Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

This is a heads up for all you Oberon fans. Since October has five Thursdays, the third Thursday of the month comes a bit earlier than usual: October 16. Our meeting this month is thus on October 16. Please be sure to mark your calendars. We will reminisce about the great potluck meeting at Linda's in September. There will be a brief report about our Greenblatt Encounter in Grand Rapids. And, wouldn't you know, much to say about the joint Shakespeare Oxford Society/Shakespeare Fellowship conference to be held Oct 9-12 in White Plains, New York. All this plus our famous Tom Townsend Treasurer's Report as well as no telling what other sense and nonsense that may occur. Please join us October 16 for all our usual rollicking merriment at the Farmington Library, Room B. These are evenings not to be missed. Dramatically yours, Tom Hunter

First of all, forgive me for the somewhat far-reaching title of this blog (although I think Stephen Greenblatt would approve of it). I was moved by the increasingly broad geographical trend of the last two blogs on this subject and I wanted to continue with it. It also ties in with what I thought was the most interesting parts of the presentation we saw in Grand Rapids. I can't really add very much to the two excellent blogs that have already been posted, but I can say a few things. I would like to give a word of thanks to Marty for letting us know of this opportunity to see Stephen Greenblatt. I only wish we had found out sooner. Perhaps we could have organized a larger Oberon contingent. Perhaps we could have had time to print up our "Holocaust Denial" posters or lapel pins. Anyway, I had a great time in Grand Rapids and I am glad I went. It's true that it was sometimes hard to follow the details of what Greenblatt was saying, but I liked his general idea. He is int...

Little did I think when Marty H. passed along on Wednesday the heads-up about Stephen Greenblatt at Grand Valley State in Grand Rapids that on Thursday Linda, Richard and I would be motoring our way westward across our beautiful state to the land of Amway to hear one of the most renown literary teachers and critics of our time. Well, we did, and there we found Mr. Greenblatt and a large lecture hall filled with Grand Valleyites who had come to hear his tale of the cultural mobility of Cardenio . The Cardenio project actually represents quite an undertaking, a grand experiment in cultural differences. It is a variation of the Cardenio text as updated by Greenblatt and a professional playwright Charles Mee (prompting many humorous references to the joint work of Mee and I) which was then sent out to be produced in various countries to compare the cultural differences emerging from the various productions. Why Cardenio ? Greenblatt said that it was important to the experiment to use ...

Last night a few Oberons trekked across Michigan to attend Stephen Greenblatt’s lecture on “Cultural Mobility: The Strange Case of Shakespeare’s Cardenio” in the L.V. Eberhard Center at Grand Valley State University in downtown Grand Rapids. Greenblatt, who is a professor of humanities at Harvard, is the GVSU’s Distinguished Academic Lecturer for their Fall Arts Celebration which includes the fifteenth anniversary season of the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival . This year the festival offering is A Midsummer Night’s Dream ballywood-style at 7:30 p.m. Sept 26, 27, Oct. 2, 3, 4 and matinees at 2 p.m. Sept 27, 28, Oct 4, 5 at the Louis Armstrong Theatre Performing Arts Center on the GVSU Allendale campus. Greenblatt is, famously, the author of numerous critical works on the Shakespeare oeuvre, most recently his 2004 $1-million baby -- Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare . He is known for his development of a theory called “new historicism” which as near as I can figure ...

. . . brings in his revenges. Clown, Twelfth Night , V,i On September 21, the Oberons once again convened to the labyrinth in Howell to purify their hearts for another year's adventures. And, of course, we ate. And Tom T. reminded us of time's whirligig while we ate: tossed salad bleu-cheese slaw tuna noodle casserole VG's fried chicken pasta shells and peas peanut butter krispy rice treats chocolate zuccini cake cheesecake and the best chocolate cake in Michigan And Richard was presented with a puzzle to commemorate his leadership in the Ann Arbor SOS/SF conference. (What's two year's delay among friends?)