Scribleriana

91 SCRIBLERIANA The Scriblerian welcomes Michael Rotenberg -Schwartz (New Jersey City University ), who joins us as a Contributing Editor. He will help us with the editing and preparation of the manuscript . We also thank Dean Larry Mullins of the School of Liberal Arts, Auburn University Montgomery for his continuing support, vital to our thorough editing . The assistance of Samantha Batten (Auburn University), who is stepping down as an Assistant Editor, and of Shiladitya Sen (Temple University) was especially valuable. We welcome Chloe Wigston Smith (Vassar College ), Shea Stuart (Auburn University), Alexander Pickett (Auburn University Montgomery ), Stefanie Holman (Auburn University Montgomery), and David Letzler (Temple University) as Assistant Editors. They and Jacquelyn Tumminello (University of Florida ) also saved us from many slips. And special thanks again go to Melvyn New for his timely and valuable advice. MARK MORRIS’S KING ARTHUR According to Alistair Macaulay’s review, ‘‘Flimflamalot’’(TLS, July 21, 2006), the theatergoers for King Arthur apparently missed excellent singing (‘‘Fortunately the musical performance is of a high order’’), but not much else: ‘‘Mark Morris’s production of Purcell’s opera King Arthur is a trivial work by an important artist. . . . [Morris] minimizes the differences between singers and the Mark Morris Dance Group. . . .[He] cuts the spoken words in between musical sections; in the program he admits that he doesn’t like them. . . . King Arthur feels like camp of a lower order [than his] . . . more successful effort in Dido and Aeneas: trivial about the serious, serious about the trivial, but never letting seriousness flower before our eyes. . . . The show left nothing firm in my head except a sense of the essential peculiarity of Morris’s response to music. . . . English National Opera has been unfortunate with its Morris premieres . . . . How an artist of such power [as Morris in All Fours] can flippantly squander his talents in this King Arthur is a mystery.’’ . . . WINTERBOTTOM’S TRISTRAM SHANDY Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Michael Winterbottom, script by Martin Hardy (Frank Cottrell Boyce). Picturehouse Productions, 2005. Available on DVD (HBO), $27.95. Winterbottom’s film seems to have fizzled in the United States. (It never was shown in any theater in the small but highly academic corner of Massachusetts where I live, for example .) A number of reviews—in journals ranging from Time to the New Yorker to The Nation to Rolling Stone—appeared soon after the January opening in New York City and Los Angeles. Their repetitive quality (almost all featuring the words ‘‘unreadable’’ and ‘‘unfilmable,’’ occasionally ‘‘unwatchable’’) may have contributed to the fizzle. But what has Winterbottom actually done with (or to) Sterne’s novel? The first half hour or so features some of the principal catastrophes of Tristram’s early life—his difficult birth (including the flattening of his nose), his naming, his circumcision by the sash window , eventually his conception—as well as scenes from the battle of Namur where Uncle Toby received his wound. Though most of the rest focuses on the tribulations of making any film and particularly this one, Winterbottom does include many unlikely moments from the novel, including Phutatorius’s chestnut, Ernulfus’s curse, the Tristrapoedia, the wedding contract, and even the black page. The 92 Widow Wadman makes a late appearance, as she does in the novel, and the film ends as the novel does, with Yorick’s answer to Tristram ’s mother’s question, ‘‘what is all this story about?——A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick——And one of the best of its kind I ever heard.’’ Some Shandeans may object to the omission of Uncle Toby’s sentimental communion with his brother Walter and with the fly, or Trim’s wonderful, inconclusive stories, or the tuning of the violin. Some may wonder why Winterbottom included many sequences of Elizabeth Shandy screaming during Tristram ’s birth, when in the novel the birth takes place offstage. But, just as Sterne’s book dwells on the paradoxes involved in creating a consecutive narrative, the film focuses on the dilemmas of film making. The film’s music provides some clues to this preoccupation. We hear excerpts from Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, Kubrick’s...