentially a comic motive."

Paper bullets of the brain: experiments with …, 2006

In copertina: "Playing with Shakespeare" © Paolo Venerando

2015

Ver, begin by Ricardo Mena will be recognized as a milestone on the path toward understanding the Elizabethan age and the phenomenon of “Shakespeare” … Here is the most complete, most in-depth rendering to date of the biographical and historical truths that have remained hidden beneath the Shakespeare myth … Ricardo Mena takes us on a guided tour to the otherwise invisible heart of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras; and let it be proclaimed that no previous scholar, no researcher, no author before now has dared to travel so far beneath the surface of the recorded history and the surviving literature. No one till now has maintained the clarity of vision that is shared with us in the following pages. The result is an unprecedented synthesis of various strands of evidence, all woven into a grand sweep of narrative that spans the golden age of the English Renaissance, informing us about our own history and about the forces that have helped to shape our current civilization ... The debates over “Shakespeare” that begun in the 1800s and continued all through the twentieth century are now bearing fruit; and Ver, begin marks the first real attempt to construct (or reconstruct) the full story, integrating all its pieces so they fit together and make sense, even as each aspect sheds new light on the others. This book is about not only knowing the truth, but, in the end, about understanding it.—Hank Whittemore, author of The Monument and Shakespeare's Son and his Sonnets, quoted from the Foreword of Ver, begin. The lengthy volume ... is memorable for something yet more ad hoc: its vital energy, freedom of thought, and imaginativeness to rearrange pieces previously frozen on the Elizabethan chessboard. This makes for an intellectual wild ride ... Several monographs twine together in a single revolutionary epic ... In short, the book is an achievement. Perhaps just because of its driving, prolix, protean character, wherein discoveries fly out like sparks along the way, the reader sees a new perspective on the age that reaches beyond the Oxford-centered understanding. With that flair, I expect it will be picked up by a commercial publisher, Spanish or English. Ricardo Mena’s website contains some of the liveliest literary commentaries available on the Internet ... Santayana’s morality lies back of the work, that skepticism is wholesome, that thinkers must not surrender lightly the duty of independent thought. This principled attitude, far from being contentious, imbues the book’s literary criticism with positive rather than adversarial light. Ver, begin is a spiritual advance upon much invective and polemic that have gone before.—William J. Ray, peer review on Ver, begin, the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter (Vol. 51 Summer 2015).