Storm Scene Research Articles

Figuring Displacement: Spaces of Imagination in Early Modern and Postmodern Intertextual Transmissions

This essay examines, ecocritically, geocritically, and comparatively, the metaphoric spaces represented in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters—seas, mountains, islands, jungle—to show that these spaces allow for different interpretations, yet they are spaces of individual imagination in both the play and the novel, suggesting transformation and metamorphosis. I argue that these literary spaces show a common feature of displacement, which allows human language to re-imagine other worlds—in literature and in visual arts. The spaces of imagination proliferated through Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Barnes’ novel have suffered a transformation in time and space, as they speak to past and present audiences and readers. The sea in Barnes’ chapter entitled “Shipwreck” symbolizes danger but also hope, as does the sea in the storm scene in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Mountain in Barnes’ eponymous chapter represents an isolated and inaccessible landscape on Mount Ararat, at the intersection of three cultures (Armenia, Turkey and Russia), but it also represents the biblical language of faith and hermitic isolation. Similarly, the island in The Tempest, which is—geologically—a mountain above the water, represents metaphorically the island of the mind. The jungle in Barnes’ chapter “Upstream” is a remote place in the forest on the Orinoco River, where Europeans and native Indians interact while making a movie; this movie is a work of visual art, represented in a novel; so is any one of the many productions of The Tempest, which reiterates the island’s imaginary space in various directorial interpretations. All these locations are metaphoric spaces of imagination, transmitted through different media, in which reality is transformed into literary representation by means of fictional description or theatrical action.

Grim humor in the tale of the wolf’s death

Abstract Contrary to other episodes of the Ysengrimus, the final episode in the seventh book of the Flemish animal epic is not based upon a known animal fable. The narrative core seems to be the story of the death of the prophet Muhammad as told by Embrico of Mainz. In this article I argue that the poet of the Ysengrimus may also have used elements from Ovid’s tale of Pentheus and the maenads in the third book of the Metamorphoses, just as the wolf’s eschatological prophesy might be an intertextual play on the storm scene in the first book of the Aeneid. Following this, I elaborate some clues that lend support to the idea, previously presented in the literature, that the portrayal of the sow Salaura refers to Hildegard of Bingen and her visions, publicly acknowledged by Pope Eugenius III during the Synod in Trier in 1147–1148, just before the completion of Ysengrimus.

King Lear, Answer to Job: The Archetypes of Godhead

William Shakespeare’s King Lear is often deemed the penultimate tragic drama. To fully grasp its archetypal reach, we must apply the insights of Carl Jung. Before Lear gives away his kingdom, he is as arbitrarily willful and irrational as the intemperate Yahweh whom Jung portrays in Answer to Job. Yahweh is a primitive, unconscious storm deity who must redeem himself from the injustices he inflicted upon Job by suffering the common lot of humanity as Jesus. Jung saw in the Bible a story of Yahweh’s struggle to gain Job’s humane consciousness. Shakespeare, the visionary artist, adopts this same basic narrative when Lear in the storm scene becomes the suffering Job, then gains insight and compassion with his Fool and later with his daughter, Cordelia. When Cordelia dies, Lear responds with Promethean defiance. Shakespeare presents his own vision of Jung’s quaternal Godhead with Lear first playing Yahweh, then suffering Job, and finally, Job’s Promethean opposite. The prototypical face of Godhead, the Wise-figure archetype embodying truth and wholeness, is Cordelia, who manifests both Christ as a symbol of the self and Sophia as Holy Spirit. In this way, Shakespeare solves Jung’s problem of the Godhead’s missing feminine. As a literary treatment of the Godhead’s archetypes and tragic nature, King Lear is a singularly important work. By illumining Lear’s archetypal patterns, Answer to Job demonstrates the depth and profundity of Jung’s religious insights on the Godhead.

The Tempest

Reviewed by: The Tempest Lily Freeman-Jones The Tempest Presented by The Globe Touring Ensemble at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. 11 June–29 August 2021. Directed by Brendan O’Hea. Associate directed by Vanessa-Faye Stanley. Design by Andrew D. Edwards. Costumes by Lorraine Ebdon-Price and Becky Gunstone. Music composed by Catherine Jayes. Choreography by Siân Williams. Text by Giles Block. Fight Direction by RC Annie Ltd. With Mark Desebrock (Prospero), Sara Lessore (Miranda), Tom Chapman (Ferdinand), Emma Ernest (Ariel), Stephenson Ardern-Sodje (Caliban/Antonio), Colm Gormley (Trinculo/Gonzalo), Katy Secombe (Stephano/Sebastian), and Anna Crichlow (Alonso). The Globe Touring Ensemble’s 2021 production of The Tempest opened with a collision of styles, as a swinging jazz number performed by the entire cast segued into the plaintive tones of two recorders. These mournful notes built to a shrill pitch, as the storm scene began in earnest. The mingling of moods in these first moments prefigured how this production would balance anxiety against the irreverent joy of community—an apt emotional palette amid the easing COVID-19 restrictions of summer 2021. Of course, a bifurcated structure has always been embedded in the play-text itself. This production emphasized, rather than complicated, the very different moods of the plot and sub-plot. Trinculo and Stephano’s drinking scenes provided riotous hilarity, which offset the studied unease of Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban. However, the slapstick buffoonery of the ship’s passengers somewhat eclipsed the pathos of the island’s inhabitants. There emerged a faint unwillingness to linger on the more sincere, or troubling, parts of the play. This wasn’t solely directorial: the audience themselves certainly seemed to be seeking comfort, rather than challenge, after many lockdowns away from the theater. More than once, lines such as Miranda’s “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness” (1.2.106) or Caliban’s “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is I know how to curse” (1.2.364–5) were delivered seriously by actors, but met with uncertain titters from groundlings. If these unexpected reactions discomfited the actors, they did an admirable job of concealing it. Yet, it must be said, this light-hearted mood was facilitated by a relatively straightforward production, which did little to highlight the play’s darker aspects or push them in new directions. Some promising avenues of characterization were left only partly explored. For example, the casting of Mark Desebrock as an unusually young Prospero allowed a different [End Page 180] kind of vulnerability to come to the fore. In a time when there is much talk of white male fragility, Desebrock’s visibly uncertain and anxious patriarch felt doubly well-judged and worth further development. Meanwhile, Emma Ernest as Ariel was a wonderfully tense presence onstage, twitching her fingers and delivering lines with an abrupt jerkiness that occasionally broke into a sob. But Ernest’s misery in enslavement meant her character elicited more sympathy than fear, which slightly undermined Ariel’s more fearsome guises—as when, in one of the most spectacular moments of the performance, she appeared in the balcony space with blood-dipped blades curving claw-like from her wrists. Similarly, Stephenson Ardern-Sodje’s Caliban was not always as formidable as the character often is. He had an explosive entrance: after the usual cry of “There’s wood enough within” (1.2.315), the trapdoor slammed open to reveal a face contorted with rage. His sudden leering when Prospero referenced his attempted assault of Miranda was also powerfully threatening. Yet the cuts made to the script seemed to have truncated some of his interactions with Prospero and Miranda, and many of his lines didn’t find the space to expand as they might. However, the failure of these more profound moments to land meant that the comic scenes shone all the more. The energy in the Globe Theatre palpably lifted as Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano brought the audience into hysterics. Colm Gormley’s deft confidence and timing (perhaps owing to his past background in stand-up comedy) stood out in a production in which speech seemed occasionally to be a little rushed, muttered, or likely to fall through the gaps. His...

Thinking through Place on the Early Modern English Stage. Andrew Bozio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+213.

<i>Thinking through Place on the Early Modern English Stage</i>. Andrew Bozio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+213.

TROUBLE AT SEA IN JUVENAL 12, PERSIUS 6 AND THE PROEM TO LUCRETIUS,DE RERUM NATURA2

This paper argues that the shipwreck scene in Juvenal 12 should be read as another exploration of the satiric ‘sketch’ offered in the proem to Lucretius,De rerum natura2: a thematic response to and exploration of the scene of troubles at sea in the Lucretian proem. The beleaguered sea-merchant Catullus should not have gone sailing at all – but he responds to trouble as an Epicurean would recommend. Juvenal 12 displays Epicurean conceptions of friendship and sacrifice, and an allusion to a storm scene in Persius 6 (itself intertextually connected to Lucretius’ proem) confirms the satiric importance of Lucretius in Juvenal's passage.

Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory by Nidesh Lawtoo

Reviewed by: Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory by Nidesh Lawtoo Claude Maisonnat (bio) Nidesh Lawtoo. Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory. Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 2017. xiii + 420 pp. ISBN: 9781611862188. Here is an innovative book that deliberately stands apart from run-of-the-mill critical studies of Conrad’s works. The project is justifiably ambitious and foregrounds its theoretical bias as early as the subtitle which could act as a caveat to some. However, that Lawtoo qualifies his book as theory-oriented should not discourage those who are not theoretically oriented because it is a tightly-knit and thoroughgoing demonstration that is at the same time well-written and eminently readable. The unifying concept which connects all the chapters of the book is that of mimesis, already implicitly contained in the word “shadow,” but it is more than that. It should not simply be understood as a mimetic approach to the old [End Page 201] romantic topos of the figure of the double but most convincingly as an exploration of hitherto largely ignored aspects of modernity. Lawtoo’s starting point is the idea that mimesis is a protean concept in search of an identity and to a large extent the whole book can be read as an attempt to explore the various facets of that identity, touching on subjects like post-colonial studies, new materialism, environmental studies, and even the neurosciences. The danger of resorting to such a unifying concept is, of course, that it entails a number of repetitions, but Lawtoo’s efforts to overcome the conundrum of relying on a single hypothesis to account for human behavior and artistic creation are eventually rewarded. Far from diluting the notion by widening its scope and thus threatening to blunt its cutting edge and diminish its efficiency, he skilfully succeeds in demonstrating its relevance to new fields of expertise like the theory of catastrophe, the emergence of the Anthropocene, the ethics of sharing, and the threat of horrorism, among others. His acute understanding of theoretical stakes is nothing new as he had already illustrated this in his previous and successful book on Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought. Lawtoo’s method of textual investigation is original and always the same: he focuses on a particular episode which could appear minor to some, and explores its many theoretical implications, in the meantime showing why it is crucial and sheds some light on the whole text. This is something of a technical feat, as it ultimately proves highly convincing and satisfactory. This is the case, for instance, of the significance of the last duel between d’Hubert and Féraud in “The Duel,” interpreted as a way of putting an end to the repetition of violence, or the storm scene on board the Sephora in “The Secret Sharer,” revisited in the light of the Anthropocene and the ethics of catastrophe. The book itself with its 420 pages, 361 of them being devoted to a series of essays on individual works, is composed of three main parts: Ethics of Catastrophe, Anthropology of Frenzy, and Metaphysics of Tragedy, followed by a coda entitled “Conrad’s Neuroplasticity,” the latter being perhaps not indispensable. It looks at A Personal Record and Under Western Eyes, exploring briefly such concepts as the neuro turn and brain plasticity, and attempts to account for the question of language and adoption. The whole comprises eight chapters altogether. In a lengthy but necessary and helpful introduction of some forty pages, Lawtoo explains what he means by the figure of the artist as double beyond the mere homo duplex cliché that Conrad applied to himself. Then he considers his own position as a Janus-faced reader who wants to be as much critically oriented as he is theoretically oriented as far as his epistemological approach is concerned. This leads him to assess his position as a protean theorist who covers multiple cultural grounds encompassing psychoanalysis, sociology, psychology, anthropology, post-colonial studies, [End Page 202] media studies, affect theory, and even neurology with the discovery of the function of mirror neurons in the way the brain works. In this last instance, he threads his path cautiously, and rightly so, because the...

Lear by Aribert Reimann, and: King Lear by Aulis Sallinen (review)

Reviewed by: Learby Aribert Reimann, and: King Learby Aulis Sallinen John Holland Aribert Reimann. Lear. DVD. Simone Young / Philharmoniker Hamburg and Chorus of Staatsoper Hamburg. With Bo Skovhus, Katja Pieweck, Hellen Kwon, Siobhan Stagg, Andrew Watts. Halle/Saale, Germany: ArtHaus Musik, 2015. 109063. $29.99. Aulis Sallinen. King Lear. DVD. Okko Kamu / Orchestra and Chorus of Finnish National Opera. With Matti Salminen, Taina Piira, Satu Vihavainen, Lilli Paasikivi, Jorma Hynninen. Helsinki: Ondine, 2015. ODV4010. $29.99. Of all the operas which never moved beyond the planning stage, Giuseppe Verdi’s King Learwill probably head anyone’s list as our greatest loss. Except for a forgotten work performed in 1937 by an obscure Italian composer with close ties to the Fascist party, no one seems to have taken on Shakespeare’s monumental tragedy until the last quarter of the 20 thcentury, when two composers of international reputation took it on – Aribert Reimann in 1978, and Aulis Sallinen in 2000. Reimann’s Learwas written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and first performed in Munich. Since that time it has received approximately thirty productions around the world, possibly unique for a post–World War II opera. The reason, however, is clear: Reimann’s score shows a dramatic sensitivity which is lacking in so many contemporary operas, and the title role is an outstanding vehicle for a star baritone. The dense orchestral textures are chosen carefully for each character and situation. The [End Page 598]music rages violently for such “bad” characters as Goneril, Regan, and Edmund, as well as the storm scene, yet the well-intentioned characters Edgar, Cordelia, and Gloucester are given music that is gentle and eloquent. Lear himself fits into both worlds but his final mad scene is as heartbreaking as anything in opera. The performance presented here was filmed at the Hamburg State Opera in 2014, and features Bo Skovhus in the title role. Skovhus is one of the top singing actors of our time, and he is in full command of the role. The rest of the cast rises to his level musically and frequently dramatically. Special mention must go to Andrew Watts as Edgar, whose role requires him to move from a traditional lyric tenor up into a vibrant countertenor head voice, a shift that he handles admirably. Siobhan Stagg is a moving Cordelia, and the other sisters are suitably nasty in their more dramatic soprano music. Stage director Karoline Gruber presents the work in modern dress on an abstract revolving set, respecting the text but adding a few touches such as the Fool lingering on stage for most of the opera, sometimes upstaging the principle action as he does in the final scene (the camera shifting focus to him does not help). While Reimann’s operas tend to be based on literary classics and preserve the shape and intentions of their sources, Sallinen’s operas are much more dramatically abstract, and in fact King Lear(his sixth) is the first to be based on a traditional drama. In writing his own libretto, Sallinen has said that he wanted to remove many of the purely narrative scenes and focus instead on the more poetical passages. As a result, several important scenes, such as the blinding of Gloucester, are omitted and merely described later by a Greek chorus of sorts. He has also eliminated the role of Kent entirely. The end result is less of a faithful representation of Shakespeare’s play than a free interpretation of some of its themes. The performance represented here was filmed in Helsinki in 2002, two years after the premiere, and with one or two exceptions, features the original cast, all of whom have worked with Sallinen previously. Bass Matti Salminen in the title role can only be described as monumental. If his is not the subtlest dramatic performance, he clearly establishes himself as the power center around which everyone else revolves. Jorma Hynninen as Gloucester gives the most thoughtful performance and is genuinely moving. The more villainous characters come across as comic grotesques although Jorma Silvasti as Edmund works the hardest to make his character less of a stereotype. Musically, cast and conductor are in full command...

Research on Electronic Technology in Risk Analysis of Power System Based on Electronic Materials and Geomagnetic Storm Scene Model

Power system storm disaster risk assessment need to simulate the storm scene, the storm induced electric field is one of the key places. Spatial and temporal distribution model of electronic technology is proposed to establish an electric field and magnetic storms inductively for 7-9 November 2004 geomagnetic storm scenario simulated observational data, and integration with the power system, as an application of the GIC were considered the standard case model risk analysis system running under the impact of the storm. Numerical results show that the electronic materials model can effectively simulate the storm scene and can easily be combined with the power system parameters.

Andreas Höfele Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s TheatreStage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Andreas Höfele. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+315.

<i>Andreas Höfele</i> Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre<i>Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre</i>. Andreas Höfele. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+315.

“What Country, Friends, Is This?”: Touring Shakespeares, Agency, and Efficacy in Theatre Historiography

The curtain rose at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, on 14 August 2011 to reveal a richly textured production ofThe Tempeston a bare stage with minimal props. As the lights came up, a group of white-robed sailors were caught in a meticulously choreographed storm, dancing to the mesmerizing beats of the master drummer upstage. The performers’ costumes echoed traditional Koreanhanbokattire and their acting style incorporatedt'alch'ummask-dance drama techniques. Their long white sleeves flapped and swayed in sync with their movements. Engulfed in stagewide sapphire and then crimson lighting, their sleeves were transformed from symbols of violent wind and waves to raging fire on board a ship approaching a world where, as Gonzalo aptly summarized, “no man was his own” (5.1.211). With Prospero (King Zilzi) as the drummer upstage and Ariel dancing in the midst of the unfortunate sailors, the storm scene—one of the longest renditions of the “direful spectacle” (1.2.26) in the performance history ofThe Tempest—served as an anchor to the tragicomic narrative about the self and the other. For a fleeting moment, Prospero gave the impression of being a drillmaster at the helm.

Review

Review

Layered Meanings of Nature: the Storm Scene in King Lear

Layered Meanings of Nature: the Storm Scene in King Lear

Strange weather in King Lear

This article argues that King Lear can help re-shape the emerging discourse of eco-criticism. The play's focus on human dis-harmony with the non-human environment resonates with recent developments in ecological science like the “post-equilibrium shift”. Shakespeare's representations of dis-equilibrium in the storm scenes can correct eco-criticism's reliance on pastoral and Romantic visions of harmony. The play's emphasis on the way natural systems, especially the weather, disrupt humanity's meaning-making capacities generates an alternative to dualistic notions of the self–nature relationship. By representing ecological instability and pluralized selfhood, King Lear reminds “green” readers how difficult and disorderly living in a mutable eco-system can be.

Breaking Form through Sound: Instrumental Aesthetics, Tempête, and Temporality in the French Baroque Cantata

Abstract Between Lully's death (1687) and Rameau's operatic debut (1733), composers of the tragédie en musique experimented with instrumental effects, greatly expanding the dramatic role of the orchestra. The profusion of these effects coincides with a new aesthetic reappraisal of instrumental music in France, as can be observed in the writings of Du Bos. The tempête constitutes one of the most remarkable examples. Its sonic violence was too strong to end with the instrumental movement that depicted it; indeed, composers often prolonged the storm scene into a series of movements all connected by thematic material and key to produce a verisimilar effect of the storm's momentum, thereby creating what I term “the domino effect.” By the early eighteenth century, the tempête had become such a well established and popular topos that it began migrating to non-staged genres like the cantata. The transference of the tempest topos from the tragédie lyrique to the French baroque cantata entailed the breaking of formal frames. Unlike the supple dramatic structure of French opera, the cantata adopted the more rigid mold of the Italian opera seria—the recitative-aria unit—which separated the flow of time into active and static moments. Three case studies—Bernier's Hipolite et Aricie (1703), Jacquet de la Guerre's Jonas (1708), and Morin's Le naufrage d'Ulisse (1712)—demonstrate how composers manipulated this mold to satisfy a French aesthetic that valued temporal continuity for the sake of verisimilitude. All three composers employ key and instrumental music to portray the storm's forward momentum across recitatives and arias, relying primarily on rhythmic energy and melodic activity to create continuity. Although each composer's musical response varies according to personal style, what emerges is a shared aesthetic and compositional strategy employed to portray an event whose relentless power transcends the temporal boundaries between recitative and aria. This aesthetic of continuity and linearity shown by French baroque composers influenced the treatment of the tempest topos in the later eighteenth-century repertory, vocal and instrumental alike, including opera, the concerto, the overture-suite, and the characteristic symphony.

King Lear (review)

Reviewed by: King Lear Michael J. Collins King Lear Presented by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London. April 23–August 17, 2008. Directed by Dominic Dromgoole. Designed by Jonathan Fensom. Music by Claire van Kampen. Choreography by Sian Williams. Fights by Renny Krupinski. With David Calder (King Lear), Sally Bretton (Goneril), Fraser James (Duke of Albany), Kellie Bright (Regan), Peter Hamilton Dyer (Duke of Cornwall), Jodie McNee (Cordelia), Danny Lee Wynter (Lear’s Fool), Kevork Malikyan (Lear’s Knight), Paul Copley (Earl of Kent), Joseph Mydell (Earl of Gloucester), Trystan Gravelle (Edgar), Daniel Hawksford (Edmund), Paul Lloyd (Old Man, Doctor, Bedlamite, Knight, Soldier), Kurt Egyiawan (Curran, Bedlamite, Knight, Soldier), Ashley Rolfe (Oswald), Beru Tessema (King of France, Bedlamite, Knight, Soldier), Ben Bishop (Duke of Burgundy, Bedlamite, Knight, Soldier), Pamela Hay (Ballad Singer), Michael Jarvis, Ben Lee, Richard Marshall, and Fabian Spencer (Bedlamites, Knights, Soldiers). The stage at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was almost entirely bare as the audience entered for Dominic Dromgoole’s production of King Lear. Four red wooden panels, each about eight feet tall, which slid across the stage into various configurations during the performance, stood toward the back of the stage, one just behind the right pillar, the other three near the back wall. A garland of ivy, which Lear’s riotous, brawling knights would later pull down as they left Goneril’s castle in 1.2, ran onto the stage from the tops of two poles at opposite sides of the yard and then continued along the rail of the balcony and down each side of the center door. An octagonal platform, which looked like a large drum, extended [End Page 92] Click for larger view View full resolution David Calder as King Lear in King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe (2008). Photo by John Haynes. [End Page 93] the center of the stage farther out into the yard and, with five steps on each side, allowed exits and entrances through it. As the musicians on the stage brought their drumming to an abrupt end, the actors entered, and (without the opening lines of Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund) Lear, taking Goneril by the hand and swirling her to center stage, began the play. The production, which cut speeches and overlapped scenes, moved quickly, running (with the interval) three hours and ten minutes. (Gloucester’s stark articulation of his existential courage, “if I die for it, as no less is threatened me, the king, my old master, must be relieved,” was unfortunately among the lines lost.) An essay in the program by Neil Rhodes (“Objects of Fear and Charity”) proposed that “homelessness is at the heart of King Lear and it was a highly visible problem in Shakespeare’s time.” The production made that socio-political dimension of the play more prominent with the appearance on the stage of the “houseless poverty” Lear remembers in his prayer on the heath. In the first storm scene (3.1), for example, which was created manually with a drum, a wind machine, and a metal sheet, these “bedlamites,” as the program called them, entered the yard and (as Edgar had in 2.3) climbed the poles to the left and right of the stage. At the beginning of the trial scene (3.6), they were sleeping at the back of the stage, only to be awakened and frightened away by the mad King. They appeared again during the scene between Kent and the gentlemen (4.3). Although the production for the most avoided the characteristic interplay between actors and audience at the Globe, it did from time to time draw the audience more closely into the action. Edmund directed his questions about which sister he should take to one of the groundlings, evoking laughter in the audience. Later, at the blinding of Gloucester, Regan kissed Cornwall passionately after he had positioned a chair for Gloucester up center, and Cornwall, after violently ripping out the first eye, tossed something wet and slimy out into the yard. Regan then sat on Gloucester’s lap and, with Cornwall behind her, his hand on her buttocks, tore out the second eye. Covered with blood, she stood up, kissed her wounded husband again, and then helped...

Media ritual in catastrophic time

Television news coverage of Hurricane Katrina's impact on Mississippi and New Orleans presented viewers with broadcast journalists who were on the scene but were largely left without access to traditional government sources. Through a textual analysis of transcripts of cable and network news reports, this study compares the media's performance during the six days following 29 August, 2005 to news coverage following 11 September, 2001. In this way, it interprets how and why the 11 September attacks produced a `sphere of consensus' unifying the media and the state, while Katrina produced the opposite dynamic. Central to this analysis is the normative concept of `media ritual', especially where the media's ritual consensus with government was `de-centered' by the federal government's de facto absence from the storm scene for that crucial week.

Roman Actors and Egyptian Transvestites

In its 1999 season the Southwark Globe took up several challenges from its critics: to prove that it could do Shakespearean tragedy as well as comedy, to adopt more Elizabethan conventions (in this case, all-male casts for frius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra), and to perform a new play. To make room for the last of these, which opened after I left, there were no plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries this year; I suspect that they will mostly be relegated to the small indoor theater when it finally materializes, and that the same will be true of new plays. The Globe theater has also taken notice of last season's complaints about problems seeing and hearing the actors. The pillars have new, slimmer bases; though actors can no longer stand on them, a little more of the forestage can now be seen from the side. This year each production has had a "Master of Play" and "Master of Verse," and the work of these coyly named individuals, especially the latter, has made a difference. While some of the actors occasionally sounded as if they were forcing their voices, most could make themselves heard even above the sound of a helicopter. The stage movement was also much more inventive, with most actors apparently comfortable about playing to the whole of their audience instead of just the quadrant directly in front of the stage. The result was that, even more than last summer, one play seemed to differ from another largely in terms of the roles it offered the Globe audience. What made me particularly aware of this odd categorization was the experience of watching a production in which I as audience member apparently had no role, the Kathakali King Lear presented by the visiting Annette Leday/Keli Company. In Kathakali, a traditional Indian dramatic form that ultimately derives from an even older Sanskrit tradition, the visual and verbal components of a character are entrusted to separate performers. The words are chanted by two narrators, with emotions represented by a cascade of percussive sounds and words accompanied by an uncannily rapid fluttering of hands and fingers on the part of the heavily made-up actors. The much-simplified plot (adapted by David McRuvie, translated into Malayalam by K. Marumakan Raja) deals only with Lear: Goneril and Regan are unmarried and competing not only for their father's love but also, rather blatantly, for France's, a fact that exacerbates their antagonism toward Cordelia. Since Tom is simply a madman, not the disguised Edgar, France largely takes over Edgar's role, finally killing both the wicked sisters. Goneril, Regan, and France had some bravura dancing-France enacted the entire battle himself-while the Fool was played as a character role. Like Shakespeare's company, the Kathakali one is normally all-male, though in this production Cordelia was played by the choreographer Annette Leday, who indicated the character's silence by means of restrained hand movements. I suspect that the production took some other liberties with the conventions: in the storm scenes, musicians represented the onset of Lear's madness with eerie nonmusical noises, and at the end, when the sounds of grief came from Lear himself instead of the chanters, there seemed to be a deliberate shattering of convention. The production offered a fascinating glimpse of Lear as a folktale, with occasional moments of real beauty and poignancy. But it was both frustrating and instructive to see it in a theater where the audience normally expects to be fully involved in the per-

Melville's "The Candles" and the Easter Vigil

Melville critics long detected ritualistic quality in The Candles, the storm scene late in Moby-Dick (1851) in which corpusants form atop the Pequod9s masts, and Captain Ahab, after addressing the spirit clear fire they embody, extinguishes them in an act defiance that seals his doom. Lawrance Thompson, noting Ahab9s prayerlike but blasphemous utterances, Stubb9s supplications to the corpusants to have mercy on us all, and the scene9s profusion trinities, tapers, and other Christian signifiers, described the storm scene as a kind inverted religious ritual that correlates, as such, to the inverted communion The Quarter-Deck and the inverted baptism The Forge. It may be, however, that The Candles is more than a sort of inverted rite-more, that is, than scene suggesting, with obviously subversive intent, the forms and usages pious Christian observance but having no particular original in mind. For to remarkable extent the images, actions, dialogue, and dramatic structure this chapter long and properly regarded as the novel9s climax, seem to evoke but also to invert corresponding elements the Easter Vigil, religious observance itself long regarded as the climax the Christian liturgical year.

Hellenistic reference in the proem of Theocritus, Idyll 22

Theocritus' twenty-second idyll is cast in the form of a hymn to the Dioscuri, who are addressed in the proem as saviours of men, horses, and ships. This opening section of the idyll is modelled loosely on the short thirty-third Homeric hymn, and like that hymn contains an expanded account of the twins' rescue of ships about to be lost in a storm. As is hardly surprising, Theocritus in reworking the Homeric hymn draws on other literary antecedents as well, and like other Alexandrian poets makes prominent use of diction borrowed and adapted from the Homeric epics. At the same time, the proem also shares several points of contact, largely overlooked or disputed by previous scholarship, with the poetry of Theocritus' own contemporaries. In the present paper, I shall suggest that in the storm scene of the proem references to Aratus' Phaenomena and Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica occur in a carefully arranged pattern with potentially significant implications for our understanding of the proem and the idyll as a whole.