Filial Devotion Research Articles

Shakespeare and Garrick (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Garrick Barbara Mackey Shakespeare and Garrick. By Vanessa Cunningham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; pp. 250. $99.00 cloth. A great many books on David Garrick are available—from the popular and lavishly illustrated (Alan Kendall) to the scholarly and critical (Stone and Kahrl). Although Vanessa Cunningham includes some biographical and historical background, her text largely details Garrick’s approach to Shakespeare performance, thus illustrating both Garrick’s veneration of Shakespeare and his rather free alterations of Shakespeare’s text. In her prologue, Cunningham states that she will describe six of Garrick’s twenty-two alterations of Shakespeare’s plays, two each from his early, middle, and late period “to explore whether any trends . . . are discernible in Garrick’s alterations over time” (1). Garrick entered the theatre as a great boom in Shakespeare revivals was growing, and he became known as a “great rescuer” (7), deleting many additions that had been grafted on during the Restoration. But Garrick did not start with the First Folio or any of the new editions that were appearing in his time; he began with the familiar scripts already in use, “mirror[ing] the practice of those eighteenth century editors who preferred to ‘correct’ the editions of their immediate predecessors rather than go back to the original text” (148). So although Garrick claimed to have rediscovered Shakespeare’s true texts, in reality he made whatever changes he felt would appeal to an eighteenth-century audience. In chapter 3, Cunningham describes Garrick’s treatment of two Shakespeare plays performed early in his career: Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. In each of these, the character played by Garrick is enlarged. Death scenes in particular were augmented, and Garrick’s influence was so powerful that these alterations were maintained for the next hundred years. Garrick did his first adaptation, Macbeth, when he was twenty-six (1744). Garrick began with D’Avenant’s version, which emphasized the moral message by giving Macbeth a farewell line to his ambition and by expanding the roles of the Macduffs, who represented a model couple resisting the temptation of ambition. Garrick even wrote a death speech of eight lines in order to make the moral instruction more explicit. Maintaining the purity [End Page 495] of genre, Garrick cut the porter and focused on Macbeth’s personal struggles. For Romeo and Juliet, Garrick began with Pope’s version, which excised most of the wordplay and bawdy language. Garrick’s greatest departure from the text was to add seventy-five lines to the last act so that Romeo and Juliet would have a chance to meet again before their deaths, thus prolonging the pathos. This version was played until the 1840s. In successive editions, Garrick removed all references to Rosaline and created new lines to indicate that Romeo had never been in love before, so as to satisfy audiences that expected leading characters to be exemplars of moral virtue. In chapter 4, Cunningham considers Garrick’s mid-career (1753–68) adaptations, showing how Garrick radically transformed some plays and minimally altered others. The Winter’s Tale was criticized for violating the unities and for Leontes’ alleged violations of decorum. Thus Garrick completely eliminated the first three acts and the shifts in time and location, necessitating the addition of over four hundred new lines of exposition. To make Leontes more acceptable, Garrick omitted his scenes of jealousy and turned him into a sentimental character, grieving and penitent. Chapter 6 discusses King Lear, which Garrick first played in 1742 when he was twenty-five, and last played in 1776, two nights before he retired. The early performances used Nahum Tate’s version, and although Garrick replaced more and more of Tate’s lines with Shakespeare’s, he seemed unable to shake off that version fully. Garrick’s audiences were reading “novels of sensibility” that described “the sufferings of the virtuous” (134); thus Garrick rushed “to shape a version primarily concerned with the sufferings of Lear and Cordelia” (124). Emphasizing the filial devotion of Cordelia and the goodness of Lear, Garrick modified all speeches where Lear curses his daughters, while playing down the political aspects. In all versions, Garrick omitted the Fool and ended...

Fish bile and cautery: trachoma treatment in art

Fish bile and cautery: trachoma treatment in art

Filial nationalism among Chinese teenagers with global identities

ABSTRACTIn this article, I look at the apparent contradiction between Chinese teenagers' nationalism and their identification with a global imagined community that deemed China inferior. I examine how teenagers I knew in Dalian City, China, attempted to resolve this contradiction through the idiom of filial devotion, which they found more convincing than state‐sponsored discourses of nationalism that emphasized China's admirability. Despite their admiration for wealthier societies, they maintained a strong sense of filial nationalism, which they saw as analogous to their unconditional loyalty to their parents. Such nationalism could not be nullified by their disgust with China's low status in the capitalist world system.

Les voies de la science grecque: Etudes sur la transmission des textes de l'Antiquite au dix-neuvieme siecle

Reviewed by: Les voies de la science grecque: Études sur la transmission des textes de l’Antiquité au dix-neuvième siècle Richard J. Durling Danielle Jacquart, ed. Les voies de la science grecque: Études sur la transmission des textes de l’Antiquité au dix-neuvième siècle. École pratique des Hautes Études, IVe section, Sciences historiques et philologiques. V. Hautes études médiévales et modernes, no. 78. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1997. x + 486 pp. Fr. F. 89.80 (paperbound). The present set of nine studies is intended to illustrate the diverse ways in which Greek medicine and science were handed down to Christian and Muslim scholars in subsequent centuries. The first paper, by Béatrice Bakhouche (pp. 1–31), is a brief study of the fortuna of Plato’s Timaeus in the medieval West. Despite its esoteric language, the work soon became a popular text in the schools, accompanied by numerous commentaries. It was translated into Latin by both Cicero and Calcidius. Nicoletta Palmieri contributes a lengthy and lively article (pp. 33–133) on the theory of medicine from the Alexandrians (5th–7th century a.d.) to the Arabs (9th–11th century). First and foremost come the commentaries to the Galenic treatises On the Sects, The Medical Art, On the Pulses for Beginners, and To Glauco On the Method of Healing. The Medical Art, of course, became the most authoritative of all Galenic writings in the Middle Ages, and indeed in the Renaissance: the commentary on it by “Alī ibn Rid.wān proved a highly influential guide to the intricacies of Galenic dogma. As for On the Sects, it too was viewed as an essential introduction to the Alexandrian canon of Galen’s works. Another important source for the history of Galenism between the Alexandrians and the Arabs are the so-called Summaria Alexandrinorum: résumés of Galenic works, edited in Arabic, or more likely translated from the Greek (p. 80). Françoise Micheau studies (pp. 147–79) the sponsors of Galenic translations made by H.unayn ibn Ish.āq, in ninth-century Baghdad. Danielle Jacquart’s contribution to the volume she edits is a masterly analysis (pp. 241–329) of a medieval French translation of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, by Martin de Saint-Gille (1362–63). The translation cannot ever have been very popular, since it now exists in only one copy (Paris BN fr. 24246). Jacquart has occasion to criticize constantly G. Lafeuille’s edition of the French text (Geneva, 1954). Jean-Marc Mandosio discusses the ancient sources for the classification of the sciences and arts in the Renaissance (pp. 331–90). He pays special attention to Politian’s Panepistemon (1491) and its sources, and then turns to Politian’s contemporaries: G. Savonarola (1452–98), Apologeticus de ratione poeticae artis (1492); Giorgio Valla (1447–1500), De expetendis et fugiendis rebus (Venice, 1501); and Gregor Reisch (1467?-1525), Margarita philosophica (1503). Politian’s Panepistemon had more influence than any of the others. Pride of place was given to Politian’s book by the Zürich polymath Konrad Gessner in the latter’s Pandectarum libri XXI [End Page 301] (1548). Finally, Ramus (1515–72) breaks utterly with Aristotle, whom Politian is careful to adapt, rather than to criticize. Brigitte Mondrain studies (pp. 391–417) the medical humanist Janus Cornarius (1500–1558), notable inter alia for his editions and translations of Hippocrates and Galen. Cornarius was also highly interested in theology (he was the first to translate all the correspondence between Basil and Gregory of Nazianzen [p. 400]). “Son oeuvre demeure sans équivalent par son ampleur” (p. 417). Danielle Gourevitch edits the intriguing correspondence between the noted English philologist and medical historian William A. Greenhill and his French colleagues Charles Daremberg and Gustave Dugat, in connection with the Arabic version of Galen’s On Anatomical Procedures. The letters tell a tragicomic story of naked ambition, fatuous rivalry, and filial devotion. A few mistakes have crept into Gourevitch’s transcriptions of the English letters: on p. 464, “how next” should be followed by “to,” “hospitally” should be “hospitably,” and “1994” should be “1894”; on p. 465, “understanding” should be “undertaking”; on p. 466, “applied” should read “supplied...

Filial devotion in Tamil culture and the Tiger cult of martyrdom

The popular responses to the first instance of cyanide suicide in the Jaffna Peninsula, that of Ponnadurai Sivakumaran in 1974, highlight the value that is accorded to devotional sacrifice in Tamil culture on both sides of the Palk Strait. The circumstances of Tamil dissatisfaction with Sinhalese society and the state apparatus provided an ideal scenario for the crystallisation of this emphasis. The LTTE have seized the opportunity and built up a cult of martyrdom as a mobilisational device, cementing force and precise weapon. Such instrumental usages should not obscure the likelihood that, among the Tiger leadership, the cyanide vial is both instrument and faith. Speculatively it is suggested that the varied expressions of Tamil sentiment in northern Sri Lanka during the 1960s and 1970s-before the Tigers secured their dominance—will reveal an emphasis on filial devotion in ways which draw on Caizkam and bhakti traditions. The article therefore draws attention to certain continuities in the popular folk cults in Tamil lands—traditions which provide a seedbed of evocative symbols that, in specific contexts, can impel, or be made to impel, individuals in sacrificial directions. The essqy argues that the understanding of such subjectivities and these essentialising moves among the Tamil militants requires a measure of essentialisation in our approaches. It elaborates this view through a critical review of Pandian's instrumental and semiotic analysis of the MGR phenomenon, a review which enables the author to introduce the hermeneutic approach of the early Taussig and his own subjectivist emphasis on the manner in which some Tamils merge their being with that of the icon of their hearts, be it MGR, Eelam or Prabhakaran.

The Throat of the Peacock: A Book of Modern Senryu on Parents and Children, with a Sūtra by the Buddha about Filial Devotion

The Throat of the Peacock: A Book of Modern Senryu on Parents and Children, with a Sūtra by the Buddha about Filial Devotion

King Lear: Monstrous Mimesis

How does one read King Lear? We as readers often lull ourselves into a sense of false understanding: we take it to be such a great and powerful work, whose profundity is so real and true, and hence, immediate, that we fail to question it. The work communicates despite its opacity; the reader resolves the difficulties of the play into simple, if not to say simplistic, oppositions and accessible, comprehensible structures where there is a seeming transparency of signification: Lear is mad, Goneril and Regan are ungrateful, and Cordelia is loving and heroic. It could not be so simple, for a simple (simplistic) solution along these lines of psychological typology cannot do justice to the work's complexity. Lear, for example, is more than mad; this madness in any case must be at least explicated in textual terms rather than in pseudopsychological or metaphysical ones. Apart from the all too easily comprehensible plot about filial devotion, one of the main reasons for the assumed transparency of the play is the nature of the language itself, often singularly unpoetic (in normative terms), and like the characters who use it, jarring, aberrant, and at times awkward. The prose content of the play is also rather high in comparison to the rest of the major tragedies. Furthermore, there is an (apparent) lack of poetic fancy or imagination, with far fewer extended, complicated images than in many of the other plays. There is in fact only one salient linguistic feature apart from the uneven language and that is the negation endlessly repeated. The words no, never, nothing, and similar words are prevalent throughout, as if, in this most tragic by being most basic and most nihilistic of Shakespearean plays, negation had replaced poetry as a dramatic vehicle as the only means of communication. The poetic pulse is not continuous; it is broken-negated-by the prose, the often prosaic verse, and by the negation in language of language and of

Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll: The Freethought Connection

RITICS OF SAMUEL CLEMENS (including those who have discussed his religious ideas) have slighted his friendship with Robert Ingersoll and have ignored his interest in Ingersoll's philosophy. According to Howells, Clemens greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he . . . regarded as an evangel of a new gospel-the gospel of free thought,1 but no one has attempted to define Clemens's understanding of Ingersoll's gospel of freethought or to suggest extent to which he was influenced by it. Ingersoll's ideas did influence Clemens, and an understanding of those ideas helps illuminate freethought tenor of Clemens's works. Ingersoll's philosophy, a form of anticlerical rationalism, can be traced back through Thomas Paine to Voltaire and French encyclopaedists. Paine's rejection of Bible as revealed truth, his opposition to religious persecution, and his republican faith in perfectibility of man provided framework for Ingersoll's philosophy. Like most nineteenth-century rationalists, Ingersoll embraced science as true guide for man. He argued that morality is secular, not religious, in origin, stressed uncertainty of a future life and importance of devoting energy to this life only. He exaggerated narrowness of religious mind, painted in gruesome colors tortures and violences committed in name of The Prince of Peace, and sentimentalized joys of honest toil, secular bliss of hearth, conjugal love, and filial devotion. Ingersoll led a lecture crusade against Christianity and what he described as gloomy spirit of Calvinism. So impressive were his rhetorical skills, so tireless was his will, that, as one historian of freethought has argued, the entire freethought movement was inseparably bound up with him. Through lecture platform and press,

An Interpretation of the Role of the Hoopoe in Afghan Folklore and Magic

THE hoopoe (Upupa epops, L.), a colorful bird about ii inches long, with slender black beak, wings striped with broad bands of black and white, russet breast and fan-like crest, is found throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe where its regal air and flamboyant plumage has assured it a prominent place in folklore. Hoopoe-lore through time and space reveals an amazingly wide range of roles and attributes.' It was regarded as a sacred bird in ancient Egypt where, according to Aelian, 'even upon the scepters of the gods a Hoopoe is an augmentation of honore'.2 The ancient Arabs ascribed many miraculous medicinal qualities to it while Persian poetic imagery credits the bird with such gentle qualities as filial devotion and virtuousness. Contrast this to the Scandinavian

Progress in education: Vietnam

Since 1961 Southern Illinois University has been involved in working with Vietnamese educators through an Agency for International Development Contract to improve, develop, and expand the elementary teacher education programs in the Republic of Vietnam. This involvement has been somewhat similar to that of George Peabody College for Teachers in Korea. These kinds of involvements resulting, in addition to the improvement of education in the host nation, in lasting relationships between educators and institutions offer much hope for future work with institutions and individuals in developing nations throughout the world. This brief explanation of the progress of this program in Vietnam may offer insights into some of the problems and successes of this and similar programs. It is impossible in a cursory overview to identify all of the influences which have had an impact upon Vietnamese education; however, in an attempt to set the stage for a brief look at current conditions, one must be aware of certain strong and national influences which have had a tremendous impact upon Vietnamese education. According to Harvey H. Smith, et. al., The educational system in the pre-French period bore the imprint of nearly ten centuries (111 B.C. to A.D. 939) of Chinese rule and cultural influence. Confucianism, with its emphasis on learning and filial devotion, was a central force in a social order which gave

The Historical Date of the Coplas and the Death of Jorge Manrique

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Historical Date of the Coplas and the Death of Jorge ManriqueRichard P. KinkadeRichard P. Kinkade Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 45, Number 2Apr., 1970 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2851538 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1970 The Mediaeval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Money and Medical Schools

American medical education has become sternly introspective and, for all I know, none soon. At times it is positively spastic. Deans are harassed by demands for space, money, beds, teaching, research, with a groundswell of complaints from those in practice that doctors are getting too scientific. I can look back over more generations of medical education than my contemporaries who are now teaching medicine, since I grew up in the family of a professor of anatomy who was also an MD, even then a bit unusual. Even discounting filial devotion, more or less inadvertently I was in a position to listen to all kinds of major and minor comments about teaching and learning medicine. I can say with conviction that my father's generation of teachers assumed that by virtue of having been appointed as teachers they knew what teaching was all about. They seemed to pay very little attention

Submarine Telegraphs

IF experience, the possession of records, filial devotion, and many friendships qualify a man to chronicle contemporaneous events, Mr. Charles Bright is eminently; prepared to write a history in which his father played an important part. This book is full of information. It gives evidence of great industry. It is well printed, admirably illustrated, thoroughly indexed, and makes a book of reference which should be in every engineer's library. The literature of the subject has been very meagre. Two or three text-books deal with the construction and working of cables. Many valuable papers are scattered in the Proceedings of engineering institutions, but there is no complete history of an industry that has not yet attained its jubilee. Mr. Bright has fulfilled his task very well. There is a remarkable free use of the footnote system. Sometimes the footnote, the result of subsequent inquiry, contradicts the text, but more often it gives details useful to the engineer, but uninteresting to the general reader. The book is divided into three parts: history, construction, and working. In the first part the evolution of the system of submarine telegraphy, still in active progress and without any sign of finality ahead, is lightly sketched. The days of secrecy have ceased; and manufacturers, engineers, and commercial managers are equally ready to publish all they know. The rough and tumble rule of thumb method of the speculative pioneer has disappeared, and the results of practical observation and scientific deduction control the progress of the industry. It is very interesting to note that the form of the first effective cable laid from Dover to Calais in 1851 has been but very little departed from, but its details and dimensions have changed with every requirement and for every ocean. Its development has given a knowledge of the sea, of its bottom, of its currents, and of its life, that has enlightened the geographer and the biologist. Science has advanced part fiassu with engineering. The engineer has succeeded in interring many a foolish assumption in Davy Jones' locker, and in bringing to light and illustrating many a new condition undreamt of by the mathematician. Mr. Bright points out that success was obtained in face of scientific and public opinion. Even the Astronomer Royal of the day (Airy)