A Note of Daniel Deronda\u27s Circumcision

For the last twenty years or so critics have wondered if Daniel Deronda, the eponymous hero of George Eliot\u27s last novel, was circumcised or not. If he was, he would scarcely have to wait for his mother\u27s revelations to know he was a Jew. Some commentators, however, say that, for medical reasons, circumcision was not uncommon among middle class people at the time of Deronda\u27s infancy, and he might therefore not have given much attention to the matter. Professor John Sutherland, recently entering this lively discussion! points to the rebellion by Deronda\u27s mother against her father\u27s Judaism as a prime factor in his persuasive argument against the circumcision. Sutherland omits to note that later on, uncircumcised, Deronda might have to deal with his incompleteness as a Jew in a life devoted to redemptive activities among his people. Victorian propriety and Eliot\u27s own reticence - did Dorothea and Casaubon consummate the marriage? - keep such questions off the page. But there is no evasion, for the symbolic references and narrator\u27s language in each of these answer the question as asked, while they also stir larger reverberations that transcend the literal level and become part of the thematic material of the novel

A Pre-History of Performing Rights in Anglo-American Copyright Law

Statutes creating performing rights--the subset of copyright that secures the right to perform a work – first appeared in the United Kingdom in 1833, and in the United States in 1856. As I explore in the larger project of which this paper forms a part, during the decades that followed these laws’ passage, jurists and theater-makers defined performance as a marketable commodity, what I call the performance-commodity. They did so by negotiating between performance’s aesthetic value and its economic value. This commodity-centered approach was absent from most copyright lawsuits about performance before 1833 and 1856 because jurists and litigants did not conceive performance’s value primarily in terms of an artistic and economic marketplace. Rather, as this paper argues, parties to pre-performing rights suits concerned themselves with other values surrounding theatrical performances, including the utility of manuscript plays, social status, and political power. In many ways, theater was property well before performing rights laws appeared. As the first section of this paper notes, during the Early Modern period, theater companies performed, adapted, and revised their repertory to suit their needs. To own a play meant to use a play in performance. When British theaters reopened during the Restoration, the monarchy restricted the right to perform to two theaters in London and Westminster, the so-called patent theaters of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. This duopoly encouraged a limited view of theater’s value, with the most valuable properties being the theatrical patents, rather than any individual play. Thus, even as books became alienable commodities in the eighteenth century, the value of which existed in exchange, plays – and the right to perform them--remained tied to alternative value systems. Reading three pre-performing rights suits about theater, I demonstrate how these lawsuits contest not the economic and aesthetic value of performance as a commodity, but rather theater’s value as a physical object, a social product, and a political force. The first case, Macklin v. Richardson (1770), involved the actor Charles Macklin and his play Love à la Mode, which Richardson had printed, without authorization, from notes taken during a performance. Macklin’s claims rested on a conception of the play as valuable primarily to himself as a star performer. The suit thus rested on the legal status of Macklin’s manuscript, and his rights to keep the text out of print, rather than on the problematic value of performance. In Coleman v. Wathen (1793), performance similarly disappears from consideration, this time supplanted by the question of personal honor. I argue that the plaintiff, by pursuing an action for the penalty rather than an injunction, failed to conceive of his play as a commodity in a market. Coleman regarde the defendant primarily as having violated social norms and having offended Coleman’s honor, for which the legal penalty would make proper amends. The final lawsuit reveals the close entanglement of theater and politics. Purportedly, Murray v. Elliston (1821) hinged on Lord Byron’s right to forbid performances of his closet drama Marino Faliero. By situating that lawsuit within the contemporary political climate, and, in particular, in relation to recent battles over the patent theater duopoly, I offer a political reading of Murray. In staging Byron’s play at Drury Lane, Robert Elliston converted the radical drama into an affirmation of the monarch’s authority and a demonstration of the patent theater’s ability to serve that authority. I close with a discussion of a pre-performing rights lawsuit in the United States where, unlike in England, a competitively commercial mentality was emerging in the theater. In Jones v. Thorne (1843), commentaries on the lawsuit attend to the intersection of commercial and artistic concerns in a commodified performance. This pattern, in which defining performance for purchase and sale in the market necessarily provoked questions about performance’s aesthetic ontology, would define performing rights litigation after the passage of performing rights statutes. The remainder of this project takes up where this paper leaves off, exploring the development of the performance-commodity in that later period. Close readings of litigation, newspaper reports, legal treatises, and business and legal correspondence reveal how the problem of performance’s legal (and, by way of the law, economic) ontology seeped into the period’s artistic debates. For example, I read the affirmation of a performing right in melodramatic spectacle (Daly v. Palmer (1868)) as an endorsement of human presence over technological reproduction. And Gilbert & Sullivan’s copyright troubles in the United States underlined Sullivan’s anxiety about his music’s subservience to Gilbert’s libretti. Along the way, I trace the institution of the “copyright performance” in the United Kingdom, a performance genre meant to secure performing rights for unprinted or foreign-premiered plays that, in its pursuit of legal efficacy, became a theatrical nullity. I also interrogate the problem of adaptation and translation, whether across borders or between genres, and how such translations provoked theories about national identities and the relationship between the public and the private sphere. Ultimately, the project argues that copyright law is a form of criticism, and that legal theories of art contribute not only to how artists buy and sell their art, but also how they conceive of and make their work

The Salve of Duty: Global Theatre at the American Border, 1875-1900

This essay argues that national borders impede the flow of theatre around the globe. I examine nineteenth-century American disputes about tariffs on the importation of theatrical production materials as an example of theatrical protectionism. I argue that we must balance utopian visions of global theatrical culture against the real national culture industries that sometimes view international trade as a threat to their livelihoods. As these nineteenth-century tariff debates demonstrate, theatre is subject to the same pressures on the trans-national movement of goods and labour as other industries

A Note on Hermione in Daniel Deronda

After a paragraph in which the narrator sympathetically examines Rex\u27s love for his cousin Gwendolen, the young people plan a tableau vivant at Offendene. Gwendolen rejects Rex\u27s suggestion of himself as Achilles, with Gwendolen as Briseis, then agrees with his next idea that she should be Hermione as the statue, and he Leontes, from The Winter\u27s Tale. During the playing of this scene, and provoked. perhaps. by the \u27thunderous chord\u27 (91)1 struck by Herr Klesmer on the piano. the panel on the wall opens to disclose what the family saw on the day of their moving in, \u27the picture of an upturned dead face, from which an obscure figure seemed to be fleeing with outstretched arms\u27 (56). In this episode, the reader is invited to look at and then beyond the moment near the end of the play as a comment on matters early in the novel. Just before the passage about Rex\u27s love, the narrator offers to the reader the most famous of several warnings about the way the novel is to be read, \u27for all meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation\u27 (88). The tableau itself is \u27likely to be successful, since we know from ancient fable that an imitation may have more chance of success than the original\u27 (90). This touches, of course, the questions of mimesis discussed by Aristotle. but also takes the reader back a few lines to ancient fables arising from the mention of Achilles

Mrs. Meyrick\u27s Cat

\u27\u27\u27Great God! the words escaped Deronda\u27 as he watched the just-prevented-from-drowning Mirah. \u27The old thought had come now with a new impetus of mingled feeling, and urged that exclamation in which both East and West have for ages concentrated their awe in the presence of inexorable calamity.\u27! Among those who welcome Mirah to Mrs. Meyrick\u27s household is the cat Hafiz, seen by Deronda as it \u27came forward with tail erect and rubbed himself against her ankles\u27, an Eastern moment accompanying Mirah\u27s entrance into the Meyrick family. Hafiz is later to purr as Mirah starts to tell her story to Mrs. Meyrick

The Impact of Formal Extracurricular Activities on Satisfaction and Attitudes-toward-School among At-Risk Adolescents

At-risk adolescents, comprised mainly of low-income African American and Hispanic/Latino students, tend to disengage and dropout of school because they lack a bond to school and society. Formal extracurricular activity in schools is one way to develop student involvement and attachment to school. The researcher sought to explore how participation of at-risk adolescent students in formal extracurricular sport activity impacted their academic perceptions, attitudes toward school, motivation, and satisfaction with life. The researcher also examined whether location, international versus local, made a difference in the impact of formal extracurricular activities on at-risk adolescent students. Seventy-four at-risk adolescent and primarily students of Hispanic descent (thirty-nine Hispanic participants, from and living in Cumbaya, Ecuador and thirty-five made up of Hispanics, African Americans, and Caucasians living in Gresham, Oregon) served as participants. These adolescents were chosen because low-income Hispanics form the fastest growing immigrant ethnic minority in schools and represent an extremely at-risk population. The analyses revealed that at-risk adolescents participating in formal extracurricular activity irrespective of location rated academic perceptions, attitudes toward school, motivation, and satisfaction with life positively. Combining extracurricular activities with other sports and duration of participation had a positive impact on motivation and attitude towards teachers and families, respectively. Overall life satisfaction in participants who spent a minimum of two years in sports was greater than that of those who did not participate. Participants in Cumbaya had more positive attitudes toward academic self-perception, teachers and school, and were also more motivated and satisfied with school than participants in Gresham

Everything You Own Belongs to the Land: Land, Community, and History in Tillery, North Carolina

Everything You Own Belongs to the Land: Land, Community, and History in Tillery, North Carolin