Abstract: In this seminar paper James Loehlin analyzes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona . Largely ignored and rarely performed for centuries, the play was staged by Peter Hall in 1960, only to be found “gloomy, fussy, and unfunny” by critics. Loehlin compares the productions of Robin Phillips (1970), John Barton (1981), David Thacker (1991), Edward Hall (1998), and . The Shakespeare Association of America seminar on April 2, 2015, was led by Elizabeth Rivlin of Clemson University and Melissa Walter of the University of the Fraser Valley.
Abstract: James Loehlin presented this talk at the sixth Blackfriars Conference, “Shakespeare and Performance,” held in Staunton, Virginia, October 25–30, 2011. He considers the relationship between prose and poetry in Shakespeare’s plays from a performance point of view, highlighting scenes from As You Like It and Hamlet that feature exchanges that move into and out of verse. Loehlin asks us to tune in to the expressive rhythms of Shakespeare’s language as a key to understanding the interpersonal dynamics and rhetorical power struggles between characters. As he notes, the purpose of the talk is to call our attention to what he regarded as an understudied feature of Shakespearean performance studies and scholarship about the Elizabethan stage.
Abstract: James Loehlin delivered these remarks on Othello in September 2008 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which featured a production of the play directed by Lisa Peterson. The talk, intended for a general audience, picks up on the critic G. Wilson Knight’s discussion of the “Othello music”—the unusually rich and evocative language spoken by the play’s protagonist. One of Loehlin’s aims here, it seems, is to encourage theatergoers to tune in to the play as a piece of poetry and to take note of the ways Shakespeare draws on the sonic affordances of language to enrich and complicate our response to the story and the characters.
Abstract: James Loehlin spoke on October 6, 2006, to the University of Texas British Studies Seminar (now British, Irish, and Empire Studies), a long-running public lecture series. In his presentation, Loehlin contends that Hamlet mirrors Western history’s transition from medievalism to modernism. “[W]riting in a changing world” that “would go on changing,” Shakespeare was perhaps inspired “to infuse Hamlet with some of the complexity and mystery that have kept us rediscovering it for four centuries.” This favorite play is a gift that keeps on giving, as Loehlin argues in this overview of its performance history.
Abstract: James Loehlin delivered this paper at his last presentation to the Shakespeare Association of America. Drawing on his deep knowledge of the stage history of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar , Loehlin focuses primarily on four recent productions in order to analyze their creative decision-making—acts of attunement that add topicality and surprise to this anything but predictable play.
Abstract: James Loehlin wrote this essay during his graduate studies at Stanford University in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There, Loehlin worked closely with Brecht’s protégé Carl Weber, who was an influential director, scholar, and teacher in his own right. Loehlin begins by discussing Brecht’s complex and changing attitude toward Shakespeare and the Elizabethan stage before considering his various attempts to historicize tragedy and deconstruct the figure of the tragic hero. He finishes by touching on Brecht’s lasting legacy for cultural materialist scholarship and for contemporary, historically minded productions of Shakespeare.
Abstract: In published his first book, Henry V , for the Shakespeare in Performance series (Manchester UP). Twenty-five years later, Loehlin delivered the following paper, which surveys performance trends over the intervening quarter century, at the “New Approaches to Henry V ” virtual seminar. The Shakespeare Association of America seminar was led by Emma K. Atwood of the University of Montevallo and Jennifer Feather of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Abstract: James Loehlin delivered these remarks at the “Teaching Shakespeare” symposium, convened at Dartmouth College, October 17–18, 2014. Presenting to the intergenerational gathering of preeminent Shakespeareans and teachers of Shakespeare, Loehlin makes a compelling case for the value of performance pedagogy. He outlines the many classroom benefits of performance before providing some concrete advice and lessons from his own teaching practice. The original presentation included a participatory exercise, which has been described in an editors’ note. Readers are encouraged to read Loehlin’s earlier essay “Teaching through Performance,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (Blackwell, 2005), edited by Barbara Hodgson and W. B. Worthen.
Throughout his career as a public figure, James Weldon Johnson promoted the idea that well-framed arguments would compel whites to dismantle segregation, outlaw lynching, and establish racial equality. But in his only work of fiction, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Johnson explores an equally important aspect of argumentation: who gets to participate in arguments in the first place. Turning to contemporary theorists (and critics) of social contract theory, this essay argues that Johnson's novel demonstrates that dismantling white supremacy requires not just better arguments but also structural access to argument itself.
This lively and wide-ranging discussion of Stanley Fish's book Law at the Movies delves into the book's central concerns: the connection between cinema and legal doctrine, and the complex relationship between classic Hollywood cinema and the foundations of modern liberalism. After two extended commentaries on the book from Professors Julie Stone Peters and Peter Goodrich, Professor Fish responds to their questions, critiques, and provocations before describing some of the new directions in which his research on this topic is taking him, including some intriguing arguments about film noir.
God the Father's reference to those "elect above the rest" in John Milton's Paradise Lost seems to propose a Calvinist distinction between the elect whom God chooses to save and all the rest who are damned. This would reverse the Arminian position he expresses elsewhere and the one Milton upholds in his theological treatise De doctrina Christiana. This article proposes instead that the "elect above the rest" are not the only ones to obtain salvation. Even without the established method of Christian faith, "the rest" can also "safe arrive" through faithfulness, obedience, and sincerity, making salvation available even for those who have not heard of Christ.
This article suggests that Thomas Hobbes's thought accounts for a significant part of The Godfather's political philosophy. The figure of the don, as it appears in Mario Puzo's novel and Francis Ford Coppola's movie trilogy, is a representation of the Hobbesian sovereign. The exception and the protection, the two most prominent features in the definition of sovereignty, determine the character of the Godfather. He embodies both the exception, as an authority who has absolute power over life and death, and the protection, as the head of the Mafia's prerogative to fulfill the basic functions of the state over the members of his "family."
This article tracks, first, the influence of the Scottish poet and novelist Walter Scott on early picturesque depictions of the city of Vancouver and, second, the critique of that picturesque in Legends of Vancouver (1911), by the Mohawk Canadian writer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). Vancouver artists adapted the picturesque, with Scott's poetry as one of its touchstones, to depict the commercial activity of the city's coasts surrounded by the North Shore Mountains, to where Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh communities were displaced. Scott's dialectical articulations of the picturesque also provided a template for Johnson to evince its dispossessive effects and its critical power.
Looking through a theoretical lens of dis/embodiment, this close reading of The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven (1990) and The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life (2000) considers their portrayals of the mundane, the body, and the mind linked to personal relationships and fantasies. Upon closer examination, the plays envision general and at times seemingly contradictory workings of human imagination as well as embodied and disembodied voices that foster relationships and personal connections. With their focus on the human body on-and offstage, the microdramas engage in metatheatrical commentaries and social and cultural criticism.
This article offers an interpretation of Don DeLillo's play Valparaiso (1999), with a particular focus on the substitution of bodies and the body's role as a stage presence and a displaced object, highlighting how the body's physical presence is secondary to its media representation. In Valparaiso, the protagonist, Michael Majeski, repetitiously gives interviews to the media telling the story of having ended up in Valparaiso, Chile, instead of Valparaiso, Indiana, while on a business trip. The body is reflective of the play's central themes, such as mistaken identity, celebrity culture, the role of the media, and the dissolution of the self in the postmodern world.
In The Day Room (1986), Don DeLillo's characters represent postmodern figurations of subjectivity and are defined by their continuous acts of performance and role-play. DeLillo depicts this mode of postmodern identity in his early play as a response to the end of authenticity and the mediatization of reality. At the same time, the play unfolds a discourse on the value and limitations of aesthetics to resist such cultural commodification. This essay suggests that the unusual interplay of postmodernism and absurdism in The Day Room expresses DeLillo's ambivalent postmodernism and prefigures his contemporary concern with performance and subjectivity in the early twenty-first century.
In Don DeLillo's play The Word for Snow (2007), global warming has dramatically altered the human condition, affecting embodiment, consciousness, cognition, and the prerequisites of communication. In this article, I argue that this play portrays climate change as a highly complex issue that shows both human and nonhuman ecologies to be deeply interconnected and has experiential, epistemological, and ethical consequences. I interpret DeLillo's play by drawing on concepts from the fields of (eco)phenomenology and biosemiotics, which allow me to describe the play's presentation of climate change as a confluence of (failed) communicative processes.
This essay presents an ecocritical reading of Don DeLillo's play Love-Lies-Bleeding, in which the settler colonial legacy of post-World War II land art comes under scrutiny from an ecofeminism that seeks to reclaim an environmental ethics of embodiment. DeLillo's patriarch, the artist Alex Macklin, excavates a hollow in the desert mountains where he plans to house several paintings-a self-aggrandizing practice of masculine geological inscription. Combating this practice, Alex's wives and even the planet itself mount a refusal of Alex's aesthetic project in favor of an ecological expansiveness. The play complements this conceptual antagonism through a formal tension between the unbounded space of geographical landscape and the bounded space of the stage.
Don DeLillo's The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), which was never staged and whose stageworthiness was once dismissed by the author, is nonetheless a fundamental precursor to DeLillo's exploration of dramatic form as embodied action. This essay interprets the play through emplacement and embodiment, analyzing its use of stage space, its characters' interactions, and the tension between verbal and nonverbal codes. The play, I argue, interrogates the idea of embodiment and the desire for disembodiment, expressed in strategies of asceticism and prosthetic memory. These underscore the work's dramatic potential and its meditation on performance, presence, embodiment, and language.
