RE: 2 Henry VI - Closure

Notes: "There you go again" was actually referring to myself, who often seems to take a non-new-critical angle. That's partly because I was poorly trained (or made skeptical of New Criticism in my infancy), entering Yale easily intimidated and unprepared.

As far as Randall's remarks are concerned, I have been searching the web and discovered that there is a 1990 re-do of Harbage's Annals of English drama for sale in various places -- at prices only a university library is likely to pay. I suspect it is probably a fine summation of all the writing and publication hints that history provides. I will have to find a friendly library that owns one and photocopy the pages covering the years between, say, 1550 and 1615, the years that most interest me.

Then, on a different note, we watches a film called Stage Beauty last night. It purported to be about the change from men playing women to women playing women at the start of the Restoration, but it blundered through a plot and series of plot shifts and tossed-off little "truths" that its actors couldn't begin to manage -- like a miraculous 5-minute change of one character from what struck me as 19th-century acting styles (portrayed as Restoration styles -- Gil would know) to some sort of Stanislavsky "realism." Ugh. This led to MY dream which was to find myself suddenly in charge of a bunch of young people who were rehearsing a play that was going to be performed soon to me have two days to learn the part of Kent for King Lear. Sweet dreams!

Ernst