{"id":321,"date":"2012-10-02T19:47:48","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T19:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/?page_id=321"},"modified":"2022-10-04T19:35:52","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T19:35:52","slug":"from-the-editor","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/issues\/volume-iii-2009\/from-the-editor\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the third volume of the online journal Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley<\/em><\/span> Shakespeare Conference<\/em>. The conference itself was held on 22-24 October 2009 on the campus of Ohio University and its main theme was \u201cShakespeare on Screen: 1899-2009.\u201d Our meeting was generously supported by the Ohio University College of Arts and Sciences, the Dean of the Ohio University Graduate School, and the University\u2019s Vice President for Research. Forty-seven<\/span>
\n papers and two plenary addresses were delivered during the three-day conference, from which the journal\u2019s editorial board chose four outstanding essays to publish.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first essay in this volume, by James Newlin, reveals how complicated and multilayered Influences on — and sources of — a work of art can be. Gus Van Sant\u2019s My Own Private Idaho has generally been seen as indebted to Shakespeare\u2019s Henriad and Orson Welles\u2019 Chimes at Midnight, but Newlin reveals a list of other influences that include British punk culture and<\/span>
\n Madonna, to name but a few. By the end of Newlin\u2019s essay, Van Sant\u2019s film is revealed as \u201cthe interplay of the fantastic, the pastoral, and the social.\u201d As a result, the genre that best fits Van Sant\u2019s movie is not \u201cgritty realism,\u201d as some have argued, but \u201cromance\u201d \u2013 a postmodern romance of the American Midwest.<\/span><\/p>\n

Next comes Nick Roth\u2019s close look at three films of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream\u00a0(Noble\u2019s, Hoffman\u2019s, and Moshinky\u2019s) that grapple with the problem of how to present Hippolyta to a modern audience. Making her more or less \u201cprogressive\u201d in modern feminist terms, Roth finds, seems to lead to \u201cideological trade-offs that jettison the profound cultural anxieties embedded in the figure of the Queen of the Amazons.\u201d He theorizes that, whatever the initial choices made by directors, Hippolyta\u2019s function and meaning seem \u201cforeclosed by the<\/span>
\n structure of the play\u201d and tend toward the \u201chetero-normative.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The final two essays in this volume focus on Hamlet and Hamlet, but in very different ways. James Lewin offers a Presentist reading of Hamlet that depends on recent scholarship\u2019s understanding of the main character. Instead of a weak-willed anti-hero who cannot act, Hamlet is best seen as a \u201ccunning trickster\u201d and a \u201chard-boiled investigator\u201d (though with deep interiority) who could teach us how to face the uncertain world opened up by 9\/11 while, at the\u00a0same time, inviting us to recognize our own responsibility and culpability for the uncertain<\/span> situation we face. In the final essay in this volume, Rachel Zlatkin invites us to reconsider Olivier\u2019s 1948 film production of Hamlet, especially in view of Olivier\u2019s own admission that his film\u2019s focus is not so much the play as the character of Hamlet himself. Zlatkin argues that Olivier\u2019s film is better understood from the theoretical perspective of D.W. Winnicott\u2019s \u201cobjectrelations theory,\u201d despite Olivier\u2019s announced interest in an Oedipal Hamlet. Zlatkin demonstrates that many of the major objects and symbols in the play function according to Winnicott\u2019s theory, and she suggests that Olivier\u2019s Hamlet never really makes the transition to a mature psyche that understands others as fundamentally different from the self.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, I want to gratefully acknowledge Sandee Lloyd\u2019s contributions as technical editor of this collection and for providing the cover for this volume. Thanks also to Professors Gabriel Rieger (Concord University) and Curtis Breight (University of Pittsburgh) for acting as referees for Volume 3.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the third volume of the online journal Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference. The conference itself was held on 22-24 October 2009 on the campus of Ohio University and its main theme was \u201cShakespeare on Screen: 1899-2009.\u201d Our meeting was generously supported by the Ohio University College of Arts and Sciences, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1384,"featured_media":0,"parent":68,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-321","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2185,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/321\/revisions\/2185"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}