Jeffrey Cohen at George Washington U in DC, who’ll be hosting a wonderful event known as the TemFest on December 3 to which everyone should certainly come, has some very stimulating thoughts on teaching King Lear and the heartbreaking final scene of the Kozinstev film.

Makes me think that one of my usual pedagogical responses to Kozinstev’s great film, emphasizing the politics of suffering and collective action, esp in the hovel scene but also in that tableau with Cordelia’s body, may be another way of avoiding the “nothing” at the play’s heart.  Those trapdoors keep opening…

Here’s a link to pictures from another new Tempest, this one by Act II Playhouse in Amber, PA.  Opens tomorrow!

Via bloggingshakespeare.com, here’s an interesting post & slideshow about our young lovers —

Blogging shakespeare

Here’s an image from Cutting Ball’s now-playing San Francisco Tempest, which is set, in director Rob Melrose’s phrase, “in a psychiatrist’s office at the bottom of a swimming pool” —

Thanks to Lang Davison for the link.

Our Norton Tempest has only a slice of Robert Browning’s great poem, “Caliban upon Setebos.”  The rest can be found at this link, and it’s very much worth reading.

Robert Browning, “Caliban upon Setebos” (1864)

I’m looking forward to reading your short papers, which should start rolling into my email inbox any hour now.  As we all get ready for our next meeting, on Oct 19, here’s a link to our special guest Derek Owens’s 2001 book, *Composition and Sustainability*.  The whole text is online.  Read as much as you like, but at least the preface plus the first & last chapters.  (That’s a good model for dipping into a scholarly book, btw — first chapter, then the last, then see what you need from the middle.)

Composition and Sustainability

We’ll likely spend most of our time tomorrow night on 20c responses to The Tempest, esp Cesaire’s and some of the other modern critics.  (Lamming seems to have aroused some interest already.)  But I wanted to put a word in early for the little snippets of source text that precede those essays, inc Pico’s “Oration,” from which the title of this post comes.

These snippets are hard to read (esp the shorter ones), and sometimes hard to follow (esp when excerpted), but they repay the effort.  Pico’s phrase might help us think about the philosophical basis for Prospero’s treatment of Caliban (whom he calls “thou earth” in 1.2), and more broadly about intellectual aspiration and what it does in this play.

For any who are wanting to work on post-colonial readings, too, I strongly suggest looking closely at Samuel Purchas (93-5), who gives a succinct summary of the reasons Englishmen felt justified in colonizing the New World.