Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (Stage Adaptation) Review

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(More customer reviews)The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne takes place in seventeenth-century Boston. The townspeople gather in an area to watch for who should emerge from the prison door. It could be anyone. Hester Prynne emerges holding a baby about three months of age. This woman had a golden embroidery of the letter "A" - so artistically done, everyone stopped to stare at its beauty. This letter stood for "adulterer" and would be her punishment for having a baby with a man who was not her husband. Her husband had sent her to America ahead of him but did not come to join her. No one has heard from him in years.
Hester Prynne would not give the name of her accomplice and said her baby, Pearl, would never know an earthly father but will seek a heavenly one. Soon after, Hester is encountered by a man who introduced himself as Roger Chillingworth; he then tells Hester a secret she must not share with anyone and she agrees. Roger Chillingworth's secret is his true identity - Hester's husband. So he vows to take revenge upon the man who laid hands upon his wife and gave her a child.
But through her punishment, Hester's character develops throughout the book although she is isolated by society. "Man had marked this woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which has such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on the same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven!" (Chapter 6; pg. 82) This passage portrays one of many cases of irony in this book - the same act tarnished her reputation forever at the same time as giving her her most treasured possession. Pearl is a main focus of irony in The Scarlet Letter as well as a main character: "She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence,--the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment,--whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation."(Chapter 7; pg. 94) Pearl has a wild and fiery side - she feels the need to protect herself and her mother against the people of Boston. When children cause trouble to her and her mother, Pearl "punishes" them for it. What is ironic is that Pearl punishes the rising generation (children her age) for their sins while Hester's generation is punishing Hester. To add on to the irony, Pearl is the reason for Hester's punishment.
As mention earlier, Hester's character grows throughout the book through her punishment. Hester even states that Pearl is the living scarlet letter; although Pearl is her child, she still gets punished from Pearl. Hester told the Governor, "She is my happiness!--she is my torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a million-fold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!'" (Chapter 8; pg. 103-104) This passage reveals the deepest of Hester's thoughts of Pearl in the book - it portrays the relationship the two share. It reveals the love Hester has for Pearl as well as the thoughts of Pearl: although a blessing from God, she is constantly reminded by her sins from Pearl.
The Scarlet Letter is a wonderful book filled with irony, symbolism, character, conflict and so much more. The life of retribution and sins it incorporates a criticism of Puritan values while slightly justifying it. This tale is filled with many opposites - hate and love, secrecy and exposed secrets, light and dark, evil and good - which makes the plot more exciting, interesting, and valuable to me as a reader and as a human.

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Leslie Fiedler pronounced it the first American tragedy. F.O. Mathiessen considered it the "Puritan Faust." Until now, it appeared that Nathaniel Hawthorne's haunting drama of judgement, alienation, and redemption would be forever confined to the page. Now comes the stage version to do it justice. DeMaiolo's brooding choruses of superstition and doubt hover like the furies hungry for vengeance on the "voluptuous Oriental" woman whose fate would commingle with every life in Salem. The audience joins the chorus as they weigh the American contract of freedom against the fine print of convention and taboo. Performance rights available from Applause.

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Applause First Folio of Shakespeare in Modern Type: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (Applause First Folio Editions) Review

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(More customer reviews)A Crazy Scheme?
The Applause First Folio of Shakespeare should not be confused with a facsimile of the 1623 folio published by Applause in the 1990's. In the earlier facsmile, Applause used the images from
the Norton Facsimile without permission. W. W. Norton sued, and Applause withdrew the facsimile. In 2001 Applause published another edition of the first folio, this one being in modern
type. It's not specifically a facsimile edition, but it does present the Shakespeare's plays in the order they were presented in the 1623 folio. Though this edition is in modern type the spelling and punctuation of the first folio have been for the most part retained.
In his acknowlegements Freeman thanks his publisher for persisting with such a crazy scheme. Crazy? Perhaps. Audacious? Certainly. You see, Freeman is an actor, not a textual scholar and he rejects the work of textual scholars. For example, he proposes that the punctuation marks of the folio are rhetorical signals. They are the cues for the actors. This controversial proposition has been roundly criticized by many scholars, but Freeman is undaunted. I applaud his audacity. The great value of this edition is that it retains so much of the spelling and punctuation of the 1623 folio. Finally we have an original spelling edition of most of Shakespeare's plays in print.
It is important to note that this is not a complete edition of Shakespeare's writings. The narrative poems, the sonnets, the occasional poems, "Pericles," and "Two Noble Kinsmen" are not included.
It should be stated that this edition does not in every instance reproduce the spelling of the 1623 folio. Freeman's treatment of abbrivations is unsatisfactory. For example it was common practice in the 17th century to represent certain words by a special kind of abbrivation. On page lviii Freeman explains that "y" with an umlaut was usually short hand for "you," "thee," "thou,""thy," "thine," or "yours." The 1623 folio usually spells these abbrivations differently from the way Freeman describes it. The word "thou" could be represented by the letter "y" with the superscript "u" directly on top of it. The word "that" could be written with the letter "y" with the superscript "t" directly over it. The word "the" could be written with the letter "y" with the superscript "e" directly over it and so on. In Freeman's edition all the superscript letters are replaced by umlauts, so there is no way of telling what the superscript letter was, and hence no way of knowing what the word is. So when you come across the line "Thou do'st then wrong me, as (y/with umlaut) slaughterer doth" (page 441, col. 2, line 1) are you supposed to read:
"Thou do'st then wrong me, as thou slaughterer doth," or
"Thou do'st then wrong me, as thee slaughterer doth," or
"Thou do'st then wrong me, as that slaughterer doth"?
You'll have to go to a facsimile edition to find out that that the third line is the correct reading. It is also interesting to note that the word "that" doesn't appear in Freeman's list of what "y with umlaut" could stand for.
The edition should be used with caution.

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This landmark publication is printed in clear, legible type. Each play has its own comprehensive introduction as well as extensive, expert annotations. Highlighted areas show where lines have been altered over time and also shows where verse has been changed to prose in the past (but not here!) The original compositions are marked and folio clues are highlighted.

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Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle: Paperback Book (Applause Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)Biography written by a family member or friend so often is mere hagiography, not good biography. But the book by Julie Gilbert, Edna Ferber's great-niece, was the only Ferber biography I could find, so I decided I would start there to learn about Ferber, and I'm really glad I did. Is the Gilbert book objective? Of course not. No one writes objective biography.

I applaud Gilbert for her courage in presenting Ferber as a real person, exposing the extremes of her personality. Ferber was outsized-she had a benevolent heart coupled with colossal rage: "When Ferber got worked up over an issue, there was nobody who could touch her. She was a dervish of indignation. When she was calm she exuded power; when she was upset she exuded great power." Katherine Hepburn, twenty years Ferber's junior, says: "We were dangerous women. There aren't any more of us around."

I give the book only four stars for two reasons: One, becauseI wish Gilbert had included photos. I love the image that Gilbert writes of Ferber and her sister Fan looking together like a Diane Arbus photo: "visually similar and visually sour." A picture of these two together would have added a lot to the book; and two, because Gilbert doesn't include sources. Perhaps most of Ferber's papers are still in the family's control; regardless, I would like to have known where Gilbert found her information.

That being said, I would recommend this book for anyone interested in Edna Ferber, and also in New York, theater, and party life of the 1930s. Whee, Ferb! Wot a girl!

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This enduring biography of the popular writer begins with Ferber's last years in New York City, exploring the setting in which she did all of her great writing. Diaries, copious correspondence, and the cooperation of distinguished living friends have resulted in a rich portrait of a period and a literary circle not yet fully documented, and an insightful engaging analysis of a woman writer highly influential in the shaping of twentieth century America.

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Lolita: The Book of the Film (Applause Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)There's a very brief entry by Jeremy Irons, a slightly longer one by Lyne that deals with the travails of the film following its release after everyone's heroic effort to get it made, then Peter Schiff's longer introduction that covers much of the same ground in greater detail.The bulk of the book is made up of the shooting script -- the scenes as they were written and filmed -- before the actual editing and trimming, plus a lot of real estate devoted to screen shots from the film.

I said Schiff's essay gives us greater detail but "greater" is such a relative term.It's clear that getting the production funded, filmed, and marketed was a nightmare, but I'd have liked to know more about some of the pre-production decisions regarding the movie as movie -- not as so much of the public (and professionals) saw it, a rabble-rousing endorsement of pedophilia.Schiff tells us that Irons was the obvious choice for Humbert.Fine, but why?And what made Dominique Swain stand out from the thousands of other young girls whose mothers would willingly have them debauched on screen?Well -- we don't find out.

The rest of the book is in many ways more interesting than the introductory sections.It follows pretty closely the dialog and events we see in the finished product but the excisions are fascinating in themselves.What a country of blue noses we are.The scene in which HH has his first orgasm with Lolita on the Sunday living room couch is gone, for instance.

Too much forbidden sex, although Lolita may be unaware of what happens.But the climactic killing of Quilty, with all its agony and its oceans of gore, is intact.It's okay to shoot a man in cold blood, to put innumerable holes through his naked body, and to show it realistically -- but don't touch a fourteen-year-old knee.

The script presented here follows the novel far more closely than Kubrick's did.In some ways it's a weakness because a lot of what goes on in the novel isn't spelled out in the dialog, only in HH's descriptions of it, as Schiff points out.This requires that some original dialog be added, and the writers (who included at one point David Mamet) do a pretty good job of it.It's tough enough to squeeze a classic novel into the shape of a movie.Joseph Strick tried it with "Ulysses" and it was a dismal failure.Lyne's "Lolita" more closely approaches success.

I was reminded of another attempt to shape a long and complex novel into a film: "The Caine Mutiny."In the book, Captain Queeg's paranoia gradually reveals itself in a series of related incidents of enough intricacy that they simply couldn't be depicted in the movie.So, early on, during the first wardroom meeting, Queeg's neurotic behavior is adumbrated in a single statement.He's describing his experiences in the Atlantic and adds:"The way those subs ganged up on us, I thought they had it in for me persnally."To me, that represents skillfull screen writing and the script of "Lolita" shows it in abundance.

Yet, by sticking to the events of the novel as closely as it does, the script misses something.It misses the same thing that Strick's version of "Ulysses" did."Lolita" is, at base, a serious and even tragic story, but not as HH tells it.A few earnest passages aside, it's hilarious.But the script can't capture most of the comic turns taken by Nabokov's prose.What little humor there is, is confined to a few brief moments -- the mix-ups over HH's name, for instance.At the Beardsley School for Girls the headmistress addresses him as "Professor Himmler."And at the Enchanted Hunters, he coldly informs the clerk that "the name is not Humbug but Herbert -- I mean Humbert."

And, man, does this script need some of the novel's humor.Kubrick at least had a non-canonical Peter Sellers in five different roles.(Some were more successful than others.)And it had an African-American hotel porter wrestling with a fold-up cot that insisted on reverting to its more compact form.

Lyne's movie has none of Sellers' outrageous hamminess and no slapstick.And the absence of that ludic element turns the script into a somewhat gloomy love story.The moody musical score helps keep it there.So does the photography which is too often dark, foggy, and rainy, whereas Nabokov's novel was full of sunshine, beaches, vast furrowed plains, and craggy mountains.

Okay.At its base, it's a tragedy.We know that.But why remove the one element that makes it more than that?I guess, in a way, it can't be helped.HH was pretty snotty, and contemptuous of almost everyone he met, but that was all internally edited by him.Outwardly he was polite and a little distant in a proper aristocratic way.His demeanor was phony but deliberately so, and the irony of the contrast between his amused contempt and his interactional delicacy is gone.

I suppose this is about as good as it can get.There is always so much more to a work of fiction than what we see on the screen, at least as far as a classic work like "Lolita" is concerned.Hitchcock's movie of "Psycho" was actually an improvement over Robert Bloch's unimaginative story.

No comment on those who find the novel or either film version offensive because the story is an endorsement of pedophilia, or because it encourages statutory rape or something.

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Foreward by Jeremy Irons and preface by Adrian Lyne. Based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. In the introduction to the Applause LOLITA, Schiff tells the astounding story behind the most controversial movie of our time.

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Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter (Limelight) Review

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(More customer reviews)Heaven & Hell To Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter by Preston Neal Jones is by no means a trivial read, and it is its sheer density that makes it so special.Jones compiled numerous interviews and basically provides an oral history of what many consider a compelling masterpiece, offering as thorough a history as one could ask for.Yes, there is much detail here, and perhaps those not familiar with Laughton's film (or fond of it) may be overwhelmed, but consider for a moment what you have here.

How many of us dream of actually observing the creation and production of a favorite film?Jones provides just that -- even without interviews from Laughton or the principal performers (save Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish), we see the film of Davis Grubb's novel being imagined, created, and released as described by those who were there, including Davis Grubb.Where a director's commentary on a DVD is typically a trifle, providing some interesting notes and observations limited by the film's running time, this book is all about immersion -- you almost feel you are there, and you're invited to stay for awhile.Jones rarely intrudes upon the first person accounts of the participants, and when he does, it's usually to point out potential discrepancies between remembered versions of events.

The "loose" narrative of oral history, any oral history, fills in an amazing amount of detail by accident, rather than by authorial intent, and this book leaves one feeling completely satisfied (or for those withshorter attention spans on the subject, perhaps a bit full) on a subject that seemed lost -- that we're seeing this book in 2002, nearly two generations separated from the film's creation, shows us the result of determined and dedicated sleuthing.This book can't have been easy to write or compile.

As presented, the book doesn't read like a typical film history, but more like an eyewitness account, and of course, that's what it is.If only more film books like this existed -- the greatest accomplishment of this book is not that you can walk away with facts -- it's that you can walk away feeling not only like you were there, but that you actually knew the participants, and could see where the social fabric between the personalities grew taut and relaxed at key points in the narrative.

Hats off to Jones -- a fine job, and one would hope, as novel in its execution as the film it describes, that will hopefully inspire imitation.Fans of the film are decidedly in your debt.

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Winner of the Rondo Hatton Award for "Book of the Year" (2002) from the Classic Horror Film Board, in "Heaven & Hell to Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter," author Preston Neal Jones tells us how the unique film "The Night of the Hunter" came to be, from its beginnings in the pages of Davis Grubb's novel to the acquisition of film rights by producer Paul Gregory, the hiring of Charles Laughton to direct and James Agee to write the script, to every aspect of the film's development and production--casting, designing, shooting, scoring and editing--to the profound disappointment upon its release. Recently re-released, "The Night of the Hunter," the only film directed by the late actor Charles Laughton, has now joined the select ranks of pictures chosen for inclusion in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress and is counted among the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Thrillers." As the late Pauline Kael pointed out in writing of "The Night of the Hunter," "...truly frightening movies have a way of becoming classics of a kind."

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