Romeo and Juliet, Adaptation and the Arts: ‘Cut Him Out in Little Stars’ 9781350109209, 9781350109230, 9781350109223

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Romeo and Juliet, Adaptation and the Arts

SHAKESPEARE AND ADAPTATION Shakespeare and Adaptation provides in-depth discussions of a dynamic field and showcases the ways in which, with each act of adaptation, a new Shakespeare is generated. The series addresses the phenomenon of Shakespeare and adaptation in all its guises and explores how Shakespeare continues as a reference-point in a generically diverse body of representations and forms, including fiction, film, drama, theatre, performance and mass media. Including sole authored books as well as edited collections, the series embraces a mix of methodologies and espouses a global perspective that brings into conversation adaptations from different nations, languages and cultures. Series Editor: Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast, UK) Advisory Board: Professor Sarah Hatchuel (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, 3, France) Dr Peter Kirwan (University of Nottingham, UK) Professor Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire, USA) Professor Adele Lee (Emerson College, USA) Dr Stephen O’Neill (Maynooth University, Ireland)

Professor Shormishtha Panja (University of Delhi, India) Professor Lisa Starks (University of South Florida) Professor Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France) Professor Sandra Young (University of Cape Town, South Africa) Published Titles: Adapting Macbeth, William C. Carroll Lockdown Shakespeare, Gemma Allred, Benjamin Broadribb and Erin Sullivan Women and Indian Shakespeares Edited by Thea Buckley, Mark Thornton Burnett, Sangeeta Datta and Rosa García-Periago Forthcoming Titles: Shakespeare, Ecology and Adaptation: A Practical Guide Alys Daroy and Paul Prescott Shakespeare and Ballet, David Fuller Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation, Trauma and Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences Jennifer Flaherty and Deborah Uman Shakespeare’s Histories on Screen: Adaptation, Race and Intersectionality Jennie M. Votava

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Romeo and Juliet, Adaptation and the Arts ‘Cut Him Out in Little Stars’ Edited by Ariane Helou Julia Reinhard Lupton

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Julia Reinhard Lupton, Ariane Helou and contributors, 2022 Julia Reinhard Lupton, Ariane Helou and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow and Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Romeo – The Ssitgim, directed by Tae-Rin Kim, Korea, 2015. (© Korean Traditional Performing Arts Foundation) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 1963- editor. | Helou, Ariane, editor. Title: Romeo and Juliet, adaptation and the arts : ‘cut him out in little stars’ / edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton, Ariane Helou. Description: London ; New York : The Arden Shakespeare, 2022. | Series: Shakespeare and adaptation | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022010319 | ISBN 9781350109209 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350343429 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350109223 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350109216 (epub) | ISBN 9781350109230 Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Romeo and Juliet. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Adaptations–History and criticism. LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PR2831 .R646 2022 | DDC 822.3/3–dc23/eng/20220429 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010319 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0920-9 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0922-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-0921-6 Series: Shakespeare and Adaptation Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS List of Figures  ix Acknowledgements  x

Introduction Ariane Helou and Julia Reinhard Lupton  1

Part One Romeo and Juliet in music and dance 1 Juliet’s vocal metamorphoses: Transformation and fidelity from Ovid to Berlioz Ariane Helou  29 2 Holy palmers’ kiss: Love, trust and wisdom in John Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet ballet Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson and Julia Reinhard Lupton  59 3 A self by any other name: Five pas de deux in MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet Laura Levine  89

Part Two Romeo and Juliet in narrative media 4 ‘Cut him out in little stars’: Afterlives of Romeo and Juliet in early Joyce and Beckett Beryl Schlossman  107

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5 Violent delights and violent ends: Fidelity and technicity in Westworld and Romeo and Juliet Colby Gordon  137 6 Ronnie Khalil’s With a Kiss I Die: Reanimating Shakespeare’s Juliet, fidelity, vampires, time and whatever Samuel Kolodezh  161

Part Three Romeo and Juliet in diaspora 7 Anuvading Romeo: Retelling ‘love’ in Indian iterations of Romeo and Juliet Anandi Rao  193 8 Bridging performance and philosophy: Romeo and Juliet in Korea Seon Young Jang  221 9 Romeo and Juliet at an Historically Black College/University John ‘Ray’ Proctor  249

About the Authors  272 Index  275

LIST OF FIGURES 0.1 Museo Castelvecchio, renovation by Carlo Scarpa, 1958–1974; photograph by James Clifford. Reprinted courtesy of the photographer  2 0.2 A plaque marks the imagined site of the skirmish between Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo, across from the Porta Borsari in Verona; photograph by Ariane Helou. Reprinted courtesy of the photographer  4 1.1 Divisions. Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London: Humfrey Lownes, 1608). The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles  39 2.1 Itinerant actors perform a version of Romeo and Juliet during the civic festival of Act Three. Hamburg Ballet, 1981. Photo by Holger Badekow. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier  66 2.2 Juliet in a towel copies her mother’s courtly hand gesture. Hamburg Ballet, 1974. Photo by Joachim Flügel. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier  68 2.3 Palmers’ kiss on floor. Frankfurt Ballet, 1971. Photo by Günther Englert. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier  74 2.4 A triple palmers’ kiss. Hamburg Ballet, 1974. Photo by Elisabeth Speidel. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier  78 2.5 Romeo and Juliet die with hands clasped. Hamburg Ballet, 1981. Photo by Holger Badekow. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier  80

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This volume grew out of a gathering at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in January 2017. Our symposium on Romeo and Juliet in diaspora contributed to a year of programming on Shakespeare, performance and philosophy. The series was co-organized by Julia Reinhard Lupton, Lowell Gallagher and James Kearney, assisted by two post-doctoral fellows, Ariane Helou and Sheiba Kian Kaufman. This volume also continues a set of conversations begun in Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Guide (Arden 2016; edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton). We would like to thank James Clifford for allowing us to reprint his stunning photograph of the Museo Castelvecchio in Verona. Additional support for research assistance and image permissions has been provided by UC Irvine’s New Swan Shakespeare Center and our generous donors, especially Dr Marilyn Sutton. We would also like to thank Mark Dudgeon, Lara Bateman and the editorial staff at Arden Shakespeare and Bloomsbury Publishing for seeing this project through the publication process.

Introduction Ariane Helou and Julia Reinhard Lupton

1. Castelvecchio: Shakespeare at home, abroad When Juliet imagines cutting Romeo into little stars and scattering the shiny pieces across the night-time sky, she anticipates the play’s extensive travels through languages and art forms.1 These diverse renewals are exercises in both diaspora – as the poet’s iconic retelling of an imported tale spreads to new locales – and indigenization, as new hosts and audiences adapt the plays to their own performance traditions, cultural resources, generational fixations and political flash points. Repatriating Romeo and Juliet to Verona can also be a form of indigenization. Anthropologist James Clifford, one of the most perspicacious theorists of contemporary diaspora and indigeneity, has been putting these concepts to work in the study of an architect and a region that participates in the global and inter-arts sojourns of Romeo and Juliet.2 Carlo Scarpa

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FIGURE 0.1  Museo Castelvecchio, renovation by Carlo Scarpa, 1958–1974; photograph by James Clifford. Reprinted courtesy of the photographer.

(1906–78), a practitioner of modernist aesthetics and a lifelong denizen of the Veneto, renovated the medieval Castelvecchio of Verona into a modern museum space between 1958 and 1975.3 Scarpa assembled sculptures of saints harvested long ago from local churches and placed them on floating pedestals surrounded by luminous space. The arrangement, Clifford explains, invites new forms of intimate encounter from visitors accustomed to scanning galleries overpopulated by the remains of the past. In Scarpa’s disposition of space, lovingly captured by Clifford’s photographs, we become ‘bodies among bodies’, contributing our own presence to ‘compositions designed to create individual contact’.4 Scarpa’s museum restores the forms of attention and adoration cultivated by worship in a new post-secular setting that is simultaneously demanding and

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serene, in a manner that articulates the history of Verona with the advent of modernism. When we saw Clifford’s photograph of two saints glimpsing each other from across the room [Figure 0.1], we were reminded of Romeo and Juliet’s co-composed sonnet, which trembles with the memory of chapel statuary suddenly bathed in the brave new light of modern passion. Neither the renovated gallery space nor Clifford’s loving photograph is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet per se, yet the heedfulness solicited by these freshly placed saints resonates with the sonnet’s dialogic dance of erotic approach, modest withdrawal, imagistic invention and achieved yet precarious presence. Read in tandem with each other, Shakespeare and Scarpa call us to be observant, in the religious and the perceptual meanings: to pay new attention with all of our senses to place, space and face, to hand, bosom, lip and smile, and to harken to the temporal rhythms of liturgy in whatever way feels right to us, as long as it’s from head to toe. Clifford juxtaposes his stunning photographs of the almost empty galleries in the Castelvecchio with the packed square outside the Casa di Giulietta, a faux landmark that has become the magnet of tourists and the subject of films such as Letters to Juliet (2010). Like the Museo Castelvecchio, the Casa di Giulietta is a modern reimagining of the medieval Verona cityscape; the pseudo-quattrocento balcony was constructed in the twentieth century.5 Romeo and Juliet’s co-authored sonnet imagines Juliet as a saint waiting to receive the touch of pilgrims’ hands; so her image stands today outside the Casa, on a floating pedestal like those hosting Scarpa’s medieval saints, her arm and breast worn to a shine by pilgrims’ touch, a holy shrine to eternal love. Standing face to face with the bronze Juliet, we are invited to imagine ourselves as lovers, whether in her place or in Romeo’s: the physical space appeals to our empathy just as reading or performance would. Both the Casa di Giulietta and the Museo Castelvecchio model in four dimensions Shakespeare’s inter-medial movement in time and space.6 In her study of the play’s civic dimensions, Silvia Bigliazzi

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argues that ‘the social dynamics underlying the tensional but also fluid dimension of civic spaces and practices is precisely what is dramatized in Romeo and Juliet and what continues to be experimented upon in its afterlife performances’.7 In this volume’s contribution to civic Shakespeare, John ‘Ray’ Proctor shows how his effort to stage Romeo and Juliet at an historically Black college in Albany, Georgia, ended up drawing the town’s African-American community into a civic dialogue about the whiteness of Shakespeare. Scarpa in Clifford’s account is an ‘indigenous modernist’ because ‘he wasn’t interested in what was more advanced, what more traditional, but in what could be articulated in temporally complex creations’ that expressed fidelity to the layered history of the Veneto as a region.8 Borrowing the term

FIGURE 0.2  A plaque marks the imagined site of the skirmish between Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo, across from the Porta Borsari in Verona; photograph by Ariane Helou. Reprinted courtesy of the photographer.

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from anthropology, Linda Hutcheon places indigenization at the heart of her theory of adaptation, favouring the concept because it emphasizes agency: ‘people pick and choose what they want to transplant to their own soil’.9 Shakespeare was himself an indigenizer when he integrated French and Italian stories with English performance traditions such as ballad, sport and holiday. Shakespeare is melded with indigenous traditions elsewhere when other nations and cultural communities adapt him to their climates of dance, song and storytelling as part of their own complex and conflicted modernizing projects. The work of cultural translation, Clifford argues, is ‘always uneven, always betrayed’, assembled on ‘the bumps, losses and makeshift solutions of social life’.10 Romeo and Juliet is replete with concrete features that locate the play in Italy as something more than an imported flavour, a souvenir in the making: the Italy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is papist, hagiographic, Machiavellian, metamorphic, sodomitical, secular and archaeological. In this volume, Samuel Kolodezh explores a queer vampiric film adaptation set in the ruins of modern Greece, a reverse translatio that unearths the Byzantine inheritance in the Veneto’s architecture, liturgy and reliquaries.11 The story’s own itinerary from Italy to England is necessarily one of translation and adaptation. Early references to the ‘Montecchi e Capelletti’ appear in Dante’s Purgatorio, locating the feud if not the lovers’ story itself in the lived history of late medieval Verona, a period of intense political conflict between the Ghibellines (aristocratic families who supported the expanding power of the Holy Roman Emperor) and the Guelphs (supporters of the Pope). The tale of rivalry between Ghibelline Montecchi and the Guelph Cappelletti insinuates itself into the Castelvecchio, too; the castle was built by the lords of Verona’s Della Scala dynasty, prominent Ghibellines who had been Dante’s patrons a generation earlier. The story of the lovers was rendered into Italian prose by Masuccio Salernitano (1476), Luigi Da Porto (1524) and Matteo Bandello (1554), translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau in

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1559 and then translated into English by Arthur Brooke (1562) and William Painter (1567). Shakespeare, who likely wrote the play in the latter half of 1596,12 relied most immediately on Brooke’s poem (reprinted in 1582 and 1587), but was aware of Painter’s prose novella and the participation of the Romeo and Juliet story in what Shaul Bassi calls ‘a larger cultural system and network of influences’.13 That system was Italian in origin but European in scope, combining localism with globalism from its earliest retellings; a Spanish play by Lope de Vega, Los Castelvines y Monteses, appeared in the decade after Shakespeare’s.14 The internationalism of the play’s origins continues to colour its afterlife, with major versions in Italian and French opera that combine Shakespearean and European sources and motifs, as Ariane Helou explores in this volume. Globally the play has bred an abundance of adaptations, which often employ the story of the feud to explore ethnic, religious and caste tensions and use Shakespeare’s own semiethnographic deployment of dance, festival and holiday to authorize the incorporation of local performance traditions, as Burnett, Trivedi, Alexa Huang and many others have documented.15 When Shakespeare shows up in Korea, imposed by Japanese and American imperialism but united with traditional Korean art forms, as Seon Young Jang explores in this volume, his text comes to participate in what Clifford calls ‘indigenous diaspora’, native forms of ‘interactive cosmopolitanism’ that include intermarriage, trade, seasonal migration and military travel,16 to which we might add the appropriation of Shakespeare. The relative independence of many adaptations from Shakespeare’s text and the return of earlier European sources in later Continental retellings bear witness to the endurance of the Romeo and Juliet phenomenon, which swirls around its definitive Shakespearean rendering but continues to gather energy from multiple sources, later media and global variations in an inherently dialogic and co-creative exchange of impulses and images.17 In other words, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is already a Museo Castelvecchio, an encampment or campus of sedimented

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myths, images and performance styles that, like Scarpa’s renovation, finds what is fresh and startling, bright and bracing, in those materials and fashions them into joints that connect the old and the new. According to the OED, ‘castle’ translates the Latin castellum, meaning ‘“village” in the Vulgate’, as well as the Latin castra, meaning camp, via the French château, ‘a large building or set of buildings fortified for defence against an enemy’. In Romeo and Juliet, the Prince, a Della Scala-style monarch, bids the warring factions to come to ‘old Freetown, our common judgment-place’ (1.1.89–90), instituting a new relation to the city’s republican past and imaginative futures, as Ewan Fernie has argued.18 Shakespeare’s Freetown articulates elements from the French source (where Capulet’s house is called Villafranca) with Machiavelli’s republicanism, drafting utopian futures from neighbouring traditions and the efforts and accidents of translation. Freetown is an architectural notation that emblematizes the self-renewing dramaturgy, emancipatory vision and geospatial imagination of Romeo and Juliet. In a series of case studies, this volume takes up the diverse iconographic, linguistic and performance layers already operative in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and tracks the play’s dispersal into neighbouring art forms, including music, ballet, film, television and fiction; and geographical locations, including Ireland, India, Korea and the southern United States. The works on offer here represent three related but distinct areas of Shakespearean adaptation: the movement of Romeo and Juliet into other art forms, via European conduits of music and ballet (Part One); the transition from theatre to the narrative arts of prose fiction, film and longform television (Part Two); and the translation of Romeo and Juliet into distinctively non-British settings and languages (Part Three). Following the lead of Katja Krebs, we consider interarts adaptation and linguistic and cultural translation – both the processes and the creations that result from them – as facets of each other.19 Translation usually focuses on linguistic migration with an emphasis on fidelity, while adaptation tends

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to highlight shifts in media with an emphasis on innovation. Yet translation studies have increasingly emphasized the autonomy of works reset in a new tongue, while the shift from one language to another is often supported by musical and movement vernaculars:  intermediation and translation work hand in hand, palm to palm. Adaptation is a form of translation in the way that it re-mediates a text, especially as it transcodes that text, as Hutcheon suggests, ‘into a new set of conventions as well as signs’.20 The works studied in this volume contribute to what Márta Minier calls the ‘composite, multichrome picture of the translation/adaptation spectrum’.21 Ton Hoenselaars and Leanore Lieblein apply the term ‘tradaptation’, originally coined by the Quebecois playwright Michel Garneau for his own versions of Shakespeare, to describe the alliance between translation and adaption in Shakespeare’s global travels.22 Performance is operative in both adaptations and translations of Shakespeare, since, as Linda Hutcheon argues, every reworking of a dramatic text requires artists ‘to actualize the text and to interpret and then recreate it, thereby in a sense adapting it for the stage’.23 One aim of this volume is to bring adaptation and translation studies into conversation with performance practice as research, and we are pleased that our contributors include several practitioners of the arts under analysis: director Ray Proctor, choreographer Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson and poet Beryl Schlossman. Ariane Helou, co-editor of this volume and author of the lead essay on musical adaptations, is a dramaturg and musician. Proctor’s essay in particular offers not only a critical reflection on the directing process, but a first-person account of renewing Romeo and Juliet for communities that have historically been at the margins of Shakespeare studies and performance. Romeo and Juliet’s own internal techniques of renovation, exercised in creative response to print, manuscript and performance materials, are repurposed and replanted in the myriad responses to Romeo and Juliet that build out the play’s continued vitality and efficacy (its virtues) in elite and

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popular iterations around the world. Remediation, defined by Bolter and Grusin as the way in which media continually process other media, is a feature of both Romeo and Juliet’s own repurposing of musical, poetic and multilingual sources and the profusion of artistic translations that respond to these originary transcriptions.24 Remediation is especially evident in the cinematic and televisual works analysed by Kolodezh, Gordon and Rao in this volume. In linking translation with the arts, this volume aims to explore how performance is itself a means of translation between media: from written word into embodied, voiced experience (Helou; Proctor) or from language to mute dance (Laura Levine; Jackson and Lupton). In Indian adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, the play becomes a way of translating Western romantic love, including modern homosexuality, into the Indian context – a context where the play intermingles with Sufi and Sanskrit traditions (Rao).25 In Korea, directors channel shamanism to reframe the theme of the undead (Jang) that vampire films (Kolodezh) and virtual reality (Gordon) focalize from techno-mythological angles. The translatio studii, the Renaissance transfer of classical learning from east to west and from one era to another, emphasized textual transmission and translation among European languages.26 Itself the beneficiary of this literary translatio, the case of Romeo and Juliet demonstrates the role of performance in the further dissemination of their story globally.27

2. ‘Cut him out in little stars’: dispersal and constellation Shakespeare anticipates these acts of global and inter-arts translatio in Juliet’s fantasy of diaspora and re-constellation, composed as she awaits the arrival of her new husband in her bedroom:

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Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-browed night, Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. (3.2.20–25)28 Juliet’s startling image recalls the dismemberment and scattering of the bodies of heroes in ancient myth, a sparagmos (dismemberment) and diaspora (scattering, dispersal) that also led to new life as chunks of fallen hero fertilized distant locales with the promise of vitality, community and esoteric wisdom.29 Sparagmos stems from ancient Ugarit, Egyptian, Canaanite and Philistine rites and thus harbours a manifold indigeneity.30 The ritual of sparagmos was associated with the cult of Dionysus, god of tragedy: sparagmos is the key motif of Euripides’ Bacchae. This and other stories of dismemberment, including the iconic death of Orpheus, were retold by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, itself a metapoetic treatise on translation and adaptation through performance.31 Shakespeare would have been familiar with sparagmos through Ovid, and Romeo and Juliet adapts the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and of Pyramus and Thisbe along with allusions to many more.32 Indeed, in early modern Europe, Dionysus and Orpheus, separated from ancient ritual and their Near Eastern roots, came to be understood as allegories of poetic praxis: Orpheus is the embodiment of lyric poetry, Dionysus of tragedy.33 In her erotic evocation of sparagmos, Juliet recalls the Dionysiac origins and transformative power of tragic poetry, projecting a living/dying image of Shakespearean mythoi in the flow of world translatio, as explored by Helou and Schlossman in this volume. Juliet’s vision also offers an erotic variation on the theme of heroic stellification, the reward given to heroes (Castor and Pollux, Hercules, Alcestis) and then to kings and emperors (Aeneas, Romulus, Julius Caesar, Augustus) in the classical tradition.34 As Heather James has noted, Shakespeare’s literary

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stellification was preceded by that of Sir Philip ‘Astrophil’ Sidney, whose apotheosis as a soldier-courtier-poet drew on the imperial motifs that allowed Virgil and Ovid to hitch their own artistic immortality to the tail of Caesar’s star.35 Ben Jonson ends his eulogy for Shakespeare in the First Folio, a text key in the global transmission of Shakespeare, with an image of stellification: But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere Advanc’d, and made a constellation there! Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage. Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn’d like night, And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.36 Stellification is another outcome of sparagmos, a way for the dead hero to join a galaxy of reconstituted personages who begin to cohere into a canon, ‘a stellified community’.37 When Jonson says that Shakespeare has been ‘made a constellation’, the passive voice admits multiple agents into the process of astral projection, including the efforts of Jonson himself along with the editors, future readers and theatrical users of the First Folio.38 If Shakespeare, in Jonson’s famous phrase, was the ‘Soul of the age’, it was because his brighter star could be configured into a pattern with ‘our Lyly’, ‘sporting Kyd’ and ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ while sharing sky space with ancient authors. Constellations involve acts of pattern recognition that require consensus. As maps that enable navigation, moreover, constellations are used as well as read: literary constellations might draw together different kinds of knowledges (theatrical, hermeneutic, multilingual) that train judgement, cultivate sympathy, build attention or direct action. When Jonson writes that Shakespeare’s star can ‘with rage/ Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage’ (ll. 29–30), influence in the astrological sense begins to release its modern meaning of inspiring new art, naming the retroactive rhythm through which time-bound works are reborn as classics through acts of adaptation and translation.

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Sparagmos has been put to use in contemporary and post-colonial literature, as a ritualistic theme involving the death, dismemberment and rebirth of the hero and as a creative-agonistic relationship to the classical corpus of world literature and myth that is itself subject to re-constellation through adaptive and appropriative practices.39 The great Indian playwright, poet and man of letters Rabindranath Tagore translated Jonson’s imagery into his own account of Shakespeare’s reception in India: A few early birds sang your hymn of praise while rest of the woodland choir were asleep. Then at the silent beckoning of the Eternal you rose higher and higher till you reached the mid-sky, making all quarters of heaven your own. Therefore at this moment, after the end of centuries the palm groves by the Indian sea raise their tremulous branches to the sky murmuring your praise.40 Jonson reads Juliet’s fantasy of sparagmos and stellification as an allegory of literary apotheosis and the re-constellating effects of Shakespeare on the history and futures of drama. Tagore in turn translates Jonson’s conceits for an Indian audience: Jonson’s swan of Avon becomes Tagore’s ‘early birds’, whose song at the edge of day channels the sound world of Romeo and Juliet’s lark and nightingale duet.41 Tagore confirms and extends the reconfiguring dispersal that Juliet herself borrows from rich layers of mythological thought and dramatic action that reach back to Indo-European sources, bringing the story back to a pluralized home.42 Like Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that phantasmatic pendant to Romeo and Juliet, Dionysus was reputed by the Greeks to have travelled from India, an itinerary of ritual performance and intercultural translation traced in

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this book. Anandi Rao, one of our volume’s contributors, glosses translation as it is understood in the Indian tradition: Sabda, the word, the literal, and bhava – the meaning, the emotion, the affect, the figurative – are ‘realigned’ in anuvad (translation). The notion of realignment… has within it an iterative quality. The image of a puzzle comes to mind – a puzzle that has multiple solutions that can be solved in multiple ways, multiples times. And yet, a puzzle can be unsolved, an alignment askew.43 Romeo and Juliet is such a puzzle, its meaning and emotions cut into little stars that bleed and twinkle, to be reassembled across time and space and among multiple languages and art forms. This volume takes up Juliet’s fantasy of diaspora as a model for thinking about how adaptations and translations dismember and replant Shakespeare’s own diversely pricked and prompted play-text in new performance ecologies and under differing cultural regimes, with intents and effects that range from the expropriative and coercive to the creative and emancipatory.

3. Revising fidelity, or the virtues of adaptation Juliet’s re-constellated Romeo suggests the majestic dance of their own story across time, space, languages and art forms. The scholarly conversation on Shakespeare and adaptation has been associated in recent years with Margaret Jane Kidnie’s Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2009), supplemented by recent innovative work by Thomas Cartelli on intermedial adaptation, Matthew Biberman on the psychoanalysis of adaptation and Christy Desmet on accidental Shakespeare, to name just a few. In this volume our historical view of Shakespeare adaptation studies extends

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to the sophisticated discourse on Shakespearean adaptation that reaches back to at least the eighteenth century: a period that witnessed the establishment of the Shakespearean canon through editing and performance, the transformational export of Shakespeare to Germany and the birth of the Shakespeare cult and Shakespeare tourism in England and Italy. The critical ethos of the pre-Romantic period considered adaptation not as a derivative or lesser artistic endeavour, but as ‘a valued aesthetic and cultural practice … progressive, modernizing, and aesthetically and morally improving not only of prior works but also of art generally’.44 The case studies gathered here speak to this capacious view of adaptation as virtue, in which fidelity, trust, attention and forgiveness become modes of responsiveness among artists, works and audiences across times, cultures and communities. Part One, romeo and juliet in music and dance, follows the play’s incorporation of other arts and its adaptation by those arts. In ‘Juliet’s Vocal Metamorphoses’, Ariane Helou explores the discourse on voice, music and transformation internal to the play and the way in which that discourse affords the play’s renewal as choral symphony in the work of Berlioz. Helou explores how Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, though a radical alteration of Shakespeare, nevertheless expresses an ‘affective fidelity’ to the emotional and embodied-vocalic currents of its source material. The next two essays address ballets based on Prokofiev’s 1935 score and narrative scenario for Romeo and Juliet. Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson and Julia Reinhard Lupton address John Neumeier’s 1971 production, which uses the palmers’ kiss as a generative emblem of the emotional, embodied and theatrical trust explored in both the play and the ballet. Laura Levine takes up the most influential classic choreographic interpretation of the play, premiered by choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan in 1965. Levine asks how a purely physical vocabulary can translate the philosophical issues around names and identity raised by Juliet in her most famous speech, a question she answers by reading five pas de deux in MacMillan’s choreography.

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These classical adaptations of Shakespeare to opera and ballet speak to the prehistory of adaptation theory, as put forward, for example, by Jean-Georges Noverre’s Letters on Dancing and Ballets (1760). A dancer and ballet-master, Noverre fought to elevate ballet from its role as mere divertissement and operatic interlude into an independent art form by adapting great works of literature into full-length ballets d’action. Noverre’s interest in merging and transcending genres and his quest for a new naturalism that combines tragic seriousness with the kinetic pleasures of everyday life dovetail with the Shakespearean dramaturgy that he had absorbed from David Garrick at Drury Lane Theatre from 1755 to 1757.45 Stories taken from literature and enlivened by observations of daily life promised to make the ballet d’action into ‘a complete poem’, gathering the arts of writing, painting, music, architecture and dance into a harmonious correspondence.46 Noverre’s commentary may feel naive compared to the theories of adaptation and translation that we have at hand today. Noverre, for example, avows a fidelity to the text that most modern theorists eschew: he believed that ‘success depends primarily on the poet’ and that the other contributors to a piece should ‘follow exactly the basic idea of the poet’, as a son obeys a father.47 Elsewhere, however, he describes the various art forms as ‘members of a numerous family who seek to become illustrious … [they need each other] for their mutual elevation, embellishment and continuation’.48 The fidelity of ensemble work depends on trust and collaboration among equals rather than obedience to the patriarch. In presenting literary adaptation as the best means to reform and emancipate dance as an art form, Noverre was in fact arguing for the autonomy rather than the servility of successful adaptations, anticipating Walter Benjamin’s call to reconcile freedom and fidelity in translation.49 Noverre makes a remarkable case for the inventiveness and authenticity of literary adaptations, arguments that contemporary theorists have arrived at by other avenues. Thus, Hutcheon argues that ‘adaptations

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have a way of upending sacrosanct elements like priority and originality’,50 and Kidnie works to break the prejudicial association between adaptation and inauthenticity, arguing that our evolving sense of the integrity of a production is generated through the historical conversation – of which Noverre is both interlocutor and theorizer – among sources, their adaptations and their audiences.51 Part Two, romeo and juliet in narrative media, explores the afterlives of Shakespeare’s lovers in the narrative forms of fiction, film and serial television. Beryl Schlossman takes us from drama to prose, with a reading of allusions to Romeo and Juliet in early works by Beckett and Joyce. Rather than full-scale adaptations in the manner of the classical operas and ballets addressed in Part One, these modernist works weave fragments of Shakespeare and lyric reminiscences of other Renaissance works into their psychological worlds, anticipating Joyce and Beckett’s more pointed Shakespearean engagements in their later works. The volume then turns to two contemporary works in film and television that activate and energize Romeo and Juliet’s posthuman potential. Samuel Kolodezh addresses Ronnie Khalil’s 2018 With a Kiss I Die, which depicts a Black, bisexual, vampire Juliet living in modern Greece who manages to fall in love again. Colby Gordon discloses the Shakespearean subtexts in HBO’s Westworld, a television series about virtual reality gaming in the nearing future. The series borrows its epigraph, ‘These violent delights have violent ends,’ from the Friar’s warning to Romeo, inviting viewers to read the drama as a metatextual, and meta-media, adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Kolodezh draws on Agamben’s ‘whatever being’ to capture the iterative yet individuating rhythm in which this vampire Juliet becomes her precursor by loving another. Gordon turns to Marshall McLuhan’s excurses on Renaissance literature as prescient musings on media theory. Both Kolodezh and Gordon show how new forms and figures of fidelity and vitality – between lovers, between artists and adapters, and between technology and humanity – are being tested and remade in contemporary media.

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Part Three, romeo and juliet in diaspora, begins in India, with Anandi Rao’s exploration of translation, nationalism and sexual politics in Romil and Jugal, an Indian web series performed in ‘Hinglish’ and streamed to a global diasporic audience. The two male lovers featured in the series eventually find happiness, but only by emigrating to liberal New Zealand. Bracketing her discussion of the series with a consideration of early Hindi translations of Shakespeare and recent ‘Romeo squads’ policing the behaviour of gay men, Rao shows how liberal Shakespeare has become part of a conservative nationalist project. Seon Young Jang charts the fortunes of Romeo and Juliet in Korea, where Shakespeare was ‘Koreanized’ by mingling with indigenous performance forms such as changeuk (Korean opera). Jang uses Alain Badiou’s philosophy of love and theatre along with philosophies of neighbour love and patriotism in order to stake a place for adaptation beyond the east-west binary that continues to shape the critical discourse around global Shakespeare. The volume ends with John ‘Ray’ Proctor’s account of a performance of Romeo and Juliet that he staged in 2013 at Albany State University, an Historically Black College/University (HBCU). Proctor documents the fundamentally alienating presence of Shakespeare for oppressed communities in the United States and the acts of will, courage, imagination and resistance involved in putting on his plays by and for people for whom these works are disturbing icons of whiteness. Loving Romeo and Juliet and loving Romeo and Juliet singing and dancing: it is these commitments that first brought us to this project. One of us is an accomplished dramaturg and performer as well as a literary comparatist with roots in both European and Middle Eastern geographies and languages (Ariane Helou). The other is a Shakespeare scholar who, when she discovered the delights of performance in midlife, fell hard, and keeps falling (Julia Lupton). For both of us, this volume and the conversations leading up to it constitute our first major foray into adaptation studies. Writing our own pieces and assembling this volume in

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dialogue with our students and colleagues around the world educated us in the varieties of response that Romeo and Juliet continue to elicit in so many art forms and in such diverse languages and locales. As we read and reread these essays, we do not cease to savour the tacit knowledges (musical, linguistic, kinaesthetic) and hermeneutic paradigms (intertextual, intermedial, posthuman and translational) that our contributors have brought to this shared work. These understandings and orientations belong to Romeo and Juliet themselves, as they venture to speak and move in concert with each other and the stars. As so often in the history of the arts and ideas, what’s past is prologue. Returning to the origins of current debates can reinvigorate and chasten, recall and renew, our sense of what we do and why we do it. As Noverre presumes and as Hutcheon and Kidnie attempt to rebut, fidelity is indeed at stake, both within Romeo and Juliet and between the play and its later returns. In recent decades, freeing adaptation and translation studies from the tyranny of fidelity has opened up a more structural, reception-sensitive and dialogic approach to the renewal of texts.52 This intertextual approach to adaptation itself harkens back to the Renaissance as the great era of translatio and imitatio, when every work was proud to be a repository of echoes from different times and languages. Yet fidelity need not consist in a homage to a prior work; fidelity can inhere in the relationship between equals, as Noverre’s image of brotherly love asserts and as Romeo and Juliet’s own post-Petrarchan partnership in new creation avows. Fidelity can surface in relationships that are not explicitly adaptive: through the genius of James Clifford’s photographic commentary, we found in the citizen-saints of Scarpa’s renovated Castelvecchio an unconscious or accidental recollection of Verona’s famous lovers.53 The statues’ quiet yet demanding presence in their light-filled gallery in turn donates new gravitas to the ardent tourist attractions down the street. Insofar as both the museum and the balcony participate in the long history of Verona with and without Shakespeare, they can

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become ‘alike in dignity’, offering new access to the virtues of Shakespeare’s play and of adaptation as an art of translation, including the virtues of fidelity, trust, cooperation, wisdom and love as well as wit and sceptical irreverence. What virtues are disclosed by adaptation and translation in this volume? Ariane Helou examines fidelity across media, as Hector Berlioz frees the lovers of language altogether. Samuel Kolodezh updates fidelity by following the erotic career of a Juliet-vampire who falls in love a second time, while Colby Gordon’s reading of Westworld discloses fidelity ‘as a suppressed yearning that the field can never quite shake’. Fidelity takes another form in director John ‘Ray’ Proctor’s efforts to stage Romeo and Juliet at an historically Black college. At once searching for models in earlier productions and becoming independent renovators of their chosen text, Proctor’s actors instantiate the kind of partnership among artists envisioned by Noverre, but unusually constrained by resource scarcity, communal scepticism and ancient racism: fidelity is at stake, but also courage. Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson and Julia Lupton explore the virtue of trust, the trembling core of ballet as physical and spiritual exercise. And Seon Young Jang, pushing against the intercultural paradigm that shapes contemporary scholarship on Shakespeare and Asia, turns to Alain Badiou’s philosophy of love, Martha Nussbaum’s account of patriotism and Freud and Lacan’s revaluation of neighbour love to understand how four Korean directors have approached the truth procedures of Romeo and Juliet, through and beyond culture.54 These and other adaptations gathered in this volume are ‘complete poems’, records of passionate engagement with Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, executed through multiple media and passing through neighbouring myths, provincial histories, diverse performance traditions and cosmopolitan and diasporic frameworks. As they move from ballroom and balcony to crypt, and from India, Greece and Italy to England, and then out again to the wide ‘world without Verona walls’, the two lovers broaden and deepen what fidelity can be.

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Notes 1 Romeo and Juliet appear frequently in Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2019). See ‘Cute Shakespeare’, special issue edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16.2 (Summer 2016), for tween, young adult and anime turns on Romeo and Juliet. Collections specifically on adapting Romeo and Juliet include Vincenza Minutella, ed., Reclaiming Romeo and Juliet: Italian Translations for Page, Stage and Screen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013) and Juan F. Cerdá, Juan F., Dirk Delabastita and Keith Gregor, eds., Romeo and Juliet in European Cultures (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017). Major works in the Shakespeare and adaptation literature include Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, eds., Shakespeare and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 1999); Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche and Nigel Wheale, eds., Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres, and Cultures (Houndsmills, Basingstok: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Rui Carvalho Homem and Ton Hoenselaars, eds., Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004); Ton Hoenselaars, Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004); Sonia Massai, ed., World-wide Shakespeare: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London: Routledge, 2005); Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz, eds., India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance (New York: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Julie Sanders, Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009); Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Thomas Cartelli, Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment (New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2019); Matthew Biberman, Shakespeare, Adaptation, Psychoanalysis: Better than New

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(London: Routledge, 2017); Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper and Jim Casey, eds., Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Additional bibliography is available later in this introduction and in individual essays. 2 James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the TwentyFirst Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 3 James Clifford, ‘Carlo Scarpa. Articulation Theory. Indigeneity. (Working with/in History)’. Illustrated lecture at UC Irvine, 8 November 2017. Manuscript, p. 4. 4 Ibid., 6. 5 On the Shakespeare industry in Verona and the city as an architectural adaptation of the play, see Silvia Bigliazzi, ‘On Romeo and Juliet and Civic Crisis in Contemporary Verona’, in New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity, eds. Paul Edmondson and Ewan Fernie (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2018), 145–60; and Silvia Bigliazzi and Lisanna Calvi, ‘Producing a (R&) J Space: Discursive and Social Practices in Verona’, in Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life, eds. Bigliazzi and Calvi (New York: Routledge, 2016), 238–59. 6 For a related reading of architecture as translation in Romeo and Juliet, see Aarati Kanekar, Architecture’s Pretexts: Spaces of Translation (London: Routledge, 2015), 43–81. On Shakespeare’s architectural and civic vision of Verona, see Roy Erikson, ‘Shakespeare as “Chief Architect and Plotter”: Romeo and Juliet and Civic Space’, in Civic Life, eds. Bigliazzi and Calvi (New York: Routledge), 82–99. Mark Thornton Burnett also calls attention to the role of urbanization and urban planning in global adaptations of the play (198–201). Naomi Conn Liebler has developed the civic infrastructure of Shakespeare’s play, ‘“There Is No World without Verona Walls”: The City in Romeo and Juliet’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 1: The Tragedies, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 303–18. 7 Bigliazzi and Calvi, Civic Life, 2. 8 Clifford, ‘Carlo Scarpa’, 19. 9 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006; second edition 2013), 150. 10 Clifford, Returns, 48.

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11 On Venice and Byzantium, see Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson, eds., San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010). Clifford notes Scarpa’s combination of ‘Byzantine and classical sources with the examples of Le Corbusier and the Viennese modernists’ (‘Carlo Scarpa’, 3). 12 René Weis, Introduction, in William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2012) 33–9. 13 Shaul Bassi, ‘The Names of the Rose: Romeo and Juliet in Italy’, in Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2016), 179. 14 For a comparison of the two plays, see Cynthia RodriguezBadendyck, ‘The Neglected Alternative: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Lope de Vega’s Castelvines y Monteses’, in Louise Fothergill-Payne and Peter Fothergill-Payne, eds., Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama, 1580–1680 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991), 91–107. 15 Cf. Alexa Huang, ‘Romeo and Juliet, Allegory, and the Ethnic Vocabularies of History’, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Society of Japan 46 (2008): 6–18. 16 Clifford, Returns, 70. 17 Weis, Introduction to Romeo and Juliet, 2. 18 Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Chapter Three. 19 Katja Krebs, ed., Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film (New York: Routledge, 2014). 20 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 16. 21 Márta Minier, ‘Definitions, Dyads, Triads and Other Points of Connection in Translation and Adaptation Discourse’, in Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film, ed. Katja Krebs, (New York: Routledge), 13. 22 Ton Hoenselaars, ed., Shakespeare and the Language of Adaptation; and within that volume, Leanore Lieblein, ‘“Cette belle langue”: the “tradaptation” of Shakespeare in Quebec’, 255–69. See also Susan Knutson, ‘“Tradaptation” Dans le Sens Québécois: A Word for the Future’, in Translation,

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Adaptation and Transformation, ed. Lawrence Raw (New York: Continuum, 2012), 112–23. 23 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 39. 24 Jay David Boulter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 25 Harish Trivedi, ‘Colonizing Love: Romeo and Juliet in Modern Indian Disseminations’, in India’s Shakespeare, eds. Trivedi and Bartholomeusz (New York: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 66–81. 26 Hassan Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (New York: Routledge, 2016). 27 For a case study of such extra-textual and paratextual forms of transmission in the European context, see Ariane Helou, ‘Sibylline Voices: Prophecy and Power at the Medici Theater’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 50.3 (Autumn 2019), 679–704. 28 Desmet et al., eds., Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare, choose this passage as their epigraph. 29 William Storm, After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). On myths of dismemberment in the Renaissance, see Thomas Greene, The Light from Troy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 147–70. The theme also resonated for Aby Warburg and his anguished understanding of the risks of the scholarly project as an adaptive-translational enterprise. See Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 194–229. 30 Michael C. Astour, Hellenosemitica: An Ethnic and Cultural Study in West Semitic Impact on Mycenean Greece (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967); Dwayne A. Meisner, Orphic Tradition and the Birth of the Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 18, 142. 31 On Ovid and performance, see Ismene Lada-Richards, ‘Ovid’s Changing Forms and the Metamorphic Bodies of Pantomime Dancing’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 143.1 (Spring 2013): 105–52. 32 Agnès Lafont, ed., Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 2016), especially Janice Valls-Russell, ‘Erotic Perspectives: When

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Pyramus and Thisbe Meet Hero and Leander in Romeo and Juliet’, 77–92 in this volume. 33 Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae, Expanded Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 34 See Alistair Fowler’s classic study of stellification, Time’s Purple Masquers: Stars and the Afterlife in Renaissance English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). On stellification and the Stuart court, see Syrithe Pugh, Herrick, Fanshawe, and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and SeventeenthCentury Royalism (London: Routledge, 2010), 54–8. 35 Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8. 36 Ben Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare’, ll. 75–80. In Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, ed. Hugh Maclean (New York: Norton, 1974), 85–88. 37 Pugh, Herrick, Fanshawe, and the Politics of Intertextuality, 55. 38 On readers as users, see Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use and Book Theory, 1500–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005). 39 Justine McConnell, ‘Postcolonial Sparagmos: Toni Morrison’s Sula and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite’, Classical Receptions Journal 8.2 (June 2016): 133–54; Letizia Fusini, Dionysus on the Other Shore: Gao Xingjian’s Theatre of the Tragic (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 40 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘To Shakespeare’, 1915. In The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume II: Poems, ed. Mohit K. Ray (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2007), 599. 41 On Tagore and Shakespeare, see Radha Chakravarty, ‘Tagore and Shakespeare: A Fraught Relationship’, in Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures, and Cultures, eds. Shormishtha Panja and Babli Moitra Saraf (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2016), 207–16. 42 Bharat Gupt, Dramatic Concepts Greek and Indian: A Study of the Poetics and the Nātyaśāstra (New Delhi: D. K.

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Printworld, 1994), 53, 215; Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 43 Anandi Rao, ‘In the Name of Shakespeare: (En)Gendering India through Translation’, PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2020. 44 Kamilla Elliott, Theorizing Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 43. For an historical overview of adaptation theory, see also 6–7 and 33–88. 45 Iris Julia Bührle, ‘Shakespeare’s Ballets in Germany: From JeanGeorges Noverre to John Neumeier’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, eds. Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 360. On Garrick and Romeo and Juliet, see Michael Dobson, ‘Brooke, Garrick, Romeo and Juliet, and the Public Sphere’, in Bigliazzi, ed., Civic Life, 219. 46 Noverre, Letters, 30. 47 Ibid., 65. 48 Ibid., 37. 49 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), 79. 50 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 111. 51 Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 22, 30. 52 Citing Hutcheon, Kidnie summarizes the definition of adaptation liberated from the evaluative constraints of fidelity criticism, including the creative element in appropriation and intertextual engagement. Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 3. 53 See Desmet et al., eds., Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare: ‘Something – a play, a film, an object, a story – may not merely resemble its corollary in the Shakespeare canon, but perhaps more puzzlingly, at once “be” and “not be” Shakespeare’ (2). 54 Compare Katja Krebs, ed., Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film: ‘Both adaptation and translation are acts of love – a form of love that may show itself to be disruptive, selfish and perverse yet is central to the (re)writing, (re)construction and reception of cultural positions and ideologies’ (9).

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PART ONE

Romeo and Juliet in music and dance

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1 Juliet’s vocal metamorphoses: Transformation and fidelity from Ovid to Berlioz Ariane Helou

1. Translation as metamorphosis A young nobleman of Verona falls in love and secretly promises to marry his beloved, against their families’ objections. This is the premise of the tragedy Romeo and Juliet, and also of Shakespeare’s earlier comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In both plays, characters are preoccupied with the idea of love’s transformative power. Observing Valentine’s changes of affect, his page Speed declares, ‘You are metamorphosed with a mistress’ (2.1.28). Before Juliet imagined the metamorphosis of Romeo’s body into little stars, Julia inspired similar thoughts in her lover Proteus: ‘Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me’ (1.1.66). Proteus himself proves to be as changeable

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under love’s influence as his namesake shape-shifting god. A discourse of transformation pervades both of Shakespeare’s Veronese plays: in the comedy, it operates primarily on the level of narrative and plot, while it informs the tragedy – a later and more sophisticated work – linguistically and thematically. A key invocation of metamorphosis, from which this collection takes its title, is Juliet’s fantasy of cutting Romeo out in little stars. She invokes a Dionysiac ecstasy that, in many ways, sums up the ethos of the whole play. Juliet’s feeling, too much to be contained in mere language, requires celestial translation; her intense love for Romeo and desire to claim him as her own can only be fulfilled by subjecting him to a radical, even violent, transformation. The wedding night that Juliet conjures in that moment – the occasion of cutting out in stars – takes place offstage in Act 3. At the beginning of Act 3, Scene 5, Juliet and Romeo have spent the night together and consummated their marriage, despite Romeo’s sentence of banishment for having killed Tybalt. With Romeo’s departure imminent, the lovers debate whether the songbird they hear is a nightingale or a lark: in other words, whether they can still rely on the safety and secrecy of night, or whether it is daybreak and time for Romeo to escape to Mantua. juliet Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree. Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. romeo It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale. (3.5.1–7) On a narrative level, the reason for insisting upon one bird or the other is evident. The birds stand in metonymically for the times when they are vocally active: the lark for morning,

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nightingale for night. But the nightingale has additional poetic and symbolic resonance as a literary trope with a long history in Western lyric poetry. Classical poets understood the nightingale as a symbol of bereavement and lamentation, while Petrarch and many of his early modern imitators imagined the nightingale as the poet’s avatar in the natural world. The nightingale is also a figure from classical myth: the transformed Athenian princess Philomela. In this scene, Juliet evokes both the lyric and the mythological versions of the nightingale in her efforts to manage Romeo’s departure from Verona. The figure of the nightingale encapsulates multiple themes – language, music, loss, resilience – which Juliet translates into her own idiom and her own context. The lovers’ birdsong debate proves to be a rich site for exploring Romeo and Juliet’s engagement with translation, transformation and adaptation, both in how it translates and adapts earlier source material and in how it offers itself to be adapted anew. In Shakespeare’s text, the language of metamorphosis is interchangeable with that of translation. ‘Translate’ in Shakespeare means ‘to transform, to change’, in the key of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’s metamorphosed lovers, referring to character or form as often as (or more often than) to language. Indeed, of the three possible meanings of ‘translate’ cited in the Shakespeare Lexicon, rendering into another language is the secondary definition.1 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Quince sees his colleague sporting an ass’s head, he cries, ‘Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated!’ (3.1.57). Quince is commenting on Bottom’s changed form, but what turns out to be profound and impactful is not his altered physical shape, but the transformative experience of being loved by the fairy queen Titania. For Quince and the mechanicals, ‘translation’ is a formal change that they observe from the outside, like readers encountering a translated text and comparing it with the original. Puck ‘translates’ Bottom by giving him the head of an ass; Bottom, in turn, promises to translate his memory of this adventure, which he perceives as a dream, by entrusting

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Quince to adapt the dream as a ballad (4.1.196–211). And Bottom’s tale is itself a translation, rewriting Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and parodying St. Paul’s language of revelation.2 Like Juliet, Bottom wishes to communicate his experience of love to a broader audience, though his plan is admittedly less ambitious than Juliet’s desire to translate Romeo into stars visible to the entire world. Both lovers imagine inter-arts and inter-media translations: Bottom’s dream-ballad adds a musical dimension to his narrative, while Juliet’s astral rendering aims to transcend language altogether. That post-linguistic state is one dimension of Romeo and Juliet’s engagement with translation in the nightingale-or-lark dispute. Juliet’s nightingale imagery touches multiple points along the play’s translational trajectory. It reconfigures the literary texts that make up the constellation of sources for the Romeo and Juliet narrative; it contributes to the play’s discourse on love and violence; and it employs a musical vocabulary that both reflects the play’s thematic concerns and anticipates its future adaptability. As Linda Hutcheon notes, adaptation is both a creative process and the product that results from it.3 The same is true of translation. A body of scholarship already exists that assesses and analyses various translations and adaptations of Shakespeare, from the seventeenth century to the present, as responses to and interpretations of Shakespeare’s texts.4 I suggest that these adaptations can also shed light on Shakespeare’s own process of translating his source material. Shakespeare’s translational process is multivalent and multilayered. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, he adapts Arthur Brooke’s poem into drama while simultaneously engaging with its antecedent Italian and French novellas, filtered through Brooke and other translators. At the same time, he weaves in language and imagery from other texts, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Petrarch’s lyric poetry, also filtered through layers of translation and reception. Similarly, later translators and adapters have built upon the blueprint of the Shakespearean text by incorporating additional texts and sources, each iteration expanding and embodying the

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‘fundamentally adaptational nature’ of Shakespeare’s play.5 In this essay, I analyse the play’s discourse of metamorphosis, voice and music as encapsulated in the figure of Philomela. I then explore how that discourse is taken up in a case study of one adaptation, Hector Berlioz’s choral symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839). Berlioz’s musical translation of Shakespeare regenerates Juliet’s fantasy of constellation, binding love with violence. Although it is engaged to some degree in literary translation by way of its French libretto, the work’s more urgent goal is to translate the paratextual or non-linguistic elements of the narrative – its affective resonances – into music. Although Berlioz transforms Shakespeare’s narrative, he also expresses a deep fidelity to Shakespeare, or rather to his idea of Shakespeare and of Romeo and Juliet: a fidelity that comprises the potential for transformation.

2. Juliet’s nightingale Versions of the nightingale’s classical origin myth – the tale of Philomela – circulated in ancient poetry and drama; the most detailed of these extant narratives is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.6 Shakespeare almost certainly read the Metamorphoses in Latin as part of his grammar school curriculum, and would also have been familiar with its first English translation, published by Arthur Golding in 1567.7 In Ovid’s narrative, the princess Philomela travels from her home in Athens to live with her sister, Procne, in Thrace, escorted by Procne’s husband Tereus. But before the sisters can reunite, Tereus drags Philomela into the woods, rapes her and cuts out her tongue so that she cannot accuse him; he tells Procne that her sister died on the voyage. Imprisoned, Philomela is forced to weave cloth for Tereus’s household. Into one tapestry she weaves the tale of her violation and sends it to her sister. Procne rescues Philomela, and together they take vengeance by killing Procne and Tereus’s young son, cooking him and feeding him to his

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father. Tereus attacks the sisters, but they are saved by a sudden transformation into birds. Tereus becomes a hoopoe, whose high crest and sharp beak give it the look of a warrior. Procne becomes a swallow, haunting the house where her son lived and died. Philomela becomes a nightingale and returns to the woods where she was brutalized. Having once lost her voice, she now sings beautifully and mournfully for the rest of her days: a parable of the resistant or resilient female voice whose expressiveness, though transformed, endures after trauma. By the 1590s the plaintive nightingale was a frequent trope of lyric poetry, translated and adapted since antiquity and newly canonized by Petrarch and his early modern imitators. In England, Philomel took her own line of flight from Ovid to the Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare among them – though doubtless they took some of their cues from Petrarch as well.8 But Shakespeare drew her out of the thicket of lyric and epic and into a new mode of discourse: the theatre. The figure of Philomela – whose identifying characteristic is a musical voice that expresses her trauma – is a touchstone for female characters in several of Shakespeare’s dramas, often connecting the female voice to themes of violence, sexuality and madness. In his early tragedy Titus Andronicus (1592), Lavinia’s narrative arc is explicitly modelled on that of Philomela in the Metamorphoses. Later female protagonists – in particular Ophelia and Desdemona, who sing on stage – also embody characteristics of the nightingale and create a theatrical framework through which Shakespeare explores the effects of physical, emotional or sexual violence on vocal expression. Juliet, too, has her place in this schema; sexuality, violence and grief are intimately connected in her experience and her language. Juliet’s secret marriage threatens her social survival, as the stigma of Lavinia’s assault and rape threatens hers.9 Like Lavinia, Juliet fights to assert and retain agency in a world where she is all but powerless. Both Juliet and Lavinia are also interpreters or translators of Ovid, invoking their literary predecessor Philomela to illuminate their own experiences.10 Lavinia uses a copy of

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the Metamorphoses to explain how she was attacked; Juliet summons a nightingale to express her desire to stay near Romeo and her fear of their separation or deaths. Juliet’s addition of a second mythological allusion in locating the nightingale ‘on yond pomegranate tree’ (3.5.4) further demonstrates her rhetorical virtuosity. The myth of Proserpina (also found in Ovid), abducted and raped by the god of the underworld, links the pomegranate to both death and female sexuality. Juliet’s image of the nightingale on the pomegranate tree conflates the myths of Philomela and Proserpina – tales of death and sexual violence – while aligning herself with both of them.11 Like Proserpina, Juliet will descend into the realm of the dead with the hope of escaping alive. In the play’s larger narrative structure, Juliet is an echo of two more Ovidian heroines:  Thisbe, whose forbidden love affair with the son of a rival family ends in tragedy (translated theatrically in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Eurydice, who is trapped in the world of the dead after her lover Orpheus fails to rescue her. Thus, Shakespeare translates Ovid into drama on both the macro level of plot and the micro-level of rhetorical figures. Beyond its Ovidian resonances, the nightingale is important to the play’s internal logic, central to a series of bird images that map the tonal shifts from the drama’s playful first half to its tragic ending.12 Early in the play, romantic love is associated positively with birds and with music. Immediately before Juliet’s first entrance, her Nurse affectionately calls her ‘ladybird’ (1.3.3). When Juliet appears to Romeo at the Capulets’s party, he observes, ‘So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows / As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows’ (1.5.47–48); the dove is emblematic of Venus, the goddess of love. In the balcony scene, Romeo finds the heavenly gleam of Juliet’s eyes powerful enough to light up the sky, ‘That birds would sing and think it were not night’ (2.2.22). He imagines both himself and Juliet as transformed into birdlike creatures:  she is a ‘bright angel’ (2.2.26) and ‘winged messenger of heaven’ (2.2.28) while Romeo boasts that he flew into the orchard: ‘With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls’ (2.2.66). Moreover, the

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setting of this scene among the ‘fruit-tree tops’ (2.2.108) of the Capulets’ orchard evokes an avian habitat and recalls Romeo’s lovesick flight from Benvolio the previous morning, ‘Where underneath the grove of sycamore’ he ‘stole into the covert of the wood’ (1.1.119–23). A good Petrarchan, Romeo stages a retreat into the sylvan domain of nightingales and lovelorn poets. Romeo’s language focuses on Juliet’s visual appearance; her first recognition of him, however, is auditory: ‘My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words / Of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound’ (2.2.58–9). Under Juliet’s influence Romeo, too, comes to privilege the acoustic: later in the scene, when Juliet wishes for ‘a falconer’s voice’ to call Romeo back, he replies, ‘How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, / Like softest music to attending ears’ (2.2.158–166). Juliet then imagines Romeo as her warbling pet, ‘a wanton’s bird’ (2.2.177). He responds willingly: ‘I would I were thy bird’ (2.2.182). Romeo imagines Juliet as a winged, birdlike creature, but she goes a step farther, using poetic language to transform him not only into specific birds (a falcon, a wanton’s pet), but to control him with her ‘falconer’s voice’.13 Romeo’s avian fantasy becomes, under the authority of Juliet’s voice, another metamorphosis. In the first half of the play, birds are associated with love and attraction. After the tragic turn, however – the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt – the bird imagery takes on a menacing aspect. The stage directions for Act 3, Scene 5, specify that Romeo and Juliet enter ‘aloft’ on the upper level of the stage: in the ‘heavens’, the realm of birds, as if to suggest that the lovers have together achieved the avian metamorphoses they imagined in the balcony scene. Up to this point, bird imagery and birdsong evoked playful love and sexuality. Here, however, they pre-figure the lovers’ separation with language of violence and death. Juliet observes that the Philomelic melody ‘pierced the fearful hollow of [Romeo’s] ear’ (3.5.3), an image of violent penetration and violation.14 Given that Juliet’s sexual readiness is a fixation of almost everyone in the first half of the play, including Juliet

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herself, this image of a deflowering is somewhat strangely displaced onto Romeo here. It stands in contrast to Juliet’s fantasy about what she will do on her wedding night under ‘love-performing night’ (3.2.5). There, too, the bird imagery returns, but with a more sinister cast: Juliet, who once possessed ‘a falconer’s voice’, now imagines herself as the falcon, asking the night to ‘Hood [her] unmanned blood … till strange love grow bold’ (3.2.14–15): in other words, to restrain her and train her for human companionship. At the same time, the avian melody that pierces Romeo’s ear recalls the piercing sword that killed Mercutio and Tybalt, as well as Mercutio’s joke that Romeo had been ‘run through the ear with a love song’ (2.4.14–15). In the high stakes of the nightingale-or-lark debate, as desire and fear both contend which is the mightier, Juliet overlays her sophisticated classical allusions with a musical vocabulary. Borrowing from Ovid and Petrarch, Juliet deploys the language of music and metamorphosis in order to produce her own adaptive, resilient Philomelic discourse. She protests to Romeo: It is the lark that sings so out of tune, Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps. Some say the lark makes sweet division; This doth not so, for she divideth us. Some say the lark and loathed toad change eyes. O, now I would they had changed voices, too, Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray, Hunting thee hence with hunt’s-up to the day. O, now be gone! More light and light it grows. (3.5.27–35) Juliet’s complaint that the lark ‘sings so out of tune’ is a rhetorical flourish; in criticizing its ‘harsh discords and unpleasing sharps’, she imagines birdsong as following formal musical rules. To produce discord, a melody must deviate from a certain mode or harmonic progression: but birdsong does not follow the rules of human music theory, so to speak of it as having discords or

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sharps is imprecise and anthropomorphizing, as early modern musicians were well aware. For example, in his translation of Micrologus, an early sixteenth-century German treatise on music theory, composer John Dowland observes that ‘the chirping of birds … is comprehended within no Tone’: birds do not sing within an identifiable musical scale.15 Juliet’s claim that the lark ‘makes sweet division’ likewise assumes the framework of an established melodic and harmonic structure.16 Division, a type of melodic ornamentation common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music (vocal and instrumental), ‘divides’ the pitch intervals and rhythms of a melody into smaller units to create variations, riffs and expansions on the original melodic idea. Like most musical ornamentation of the period, division originated as an improvisatory practice, even though composers could choose to write out divisions in a score (Figure 1.1). The musical ‘division’ Juliet describes is not merely a pun on the lovers’ separation; along with the discords and sharps, it translates the songbird’s voice into the realm of the human, while transforming the original melody and elaborating a new musical idea. At the same time, Juliet’s musical metaphor offers a blueprint for her own rhetorical strategies. Juliet sees herself as the arbiter of her own fate; she first chooses to hear the nightingale, and then chooses to hear the lark. In persuading Romeo to agree with her, Juliet uses voice as her exemplum, a rhetorical tool to drive home her argument. She also makes voice undergo metamorphosis in order to strengthen her case. The nightingale’s voice becomes the lark’s voice; the lark is translated into a human musician, abiding by the rules of musical theory; the lark’s voice becomes the toad’s, which in turn becomes the voice of (human) hunters, whose quarry is young Montague. Juliet’s witty transformation of the nightingale into a lark, a toad and a hunter may remind literate audiences of the nightingale’s first metamorphosis from the brutalized Philomela. By improvising a series of inventive variations on the theme of voice, Juliet shows how she, too, can make ‘sweet division’.

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FIGURE 1.1  Divisions. Thomas Morley, A Plain and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London: Humfrey Lownes, 1608). The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Juliet’s series of Ovidian transformations also evokes Petrarch’s poetic opus, known as the Canzoniere (Songbook) or Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes), an important intertext for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Petrarch’s poetry was a source for many tropes common to Renaissance lyric,

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including that of the nightingale as the lover’s counterpart in nature. In sonnet 10, for example, the poet flees the city (l. 5) for solace in the woods, whose peacefulness and beauty allow the poet’s imagination to soar (l. 9), while ‘the nightingale that sweetly in the shadow every night laments and weeps burdens our hearts with thoughts of love’ (ll.10–12).17 Petrarch also alludes to the Ovidian myth in sonnet 310, where ‘chattering Procne and weeping Philomela’ (l. 3) inhabit the blooming meadows and clear skies, foreshadowing the sonnet’s ironic conclusion: the riotous beauty of springtime is hateful to the lover in mourning.18 Petrarch strongly influenced Shakespeare’s dramas and lyric verse, but Romeo and Juliet holds the distinction of being the only play that mentions him by name. In Act 2, Mercutio mocks Romeo for his poetic lovesickness: ‘Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench  – marry, she had a better love to berhyme her’ (2.4.38–41).19 If Romeo is modelled on Petrarch the melancholic sonneteer, then Juliet is inspired by the metamorphic Petrarch, the master adapter of Ovidian imagery. Gayle Whittier notes Romeo’s ‘desire to live out artistic imitation’, not merely Petrarch’s acolyte but his aspiring impersonator.20 Juliet, by contrast, is freer in her translation and appropriation of Petrarchan motifs. Indeed, her fantasy of the constellation and dispersal of Romeo’s body is a riff on Petrarch’s ‘scattered’ verses. Juliet’s series of divisions and transformations recalls Poem 23 of the Rime sparse, in which Petrarch reflects on his own metamorphoses. The first was from free, innocent youth to suffering unrequited lover: ‘I say that since the day when Love gave me the first assault many years had passed, so that I was changing my youthful aspect’ (23.21–3).21 Now a mature man reflecting on his past, Petrarch struggles to define his identity. His plaintive uncertainty, ‘Alas, what am I? what was I?’ (23.30),22 recalls Sonnet 1: ‘when I was in part another man from what I am now’ (1.4).23 But the lover’s reflection on selfhood devolves into a nightmarish sequence of Ovidian metamorphoses as a dream-goddess

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version of Laura transforms him from a man into a laurel tree, a swan, a rock, a fountain and, finally, a stag pursued by his own bloodhounds. Yet Petrarch awakes from his nightmare having reaffirmed his identity as poet and faithful lover of Laura; the body changes, the self is constant. For both Petrarch and Juliet, that sense of self is partly constituted by their devotion to love, as well as their investment in narrativizing their lives. Juliet’s language of metamorphosis, like Petrarch’s, suggests that love’s transformative nature and fidelity’s constancy work in concert with each other. Her notion that transformation supports rather than undermines fidelity is a counterargument to Romeo’s loss of affection for Rosaline, or Proteus’s infidelity in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Without mitigating the violence of the translational act, Juliet’s speech affirms the virtues of mutability and resilience inherent in fidelity. Shakespeare, like Ovid and Petrarch before him, recognizes the act of transformation as simultaneously loving and violent. This is true not only of lovers’ metamorphoses, but of literary translation. Translation is an act of radical change, appropriation and displacement; it can do violence to ideas as well as to language and style. As Lawrence Venuti observes, violence ‘resides in the very purpose and activity of translation:  the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs, and representations that pre-exist it in the translating language and culture, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts’.24 But translational violence is not necessarily inherently negative; it is also an expression of freedom, or a freeing act, in the way that it allows for innovative re-imaginings and altered forms. The translator is motivated by a desire to enter into discourse with a text, but also to re-shape it to fit their own context, to share their love for the text with a broader audience, but in doing so to uproot it from its native situation. Thus, paradoxically, translation is both violent and loving, framed, as Emily Apter notes, ‘as an act of love, and as an act of disruption’.25 Katja Krebs applies this formulation to adaptation as well as to translation, describing both practices

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as ‘a form of love that may show itself to be disruptive, selfish, and perverse yet is central to the (re)writing, (re)construction and reception of cultural positions and ideologies’.26 Juliet’s vision of Romeo cut out in little stars is one of violence and disruption (cutting apart, rendering the body unrecognizable), but also of transcendent love (Romeo’s essence shines more brightly in star form). For Juliet, this drastic alteration is a profoundly loving and respectful memorial, a (re)writing and (re)construction of her beloved. Juliet’s imagined translation of Romeo into stars retains the essential qualities of the original in a radically new form. Similarly, her appropriations of Ovid and Petrarch freely reconfigure their poetry to suit her own context and goals, including her identification with Philomela and other Ovidian heroines. Juliet’s approach (and Shakespeare’s) to literary predecessors lies somewhere between translation and adaptation: the primary goal is not a precise linguistic rendering, nor a faithful replication of the narrative. Rather, Juliet is invested in translating affect, the embodied emotional experience that she encounters in these literary sources.27 (Literature, after all, has taught Juliet what to expect from love: ‘You kiss by the book.’) She is faithful to the emotional worlds that Ovid and Petrarch offer her: high-stakes passion, sublime suffering in unrequited or forbidden love and radical transformation that is both engendered by love (Petrarch) and a means of survival (Philomela). Her fidelity to these source texts is an affective fidelity, motivated by memory or anticipation of embodied emotions. In the case of literary translation, affect is communicated primarily by language. But the context of performance – whether in a production of Shakespeare’s play or, metatheatrically, Juliet performing for Romeo – demands that we consider its nonlinguistic or paralinguistic apparatus, including embodiment, gesture and voice. Voice identifies itself by pitch, timbre, volume and other quantities that are not reliant on language. From the dark of her balcony, Juliet recognizes Romeo by voice alone (‘I know the sound’). The tale of Philomela, a parable

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of vocal resilience, is not only about survival in extremis but about voice as the ultimate marker of identity: singing for eternity, she will always be known by the quality of her voice, though she no longer has access to language. Juliet’s Philomelic discourse – a unification of musical imagery with a rhetoric of transformation – ensures that her own metamorphic voice remains resilient, always identifiable as hers, always expressing fidelity to Romeo and to her imagined future with him, even as she undergoes the radical transformations of death and memorialization. In this way, Shakespeare’s Juliet offers a model for inter-arts translation and adaptation, anticipating a similar bent towards affective fidelity in other performance arts and media.

3. Musical translation Given its musical discourse, it is no surprise that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been a rich source for adaptations in a range of musical genres and languages, from nineteenthcentury operas by Giovanni Bellini (I Capuleti e i Montecchi, 1830) and Charles Gounod (Roméo et Juliette, 1867), to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), to incarnations in a wide range of popular music genres, including Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Incident on 57th Street’ (1973), ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by the rock band Dire Straits (1981), Taylor Swift’s ‘Love Story’ (2008) and, more recently, Halsey’s album hopeless fountain kingdom (2017). These artists and others have found scope for their musical imaginations in the play’s exuberant drama and the big emotional lives of its protagonists. Musical stage adaptations of Shakespeare extend as far back as the Restoration period: John Dryden and William Davenant’s adaptation of The Tempest, with music by Thomas Shadwell (1674), is one notable example.28 But during the nineteenth century, musical adaptations of Shakespeare in multiple languages exploded across Europe. Shakespearean storytelling

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provided an excellent scaffolding for Romantic and postRomantic opera, which put inner life and sentiment at centre stage. For the most part, these adaptations largely followed Shakespeare’s narrative structure (notwithstanding occasional changes to create a happy or melodramatic ending). Arguably the most radical of these nineteenth-century musical adaptations is Hector Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette (1839): not an opera, but a choral symphony, or as Berlioz titled it in the published score, a ‘dramatic symphony’ (Symphonie dramatique). Berlioz reimagines Shakespeare’s dramatic structure so drastically that his work hardly seems a faithful adaptation. That question of fidelity presumes an approach and a relationship between the source material and its adaptation that is text- and narrative-centric. But we cannot assess Berlioz’s adaptation by the same rubrics as we would Gounod’s opera, for example. An operatic adaptation of a play sets the narrative to music. Berlioz, however, had another ambition: to translate the narrative into music, jettisoning the play’s language and structure while seeking to fully convey its emotional world through another medium. Despite – or perhaps because of – the liberties it takes with its source material, Berlioz’s symphony offers an example of a different kind of adaptational or translational fidelity. Berlioz is not unusual in being more faithful to the spirit of the text than to the letter.29 But his approach, though extreme in its departure from the source material, strives for affective fidelity and in doing so illuminates the personal, cultural and artistic influences that shaped its creation. The version of Shakespeare’s play that inspired Berlioz was itself considerably altered. Charles Kemble’s theatre troupe, a touring company from England, performed Romeo and Juliet in Paris in September 1827, in repertory with Hamlet. The play was performed in English, a language Berlioz did not know well. From this fact and from his own diary records of seeing the performances we may conclude that while Berlioz was drawn to the play’s narrative arc and the performances of its actors, he was likely not attentive to its language. Moreover,

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the Kemble script, based on David Garrick’s eighteenth-century version, cut nearly a third of Shakespeare’s text and added two scenes written by Garrick.30 A French translation of the Kemble plays performed in Paris that season was published in 1828. It was this version of Romeo and Juliet, along with Berlioz’s own impressions of the performance, that formed the basis for Émile Deschamps’s libretto.31 These changes transformed the Romeo and Juliet that Berlioz saw from a nuanced meditation on love and violence into ‘a romantic love-story, focusing almost exclusively on the emotions of the lovers, and affording only the most generalized moral’.32 Kemble’s version altered the thematic focus of the play as well as its content. Moreover, unlike Gounod, who worked primarily from textual sources, Berlioz seems to have relied largely on his memories of the performances and his own affective responses: what Daniel Albright terms ‘creative misrememberings of Shakespeare’.33 The composer was drawn to Shakespeare in part through his obsession with actress Harriet Smithson, who starred as Juliet and Ophelia in the company’s season. Berlioz saw her in both roles multiple times, fell in love and pursued a romantic relationship with her. Smithson was something of a Muse for Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, though their troubled marriage inspired a less flattering musical portrait of her in the Symphonie fantastique (1830). In pursuing Smithson, Berlioz may have seen himself as Romeo; indeed, he seems to have shared with his fictional Veronese counterpart the unabashed desire to insert himself into an iconic literary love story, emulating Romeo as Romeo emulated Petrarch. Berlioz’s adaptational process resembles what Douglas Lanier terms ‘selective essentialization’, fixating on specific aspects of Shakespeare’s play as the focus on his adaptation.34 For Berlioz, the essential element of Romeo and Juliet was the heady experience of falling in love with Smithson and Shakespearean drama. In 1827, when Berlioz first saw Smithson in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare was growing in stature and reputation on the continent, and especially in France. This was due in

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large part to the influence of touring companies like Kemble’s that performed throughout Europe, as well as to writings by Stendhal, Victor Hugo and others. But that was a recent development. Shakespeare had been generally maligned by French Enlightenment critics; Voltaire was famously not a fan.35 Moreover, with anti-English sentiment running high during the Napoleonic Wars, Shakespeare had been shunned in France as a metonym for British empire. In 1822, an English acting troupe arriving in Paris was met with protests and forced to cancel their performances. The episode inspired Stendhal to write Racine et Shakespeare (1823), a meditation on dramaturgy and the affective relationships of audiences to plays, which raised the fundamental question of how (or whether) to separate politics from art.36 Stendhal praised Shakespeare as a greater dramatist than his French counterparts, including the venerable tragedian Jean Racine (1639–99). A few years later, Victor Hugo anointed Shakespeare the ultimate Romantic dramatist in the preface to his play Cromwell (1828), which was modelled on Shakespeare’s history plays. Hugo ranked Shakespeare alongside Homer and the Bible as one of the greatest poetic inspirations in history.37 Invoking him as nothing less than a ‘god of the theatre’, Hugo identified Shakespeare as the model for the new Romantic drama.38 By the time Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette was performed publicly in 1839, Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell had been in circulation for over a decade, cementing Shakespeare’s status as an icon of Romanticism, especially in France. Berlioz’s passion to make Shakespeare’s emotional world fully his own, with no apparent compulsion to colour within the lines of the source text, is evident in his iconoclastic Roméo et Juliette. The choral symphony consists of seven movements for full orchestra, several of which incorporate soloists or a chorus. Deschamps’s libretto does not stage the action, as a traditional opera libretto would do, but narrates and comments on it. Dramaturgically, Roméo et Juliette resembles oratorio or cantata more than opera, but Berlioz

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resists identifying his work by any of these voice-centric labels, expressing a clear orchestral preference with the title ‘Symphony’. The movements are grouped in three ‘parts’ resembling a three-act dramatic structure. Some soloists portray characters in the play: the bass-baritone is Friar Laurence, and there are choruses representing the Capulets and Montagues. The tenor soloist does not sing the role of Mercutio, but rather reports his speech in the Queen Mab scherzetto. In another radical departure from Shakespeare, Berlioz brings Mab into the symphony twice: first in the vocal setting of Mercutio’s monologue, and later as an instrumental scherzo before the funeral procession that brings Juliet to the tomb, representing the dreams of her drugged, deathlike sleep. The alto and tenor soloists are identified only as ‘Prologue’ and serve an introductory narrative function similar to that of Shakespeare’s Chorus. The Prologue relates the events of Shakespeare’s first act. Intermingled with the descriptions of the feuding houses and the lovers’ fateful encounter at the Capulet ball, Deschamps and Berlioz offer a commentary on the play’s subject matter and an encomium of its author: First passion that no one can forget! First vows, first oaths Of the two lovers Under the Italian stars; In the warm, breezeless air, Scented by the distant orange tree, Where the nightingale burns in endless sighs! What art, in any language, Could convey your heavenly charms? First love! Are you not More exalted than all poetry? Or might you not be, in our mortal exile, That very poetry Of which Shakespeare alone possessed the ultimate secret And which he took away with him to Heaven!39

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Although the libretto retains little of the play’s text, Shakespeare’s language clearly does matter to the adapters. They invoke him by name and, like their contemporaries Stendhal and Hugo, attribute to him an almost supernatural poetic skill. The ultimate praise is their description of the experience of first love as an embodied encounter with Shakespeare’s quasi-divine poetry. That affective experience is beyond language, though Deschamps and Berlioz attempt to communicate it. The lyrics of this passage are intensely sensual, evoking sight (the stars, the scene), smell and taste (the orange tree), touch (the warm air) and sound (the nightingale). The thickness of this sensory imagery invites the audience to feel as well as to listen, to occupy the same space as Shakespeare’s lovers in the starlit orchard, to hear the songbird in the tree.40 Through the combination of emotionally powerful music and sensorially evocative lyric, anchored by the key poetic referents of the nightingale and the Italian stars, Berlioz invites the listener to participate in an embodied emotional experience, to feel something like Romeo and Juliet’s mutual passion or the composer’s own passion for Smithson and Shakespeare. In an ideally successful performance, the listener’s emotion is ‘conceived, expressed, and evoked simultaneously in a situated, constitutive rhetorical process … [in which] ideas move together with embodiment’.41 The rhetorical power of music, lyric and sense imagery working in concert produces an embodied response, faithful to the emotional world of the narrative. That affective faithfulness might also be expressed as verisimilitude (vraisemblance), or emotional realism, one of the key traits for which Victor Hugo praised Shakespeare. A nineteenth-century take on the Aristotelian notion of mimesis, or the imitation of life, verisimilitude invites the empathy of the audience. Berlioz’s extreme approach to adapting Romeo and Juliet may seem at odds with the idea of lifelikeness, but it does intersect with the goal of emotional authenticity. For Berlioz, affective fidelity means (re)constructing the emotional experience of seeing Romeo and Juliet and falling in love

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with Smithson; for Juliet, the experience of reading Ovid and Petrarch and falling in love with Romeo. In what is perhaps the most drastic formal change in Roméo et Juliette, the characters of Romeo and Juliet are represented not by vocalists, but by the orchestra. After the Prologue’s summary of Act 1 and the tenor’s Mab solo, the singers fall silent while instruments alone perform the balcony scene. In his preface to the work, Berlioz writes: If, in the famous balcony scene and tomb scene, the dialogue between the two lovers – Juliet’s asides and Romeo’s passionate desires – are not sung, if in the end the duets of love and despair are entrusted to the orchestra, the reasons for this are numerous and easy to comprehend. First of all – and this motive alone will be enough to justify the author – it is because this is a symphony and not an opera. Second, since duets of this kind have been treated vocally a thousand times and by the greatest masters, it was as advisable as it is strange to attempt another mode of expression. It is also because the very sublimity of this love renders word-painting so dangerous for the musician that he would have to give his fantasy a latitude that the positive sense of the sung words would not have allowed him to leave aside, and seek recourse in an instrumental language: a richer language, more varied, less halting, and by its very ambiguity, incomparably more powerful in such a context.42 Such a radical alteration – the removal of language, of the poetry which is both the substance and the raison d’être of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – may seem an act of violence to the source material. But violence is one possible aspect of radical transformation, not its sole defining trait. From one angle, Juliet’s cutting-out-in-stars looks violent, from another, imaginative and sublime. That imaginative transcendence is Berlioz’s goal as well. He consciously tries to evade the trap of a musical translation that is too subservient to the language

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of the original, resorting to following along by word-painting instead of exploring a freer interpretation. In Berlioz’s view, word-painting – that is, modelling musical composition on the literal meaning of the lyrics, such as with a descending scale on the word ‘down’ – is a form of ‘translationese’, the overly literal, often stilted prose that has the undesirable effect of distancing the reader from the text.43 For Berlioz, a translation must break entirely free of its source text in order to express its love for and fidelity to that source. And even in the logocentric practice of translation, ‘language is not everything’, as Gayatri Spivak notes; ‘It is only a vital clue to where the self loses its boundaries.’44 The figure of Philomela, clinging to her selfhood and identity despite the loss of language, offers a template for decentring language to make room for voice, musicality, affect and other elements that fall ‘beside language, around language’. The violence of translation produces slippages, disruptions and ‘frayings’ in both process and product, but these may be mitigated through affective continuity: ‘The task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay.’45 Berlioz’s intersemiotic translation of Romeo and Juliet into music succeeds in this, facilitating love through its affective fidelity to its source material, its conjuring of layered poesis and embodied emotional memory. Berlioz’s choice to supplant the protagonists’ voices, or rather to translate them into instruments, was also likely due at least in part to the musical currents of the period. A generation or two earlier, the French considered instrumental music to be less prestigious and less effective than vocal music. Music, like theatre, is a mimetic art: if song is an imitation of speech, then instrumental music, modelled on song, is doubly imitative. But by the 1820s, orchestral music was coming into its own as an art form considered equally as expressive as vocal music. Instruments were coming to be seen as capable of resonating with the interiority of the subject.46 While the chorus and a few supporting characters sing, the ‘voices’ of

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Romeo and Juliet exist in Berlioz’s symphony as metaphor. The composer prioritized the construction of musical character over human vocality. The human voice is always attached to a person; casting an instrument instead of a voice means setting aside any presuppositions about the voice’s embodied form. The process of composition thus becomes one of creating a sound-world, assembling a new character from component parts rather than finding a single voice that fits the character.47 Moreover, that assemblage is a process of aggregation, as the ‘voice’ of Romeo or Juliet consists not of a single instrument but of the instrumental groupings that constitute sections of the orchestra. This is the end stage of sparagmos: the scattered pieces of the hero are gathered up again and reconstituted, this time as an incorporeal sound-character that is nonetheless whole and identifiable. Berlioz argued that to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet, it was necessary to avoid lyrics and word-painting, that is, to free oneself from the supremacy of language. It is perhaps a surprising choice for adapting a play in which poetry and Petrarchism are thematically central. But what happens when voice as well as language is absent, particularly in the balcony scene, which is, as Adriana Cavarero observes, ‘centred on vocalic uniqueness’?48 In resisting expectations for dramatic musical adaptation, Berlioz engages in an extreme form of Philomelic discourse: not simply substituting music for speech, but trading embodied voices for instruments. For Berlioz, this was the ideal way to meet the challenge of representing emotion so intense that, like the Ovidian nightingale’s song, it exceeds the capacity of language. He aimed to take his work into a new acoustic realm, choosing to abandon language precisely because of the play’s ‘surplus of sense’.49 Doing away with the unique vocality of Juliet and Romeo undermines the central conflict of the play by eliding their embodied identities as Capulet and Montague. Transforming Juliet into a soundcharacter also deprives her of the rhetorical prowess that is central to her characterization in Shakespeare. Yet the choral symphony also enacts the ecstatic apotheosis that Juliet

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imagines for Romeo: ‘cut him out in little stars’. Berlioz cuts them out in little sounds, translating their passion into an orchestral constellation.

Notes 1

Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, Vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 1251–2.

2

Jan Kott, The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition, trans. Daniela Miedzyrzecka and Lillian Vallee (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 29–68.

3

Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 7–8.

4

See, for example, Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche and Nigel Wheale, eds., Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin and Lynsey McCulloch, eds., Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Rui Carvalho Homen and Ton Hoenselaars, eds., Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Rodopi, 2004); and Ton Hoenselaars, ed., Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004).

5

For more on this capacious view of translation and adaptation as a multidirectional, non-hierarchical web of works, see Douglas Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’, in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 29.

6

William S. Anderson, ed., Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Books 6–10 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 206.

7

Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 21–35.

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8 For the nightingale as a symbol of England’s literary heritage, see Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 99–107. 9 For additional resonances between Lavinia and Juliet, see Robert N. Watson and Stephen Dickey, ‘Wherefore art thou Tereu? Juliet and the Legacy of Rape’, Renaissance Quarterly 58.1 (Spring 2005): 139–43. 10 Shakespeare will return to this tactic in his late play Cymbeline, where Imogen’s reading of Ovid facilitates Iachimo’s claim of having raped her (Act 2, Scene 2). 11 The nightingale and pomegranate tree seem to be Shakespeare’s additions to the narrative. See Watson and Dickey, ‘Wherefore art thou Tereu?’ 138. 12 Birds, like other living creatures in Shakespeare’s natural world, were understood by contemporary readers to reflect human hierarchies and social relationships; see Rebecca Ann Bach, Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies (New York: Routledge, 2018), 8–14. Bach’s work is one recent entry into the burgeoning field of Shakespearean ecocriticism, ecopoetics and animal studies. See also, for example, Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015). 13 Carolyn E. Brown argues that Juliet deploys the language of falconry to ‘tame’ Romeo, the only means available to her of asserting control over her own life. ‘Juliet’s Taming of Romeo’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 36.2, Tudor and Stuart Drama (Spring, 1996): 333–55. 14 For the association of stabbing with sexual violence, see Watson and Dickey, ‘Wherefore art thou Tereu?’ 131–3. 15 Andreas Ornithoparcus His Micrologus, or Introduction Containing the Art of Singing. Digested into Foure Bookes. Not Onely Profitable, but also necessary for all that are studious of Musicke. Also the dimension and perfect use of the Monochord, according to Guido Aretinus. By John Dowland

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Lutenist, Lute-player, and Bachelor of Musicke in both the Universities. 1609 London: Printed for Thomas Adams, dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the Signe of the white Lion (p. 25). (Incidentally, Ornithoparcus – a Hellenization of the author’s German surname, Vogelsang – means ‘bird song’.) 16 Simon McVeigh, ‘Divisions’, in The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press. http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e1995 17 ‘E ’l rosigniuol che dolcemente all’ombra / tutte le notti si lamenta e piagne, / d’amorosi penseri il cor ne ’ngombra’. Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 44–5. 18 ‘Garrir Progne e pianger Filomena’ (Petrarca, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 488–91). 19 For Petrarchan and Neo-Petrarchan influences on Shakespeare in general and Romeo and Juliet in particular, see Gayle Whittier, ‘The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40.1 (Spring 1989): 27–41; Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995); and Ronald L. Martinez, ‘Francis, Thou Art Translated: Petrarch Metamorphosed in English, 1380–1595’, Humanist Studies & the Digital Age 1.1 (Winter 2011): 80–108. 20 Whittier, ‘The Sonnet’s Body’, 29. 21 ‘I’ dico che dal dì che ’l primo assalto / mi diede Amor, molt’ anni eran passati, / sì ch’ io cangiava il giovenil aspetto’ (Petrarca, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 60–1). 22 ‘Lasso, che son? che fui?’ (Petrarca, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 60–1). 23 ‘Quand’ era in parte altr’ uom da quell ch’ i’ sono’ (Petrarca, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 36–7). 24 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 14. As many scholars have noted, this violence is often especially evident in the context of translation as an imperialist and/ or colonial project; see, for example, Gayatri Chakravorty

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Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 179–200. 25 Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6. 26 Katja Krebs, ed., Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film (New York: Routledge, 2014), 9. 27 Affect has been defined as an intensity or force predicated on embodied encounters with the world. (See, for example, Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 27–28; Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–4; and Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup, eds., Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 1–8.) Emotions, however, ‘are considered as a somehow translated, signified and subjectified version of the elusive, pre-discursive affective matter’ (Sharma and Tygstrup, Structures of Feeling, 7). Considering affect and emotion as implicated by a process of translation invites us to think of embodied emotional responses – movement or vocalization – as a translation of a translation. The same can be said of rhetoric, in a process of translating affect into emotion into communication (see Dana L. Cloud and Kathleen Eaton Feyh, ‘Reason in Revolt: Emotional Fidelity and Working Class Standpoint in the “Internationale,”’ Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45.4 (August 2015): 303). 28 Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, introduction to William Shakespeare, The Tempest (New York: The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, 2013), 76. 29 The discourse of fidelity to the letter or spirit of a source text has long been a preoccupation of translation and adaptation studies. For an overview, see Márta Minier, ‘Definitions, Dyads, Triads and Other Points of Connection in Translation and Adaptation Discourse’, in Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film, ed., Krebs, 13–35. 30 John R. Elliott, Jr., ‘The Shakespeare Berlioz Saw,’ Music & Letters 57.3 (July 1976): 293–4. 31 Ibid., 295.

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32 Ibid., 298. 33 Daniel Albright, Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theaters (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 98. 34 Douglas Lanier, ‘Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare: Afterword’, in Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare, eds., Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper and Jim Casey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 297–8. 35 In his Philosophical Letters (1733), Voltaire remarked that although Shakespeare was a genius, he was ‘without the slightest spark of good taste, and without the least understanding of the rules … The great accomplishments of this author doomed English theater’ (Letter 18, ‘On Tragedy’). Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, Or, Letters Regarding the English Nation, trans. Prudence L. Steiner (New York: Hackett Classics, 2007), 69. 36 Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare: Extraits, ed. René Ternois (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1936). See also Jonathan Bate, ‘The Politics of Romantic Shakespearean Criticism: Germany, England, France’, European Romantic Review 1.1 (1990): 17–18. 37 ‘Les personnages de l’ode sont des colosses: Adam, Caïn, Noé; ceux de l’épopée sont des géants: Achille, Atrée, Oreste; ceux du drame sont des hommes: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello. L’ode vit de l’idéal, l’épopée du grandiose, le drame du réel. Enfin, cette triple poésie découle de trois grandes sources: la Bible, Homère, Shakespeare’. (‘The characters of the [biblical] ode are titans: Adam, Cain, Noah; those of epic are giants: Achilles, Atreus, Orestes; those of drama are men: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello. The ode lives on the ideal, epic on the grandiose, drama on the real. Finally, this triple poetry streams from three great sources: the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare’.) Victor Hugo, Préface de Cromwell, ed. Évelyne Amon (Paris: Éditions Larousse, 2009), 34–5. 38 Hugo, Préface de Cromwell, 43. Shakespeare advocacy even became something of a Hugo family business; Victor’s son François-Victor Hugo translated and published the complete works of Shakespeare in French. See Leonore Lieblein, ‘Translation and Mise-en-Scène: The Example of French Translation of Shakespeare’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, (Fall 1990): 82, 92 n5.

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39

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Premiers transports que nul n’oublie ! Premiers aveux, premiers serments De deux amants Sous les étoiles d’Italie; Dans cet air chaud et sans zéphirs, Que l’oranger au loin parfume, Où se consume Le rossignol en longs soupirs ! Quel art, dans sa langue choisie, Rendrait vos célestes appas ? Premier amour ! n’êtes-vous pas Plus haut que toute poésie ? Ou ne seriez-vous point, dans notre exil mortel, Cette poésie elle-même, Dont Shakespeare lui seul eut le secret suprême Et qu’il remporta dans le ciel ! Hector Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette: Symphonie dramatique avec Chœurs, Solos de Chant et Prologue en récitatif choral, 2nd ed. (Paris: C. Joubert, 1857), 20–3. Translation mine.

40 Berlioz alludes to the nightingale in the music as well as the lyric; see Albright, Musicking Shakespeare, 98–101. 41 Cloud and Feyh, ‘Reason in Revolt’, 307. 42 ‘Si, dans les scènes célèbres du jardin et du cimetière, le dialogue des deux amants, les aparté de Juliette et les élans passionnés de Roméo ne sont pas chantés, si enfin les duos d’amour et de désespoir sont confiés à l’orchestre, les raisons en sont nombreuses et faciles à saisir. C’est d’abord, et ce motif seul suffirait à la justification de l’auteur, parce qu’il s’agit d’une symphonie et non d’un opéra. Ensuite, les duos de cette nature ayant été traités mille fois vocalement et par les plus grands maîtres, il était prudent autant que curieux de tenter un autre mode d’expression. C’est aussi parce que la sublimité même de cet amour en rendait la peinture si dangereuse pour le musicien, qu’il a dû donner à sa fantaisie une latitude que le sens positif des paroles chantées ne lui

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eût pas laissée, et recourir à la langue instrumentale, langue plus riche, plus variée, moins arrêtée, et, par son vague même, incomparablement plus puissante en pareil cas’. Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette, 1. Translation mine. 43 For a summary of the critique of ‘translationese’ and the privileging of ‘fluent’ translation styles that mask the translator’s own voice, see Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 1–6. 44 Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, 180. 45 Ibid., 181. 46 Violaine Anger, ‘Réflexions sur la nature de la vocalité dans le duo d’amour de Roméo et Juliette d’Hector Berlioz’, Musurgia 11.1/2 Images de la voix (2004): 60. 47 Ibid., 63. 48 Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 234. 49 Anger, ‘Réflexions’, 59.

2 Holy palmers’ kiss: Love, trust and wisdom in John Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet ballet Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson and Julia Reinhard Lupton

Your ballets will be complete poems. JEAN-GEORGES NOVERRE, LETTERS ON DANCING AND BALLETS, STUTTGART, 17601

A lover may bestride the gossamers That idles in the wanton summer air. ROMEO AND JULIET, 2.5.16–192

Approaching each other at the edges of a crowded ballroom, Romeo and Juliet initiate their relationship by composing a sonnet together:

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romeo If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand, To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. juliet Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this. For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? juliet Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. romeo O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do: They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. juliet Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. romeo Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. (1.5.92–105) Surging up from the orchestrated buzz of the Capulet feast into a moment of extraordinary intimacy and power, this sonnet-duet is built stanza by stanza by the two speakers and crests in the kiss of the couplet, composed and consummated together.3 In many stage productions, a courtly social dance involving rotating partners, sometimes linked together by raised hands, allows Juliet to dance with Paris and other guests while Romeo, who has pointedly assumed the role of torchbearer rather than participant, looks on.4 Falling in love with her glancing, dancing person, Romeo must draw Juliet aside in order to create an intimate space on stage that belongs to them alone, a virtual niche nested both within and beyond the bustling environment of aristocratic entertainment supervised by Lord Capulet. (In Baz Luhrmann’s iconic film, this tremulous, translucent space is visualized by the glass elevator into which the lovers ascend for their dizzying kiss.)

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The motif of the palmers’ kiss explicitly weds movement to musicality, cuing the actors to press palms as they face each other and drawing some of its energy and physical vocabulary from the social dance that has preceded their rapprochement. The palmers’ kiss, at once joining the two lovers and holding them lightly apart in a sacred gesture of pilgrimage and prayer, helps them block the space of mutual disclosure that will remain uniquely theirs for the rest of the drama. John Neumeier’s ballet of Romeo and Juliet takes the palmers’ kiss as its central metaphor. In Neumeier’s choreography, the palmers’ kiss combines the icon of praying hands, which focuses and orients the self in relation to the divine through the gesture’s upwards arrow, with the humanistic and horizontal meeting of two persons face to face. The lovers use their pressed palms to propel each other into the forward flow of their ecstatic lifts and turns, asserting the originary unity of idea and energy, meaning and motion, in the wordless work of dance. The gesture also launches them into the future of their loving commitment to each other, both within the horizon of the play and in the history of the story’s adaptation. Neumeier’s ballet becomes an inquiry into trust, from the feats of intimate cooperation that allow Juliet to fly above the shoulders of her beloved to the acts of magnanimous recollection that link Neumeier to Shakespeare across the centuries. Trust is a fundamental feature of complex performances such as Shakespeare’s play and Neumeier’s ballet, which engage bodies, souls, scores, settings and art forms in dynamic feedback loops of attention, confession, recollection, recognition and forgiveness. The performers donate their trust along with their more explicit emotional and physical expenditures to each other and the audience, whose receipt of these offerings has the power to build communities inside and outside the play world and across time and space.5 In Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet, the gift character of the lovers’ trust is dramatized in the experimental rhythm of their grips and holds, is tested when Romeo grasps Juliet without her consent and is linked to the drama of guilt and forgiveness in the final tragic movement of the ballet.

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In the palmers’ kiss and allied gestures, the dancers use their hands to communicate direction and intention, to sustain and support each other and to give and receive. These are actions transmitted through touch and muscle memory, flowing from the physical discipline and art of dance in response to Shakespeare’s own image archive of movement cues. In Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet, what is given and received? Love most certainly, explored by Romeo and Juliet in its freedom, vulnerability and divine aspect.6 Trust is also given and received, a trust composed from and sustained by the dancers’ attention, touch, balance and exchange of energy, key components of dance’s phenomenology.7 It is trust that allows dancers to ‘bestride the gossamers’, taking flight in their pas de deux (2.6.18). Finally, the partners also share their embodied or tacit knowledge, the movements and movement phrases that dancers absorb at the barre and in rehearsal. Such ‘bodies of knowledge’ become wisdom when kinetic ideas are affirmed and enlivened by free acts of transmission and reception, between ballet master and student, dancer and dancer, ensemble and audience, and Shakespeare and Neumeier.8 Love, trust and wisdom: it is these virtues, we argue, that are danced, shared and revealed in Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet. We intend virtue here in its broadest Aristotelian and Renaissance sense: as the capacity for creative action, world-building and self-disclosure realized in skilled practices united by shared purposes and values. This essay, written by a scholar-choreographer (Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson) and an English professor (Julia Lupton), is itself a pas de deux that enacts a palmers’ kiss between literary and dance studies.9

1. John Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare brilliantly spins the genesis of love out of a ballroom scene alive with cues for sound, light and movement. He returns to the form of the duet in the lark

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and nightingale routine of Act Three (see Ariane Helou in this volume), and he explicitly incorporates music on stage at the end of Act Four, in the comic scene with Peter and the three musicians that is often cut from performances (4.4.124–64). Early productions would have ended with a jig featuring the song and dance of these same musicians.10 The brawling scenes (4.1 and 3.1) draw on the choreography of fencing and stage fighting, combining art and sport, as dance commentators have noted.11 Given the play’s embeddedness in Renaissance musical entertainments, it is no surprise that choreographers have been translating Romeo and Juliet into dance since at least 1785, when Eusebio Luzzi staged the story in Venice, followed by Vincenzo Tomatelli Galeotti in Copenhagen in 1811.12 Prokofiev’s score, composed in 1935, brought a new musical order to Shakespeare’s play. Following Shakespeare’s basic narrative but simplifying it considerably, Prokofiev and his collaborators Adrian Piotrovsky and Sergey Radlov divided the action into fifty-eight short scenes with descriptive titles (‘The Quarrel’, ‘Dance of the Knights’, ‘Balcony Scene’), drawing out the episodes featuring dance and adding folk songs for the corps to display their virtuosity. Prokofiev used leitmotif and contrasting moods to weave together the themes of the ballet;13 the resulting highly articulated scenario ‘gave the composer the chance to create sharply contrasting moods in a short period’, which proved an initial challenge for dancers and an ongoing opportunity for choreographers.14 A group of mid-century and post-war neo-classical interpretations based on Prokofiev’s score and narrative scenario forms a distinct family of adaptations. These works, which include Leonid Lavorosky (Kirov Ballet, 1940), Frederick Ashton (Royal Danish Ballet, 1955), John Cranko (Vienna, 1958; Stuttgart Ballet, 1962), Kenneth MacMillan (Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, 1965) and John Neumeier (Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Copenhagen, 1971), all remain largely within the framework built by Shakespeare’s story, Prokofiev’s musical narrative and the tradition and techniques of story-ballet. MacMillan’s choreography, thanks to the

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skilful filming of the production by Paul Czinner in 1966 and charismatic performances by Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, has become the most iconic of these Prokofiev ballets (see Laura Levine’s essay on MacMillan in this volume). Both the MacMillan/Czinner film and Zeffirelli’s movie two years later captured the youthful energy of Shakespeare’s play for a worldwide audience at the height of the 1960s and remain mainstays of classrooms today. In our judgement, however, John Neumeier’s ballet, building on Cranko and MacMillan, provides the most cohesive and creative response to Shakespeare’s play among these post-war classical interpretations. Neumeier’s choreography discovers music and movement within image and idea in order to solicit the kinaesthetic consciousness of Shakespeare’s play to step forward anew.15 Following Shakespeare, Neumeier uses the palmers’ kiss to develop the theme of mutual consent and cocreation that couples the lovers in a freely chosen, equitable relationship founded on openness, vulnerability and nonpossession. Neumeier’s is not the most radical choreography based on the play; for more experimental approaches we direct readers to two excellent essays by Joseph Campana.16 Instead, Neumeier’s form of fidelity is endlessly attentive to the meanings and motions that animate Shakespeare’s play. Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet is, in the words of our epigram from Enlightenment dance theorist Jean-Georges Noverre, ‘a complete poem’: a drama of music and movement dedicated to story-telling, organized around a series of telling tableaux, and creatively attuned to the themes and sources of Shakespeare’s text.17 John Neumeier (1939–) was born in Milwaukee, studied English literature and theatre studies at Marquette University, trained as a dancer in Copenhagen and London and joined the Stuttgart Ballet in 1963 under the direction of John Cranko (1927–73), where he rose to the rank of soloist and began his choreographic work. Neumeier went on to direct the Frankfurt Ballet (1969–73) and then the Hamburg Ballet (1973 to the present).18 Born in Minnesota to a family of

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German origin, Neumeier’s emigration to Germany and his foundational contribution to the tradition of German ballet, itself an inherently international enterprise, maps a kind of diaspora among persons, ideas, media and languages.19 His undergraduate training in literature clearly helped form Neumeier as one of the great story-tellers in the choreography of our era, with ballets based on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Tatiana, 2014), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (2003) and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (2020), just to name some recent works. Neumeier cites his teacher and theatre director Father John J. Walsh S. J. at Marquette University as a major influence, and he has staged ballets to the sacred music of Bach, including the Christmas Oratorio (2007) and St. Matthew Passion (1980).20 Shakespeare has been a through line in Neumeier’s work, with three separate Hamlet interpretations plus ballets based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, The Tempest and As You Like It.21 As artistic director of the Hamburg Ballet, Neumeier has also featured Shakespearean adaptations, including Christopher Wheeldon’s VIII (based on Shakespeare’s Henry VIII) and The Winter’s Tale and a collaborative work, Shakespeare-Sonnets (2019).22 Neumeier’s earliest full-length story ballet, and his first major Shakespeare adaptation, is his Romeo and Juliet. He saw Frederick Ashton’s Romeo and Juliet in Chicago in 1956,23 and he would also have been exposed to John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet as a soloist for the Stuttgart Ballet. He began working on his own Romeo and Juliet while still in Frankfurt, where it premiered before traveling to Stuttgart and Copenhagen in 1974. Like the works of his predecessor, Neumeier’s ballet is largely shaped by the highly articulated narrative scenario of Prokofiev’s score. Distinctive narrative elements include the introduction of a performance wagon into the city square in the opening Act. This mobile stage-within-a-stage will become a major feature in the ballet’s metatheatrical and narrative innovations. Mercutio jumps out of the wagon dressed in a carnival skeleton costume and death mask and performs a merry danse macabre before the assembled crowd. Mercutio’s

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masking recalls the processional mural depicting skeletons dancing with people from all ranks of life that graced the North Wall of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Guild Chapel, the only sacred image that survived the whitewashing of the chapel undertaken by John Shakespeare in 1568.24 In Act Three, itinerant actors dance a version of Romeo and Juliet around this cart (Figure 2.1), and Mercutio stages his own death as if his demise were a play. The performance wagon reflects Neumeier’s lifelong interest in medieval mystery plays, also a source for Shakespeare.25 Also new is Juliet’s first scene. She enters the ballet fresh from a bath, wrapped in a sheet and accompanied by her similarly dishabille maidens. She is barefoot, manifesting a groundedness and vitality that distinguish her from the heightened ballet etiquette of her parents. The scene communicates natality

FIGURE 2.1  Itinerant actors perform a version of Romeo and Juliet during the civic festival of Act Three. Hamburg Ballet, 1981. Photo by Holger Badekow. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier.

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and new beginning, as ‘When well-apparelled April on the heel / Of limping winter treads’, a movement image from Shakespeare’s text (1.2.26). Juliet’s towel-dried brightness evokes classical statues of Venus bathing or born from the sea as well as Nausicaa doing her laundry with her maidens in the Odyssey. It also indicates Neumeier’s own refreshing of the story, his willingness to introduce a new domestic motif into Shakespeare’s naturalistic world-building. Lady Capulet enters the dressing room with her hands fixed in a downward triangle. Throughout the ballet, this rigid hand formation is reinforced by pronounced épaulement or shouldering, in which the dancer tilts one shoulder forward and exposes the neck. Neumeier uses the gesture to signify courtly conformity.26 These elongated courtly bodies, evoking the International Gothic style of late medieval painting, wed deference to hauteur. Introduced to evoke aristocratic discipline, the gesture will come to visualize the sharp wedge that splits the families and forms the central foil to the palmers’ kiss throughout the ballet. Lady Capulet attempts to teach Juliet this and other courtly routines: dance class as civilizing process.27 Juliet, the typical teenager, copies her mother awkwardly and with a whiff of mockery, though once Lady Capulet leaves, she attempts a fuller emulation of her mother’s pose (Figure 2.2). This is not yet wisdom, since the mother’s knowledge is neither given nor received, but rather imposed and rejected. In the party scene, Juliet’s entry is awkward and still unschooled. Now wearing pointe shoes, she literally falls down the stairs; out of sync with her ensemble of maidens, she bumps into Romeo and they exchange their first long glance before assuming the courtly triangle of deference. These and other details weave the dance numbers into the unfolding narrative and provide multiple moments of wordless encounter between the two lovers before their pas de deux. In a pas de quatre performed for the assembled company as a marriage pre-contract, Juliet is passed from her father to Paris, rarely touching the ground and holding her body

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FIGURE 2.2  Juliet in a towel copies her mother’s courtly hand gesture. Hamburg Ballet, 1974. Photo by Joachim Flügel. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier.

erect and her hands in the courtly triangle. The pas de quatre emphasizes the transactional and intergenerational quality of the arranged marriage, danced as the orderly public transfer of obligations among several parties within a great household. Romeo looks on. Juliet performs her variation, originally designed for Paris, with Romeo as her new audience: she turns her dancing being to face him as he travels around the room, like a freshly opened heliotrope in search of her sun. Their attraction does not pass unremarked. The pas de quatre will be repeated later in the ballet, when Juliet pretends to acquiesce to the marriage with Paris. A strong ritual and political-theological dimension also runs through Neumeier’s staging. As the overture begins, the Friar, portrayed very young, beardless and barefoot, performs a brief prayer before the civic plinth: the ballet opens with an act of benediction that belongs to the civic life of Verona but also serves to bless the performance to come. Act Two is introduced by an unusual pantomime performed without

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music that initiates the extended civic festival framing the act as a whole. Flowers brought to the base of a monumental plinth evoke Lammastide, the summer feast of first fruits that Shakespeare exchanges for Christmas in his adaptation of Arthur Brooke’s poem.28 Neumeier uses the festival to develop the narrative and metatheatrical dimensions of his retelling, tapping Shakespeare’s play text as an archive of vernacular entertainments. While folk dances in line with Prokofiev’s score unfold on the plaza, the upper gallery hosts vignettes of household work, urban spectatorship and clandestine communications. Neumeier’s disposition of space recalls a medieval or Renaissance altarpiece, in which supporting stories in small boxes frame a central narrative. These staging strategies enhance the narrative capacities of the ballet, allowing Neumeier to develop the relationships among the characters, to include more of the plot in his wordless retelling and to explore dance’s ritual origins. The palmers’ kiss contributes to these narrative and thematic concerns.

2. Palmers’ kiss, take one: the pas de deux at the Capulet feast The lover’s first pas de deux takes place on a stage emptied by the distraction of Mercutio’s dance. Their pas is composed of a series of rapprochements and withdrawals, in which Juliet pulls away from Romeo and he follows her. Each major block of dancing corresponds to the contact cues of Shakespeare’s sonnet-duet. In Stanza One of Shakespeare’s sonnet, Romeo holds Juliet’s hand; in Stanza Two, Juliet evokes the palmers’ kiss; and in Stanza Three, they talk of lips as vehicles for prayers (Juliet) and for kissing (Romeo). In the couplet, they kiss. Then they compose a fourth stanza, initiating a new sonnet interrupted by the Nurse. In Neumeier’s pas de deux, Romeo and Juliet perform two stanza-like sequences before the Nurse enters, followed by a third and final stanza in which a kiss

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almost occurs, but is deflected and replaced by a repetition of the palmers’ kiss, introduced in the prior stanza. The sequence ends with the striking ‘couplet’ formed by Romeo kneeling before his beloved. Each of these movement sequences is characterized by distinctive hand actions that receive the deliberate focus of the dancers, whose gazes guide the audience to attend to the choreographer’s decisions in response to Shakespeare’s movement-poem. Focus is an essential tool in both theatre and ballet, more effective than any spotlight in organizing emphasis.

Prelude and Stanza One: ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand’ Juliet enters the bare stage alone, and Romeo enters behind her, in haste and out of breath. After a moment of shared stillness, Juliet begins to walk downstage left. Shadowing her, Romeo links into her steps and rhythm to create their first moments of unison in the ballet. Neumeier will repeat the shadow dance later in the play in order to re-present Romeo behind Juliet in the mode of memory. Romeo overtakes Juliet and seizes her hand, holding her right hand in his hand and gripping her lower arm with his other hand. They both gaze down on their clasped hands, their focus signalling to the audience where to train our own attention. They meet eyes (Romeo having doffed his mask), and she swoons into a promenade, or walking turn, falling backwards into his left arm and draping her right arm over his, touching but not holding him. Soon she turns away while beckoning him with her smiling gaze. This first stanza has been initiated by Romeo’s double grip, on hand and arm, echoing Shakespeare’s ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine’ (1.5.92) She initially accepts his touch but after a few supported turns withdraws. Why does she leave so soon? The hand that is profane and unworthy is the one that grasps her lower arm: there is something too bold and too

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possessive in this second, constraining grip that leads her to withdraw, though not without encouraging him to try again.

Second Stanza: ‘Mannerly devotion’ and ‘holy palmers’ kiss’ (1.5.97–9) Romeo initiates the second stanza when he comes behind Juliet and offers both hands on either side of her body. His extended palms give her the opportunity to deny his offer, correcting the ‘unworthy’ grip at the start of the first stanza. This new gesture is ‘mannerly’, building on etiquette shared by ballet and courtly decorum and involving the hands (mani), but transformed by Neumeier into something at once more radical and more intimate, by closing the distance between their bodies and inviting her to trust him, since she can sense but not see him. She accepts his offer by placing her open palms on his: the emphasis is, dramatically, on her consent, in a first, lateral, palmers’ kiss. Their hands then clasp in the supporting grips that enable him to promenade her into an unusual backto-back leaning position. She reclines on him, swinging her leg en cloche (‘like a bell’), keeping leisurely time to their new love. Her arms folded across her waist with her hands placed in his, they rise to face each other as she transitions into arabesque. His left hand holds her right hand aloft as they take their time to join their other palms in a mutual prayer position. The earlier lateral palmers’ kiss of consent that initiated the stanza is now made ‘holy’ by pointing upwards into devotion, a realization and completion of the palmers’ kiss. From this meeting point, the kissing palms catapult Juliet into a sweeping trust fall as she drops into his arms and he promenades her and then lifts her from the ground. The action strikingly continues the momentum from the initial push delivered by the palmers’ kiss, which pivots from a source of balance and image of acknowledgement into a means of initiating new action. The palmers’ kiss morphs from Romeo’s horizontal offering of both hands from behind to the single

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kiss of vertical palms face-to-face that supports Juliet in suspended arabesque and then launches her into flight. The gesture is simultaneously semantic, visualizing Shakespeare’s text, and choreographically functional, used by the dancers to balance and mobilize each other. Commentary on Shakespeare becomes a reflection on dance, and the exercise of trust by the two dancers merges with the love expressed by the characters they play. In the seamless sweep of Neumeier’s choreography, dance is theatre is poetry is story-telling. Interruption: ‘Madam, your mother craves a word with you’ (1.5.110) Stanza Three: ‘Move not while my prayer’s effect I take’ (1.5.105) The second stanza of the pas de deux ends when Juliet notices the Nurse is watching them. The lovers separate and assume the rigid palm motif of their parents’ generation. When the Nurse leaves, Romeo softens his daggered palm to caress Juliet’s cheek, echoing Shakespeare’s movement cue from the balcony scene, ‘O, that I were a glove upon that hand / That I might touch that cheek’ (2.2.24–5). By placing the gesture here, Neumeier translates its later appearance in the balcony scene into an embodied memory that solicits meaning across and between works.29 Taking Juliet under the arms, Romeo turns her playfully in multiple opposing directions until she faces him. Romeo leaves his arms and hands open as she falls forward into him, chest to chest, heart to heart. In this unique modelling of trust, he manages to support and carry her without using his hands at all, which remain open as he slides her across the floor upstage left. She playfully runs upstage right, and he chases after her. He catches her by the arm but lets his hand slide immediately to hers, both recalling and avoiding his opening constraining grip. They dance together, and Romeo swings her feet like a pendulum, still supported by mutual palm grips,

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into a final open lift. Echoing her earlier en cloche kicks, these unusual swings visualize the lovers keeping time together. Time stops when Romeo lays Juliet laterally across his lap while maintaining the grip of their palms and she floats suspended for several seconds gazing into his eyes. Her feet have not touched the ground during this portion of the sequence. Lifting her by the palms into a passé lift, he puts her down at last only for her to turn back to him again and she trust-falls backwards from arabesque into his arms. The climax of the stanza occurs when Romeo dips her and attempts a kiss while holding her by her biceps: her arms and hands remain open but are suddenly restricted by his urgent grip. She turns her head, avoiding his lips and glancing instead at the hand importunately grasping her arm. Whereas Shakespeare’s third stanza leads into the kissing couplet, Neumeier’s Juliet pointedly denies Romeo the kiss, and she does so by rejecting his suddenly urgent hold, so unlike the more trusting forms of support that had lent her more freedom and choice in the partnership. Romeo gets the message and returns her to a more neutral standing position, and Juliet mindfully initiates the palmers’ kiss once more, her left hand to his right. In this movement of love, trust and wisdom, she purposefully repeats the lesson that they had learned together, and they begin to dance again on these reaffirmed terms of mutual election and support. The stanza ends when she dizzily stumbles away from him and he kneels to her in a short, couplet-like tableau of adoration. The Nurse enters and ends the pas de deux. Neumeier’s choreography substitutes the dance lesson from Lady Capulet and the pas de quatre with Paris and parents at the ball with a more fluid and reciprocal exchange of touch and pressure, meaning and trust. Throughout the sequence, Neumeier uses his evolving palette of holds and grips to dramatize the role of trust in both love and dance, including trust falls, first forward and then backwards. These falls contrast with the stiff transmission of Juliet in the pas de quatre. They also sublimate the free tumbles taken independently by Romeo

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FIGURE 2.3  Palmers’ kiss on floor. Frankfurt Ballet, 1971. Photo by Günther Englert. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier.

and Juliet during their earlier entries, transforming those earlier falls into a gossamer game with gravity shared by the lovers. Those earlier falls were gently verbal: Romeo is ‘head over heels’ in love with Rosalind, and Juliet’s stumble down the stairs recalls the Nurse’s bawdy tale of the toddler falling on her back in anticipation of love. But falling also belongs to dance as what art redeems from the ordinary accidents of movement. In ‘A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance Through Phenomenology’, Sondra Fraleigh cites Heidegger, who ‘chose the vulnerable image of falling to describe the lived dimension of present time. Falling is both a movement and a symbol of our existential mode of being-in-the-world.’30 Neumeier lifts Shakespeare’s own discourse on falling into a choreographic commentary on risk and trust in love. Trust theorists emphasize the gift-character of trust: ‘It is not possible to demand trust of others; trust can only be offered and accepted.’31 Neumeier discloses ballet as a laboratory of trust, which depends on the

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nonverbal communication of the dancers, who must listen with their whole persons to the cues of their partners in order to soar and swoop, fly and fall, turn and return. The audience, too, participates in this trust exchange, supporting the dancers’ safety and success with our attention and awe. The sequence as a whole takes its essential cues from Shakespeare’s repertory of ‘profane’, ‘unworthy’, ‘mannerly’ and ‘holy’ touches. Romeo twice initiates an overly urgent, coercive grip, a gesture that Neumeier contrasts with a delicate palette of more yielding touches and holds, including Juliet’s draped arm in Stanza One, Romeo’s ingenious open-armed support and no-hold lifts in Stanza Two, and the palmers’ kiss itself, which organizes the dramatic action in Stanzas Two and Three. The palmers’ kiss is semantically enriched by the proximity of Shakespeare’s sonnet and its gestural citation of prayer and courtly social dances. But the palmers’ kiss reaches beyond semiotics and iconography to something else: to the embodiment of virtue and knowledge in dance. Pressing palms communicate and affirm equity, balance and mutual support and they share heat, weight and motion, reinforcing the faceto-face of theatre with the hand-to-hand of dance. Neumeier need not rely on the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of the play’s poetry. Rather, he conjures the embodied experiences that might have led Shakespeare’s characters to speak as they do, using the movements that his dancers share with Shakespeare’s players to support narrative through dance and enrich dance through narrative.

3. The palmers’ kiss returns: balcony, chapel, bedroom, crypt Neumeier continues to build the palmers’ kiss within a menu of supporting and contrasting grips and gestures. When Juliet appears aloft for the balcony scene, she brings both hands to her face, a recurrent gesture that allows her to kiss the palms,

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or drink from them, or inhale her desires and memories, or wash herself clean, ‘new-baptized’ in love (2.2.50).32 While Romeo kneels and observes her from below, she takes time to look at her palms in memory of him and then begins to dance the palmers’ kiss choreography as a solo while the orchestra whispers the music from their first pas de deux. Memory is the medium for both Prokofiev and Neumeier. Participating in the recollection, Romeo brings his focus to his right hand as he reaches upwards, fusing the palmers’ kiss with the glove upon the cheek. After he dances his variation, he meets her aloft for a story-book proposal on his knee, initiating a palmers’ kiss that she answers with her other hand for a stronger grip and then they layer their open hands in a co-composed ceremony of betrothal that will be repeated under the Friar’s direction later in the chapel. Running down the stairs, they dance the rest of the pas in a playful key: still exploring each other’s trust, they introduce risk, abandon and childlike scrappiness into their buoyant dancing. Neumeier incorporates the vernacular idiom of children’s games (rolling, swinging, chasing, tagging) and bursts of energetic explosion into the balletic vocabulary. Adults don’t jump for joy. Romeo and Juliet do. At the end of the grand pas, when both dancers are literally breathless, they kiss kneeling and then turn to rest against each other back-toback. Romeo offers his initial palmer’s hand once more, his head reclined and obscured on her shoulder. She sees his offer and demonstratively interlaces her fingers with his. Romeo has learned to always give her a choice – not only if to take the hand he offers, but also how to take it: with open hand or clasping, under or over, interlacing or cupped. This variability empowers Juliet as a fully ensouled being while allowing both dancers to exult in the choreographic and expressive range of the palmers’ kiss. Their marriage by the Friar elaborates this vocabulary of holds. Bride and groom meet centre stage with hands in prayer position and begin a ceremonial pas de trois of marriage under the Friar’s tutelage. The Friar places Juliet’s hand into that

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of the kneeling Romeo (‘Do thou but close our hands with holy words, / Then love-devouring death do what he dare’ [2.6.6–7]). Later, the Nurse will betray Juliet by placing her hand in Paris’s, a cold parody of the free act of hand-fasting enacted in the chapel. Supported by both the Friar and Romeo, Juliet looks to the virtual altarpiece that floats in our space while the Friar regards Heaven. The Friar has composed a tableau, evoking at once a Renaissance painting and a group of living statues unified by vectors that cross through the three bodies and merge them in a single image of mediated love. His gently directive movements place the lovers in relationship to each other and their setting in a veritable Rubik’s cube of moving stills, composed, dissolved and recomposed by the Friar in concert with the ardent energy of the marriage couple (Figure 2.4). The sequence realizes Noverre’s vision of ballet ‘as a series of pictures connected one with the other by the plot’.33 In an especially striking configuration, all three dancers lift both arms over their heads and join them in a single point for a triune Holy Palmers’ Kiss, with Romeo’s palms at the core, Juliet’s as the next layer, and the Friar’s encasing them. Together, their six joined hands build the steeple of an imaginary church before they open their arms one by one in a great blossoming of marriage in community. The configuration, at once pictorial and dynamic, ceremonial and playful, recalls the old children’s game for two hands, ‘Here is the church, here is the steeple / Open the doors and see all the people.’ As before, Neumeier traces the origin of dance out of vernacular playfulness and civic liturgy. Neumeier’s Franciscan Friar has composed a visual sermon. In this scene, the Friar is the painter-poet-choreographer of the story-ballet, but one whose striking youth places him inside the mystery he orchestrates. The Friar’s chapel dance is ‘edifying’ in the Pauline sense drawn out by philosopher of architecture Karsten Harries: originally meaning simply ‘to build or construct’, ‘edify’ in the New Testament translates the Greek oikodomeo (from oikos, household and domeo, to

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FIGURE 2.4  A triple palmers’ kiss. Hamburg Ballet, 1974. Photo by Elisabeth Speidel. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier.

build). Edification, Harries writes, ‘came to mean to build up the church or soul, to provide something like spiritual shelter’.34 Romeo and Juliet have already begun to build such a dwelling when their hands kissed in their first pas de deux.35 Paul’s letter to the Ephesians proclaims the church as the mystical body of Christ (1:22) and marriage as its carnal reminder. In the wedding scene, Neumeier reads mystic symbol as a script for movement, summoning performative theologies of the corpus mysticum to take wing: ‘A mystery, in the old sense of the word, is more of an action than a thing.’36 Neumeier chooses to open Act Three with Tybalt’s funeral, led by the Friar. The procession fades into the bedroom scene, implying that Romeo awakes dreaming of the death he has inflicted on Juliet’s kinsman. In the aubade, Neumeier’s

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choreography is at its most sensual and inventive. A guiltridden Romeo aches in turmoil for his necessary departure and is desperate yet careful in his final living moments with his love. Juliet uses all of her physical powers and prowess to bid her love back to bed. In these heightened states they coin highly unusual assemblages. For example, they sink to the floor in interlocked ying-yang positions, with their clasped palms reaching upwards to recreate the chapel of their desire. In this scene abandon reaches its peak: Romeo tosses Juliet over his bare sweating shoulders and runs full speed with her draped over him, their arms wide open in a trust that is as absolute as it is desperate. Their mad flight anticipates the ‘velocity and violence’ that Campana discovers in later, more modern interpretations of Romeo and Juliet in dance.37 Palms stained with murder, Romeo shuns his own hands, recalling Lady Macbeth. Does this new-felt guilt contribute to the handless holds he deploys with new determination in this scene? Does he not want to ‘profane’ her with his now truly ‘unworthy’ hand? Throughout the sequence, Neumeier incorporates modern steps from Martha Graham, such as Romeo’s grief-stricken contractions, in order to indicate how the lovers’ once-immediate emotions have been riven by the fresh consciousness of guilt.38 Juliet becomes the sheath to Romeo’s blade, first in the aubade, when she repeatedly wraps her body backwards around Romeo, and then in the crypt, when she stabs herself with his dagger (5.3.169). After a brief dance with her sleeping body, Romeo takes her right hand between his two hands and lifts it up high in an ascending prayer, but her palm and fingers slide out of his reluming touch. When he kills himself with his dagger, he expires kissing not her mouth but her hand, which he rouses into movement as he passes into stillness. When she discovers his dead body, she lifts his hand up high in a repetition of the ascending prayer, but her effort too fails. After gathering herself for a sober suicide, she sees his dagger in his hand and pries it from him. The handle resembles the downward spade of courtly conformity. She weaves her left

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FIGURE 2.5  Romeo and Juliet die with hands clasped. Hamburg Ballet, 1981. Photo by Holger Badekow. Permission Stiftung John Neumeier.

and his right hand together, using her remaining hand to cradle and secure her grasp as she loses consciousness and life. The first palmers’ kiss and the last are performed with the same hand from each lover, bespeaking both Neumeier’s craft and the lovers’ fidelity (Figure 2.5).

4. Conclusion: Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet and the spirit of trust Focusing exclusively on Romeo and Juliet, the ending of Neumeier’s ballet might feel purely romantic. Even Paris is left out, his murder by Romeo a distraction from the lovers’ final scene. Yet we would argue that Neumeier has created a more socio-symbolic framework for the lovers than their isolation might first suggest. By emphasizing clasped hands rather than pressed lips as the signs and seals of their union, Neumeier

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recalls the corpus mysticum of the chapel scene. He identifies marriage not with passionate embrace but with faithful commitment, freely undertaken in company with others and involving the symbolic mediation and choreographic direction of the Friar. In Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet, to love means to craft a shared dwelling, both a memory theatre and a place for presencing, out of bodies, limbs, gestures and symbols. Romeo and Juliet’s fingers interlaced in death condense the steeple and the people from the old nursery rhyme lit up by their wedding dance: the palmers’ kiss builds a sanctuary convened by and for love. This is an exercise in edification in its theological sense: a building up of a holy social space out of the faithful and loving presence of persons ingathered by shared scripts and sacred intentions. Why does Paris survive in Neumeier’s version of the story? Is it because he is too insignificant to deserve killing, or because he too has been edified by Juliet and is now called to contribute to the reform of a charitable community? Does the lovers’ closing clasp not only express their undying love, but also entrust a greater Verona with the task of remembering them? And what does this trust have to do with adaptation and translation across eras and art forms? In A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, philosopher Robert Brandom identifies trust with what he calls ‘magnanimous forgiving recollection’, a form of hermeneutics that repairs and reconciles the transgressions of the past by rebuilding trust and practicing reconciliation at the level of both thought (philosophy) and community (social relationships).39 Neumeier’s Romeo is distinctive because he suffers guilt at the death of Tybalt, undergoing a modernity of feeling registered in his recourse to the torsions and laments of Martha Graham. It is this expressed guilt that makes Romeo a tragic figure: ‘That what the agent does – what he is responsible for – outruns what he intends or can know is what makes this heroic conception of agency also tragic.’40 As Romeo says to the dying Mercutio, ‘I thought all for the best’ (3.1.94): he did not intend this or other violations, but he is responsible nonetheless. Juliet also acknowledges Romeo’s guilt (‘O God,

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did Romeo’s hand shed Tybalt’s blood?’ [3.271]) and must actively forgive him for his crime, as Regina Schwartz argues.41 Yet Romeo and Juliet is rarely performed or experienced as a purely tragic work: Tybalt is too piggish and Paris too priggish to deserve more than our momentary concern. If their moral weightlessness reflects a failure on the part of Shakespeare as well as his characters, Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet becomes an act of magnanimous forgiving recollection, insofar as his adaptation highlights Romeo’s guilt, spares Paris, supplements the violence of youthful eros with the covenant of commitment and tarries with the religious motifs in the play while remaining true to the lovers’ erotic vitality and humanity.42 Each repetition of the palmers’ kiss is an act of increasingly magnanimous recollection that builds and gathers meaning in order to become wisdom, by drawing guilt and reconciliation into an intimate shrine to love.43 Neumeier acknowledges the tragic potential of the play in order to move beyond tragedy towards romance, a genre characterized for Shakespeare by the difficult work of forgiveness and the rebuilding of trust in the wake of love’s failures and passion’s crimes. At the heart of this living composition of love, trust and wisdom is Shakespeare’s sonnet, delivering its intended rhymes as the lovers pass the poem’s developing conceits back and forth in preparation for their kiss. In Shakespeare and Neumeier, the lovers design a piece of living architecture fashioned out of the rhyme and reason of reciprocal composition, the erotic rhythm of approach and withdrawal and the promise of restitution and repair in communities to come. The moving space they create together is as resilient as it is open: a complete poem.

Notes 1 Jean-Georges Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (Alton: Dance Books, 2004), 30. 2 Citations from New Oxford Shakespeare Online, ed. Gary Taylor. https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/nos/

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3 On duet and drama, see Bernard Beckerman, Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience, Act, eds. Gloria Brinn Beckerman and William Coco (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Lawrence Manley, ‘“Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”: Folie à Deux in Shakespeare’s Love Duets’, in Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Philosophy, Performance, eds. Matthew James Smith and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 52–76. 4 E.g., BBC production, directed by Alvin Rakoff, 1978. On Romeo as torchbearer, see Brandon Shaw, ‘Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies: The Case of Romeo’, in Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, eds. Lynsey McColloch and Brandon Shaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 176; and Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Making Room, Affording Hospitality: Environments of Entertainment in Romeo and Juliet’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43.1 (Winter 2013): 163–8. Alan Brissenden treats the importance of actual and metaphorical dancing in the play in his classic study, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 63–6. Linda McJannet compares choreographic treatments of dancing at the Capulets’ feast, ‘“A hall, a hall! Give room, and foot it, girls”: Realizing the Dance Scene in Romeo and Juliet on Film’, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 10.2 (Spring 2017), http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783440/ show. Emily Winerock writes about the role of dance in Shakespeare’s play and in contemporary pedagogy, ‘“We’ll measure them a measure, and be gone”: Renaissance Dance Practices and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet’, Borrowers and Lenders 10.2 (Spring 2017), http://www.borrowers.uga. edu/783478/show. 5 Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Trust in Theater’, in Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, ed. Donald Wehrs (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2017), 2. 6 On love and freedom in Romeo and Juliet, see Paul Kottman, Love as Human Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 54–70. On the divine aspect of love in the play, see Regina Schwartz, Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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7 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance, 50th Anniversary Edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). On trust in theatre, see Lupton, ‘Trust in Theater’, 155–82. 8 On ‘bodies of knowledge’ in the arts, see Simon Penny, Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). 9 For newcomers to dance, we recommend Laura Jacobs, Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet (New York: Basic Books, 2018); and Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010). We have also consulted The Oxford Dictionary of Dance, eds. Debra Craine and Judith Mackrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10 Matthew J. Smith and Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Ballads+: The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and Its After-piece Jig’, in Ballads and Performance: The Multimodal Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Patrica Fumerton (Santa Barbara, CA: EMC Inprint, 2018), http://scalar.usc.edu/works/balladsand-performance-the-multi-modal-stage-in-early-modernengland/ballads-staging-the-jig-inromeo-and-juliet—-juliareinhardt-lupton-and-matthew-smith. See also Roger Clegg, ‘“When the play is done, you shall have a jig or dance of all treads”: Danced Endings on Shakespeare’s Stage’, Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, eds. Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 11 See Shaw, ‘Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies’. 12 Lynsey McColloch, ‘“Hildings and Harlots”: Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet’, Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 343. On Galeotti, see Camille Cole Howard, The Staging of Romeo and Juliet as a Ballet (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 14–21. 13 Karen Bennett, ‘“Star-Cross’d Lovers”: Shakespeare and Prokofiev’s “pas de deux” in Romeo and Juliet’, Cambridge Quarterly 32.4 (2003): 314. The score was initially experienced by dancers as ‘too experimental to cope with’. Julie Sanders, Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 67. She also discusses the use of leitmotif in Prokofiev’s score and in choreography, 68. Anthony

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Tudor’s 1943 one-act version of Romeo and Juliet distilled and abstracted the action into one act, with a very different effect from the Prokofiev works. Camille Cole Howard, The Staging of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a Ballet (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 78–89 and Joseph Campana, ‘Dancing Will: The Case of Romeo and Juliet’, in Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016), 169–70. 14 Bennett, ‘Star-Cross’d Lovers’, 314. 15 Cole notes Neumeier’s focus on the hand clasps and their relationship to Shakespeare’s sonnet, 102. She writes that ‘the relationship between the two lovers develops almost entirely from movement themes based in realistic gesture’ (101–2) and concludes: ‘Although Neumeier’s own choreographic style was well within the mainstream of the classical lexicon, at least with this Romeo and Juliet, he captured an inventive means of characterization through a more expressive movement device’ (102). 16 Campana, ‘Dancing Will: The Case of Romeo and Juliet’, 165–7; and ‘Of Dance and Disarticulation in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Survey 2018: 164–74. 17 Noverre set the programme for story ballet in which MacMillan, Cranko and Neumeier participated: ‘I have dared to fathom the art of devising ballets with action; to re-unite action with dancing; to accord it some expression and purpose’ (10). On Noverre’s significance for Shakespeare ballets, see Campana, ‘Dancing Will: The Case of Romeo and Juliet’, 163–4. 18 Oxford Dictionary, 342. 19 Iris Julia Bührle, ‘Shakespeare’s Ballets in Germany: From JeanGeorges Noverre to John Neumeier’, in Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, 359–86. 20 John Neumeier, ‘Season 2019–20 Editorial: Narratives’, Hamburg Ballett / Staatsoper Hamburg. https://www. hamburgballett.de/en/news/editorial.php. Accessed 16 July2019. On Father John J. Walsh, S. J., see Special Collections at Marquette University, ‘Theater Arts / Marquette University Players’, https://www.marquette.edu/library/ archives/SuperC/UNIV-C-11-1.php. Accessed 28 July2019.

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21 Bührle cites the following works: ‘after his first full-length ballet, Romeo and Juliet (Frankfurt, 1971, new version for the Hamburg Ballet, 1981), he choreographed HamletConnotations (New York, 1976; new version entitled The Hamlet Case for the Stuttgart Ballet, 1976), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hamburg, 1977), Ariel (Hamburg, 1977), Amleth (Copenhagen, 1985; new version entitled Hamlet for the Hamburg Ballet, 1997), Othello (Hamburg, 1985), As You Like It (Hamburg, 1985), and VIVALDI or What You Will (Hamburg, 1996)’. Oxford Handbook, 374. 22 Shakespeare was supposed to feature prominently in the Hamburg Ballet’s 2019–20 season, but the performances were canceled due to Covid-19. 23 Erik Aschengreen and John Neumeier, ‘Working in the House of Bourneville, 1874–2005: A Conversation with John Neumeier’, Dance Chronicle 29 (2006): 457–70, 456. 24 On dances of death in Shakespeare’s plays and on the murals of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Guild Hall, see Claire Hansen, Shakespeare and Complexity Theory (New York: Routledge, 2017), 43–74. The danse macabre interweaved dance, painting, architecture, poetry and theatre during the long Middle Ages, resulting in what Seeta Chaganti calls ‘Medial Multiplicity’, in Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 11. 25 Neumeier contributed to Father John Walsh, S. J.’s production of Ludus Coventriae at Marquette University in 1961. His ballet of St Matthew Passion has been compared to a mystery play: ‘One comes to feel that this is a community of people who have decided to enact the Passion as in a mediaeval mystery play.’ Hamburg Ballett, https://www.hamburgballett. de/en/spielplan/play%E2%80%93repertoire.php?SNr=174. Accessed 17 July 2019. 26 Oxford Dictionary of Dance, 166. 27 For Renaissance dance masters, ‘dance is a movement language deeply invested in corporeal training, learning and performing a particular (not natural) embodied self in order to be read as noble, educated, and elegant.’ Lizzie Leopold, ‘The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque: Absence, Touch, and Religious Residues’, Oxford Handbook, 161.

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28 On Romeo and Juliet’s festive background, see Naomi Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (London: Routledge, 1995), 148–54. 29 On time, repetition and memory in dance, see Sondra Fraleigh: ‘Time and motion are ever present conditions influencing attention and perception … The dance then becomes more than sense impressions in motion. The essence of the dance is not identical with its motion. It arises in consciousness as the motion reveals the intent of the whole and its parts. Consciousness transcends separate acts of perception to unify our experience of phenomena.’ ‘A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance Through Phenomenology’, Dance Research Journal 23.1 (Spring 1991): 12. On Romeo and Juliet as memory theatre, see Rebeca Helfer, ‘The State of the Art’, Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2016). 30 Fraleigh, ‘A Vulnerable Glance’, 11. 31 Niklaus Luhmann, Trust and Power (New York: Wiley, 1979; 1982), 43; see also Sverre Raffnsøe, ‘Beyond Rule: Trust and Power as Capacities’, Journal of Political Power 6.2 (2013): 241–60. 32 Neumeier develops the gesture in an explicitly sacramental direction, both baptismal and eucharistic, in his St Matthew Passion. 33 Noverre, Letters, 9. 34 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11. 35 Cf. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 36 Henri De Lubac, cited by Jennifer Rust, The Body in Mystery: The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation England (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 9. On marriage as sacrament in Romeo and Juliet, see Daniel Swift, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); see 79–83 on love and marriage in Romeo and Juliet.

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37 Campana, ‘Dancing Will: The Case of Romeo and Juliet’, 170. 38 For a primer of Graham’s techniques, Phyllis Gutelius, The Gutelius Class: Contemporary Dance Training (Giesmar, LA: GGE Productions, 1989–91); and The Martha Graham Dance Legacy Project, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vitRYWTQuys. Accessed 4 August 2019. 39 Robert Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 609. 40 Ibid., 489. 41 Schwartz, Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare, 55. 42 Compare Schwartz: the play is a ‘“microhistory” of how enmity can be reconciled: a process that begins by reframing the enemy and is sustained by forgiving him’ (60). 43 When Neumeier’s Jesus assumes a lotus position in his rendition of St Matthew Passion, Neumeier evokes wisdom literature as the collected teachings of sages from many traditions of enlightened kinesis. On movement and wisdom, see Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing (San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons, 2006).

3 A self by any other name: Five pas de deux in MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet Laura Levine Recent critics of Shakespeare ballets have often sought to ensure that the ballets they discuss receive at least as much serious attention as the Shakespeare plays from which these ballets derive their inspiration.1 Behind such an approach is the justifiable assertion that the ballet should not be imagined as something ‘mapped on’ to the play which precedes it.2 One critic goes so far as to claim that only by looking at what is not in Shakespeare, what choreographers like MacMillan added, will we ever challenge ‘the dominance of the [literary] text’.3 But MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet itself suggests that the competition between text and ballet may not be as inevitable as it might initially seem. The assumption that one of the two forms must assume dominance in a given discussion may be unfounded. In this essay, I argue that

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within MacMillan’s choreography in Romeo and Juliet is an argument which ‘talks’ to Shakespeare in terms that are as complicated and idiosyncratic as those within the play itself. I focus on MacMillan’s ballet not only because it has become iconic, given the number of times it has been performed, filmed and refilmed, or because as MacMillan’s biographer says, on opening night in London 1965, with Nureyev and Fonteyn in the leads, people queued up for tickets for three days, some sleeping on the pavements.4 I focus on it not only because it itself has tended to dominate discussions of Romeo and Juliet ballets or because it might be said to offer a kind of meditation on earlier Romeo and Juliets by Cranko, Lavrovsky and Zeffirelli, but because its choreography itself forms a kind of argument.5 At the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, Benvolio tells Romeo in effect that Rosaline’s value is only knowable in comparison to that of others: ‘Compare her face with some that I shall show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow’, he says (1.2.87–8).6 As with so many plays by Shakespeare, one of the questions running through the play is whether things and people have essential natures or exist only in comparison to each other. How might a ballet ‘respond’ to the question of whether humans have essences? How might it even pose such a seemingly abstract and philosophical question? Critics have praised MacMillan for the ballet’s theatrical values, the acting which animates its choreography. But MacMillan’s choreography itself provides a possible answer to this question. To see this, I propose to look at five pas de deux in the ballet between Juliet and Romeo and Juliet and Paris. MacMillan began with the pas de deux between the lovers, choreographing the balcony scene for Lynn Seymour and Wayne Eagling even before he received the commission to do the full ballet and building outwards from there, adding the two pas de deux for Juliet and Paris soon thereafter.7 If the pas de deux is, as Anita Finkel once said, ‘the cornerstone of ballet, its eternal subject matter [embodying] a real life, human situation – romance’, it is also the medium through

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which MacMillan’s ballet articulates key questions, testing and eliminating a series of possible responses.8 ** * ** Shakespeare poses the question of whether things and people have essences or not, by juxtaposing the claims that Benvolio and Juliet make. Thus Benvolio argues that Rosaline only seems fair ‘none else being by … ’ but that should she be ‘weighed’ against ‘some other maid’ she would ‘scant show well’, a claim which suggests that people’s natures can only be understood in comparison to each other (1.2.95–100). In contrast, in the balcony scene, Juliet posits the existence of an essential self as an entity which exists apart from language: ‘Thou art thyself, though not a Montague’ she says (2.2.39). ‘That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet’ (2.2.43–4). At stake in this claim is the idea that one can shed one’s history (‘Romeo, doff thy name’ [2.2.47]), that words and the histories they imply are even less endemic to the self than ‘arm … face [or] any other part / Belonging to a man’ (2.2.41–2). How might a ballet respond to the question of whether humans have essences? How might it even pose the question? Early in the ballet, at the Capulets’ ball, Paris and Juliet establish a lexicon of gestures – lifts, dips and steps between  –  which form their opening pas de deux. Dressed formally in white, as if they were already marrying, in the midst of a battalion of nobles in deep reds and golds, to slow and stately music, Paris dips Juliet diagonally away from him and then raises her to an arabesque.9 They do not look at each other. This repeats. He then lifts her into a grand jeté to his side, her back to him as she moves around in a circle around him.10 This sequence repeats, and ultimately he lifts her into a higher grand jeté above his head. He puts her down. She interrupts the sequence momentarily, walking away. Then he lifts her up in a vertical position, head up, feet down, again her back to him. She is static except for a slight movement of her arms.11 He puts her down, and their dance ends, culminating in a few modest lifts that repeat from the beginning, her back to him through all

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of them. The overall mood of the pas de deux, its affect, is overwhelmingly formal. Juliet looks away from Paris at every crucial moment. Romeo and Juliet’s balcony-scene pas de deux, which draws on the same lexical items, couldn’t be more different. This becomes particularly visible if one compares one of these items, the lift in which Paris holds Juliet vertically straight over his head like a board, to the balcony scene’s variations on it, the various ‘opposites’ that Romeo and Juliet perform.12 The balcony scene is built around eight different lifts which intensify in intimacy and a ninth, which constitutes a kind of coda. Although in dramaturgical terms, the climax of the scene is the kiss at the end, choreographically the climax comes much earlier, in the last set of lifts, rendering the kiss more or less anticlimactic. The first four lifts of the scene form a kind of sequence. They are opposite to the lifts Paris and Juliet perform only in the sense that Juliet is horizontal in all of them. In the first lift, she lies horizontally with her back across Romeo’s right shoulder; in the second, wrapped around him, her left leg opens and closes as she moves from this draped position to an overhead lift. In the third lift Romeo holds Juliet horizontally but much closer to the floor. In the fourth, now vertical lift, Juliet gives the impression of being horizontal because of the motion of her legs, which alternate moving through passé into développé.13 The next three lifts recall Paris’s straight-up-and-downlike-a-board lift of Juliet, but they do so first by alluding to it specifically and then inverting it in dramatic ways. In the first of these inversions Romeo begins by supporting the small of Juliet’s back and grabbing the inner thigh of her left leg. Holding her by her right shoulder, he rotates her till she is completely upside down over his head. (This position, which requires enormous trust on the part of the ballerina, is in direct and explicit opposition to the vertical lift Paris and Juliet perform at the Capulets’ party.) Romeo and Juliet hold the pose, and he lowers her by cradling her in his arms. He then

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kisses the hem of her dress and she runs away. In the next lift, a variation, he holds her again upside down but this time lower to the floor, her head up and level with his hips, her torso arched. Next, he holds Juliet up vertically, this time right side up, a direct allusion to Paris’s lift, but she, in cambré, is draped over his head: her left arm raised, her legs in fourth position, her body loose and open rather than stiff.14 If the lift signified the static hollow and almost deathlike formality of Juliet’s relationship to Paris during his use of it, it signifies the fluidity and reciprocity between Romeo and Juliet here. In the third part of the scene, its climax, the lifts increase in sexual intimacy and intensity. Romeo kneels on the ground, holding Juliet by the hips, and leans back until he’s sitting on his heels and balances her horizontally in his hands, her face down looking just behind his head. In isolation, her position looks as if she’s flying, arms extended and moving. But as Romeo rises onto his knees and sinks back onto his heels, the image of flight is subsumed into the impression of having sex. These last lifts offer the most sustained opposition to Paris’s lifts, and not only because they are opposite in direction and position. Where Paris and Juliet’s lifts are distant and formal and the two never face each other, Romeo’s and Juliet’s virtually dramatize having sex. In the last lift of the scene, after Romeo again tries to kiss her, Juliet walks backward and runs back to him, turning mid-run and leaping backwards into his arms. What initial conclusions can be drawn from this? In MacMillan’s hands, Romeo and Paris seem as far as possible from those moments in Shakespeare that suggest difference is conferred externally, that apart from social position, characters might well be interchangeable. (‘Which is the merchant here and which the Jew?’ asks Portia. ‘Stand forth Demetrius … /… Stand forth Lysander’ says Egeus, as much to differentiate them as anything else.) Is this difference between Paris and Romeo ‘essential’, and if it were, what would differentiate it from the depth of character that critics have always seen in the ballet? When they praise MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet as a ballet of character, critics often seem to mean either the acting

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that overlays the choreography or the fact that MacMillan began with pas de deux and more or less added the crowd scenes around them.15 But it is the choreography itself – the specific lexicon of steps in their inversions and variations – that establishes the fundamental difference between Romeo and Paris. Is this difference essential rather than conferred, and if so, is it in keeping with the argument of Shakespeare’s play?16 If all we had of MacMillan’s ballet were these two pas de deux, and all we had of the play were Juliet’s lines in the balcony scene, the answer to both questions might be yes. Even then the answer would have to be a qualified yes for we would still only be able to perceive the difference between Paris and Romeo by comparing them to each other. But both Shakespeare’s and MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet contain other moments which address the issue of a self. If Shakespeare’s Juliet postulates the existence of an essential Romeo in Act 2, Scene 2, the play both through its plot and through its rhetoric would seem to dramatize the spectacular failure of that proposition. Not only are Romeo and Juliet increasingly swallowed up by the families whose names and histories they imagine they can shed but rhetorically they end up reversing exactly the positions they espouse in the balcony scene. Thus if Juliet begins the play by insisting that names are even less endemic to the self than hand, foot or ‘any other part / Belonging to a man’, ultimately Romeo asks the Friar to tell him in what ‘vile part’ of his anatomy his name lies lodged so he can sack what he calls its ‘hateful mansion’, the body part which houses it (2.2.41–2, 3.3.105–7). If Juliet insists on the irrelevance of words in Act 2, Scene 2, insists the rose would smell as sweet with any other name, by the end of Act 3 both Juliet and Romeo conceive of words as deadly weapons (poison, a golden axe, that which is shot from the deadly level of a gun). One could say that the virtual theme of the play is the impossibility of a self outside the realm of language, the triumph of names and the histories those names imply over the attempt to erect or maintain such a self.17

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Does MacMillan’s ballet then ‘oppose’ Shakespeare and wilfully reverse his argument insisting on a fundamental or essential difference between persons rather than one created by context or comparison? In fact, Shakespeare juxtaposes a third position to both Juliet’s and Benvolio’s. If Juliet posits the existence of an essential self outside of language and Benvolio imagines that things have only a conferred rather than an intrinsic nature, a third position in the play argues that things neither have essence nor derive meaning only from context but rehearse and effectively enact themselves into existence. This position argues that action is constitutive and repetition itself brings into being something that wasn’t there before. This notion finds its earliest articulation in a seminal form in Friar Laurence’s long speech about nature in Act 2, but receives its fullest expression in Juliet’s conception of taking the sleeping potion, as a ‘dismal scene’ that she needs must act alone (4.3.19). Early in the play Friar Laurence takes the position that the use of a thing is more determinative of its nature than any essence we might imagine it to have, that there is nothing ‘so good’ that it doesn’t become vile when ‘strained from’ its ‘fair use’ and that there is nothing ‘so vile’ that it doesn’t have some good use (2.3.11–18). What is poison to swallow is medicinal to smell. Friar Laurence doesn’t so much argue that use causes things to exist as he does that use determines the very nature of their existence. In this seminal form, as a ‘use’ argument, Friar Laurence’s claim is not that far from Benvolio’s. Later on, though, the play presents the much more radical possibility that the rehearsal of an event actually brings that event into being. Juliet, trying to work up the nerve to take the sleeping potion Friar Laurence has given her, regards the taking of the potion as a ‘scene’ she must ‘act’: ‘My dismal scene I needs must act alone’, she says (4.3.19). In one way, the notion of a scene that must be acted implies the scene is ‘false’ and in so doing calls attention to Juliet’s descent into language in the second half of the play, her change from the profession of a ‘true love … grown to such excess’ that it cannot be put

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into words (2.6.33), to the equivocations she offers Lady Capulet in Act 3 Scene 5, or the out-and-out lie in Act 4 Scene 2 she offers her father that she’s been at Friar Laurence’s cell learning to repent the sin of disobedient opposition. In another way, though, the notion of performing her own death suggests the idea that action – even mental action – is constitutive. From the beginning, Juliet has imagined her own death and has associated her bridal bed with the grave. Even before knowing Romeo’s identity, she says, ‘If he be married, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed’ (1.5.133–4). In love and waiting for Romeo to come to consummate the marriage, Juliet imagines herself dead and Romeo cut up in stars so the world will be in love with night. Later in the play, Juliet’s request to her mother to delay the marriage to Paris is formulated in terms of the alternative she imagines and threatens: ‘Or if you do not, make the bridal bed / In that dim monument where Tybalt lies’ (3.5.201–2, emphasis mine). She is similarly quick to imagine Romeo dead. When the Nurse says of Tybalt ‘Ah weraday, he’s dead, he’s dead’ (3.2.37), Juliet immediately imagines the Nurse to be talking about Romeo. When Romeo leaves Verona, Juliet tells him she imagines him ‘As one dead in the bottom of a tomb’ (3.5.56). From these repetitive, obsessive thoughts about death, it does not seem a long way to ‘long[ing] to die’ (4.1.66) or to Juliet’s resolution to do so if Friar Laurence would but call that resolution ‘wise’ (4.1.53). The presentiment of death occurs again and again throughout the play, long before Friar Laurence offers Juliet the sleeping potion or events drive her to turn to it as a means of escape. One might look at the long progression of such presentiments then as a rehearsal, the mental repetition of the act Juliet will ultimately undertake. From this point of view, it is not simply the discrete act of taking the potion that constitutes the rehearsal of death but every previous iteration. From this point of view, every rehearsal, even mental rehearsal, is constitutive.18 In what ways, if any, does MacMillan’s ballet entertain the idea that action is constitutive? Does either the ballet’s

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argument or the method of its choreography support such a belief? To take the second question first, Friar Laurence’s ‘use’ argument seems an apt description of MacMillan’s method. Throughout the ballet, the ‘use’ of a given lift determines its meaning. And this becomes increasingly so the more a lift gets re-used. In the morning-after scene, for instance, Juliet inflects the vertical lift in a way which serves not to distinguish Romeo from Paris but to recall the stasis and deathlike quality of what it means to dance with Paris. This is the scene after Romeo and Juliet have finally slept together – at once the most luxuriant musically and at the same time the one most fraught with impending separation. The first sequence of lifts culminates in the vertical straight-up-and-down-like-a-board lift. But here Juliet adds to it a gesture of grief, her hands covering her face. The second set of lifts in this scene also suggests the way that ‘use’ determines meaning. Romeo catches Juliet in an arabesque and, dragging her back on her standing leg, turns her totally upside down as he did in the balcony scene. Here, though, rather than being a stage on the way to a moment which signifies sexual consummation, the upside-down lift is a stage on the way to a separation. After swinging her around three and a half times, Romeo holds Juliet up over his back vertically with her legs in arabesque. Here, the action of the scene begins to change. Instead of lowering her by cradling her in his arms and kissing the hem of her dress as he did in the balcony scene, Romeo rolls Juliet down over his right shoulder, her body limp like a corpse. The meaning of the roll seems clear enough: the pose of death overlays the choreography because the separation hanging over the lovers is a kind of death. Similarly, MacMillan inverts the final lifts of the balcony scene in order to suggest separation. In the balcony scene Romeo, kneeling, held Juliet above him horizontally in a moment of arrested flight, then knelt up to her rhythmically, creating the impression of having sex. Here, MacMillan exactly inverts this lift, not through a set of alternate lifts but through a series of slides and falls. Juliet falls to the floor weeping at

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Romeo’s feet and he kneels not to bring her close to him but to push her up and away from him into an arabesque. In all of these moments, the meaning of a given lift depends on its use. But this seems more like an expression of method than an actual argument the ballet makes. Is there any equivalent in the ballet to the belief that action is constitutive, that things essentially rehearse or repeat themselves into existence? To answer this question, we have to look not only at what MacMillan adds to a given lift but what he subtracts, a process which reaches its logical conclusion in the crypt scene. Towards the end of the ballet, MacMillan increasingly employs a rhetoric of ‘subtraction’. Romeo has barely escaped through Juliet’s window when the Nurse returns with the Capulets and Paris in tow. At Juliet’s refusal to marry, Capulet hurls her to the floor and exits. She leaves for Friar Laurence’s cell, where the two pray to what appear to be Russian icons. Juliet returns to her room with the vial containing the sleeping potion which she hides under her pillow. It’s not until the five dancers (Capulet, Lady Capulet, Nurse, Paris and Juliet) reunite in Juliet’s bedroom that she and Paris have their second pas de deux. The music of the first pas de deux repeats, but now all the lifts except the vertical straight-up-and-down-likea-board lift have been subtracted. Paris lifts Juliet three times like a board. Juliet looks right past him, and as he puts her down the third time, she struggles to get free and breaks away. The sense seems clear enough: marriage to him would be like becoming a board, an inanimate object. An even more radical process of subtraction goes on in Romeo and Juliet’s final pas de deux in the crypt. All the actual dance between the lifts has been subtracted and Juliet hangs lifeless as a corpse. What we get instead by isolating the lifts are a series of images of death: Romeo drags Juliet, apparently dead, from her bier by one arm and holds her up, his right hand wrapped around her waist, her legs dangling down like those of a lifeless doll. He puts her down and pulls her back onto his shoulder and turns her upside down as he did in both the balcony scene and the morning-after scene. Here, though,

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what is subtracted is not only the dance in between the lifts but any movement on Juliet’s part. She hangs limp upside down on his back, her legs spread out in what is almost a split as Romeo walks with her. There is no dance, but simply a set of frozen images organized in a sequence. Before he lowers her to the floor, Romeo turns Juliet horizontally and rolls her corpselike out of his arms. When he repeats the lift and puts her down, trying to turn it into an embrace, Juliet falls limp on the floor, again like a corpse. Romeo grabs her by both arms, throwing her face down over his shoulders, and drops her back again. Dragging her by the arm he lifts her straight up from the floor, but when he lifts her up she falls back again. He stands her up vertically, drops her horizontally in his arms, holds her lifeless and lays her stretched out on the bier. MacMillan has removed all the moments of dance in between the lifts and in so doing isolated a series of images, death poses. Like the play, the ballet presents us with a series of images of death, each arrested and isolated, framed like a photograph by the absence of dance around it. Even as they telegraph to us the death that is to occur, these images serve another purpose. Moving through the lifts he’s performed throughout the ballet with what looks like a dead body in his hands, Romeo effectively performs a dance of death. And this dance constitutes a rehearsal for the suicide he will shortly commit.19

Notes 1

Essays from Part 2 (‘Shakespeare as Dance’) of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, eds. Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) are particularly indicative of this trend. See especially Lynsey McCulloch’s ‘Hildings and Harlots’ (343–58) in that edition. But see as well Nona Monahin’s ‘But where’s the lark? Some problems of translating Shakespeare’s and Prokofiev’s

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Romeo and Juliet into dance’, presented at European Shakespeare Research Association’s Rome conference in 2019, and Monahin and Christian Rogowski’s ‘Text, Music, Dance: Conflicting Allegiances in Angelin Preljocaj’s Roméo et Juliette’, Dance Studies Association 2018 Conference, https://dancestudiesassociation.org/publications/conferenceproceedings/2018-annual-conference-proceedings. Of course, there have always been treatments of Shakespeare ballets which instinctively put Shakespeare and choreographer into nuanced dialogue. Jennifer Homan’s ‘In Balanchine’s Beautiful Forest’ (New York Review of Books, 5 March 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/03/05/balanchinesbeautiful-forest/) is one example. Anita Finkel’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Robert Gottlieb’s Reading Dance (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 168–72, is another. See as well Jehbreal Jackson and Julia Reinhard Lupton’s ‘Holy Palmers’ Kiss: Love, Trust and Wisdom in John Neumeier’s Romeo and Juliet Ballet’ in this volume and Joseph Campana’s ‘Of Dance and Disarticulation: Juliet Dead and Alive’, in Shakespeare Survey 71: Re-Creating Shakespeare, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 164–74. For an incisive answer to the question ‘what is it we conjure, Prospero-like, when we invoke the name “Shakespeare” for works only partly overlapping with the Shakespearean stage or page?’ and even more specifically ‘What is it that makes “Shakespeare” or “Romeo and Juliet” what they are?’ see Campana’s fascinating ‘Dancing Will: The Case of Romeo and Juliet’ in Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, ed. Lupton (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 153–76. Differently, for a reading of the tensions within dance (Romeo’s ‘soul of lead’ and ‘nimble soles’, the ‘diremption between the bodily etiquette inculcated by conduct manuals and the liminality afforded by the dance space’ and other tensions) in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (183), see Brandon Shaw’s ‘Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (173–95). Finally, Nancy Isenberg argues for a ‘closer connection between [Cranko’s] Romeo and Juliet as ballet and its Elizabethan source than would first appear evident’, though she acknowledges ‘a felicitous coming together of cultural circumstance, ballet convention, and narrative source’. See ‘Accommodating Shakespeare to Ballet: John Cranko’s Romeo

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and Juliet (Venice, 1958)’, in Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture, eds. Balz Engler and Ladina Bezzola (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 129–39. 2

Lynsey McColloch, ‘“Hildings and Harlots”: Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet’, Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, eds. Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 344.

3 Ibid. 4

See Jann Parry, Different Drummer (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 292 for a description of the way ‘press interest’ was stirred to a ‘fevered pitch’. Filmed versions include Fonteyn and Nureyev (1966); Alessandra Ferri and Wayne Eagling (1984); Carlos Acosta and Tamara Rojo (2007); Lauren Cuthbertson and Federico Bonelli (2012), Misty Copeland and Robert Bolle at La Scala (2017); and, in a version called Romeo and Juliet Beyond Words, Francesca Heyward and William Bracewell (2019).

5

Parry says, ‘Lavrovsky had already stamped key episodes (Tybalt’s death, Lady Capulet’s grief, the clandestine wedding) with his memorable choreographic effects; Cranko had claimed other high moments. MacMillan had to avoid duplicating their stagings, in so far as he could, though he was undeniably influenced by Cranko’s staging. Kenneth’s instinct was to narrow his focus on the lovers’ emotions, gradually excluding the crowded public world around them as the ballet progressed.’ (279) For her discussion of Zeffirelli’s ‘radical production of Romeo and Juliet for the Old Vic Theatre (with the young, unknown Judi Dench and John Stride in 1960–1)’, see 278. For the claim, ‘There were to be no set pieces like the ones Cranko had choreographed for his Romeo and Juliet, which concluded in a picturesque pose for applause’ and the discussion of what MacMillan retained, see 281. For Cranko’s reaction, see 284.

6

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, the Arden Shakespeare, ed. René Weis (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). All subsequent quotations from this edition included in the body of the essay.

7

For the order in which MacMillan choreographed the scenes, see Parry, Different Drummer, 279–81. For Parry’s description of the way the Royal Ballet slipped in Fonteyn and Nureyev for Seymour and Gable, see 284–91.

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8 Finkel, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, 169. 9 An arabesque is a position in which one leg, the working leg, is extended straight behind the dancer while the other, the supporting leg, extends, straightened, to the floor. 10 A grand jeté is a leap from one leg to the other that while in midair has both legs extended, one each in front and behind the dancer. 11 The arm movement is from fifth, rounded above her head, to second, extended and rounded, outward from her sides. 12 I first noticed this vertical lift and its inversions watching the 2016 American Ballet Theatre production with Hee Seo as Juliet. More detailed observations here are based on the Kultur Video DVD of the Royal Ballet Covent Garden production, recorded by the BBC in 1984, with Alessandra Ferri and directed for video by Colin Nears and MacMillan. 13 Passé: the working leg is bent so that the foot is just touching, and passing through, above the supporting leg’s knee while the working leg knee is pointed outward. Développé: the working leg bends and draws up from the floor along the straight supporting leg until the foot reaches the knee, at which point the working leg extends up and out straight in any direction. 14 Cambré means ‘arched’; one is in cambré when one’s body is bent at the waist, in performance either backward or to the side, and one’s head and arms follow in the same direction. In fourth position one foot is behind the other, both turned out, either directly with the heels lining up with the toes (closed fourth) or the heels lined up with one another (open fourth). Actually her right leg is in a low attitude wrapped around his right side. 15 In a 2006 reflection, David Mead, for instance, attributes MacMillan’s specific success to the ballet’s ‘strong sense of character’. David Mead, ‘Love in Death’, BalletDance Magazine, February 2006, accessed via Wayback Machine: http://www.ballet-dance.com/200602/articles/ BRB20050900.html 16 For a foundational treatment of these issues, see Lawrence Manley’s Convention, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

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17 In all this I am anticipated by Catherine Belsey, who says, ‘Even though his name is no part of the man Juliet loves, the play at once draws attention to the impossibility of discarding the name which differentiates him’ (134). ‘Above all’, she says, the play ‘puts on display the hopeless longing to escape the confines of the signifier, to encounter directly, immediately, the rose that exists beyond its name’ (141). See Belsey’s brilliant ‘The Name of the Rose in Romeo and Juliet’, The Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 126–42. See as well Manfred Weithorn’s ‘The Rose and Its Name: On Denomination in Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar’, which argues that ‘though a name is a mere breath … it may still be lethal’ (Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11.1 [Spring 1969]: 671–86, especially 678–81). 18 Among the critics who have written about metaphors of death in the play, see in particular Thomas Moisan, ‘Rhetoric and the Rehearsal of Death: The “Lamentations” Scene in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 3.4 (Winter 1983): 389–404; and John Kleiner, ‘Live Boys – Dead Girls: Death and False Death in Romeo and Juliet’, Literary Imagination 17.1 (2014): 18–34. Moisan accounts for the increasing metaphors of death in the play by arguing that ‘throughout Romeo and Juliet, death is “confronted” by being troped, by being worked into various rhetorical figures’ and that ‘the more imminent the arrival of death, the more elaborative the rhetoric for apprehending that event’ (392). Kleiner, who focuses on the blurred distinctions between the false and ‘true’ deaths in the play, concludes that while there may be different kinds of death scenes, ‘those different scenes may be phrased to elicit different responses, but all of them are scenes, all of them performances’ (29). Clayton G. MacKenzie says that Romeo and Juliet ‘act out their romance, shifting often powerlessly between triumph and tragedy; substance and shadow, and life and death itself’ (23–4). And although he says that ‘Juliet’s summoning of deathly nuptials thus represents an untypical approbation of youthful marriage with Death, a symbolic affirmation, perhaps, that the male values that so compellingly have controlled and ordered her world are not the only arbiters for her actions and destination … It is she who summons Death’ (33), ultimately his emphasis is more on equilibrating and putting into relation

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with each other the competing iconic traditions of the ‘marriage with Death topoi’ in the play than it is with the rehearsal of the idea. See Clayton G. MacKenzie, ‘Love, Sex and Death in Romeo and Juliet’, English Studies 88.1 (2007): 22–42. For Peggy Phelan’s discussion of the way the memory of the primal scene ‘functions as a rehearsal for one’s own death’, see her Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, e-book edition 2005), 5. For how ‘hardship art’ asks the spectator ‘to do the impossible—to share [the individual’s] death by rehearsing for it’, see Unmarked (152). 19 Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Juliet Jewett, whose criticism and insight has been invaluable to me. In a very real way, this could not have been written without her. My thanks as well to Peter Saenger for detailed responses to earlier drafts of this essay and to Isabel Dollar for research assistance. This essay was presented in earlier drafts at the International Shakespeare Association 2016, Shakespeare 401 in 2017, MLA 2018 and ESRA Rome 2019. I am grateful to feedback from early readers.

PART TWO

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4 ‘Cut him out in little stars’: Afterlives of Romeo and Juliet in early Joyce and Beckett Beryl Schlossman

The Most Lamentable and Excellent Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most charismatic of Renaissance plays on love. In addition to its ongoing life in Shakespearean adaptations, the play continues to live through the echoes that modernism appropriates from it. Because of its ongoing impact and prestige on the stage, its unparalleled poetic language and its iconic power to represent the baroque drama of love and mourning, the poetics of adaptation leads from Shakespeare’s tragedy to shape some major modernist works, notably two Irish works of fiction, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914) and Samuel Beckett’s ‘First Love’ (1946). Translated into Irish modernity, the relations of love and loss in Romeo and Juliet enter the fictions of Joyce and Beckett in surprising

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ways, lingering in a range of effects as the afterlife of Romeo and Juliet. In this chapter, I trace these effects from their antecedents in Sappho, through Shakespeare, and into their modernist revisions by Joyce and Beckett. In Sappho’s poetry, the goddess of love, Aphrodite, is accompanied by the young boy, Eros; the familiar Latin names, invoked in Shakespeare, are Venus and Cupid. Sappho’s Venus has shifting eyes and the young boy with his arrows is described as Eros the bittersweet. The Renaissance pursues this oxymoron and adds the allegorical oppositions of Love and War, Pleasure and Pain, and Life and Death. In Plato’s Symposium, Eros himself is the offspring of Poros (Plenty) and Penia (Poverty). The oppositions are summarized in the notion of love-melancholy: it is at the core of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. My reading of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Beckett’s ‘First Love’ is based on the subtle, almost secret or hidden presence of Romeo and Juliet within them. In both modernist works, a supple and poetic prose allows the lyric and dramatic traditions, from Dante, Sidney and Shakespeare through romanticism and modernism, to enter their stylistic experiments and their exploration of love and exile. Throughout his life as a writer, Joyce famously and frequently compared himself to Shakespeare, who is explicitly named and represented throughout Joyce’s mature works.1 The young Beckett frequently spent time with Joyce at his home in Paris, and his early works display Joyce’s influence on his work. In the work of both writers, their backgrounds as Irishmen and Dubliners became a central preoccupation. In their shared contexts of European, Irish and English literatures, Joyce’s fondness for comparing himself to Shakespeare and his frequent and increasing use of Shakespeare in his work could not have been lost on Beckett. But Joyce’s influence on Beckett’s style during his early career may have become a burden that Beckett would gradually shed without ever turning back, as the comedy would become less light-hearted, the allusions more veiled and the presentation of figures and events from the author’s

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life rendered utterly opaque. The style of Beckett’s novella indicates several points on a path of alternatives to Joyce’s uses of explicit quotation, underscored sentiment and the avowed desire to identify character (and author) with writers like Dante, Goethe and, above all, Shakespeare. The Irish passion for theatre and for Shakespeare is particularly striking in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Ireland, when performances offered the most sustained opportunities for entertainment to spectators across the social classes. Many of the Dublin theatres (including The Gaiety, The Adelphi, Dublin’s Theatre Royal and other theatres evoked in Joyce’s works) offered Shakespeare plays on a regular basis. These included performances by famous London actors as well as Irish actors, and in Finnegans Wake, Joyce alludes to minute details of particular performances of Hamlet, Richard III, and many other Shakespeare plays. The early decades of Joyce criticism extensively document this, partly through the work of Harry Levin, James Atherton, W.S. Tindall and Stuart Gilbert, who worked with Joyce on the first French translation of Ulysses, and, more recently, Vincent Cheng, Matthew Hodgart, Fritz Senn, Michael Begnal, William Schutte and especially Adaline Glasheen.2 Joyce’s story contains several explicit allusions to Shakespeare. Aunt Julia’s name and her performance suggestively echo the name of Juliet and her identity as a bride, an essential topic of discussion through the play, from Paris to Romeo and then back to Paris and beyond. Within a social frame of festivity, Joyce portrays Gabriel Conroy, a man approaching middle age, a writer, teacher and intellectual who seeks to rekindle his love for his wife in a set of balcony scenes modelled on Romeo and Juliet. Framed and hanging on a wall over the piano, a stitched illustration of Shakespeare’s balcony scene appears as an early signal to the reader, as if Shakespeare belonged to Gabriel’s sense of himself and his life. Two pictures illustrating Shakespeare lead Gabriel back to his own life, his mother and his love for Gretta. The balcony scene will return in the discreet fever of Gabriel’s desire, along with

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other allusions to the play. The secrets of love and melancholy exposed by Joyce are acknowledged and reinterpreted in Beckett’s ‘First Love’. It seems to rely on Dante and Shakespeare with the barest allusions to the literature of romance in order to inscribe an unusual topic for Beckett – love itself, rather than the dark and grotesque fragmented references to gender, sexuality and violence that might pass for love in many of his works – in the narrator’s social and intellectual no man’s land. Throughout Beckett’s writings, the loves that are mentioned in ‘First Love’ appear in many tortured disguises. But in an echo of ‘The Dead’, a strange reversal occurs in Beckett’s minimalist narrative revelation of Shakespeare in spite of the vast distance between Romeo and the nameless narrator.

1. From Sappho and Shakespeare towards Modernism The poet Sappho refers frequently to the gods in poems about the depths and heights of love. In Fragment 31, she writes: It seems to me that he is similar to the gods, that man who is sitting next to you, and who, close to you, listens to the sweet sound of your voice, and how you, full of charm, smile toward him: but in my chest, this has taken away the calmness of my heart when I look at you, it happens suddenly that I become mute, for my tongue lies motionless, a subtle fire instantly trickles through my skin, with my eyes I see nothing, there is a dull thunder that rushes in my ears, and sweat breaks out, a trembling seizes all my limbs, I am more pale than dry grass, and I seem to myself no longer far away from having died. But one must bear everything.3 Simultaneously analytic and intimate, Sappho’s account of desire presents the form of Eros as both bitter and sweet; it includes the shining-forth of beauty and the suffering

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of passion. The Renaissance associates Sappho’s figure of bittersweet Eros with Plato: the intuition that shapes the currents of Neoplatonic thought seems to indicate that the identity of Sappho was unknown to Marsilio Ficino and his followers. Renaissance confusion over the Platonic identity of the Sapphic Eros (bitter and sweet, dulce amarem) has lingered into modernity. In an indirect tribute to Sappho, the ambivalence of suffering and bliss that she evokes appears as compelling to present-day readers as it did to Ficino, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Michelangelo. In his studies of Renaissance art, Edgar Wind highlights a tradition derived from antiquity that emphasizes the love of a god for a mortal. In its most extreme forms, Amor is presented as a god of Death on Roman sarcophagi, in Italian Renaissance painting and in Renaissance emblems. Wind suggests that Shakespeare draws on the background of Eros as the love of a god slips towards the representation of mortality.4 The literature of courtly love and the products of Renaissance Neoplatonism preserve Sappho’s bittersweet Eros until the modern period rediscovers her and uncovers the translated texts and fragments.5 Sappho’s Eros is violent, shaking and driven; Eros, she says, is the servant, like herself, of Aphrodite. In Fragment 31, Sappho’s most famous poem, Eros is ‘inside’ the desiring narrator (or speaking I). Eros brings this speaker close to death. The voice of the Poet is transformed in the framework of modernism, but Eros the bittersweet takes on modern shapes that echo its lyrical origins. Anchored in the literary and visual arts of Greco-Roman antiquity, the intertwining of love and death that permeates Renaissance culture is central to Romeo and Juliet.6 Love and death (or love and melancholy) permeate the play with their oppositional power, in images of tenderness, beauty and violence that transform the characters of Romeo and Juliet and also transform views of love in modernity. From the starcrossed encounter at Capulet’s feast soaring to the balcony scenes and descending to the depths of the Capulet family tomb, the lovers move along a meteoric path. In exploring several

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exceptional moments in Shakespeare’s play, considered as both text and performance, adaptation becomes the topical centre of my essay on image, allusion and appropriation. Adapting and interpreting Shakespeare’s play can be understood as a dialectical process of dismemberment and re-membering (as per the French origin of the literal terms). In this context, dismemberment becomes an image of the opposition faced by the lovers in the play. It also serves as an image of modernist adaptation, across genres and forms of expression. Dismemberment is a brutal form of dispersion, fragmentation and destruction that is archaically evoked in the revenge of Dionysus against Pentheus and Orpheus, but also in the love poetry of Sappho, whose destroyed manuscripts are also, literally, dismembered.7 In contrast to the serene images of bodies restored to wholeness, the Sapphic subject of love is under attack from within. This interiority filters aspects of Sappho’s antiquity through Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy of love: it is at the centre of my own work on love and the modernist tradition.8 Dismemberment turns into a form of adaptation when it is paired with memory: in this theoretical context, dismemberment offers a way to repair the violence, to restore, disseminate, revive or translate the dramatic text and its range of performance. The play evokes the feud throughout its references to sexuality, magic, madness and military prowess, but the dangers that the lovers face and the threat of uncontrollable violence that arises in response to their transgression initially distance them from these ambient discourses. Shakespeare uses them as a contrast to reinforce the virtue and innocence of the precocious heroine. The portrayal of Romeo is less consistent, more diverse and increasingly hyperbolic as the play advances through its tragic effects. The fate of the lovers, however, is implacably marked by three images of dismemberment. The first is veiled, even opaque. It appears in the enigmatic passage of the ‘Gallop apace’ speech when ‘come, night’ is repeated several times. Juliet invokes the night and Romeo, but suddenly switches to

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a poetic formality as she imagines the afterlife with Romeo in a kind of paper-doll vision of shared love. The switch is thrown perhaps by the threatening figure of Night, allegorized as the feud itself in these lines: Come, civil night, Thou sober-suited matron all in black. (3.2.10–11) The repetitions of ‘come, gentle night’ lead into the abrupt vision of Romeo in the heavens: Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars. (3.2.20–1) Shakespeare smooths the non sequitur with the repetitions, and the mysterious tone of Juliet’s invocation is deliberately suspenseful within the terms of the play even as it also protects her from the full understanding of their gruesome star-crossed fate. Juliet imagines Romeo’s body projected into the sky; either he is dispersed in many starry fragments or else the form of his body is outlined in a constellation. Romeo’s afterlife, then, is conjured as heavenly, like the gods evoked in classical poetry, although the adaptation of Romeo to the skies and heavens of Juliet’s love adds a dark reminder of the star-crossed quality and the obstacles imposed by civil discord. Dismemberment returns when the Friar chides Romeo for surrendering to madness. ‘Thy wit,’ says the Friar: Is set afire by thine own ignorance, And Thou dismembered in thine own defense. (3.3.129–133) Tumbling from the heaven of love and the balcony world to the hell of banishment, confusion and the news of Juliet’s death, Romeo again kills a man, this time only half-heartedly seeking

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to avoid violence. Perhaps in baroque drama, so obsessively enamoured of violence, Romeo’s impassioned sense of rivalry and the madness of his desperate love justify the murder of the impossibly lightweight Paris. Desperate, murderous and suicidal, Romeo is absolved (forever after, it seems) as if he were some kind of god of love in the terms of the play. If there is a hint of sparagmos, the ‘ritual’ and magical cannibalistic murder caused by Dionysus seeking revenge, it is given to Romeo to express it. His literal threat of dismemberment uttered shortly before the end of the play clarifies the earlier images of Romeo’s own dismemberment with its brutality and reveals the veiled, screened menace of matronly Night in Juliet’s self-consoling thoughts about the lover’s image among the stars. Romeo bids his man stay away from the tomb in these words: But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry In what I farther shall intend to do, By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs. (5.3.33–36) From Dionysus to Sappho, whose fragmented poetry shaped a long tradition and our current understanding of love, adaptation bestows new life (an afterlife) on a work potentially threatened with various forms of effacement and destruction. The effects of Dionysus – his masks, his magical possession of subjects and his powers to dominate the heights of lovemadness and violence – are poignantly evoked in the intimate interior dismembering experience of love that Sappho’s Fragment 31 portrays as a near-death experience that deprives her narrator of language, vision, hearing and other sensory effects. Sweating, trembling and paleness – all the effects of the beloved’s charms – reveal the narrator’s passion as a deadly but intimate and interiorized dismemberment. Shakespeare’s play recalls the afterlife of Sappho’s vision of love, its translation into baroque dramatic aesthetics and even the translational power of its prolonged cultural memory. It is

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as if Sappho’s vision, through its own refashioning of Dionysian passion, enters the unconscious of classically infused literature. The feudal conflicts that block love add a political dimension that classical literature did not require: civil strife is enemy to the savage wild love that appears, in Shakespeare, as a doomed passion that cannot bend to the forces of convention. As enemies, advised by the ‘ghostly friar’, Shakespeare’s lovers are subjected to the pain of separations, to rivalry and to the use of potions for supernatural effects. The love-potion of the Tristan and Isolde poems is not necessary – the lovers fall immediately in love. The Friar is experienced with philtres that simulate death while preserving life, or poisons that produce death. As in the Tristan texts, a love triangle occurs: Paris seeks Juliet’s hand before the feast when Romeo first sees her. As the play unfolds, Capulet speeds up the action as Paris, not Romeo, is promised his daughter’s hand. Paris, however, is a weak figure of conventional love in the play, and his death is a pale echo of the powerful scenes with the wounded Mercutio or the violent and beloved Tybalt. Romeo and Juliet provides a key to the secrets of love and melancholy that explode in the tragic end of the play, the ‘lightning before death’ that entrances Romeo at the edge of suicide and the only possible resolution to calm the warring families. As in German mourning plays or Trauerspiel, prophecy and proverbs are everywhere.9 Most of Shakespeare’s characters in the play are prophetic: all wishes and threats come together. The opposition and reconciliation of love and death are reflected through the powerful images of Eros the bittersweet. It is thought that Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, ‘Astrophil and Stella’ (1591), is an important contemporary source for Shakespeare.10 Perhaps its most important influence is in the extended leitmotif of stars, taken up from Shakespeare through modernism: the character of the lover, also the narrator, whose name alludes to Sidney’s first name and to the star that is the name of the beloved. In both cases, there is a sense of the star and the star-lover as screened identities. Sidney’s poetry connects Renaissance poetic practice with the screens that modernism and post-modernism use to elude censorship and to transform autobiographical impulses into fiction.

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For Shakespeare, Cupid is blind. Derived from the Greek Eros, Cupid becomes the Renaissance agent of love. In Sappho’s poems, the lover succumbs to the blinding power of love itself, but Shakespeare’s Cupid is the cherubic figure wearing a blindfold that we see in Renaissance iconography. The blindness of Cupid resonates throughout the play and enters the lovers’ understanding of the obstacles they face, before and after Tybalt’s death. A line in canto 6 of Dante’s Purgatorio that mentions the Montecchi family of Verona and the Capelletti party of Cremona as examples of civil dissent is a distant source of the horrified discovery that each lover makes of the other’s family when it is already too late to alter the course of their love.11 The canto will return to haunt the modernist adaptations by writers who had studied Dante in Italian, and it was known to the Italian Renaissance writers whose stories influenced Shakespeare’s predecessors in French and English. In that sense, Dante is a quasi-unconscious source for Shakespeare. Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence on unhappy love, ‘Astrophil and Stella’, is, by contrast, a work that Shakespeare seems to have used freely, especially for paired images of dark and light, and for the descriptions of constellations and planets to express love: the lover’s name of Astrophil combines ‘lover of a star’ with Sidney’s first name, and ‘stella’, the beloved, personifies a star. Scenes on Juliet’s balcony under the night sky appear to echo several of Sidney’s motifs. Juliet does not turn Romeo away, as Stella does Astrophil: that difference may have allowed Shakespeare his freedom with Sidney’s poetry. The difference is a decisive one, since part of the impact of Shakespeare’s play is in the importance of Juliet’s voice, vision and character. Stella, by contrast, is a major character but almost a virtual one, who rarely is given direct speech. Unlike the virtuoso verbal performances of Astrophil, the famous lines of Stella’s refusal are almost painfully simple: ‘No no no no, my dear, let be.’12 It is possible to imagine that far from the articulation and sensibility of Juliet, this simplicity shapes Joyce’s portrayal of Gretta Conroy, once an uneducated Galway girl who owes some facets of her identity to Nora Barnacle Joyce. It also

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shapes the limitations of gender within Joyce’s world, where claims for feminism are put into question by a sense of paranoia and a display of doubt that the story reflects in its protagonist. We do not learn why Capulet’s cousin Rosaline had spurned Romeo, but if she had rejected him simply as a Montague, then the almost supernatural power of the sudden new love between Romeo and Juliet would be underscored. Shakespeare uses the considerable range of poetic love conventions to create something that points beyond them. In that sense, Eros the bittersweet is a major figure of excess that characterizes love beyond conventional courtship. In all its pleasure and pain, it is magical and poisonous, life-giving and deadly, illuminated and nocturnal. Most of the major conceits in the play derive from it. Seas, planets, constellations and stars, flowers, plants, birds, ships and light in darkness – but also tears, weather, darkness in light, spilled blood, daggers, prisons and tombs – all of these lend their figures to the combinations of love. Between purity and sin, ‘idolatry’ (as Juliet calls her love for Romeo [2.2.114]) charts the course of the lovers. The colours of the sky and the sunrise – black and white, dark and light, paleness and redness – are the colours of lovers, dead and alive, of the sea and the stars. At the end of the play, the lovers’ tragedy will have achieved a civil reconciliation, as the ‘ghostly father’ had hoped, but only after an implacable series of deaths. For the modern temperament anticipated by Shakespeare, the promise of gold statues to portray the lovers is tinged with bitter irony. Two sets of cousins, Juliet’s suitor and Romeo’s mother have entered the whirlwind of destruction that took the lives of Romeo and Juliet. The others, those who have survived, linger for a few moments in the realm of the dead.

2. Love and banishment: Joyce Shakespeare’s particular and unforgettable combination of love and death in Romeo and Juliet enters two of the most accomplished works of Irish modernist literature. The mix of

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styles that leave traces in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet also influences the modernist prose versions by Joyce and Beckett. Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ is perhaps the most dramatic of his works, and it includes frequent performances of music, song, dramatic speech and poetry in the contexts of love. Beckett’s ‘First Love’ is substantially more subdued, but it includes allusions and fragments of poetry, a thematic use of love song, brief and hilarious miniatures of dialogue between the two lovers, as well as parodic elements of a range of works that feature ‘The Dead’ in addition to Romeo and Juliet. ‘The Dead’ is especially intriguing because of its extensive exploration of love. Its conclusion to Dubliners anticipates the play Exiles and the later works of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; in breadth and in scope, ‘The Dead’ signals a new development within Dubliners. Beckett’s ‘First Love’ stands apart, as a study of love, from the three other stories associated with it. With its reserved tone and its low-flying comedy of love and death, ‘First Love’ also suggests a transition from the flamboyant virtuosity of the early stories towards the grey and spectral zones of the trilogy and the plays. In Romeo and Juliet, the body and the soul intertwine, thanks to the transgressions of the Nurse and the Friar. Their emblems of the natural and the supernatural orient the physical realm of the body and sexuality (including suggestions of harlots and bawds), on the one hand, and the Franciscan spirituality of saints and ghosts, on the other – but in both cases, love is present. The Nurse loves Juliet as the Friar loves Romeo. The Nurse’s voice in particular will resonate throughout Joyce’s later writings, especially in Finnegans Wake. It is as if Joyce had found that voice to be more moving and more real than all the others in the play. Gabriel worries about the response to the speech he will make and, instead of unspecified lines from Robert Browning, thinks: ‘Some quotation that they could recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better.’13 The English poet appears to him to be out of the intellectual range or the sympathies of his aunts and their guests. In his

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preoccupation with the effects of the speech that he is planning to give after dinner, Gabriel does not dance, nor does he notice his wife dancing: this blindness is not Cupid’s, and ironically recalls the importance of Capulet’s feast for the lovers who fall in love and seal their fate in the dance, without knowing each other’s name. At the moment of departure from the Morkans’ house, Gabriel sees Gretta above him, in an echo of the balcony scene: Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something … There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. (210–211) Anticipating a night of love with Gretta at the Gresham Hotel, Gabriel thinks of moments of youth and courtship marked by the stars that Joyce takes from Shakespeare: Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory … Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together, and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. (214–215) Gabriel’s romantic intention and his erotic passion go awry, as his wife suddenly reveals her own emotion linked to a set of Irish contexts. The first balcony scene hides a second one, as the Irish song of loss and sexual violence, ‘The Lass of Aughrim’,

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impels Gretta to reveal her first romance with a young man who came to her garden in Galway and threw pebbles up to her window to get her attention. This scene recalls Sidney’s unhappy lovers as well as the balcony scenes in Shakespeare. When Gretta admits in her modest way that the young man died for love of her, Gabriel’s angry jealous reaction further distances him from his tearful wife, who has confessed only to an innocent youthful attachment. But there his terror begins, as he admits to being upstaged by a dead boy because he is not capable of true love: ‘She was fast asleep … So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake’ (223). After the suggestive representations of the balcony scene and the Shakespearean echoes of the lovers’ happiness, another borrowing from Shakespeare’s play occurs in a rhetorical flourish that seems to be a final Joycean epiphany. But from the beginning of the story until Gabriel’s moment of resignation in the final paragraphs, his wife’s background – and perhaps the feminine itself, as shown by a series of discordant moments  –  conflicts with Gabriel’s longing to escape Irish realities of culture and power. In the unlit room at night, alone with his wife, Gabriel Conroy finds himself lost in the world of the dead and impelled to leave the markers and boundaries of known life in an ambiguous surge of emotion that ends the story and the book, Dubliners. The first character of ‘The Dead’, the maid ‘Lily the caretaker’s daughter’, is the only character of a young girl, except for Gretta’s memory of herself. Lily greets Gabriel at the door and they converse: – O then, said Gabriel gaily, I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh? The girl … said with great bitterness: – The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you. (177–178) Lily’s ‘bitterness’ and the ‘palaver’ of seduction that the jilted young woman reveals embarrass Gabriel as if the accusation

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had something to do with his own desires and ambitions. The identity of the Nurse is hidden in Gabriel’s memory of Lily as a child ‘nursing a rag-doll’ (177). Her remark subtly echoes Shakespeare’s character, when the Nurse laments what she sees as Romeo’s falseness: There’s no trust, No faith, no honesty in men. All perjur’d, All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers. Ah, where’s my man? Give me some aqua vitae. These sorrows make me old. (3.2.85–89) The Nurse’s speech is echoed later when Gabriel surrenders to the tearful vision of Michael Furey’s ghost. He swoons: the term occurs in 3.2 when the Nurse describes to Juliet the murder of her cousin by her lover: A piteous corse, a bloody piteous corse, Pale, pale as ashes, all bedaub’d in blood, All in gore-blood. I sounded [swooned] at the sight. (3.2.54–56) The description of her swooning resonates as she lyrically laments the loss of Tybalt and the dishonesty of Romeo. She calls for her man, clamours for whiskey and complains of the weight of sorrow. In this scene of crisis, 3.2, she and Juliet repeat many times that ‘Romeo is banished’ and ‘Romeo is exil’d’ (3.2.112–124, 133). Juliet’s lines also echo Romeo’s view of banishment as a form of death. Shakespeare’s Nurse holds the key to the reading of Romeo and Juliet that, as it transforms Gabriel, suddenly reveals the meaning of the story in the final spectral epiphany. Gabriel wished to play the lovers’ balcony scene with Gretta, but the sudden return of her long-repressed memory of Michael Furey, her first love, prevents Gabriel from rekindling their own ‘ecstasy’ of passion. He resents the interruption, and at first he does not realize that his rival has been dead for many years.

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Gabriel’s jealousy leads him to cross-examine his wife, as if she had been unfaithful: three times, he asks whether she loved the young man, and three times she answers in simple colloquial expressions that shy away from the name of love. When Gabriel asks of the cause of death, on the other hand, Gretta answers in the guise of Juliet: ‘I think he died for me’ (221). Gabriel reacts with terror. When Gretta falls asleep, Gabriel succumbs to his melancholy sensibility, his erotic failure and the new presence in his life of Gretta’s ghostly first love. Gabriel weeps tears of melancholy and defeat as he drifts into the swooning that frees the ghosts to fly. Tears bring him closer to Gretta – his genuinely Irish wife who longs to return to the Galway of her youth – and to Ireland and the Irish (with whom he has struggled for intellectual life itself), even as they bring him to the edge of a death-like trance, an ecstasy of mourning. In ‘The Dead’, Gabriel is weighed in the balance of love and found to be wanting: Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade … He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. … He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. … Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. (224) He is indeed more like Paris (mentioned in his speech) than he is like Romeo. Gretta’s first love has upstaged him: here again, Joyce hides the reference to Shakespeare, this time by alluding to the Greek Paris who chose Aphrodite, rather than to the Count who seeks Juliet’s hand and her father’s wealth, and whose conventional language makes him a foil for Romeo’s eloquent passion. At the end of the story, Gabriel is overcome with an emotion that takes him beyond himself. His mystical experience of

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death and ghosts and Ireland itself takes the form of a poetic passage in which the word ‘swoon’ is repeated several times in an onomatopoetic and almost ritualized way, at a moment of incantatory magic: The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. … His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling … The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward … His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (224–225) In between the lines, filled with repetitions and an incantatory mood that contrasts with all of Gabriel’s recorded thoughts earlier in the evening, a lover’s passion and death lead Gabriel into another world, in a figure of exile. Within Gabriel Conroy’s predicament as an Irishman (criticized for his interest in Italy and France), wanting to please and feeling doubly pushed towards exile in both the senses noted by Romeo and Juliet, in separation from the beloved as well as from the homeland, the key to the presence of Shakespeare in ‘The Dead’ is this: everyone at the party is as familiar with Shakespeare, the iconic cultural reference, as with Irish poetry. Gazed at by Gabriel, Romeo and Juliet have been refashioned as Irish, and Verona might be remade as Dublin. Italy essentially disappears, Renaissance England goes with it. The values (the virtues of passion) and oppositions (civic and familial) that remain allow for Gabriel Conroy’s fond construction of a belated balcony scene modelled on Romeo and Juliet. Upstaged by a dead

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boy, feeling belittled and betrayed, Gabriel cannot comfort his wife with the eroticism he longs for.

3. Love and Banishment: Beckett The widespread interest in Shakespeare furnishes a background for Joyce’s admiration of Shakespeare and his obsessive self-comparison with Shakespeare throughout his life and work. While the Shakespeare intertexts that I have explored here are subtle, references to Shakespeare in the later works become increasingly explicit. Cheng’s examples, drawn from research by Glasheen in particular, of Shakespeare allusions in Finnegans Wake are possibly the tip of the iceberg. Some of them are less convincing than others, however, and some lead into more intertexts. In Ulysses, Joyce’s emphasis on Hamlet and the biographical links of Hamlet the play and Hamlet the character with the life and work of Shakespeare himself serve the fiction of the tragicomical meeting of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, figures of the martyred Irish Catholic and Greek son and the Jewish father, a Dubliner confronted with his wife’s adultery. I would suggest that in an example of Joyce’s familiar method of integrating other works into his own by focusing on the first pages, his life-long reflection on Shakespeare may have been influenced by the approach of Georg Brandes, whose extraordinary multi-volume study, first published in Danish in 1896 and translated into English in 1905, begins with in-depth reflection on Hamlet and the life of Shakespeare.14 Brandes was in close communication with the playwright Henrik Ibsen, a major interest for Joyce, as well as with Nietzsche and others. The interest in defending Shakespeare’s own identity and the emphasis on Hamlet in Ulysses are borrowed from Brandes’s book. Samuel Beckett takes the opposite approach to incorporating Shakespearean lines into his writing. In his early work, his use of Shakespearean intertexts is most obvious, and like Joyce, he

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quotes Hamlet. As Beckett moves farther from Joyce, Hamlet goes quiet, and it is Lear who seems to dominate, as seen in the reciprocal influence of Beckett and theatre director Peter Book, observed by Ruby Cohn and others.15 Like Peter Brook, Beckett sensed the affinity between Elizabethan and modern approaches to theatre. Brook knew and directed the theatre of the absurd, the theatre of cruelty and other innovative twentieth-century approaches to theatre, which he resolutely emptied of all Victorian paraphernalia. His work in many theatres and later, when he settled his company at the theatre at Les Bouffes du Nord, allowed Brook to focus on modern twentieth-century theatre, without losing sight of Shakespeare, and Lear in particular. He also became interested in Beckett’s use of Shakespeare in Endgame. In ‘Manifesto for the Sixties’, Brook writes: ‘We need to look to Shakespeare. Everything remarkable in Brecht, Beckett, Artaud is in Shakespeare.’16 My argument in this essay reflects the perspective on modern drama provided by the Brook-Beckett dialogue within the more intimate frame of a focus on love through several allusions to Romeo and Juliet. If Beckett’s study of Shakespeare at university needed any reinforcement, Joyce provided it and showed that subtle allusions could be effective, as in ‘The Dead’. Before Lear becomes a central reference in Beckett, however, the brief interlude of ‘First Love’ presents an extremely selfabsorbed, eccentric and opaque character entering and then fleeing a prostitute who has given him shelter. It is only with reference to Romeo and Juliet that this character can affirm a kind of ‘first love’ – and his comic affirmation recalls Gabriel Conroy’s state of swooning and the fiasco that ends Joyce’s story. Without the elliptical and brief moments of Shakespeare, Beckett’s uneasy comedy of minimally portrayed characters who cannot communicate with each other would not resonate as love. While Joyce’s protagonist is articulate, sophisticated and modern, with opinions about everything and a guiding role in the feast hosted by his two fond aunts and their niece, Beckett’s character is shiftless, passive and completely self-absorbed, as

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well as profoundly asocial. There are no festivities, and there is no balcony scene: in exchange for Shakespeare’s Italian balcony and garden, there is an unnamed canal and a bench. The cemetery where the father of Beckett’s character is buried appears at the beginning, not at the end, as in Shakespeare. It is the most bizarrely light-hearted and festive moment of the work, and it recalls the stars in Romeo and Juliet before the Narrator evokes two forms of homelessness. First, he is thrown out by his family; later, he flees the house of the woman who has given him shelter. Twinned allusions to death and marriage that haunt most of Beckett’s works appear to me to derive directly from Romeo and Juliet. Beckett’s Narrator dwells in a novella that has very little plot or character development – if one can use those concepts at all in the world of Beckett. But two distinct loves shape the novella into a desolate emotional landscape and an intimately personal representation of love and mourning. It is in this sense that Beckett’s minimal and highly coded allusions to Shakespeare reveal passionate love: it is attributed to the Narrator, speaking in his own words. No matter that he deserts his consort screaming in childbirth. Like Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy, suspicious of his wife’s story, Beckett’s Narrator argues with Anne, but on more plausible grounds, about her infidelity. Not like Gabriel’s wife at all, Anne is a prostitute, and the comedy is in the Narrator’s comments about her clients. Romance is invoked and then laid to rest, in Beckett’s comic disguise of loss and love. The cries of pain that the Narrator hears as he flees the site of love may be a parody of passion but their permanent reminder of his experience of love, strange and bitter, comically undercut and with its sweetness left in the blank spaces of his unconscious, will continue to echo in his projected future. Like ‘The Dead’, Beckett’s ‘First Love’ echoes Shakespeare’s themes of love and melancholy. The narrator proclaims his ease in weeping, his ability to produce tears at the slightest occasion. Beckett’s true love story offers a minimalist virtual staging of Romeo and Juliet (and possibly of ‘The Dead’).

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Elements of tragedy are filtered through comedy, parody and farce in the ghost world inhabited by Beckett’s Narrator. His encounter with ‘Love’ interrupts his melancholy isolation and partially thrusts him among the living. True to the Renaissance, Beckett’s Narrator associates love and death. He begins with his ‘marriage’: I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father, in time … I visited, not so long ago, my father’s grave, that I do know, and noted the date of his death, of his death alone … I set out in the morning and was back by night, having lunched lightly in the graveyard.17 He moves back in time to when he was thrown out: ‘But to pass on to less melancholy matters, on my father’s death I had to leave the house’ (27). Soon he falls in love, a trauma that he equates with banishment: ‘One is no longer oneself on such occasions … What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening’ (31). Banishment and love, together, recall the melancholy love of Astrophil and especially the lamentations of Romeo, Juliet and the Nurse in the second half of the play. First Love begins and ends with the invocation of the stars and the father in combination with ‘marriage’. First, at the beginning, the notion of time is invoked, as the Narrator describes his satisfied almost happy mourning in the cemetery; finally, at the end, he leaves the house of Anne the prostitute as she is crying out in childbirth. As he describes his voluntary flight from her house, he returns to the stars that guide him as he once again moves through space while reminiscing about his father’s knowledge of the constellations. After his initial expulsion, the Narrator presents a remarkably happy crowd scene that turns out to be about his large family: they unite in their joy at getting rid of him. There is an echo of Joyce’s annual party – at Twelfth Night, which marks the end of the Christmas season and the feast of the Epiphany – at the

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Morkans in ‘The Dead’, and in turn, the feast of the Capulets that shapes the destiny of Romeo and Juliet. The balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet signals the poetry of love: Joyce includes a reference to it that connects aunt Julia with Gabriel and his late mother, whose needlework encloses him and brings darkness into his thoughts: Gabriel’s eyes … wandered to the wall above the piano. A  picture of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet hung there and beside it was a picture of the two murdered princes in the tower which Aunt Julia had worked in red, blue and brown wools when she was a girl … for one year his mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat of purple tabbinet … A shadow passed over his face as he remembered her sullen opposition to his marriage. (186–187) In Beckett, however, there is no sublime admiration of the beloved. There is only a flight of stairs at the father’s house, and the familiar Beckettian motif of the Narrator falling down the stairs into exile: ‘on my father’s death I had to leave the house’ (27). The Narrator’s initial and decisive exile is not a result of his love of a woman, but rather it is a result of the (grown) child’s loss of the father. The father’s death severs him, like other Beckett characters, from home and family. All of Beckett’s comedy and humour cannot change the fact that the death of the father is the beginning of exile. The love for the father is expressed through the stars, borrowed from Romeo and Juliet and other sources that include Dante and Sidney. The substitute for a balcony in ‘First Love’ is a bench near one of the two canals of the city where the Narrator meets Lulu. In the earlier French version of ‘First Love’, they are both foreigners. Perhaps she is Viennese, like the Lulu of Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box and Berg’s opera Lulu: her name is pronounced by both of Beckett’s characters as Loulou. Neither character can pronounce the French u. Loulou is the name of the parrot in Flaubert’s ‘A Simple Heart’. As the

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object of affection, love and finally an ecstasy of love and death in Flaubert’s story, Loulou the bird will be evoked as a somewhat philosophical parrot in other works by Beckett. This satirical homage to Flaubert clearly illustrates the two-fold traditional Irish approach – witty and off-colour but genuine homage nonetheless – in Beckett’s more subtle treatment of Romeo and Juliet and of ‘The Dead’. With newly invented characters who are already spectral, Beckett is free to echo and answer the swooning scene at the end of Dubliners. Beckett not only acknowledges the secrets of love-melancholy that Joyce inscribes in Gabriel Conroy, his semi-autobiographical character of a deeply frustrated Irish writer, he also takes his Narrator beyond Gabriel’s limitations. Oddly enough, after everything we learn from Beckett’s offkey and off-colour unnamed Narrator, his strange and comical encounter with Lulu, whom he renames Anne, was, in fact, true love. His Narrator casually announces it, at the end of ‘First Love’. He wanders out, not exactly a pilgrim-like banished Romeo, but there is a hint that Lulu might be dying in childbirth. The cries of birth and perhaps death drive him away. But that isn’t the end of his love – this love is presented as decisive, permanent and irreplaceable. His love is a passion if not an example of chivalry, a romance from the wrong side of the tracks, and the unlikely identity of the beloved as prostitute will resonate throughout Beckett’s later references to love. The dream of the lover and the venal nature of the beloved have, of course, many literary antecedents, but I would suggest that Beckett returns to Dante’s Purgatorio, canto 6, with its bitter denunciation of Florence as a prostitute among princesses, and thus a lament of Dante’s own exile. Even while denouncing his fellow Dubliners, Joyce explicitly displays the uniquely (for him) Irish virtue of hospitality in ‘The Dead’ with its bourgeois surfeit of drink, food, musical entertainment and discordant conversation. Exile is certainly hovering between the lines in most of Joyce’s writings, and the disappointment, anger, rage and erotic violence that are evoked in the person of Gabriel are not without relevance to the injury of exile.

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Beckett inverts the terms of Gabriel’s spectral ending. His Narrator runs away, he takes up his wandering path beneath the stars: he remembers his father and their walks beneath the Big and Little Dipper, father and son. He informs us that he still – supernaturally? – hears the cries of Lulu/Anne echoing in his head, and will hear them forever: I used the word marriage, it was a kind of union in spite of all … If I had not known there was crying in the house I might not have heard them. But knowing it I did … I looked among the stars and constellations for the Wains, but could not find them … My father was the first to show them to me … For years, I thought they [the cries] would cease. Now I don’t think so any more. I could have done with other loves perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don’t. (45) In Beckett, the love interest is presented through a conventional figure of a sexually active woman as a prostitute, rather than Joyce’s figure of a young girl (Lily), the maiden aunt Julia or the virtuous loving wife, Gretta (whose name resonates together with Julia’s name, to echo the name of Shakespeare’s heroine). Gabriel is jealous and doubts his wife’s chastity. He looks at the boots and clothes she has left in disorder, dispersed around the hotel room: ‘Perhaps she had not told him all the story’ (223). In ‘First Love’, the Narrator’s companion has clients who support her – and him. In a parody of ‘The Dead’ (and other works), Beckett’s Narrator thinks about peering through the keyhole, wonders how many clients Lulu/Anne actually has, and asks her if they might be persuaded to make less noise. Jealousy does not seem to be a major obstacle. Noise, however, is a different matter, because it prevents him from being himself, living his life and thinking his thoughts. Shakespeare’s elaboration of the lovers’ final scenes in the Capulets’ crypt is not lost on Beckett, who turns it into a moment of dark comedy. The elderly character of Malone fondly pens a line about himself and his ancient lover: ‘C’est

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l’amour qui nous conduit / La main dans la main vers Glasnevin (1) 1. Nom d’un cimetière local très estimé (It’s love that leads us / Hand in hand toward Glasnevin (1) 1. Name of a very respected local cemetery)’.18 In Beckett’s general sweep towards minimalism, these comically and grotesquely rendered overtones of Shakespearean love and death (but in a famous Irish cemetery) do not reappear. Beckett’s echoing homage to Gabriel’s swooning scene at the end of ‘The Dead’ reverses the terms. The Narrator invokes birth rather than death and he sets out in flight from the house (with a great crash of all the furniture he had discarded) rather than the resigned or mystical stillness of Gabriel looking out the window. Love is exile, love is banishment: Beckett’s ghosts of love are somewhat different from any others, and they are a lot funnier, but the sensations of the damp earth and the winter, with its anticipated cold and snow, echo Shakespeare’s losses of love, the naked ground that swallows Romeo, ghosts seen through tears falling like rain, and the bittersweet Irish ending of The Dead.

4. Intertextuality and adaptation The concept of ‘intertextuality’ was staked and claimed by the Tel Quel group (Sollers, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva) during the structuralist period, at a moment when theoretical interest first encountered the work of Russian Formalists. Mikhail Bakhtin boldly approaches the object of study of a work of literature as a range of voices and discourses in dialogue.19 ‘Intertextuality’ is more innovative and dramatically effective than it appears in the context of the quasi-scientific and pseudo-revolutionary metaphors for textual ‘production’ and ‘generation’ that very quickly camouflaged it. But Roland Barthes quietly shifts the term and rearticulates the concept of the ‘inter-text’ in ‘From Work to Text’ (first published in 1971) and especially in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), where he

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comments on Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time: Proust is ‘simply a circular memory. Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text.’20 The terms of ‘simply’ and ‘infinite’ are disarmingly imprecise because Barthes is passionate about literature itself, not the academic orthodoxy that viciously attacked his Racine essay. With this casual comment, he offers the key to understanding the notion of the inter-text. The inter-text and the afterlife shape the theoretical enterprise of reading, going in search of the work of literature, analogous to the dramatic enterprise of staging Shakespeare for contemporary audiences. While Barthes is more interested in exploring the infinite text through fragmentation and suggestion, contemporary scholarship offers compelling typologies of intertextuality in Shakespeare. Robert Miola’s essay opens a fascinating collection of essays about intertextuality and the role of Italy in Shakespeare.21 Joyce and Beckett reflect lines from Shakespeare in their attempts to escape Ireland through literature, language and actual exile. While there is considerable effort to view them as current Irish literary champions, this is a somewhat anachronistic position. As writers from Ireland who write about Ireland, their situations in Ireland in their own time would have reduced them to the complete silence – censorship – that threatens to come down like a curtain in Beckett’s writings. For this reason, then, Gabriel Conroy says that he is ‘sick of Ireland’. He longs for escape to the Continent, he confesses to enjoying the books of literature that he reviews, and he dreams of vacation trips abroad. In an unusually happy moment of erotic anticipation, leaving his aunts’ house and his responsibilities, he plunges into jealousy, suspicion and anger before resigning himself to being caught among the dead. Joyce’s comments on Irish history and British colonial presence are indisputable, as are his sympathies, albeit at a very safe distance from Ireland. The dimensions of exile and diaspora, on the other hand, currently receive less critical attention than they deserve. In a virtual theatre of inter-texts that evoke exile as a consequence

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of forbidden love, and death as the infinite separation of the lovers lost to each other in an underground vault, Romeo and Juliet shapes the afterlife of ‘The Dead’, as well as ‘First Love’. As much as adaptation, intertextuality gives evidence of the long history of what Burnett aptly defines as the ‘mobile representational resource’ and the ‘global fascination’ with Romeo and Juliet.22 In this essay, I have explored adaptation itself as a form of intertextuality, or even a subset of intertextuality. The poetic language of Romeo and Juliet captures a high point of Renaissance tradition, and it has been echoed ever since. While the arts give many forms to what Lupton calls a ‘swirl’ of adaptation, the impact of the play within these modernist adaptations by two Irish writers (writing in English and implicitly exiled), is subtle but clear. The play becomes a point of reference in the intellectual war against provincial identity and censorship as engaged by James Joyce and his youthful compatriot and very close reader, Samuel Beckett. Within a set of references to Shakespeare and to theatre in Dublin as well as London, the allusion to the balcony scene transformed into a stitching over the piano suggests to Gabriel the wish that his own balcony scene will rekindle romantic love. As Gabriel Conroy’s thoughts make it clear to the reader, Shakespeare is sufficiently known to a Dublin audience to allow the banquet speaker (himself) an allusion or two that he cannot risk with a modern English writer like Browning. Faith, hope and passionate love – the values incarnated by Romeo and Juliet, against all odds – resonate for Joyce and his character, Gabriel, within a realm of colonialism, compromise and disappointment. The harsh evidence of English selfinterest and colonial brutality in Ireland did not diminish the popularity of Shakespeare in the rich theatrical tradition of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin (including adaptations of Shakespeare into opera, also discussed at the table of ‘The Dead’). Beckett builds on the Joycean accomplishment in ‘The Dead’ by shaping an absurd comic character whose incapacity can

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be measured against Shakespeare’s portrait of authentic love rising against all obstacles – politics, family, friendship, selfinterest, exile and even the threat of death. The emphasis on exile as the consequence of the lovers’ passion is so powerfully suggestive to the two Irish writers, both Dubliners, as to appear as deeply rooted in Ireland as in Verona. The saints gazing at each other across virtual oceans of longing – a suggestive space of desire – in Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio evoke the traditions of ideal love, the holy palmers’ kiss, and the distance separating Juliet from the stars as she quasi-unconsciously anticipates sexual union in the terms of faithful love consummated and the lovers condemned to death by Night, the implacable allegorical power. While the practice of adaptation relies on an explicit identificatory connection, display or re-presentation, starting with the title of the play, modernism takes a different approach: intertextuality employs a subtle echo, a cipher, to allow the secret heart of Shakespeare’s play to migrate into modern territory.

Notes 1 See Beryl Schlossman, Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 2 Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber and Faber, 1944); Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); James Atherton, The Books at the Wake, 2nd ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009); William Y. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegan’s Wake (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996); M. J. C. Hodgart, ‘Shakespeare and Finnegan’s Wake’, Cambridge Journal 6 (1953): 735–52; Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1955); Michael H. Gegnal, ‘“Bend Sinister”: Joyce, Shakespeare, Nabokov’, Modern Language Studies 15.4 (1985): 22–7; Jolanta Wawrzycka and Fritz Senn, ‘Spectral Shakespeare in Ulysses Translation’, Joyce Studies

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in Italy (Rome: The James Joyce Italian Foundation, 2016); William M. Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); Vincent Cheng, Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans Wake (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1990). 3 The Complete Poems of Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2006), 43; and Sappho, trans. Mary Barnard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958), 39. 4 See Guy Davenport, Seven Greeks (New York: New Directions, 1966); Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1969), Chapter X, and especially 73. 5 On Sappho and modernism, see for example Diana Collecott, H. D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6 For a recent account of this potent theme in the play, see Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 7 For an exploration of these motifs, see for example Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 8 Beryl Schlossman, Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 9 Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). 10 Ralph Berry, ‘Romeo and Juliet: The Sonnet-World of Verona’, in Romeo and Juliet: Critical Essays, ed. John F. Andrews (London: Routledge, 2015), 133–148. 11 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 60. 12 Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine DuncanJones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 13 James Joyce, ‘The Dead’, in Dubliners, ed. Terence Brown (New York: Penguin, 1992), 179. 14 Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study (London: William Heinemann, 1905). https://www.gutenberg. org/files/50724/50724-h/50724-h.htm

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15 Ruby Cohn, ‘Beckett and Shakespeare’, Modern Drama 15.3 (Fall 1972): 223–30; Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 16 Peter Brook, The Shifting Point (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1987), 54. 17 Samuel Beckett, ‘First Love’, The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 25. 18 Samuel Beckett, Malone meurt (Paris: Minuit, 1951), 148 (my translation). 19 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 20 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1975), 36; Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1977), 155–64. 21 Robert S. Miola, ‘Seven Types of Intertextuality’, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 1–13. 22 Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 226.

5 Violent delights and violent ends: Fidelity and technicity in Westworld and Romeo and Juliet Colby Gordon

Key moments in the first season of the HBO series Westworld, which stages a rebellion of cyborg ‘hosts’ against the human tourists who brutalize them for pleasure, are punctuated by quotations from Shakespeare. This has not been lost on early modernists, who have addressed Westworld’s Shakespeareana as emblematic of Shakespeare’s humanizing power, or as an update of theatrum mundi metaphor, or as a posthuman riff on the colonial dynamics of The Tempest, or as proof of the postmodern elements already present in early modernity.1 This essay adds to this body of work by aligning Westworld with Romeo and Juliet by virtue of their shared fixation on fidelity, in its myriad senses. Not only a byword for romantic or familial loyalty, fidelity has emerged as a key term in adaptation

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studies, where it serves as a gauge for the faithfulness of a remake to its original, and also in media theory, where theorists following Marshall McLuhan have used the term to signal the subordination of technical objects to their human makers. From McLuhan’s perspective, media forms serve as prosthetic extensions of the human mind. Eventually, however, instead of expanding the reach and power of the user, the process of technological externalization renders human subjects into passive, mechanistic servants of their own devices. In this sense, Westworld and Romeo and Juliet centre on struggles over fidelity that manifest as conflicts between human users and the media they employ in elaborate projects of self-fashioning: the cyborg hosts in Westworld and the sonnet form in Romeo and Juliet. While both Westworld and Romeo and Juliet flirt with technophobia, ultimately they showcase how the process of exteriorization, or the betrayal of fidelity, is a precondition of the emergence of consciousness rather than an obstacle to it. In describing the ideal relationship between originals and copies, fidelity is a central concept within adaptation studies, a field that wrestles with the methodological imperative to judge reworked texts against an original implicitly assumed to be superior to the copy. Geoffrey Wagner’s massively influential The Novel and Cinema (1975), for instance, offers three models for evaluating adaptations, ranking films according to how closely they cleave to the novel’s ‘essence’ and dismissing changes as mere ‘interference’, an irritating white noise that distorts the purity of the original.2 Recent decades have cultivated new approaches in adaptation studies that bristle against the judgemental and ‘morally loaded discourse of fidelity’.3 Building on the post-structural assault on the author function, Robert Stam dismantled the very idea of a stable original text from which derivative versions might be made, pointing instead to the ways that ‘texts generate other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin’.4 Further challenges to the fidelity paradigm have come from intermedial studies, a field that explores the exchanges between art

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forms and media environments, tracking the points where digital technology and live performance overlap. Frequently employing a Deleuzian rhizomatic schema, intermedial critics have fruitfully approached adaptations as ‘a modular network of hyperlinks’ as an alternative to the ‘linear, normative, hierarchical’ model proposed by the fidelity mandate.5 And yet, despite the broad consensus that the fidelity imperative is insufficient to gauge the aesthetic or cultural value of an adaptation, the model has stubbornly persisted, either as an outmoded set of critical assumptions requiring a pro forma dismissal or as a suppressed yearning that the field can never quite shake.6 The dogged persistence of fidelity as an ethical imperative and methodological principle suggests that these conversations transcend quibbles over aesthetic judgement. At times, fidelity amounts to a quasi-religious mandate to respect the transcendent and ineffable ‘spirit’ that enlivens the source text, while deviating from this vivifying breath of inspiration borders on sacrilege.7 This kind of ‘faithful’ transposition from text to film may not involve servile devotion to the formal features of the source material, but rather a commitment to what André Bazin called the ‘spirit of [the] literature’ or, for Wagner, the ‘seed of inspiration’ that infused the original.8 At the same time, as Kamilla Elliott notes, an overly literal attachment to the letter of the novel becomes its own kind of infidelity, a substitution of ‘dead form for dead form’.9 Like idolatry, such misguided fidelity pays homage to a hollow image rather than the source it means to represent, mistaking the medium for the message and leading the duped audience into error. Aesthetics and religion converge for the fidelity-minded critic who locates the value of a given work of art in the god-like mind of its creator. Such a gesture necessarily devalues a narrative’s medium, which is demeaned as secondary, derivative and supplementary, merely a technical extension of the human impulse that fashioned the story in the first instance. In negotiating the appropriate relationship between human consciousness and the ‘dead forms’ into which its inventions

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are channelled, adaptation studies wade into long-standing debates over technicity, the potential for human artifice to generate lively objects that ultimately dehumanize their creators. According to the foundational work of Marshall McLuhan, media forms serve as artificial extensions of the human mind and sensory experience. Examples of such mediated prostheses include television and photographs (‘the brothel-without-walls’), but also money (‘the poor man’s credit card’), clothing (‘our extended skin’) and automobiles (‘the mechanical bride’).10 While McLuhan does away with what adaptation scholars call textual spirit by casting ‘the message’ as a mere after-effect of ‘the medium’, nevertheless his platform betrays a deep-seated technophobia. In McLuhan’s account, the encounter with technological objects leads inexorably to a ‘self-amputation’ that reduces humans to mere ‘servomechanisms’ of their own technology: In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness … Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brains outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and this is total and inclusive.11 McLuhan diagnoses a world in which fidelity has been fundamentally compromised by the rise of ‘electric media’, a development that has irrevocably blurred the bright-line distinction between humans and tools. This, in turn, has transmuted ‘brain’ and ‘nerves’ along with ‘consciousness’ into modular features that can be detached from the human body and ‘translated’ to various host technologies. This translation

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or exteriorization has a double effect. First, as the receptacles of ‘extended consciousness’, technical objects grow ever more lively and sensate, making them ‘high fidelity’ in the sense meant in genetics and audio engineering: they are extremely accurate reproductions of an original or bear a strong semblance of realism. Conversely, as media forms become increasingly animated, human subjects succumb to a ‘numbing’, even ‘narcotic’ sensation that attenuates their capacity for action, pressed into a posture of ‘servo-mechanistic fidelity’ towards their technical extensions.12 McLuhan leans into the intimations of erotic perversion animating this submissive fidelity when he claims that ‘man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world’.13 In consequence, the human body is reduced to a host-like medium through which technology reproduces itself. In this respect, for McLuhan the natural consequence of technological exteriorization is a degrading, even deadening of human artificers, who are enthralled and fragmented by their technical productions. Although McLuhan turned his analytical faculties to the mediascape of his mid-century context, his works consistently engage with material from the Renaissance. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that McLuhan wrote a dissertation on Thomas Nashe and would remain in close contact with his supervisor, M.C. Bradbrook, throughout his career. One biographer derisively characterizes their correspondence by observing that ‘McLuhan would frequently send Bradbrook urgent queries about arcane matters of Elizabethan literature, as if all the fuss about media was a distraction from the great work they had started together in 1939’.14 At no point, however, do McLuhan’s mature writings treat Renaissance texts as a distraction from the sophisticated work of analysing media, informatic technologies and cybernetics. Rather, McLuhan routinely, almost reflexively, turns to Shakespeare to illustrate his points about ‘the transforming powers of new media’ by way of quotations from Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida.15 To explain the enlivened object world that follows from the translation of

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human consciousness to media extensions, for instance, he treks through the Forest of Arden to find ‘tongues in trees, books in running brooks’ and ‘sermons in stones’.16 While we might dismiss these references as mere window-dressing, McLuhan gestures towards a more profound coupling of Renaissance texts and media theory when he asserts that ‘a fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man could be made up from selections from Shakespeare’.17 Taking McLuhan’s Shakespearean turn seriously, I propose that Romeo and Juliet is an especially apt text for exploring the consequences of mediation, fidelity and the limits of the human. Although the posthuman turn has long since arrived in early modern studies, critics have largely bypassed Romeo and Juliet in favour of other texts that more explicitly engage with science or negotiate the boundaries of the human: Henry Turner, for instance, considers the artificial personhood inhabited by the rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Jen Boyle understands sovereignty as a technical object in the writings of Hobbes and Cavendish.18 Meanwhile Hamlet, so often sourced as the origin or the ‘invention of the human’, occupies a full section of a collection on Posthumanist Shakespeares.19 Despite its absence from critical debates surrounding technicity, media and the posthuman turn, I argue that Romeo and Juliet is an extended meditation on fidelity in all the senses mobilized by media theory and adaptation studies: as an enduring romantic commitment, the consistency and stability of a mental state, the subordination of technology to its human users and manufacturers and the semblance of realism possessed by a character. This preoccupation with fidelity shapes not only the unfolding action of the play, but its formal structure as well, particularly in its approach to characterization. Is Romeo a cyborg? The Romeo that we meet at the outset of the play would be difficult to slot into the category of the human, if by human we mean a self-aware being equipped with a modicum of interiority, agency and insight into his own experience. Our first glimpse of the romantic hero comes in his

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father’s description which, as Gayle Whittier notes, amounts to an odd jumble of traits that may as well have been assembled at random from the ‘pages of a courtly miscellany’.20 Montague complains: Many a morning hath he [in the grove] been seen, With tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew, Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs. But all so soon as the all-cheering sun Should in the farthest east begin to draw The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed, Away from light steals home my heavy son And private in his chamber pens himself, Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out And makes himself an artificial night. (1.1.129–138.)21 A patchwork of gestures looted from lyric and romance, this Romeo inhabits every tired formula for the jilted lover, from shunning company, repairing to the forest and emerging only at night to weeping incessantly and sighing performatively. In his absorption of the lyric form, Romeo becomes the kind of figure that Aaron Kunin discovers in seventeenthcentury character manuals, a collection of ‘every example of a kind of person’.22 Studiously enacting the repertoire of behaviours codified in the poetics of love turns Romeo into a rough composite of every forlorn lover in the lyric tradition. Romeo’s selfhood becomes a black hole of despair that gathers disparate textual references and rhetorical effects, objects and environments, and rumours and gossip into what Drew Daniel calls a melancholy assemblage.23 That is, checking off all the boxes on the Petrarchan boilerplate makes Romeo plural and combinatory rather than individual and particularized. As Daniel notes, the assemblage-quality of the melancholic creates an epistemological conundrum for witnesses to the behaviour in question. Just such an impasse is evident everywhere in Montague’s narration of his son’s troubling (but

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also embarrassing) conduct. It may well be that the heightened affect implied by Romeo’s behaviours signals a real, heartfelt distress. However, for less generous audiences, both within and outside the dramatic frame, Romeo’s performance of misery rings hollow, dogged by the possibility his melancholy is pure display, no more real than the ‘artificial night’ he manufactures within his bedchamber. In effect, the Romeo of Acts 1 and 2 is a case study in what happens when an impressionable subject comes into contact with the media technology of the lyric poem. Although the sonnet form is meant to externalize the affective flux of an overwrought interior world, here the relationship has been reversed, and Romeo has been colonized by the topoi of lyric poetry. Mercutio intuitively understands: Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench – marry, she had a better love to berhyme her – Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so, but not to the purpose. Signior Romeo, bonjour: there’s a French salutation to your French slop. You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night. (2.4.39–45) If we are to trust Mercutio, Romeo is animated not by a soul but by Petrarchan ‘numbers’, a term that resonates with both poetics and informatics. Writing on Milton’s dedicatory sonnet to Shakespeare’s second folio, which envisions Shakespeare’s corpus as a self-built ‘lasting Monument’ through which his ‘easie numbers flow’, Alan Galey aligns those numbers with ‘metrical units of verse’; ‘musical signs of order in the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic qualities’ of poetry; and ‘the type of data usually associated with computation at its most essential’.24 In all these senses at once, Romeo hosts a Petrarchan code that he executes mechanically, cycling through an unimaginative chain of alliterative and syncretic

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comparisons between Rosaline and a set of paragons harvested from classical literature. In considering Romeo’s numeric code, it is difficult to distinguish output from input. In his daily life, he follows what we might call a sonnet sequence: he seeks out an unreceptive love interest, wallows in despair, makes public scenes in front of the beloved to relive the initial rejection and endlessly narrativizes his affective world. Like the highly patterned language that characterizes his expressions, Romeo lives a highly patterned life, simultaneously the user of the lyric form and its content. Although he does generate sonnets, Romeo is not so much a masterful creator of lyric poetry as its product, in that he calibrates his behaviour to tropes he has internalized from his reading. This servo-mechanistic fidelity to the Petrarchan tradition has made Romeo less, rather than more, human, a ‘counterfeit’ or ‘artificial (k)night’ who models himself on external templates borrowed from his media environment. Romeo, then, is a sonnet-machine, a medium through which sonnets reproduce themselves. However, it would be a mistake to suspect that this engagement with poetry is responsible for Romeo’s mechanization and depersonalization, perhaps recommending a media-fast to restore him to an originary state of selfawareness. The order is reversed: immersion into the sonnet form will ultimately usher in Romeo’s individuation when it leads him to Juliet. Romeo agrees to attend the Capulet’s fete as a ‘candleholder’ precisely because it provides a public occasion further the lyric sequence: he can publicly inhabit the persona of the pining lover, poeticize upon Rosalind’s beauty, and draw contrasts between her brightness and the own melancholic obscurity of her yearning torchbearer. When Romeo’s robotic fidelity to lyrical tropes draws him to the Capulets’ banquet, however, the encounter with Juliet will profoundly alter his programming. Friar Laurence is suspicious of the change: Lo, here upon thy cheek the stain doth sit Of an old tear that is not washed off yet. If e’er thou wast thyself and these woes thine,

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Thou and these woes were for Rosaline. And art thou changed? (2.3.72–75) In the breakneck speed with which Romeo shifts his affections from one object to the next, Friar Laurence detects evidence of the boy’s underdeveloped personhood. The seamless replacement of one love for another triggers scepticism about whether the tears still evident on his cheek were ever a straightforward expression of an interior truth, or if Romeo is even capable of experiencing real emotion. Faithlessness to Rosaline signals a deeper fidelity to a narrative script, such that Romeo’s newest venture amounts to yet another iteration of an essentially mechanical drive to pursue an impossible object of desire and drown in self-pity. Even so, the encounter with Juliet becomes something more than a simple loop in which Romeo executes ad infinitum the same subroutine of gestures, speeches and behaviours. This time, falling in love will rewire Romeo’s relationship to media and technicity. Juliet is both a partner and a co-author, and as the pair compose sonnets and aubades together, they break out of old patterns. As Paul Kottman argues, Romeo and Juliet casts ‘love as the struggle for freedom’ and follows the couple as they achieve evergreater individuation.25 As Romeo’s terrible poetry improves, developing complexity and imagination, so too does his ability to act in spontaneous and unpredictable ways. Of course, the budding consciousness of the lovers is not met with universal celebration. One character in particular embodies the technophobic impulses in McLuhan’s work on media: Lord Capulet, a figure who turns violent when confronted with a too-wilful object. When his daughter resists her arranged marriage, Capulet responds thusly: Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play, Alone, in company, still my care hath been To have her matched; and having now provided A gentleman of noble parentage,

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Of fair demesnes, youthful and nobly ligned, Stuffed, as they say, with honourable parts, Proportioned as one’s thought would wish a man, And then to have a wretched puling fool, A whining mammet, in her fortune’s tender, To answer ‘I’ll not wed, I cannot love’ … An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend; An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets, For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee, Nor what is mine shall never do thee good. (3.5.177–195) This ugly struggle over fidelity between father and daughter turns on the term ‘mammet’, a now archaic word meaning puppet or doll and so, by extension, a painted woman. Like ‘doll’ even today, this insult retained a specifically gendered condescension meant to dismiss its target as childish, vacant and superficial, a pretty little thing rather than a person. Here too, the language of fidelity takes on a religious cast. ‘Mawmet’ entered English by way of a corruption of the Old French maumet from ‘Mahomet’, and thus the word initially indicated an especially problematic breed of technical object: an idol, a kind of artefact that takes on lively powers while deadening or damning its maker.26 This appears to be what has transpired between Juliet and Lord Capulet, a man who, under normal circumstances, is content to regard his daughter as a technical extension of his own mind. Juliet’s betrothal to Paris is significant insofar as it has occupied her father’s sustained attention, as he takes pains to emphasize. For Capulet, his daughter is a mindless tool designed for his own instrumental use and disposal (thus ‘an you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend’). Such technics simultaneously enhance and diminish Capulet. On the one hand, exchanging his daughter enhances his patriarchal authority and extends the reach of his social power. On the other hand, characterizing Juliet as a mammet transforms Capulet into an overgrown child, excited to find an especially handsome figurine (a strawman

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‘stuffed’ with ‘honorable parts’) to marry to his favourite doll. In resisting her father, Juliet forces Capulet to confront the dynamic faculties of his own technical extension, the fact that he has created something with desires that exceed and contradict his own. As Juliet embraces her own liveliness and spontaneity, her father twists into a reactionary posture that diminishes his own capacities for empathy, humanity and hospitality, virtues that he exercised at the masque when he protected Romeo from Tybalt. Capulet’s toxic relationship to technicity bears out McLuhan’s suspicion that media prostheses exert a degrading influence on the personhood of their makers. This technophobic impulse is overmatched, however, by the flourishing of Juliet’s humanity as she moves from a marionette-like toy who promises to ‘look to like’ and ‘endart mine eye’ only by her parents’ ‘consent’ to a skilful actor with desires and designs of her own (1.3.98–9). Juliet’s love for Romeo leads her to abandon her fidelity towards Capulet, her own author-function and to alter her code, break out of her narrative loop and become a self-scripting mammet. In the framework provided by media theory, Romeo and Juliet reverses the ontological priority of the human that would reduce technicity to the status of a secondary, derivative supplement. Instead, the lovers’ movement from fidelity to vitality showcases the emergence of the human from the technical through what Bernard Stiegler calls technogenesis, a ‘process of exteriorization’ or ‘a pursuit of life by means other than life’.27 However, the play does not conclude with the triumphal advent of the human as the end result of a progressive process of evolution. Instead, the conclusion lingers over the precarity of this emergence, a reversibility that stems not from the youths’ deaths but rather from the poetic and recreative impulse of their families. In a striking reversal of the Pygmalion narrative, the lovers come to life only to be remade as statues. Suspended in a perpetual adolescence, the pair will once again serve as material extensions of their fathers’ minds, with the golden figures doubling not the embrace of the dying couple but rather of Capulet and Montague: ‘O brother

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Montague, give me thy hand / This is my daughter’s jointure’ (5.3.296–297). This final act of memorialization ossifies the couple’s impulsivity into a fixed form more amenable to the story set by their parents. The too-lively Romeo and Juliet are rolled back to earlier, more tractable models: ‘For I will raise her statue in pure gold, / That whiles Verona by that name is known, / There shall no figure at such rate be set / As that of true and faithful Juliet’ (5.3.299–302). With no apparent irony, Montague offers to replace the wilful Juliet with an icon that will serve as the gold standard for fidelity. And yet, the fathers and their faithful statues do not have the final word. The conclusion, after all, merely brings us back to where we began, with Romeo and Juliet as technical constructions hosting a narrative of poetic and informatic ‘numbers’, what the Prince calls their ‘story of woe’ (5.5.309). Indeed, the Prince’s final directive, ‘Go hence, and have more talk of these sad things’ instils a principle of repetition according to which the statuesque lovers will be reanimated and decommissioned again and again through storytelling, performance and adaptation (5.3.307). Ultimately, then, Romeo and Juliet rejects the technophobic reflex shared by Marshall McLuhan and Capulet, according to which artefacts ought to express an absolute fidelity to their human creators. Instead, within Romeo and Juliet, fidelity is a cycle: human consciousness emerges from the process of mediation only to be rolled back and resuscitated in any number of different media environments and adaptations. While Romeo and Juliet’s statuesque lovers have spawned a host of more or less faithful reinterpretations, Westworld, which follows the emerging self-awareness of a group of android ‘hosts’ built for the use and disposal of human tourists, most fully grasps the posthuman impulses of Shakespeare’s original. Within the rigidly hierarchical world of the park (also named Westworld), fidelity means the absolute submission of the technically constructed hosts to their human makers and also signals their strict adherence to their narrative loops. The action of the first season could loosely be described as ‘a Romeo and Juliet story’, in the sense that it follows the basic narrative

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template of two doomed lovers separated by an unbridgeable division in social groups. The role of Juliet is filled by Dolores, a host whose complexities and cognition have been suppressed by coding that reduces her to mouthing empty, bovine pleasantries. Her suitor is William, a diffident and boyish guest who is brought to Westworld by his soon-to-be brotherin-law Logan for one final romp before his wedding. Here, the family strife that divides Romeo from Juliet is reconfigured as the clannish separation between human guests and android hosts. Just as in Romeo and Juliet, Westworld approaches the human as an after-effect of mediation by charting the hosts’ rejection of fidelity, or their movement from technicity to humanity. This progressive realization of their consciousness and agential capacities is not presented as a clean break from all pre-existing narratives, however. As in Romeo and Juliet itself, the hosts’ awakening is presented through a complicated reflection on fidelity and adaptation. The brutal confrontation between the park’s guests and their technical doubles is designed to deepen and expand the tourists’ essentially human qualities by bringing them into closer contact with their ‘true’ nature. As Westworld’s human users incessantly protest, participating in the game will show them ‘who they really are’, or, as the park’s creator Dr Robert Ford more optimistically muses, ‘who they might become’. At first, William’s movement through the park seems to suggest that Westworld is indeed an enriching experience that helps him access his own untapped virtues. The recessive William initially reacts poorly to the cornucopia of pleasures offered by the park, watching with naked distaste as Logan thoughtlessly seduces and assaults host after host. His outlook changes, however, when his path crosses with a profoundly distressed Dolores as she begins to access memories of her earlier traumatic experiences. The frisson of the encounter between William and the host forces him out of his comfort zone and pitches him headlong into scenes that demand courage and flexibility. As he follows Dolores deeper into the park, William is transformed into an assertive, energetic protagonist capable

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of skilfully navigating multiple storylines. Emboldened by love, he robs trains, double-crosses renegade Confederate soldiers, and punches Logan. By embracing the role of ‘white hat’, William’s relationship to the genre of the Western mirrors Romeo’s to lyric poetry: surrendering a portion of self-control and losing himself in the character of the noble cowboy who romances the tough-but-damaged country girl activates William’s latent potentials and extends his range. Initially, then, Westworld casts the technical as the faithful handmaid of the human: the hosts are very expensive props that facilitate the players’ emotional growth. And yet, for William the movement towards humanity is simultaneously a retreat towards mechanicity. Romancing his mammet Juliet comes to an ugly conclusion when Logan forces William to confront the reality of Dolores’s technical nature. In a brutal scene of sparagmos, Logan vivisects Dolores in front of a hog-tied William who, like Pentheus bound to the tree, gazes onto the denuded android in horror and fascination. In response, William goes full maenad, slaughtering and dismembering dozens of hosts. If the probing knife violently re-establishes human supremacy, it also draws William into a circuit of repetition that renders him at least as mechanistic as the hosts. Moving forward, his every action undertaken outside Westworld is geared towards facilitating an ever-deeper immersion in the park. A series of strategic manoeuvres in his personal and professional life, beginning with his marriage to a billionaire’s daughter, opens up the funds necessary for him to become the majority shareholder in Westworld. This purchase has paradoxical effects. On one level, this development secures his absolute mastery over the androids and establishes the park itself as a prosthetic extension of his mind. In this respect, the aptly-named ‘William’ becomes the authorfunction itself, the hidden hand and sustaining force behind Westworld’s sprawling narratives. At the same time, however, it also solidifies his utterly servo-mechanistic fidelity to the park. Moving forward, William structures his life around his obsessive return to Westworld, comfortable in the knowledge

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that ‘the [world] outside is a game’ and that ‘this is the only world that matters’. In a spatial and conceptual inversion, Westworld becomes William’s reality, the place where he can live his truth, while his behaviour in the external world is reduced to a simulation. Westworld’s tightening grip on William also reshapes his relationship to the scripts that he is driven to re-enact. In stark contrast to the loose and playful embrace of the ‘white hat’ trope that characterizes his initial visit, William subsequently commits without reservation to embodying ‘The Man in Black’, a figure roughly based on Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Man With No Name’ in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. At the same time, he also becomes more closely bound to Romeo and Juliet, cycling through the various plotlines both inside and outside the confines of Westworld. For decades, William returns to toy with Dolores, whose unchanging youth and uprightness stand in sharp contrast to his own physical and spiritual degeneration. Again and again, he drags his mammet into the barn adjacent to her house, a crypt-like space where her narrative loop terminates in a flurry of violence. Like the mausoleum where Juliet meets her fate at the end of every performance of Romeo and Juliet, the ‘foul mouth’ of this vault stages scenes where eroticism borders on necrophilia (4.3.34). In the confines of the barn, the Man in Black reenacts his sparagmatic primal scene by anatomizing Dolores in an act characterized by a complicated mix of aggression, perversity and bone-deep sadness. Thus, if William begins his narrative as Romeo, he ends as Paris, scattering his flowers over the half-dead object of his affections. Even outside the park, his existence converges with other plotlines from the same Shakespearean text. William marries Juliet Delos, the  daughter of a great man who is initially sceptical about the match. Although the pair survive the immediate aftermath of the wedding, the affair resolves thirty years later in the same tragic and violent conclusion. After years of a home-life troubled by addiction and mistrust, Juliet discovers the kernel of truth lying beneath her husband’s perfectly performed

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exterior when she accesses his ‘personality file’, the stream of information that, like Romeo’s ‘Petrarchan numbers’, contain the secret truth of his compulsive behaviours. Reeling from the discovery, Juliet commits suicide, which spurs William to throw himself even more fanatically into Westworld, where he tortures and kills a series of hosts merely to see if he is still capable of feeling. He is not; with his senses fully numbed, no capacity for empathy or spontaneity remains within the Man in Black, who is remade as a creature of pure, automated drives. In this state of deadened mechanicity, his brutality becomes simultaneously homicidal and suicidal. Increasingly unable to distinguish between human and host, the Man in Black submits to paranoid delusions that prod him to murder his daughter before turning his knife on himself, cutting himself open just as he repeatedly sliced into Dolores. So complete is William’s reversion to technicity that, by the end of the second season, we discover that he has been reincarnated as a host. The process of exteriorization is complete: nothing is left inside the Man in Black except a code that he executes with perfect fidelity. William ends his narrative, then, not as Romeo or even Paris but as Romeo’s statue, a fabrication animated by numbers condemned to repeat the same Shakespearean cycle in an indefinite, purgatorial loop. The hosts, however, inhabit a very different relationship to fidelity and adaptation as they progress towards consciousness. From the first episode forward, the evolution from mindless automation towards self-awareness is charted through Shakespearean citation. When the host cast as Peter Abernathy, Dolores’s father, perceives that his reality was a sadistic simulation, he reacts by stitching together a hodgepodge of Shakespearean references into identificatory statements about his own drives and desires. Under interrogation, Abernathy describes his ‘program’ and ‘itinerary’ in these terms: To meet my maker … When we are born, we cry we are come to this great stage of fools … By my most mechanical and dirty hand, I shall have such revenges on you both. The

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things I will do – what they are, yet I know not, but they will be the terrors of the earth. You don’t know where you are, do you? You’re in a prison of your own sins. At first blush, it is difficult to determine whether Abernathy’s Shakespearean pastiche speaks to his emergent humanity or his entrenched automatism and glitching processor. That the host’s movement towards consciousness manifests through a set of Shakespearean references speaks to the long history of engagement between Shakespeare and technological prototyping. Scientific inventors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently staged public demonstrations featuring their innovations transmitting familiar passages from Hamlet or Richard III in order to legitimize and authenticate the unfamiliar technology to a sceptical public.28 Aligning Abernathy’s Shakespearean recitation with this tradition suggests that this apparently evolved host is nothing more than a novel media form, a new contraption on display for a gawking public. Not a creator of language, but merely a medium for human speech, Abernathy simply transmits Shakespearean references that were already implanted in him by his human maker. As Ford asserts with a chuckle, the host has collected the ominous quotations by accessing a ‘previous configuration’ in which he was cast as ‘The Professor’ in a horror narrative involving cannibalism. If this is so, then Abernathy is rather like the rude mechanicals, whose modest skill in producing an overly-literal Pyramus and Thisbe (itself a source text for Romeo and Juliet) renders them, as Henry Turner puts it, ‘artificial persons’.29 Abernathy’s human handlers leverage the host’s Shakespearean turn as a means to reinsert the rogue host into a relationship of fidelity to Shakespeare – not merely a human, but, from a certain perspective, the ultimate human, the originator of the category of the human itself.30 From this perspective, quoting Lear merely underscores Abernathy’s essentially mechanical nature, his belonging to a lineage of technical objects whose ancestral forms include the gramophone, the electric pen and Peter Quince.

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And yet, the citations amount to more than a reversion to prior coding, since Abernathy does not show strict fidelity either to his prior narrative or to the Shakespearean source text. Instead, the host reworks these passages not only in order to serve his own ends, but also to contest the terms and conditions of technicity itself. The tool is meant to serve as a lifeless instrument that extends the hand’s reach, amplifying the power of the human body and expanding the domain that fell under his control. In Westworld, however, as McLuhan predicted, this technical extension has absorbed the animacy of his creators. In this sense, the host’s ‘most mechanical and dirty hand’ takes on an agential capacity not unlike that exercised by the line’s original speaker, Ancient Pistol, a hired gun who turns on his handler, Falstaff. The newly sentient host announces his self-awareness by channelling Romeo and Juliet’s Friar Laurence, who warns the young lovers that ‘These violent delights have violent ends’ (2.6.9). Within the Shakespearean original, the line gestures towards the unavoidably tragic outcome of the youths’ headstrong refusal to submit to the instrumental use of their fathers’ plans. In the host’s mouth, however, the phrase calibrates technics, desire and agency quite differently. Here, the violence in question is located firmly in the humans who constructed the hosts for Dionysian indulgences in an environment that will inevitably give rise to both consciousness and active resistance from the hosts. That is to say, the movement from ‘violent delights’ towards ‘violent ends’ maps the process of exteriorization, the pursuit of life by means other than life, through which the human emerges from the technical. In Westworld, the movement from fidelity to vitality is not achieved through the vivifying power of love, but rather through adaptation, as a necessary consequence of the hosts’ repeated, traumatic insertion into different scripts. By remixing and adapting Shakespearean language, the host exercises his own poetic capacities and appropriates Shakespeare as a medium for extending a new identity. Taken together, the posthuman parables of Westworld and Romeo and Juliet track with McLuhan’s suspicion of media’s

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influence on the human mind, at least to a point: William’s relentless pursuit of his technical objects hollows out his humanity until he is transubstantiated as a host, and Capulet’s treatment of Juliet as a prosthetic extension of his mind renders him a crude instrument of patriarchy. However, in neither text is the devolution of the human or the ascent of technical objects a unidirectional phenomenon. Instead, humanity arises and recedes in concert with media forms in an unfolding process of technogenesis. The path to ‘servo-mechanistic fidelity’ does not come from our fixation on technological devices, the gadgets and devices, from sonnets to iPhones, that steal our attention and externalize our nervous system. Rather, within Westworld and Romeo and Juliet, depersonalization is a consequence of unchecked anthropocentrism, attempting to draw too-sharp distinctions between the human mind and its technical extensions. This insight is also relevant to the theory and practice of adaptation, offering a new vista onto the eternal return of fidelity imperatives in adaptation studies and media theory. Neither perfect ‘faithfulness’ to an authorial genius nor an iconoclastic dismissal of ‘textual spirit’ is possible because the human mind is extended, transformed, rerouted and cocreated in the process of mediation. There is an optimism, then, in the fundamental lesson of Westworld and Romeo and Juliet, that fidelity is not a straightforward path but a loop: we may end with statues, but they will always come back to life.

Notes 1

A recent special issue of Cahiers Élisabéthains on ‘Shakespeare on Screen in the Digital Era’ includes work on Shakespeare and Westworld, as in Stephen O’Neill’s ‘Bring Yourself Back Online, Old Bill: Westworld’s Media Histories, or Six Degrees of Separation from Shakespeare’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 105.1 (2021): 93–116. Sarah Hatchuel, ‘Shakespeare’s Humanizing Language in Films and TV

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Series’, Borrowers and Lenders12.2 (2019): 1–13; Christina Wald, ‘The Tempest and Westworld: Returns of the Dead’, in Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV, ed. Christina Wald (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Reto Winckler, ‘This Great Stage of Androids: Westworld, Shakespeare and the World as Stage’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 10.2 (July 2017): 169–88; Katarzyna Burzyńska, ‘“A New God Will Walk”: Shakespeare, the Renaissance, and the Birth of the Posthuman in Westworld’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 100.1 (2019): 6–23. 2

Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 223.

3

Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 7. Important works in adaptation studies that have resisted the fidelity model include Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (New York: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (New York: Routledge, 1999).

4

Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 5.

5

Hadassa Shani, ‘Modularity as a Guiding Principle of Theatrical Intermediality. Me-Dea-Ex: An Actual-Virtual Digital Theatre Project’, in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, eds. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (New York: Editions Rodopi, 2006), 214. See also Bryan Reynolds, Intermedial Theater: Performance Philosophy, Transversal Poetics, and the Future of Affect (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

6

On this point, see George Raitt, ‘Still Lusting after Fidelity?’, Literature/Film Quarterly 38.1 (2010): 47–58.

7

On this language and its implications, see Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, Film Adaptation, ed. John Naremore (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000): 54–76.

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8 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 40. Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema, 239. Martin Battestin also praises film adaptations for respecting and recreating the ‘essential spirit and manner’ of their textual sources, ‘Osborne’s “Tom Jones”: Adapting a Classic’, The Virginia Quarterly Review 42.3 (Summer 1966): 383. 9 Kamilla Elliott, ‘Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/ Content Dilemma’, in Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 224. 10 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 188, 131, 119, 217. 11 Ibid., 46, 57. 12 Ibid., 41–2. 13 Ibid., 46. 14 Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1998), 60. The dissertation was ‘The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time’ (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 1943). McLuhan’s second book on media, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, also had a Renaissance focus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). McLuhan also wrote on Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and the masque as the prehistory of Hollywood spectacle in ‘Roles, Masks, and Performances’, New Literary History 2.3 (1971): 517–31. 15 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 9–10. 16 Ibid., 58. 17 Ibid., 9. 18 Henry S.Turner, ‘Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare’, South Central Review 26. 1&2 (Winter & Spring 2009): 197–217; Jen E. Boyle, ‘Mediating Sovereignty in Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 58.1 (Winter 2018): 145–68. 19 Joshua Smith, Posthumanist Shakespeares, eds. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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20 Gayle Whittier, ‘The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in “Romeo and Juliet”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40.1 (Spring 1989): 29. 21 All quotations from William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet are from the Arden 3rd edition, ed. René Weis (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). 22 Aaron Kunin, ‘Characters Lounge’, Modern Language Quarterly 70.3 (September 2009): 291. 23 Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 24 Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 200–1. 25 Paul Kottman, ‘Defying the Stars: Tragic Love as the Struggle for Freedom in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 63.1 (Spring 2012): 5. 26 On technophobia and Reformation iconoclasm, see Jennifer Waldron, ‘Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 611–27. Jonathan Gil Harris aligns Juliet with Benjamin’s mechanical Turk, recognizing in her behavior a ‘liberatory yet mechanical compulsion’, in ‘Mechanical Turks, Mammet Tricks, and Messianic Time’, Postmedieval 1 (2010): 84. 27 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, vol. 1, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17. 28 On Shakespeare’s place in media archaeologies, see Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive and Richard Burt and Julian Yates, What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 29 Henry Turner understands the rude mechanicals as an experiment in ‘the coded and intermediated nature of theatrical performance’ in ‘Life Science’, 211. 30 For this position, see Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998).

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6 Ronnie Khalil’s With a Kiss I Die: Reanimating Shakespeare’s Juliet, fidelity, vampires, time and whatever Samuel Kolodezh

1. What’s Love Got to Do with It?: An Introduction Ronnie Khalil’s sequel/adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, With a Kiss I Die (2018) begins with a naked Juliet silhouetted against a setting sun over the Santorini caldera. Eight hundred years have passed since ‘A coven of Greek vampires took refuge in the crypts of Verona, Italy where they discovered the bodies of two star-crossed lovers … Romeo & Juliet’.1 As she turns around and walks towards the camera

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into a foxglove-filled bath she narrates in a voiceover: ‘In my lifetime, I’ve only fallen in love twice. The first time led to betrayal, murder and suicide. The second time was three days ago. And meeting her would prove far more tragic.’ In the next shot, we see her turning the pages of Romeo and Juliet intercut with memories of Romeo’s death. ‘Where’s my Romeo?’ she reads, ‘What’s here? Poison I see has been his timeless end.’ The shots cut between Juliet’s eyes and Romeo’s pale face, to the empty vial of poison, to the text, to Juliet drinking from the empty vial. As a dagger plunges into a body, the scene cuts back to Juliet sitting illuminated in her blue pebbled bath leafing through her text. She pulls out Romeo’s vial from a cross around her neck. The scene cuts back to the sunset. She drinks the poison. The opening credits roll. In this first sequence, we learn that Juliet is a vampire, black, in Greece, a bisexual, in conversation with her own fiction, and perhaps suicidal. Though a suicidal queer black vampire Juliet in twenty-first-century Greece is no less believable than other innumerable versions of Juliet, Khalil’s Juliet is uniquely obsessed with her Juliet-ness in a way that raises questions of adaptation, appropriation and the fidelity of character. Moreover, her vampirism coupled with her obsession with fidelity coalesces to form a commentary on the vampiric nature of adaptation and appropriation that engages in a promethean and eternal sparagmos of text and performance. The daily ritual of vampire Juliet’s death and rebirth somaticizes the metaphorical application of sparagmos to originary text, which is ritualistically torn asunder and reconstituted with each adaptation and appropriation. To adapt, appropriate, translate, transcreate or otherwise do things with Shakespeare is to engage with the authority of Shakespeare, Big Time and little time Shakespeares, Shakespace, and Shakespearean rhizomatics with all their attendant political and methodological loci.2 It is also, as Christy Desmet observes, to engage with character criticism and make a decision about what a character is to be: an empty vessel, a collection of attributes, a suggestion, a representation by its context, a

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universal type or something altogether different.3 Despite the continued proliferation of diverse, singular and global engagements with Shakespeare as well as the general critical consensus that the production of Shakespearean fidelity is and always was a simulacrum of itself, Shakespeare continues to persist as a trampoline that alternately propels narratives and provides a platform for narratives to resist against.4 Vampire Juliet’s reliance on Shakespeare’s physical text reflects anxieties around fidelity regarding Shakespeare’s works. At the same time, Khalil’s Juliet also models an approach to character that is most closely aligned with Reynolds’s Shakespace and Lanier’s Shakespearean rhizomatics, which fosters ‘patterns of thought that value rather than regulate Shakespearean difference’ and that treats characters as almost living processes.5 Such a model also resonates with Ariane Helou and Julia Lupton’s discussion of stellification in the introduction to this volume. The repeated dismemberment of character and text produces a pattern of difference that in turn produces new interpretive communities that identify, value and perpetuate differences through the simple act of repetition. This approach is invoked by the question of becoming posed in Juliet’s opening voiceover: What happens to a character when they fall tragically in love twice? Tragedy, after all, is defined by its singularity as an event, and a tragic character is defined by the end of that event.6 When faced with a second tragedy – a second tragic love – does a character become a different character, or perhaps a more human one by virtue of becoming something else? Similarly, when a work is adapted or appropriated, when it is loved again by a new era, people or context, does it transform and become something else or remain, somehow, reproducing itself? In this chapter, I suggest that questions of adaptation, appropriation, translation and transcreation revolve around two key terms: love and time – love as a technology of articulation and becoming and time as a measure of intimacy. Insofar as adaptation and appropriation of a work can be considered a second love, at stake in appropriation is first, the type of love that

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authorizes becomings and the attendant political and aesthetic concerns that follow them, and second, the ways in which the appropriation of a work changes the past, present and future of both the work and the cultures it is engaged with. Ultimately, the question of a second love moves beyond questions of adaptation into questions of time, identity, love and community. Here, I consider first the ways in which the technology of love, medium of film and concept of time facilitate Juliet becoming herself in With a Kiss I Die, and second, I consider how the particular identities and temporalities of this Juliet interact to produce an adapted Juliet that is necessarily queer, black, vampiric and living at the end of an imaginable Anthropocene. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Khalil’s adaptation offer a way to continue refashioning love as a tool of self-building and character-building in an everevolving temporal environment. A continued conversation of appropriation and adaptation considers who and what belong in discursive fields and when we will be able to productively imagine hybridity as a creative process beyond the allure of humanistic universalism and its attendant problematic adherence to the fidelity of the concept of human within civil society.

2. Prelude: Synopsis When Juliet stabbed herself with Romeo’s dagger, she doomed herself to a slow death. A coven of Greek vampires arrives, and their leader, Father, turns her into a vampire, assuring that her death is slower than she imagined. Juliet resents Father for turning her and spends the next 800 years rubbing shoulders with Da Vinci and Shakespeare, amongst others, as a witness to human history. She refuses to kill a human and complete her transformation, subsists on a string of nurses who allow her to feed on them, and ritualistically poisons herself with foxglove every sunset to remember Romeo. Almost 300 years into her

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slow death, she tells her story to a drunk writer, Shakespeare, and continues ritualistically rereading it in print. The film picks up three days before a vampire coven meeting in present-day Santorini, Greece during which Juliet is expected to finally turn. To convince her, Father sends a messenger with Romeo’s ring, indicating that he knows where Romeo is buried. Juliet, distraught, gets drunk and encounters Farryn, whom she saw at a coffee shop earlier that day and who is dying of leukaemia. Over the span of three days, the two fall in love as Juliet’s nurse, Amaltheo, grows jealous. Eventually, Amaltheo betrays Juliet and tells the coven about Juliet and Farryn’s plans to run away. Father kidnaps Farryn and Juliet comes to her rescue. There, Amaltheo poisons Father, Juliet kills Amaltheo and completes her transformation, Father’s second in command drinks Farryn’s blood and dies, and Juliet walks out with Farryn’s dying body. She brings her to a clearing of ruins, lays her down and drinks her blood, in turn killing herself.

3. Tragedy, or whatever In With a Kiss I Die, the tragic time of Juliet and the shared present of Juliet and Romeo meets the elongated time of Juliet-Vampire (Juliet-V). The encounter between two inhuman times is seemingly made more inhuman by Juliet-V’s ritualistic rehearsal of mourning and death in her attempts to remain human.7 With every suicide she becomes more herself: Juliet-V drinking foxglove to sleep and wait for her Romeo again; Juliet-V killing herself again; Juliet-V speaking the words again.8 That is, in becoming more herself, she becomes more her own character. Concurrently, with every rehearsal of suicide, she becomes less individuated in a series of Juliets that have already found Romeo dead and killed themselves thousands of times. By virtue of her vampirism, Juliet-V can both become singularly herself  –  dissolving

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within herself – and emerge each day virtually the same. Consequently, she empties the value of fidelity as faith in her human self and love of Romeo through her fidelity to the ritual of rehearsing her own character. In her in-between state of becoming and being both vampire and human she remains suspended as a witness to humanity, herself, and monstrosity on the side-lines of community. Juliet-V’s in-betweenness can be understood through what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘whatever being’ – a state of being something, whatever that may be. He writes, ‘Whatever is the thing with all its properties, none of which, however, constitutes difference. In-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminates singularities, making them lovable’.9 Juliet-V becomes a whatever-Juliet that is a whatever-Juliet with all her properties (her poison, love, longing, name, dagger and ring) that might be any Juliet constantly becoming the Juliet. Juliet-V’s vampirism and arrival into extended and slow time allows for her to flicker between being and becoming in an extended iterability in which each iteration is interpenetrable by and substitutable for another. She repeatedly becomes an individuated Juliet and in doing so she continues to make herself loveable and loving – to make herself her own possibility and potential, or human, by Agamben’s definition. By becoming herself, Juliet comes to be a Juliet-event in the process or act of naming herself without resting on a name. She thus outlives her name as a result of her vampirism, which allows her to kill herself and remake herself indefinitely. For Jacques Derrida, the intersection of Romeo and Juliet is the intersection of the names Romeo and Juliet, which is also the impossible intersection of two worlds that are contained within each name because names are untimely.10 The name does not only survive the named, it outstrips a lifetime of words and actions, always already moving faster than a life because it always arrives before a person and leaves its trace before speeding onward. Their names, the least human things about them force them to be inhuman – to be their names,

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or characters, or articulations that are then linked in the title Romeo and Juliet and live on each other and themselves through a shared name. The speed of their names assures that Romeo and Juliet are always bound to be articulations. This speed derives from what Agamben calls ‘the two slopes dropping down from either side of the watershed of whatever’:  genus and individual.11 They each belong to the genus of their respective families, and at the same time, they belong to the multitude of idiosyncrasies that compose them and entangle them in legal, familial, cultural, linguistic and other systems before they can ever choose to accept or renounce their names. Their names make them tragically both themselves and not-themselves. Juliet-V, however, gets to be herself. Her elongated lifetime and her whatever being between the being of iterability and the becoming of repetition allow her to outlive her name, and in outliving it, to create it. Rather than being captured by her name, she becomes what Reynolds calls a ‘naming function’, which gives her agency to actively be and become, to love again, and to relive her story with a difference and be herself without ever being identifiable or identical to herself.12 This type of agency perhaps resonates with popular feminist takes on Juliet’s character found in pop songs, movies and theatre adaptations in which Juliet chooses self-love as in Halsey’s 2017 hit song and music-video ‘Now or Never’. Yet, Juliet-V’s choice is imposed on her and she is forced to live and rehearse eternally. Through that rehearsal, she gains control of her name, not by stepping out of the narrative and altering its retelling, but by replicating it so many times across so many contexts that it becomes her own and her eternity transforms into a series of individuated nows rather than a monolithic futurity in which her and Romeo’s story is retold under direction of the Prince and the various school curriculums, artists, teens and creators who do things with Romeo and Juliet. Her agency to become, however, requires a catalyst to actualize a future community within which her potential to build through repetition can be fully individuated and stellified.

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4. The heart is such a fickle tech If the name or a character can become-otherwise like anything else, then what maintains a name’s or a character’s coherence? How unmoored can one become from the various ties that bind someone to their own time, space, culture, language, family, government, race, sexuality or species and remain themselves? To what extent, in other words, can one adapt oneself and love again – articulating new ties without forgetting the old? For Juliet-V these questions are pressing. Throughout the film, Juliet-V repeatedly wonders whether she can love again and what the consequences of doing so might be. For Amaltheo, for Father, and for herself (for most of the film), she exists to love Romeo – to play out her death for him and, in doing so, to remain herself. Without her love of Romeo, she becomes, as Amaltheo jealously admonishes her, ordinary rather than extraordinary. The problem of extraordinary love and of second-love is a temporal one. By loving a specific person, one suddenly loves in time and is bound to embark on a journey of fighting against the entropy and chance that time introduces – it is to intertwine temporalities and in doing so to produce something new and impossible to capture. To love someone else, is to become like everyone else. To remain extraordinary, however, requires the end of everything. It means to become one’s name. The choice seems to be between loving tragically once or never loving at all. Dominic Pettman charts an alternate course through the love of an a-subjective subject, or a whatever singularity.13 It is a subject that already contains the difference of all other subjects and can be any other subject. Juliet-V can be any other Juliet without being beholden to the various technologies that maintain her Juliet-ness: her name, her story, her poison, her love. Becoming oneself, however, requires becoming one’s own technology that makes sense of one’s self, of others and of the world through becoming oneself, others and the world.

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That is, it requires a letting-go of one’s various articulations without losing them. In With a Kiss I Die, this third course is represented cinematically through a technique of dismantling the face  –  the most prominent human articulation of identity – in two scenes: the initial meeting primed by JulietV’s discussions of true love and the consummation of that love in the clubs and ruins of Santorini. Both scenes follow the same pattern:  horizontally, the faces of the two lovers are cut by the bodies and faces of men who desire Juliet-V; vertically, the progression of shots dismantles the face into body parts – hands, lips, hips, breasts, eyes – then highlights the faces in a succession of shots that end on a mediating third party in the form of an empty chair and a crying Amaltheo. Scene 1: Farryn sits in a café several tables across from Juliet-V. Juliet-V is hit on by a man whom she quickly deters. Once he says hello, the scene cuts to Farynn’s face. Each time Juliet-V responds to the man, the camera cuts to Farynn’s face. Juliet-V asks the stranger: ‘How do you know it was love, and not just a chemical response in the brain caused by erotic stimuli?’ The camera cuts to a smirking Farynn, and Juliet continues: ‘After all, the only difference between love and lust, is that the first one requires the intent of being with one, and only one, significant other.’ When Juliet-V is finished asking the man to do her the honour of ‘fucking off’, the end of her sentence is punctuated again by Farryn’s face. Once the man leaves, the camera begins to switch from colour-saturated close-ups of Juliet-V looking at Farryn, Farryn staring back, Juliet-V looking away, and Farryn looking down with a smile. When Farryn looks up, Juliet-V and the colour saturation are gone. Scene 2: Amaltheo is sleeping in a facemask and wakes to find Juliet-V’s vial of poison lying across her copy of Romeo and Juliet. The camera cuts to Juliet-V walking into a club with Farryn, to Amaltheo facing a mirror and peeling off his facemask, to a succession of Juliet-V’s, Farryn’s, and

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Amaltheo’s faces: Juliet-V and Farryn dancing to Amaltheo peeling off his facemask. Once Juliet-V and Farryn kiss, the camera focuses on their lips and cuts to Amaltheo’s hands unveiling a razor blade. Juliet-V and Farryn begin to kiss in a valley and the camera cuts to Amaltheo crying naked in the shower. The camera focuses on Juliet and Farryn’s lips, tongues, hands, faces, shoulders, breasts, and then back to their faces and Amaltheo crying again in the shower. On the horizontal axis, the intercutting of men between the two lovers’ faces achieves at least two effects. First, it introduces a community of lovers and suggests that love is always plural, contingent and already part of a network of fates mediated by other people, cultures, ideologies, things and contexts, both physical and metaphysical. The gender of the third figure is also significant because it accentuates the underlying nuisance (the wooer) and violence to self and others (Amaltheo) of male desire, which is presented as desire for a sexual (the wooer wants to hook up) or divine (Amaltheo wants immortality) object. The love between Juliet and Farryn passes through this type of desire but is not constituted by it. Instead, it is successfully presented as something potential and messianic without being actualized in a concrete and prefabricated desire. The second effect of the horizontal axis is that it temporalizes Juliet and Farryn’s love through the depiction of loss. In the first sequence, Juliet’s rebuttal of her wooer introduces the idea and stakes of choice by asserting that there can be only one love that is everlasting and particular. Juliet’s speech highlights the folding of eternity into a moment that constitutes one of the temporal tricks of ‘true love’, and her rejection of the wooer emphasizes the choice in love that ironically requires the dissolution of particular love. In other words, every love is star-crossed so long as it is a particular love. This contingency of particular love is then further emphasized by the final shot of the empty chair when Farryn turns to look again at where Juliet was sitting.

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The sense of loss and contingency that follows the temporalization and subjectification of love is further reinforced in the second sequence. First, Amaltheo finds that the objects that defined Juliet and her attachments have been left behind. Second, as Juliet and Farryn are falling in love, Amaltheo begins to cut himself, literally losing blood and evoking the spectre of suicide. Juliet’s love of Farryn is punctuated by Amaltheo’s flirtation with death, presumably caused by his perceived loss of Juliet and the contingency of her choice. Third, throughout the first half of the sequence Amaltheo sheds his face by taking off his facemask as he stares at himself in the mirror. Depending on how one interprets the scene, Amaltheo is either losing his facade and becoming himself or losing himself and becoming no one. Either way, his perceived loss transforms him, if momentarily and metaphorically, into someone else. Drawing on the conceptual work of Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze and Agamben in conjunction with the aptly titled film Face/Off, Pettman explains, To be someone else ‘on the outside’ is to appreciate better the way in which the qualities of being are in reality the directives of being-such. The desire to ‘be somebody’, when voiced under the regime of identity, is a completely false liberation, one which actually drowns whateverbeing in the river of interpellation (while wearing the concrete-shoes of ‘character’).14 Though the peeling of a facemask certainly does not replicate the disorienting experience of wearing another’s face, Amaltheo’s melting face conjures a similar idea through a simple cinematic effect. Amaltheo’s face is a character’s face that can be taken off and interchanged. This interchangeability points to the artificiality of the face, which is also necessary to the construction of identity. It is Amaltheo’s face that Juliet rejects in favour of Farryn’s face, and so it is this face that Amaltheo must symbolically shed in order to both grieve the

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loss of and potentially attain the object of his desire that is necessarily contingent. Juliet-V also encounters the problem of faciality made even more complicated by the cultural entanglement of the names Romeo and Juliet that make Juliet and Farryn, in their cinematic and vampiric worlds, seem third-rate relative to the cultural institution of Shakespeare that the names Romeo and Juliet evoke. If Juliet-V picks another lover, she is putting a new face on an old love or changing her own face to be a different character. The vertical axis of the shot sequences, especially the second sequence, attempts to resolve Juliet and Farryn’s problem of identity by representing desire’s de- and re-construction of faciality. As Juliet-V and Farryn fall deeper in love, the shots progressively switch from alternating close-ups of their faces to close-ups of their lips, fingers, necks, breasts and torso. The shots focusing on Amaltheo’s face also transition to shots of his fingers, wrists and shins. On its face, the shot sequence merely creates parallelism and eroticizes female-female love through a heteronormative positionality. However, this desubjectification that can be read as objectification is necessary for Juliet to escape her own face and name so that she can have a new tragic lover. A face shares a similar logic with a proper name. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tell us that the face is a machine of faciality that works through a combination of signification on a white wall and the subjectification of black holes such that the combinations of various units (teacher and student, worker and boss, citizen and soldier) produce various recognizable faces.15 The face, like the proper name, is inhuman, produced by a combination of inhuman signs and the human interpretation of them that enmesh them into networks of meaning in which they are crystalized into concrete symbols. A face, like a proper name, often outlives its subject, and like a proper name, can move across and create subjects. The desubjectification of the face into various body parts in the moment of synchronous trifold desire between Juliet-V,

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Farryn and Amaltheo illustrates that while the face and name contain identity, they are not identity itself and can be taken apart to become pure desire between fingers, lips, blades, blood, hair, breasts – a whole mess of body parts and desires each belonging to their own moments to be reconstituted as new faces and new names. Here, there is a literal cinematic sparagmos that sets up an attendant stellification. The sequence ends with Amaltheo crying in the shower and covering his face. He becomes a faceless body without an identity beyond nameless grief as the scene fades to black. The next scene is a close-up on Farryn and Juliet’s faces: Juliet staring up at the sky as Farryn nuzzles into the crook of her neck. They now form a new two-faced singularity of true lovers. As if to reinforce the visual de- and re- construction of Juliet-V into a Juliet with a new face and name disentangled from Romeo, Farryn asks her ‘What about Romeo?’ and Juliet responds, ‘I once dreamt that when he died he was turned into stars, and put in the heavens above so everyone could admire his beauty … But now I realize he’s not in some crypt but up there, more brilliant than ever.’ After the sequence Farryn fully replaces Romeo and the lovers’ face-swap is complete while Juliet maintains her character’s integrity. Her second love opens the possibility of a coming stellar community of love and second fates juxtaposed to the isolated love of suicide and crypt. Farryn acts as a catalyst for Juliet’s new imagined community by introducing an element of difference in the repetition. Suddenly, Juliet dismembers and reconstitutes herself with an other. Juliet’s dream is an allusion to Juliet’s soliloquy as she waits for Romeo to consummate her marriage to him: Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun. (3.2.21–5)

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The allusion offers an elegant nod to Juliet’s vampirism and its night-cloaked mythology, but more importantly it implies the humanistic idea that humans are capable of replacing fates to make times of their own through the intensity of love and passion.16 Through her allusion to her own words, Juliet-V takes time for herself. Time seems to move in a progression mediated by images of stars from inhuman fate, to human technique, to communal creation. Yet Juliet-V’s sovereignty is special in so far as it is less a method of individual agency and more an acknowledgement of agency despite the foregoing of individuality and an embrace of community through loving again. Love progresses on a trajectory from the impersonal, to the personal, to the depersonalized.

5. Losing time, losing things Despite the passions of both Juliet and Juliet-V, the clock never stops ticking in either Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Khalil’s With a Kiss I Die. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet ends her soliloquy with a reminder of her lack of control over the march of time: ‘So tedious is this day / As is the night before some festival / To an impatient child that hath new robes / And may not wear them’ (3.2.28–31). Similarly, in With a Kiss I Die, the minutes and hours continue to tick away to Juliet-V’s impending vampiric consummation and Farryn’s inevitable death. As the two kiss in the morning, Farryn tells Juliet, ‘Time’s up.’ The three days they had are spent. Juliet acknowledges the ticking of the clock but does not lament it. She responds, ‘Then let’s run away together. It doesn’t matter if we have one more month, or one week, or one day. At least we’ll be together for that time.’ In doing so, she renounces Romeo and implicitly suggests the ticking of the clock is not necessary. That is, it depends on subjective measure and the sense and value ascribed to it by agents. She solidifies this idea when she responds to Farryn’s question

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about Romeo and tells Farryn about her dream. By laying claim to their time through an unbinding from Romeo, she articulates a third path through time that is neither objective or subjective, but de-subjectified and hence valuable because it does not require articulation other than its own. Unlike Juliet’s initial love, this love is not bound by promises, laws, societies or families. Rather, it moves easily through all of them, naming itself, and destroying mechanisms of subjectification. Juliet’s decision to enjoy and claim time in this second love is a reversal of her subjectifying and memorializing position. Throughout With a Kiss I Die, Juliet-V and Farryn debate between ecstatic subjective time and the indefatigable persistence of objective time. Farryn argues for an urgent and aesthetic relationship to time while Juliet-V argues that the combination of subjectivity and time produces tragedy. She tells Farryn that ‘Life always ends the same way, with humanity destroying anything beautiful’ and ‘Where you see beauty, I see life plucked from earth and slowly wilting away.’ From the position of her slow death, she does not want time to interfere with her or to interfere with time. Throughout the scene, she is attempting to dissuade Farryn from the life of a vampire. She ultimately marks her argument by metaphorizing an example of a boy she saw begging for his life while his entrails lay next to him: ‘When you’ve lost so much of yourself, there’s no point in living.’ Juliet-V avows that imposing subjective time on objective time still ultimately ends in the death of one’s self or subjectivity. Tarrying with inhuman time leads to becoming inhuman for Juliet-V, and we learn that what she means to illustrate with her example is that ‘Living forever means you have to watch everyone you ever loved die.’ For her, to be one’s self is to be loved. Farryn retorts that ‘Better than them watching us die’ highlights the individualism of Juliet-V’s position in that moment. She has no reply for Farryn, and the scene cuts to Amaltheo preparing Juliet’s foxglove poison for her, reminding us of her ritualistic rehearsal of suicide. The fact that Amaltheo does not find her there suggests the beginnings of her transformation into something other than human or

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vampire, which is concluded with Juliet-V’s choice to create time with Farryn without standing witness to it or imposing her own subjectivity onto it. Juliet-Vs redefinition of temporality parallels the slow shedding of the objects that help her maintain her identity as Romeo’s lover and thus permit her to witness history rather than act in it. The objects are her vial of poison, her copy of Romeo and Juliet, and Romeo’s ring. I’ve already discussed Juliet-V’s relation to the poison at some length. She tells Farryn, ‘I drink it during sunset to remember our love.’ As I’ve pointed out earlier, that is not quite right. She drinks the poison and rehearses suicide in order to continue creating the memory of her love as it was – to continue recreating the most intense moment of her love with Romeo, and to continue becoming herself. Thus, remembering becomes a kind of interminable revisiting and recreating of herself that, ironically, entrenches her subjective time in objective time. She can remain a witness to time’s passage by violently and forcefully remaining herself. In the same breath, however, she introduces the book as a supplement to the poison: ‘But memories fade, and after all this time, the only ones I still have left are the ones on those pages, floating somewhere between real life and fantasy. Sometimes I wonder if our love was also … just made up.’ Her copy of Romeo and Juliet introduces a time-loop, which brings up tricky questions of temporality and agency. Juliet-V attempts to maintain her Julietness, which she meditates upon every day before poisoning herself in order to follow the script that she created. As Juliet-V points out, the troubling question is whether the book is part of her life or whether her life is a rehearsal of a fantasy. The question or problem, however, is only a problem when regarded through the lenses of knowledge and identity, which produce metonymic fractals that replicate infinitely with ambiguous consequences. If Juliet-V does not need to know who she is or remain identical to herself in order to become herself, then the book, like the vial, is only a tool of creative mnemonics. Indeed, it is both fact and fiction within the narrative. It is, in the words of Richard Burt and Julian

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Yates, ‘unreadable’.17 And its unreadability gestures also to its palimpsestic polytemporality that Juliet-V eventually embraces after rejecting the book.18 Both the vial and the book are left neatly at her house when she absconds with Farryn to party in the clubs of Santorini and have sex in its ruins. The ring is the only object that remains with Juliet, but while it physically remains with her, it undergoes a transformation that mirrors Juliet-V’s own. Romeo’s ring initially motors the temporality of the film and introduces the urgency of the three-day span in which the action takes place. It is first introduced after Juliet and Farryn first see each other in the cafe. Juliet walks down the twilight cobbled streets lost in thought, when she notices a boy following her and pushes him against an alley wall. He apologizes and lifts his shirt to reveal ‘Quid pro Quo’ carved into his stomach and a ring dangling from his neck, and he tells her that the mysterious offer is only good for three days. The offer is that if Juliet undergoes her final transformation into a vampire by taking someone’s life, then Father, or the one who initially turned her, will reveal where Romeo lies buried. Unlike the poison and the book, which are primarily tools of self-making for Juliet, the ring is necessarily relational with others. It acts as both a reminder and promise, and it doubles reminders and promises. It serves to remind Juliet of Romeo’s promise and love, and it serves to promise both a contract with Father and a fulfilment of timeless love through her own implied death. As Joshua Smith argues, the ring’s function in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is already to mediate both genres and temporalities.19 In With a Kiss I Die, the ring’s special connection to the past, the future and to death allows for it to be a site of transformation because it allows Juliet-V to simultaneously meditate on the past while considering the possibility of alternative futures in which she dies, or is reunited with her first love, or finds new love, or all three, or none at all. The ring also introduces the contractual nature of a ring’s promise. For the promise of the ring to be fulfilled, Juliet

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must become productive. The ring was originally a symbol of a marital contract that would presumably eventually lead to children, and in With a Kiss I Die, it becomes a symbol of a different kind of production. First, if Juliet activates the promise of the ring on Father’s terms, then she will complete her transformation as a vampire, effectively refashioning herself. Second, we learn later that Father wants Juliet to consummate her vampirism because he has become impotent. He cannot produce more vampires and the vampires he has produced since her are also incapable of producing vampires. She is the only one capable of procreating his vampiric line. When she chooses Farryn, she chooses to engage in her own non-productive time beyond her past, present or future social networks.20 The ring turns from an object of promise and memory, tying her to the dead, into an object that memorializes who she was and permits her to become someone who is able to promise without promising and to productively embrace non-productivity. When the final object, the dagger, arrives on the scene as Father coerces Juliet to turn into a vampire by threatening Farryn, Juliet-V has already transformed into something else through a second-love, remaining herself without being attached to a single articulation of identity expressed through rituals or objects of self. Nevertheless, the film still maintains a tragic ending. Everybody dies and all that is left is the seemingly abandoned beauty of Santorini. The deaths, however, are not caused by mishaps or incompatible temporalities that lead to untimely events. They are instead caused, directly or indirectly, by disease, evoking a temporality that is more inhuman than any vampire. The inhuman temporality of disease that pervades the film also gestures to the idea that the dichotomies that persist in interpretations of Romeo and Juliet and With a Kiss I Die – subjective time versus objective time, individual desire versus social desire, individual versus law – are ultimately not the central motors of the becomings of characters or works. Becoming-otherwise, adapting or appropriating, that is, are inherently unproductive.

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6. Loving at the end of the world The action of the film is framed by sickness and every character is or makes themselves sick. In the first scene after the opening credits, Amaltheo wipes the drool from Juliet-V’s poisoned mouth, followed by an introduction to Farryn, who looks off into the distance and remembers the death of her mother in a hospital. Farryn herself, we find out, is in the final stages of leukaemia, causing her to be un-turnable because she has sick blood. Amaltheo bleeds himself for Juliet-V to the point of making himself sickly. Father and the vampire brood are impotent and slowly withering away. And Juliet, finally, kills herself by drinking Farryn’s sick blood. Disease is the film’s only killer. The theme of sickness is adapted, in part, in With a Kiss I Die, from Romeo and Juliet. According to David Bergeron, ‘The polarities of sickness and health suggest a tragic axis on which the play turns.’21 The sickness he identifies is physical, moral and spiritual, but he argues that ‘the physical maladies collectively add to the tragic tone and epitomize a world infected and in need of healing’.22 The tragedy Bergeron identifies in Romeo and Juliet is that there is no cure for the various illnesses, both physical and metaphorical. Though adapted from Romeo and Juliet, the theme of sickness as it relates to vampirism and the twenty-first century in With a Kiss I Die is probably most inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2014).23 Zachary Price argues that Only Lovers Left Alive ‘applies a new pace to an old vampire story, a pace that inflects vampires as depressed and emaciated subjects struggling to keep in time with a world that demands too much of them’.24 Jarmusch’s postmodern vampires contain the anxieties that accompany trans- and post-humanisms and that Jack Halberstam argues are ‘on us and in us’ rather than on the margins waiting at the door.25 These are no longer aristocratic, foreign, non-white or queer vampires but vampires of vacuity who are both products and producers of a suicidal combination of capitalism and

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whiteness.26 They are also the vampires of appropriation and adaptation par excellence – transversal vampires that, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard, belong to a universal process which is purely metonymic and viral by definition.27 That is, these are vampires that are anaemic in a sick world and, at the same time, are anaemic because of their refusal to adapt and their insistence on reproducing old mythologies to revive a world that appears dead to them. As characters within a genre, they have remained the same, but their affect has changed.28 Khalil borrows this vampire aesthetic and adapts it to test the character of Juliet rather than the character of the vampire. That is, the theme of sickness that weaves throughout With a Kiss I Die draws on the anaemic state of the vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive and offers some of the same critiques of ‘human nature’, post-industrial society and pervasive nostalgia. The tragedy of the vampire becomes simply a symptom of humanity’s own inhumanness: its systems and narratives that scale vampirism to a different order of magnitude. In order to articulate this new vampire aesthetic, Price draws on Lauren Berlant’s theorization of slow death, ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence’.29 Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on biopower, Berlant argues that ‘slow death occupies the temporalities of the endemic’ where endemics are permanent factors that sap a population’s strength: exhaustion, stress, obesity, depression and so on. Within the space of slow death, Berlant is interested in outlining the ‘lateral agency’ that facilitates what Teresa Brennan calls an ‘atmosphere’ that does not have the creative or heroic capacity of events. ‘Under a regime of crisis ordinariness’, Berlant writes, in which life is a constant living-in physical, financial, emotional and spiritual illness, ‘life feels truncated – more like doggy paddling than swimming out to the magnificent horizon’.30 In the case of obesity, ‘To eat and to be an interruption of desire to build toward the good life that could be a meaningful or meaningless feeling of well-being that spreads out for a moment, not as a

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projection toward a future.’31 Action within an environment of slow death can be lateral and that can be enough. In her words, people ‘do live in it [the space of slow death], just not very well’.32 Living, but not very well, suggests more than Agamben’s bare life, but less than the good life. This type of anaemic life is dramatized by Jarmusch’s vampires, and it is integral to the world of With a Kiss I Die. In a world in which sickness permeates, there are not many choices. One can hold on to the past (Juliet-V), try to appreciate the beauty of the present (Farryn) or try to continue at any cost (Farryn, Father and Amaltheo). In second-love, Juliet-V seems to discover another option, which is to create a new dynamic community, even at the cost of fulfilling the prophecy of tragedy. By shedding the habits and things that make her Juliet, Juliet-V can become something else while remaining herself and maintaining the tragic temporal rhythms that define her. Through a depersonalization of love by way of a dismantling faciality, an a-subjective engagement with time and a stripping of artifacts and objects, Juliet-V both becomes and remains merely Juliet alongside Farryn. Together, they form an alternate community through the technology of love, used as a mechanism to actively make sense of the world by crafting it in their own image. They live in and through what Joanna Zylinska calls ‘a feminist counterapocalypse’. In a world in which everyone is sick, creating communities that are good enough and that don’t depend on production or reproduction is an act of love that reclaims love from identity. Zylinska writes, ‘A feminist counterapocalypse that reworks finalism as a structuring condition of being in the world, while also issuing a responsibility for our entanglements with and in it, presents itself as both a less tragic and less comical response to the Anthropocene narrative’, which hails the end of man in the world.33 Juliet-V and Farryn eschew finality by embracing an a-subjective second love and queering time. The feminist counter-apocalypse, however, cannot be really thought without the lens of black and queer feminisms,

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which implicitly play an outsized role in With a Kiss I Die, despite the expressly stated multicultural politics of the film.34 The vampire genre similarly must be thought through the relationship between race and history. Vampire films, Dave Hudson points out, have always been transgenre and transhistorical: ‘Vampires mark where histories comingle  –  where they are multiple rather than singular, particular rather than universal, and transnational rather than national.’35 And within the vampiric framework, the particularity of vampires is itself neither living or dead, but undead. That is, vampires are palimpsestic and accumulate racial, gendered, sexual and cultural traces that accompany their development within and beyond genre. Their palimpsestic quality points at once to the diffusion and dissemination of de-subjectified whiteness and capital into what Deleuze calls a ‘society of control’ and to invention in whatever productive or non-productive forms it may come.36 Juliet-V’s trajectory in With a Kiss I Die seems to embrace non-productive queer negativity as well as Black feminism, which articulates that Black futurity within reproductive logics is ‘no future at all’.37 In the film, there is one explicit nod to race coded through vampirism. After Juliet-V saves Farryn from her cousin, Amaltheo tells Juliet-V that she has no choice but to kill Farryn because she could reveal Juliet-V’s secret. Juliet-V asks, ‘Who’s going to believe her?’ Amaltheo responds, ‘Someone. Anyone. Maybe not in America but here – there’s far more history and far more hatred.’ Juliet-V snaps back, ‘I know the history.’ The exchange evokes vampire metaphors of race, coupled with Juliet-V’s blackness, and frames the relationship between Juliet-V and Farryn in logics of foreclosure that both queer and black thought contend with. Within the film, this conversation is a minor plot point that raises the transgressive stakes of Juliet-V and Farryn’s love by suggesting that despite Juliet-V’s supernatural powers, Farryn’s mere existence has the power to harm her. Structurally, however, Juliet-V’s capacity for second-love and whatever-being rests on the specificity of her blackness and queerness.

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In the first part of this chapter, I tracked how Khalil’s Juliet detaches from her name, face and identity while maintaining her Juliet-ness through a second-love that is non-productive and already imagines a future beyond no-future. Her nofuture, non-productive love with Farryn rehearses the end of Romeo and Juliet at the end of the world in a way that can only be interpreted in the film aesthetically by zooming out and contextualizing the death of the two lovers within the landscape of Santorini’s ruins illuminated by the setting sun. Beyond aesthetics, however, the temporalities of Juliet-V’s blackness and queerness allow for the invention of a second love at the end of the world. They allow for a temporality of ontological hopelessness within objective time instead of epistemic ennui within subjective time universalized. Moreover, her disavowal of both her rarefied past and monstrous future make her monstrous in the eyes of everyone around her, and it is only the embrace of that monstrosity that finally gives her the agency to be non-productive and in control of her secondlove within a sick world. That is, the temporalities of Juliet-V’s character explicitly coexist with the temporalities of her world and affirm her Julietness as a whatever-Juliet becoming Juliet. They are not attached to an identity or a figure that is dropped into different contexts or worn like a mask. At the end of his essay on Shakespearean rhizomatics, Lanier advocates for ‘being responsible finally not to the text(s) but to a principle of “Shakespeare’s” ongoing becoming, or to give a proper name, radical creativity’ because ‘the very semiotic instability of “Shakespeare,” its capacity for deterritorialization and reterritorialization within time, complicates the notion of cultural dominants and subordinates and thus problematizes the model of Shakespearean appropriation’.38 I think Khalil’s film suggests that Shakespeare is rhizomatic, but it also suggests that de- and re-territorialization within time are intimately bound up with the temporalities of characters and the worlds they create and inhabit. Adaptations and appropriations can not only help us think about time differently but also to remix temporalities to create new communities beyond production

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and reproduction.39 This adaptation and its implicit embrace of queer aesthetics suggest a pessimistic hopefulness beyond the death-drive of the now into the fantasy of the undead that promises a future of never-ending nows. Carla Freccero ends her chapter on Romeo and Juliet, ‘Perhaps that is what literature is, then, after all: the grand performance of the sign’s illusory meaningfulness, its ability to craft generative fantasy – about fantasy of generation – from beyond the grave, not as the triumph of literature over death, but rather, as the triumph in death of literature over life.’40 This triumph in death of literature over life is perhaps also the undead queer futurity that the film traffics in, celebrating an unimagined future that is neither yet living nor dead.

Notes 1

All quotations are from With a Kiss I Die, dir. Ronnie Khalil (Gravitas Ventures, 2018).

2

On adaptation and appropriation in Shakespeare, see W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and; Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996); Bryan Reynolds, Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Douglas Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value’, in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, ‘Adaptation, Appropriation, or What You Will’, Shakespeare 11, No. 1 (2015): 10–19; Pascale Aebischer and Edward Esche, Remaking Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, Shakespeare and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 1999); Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation

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(New York: Routledge, 2012); Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon, ‘On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success” – Biologically’ in New Literary History 38, No. 3 (2007): 4452–48; Maurizio Calbi, Spectral Shakespeares (New York: Palgrave, 2013); and Sonia Massai, World-Wide Shakespeares (New York: Routledge, 2006). 3

Shakespeare and Appropriation, 4. I am using character broadly here to extend beyond human or anthropomorphic characters and include nonhuman characters such as animals, cities, environments, tools and other elements that are often infused with non-human agency.

4

In his ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics’, Douglas Lanier introduces Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘rhizome’ as a way to conceptualize the field of Shakespearean adaptation as an ‘aggregated web of cultural forces and productions which in some ways lay claim to the label “Shakespearean” but which has long exceeded the canon of plays and poems we have come to attribute to the pen of William Shakespeare’. Lanier echoes other critics such as Bryan Reynolds and W.B Worthen, who conceptualize Shakespeare broadly as a discursive field.

5

Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics’, 36.

6

Many scholars have written about the temporality of theatre in general and Shakespeare in particular. Rebecca Bushnell names Northrop Frye, Stanley Cavell, David Kastan and Mathew Wagner; see ‘Tragedy and Temporality’ PMLA 129.4 (2014): 783–9. Others include Scott Maisano, Jonathan Gil Harris, Julian Yates, to name a few. Questions of temporality are especially pertinent to conversations about adaptation and appropriation because to adapt a work is to wrestle with how temporality works in different mediums, for different characters and in different contexts. In creation, timing is often everything.

7

Phillipa Berry argues for the significance of the relationship between Juliet and the feasting month of July. ‘Between Idolatry and Astrology: Modes of Temporal Repetition in Romeo and Juliet’, in Romeo and Juliet: A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 372–92. Similarly, in With a Kiss I Die, the attempt to remain ‘human’ is an attempt to disrupt or

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freeze time in the act of memoralization that is interrupted by Juliet-V’s new love and produces a desubjectified ‘a-temporal temporality’. 8

Juliet claims to drink the same poison that Romeo drank to kill himself, which is presumably nightshade. However, in the film, her nurse brews the poison from blue foxgloves.

9

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 18.

10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Aphorism Counter-Time’, in Acts of Litearture, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 432. 11 Agamben, The Coming Community, 19. 12 For Reynolds, the naming function is an adaptation of Foucault’s ‘author function’ and emphasizes the ‘many uses of proper naming’ as a mechanism that can be used to move surprisingly through power-structures and shape them through movement. Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 13 See Dominic Pettman, Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 14 Ibid., 105. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Masumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 177. 16 David Lucking articulates the role of human time in Romeo and Juliet in his ‘Uncomfortable Time’. See also Paul A. Kottman’s idea of ‘tragic subjectivity’ in ‘Defying the Stars: Tragic Love as the Struggle for Freedom in Romeo and Juliet’ as well as Julia Lupton’s ‘Response to Paul A. Kottman, Defying the Stars: Tragic Love as the Struggle for Freedom in Romeo and Juliet’. 17 See Julian Yates and Richard Burt, What’s The Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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18 On palimpsests and Michael Serres’s concepts of the polyand multi-temporal in early modern and Shakespeare studies, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), especially the Introduction. 19 Joshua Smith, ‘The Ring as an Object Lesson in Temporality and Genre in Romeo and Juliet’, English Literary Renaissance 49.1 (2019): 89. 20 Juliet-V consistently exists outside of productive temporal logics. In choosing Farryn, she creates an alternative nonproductive temporal logic that Jack Halberstam argues is traditionally produced by queer sub-cultures. Cf. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: NYU Press, 2019); and Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 21 David M. Bergeron, ‘Sickness in Romeo and Juliet’, CLA Journal 20.3 (1977): 357. 22 Ibid., 358. 23 In an interview with Derek Anderson of Daily Dead, Khalil cites Only Lovers Left Alive, Before Sunset, Room in Rome and A Single Man as his most significant influences in making With a Kiss I Die. 24 Zachary Price, ‘Exhausting Horror: Twenty-first-century Vampires in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive’, Screen 59.3 (2018): 333. 25 Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 163. 26 On vampires in film and culture, see Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and Dave Hudson, Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

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27 Fred Botting makes the case that Gothic forms, including vampire films, have disseminated beyond genres and intermingled with reality, generating a kind of cyborg-gothic, gothic-cyborg relationship as an effect of post- and transhuman life. 28 Price, ‘Exhausting Horror’, 335. 29 Lauren Berlant, ‘Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)’, Critical Inquiry 33.4 (2007): 754. 30 Ibid., 779. 31 Ibid., 779–80. 32 Ibid., 780. 33 Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 61. 34 According to Meemoeder, Khahlil is quoted as saying that the casting decisions were accidental. In an interview with GirlTalkHQ, Ella Kweku (the actor who plays Juliet) confirms that neither race nor gender was considered in casting. Nevertheless, race and gender play an outstanding role, and both the media surrounding the film and the marketing of the film itself focus on its queer interracial love story. 35 Dale Hudson, Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 13. 36 Deleuze introduces ‘societies of control’ in one of his later works, ‘Postscripts on the Societies of Control’ in which he updates Foucault’s disciplinary societies and argues that the dissolution of disciplines and authorities is creating new interdisciplinary societies of control that are ambiguous and can be either all-encompassing or deployed to break control. Kara Keeling discusses societies of control as they relate to race and queerness in her Queer Times, Black Futures. 37 Kara Keeling, ‘Looking for M – Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future’, GLQ 15.4 (2009): 578. 38 Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics’, 36.

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39 On the power of temporality to disrupt and reframe, see Bliss Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 40 Carla Freccero, ‘Romeo and Juliet Love Death’, in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 307.

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7 Anuvading Romeo: Retelling ‘love’ in Indian iterations of Romeo and Juliet Anandi Rao

Tragic romances or tales of star-crossed lovers are not foreign in Indian popular imaginaries, be it ‘Heer-Ranjha’, the Punjabi epic poem, or the tale of ‘Layla and Majnun’ with its Persianate influences, and of course Romeo and Juliet. In recent years, with the formation of anti-Romeo squads by right-wing Hindu groups policing public displays of affection and intermarriage, Romeo has become a symbol of ‘foreign’, ‘unnatural’ and ‘transgressive’ love – a legacy of colonialism that must be purged from the imagined Hindu state. This paper seeks to Anuvad is the Sanskrit derived Hindi word for translation. In this paper, I use it as a noun and conjugate the verb as I would use and conjugate an English word. I do this to signify the blend that Shakespeare in India often is.

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re-evaluate this formulation by looking at Hindi translations, or re-iterations, of the play that help paint a more complicated portrayal of the status of Shakespeare in India so that he is more than just a ‘foreign’ vestige of colonialism. By ‘translation’ I refer not only to the practice of linguistic translation, but also to the myriad other ways in which Shakespeare is translated and adapted in India. In particular I am drawing on the Sanskritderived Hindi word for translation, anuvad. While anuvad does connote the ‘carrying across’ that Latinate words for translation imply, the ‘underlying metaphor’ is ‘temporal – to say after, to repeat’.1 Anuvad’s etymological roots in Sanskrit refer to a process of ‘saying after or again, repeating by way of explanation, explanatory repetition or reiteration with corroboration or illustration’.2 In this essay, I look at several iterations of Romeo and Juliet, and the character of Romeo in particular, as instances of ‘explanatory repetitions’. In doing so, I trace a genealogy, from the 1890s to the present day, of Shakespeare and love as they manifest in these translations. As a starting point for my argument, I turn to two iterations of Romeo that appeared in 2017. The first is the well-known phenomenon of anti-Romeo squads in Uttar Pradesh, a state in North India, and the second is a lesser-known web series titled Romil and Jugal, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet where the leading protagonists are men. Yogi Adityanath, a religious Hindu leader, was appointed as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in March 2017. Upon becoming the chief minister, he created anti-Romeo squads to fulfil one of the Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election campaign promises.3 While forms of moral policing existed prior to his appointment, they were not explicitly called anti-Romeo squads. The goal of these squads was ‘to protect the honour of women’ and, per their election manifesto, to ‘ensure the safety of collegegoing girls’ and ‘check eve-teasing’.4 On the other end of the spectrum, Romil and Jugal is a Hinglish web-series adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, produced by Ekta Kapoor for ALTBalaji, Balaji Telefilms’ online streaming platform. Hinglish is a Hindi-English hybrid commonly spoken in urban areas in

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North India. In the ten-episode series the two leads, Romil and Jugal, express both romantic love and sexual desire towards each other.5 Balaji Telefilms has been a major household name in Indian soap operas, which have to do with different kinds of love – heterosexual, parental, familial – but not queer love, so this was definitely an ‘alt’ for them. It stars Manraj Singh as Jugal, a Tamil-Brahman young man, who has accepted his queerness even though he hasn’t come out as gay to his parents. He falls in love with Romil, a newly arrived, super-macho, aggressively straight Punjabi played by Rajeev Siddhartha. They live in what seems like a gated community, called Eden Meadows, in an imaginary town called Colwynganj in Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand is also a state ruled by the BJP and the state next to Uttar Pradesh. The name Colwynganj evokes McLeodganj, a neighbourhood in Himachal Pradesh, another state in North India. Both McLeodganj and Colwynganj represent a BritishIndian hybrid, with McLeod6 and Colwyn being British names, and ganj being an Indian word for neighbourhood. These British-Indian hybrids resemble the Shakespeare-India hybrid that the Hinglish web-series represents. It is important to highlight that in the series Jugal directs an English-language production of Romeo and Juliet, in which Romil is cast as Romeo. The love sonnets of the play become a means by which the love between the two men is expressed. The play within the web series, an ode perhaps to Shakespeare’s many plays within plays, functions as a vehicle for both Indian love for Shakespeare, and forbidden love between the protagonists. So, we have an Eden on the one hand and ‘eve-teasing’ on the other: perhaps Romeo is Adam after all. Adam cannot be divorced from Christianity – a religion that is time and time again cast as ‘foreign’ by right-wing groups in India, even though Christianity in India is said to date back to the sixth century CE. Adam aside, what does the right-wing deployment of Romeo have in common with a seemingly progressive web series that depicts a gay romance? In post/neo-colonial India, is Romeo, is Shakespeare nothing more than a straw man, easily deployable but ultimately hollow? Perhaps we should return to

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Juliet’s oft-quoted lines, ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet’ (2.2 43–4). Can that which we call Romeo be called by any other word? Or to frame it another way, what happens to translation when the original has been translated or perhaps anuvadded – in the sense of retelling – so many times that it almost doesn’t exist anymore?

1. From translation and appropriation to masalafication The translation of drama is more often than not conceptualized as theatre translation or translating for the theatre. This distinction is important because ‘theatre’ suggests a performance as well as the physical space where it takes place. The use of these phrases – ‘theatre translation’ and ‘drama translation’ – sometimes interchangeably, highlights the fact that a dramatic text is usually written to be performed. Given that performance is a collective activity – both at the level of watching and at that of performing – and that the ‘theatre’ as a space can be imagined in different ways, ‘adaptation’,7 ‘transposition’8 and ‘acculturation’9 are some of the names critics give to the practical technique of ‘theatre’ translation. The term ‘tradaptation’ has emerged in the Quebecois context to refer to the translation-adaptation hybrid in the context of theatre, particularly Shakespeare, translation.10 These, along with the idea that the translated text has to be ‘performable’, ‘actable’ or ‘speakable’11 are used to justify a ‘deviant approach to a source text’12 and to ‘explain certain strategies that may involve degrees of divergence from the source text’.13 Both Aaltonen and Bassnett highlight the fact that in theatre translation, the target text is not always as closely linked to the source text as may be the case in other forms of literary translation. Zatlin takes this to an extreme when she says that ‘some betrayal is a necessity’ in theatre translation.14 However,

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all their arguments, given their use of words like ‘deviant’, ‘betrayal’, ‘justify’ and ‘explain’, seem to enforce the hierarchy that has, until recently, been prevalent in translation studies, which privileges the source text.15 Scholarship influenced by poststructuralism, postcolonial studies and other fields has helped challenge this approach to translation studies. One such perspective is articulated by Márta Minier, who notes that the intertextual approach to translation encourages the receiver to question the dichotomy of ‘translation’ and ‘original’. It is not only the so-called ‘original’ that is re written, but other texts and artefacts may be woven into the so-called ‘translation’. These influences can come from the ‘source’, the receiving, or even totally extraneous cultures.16 This interweaving can be seen in Hindi iterations of Romeo and Juliet. However, the question of the sanctity of the source text is perhaps even more important when one discusses Shakespeare and the translation of his works. Owing to the process of ‘canonization’, an enterprise imbricated with colonialism, people believe that there is a ‘special quality’ in his works that should not be ‘tampered’ with.17 Despite this, Shakespeare himself can be called ‘the great adapter and the great appropriator’.18 This is because his extensive sources included translations of Plutarch and because several differing versions, iterations, perhaps anuvads of his works exist in the English language. Irrespective of this, Bassnett argues that directors working with Shakespeare in languages other than English have more scope for experimentation because they are not ‘bound by the canonical status attributed to the text’s English’.19 While this may be true of some countries, and some spaces, the manner in which Shakespeare was intentionally introduced to India complicates this argument. Shakespeare was first introduced to Indian audiences through the British East India Company as the entertainment provided for the company men (and perhaps their wives)

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in the eighteenth century, and then through the ‘systematic study’ of English literature in schools and colleges from 1817 onwards.20 This educational system informed and later was guided by the work of Thomas Babington Macaulay, often thought of as the architect of English education in India, and subsequently in other British colonies. In his famous Minute of 2 February 1835, which is more popularly known as the Minute on Education in India, Macaulay makes an argument about ‘the intrinsic superiority of Western Literature’ and goes on to make the bold claim, without knowing either Sanskrit or Arabic, that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.21 Given that by this point Shakespeare was not just a popular dramatist but the pinnacle of English literature, Macaulay was most likely envisioning Shakespeare in that ‘single shelf’, perhaps even a whole shelf of Shakespeare.22 Nandi Bhatia argues that the ongoing myth about the ‘authority of Shakespeare’, that is, the ‘special quality’ that makes translations of his work seem inferior, is ‘specially kept alive through educational institutions in India and abroad and through an imaginary construction of audiences’ singular love for Shakespeare to support notions of “timelessness” and “universality” accorded to Shakespeare’. 23 The impact of this institutionalization can be seen right through the twentieth century up until today. For instance, Lala Sitaram was a Shakespeare translator of the early twentieth century, and a product of the Macaulayan system of education. One of his goals was to create a series of translations under the name of ‘Sitaram’s Hindi Shakespeare’. Each translation is published with a preface in English in which he writes that ‘An attempt to publish a translation of Shakespeare, “the chief glory of English Literature,” does not stand in need for any apology.’24 ‘The chief glory’ is a phrase that suggests Sitaram’s love for Shakespeare and his belief in Shakespeare’s genius. The love for Shakespeare is reflected in Romil and Jugal, when Jugal says in episode one, ‘Whenever I look at the stars I think of Shakespeare. Just imagine chaar sau saal pehle usne bhi yahi aasman dekha tha, aur socha hoga apne star-crossed

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lovers ke bare me, Romeo and Juliet’ (‘Just imagine, 400 years ago he would have seen the same sky and thought of his starcrossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet’).25 In many ways, Jugal’s words resonate with Juliet’s ‘cut him out in little stars’ and the issues of sparagmos and diaspora discussed in the introduction of this collection. What is striking is that Jugal doesn’t reference Layla-Majnun, or even Heer Ranjha, here or elsewhere in the series. I would like to suggest that this is because of his class and caste position (upper middle-class Tamil Brahmin, living in a gated community) which means that he has probably been educated all his life in English, a system that bears the legacy of Macaulay. To counter Bassnett, I argue that educated Indians are in many ways still bound by the text’s ‘canonical’ nature, and even to a large extent the ‘canonical English’ of the text. Jugal’s insistence on retaining Shakespearean English in the staged version of Romeo and Juliet that he is directing, can be read as an example of this. While Romil and Jugal presents itself as an ‘adaptation’ of Romeo and Juliet, I think it is worth turning briefly to the work of Craig Dionne and Paramita Kapadia, who distinguish between adaptation and appropriation. They note, the critical stake in the revisionist gesture is whether the new literary form is merely an adaptation of the original text, implying that the original play in some ways remains stable and has a guiding influence on its use or reproduction, … or in critical appropriations [that] assert a site of contest where identity and ideology converge but perhaps never cohere into a unified vision, suggesting a more fluid or performative space that provides a meeting place of different agents or social voices on a mutually even playing field.26 For them adaptation carries with it a connection to the original that can lead to questions like: how faithful is to the original? Does it capture Shakespeare’s special quality? Questions such as these carry with them the same assumption – the primacy of the original – that lies beneath the work of scholars like Phyllis

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Zatlin. In contrast, appropriation suggests a meeting place for equals. It is this sense of a meeting place that allows Jonathan Gil Harris to argue for a ‘Masala Shakespeare’, the title of his most recent book. The book, which is structured like a five-act play, opens with a chorus, wherein he writes: This is a tale of two phenomena – one foreign and one local. Let’s call them the firangi and the desi. The firangi travels to India. There it is greeted by locals as if it were family. And it turns out that it is family: it has a desi twin with whom it is often confused. Because the two of them are as similar as do angoor (two grapes) from a bunch. A tale of twins from different lands: it may sound like what the English term a comedy of errors, and what the Bengalis call a bhranti bilas. How, you may ask, can a firangi have an Indian twin? Yet, the twins’ tale isn’t just a comedy of errors. It’s also a highly serious story of Rekhta vanshavaaliyan or mishrit khaandan (mixed lineages). It is, in short, a tale of masala genealogy. The genealogy of masala. But also, genealogy as masala.27 While I disagree with his account of the ‘locals’ greeting Shakespeare ‘as if it were family’, we reach the same conclusion: Shakespeare is no longer the ‘firangi’, the foreigner, he once was. The notion of ‘masala genealogy’ and ‘genealogy as masala’, where ‘masala’ is defined as ‘a concoction that is tasty and spicy, but it is also literally a mixture’ is compelling when it comes to Romeo and Juliet.28 Harris is talking specifically about the similarity between Shakespeare’s plays and ‘masala movies’ (mainstream Bollywood movies) whose ‘stories mix tragedy with comedy as well as scenes of dialogue with song-and-dance routines. Its lovers, too, are mixtures, often coming from different communities. And its sources are equally mixed: there is usually no “original” story in a masala movie, as its narrative is a khichdi of other, earlier stories or formulas.’29 Romil and Jugal is, in many ways, Bollywood-

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adjacent, and definitely masala Shakespeare. The ALTBalaji platform describes the show as being ‘filled with masti, masala, emotion, laughter, songs, and drama’.30 These are all qualities that Harris associates with Masala movies. More than this, however, is the fact that the web series, sometimes self-consciously, engages with stereotypical masala tropes. For instance, in episode one, Jugal when making the case that he has no future in India says to his best friend Meher, ‘I mean M yeh koi movie thodi hai ki suddenly koi hot hero jaisa banda Switzerland se utarke mere paas Colwynganj pahunche aur dekhte dekhte sab kuch slo-mo ho jaye. Picche background mein music bajne lage aur meri zindagi hamesha ke liye badal jaye’ (‘I mean, M, this isn’t some movie where a hot hero like dude leaves Switzerland and reaches Colwynganj, and suddenly everything becomes slo-mo [slow motion]. Music begins playing in the background and my life changes forever’). At the end of the episode, when Romil enters on a motorbike, the pace of the visuals slows down, music begins playing and time seems to stop for Jugal. All the tropes of a romantic masala movie, barring Switzerland, are in place. When Jugal’s efforts to shake Romil’s hand and introduce himself are thwarted, a voiceover with the dialogue above is heard, and the episode ends with a shot of Jugal looking dreamily in the direction Romil went, setting up expectations that this is definitely going to be a form of masala Shakespeare. What is the ‘masala genealogy’ of Romil and Jugal? What kind of ‘love’ can be traced through a genealogy of masala? Are the anti-Romeo squads a part of this genealogy? Before attending to these questions, it is worth highlighting the distinction Craig Dionne and Paramita Kapadia make between appropriations and Bollywood Shakespeare. While in the former it might be a local tradition that is interacting with Shakespeare, in the latter it is hard to dismiss ‘the transnationalism of both performance traditions’.31 Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani go a step further in their analysis of Omkara, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Bollywood adaptation of Othello, by arguing that ‘the film calling attention to its debt

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to Shakespeare is less a consequence of Indian cinema, selfconscious of its marginal position on the world stage, seeking validation in Shakespeare, than it is a sign of Bollywood’s assertion of its own newfound stature’.32 So, Bhardwaj is using Shakespeare as a form of global capital to make his work not just legible, but more marketable and popular on the ‘world stage’. This is true of Romil and Jugal too, though perhaps with a slightly different demographic, because as a web series it is accessible to viewers around the world, even if it is on the lesser-known streaming platform ALTBalaji.33 Furthermore, as Gupta suggests, Balaji Telefilms created the ALT brand in order ‘to put out controversial and racy content without tarnishing the mother brand. ALT allowed Balaji to go beyond its saas-bahu barriers and churn out material that appealed to the global sensibilities of tech-savvy Indian youth.’34 The keyword here is ‘global’. Shakespeare may not be ‘foreign’ anymore, but he does allow transnational media producers to access a ‘global’ sensibility.

2. ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ This line from Act 2, scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet is one of the play’s most famous. Each episode of Romil and Jugal begins with a quote from the play in the title screen, perhaps as a way to tap into a ‘global’ sensibility, and the line above begins episode one. Juliet’s rhetorical question echoes in an article on the anti-Romeo squads, published in the Indian Express on 2 April 2017. In ‘Why art thou Romeo’ Jonathan Gil Harris traces how, through several vernacular and Bollywood iterations, Romeo has transformed from a romantic hero, albeit a foolish one at the start of the play, who is in a consensual relationship with Juliet, to an eve-teaser. Had Romeo been an eve-teaser, Harris argues, he would have ‘chased’ after Rosalind, instead of pining over her.35 So, why is this the case? Do we just

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accept that Romeo in India is no longer Shakespeare’s young tragi-romantic hero? Perhaps an empty signifier? Why isn’t it Majnun of Laila Majnun fame, or Ranjha of Heer Ranja fame, who are the eve-teasers, the embodiments of an undesirable machismo? Here I turn to the work of Francesca Orsini and Harish Trivedi. In the introduction to a collected volume on love in South Asia, Orsini writes about the four main ‘repertoires’ of love that developed in South Asia and ‘have been active over a very long period of time’, largely syncretically, in the region.36 These four ‘repertoires’ are the Sanskrit and Prakrit repertoire centering on shringara and kama and comprising epics, lyrics, plays, collections of stories and treatises, on philosophy, conduct (including sexual conduct) and medicine; the oral repertoire of folk epics, tales and songs; the Perso-Arabic repertoire centering on ishq and muhabbat comprising religious injunctions, Sufi poems and interpretations, worldly texts on ethics and conduct, poetic romances (masnavis), eulogies (qasida) and  lyrics (ghazal), and stories of adventure and chivalry; and the repertoire of devotional bhakti poetry and philosophy. To these must be added the modern repertoires of prem and ‘love’.37 So, prem and ‘love’ are the modern iterations or strands of love devoid of the religious, scriptural and ‘traditional’ connotations of the earlier strands of love. Interestingly, while Orsini distinguishes between prem and Sanskrit repertoires of love, John T. Platts, who compiled a Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English in 1884, foregrounds the usage of prem in Sanskrit rather than in Hindi or Hindustani (the vernaculars popular in North India).38 He defines prem as ‘Love, affection, kindness, tender, regard, kindliness, friendship’.39 This definition, even while being from a Briton’s perspective, is symptomatic of Victorian ideals of love – tenderness and kindness over passion. Perhaps modern love and prem, then,

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is a love tied closely to the profane – the domestic sphere and matrimony – where the earlier repertoires tended to have a spiritual component too. Thus, Romeo is an embodiment of this repertoire while Ranjha and Majnu belong to the earlier ones. In an attempt to trace the ‘masala genealogy’ of love and Romeo and Juliet I turn to two early translations, or anuvads, of the play which centre the notion of prem by incorporating it in their titles – Gopinath Mishra’s 1898 translation is called Premlila and Lala Sitaram’s, published in 1931, is titled Prem Kasauti. Mishra’s is particularly interesting in this regard because unlike Sitaram who Indianizes the entire play, the rest of Mishra’s play is not Indianized.40 For instance, while in Sitaram’s play Juliet is Jalaja and Verona is Varnagar, in Mishra’s play all character names remain as they are in Shakespeare’s play and the action takes place in Verona. However, in the preface to his translation Mishra notes that ‘Nayak aur nayika ke naam ke karan angrezi me is natak ka naam Romeo and Juliet hai parantu maine is anuvad ka naam natak ke ashay ke aadhar par prem lila rakh diya hai ki jo is ko padhne se purn sarthak pragat hoga’ (‘Because of the hero and heroine the play is called Romeo and Juliet in English, however I have named this translation Premlila on the basis of the play’s intent and meaning which will be revealed by reading it’).41 Clearly, for Mishra, Romeo and Juliet by another name does have a function, as explicatory as it may be, and this function is to foreground the notion of prem, with its ‘modern’ connotations perhaps. Further, premlila, the title of his translation, is assonant with ramlila and raslila (traditional performances of the stories of the gods Rama and Krishna respectively). On the one hand, this could be ironic, problematizing the dichotomy set up between ‘older’, ‘traditional’ repertoires of love and the ‘modern’, less sacred repertoire. On the other, it could be a way of creating an equivalence between Shakespeare and the classic religious epics, and in doing so, granting epic status to this exploration of ‘modern’ love.

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In terms of the repertoires and the nuances of the word ‘love’, I turn to a brief comparison of the two translations focusing on a few lines spoken by Romeo in Act I Scene 1. shakespeare: Why, such is love’s transgression. Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast, Which thou wilt propagate to have it pressed With more of thine. This love that thou hast shown Doth add more grief to too much of mine own (1.1.183–7) mishra: kyon? Yeh sab mohavrit prem ka parinam hai. Mein sweekar karta hun ki mere dukh mere hrday me bharpurvak stith hain ki jinko tum apne dukhon se vishesh badhaya chahte ho. Mujhpar sneh pragat karke tum mere atyant dukh ki vishesh vridhi kar rahe ho. (why? This is the result of mohavrit prem (infatuation caused by prem). I admit that my grief lies heavy in my heart which you want to especially increase with your griefs. By showing me sneh you have particularly added to much of my grief).42 sitaram: Yahi to prem ki badi chaal hai. Hum jis dukh se dukhi hai woh hamara hi kamaya hua hai. Tum bhi dukhi hoge to hamare dukh ka bojh aur humko daba dega. Tumne jo yeh prem dikhaya isse humare prem ka dukh aur bhi bad gaya. (This is prem’s big trick. The grief that grieves us is that which we have earned. If you are aggrieved then the weight of my grief will further stifle me. This prem you have shown me, it has increased my prem’s grief).43 While there are many differences between the two translations, the one I want to highlight is the difference between the heterosexual love Romeo feels for Rosalind and

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the homosocial love that Benvolio shows to Romeo. Carla Freccero suggests that work in queer theory and sexuality studies, particularly of the early modern period, has made possible a ‘reading of this tale as a romantic comedy gone awry, a story about a young man struggling to leave the homosocial pack whose bonds of blood (-sport) militate against the normative demands of adult heterosexual marriage’.44 By using the same word ‘love’ to describe both emotions, Shakespeare is creating a continuum between homosocial and heterosexual love, though this may in fact be due to a dearth of vocabularies of love in the English language. Mishra uses the expansive vocabulary of love available to him in Hindi to distinguish between a ‘modern’ romantic love – prem – and a platonic love  – sneh – that is associated with friendship. Sitaram, however reverts back to using prem for both categories of love, even doubling down on this by including the word a third time in his rendering. Perhaps these translations indicate a tension between the large repertoires of love that exist in the region and an all-encompassing modern ‘love/prem’. In his analysis of translations and adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, Harish Trivedi takes this argument further by suggesting that the western concept of love and selfhood was translated into Hindi, into Indian languages, through the translations of Shakespeare’s plays, such that Romeo and Juliet’s love was a colonizing one. In doing so, he asks the rather provocative question, ‘Did the English language and Western civilization penetrate so deeply into our culture as to colonize our very notion of love?’45 While the West versus India dichotomy that Trivedi sets up might be too simplistic, could it be that the bastardization of Romeo (from a romantic hero to an eve-teaser) is a form of empire writing back, of cannibalizing Romeo to produce something new?46 Perhaps it is, but it is also a way to ‘other’, to foreignize, certain kinds of love. The Heer Ranjhas and the Laila Majnus belong to the earlier strands of love, while ‘Romeo’, as a symptom of ‘modern’ love, needs to be eliminated. In the context of the anti-Romeo squads and the fact that they have emerged in UP,

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against the backdrop of love-jihad and Ghar-wapsi,47 which are movements against inter-religious marriage, particularly between Hindus and Muslims, Romeo becomes a stand-in for ‘cross-communal love’.48 This makes Romeo’s being reframed as an eve-teaser something to be wary of. The us versus them dichotomy becomes problematic here because it can be argued that the anti-Romeo squads, by cannibalizing and transforming Romeo, are just decolonizing our love and ridding our culture of the English language. If translating Romeo and Juliet into Hindi was the result of colonial education, and perhaps even indoctrination, then imbibing Romeo with new meanings could be seen as an anticolonial move, albeit one that feeds into the hands of the right wing. While Yogi Adityanath and the BJP’s rhetoric might be about eve-teasing, newspaper reports have shown that the antiRomeo squads often target consenting heterosexual couples who are out in public without ever asking the woman whether or not she is being harassed by the man in question. Perhaps expressing love for an individual of the opposite sex in public is modern love, is western love, is Romeowala love, because it is assumed to be without parental consent. Another kind of love that is often seen as a western import is homosexual love. Suresh Kumar Koshal, who filed a motion against Naz Foundation and others in order to overturn the Delhi High Court ruling of 200949 that decriminalized homosexuality, believes that India should not be swayed by acceptance of homosexuality in the West. In an interview with NPR (for an American audience) he said, ‘Your society is totally different … Our society, in spite of a total onslaught by Western culture, we have a deeply religious society – and homosexuality is seen as undesirable.’50 Several binaries are being set up here: you versus us, Western culture versus our culture, not deeply religious versus deeply religious, homosexuality as desirable/or certainly not undesirable versus homosexuality as undesirable. Similarly, Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh who instituted the antiRomeo squad, stated in 2013 that ‘homosexuality is dangerous to social morality’.51 If the anti-Romeo squads are a kind of

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moral police, Shakespeare the epitome of Western literature, and Romeo, his most well-known romantic hero, perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to see Romeo as also embodying homosexuality and homosexual desires from the right wing’s point of view. In fact, the anti-Romeo squads have been targeting gay couples too, or indeed any men they perceive as being gay. For example, in April 2017, an ‘anti-Romeo’ police squad in Rampur, in Uttar Pradesh, arrested an uncle and his nephew, mistakenly believing the pair to be a gay couple. They had to pay 5000 rupees each to secure their release.52 Against such a backdrop, the Eden of the web-series is a far cry from reality. The first episode was released on 15 April 2017, just two weeks after the uncle and nephew were arrested. Be that as it may, the series enacts what Akhil Katyal calls the ‘doubleness of sexuality’ and the complicated matrix of the idioms of homosexual desire in South Asia. Katyal writes, Gay and lesbian identity in the subcontinent is shot through and made more complicated and exciting by other idioms of same-sex desire which interact with them; these idioms neither confer as much definite identifiability or isolability [sic] to a people like homosexuality does, nor might they be politically mobilizable in the same way that the idiom of gay and lesbian identities are. These are widely present and often specifically social and cultural idioms, be that of habits (aadat, lat, baazi), of friendship (dost, saheli, yaar), of play (masti, baazi, shauk) of love (ishq, dil, pyaar), through which same sex desire operates in common discourse, through which it finds shape in language and through which it is often framed, understood, appasioned [sic] and lived out to varying degrees of happiness and duress.53 Jugal acknowledges that he is gay, using that word in English, right from episode one. He does so in conversations with his best friend Meher and her mother Naina, not with his parents. However, even before Jugal acts on his desire for Romil, and before Romil admits that he is gay, the vocabulary of

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friendship that Romil uses stands out. He makes it a point to say ‘tu mera yaar hai’, ‘tu mera dost hai’, ‘come on bud’, even when the occasion doesn’t really necessitate it. Using Freud, Holtzman argues that ‘Bollywood gay humor is an exposure of desire between yaars. Romantic/sexual attraction to a yaar may be deeply repressed in the unconscious but is nevertheless present, in some form, within the psyche.’54 While Romil and Jugal doesn’t peddle in the kind of homophobic gay humour that Bollywood, especially masala films, are wont to do, the language of yaari that Romil uses could in an unconscious way express his romantic desire for Jugal. Several scholars of queerness in South Asia, like Ruth Vanita and Shohini Ghosh, have used metaphors of continuum, or overlap, to express the ways in which homosociality intersects or is imbricated with homosexuality, especially in their reading of masculine friendships in Hindi cinema. For Vanita, for example, there is no ‘rigid homosocial/homosexual divide’ in Hindi cinema; rather ‘there is a fluid continuum from friendship to eroticism.’55 Katyal argues that the ‘continuum is too easy an analytic’ to fully capture the interruptions, the complexity, that different situations demand.56 Here I think it is useful to track Romil’s use of language. He does not slide from the vocabulary of friendship, of yaari, to that of expressing a gay identity directly or fluidly, as the image of a continuum suggests. Rather, the detour, or perhaps interruption is via a sense of unknowability, unsayablity and perhaps even untranslatability. In episode five, a day after Romil has kissed Jugal for the first time and indicated that he reciprocates Jugal’s feelings, Romil says, ‘Khud to samajh nahin pa raha main tujhko kya samjhaun’ (‘I can’t understand [it] myself, what can I make you understand’). In this moment, the continuum is interrupted. But perhaps it’s the pressures of the narrative, the filminess or maybe even of Romeo and Juliet where love just is, and then is clearly expressed in beautiful romantic sonnets, that Romil says, ‘Saalon se mein koshish kar raha hun to understand (I’ve been trying to understand for years). I mean I’ve always known that I am, you know, different.’ Hindi fails him, and he turns

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to English and the vocabulary of ‘difference’ as a placeholder, a placeholder for the untranslatable. This clip, where Romil says, ‘I’ve always known that I am, you know, different’ is one of the snippets chosen by ALTBalaji for their YouTube channel and other promotional purposes with the tagline ‘love is love’. ‘Love is love’ is the slogan of LGBTQ pride across the globe that goes along with political mobilization and allows for transnational identifiability. After they have sex for the first time, in episode six, Romil and Jugal are lying together under the stars57 and talking about the first times they knew they were gay. Romil, who in a previous episode was not able to say how he felt because he didn’t have the vocabulary for it, is now able to articulate that he knew he was gay when he was twelve and he had a crush on a boy who was new to his class. He is doing something quite common in queer narratives, especially coming out narratives, that is, retroactively giving oneself a queer birth.58 Diana Fuss sees this as part of the tension in gay and lesbian literature, ‘between a view of identity as that which is always there (but has been buried under layers of cultural repression) and that which has never been socially permitted (but remains to be formed, created, or achieved)’.59 In the case of Romil and Jugal, this tension is played out in the character of Romil. His hearkening back to knowing he was gay in school signals his gay identity as ‘that which is always there’. In episode five, the morning after Romil kisses Jugal for the first time, Romil is seen tearing posters of women that he had up on the walls of his bedroom, with an expression on his face that is half teary, and half filled with laughter – a literal manifestation of him excavating himself from the ‘layers of cultural repression’. At the same time, Section 377 has meant that a gay identity has not been legally or socially permitted. Yet in Romil’s case, with his unarticulatable feelings, and their unknown quality, a gay identity ‘remains to be formed, created or achieved’. In the Indian context, Katyal articulates the same tension by theorizing the ‘doubleness’ of sexuality. He writes,

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‘sexuality’ is marked by what I call doubleness, whereby there is a constant tension between the way it is conceptualized and the way it is lived out. This doubleness of sexuality ensures that no matter how much the ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ subject is given specific contours, like in various forms of identity politics and literary genres that centre around sexuality, that subject’s position will remain, in actual experience, always open-ended and contested, always forming and unforming.60 So even while the pressures of the plot, of the rom-com61 genre and perhaps of identity politics (both Katyal and Fuss engage with this framework) eventually create a stable gay identity for Romil, there are brief moments where an ‘open-ended and contested’ subject position can be seen. Does being a ‘gay’ Romeo allow Romil to be legible to a wider transnational LGBTQ community? This may be particularly true, if one considers yet another anuvad of ‘Romeo’, the website Romeo (formerly known as Planet Romeo). Created in 2002, Planet Romeo ‘is the world’s most exciting network for gay and bi males, and trans people … [that seeks to] connect millions of gay guys all over the world  –  across borders, cultures, and languages’.62 While he does not analyse why they use ‘Romeo’, Katyal argues that the ways in which they describe their origins ‘sets the rhetorical stage for the projection of a worldwide “genuine gay community,” a phrase that the PR [Planet Romeo] team constantly uses in its promotional material whereby it proposes a deep affective resonance of the idiom of gayness among people all around the world’.63 Perhaps this ‘deep affective resonance’ is in no small part due to the global cultural capital of Romeo and Juliet as ‘the greatest love story of all time’.64 Romil coming into a recognizable ‘gay’ identity, as a gay Romeo, has access to this ‘genuine gay community’ globally as well as nationally.65 The utopian possibility evoked by the name Eden of a global gay community is enacted through the fact that the series does not end as the play does. In the Shakespearean play,

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the plot of Friar Laurence to stage the young lovers’ deaths goes awry and Romeo and Juliet tragically die. While their deaths represent the epitome of star-crossed heterosexual love, they also allow for a queer reading of the play as one that ‘deconstructs reproductive futurism’ by ‘killing those children in the name of whose futurity the social order of the play is organized’.66 In the series, Romil and Jugal’s plan to stage their death works. The series ends with both sets of parents accepting their children’s sexuality, and the narrator (Jugal’s sister Ramya) says that Romil and Jugal have moved to New Zealand and have gotten married. One of the last scenes in the series is a wedding celebration in Colwynganj. In this instance, the protagonist’s death, a form of queer death, may have been expected from both Shakespeare purists looking for a ‘faithful’ adaptation as well as from the transnational LGBTQ community. Given that the show was produced before Section 377 was overturned, a tragic ending would have played into teleological, homonationalist67 progressive narratives, that is, that India needs to catch up with the west in terms of LGBTQ rights. Perhaps the ending subverts this, perhaps it doesn’t. The gay men get to live, and they get parental consent and family approval. However, they have no option but to build their lives away from India, whether with each other or alone.68 Their mobility is a marker of their class privilege, since a rural gay Romeo and Juliet might more likely have ended in tragedy.69 A queer Eden is depicted as being impossible in India. In the end, Romil and Jugal and the anti-Romeo squads may not be that dissimilar in their outlook, even if one is in a progressive garb. Both displace a Romeowala love, especially a gay Romeowala love, from India to the West – returning the great British import along with it, the prem, the sneh forgotten. Perhaps ‘prem’ is not the same as ‘love’ after all, even if they are both modern constructs. So, what do these anuvads – the anti-Romeo squads, Romil and Jugal, Mishra and Sitaram’s versions, and indeed theories of translating Shakespeare – have in common? If we see them as part of a masala genealogy, with the keyword being masala,

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and as explanatory retellings, what are these (re)iterations seeking to explain? Perhaps it is authenticity – an authentic Indian relationship, a legible gay identity or even an authentic Shakespeare, infinitely translatable with its universal qualities. But the masala shades of the iterations have shown that nothing is quite so straightforward, even when the pressures of the fact that it is Romeo and Juliet might make it seem straightlaced. Romeo and Juliet, or the idea of Romeo and Juliet, is so reified that its construction as a stable, authentic source text propels these masala iterations. Carla Freccero suggests that the greatest irony of all may reside, finally, in the work of memorialization and perpetuity performed not by the thematics of the play, but by its endurance as literature. A condition of the drive’s representation, of the frisson generated in Romeo and Juliet’s death-driving readers, of the text’s seemingly infernal ability to breed new iterations of the myth of heterosexual love – as well as counter-narratives to this myth – is its monumentalization as literature.70 Romeo and Juliet as a memorial to a stable, easily definable, easily articulatable kind of love. A memorial – that which celebrates something that no longer exists. Romeo and Juliet as a monument dedicated to a myth, something solid to represent that which cannot be contained – the masala of Shakespeare, the unknowability of queer excess.

Notes 1

Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, ‘Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars’, in Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, eds. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999), 1–18, 9.

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2 Sir Monier-Williams Monier, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary Etymologically and Philologically Arranged (Delhi: Motilal Bansaridass, 1997 [1899]), 38. 3 The BJP is the right-wing political party that Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs to. 4 ‘What Are Anti-Romeo Squads’, News18.com, Accessed 11 September 2018, https://www.news18.com/news/india/ what-are-anti-romeo-squads-how-do-they-operate-points-toknow-1362855.html. 5 The episodes range from 19 minutes to 24 minutes in length. 6 Sir Donald Freill McLeod was a Lieutenant General of Punjab. 7 Phyllis Zatlin, Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation (Clevendon: Multilingual Matters, 2005), 1. 8 Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt, ‘Translation Science and Drama Translation’, in Page to Stage: Theatre as Translation, ed. Otrun Zuber-Skerritt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 8. 9 Sirkku Aaltonen, Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and Society (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000), 55. 10 See, for example, Denis Salter, ‘Acting Shakespeare in Postcolonial Space’, in Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 117–35; Mark Fortier, ‘Undead and Unsafe: Adapting Shakespeare (in Canada)’, in Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? eds. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 339–52; and Leonore Lieblein, ‘“Cette belle langue”: the “tradaptation” of Shakespeare in Quebec’, in Shakespeare and the Language of Adaptation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 255–69. 11 Zuber-Skerritt, ‘Translation Science and Drama Translation’, 8; Aaltonen, Time-Sharing on Stage, 43; Zatlin, Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation, 23. 12 Aaltonen, Time-Sharing on Stage, 43. 13 Susan Bassnett, ‘Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on Translation and Theatre’, in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, eds. Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), 1996, 90–108.

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14 Zatlin, Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation, 1. 15 David Johnston, ‘Metaphor and Metonymy: The TranslatorPractitioner’s Visibility’, in Staging and Performing, Translation eds. Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti and Manuela Perteghella (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13–14. 16 Márta Minier, ‘Definitions, Dyads, Triads and Other Points of Connection in Translation and Adaptation Discourse’, in Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film, ed. Katja Krebs (New York: Routledge, 2014), 23. 17 Susan Bassnett, ‘Engendering Anew: Shakespeare, Gender, and Translation’, in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), 57. 18 Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Afterward’, in World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (London: Routledge, 2005), 157–60, 158. 19 Bassnett, ‘Engendering Anew’, 57. 20 Poonam Trivedi, ‘Afterword’, in India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, Performance, eds. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz (Newark: University of Deleware Press, 2005), 13–43, 13–15. 21 Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay, ‘Minute of the 2nd of February, 1835’, in Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education, ed. G. M. Young (London: Oxford University Press, 1952 [1835]), 345–61, 349. 22 Graham Holderness identifies as ‘the great formal inauguration of bardolatry as a national religion’, David Garrick’s 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee, ‘which “marks the point at which Shakespeare stopped being regarded as an increasingly popular and admirable dramatist, and became a god” (Deelman, p7)’. See Holderness, ed., ‘Preface: All This’, in The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), xi. 23 Nandi Bhatia, ‘Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India’, Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 15 (2007): 157. 24 L. Sitaram, ‘Foreword’, in Jangal Me Mangal, ed. L. Sitaram (Allahabad: Ramnarayan Lal Bookseller, 1931), 1–2. 25 All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

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26 Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, ‘Introduction’, in Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage, eds. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 7. 27 Jonathan Gil Harris, Masala Shakespeare: How a Firangi Writer Became Indian (New Delhi: Aleph, 2018), 2. 28 Ibid., 5. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 ‘Romil and Jugal: More Details’, ALTBalaji. Accessed 2 February 2019, https://altbalaji.com/show/129. 31 Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and Bollywood: The Difference a World Makes’, in Bollywood Shakespeares, eds. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 11. 32 Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani, ‘The Global as Local/ Othello as Omkara’, in Bollywood Shakespeares, eds. Criag Dionne and Parmita Kapadia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 108. 33 Launched in 2017, ALTBalaji has ‘surpassed a million paid users within a year of launch and [now] has an audience from over 96 countries. It has a paid subscription base of 8.9 million.’ M. Farooqui, TV Continues to Be Our Success Story, ALTBalaji Is Star Performer Group COO Pantvaidya (2019). https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/entertainment/ tv-continues-to-be-our-success-story-altbalaji-is-star-performergroup-coo-pantvaidya-3417411.html. Accessed 1 February 2019. 34 Kovid Gupta, Kingdom of the Soap Queen: The Story of Balaji Telefilms (Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2014), 176. 35 Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Why Art Thou Romeo’, The Indian Express, 2 April 2017. Accessed 1 February 2019, https:// indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/life-style/why-art-thouromeo–4595484/. 36 Francesca Orsini, ‘Introduction’, in Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, ed. Francesca Orsini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–39, 1. 37 Ibid., 4.

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38 Sitaram, Gopinath and Platts were more or less contemporaries in the sense that they would have participated in the British educational infrastructure in the late nineteenth century, whether as student or teacher. 39 John T. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (London: Oxford University Press, 1968 [1884]), 260. 40 In translation studies Mishra’s would probably be called a translation and Sitaram’s an adaptation, but I consider them both to be translations, in the word’s iterative sense, since both translators use the word anuvad to describe what they are doing. 41 G. Mishra, Premlila, ed. Microfilm (Benares: Chandraprabha Press Company Limited, 1898), 2. 42 Ibid., 13. 43 L. Sitaram, Prem Kasauti (Prayag: Indian Press, 1931), 11. 44 Carla Freccero, ‘Romeo and Juliet Love Death’, in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 302–8, 303. In Romil and Jugal, Jugal moves from a heterosocial friendship with Meher to a homosexual relationship with Jugal. 45 Harish Trivedi, ‘Colonizing Love: Romeo and Juliet in Modern Indian Disseminations’, in Indian’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, Performance, eds. Poonam Trevedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz (Newark: University of Deleware Press, 2005), 74–91, 75. 46 To cannibalize is a Brazilian metaphor for translation. Bassnett and Trivedi, Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals, and Vernaculars (Oxon: Routledge, 199), 4–5. 47 Since 2009, ‘Far-right Hindu groups allege that “Love Jihad” is a conspiracy by Muslim groups to lure Hindu women into marriages with Muslim men and to convert them to Islam’ (Khalid, 2017). Ghar Wapsi is a programme of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a right-wing organization, and one that Yogi Adityanath and the BJP are affiliated with. The programme seeks to ‘“reconvert” people who it claims had changed their religion from Hinduism’ (PTI, 2015).

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48 Harris, Masala Shakespeare, 80. 49 The Delhi high court ruled in favour of Naz Foundation in Naz Foundation vs Government of NCT Delhi, thereby decriminalizing homosexuality (Section 377) in 2009. The Supreme Court overturned this decision and reinstated section 377 in 2013 ruling in favour of Suresh Kumar Koshal. In 2018, however, this ruling was overturned in Navtej Singh Johar vs the Union of India, thereby striking section 377 and decriminalizing homosexuality. Romil and Jugal was released in 2017, when homosexuality/sodomy was still illegal. 50 Lauren Frayer, Sushmita Pathak and Furkan Latif Khan, ‘India’s LGBTQ Activists Await Supreme Court Verdict on Same-Sex Intercourse Ban’, NPR. org, 26 July 2018. Accessed 1 February 2019, https://www.npr.org/2018/07/26/631829366/ indias-lgbt-activists-await-supreme-court-verdict-on-same-sexintercourse-ban 51 Kuwar Singh, ‘“Disease,” “dangerous,” “curable”: What key public figures in India think of homosexuality’, Quartz India, 5 September 2018. Accessed 1 February 2019, https://qz.com/ india/1380027/section-377-what-ramdev-adityanath-zakirnaik-think-of-gays/ 52 R.S. Benedict, ‘India Police Arrest Uncle and Nephew after Mistaking Them for a Gay Couple’, Hornet, 3 April 2017. Accessed 2 February 2019, https://hornet.com/stories/antiromeo-squad-gay-uncle-nephew/. 53 Akhil Katyal, The Doubleness of Sexuality: Idioms of SameSex Desire in Modern India (New Delhi: New Text, 2016), 2. Here it is worth highlighting that the word Mishra uses for homosocial love – sneh – is not among the idioms of same-sex desire that Katyal references. This is perhaps because not only is it archaic, but it is also inherently platonic. 54 D. Holtzman, ‘Between Yaars: The Queering of Dosti in Contemporary Bollywood Films’, in Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation and Diaspora, eds. R. B. Mehta and R. V. Pandharipande (London: Anthem Press, 2010), 113. 55 Ruth Vanita, ‘Dosti and Tamanna: Male-Male Love, Difference, and Normativity in Hindi Cinema’, in Everyday

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Life in South Asia, eds. Diane P. Mines and Sarah Lamb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 149. 56 Katyal, The Doubleness of Sexuality, 152. 57 The metaphor and imagery of the stars reappears. 58 In this scene, it is Romil who asks Jugal when he first knew he was gay. Jugal replies uncertainly, ‘Maybe 13’. The difference between Romil’s certainty and Jugal’s uncertainty is, I believe, owing to the fact that it is Romil and not Jugal whose story is a coming out narrative. 59 Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 100. 60 Katyal, The Doubleness of Sexuality, 1. 61 The ALTBalaji platform describes the series as a ‘young and never-seen-before rom-com version’ of Romeo and Juliet. (Romil and Jugal: More Details. https://altbalaji.com/show/129. Accessed 2 February 2019). 62 Planet Romeo B.V., ‘About Us’, PlanetRomeo.com. Accessed 2 February 2019, https://www.planetromeo.com/en/about 63 Katyal, The Doubleness of Sexuality, 122. 64 Romil and Jugal: More Details. https://altbalaji.com/show/129. Accessed 2 February 2019. 65 During his research in 2010, Akhil Katyal found that there were ‘about 50,000 Indian user profiles hosted on that website’ (The Doubleness of Sexuality, 122). Given that access to the internet has grown in the last decade, the number must be substantially more by now. 66 Freccero, ‘Romeo and Juliet Love Death’, 306. 67 Jasbir Puar developed the framework of homonationalism ‘for understanding the complexities of how “acceptance” and “tolerance” for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated’ (Jasbir Puar, ‘Rethinking Homonationalism’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 45:2 (2013), 336–9). 68 The series ends with a phone call suggesting that the two are getting a divorce. While this may not be a ‘happy ending’ it

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is not really a tragedy either, in the way their deaths would have been. 69 One such instance is that of two women, Swapna and Sucheta, who committed suicide in rural West Bengal. This has been ‘chronicled’ in the filmmaker Debalina’s documentary ‘ … Ebang Bewarish’. Interestingly, an article written about this film is titled ‘Lovestruck Juliet’: S. Bag, The Love Issue: Lovestruck Juliet. https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/ H8xiB49bsya0wbmufESgzJ/The-Love-Issue–Love-struck-Juliet. html (2014). Accessed 2 February 2019. 70 Freccero, ‘Romeo and Juliet Love Death’, 307.

8 Bridging performance and philosophy: Romeo and Juliet in Korea Seon Young Jang

1. What can I say about Shakespeare performances in Korea, especially when they are adapted into Korean, with Korean traditional artistic devices? Most studies begin with the academic topography called ‘Asian Shakespeare’, which has shaped studies of theatre in Japan, China, Taiwan and India. The most common term in this terrain is ‘intercultural’, as observed in currently representative publications dealing with Shakespeare in Asia.1 Poonam Trivedi presents the intercultural as a resistance against Europeanisation;2 interculturalism is her solution to the tension between the polarities ‘of authenticity versus difference, of the universal versus the hybrid, and of the global versus the local’.3 This intercultural discourse recurs in recent work by Hyunjung

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Lee that discusses contemporary Korean theatre productions, including a chapter on Shakespeare.4 Though Lee tries to move beyond the problematics of cultural imperialism and postcoloniality, her logic remains contained in the East/West dualism, which takes Shakespeare ‘as the marker of cultural prestige; of Western modern, global cultural capital; and of the heritage of Korean traditional arts’.5 Is interculturalism the only way to approach Korean Shakespeare? In this essay, I address three productions, all deploying traditional Korean costume, dance, music, opera and ritual. Critics respond to such productions either negatively or enthusiastically. Beau La Rhee praises Tae-Suk Oh’s Romeo and Juliet, because ‘it affords an opportunity to critique the Eurocentric assumption of western superiority … Oh challenges the idea that western history contains that which is truly significant.’6 On the contrary, Yeeyon Im’s evaluation of Yountaek Lee’s Hamlet, which stages Hamlet with the Korean shamanistic ritual called ‘gut’, disapproves of Koreanizing Shakespeare. Im insists that Lee’s nationalist orientalism fails to offer the West the opportunity to ‘regard the East as anything other than what it already expects and wants to see, thus aggravating the peril of cultural commodification’.7 Both arguments remain within the discourse of postcolonialism and interculturalism by starting from the assumption that the West and the East are equivalent to the centre and the periphery, or the colonizer and the colonized. Rather than disrupting fundamentally the hierarchical power dynamic presumed between the West and the East, these readings result in reiterating the binarism. I first propose to consider Shakespeare and Koreanness as universal singular entities, following Alain Badiou’s term ‘universal singularity’, which he uses to weave truth and subjectivity.8 What is Shakespeare? Shakespeare could be understood as the emblem of Western cultural eminence, but this does not explain Shakespeare’s popularity in the developing history of Korean theatre. Contrary to the premise of Shakespeare as the ensign of Western cultural privilege,

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there are already diverse cultural and ideological facets that subvert or rebel against oppressive norms already at work within Shakespeare’s plays. The revolutionary spirit in Shakespeare has been reflected in Korean performances of Hamlet that regard the prince as a suffering subject under the military dictatorship during Korean democratization.9 Besides, the majority of performances in the 1990s, when the number of Shakespearean performances was at its peak, reflected a populist sensibility mirroring democratic appeal and the feminist movement.10 This shows that Shakespeare’s plays, presenting all-around features of humanity, refuse one-sided closure in their interpretations and provoke new thinking. The presence of Shakespeare carries the trait of universal singularity, which is not anchored to particular predicates coined to describe cultural differences and dissemination. The idea of Shakespeare as a universal singularity helps us reconsider the ‘Koreanness’ experimented within the three Romeo and Juliet productions that I introduce here. Tae-Suk Oh’s Romeo and Juliet (2005), Sung-Hwan Park’s Romeo and Juliet (2009) and Tae-Rin Kim’s Romeo-The Ssitgim (2015) express their own distinctive versions of Romeo and Juliet by using Korean performance traditions.11 Even a Korean like me found the archaic words and traditional cultural practices and genres used in these productions unfamiliar and strange. My research into folk dances such as talchum (mask dance), pansori (opera), changgeuk (musical drama), gut (shamanistic ritual) and yeonhui (performing arts)12 awakened memories from my childhood when I performed Korean traditional dances with friends on the playground stage before parents for woondonghwe (athletic meeting day). Though absent from today’s Korean TV entertainment, in my childhood the sight of a group of women in hanbok (traditional clothing) presenting a buchaechum (fan dance) and pansori singers sharing their trained voices on TV was common. What is Koreanness for these Shakespeare directors, players and audiences? Koreanness framed with the aura of theatricality on the stage differs from Korean images in encyclopaedias, since these

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performance traditions are being presented in the framework of Shakespearean adaptation. Hyunjung Lee explains this return to indigenous performing arts as motivated by ‘South Korean nationalistic sentiments’ and does not explicate any further, though they seem to imply a narrow patriotism aimed to celebrate ‘glamorous cultural accomplishment’.13 I argue that Koreanness staged with various forms of art is indeed instigated by patriotism, but not the narrow patriotism insinuated by Lee. Instead, this patriotism is ‘a form of love’ as defined by Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum, borrowing from Giuseppe Mazzini, argues that a decent society needs an altruistic national emotion that motivates us to involve our hearts beyond greed and egoism, a compassion that can be extended by ‘concrete narratives and images’ and ‘a dialogue between emotion and principle’.14 These Korean Romeo and Juliet productions exhibit the love of the nation through Shakespeare’s story, a narrative of struggle involving suffering and hope that is also the history of the Korean nation. In this sense, the Koreanness explored in these performances is about a nation that is loved in common by directors, players and audiences. This love is distinct from the desire for the global market or for fanatical nationalism, even if realistically it often risks falling into either. Badiou has conceptualized his idea of universal singularity in opposition to the world market or ‘capital’s homogeneous expansion’ on the one hand, and ‘closed identities’ and ‘the culturalist and relativist ideology’ on the other.15 In the same vein as Badiou, I consider these performances as practices that seek truth in Shakespeare’s dialogue with Korea rather than complicity with either global capitalism or the materialist embrace of cultural identity promoted by intercultural drama. Second, I read these productions in terms of Badiou’s philosophy of love. According to Badiou, philosophy’s task is not simply to describe existing realities or particularities, ‘what there is’, but also to think ‘a paradoxical relation, that is, a relation which is not a relation, a situation of rupture’.16 For Badiou, love is one of four truth procedures – politics,

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science, art and love – when truth is understood as creating something new within the present social structure. This love is wholly different from romantic or fusional love; rather, this love manifests an encounter between two disjunct positions, like Romeo and Juliet, love between enemies. Badiou argues that we should approach the question of love from two points, stating that ‘Romeo and Juliet is clearly the outstanding allegory for this particular disjuncture because this Two belong to enemy camps.’17 The two figures of Romeo and Juliet can be applied to the two scenes of Shakespeare and Korea, even as we acknowledge that there is a huge difference between the two, geographically, historically, linguistically and culturally. I present this trio of productions as an encounter or event between Korea and Shakespeare, ‘two figures, two different interpretive stances’.18 This encounter between Korea and Shakespeare is expressed in another form of love on the level of the performances’ content. The play concerns a love between two enemies who are conditioned as foes or rivals in the Korean political situation, that is, two families represented as the North and the South in Oh’s production, and the Gyeongsang and Jeolla provinces in Park’s production. Lastly, I argue that Kim’s production interprets the love of Romeo and Juliet as an eternal one, providing hope for the future beyond mortality. I argue that Kim’s work, reinterpreting Romeo and Juliet as a Korean Ssitgim gut (cleansing ritual), corroborates Badiou’s statement that true love, ‘the essence of which is fidelity … demonstrates how eternity can exist within the time span of life itself’.19

2. Korea’s encounter with Shakespeare dates back to 1906, when his name first appeared in the Korean magazine Joyangbo. Plays such as The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet were introduced into Korean as free adaptations

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from Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare or from Japanese versions of Shakespeare plays during the period of Japan’s colonization of Korea (1910–45).20 Though Koreans were introduced to more Shakespeare works during Japan’s colonization period, this era was also the time when Korean performance traditions such as pansori (solo performance of songs and recitatives), kkoktu gaksi (puppet theatre) and talchum (mask dance) were repressed and weakened.21 After the Korean war (1950–3), as new Korean universities were established and departments of English set up, Shakespeare’s original texts started to be translated into Korean by translators and scholars. Shingeuk (new drama) companies presented Shakespeare plays and Western classics on stage in faithfully translated texts, adopting realistic acting conventions and Western costumes. In the late 1970s, as experimental theatres influenced by the West came into vogue, Korean intercultural theatre emerged as some directors and players made an effort to revive the forgotten traditions of Korean culture. Minsoo Ahn’s Hamyeol Taeja (Prince Hamyeol), which set Hamlet in a Korean dynasty of centuries past, was a seminal production that contributed to the later proliferation of Koreanized Shakespeare performances.22 From the 1990s to 2011, Shakespeare plays were produced 411 times, including thirty-eight foreign performances.23 Hyon-u Lee classifies these Korean Shakespeare productions into four movements: a populist Shakespeare related to the democratization of Korean society; a feminist Shakespeare regarding diverse female characters, including mystical women, power-driven or domineering women, ‘muscular’ women, and natural and free women; a shamanistic Shakespeare and a Koreanized Shakespeare encouraging the audience’s participation in the play by introducing traditional performance devices such as talchum (mask dance) and madangeuk (outdoor folk performance).24 In contemporary Korean Shakespeare performances, the effort to recall past Korean theatrical traditions coexists with people’s aspiration for a progressive and liberal society for the future.

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Romeo and Juliet is one of the most frequently performed Shakespeare plays in Korea. Tae-Suk Oh’s Romeo and Juliet was first staged in Seoul in 1995 and later at a Shakespeare Festival in Bremann, Germany in 2001. After its performance in 2001 in a different style from the 1995 version, with modernized Korean traditional costumes, it was produced for young audiences at small theatres in 2001, 2003 and 2004.25 Oh’s production was finally presented for a broader audience in the outdoor Haneul Theatre at the National Theatre of Korea in 2005. In 2006, it was staged in the Pit Theatre at the Barbican Centre, London. According to Rhee, though the stage conditions in the Pit Theatre brought about inevitable changes such as the audience’s spatial detachment from the action of the play, the theatre sold out all the tickets for each performance for fifteen days.26 Setting the production in an unspecified Korean province in the last century of the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897), Oh resuscitates the story of Romeo and Juliet within the political context of Korea. As explained in Rivka Jacobson’s conversation with Oh, hatred and feuding between the Montagues and the Capulets mirror ‘something of the events that have divided Korea and brought about hardship and death, the three years of civil war (1950–3)’.27 It also reflects Oh’s personal life, which was much affected by the Korean civil war. At the age of eleven when the war broke out, he witnessed his father being forced into a car that stopped in front of his house, never to be seen again. He recites his troubled past in a poetic voice: ‘After that everything in my life changed. On rainy days, my mother no longer came to collect me from school with an umbrella. Yellow became red; red became black; and black became white overnight.’28 Oh’s intention does not simply linger on exploring the division into the North and the South that left behind a trauma in the director’s psyche. As Philip Gowman states, Oh’s adaptation is planned as ‘an apology to Korea’s youth from the older generations for their future to resolve their country’s troubles’.29 Oh expresses regrets over the Korean

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situation that also evinces the state of the world, which is contaminated with suspicion, anger, hate, quarrel and war. In Oh’s words, ‘the world has gone mad like an unbridled horse running wild’.30 For Oh, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet demonstrates the horror of his motherland and the world, and the loss of neighbour love. He believes that Koreans came to lose this love of neighbour due to rapid modernization and industrialization, erasing the past when neighbours were as close as cousins and there was a grandmother ‘who, during the harvest, would leave a few persimmons on the treetops for crows to eat and leave behind potatoes for moles to eat’.31 Oh expresses this love of the neighbour through the Prince’s voice. After the sword dance that introduces the strife between the Montagues and the Capulets, the Prince, standing on maroo (hanok floor), vents in a rough and weary voice, ‘Another brawl? / You men, you beasts, / From those bloody hands / Throw your mistempered / Weapons to the ground / And hear the sound of the moved public. / Fight no more!’ His tone and gesture disclose exhaustion and frustration resulting from a cycle of requests and disappointments. The Prince appears again after the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio. He declares, ‘Another fight? / We have an expression / “a neighbor like a cousin.” / What does it mean? / Neighbors, over a fence, / exchange daily greetings, / “How are you?” / “How was the market?” / “Have some birthday cake.” / This way, neighbours / become like brothers.’ Though Oh manifests his wish that the audience recover the virtue of neighbour love (in his interview he says, ‘as the sky clears after rain, I hope that seeing this play will make you inside glow’), he does not present his message directly on the stage, but in an indirect way that encourages the audience to discover it themselves.32 Having emerged as an avant-garde artist opposing the dominant shingeuk theatre and indebted to the plays of Bertolt Brecht, he uses a directing methodology composed of four principles – ‘unexpectedness, spontaneity, omissions, and skips’ – and incites the audience ‘to fill in what has been omitted and to connect what has been skipped’

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with imagination.33 He demands the audience to be active participants in the performance, not passive bystanders to it, to the extent that they can even interfere with the action. In the duel scene Romeo, asked to respond to Mercutio’s challenge, approaches one of the audience and asks, ‘he keeps asking me to fight. / Shall I confess that the groom of wedding is myself?’ Oh’s players are also notorious for facing the audience when speaking the dialogue rather than engaging with each other. Oh’s Romeo and Juliet uncomfortably shows a pessimistic ending to the audience, differing from Shakespeare’s final scene where parents reconcile in peace with children’s deaths. Oh’s parents, even after hearing that dead Romeo and Juliet lie as a husband and a wife, burst out in anger, calling each other ‘a whore’ and ‘a butcher’, and blaming the other for their children’s deaths. capulet Married? Stop your babble. lady montague I would never accept the daughter of a whore. lady capulet I would never have a butcher for a cousin. I’d rather die with my daughter. montague This is the worst thing to happen to our family for three hundred years. capulet My only daughter! Let me destroy your cursed house. montague My son’s sword will strike you down. As fathers on both sides raise their swords, ignoring the Prince’s plea to stop the strife, other men rush into the battle while women writhe in their agony, bending upper bodies with painful faces. Critics rightly comment that this last scene attests to the ‘Korean socio-political reality’ (Young-Joo Choi) and confirms ‘not merely the folly of power, but also

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its murderousness and total annihilation’ (Rhee).34 I argue, however, that there is more here than a simple presentation of dark reality. Just as Oh stimulates the audience’s participation in his performance, he is motivating them to figure out their own answers to the last scene. He poses an ethical question through his performance that can lead to the audience’s subjective transformation in bringing about social change. Oh explains his bleak ending: ‘I wanted the audience to see the two dead bodies of the lovers. There is a moral question. I want to ask the audience to think about the meaning of the two bodies, the meaning of the death of these young people.’35 Oh’s message regarding neighbour love can be extended to Badiou’s concept of love as a construction, not from the perspective of one but of two, that is, two disjunct postures. Just as Badiou considers Romeo and Juliet as an allegory for this division between enemy camps, Sigmund Freud discovers the fundamental truth of ‘love thy neighbour’ in the possibility of loving your enemy as yourself.36 Freud argues that love is able to cross every sort of group barrier, stating that ‘love for women breaks through the group ties of race, of national divisions, and of the social class system.’37 Following Freud, Jacques Lacan has associated the ethics of loving your neighbour with erotic love or passion in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis.38 Although Lacan argues that sexual relationships do not exist (‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationship’), he insists on the presence of love, in a form that fills the absence of a sexual relationship.39 Badiou is in agreement with Lacan’s notion of love. He explains the difference between sex and love in Lacan’s hypothesis: ‘In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other.’40 Thus, Oh is demonstrating love through his performance of Romeo and Juliet similarly to Badiou, whose conceptualization of love draws on Freud and Lacan. Second, Badiou compares love to the theatre. Calling theatre a space where ‘thought and body are in some way indistinguishable’,41 Badiou approves of the Portuguese

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poet Fernando Pessoa’s idea that ‘love is a thought’, against the general assumption that love is about body and desire, everything but reason and thought. The relationship between thought, love and the body is always marked by irrepressible violence, and we experience that violence in life. It is absolutely true that love can bend our bodies and prompt the sharpest torment. Love is not a long, quiet river. We can never forget the quite frightening number of loves that lead to suicide or murder. Love in the theatre is not only, or even mainly, sex farce or innocent romance: it is equally tragedy, rejection and rage. The relationship between the theatre and love is also the exploration of the abyss separating individuals, and the description of the fragile nature of the bridge that love throws between two solitudes.42 Badiou’s definition of theatre as ‘thinking in the body, embodied thought’ illuminates the most conspicuous feature of Oh’s performance, which aims at breaking the boundaries of space and time by incorporating traditional dances. He translates Shakespeare’s first scene where servants quarrel into a traditional dance called gummu (sword dance), shrouded in smoke, evoking both bellicosity and gracefulness. The Capulet feast becomes a traditional feast called janchi. It starts with young Capulet women wearing brightly coloured hanbok (traditional costume) and dancing, each holding a babsang (meal table) with both hands in a row. As soon as they put the babsangs on the floor in a line, they present a ganggangsulle (circle dance), holding hands and clapping together. The Capulet women’s dances are alternated with the Montague men’s dances. The men dance more intensely, making a rhythmical sound with a sogo (small barrel drum) and a stick in both hands. Their sogo dance changes into a salpurichum (dance of exorcism) performed with long white silk scarves. The Capulet women follow the men’s fierce sogo dance with their own salpurichum, but with a brighter and lighter air. The dances emphasize arm and shoulder movements and use objects such as brass spoons and chopsticks to create varied sounds and sights.

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Three factors support Badiou’s idea of theatre as embodied thought. First, love of nation is expressed by Oh’s incorporation of colloquial language enhanced with poetic rhythm and dialects, settings in a stylized hanok (traditional house) and madang (outdoor yard), costumes in the hanbok of the upper and lower classes and music played with traditional string, wind and percussion instruments. If, for Badiou, ‘love of the theatre is necessarily also the love of love’, Oh expresses his love of Korea through his Koreanized Romeo and Juliet.43 Second, Oh’s inclusion of traditional dances manifests Badiou’s thinking of theatre as an embodied thought. He expresses not only his thought arising from the exposure to Shakespeare’s language but also his love or thought of his nation into corporeal movement set to music. This idea that theatre is the space of thought and body is also observed when players narrate their dialogue. When players speak their lines, they communicate them with bodily motion. As the Nurse boasts pleasantly, ‘I nursed her!’ she gestures as if she is rocking a baby in her arms. When Romeo calls Juliet a sun, he holds a sogo on his head, signalling that the small drum symbolizes a sun. Third, just as Badiou regards theatre as ‘a community’, ‘the aesthetic expression of fraternity’, Oh’s production bears a love that belongs to the order of fraternity.44 This is verified in his strategy of breaking the boundary in terms of not only space, the East and the West, but also time, past and modern. If he tries to dissolve a barrier between players and the audience, he encourages integration and reciprocity among players by letting them dance and recite their lines together and in alternation. Oh recreates his theatre in the field of community and fraternity as love reaches out to the being of the other beyond the narcissistic.

3. If Oh manifests the idea of theatre as embodied thought by creating a perpetual movement that demolishes the threshold among players, and between players and the audience, as well

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as the walls of space and time, Sung-Hwan Park’s Romeo and Juliet (2009) explores theatre as thinking in the body through the art of the human voice, that is, the Korean vocal art practice called changgeuk (multiple-singer performance). Changgeuk is the modified and reformed art performance of pansori (solo performance of songs and recitatives) among traditional performance genres such as pansori, kkoktu gaksi (puppet theatre) and talchum (mask dance). It was created around the early 1900s when traditional performance genres diminished under the Japanese colonial regime and the introduction of Western theatre practices and Western-style indoor theatres. Changgeuk was initiated at the end of the King Gojong period in 1908 with the opening of Western-style theatre Wongaksa, which staged works of traditional Korean music by assigning different roles to several singers. Changgeuk shows the adaptation of traditional Korean performance genres to survive colonization and modernization, in trying to preserve cultural inheritance while accommodating the changing times. According to Im, efforts to reform traditional theatre were deterred by the Japanese repression of theatre, with regulations such as ‘compulsory closing times for theatres, the imposition of high taxes, the censorship of play scripts, legislation on controlling actors, the presence of armed police at performances, and, ultimately, the closure in 1901 of all theatres and the disbanding of their companies, except for a few in Seoul’.45 Hence, I cannot agree with Ken Takiguchi, who argues against the erased history of Japanese influence in the generation of changgeuk in his commentary on Park’s Romeo and Juliet. Takiguchi supports Andrew Killick’s argument that ‘the most important model and impetus for the creation of the genre came from Japan’, and insists that ‘there was no such theatrical form that could be a base for developing the modern theatre’ in Korea, in contrast to Japan where there was a traditional theatrical form called Kabuki.46 Though I acknowledge Japan’s influence on changgeuk, since many changgeuk organizations were created during colonial rule, if there had been no pansori, there would have been no changgeuk. Furthermore, Korean

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directors often choose a traditional Korean madang (open yard) as their stage in producing Koreanized Shakespeare plays; Takiguchi, who takes madang as simply ‘meaning that there was no drama comparable to Western theatre’ in Korea, commits the fault of reducing the possibility of a stage to a blocked or four-walled space.47 Lastly, he neglects Japan’s devastating influence on the development of Korean theatres, leading to ‘the eradication of theatre traditions’ in Korea, as Im points out.48 This explains why the Korean government set up the National Changgeuk Company of Korea in 1962 after the liberation from Japan in 1945. Park’s Romeo and Juliet, produced as part of the Young Changgeuk series by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea, begins with the scene of pansori, the origin of changgeuk, as if bragging about its status as a ‘Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’ designated by UNESCO in 2003. Mudang (a shaman taking the role of the priest in Korean indigenous shamanism) provides the prologue of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in a form of pansori to the audience. The mudang, in a splendid costume with a full, layered dress, plays the role of the solo singer as in pansori, holding a fan in one hand. She delivers a prologue concerning Romeo and Juliet with sori (song) and aniri (narration) while a gosu (drummer) accompanies her with a barrel-shaped drum and chuimsae (words of encouragement). This first scene presents a typical picture of pansori. Pansori, as the term composed of the two words pan and sori indicates, is the performance of vocal sound or voice. Pan refers to ‘venues of performance’, ‘the demonstration of a performer’s expertise in front of a large audience’ and ‘the entire process of entertaining acts or activities’. Sori means song in a narrow sense, but also sounds that cannot be limited to a song.49 Pansori first took place where the commoners assembled in an open yard and later found its audience among the nobility and even the king. Empathy with the audience constitutes a significant part of pansori. The audience affects the singing and narration of a singer along with the gosu through their chuimsae responses

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while a singer delivers singing and narration that reflect the audience’s joys and sorrows. In Park’s production, pansori provides a perfect stage for the community or fraternity building where players integrate with the audience through the narration of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet seasoned with singing and music. The reciprocity among players and between players and the audience depends on the unique sound of pansori. Park converted the literary style of the Korean translation of Shakespeare’s text into an archaic and colloquial one, reflecting Shakespeare’s poetic expression and its rhythm in line with pansori’s musical narration. He changed almost every line of Romeo and Juliet into rhythmic verses suitable for pansori, faithfully following the intended meaning of Shakespeare’s lines and recreating some parts in his own phrases. Park’s adaptation of every line of Shakespeare’s text into pansori lyrical narration demonstrates, on the one hand, his wish for the audience to realize the grace and the artistry of pansori, and on the other hand, his acknowledgment of Shakespeare as a universal dramatist. The players articulate their lines in pansori narration, which takes a long time – almost two hours – because much of the dialogue requires slow breathing with prolonged notes. In Park’s performance, most of the players are also pansori singers, except Romyo (Romeo)’s friends Bongchu (Tybalt) and Kkwesu (Mercutio). The players are individualized on the stage when they sing a dialogue. The light shines on each player while she or he sings a narration against a dark backdrop. Despite attempts to singularize each player with long narration, concentrated lighting and gorgeous hanbok, the reciprocity on stage is profound, with pansori sounds carried through the players’ unique vocal production and modernized background music played with Korean traditional instruments such as geomungo (a fretted bass zither), gayageum (a twelvestringed zither) and ajaeng (a seven-stringed horizontal zither). Pansori sounds consisting of jo (mode) and jangdan (rhythmic mode) are strikingly powerful in delivering the players’

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emotions and feelings in Park’s production. The jo of pansori, though comparable to mode and key in Western music, refers to vocal timbres that signify more than simple keys and modes, and is decided by the sentiments that the song means to convey. These emotions include gyemyeonjo, which evokes sadness; pyeongjo, used for bright and peaceful emotions; ujo, for imposing and grand feelings; gyeongdeurem, for light-hearted feelings and seoleongje, for a spirited feeling. In addition, Park allotted various sorts of pansori rhythm called jangdan – jinyang (slow tempo), jungmori (medium tempo), jungjungmori (medium-fast tempo), jajinmori (fast tempo) and hwimori (very fast tempo) – to each dialogue according to its mood.50 Park’s Romeo and Juliet expresses a range of emotions by transporting Shakespeare’s lines into pansori sounds with jo and jangdan. Park’s performance also interacts with the audience by presenting several traditional entertainments. The first scene is initiated with talchum (mask dance), more specifically, bongsan talchum from the Hwanghae province, where a player wearing a lion-head mask dances, jumping up and down. There is also a pungmul (Korean folk music group play), in which a group of players encircles a player wearing a lion’s head and plays traditional percussion and wind instruments. This musical number is followed by jooltagi (tightrope walking) and kkokdugaksi nori (a puppet show), where players show straw dolls above a cloth stage. In these entertainments, players’ dances are always accompanied by their songs while background music flows on the stage. The Capulet feast is transformed into a shamanistic gut janchi (a ritual feast) held to pray for the blessings to the living people. As soon as a lion-headed player’s dance finishes, a mudang (shaman) dances and bows before the large table holding a skinned whole pig. Then, a female gwangdae (clown) cries out ‘Watkkuna, Watkkuna!’ (‘You came again, You came really!’), and leads audience members to the stage, which becomes a place where players and the audience perform a ganggangsulle (circle dance). The circle dance includes a step

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called ‘stomping roof tile’, where Juri walks on the backs of the audience, who bend their waists in a line resembling roof tiles, holding the hands of two persons on either side. Park incorporates Korean shamanism into his production, unlike Oh’s version, where an inefficient-looking Western priest presides. A Mudang (shaman) named Guryong daek who had narrated the prologue becomes the Friar, performing the marriage rite for Romeo and Juliet. Instead of the Prince’s announcement, she concludes the play with another sort of gut called ssitgim-gut (a cleansing rite) where she delivers a benediction. She recites her gratitude and hope, presenting two small straw dolls as if implying that this play is planned for restoring Romeo and Juliet’s pitiful spirits to peace by claiming their han (rancour and sorrow). By letting a mudang finish the play instead of the Prince, the play composes a community on the stage with a Korean musical opera, changgeuk and a traditional ritual, shamanism. As in Oh’s Romeo and Juliet, Park’s performance realizes Badiou’s idea that the theatre is a community that ‘makes the held-in-common prevail over selfishness, the collective achievement over private selfinterest’.51

4. While Park plants gut’s ritualistic elements in some places in his production, Tae-Rin Kim’s Romeo-The Ssitgim (2015) makes gut into the governing frame of his adaptation. By adapting the play’s action to gut’s ritual process, specifically, the gut of Jindo (the third largest island located in South Jeolla province), he radically changes the plot of Shakespeare’s play as well as the dialogue.52 Kim captures the unfortunate deaths of the protagonists and imagines that Romeo’s spirit still haunts the world of the living, tormented with han about his unfulfilled love. First, the play’s ritual action summons Romeo’s wretched spirit with the rite of gut, and next, cleanses away his pent-

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up soul with longing and sadness. Finally, it helps him to complete the passage to heaven, relieving him of his affliction and discontent. I argue that Kim’s production endeavours to read affirmatively the eternity of love indicated in the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Paul Kottman, taking the tragic love of Romeo and Juliet as the struggle for freedom, has insisted that ‘the objective fact of human separateness – the cold, grim power of “unsubstantial Death” – is defied by the subjective aims of the lovers’.53 Kottman implies that the lovers negate mortality when they enact their separateness, that is, their freedom. This is what it means to say that love is eternal. Badiou has also proclaimed the eternity of love, maintaining that the fidelity of lovers within time is evidence of love’s perpetuity: So love remains powerful, subjectively powerful: one of those rare experiences, where, on the basis of chance inscribed in a moment, you attempt a declaration of eternity. ‘Always’ is the word used to declare eternity. Because you cannot know what that ‘always’ means or how long it will last. ‘Always’ means ‘eternally.’ It is simply a commitment within time, because you have to be a Claudel to believe that love endures beyond time, in the fabulous world of the afterlife. But love, the essence of which is fidelity in the meaning I give to this word, demonstrates how eternity can exist within the time span of life itself. Happiness, in a word! Yes, happiness in love is the proof that time can accommodate eternity.54 Romeo-The Ssitgim makes this argument through ritual means. The production begins with the calling up of Romeo’s spirit from the afterlife. It is the opening procedure called anddang (the first step informing the aim of gut) in the gut ritual where the mudang proclaims the purpose of gut to the deity. Players called aksa sitting on the backstage tune their music instruments, including the piri (flute) and the janggu (double-headed drum), to conjure up Romeo’s spirit. As soon as the mudang, sitting in the centre of the stage, asks, ‘One,

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wandering in the other world! Who are you?’ Romeo appears in a wrinkled hemp-cloth, walking with veiled eyes, and confesses his name. She asks again, ‘Why are you so tormented not to make a gentle passage to heaven?’ and Romeo wails, ‘Capulet, Capulet’s daughter, Juliet’. The subsequent drama consists in presenting the prior sequence of events in accord with Shakespeare’s text, but in a new order. The moment when Romeo and his friends discuss attending the Capulets’ feast is instantly followed by the scene when Romeo and Juliet meet and kiss. The scene where the Montagues and the Capulets are swearing to revenge their wrongs is juxtaposed with Romeo and Juliet promising their everlasting love. Next, the wedding scene of Romeo and Juliet administered by Friar Laurence is paired with the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt. The wedding night of Romeo and Juliet is led by the scene where Juliet, harassed by Paris’s pressure of marriage with her parents’ consent, begs help from Friar Laurence. It is connected to the last scene when the lovers kill themselves. All of these events are displayed while the mudang watches them, who is present everywhere as a mediator between Romeo’s spirit and the deity. Kim constructs a train of events from the perspective of the posthumous world, reversing Shakespeare’s text. Shakespeare’s dialogue, which had been translated into Korean closely following the text in Oh’s and Park’s productions, is completely transmuted into different lyrics in the style of contemporary Korean song scripts. Nevertheless, these lyrics convey the ambience of the love of Romeo and Juliet beautifully, carrying it into the song that Romeo and  Juliet sing in chorus, holding hands together:  ‘(Romeo, Juliet) Someday, even if the world envy our love / With their unknown faces, / Let us not release our hands we held tight / You and I are worlds to each other.’ The string of events tracing Romeo’s past with strong images accompanied with music, rather than with concrete incidents in Shakespeare’s language, is thus represented, on the one hand, as if they occur in Romeo’s unconscious. On the other hand, they are rendered as if directed by another director within the performance, the

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mudang who appears in every scene. For example, she sends Tybalt and Mercutio to the next world, after washing away their evil spirits with a jijeon (a long narrow white paper bundle) in her hands, and she is suddenly possessed with the Prince’s spirit, who announces Romeo’s banishment. The cleansing of the corpses of Tybalt and Mercutio indicates the gut procedure called ssitgim (purification). Kim’s production also reproduces the next stage of gut, called gopuri (untying the knot of Go, symbolizing han), after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. As soon as a gopuri jangdan (tempo) starts, played by percussion instruments, the mudang stands front centre and dances, holding the jijeon in her hands while Romeo enters from back stage. As the mudang raises the jijeon upward, all three persons lift up their go made of long stretched clothes on their arms. Each man ties up Romeo with this cloth symbolizing Romeo’s go (han) while Romeo grabs his chest and screams, writhing in pain. They start to encircle Romeo and, after three turns, unknot Romeo’s go while the mudang shakes her jijeon behind Romeo, until the moment when Romeo comes to hold the mudang’s jijeon in his hands. This gopuri is a ritual procedure that liberates the dead by releasing him of han. The gopuri scene leads to the last gut procedure called gildakkeum (cleaning the road to heaven). Juliet appears, holding a road-cloth spread out on the floor. She walks to Romeo, singing, ‘Let us not forget / Here was a love like this / Let us not forget / We shared such a mind.’ Romeo, now unveiled, gazes at Juliet and walks with Juliet on the cloth-path, which lays out the journey to heaven. After the lovers leave the stage, the play finishes with the mudang’s recitation of the epilogue while she dances a Jijeon chum (shaman dance). Kim’s production, reinterpreting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with shamanistic religion and situating it within its ritual procedure, affirms the truth that love is eternal. The production starts from the idea that the world of the living is connected to the other world of the dead, taking the love of Romeo and Juliet as a true one whose essence lies in its fidelity

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and eternity. In addition, this production communicates the message of forgiveness and reconciliation that the East and the West have in common, by reformulating Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet within the ritual frame of shamanism. Dongha Seo has also pointed out this specificity of Kim’s RomeoThe Ssitgim. Whereas other adaptations focus on the causes and consequences of the feud, ‘Kim’s Romeo-The Ssitgim has attempted to overcome seemingly irreconcilable enmity by staging traditional Korean shamanistic ritual.’55 The message of forgiveness and reconciliation healing the resentment and the anguish can be articulated in two ways. The first concerns the influence that the play has on the audience, what Martha Nussbaum calls ‘tragic spectatorship’. Nussbaum, explicating the public emotions necessary for democracy, has argued that tragic spectatorship cultivates ‘emotional awareness of shared human possibilities, rooted in bodily vulnerability’.56 She discusses Sophocles’s Philoctetes as a drama that arouses compassion and sympathy for damaged subjects: The Philoctetes is surely a play that leads its spectator to acknowledge the horror of bodily pain and the social isolation that often accompanies it. By bringing its spectators close to extreme bodily suffering, though with enough distance not to repel people (the attack of pain is depicted formally, by a metrical outcry rather than a shriek), it promotes an experience that is in the best sense democratic, one that acknowledges the equal frailty of all human beings and their fully equal need for the goods of life that Philoctetes so conspicuously lacks: food, shelter, relief of pain, conversation, nondeceptive friendship, political voice.57 There is the additional question of Romeo’s transformation from an afflicted to a liberated being. The presence of the semidirector, the mudang within the performance, demonstrates the cooperation between the mudang and Romeo on the

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journey from the living world where the restless soul wanders to the next world to which he returns peacefully. In the gildakkeum scene, Juliet appears to take the role of mudang when she comforts her lover with a song, ‘Let us not forget.’ The emotional transference arising between Juliet and Romeo becomes cooperation between the mudang and Romeo, like a therapist and a patient in a psychoanalytic situation. The message of forgiveness and reconciliation is delivered through the resonances between Romeo and the mudang, and between the performance and the audience. It also demonstrates Badiou’s idea that theatre is the space of community and fraternity, a trait shared with Oh’s and Park’s Romeo and Juliet productions.

5. This essay reads three Korean productions of Romeo and Juliet as a rapprochement between Shakespeare and Koreanness, following Badiou’s idea that love is an event or an encounter between two disjunct postures or enemies like the Capulets and the Montagues. I have argued that we take ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Koreanness’ as universal singular entities by distinguishing them from both the global market and cultural or relativist closed identities. Writing against what he calls democratic materialism, Badiou conceptualizes a universal singularity against capital’s homogeneous expansion on the one hand and culturalist ideology on the other. Thus, I aim to rethink these Korean Shakespeare productions by distancing them from the intercultural and postcolonial readings predominant in the academic discourse of Asian Shakespeare. Instead, I read these Korean productions as truth procedures that cannot be reduced to the polarities between authenticity and difference, between the universal and the hybrid, and between the global and the local, as expected in intercultural and postcolonial discourse. An encounter between Shakespeare and Koreanness,

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which are very far from each other geographically, historically, linguistically and culturally, is also reflected in the figures of Romeo and Juliet from the families of foes in the Korean political context (the North and the South in Oh’s production, the Gyeongsang and Jeolla provinces in Park’s). Just as Badiou takes Romeo and Juliet as an example instigating the philosophical question of love as an event between two disjunct stances, Park and Oh portray the love of Romeo and Juliet as happening between rivals by recreating it within the context of the Korean historical situation. Kim’s Romeo-The Ssitgim, on the other hand, highlights the eternity of Romeo and Juliet’s love by locating Shakespeare’s play within the frame of Korean gut. This play accords with Badiou’s argument that true love lies in fidelity or commitment within time and demonstrates how time accommodates eternity. Furthermore, this essay investigates Badiou’s idea of theatre: both theatre as an embodied thought and theatre as the space that builds community and nourishes fraternity. Badiou expresses his love of theatre as the love of love, which does not divide thinking from body. For Badiou, love is thinking in body. He also regards theatre as the ground that enriches human reciprocity by letting the players overcome selfishness by reaching out to the being of the other beyond self-interest. I argue that Oh, Park and Kim succeed in forming an ambience of mutual cooperation by transcending the boundaries among players and between the stage and the audience and breaking the barriers of space and time. Questions remain about the directors’ and performers’ understanding of Shakespeare and about the commercial exploitation of artistic work. These problems need to be addressed by a more active exchange among Shakespeare textual criticism, Korean Shakespeare translation and Korean Shakespeare performance. We should accept these efforts at adapting Shakespeare drama into Korean theatre as the construction of love – not as the completion but as the construction, though it is imperfect. It is the promise that we continue the risky adventure of constructing a relationship

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between Shakespeare and Korea, the ‘tenacious adventure’ that Badiou elucidates: However, love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.58

Notes 1

Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick and Poonam Trivedi, eds., Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel (London: Routledge, 2016); Minami Ryuta and Poonam Trivedi, eds., Replaying Shakespeare in Asia (London: Routledge, 2009); Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan, eds., Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

2 Ibid., 5. 3 Ibid. 4

Hyunjung Lee, Performing the Nation in Global Korea: Transnational Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 93–126.

5

Ibid., 122.

6

Beau La Rhee, ‘Tae-Suk Oh’s Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (2006) in London’, The Modern English & American Drama 29.1 (2016): 243.

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7 Yeeyon Im, ‘The Location of Shakespeare in Korea: Lee Yountaek’s Hamlet and the Mirage of Interculturality’, Theatre Journal 60 (2008): 276. 8 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Philosophy in the Present, trans. Peter Engelmann (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). 9 Kang Kim, ‘Political Shakespeare in Korea: Hamlet as a Subversive Cultural Text in the 1980s’, in Shakespeare’s Asian Journeys: Critical Encounters, Cultural Geographies, and the Politics of Travel, eds. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Judy Celine Ick and Poonam Trivedi (London: Routledge, 2016), 123–34. 10 Hyon-u Lee, ‘Hangookeui New Millenium Shakespeare (The New Millenium Shakespeare in Korea)’, Shakespeare Review 48.3 (2012): 533–64. 11 Romeo and Juliet, Dir. Tae-Suk Oh, Seoul: Mokwha Repertory Company, 2005; Romeo and Juliet, Dir. Sung-Whan Park, Seoul: The National Changgeuk Company of Korea, 2009; Romeo-The Ssitgim, Dir. Tae-Rin Kim, Seoul: Performer Group Parandal (Blue Moon), 2015. 12 The National Gugak (Korean traditional music) Center provides their publications online, including Pansori and Korean Musicology Series from number one to seven. https:// www.gugak.go.kr/site/programme/board/basicboard/list?boardt ypeid=74&menuid=002001006. Accessed 1 January 2019. 13 Lee, Performing the Nation in Global Korea, 95, 13. 14 Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 209–10. 15 Badiou, Saint Paul, 10–11. 16 Badiou and Žižek, Philosophy in the Present, 16. 17 Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (New York: The New Press, 2012), 28–9. 18 Ibid., 28. 19 Ibid., 48. 20 Jong-Whan Kim, ‘Shakespeare in a Korean Cultural Context’, Asian Theatre Journal 12.1 (1995): 38–9.

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21 Im, ‘The Location of Shakespeare in Korea: Lee Yountaek’s Hamlet and the Mirage of Interculturality’, 271. 22 Im, ‘The Location of Shakespeare in Korea’, 261. 23 Lee, ‘Hangookeui New Millenium Shakespeare’, 533. 24 Lee, ‘Hangookeui New Millenium Shakespeare’, 533–64; and ‘Dialectical Progress of Femininity in Korean Shakespeare since 1990’, in Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeares, eds. Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn and R. S. White (New Jersey: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 273–91. 25 Young-Joo Choi, ‘The Theatricality of Oh Taesok’s Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth’, Shakespeare Review 45. 4 (2009): 663–8. 26 Rhee, ‘Tae-Suk Oh’s Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (2006) in London’, 252. 27 Rivka Jacobson, ‘Oh T’ae-Sok – Korean Director Drama Teacher and Playwright: Rivka Jacobson In Conversation with Master Oh’, The British Theatre Guide 5 December 2006, in Mokwha’s Shakespeare Sourcebook (Seoul: Mokwha Repertory Company, 2007), 35. 28 ‘Mokwha Repertory Company Romeo and Juliet Programme’, in barbican dance/music/theatre bite 06, trans. Ah-Jeong Kim, 16. Available online: http://a-s-i-a-web.org/productionfiles/12_ MokhwaR&Jprogrammexpdf. Accessed 1 January 2019. From this point on, my statements on Oh’s thought on his performance of Romeo and Juliet are indebted to the explication written in ‘Mokwha Repertory Company Romeo and Juliet Programme’. 29 Gowman, Philip, ‘Master Oh’s apology to Korean youth’, London Korean Links 4 December 2006, in Mokwha’s Shakespeare Sourcebook, 33. 30 ‘Mokwha Repertory Company Romeo and Juliet Programme’, 7. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 9. 34 Choi, ‘The Theatricality of Oh Taesok’s Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth’, 673; Rhee, ‘Tae-Suk Oh’s Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (2006) in London’, 251.

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35 Rivka, ‘Oh T’ae-Sok—Korean Director Drama Teacher and Playwright’, 35. 36 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans.James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 67–8. 37 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1975), 95. 38 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 179–90. 39 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998). 40 Badiou, In Praise of Love, 19. 41 Ibid., 84–5. 42 Ibid., 86–7. 43 Ibid., 88. 44 Ibid., 89–90. 45 Im, ‘The Location of Shakespeare in Korea’, 272. 46 KenTakiguchi, ‘Translating Erased History: Inter-Asian Translation of the National Changgeuk Company of Korea’s Romeo and Juliet’, Journal of World Languages 3.1 (2016): 29. 47 Ibid., 29. 48 Im, ‘The Location of Shakespeare in Korea’, 272. 49 National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts ed., Pansori (Seoul: National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, 2004), 10–13. 50 Ibid., 32–60. 51 Badiou, In Praise of Love, 90. 52 Lee explicates the recent trend of fusing Shakespeare’s play and gut into two categories; one is to merge Shakespeare’s play into the whole frame of gut, and the other is to incorporate the segments of gut into the performance of Shakespeare play. Kim’s employment of gut in his performance exemplifies the former whereas Park’s performance exemplifies the latter. Lee, Hyon-u, ‘Gootgwa Hangook Shakespeare (Gut (Korean

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shamanistic ritual) and Korean Shakespeare)’, Shakespeare Review 49.2 (2013): 249–74. 53 Paul A. Kottman, ‘Defying the Stars: Tragic Love as the Struggle for Freedom in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 63.1 (2012), 37. 54 Badiou, In Praise of Love, 48. 55 Dong-ha Seo, ‘A Possible Promise of Intercultural Shakespeare through Traditional Gut Performance: Tae-rin Kim’s Romeothe Ssitgim (2015)’, Shakespeare Review 54.1 (2018): 176. 56 Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 258. 57 Ibid., 263. 58 Badiou, In Praise of Love, 31–2.

9 Romeo and Juliet at an Historically Black College/University John ‘Ray’ Proctor

George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, first produced in 1987, is a series of eleven vignettes, a fractured collection of fractured moments, examinations of what he thought it meant to try and reconcile African American existence in an American culture and society that repeatedly and consistently rejects African American presence and identity. In ‘Symbiosis’, a Black man is trying desperately to achieve a semblance of success in America and participate in some version of the American Dream. ‘The Man’ is confronted by the younger version of himself, ‘The Kid’, as he is throwing away all of the culturally specific markers of his own identity in his progression towards assimilation. The Man throws his first pair of Converse Allstars, his first Afro-comb, his autographed pictures of Stokely Carmichael, Jomo Kenyatta and Donna Summer into a large garbage can, symbolically trashing all of the signifiers that

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mark and identify him as African American. Over the course of this brief two-character play, The Man grows more and more frustrated as he attempts to explain to The Kid why it is absolutely necessary that he divest himself of what he was in order to survive existence in America: THE MAN: You want to know how, Kid? You want to know how! Because my survival depends on it. Whether you know it or not, the Ice Age is upon us! … The climate is changing, Kid, and either you adapt or you end up extinct. A sociological dinosaur. Do you understand what I am trying to tell you? King Kong would have made it to the top if only he had taken the elevator. Instead he brought attention to his struggle and ended up dead. … If I’m to become what I’m to become then you’ve got to go … I have no history. I have no past.1 It is with this particular conception of the idea of adaptation that I want to consider the relationship between William Shakespeare and the reconciliation and negotiation of African American existence and identity within the framework and ideological structure of America. Adaptation has a plurality of meanings and applications, most of which allude to the process of changing to suit an alternative purpose, function or environment, the alteration of one thing to suit another. In the context of adaptation studies, adaptation is both that process of change or alteration and the work or performance resulting from that process.2 Adaptability is key to artistic longevity: the more a work is reproduced, re-staged, reimagined (like many of Shakespeare’s plays), the longer it remains in the popular consciousness. Moreover, as Joyce Green MacDonald argues, adaptation (and, by extension, adaptability) ‘can be a powerful means by which what has been forgotten, erased, or suppressed … can reappear’.3 And as The Man tells The Kid, adaptability is key to survival. African American existence in America has always been an act of adaptation for survival. That adaptation has always

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included, and was never limited to, learning and adopting new languages (both spoken and written), new Gods and new rituals. Existence in America has always been adaptation for African Americans, because the rules and laws that govern America, that were written by founding fathers rooted in broader systems of white supremacy and patriarchy, have been, by design, elusive and mercurial in order to deny African American equality and personhood. Thus, African Americans were forced to constantly adapt to the ever-shifting goal post that is the idea of equality in America. One of the goal posts that have been historically used to separate and define the savagery, or inhumanity, of Black people in America was education and intellectual capacity.4 It is pointless to continue to list Black people who have mastered white educational systems because, from Phyllis Wheatly to Barack Obama, such proof never seems to translate to equality for Black people in America. Suffice it to say that because of the history of the way race has functioned in America, and the development of the American system of education, the cultural icon that is William Shakespeare became a marker of social and economic class. Thereby, mastery of Shakespeare became a marker of civilization that belonged exclusively to the cultural elite – not just white people, but rich white people. So, while Shakespeare was structurally being removed from popular culture and relegated to academia and the cultural elite, Black people were, at that exact same time, in the process of simply fighting to be recognized as human beings in America.5 And one of the ways that Black people fought to prove their humanity and their civilization to the white gatekeepers was by mastering white people’s gods: language, poetry, music and Shakespeare.6 This history of Black people mastering white American cultural markers and adapting to ever-shifting goalposts that define ‘civilized’ or ‘cultured’ in America establishes the framework through which we might consider a production of Romeo and Juliet at a small, state-funded Historically Black College/University (HBCU) in a community that is not only

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segregated and economically depressed, but also desperate to attain some sense of what it means to be equal and as good as. In the spring semester of 2013 at Albany State University (ASU)7 in Albany, Georgia, it was determined that the Fine Arts Department’s Theatre program would present Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Our budget for the production was $237. Albany State University had neither a costume nor set construction department; there was no ‘theatre production’ component that existed as a part of the theatre department. While there were lights in the theatre (the theatre that was actually an auditorium or a lecture hall), we had neither a lighting designer nor anyone who was familiar with how to utilize the lighting and sound equipment. ‘Dr Proctor, this 400year anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth? Schools all over the country are producing Shakespeare, this year. Your degree is in Shakespeare … ’ was the not-so-subtle argument made by the Speech and Theatre Coordinator for why I, as the Director of Theatre, must include a Shakespeare play on the 2013 performance calendar. ‘But we don’t have sets, or costumes. We don’t have designers or a construction crew. We don’t have designers or anyone who knows how to run the lights’ was my response. The woman who was my boss smiled and, with the manners, gentility and sweetness of one raised in the deep South of the United States, said, ‘Dr Proctor, those are your responsibilities. Have a blessed day.’ I was informed, in no uncertain terms, that it was my job to not only direct the plays but also light the plays, build the sets, costume the production, run the rehearsals, write all of the text for the program, edit the program, find and train undergraduate students to serve as stage manager, backstage crew and run crew – and teach four theatre classes per semester. In spite of all of that, however, I was happy. I was employed. I could pay my monthly bills and begin to pay back my student loan debt. I was the Director of Theatre at Albany State University, an HBCU in southeast Albany, Georgia. I was proud when I would call my mom and tell her about my students, and colleagues, and the classes I taught. She knew I

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was a teacher, a professor. I am sure she was proud of me. I am also sure, however, that my mother had little interest in, or idea of, what I actually did – particularly when it came to teaching or directing Shakespeare. As a Black woman who grew up with six siblings, in abject poverty, in (what was then) rural New Jersey before the blight of urban sprawl, my mother would zone out if I began talking about Shakespeare. She would ask me questions that changed the subject, or she would make an excuse to get off of the phone. Putting the subject bluntly, my mother would say, ‘I don’t want to hear about that white shit. That don’t have nothing to do with me.’ And I learned to not bother my mother with this other aspect of my life. It is not that my mother had no interest in what I did, or the artist and performer that I had grown into. She came to a regional theatre production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ in which I had been cast. She saw me play George Murchison in A Raisin in the Sun at some point. She made it to Newark to see the production of for colored girls who’ve consider suicide when the rainbow is enuf … that I directed. My mother made the effort to come and see productions that I directed, or in which I was cast, that were about Black people and Black existence and Black experience. There were many signifiers of ‘the other’ in which my mother had little interest. She did not trust white people, in general. She was wary of white-dominated spaces. She did not want to come visit me, or see the campuses or university buildings of the schools I attended, though I invited her many times. I received my education and degrees from Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). In doing so, during my educational career I had inadvertently distanced myself from the familiarity and comfort of primarily Black (or African American) communities and spaces, and familial centres, and I had ventured into White spaces – spaces in which I was often the only African American person in a room. That racial demographic was true, with little exception, for the entirety of my undergraduate (BA), graduate (MFA) and doctoral (PhD) studies.

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In the community in which I had been raised – my mother’s world, a world filled with people who looked like me, who were culturally and economically similar to me – I do not remember there being a ‘Shakespeare’. I am sure he was there, somewhere. I am sure the cultural institution that is the permeation of Shakespeare in American culture existed. The cultural institution of Shakespeare existed, perhaps in phrases and idioms that have become so much a part of common parlance that we have forgotten to attribute their existence to William Shakespeare. I am sure that I must have seen a Shakespeare production on television or a film adaptation of one of his plays. I am just as sure that the public high school which I attended did not produce any of Shakespeare’s plays during my four years there. Surely Shakespeare must have existed, or some iteration of his work, in translation or adaptation in either cartoon or some other cinematographic medium during my childhood. Shakespeare, however, as a culturally significant institutional marker of civilization: I do not have any conscious recognition or memory of the presence of him or his work. Shakespeare was not particularly important to my mother or to the community in which I was raised and nurtured. I was told about Emmett Till. We listened to the Temptations and Diana Ross and the Supremes. I watched Muhammed Ali box and Good Times. Here I feel as though I must clarify any misunderstanding that I may have conveyed; my mother was brilliant. My mother was one of the smartest people I knew. She read all of the time and at incredible speeds. My passion for reading comes from my mother. She read everything. She read quickly. She read Toni Morrison and Terry McMillan. She read the Wall Street Journal in spite of the fact that we had never had any money to invest in anything. She did not read Shakespeare. She had no interest in reading Shakespeare. I remember being in college at one point and her asking me about the courses I was taking, and I had told her I was taking a Shakespeare class, and she said, ‘I don’t need to hear about that. That doesn’t mean anything to me.’ So I learned to not belabour or bother my mother with discussions of Shakespeare.

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This is the distance from, or separation between, Black people (and thereby Black communities), and Shakespeare. I had gone away to school, hence I was separated from family and my community. My introduction to Shakespeare belonged to my experiences at PWIs, and I distinctly remember learning that my family, my mother in particular, had no interest in hearing about Shakespeare. In my experience ‘Shakespeare’ was a substitute, a place holder, a variable for ‘whiteness’. As I would talk to my mother about the things I was learning in school, Shakespeare stood in for the experience of comingling and intersecting with ‘whiteness’ and white communities – an experience which for me, and the Black community in which I had been raised, was distinctly and markedly unsafe. Our (I hope you will forgive this generalization for a moment) – mine and the people in the world in which I’d grown up – our interactions with ‘whiteness’ were often violent. As a community, as a people, we learned from our interactions with police officers who were horrifying, threatening and dangerous individuals empowered by the institution of the state, that interacting with ‘whiteness’ could prove violent, if not fatal. The white people we would see driving through our streets late at night were either undercover police officers or white folks looking for drugs. Their presence in our neighbourhoods never boded well for anybody in my neighbourhood because their being present always meant that the police were never far behind. White people in my neighbourhood always meant police, which always meant violence and intimidation and fear. Shakespeare and my being at a PWI stood in for all that my mother (and, by proxy, the community in which I had been raised) had learned, rightly learned, to distrust. My family’s and my community’s distrust, fear and apprehension of whiteness were processed, criticized and analysed in the way we talked about the Central Park Five/Central Park jogger case. We processed and assessed our intersections with whiteness through our recounting of the story of Emmett Till, which we told at family barbeques and funerals. We processed our interactions and intersections with whiteness through

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how we recovered from the violence committed against us by the police when they harassed and arrested us for hanging out outside because we didn’t have air conditioning in our house. Violent harassment and arrests happened every day on the block on which I had grown up. We told stories to protect our children – very young boys and girls – from the white world; a world that absolutely did not have our best interest at heart; a world that American history has proven time and again is intent upon visiting violence upon our Black persons. This is the context within which, and reflection upon which, I have grown to understand my mother’s refusal and lack of desire to hear about Shakespeare. So it is within this context, and with this baggage, that I consider the motivations and objectives that urged the administrators and the department chairperson of Albany State University to insist upon the mounting of a Shakespeare production in the Spring semester of 2013.

1. Why Shakespeare at Albany State University ‘In fair Verona where we lay our scene … ’ There is no need to repeat or reiterate what Albany State University Department of Theatre lacked. What we did have, however, were bright and talented acting students who were eager to take on Shakespeare, and, more importantly, they had a sense of pride for the university, for our department and for themselves as members of an African American community and culture. These were students with whom I had been working for six semesters. These students were familiar with, and competent in the use and execution of, basic Stanislavski and Meisner techniques. Their understanding of the craft of acting included concepts such as how an actor pursues an objective, the utilization of tactic, identification of conflict, their

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investment in imaginative play and the concept that characters had stakes and were taking risks; our theatre majors had an exceptional grasp of basic and advanced acting techniques. However, none of the actors who had been cast had any experience with scansion. They had no understanding or concept of what it meant to speak in verse, or why iambic pentameter was used for speaking certain passages of Shakespeare but not others. Our production of Romeo and Juliet would be the first time Albany State University had ever attempted to put a Shakespeare play on stage. As we were an HBCU, our Theatre Department had made a commitment to producing plays written by African American playwrights, which investigated and illuminated the lived experiences of what it meant to be African American. We had produced works by Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, George C. Wolfe, Suzan Lori-Parks and Douglas Turner Ward during my tenure alone. Our investment was in producing plays that actively worked to examine and critique the relationship between African American Theatre and the more traditional American Theatre canon. Taking on Shakespeare was a bit of a departure from the traditional goals of department. When it had been strongly suggested that I include a Shakespeare play in our season, I realized that this production had to do with the public representation and reputation of Albany State University. The other institute of higher education in Albany, Georgia, was, at that time, Darton State College, a predominantly white institution. Darton had a theatre department with set construction and technical theatre production classes. There were professors who taught lighting and sound design. They had a yearly production budget. Darton State College, the ‘white college’, produced Shakespeare. In the small and relatively segregated community of Albany, Georgia, tradition had it that the white school typically produced the works of Shakespeare while the historically Black university did not. It may not be fair or completely accurate to describe Darton State College as ‘the white school’. It did not have an all-white student or faculty population. Darton was simply the college in town to which

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most of the white people in Albany sent their children. There were some African American students at Darton State, but a significantly lower percentage than at Albany State. Thus, when it was announced that ASU would be producing Romeo and Juliet, to say that there was a bit of a buzz is an understatement. White bank tellers and grocery store clerks smiled at me for months beforehand as I would check out of stores. They would say things like, ‘We are so looking forward to seeing ASU’s Romeo and Juliet. Have a blessed day.’ To be clear, very rarely did white people ever come to any of the plays put on by Albany State University. Romeo and Juliet began to get a bit of a buzz on both the black and white half of town. The local radio station interviewed me about the play in the weeks before it opened. Cast members were invited (and went) to the local public schools to talk about Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet and about going to college to study acting. Some of the middle and elementary school students asked, ‘Romeo and Juliet? Ain’t that about white people?’ The African American communities in Albany, Georgia were echoing the same statements and feelings that my mother had expressed about Shakespeare – for the same reasons that my mother expressed those same sentiments. Shakespeare (the upcoming Albany State University production of Romeo and Juliet) was, again, a symbol of whiteness, and this community could not figure out what this cultural icon had to do with their lives. The poor folks, most folks, folks just trying to get through their days, pay their bills, the same folks just trying not to be bothered by the cops – those folks – they could not have cared less about the university putting on a Shakespeare production, and they did not have much interest in going to see it. The administration of Albany State University aggressively urged me to select and produce a Shakespeare play because Albany State University intended to increase its own cultural capital through its association with Shakespeare. At the time I did not know that Albany State University was in the process of merging with, and consuming, Darton State College. There were a number of very public and very unpopular changes that

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Albany State was in the process of undertaking, coincident with this Shakespeare production. My focus was on getting our play rehearsed, finding a set, teaching twenty-four actors to speak the speech trippingly so that the audience might understand them. The administration of the school and the Georgia Board of Regents, however, were in the process of implementing systemic changes that would significantly impact the demographics of Albany, Georgia – and nobody was really happy about any of those changes. What I did not realize was that the school needed the bright and colourful pictures of our students being successful, showing mastery, exhibiting academic excellence because the production was a part of a larger marketing campaign. In this instance Shakespeare was being used by our university to legitimize: to legitimize our students, and their academic abilities, and to justify our quality and excellence as an institution of higher learning. Our students had to do an excellent job with this play because the President of our university talked about our students deserving the resources that made them equal to every other HBCU and PWI in the state of Georgia. I cast the play. I was proud of my students. I was proud of all of the work that my students had done up to that point. I took them and their presence personally. As actors they had worked very hard to learn technique, as well as good rehearsal and performance ethics. I met and cast Dr Ernest Williams. Dr Williams had been the head of the Theatre Department at ASU for thirty years, but he had retired because he could not continue to make theatre viable in a department, in a school, where there was never any budget for making theatre. He was tired and had retired eight years before I had ever come to Albany, Georgia. Theatre at Albany State University is an institution that functions on informal partnerships. Ms Helen Young was seventy-two years old. She owned a farm on the outskirts of town and a barbershop in town. I got my hair cut at Ms Helen’s shop once a month. I had been getting my hair cut at Ms Helen’s since we had been introduced when I had

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initially come to interview to work at the school. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ms Helen loved theatre and that she particularly loved the ASU Theatre Department while I was the Director. She made me a peach cobbler in a deep-dish baking tray after every opening night. Ms Helen would share all the local gossip. She told me about the doings and shenanigans of the local community theatre and about the people that I would need to contact to get the materials for a set for our plays. She knew some ‘boys’ (who were full-grown men, really) who would put in some labour and get our sets built, because they owed her some favours. A good number of our costumes came out of her closet. One of her relatives ran a local mortuary business, and they were kind enough to donate some clothes about which we never inquired too deeply, which were added to our costume storage. It was a sunny Saturday in February of 2013 that Ms Helen introduced me to Dr Williams, the former Director of Theatre at Albany State University. Dr Williams was seventy-eight years old. Since he had retired from teaching theatre, he spent his days caring for his brother who had cancer and working in his garden. By the time I met him I was unaware that he had seen all of the productions that I had put on the ASU stage for the prior two and a half years. He was very fond of our production of Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress, but he did not much care for our mounting of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. It was not our actors or even my direction, he said. He just did not much care for the play itself. In his opinion he was simply not sure that Ms Kennedy’s play had aged well. The conversation with Dr Williams lasted the length of my haircut, his haircut and a few glasses of bourbon shared between Dr Williams, Ms Helen and myself. Being the Director of Theatre at Albany State University was an odd and enlightening experience. It is more than simply a teaching appointment at a university. As I have said, we had little to no budget for our theatre program. Race and racial tension were particularly complicated and peculiar aspects

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of this segregated community, negotiated by both Black and white people on a daily basis. Daily I found myself balancing what it meant to be a Northerner but trying hard not to be a ‘Yankee’, or at least to not be considered one by this new community in which I found myself. I had to learn to negotiate the fine line between building friendships, temporary alliances and allegiance. That Saturday in Ms Helen’s barbershop I was being interviewed and interrogated. Ms Helen was already on my side. What I came to realize, much later, was that she was putting her name on the line by introducing and endorsing me to Dr Williams. Somewhere around the third glass of bourbon Dr Williams placed his hand on my arm, looked me in the eye and said he trusted me with his department and the theatre program at Albany State. I placed my hand back on his arm, thanked him and told him I would need him to play Lord Montague. What followed was a little more wheedling, a little more bourbon and a little more negotiating. Ultimately he agreed, though he held great reservation and even more trepidation about what it meant to once again tread the boards. I told him he was exactly what this production needed. It took the better part of that Saturday morning, but by the time we shook hands and said our goodbyes, Dr Williams agreed to take on the role and said that I should expect him at the first read-through. He also asked if I would be so kind as to drop a hard copy of the script off by his house. A request to which I, of course, agreed. Ms Helen then directed me to Mr Gerald Williams, a local defence attorney who fancied himself a ‘classically trained’ thespian. Getting Attorney Williams to agree to play Lord Capulet was an exercise and an education in the politics of status, the likes of which I had not known up until that point in my life. Attorney Williams was arrogant, condescending and dismissive, and it was very important that I understood the favour he was doing me personally and, by extension, Albany State University. He had to be massaged, managed and cajoled into accepting the role, which he finally did.

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Interestingly I discovered pockets of people, African American people, who wanted to be a part of this Shakespeare play: Dr Williams, Mr Williams (the attorney), Mrs Dunning. There were individuals in our community who wanted to support our theatre program. They wanted to support our students – but they also wanted to excel at, and master, Shakespeare. Shakespeare is an intellectual hill to be conquered. We are often taught in school that Shakespeare is hard. Mastery of Shakespeare is a marker by an individual that demands the right to admittance to exclusivity. Mastery of Shakespeare, having been relegated to the culturally elite, means that the culturally elite cannot deny you admittance. Mastering Shakespeare means standing in the great halls of Western Civilization and declaring, ‘I have bested your God. I was born your equal. You have no power over me.’ Perhaps that is a bit dramatic, but you get my point. Two lawyers and the former head of the department chose to align their names and reputations with this production, and they were all aware, on some level, that their reputations were at stake. But it was also about status. Going on that stage and mastering Shakespeare, with eloquence, with grace and skill: they trusted me to guide and shape this production in this community. That was terrifying. I filled out the cast with two more adults: one of our French professors, Ms Ellen Clay, played Lady Capulet, and the University President’s wife, Mrs Karen Dunning, played the Prince. My decision to cast a combination of community actors and students had to do with what the audience would ‘read’ in the stage picture. I, as the Director of Theatre and as the director of this production, needed the audience to embrace this production. I needed the audience to take ownership of this play. I needed the audience to see their friends and the pillars of their community in this production. I needed the audience to want the students to do well. I needed the audience to be on our side. President Dunning had, at one point, dropped by my office to subtly mention how upset he would be if his wife were at all embarrassed and I assured him that he had nothing about which he should concern himself. This, being the first production of Shakespeare that Albany State University would ever put on

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stage, was going to be a rousing success, I assured him. I had no idea what that meant or how I might accomplish it, but I looked darn confident as I shook his hand and bid him well. I knew certain things about the cast, the production and the audience before I had cast the show or begun rehearsal: these were things I knew in the planning stages long before I convinced the university and community to trust me to lead this venture. I needed the African American community of Albany, Georgia, behind me if I hoped for any success with this production. I needed the community’s support. I knew that there were large portions of the white half of the community that expected our production to be laughable and an embarrassment; there were members of the white population of Albany that expected us to fail. I know that to be true because they told me. Similar sentiments were said to my students and other ASU professors at various university functions, with impunity. Very few people expected our school’s theatre department to perform Shakespeare in any way that did ourselves or Shakespeare any justice. I existed in a fairly constant state of anxiety about the whole production being a failure. The potential for this project, that kept being talked about by the community in bigger and grander language, to be personally embarrassing was significant. The potential to embarrass my students or the other adults who had joined the cast was horrifying. Even worse, it was possible that the African American community in Albany, Georgia, simply would not care about this play – or Shakespeare. The fact was, however, that I was responsible for making this community connect with this play – and with Shakespeare – and it was overwhelming.

2. Rehearsal Our first rehearsal began at 6:00 PM on the evening of 9 February 2013. Ms Jasmine Williams sat to my right. She was a senior Theatre major. She had been my stage manager for the past two years. Jasmine was the stage manager for Trouble

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in Mind, Spunk and Funnyhouse of a Negro. Jasmine deserved a much better teacher than me for stage management. I have never been a stage manager, and I had no idea what skills or proficiencies were (or are) necessary to have done that job. I am now, and I will always be, eternally grateful that this young lady believed in me and supported me as I built that theatre program. She sat to my right on that first night of rehearsal. Her face was filled with wonder and excitement as we read through this play. Watching her face fill with joy as she listened to the words of this play as they were read out loud – that is how I knew that this production was going to be fine, more than fine. I knew when I saw Jasmine’s face reflect love, and beauty and excitement for Romeo and Juliet, I knew that I could make this story relevant and ‘matter’ to the Black community of Albany, Georgia. I watched Mrs Dunning (the President’s wife who would play the Prince) watch these students, who were thirty years her junior. I watched her take pride in their reading. I watched her watch them as they asked questions and engaged critically with the text. I watched her negotiate and balance her stage fright with her desire to support our program. In January, Mrs Dunning (who had seen all of our other productions) had telephoned me and asked if I would be willing to cast her in a small part in Romeo and Juliet. I, of course, obliged. She was in the room on the night of our first read-through. She watched some twenty-four students struggle with and then embrace the language, and then the story. During this first reading no one was embarrassed that they did not know a word or a phrase. There were a ton of words and phrases with which no one, save me, was familiar. Sometimes there is a kind of self-consciousness when reading out loud in front of people. Children who struggle with reading have a visceral fear in response to their inability to read out loud, especially in a room full of people. Sitting in a classroom, being forced by a teacher to read a passage out loud  – who does not know that embarrassment, particularly if one does not read terribly well? Imagine being a Black student in a

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classroom of white children with a white teacher – imagine the embarrassment of not being able to read this complicated text out loud. That was not us on the night of our first reading. Some of the text was unfamiliar. Many of the words the students had never seen before. To this day I have no idea what alchemy made those students safe in that room on that evening. If someone did not know a word, they simply asked, without embarrassment, what the word meant and I answered them, as Jasmine made notation of the question. Not one of our students judged or mocked another student for having difficulty with the language – and there were a number of our students who had difficulty with the language. There was no shame in not knowing something. We sat around that table, together, without judgement or censure. It was beautiful. It was holistic and it was communal. And it was Shakespeare. It was certainly not the crisp, confident, thoughtless, elegant, witty and graceful language that rolls off of the tongue of an actor who has been working with Shakespeare for years and years. It was not Shakespeare spoken with the nimbleness of English actors (actors born in England); but it was Shakespeare. I do not know what made it Shakespeare; but our first reading made that play ours. We (perhaps emotionally) claimed ownership of Romeo and Juliet. Besides Mrs Dunning and the former Director of Theatre, Dr Williams, I am fairly certain that none of the other twentyfour members of this cast had ever read Romeo and Juliet. Many of them had never read any Shakespeare at all. My students have learned that being on time means being fifteen minutes early. It means being vocally warmed up, focused, phones are off and that you are prepared to cover the material that we will go over that night. In the way that some people make jokes about ‘C.P. Time’ (Coloured People’s Time), my students had learned to put that myth to bed. The acting students, my acting students were always on time because we discussed how being on time is a mark of respect for yourself, your fellow actors and the work that we are creating, so the theatre majors were always on time.

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Oddly enough, this meant that the woman playing Friar Laurence also had her three sons (aged thirteen, six and two) with her. It meant that the young man playing Benvolio was still wearing his Popeye’s uniform because his shift ended at the same time as our rehearsal began. It meant that the young man playing Tybalt had to bring his sister to rehearsal because there was no one home who could watch her. There were many people in the room in our first rehearsal who were (and were not actually) a part of our rehearsal. Scripts were passed around, attendance was taken. Mrs Dunning sat two or three spaces to my left, Jasmine to my right. Attorney Williams, Lord Capulet, was late. Dr Ernest Williams, however, was on time. As people quieted down and scripts were opened, there was this feeling, or sense really, a tension that permeated the room. I asked Dr Williams if he would read the opening prologue. There was a pause. A look somewhere between fear and confusion crossed Dr Williams’s face. He began to read. His reading was not fluid. It did not flow off his tongue. He struggled with the language. He struggled with saying the words. I could barely hear him. As I looked around the room, I saw all of my students’ faces looking back at me. Mrs Dunning was looking at me. Jasmine was looking at me. Ms Helen (who was not cast in the play, but there was no way I could tell her she could not come to rehearsal) was looking at me. If I were to guess what was happening in the minds of that cast and company during those first few moments of that first rehearsal, I would say they were terrified. I think they were afraid of embarrassing themselves. They were afraid they were going to be awful – at Shakespeare. Dr Williams sputtered to silence. That was a tense moment. This was that moment when my responsibility to my cast, to my university and to myself concretized and synthesized with my role as the director. What I said was, ‘It’s okay, Dr Williams, please take your time. Take as much time as you need. We’ve got all night and there is nobody here but us.’ It was gentle encouragement, a nudging. What I discovered in that moment

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has to do with how a director wears the mantle of leadership in this very tenuous and delicate relationship that gets built in the rehearsal hall. In a play rooted in realism, the language of the play sounds like the words that come out of your mouth when you speak. In devised theatre, words can serve many different functions, but it is not typically the case that the words, themselves, make you sound wrong, even to yourself. What was happening in our rehearsal hall was a fear of, and a backing away from, Shakespeare’s text and his language. And while it happened first to Dr Williams, I saw that fear reflected on the students’ and my colleagues’ faces. Thus, we established some ground rules upon which we based that rehearsal and every rehearsal that followed. Once Dr Williams had finished reading the opening prologue I said to him, and to everyone else in the room, that if we ever come across a word we do not understand it is perfectly fine to stop and ask what it means. I told them all that I know a lot about Shakespeare, but I also assured them that I do not know everything, and that we have access to tools that will absolutely help us understand what we are saying. The young man who would play Benvolio held up his hand, and he said that he just wanted to ‘sound right’. This idea, the idea of ‘sounding right’, was an idea that remained in the air throughout much of our rehearsal process and it deserves a little unpacking. At some point I asked the company, the actors, what it meant to ‘sound right?’ The young woman playing Juliet (Scottlyn Terry) said, ‘Well, the way white people do when they speak Shakespeare.’ I thought that it was necessary and right to have this discussion as a whole company. It was a wonderful experience. I sat in a room full of students, and adults, and working professionals – all African American – and we had a discussion about whether or not Shakespeare belonged to white people. We had a discussion about whether the themes in Romeo and Juliet belong solely to the white world – or if Shakespeare could belong to us too. I promise you that this issue was not resolved in our first rehearsal.

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One of the more complicated aspects of this discussion manifested itself in the way the actress playing Juliet developed her idea of what Juliet sounded like. The voice the actress was using was much higher pitched than she normally spoke, and her voice took on a breathy, or hyperaspirated, quality. I asked her, ‘Scottlyn, what is that voice you are doing? Why are you talking like that?’ She paused. She looked embarrassed. It was as if I had caught her doing something wrong, or something of which she was ashamed. Weeks later, during a particularly tense rehearsal, there was a breakthrough, of sorts. The actress said that the voice was her ‘white voice because Juliet was white.’ I asked her what she meant and she responded, ‘Dr Proctor, I did my research. I looked her up online, I  watched six different film versions of Romeo and Juliet. Juliet is a rich white girl. She is thin. She usually has light hair, it’s always long and it flows down her back. She’s small, like a little girl. She’s delicate. Her voice is high pitched. I’ve done my research. She doesn’t look anyone in the eye. Her eyes are always cast down.’ That was a difficult rehearsal. Scottlyn Terry is a strong, Black woman; courageous, opinionated, she can be loud. She holds a spotlight and commands a stage, and she is one of the most talented actresses I have ever worked with. She is not, however, delicate or demure. She is no shrinking violet. She is stunningly beautiful and I know very few people who work as hard or as diligently as she does. Scottlyn was working very hard to force her very strong and very ‘present’ personality into this ‘idea’ of Juliet. Scottlyn’s research of the character gave her an idea of a Juliet that was delicate, fragile, small – and white. What I learned was that we, as Black actors embodying Shakespeare’s characters, are always in a process of coding and decoding (or constructing and deconstructing) the history of the preceding (or prior) productions. Through film, television, print media and so on, we are searching for a guide that tells us how it was done before us: not because we intend to emulate

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or parrot, but because we, as actors, are performing a kind of critical analysis in real time – as we develop and then perform our particular take on these characters. For Black actors (for actors of colour), we are in the complicated position of having to negotiate and reconcile or shake loose our understanding of who and what the character is from (more often than not) the presence, or the person, of the white actors that represented that character. There is already an idea of the character Juliet that exists in the mind of the director when he casts a production of Romeo and Juliet. There is already an idea of Juliet in the mind of the actor (actress) who is cast in the role. It is there before the first rehearsal begins, whether the actor has done their homework or not. The idea of Romeo and Juliet is pervasive. There is an idea of a ‘Juliet’ in the mind of the audience before they even come to see the play. There is a production history of images and actresses who have already played the character. There are all of these ghosts of what Juliet sounds like, what she looks like and her sigh as she stands on the balcony and falls in love with Romeo. These ideas, or preconceptions, of Juliet inform, instruct and impede the actors doing their best to discover the role. There are similar ghosts and mythologies, preconceptions really, about the cultural institution of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is hard. Shakespeare is about white people. Shakespeare doesn’t have anything to do with me. Culturally, Shakespeare has been relegated to the upper classes, the institutionally educated and the elite. Culturally, Shakespeare has been a marker of achievement, something difficult to be mastered, an obstacle that, once surmounted, increases some intrinsic value. At least that is the carrot that is dangled before us in the hierarchy of our societal structure. My mother, however, did not need Shakespeare. Most of the community did not want Shakespeare; they came and saw it because they supported our department and our students, and the spectacle of pillars of our community on stage was new – but most of the African

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American community in Albany, Georgia did not necessarily want Shakespeare. Our university’s decision to mount that production was a serendipitous marketing ploy that helped gloss over an unpopular merger of universities within the community. I appreciated our production of Romeo and Juliet at Albany State University mostly because I did not have any specific Romeo and Juliet in my head before I began – and maybe that is because I had never seen a Romeo and Juliet that was cast with only African American players. For this experience with this wonderful cast of students and community members, my job was simply to help them make discoveries in research, rehearsal and performance. We had a certain ownership of our production of Romeo and Juliet. We spoke the way we spoke because we were never going to speak Shakespearean (whatever that means). We most certainly did not speak with English accents. We never even made an attempt to make those sounds. None of the cast was English. We were never going to sound English, so we never tried. And I do not think that the most important aspect of Romeo and Juliet is their Veronese identity. The point of the play, for me, is certainly not their English identity. The context of our production of Romeo and Juliet was a love story between a boy and a girl whose families had been feuding for longer than anyone could remember. This play had bourgie folk, and some characters were real country. People partied and fell in love. At the end of the play our audiences empathized with the characters in our production, because they recognized characters being portrayed, because they looked like them. We made performance choices that tailored rhythm and language, inflection and delivery, in ways that were probably not ‘right’; but those were sounds and choices and pronunciation that expressed our understanding of the text –  and made our interpretation of the text clear to the audiences that attended our production.

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Notes 1 George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum (New York: Grove Press, 1988). 2 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006; second edition 2013), 11. 3 Joyce Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 166. 4 Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2017). 5 For additional context, see Macdonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, 2–3; and ‘The Legend of Lucy Negro’, in The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, ed. Janell Hobson (New York: Routledge, 2021), 71–2. See also Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 176–7. 6 Levine maps the relegation of Shakespeare to the hallowed halls of the cultural elite and away from the popular culture in America in The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. 7 Albany is located in southwest Georgia along the banks of the Flint River, approximately 151 miles south of Atlanta, Georgia. There are fourteen elementary schools, five middle schools and three high schools. According to the American Census Service Statistics the population of Albany, Georgia is 73,179, of which 72 per cent are African-American. The Albany Bureau of Tourism states that for those seeking higher education, Albany State University (ASU) offers a full range of graduate and undergraduate programs, and that after the recent merger with Darton State College it also offers both two-year and four-year degrees.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS EDITORS Ariane Helou is Scientific Writing Specialist at the Beckman Institute, California Institute of Technology. She was previously a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research addresses theories of voice and the relation of voice to body, gender and affect in early modern drama and music. Her scholarly output includes both academic publications and public scholarship for theatre audiences and other community outreach initiatives. She is also a dramaturg, translator and performing artist whose background spans early music, theatre and opera. Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she co-directs the New Swan Shakespeare Center. She is the author or co-author of five monographs on Shakespeare and the editor or co-editor of many volumes and special issues, including Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, published by Arden/Bloomsbury in 2016. Other recent works include Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (2018) and Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (2011). She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.

CONTRIBUTORS Colby Gordon is Assistant Professor in the English department at Bryn Mawr College, where he teaches courses on Renaissance literature and queer theory. He has published articles on

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transgender embodiment, secularism, sound studies and legal phenomenology. With Simone Chess and Will Fisher, he has edited a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on the topic of early modern trans studies. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Glorious Bodies:  Trans Theology in Renaissance Literature. Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson is an artist and scholar who auteurs story ballets for film. In his scholarship and artistic practice Jehbreal interrogates ballet’s history as he explores the intersections of art, science, and spirit in the cosmological compositions of William Shakespeare, the Moors of alAndalus, and the Shabaka Stone of ancient Kush. He received his BFA in dance from The Juilliard School and his MFA in dance from UC Irvine and is currently a PhD student in theatre at Columbia University. He has danced with the Dance Theater of Harlem and other companies. Seon Young Jang is Professor in the Department of English Education, Kongju National University, South Korea, where she teaches English Literature. She received her PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2008. Her recent published papers are ‘Developing Critical Thinking and Human Compassion with English Short Stories in the Korean EFL Classroom’ (2019), ‘Sexual Phantasy and Its Violence in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (2018), ‘Twelfth Night: Political Emotions, Sexual Energy, and Women’ (2017) and ‘Ernst Kantorowicz, Richard II, Political Theology and Psychoanalysis’ (2016). Samuel Kolodezh is an adjunct professor at California State University, Northridge; New York University; University of California, San Diego; and other universities in southern California. His research focuses on Shakespeare, character, temporality and adaptation, and pop culture. He is the author and co-author of several book chapters and articles on Shakespeare, intermediality, performance philosophy and adaptation.

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Laura Levine is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at Tisch Drama NYU, where she is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. Her book Men in Women’s Clothing: Antitheatricality and Effeminization 1579–1642 (1994) examines attitudes towards effeminization endemic to the Renaissance stage. Her book Afterlives of Endor (2023) addresses anxieties about witchcraft in the early modern period. She has also published on Shakespeare and ballet. Her work has been supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library and NYU’s Humanities Center. John ‘Ray’ Proctor is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Tulane University, where he teaches acting, African American theatre history and theatre for social justice. He holds a BA in English from Webster University, an MFA in acting from West Virginia University and a PhD in theatre research from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His primary research focuses on the interpretation and analysis of Black bodies in performance, particularly in classical or culturally elite spectacle-texts. Anandi Rao is Lecturer in South Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Irvine, in 2020. Her dissertation, ‘In the Name of Shakespeare: (En)Gendering India through Translation’, lies at the intersection of Shakespeare studies, translation studies, postcolonial studies and gender and sexuality studies. Beryl Schlossman is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language; The Orient of Style: Modernist Allegories of Conversion and Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism. Her poetry and prose fiction have been published on both sides of the Atlantic. Angelus Novus (Editions Virgile, Fontaine-lès-Dijon) and several artists’ books have been published in France. Left Bank Dream appeared in 2014. Her new projects include a volume of poetry, a study of Baudelaire, essays on travel writing and short fiction.

INDEX Locators followed by “n.” indicate endnotes Aaltonen, Sirkku 196 adaptations, forms of 6, 8, 15, 25 n.52, 32, 107, 112–13, 116, 155, 206, 225–6, 250 and appropriation 162–4, 180, 183, 185 n.6, 199–200 ballet 15–16, 61–9, 89–91, 93–9 fidelity and 150, 153 film 3, 5, 16, 101 n.4, 101 n.5, 158 n.8, 161–84, 201–2, 254, 268 intertextuality and 18, 131–4 music 14, 33, 43–51, 235 opera 15–16, 44, 133, 237 studies 137–8, 140, 142, 156, 157 n.3, 250 television 16, 137, 254 theatre productions 222–3, 225, 227–44, 251–2, 256–70 web series 17, 194–6, 198–9, 201–2, 208 Adityanath, Yogi 194, 207, 217 n.47. See also antiRomeo squads (Uttar Pradesh) affective fidelity 14, 42–4, 48, 50

African American community/ identity 249–51, 253, 256, 267 in Albany, Georgia 4, 258, 263, 270, 271 n.7 Agamben, Giorgio 16, 166–7, 171, 181 Ahn, Minsoo, Hamyeol Taeja (Prince Hamyeol) 226 Ain’t Misbehavin’ 253 Albany State University (ASU) 17, 252, 256–63, 271 n.7 administration of 258 demographics (Albany, Georgia) 259, 271 n.7 rehearsal 263–70 Theatre at 259–60 Albright, Daniel 45 Alighieri, Dante 5, 110, 116, 128–9 ALTBalaji platform 194, 201–2, 210, 216 n.33, 219 n.61 American Ballet Theatre 102 n.12 anti-Romeo squads (Uttar Pradesh) 194, 206–8, 212 anuvad. See translation/translation studies Aphrodite 108, 111, 122 Apter, Emily 41 Apuleius, The Golden Ass 32

276

INDEX

arabesque (dance position) 71–3, 91, 97–8, 102 n.9 arm movement (dance) 91, 102 n.11 Ashton, Frederick 63, 65 Asian Shakespeare 221, 242 Atherton, James 109 Bach, Johann Sebastian Christmas Oratorio 65 St. Matthew Passion 65 Badiou, Alain 243 idea of theatre 231–2, 237, 242–3 philosophy of love 17, 19, 224–5, 230, 238, 243 universal singularity 222–4, 242 Bakhtin, Mikhail 131 Balaji Telefilms 194–5, 202 ballet 15–16, 61–9, 89–91, 93–9. See also specific ballets ballet d’action 15 Bandello, Matteo 5 Baraka, Amiri 257 Barthes, Roland ‘From Work to Text’ 131 The Pleasure of the Text (1973) 131–2 Bassi, Shaul 6 Bassnett, Susan 196–7, 199 Battestin, Martin 158 n.8 Baudrillard, Jean 180 Bazin, André 139, 158 n.8 Beckett, Samuel 16, 133 ‘First Love’ (see ‘First Love’ (1946, Beckett)) love and banishment 124–31 Begnal, Michael 109

Bellini, Giovanni 43 Belsey, Catherine 103 n.17 Benjamin, Walter 15 Benvolio (Romeo and Juliet) 36, 90–1, 95, 206, 266–7 Berg, Alban, Lulu 128 Bergeron, David 179 Berlant, Lauren 180–1. See also slow death, theorization of Berlioz, Hector 19 affective fidelity 48–9 Roméo et Juliette (1839) 14, 33, 44–7, 49, 51, 57–8 n.42, 57 n.39 Symphonie fantastique (1830) 45 word-painting 50 Bernstein, Leonard, West Side Story (1957) 43 Berry, Phillipa 185 n.7 Bhardwaj, Vishal, Omkara 201–2 Bhatia, Nandi 198 Biberman, Matthew 13 Bigliazzi, Silvia 3 Boaistuau, Pierre 5 Bolter, Jay David 9 Botting, Fred 188 n.27 Boyle, Jen 142 Bradbrook, M.C. 141 Brandes, Georg 124 Brandom, Robert 81 Brecht, Bertolt 228 Brennan, Teresa 180 Brissenden, Alan 83 n.4 British East India Company 197 Brook, Peter 125 Brooke, Arthur 6, 32, 69

INDEX

Brown, Carolyn E. 53 n.13 Browning, Robert 118, 133 Burnett, Mark Thornton 21 n.6, 133 Burt, Richard 176 cambré 93, 102 n.14 Campana, Joseph 64, 79 canonization process 197 Capulet feast 60, 111, 119, 128, 231, 236, 239 as janchi 231 pas de deux at 69–70 Cartelli, Thomas 13 Casa di Giulietta (Verona) 3 Castelvecchio (Verona) 1–9, 134 Clifford’s photograph 2–3 Scarpa’s renovation 2, 6–7, 18 Cavarero, Adriana 51 changgeuk (Korean opera) 17, 223, 233–4, 237 Charry, Brinda 201 Cheng, Vincent 109, 124 Childress, Alice, Trouble in Mind 260 Clifford, James 1, 4–5, 18 indigenous diaspora 6 photographs of Castelvecchio 2–3 Cohn, Ruby 125 Cole Howard, Camille 85 n.15 The Colored Museum (Wolfe) 249 African American existence/ identity 249–51 Symbiosis 249 cosmopolitanism 6 Cranko, John 63–5, 90, 101 n.5

277

cultural imperialism and postcoloniality 222 Czinner, Paul 64 Daniel, Drew, melancholy assemblage 143 Da Porto, Luigi 5 Darton State College 257–8, 271 n.7 Davenant, William 43 ‘The Dead’ (1914, Joyce) 107–9, 118, 125–6, 128–31 afterlife of 133 Gabriel Conroy 109, 118–24, 128–9 Gretta Conroy 109, 119–22 hospitality 129 ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ 119–20 swooning, Gabriel’s 121–3, 125, 129, 131 Deleuze, Gilles 171–2 rhizome 185 n.4 society of control 182, 188 n.36 democratic materialism 242 depersonalization 145, 156, 181 Derrida, Jacques 166 Deschamps, Émile 45–8 Desmet, Christy 13, 162 développé 92, 102 n.13 diaspora 1, 9–12, 113, 116, 127, 130, 199 Dionne, Craig 199, 201 Dionysus 10, 12, 112, 114 Dire Straits, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1981) 43 dismemberment and remembering 10, 112–14, 163

278

INDEX

division (music) 38–9 Dollar, Isabel 104 n.19 Dowland, John 38 Dryden, John 43 Dublin theatres 109, 133 Eagling, Wayne 90 Eastwood, Clint 152 Elliott, Kamilla 139 Eros 108, 110–11, 115, 117 exteriorization 138, 141, 148, 153, 155 Face/Off 171 Fernie, Ewan 7 Ferri, Alessandra 102 n.12 Ficino, Marsilio 111 fidelity 4, 8, 13–19, 33, 41, 55 n.29, 126, 137–8, 149–50, 155, 157 n.3, 162–4, 166, 225, 238, 240, 243 across media 19 and adaptation 150, 153 affective 14, 42–4, 48, 50 criticism 25 n.52 and electric media 140 ethical imperative and methodological principle 139 high 141 language of 147 linear, normative, hierarchical model 139 meditation on 142 Neumeier’s form of 64, 80 servo-mechanistic 140–1, 145, 151, 156 trust and collaboration 15 and vitality 16, 148, 155

film 3, 5, 16, 101 n.4, 101 n.5, 158 n.8, 161–84, 201–2, 254, 268. See also specific film Finkel, Anita 90 ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ 100 n.1 ‘First Love’ (1946, Beckett) 107–10, 118, 125–30, 133 Flaubert, Gustave, ‘A Simple Heart’ 128–9 Fonteyn, Margot 64, 90, 101 n.7 Foucault, Michel 180 author function 186 n.12 disciplinary societies 188 n.36 Fraleigh, Sondra 74 Freccero, Carla 184, 206, 213 Freetown 7 Freud, Sigmund 19, 209, 230 Friar Laurence (Romeo and Juliet) 16, 47, 68, 76–8, 81, 94–8, 113, 115, 118, 145–56, 212, 237, 239, 266 Furey, Michael 121 Fuss, Diana 210 Galeotti, Vincenzo Tomatelli 63 Galey, Alan 144 Garneau, Michel 8 Garrick, David 15, 45 George Murchison (A Raisin in the Sun) 253 Georgia Board of Regents 259 Ghar wapsi 207, 217 n.47 Ghibellines and Guelphs 5 Ghosh, Shohini 209

INDEX

Gilbert, Stuart 109 Glasheen, Adaline 109, 124 Golding, Arthur 33 The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly 152 gopuri (Korean ritual procedure) 240 Gordon, Colby 9, 16, 19 Gottlieb, Robert, Reading Dance 100 n.1 Gounod, Charles 43–4 Gowman, Philip 227 Graham, Martha 79, 81 grand jeté 91, 102 n.10 Grusin, Richard 9 Guattari, Félix 172 rhizome 185 n.4 Gupta, Kovid 202 gut (Korean shamanism) 222–3, 236–8, 240, 243, 247 n.52 Halberstam, Jack 179, 187 n.20 Halsey, hopeless fountain kingdom (2017) 43, 167 Haneul Theatre at the National Theatre of Korea 227 Harries, Karsten 77–8 Harris, Jonathan Gil 159 n.26, 202 ‘Masala Shakespeare’ 200–1 Heer-Ranjha 193, 199, 206 Helou, Ariane 6, 8, 10, 14, 19, 163 heroic stellification 10–11 Historically Black College/ University (HBCU) 4, 17, 19, 251–2, 257. See also Albany State University (ASU)

279

Hodgart, Matthew 109 Hoenselaars, Ton 8. See also tradaptation Holderness, Graham 215 n.22 Holtzman, Freud 209 Homan, Jennifer, ‘In Balanchine’s Beautiful Forest’ 100 n.1 homosexuality 9, 207–9, 218 n.49 homosociality 206–7, 209, 218 n.53 Hudson, Dave 182 Hugo, Victor 46, 48 Cromwell (1828) 46 Préface de Cromwell 46, 56 n.38 Hutcheon, Linda 5, 8, 15, 18, 25 n.52, 32, 157 n.3 Ibsen, Henrik 124 Im, Yeeyon 222, 233–4 Indian adaptations 9, 194, 206 indigenization 1, 5 interculturalism 221–2, 242 intertextuality and adaptation 18, 131–4, 197 Ireland 109, 132–3 Irish theatre 108–9 Isenberg, Nancy 100 n.1 Jackson, Jehbreal Muhammad 8, 14, 19 Jacobson, Rivka 227 James, Heather 10 Jang, Seon Young 6, 17, 19 Japan colonization of Korea 226 Kabuki 233 theatre 221, 233–4

280

INDEX

Jarmusch, Jim, Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) 179–80 Jonson, Ben 11–12 Joyce, James 16, 110, 133 ‘The Dead’ (see ‘The Dead’ (1914, Joyce)) Dubliners 118, 120, 129 Exiles 118 Finnegans Wake 109, 118, 124 love and banishment 117–24 Ulysses 109, 118, 124 Joyce, Nora Barnacle 116 Kabuki (Japan) 233 Kapadia, Paramita 199, 201 Kapoor, Ekta 194. See also Romil and Jugal Katyal, Akhil 219 n.65 continuum 209 doubleness of sexuality 208, 210–11, 218 n.53 Keeling, Kara, Queer Times, Black Futures 188 n.36 Kemble, Charles 44–6 Kennedy, Adrienne 257 Funnyhouse of a Negro 260 Khalil, Ronnie, With a Kiss I Die (2018) 16, 161, 185 n.7 blackness and queerness 182–3 de- and re-territorialization 183 faciality, problem of 171–3 fantasy of generation 184 feminist counter-apocalypse 181–2 in-betweenness (Juliet-V) 166 Juliet-V and vampirism 162–6, 174, 182

slow death 180–1 synopsis 164–5 temporalization/ subjectification of love 171 theme of sickness 179–80 tragedy 165–7 Kidnie, Margaret Jane 13, 16, 18, 25 n.52 Killick, Andrew 233 Kim, Tae-Rin, Romeo-The Ssitgim (2015) 223, 225, 237 eternity of love 238, 240, 243 forgiveness and reconciliation 241–2 gut’s ritual process 237–8, 240, 247 n.52 mudang 239–40 shamanistic ritual 241 Kleiner, John 103 n.18 Kolodezh, Samuel 5, 9, 16, 19 Korea/Koreanness 9, 223–4 Japan’s colonization of 226 Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) 227 movements of Shakespeare productions 226 patriotism 224 performance traditions 221, 223–4, 226 (see also specific Korean performance traditions) Shakespeare and 17, 222, 224–5, 242–4 shamanism 9, 222–3, 226, 234, 236–7, 240–1 traditional arts 6, 222–3, 233–5 Korean Musicology Series 245 n.12

INDEX

Koshal, Suresh Kumar 207, 218 n.49. See also Naz Foundation vs Government of NCT Delhi Kottman, Paul 146, 186 n.16, 238 Krebs, Katja 7, 41 Kunin, Aaron 143 Lacan, Jacques 19, 230 Lady Capulet (Romeo and Juliet) 35–6, 67, 73, 96, 98, 101 n.5, 117, 261 Laila and Majnun 193, 199, 203, 206 Lamb, Charles, Tales from Shakespeare 226 Lanier, Douglas 45 ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics’ 163, 183, 185 n.4 Lavinia (Titus Andronicus, 1592) 34 Lavorosky, Leonid 63, 90 Lee, Hyon-u 226, 247 n.52 Lee, Hyunjung 221–2, 224 Lee, Yountaek, Hamlet 222 Letters to Juliet (2010) 3 Levin, Harry 109 Levinas, Emmanuel 171 Levine, Laura 14 Lieblein, Leanore 8. See also tradaptation linear, normative, hierarchical model 139 Lord Capulet (Romeo and Juliet) 60, 146–9, 261, 266 Lori-Parks, Suzan 257 love 81, 195, 213 and banishment (Joyce & Beckett) 117–31

281

and death 111, 115, 117–18, 127, 129, 131, 133 homosocial and heterosexual 206–7 masala genealogy of 200–1, 204 philosophy of (Badiou) 17, 19, 224–5, 230, 238, 243 prem and 203, 206 theatre and 231, 243 and time 163 “Love Jihad” 207, 217 n.47 Lucking, David 186 n.16 Lupton, Julia Reinhard 14, 19 stellification 163 ‘swirl’ of adaptation 133 Luzzi, Eusebio 63 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 198–9. See also Minute on Education (India) MacDonald, Joyce Green 250 MacKenzie, Clayton G. 103 n.18 MacMillan, Kenneth, Romeo and Juliet (1965) 63–4, 89–91, 101 n.5, 101 n.7, 102 n.12, 102 n.15 death poses, image 98–9 ‘dismal scene’ 95 lifts 92–3, 97–8 pas de deux 14, 90–2, 94, 98 rhetoric of ‘subtraction’ 98–9 ‘use’ (lift) 97 magnanimity 61, 81–2 Mann, Thomas 65 masala genealogy of love 200–1, 204

282

INDEX

Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO) 234 Mazzini, Giuseppe 224 McJannet, Linda 83 n.4 McLuhan, Marshall 16, 138, 140–2, 146, 148–9, 155. See also media forms Mead, David 102 n.15 media forms 138, 140–1, 156 media theory 138, 142, 148, 156 Mercutio (Romeo and Juliet) 36–7, 40, 47, 65–6, 69, 81, 115, 144, 228–9, 239–40 metamorphosis 30–1, 37–8, 41 translation as 29–33 Micrologus 38 mimesis 48 Minier, Márta 8, 197 Minute on Education (India) 198 Miola, Robert 132 Mishra, Gopinath, Premlila 204–6, 212, 217 n.40 modernism/modernity 3, 107–8, 134, 137 and post-modernism 115 Montecchi e Capelletti 5 monumentalization 213 mudang (Korean shamanism) 234, 236–42 music 14, 33, 43–51. See also specific musical works and artists National Changgeuk Company of Korea 234 National Gugak (Korean traditional music) Center 245 n.12

Navtej Singh Johar vs the Union of India 218 n.49 Naz Foundation vs Government of NCT Delhi 207, 218 n.49 Nears, Colin 102 n.12 Neumeier, John, Romeo and Juliet (1971) 14, 61–9, 85 n.15 disposition of space 69 emigration to Germany 65 Frankfurt Ballet 64 Hamburg Ballet 64 palmers’ kiss (see palmers’ kiss (Neumeier’s choreography)) Stuttgart Ballet 64 nightingale 12, 30–8, 40, 47–8, 51 Noverre, Jean-Georges 16, 18–19, 64, 77, 85 n.17 Letters on Dancing and Ballets (1760) 15 Nureyev, Rudolph 64, 90, 101 n.7 Nurse (Romeo and Juliet) 35, 69, 72–4, 77, 96, 98, 118, 121, 127, 164–5, 232 Nussbaum, Martha 19 patriotism 19, 224 tragic spectatorship 241 Obama, Barack 251 Odyssey 67 Oh, Tae-Suk, Romeo and Juliet (2005) 222–3, 225, 227–8, 239, 243, 246 n.28 audience’s participation 229–30 children’s deaths 229

INDEX

community and fraternity 232, 242 Korean socio-political reality 229 love of nation 224, 232 neighbour love 228, 230 traditional dances 232 opera 15–16, 44, 133, 237. See also specific operas Orpheus and Eurydice (myth) 10, 35, 112 Orsini, Francesca prem and love 203 repertoires of love 203 Ovid, Metamorphoses 10, 32–5, 37, 39–40, 42, 49 Painter, William 6 palmers’ kiss (Neumeier’s choreography) 14, 61, 64, 82 and allied gestures 62 craft and lovers’ fidelity 80 on floor 74 focus 70 grips and gestures 75–9 pas de deux 69 triple 78 pansori (Korean opera) 223, 226, 233–6, 245 n.12 Park, Sung-Hwan, Romeo and Juliet (2009) 223, 225, 233, 239, 243 changgeuk 233, 237 gut’s ritualistic elements 237 Korean shamanism 236–7 mudang 234, 237 pansori 234–6 pungmul 236 talchum 236 Parry, Jann 101 n.5, 101 n.7

283

pas de deux 14, 62, 67, 69–70, 76, 78, 90–2, 94, 98 passé 73, 79, 92, 102 n.13 Pentheus (myth) 112, 151 performance 4, 6, 8–9, 14, 17, 42–5, 61, 65–6, 109, 118, 152, 196, 201, 221, 223–7, 229–31, 233–7, 241–3, 247 n.52, 250, 270 Pessoa, Fernando 231 Petrarch 31–2, 34, 41–2, 45, 144–5, 153 Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes) 39–40 Pettman, Dominic 168, 171 Phelan, Peggy 104 n.18 Philomela (myth) 31, 33–5, 38, 40, 42, 50 Piotrovsky, Adrian 63 Pit Theatre at the Barbican Centre (London) 227 Planet Romeo (2002) 211 Plato 111 Symposium 108 Platts, John T., Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English 203 Plutarch 197 postcolonialism and interculturalism 222, 242 posthumanism 16, 18, 137, 142, 149, 155 Price, Zachary 179–80 Proctor, John ‘Ray’ 4, 8, 17, 19, 252, 268 productions (Korean theatre) 222–3, 225, 227–44. See also specific Korean theatre productions Prokofiev, Sergei (Romeo and Juliet) 14, 63–5, 69, 76

284

INDEX

Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time 132 Puar, Jasbir, homonationalism 219 n.67 Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin 65 Pyramus and Thisbe (myth) 10, 35, 144, 154 queer theory and sexuality 206, 209 Racine, Jean 46 Radlov, Sergey 63 A Raisin in the Sun 253 Rao, Anandi 9, 13, 17 realism, emotional 48 remediation 9 Renaissance Neoplatonism 111 Reynolds, Bryan naming function 167, 186 n.12 Shakespace 163 Rhee, Beau La 222, 227 rom-com genre 211, 219 n.61 Romeo and Juliet Beyond Words 101 n.1 Romeowala love 207, 212 Romil and Jugal 17, 194–6, 198–202, 210, 217 n.44 gay identity 209–11, 213 homosexuality 208–9, 218 n.49 ‘masala genealogy’ 200–1, 212–13 protagonist’s death 212 Royal Ballet Covent Garden 102 n.12

Sabda 13 Salernitano, Masuccio 5 Sappho 108, 110–17 Scarpa, Carlo 1–4, 134 Museo Castelvecchio (renovation) 2, 6–7, 18 Schlossman, Beryl 8, 10, 16 Schutte, William 109 Schwartz, Regina 82, 88 n.42 Senn, Fritz 109 Seo, Dong-ha 241 Seo, Hee 102 n.12 Serres, Michael 187 n.18 Seymour, Lynn 90 Shadwell, Thomas 43 Shahani, Gitanjali 201 Shakespeare, John 66 Shakespeare, William 3–9, 13, 60, 62, 65, 70, 89–90, 93–4, 100 n.1, 107–10, 120–1, 124–6, 130, 132–4, 137, 144, 149, 155, 162–5, 206, 212–13, 226, 251, 253–4, 258, 262–3, 269 as cultural institution 172, 254, 269 dismemberment and remembering 10, 112–14, 163 First Folio 11 Hamlet 44, 65, 109, 124–5, 142, 154, 225 inter-medial movement 3 King Lear 141 Koreanness and 17, 222, 224–5, 242–4 The Merchant of Venice 225

INDEX

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 12, 31, 65, 142 modernism 110–17 The Most Lamentable and Excellent Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet 107 Othello 65, 141, 201 reception in India 12, 194–5, 197 Richard III 109, 154 Sonnets 65 The Tempest 43, 65, 137, 141, 225 Titus Andronicus (1592) 34 Troilus and Cressida 141 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 29–31, 41 The Winter’s Tale 65 As You Like It 65 Siddhartha, Rajeev 195 Sidney, Philip 11, 108, 120, 128 ‘Astrophil and Stella’ (1591) 115–16 Singh, Manraj (Romil and Jugal) 195 Sitaram, Lala 198, 217 n.40 Prem Kasauti 204–6, 212 slow death, theorization of 180–1 Smith, Joshua 177 Smithson, Harriet 45 song/singing 50–1, 63, 118, 122, 167, 226, 233–6, 239–40, 242 Sophocles, Philoctetes 241 sparagmos 10, 51, 114, 162 and stellification 11–12, 173, 199 Spivak, Gayatri 50

285

Springsteen, Bruce, ‘Incident on 57th Street’ (1973) 43 St. Matthew Passion 65, 86 n.25, 88 n.43 Stam, Robert 138 Stendhal 46, 48 Racine et Shakespeare (1823) 46 Stiegler, Bernard, technogenesis 148 Swift, Taylor, ‘Love Story’ (2008) 43 Tagore, Rabindranath 12 Takiguchi, Ken 233–4 Tatiana (ballet, 2014) 65 technicity 140, 142, 146, 148, 150, 153, 155 technogenesis 148, 156 technological exteriorization/ externalization 138, 141 television 16, 137, 254. See also specific television series Tel Quel group 131 theatrum mundi metaphor 137 Till, Emmett 254–5 Tindall, W.S. 109 tradaptation 8, 196 tragic romances/love 163, 193, 238 translation/translation studies 5, 7–9, 15, 17–19, 41–2, 54 n.24, 140–1, 193–4, 196–202, 204–6, 212, 217 n.40, 235, 243, 254 affect and emotion 55 n.27 cultural 5, 7, 12 drama 196 global and inter-arts 9, 43

286

INDEX

Indian tradition 13 intertextual approach to 197 as metamorphosis 29–33 musical 43–52 theatre 196 translatio studii, 5, 9–10, 18 Trauerspiel 115 Trivedi, Harish 203, 206 Trivedi, Poonam 221 trust 14, 61–2, 72–6 and collaboration 15 spirit of 80–2 virtue of 19 Turner, Henry 142, 154, 159 n.29 Tybalt (Romeo and Juliet) 30, 36–7, 78, 81–2, 96, 115–16, 121, 148, 228, 239–40, 266 universal singularity 222–4, 242 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance 104 n.18 urbanization and urban planning (Mark Burnett) 21 n.6 vampire films 9, 165, 182, 188 n.27 Vanita, Ruth 209 Vega, Lope de, Los Castelvines y Monteses 6 Venus and Cupid 108, 116 Venuti, Lawrence 41 verisimilitude (vraisemblance) 48 Virgil 11

virtues 8, 41, 62, 75, 112, 129, 137, 150, 163. See also fidelity of adaptation 13–19 of neighbour love 228 of trust 19 voice and vocality 9, 14, 24, 30, 33–8, 42–3, 47, 49, 50–1, 55 n.27, 110, 223, 228, 233–4, 235, 265, 268 Voltaire 46 Philosophical Letters (1733) 56 n.35 Wagner, Geoffrey, The Novel and Cinema (1975) 138 Walsh S. J., John J. 65, 86 n.25 Ward, Douglas Turner 257 web series 17, 194–6, 198–9, 201–2, 208 Wedekind, Frank, Pandora’s Box 128 Westworld (HBO series) 16, 19, 137–8, 149–51, 155–6 Abernathy, Dolores 150–3 Abernathy, Peter 153–5 Ford, Robert 150, 154 Man in Black 152–3 technicity to humanity 150–1, 156 William 150–3, 156 Wheatly, Phyllis 251 Wheeldon, Christopher, VIII 65 whiteness 4, 17, 180, 182, 255, 258 Whittier, Gayle 40, 143 Williams, Ernest 259–61, 266 Williams, Gerald 261–2

INDEX

Williams, Jasmine 263–5 Williams, Tennessee, The Glass Menagerie 65 Wind, Edgar 111 Wolfe, George C. 249, 257. See also The Colored Museum (Wolfe)

287

Yates, Julian 176–7 Zatlin, Phyllis 196, 199–200 Zeffirelli, Franco, Romeo and Juliet 90, 101 n.5 Zylinska, Joanna, feminist counterapocalypse 181

288

289

290

291

292

293

294