THE ARDEN RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 9781350140363, 9781350140394, 9781350140387

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THE ARDEN RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

ARDEN SHAKESPEARE HANDBOOKS The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism Edited by Evelyn Gajowski ISBN 978-1-3500-9322-5 FORTHCOMING TITLES The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama Edited by Michelle Dowd and Tom Rutter ISBN 978-1-3501-6185-6 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies Edited by Lukas Erne ISBN 978-1-3500-8063-8 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation Studies Edited by Diana Henderson and Stephen O’Neill ISBN 978-1-3501-1030-4 The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance Edited by Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince ISBN 978-1-3500-8067-6

THE ARDEN RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Edited by David Ruiter

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 2021 This paperback edition published 2022 Copyright © David Ruiter and contributors, 2021, 2022 David Ruiter 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. xv-xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image © Oxygen / Getty Images 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. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4036-3 PB: 978-1-3503-2751-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-4038-7 eBook: 978-1-3501-4037-0 Series: The Arden Shakespeare Handbooks 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.

For Catherine Elena Ruiter, who carries the light

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors S eries P reface  Acknowledgements

ix x xiii xv

Introduction. This is real life: Shakespeare and social justice as a field of play   David Ruiter

1

PART ONE:  THE SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE INTERVIEWS 1.1

Deconstructing social hierarchies  Erin Coulehan Chris Anthony Erica Whyman Arthur L. Little, Jr Ewan Fernie Farah Karim-Cooper

25 27 30 34 38 41

PART TWO:  THE PRACTICE OF SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 2.1 Active Shakespeare: A social justice framework   47 Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi 2.2 Bending toward justice: From Shakespeare’s Black Mediterranean to August Wilson’s Black Atlantic  Peter Erickson 60 2.3 Black Hamlet, social justice, and the minds of apartheid  74 Arthur L. Little, Jr 2.4 Shakespeare and civil rights: Rhetorical universalism  94 Jason Demeter 2.5 Shakespeare’s Disabled, Disabled Shakespeare  Adelle Hulsmeier 109 2.6 Social justice in the academy: Reflecting on Shakespeare’s royal women  Christie Carson 125 PART THREE: THE PERFORMANCE OF SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 3.1 William Shakespeare’s Enrique IV, primera parte: Common [battle]grounds between medieval England and Mexico’s present  Alfredo Michel Modenessi and Paulina Morales

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3.2 King Lear and gender justice in India  Preti Taneja 3.3 Re-enacting Hamlet in Southern Africa  Malcolm Cocks 3.4 ‘Shakespeare in prison’: A South African social justice alternative  Kevin A. Quarmby 3.5 Romeo and Juliet with Chinese characteristics: Questions of usefulness and engagement in twenty-first-century China  Julie Sanders and Li Jun 3.6 Social justice, social order and political power in NTCC’s adaptation of Richard III  Chee Keng Lee

160 175 190

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PART FOUR:  THE ECONOMIES OF SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 4.1 The empathetic imagination and the dream of equality: Shakespeare’s ‘poetical justice’  Kiernan Ryan 4.2 The idea of communism in Shakespeare  Peter Holbrook 4.3 ‘Leftward, ho!’: Shakespeare and Lenin in the tempest of class politics  Jeffrey Butcher 4.4 Social justice and the reign of Regan in Shakespeare’s King Lear  Geraldo U. de Sousa Annotated Bibliography Index

235 251

265 280 300 323

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Gabriela Núñez (Mistress Quickly), Constantino Morán (Prince Hal), Enrique Arreola (Traveller 1), Roberto Soto (Falstaff) and Óscar Narváez (Bardolph). Photograph by Sergio Carreón Ireta. Courtesy of the artist 2. Constantino Morán (Prince Hal) and Roberto Soto (Falstaff). Photograph by Alma Curiel. Courtesy of the artist 3. La Corrala del Mitote. Photograph by Alma Curiel. Courtesy of the artist 4. Roberto Soto (Falstaff). Photograph by Sergio Carreón Ireta. Courtesy of the artist

145 148 151 152

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Anthony is Assistant Professor of Acting at DePaul University, Chicago, USA. Her work in the project Will Power to Youth, which explores the intersections of art and social justice, has informed her career as a professional director, teacher and performer. Jeffrey Butcher is an assistant professor of English at the College of Coastal Georgia, USA. His scholarly interests in the early modern period, namely Shakespeare studies, are complemented by his engagement in political interventions into Marxistinflected theory. Christie Carson was Reader of Shakespeare and Performance and taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK for twenty-four years. She is co-editor of Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, Shakespeare Beyond English and Shakespeare and the Digital World. Malcolm Cocks explores Shakespeare in adaptation and performance, with a focus on grassroots theatre and its audiences in the Global South. Dr Cocks is a Lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies (St Augustine’s Campus, Trinidad). Erin Coulehan is a journalist and scholar living in El Paso, Texas. Her work on social justice can be found in The New York Times, Teen Vogue and more. She can be found researching and writing with her dedicated assistants – three bull dogs and a Great Dane mix. Jason Demeter is an assistant professor at Norfolk State University, USA, specializing in Shakespeare, Renaissance literature and African American literature. His interests are transatlantic and transhistorical, centring on the relationship between canonical Anglophone literature and American constructions of race and national identity. Peter Erickson’s work focuses on the study of race and gender in Shakespeare from Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama and Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art and on contemporary African diasporic visual artists.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Ewan Fernie is Professor at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK and Director of the Everything to Everybody project, aiming to return the world’s first Shakespeare Library to the people of Birmingham. His books include Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter. Peter Holbrook directs the University of Queensland Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. He is the author of English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom and is currently writing about literature and the politics of nature. Adelle Hulsmeier is a senior lecturer and programme leader at the University of Sunderland, UK. Her career trajectory is characterized by her conviction to embed the notion of social change as an integral part of teaching and learning. Li Jun is Associate Professor of English at the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing. He received his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. He is the author of Popular Shakespeare in China: 1993–2008. Farah Karim-Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London, UK and Head of Higher Education and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe. She is the author of The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage and the forthcoming Shakespeare, Race, and Mortality. Chee Keng Lee is a theatre director, screenwriter and English–Chinese translator of theatre and film texts. He is Assistant Professor (Theatre Practice) at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Arthur L. Little, Jr is Associate Professor of English at UCLA, USA and is the author of Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice and Shakespeare and Race Theory (forthcoming). He is also the editor of White People in Shakespeare (in progress). Alfredo Michel Modenessi is a professor at the National University of Mexico and a stage translator, who has written on Shakespeare, performance and film and translated over forty-five plays, including sixteen by Shakespeare. He is currently writing on Shakespeare and Mexican film and translating the Sonnets. Paulina Morales studied English Literature at the National University of Mexico and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. She worked on Mexican film adaptations of Othello and collaborated on MIT’s Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive. She teaches communication and writes about art. Kevin A. Quarmby is Associate Professor of English at The College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, USA. He is the editor of Scene: Reviews of Early Modern Drama and author of The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries.

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David Ruiter serves as Faculty Director of the Teaching + Learning Commons at The University of California San Diego. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Festive History and co-editor, with Ruben Espinosa, of Shakespeare and Immigration. Kiernan Ryan is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, an Emeritus Fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK and a Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford upon Avon, UK. Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama and Deputy ViceChancellor at Newcastle University in the UK. She has published widely on early modern drama, women’s writing and adaptation studies and co-edits a series of books on early modern literary geographies. Geraldo U. de Sousa is Professor of English at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the author of At Home in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters and numerous essays. His current project focuses on Shakespeare’s comedies. Preti Taneja’s award-winning novel We That Are Young translates King Lear to contemporary India. Her current research is on Shakespeare and human rights in conflict and post-conflict zones. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, UK. Ayanna Thompson is Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) and Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author and editor of numerous books on Shakespeare, race and performance. Laura Turchi is a teacher and educator at the University of Houston, USA, who specializes in English Language Arts. Her research centres on how secondary students experience Shakespeare plays, how digital tools expand and how matters of race and identity inform their understanding. Erica Whyman is the Deputy Artistic Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Under her, the RSC has been at the forefront of cutting-edge performances that challenge audiences to think about theatre and society in nuanced and intersectional ways.

SERIES PREFACE

The Arden Shakespeare Handbooks provide researchers and graduate students with both cutting-edge perspectives on perennial questions and authoritative overviews of the history of research. The series comprises single-volume reference works that map the parameters of a discipline or sub-discipline and present the current state of research. Each Handbook offers a systematic and structured range of specially commissioned chapters reflecting on the history, methodologies, current debates and future of a particular field of research. Additional resources, such as a chronology of important milestones that have shaped the field, a glossary of key terms, an annotated bibliography and a list of further resources are included. It is hoped that the series will provide both a thorough grounding in the range of research under each heading, and a practical guide that equips readers to conduct their own independent research. The topics selected for coverage in the series lie at the heart of the study of Shakespeare today, and at the time of writing include: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

contemporary Shakespeare criticism and theory Shakespeare and textual studies Shakespeare and contemporary performance Shakespeare and adaptation Shakespeare and social justice Shakespeare and early modern drama

While each volume in the series provides coverage of a distinct area of research, it will be immediately apparent that ‘distinct’ becomes a slippery concept: how does one define contemporary criticism as distinct from contemporary performance? Indeed, the very porousness of research areas becomes even more marked if, for instance, one explores research in Shakespeare and contemporary performance (in the volume edited by Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince) and Shakespeare and adaptation (in the volume edited by Diana Henderson and Stephen O’Neill). Questions of social justice permeate each area of research, for, as Evelyn Gajowski notes in the introduction to The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism, ‘many of the essays … suggest the inseparability of critical practices, on the one hand, and social justice and political activism, on the other’. Even where we might be inclined to feel on safer ground about the ‘particular field’ of textual studies as distinct from other fields of Shakespeare studies, Lukas Erne disabuses that notion in his introduction to The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies:

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SERIES PREFACE

Textual variants and multiplicity create their own proliferation of meanings, nor can textual studies and criticism ultimately be kept apart. For the question of what the text is decisively impacts the question of what the text means. While acknowledging the artificiality of boundaries and the inevitability of some degree of overlap, we have nevertheless encouraged editors to determine the contours of their Handbook with an eye on other titles in the same series. Just as each book provides a systematic grounding for readers, the series as a whole presents an invitation to readers to delve into each volume, to find those connections and points of intersection, and to explore the related fields that ultimately will enrich their own research.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice comes happily to life as a fully collaborative project designed to establish both a field of play for the current work of practitioners across the intersectional spectrum of Shakespeare and an ongoing venue for such work to be created for the honor and advocacy of cultures and people in their contexts. Any and all success this handbook achieves will be due to the diversity and depth of this collaboration. My first gratitude, then, goes to all of the authors and interviewees; as each knows, this journey has at times felt perilous and lengthy, as we looked for a space in which this work would flourish. Eventually, that fruitful space was found with The Arden Shakespeare, thanks to the thought and vision of Mark Dudgeon and Lara Bateman, who saw the value of the work immediately and supported its growth into this volume; they have been exceptional partners in this endeavour and the handbook is much better as the result of their care. Thanks, also, to Deborah Maloney, for her thoughtful attention to all of the details that allow this work to shine. To those who assisted me in this work – Randi Bossie, Paul LaPrade, Alessandra Narváez Varela and Evan Stapleton – thank you for valuing this project; you and your contributions are invaluable. I would also offer a very special thanks to Erin Coulehan, who worked creatively and tirelessly at every step to make sure that the work got done, that the communication remained strong, and that we pushed the boundaries a little farther. I also wish to thank several colleagues: Peter Erickson, who met me in coffee shops in St. Louis and Chicago to urge on the project from its inception; Geraldo de Sousa, who told me in a courtyard in Los Angeles that the work was necessary to the discipline and for the encouragement of the good work of those included here and those who will carry it forward; Ayanna Thompson, who in New Orleans advocated for maintaining the full spectrum of voices and standpoints represented here, even when that meant continuing the search for the right publisher; and Ewan Fernie, who in Stratford and Washington, DC, steadfastly supported an unbowed attitude in respect to the ideals of the book and facilitated the first meeting with Mark Dudgeon. So many other colleagues – among them Chris Anthony, David Bergeron, Katie Craik, Peter Holbrook, Arthur Little, Eric Mallin, April Massey, Rodolpho Mata, Clare McManus, Avraham Oz, Michaela von Britzke, and many others – offered good courage along the road. I would also like to offer my great gratitude to my dear friend, the late Martha Andresen, who always spoke so elegantly with me, for more than two decades, about the wondrous potential of better Shakespeares and better worlds; I wish you were with us today and all days. My community at the University of Texas at El Paso also played a keen role in allowing me the support and sustenance to do this work amidst so many other

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projects. Thanks to the Provosts I have served under: Junius Gonzales, Howard Daudistel, Carol Parker and John Wiebe, as well as the Presidents, Diana Natalicio and Heather Wilson. Thanks to those who were with me in so many endeavours and who created a community that allowed this work to move with urgency and some grace: Nicole Aguilar, Melissa Barba, Florina Barnett, Ezra Cappell, Ann Gates, Charlie Gibbens, Roy Mathew, Erika Mein, Louie Rodriguez and Sandy Salinas; to my departmental colleagues in literature, and especially my fellow Shakespeareans: Ruben Espinosa, Andrew Fleck, Joseph Ortiz and Tony Stafford; to my department chair, Brian Yothers, and my dean, Denis O’Hearn. Every day, I also experience gratitude for all my amazing students, who over the years have made a cumulative, catalytic impact on me and my life with Shakespeare, expanding my thinking and the work and bringing in more diversity, equity and inclusion; together we have formed learning communities that bend towards justice. At this writing, I am in the process of transitioning to the University of California San Diego, and would therefore also like to thank my colleagues in the UCSD Department of Theatre and Dance, and especially the Performance Studies faculty; Cristina Della Coletta, Dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities; Carlos Jensen, Associate Vice Chancellor—Educational Innovation; Elizabeth H. Simmons, Executive Vice Chancellor; Pradeep Khosla, Chancellor; and, of course, everyone who works through and with and for the collective impact of the Teaching + Learning Commons, so that every UCSD student has the best opportunity to grow and thrive. Gratitude beyond words goes to my parents, Carole and Arthur Ruiter, who broadly answered the question of ‘Who is my neighbour?’ and gave rise to my ideals around care, honor, and advocacy for others; to my amazing siblings – we were once all together, and now we are all out in the world, each trying to do our part to make it a bit better; and to the whole wonderful family, whom I will not name individually because it keeps growing. And, of course, to my incredible daughter, Catherine, who remains my strong and shining reminder that we must do our best so that those who follow us can do better still.

Introduction This is real life: Shakespeare and social justice as a field of play DAVID RUITER

AN INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Fundamentally, a handbook of Shakespeare and social justice must attempt to find the convergence of the play-full life of theatrical, literary and critical performance with real, lived experience – and not just any experience, but experience that falls outside of the bounds of what we might see as a just society. Although many have shown that we can come to view the past more justly and that history informs and influences our thinking about both just and unjust societies of the past and present, the actual work of social justice takes place in identifiable locations and contexts in the present and future. The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice addresses the relevance and responsibility of art to the real world – to the significant teaching and learning, performance and practice, theory and economies that not only expand the discussion of literature and theatre, but also open the gates of engagement between the life of the mind and lived experience. The collection draws from noted scholars, writers and practitioners from around the globe to assert the power of art to question, disrupt, and reinvigorate both the ties that bind and the barriers that divide us. To draw on the wisdom of Ralph Ellison, a leading practitioner of literary arts activism, as found in the epilogue to Invisible Man (1995: 572–81), this collection of chapters, including interviews and other resources, demonstrates that a fully realized diversity of experience and expertise adds to the health and bounty, even the sustainability, of Shakespeare study, performance and theory. Ideally, it also migrates beyond these borders and into reconsiderations of the role of Shakespeare, literature, theatre and the arts in a society that is urgently in need of new and renewed discussions and practices of social justice. Together, the pieces here begin to establish the ground on which such a convergence – of theory and practice, of Shakespeare and society, of theatre and social justice – can meaningfully take place; that is, this handbook begins to establish a field of play, a space in which to perform and otherwise enact social justice via Shakespeare.

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THE ARDEN RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Ultimately, the writing and interviews collected here, all centred on Shakespeare, will be only a beginning, a disparate and indeed desperate effort to cover a broad spectrum broadly, from finding creative pathways to approach past and present situations in which social justice is lacking, to reflecting on those situations and shining a light on them and to picturing ways to ameliorate these situations as we move forward. Such pathways are not merely ephemeral – the life of the mind – but real, as they are indeed mapped to actual locations and contexts around the world. Still, the frequent critique that the art and story of social justice does not positively impact those it purports to uplift and empower often enough – and may, in fact, have the opposite effect, of valorizing or sentimentalizing the conditions of poverty, discrimination, incarceration or other forms of enslavement – is not without merit and is addressed in several of the interviews and pieces contained in this collection. Out of these possibilities and concerns, this handbook strives to establish safe and inclusive spaces for such efforts to take place, to be considered, shared, modified and improved collectively. This diverse and inclusive space may then be seen as the ground on which the effort is being continuously made to construct and perform modes of Shakespeare and social justice, bridging not only words and deeds, but also relevant social thinking and actual social change. In the chapters and performances here, we see a constructive act that is both real and performative, addressing real situations through the use of the creative and theatrical, in an attempt to establish a field of play for an ongoing effort to make Shakespeare relevant and useful to the causes and contexts of social justice. At least two basic questions come to mind in this effort: • What can Shakespeare (considered in its multiplicity: in pedagogy, performance, scholarship, etc.) say or do that could truly impact social justice in its contextual specificity, either in his time, ours, the time in between or the time to come? • How could the plays and poetry be used – by teachers, actors, directors, scholars, etc. – to support social justice? These are two of the primary considerations that this collection attempts to respond to, if not fully answer. Before going further, it should be clear that this collection is not designed to define or redefine social justice, nor to be a guide for how social theory, activism or social justice should be approached; rather, it is a handbook, a partial framework, an intentional but always unfinished collection of ways and means by which Shakespeare could be employed in a larger quest for social justice. Nonetheless, there are two central social justice tenets, at least, that apply well here: that we seek for social justice globally and discover it locally and that we will create ways forward in an ongoing pursuit of social justice through continuous discourse, enactment and shared responsibility.1 Through this handbook, we hope to collectively create the space, the field of play, for more necessary social justice work in the discipline, the theatre, the classroom, the prison, the creative arts, etc. and especially for the communities we serve now and in the future.

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As to the question of ‘why Shakespeare?’ for this work of social justice, I would fall back on a discussion I once had with Chris Anthony, who also participates in this collection. A dozen or more years ago, in a food court in downtown Los Angeles, Anthony and I discussed Shakespeare’s relevance to social justice projects, and she proposed that we would, in such a context, need to view Shakespeare not so much as a literary artefact as a venue, the actual platform on which we could perform stories and activities that would promote social justice. Anthony was doing and continues to do just that in her work with Will Power to Youth, which gave her view credibility then and now. But what does it mean to think of Shakespeare as a venue? Fundamentally, and especially within this collection, it means that Shakespeare can be a platform on which we stage our best thinking, imagining and even (en)acting in respect to social justice. The plays have room for that, as the contributors to this collection show. The Shakespeare industry – thanks to the contributors here and many others – is creating more room for that. Anthony stated that while other theatrical works might be just as or even more effective as literature and theatre in the social justice arena, Shakespeare held a special place because his work was already part of the larger cultural discourse and therefore allowed access to and, importantly, funding for, social justice work in school classrooms, big-time and small-time theatre, prisons, scholarly projects, etc. In this handbook, we value Shakespeare as just such a venue, a dynamic site for social justice work. Much more lies ahead in this discussion and ideally, this volume will become dialogic for its readers, offering space for the addition of their voices and stories, too. In this way, the collection has the opportunity to be generative, adding many voices and narratives in many spaces. This generative quality must, in fact, be the goal of this work, for when all of the pieces gathered here are considered collectively, it becomes self-evident that any convergence of Shakespeare and social justice will only happen contextually, both in terms of time (past/present/future) and space, because it will, of necessity, enjoin the narrative/performative and the real. As Martin Orkin says in Local Shakespeares, ‘Since their first performances, Shakespeare’s texts have been and are, in a manner of speaking, travelers to countless and always different locations’ (2005: 1). Still, says Orkin, each is also fundamentally local, unique to the context of: each reader who comes to the text, in terms of her or his time and place, what is within that place epistemologically current, the particular institutional position or struggles within which she or he is situated or with which she or he is actively engaged, or … the particular knowledges and ideologies she or he exemplifies or legitimates. (ibid.: 2) Much like Ellison, Orkin stands for the diversity of these standpoints as the primary means to expand the ‘understanding of the text and its location’ (ibid.).2 This is a necessary step, represented in many of the pieces here, in the ongoing effort to decolonize the Shakespearean text. This handbook, in an effort to take the subsequent step, collectively builds a narrative around the possibility of Shakespeare

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being of social justice utility within a variety of locations, differently. In other words, recognizing that real life in different contexts can be meaningful to the building of Shakespeare, now we hope to consider how Shakespeare can be useful for the building of real lives around the globe. To that end, I’ll start with two narratives drawn from real life, including one nonShakespearean and one Shakespearean performance that helped shape the thinking that led to this handbook.

THIS / IS / REAL / LIFE (London, 2018) On massive screens, one word at a time, THIS / IS / REAL / LIFE appeared in the Olympic Stadium, London, prior to the start of the Beyoncé/Jay-Z On the Run II concert on 16 June 2018. As the sun set, the four words quieted the kinetic crowd of thousands, and because the show did not start right after the words appeared, many in the crowd looked wonderingly to left and right, stood on their toes, even glanced behind them to see if they were missing something: What is real life? What is happening? But nothing else happened. It was a confusing moment. Thousands of people with considerable energy, experience, intelligence, culture, talent and power worked for a moment, both individually and collectively, to solve the seeming riddle and answer the question ‘What is real life?’ In that moment, all they had was this: a stadium filled, as they could see as they looked around, with other concert-goers, a cross-section of London and the world – black, brown, white, mixed; older and younger; privileged and not; immigrants and not; some in families, as couples, with friends, alone; some disabled; regular concert-goers, members of the Beyhive and those at a concert for the first time; from multiple backgrounds, countries, continents, cultures, languages, belief-systems, sexualities, political persuasions, religions. All were here, all at once, together, to see, sing, dance and be part of something. This is real life? Yes. Yes, because whatever happens now will happen in this context, with these people, at this time, in this political moment, in this space. The music might be performed again, may have been performed before. Maybe the same words in the same order. Maybe in similar costumes or not. Maybe with some of the same dancers and musicians. But it never happened like it is happening now, in this time and space, with these people in the audience, in this exact political moment. So we were called by the message on the screen to pay attention, because what happens now means something now. This – this very moment – is real life. As the concert began and rolled on, a narrative began to emerge. A narrative focused on primary characters, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, and some others – family, friends, fans, foes. This was a story of life lived through relationships, through hardship, in difficult and privileged locations, in extremis, in love. A narrative where racism,

SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE AS A FIELD OF PLAY

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economic (dis)advantage, sexism, hatred, tearing mistakes and binding forgiveness are real and lived both in the imagined and the real lives and narratives that we all partake in now, during this performance, and differently. For those in the audience it was a story; for the musicians, too. But for both it also referenced history and histories and real life and performance historically. And it showed a way to make a performance out of the real and the imagined, but also how to push the real and the imagined forward. To make it mean something now. To make it mean something as we move forward, separately and together. When the concert ended, my daughter and I got on the Central Line of the London Underground and started back to our rented flat. We moved with the crowd, crushed together onto the train. On the way back, stop after stop – Stratford to Mile End to Bethnal Green to Liverpool Street to Saint Paul’s and so on up to Holland Park – stop after stop the crowd thinned, some got off the train and went back to another part of their real lives. And they went forward, maybe differently because of what they had experienced at a concert, with people who were and were not their neighbours, in a space and at a time that was already moving into the distance and into the past. What they had previously anticipated happening in the future, and had just experienced in an energized present, was receding into the past, but as the performance showed, those past pieces were the raw materials out of which the future narrative could be presently constructed, reconstructed, remade, improved, made more just, possibly into something one or many could be proud of. While it was a special concert, I do not mean to idolize Beyoncé and Jay-Z, the contemporary music scene, theatrical performance or the popular cultural scene of London, either in Shakespeare’s age or our own. Nor do I mean to universalize our always vastly varied human experience and history, even if we sometimes do partake from the same table, whether by choice or not. In fact, it remains unclear to me whether THIS / IS / REAL / LIFE is a statement or a question. This is real life? It was, after all, a musical performance, a theatrical presentation of or about real life. At the very least, it was a way to hold a mirror – a camera, a screen – up to nature, in an effort to reflect three things at once: the real life of now, the real life previously that influences the now and the real lives that still can emerge. The idea that theatrical performance can bring these three realities, or potential realities, together is not new. And for those of us who spend our lives in some relationship with Shakespeare, this mirror that reflects such possible pasts, presents and futures puts us in mind of Hamlet and the players come to Elsinore and, therefore, in mind of social justice.

HOLD A MIRROR UP (London, 2017) As I reflected on Beyoncé’s show, I was put in mind of another London performance that I had attended with my daughter almost exactly one year earlier: the 2017 Andrew Scott Hamlet at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Under the direction of Robert

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Icke, Scott’s particularly reflective Hamlet agonized over how the past impacts his present and the present, how the presentation of a play based on a possible past could impact all possible futures. The production began to reflect various time dimensions simultaneously, kaleidoscopically, forming a highly pressured theatrical moment for both the players and the audience. We began to be drawn into a temporal vertigo: we were in our present, the present of the production, born out of the past work of Shakespeare; we were also witness to Hamlet’s murderous plotting and penning of ‘some dozen or sixteen lines’ (2.2.535–7)3 based on a possible past narrated by a ghost, even as the prince knows that if he does this thing and inserts his edits into the performance or doesn’t do it, it will change all possible futures. So, in this context, Andrew Scott is both Andrew Scott and Hamlet at the same time and we are ourselves, both in the Harold Pinter Theatre watching Hamlet and also in the Elsinore theatre watching The Mousetrap. As the result of the temporal pressure associated with the play-inside-the-play, we feel with Hamlet that now something is going to happen that could change the future, change the time. In the small space of the theatre, this jarring realization – of real and possible pasts, multiple presents, the huge array of possible futures for Shakespeare, yes, and for all of us who still draw breath – became the raw, context-rich material out of which we can now begin to seed a field of play for theatre and social justice. Such a field of play must always be found contextually responsive to specific pasts, presents and possible futures. The same is true for Hamlet himself.

HAMLET (Somewhere around the globe, 1599–present–future) Shortly after Hamlet requests to make an edit to The Murder of Gonzago/The Mousetrap, he famously coaches the players prior to the performance, saying, ‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action’ (3.2.17). In ardently making his point to avoid theatrical hyperbole, Hamlet contextualizes his acting paradigm within the larger discussion of theatre, saying that the ‘purpose of playing’: […] both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to Nature; to show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. (3.2.20–4) While Hamlet discusses acting and dramatic theatre in general, these lines occur in a highly specific context: at this moment, he is in the process of plotting an altered performance specifically for its potential impact on the king and the kingdom. These four lines may hold untold treasure in respect to the work conducted here in service of establishing a field of play for Shakespeare and social justice. I came to realize more of this narrative bounty in discussing the passage with the playwright Georgina Escobar, the poet Alessandra Nárvaez Varela, the director Erica Whyman, the scholar Ewan Fernie and the educators Brad Jacobson and Paul LaPrade. Through those conversations, some fundamentals began to come into focus, as follows:

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‘BOTH AT THE FIRST AND NOW, WAS AND IS’ As Hamlet begins to consider the purpose of theatre generally, even while he plots a particular performance change in order to clarify the past and present and alter the future, he makes doubly sure to note that theatre exists historically and presently; theatre is not then bound by time, even if, as he soon says, it is shaped by time. Separating ‘first’ from ‘now’ and ‘was’ from ‘is’, Hamlet distinguishes between a past tense theatre (theatre that existed in the past, was first made in the past and is part of the historical record) and a present tense theatre (theatre that exists in the omnipresent now). Hamlet values both ‘was’ and ‘is’ equally, not subjugating one  to the other; but he is also using both the past and the present to influence possible futures. His words, in fact, are to guide those possible futures: he is directing the acting of the players for their upcoming performance at Elsinore to affectively change the way the actors deliver the performance. In other words, this is not so much a critique of theatre past as a present plan for theatre future: if a play written in the past is performed in a meaningfully altered way in the present, Hamlet may better understand the future course of justice. In this advice and alteration, Hamlet employs theatre for a purpose, for the cause of social justice. He is, as Margreta de Grazia says, ‘… dreaming of things to come, beyond the logic of vengeance, calculation, commensurability’; in the pursuit of justice, Hamlet operates beyond the logic of past and present, and instead ‘opens up spaces of access to the future’ (1999: 265). In a nutshell: we are watching Hamlet work with a script and troupe to design an old play in a new way, based on the present context, so that he can alter the future. This shows us that theatre exists in all three dimensions of time, and that it can be used to shape the future, as Hamlet pursues his own social justice in his own context. And, therefore, Shakespearean scripts and performances can function in the same way for us as we pursue social justice in our own moments and contexts.

‘TO HOLD, AS ‘TWERE, THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE’ In Shakespeare’s work and time, a mirror often functions in a temporally similar way: to show present realities, to highlight moments from the past, and to present and shape possible futures.4 The mirror, then, is an instrument that can be used by the living to alter the future, just as Hamlet is using theatre here. Throughout the play and the play-within-the-play, Hamlet is interested in bearing witness to the present reaction that Claudius may have in response to past actions; that response will allow Hamlet, he thinks, to pursue a better, more socially just future. In relation to social justice, then, theatre has the chance to demonstrate the abuses of the day, as happens frequently in Shakespeare; through his canon, we are almost constantly considering present realities and abuses: of Jews, blacks, indigenous peoples, women, immigrants and aliens, the incarcerated, apprentices, labourers, the rural poor, disabled people, daughters, sons, parents, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, colleagues, leaders, followers, etc. Of course, we know that Shakespeare’s scripts also reflect the past – especially in the history and Roman plays – however partially or imperfectly. And Shakespeare’s plays picture forth possible futures, for example:

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• the formerly tyrannical Lear play-acts a sort of round table with the fool, Kent, and Poor Tom, exhibiting a dialogic possibility that moves beyond assumed hierarchies and into the territory of a more socially just future; • Hal and Falstaff play-act multiple visions of Henry IV’s future relationship with the prince, based on their understanding of past and present circumstances; • Bottom and Company play-act a past tragedy into part of a present comedy as the couples prepare for their future lives together. There are myriad other examples, but in all of these, we see the reflected ‘was’ and ‘is’ as part of the formation of the future, the could be.

‘TO SHOW VIRTUE HER OWN FEATURE, SCORN HER OWN IMAGE’ In juxtaposing virtue and scorn, we see a deliberate effort for theatre to reflect an honest appraisal of human situations. As Erica Whyman makes clear in her productions and in her interview for this collection, Shakespeare’s characters are consistently, humanly mixed; there is much to scorn, but there is also much to value, even valorize, which is as true in Shakespeare’s day as in ours. Here, Hamlet makes a special note that we need to see and reflect the nature of the time in its variety  – neither overly dreadful nor hopeful, but impressively, constantly mixed both in abundant present and past realities and in future possibilities. This reflective view is freeing for our work with Shakespeare because it presses on our openness to human variety and the array of opportunities to use the plays, poems and performances in ways that further the cause of social justice.

‘THE VERY AGE AND BODY OF THE TIME HIS FORM AND PRESSURE’ At this point it is difficult, and indeed contrary to the Hamletic formula, to see ‘the time’ as meaning ‘in Shakespeare’s or Hamlet’s time’; we remember that Hamlet has referenced ‘the time’ previously, when he calls the players the ‘abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’ (2.2.520, italics mine). Again, the idea appears to be that actors and theatre generally ‘hold the mirror up’ to the time, contextually, in terms of both moment and space, but we also know that Hamlet sees the plays and performances as malleable, flexible, usable for his moment and his future. He is, in fact, less concerned about historical attenuation or propriety, than he is about what the play can do for him, for his purpose now – which is itself part of 1) an age, a longer and broader view of an historical moment; and 2) a body, certainly the human body/bodies but also other social and political bodies. The time, then, considered broadly, is also subject to ‘form and pressure’, which might be taken to mean the shaping or formative influence that the past and current contexts and aspirations have on the creative process and product. As Hamlet

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works on the play, he is himself subject to his depressed and potentially out-ofshape body, his familial and social body and the body politic simultaneously; he is also subject to the pressures that each of these bodies exert upon him. So Hamlet’s brief career as a playwright, just twelve to sixteen lines, is shaped out of past and present circumstances, as well as future considerations. For him, while the ‘play’s the thing’ (2.2.599), it is also the thing that can be altered to ‘catch the conscience of the King’ (2.2.600). For Hamlet, then, the play is the malleable thing, the changeable thing, the deployable thing in service of social justice. If we choose to follow Hamlet’s theatrical paradigm, then theatre: 1) presents the very age and body of the time; and 2) understands that time’s age and body keep moving relentlessly forward, constantly formed and pressured by contemporary circumstances. Once again, this allows for the constant blooming of new Hamlets, Othellos, Rosalinds and Shylocks from new soil, because the contextual soil is always and necessarily new and the seeds of Shakespeare will grow in an infinite variety of forms and bodies as the result of those widely varied contexts, and they will speak to different circumstances differently, especially when developed in the pursuit of social justice.5

A FIELD OF PLAY FOR SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Ultimately, through Hamlet, we see some elements of a field of play for Shakespeare and social justice emerging, as he makes clear that 1. theatre and drama do indeed have a purpose; 2. that purpose has not changed over time, but is as it was; 3. that purpose ‘is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to Nature’, meaning contextually to show pasts, presents and possible futures in their diverse and variable states, not sacrificing the ill to present the good, nor vice versa, nor assuming the inviolability of one perspective on the past, present or future;6 4. this purpose, in our time, as in Hamlet’s, can be marshalled for the cause of social justice. Hamlet’s social justice cause is to discover the truth of his father’s death and the guilt or innocence of Claudius so that he knows how to enact his own future, which, by extension, is the future of his family and his country; 5. the time is now: shaped by the past, reflective of the contemporary moment, specific to context and aimed at the future. In this respect, the theatrical now of Shakespeare and social justice is happening differently everywhere: in this collection, this now happens and differently in a village in India, in the Zócalo in Mexico City, in downtown Los Angeles, in a prison in South Africa, in large and small theatres in China, in a university in England, in the Globe Theatre and in plays, performances, essays and classrooms all across the world. In each, multiple pasts – with their attendant forms and pressures – inform all of these different nows differently, just as Diane Taylor makes clear with her concept of ‘acts of transfer’, whereby performance in all of its many forms, contexts and presents always ‘enacts embodied memory’ (2007: 20); in this, the past, present,

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and future collide and collaborate ‘as they generate, record, and transmit’ multiple ways of knowing and becoming (ibid.: 21). Likewise, all of these Shakespearean nows, responding to present circumstances, forms and pressures contextually, have the ability, Hamlet-like, to work collectively for the cause of social justice. In this, we might find, to use the concept proposed by Rebecca Schneider, that ‘what remains’ comes from the live, the performance – whether reading, writing, discussing, performing, teaching, viewing, etc. – and is in fact the affect or impact of that performance, the influence of that performance on the context (2011: 87– 110). Regardless of the narrative medium, there is an immediacy caused not only by Shakespeare’s words but also by the situation, the context, in which these words are brought forth and to what effect.

‘THE PLAY’S THE THING’ In Hamlet, the work of social justice begins with a changed narrative: the prince alters the play script, which then alters the pursuit of social justice. He actually does this editing work at least twice in the play, as he also alters the script of his own death  – which he refers to as a ‘play’ (5.2.31) – sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the gallows in his place (5.2.46). The constant in Hamlet’s rewriting of scripts is the underlying power of narrative to shape his lively pursuit of social justice; even if we consider his second rewriting to be a questionable act of social justice, it does preserve his life temporarily, which allows him to continue the pursuit. Hamlet’s faith in narrative as the driver of social justice has recently been seconded by Yuval Noah Harari in his best-selling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015). Harari says, ‘There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and justice outside the common imagination of human beings’ (2015: 28). This mirrors Hamlet’s thinking that there is ‘nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ (2.2.248). But, of course, in neither case is that fundamental thought the end of the argument. Rather, Harari goes on to demonstrate that narratives fill the landscapes that humans found devoid of ‘natural order’, with spectacular inventions such as gods and nations and justice (2015: 28). Likewise, no natural order ever comes into existence in Hamlet, despite some wishing after one,7 but what does emerge is a lively narrative that has had tremendous influence and power for more than four centuries. The question now is to what use we will put those narratives and to what end. Harari makes clear that out of narrative we form orders, among them more just and unjust societies. That includes narratives constructed to demean and dehumanize, to separate and divide, and those that uplift, empower and even go so far as to assume virtue. All of these are, ultimately, ‘cultural choices’, Harari says, ‘from among a bewildering palette of possibilities’ (2015: 45). These narrative choices, edits and alterations make a real difference, as Hamlet fully demonstrates. This volume will show how these choices can and do continue to make a difference for Shakespeare, for social justice and the convergence of the two.

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This idea of all social order and justice as founded on narrative may irritate some who wish to believe a single order as ideal or even divine, but Harari says: We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. (110) In fact, Harari says that in order to create mass cooperation, and mass change, the only historically effective way has been found in humans’ ability to have ‘created imagined orders and devised scripts’ (133). In other words, the scripts need to be flexible, applicable and useful for the formation of better order and a more just society. This is the Hamletic (script/actor) method: use the script and the performance to discover a path to social justice. In this collection, the authors and interviewees have taken the opportunity to look again at Shakespeare’s old plays and to think new thoughts, to reflect the world as they find it, to shine a light on the realities of the present and to picture other and better futures, including those that were discovered before and might be recovered again to our social benefit.

A CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL JUSTICE DEBATE, VIA HAMLET Understanding that social justice must be found in the contextually specific present, and is always aimed at creating a better future, all social justice narratives, as real lives, also have past narratives, scripts and dialogues that serve as both forms and pressures on current endeavours. And while, as promised at the outset, this collection is not meant to provide new definitions of social justice, per se, nor to provide a history of social justice thinking, it may be useful to consider, briefly, how recent social justice philosophy can be of use in the construction of a highly diverse field of play. For example, an interesting current philosophical debate resonates with our consideration of the overall issues and histories of social justice within the Shakespeare industry, and particularly of the question of who, ultimately, are the responsible parties. This is a question as alive for Shakespeare’s characters as for the Shakespeare practitioners featured in this volume, and it is a topic that will be addressed throughout the collection. Iris Marion Young and Martha Nussbaum dialogically take up the consideration of guilt and responsibility in Young’s Responsibility for Justice (2013), a consideration that also has value when we look to Shakespeare. Young and Nussbaum carefully consider the idea of who is responsible for social injustice and who is responsible for setting things right. Throughout the text, Young argues for a clear division between guilt and responsibility in the pursuit of social justice: guilt, Young says, is backward-looking, attempting to assign blame, while responsibility must be forward-looking, attempting to improve people and systems; Nussbaum would argue for the motivating power of guilt to bring social justice work to pass.

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To illustrate Young’s point via Hamlet, we can see that Claudius has guilt and only briefly a sense of responsibility, while Hamlet has responsibility but seems somewhat removed from guilt, except possibly in terms of his delayed response to the ghost; still, for the most part, he is focused forward to correct an injustice and to thereby ‘set it right’ (1.5.189). Nussbaum would say, however, that Hamlet needs to do better at looking at his and the situation’s past in order to pursue justice correctly (Young 2013: xix-xxv).8 In other words, Hamlet’s worry about his inactivity is on the right track: he has a responsibility to take on the injustice, in the person of Claudius, which he has shirked. As time moves forward, this shirked responsibility turns into guilt, which in turn fuels his future responsibility. Nussbaum shows that the past is indeed a prologue to better action, or at least it can be so long as we don’t get addicted in the meantime to guilt for itself instead of as a spur to improved action going forward. I bring this forward here before quickly cataloguing the chapters to follow because it is important for us, collectively, to think about Shakespeare and social justice in the past and present in order to elevate the moment that the authors of this collection provide: several of them will articulate missed opportunities for social justice in the Shakespeare industry’s various venues, which serves to point up that the work remains our shared, ongoing responsibility. If we can, as Nussbaum would have it, collectively accept that much criticism then we can potentially find a future for Shakespeare and society that goes beyond what we have accomplished so far. And, if we care not a whit for accepting blame, then still, as with Young, we must know that there is still work to be done in this arena, that it can be done even better than it has been done before, and that we have the collective strength to do it. All of this may spur on those of us associated with Shakespeare in some way, so that we can begin again to think, vigorously and vigilantly, about our responsibilities as scholars, teachers, actors, directors, producers, professors and so on, to use what we value for social good, for social justice. We don’t all need to agree as to what that looks like; in fact, we shouldn’t, because it looks different in different contexts, as the collection makes clear. But we should hold the mirror up to see where we are with Shakespeare, where we’ve been and where we still might go. As one contributor to this collection, Kiernan Ryan, says, akin to de Grazia: To discover that Shakespeare’s drama had all along been ‘dreaming on things to come’ would be to reclaim a rich legacy: the prospect of a critical practice through which the world as it was and the world as it is could engage in a dialogue—a genuine, unpredictable dialogue—about the world as it might one day be. (2002: 176) Hamlet uses just such a practice, and collectively so do all of the contributors to this volume, as they see much social justice territory yet to discover, much variety and depth still to find and value; and, this, I think is an honourable venture that avoids turning our work with Shakespeare into a ‘shallow’ enterprise, as David Schalkwyk once poignantly stated (2005: 16).

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This volume is constructed not as a means to forward a particular philosophy of social justice, nor of literature or theatre as social justice, but just the opposite: the collection seeks to create the dialogic space for us to consider how and when and where social justice has been, is being and can be forwarded through the use of Shakespeare. Some of those discussions happen in the scholarly realm of literary analysis; others happen by way of theatrical performance; and still others happen in educational venues, community engagement and prison programmes. But what is important here is that literature and theatre, and particularly Shakespeare, are inherently usable and indeed useful when implemented on behalf of visions of a better society.

THE COLLECTION To best illuminate the range of Shakespeare and social justice work, and thereby establish possibilities offered within this field of play, the collection is organized into four general sections: • • • •

The Shakespeare and social justice interviews The practice of Shakespeare and social justice The performance of Shakespeare and social justice The economies of Shakespeare and social justice

The first section, a collection of short interviews, is designed to add breadth and purpose to the field of play and leverage the dialogue about Shakespeare and social justice by highlighting moments of positive deviance – where positive results are achieved in circumstances that would ordinarily appear challenging or fraught – and especially (de)constructed hierarchies, where barriers to Shakespeare and social justice have been historically constructed, now creating an opportunity to challenge these obstacles and discover creative and healthful solutions. Erin Coulehan sets the stage, locally and globally, for the following interviewees: • Chris Anthony, Director of the Will Power to Youth programme in urban Los Angeles • Erica Whyman, equity-focused Deputy Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company • Arthur L. Little, Jr, leading Shakespeare and critical race scholar • Ewan Fernie, Director of the Everything to Everybody project, returning the world’s first Shakespeare Library to the public • Farah Karim-Cooper, Director of the Shakespeare and Race Festival 2018. All have been intentionally drawn from the breadth of Shakespeare practitioners – in scholarship, performance, education and activism – each approaching the topic and its realization from specific and multiple points of entry. The interviews are brief excerpts from larger conversations, designed to interrogate, investigate, illuminate, fumigate, irritate and ignite necessary dialogues and actions. The second section, ‘The practice of Shakespeare and social justice’, provides a set of chapters that collectively demonstrate an array of possible strategies – in terms

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of pedagogy, scholarship, social- and self-definition – that promote the creative and disciplined approaches necessary to establishing a field of play. In ‘Active Shakespeare: A social justice framework’, Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi ask a difficult question: ‘What does it mean to focus on the universal when the racial, gendered, ability and/or sexual-orientation differences among the students are left unaddressed?’ In response, the authors argue that in current classrooms, Shakespeare should be placed within a social justice framework to ensure that the work continues to resonate with contemporary readers. Active approaches to Shakespeare empower students to respond to complex texts and diverse identities in dynamic communities. Thompson and Turchi demonstrate that Shakespeare in the classroom should not be treated as separate from lived realities; rather, Gen Z learners are often eager to engage in conversations, via Shakespeare, on the contradictions between their unease about considering race and difference and their beliefs in the value of diversity and culture. In ‘Bending toward justice: From Shakespeare’s Black Mediterranean to August Wilson’s Black Atlantic’, Peter Erickson takes up Thompson and Turchi’s challenge and engages with the complexity of race in the modernized world. Erickson writes, ‘We do not live in a post-Shakespeare world. But we do live in a world that offers other definitions and expectations of social justice that come from outside Shakespeare’s work.’ Erickson explores connections between Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) and August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988) to evaluate the concept of social justice in a cross-historical context, specifically in terms of race, showing the possibility of a continuum that ‘bends towards justice’. Much in line with the correctives provided by Thompson and Turchi, Erickson advocates for transcultural/multicultural education as necessary for ongoing critical discussions of race. In ‘Black Hamlet, social justice, and the minds of apartheid’, Arthur L. Little, Jr also explores issues of race that run through and transcend generations and cultures, through the story of Wulf Sachs and his Black Hamlet. Little suggests that in Sachs, a Jewish doctor and psychoanalyst, we see a process of modernity anchored by the freedom of a self-examining/self-determining Hamlet. Pursuant to this is an evolving relationship between modernity and civility that is increasingly racist and antiSemitic. Ultimately, says Little, Shakespeare gives us not just our own humanness and freedom, but also the discipline to achieve. Expanding the discussion on race and identity to larger social movements, Jason Demeter, in ‘Shakespeare and civil rights: Rhetorical universalism’, demonstrates how Shakespeare’s image was used as an instrument of social justice within the sermons and speeches of black civil rights activists during the American civil rights movement. Demeter’s analysis explores the social justice efficacy of rhetorical universalism, which he describes ‘as the use and subversion of universalist doctrine as a means of contesting essentialist constructions of identity, such as how Shakespeare’s image as a universal poet is employed to confront and challenge entrenched white supremacist ideologies’. Adelle Hulsmeier continues the collection’s exploration of under-represented communities in Shakespeare and society in ‘Shakespeare’s Disabled, Disabled

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Shakespeare’, which focuses on historical readings of the disabled through the characters of Richard (Richard III) and Gloucester (Henry VI Parts II and III). Hulsmeier argues that Shakespeare can be used to showcase the process of moving toward social justice, in terms of disability and the disabled, by comparing and contrasting ‘then and now’. Ultimately, she shows that historical context can be used to prompt necessary conversations about social justice. Christie Carson turns identity exploration inward by sharing about her life and work while discussing women’s roles in ‘Social justice in the academy: Reflecting on Shakespeare’s royal women’. Carson uses these characters as examples or mirrors of women who look to a future of greater equality and who also offer hope that a kinder world will exist for their children. Carson shares an autobiographical narrative to highlight the impact of contemporary political and social movements that create a space for her own work to continue to follow the path towards social justice. The third section of the collection, ‘The performance of Shakespeare and social justice’, illustrates the possibilities and pitfalls of programming that aims at positive social change. In this section, we note the vast geographical boundaries of this field of play, even while acknowledging that every real social justice effort is, out of necessity, context-specific. In ‘William Shakespeare’s Enrique IV, primera parte: Common [battle]grounds between medieval England and Mexico’s present’, Alfredo Modenessi and Paulina Morales reveal that the production of 1 Henry IV by the National Theatre Company of Mexico, designed for the 2012 ‘Globe to Globe: 37 Plays 37 Languages’ festival, was not intended to be merely Mexico’s proud contribution to an initiative within London’s larger role as host of the 2012 Olympic Games. Instead, the project was conceived as a locally generated and politically inflected endeavour: it was meant to tap into the dire conditions of power and privilege in Mexico. Modenessi and Morales examine the context, language, original venue and staging style for Enrique IV, Primera Parte in order to locate a larger framework of theatre practices that are ‘global’ and also contextually attuned to social justice. In ‘King Lear and gender justice in India’, award-winning novelist Preti Taneja further examines cultural and political distinctions, reminding the reader that Shakespeare’s works were imposed on Indians through the education programmes of the colonies, which opens up a multitude of contemporary issues. Today, Indian appropriations of Shakespeare articulate the complex identities formed out of a history that is steeped in subjugation and the shift from socialism to capitalism. These appropriations have the potential to speak to social injustices that continue to do great damage. For example, Taneja discovers how a student appropriation of King Lear that took place ten weeks after the death of twenty-three-year-oldintern Jyoti Singh Pandey – who was beaten, raped and tortured on a private bus – functions as a call for gender justice in India, as well as an example of how theatre can be mobilized to activate social change. Malcolm Cocks takes up others aspects of Shakespeare’s cultural and socioeconomic utility in ‘Re-enacting Hamlet in South Africa’. Cocks demonstrates that while Shakespeare’s appeal in South Africa often adheres to ‘universal values’ that are apparently embodied in his plays, these assumptions do little to account for the

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conditions that make performances of Shakespeare available in the region. Cocks showcases that local theatre companies have begun to use the ‘Shakespeare’ brand as a strategic tool to gain visibility locally and nationally and connect with a global Shakespeare community. While local Shakespeare performances continue to be shaped by divisive cultural, economic and institutional power relations, Shakespeare’s cultural purchase may provide better access to centres of power through partnership and collaboration and may, therefore, function as a possible venue for social justice interventions. Kevin Quarmby finds other forms of utility for Shakespeare in South Africa, even while he challenges, from a pedagogical perspective, the validity of ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives from around the globe in ‘“Shakespeare in prison”: A South African social justice alternative’. Quarmby takes an in-depth look at one South African effort that seeks to de-commodify incarcerated populations by empowering inmates to confront their fear of Shakespeare, which serves as a counter to the fear of day-to-day violence. Quarmby examines the growth of young incarcerated men whose lives were improved by such initiatives, and champions similar models of performance to influence policy reform. By demonstrating the human potential of young men who share dreams of being contributing members of their community, Shakespeare’s ‘poetical justice’ message, highlighted later in this collection by Kiernan Ryan, might at last be heard by those with the power and will to enforce meaningful penal reform. Julie Sanders and Li Jun move us deeper into the complex contextual ‘now’ of Shakespeare and social justice with ‘Romeo and Juliet with Chinese characteristics: Questions of usefulness and engagement in twenty-first-century China’. To do this, the authors bring two very different productions of Romeo and Juliet into dialogue and examine what has sometimes been categorized as ‘small-time Shakespeare’: one production was designed specifically to engage migrant worker audiences in Beijing and the other was aimed at young adult audiences. Sanders and Li assert that in China, the most creative and challenging work on Shakespeare is taking place less in the mainstream, government-sponsored commercial theatres than in other kinds of public spaces, such as universities and public spaces. This chapter challenges the idea of ‘useful’ Shakespeare – useful for those who would support the status quo and to those who would champion a more just future – and moves towards a thoughtprovoking conclusion, where grass-roots theatre offers a counter-balance to big-time productions through the performances that actively speak to (and for) marginalized and disenfranchised populations. Demonstrating a less-optimistic counterpoint to the contributions before it, Chee Keng Lee interrogates ‘Social justice, social order and political power in NTCC’s adaptation of Richard III’. Lee suggests that despite efforts at globalization, both in the Shakespeare industry and the socio-economy, Shakespearean messages may remain lost in translation. Using a production of Richard III that leveraged creative freedom, Lee highlights gaps in performance that raise issues of audience reception and universality. The chapter argues that in taking away Gloucester’s deformity and introducing three witches to set him into action, the production framed itself squarely as a story of political ambition and a power struggle familiar to modern

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Chinese audiences, raising questions as to the potential for social justice in the production narrative. The fourth and final section of the collection, ‘The economies of Shakespeare and social justice’, focuses especially on power and the inequity of resources that in themselves form a conspicuous and crucial dimension within the overall scope of this field of play, spanning the temporal universe – past, present and future. In ‘The empathetic imagination and the dream of equality: Shakespeare’s “poetical justice”’, Kiernan Ryan explores Shakespeare’s critique of justice and suggests that the concept is ‘poetical’, meaning ‘subjunctive, fictional rather than factual’. Moreover, Ryan argues that Shakespeare’s imagination ‘is capable of transmuting what would otherwise remain a bloodless abstraction into a living, breathing possibility’. According to Ryan, the appeal lies in Shakespeare’s ability to dramatize the divisive world of his day, ultimately not so different from our world today, from a perspective that is both revolutionary and universal. Therefore, Shakespeare shows an ability to envision the social, sexual and racial inequalities of the early modern period as ongoing issues in need of continued attention as we pursue a better future. Boldly moving into the specifics of such a transfigured future, Peter Holbrook also builds on Erickson’s idea of a long, trans-historical arc in ‘The idea of communism in Shakespeare’. Holbrook addresses the fact that ‘communism’ is now almost an unspeakable word in public speech and discusses communistic beliefs in Shakespeare’s world in order to examine the ongoing existence of exploitation and inequalities and the ongoing demand for justice and solidarity. Perhaps, says Holbrook, improved social ideals and responses might surface or resurface, such as the vision found in Shakespeare’s imagination. Evidence for Holbrook’s socio-economic possibility can be found in Jeffrey Butcher’s ‘“Leftward Ho!”: Shakespeare and Lenin in the tempest of class politics’. Using an economic framework, Butcher appeals for the inclusion of Leftist writers and Marxist Shakespeareans and argues that this political addition could have a profound impact on scholarly discourse. According to Butcher, ‘Lenin and Leftist writers recognized the fact that literature – fiction, poetry, drama and theory – plays a major role in political discussions and political movements’ that can be applied to Shakespeare due to his cultural authority. Butcher argues that this application is paramount because only with the inclusion of the working-class perspective will the larger messages of Shakespeare and social justice work to shatter inequalities. In ‘Social justice and the reign of Regan in Shakespeare’s King Lear’, Geraldo de Sousa provides the collection’s last word on both the economies of social justice and the larger theme of context, large and small. Sousa asserts that Lear itself offers multiple concepts of social justice. For example, the play suggests that social justice serves to deliver reward or punishment, to give ‘due deserts’. Additionally, social justice depends on proximity and barrier-breaking vision. In this way, social justice is presented in the play as an opportunity to make ‘visible the invisible and, therefore, to perform acts of kindness and charity. Just as Shakespeare localizes Lear’s action in the characters’ living places and spaces, and grounds the tragic experience in their material world, we see that social justice depends on breaking provisional boundaries dividing rich from poor.’ Sousa argues that in Lear, Shakespeare portrays his most

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sustained representation of poverty and social justice, exploring such topics as loss, need and the redistribution of wealth and power.

‘A KIND OF FIGHTING’ While this introduction has looked time and again to Hamlet, it has not yet reflected on what may be the prince’s ultimate and the collection’s primary motivation for change. Hamlet, in relating his narrative of personal growth – through sea battle, capture and brave return – to Horatio, begins by saying: Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep. (5.2.4–5) The prince here suggests that his transformation began because he knew in his heart that something was wrong; he then experienced new words and actions and people and culture and he came back changed, ready to fight, forgive and act for a cause. Ready, in the end, to finally try to set things right. Likewise, the contributors to this collection demonstrate, piece by piece, their own kind of heartfelt fighting, knowing that there is still time to make more of Shakespeare, to do more, to suit the old words to new actions, experiences, and events – in performance, education, scholarship, activism, etc. – that will make a difference to the possibility of heightened social justice in multiple contexts around the globe. The authors and interviewees demonstrate a vast array of perspectives, methodologies and practices that together work to chalk the first lines of a field of play on which this work of Shakespeare and social justice can continue to take place with greater creativity and value, diversity and equity, openness and cultural impact. In sum, the contributors demonstrate that the play-full life and real life can be joined, to great effect, by way of Shakespeare. And yet, in the end there’s no particular prescription found in these pages, just a shared desire to honour the significant work that is being done, to point up the challenges that remain and to catalyze, through Shakespeare, a kind of longing, a kind of fighting for social justice.

NOTES 1. For those who have an interest in the history of social justice thinking, some useful starting points might be found in the following: political philosopher and public intellectual Michael J. Sandel, in his book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2010), posits that any conception of social justice necessarily builds on, and likely foregrounds, three historically fundamental ideals: ‘welfare, freedom, and virtue’ (19). Three decades earlier, Randolph L. Braham put it similarly when he stated that while ‘the concept [of social justice] continues to elude precise definition, most contemporary philosophers and social scientists still emphasize the three traditional fundamental principles underlying it: liberty, equality, and desert’ (1981: x). Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic also create broad categories of social justice-building on work from Plato and Socrates through to David Miller, Nancy

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Fraser and Alex Honneth and more – to demonstrate that social justice ‘is concerned not with the narrow focus of what is just for the individual alone, but what is just for the social whole’ (2007: 2); they focus on a bi-partite consideration of social justice made up of ‘distributive principles (fair allocation of rewards and burdens) and retributive principles (appropriate responses to harm)’ (2007: 200, parentheses theirs). While Sandel, Braham, Capeheart and Milovanovic use slightly different frames to consider historical social justice, all are closely aligned and overlapping, creating multiple points of relatability to our focus on Shakespeare and social justice. Ultimately, the authors share two concepts central to this collection: 1) that ‘we need to seek justice on a global scale and within our local setting’ and 2) that there is an everlasting need to converse and act together if we are to sustain and ‘cultivate the solidarity and sense of mutual responsibility that a just society requires’ (Sandel 2010: 264). See also the chapter by Geraldo de Sousa in this collection. For more on the philosophical/legal/political issues of mutual responsibility, identity and becoming, I would recommend Appiah (2006), Buber (1971), Crenshaw (1991), Derrida (2000) and Levinas (1985). 2. Even now, Laura Bohannan’s essay, originally published in 1966, remains significant to this discussion. See Bohannan (1996). 3. This, and all citations to Shakespeare’s work contained in this collection, are from The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare). Here, I will rely on the 1623 First Folio edition of Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. 4. Of course, there are other famous mirrors in Shakespeare, most notably in Richard II and King Lear. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser uses mirrors in a multitude of ways, but especially to exemplify right and wrong behaviour for the purpose of improving future behaviour. Of course, The Mirror for Magistrates collection operates similarly, and may have been the most politically influential of these pieces during Shakespeare’s time. For the use of mirrors in Shakespeare’s work, see especially Hunt (2011); Kelly (2002); Neill (1975); and Rozett (1990). 5. In examining my own thinking on these matters, I want to acknowledge the influence of Jonathan Bate in his essay, ‘Caliban and Ariel Write Back’ (2000). Here, Bate demonstrates how The Tempest might have been viewed in Shakespeare’s time, how it is currently valued and how it will still ‘need’ to be viewed (176). 6. This is not the time to enter into a discussion on Elizabethan views of history, but it may bear noting that Holinshed’s Chronicles do, essentially, follow the same method, providing multiple views without priority. 7. There is a lot of talk in the play about apparently natural and unnatural orders, relationships, marriages, etc. In fact, the Hamlets, Jr. and Sr., seem a bit obsessed with the idea of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, especially early in the play. Horatio is the only other character in the play to use either term, and he does so only when he starts to form a narrative for Fortinbras once both Hamlets are dead. 8. A similar point is made by Stephen Greenblatt (1991), in his brief essay, ‘The Best Way to Kill Our Literary Inheritance is to Turn It into a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order’.

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REFERENCES Appiah, K. (2006), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Bate, J. (2000), ‘Caliban and Ariel Write Back’, Shakespeare and Race, C. Alexander and S. Wells (eds), 165–76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bohannan, L. (1996), ‘Shakespeare in the Bush. An American Anthropologist Set Out to Study the Tiv of West Africa and was Taught the True Meaning of Hamlet’, Natural History 75: 28–33. Braham, R. (1981), Social Justice, Boston, the Hague, New York: Martinus Nihoff. Buber, M. (1971), I and Thou, New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. Capeheart, L. and D. Milovanovic (2007), Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Crenshaw, K (1991), ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, The University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 1(8): 139–67. Derrida, J. and A. Dufourmantelle (2000), Of Hospitality, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Ellison, R. (1995), Invisible Man, New York: Vintage. de Grazia, M. (1999), ‘Teleology, Delay, and the “Old Mole”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 50(3): 251–67. Greenblatt, S. (1991), ‘The Best Way to Kill Our Literary Inheritance is to Turn It into a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order’, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Available online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Turning-Literature-Into-a/87099 (accessed 13 December 2019) Harari, Y. (2015), Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, New York: Harper Perennial. Hunt, M. (2011), Shakespeare’s Speculative Art, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, P. (2002), ‘Surpassing Glass: Shakespeare’s Mirrors’, Early Modern Literary Studies 8(1): 2.1–32. Available online: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/08-2/kellglas.htm (accessed 13 December 2019). Levinas, E. (1985), Ethics and Infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Neill, M. (1975), ‘Shakespeare’s Halle of Mirrors: Play, Politics, and Psychology in Richard III’, Shakespeare Studies 8: 99–129. Orkin, M. (2005), Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power, London and New York: Routledge. Rozett, M. (1990), ‘Holding Mirrors up to Nature: First Readers as Moralists’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41(2): 211–21. Ryan, K. (2002), Shakespeare, 3rd edn., New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sandel, M. (2010), Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Schalkwyk, D. (2005), ‘Between Historicism and Presentism: Love and Science in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest’, Shakespeare in South Africa: Journal of the Shakespeare Society of South Africa 17: 1–17.

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Schneider, P. (2011), Performance Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London and New York: Routledge. Taylor, D. (2007), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, 3rd edn., Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Young, I. (2013), Responsibility for Justice, rep. edn., New York: Oxford University Press.

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PART ONE

The Shakespeare and social justice interviews

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CHAPTER 1.1

Deconstructing social hierarchies ERIN COULEHAN

As I write this, nestled in my home office in one of the oldest neighbourhoods in El Paso, Texas, social hierarchies are being broken down all around me. President Trump was impeached, migrants in Ciudad Juárez are facing dangerous conditions and a general sense of unrest has lingered for the past three years. Many things are changing. When I think about breaking down social hierarchies, I think about groups of students I worked with at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in the summers of 2018 and 2019. I was a teaching assistant for a study abroad course on Shakespeare that travelled to London to study literature and theatre, always through a social justice lens. For many of these students (I was once one of them), this seemed like a fantasy drawn from one of the fancy texts on the syllabus. There was no way a girl in El Paso, one of the poorest metropolitan areas in the United States, was going to go to Shakespeare’s Globe to study, write and pursue a scholarly life. It somehow seems beyond reality, in much the same way that the same girl who once studied abroad is now assisting in editing this collection. But we make it happen! These students exemplify breaking down social hierarchies because they do it every single day. Eighty per cent of UTEP students are Latinx, over 50 per cent are first-generation college students, and many come from households that earn less than $20,000 a year. Households. For many students getting through college is a massive undertaking that the entire family faces together, with talent, courage and resilience. There is a great deal of responsibility and sacrifice and things like studying abroad often don’t fit into the framework. In 2018, one of our students booked a very tedious flight to London in a moment of panic that many of our students face when the realization of their travel hits. She had never travelled on a plane before and was overwhelmed by the possibilities suddenly available to her. She then felt humiliated that she had failed at such a basic task, booking a plane ticket. How, she thought, would she fare in London? We were able to rebook her flight and even arranged for other students to book the same itinerary – instant allies!

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By going to London, this young woman shattered every boundary she thought was limiting her. Her race, her size, her financial status, being a woman. She excelled in her coursework, but most importantly she learned how to live. She texted me selfies with Lady Gaga from the front row at a concert, emailed about the best way to get to Paris from London for a weekend trip with her ‘flatmates’ (her term!), and she came back with a new-found confidence in herself. For the first time, she told me, she was proud to take up space, and felt that this first experience empowered her to do it again and again. This is what Shakespeare and a commitment to social justice does: changes things. What follows is a collection of five interviews conducted by David Ruiter with professionals who are helping to break down social hierarchies within their own spaces. We see the ways that Shakespeare and social justice works on theatrical and political stages, from Chris Anthony of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, who notes how Shakespeare has helped to reshape the city following devastating social uproar, and Erica Whyman from the Royal Shakespeare Company, who has made important and controversial casting decisions that have led to increased inclusivity and acclaim. In other contexts – cultural, racial, sexual, educational, etc. – Arthur L. Little Jr. discusses social hierarchies in terms of the black male heterosexual body in America and Shakespeare; Ewan Fernie considers how relationships between British cities and Shakespeare’s humanism encourage a greater sense of personhood; and Farah Karim-Cooper, from Shakespeare’s Globe, takes up the cause of activating audiences and students to seek out higher levels of representation. These conversations are rich with the stuff that makes our academic, political and poetic hearts beat, allowing us to engage in and help generate something – a cause, a fight, a humanity, certainly a dialogue – greater than ourselves. In reading these interviews, I hope that more conversations are sparked. With your students. With your families. With yourselves. I think you’ll find that you arrive at more questions than answers; that is part of the magic that we’re able to achieve through the momentum of continued engagement – and, of course, Shakespeare.

CHRIS ANTHONY Chris Anthony is an assistant professor of Performance at The Theatre School at DePaul University, Chicago. She has worked to find common ground between art and community, using human relations dialogue to enrich artistic practice and artmaking in the service of community development. She began working with the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles’ Will Power to Youth programme in 1995 and has been Programme Director since 2001. Will Power to Youth has been highly praised for its effectiveness in community arts and has won numerous commendations, including the prestigious ‘Coming Up Taller’ award. Anthony has directed performances at the St. Louis Black Rep, Cornerstone Theatre and Native Voices and her programmes and performances consistently work towards empowering youth, veterans and other vulnerable populations. In this interview, Chris Anthony discusses how the perceived hierarchies of access to Shakespeare shifted in urban youth and continue to evolve our understanding of literature and the human experience.

*** David Ruiter (DR): Why don’t we talk for just a second about why 1993 is important for Will Power to Youth? Chris Anthony (CA): 1993 is an important year for Will Power to Youth because it was the culmination of a year of planning that was prompted by the civil unrest in Los Angeles in April of 1992. So at the end of April 1992, the Rodney King riots, as they’re popularly known, broke out following the acquittal. Following the Rodney King riots and the devastation primarily in south LA – but actually across all Los Angeles; it flared up in south LA, but spread across the breadth of the city – there was a lot of tension amongst civic leadership, private foundations and from a lot of artists in Los Angeles, a lot of pooling of resources and rallying of people together to help. And so Will Power to Youth was created as a partnership between the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, which was then Shakespeare Festival LA, and The National Conference of Community and Justice, which was then the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) in LA. So there was one person, Dani Bedau, who had been a teenager in the NCCJ programme and trained as an actor at CalArts and was an intern at Shakespeare Festival, but had the vision to bring the world of inter-community dialogue and theatre together. So Will Power to Youth really was developed after conversations that the Shakespeare Center had, folks at NCCJ had, with teenagers and asking them what they wanted. And their answers generally boiled down to they wanted teachers who genuinely cared about them and what they were teaching, and they wanted jobs. So Will Power to Youth from the very beginning has been a jobs programme. Young people, essentially between the ages of fourteen to twenty-one, and now it’s fifteen to twenty-one, have been paid to work on a Shakespeare play in the summer. DR: The community wanted youth summer employment through this?

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CA: For the kids it was about having a job in the summer. I think the city leadership, the community development department, was aware of the ways this job could help kids prepare for careers in the future. I think that was not necessarily the students’ entry point but it is something the programme had to show evidence of in order to receive certain support. DR: Tell us a little about how successful the Will Power to Youth programme was at the beginning, and how successful it’s been over time. Particularly, who were the young people who were there at the beginning? Where did they come from? Has that remained the same? Is the geographic location of the student population the same for the most part? And, in the last fifteen years, the downtown area of Los Angeles has also changed. So can you walk us through from when you were there at the beginning and what has happened over time in terms of who’s involved in the community? CA: Because the programme was sponsored by the city and was always connected to the city’s Summer Youth Employment programme, there was always a political connection. There was always a stipulation from the money that paid the youth who we could hire and where they came from. And that geographic centre shifted from year to year depending on which city council person sponsored it, or where the city’s priority was. When I first started, we were in Watts, we were in Jordan Downs (Nickerson Gardens), we were at the King Drew Medical Center, that’s where we performed. We have been in other parts like Fairfax and Olympic – sort of that Miracle Mile area – but it has always been designed to serve children living at or below the poverty level. So we have always served that population and no matter where it was. But the geographic centres, and therefore the ethnic centres, have shifted. So being in Los Angeles, this has always been a Hispanic-serving programme; like a university would be designated, we would be [Hispanic-serving] just because we’re in LA. But the composition of that community has shifted a lot. In the very earliest years, there was a mandate to serve low-income students, and they were always Black or Latinx. There was always a Black presence earlier, and then in the mid-to- late ’90s we spent more time in Hollywood, and there were more services with the GLASS houses (the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services), so we had more trans youth, we had more street youth. More kids who had been kicked out of their homes for being gay, or were involved with various substances and were in foster homes or homeless shelters. Then the funding shifted again and we got the building in downtown Los Angeles. And so when we got our own physical space, and not just a church basement each year, the funding also shifted to serve more of that geographic area. In the year 2000, when we acquired the space, [the newcomer centre was at] Belmont High School, so we served a lot of very fresh immigrants from Central America and Mexico. That population was very well represented there, and so we had a lot of English-language learners. The building also sits in Historic Filipinotown, with great community partners. But we also served, similarly, the north end; a mile north of us is Chinatown. So we also had a larger Chinese and Chinese immigrant population in Will Power to Youth, and there was a big Korean community just

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west of us. Right now, the Latinx immigrant population has shifted into Koreatown because a lot of downtown has gentrified so much that a lot of families have been sort of pushed over further west. A lot of kids in the early 2000s lived in Pico Union, which is the neighbourhood the Staples Center is in. Before the Staples Center was built, there was a lot of dense housing and a lot of people were pushed out of that area for the building and development of the area. DR: So we’re talking about immigration and therefore new national identities, relocation from outside of the country into LA or from one part of LA into another part of LA. We’re talking about a pretty wide spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds. We’re talking about socio-economic status from the bottom quarter; we’re also talking about sexual identity transitions through issues that have also caused homelessness. All of this comes through the door of one place, and I don’t think most people would find that place to be about Shakespeare if they were to have guessed – in fact, it seems really incredible to think that, after all the things that you just mentioned stemming from racial and other sorts of violence, like with the Rodney King riots. All the people that you’re serving in various parts of the city and yet these kids are coming to find employment, care and some opportunity within the doors of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. What is the relationship? How does Shakespeare connect to all of this? CA: It’s crazy, right? I think that there are many levels to the answer. Historically, Shakespeare has been used as a goal to aspire to. That if you can get good at something, then you can understand Shakespeare. Or if you are educated or cultured, then you can understand Shakespeare: that there’s a process that you have to go through. A rigorous, mind-altering process that will somehow grant you entry into some sort of enlightened state by virtue of reading Shakespeare. Shakespeare was really good at writing about people and because he understood so much about humanity, our students are walking through the door with a wealth of knowledge of Shakespeare – but they just don’t know the language. Actually, tonight we’re going to have a performance of Will Power to Youth, and we’re doing a production of Twelfth Night. The young woman who plays Fabian is the third of her siblings to do the programme. Her older sister first did the programme in 2007, and she played Lady Montague. She had been sent away from her family in the Philippines. She had been sent away for some sort of teenage shenanigans. They sent her to the US, and when she first got here she wasn’t allowed to speak Tagalog, her native language, at home because they wanted her to speak English. She was really having a hard time, and she wrote a piece with other members of the community for Lady Montague to speak about what would happen to her if anything happened to Romeo. She said, ‘If anything happened to Romeo, my heart could not function.’ And to have a play that’s so widely known as this cultural touchstone is one thing, but to have a young person who actually understands banishment? Who actually knows what it feels like to be sent away, and what that separation would mean? I think most professors I’ve ever had have no experience with that. I don’t know anyone else better to teach me about banishment than this young woman who was separated from everyone she knew, and just sent away.

ERICA WHYMAN Erica Whyman is the Deputy Artistic Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Under Whyman, the RSC has been at the forefront of cutting-edge performances that challenge audiences to think about theatre and society in nuanced and intersectional ways. She has set an example as a leader who is committed to equality, diversity and ensuring access to theatre and to Shakespeare. In 2016, she directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for the Nation, incorporating fourteen amateur theatre groups into the professional production alongside 600 children, performing all over the UK, and in 2018, she directed the much-lauded production of Romeo and Juliet at the RSC, the Barbican and on a national tour. She was one of the first fellows of the Clore Leadership Programme and in the 2012 New Year’s Honours List she was awarded an OBE for Services to Theatre in the UK. In November 2016, she won the Peter Brook Empty Space Special Achievement award. She is the Chair of Theatre 503 and Deputy Chair of the Coventry City of Culture Trust. In this interview, Erica Whyman explores shifting hierarchies of race and gender in plays like Romeo and Juliet and the effect these shifts have on young audiences.

*** David Ruiter (DR): You recently said that Shakespeare leads need to be played by a wider range than we’ve seen. Can you talk about that a little bit? Erica Whyman (EW): I think quite a lot of change is happening, but I am mindful that [in] the RSC’s and Shakespeare’s history in the UK, there have been moments where we’ve seen intriguing new thoughts on who can play leads. And it hasn’t turned into consistent changes in how we think about it. And the reason I think it matters so much is theatre is, of course, a platform where we’re reflecting society. Where we have an opportunity to paint a picture both of the society as it really is, as opposed to, perhaps, narrow versions that we receive via other media. But also, where we can stretch an audience – shift the way they might imagine society and [in] an imaginative space, where that’s not threatening but exciting and opens up horizons and possibilities. And I feel that about the theatre, but, I guess with Shakespeare in the UK, there is such a complex set of relationships with the meanings of his work. In the sense, still prevailing is ‘Shakespeare is for an educated elite.’ The work is difficult, the words are difficult, their experience at school wasn’t great because it made them feel bored or excluded. My experience of his plays is that they are much more democratic and multifaceted than that general view suggests. Therefore, when you shift a perspective on Shakespeare, you shift something greater. You shift a sense of how society is structured. For example, a young person who believed they couldn’t speak or understand Shakespeare, when they discover that they can, the difficulty is a pleasure that they find they can overcome with the right tools. They find they can do anything because they have broken into a citadel.

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To me, it’s about an exponential win both with the audience or an artist, or a participant in a non-professional setting – there’s this huge potential change if they think Shakespeare is for them, about them. DR: It’s very interesting because I was just dealing with Hamlet’s idea of holding the mirror up to nature. But in that, he does actually talk about that it’s to reflect but also to show forward. It’s interesting that inside the play we get a comment about what theatre can do in terms of creating a stronger sense of the realities of the day, but also showing pathways forward – some that might be more productive than others. Let’s talk a little bit about intersectionality in theatre. Intersectionality in my mind is a way forward if we can come to stronger terms about what it means for performance, casting, audience. I was wondering if you’d be able to comment about that. EW: Yes, and maybe it’s easier for me to talk about our recent Romeo and Juliet. There was quite a lot written and spoken about for my casting of Mercutio. I cast an actress called Charlotte Josephine, a writer/performer. Very smart, very energetic, her own writing is very poetic and has a kind of similarity to the cocktail and violence of Mercutio’s words, but also the magic and delight. So she seemed genuinely the right person for the task, she happens also to be a boxer herself. Kind of an interesting story about Charlie herself is that she wrote a play about being a boxer called Bitch Boxer and taught herself to box as a result. And that is worth saying because the part of course requires you to be an inciter of violence. And I think that’s partly why there was so much written about it. To see a woman inciting such violence still feels new and challenging to some audience members, and yet hugely refreshing to others. But, my experience working on the play was that that was a pretty straightforward choice. Then it was really a true pleasure to explore the text through Charlie’s eyes, but also everyone else involved with scenes Mercutio is in were able to use that question of ‘how do we react to the gender of this character?’ The way of thinking about how Tybalt others Mercutio, is refusing to fight with this creature who doesn’t really sit within the binaries of the Capulets and Montagues. I came away from spending a long time with that production, so we met a lot of audiences. Possibly, the more radical choices I made were with the casting of Romeo and Juliet, which attracted almost no media comment. So Karen Fishwick played Juliet, she’s from Glasgow and she’s a very brilliant and powerful young actress. In a way, as I went through the process of casting Mercutio and talking about gender, and the accusations that there is a kind of fashion for thinking of women in male roles and will it end? I started to say, for me, Juliet is the great revolutionary comment on gender. That’s Shakespeare – not me. That she’s a person of such, such clarity and such agency when it is theoretically taken from her and she comes back at least twice in the play, to ‘what can I do?’ And if that means throwing myself off the nearest building, then that is what I’ll do. I find it very interesting that when you make one choice to shift a particular lead to be played by people you weren’t expecting, what it did for me – and if you’re smart about that work, you can do it for an audience – is make you see everything in a different light.

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And then the intersection with race got really interesting because I quite often felt commentators chose to talk about gender, sometimes in a very ignorant way. For example, talking about gender fluidity in the production – in which there was none. Rather than talk about what they might find harder to say, which is the choices I made about some of the casting in terms of the colour of their skin. Bally Gill played Romeo, and indeed won the Ian Charleson award, which meant a lot to Bally and I because we spent quite a lot of time with this kind of discomfort that no one would quite say what they meant when they talked about modernity. They’d talk about modernity and what it meant ‘streetwise’; there are terms that are looking to replace the truth. Bally didn’t look like the kind of Romeo that they had seen before. And yet the show was greeted with such recognition by young audiences that it almost felt like creating a generational divide in some houses on some nights. Because for them, those definitions of class and race are familiar, but they are also dissolving in a way that they are not for an older audience. DR: I teach at a university that is over 80 per cent Latinx and 50 per cent firstgeneration college students, so they come to the play as an audience of their own. And like you say, there’s a lot of opportunity there because there’s a lot less presupposition about what it’s ‘supposed’ to be. And then they read it quite differently and it’s actually expanded my reading quite a lot to read with them. For instance, we often study the Sonnets first and then we get into the plays as a way of how to read Shakespeare. But by the time we get to Romeo and Juliet, I can ask one basic question: ‘Who’s the best poet in the play?’ And it’s obviously Juliet, which for them means that she is the central character. It’s no longer Romeo and Juliet, it’s Juliet, Romeo and Other People. EW: Which is of course where Shakespeare lands: Juliet and her Romeo. I feel the same about seeing it through the eyes of young people. In my prologue, everywhere we went we had a group of young people from the schools that the RSC works with nationally. They were teenagers, fourteen to eighteen years old, full of glorious opinion and conviction and fresh eyes. And this young woman said to me, ‘You better do it right’. What does ‘doing it right’ mean? And essentially, she talked about not letting Juliet become this rather wet cypher for femininity, because she didn’t see that in the play. This conversation makes me want to talk about how in that play, and it’s true in a number of the plays, Shakespeare gives you a kind of window through which to do that mirror work. So, Romeo is like any young man. He’s feckless; he’s not thought through whether this is really love; he’s self-regarding; he’s funny – very likeable as a result – but he’s not in any sense heroic or ethically pure. We’re wondering why we should even care about him given his ability to switch from girl to girl, but what I think is so brilliant about that is, by Act IV, this Henry V character arrives – but wiser than Henry V in my view. He grows up in front of our eyes and he does it with all of the colour, complexity and ugliness of any of us as we grow up. I find banishment and this amazing portrayal of a young man attacking his father figure with total injustice and

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absolute tyranny – and we understand where he’s coming from completely. But once he wrestles in that way and said what he really thinks, he’s able to come to a new place of wisdom and maturity, and then he learns of Juliet’s death. The thing that I find so radical in the play is that this wealthy, privileged young man instantly sees the apothecary in a new light. That having reached a point in his life where he can see himself more clearly, he’s then talking to an audience about the injustice of capitalism, of how money works and how money affords no law to make the apothecary rich. It’s an extraordinary thought and comes immediately after this despair. What Shakespeare’s offered me in that circumstance is to put a young man on stage that we all recognize – all his flaws and quirks – to allow him to become heroically wise and thoughtful. And then, not heroic in his death, but fearful, in a way that is the most interesting gender politics in the play for me. While Juliet has the death of a Roman emperor, Romeo has the death of a Victorian woman, kind of the precious version of ‘I take my poison and I can’t bear the smell, and I’m afraid of what it will mean.’ Shakespeare does this in a number of the plays, like with Claudio in Measure for Measure. There’s this sense that to be afraid is an emotionally radical thing to say. Not actually feeling like a hero or macho in that moment. Just feeling vulnerable.

ARTHUR L. LITTLE, JR

Arthur L. Little, Jr is an associate professor in the English department at the University  of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on Shakespeare and critical race studies and critical white studies. His additional research interests include queer studies and gender studies. He is the author of Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice and the forthcoming Shakespeare and Race Theory (forthcoming, Arden Shakespeare). He is also the editor  of the soon-to-be-published essay collection White People in Shakespeare. Beyond these and other publications, Little is also part of numerous initiatives focused on issues of diversity, equity and social justice and has dedicated his career to holding academic and professional institutions accountable, while also helping them map paths forward. In this interview, Arthur L. Little, Jr discusses social hierarchies in terms of race and the body and how these things contribute to a greater sense of social justice.

*** David Ruiter (DR): There’s this sense of Shakespeare as a hero – like a giant figure –but then there’s also the idea of Shakespeare being ‘the norm’. In other words, Shakespeare is an achievement and it’s also the way things are. How did it get this way? Arthur L. Little, Jr (AL): This strikes me, that when we’re talking about the black heterosexual body, in Shakespeare and in general, that body is showing its restraint or showing the ways in which it’s being pulled into that normative narrative by being the straight Black male body. Whereas for the white male body, that’s where it is. That it’s the ‘normal’, if you will, location. That’s not the same for the Black male body that is, for example, in our culture, read either as unsexed or oversexed. So in that context, since we’re talking about Shakespeare and social justice, I think of the Prince of Morocco and the ways in which he tries to put himself into a narrative that would allow Portia, with whom he could have an intimate relationship, because he keeps messing it up. And then he starts talking about the ‘best regarded virgins’. And it starts to push more toward this predacious rhetoric, so he overplays his hand. And what’s funny, presumably, about him, is his attempt to mimic the white hero and he gets it wrong. DR: I love how you put that together right now, because on one hand there’s this idea he has of whiteness and also of Portia’s perspective on the white/male/heterosexual being, that it’s what she’s looking for. So he’s magnetically attracted towards fulfilling a certain sexual expectation he assumes on her part, which the text clears out shortly after. But while doing that, trying to show his neighbourliness to that idea, he actually shows the distance.

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AL: Of course! And how he’s supposed to lose in the end, because the cards are stacked against him. All of this is structured around heterosexual desire around the white Portia that’s the centre of the story. And even in his narrative he talks about those Black women, presumably from his own culture in order to pursue her. And so you think, well, why have you travelled all the way here to try to lay claim to her when it seems as though you had all these beautiful, desirable women back at home? Those become ways that the text can feed certain kinds of racial narratives that can become productive for us if we talk about them, but become toxic if we don’t. Because then what we’re doing is positing that normative, white heterosexual desire as our norm as well. DR: In thinking about what you’re saying, by just passing it over as ‘well that’s just the text’, or ‘that’s what it says’, that we have somehow normalized what has occurred there. If we don’t put our hands on that moment, then in some respects we feed this idea that we heard a few years ago during the Obama administration [when] the opposition said, ‘We’ve already dealt with race in this country.’ But then we get this comment that Beyoncé made recently ‘that racism is so American, that when we protest racism, some assume we’re protesting America’. In other words, there is ubiquity – while there’s a ubiquity in Shakespeare that you were talking about before – racism is actually ubiquitous in our society and much closer to our daily living than Shakespeare is. AL: Right and I would also say, in The Merchant of Venice and the Prince of Morocco, that what you see in Shakespeare, in the text, there’s enough of a push and pull around these issues that they can actually become very productive sites for these discussions on race. Our position is far more sedimented than it is in the Shakespearean text and so whiteness is a far more fixed entity now than it is in Shakespeare’s texts, and it’s certainly there. But it is also visible in a way that it is not in our cultural moment. Because now it is just a given. DR: Yes, just like Beyoncé saying that racism has become synonymous with America, and America with whiteness. AL: We’re seeing white bodies – white people – put together in a way that didn’t necessarily need to lead to where it did, which is to this formalized creation of white people. In terms of social justice, and thinking about the ways categories accrue meaning from whiteness, we’re not interrogating that space in the way we’re talking about here. If we’re not looking at race and these other constructions and the ways they’re playing out in this very important cultural moment, not just for theatre, but the body itself, and the whole theatricalization of the body … if we’re not honestly evaluating or thinking about that then we can’t begin to get to social justice because we’re protecting … DR: … we’re protecting an injustice.

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AL: Right. How do we talk about Shakespeare protecting a white, able-bodied heterosexual class – feel good, beautiful, Shakespeare? At that point it reminds me of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, what happened is this sense of: how do we extend education or certain privileges to Blacks but not give up white supremacy? So it becomes how do you allow these brown and Black people to have access to civic engagement, but they don’t actually become part of the civic process? DR: And not even access, but true agency, because that seems to be the ultimate goal of any social justice campaign … the gaining of agency for those who have been excluded. Not just access, and part of it is. But always the power was, and remains, in the hands of white men. How could Shakespeare be a tool of social justice, if he is being turned into a sort of locus of whiteness? And then all the other things we mentioned, because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be both maintaining a power structure as it is and extending agency to others. AL: Right, because you can’t extend it, you get it out of the way. I remember saying to my students that I of course would love for them to take their souls to the polls and vote to squish Proposition 81, but I also need them to not go wearing proud badges of ‘oh look at how good I am: I voted against this horrendous thing!’ I also told them I would love for them to find the moment very chilling because you should intuit it’s actually not your place or anyone’s place to vote for or against my or anyone else’s civil rights. But you should go to the polls as an act of expediency and will hopefully vote not to strip your professor of certain civil rights and certain forms of agency. I hope you go with the knowledge that you’re performing an important theatrical part but it’s really not your existential place to grant me rights or take them away. Your even being asked is how the maintaining of power structures really works.

… DR: I guess all the iconography around Shakespeare becomes a form of control, even if you want to imagine it as a benevolent sort of control. Shakespeare ultimately becomes a venue. You have to be able to take it down to that level, and say Shakespeare itself becomes a stage. And on that stage you can act what you feel must be acted. What do you think about that? AL: What we’re talking about inside the Shakespeare text, there are all these moments where social justice seems to be – we can almost go play by play – critiqued. Not necessarily because Shakespeare is on some social justice mission, but because of the way Shakespeare is trying to look at the very meticulous ways that cultural social spaces are put together. DR: I often thought of those who had thought of preserving this sort of imagined iconography around Shakespeare as sort of like collectors of antiques. It’s not that this was just there, sitting there – this beautiful thing – and all we’ve done is make sure we kept the dust off. What you’re saying is, ‘no, we’re constructing one way or the other’,

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which on one hand is the better argument, because in other words, any Shakespeare that we have today is a constructed Shakespeare. Now the burden is upon us – all of us and many more beyond us – to say ‘well, what can you make of it?’ AL: And Shakespeare works a couple of different ways. We can look at the plays themselves, about how social justice operates in those plays. We can think about the way social justice operates in the treatment of Shakespeare, or how Shakespeare can be used in contemporary issues of social justice. And then we can also think about the history of Shakespeare and how it has worked with or against the history of social justice.

NOTE 1. Proposition 8 eliminated the right to same-sex marriage in California and in 2013, the US Supreme Court declined to rule on the measure’s constitutionality.

EWAN FERNIE

Ewan Fernie is Professor at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. He is Director of the lottery-funded Everything to Everybody project, which aims to give the world’s first Shakespeare Library back to the citizens of Birmingham. His earlier Redcrosse project invented a new civic liturgy for St George’s Day, which premiered in Windsor Castle and Manchester Cathedral, was adopted by the Royal Shakespeare Company and sparked a British National Party protest. Fernie hosted the ‘Radical Mischief’ conference inviting experiment in thought, theatre and politics with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Deputy Director, Erica Whyman. He is General Editor (with Simon Palfrey) of the influential Shakespeare Now! series. His latest books are Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter and (co-edited with Paul Edmondson) New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity. In this interview, Ewan Fernie discusses the role of cities within the wider context of Shakespeare and social structures.

*** David Ruiter (DR): You’ve been involved with two really significant projects that involve Shakespeare or early modern writing and cities, in a city context. Can you talk about this in terms of social justice values or outcomes that you might have seen as a result of that work? Ewan Fernie (EF): What’s immediately stimulating to me is your question about cities. Why cities? – it’s a good thing to think about. One thing that comes to mind is this: I’m aware of the fact that in this country, in England, in the 1850s – I think it was 1851– there was a big change in that suddenly most people lived in cities, rather than on the land. It was the first time in any nation that was the case. As I recall, we’re approaching that very tipping point now on a global scale. We’re at the point, or shortly will be, where most people in the world live in cities. That raises questions about what a city is and what a city could be. My work has been energized by a sense that something begins in Shakespeare or early modern literature, which then has a life extending through modernity, and perhaps beyond. And if that’s the case, then the question is: what does that early modern moment of ignition have to do with modernity’s most salient social form, which is the city – the industrial and post-industrial city? We hear a lot about Shakespeare’s plenitude and pluralism. And the university also is meant to contain the universe! But in our time, universities have become increasingly specialized places. In my academic lifetime, the discipline of English Studies has become more and more specialized. Of course, that has a very positive side to it. But it also involves loss, the loss of exposure to difference, and the loss of the sense of the possibility of wholeness or community both within the discipline,

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and between disciplines. The university doesn’t readily model a pluralistic wholeness as a result. I think part of what I’ve been trying to do is to use early modern literature as a spur to reimagine some kind of pluralistic wholeness in thought and in society or politics. I led a project which took Spenser’s effort to ‘fashion a gentleman’ (or self), a nation and a religion as a stimulus to do something similar now, in our own thoroughly different conditions. I’m now leading a project which will try to reanimate the Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial Library and its pioneering ethos of cultural democracy. Both these projects attempt to engender and enact an imaginative understanding of society as such, with the help of some of the great makers of our culture. Shakespeare and the idea of the university both involve a sense of extraordinary explosion into the whole array of difference and possibility. And that raises the question: is it possible to integrate all this? Is it possible for people to achieve a sense of pluralistic wholeness that is also really resonant with the real challenges of community-making and of city-making? Is it possible to maximize diversity and at the same time make a shareable social world? I’m interested in the differences, dialogue and interplay involved in contemporary community-building – and I think Shakespeare really can be a stimulus to social action and civic creativity. Perhaps the university can be too. DR: You’re talking about the pluralism that’s found in Shakespeare. Are you suggesting that pluralism comes to a sort of new life in the modern city? EF: I’ve come to feel that a big part of Shakespeare comes to life posthumously. In the nineteenth century Shakespeare becomes associated with freedom movements, as I have written about in Shakespeare for Freedom. He becomes a stimulus to individual humanism but also, and crucially, to an effort to create a comprehensive society of flourishing individuals. He helps answer the question of how we might create a social artifice that promotes fullness of expression for everyone. That is a fundamental political question; its romanticism becomes an imperative to a new kind of social organization. I think the love of Shakespeare combines with the liberal revolutions of the European nineteenth century and the emerging social life of a young America as a passion for liberal pluralism, which has now sadly faded. I also think that the difficulties and tensions of Shakespeare’s plays, and the fact that they exist in tension with one another, models some of the complexities of that liberal vision. In the nineteenth century, they realized that if cities were going to be more than an agglomeration of individuals seeking work, we needed to make a kind of artistic effort in order to imagine new political forms. Shelley says, in effect, ‘It’s not that we don’t know what’s right, it’s that we’ve lost the poetry of life.’ I think we saw that in Brexit, and in the Hillary Clinton campaign: the arguments on what many of us felt were the right – and I mean morally right – side of the question were too exclusively prudential, prosaic and conservative. I think we need to recover

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something like the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for a new and better life that the art of Shakespeare and others once disclosed to people. DR: Maurice Hunt once said to me that he was able to recognize lines from Shakespeare that someone would say out loud because Shakespeare voiced each individual character differently in each of his plays. I think that’s hard to know in its totality, but yesterday Erica Whyman said something similar, that as a director/ producer, she recognizes that each of the characters has their own voice. And what she is looking for is people who can creatively occupy the space of the voice. In other words, she’s thinking about Shakespeare as a sort of contained space, much like a city. The people within the play are to a certain extent contained by those lines, too. The actors who play the roles are contained by their own bodies and experiences. And yet, when those three things come together, within that contained space, when the role and the actor meet, she talked about there being space to creatively design and to shape what you called ‘personhood’. EF: I think that’s right. But I think acknowledging exclusion and difficulty and loss is really important. There are people, in life and in Shakespeare, who aren’t given the chance to achieve fine things. And you’re right about the script, there is never pure freedom, there’s the kind of possibility of transfiguring freedom in spite of the script. I think that suggests the precariousness of our political achievements. But we have to try – for the health of the city and all the individuals who live in it. Seeing Shakespearean performance, and even Shakespearean criticism, as an epitome of the struggle might be worthwhile.

FARAH KARIM-COOPER Farah Karim-Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London and Head of Higher Education and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe. She specializes in Shakespeare and race, feminist approaches to Shakespeare, the history of theatre and early modern performance. Her research is vital to providing an academic perspective on theatre performance and informs contemporary interpretations. She has edited numerous book collections, is editor of the Routledge Anthology edition of The Duchess of Malfi and is the author of Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment and the forthcoming Shakespeare, Race and Mortality. She was the Director of the Globe’s Shakespeare and Race Festival in 2018, is the only UK scholar to sit on the RaceB4Race Executive Board and is in the process of founding the Shakespeare and Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network in the UK. She is also incoming Vice-President of the Shakespeare Association of America. In this interview, Farah Karim-Cooper explores the process of breaking down hierarchies in theatre and education. Shakespeare, she argues, was not so much concerned with punctuation placement, but in working in theatre as a person who wanted to change things – to shake up existing structures. Karim-Cooper believes this understanding is paramount to scholars and audiences and she strives for greater diversity in Shakespeare both on stage and in education.

*** David Ruiter (DR): Why don’t we start with the big picture about Shakespeare, race, globalism and your thoughts on that in relationship to social justice. Farah Karim-Cooper (FKC): That’s a really big question! I can approach it from the perspective of a teacher at university level in the UK and as someone who works in a theatre named after Shakespeare, so a Shakespeare institution. Thinking about it from those perspectives, in the last few years we’ve been living in a situation in the US and UK – in which different minority groups feel targeted. There has been license given to hate, and the definitions of social justice are shifting, depending on what side you sit on. Things that were considered acceptable are no longer acceptable; things that weren’t acceptable are now acceptable. And so we’re seeing something shift. And what I’ve noticed in my students over the last three years – I teach students from the US and the UK, as sometimes we have international students for our higher education programmes at the Globe – is that anxiety levels are higher than I’ve seen before, and I’ve been teaching since 2000. The word ‘trauma’ comes up a lot when describing experiences related to the work that we’re doing, and there’s increasing intolerance for the ‘old’ way of doing and teaching Shakespeare. So what I mean is, if I can shift into Shakespeare a moment, there’s an anxiety about the curriculum – that it needs to be decolonized. This is happening in the US and in the UK, there have been open letters to different university boards, asking

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them, demanding from the student body a more diverse curriculum, diversity amongst faculty, more access to admissions so that the student body can become more diverse, and also calling out institutions for tokenism. Universities might admit a number of students of colour, but they don’t have many mechanisms to support them. This reinforces what we’re seeing now at the Globe, compared to when I started in 2004 and was teaching a group of students from the US who were kind of upset that I was teaching them, rather than some white male, who was much older with a sense of authority. And now, students are pissed off I’m the only faculty member of colour. And so the demands and the shifts are really palpable. DR: That’s really interesting because we started out with the idea of what is happening in the world, what does that do for justice? And now we’re here, at the Globe where you work, and I agree that the anxiety level is higher. There is more anxiety about identity early in students; the journey seems to be starting earlier for identity. And this may be great, but it could also be really, really difficult. You used the word ‘trauma’, but from what you just said, it’s sounding like they’re using their anxieties to leverage social justice causes – in a world that they find more diverse, but that also creates more space for those identity journeys. FKC: There’s representation! And that’s really important to our students; they want to see not only on the curriculum how their experiences might be accounted for in literature, art and the past, but also they want to see people teaching those courses who might understand what those experiences might be so we can speak to them. And it’s not that if you’re a white teacher you won’t be able to account for that: you need to be able to point to places where that is accounted for. So, for example, in this country, there has been massive outreach in the drama school sector and many students of colour are admitted into drama schools, but the faculty is very white. So the students go in and are told ‘do Chekhov’, ‘do Juliet’, but they might think ‘I can’t identify with that; how is their experience like mine?’ – this matters because in some training techniques, the aim is trying to get the student to liken their experience to the character. And so there’s this alienating effect that classical literature, that classical texts like Shakespeare, can have on students from a range of backgrounds – working-class, Black, minority ethnic groups – here. Many have had that encounter and that’s why there is such demand. I think it is optimistic, but it is also making a lot of people in those institutions of power afraid, entrenched. Serious changes are not being made; what I have tried to do at the Globe and what our artistic director is doing, is say, ‘Actually, Shakespeare’s going to become this big, I suppose, icon of white excellence – and he is! The Globe theatre building is a shrine – a monument – to white excellence; if we don’t swerve Shakespeare is likely to become this archaic, purist space – at least Shakespeare’s Globe will – because we are known for “authenticity and Tudor England and all-male productions.”’ That is shifting, but in shows, work and casting, diversity gets a lot of resistance from various stakeholders, even from audiences. You have to push because social justice is really important. We need to speak to wider audiences: London is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and we are striving to represent that.

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DR: Sometimes we talk about the Shakespeare ‘industry’. If that industry is going to grow, maybe if that industry is going to survive, then it is going to require a different openness and a different ability to mean more things for more people. FKC: What you have to do first is get rid of the word ‘inclusive’ because it still means that somebody owns it, and, second, you have to start teaching history as it actually was […]. We know that Shakespeare may have encountered people of colour. That knowledge in itself is powerful, and from a perspective of Shakespeare and race, it is a society that has had diversity in it; it has just been deeply unacknowledged and deliberately left out of lessons of history classes since day one. DR: Sometimes when I work on educational frameworks, we talk about the idea that people have assets and that people need access to opportunities, education, empowerment, which grows into agency and ultimately leadership. We’re getting to the point in Shakespeare and society where we’re talking about people having assets and also access. There are other layers, but the empowerment, the agency and then the turning over of leadership as a new generation comes up, it sounds like there’s still this effort to hold on or hold back. FKC: You can hire faculty of colour, or faculty from diverse backgrounds, your chairperson can be a person of colour, but you don’t have a pipeline strategy. If you don’t have a pipeline strategy you’re tokenistic, you’re checking boxes and getting the world off your back so you can hold onto those structures of power because the same people are going to rise up every time. And in ten years, those same people who rose up may not even want to be tokenistic. DR: We deal with the same thing with hiring in higher education, in general. The pools are improving, but look at the retention numbers. How many are being retained through promotion, through tenure, to the upper ranks? That’s a different figure, so people feel good, like they’re providing a certain level of access. But it’s only a certain level. FKC: What I found really fascinating when we ran our Shakespeare and Race Festival is that I had to bring scholars of colour from the US because there were virtually none here in Shakespeare studies. So we have scholars from Asian backgrounds; I’m from Pakistan originally and my father is English and I grew up in Texas. I didn’t grow up in the UK, but I have a British passport. We have a few colleagues with similar backgrounds or from a different part of Asia, but there are no AfroCaribbean scholars in Shakespeare studies employed by universities in the entire UK. And there’s one or two women of colour professors in the field, from what I understand. DR: So let’s think just for a second, since we are here [the Globe] and this is part of your career, too. A few years ago there was the Globe to Globe festival, which also made an impact locally. When I was here, seeing the Mexican population of London come out to see the performance of Henry IV was amazing. Historically speaking,

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Shakespeare was for the people who worked in London. Shakespeare’s Globe seemed to be for the people who lived and worked in London, primarily, and it became more exclusive along the way. But when you did that festival, it felt like an effort to bring it back to the diversity of the city, to a much more comprehensive view of the city. Does the Globe, or theatre in general, have the opportunity to create a different level of hospitality? Of welcome? FKC: Totally. It is about representation, but also what you struggle with in the Shakespeare sphere is that Shakespeare has been Bard-ified and was defined as this elite, difficult, thing. So people have their ideas about what Shakespeare is, and all of that gets in the way. This past summer, we had a woman of colour, a black woman, play Henry V. Powerful, extraordinary. ‘You know’, she said ‘it was really tough to own the space initially’; but she did. And how audiences responded to that really varied. They don’t want to see a black Henry V; they don’t want to see a woman Henry V – Shakespeare didn’t write it that way. How can we muck about with Shakespeare? So much of it is about understanding that the Folio is not Shakespeare’s final word, and I think that the Globe has the opportunity to educate through the Education and Research Department about a different Shakespeare, a man working in theatre –all of which can continue to be debated as productions are cast non-traditionally.

PART TWO

The practice of Shakespeare and social justice

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CHAPTER 2.1

Active Shakespeare: A social justice framework AYANNA THOMPSON AND LAURA TURCHI

Placing Shakespeare within a social justice framework is necessary in the twenty-first century to keep Shakespeare alive. The ideologies behind yoking Shakespeare and social justice together aim to interrogate Shakespeare’s cultural capital by promoting discussions about identity, culture and power. And yet, current university classroom practices do not fully reflect these ideologies especially and ironically when active and embodied approaches are employed. The idea that Shakespeare should be experienced in a kinesthetic manner is potentially powerful, but the dominance of colour-blind and culture-neutral practices undermines the efficacy of that power. Many of us know that it is problematic to ‘assume progress in race relations, view racism as mostly a thing of the past, and argue for a colour-blind ideology that ignores the impact of racial status in contemporary life’, but this knowledge has not sufficiently impacted our active approaches to the teaching of Shakespeare (Bell 2007a: 119). We structure this chapter in three sections in order to explore how to teach Shakespeare within a pedagogy of social justice: 1) we examine the current research about millennials and their beliefs about difference and bias; 2) we examine the current practices of active approaches to teaching Shakespeare that engage students as actors who interpret texts, and we challenge their assumptions about Shakespeare’s universality; and 3) we theorize a social justice approach to teaching Shakespeare that places the students’ diverse bodies at the centre of the curriculum. Nonetheless, this chapter is not providing that curriculum (i.e. we do not have space to include lesson plans here), because it is necessary to lay the theoretical foundation for a social justice approach for the teaching of Shakespeare.1 Our chapter strays far afield from Shakespeare at first, engaging recent social science research and critical race studies. We argue, however, that this foundation is necessary to inform and expand our approaches to teaching Shakespeare.

MILLENNIAL MATTERS Who are the students in our college classrooms (note: we are writing this chapter in 2014)? While there has been a lot of media coverage of millennials (those born

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between the years 1985 and 2000), there has also been a lot of research conducted about them (for marketing, political and social reasons). In this chapter, we begin with work done on millennials’ perceptions of race and equality, moving from popular culture research to the work done by Beverly Tatum, Claude Steele, Michael Omi and Howard Winant. This research reveals that our current college students are confused about racism and bias and eager to have open and respectful discussions about them. Yet, current embodied approaches to Shakespeare often segregate his works from intentional discussions about difference (race, gender, ability and/or sexuality) and bias. A recent study conducted by David Binder Research (DBR) in partnership with MTV looked specifically at the ways millennials feel and talk about race and bias. Although it may be tempting to dismiss this research as fluff or a mere marketing tool, the methodology was sound. The questions asked respondents to describe their attitudes toward diversity, difference and bias; and, more importantly, the questions did not ask them to attribute causation. The number of respondents (thousands of young adults were surveyed and recorded in in-person and online focus groups) allowed the researchers to reveal current tendencies and trends in that demographic group’s perceptions of equity.2 The research found that millennials see themselves as racially sensitive and committed to equality (‘84% say their family taught them that everyone should be treated the same, no matter what their race’) (David Binder Research 2014: 1). For instance, ‘81% believe embracing diversity and celebrating differences between the races would improve society’ (ibid.: 2). And yet the majority of millennials believe that the best way to achieve racial equality is through colour-blindness, with ‘73% believ[ing] never considering race would improve society’ (ibid.: 1). It seems clear that millennials have internalized the notion that noticing differences and initiating conversations about them is tantamount to being racist and/or biased. Even while the DBR-MTV research found that millennials celebrate diversity, it also discovered that colour-blindness is their aspirational goal, with ‘68% believ[ing that] focusing on race prevents society from becoming colourblind’ (ibid.). The vast majority of millennials also indicated that they have not had conversations about race with their families (‘Only 37% of our respondents were brought up in families that talked about race [30% White and 46% POC]’) (ibid.). We know that secondary school conversations about race tend to be relegated to and segregated within Black History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month; so students are not having sustained critical discussions about race in their secondary schools. And now the millennials are young adults and in our college classes, and they have ‘a real hunger to talk more’ about race and bias with 69 per cent indicating they long for these conversations (ibid.: 3). As Stephen Friedman, the President of MTV, observed about the findings: What [we’ve] found is that these issues are a little bit of a third rail and there’s not a place for people to have the dialogue … Our audience feels really strongly about fairness and equality, yet they don’t even really have the language to talk about it or the forum. (quoted in Badejo 2014)

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This research describes a generation interested in, but conflicted about, social justice. Now, we turn to scholars to help us work through the causations and consequences of the fantasy of a colour-blind and culture-neutral society. The developmental psychologist Beverly Tatum has researched the ways that race and bias are addressed at home and in schools. First, we examine her arguments about silence with regards to race and difference. Then, we look to her arguments about knee-jerk espousals of colour-blindness. And finally, we examine Tatum’s estimation of the developmental, psychological and societal consequences that are the result of living in silence and colour-blindness. Tatum argues that ‘[s]tereotypes, omissions, and distortions all contribute to the development of prejudice’ (Tatum 1997: 5). Thus, it is not only harmful to grow up in a community that explicitly espouses racist beliefs; but it is also harmful to grow up in a community that simply refuses to discuss race openly. The consequences of growing up in that latter community are an implicit belief that race is a taboo topic and an inability to imagine experiences in which race matters productively. As Tatum argues: Sometimes the assumptions we make about others come not from what we have been told or what we have seen on television or in books, but rather from what we have not been told. The distortion of historical information about people of color leads young people (and older people, too) to make assumptions that may go unchallenged for a long time. (Tatum 1997: 4–5) According to Tatum’s research in developmental psychology, silence is never neutral with regards to difference. If race is treated as a taboo subject, that silence implicitly communicates values, assumptions and hierarchies for race and social identity. Tatum also addresses the commonly espoused aspiration of colour-blindness. While the rhetoric of colour-blindness sounds as if it promotes equity (and certainly the millennials surveyed by DBR-MTV believe this), this evasion is another form of silence. Like Tatum, Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that it should not be surprising that colour-blindness has been wholeheartedly embraced by the neoconservatives because it enables ‘a vision of the contemporary US as an egalitarian society, one which is trying to live up to its original principles by slowly extending and applying them to the gnawing issue of race’ (Omi and Winant 1994: 1–2). As Thompson summarizes elsewhere, ‘the neoconservatives’ appropriation of the term “colour-blind” actually promotes a type of historical amnesia that eradicates the need to address and work through past injustices, inequalities, and difficulties’ (Thompson 2011: 27). In an effort to challenge the social value of colour-blindness, Tatum identifies the paralysis that stems from a fear of talking about race: fear of exposing ignorance, of being offensive and of inciting anger. The research conducted by DBR-MTV revealed that millennials are fearful. Friedman says, ‘[They] feel like [they’re] going to step on a land mine if [they] say the wrong thing’ (quoted in Badejo 2014). Tatum acknowledges the difficulty of getting beyond these fears, but eloquently describes the cost of silence:

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Unchallenged personal, cultural, and institutional racism results in the loss of human potential, lowered productivity, and a rising tide of fear and violence in our society. Individually, racism stifles our own growth and development. It clouds our vision and distorts our perceptions. It alienates us not only from others but also from ourselves and our own experiences. (Tatum 1997: 200) In other words, the cost of silence and colour-blindness are experienced by all; not just by people of colour. The social psychologist Claude Steele created experiments to examine the consequences of the ways our society communicates its values, assumptions and hierarchies for race and social identity. His work reveals the ways that young adults are subtly and nefariously impacted by these values, assumptions and hierarchies. With regards to colour-blindness, Steele created brochures for fake businesses and asked black respondents to look at the visual and textual cues about inclusiveness to determine if they would feel comfortable working there. The brochures pictured very few people of colour. But one brochure was for a company that espoused a colour-blind policy for hiring and the other espoused a policy that valued diversity. Steele found: the colour-blind policy – perhaps America’s dominant approach to these matters – didn’t work. It engendered less trust and belonging. It was as if blacks couldn’t take colour-blindness at face value when the number of minorities in the company was small. But importantly, and just as interestingly, blacks did not mistrust the company when it espoused a valuing-diversity policy. With that policy in place, they trusted the company and believed they could belong in it, even when it had few minorities. (Steele 2010: 146–7) While millennials espouse the value of colour-blindness, this rhetoric is not trusted by people of colour. As evidenced by Steele’s research, this rhetoric, in fact, sets off alarm bells of distrust for people of colour. Visual and rhetorical cues are only one dimension to Steele’s research on stereotype threats. Steele defines a stereotype threat as the threat felt in particular situations in which stereotypes relevant to one’s group identity exist. Through multiple controlled and replicated experiments, Steele has proven that a cued awareness of a stereotype negatively impacts one’s performance. Thus, in a controlled setting when students are cued to think of themselves as being in a disadvantaged group, they perform significantly worse on assessments. His experimental design accounts for other individual factors, including ability and effort (Steele 1997). In order to understand how stereotype threat affects performance, Steele tested sophomores at Stanford who had matching profiles for college-entrance requirements (including SAT scores) on the English subject test from the GRE – a stretch test for any college sophomore. Steele found that he could predict performance based on how he cued the subjects to be reminded of their racial identity as they took the exam. When subjects had to check a box for racial identification, black subjects performed significantly worse than white subjects. When no cue was present (e.g. when no

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racial box existed), black subjects performed the same as white subjects: there was no discernible difference between their scores. The power of the stereotype threat has been shown to affect women on maths and science assessments; lower-class French students on literacy exams; older workers on mental capacity assessments; white people on tests of natural athletic ability; and many others. Because Steele’s research has been replicated globally outside his laboratory, stereotype threat is now recognized as a powerful predictor of performance. It is clear from the DBR-MTV survey that millennials have bought into the fantasy that a post-racial society will cure all social ills. A total of ‘91% of respondents believe in equality and believe everyone should be treated equally’ (David Binder Research 2014: 1). And yet, only ‘20% are comfortable having a conversation about bias’ (ibid.: 3). It is clear that there is a real disconnect for millennials in the personal rhetoric that they espouse and the actions they can perform. The survey also reveals there are disconnects in the conversations they can initiate and have; the imaginative leaps they can make; and even the personal and professional relationships they can foster. Thus, studying Shakespeare can inadvertently contribute to the fantasy that a postracial society will cure all social ills. When a professor holds up the Shakespeare text as an exemplar of poetry that will survey everything (time, place, political structures, etc.), she may provoke a stereotype threat for some of her students. Shakespeare’s texts after all are riddled with invectives, jokes and innuendos about women, Jews, blacks, Turks, Muslims, gays, the disabled and others. Unthoughtful claims about Shakespeare’s universality often whitewash those invectives, jokes and innuendos and can therefore trigger stereotype threats if these specific lines and glosses are not addressed openly and critically. The Shakespeare text may be nasty, but the threat is not in the text; rather, the threat resides in the way that the nastiness of the text is subsumed under the cloak of universality. Nevertheless, students can see through the cloak and they need to be given the tools to address what they see. If they are not given these tools, then race (and other markers of difference) will remain a taboo topic that will provoke stereotype threats. So how does this impact the active teaching of Shakespeare, and how should the teaching of Shakespeare be altered in light of this research?

THE CURRENT STATE OF ACTIVE APPROACHES The current theories, methodologies and practices of active-/performance-based pedagogy espouse that Shakespeare is for everyone, that diversity brings value to the classroom and that Shakespeare provides a good vehicle to erase inequalities in access to complex texts. Most of the current performance-based pedagogy stems from education departments in theatre companies and their target audiences are K-12 teachers (‘K-12’ in the US school system are the kindergarten to 12th grades, which encompasses five- to eighteen-year-old students). Very little performancebased pedagogical work has been aimed at college and university teachers.3 The current theories of active approaches do not offer any specifics about how to address the teaching of Shakespeare and race, gender, ability and/or sexuality in practical

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terms. The result is not only an evasion of open discussions, but also the trigger for stereotype threats. In this section we examine the current state of active approaches for the teaching of Shakespeare. Active or performance-based Shakespeare teaching focuses on finding meaning through close encounters with the text as a script for action. Students learn to make interpretative or performative choices and teachers facilitate their reflection upon those choices. As a result, the student knows the character in new and interesting textbased ways. Dialogues and scenes as enacted can illuminate complex language, with meaning expressed through inflection, gestures and movement. Rather than speed through a play to understand what happens, active approaches mirror rehearsal-room techniques, trying scenes again and again and exploring the opportunities for meaning that arise with each hearing, as summarized by David Bevington and Gavin Witt: Repeating the scene with different combinations of actors in the roles enabled us all to hear what different approaches could be taken. It also enabled and required readers to explain how certain choices resulted from the actual speaking of the words. (Bevington and Witt 1999: 178) There are subtle and important distinctions between, and permeations of, active approaches (performance-based, rehearsal-room based, embodied, kinesthetic and more). Nonetheless, they all have their roots in the blending of theatre and literary studies. While we value these differences, for the purpose of this chapter we unite them under the umbrella rubric ‘active approaches’. In the UK, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stand Up for Shakespeare manifesto promotes three core principles (Do It on Your Feet; See it Live; and Start it Earlier) and the first principle is deeply invested in advocating the benefits of embodied or kinesthetic learning: These active, theatre-based approaches acknowledge the importance of kinaesthetic learning – learning through doing and feeling. By engaging directly and physically with the words and rhythms of the text, complex thoughts and language start to make sense to young people and invite instinctive and personal responses. Active techniques ensure that experiences of Shakespeare are inherently inclusive since they embrace all age ranges and abilities. They also mean that Shakespeare is collectively owned as participants collaborate and build a shared understanding of the play – with the whole class becoming ‘co-owners’ and ‘doers’. (Royal Shakespeare Company n.d.: 3) Kinesthetic learning, according to the RSC, enables the students to learn and own Shakespeare in more personal ways. Espousing a belief that the rehearsal room provides the ideal model for the classroom, the RSC states: ‘We believe the best Shakespeare classrooms are like the best rehearsal rooms where active, collaborative explorations of Shakespeare’s plays enable young people to make powerful discoveries about themselves, each other and the world they live in’ (The Royal Shakespeare Company and The University of Warwick, 2012).

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Although active approaches are not all exactly the same in theory or in practice, they all render the students’ bodies as neutral, as vehicles that can universally explore Shakespeare’s language, characters and plots. For instance, Jonothan Neelands argues that performance is powerful precisely because it enables students to ‘imagine themselves differently, to re-frame or to re-create themselves as “others’’. … Through role-taking young people develop their empathetic imagination and are invited to imagine themselves in new ways’ (Neelands 2001: 2). The principles that underpin Neelands’s approach are clearly built on the valuation of plurality and Neelands idealistically argues that ‘the ensemble in the classroom might become a model of how to live in the world; a model of “being with”’, a phrase he appropriates from Paulo Freire (Neelands 2009: 175). In the United States, the Folger Shakespeare Library has taken the lead in providing free online resources for educators who teach Shakespeare. Two key components of the Folger’s educational mission are that Shakespeare is universal and that performance-based pedagogy helps to reveal Shakespeare’s universality. For instance, in their curriculum guide for Romeo and Juliet, Robert Young, the former Director of Education, writes, ‘At the Folger, we love to see students take Shakespeare and make it their own. We believe that Shakespeare is for everyone’ (Young 2012: 9). Likewise, Fiona Banks describes the Globe Education work with active Shakespeare as ‘a tool for student learning about humanity and the wider world’ (Banks 2014: 206). What does it mean to focus on the universal when the racial, gendered, ability and/or sexual-orientation differences among the students are left unaddressed? The scholarship that addresses active approaches limits its engagement with issues of diversity in the classroom. For example, Neelands provides an anecdote in which the study of King Lear provides a vehicle for healed Hindu–Muslim relations: Now in 2008, in a class on King Lear I nearly miss a group of girls huddled together, Hindu and Muslim, purposefully poring over an image of Lear; touching, laughing. Looking closely at each other as they listen. These children model a future. They have struggled, out of necessity, to find a common culture in the classroom, in the playground, in the local streets. And in this school, drama has, for many years, been part of this struggling toward a common culture which might transcend the historical mistrust and fear of the other which still haunts their homelands in the Indian sub-continent. (Neelands 2009: 175) The goal, the potential to increase tolerance for and understanding of cultural differences, is lofty and praise-worthy. Nonetheless, it is completely unclear how the active approaches facilitate any dialogues about being other and/or being with. In this anecdote, the Hindu and Muslim girls cooperate, but how would the process differ if they did not? Neelands does not explain how the encounter with Lear has made it necessary for these students to ‘model a future’ or to ‘find a common culture’. He does not provide any specific guidance about how conflicts involving cultural, racial, or sexual identity impact the practice of an active approach.

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While many proponents of active approaches to teaching Shakespeare are incredibly precise when it comes to myriad performance-based exercises (small group, large group, vocal, language, movement, etc.), when it comes to moments of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, etc. in the plays, they often leave matters rather vague; this, in spite of the fact that many proponents go to great lengths to teach in diverse settings. Not unlike the millennials surveyed, the proponents of active approaches espouse the value of diversity but also avoid actively addressing the diverse bodies in our classrooms. Is it any wonder, then, that our students are confused, conflicted and anxious about difference? Because millennials are eager to have open conversations about who they are and how they differ from each other, we have an opportunity to retheorize active approaches to Shakespeare within a social justice framework.

RETHEORIZING ACTIVE APPROACHES Because of our belief in social justice education, we support active approaches to teaching Shakespeare. Even at the most basic level, active approaches empower students with skills for literacy and collaborative learning. But within a social justice framework, active approaches to Shakespeare empower students to employ critical lenses to complex texts and diverse identities in dynamic communities. This potent combination of student diversity and the complexity of Shakespeare’s texts enables the building of student agency and capacity. What is a social justice framework for teaching Shakespeare? We support Lee Anne Bell’s definition of social justice education, which she defines as ‘both a process and a goal’: The goal of social justice education is to enable people to develop the critical analytical tools necessary to understand oppression and their own socialization within oppressive systems, and to develop a sense of agency and a capacity to interrupt and change oppressive patterns and behaviours in themselves and in the institutions and communities of which they are a part. (Bell 2007b: 2) Our ideal classroom, then, would become a space in which social justice is not only praised but also practiced. The current active approaches to Shakespeare implicitly treat bodies as racially neutral. Again, the education programmes at places like the Folger, RSC and the Globe explicitly value diversity, but their practices effectively whitewash differences. Everyone who writes about active approaches to Shakespeare includes something about the necessity of safety in the classroom. The risks we describe are about our students’ amateur status: embarrassment about fluency (‘am I pronouncing the words correctly?’), discomfort with physicality and reluctance to publically emote. To overcome these risks, proponents of active approaches create ice-breaking and communal-building activities. Within a social justice framework, however, an active approach to Shakespeare needs to frame risk differently, engaging with the specifics of the bodies in the

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room: differently raced, gendered and abled. As Beverly Tatum states, ‘Students look to their teachers for guidance and help for living in an increasingly diverse and complex society, and educators are becoming more aware of the need to prepare their student to live in a multiracial society’ (Tatum 2007: 71). As the earlier section on the millennial generation shows, our students are not used to talking about race and difference and feel very uncomfortable doing so. So the risks in an active approach to Shakespeare are actually larger and more significant than have been acknowledged because our students’ identities are implicated. Additionally, in a social justice framework, Shakespeare’s homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and racist lines are not ignored, minimized, or laughed at. Instead, they are the starting point for interrogating complex texts, contexts and identities. Shakespeare’s texts are, of course, excellent vehicles for active approaches, not only because they are dramatic pieces but because they are also filled with metadramatic moments about the purpose and power of playing. His characters are frequently putting on roles, identities and personas. And furthermore, they are frequently commenting on what it means to play a part. Proponents of active approaches are quick to employ these moments in our pedagogy, and we explore the speeches for evidence about the character’s identity. Yet we do not allow the diverse identities of the students to impact their exploration of the character. For example, if John, a young white man, and Jane, a young black woman, are both assigned to perform Hamlet’s advice to the players, current active approaches would not expect (or hope) that John and Jane’s gender and race will affect their performative interpretations. Part of this stems from our unexamined uses of colourblind approaches, in which race is irrelevant and therefore unmentionable. If we take the claims of performance studies seriously, why do we not employ them within active approaches to Shakespeare? Performance studies alerts us to the fact that all identities are performed and fluid. As social animals, humans consciously and unconsciously adapt, adjust and alter our self-presentation based on specific contexts. While a sense of self may be constant, the presentation of self is multiple, varied and contingent (Goffman 1959). On a theoretical level, the proponents of active approaches to Shakespeare understand the importance of exploring the fluidity of identity. Thus, Brian Edmiston claims: In active and dramatic dialogue about narrative worlds people not only make meaning about texts but also may change their understanding of who they are, and who they might become, both in the classroom and in the world beyond the school. (Edmiston 2014: 4) Yet in current active approaches, a student’s personal identity is not one of the tools employed to explore language, character or scene. We argue that Hamlet becomes more interesting and dynamic if the student’s identity is part of the context that creates the contingency of Hamlet, the character and the play. In classrooms, the Shakespeare text needs to remain an open document, one in which there is ample room for interpretation, performance and analysis. If all bodies are rendered neutral then the interplay among social actors and texts is lost. The

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treatment of diverse bodies as identity-neutral has the effect of limiting the text. If you are gay, female, black or Jewish and your identity is not assumed to bring any relevant perspective to Shakespeare’s plays then the texts are dead on the page. But if context matters, as it so often does in active approaches (e.g. you are in the storm with Lear), then there are more contexts to be considered within the students’ identities. One practical way to discuss context is to foster a dialogue about casting practices with regards to race, gender, ability, etc. There are many different types of casting practices for the inclusion of diverse groups. There is even an advocacy organization that works on behalf of diverse actors, the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts (formerly the Non-Traditional Casting Project).4 As a starting point for classroom discussions, the following casting models are the most common: Blind Casting: actors are cast without regard to race, gender, and/or physical ability; the audience is supposed to be blind to the races, genders, and physical abilities of the actors, seeing only the part performed Conscious Casting: a conceptually conceived model in which actors are cast with their races, genders, and/or physical abilities framed into the concept for the production; the audience is supposed to see the races, genders, and physical abilities of the actors in order to interpret the play’s social resonances Cross-Cultural Casting: another conceptually conceived model in which the entire world of the play is translated to a different culture and location; the audience is supposed to see the differences of the actors in order to translate Shakespeare’s play to a new culture, place, and/or time period.5 When a teacher helps to distinguish and explicate these models, the class can interrogate its prior expectations and define its working practices for theatre-based classroom techniques. This is not to suggest that the class has to adopt one of these models, but that the models should provide the springboard for debate, discussion, implementation and analysis. In fact, we would hope that different classes will create entirely new and innovative casting models. Furthermore, active approaches embrace kinesthetic learning and focus on movement and gesture in the expression of the text. We argue that bodies are not neutral and that cultural signals embodied in movement and gesture are relevant. Many professors are aware that certain physical postures and gestures communicate meaning differently (e.g. to look a professor in the eye in dominant US culture is a sign of respect and truth-telling, but this is not a universal sign, as is evidenced by Navajo cultural practices) (Machamer and Gruber 1998). Yet this awareness has not filtered into the active approaches to teaching Shakespeare. The breadth of interpretative possibilities is increased when the diversity of the bodies and their cultural backgrounds in the classroom are engaged. We argue that the most effective forms of kinesthetic learning take into account individual and cultural differences. We know many college and university professors are employing some variation of active approaches because these methods promote a type of ownership of Shakespeare, the Bard. But what exactly do our students get to own? What texts? What portions of those texts? In contrast to easy claims to universality, we argue

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that active approaches should enable something more than access to cultural capital. Within a social justice framework no lines are allowed to be normalized as if they were only aesthetic moves. For example, when Romeo first sees Juliet he resorts to familiar Petrarchan constructions of beauty, declaring: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright. It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear, Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows. (1.5.43–48) This is a rich section of text to explore as evidence of Romeo’s character. Romeo’s profession of love is easy to interpret as a conventional Petrarchan expression of love. But if Romeo is performed by an Ethiopian immigrant, he may embody, interpret and perform Romeo’s metaphorical expressions of love in a radically different fashion. Within a social justice framework, potentially perplexing texts are the teachable moments. Students have the right to engage and argue with the text while being themselves – diverse millennials in the twenty-first century. If students have a right to this engagement, then instructors have an obligation to enable it. In other words, we should not ignore the uncomfortable parts of Shakespeare’s plays. Beverly Tatum writes that: a commitment to breaking the silence about race at all levels of the educational system can indeed lead to improving performance for all students. We know what to do. We just have to have the courage and commitment to do it. (Tatum 2007: 81) Proponents of active approaches know that diversity is valuable, but we have not been able to create a practice that reflects that belief. This probably stems in part from the fact that it is difficult to talk about diversity in mixed settings. It also probably stems in part from the fact that we were taught that diversity is an ancillary topic to Shakespeare (a fruitful, but nonetheless tangential, conversation). Using a social justice framework, we can give millennials what they need and want and we can keep Shakespeare relevant and necessary. A social justice framework for active approaches to Shakespeare also presents an opportunity to interrogate what’s ‘natural’ or expected in performance. Most active approaches create an artificial space in which the text and the student are isolated from the larger world. This approach forecloses discussions about social justice. Even when theatre companies are staging provocative performances of Shakespeare’s plays (e.g. The Donmar Warehouse’s all-female productions of Julius Caesar and Henry IV), discussions of these performances are not incorporated into active approaches in the classroom: as if all that is needed is the student and the text; contexts are jettisoned. Conversations about race and identity may be difficult to initiate (especially as we know that millennials are not used to talking about difference), but a social justice framework allows them to become

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normalized – part of the everyday conversation one has about Shakespeare. For us, the ideal active approach would literally incorporate context, identity and text, thereby rendering conversations about difference as part of the body politic of the Shakespeare classroom. Social justice cannot be achieved through pedagogical approaches that minimize the importance of diversity. Even though race is a construct, it is one that has real affects as Lee Anne Bell warns: constructed racial categories determine to a large degree where we live, who we marry, how much we earn, with whom we worship, the quality of health care we receive, how long we will live, who represents us in the government, how we are portrayed in the media, how much wealth we accumulate and pass on to our children, and other factors that affect life opportunities and well-being in significant and enduring ways. (Bell 2007a: 118) Shakespeare in the classroom should not be treated as separate and protected from these realities; his texts should not be segregated and quarantined from identity politics. An active approach to Shakespeare within a social justice framework allows millennials to see the contradiction between their unease about considering race and difference and their belief in the value of diversity.

NOTES 1. See our book, Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (2016) for details about designing Shakespeare teaching units. 2. For the focus groups conducted in the qualitative research portion of the study, DBR included over 100 18–24-year-olds. For the surveys conducted in the quantitative research portion of the study, DBR included approximately 3,000 14–24-year-olds. 3. The one exception is our book Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach. 4. http://inclusioninthearts.org/. 5. For further discussion about race and casting, see A. Thompson, Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006).

REFERENCES Badejo, A. (2014), ‘MTV Launches New Campaign to Address “Complicated, Thorny” Race, Gender, And LGBT Issues’, BuzzFeed Entertainment. 30 April. Available online: https://www.buzzfeed.com/anitabadejo/mtv-launches-new-campaign-to-address-biases (accessed July 2014). Banks, F. (2014), Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Bell, L. A. (2007a), ‘Twenty-First Century Racism’, in M. Adams, L. A. Bell and P. Griffin (eds), Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, 2nd edn., 117–21, New York, NY: Routledge.

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Bell, L. A. (2007b), ‘Theoretical Foundations for Social Justice Education’, in M. Adams, L. A. Bell and P. Griffin (eds), Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, 2nd edn., 1–14, New York, NY: Routledge. Bevington, D. and G. Witt (1999), ‘Working in Workshops’, in Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance, M. Riggio (ed.), New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America. David Binder Research (2014), ‘DBR- MTV Bias Survey Summary’, LookDifferent.org, 4 April. Available online: http://www.lookdifferent.org/about-us/research-studies/12014-mtv-david-binder-research-study (accessed July 2014). Edmiston, B. (2014), Transforming Teaching and Learning with Active and Dramatic Approaches: Engaging Students Across the Curriculum, New York, NY: Routledge. Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, NY: Anchor Books. Machamer, A. M. and E. Gruber (1998), ‘Secondary, Family, and Educational Risk: Comparing American Indian Adolescents and Their Peers’, The Journal of Educational Research, 91(6): 357–69. Neelands, J. (2001), ‘Editorial’, English in Education, 45(1): 2. Neelands, J. (2009), ‘Acting Together: Ensemble as a Democratic Process in Art and Life’, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 14(2): 173–89. Omi, M. and H. Winant (1994), Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edn., New York, NY and London: Routledge. Royal Shakespeare Company (n.d.), Stand Up for Shakespeare: A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools. Available online: https://www.rsc.org.uk/education (accessed July 2014). Royal Shakespeare Company and The University of Warwick (2012), ‘What is Teaching Shakespeare?’ Teaching Shakespeare. Available online: http://www. teachingshakespeare.ac.uk/ (accessed July 2014). Steele, C. (1997), ‘A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Performance and Identity’, American Psychologist 52: 613–29. Steele, C. (2010), Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Tatum, B. (1997), Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race, New York, NY: Basic Books. Tatum, B. (2007), Can We Talk about Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Thompson, A. (2006), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Thompson, A. (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, A. and L. Turchi (2016), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A StudentCentred Approach, London: The Arden Shakespeare. Young, R. (2012), ‘Shakespeare is for Everyone!’, Romeo and Juliet Curriculum Guide for Teachers and Students, New York, NY: Folger Shakespeare Library. Available online: https://www.folger.edu/teaching-modules (accessed July 2014).

CHAPTER 2.2

Bending toward justice: From Shakespeare’s Black Mediterranean to August Wilson’s Black Atlantic PETER ERICKSON

For my interpretative approach, the Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker provides a flexible and inspirational language: I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. (Parker 1867: 37–57) Particularly valuable is the combination of conviction and complication. On the one hand, Parker conveys certainty and optimism about long-term progress: ‘I am sure it bends towards justice’. Yet, on the other hand, he stresses the difficulty of seeing and calculating. The incomplete graphic figure challenges us to use our own imagination to envision an intellectual structure that is still in process and that is not already there for the seeing. From this image, I derive a model for the cultural critic as one who makes an independent contribution by actively creating analyses that potentially lead toward a realization of the initial commitment to justice. Parker’s stance positions the interpreter as facing the unknown terrain of the future, as well as that of the past; the critic excavates the past but also builds the future. As I use it here, the metaphor of the arc has multiple meanings. Historically speaking, it calls attention to the two arcs of the slave trade: first, to the early modern Mediterranean, as the site of transporting slaves from the North African coast to the southern European rim in Shakespeare’s Venetian world;1 second, to the transatlantic slave trade that constitutes August Wilson’s geographic zone of interest. Hence, my subtitle turns from the Black Mediterranean represented by the figure of Othello to its later counterpart in the Black Atlantic. Another arc following the source quotation runs from the nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker

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to Martin Luther King, Jr, whose renewal and strengthening of the statement itself signifies the bending of the arc toward racial justice in the context of a new historical opening created by the Civil Rights Movement, on through to Barack Obama’s twoterm presidency (2008–16) in the twenty-first century and, hence, beyond the span of August Wilson’s ‘pre-Obama’ career.2 We do not live in a post-Shakespeare world. But we do live in a world that offers other definitions and expectations of social justice that come from outside Shakespeare’s work. We need to acknowledge and to address these differences, as well as to test and assess the limits of Shakespearean standards of justice. The construction of our own comparative juxtapositions makes it possible to begin this conversation. The purpose of this chapter is to construct and to explore a cross-historical connection between Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) and August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988). This is emphatically not an influence study. I am not trying to prove and make no claim that Wilson was either consciously or unconsciously responding to Shakespeare’s work. Rather, I am the one making the connection as my own scholarly experiment in comparative analysis. This experiment involves examining the connection between Shakespeare and August Wilson in the expansive terms of the moral universe bending toward justice, specifically with regard to perceptions of race, in which Shakespeare and Wilson occupy two different points on the historical arc and, hence, a different experience of race. In this formulation the critical challenge becomes: How, procedurally, do we connect the two points? And what do we gain from experiencing this connection through intimate, detailed analysis? My contribution thus approaches Shakespeare from a wide angle with the explicit goal of creating a new critical method for testing the concept of social justice in a cross-historical context. Wilson’s ten-play cycle focused on the twentieth century and his play Radio Golf, concerning the final decade, was produced on Broadway after his death in 2005. Wilson, no longer with us in the present, is now part of our past. The pressure of cross-historical comparison places Shakespeare in a new perspective, but the same applies to Wilson when seen from the vantage point of subsequent work by twentyfirst-century black playwrights in our current, contemporary moment.3 Although Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is the principal text that provides the basis for the Shakespeare/Wilson juxtaposition proposed here, the argument will be expanded by reference to a larger network of Wilson’s plays to suggest how Wilson’s ‘century cycle’ as a comprehensive oeuvre has its own historical differences and complexities within itself. Wilson is not portrayed here as the endpoint of the arc, which is rather seen as an ongoing trajectory projected into the future in keeping with the spirit, as I see it, of Theodore Parker’s unfinished arc.

REVERSING THE TRAJECTORY OF RISE AND FALL Shakespeare’s Othello and August Wilson’s Herald Loomis speak from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. What could only be notionally hinted at in Othello is viscerally experienced by Loomis in his graphic vision of the Middle Passage,

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when African slaves who have survived arrive in the Americas. Each of the two plays crucially centres on the key characters’ psychological climax enacted through a literal embodiment in highly visual physical action. Othello produces his own punishment; Herald stages his own resurrection. Othello falls; Herald rises. In both cases, surprise is produced by the use of a concealed weapon. Othello, who had been disarmed, pulls out a hidden knife to end his life. As Cassio remarks, the knife is a sign of Othello’s greatness: ‘This I did fear, but thought he had no weapon, / For he was great of heart’ (5.2.358–9).4 Similarly, in the emotional climax of the final scene, Loomis unexpectedly reveals a knife (2.5; 84).5 Herald’s greatness of heart suddenly emerges but we don’t immediately know where it will lead. The prolonged tension produces a sense of danger in Herald’s wielding his knife. As with Othello, the suspense gives Loomis the opportunity to speak at length. Yet, while Othello’s trajectory curves from elevation to collapse, Herald’s ending moves in the opposite direction, from collapse to recovery, in the extraordinary transition from Loomis’s inability to stand up at the end of Act 1, when he is literally floored, to his exultant rising at the end of Act 2. Wilson creates a dramatic impact that is less a shock of instant recognition than a gradual realization that our contemporary cultural journey has expanded and changed beyond imagination. Wilson’s Herald Loomis celebrates the ecstasy of that perception. While Othello’s body slumps to join ‘the tragic loading of this bed’ (5.2.361), Loomis at the end is fully upright as his four-times repeated verb exults: ‘I’m standing! I’m standing. My legs stood up! I’m standing now!’ (2.5; 86). His standing is not only physical but metaphorical. When Loomis stands up, he stands on the ground of his forebears and he stands for a visionary commitment to migratory survival and recovery.6 He still has a distance to travel, but as his name signifies, Herald moves forward as a herald, the harbinger of a renewed black identity. By contrast, Othello starts at the high point conveyed by the implied imagery of his rhetorical upsweep in, for example, his claim to ‘speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune / As this that I have reached’ (1.2.23–4) and his familiarity with ‘hills whose heads touch heaven’ (1.3.140). But the downward trend toward the low point he will eventually attain is predicted by the unheroic and undignified episode of his downfall under stress in apparent epilepsy (4.1.47). To develop the overlaps and contrastive parallels between Othello and Herald Loomis further, I trace additional details that show how their respective arcs are formed by a series of reverse patterns that lead to different outcomes for justice.

THE COLOUR OF BLOOD Othello and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone both conclude by strongly evoking the motif of blood in Othello’s ‘bloody period’ (5.2.354) and Herald’s insistent ‘I can bleed for myself’ (2.5; 85). In Shakespeare’s earlier Venetian drama The Merchant of Venice, negotiation of the meanings of the theme of blood resonates with issues of race and ethnicity. Immediately upon his arrival as a suitor for Portia, the Prince of Morocco correctly anticipates her racial prejudice –‘Mislike me not for my complexion’ (2.1.1) – and attempts to deflect her reaction by switching from black

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and fair (‘the fairest creature northward born’ [4]) to an alternate colour system based on red blood: ‘And let us make incision for your love / To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine’ (6–7). Subsequently, Shylock appeals to blood as a sympathetic symbol of common humanity: ‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’ (3.1.54). Yet Portia’s legal strategy denies Shylock’s universal ideal by creating distinctions among ethnic blood types when she stipulates that he must not ‘shed / One drop of [Antonio’s] Christian blood’ (4.1.304–5). It is specifically Christian blood, not human blood shared by all, which is judged to be precious and thus employed to pass judgment on Shylock, whose blood is not Christian. Yet, by presumed virtue of her rejection of her father and her pursuit of marriage to a Christian, Jessica’s blood is magically transmuted. Shylock’s claim – ‘I say my daughter is my flesh and blood’ (3.1.32) – is met with scorn: ‘There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish’ (3.1.33–5). As though operating with the rules imposed by Portia, Othello is careful to preserve Desdemona’s blood: ‘Yet I’ll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow’ (5.2.3–4). Othello ultimately serves justice upon himself by administering the ‘bloody period’,7 but whether the wider sense of social justice has been performed remains an open question. Othello’s gesture is fatal, but Herald’s surface lacerations on his chest prove to be life-giving, as though dramatizing his own rebirth and resurrection. What resources does Herald have that Othello does not? When Herald uses the knife to gash his chest, his act does not display the finality of Othello’s ‘bloody period’ (5.2.354) but, in August Wilson’s words, ‘a bloodletting rite that … demonstrates his willingness to bleed as an act of redemption’ (Wilson 1991: xiv).8 Notwithstanding his earlier ‘redemption thence’ (1.3.139), this ultimate redemption is not possible for Othello. Contrary to the Christianizing of Othello through religious conversion, Herald directly attacks Christianity as a prelude to standing up on his own: ‘I don’t need nobody to bleed for me! I can bleed for myself’ (2.5; 85). In Wilson’s prose annotation, ‘Loomis is not only illustrating his willingness to bleed but saying that if salvation requires bloodshed, he doesn’t need Christ to bleed for him on the cross’ (Lyons 2006: 212). For Wilson, Herald’s resulting scars will be ‘symbolic of being marked. It’s a willingness to do battle’ (Lyons 2006: 212). Instead of Christianity, Herald turns for sustenance to an alternative source of imagery, the historical foundation of the flesh and blood of the Middle Passage that Othello’s story lacks. Herald’s initial vision is limited to bones, whose sinking suggests the fate of slaves who didn’t survive the voyage, but miraculously the bones rise: ‘a big wave … washed them out of the water and up on land’ (1.4; 52). To Herald’s astonishment, the bones assume flesh and walk – ‘They [the bones] got flesh on them! Just like you and me’ – and in his next line he expresses his recognition of their colour – ‘They black. Just like you and me’ (1.4; 52). In Wilson’s view, ‘It is not the bones walking on the water that is the terrifying part of the vision – it is when they take on flesh and reveal themselves to be like him’ (Wilson 1991: xiv). The flesh signifies both exterior black skin and interior red blood as signs of life, a validation with which Herald eagerly identifies.

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Although the temporary paralysis of Herald’s legs prevents him from imitating the mobility of the black slaves, he now has a definitive goal. The delay serves as postponement during which Herald can be seen as learning and growing. Othello has no recourse to the combined strength and resilience that this lineage provides. Instead, Othello submits to severe self-demotion by aligning his own blood with the negative image of ‘a malignant and a turbaned Turk’ (5.2.351), who deserves to die. Othello’s bloodshed is the final emblem of an entrapment from which he has no way out. In contrast, Herald’s enabling bloodshed represents a symbolic opening.

COUPLES Both Othello and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone focus on the splitting apart of married couples. Like Othello and Desdemona, Herald Loomis and his wife Martha Pentecost are forced to come to terms with the fate of separation, but their suffering concludes with a strikingly different outcome. Where Othello and Desdemona’s marriage is endorsed at the outset by the Venetian Senate, Herald and Martha’s relationship is broken from the start by Herald’s seven-year enslavement by Joe Turner. Despite the Civil War and Emancipation, the white man came in 1900 with ‘forty links of chain’ (2.2; 64–6): ‘Joe Turner catched me when my little girl was just born’ (2.2; 68). The damage is irreversible: Herald does not see his wife for eleven years after seven years of forced labour and an additional four years of searching for her. As Martha puts it, ‘My whole life shattered. It was like I had poured it in a cracked jar and it all leaked out the bottom. When it go like that there ain’t nothing you can do to put it back together’ (2.5; 82). Against the reality of this permanent fracture, the play finds an unorthodox way to reconstitute the fragments. Herald receives no justice for his involuntary servitude and has to create his own form of just resolution. In the moment of their long-sought reunion, Loomis announces the inevitability of their separation: ‘I just been waiting to look on your face to say my good-bye … Now that I see your face I can say my good-bye and make my own world’ (2.5; 82–3). But unlike Shakespeare’s spouses, Loomis and Martha are allowed to negotiate this split in a way that is not destructive, including provision for the caring transfer of their daughter Zonia. In contrast to Othello’s loss of integrity, Herald finds a justifiable new life with a potential new partner, Mattie Campbell (2.3; 72–3 and 2.5; 79 and stage direction 86). Othello disintegrates; Herald revives and moves forward. The overall effect is that the relationship between Othello and Desdemona traverses a path from unity, albeit incomplete because underlying tension remains unaddressed to drastic severance in death, while Herald and Martha shift from longterm separation to reconciliation through a shared sense of responsibility for their daughter and a restoration of sufficient dignity and respect as they pursue their separate commitments to strong and independent lives.

INDIVIDUAL STORY, COLLECTIVE SONG Both Othello and Herald struggle to achieve a valid black identity but approach this problem with conspicuously different paces, tones and modes. Where Othello is

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loquacious from the start, Herald is taciturn and withdrawn. Othello’s identity is his story. This strategy initially gives him narrative control and power. Yet, as the issues Othello faces become more difficult, his script eventually wears thin and no longer serves. He may be standing confidently tall when he responds to the invitation of Desdemona’s father, who ‘Still questioned me the story of my life’ (1.3.130), when he retells it to Desdemona after prompting her request (1.3.150–2), and when he rehearses it once again, with the Duke’s encouragement in public before the full Senate (1.3.129). Over time, the story proves to be only a superficially secure construction; Shakespeare’s plot will relentlessly bring Othello down. Othello possesses no deeper, insightful story as a substitute that he can use to fight back, with the consequence that he is utterly isolated and completely exposed. Herald is not put in Othello’s position for two reasons. First, he does not broadcast his story but keeps to himself in a meditative silence that protects him until he is finally able to speak: ‘Herald Loomis done seen some things he ain’t got words to tell you’ (1.4; 50). Second, Herald has a cultural support structure, which for Othello is virtually absent. Bynum’s sensitively gradual positive guidance for Herald could not be more opposite to Iago’s impatiently negative guidance for Othello. Even when he is confined by his non-communicative stance, Loomis is still surrounded by a wider community environment that emerges with full force in the collective moment of Juba involving the entire group (1.4.49–50). Wilson’s stage direction emphasizes the African connection conveyed by this ritual performance: ‘The Juba is reminiscent of the Ring Shouts of the African slaves … It should be as African as possible.’ Though Herald finds this display deeply disruptive and reacts with an outburst, this explicitly African event leads him directly to his vision of the Middle Passage and ultimately to a resource that can be used to acknowledge suffering accompanied by survival, healing and indomitable strength. A corresponding festive moment in Shakespeare’s Othello is the announced celebration on Cyprus (2.2). Despite Othello’s complete command, this early challenge to his authority serves as the beginning of the end when things start to fall apart. To follow C. L. Barber’s formulation ‘Through Release to Clarification’, we can observe that the two festive moments create very different clarifications about the two central characters. The clarification of Othello is that his fragile identity is subject to immediate breakdown; the clarification of Herald is that his character is breaking open to new insights that will carry him forward. This is the difference between the mediums with which each is identified: Othello’s brittle story versus Herald’s expansive song. As deployed here, linking Herald to song provides a more flexible, wide-ranging art form through which to seek and find his identity. The Juba is a multi-media occasion consisting of music, singing and dance, versatile enough to activate Herald’s imaginative powers. In the first instance, he is flattened and cannot join his ancestors: ‘Everybody’s standing and walking toward the road’ (1.4; 52). By the play’s end, he is standing and walking with them, adding his presence to the future of the group. In the end, Othello’s story is abruptly shut down. It is brittle and breakable because Othello presents himself as an exotic platitude designed for the consumption of a white audience. Brabantio, who can’t get enough of the story, wants Othello to serve as an entertainer who keeps repeating the account of the melodramatic, self-satisfied

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and clichéd role of the black male adventurer. Othello’s commitment to living out this external story prevents him from pursuing his inner story. The reverse is true for Herald, whose entire purpose is to seek his inward identity, a search for which the improvisation of song serves as an emblem of the strength of his own inherited resources.

FROM HERALD LOOMIS’S 1911 TO HARMOND WILKS’S 1997 The path of the bending arc is neither smooth nor automatic. In my view, the arc from Shakespeare to August Wilson traces a trajectory that provides valuable comparative insight and emotional experience. Yet there is another, internal arc formed by Wilson’s ten-play cycle across each decade of the twentieth century. In the final play Radio Golf – final both in representing the last decade of the chronological sequence and in being the last play that Wilson wrote – Wilson introduces an uneasy, disruptive note that produces an inconclusive ending and leaves us uncertain about the outcome of the overall cycle as a whole. When Harmond Wilks dramatically concludes Radio Golf by putting what he seems to intend as red war paint on his face, his gesture echoes Herald Loomis’s display of his own blood on his face. But the historical distance from actual blood to the artifice of paint may be too great a gap to give the latter the same degree of inspired emotional power. The result is a major wrinkle in the arc that prevents Radio Golf from staging an unequivocal triumphant climax and instead causes the play to settle for open-endedness, perhaps including doubt. Through the Othello–Herald contrast outlined here, I have suggested in effect that Wilson has indirectly countered ‘the Othello problem’. But he is left with a problem of his own: how to sustain Herald’s vision over the long historical time span represented by his entire ten-play sequence. Set in the year 1911, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone represents the second decade of the twentieth century, from which it looks out in two directions. It is very close in time and sensibility to Gem of the Ocean (2004), the play of the first decade set in 1904, and historically far removed from Radio Golf, the play at the other end of the century, set in 1997, which dramatizes the changed configuration of African American culture due to the economic advancement of the black middle and upper classes in the century’s final decade. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is separated by only seven years from 1904, the moment of Gem of the Ocean. This proximity to Wilson’s historically earliest play gives Joe Turner’s Come and Gone access to the symbolic reformulation of the Middle Passage as a positive source of inspiration and support, of which Herald becomes the vehicle and beneficiary. Just as Herald will after him, Citizen Barlow experiences a direct visionary interaction with slavery that changes his life. The connection between the two plays is made explicit when the first play anticipates the motif of standing that is so dramatically prominent in the second: ‘It’s all you can do sometimes just to stand up. Solly stood up and walked’ (2.5; 87).

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Yet the large spread or even leap of eighty-six years from the 1911 of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone to the 1997 of Radio Golf portrays the challenge of keeping the legacy of historical memory intact. Harmond Wilks’s contact with the past is more difficult because it lacks the immediacy of connection experienced by Citizen Barlow and Herald Loomis in the pair of plays from the first two decades. In the final decade, Harmond’s attention is turned to an old balustrade: ‘If you run your hand slow over some of the wood you can make out these carvings. There’s faces. Lines making letters. An old language’ (2.2; 62). Though he senses that he is touching something important, Harmond also exudes an out-of-touch unfamiliarity: he can’t quite recognize the faces or read the language. His connection seems abstract and remote. By contrast, in the 1904 of Gem of the Ocean, Citizen Barlow’s witness had been direct and intimate: ‘They all look like me. They all got my face!’ (2.2; 69). Even as far removed as Wilson’s play of the 1960s, Two Trains Running, set in 1969, there is a strong signal of the symbolic vibrancy of blood. When Sterling enters at the very end with the ham long since owed to the deceased Hambone, he is ‘bleeding from his face and his hands’ (2.5; 99) after breaking the store window. The image of his actual blood signals jubilation at the triumph of justice and provides a direct connection back to Herald Loomis’s culminating act. The affinity between Sterling and Risa, whose scars are also linked to the theme of blood, presents a continuation of the couple theme in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.9 The relationship between Harmond and Mame in Radio Golf is tenuous by comparison. The weakness and tentativeness of their bond seems indicative of a larger mood of indecisiveness caused by diminished, even perhaps lost, historical memory. The unbroken circuit between Herald and Harmond is a stretch, but it is there, held together by a thin strand in the way that both plays culminate with each character strikingly marked in red: Herald’s exposed chest with slashes, whose blood he rubs over his face (2.5; 86) corresponds to Harmond’s face adorned with red war paint.10 This convergence of visual images entails a shift of implements, from the knife to the paintbrush and of medium, from blood to paint, but in both cases the overall effect is registered by the physical imprint on the character’s body. In the opening scene of Radio Golf, Harmond makes a passing, cynically empty remark about symbolism: ‘Politics is about symbolism. Black people don’t vote but they have symbolic weight’ (1.1; 8). Ironically, the ‘symbolic weight’ carried by African Americans is true in a much deeper sense that Harmond does not yet fully understand. The whole movement of the play hinges on bringing him to a point where he is able to perceive and to act on that deeper symbolic meaning. Only when Harmond is no longer running for election as mayor, is no longer part of Bedford Hills Redevelopment and is no longer able to prevent the demolition of the house at 1839 Wylie, which we know has been celebrated from the beginning in Gem of the Ocean, does he start to consider a different perspective. The house cannot literally be repainted, but the vision of the house as evocative of the memory of the Middle Passage and the architecture of the City of Bones still lives. What are the larger symbolic possibilities of the brush Harmond picks up? Like the house, the paintbrush takes on meaning as the ultimate sign of Harmond’s

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commitment to fight for the values and inspiration traceable to the life of Aunt Ester as embodied in her house. But, at the level of the artist, the brush signifies the power of art to symbolically revive and preserve the image of the house in its full splendour, despite its impending demolition. In the end, the brush may also serve as a remembrance in honour of Romare Bearden’s art.

CROSS-MEDIA ALLIANCES: BEARDEN, WILSON, WALCOTT Joe Turner’s Come and Gone encompasses two communities. The first is envisioned by Herald Loomis in which black slaves not only survive the Middle Passage but also reconstitute themselves as a group capable of sustaining an ongoing cultural life. The second is the community of black artists working in different media to build a crossmedia network, a process exemplified by the connection between August Wilson’s theatre and the visual artist Romare Bearden.11 In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, August Wilson draws on Bearden’s art not only for the specific use of Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket (1978), but also for the general concept of collage as a method of organizing a response to the great northward migration of former black slaves from the southern United States. The final sentence of Wilson’s description accompanying Joe Turner’s Come and Gone can be placed in the artistic context of Bearden’s collage technique: Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy. (Wilson 2007: 6) Bearden’s art ‘reconnects’ and ‘reassembles’ the material and psychological pieces of ‘separation and dispersement’ into a new whole. In this transition from fracture to potential wholeness, fragments are suddenly transformed from negative liabilities to positive assets. In August Wilson’s terms for his play, we can also hear his terms for Bearden’s process of transforming ‘scraps’, ‘fragments’ and ‘remnants’ into an ‘unbroken’ ‘song’ of individual and communal identity: I called to my courage and entered the world of Romare Bearden and found a world made in my image … A world made of scraps of paper, of line and mass and form and shape and color, and all the melding … pressing on life until it gave back something in kinship. Until it gave back something in fragments, in gesture and speech, the colossal remnants of a spirit tested through time and the storm and the lash. A spirit conjured into being, unbroken, unbowed, and past any reason for song – singing an aria of faultless beauty and unbridled hope. (Wilson 1990: 9)12 To make something tattered and broken into something unbroken and whole generates – ‘past any reason’ – sufficient cause for singing. The ‘kinship’ that Bearden’s art ‘gives back’ inspires Wilson to apply this approach to his own art form

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of drama. The ‘beauty’ of the resulting music is amazing enough in itself but, even more amazing, the beauty creates ‘hope’. Wilson’s vivid narration of his epiphany in relation to Bearden’s art is akin to the moment of Herald Loomis’s revelation with which the play ends. A parallel emerges between the two pairs: the characters Herald and his guide Bynum, within the play, become analogous, at the artistic level, to August Wilson’s link to Bearden. Symbolically speaking, Bearden can be considered Wilson’s Bynum. Just as Herald discovers the existence of a tradition already in place to support and help him, so Wilson finds a tradition available for cross-media transfer of artistic expression to consolidate his development as a playwright. In his elegy for August Wilson in White Egrets, Derek Walcott situates the dramatist among painters and recognizes Wilson’s special link to Bearden by singling out only these two for intimate address on a first-name basis. The personal name August, the poem’s very first word, becomes simply ‘you’: ‘I unhook the quarter-moon to blow their praises, / you, Horace Pippin, Romare, Jacob Lawrence’ (Walcott 2010: 6).13 Walcott sees the figures of Bearden reincarnated in ‘all those riffs and arias’ (ibid.: 7) of Wilson’s characters who ‘wrestle with the roar of torrents, / black, jagged silhouettes ready to do battle / with enormous hands and eyes’ (Walcott 2010: 9–11). The silhouettes, the oversized physical features and strong voices are instantly familiar from Bearden’s collages and equally recognizable in Wilson’s plays – they belong to both artistic realms. With Walcott as witness, Bearden and Wilson exemplify the passing on of a new tradition created out of the Black Atlantic heritage. The power of this aesthetic triangulation is expansive: by putting Bearden and Wilson together, Walcott solidifies the link between them and then, by his collaboration, strengthens the lineage by extending it further through his own contribution. Walcott’s and Wilson’s respective ties to Bearden are well established.14 What is excitingly new is the poem’s completion of the triangle by making the direct connection between Wilson and Walcott.15 As the order of birth dates shows – Pippin (1888–1946), Romare Bearden (1911–88), Lawrence (1917–2000), Walcott (1930–2017) and Wilson (1945–2005) – this is not strictly a generational cohort. Yet, in their varied ways all contribute to a cohesive aesthetic whose primary drive is to represent black figures in sympathetic human forms that demand recognition. This basic overall continuity enables Walcott not only to validate the group, but to embrace and join it. Despite the silence of the ‘silver cornet’ of August Wilson’s art lying inert ‘in its velvet case’ (Walcott 2010: 6) until Walcott sounds it at the end, the lyricism of Wilson’s language presents its own musicality. Walcott prompts us to remember and to hear Wilson’s characters speak in the beautifully mixed genres of ‘riffs and arias’ (ibid.: 7) and of ‘battle cry and anthem’ (ibid.: 13).16 The sound blends theatre and nature in the image of strong voices as agitated tree leaves: ‘all those riffs and arias whose characters argue / the way that wind elates the acacias / until they wrestle with the roar of torrents’ (ibid.: 7–9). The exuberance of the verb ‘elates’ reminds us of the energy and passion that are released in Wilson’s long speeches.17 The word ‘wrestle’ (ibid.: 9) anticipates the repeated term ‘battle’ in the subsequent phrases ‘ready to do battle’ (ibid.: 10) and ‘battle cry’ (ibid.: 13). When Walcott uses the horn ‘to blow their praises’ (ibid.: 14), his ‘anthem’ includes notes of struggle and victory in the search for justice. The same notes are heard in another list of four –

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‘Malcolm, King, Garvey, Frederick Douglass’ (ibid.: 76) – a set of names comparable to the combined power of the group of artists.

THE PROSPECT OF MULTICULTURALISM IN A CROSS-HISTORICAL CONTEXT In its simplest terms, multicultural or transcultural education in literary studies promotes exposure to a broad range of works from different traditions each read independently, as though in separate, disconnected activities. Yet, as the terms ‘multi’ and ‘trans’ suggest, mixing and crossing are an important part of the experience opened up by this opportunity. The present chapter advocates a further step by creating an active link among distinct traditions, in which we, not the authors themselves, are the ones making the connections. An expanded conceptual framework for canon formation is not limited to building new traditions or to reconstituting the present canon. A third option is pursuing the opportunity to create new kinds of relationships among elements within the revised canon. Hence, for example, my bringing together themes of Shakespeare and Wilson without reference to the conventional tropes of self-conscious authorial responses to a prior tradition of masterpieces or an anxiety of influence. If changes in social justice are traceable and illuminated in terms of the arc as illustrated in the case study here, then understanding the idea of Shakespeare and social justice cannot be confined to Shakespeare but requires a broader scope that enables us to traverse a greater distance and to demonstrate more far-reaching points of contrast. While this approach may ultimately be shared as a collective project, the work begins in smaller separate projects imagined by each of us individually. The result is not one single arc but many arcs. Once different versions and variations have accumulated, a network of separate arcs can be put together in wider patterns of changing shapes whose critical force could potentially help the scholar to serve as a catalyst for new social justice initiatives in our time. Applied to the future, the outcome of such efforts is not absolutely predictable but rather a complex series of ongoing probes that remain exploratory, as well as inspirational. The unknowns and uncertainties of the future can invigorate our powers – not only of the requisite humility but also of the equally necessary spirit of hope and determination – so that intellect is attached to and matched by responsibility. In the long view, August Wilson’s explorations of racial injustice and prospects for change go further than Shakespeare’s works. Looking back from the distance of Wilson’s subsequent developments, we can see the limitations of Shakespeare’s conception of social justice in Othello.18 Shakespeare does not have the last word or the final insight on race and justice. This is not to say, however, that August Wilson’s plays present the definitive, completely finished and satisfactory solution. Wilson does not provide the ultimate destination in our current moment and we must be ready to continue moving forward. As we travel across the arc from Shakespeare to August Wilson and beyond, we encounter different questions and our perspectives on racial issues expand and change. But we have not reached a stopping point; the arc of the moral universe still bends.

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NOTES 1. For a fuller discussion, see Erickson (2014). 2. The continuing presence of Martin Luther King, Jr in August Wilson’s last play Radio Golf in the visual drama of posters is noteworthy. Four posters appear in this order: Tiger Woods (1.1; 10); Martin Luther King, Jr (1.1; 14); Harmond Wilks’s campaign poster (2.1; 53); and his partner Roosevelt’s WBTZ poster (2.1; 60). When the partnership fails, the posters are taken down in this sequence: the campaign poster (2.4; 74); Tiger Woods (2.4; 81); and the WBTZ poster (2.4; 81). Significantly, the King poster is not removed and his spirit remains. Subsequently, Barack Obama extends the image of the arc in his commemoration of Nelson Mandela on 5 December 2013. 3. I analyse new directions, exemplified by Thomas Bradshaw, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Kirsten Greenidge in the next generation after August Wilson in ‘Contemporary Black Playwrights Recalibrate: White Characters in Bradshaw, Jacobs-Jenkins, and Greenidge’ (unpublished essay). 4. Citations of Shakespeare are to The Arden Shakespeare Third Series edition. 5. Quotations from August Wilson’s plays are from the Century Cycle edition 2007, with act and scene numbers followed by page number. 6. In his 2004 interview with Maureen Dezell, Wilson makes a personal statement about the transformation of tragedy into viability: ‘People look at black American history and they say, “Oh, you poor people, what you were subjected to, that’s such a horrendous thing. I’m sure you want to forget that.” And I say no, no, I don’t want to forget that, because it’s a triumph. Black America is a tremendous triumph’ (Dezell 2006: 256). In an interview with Vera Sheppard fourteen years earlier, Wilson spells out the triumph: The suffering is only part of black history. What I want to do is place the culture on stage, to demonstrate that it has the ability to offer sustenance, so that when you leave your parents’ house, you are not in the world alone. You have something that is yours, you have a ground to stand on, and you have a viewpoint, and you have a way of proceeding in the world that has been developed by your ancestors … I think my plays are a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. And that no matter what, we are still here, the culture is still alive, it is vital, and it is as vibrant and zestful as ever. (Sheppard 2006: 104–5) 7. A performance question that arises here is: how visible should Othello’s blood be after he stabs himself? Should the audience be able to see Othello’s blood touch Desdemona as he approaches her with his final kiss? Should the play register an implied distinction between Desdemona’s white blood and Othello’s black blood? 8. In the 1997 interview with Bonnie Lyons in Conversations with August Wilson, Wilson provides a vivid description of writing the final scene in which Herald cuts himself (Lyons 2006: 216).

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9. Although the circumstances of Risa’s bleeding are different, Wilson views the result as ‘positive’ (Lyons 2006: 212). 10. Wilson’s stage direction says merely that ‘He picks up the paintbrush and exits’ (2.4; 81), but the Broadway premiere explicitly dramatized on stage what might conceivably be extrapolated from Harmond’s unfinished gesture: ‘Harmond painted warrior markings on his face, similar to Sterling’s actions, then exited the office, paintbrush in hand’ (bracketed ‘Broadway production note’, 2.4; 81). Further reference to this performance decision can be found in my interview with Harry Lennix, who originated the lead role on Broadway: Erickson (2009: 81–2). The red paint is the culmination of an image of American Indian resistance that runs through the play and is crucially articulated by Sterling Johnson at the end of act one (1.5; 51–2) and again near the end (2.4; 77). With the aid of Sterling’s symbolic intervention, Harmond may yet enter ‘the battlefield’ (2.4; 51, 77). 11. In an interview with George Plimpton and Bonnie Lyons, Wilson notes that, from the start at age twenty, his development included a connection to painting: ‘I had fallen in with a group of painters. I was intrigued and fascinated with the idea of painting’ (Plimpton and Lyons 1999: 27). 12. In the preceding paragraph, Wilson makes a direct link between his character Herald Loomis and ‘the haunting and brooding figure’ at the centre of Bearden’s Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket. 13. The poem is simply entitled ‘6’ and appears in Walcott (2010), White Egrets: Poems. Citations refer to line numbers in this sixteen-line poem. 14. For recent contributions to the substantial bibliography on August Wilson’s response to Bearden, see Pindar (2008) and Long (2011), in particular, the anecdote on 98. On Derek Walcott’s connection to Bearden, see my essay, ‘Artists’ Self-Portraiture and Self-Exploration in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound’. (2005). 15. In Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Bruce King offers brief evidence of Walcott’s acquaintance with Wilson. King mentions Walcott’s interest in Wilson (King 2000: 597) and notes Wilson’s participation in the benefit for the Playwrights Theatre at Boston University organized by Walcott in November 1991 (ibid.: 531). 16. As Sharon Olds (2008) answers the question in her title What Does an Elegy Do?: ‘It gives us something, when something or someone has been taken away, or has left. The song comes in and fills part of that space, a very small part’ (2). Walcott revives Wilson’s language so that we can hear this song again. 17. Regarding long speeches, Wilson observes: ‘There is a black person talking and he is talking a lot, and I think that we have not heard black people talk … I think the long speeches are an unconscious rebellion against the notion that blacks do not have anything important to say’ (Sheppard 2006: 104). 18. For a detailed account of the inadequacies in the outcome of Shakespeare’s Othello, see my discussion in ‘Concluding Othello: Contrasting Endings by Shakespeare and Fred Wilson’ (2016).

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REFERENCES Dezell, M. (2006). ‘A 10-Play Odyssey Continues with Gem of the Ocean’, in J. R. Bryer and M. C. Harting (eds), Conversations with August Wilson, 253–6, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Erickson, P. (2005), ‘Artists’ Self-Portraiture and Self-Exploration in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound’, Callaloo 28(1): 224–35. Erickson, P. (2009), ‘From Lear’s Button to Harmond’s Paintbrush’, Transition 102: 68–90. Erickson, P. (2014), ‘Race Words in Othello’, in R. Espinosa and D. Ruiter (eds), Shakespeare and Immigration, 159–76, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Erickson, P. (2016), ‘Concluding Othello: Contrasting Endings by Shakespeare and Fred Wilson’, Shakespeare Bulletin 34(2): 277–93. King, B. (2000), Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Long, R. A. (2011), ‘Bearden, Theater, Film, Dance’, in R. Fine and J. Francis (eds), Romare Bearden, American Modernist, 89–99, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Lyons, B. (2006), ‘An Interview with August Wilson’, in J. R. Bryer and M. C. Hartig (eds), Conversations with August Wilson, 204–22, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Olds, S. (2008), What Does an Elegy Do?, Berkeley, CA: Bancroft Library, University of California. Parker, T. (1877), ‘Of Justice and the Conscience’, in F. P. Cobbe (ed.), The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, 37–57, London: Trübner. Pindar, K. N. (2008), ‘Romare Bearden and August Wilson: History Lessons’, Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition, 37–46, New York, NY: Romare Bearden Foundation. Plimpton, G. and B. Lyons (1999), ‘August Wilson: The Art of Theater no. 14’, Paris Review 153: 1–28. Shakespeare, W. (2008), The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn., Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), New York, NY: W.W. Norton& Company. Sheppard, V. (2006), ‘August Wilson: An Interview’, in J. R. Bryer and M. C. Hartig (eds), Conversations with August Wilson, 101–17, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Walcott, D. (2010), White Egrets: Poems, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wilson, A. (1990), ‘Foreword’, in M. Schwartzman (ed.), Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, 8–9, New York, NY: Abrams. Wilson, A. (1991), ‘Preface’, in Three Plays, vii–xiv, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Wilson, A. (2007), August Wilson Century Cycle, New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group.

CHAPTER 2.3

Black Hamlet, social justice, and the minds of apartheid ARTHUR L. LITTLE, JR

Nelson Mandela conjures up a very long and complicated history of the entwining of black and Jewish social justice movements, when in the waning days of South African apartheid he declares in a 1990 speech (given to a group of white South African business executives) that Shylock’s ‘bitter question[s]’ are the same questions posed ‘many a time [by] the martingales and deprived people whom we [the anti-apartheid forces] represent.’1 He also, I would contend, disses Hamlet who has so often stood in the Western cultural imagination as the ambassador of universal truths and the apogee of the human self: Shylock, says Mandela, speaks to ‘the universal nature of human pain and suffering’. Furthermore, Shylock reaches into a genealogical place – an epistemological and ontological place – where Hamlet cannot go: Shylock’s questions, Mandela declaims ‘can only be posed by people who are discriminated against, in a society that condemns them to persistent deprivation of the material artefacts and the dignity that are due to them as human beings’ (1990: 59). But it is, of course, not simply a question of deprivation and due for Shylock but a question of his very status as a human being. As Stephen Greenblatt has summarily put it in his discussion of Shylock and anti-Semitism, ‘to insist that Jews are human only makes sense in the context of suspicion that they might not be, that they might be something else’ (66, italics in original). The human status of blacks and Jews informs so much of the dominant cultural discourse around blacks and Jews and perhaps goes a long ways to explaining the entwining of these social justice movements.2 And given the humanizing and universalizing mythopoiesis through which so much Shakespeare is consumed, it should not surprise us to find Shylock and Hamlet sometimes figuring as exemplars in these narratives. Wulf Sachs, a Jewish medical doctor and psychoanalyst working from the other end of apartheid, its beginnings, would have been psyched, however ambivalently, to see himself having already given voice to Mandela’s meditations on blacks, Jews, Shylock, Hamlet and social justice. Sachs, who would berate Jews for taking up other people’s causes while ignoring or repressing their own, would, by the time of his death in an increasingly racist and anti-Semitic South Africa, be best known

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both as an advocate for black social justice and a character of profound ambivalence. His own obituarist would pointedly decry him as an intellectual, social and political equivocator: The conflict in himself between the thoughtful investigator and the revolutionary, though it may have enriched his personality, weakened his fervour [sic] as a revolutionary and blunted his perceptions as a scientist. But he who was so energetic was not in haste to make big social changes: he was an educator of the free, not a guide for slaves.3 There is for Sachs’s 1949 obituarist something fittingly Hamletic about this man who,  like Harley Granville-Barker’s Hamlet, could ‘never … make up his mind’ (Granville-Barker 1925: 149),4 a critical view that became more or less permanently stuck to Hamlet after Laurence Olivier popularized it in the opening voiceover of his 1948 Hamlet film: ‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.’ For Sachs’s obituarist, the text that sums up and haunts Sachs’s death, and life, is Sachs’s richly autobiographical Black Hamlet: The Mind of an African Negro Revealed by Psychoanalysis (1937), which was ostensibly a psychoanalytic study – of a black African nganga, i.e. a healer-diviner, whom Sachs gives the moniker ‘John Chavafambira’. Sachs first drafted his narrative in novelistic form, African Tragedy: The Life of a Native Doctor, but finally opted for a form that he hoped would garner more serious attention from medical doctors, academicians and policymakers. Nevertheless, there are times in his ‘study’ where he admits to making up events that were not reported to him or would not have taken place in his presence (if they had taken place at all). Black Hamlet is a highly undisciplined text, something many critics have pointed out, reading at times like a novel – romantic melodrama, roman noir, political fiction and protest fiction, among them – and at others, like a work of psychoanalysis, sociology, ethnography or history, and still at others, like a work of biography or autobiography. In terms of the last of these, the main of Sachs’s narrative is divided between Chavafambira’s life before Sachs and his life after meeting Sachs. Sachs’s announcement at the beginning of Part II (there’s also a third shorter section) – ‘From now on, John’s life-story concerns the period of his association with me’ (1937: 197) – does not really begin to prepare the reader for the extent to which Sachs implicates himself not just in Chavafambira’s story, but his life. Indeed, so much of Black Hamlet, including Part I, plays out as a virtual agon between Sachs and Chavafambira and a patently unfair one, given the fact that all this is being shaped by Sachs’s narrative. The autobiographical nature of Sachs’s text has been well rehearsed and brilliantly so by many of the work’s major critics – most notably, Jacqueline Rose, Saul Dubow, Jonathan Crewe and Ranjana Khanna. And many of these critics have done a rather convincing job analysing Sachs’s exploration of and grappling with some of the formal and foundational principles of psychoanalysis, but they have also too quickly and too often assigned Hamlet something of an auxiliary role, treating it too restrictively as only the repository of Sachs’s psychoanalysis, one deeply informed by Ernest Jones’s extended Freudian reading of the play.5 And while these same critics understand,

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indeed it’s the subject matter most at hand for all of them, that Sachs’s psychoanalysis – which Crewe argues, for example, is ‘on trial’ in Black Hamlet – is deeply implicated in the ever intensifying racial politics of South Africa, they seem less attuned to how these racial politics shape Sachs’s relationship to Shakespeare’s play, particularly how Sachs finds himself reading and re-reading Hamlet as his commitment to social justice moves, however ambivalently and hesitantly, increasingly to the foreground of his own professional and personal pursuits.

HUMANNESS AND FREEDOM IN HAMLET’S SOUTH AFRICA What it means to be white, black, Jewish or human – where these terms meet, clash and bypass each other – in a changing South Africa goes to the core of how Hamlet signifies for Sachs. Hamlet is the text through which Sachs finds a way of making sense, founding a grammar so to speak, for articulating a sense of self and belonging in a society where changing attitudes and policies, formal and informal, would lead in 1948 to the full institutionalization of apartheid (coined in 1929), ‘the state of being apart’. In this South Africa where social and political separateness becomes increasingly normalized in ‘apart-hood’ (apartheid’s literal definition), Hamlet’s quip, ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ (1.2.65), takes on deeper resonance. Black Hamlet intends to challenge a South Africa that organizes and sanctions its treatment of blacks, its real and virtual imprisonment and alienation of them, by institutionalizing social policies and racial sciences to justify writing them out of kinship with whites. The collusive territorialism of kinship and kindness that the early moderns speak to (i.e. what should be the case) speaks too, to the broad understanding of social justice offered by political theorist David Miller, who asks, ‘If social justice presupposes that a boundary has been drawn inside of which its principles are applied to the circumstances of different members, how is the boundary to be fixed? Should all human beings be included, or only some?’ (1–2). But Miller presupposes a territorial contestation among human beings and sidesteps a more fundamental matter, one, albeit of course with some very real cultural and historical distinctions, that circulates in the early modern period as well as in Sachs’s 1930s South Africa, that is, the very status of blacks as human. For Sachs, the realization of social justice is inextricably bound to the crude and cruel dominant societal processes that determine in de jure fashion who among homo sapiens gets to be human. Sachs insists on reading Hamlet not simply as a play about ‘the tortured soul of an intellectual’ nor, at least not in any straightforward sense, as ‘a political play, riven with conflicts internal and external’ (Khanna 2003: 242). This, in many ways, would be a too-easy binary for him.6 The Hamlet he tries to bring into Black Hamlet is the one we met three years earlier in Sachs’s primer Psychoanalysis: Its Meaning and Practical Applications, where he offers a chapter on Hamlet ‘based on Ernest Jones’s masterly analysis of this character’, according to Sachs’s own note (1937: 197). Here, Sachs extols a Shakespeare/Hamlet who ‘with such piercing vision has … searched the depths … of all human nature … that centuries later men of every century, and of every race, have their own being moulded [sic] like wax in his hand’ (ibid.: 210). This Hamlet is the product of a Shakespeare who (in almost

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secularized Christological fashion) not only ‘freed himself’ – ‘delivered himself from something in his soul’ – but the rest of us as well, when he wrote the play (ibid.: 211). However so, the men ‘of every century, and of every race’ that Sachs identifies here are more part of an assured liberal humanism that of course, includes black Africans but does so in the kind of broad abstracted terms that really point to the real human subject as a deracinated one – free especially from what Sachs seems to see as the constraints of nationalist, racialist and religious discourses. The black African is included here almost by default, that is to say, s/he is here because of the way that Sachs’s language subscribes to a universal personhood rather than to the acknowledgement and inclusion of any kind of black particularity. Sachs’s liberal humanism is on display throughout Practical Applications, where both Hamlet and the human are characterized by an inalienable freedom that operates both from without and within. Sachs wants to import this Hamlet into Black Hamlet, where he seems to repeat the sentiments expressed in Practical Applications. But when Sachs argues in Black Hamlet that ‘Shakespeare’s tragedy appeals to men of all races and nations’, adding, ‘Shakespeare, with the intuition of genius, penetrated the depths of man’s innermost conflicts and illustrated in an unprecedented and unexcelled manner the tragic outcome of such conflicts’ (1937: 237), the context here is quite different. Whereas in Practical Applications, Sachs’s point was to foreground and insist on the universality of Hamlet, here in Black Hamlet he means to bring the black African into what he sees as the universal family, including a universal Freudian family romance. Race, particularly in Sachs’s 1930s South Africa, is anything but something that can be easily absorbed into the language of a liberal humanism (however inflected by what Sachs thought to be the universal language of psychoanalysis). When Sachs really does get around to the ‘practical’ application of psychoanalysis (as he does here), the language of his earlier text finds itself somewhat strained by matters of realpolitik. ‘Freedom’ functions differently in a text that repeatedly underscores how South Africa had become a virtual prison for blacks, and Black Hamlet delivers its most iconic and demonstrative Hamletic performance once Chavafambira has been imprisoned and other blacks accuse Sachs of not using his authority and power to free him (1937: 284–91). (I shall return to this moment later.) Sachs wants desperately (throughout Black Hamlet) to subscribe to a humanism that treats human differences ‘as if they are incidental and secondary’ (Seidler 1991: 18), and to the belief, as social theorist Victor J. Seidler explains in his critique of liberal humanism, that by allowing these traditions, histories and cultures to have weight in our experience is to compromise our freedom and self-determination as rational agents. It is to allow ourselves to fall back into ways of thinking and feeling that would determine our behaviour and so make us less free than we could be. (ibid.: 174)7 Throughout, Sachs repeatedly voices his frustrations with Chavafambira whom he sees as turning away from his potentially modern human self and finding comfort in a native atavism that only goes to support the beliefs being promulgated by an increasingly racist South Africa. Whether white South Africans or Chavafambira

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knows it, Sachs insists there is a Hamlet (suppressed though it may be) in black Africans. Hamlet dramatizes for Sachs a kind of apolitical politics, a figure whose particular circumstances may necessarily be local but whose self, i.e. humanness, is uncompromisingly universal. Hamlet (play and character) serves as Sachs’s universal ambassador. In short, insisting on an enlightened, universal humanism as the ultimate political value, as the ultimate instantiation of social justice, Sachs ‘cites’ Hamlet as prima facie evidence.8 Hamlet functions for Sachs, at least at first, not only as a universal cultural authority on the inner life but as the cultural bulwark against those who would presume to encroach on the humanness and freedom of other individuals, be they black, white or Jewish. Hamlet (play and character) functions for Sachs as the sign of an abstract revolutionary freedom, a limitless, deep and enlightened interiority that can only make its presence known when not bogged down with oppressive or repressive dictates and forces. When Sachs insists in Black Hamlet that Hamlet speaks to (and is the de facto product of) ‘all races and nations’, he means to stage Shakespeare’s play as a counter to the (kinship) discourses of ‘apart-hood’, i.e. of dis-affiliation and -filiation. But by the time Sachs finished his ‘wandering’ (as his obituarist says) and found not only Chavafambira but himself more and more enmeshed in South Africa’s realpolitik, the kind of abstracted universalism that had marked his earlier approach to Hamlet, especially in the earlier text, became more difficult to maintain. As Sachs makes his way through Black Hamlet, he begins to suspect more and more that the ‘all races and nations’ that essentially characterize the human as deracinated subject is, if not a social and political fiction, at least something in need of being rethought. Sachs’s story, like Chavafambira’s, is one about wandering through ‘all races and nations’ and one that Sachs found himself trying to anchor in Hamlet. Sachs was born in Russia in 1893, first trained at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and then went on to receive medical degrees in Cologne and London. He immigrated to South Africa in 1922, in flight from Europe’s growing anti-Semitism. His interest in psychoanalysis was galvanized in 1928 when he began working with black schizophrenic patients at the Pretoria Mental Hospital. He underwent analysis in 1929–30 in Berlin, where in 1929 he met Freud. His psychoanalytic career began in earnest with him giving a series of lectures on Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Jakob Wassermann and South African writer Sarah Gertrude Millin. He became a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1934, began the first South African Psychoanalytic Study Group in 1935, became a training analyst in 1946, lectured in the United States in 1948 (to which he had fled in order to escape the growing antiSemitism of South Africa) and died suddenly from an acute illness in 1949. In 1933, the University of Witwatersrand anthropologist Ellen Hellman introduced Sachs to Chavafambira. Chavafambira was born in Manyikaland in eastern Zimbabwe, around 1904, a ‘pure Manyika’, who came from a long familial line of healer–diviners, i.e. ngangas (according to Hellman).9 Chavafambira worked as a shepherd during his childhood, spent two years at a mission school away from his village in 1915 or 1917, and then returned to his village and worked as both a nurse and a ‘kitchen boy’. He left home for a fifteen-year period beginning in 1921, when he immigrated to South Africa like

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many Manyikas looking for work and advancement. He found domestic and hotel employment (avoiding the deadly work of the mines), married his wife Maggie and made his way to Johannesburg in 1927. He moved to Rooiyard in 1931, and when he met Sachs in 1933, he was already a cultural informant for Hellman. He agreed to a cultural and professional exchange of medical knowledge with Sachs, who would also use ‘free association’ to study (not necessarily to treat) Chavafambira, whose cooperation would presumably help Sachs prove his thesis that the normal mental states of blacks and whites were mostly equal. Black Hamlet, the outcome of that study, limns a striking list of similarities between the ‘biographies’ of Chavafambira and Hamlet. As Sachs demonstrates, ‘Even the external situation of John is very similar to that of Hamlet’ (1937: 238). They both stood to inherit authority and power through patrilineage but have those expectations dashed by an uncle who poisons his brother and usurps his public place; each sought to destroy the uncle. Both Chavafambira’s uncle Charlie and Hamlet’s uncle Claudius proceed to marry their brothers’ respective widows, Nesta and Gertrude, to whom their respective sons, Chavafambira and Hamlet, are deeply, and arguably, incestuously attached. According to Sachs, Chavafambira talked incessantly about his mother, ‘how wonderful she was, how they loved one another, and how devoted he was to her as a child, and he had many dreams about her, including at least one in which he “had the proper thing with her”’ (ibid.: 239). (Given Sachs’s general reliance on the Oedipus complex as well as his adherence to certain commonly held Western beliefs that the African suffered from a ‘groundless’ and paralyzing ‘optimism’ brought on by ‘the unstinted love of [a] mother whose milk literally flowed unceasingly (for a native mother never denies her baby the breasts)’ (ibid.: 222), not surprisingly the one line Sachs chooses to quote from Shakespeare is Claudius’s line to Laertes: ‘The Queen his mother lives almost by his looks’ (ibid.: 239)). Because of the primacy of their maternal connections, they both remained emotionally removed from their respective affectionate partners, Maggie and Ophelia. According to Sachs, Hamlet ‘fell in love with Ophelia’ but ‘was never able to wean himself’ from his mother and Chavafambira ‘was never successful, and never fully in love’ (ibid.: 239–40). They both contemplated suicide. The respective spirit of the dead father visited them both, even though Chavafambira’s father instructs him about medicines rather than calling for revenge.10 They were also both about thirty years old during the critical time of their respective stories. Rose is, of course, only superficially right when she states, ‘Sachs chooses Shakespeare’s Hamlet because of the remarkable narrative affinities between Hamlet’s tale and Chavafambira’s’ (1996a: 40). The similarities between their biographies are for Sachs, I would argue, more fortuitous than consequential. Aligning (or allying) himself with a well-rehearsed critical convention, Sachs sees Hamlet as the uber figure of interiority11 and his desire to reveal an affinity between Hamlet and Chavafambira is in many ways grounded in just this – for psychoanalysis, Oedipal – interiority. Even though crediting ‘a black African with an internal world was to go against the creeds not just of explicit racism but also of medical science’ (ibid.: 39), Sachs’s doing so was less an endpoint than a starting point. From Sachs’s humanist vantage, proving the African’s very real ontogenetic interiority (1934: 62), i.e. ‘his’ Oedipal complex – this ‘natural universal occurrence … present in the childhood of

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every human being’ (ibid.: 56–7) –would also prove (more pronouncedly so in Black Hamlet) the black African’s human status: if whites are Oedipal because they are human, then blacks are human because they are Oedipal. When he anticipates in the opening paragraphs of Black Hamlet that his research will show that ‘the fundamental principles’ of the African mind and the white one were in their ‘normal state[s] … the same’ (1937: 71), not only does he stand in opposition to those who refused to attribute the black man with any interiority but he pushes back, hard (in dramatic if not melodramatic fashion), against a mantra promulgated by social Darwinists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, eugenicists and other vested colonials that repeatedly assured audiences that ‘it is true that with his [the African’s] talent for mimicry, recalling to us in some measure his jungle cousins, he is able to present a remarkably exact, albeit superficial representation of the white man’ (Lind 1917: 303, italics added). For Saul Dubow, Sachs’s ‘psychological insight’ and his ‘humanism’ ‘equip[ped] him more adequately than many of his liberal contemporaries to appreciate the routine indignities suffered by blacks in segregationist South Africa’ (1996: 21). Jonathan Crewe expands Dubow’s argument: ‘Along with psychoanalysis the early modern humanism and European Enlightenment in which it is packaged enable Sachs to reclaim a common humanity in which he as well as John can participate’ (2001: 426). But ‘humanity’ seems something of a weak term here (a liberal humanist one), an affective appeal to just the kind of abstracted community signalled in Practical Applications that’s far more strained in Black Hamlet. If the argument in the former is, more abstractly philosophical, that blacks belong to a universal community, the focus in the latter seems, more pointedly social and political, that blacks exist as free individuated (and at least potentially enlightened) human selves. The relationship between enlightenment thought, interiority, humanness and freedom is not lost on political scientist Westel Willoughby, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, reads ‘social justice’ as an inexorable want ‘among the people of intellectual enlightenment and freedom’ (1900: 7): I am, therefore I think, or more explicatively, I am human, therefore I am free; I am free, therefore I think. Suggesting just this point, Paul D. Miller identifies ‘autonomy at all costs’ (by any means necessary) as ‘the most important precept of the Enlightenment’ (2010: 1082). Much of the critical language around Black Hamlet has focused on psychoanalysis and has more or less conceded the discussion of interiority to that disciplinary and cultural framework. First, while we are, of course, not talking about a zero sum game, yielding interiority to psychoanalysis misses, I think, not only how psychoanalysis may be read in Black Hamlet (less so in Practical Applications) as a means to an end but also how interiority is an issue as much if not more so for understanding the myriad and nuanced ways enlightened thought is ‘on trial’ in Sachs’s narrative;12 how much, for example, the issue of interiority for Sachs is tied to the issue of social justice: the assumed (promised) relationship between enlightenment and social justice causes quite a bit of strife for the cosmopolitan, highly educated and Westernized Sachs, who knows through his own personal experiences as a Jew that his efforts to bring modernity, i.e. enlightenment, to Chavafambira will not necessarily give Chavafambira access to Western humanness. Black Hamlet tells not only a black story but a Jewish one and makes Sachs less

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disinterested in his advocacy for black humanness: it also acts out the Jewish Sachs’s own Hamletic revenge performance as he foists a black Hamlet onto a society that has failed to recognize the depths of his own interiority; as a Jew (his own humanness) has failed to deliver him his own social justice, something he touches on obliquely here and there in Black Hamlet. These are important points, too, because locating interiority in an enlightened humanism contextualizes and complements the racial story that Sachs tells through Shakespeare’s Hamlet ‘who has often been taken as the first glimmer of Enlightenment man, a new figure of the human condition who, transcending the moment of emergence, stretches backward and forward through time’ (Rose 1996a: 40). In Sachs’s romance, Chavafambira becomes something of a Hamlet: he moves beyond his Hamletism and achieves something of a unitary consciousness. Like Hamlet with his new-found will-to-action as he returns to Denmark and jumps into Ophelia’s grave, Chavafambira, who has been competing with his uncle for a young woman’s romantic favours returns to Manyikaland and publicly defeats his uncle Charlie who had usurped his place as the village’s chief nganga. Writes Sachs: His own personal fight for his beloved acted as the driving-force to his desire for self-assertion, but circumstances had given him the whole of Manyikaland as a stage. Was he not the obvious leader of the people, he, John Chavafambira, hereditary nganga of the district? Self-confidence [sic] swelled within him. His chance was coming. He determined to win the girl he loved, oust Charlie, defy the powers that oppressed his people. In his day-dreams he saw himself not only the saviour [sic] of the girl, but the liberator of his family and his tribe. (1937: 317–18)13 And when Chavafambira, now a ‘man of the world’ (the new voice of social justice), proclaims (according to Sachs), ‘I will be your nganga. It is good for me to do that. As my father, Chavafambira, protected your fathers, I will protect you’ (1937: 325–6), he recalls for Sachs’s readers Hamlet’s signature repudiation of his own Hamletism: ‘This is I, / Hamlet the Dane’ (5.1.255–6).14

‘I AM A JEW’: DIS-QUOTING HAMLET Sachs adopts Hamlet as the master text for Black Hamlet, and I want to conclude by arguing that Sachs writes (more consciously than not) in order to flee, to sublimate his own Hamletism, his own incapacity to act ‘when action is required and reasonably expected’ (1937: 236). This paralysis pinpoints a want-to-be-revolutionary Sachs whose black Hamlet mirrors the ‘human recognition’ Sachs seeks for himself (Crewe 2001: 425–6) as a highly educated and cosmopolitan white Jew caught in a contact zone, trapped in a ‘double life’ between inside and outside status.15 More expansively in Sachs’s own words in Practical Applications (alluded to at the very beginning of the chapter) he writes: As a Jew, he [one of his patients] felt the effects of anti-Semitism very keenly, but, as an assimilated one, he could not join his fellow sufferers in an open fight and protest, by, for instance, joining a strong national movement. Instead, he

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sympathized to a degree of identification with women, because like them, he belonged to a group regarded as inferior and which is denied some of the rights and privileges which others enjoy. His interest in the equality of sexes was really a manifestation of his demand for equality of races. So, also, we often find Jews who are fighters for somebody else’s national or racial rights, and rationalization of similar types is the basic principle of their actions. (1934: 140–1) But unlike Sachs’s suffrage example driven by a ‘demand for equality’ (think again about Sachs’s concluding racial romance), Black Hamlet focuses the pathology on the individual character and tries to push him to equality by trying to encourage him to abdicate (forget) his local Africanness for participation in a more universal (and kingly) human community. He strives to promote the kind of ‘New African’ H. I. E. Dhlomo would write about in Sachs’s journal Democrat, who not only ‘wants a social order where every South African will be free to express himself and his personality fully, live and breathe freely’,16 but who understands he or she can become so by imagining the true self as more global than local. For the Jew in Sachs’s scenario, his sympathy turns neither on empathy nor altruism but on actively forgetting oneself, forgetting one’s roots. And in the case of Sachs as a Lithuanian Jew, he positions the undisciplined voice of Black Hamlet somewhere between a Gestandnisazwang (a compulsion to confess) and a ‘strategic forgetting’.17 For Sachs, the Jewish subject can only have a healthy sense of self if that self remains unencumbered by its Jewishness; to wit, a healthy Hamlet recognizes and speaks to the human (the man) inside the Jew. Sachs wants to subscribe to: a liberal vision of freedom … [that] assume[s] that along with our inclinations, our history, class and ethnicity can play no real part in our identities, but are simply contingent and accidental aspects which are externally constraining upon an ‘inner reason’ that is alone the source of our freedom and autonomy. (Seidler 1991: 183) Sachs’s Hamlet offers a supra-identitarian self – a signifying master voice – that Sachs adopts and performs as the voice of Black Hamlet, a voice that speaks quite consciously beyond its Jewish roots. Autobiographically, Black Hamlet is ultimately a psychoanalytic thriller, especially if we accept Sachs’s argument in Practical Applications that ‘psychoanalytical experience teaches us that madness is frequently a mode of dealing with the danger of the return of the repressed’ (1934: 204). Black Hamlet reveals and revels in Sachs’s ‘madness’: his Jewish self haunts his text as he obsessively pushes it into significance and insists it is not there, as he does, for example, when he writes with much detailed fanfare about circumcision (a practice found in some African cultures but not Chavafambira’s) but says nothing about Jewish circumcision, or when he writes about the taboo among Chavafambira’s people of eating pork: ‘I once innocently added to his confusion [back in Manyikaland] by offering him some ham from my provisions at breakfast. Chavafambira had unconcernedly consumed ham with me on many occasions’ (1937: 114, 116, 311). Sachs, of course, disregards here a similar prohibition among Jews. Or, for example, when he speaks of an African plight but alludes (we may intuit) no less to a Jewish

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one, when he effectively calls up an image of the ‘wandering Jew’ in the Jewish Diaspora, when he refers to Chavafambira in the closing paragraphs as ‘a wanderer in an unfriendly world’ (ibid.: 338). An intensifying cross-cultural political identification in Black Hamlet extends not only to a more Africanized Chavafambira but to a more globally conscious Jewish Sachs. Sachs shifts subtly, however, from a more humanistically inspired and more African-centred reading at the beginning of his text, where he observes that ‘all oppressed people … keep in close contact with one another’, to a more political and global one in the final pages where he repeats with a difference: ‘Is it, perhaps, that all oppressed people develop a strong feeling of mutual sympathy with their fellow-sufferers? The dangers to which they are exposed and the persecution to which they are all liable unite them in a feeling of “oneness”’ (ibid.: 95, 304). His rhetorical question and statement of oppressed populations who have suffered enough at the hands of white colonial authorities make something of a thinly veiled threat. The tenor of his words is clearly on display a few pages earlier when he writes about the efforts of Chavafambira’s wife’s friends to keep Chavafambira from being implicated in a murder committed by one of his patients: ‘we find ourselves as keen to save John as must have been the partisans of Dreyfus’ (ibid.: 292), a reference to l’affaire Dreyfus (1894–1906) that led to the Jew Alfred Dreyfus being falsely convicted of treason by the French government; he was later exonerated but the ordeal led to the founding of the World Zionist Organization, which pushed for the establishment of a Jewish nation-state. And however much the Jewish Sachs (as opposed to the white one) could imagine alliances between Jews and blacks, something South African officials were increasingly unhappy about, blacks were often suspicious of such alliances. Sachs recalls being told by ‘an old native’ pontificating on the particulars of the English, Dutch and Jews that the Jews ‘have no say in government …. [but] they are like jackals, glad to squeeze out of us whatever they can on the quiet’ (ibid.: 290). Understood by neither blacks nor whites, Sachs, who lays himself bare, accepts Jewish persecution even as he insists that he is in actuality a universal and free interpellated Hamletic human subject. The Sachs we find in the later pages of Black Hamlet may be said to be an ‘alone’ Hamlet (2.2.543), but he has wandered across Shakespeare’s play, trying on different persons along the way. In Practical Applications, Sachs plays an advice-giving Polonius: A well balanced man should not be afraid to be obstinate or suggestible, assertive or submissive, active or passive, when the occasion demands it, but he should be able to steer clear between over-obstinacy and over-suggestibility, overaggressiveness and over-submissiveness. The sense of justice should not manifest itself in excessive punctiliousness over trifles, nor should friendly feelings show themselves in over-kindness. So, too, impulses should be controlled, but not completely disallowed. (1934: 151) And in Black Hamlet he begins as Horatio, the teller of somebody else’s story and finds himself becoming a bit of an imperious Old Hamlet, a usurping Claudius and a spurned Ophelia before claiming for himself the heroic role of Shakespeare’s hero.

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Late in Black Hamlet, Sachs gets to prove himself as a new ‘man of action’, a man of revolutionary zeal – a Hamlet without Hamletism – when late one evening he, like Hamlet, has his own justice-seeking visitor: he’s visited by Tembu, Simon and ‘another coloured man’, who have come to inform him that Chavafambira, who is already in danger of being implicated in a murder carried out by his client Mdlawini,18 has been thrown in jail for interfering with the police harassment of a child, and tell him that it’s his duty to save him. The latter point irritates Sachs. Notwithstanding, Sachs hires a lawyer to defend Chavafambira, who has been found guilty but avoids a prison sentence by having Sachs pay a fine. The bigger issue for Sachs was Chavafambira’s rising anger and involvement in the Mdlawini case which could carry far more serious consequences. However so, Sachs imagines himself as a ‘partisan of Dreyfus’, ‘the savior of one innocent man symboliz[ing] that of the integrity of the whole society’ (1937: 292): a few days after getting Chavafambira out of jail, ‘John sat in the back of [Sachs’s] motor-car that sped [Sachs, Chavafambira, and Chavafambira’s son] towards Manyikaland, to his home’ (ibid.: 296), as Sachs dramatically breaks Chavafambira out of the prison that was South Africa.19 At the centre of this whole episode is not only Sachs as action hero but as metatexual orator who delivers a sustained Hamlet performance through a compound of soliloquies. It should also be noted that these soliloquies all take place on the night that Chavafambira is in jail and Sachs waits to learn Chavafambira’s fate. In the first, Sachs, narratively, goes into an internal monologue while his latenight visitors stand before him. He protests his innocence and then asks in a speech riddled with I’s and questions reminiscent of Hamlet’s Hecuba soliloquy, ‘How could I, one small individual, root up the curse of humanity?’ (1937: 286) This is also the Hamlet who curses he was born to set things right (1.5.197). In the second (separated from the first by a sentence), after his visitors have gone, a restless Sachs alludes to Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy by wondering whether Chavafambira’s ‘fear’ will be ‘unbearable, so unbearable’ that Chavafambira would consider suicide (ibid.: 286), even though he found Chavafambira no longer a ‘coward’ but ‘still a weakling’ (ibid.: 287). Sachs moves immediately into his (Sachs’s) third soliloquy where, according to him, he tries ‘to forget … the comments [he] had written …. [and] for the first time … see John the human being’ (ibid.: 287), recalling, of course, Hamlet’s ‘O all you host of heaven!’ soliloquy where Hamlet promises to ‘wipe away all trivial fond records / … That youth and observation copied there’ (1.5.99– 101). And then immediately into his fourth, echoing Hamlet’s ‘very witching time of night’ (3.2.390) where he, Sachs ‘in the stillness of the night’ (ibid.: 287) sees in his mind’s eye ‘the human: the real John’: And the whole panorama of his life unfolded itself vividly before me. John’s birth and christening. His mother Nesta never stopped talking of the great affair. In the church, or at [grandfather] Gwerere’s grave, and at the beer-drinking in the kraal, he was the baby son, mother’s darling, father’s choice as his perpetuator. Carefree life with practically no illness. (ibid.: 288) Sachs pulls back the curtain from a theatre of colonialism and reveals his new Hamlet rising from the dusty pages of tale-telling ghosts, graves, mothers, fathers

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and more. His musings end with him returning finally to the present moment with Chavafambira ‘in prison’ (ibid.: 289). A Hamletic Sachs takes oratorical charge and reveals himself to be Black Hamlet’s true Hamlet: despite his introjection and his liberty to focus on Chavafambira as institutional and psychological prisoner, however, he himself never gets to be a ‘free’ (or whole) – supra-identitarian – Hamlet. In this climactic compound of soliloquies, Sachs confronts himself as a thoroughly racialized subject. In fact, Sachs’s forced recognition of himself as a racialized subject crystalizes this compounded moment as the autobiographical climax of Black Hamlet, and Hamlet ‘which you might have thought would have saved [him] from so crude a … destiny’ (Rose 1996a: 80–1), reveals itself as something of a crude fiction, an unenlightened one, given the exigencies of his colonial and increasingly apartheid South Africa.20 Throughout this scene, Sachs’s humanness fractures across multiple overlapping and contradictory racial positions. He is the white man towards whom his black visitors show ‘servility’ but whose whiteness they also blame for Chavafambira’s ‘downfall’ (1937: 285–6) and makes a more politically aware Sachs anxious to prove himself neither traitor nor informant (ibid.: 290). If his whiteness is a problem, his blackness is no less so: during this compounded scene he recalls being found black by association and forced ‘to leave a consulting room … flat’ (1937: 284). He is also, of course, a Jew, and, therefore, as he also recalls here, belongs to a people accused by blacks of taking advantage of them (ibid.: 290). An internally soliloquizing Sachs stands before the gaze of his black visitors a persecuted (and prosecuted) Jewish subject: ‘Didn’t I myself, a Jew, belong to a people ceaselessly driven from pillar to post?’ (ibid.: 286) This question, the autobiographical linchpin of these compounded soliloquies, if not the whole of Black Hamlet supersedes his first (more Hamletic) question about how he ‘one small individual [could] root up the curse of humanity’; it ripples and expands throughout the scene. Sachs returns to the question several paragraphs later when he finds himself one of the possible targets of a more systematic persecutorial and prosecutorial colonial project: Mdlawini’s ‘trial continued. Mdlawini, John, myself … [sic] who next?’ (ibid.: 290). It returns again at the end of the scene when Chavafambira’s black friends put the question (as an answer) to Sachs who has asked them whether they trust his loyalty to Chavafambira: ‘What are we to think?’ (ibid.: 291). The question, the very last words of the scene and chapter lingers there, performatively as the question of a we. Textually, Sachs founds a new social and political coalition: as a Jew driven from ‘pillar to post’, he now allies himself with the oppressed, shifting the challenge his black interrogators deliver to him from himself to his white colonial reader.21 In short terms, I am arguing that Sachs’s most complete introjection of Hamlet becomes his most profound moment of Hamlet disrecognition, that is, of dissing Hamlet, the fictional man to whom Sachs turned in order to stage his own universal humanness by liberally accepting and staging the universal humanness of the black other. And if Sachs imagined all this as signalling his engaging in a process of modernity bolstered by the freedom of a self-examining and self-determining Hamlet, then the growing alliance between modernity and a civility, being defined more and more in constrictive – racist and anti-Semitic – terms would

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increasingly render the psychoanalytic liberal humanist Hamlet a more fraught and less useful model. If at the outset Sachs sees himself as the Jew taking up somebody else’s cause, what he discovers in an African present is the tenuousness of a Jewish future that sees the establishment of a homeland as a sure way to avoid persecution (Rose 1996a: 47). His Zionist aspirations turn into fantasies in the colonial terror of South Africa: the black African example makes clear to Sachs that having a homeland, even one stretching back indefinitely, is no guarantee of self-determination, of having a self immune to white tyranny: like Chavafambira’s medicines, Sachs’s arsenal (medical, intellectual or otherwise) provides him with very little protection. And it may be something of a cliché that ‘it is himself a man is looking for when he goes far away; near at hand he is liable to come up against Others’ (Mannoni 1990: 111), but it remains no more attenuated that the tragedy of Black Hamlet belongs to Sachs, who has wandered to South Africa only to discover himself as the Other from whom he has tried to escape. Where Crewe sees Sachs as desiring to become African, ‘however ambivalent[ly]’ (2001: 426), I argue finally that Sachs sees ‘becoming black’ (or African) as a way to ‘become Jewish’ (and not in any ontological sense): the very act, the very process as process, of transference, psychoanalytically and otherwise, evinces his capacity to transcend his peculiar particularities. The compounded moment becomes the anagnorisis of the autobiographical Black Hamlet, where Sachs confronts his hubristic interpellation in his own ersatz fiction of a black Other: from this vantage, blackness does not point to something real but rather to a white-owned, graded placeholder to be occupied and embodied by non-white humans, be they black, Jew, Indian, etc., and Hamlet points as readily to archetype as it does to antitype for the Jewish Sachs. However much Sachs wants to identify with Hamlet, he sounds more like Jean Améry: ‘I became a person not by subjectively appealing to my abstract humanity but by discovering myself within the given social reality as a rebelling Jew and by realising myself as one.’22 Sachs’s Jewishness comes back with precision, and while Hamlet may be the embodiment par excellence of Shakespeare’s ‘embodiment of human freedom’ (Greenblatt 2012: 1), for Sachs, Hamlet emblematizes freedom as disembodiment, that is, most prominently in Black Hamlet, the defining unraced unconscious of the black African human. But as Black Hamlet progresses, the abstracted master subject that Hamlet signifies becomes less tenable for Sachs, and while he does not abandon Shakespeare, he makes a significant gesture towards abandoning Hamlet when he revises Black Hamlet as Black Anger (1947): he leaves the Hamlet content intact but titularly disses it, strikingly erasing (or silencing) it as the narrative’s organizing principle. Even as he tries to introject Hamlet through his compounded soliloquies, Sachs can be seen turning from Hamlet to Shylock, Shakespeare’s Jew on trial. From l’affaire Dreyfus, to the Jewish witnessing in Black Hamlet, to the politically precise coalitional ‘we’ question at the end of the compounded-soliloquies scene, Sachs seems increasingly tuned to Shakespeare’s vengeance-threatening Shylock who remains all too aware culturally and personally of ‘land-thieves’ (Merchant of Venice, 1.3.21).23 Near the end of Black Hamlet, Sachs’s own rising, his own ‘bleeding’ Jewish anger can be heard, I insist, when his indirect speech turns to the subject of an African diaspora:

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To tear them away would be to leave a bleeding wound on them and on their land; to rend man from the land his ancestors had lived and in which his parents were buried, was to commit a crime screaming to heaven for vengeance. For, in a world that was slipping from under their feet, protection and succor could only be sought from these ancestors. In them they resisted; to them they prayed. (1937: 319–20) The shift to the possibility that Shylock (and not Hamlet) holds the Shakespearean arsenal and answer for becoming human becomes most pronounced near the end of Black Anger, where, interestingly, it’s Chavafambira and not Sachs who introjects Shylock’s (and perhaps Shakespeare’s) most famous call for the humanness of others (3.1.49–67), when calling for an end to black suffering: [The white man’s] excuse is that the black child cannot suffer like the white one; that if you starve it, it will not die; that if you freeze it, it will not sicken; that if you beat it, it will not feel. (1937: 296) Unlike a lone Shylock calling for vengeance, however, Chavafambira calls for broad coalition building among black Africans of whatever culture and among whites as well. Sachs fashioning himself as Hamlet in Black Hamlet reaches its most demonstrative repudiation in Black Anger when Sachs ‘dis-quotes’ Hamlet, disses him by staging his Hamletic moment as one deeply congruent with Shylock: ‘I am a Jew’ (3.1.54). Shylock’s énoncé haunts Black Hamlet more terrifyingly than any ghost ever could. To be clear, it’s not Sachs’s Jewishness per se or any kind of easily internalized anti-Semitism that’s at issue here; rather, Sachs uses Black Hamlet to work tirelessly through his own double-consciousness, treading through a black metaphorics as a way of speaking (to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison) one of those ‘unspeakable things unspoken’:24 here in Sachs’s South Africa, as it creeps towards apartheid and as Sachs witnesses (from at least a physical distance) Germany beginning to establish concentration camps in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and the systematic extermination of Jews, he finds it increasingly necessary to proclaim his humanness more explicitly and angrily. Performatively interred in the ‘black’ language of Black Hamlet is the protestation that Sachs refuses to make, that is, the protestation that Jews are human delivered as a contestation to the suspicion that they may be ‘something else’ (Greenblatt 2012: 66, qtd. above). Sachs presumes (at least in his liberal humanist world of 1933) that it is a suspicion that his introjection of Hamlet can deconstruct if not overcome. At its most crude and at its least flattering, Black Hamlet argues that if blacks are human, are kin (with whites), then, given the sociopolitical place of blacks, the same must be true for Jews. Sachs’s Hamlet becomes a particular kind of cultural artefact, dissed by the more universal figure of humanness in the context of realpolitik. No romance, no ‘unitary consciousness’, colours the end of Black Anger: by the time Sachs flees South Africa for America,25 his writings had moved from humanist extolling to socio-political purposefulness. He ends by telling his reader that, upon his departure, Chavafambira

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‘merely asked [him] to tell the people in the United States, especially the Negroes, how it was with his people in Africa, how alone, how isolated they were in their misery, with no one in the world to appeal to’ (1947: 324). Sachs, who has written ‘the story of John the man … to be read by everyone’ (ibid.: 324), began making his universal appeal of the universal subject by mounting a case through Hamlet. In the end, however, as a text Sachs reads as itself suffering from Hamletism, Hamlet can only hold out an abstracted promise of a modern subjectivity, and as the architectural master frame of his own text, it traps his text in a white universalist Christian liberal humanism that demands the excision of Jewishness. On his way to bettering the instruction (Merchant, 3.1.66–7) he finds in Hamlet, Sachs’s journeys through psychoanalysis, anti-/colonialism and his personal intimacies with a black South African and in the end Hamlet emerges for Sachs not as a text about a revered Enlightenment past but about a potentially terrifyingly impotent intellectual and political future. Crewe had argued that Sachs wanted ‘to reclaim a common humanity … [effect] a transfer of European normativeness to the African by blackening Hamlet’ (2001: 426), but I want to insist that Crewe’s working psychoanalytic frame misses something quite significant here. The enlightened thought that sits at the very core of ‘European normativeness’ becomes untenable for Sachs as he increasingly understands and experiences how humanness and its concomitant freedom are absolutely crucial to the local and global workings of social justice. It’s a critical and cultural fact that Hamlet stands in our critical and cultural imagination as Shakespeare’s surrogate in a way that Shylock does not and Shakespeare gives us not just our humanness and freedom but the discipline that makes these even imaginatively possible.26 We may do well to bring into the conversation here not only Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s argument that the humanities are actively, and sometimes corrosively, engaged in the social and political prescription of humanness,27 but also Paul Gilroy’s charged observation that ‘“race” remains an uncomfortable problem for the humanities’ (1998: 285).28 Sachs’s grappling with Hamlet serves as something of a cautionary tale not only about the fact that social justice is an inextricable part of the humanities but how our disciplinary values so often turn on just how effectively we excise social justice from ‘the language[s] of humanity’ (Harpham 2011: 59) we occupy.

NOTES 1. See Mandela 1990: 58–9. 2. For a discussion of this entwining, see, for one example, Weheliye (2014), 33–45 especially. 3. Rickman 1950: 289. 4. Granville-Barker (1926): essay first presented 13 May 1925. 5. Jones first published his Freudian reading of Hamlet in 1910 in The American Journal of Psychology. He elaborated further on this reading in his Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis (1923) and again in his Hamlet and Oedipus (1949).

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6. Closer to the ‘politics’ of Sachs’s text is what Yogita Goyal in her reading of modern abolitionist narratives calls ‘a kind of anti-politics by appeal to an obvious shared humanity’ (Goyal 2014: 64). 7. First emphasis in text Seidler; all others mine. 8. ‘Cites’ here means to reference Peter Erickson’s Citing Shakespeare, especially his explanation: ‘Citing Shakespeare is double-edged. It means to invoke Shakespeare’s quotability as an all-purpose authoritative source. But it can also mean to summon with a view to rendering judgment by engaging in critical evaluation. This second meaning prevents simple homage, and hence knocks off its tracks the idea of an imagined community whose symbolic belonging is based on feel-good common access to a Shakespeare who has said it all in the form of permanent, timeless, and universal insights’ (viii, italics added). His reading here and throughout resonates with my thinking about imagining kinship through Shakespeare. 9. Ellen Hellman (1948) includes a case history of Chavafambira in her study, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Slum Yard. Sachs calls Rooiyard ‘Swartyard’. 10. See for example, Black Hamlet, 171 and 327–8. 11. For two exemplary texts, see John Lee’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self (2000) and Richard Hillman’s Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama (1997). 12. Several of the main critics of Black Hamlet read it explicitly or implicitly as a text in which psychoanalysis is ‘on trial’. See Crewe (2001) especially. 13. Sachs sees himself as still the instrument of Chavafambira’s agency. He adds after the above: ‘My presence inspired him with still greater confidence that the final victory would be his’ (1937: 318). Presumably, Sachs’s European presence is now part of Chavafambira. 14. All Hamlet quotes are from The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (2015). 15. Sachs talks about the ‘double life’ of blacks springing from their ‘contact with European civilization’ (Black Hamlet, 235, my emphasis). Rather than the more archetypally stark contrast between blacks and whites, Africans and Europeans, I am suggesting that Sachs sets up Chavafambira to find a way to articulate a perceptively ‘more’ nuanced and fraught contact between whiteness and Jewishness. 16. Quoted in Dubow (1996: 36–7). Dhlomo, ‘African Attitudes to the European’, The Democrat, 1 December 1945. For more about Dhlomo’s ‘New African’ and its relationship to Alain Locke’s ‘New Negro’ (1925), see Couzens (1985: 110–11). Also see Dubow (1996: 18). 17. I use ‘Gestandnisazwang’ here to suggest that Black Hamlet retrospectively performs something like an unconscious confession for Sachs, whose text inscribes (witnesses) not only his failure to see or free Chavafambira’s universal and abstracted humanness but more especially his failure to fully see or free his own. I borrow the term ‘strategic forgetting’ from Crewe, who uses it in a more particular instance when talking about Chavafambira forgetting to ask his last mistress in Black Hamlet about

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her mutupo (see earlier explanation of term), and Sachs seeming to forget to offer any kind of psychoanalytic observation of it; Crewe explains, ‘no such recognition is forthcoming from Sachs, immersed as he apparently is in the romance of the “other”’. This romance of the other, I would argue, is part of the broader colonial theatre romance I discussed earlier; in other words, the romance of the other is intimately bound to the universal white romance of the self. 18. Mdlawini from Nyasaland consults with Chavafambira about his misfortunes, but Chavafambira suddenly suspects that he may be his wife’s lover, because Chavafambira knew her lover was from Nyasaland. He decides to revenge himself on Mdlawini, telling him his life was in danger; Chavafambira’s terrifying of him leads Mdlawini in the middle of the night to kill a good friend and countryman whom he mistakes for a ghost (Black Hamlet, 266–72). 19. Echoes of Hamlet’s line, ‘Denmark’s a prison … A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being o’th’worst’ (2.2.244–8), overlays so much of Black Hamlet and most especially Black Anger. For example, black settlements and villages were referred to freely and casually by white South Africans, including Sachs, as a ‘kraal’, the Dutch, Afrikaans and South African English word for ‘animal pen’, a walled or fenced-in enclosure for cattle and other livestock. However, it mattered little where black South Africans lived, because, as Ralph J. Bunche observed, there was no escape from white oppression (1992: 249). Or, as Fanon put it, ‘What is South Africa? A boiler into which thirteen million blacks are clubbed and pinned in by two and a half million whites’ (1968: 87). Moreover, prisons, argues Sachs, were an inexorable part of black life in racist South Africa. See for some pointed examples, Sachs (1937: 142 and 204). 20. Rose argues here that ‘psychoanalysis crosses completely over and, via Hamlet … passes into the service of a revolutionary ideal’ (Rose 1996a: 80–1, emphasis added). I am sympathetic towards Rose’s argument, but it seems to me the fit between psychoanalysis and any ‘revolutionary ideal’, especially for Sachs, is more fraught than Rose’s language suggests. For Sachs, I contend, the revolutionary ideal would be a shift to a place beyond the political, and psychoanalysis (which Rose is invested in saving) emerges at best as a severely compromised response to the social, political and psychological realities of South Africa. 21. The challenge faced by Sachs, who is admittedly a want-to-be-revolutionary, deserves comparison still, I think, to the kind of move that James Baldwin would make in the closing of Blues for Mister Charlie (1963), where the more pacifist Meridian argues that the instruments of black salvation may in the end be both the Bible and the gun. 22. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limit (1980), 91. It is worth the reader comparing to the ‘New African’. See Note 16 above on Dhlomo. The ‘free’ African can also be compared to C.L.R. James’s Hamlet essay. 23. Shylock’s claim that ‘there be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves, I / mean pirates’ (1.3.20–1) is a particularly charged moment (quite Sachs-like), where Shylock evokes an amalgam of atrocities against Jews then

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corrects himself (quite performatively, of course) by redirecting his reference to the more incontrovertible issue of piracy. 24. See Morrison’s essay by the same title. 25. It’s worth pointing out that Sachs belittles Chavafambira throughout Black Hamlet for his own fantasies about going to America. 26. ‘Discipline’ is meant here to evoke the ascetic, the punitive and the academy. 27. See especially Harpham (2011: 16). 28. See ibid. and throughout, especially Chapter 2, ‘Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology’, 43–79 and Chapter 6, ‘Melancholy in the Midst of Abundance: How America Invented the Humanities’, 145–90.

REFERENCES Améry, J. (1980), At the Mind’s Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Briggs, J. C. (2010), ‘The Exorcism of Macbeth: Fredrick Douglass’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’, in S. L. Newstok and A. Thompson (eds), Weyward Macbeth, 35–43, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian. Buccola, N. (2013), The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty, New York, NY: NYU Press. Couzens, T. (1985), The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo, Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Crewe, J. (2001), ‘Black Hamlet: Psychoanalysis on Trial in South Africa’, Poetics Today 22(2): 413–33. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1987), The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays and Articles, New York, NY: Library of America. Dubow, S. (1996), ‘Introduction’, in J. Rose and S. Dubow (eds), Black Hamlet, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edgar, R., ed. (1992), An African American in South Africa: the travel notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937–1 January 1938, Athens: Ohio University Press. Erickson, P. (2007), Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Eze, E. C., ed. (1997), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell. Fanon, F. (1968), Black Skin, White Masks, New York, NY: Grove Press. Gates, H. L. (1989), Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, D. B., ed. (1996), ‘Introduction’, in The Souls of Black Folk, vii–xxxv, London: Penguin. Gilroy, P. (1998), ‘Afterword: Not Being Inhuman’, in B. Cheyette and L. Marcus (eds), Modernity, Culture, and ‘The Jew’, 282–97, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Goyal, Y. (2014), ‘African Atrocity, American Humanity: Slavery and Its Transnational Afterlives’, Research in African Literatures 45(3): 48–71.

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Goyal, Y. (2015), Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Granville-Barker, H. (1926), ‘From Henry V to Hamlet’, More Prefaces to Shakespeare, 283–309, London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, S. (2012), Shakespeare’s Freedom, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Grosholz, E. (2014), ‘Nature and Culture in The Souls of Black Folk and The Quest of the Silver Fleece,’ in B. W. Bell, E. R. Grosholz and J. B. Stewart (eds), W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture, 177–92, New York, NY: Routledge. Harpham, G. G. (2011), The Humanities and the Dream of America, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hellmann, E. (1948), Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard, Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Hillman, R. (1997), Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, London: Palgrave Macmillan. James, C.L.R. (1938), The Black Jacobins, New York, NY: The Dial Press. James, C.L.R. (1992), The C.L.R. James Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Kahn, J. S. (2011), Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Khanna, R. (2003), Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lee, J. (2000), Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lind, J. E. (1917), ‘Phylogenetic Elements in the Psychoses of the Negro’, The Psychoanalytic Review 4: 303–32. Mandela, N. (1990), Nelson Mandela, Speeches 1990, ed. Greg McCartan, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Mannoni, O. (1990), Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Miller, D. (1999), Principles of Social Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, P. B. (2010), Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Morrison, T. (1992), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Patterson, O. (1982), Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rickman, J. (1950), ‘Wulf Sachs 1893–1949’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 31: 288–9. Rose, J. (1996a), ‘Introduction’, in J. Rose and S. Dubow (eds), Black Hamlet, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rose, J. (1996b), States of Fantasy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sachs, W. (1934), Psychoanalysis: Its Meaning and Practical Application, London: Cassell & Co. Sachs, W. (1937), Black Hamlet: The Mind of the African Negro Revealed by Psychoanalysis, London: Bles.

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Sachs, W. (1947), Black Anger, New York, NY: Greenwood Press. Seidler, V. J. (1991), The Moral Limits of Modernity: Love, Inequality and Oppression, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian. Tate, C. (1996), ‘Freud and His “Negro”: Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African Americans’, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1(1): 53–62. Warren, K. (2011), What Was African American Literature?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weheliye, A. G. (2014), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Willoughby, W. W. (1990), Social Justice: A Critical Essay, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Yates, S. L. (1938), ‘Black Hamlet (Book Review)’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 19: 251–2.

CHAPTER 2.4

Shakespeare and civil rights: Rhetorical universalism JASON DEMETER

SHAKESPEARE’S CONSTANT TRUTHS Among the eulogies delivered at a 1979 memorial service for labour and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph was an address by President Jimmy Carter. Randolph, the founder of the nation’s first predominantly black labour union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had died in May at the age of ninety and a number of labour and civil rights luminaries gathered at Washington, DC’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church to celebrate the activist’s life and legacy. Noting that, ‘there was hardly any … civil rights movement in [the United States] back in 1941 [when] A. Philip Randolph led the March on Washington’ (Carter 1979),1 Carter’s memorial then turns to a biographical detail that has become standard within remembrances of Randolph: his passion for Shakespeare.2 ‘[Randolph] was a man who studied Shakespeare’, claims Carter, not to show that he was highly educated or erudite, not to learn how human beings can move like chameleons on and off the stage [of] life with constantly changing principles and ideals and commitments, but he studied Shakespeare so that he could learn the constant truths of the human soul. (Carter 1979) Characteristic in the way that it recites popular assertions regarding Shakespeare’s unparallelled insight into human nature, Carter presents a quasi-religious view that presumes the poet’s value rests in his unique ability to articulate supposedly universal truths. What lifts these claims beyond common platitudes, however, is that they occur within an address celebrating Randolph, a black civil rights activist and a radical socialist. For while notions of Shakespeare’s universality had reached the status of selfevident truth within popular American culture well before the 1970s, Randolph’s love of Shakespeare is seized upon by so many as remarkable precisely because it conflicts with an equally powerful counter-narrative in which Shakespeare is portrayed as the quintessence of white, Anglo-Saxon values and Western aesthetic achievement.

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The fact that these contradictory discourses circulate in such close proximity typifies Shakespeare’s ambivalent position within postwar American mass culture. This investigation looks at the ways that this paradox is marshalled for political effect by a number of figures within the African American civil rights movement in order to give expression to an unacknowledged appropriative tradition within American civil rights rhetoric. By attending to the conditions of the poet’s deployment within the sermons and speeches of black civil rights activists and their allies, I will show how Shakespeare’s universal image was taken up and used as an instrument of social justice. While many discussions of Shakespeare’s universality rightfully address how the poet’s putatively universal ethos seems inevitably to mirror that of the dominant culture propping up his image,3 the appropriations considered herein redirect this energy by taking universalist logic to its inevitable conclusion. That is, if Shakespeare is seen to tap into a collective human experience, then to concede to the existence of such a shared humanity deconstructs wholesale persistent myths supporting the existence of racial hierarchies. This analysis explores the tactical efficacy of what I term ‘rhetorical universalism’: the use and subversion of universalist doctrine as a means of contesting essentialist constructions of identity. Indebted to Paul Gilroy’s conception of ‘strategic universalism’, I am interested in how Shakespeare’s image as a universal poet is employed to confront and challenge the entrenched white supremacist ideologies with which the poet is often implicitly associated. Though he alludes to strategic universalism at several points in Against Race, Gilroy (2000: 96, 220, 326) manages to avoid offering a straightforward explanation of the term. Nevertheless, we can infer its position as a rough equivalent to his notion of ‘planetary humanism’, broadly defined as ‘the deliberate and selfconscious renunciation of “race” as a means to categorize and divide humankind … [a] radically nonracial humanism [that] exhibits a primary concern with the forms of human dignity that race-thinking strips away’ (ibid.: 19). Crucially, my formulation departs from Gilroy in at least one major respect. While Gilroy’s language presents a valuable starting point, I am interested here in universalism’s efficacy as an improvisatory rhetorical tactic rather than its status as a broader epistemological or ontological stance. Thus, what matters most in the case of Carter’s oration are the ways it highlights the obvious incompatibility of two competing views of Shakespeare. By pitting Randolph’s deep engagement with Shakespeare against the poet’s association with a distinctly white cultural milieu, the eulogy presents auditors with a paradox. Shakespeare either is truly universal, and thus his sagacity extends across cultural and racial lines, or he is the special property of a white constituency whose racial heritage provides exclusive access to the poet’s artistry and wisdom. He cannot be both.

SHAKESPEARE’S UNIVERSAL ENGLISHNESS In some sense, the idea of Shakespeare’s universality has itself become universal. Though the language used in such discussions has varied, the frequent expressions of Shakespeare’s timelessness, his relevance, his cultural transcendence and his knowledge of human nature all seem to be getting at the same seductive idea: that

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within Shakespeare’s works there exist profound insights regarding human nature that are so powerfully expressed that their truth transcends national, cultural, historical and identificatory contingencies. Concomitant with these notions is an equally powerful sense of Shakespeare’s essential Englishness. We can see these apparently contrasting impulses given voice as early as Ben Jonson’s frequently cited memorial to Shakespeare appearing in the First Folio of 1623. ‘Triumph. My Britaine, thou hast one to showe, / To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe’, writes Jonson, ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’ (Jonson 1996: 10). Here, Jonson positions the poet’s work within a distinctly English cultural tradition while laying further claim on Shakespeare’s behalf to a far larger trans-temporal and transnational sphere of cultural influence. Shakespeare’s aesthetic achievement, claims Jonson, has allowed Britain to triumph over its literary rivals, as all of Europe is called upon to endorse Shakespeare (and England’s) perpetual eminence. While this claim represents what seems to be one of the earliest articulations of what might be called Shakespeare’s universalizing Englishness, this paradoxical discourse has continued to circulate well into the twenty-first century. Indeed, Ayanna Thompson makes this tendency plain, noting that ‘[d]espite the fact that one popular notion is that Shakespeare is timeless and universal, there is another popular notion that the universal does not really include everyone’ (Thompson 2011: 36). Put another way: ‘Shakespeare is the epitome of Western culture because he represents the exclusivity of white culture’ (ibid.: 37). And this was certainly the case within the US during the civil rights era. Consider, for example, the case of Richard Franco, a white high school student in Atlanta in the mid-1950s who remembers Shakespeare’s implication in classroom discussions of race. Describing a respected English teacher, Franco recalls: [He] read poetry beautifully … and introduced us to Shakespeare and Wordsworth. You could tell he had a real sensitivity about the human condition, about the paradoxes of life, about the fact that life is painful, and that there are lessons to be learned, insights about the nature of existence. (qtd. in Sokal 2006: 49) His teacher’s obvious aesthetic appreciation leads Franco to react with particular disappointment upon his subsequent use of Shakespeare in support of white supremacy. Franco recalls his teacher insisting during a lesson on The Merchant of Venice ‘that Jews and blacks possessed racial characteristics inherently different from those of Anglo-Saxon Protestants – that all races were not equal’ (qtd. in Sokol 2006: 49). Most informative for our purposes is the way that this remembrance gives voice to a perceived conflict between a person’s sensitivity to art, which is seen by Franco to  represent our shared humanity, and an individual’s racial biases, which aim overtly to deny transracial congruencies. Franco’s disappointment derives from the fact that ‘With all the sense of humanity that [he] got from him as an individual, it turns out he was … bigoted’ (ibid.). Shakespeare is thus drawn into conflict between the universal, described in this instance as ‘the human condition’, and the particularities of a putatively superior white race, as Franco’s teacher comes to embody the contradiction of Shakespeare’s universal Englishness. To concede Shakespeare’s

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irrelevance to people of colour would be to diminish the poet by acknowledging the boundaries of his artistry. Yet to admit the Bard’s applicability across racial and ethnic lines would be to concede the existence of a human essence that transcends these deeply entrenched categories, thereby calling into question the entire logic upon which the instructor’s white supremacy is premised. Through a feat of rhetorical sleight-of-hand, he is able to transcend this obvious paradox by enlisting Shakespeare as the ultimate authority on matters of cultural difference. The teacher is able to have it both ways as Shakespeare is constructed as both a fount of universal knowledge as well as an expert on human types.4 Astoundingly, the entire argument is premised upon Shakespeare’s unimpeachable authority regarding the essential character of Jews, as revealed by his portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. After all, who are we to argue with Shakespeare, the putative master of the human condition? While Franco’s youthful reminiscence provides a clear example of Shakespeare’s frequently contested status within the context of the evolving racial politics of the period, this ambivalence also lays the ground for a potent critique by civil rights activists who evoke Shakespeare’s image as a universal poet as a means of challenging the dominant culture’s white supremacist framework.

CIVIL RIGHTS SHAKESPEARES AND THE SERMONIC TRADITION As with any movement aimed at inciting radical social change, the struggle for black equality in America is largely a matter of rhetoric. For this reason, it makes sense that the many iconic figures in the movement, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X are remembered largely due to their persuasive faculties. Of course, neither King nor Malcolm X were operating in isolation, and both men’s approaches to political persuasion were influenced by the respective intellectual, ideological and spiritual traditions to which they subscribed. In the case of King, a product of the movement’s ecumenical Christian wing, much of his rhetorical strategy is prefigured by a broad and longstanding African American liturgical tradition.5 Indeed, as we shall see, King’s familiarity with wellworn sermonic tropes and conventions does a great deal to account for the regular presence of Shakespeare within his polemical sermons and speeches. But while King may be the most influential and well known of the many ministerial voices of the movement, he was by no means the first to evoke Shakespeare’s words and image from the pulpit in speaking to issues of racial inequality.6 The Presbyterian minister William Lloyd Imes, for example, mentions Shakespeare within the context of a 1955 sermon delivered in commemoration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Celebrating Lincoln as the ‘righteous’ and ‘Christ-like’ emancipator of slaves, Imes meditates on his influence upon the nascent civil rights movement, framing the president’s life and social conscience as something to be emulated by others concerned with equality (Imes 2006: 89, 92). Turning early in his address to Lincoln’s education and love of books, Imes praises his literary discernment, writing:

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when he knew he was interested in the law, he chose Blackstone … When he saw the excellence of the English style of some others, he steeped his mind in Shakespeare, and read what that master had to say of human nature; and who of us has any doubt where he got his great sense of moral idealism, and his undeniable faith in a ‘power that makes for righteousness.’ Well, you and I know full well that the Bible was his great source of inspiration here. (Ibid.: 90) Imes’s reference is revelatory in the way that Shakespeare is positioned firmly within a triumvirate of elite English cultural icons, all of whom are seen as instrumental in informing a particular aspect of Lincoln’s character. His legalistic insight is understood to derive from the influential eighteenth-century English jurist Sir William Blackstone, while his spiritual awareness is said to spring directly from his engagement with the Bible, itself translated under the authority and auspices of King James I.7 Most significant, for our purposes, is the fact that Lincoln’s humanistic insight is said to originate from his intense familiarity with the works of Shakespeare, who is seen as a ‘master’ capable of capturing and reproducing transcendent truths regarding human nature. Here, Imes taps into a longstanding myth regarding the poet’s universalism in heralding Shakespeare’s portrayal of essential human characteristics present within individuals irrespective of their positions in time, space or circumstance. While this notion is certainly far from novel, its significance here is its application in the context of a speech dedicated to racial equality in America. In alluding to Shakespeare’s universality within the context of a polemical address lauding Lincoln for his eventual opposition to slavery, Imes throws the paradox of Shakespeare’s cultural estimation into relief, suggesting that if Shakespeare is indeed universal, then his works might fittingly be enlisted in the service of a genuinely inclusive brand of American social politics. Indeed, Imes makes the multicultural imperative inherent to such universalist sentiment plain later in his sermon, noting that ‘The side of righteousness and human justice, whether to Gentile, or Jew, to Negro or Aryan is one eternal matter in the eyes of God’ (ibid.: 91). God, much like the universal Shakespeare, refuses to countenance ethno-racial distinctions when it comes to matters of social justice, and thus any universalist doctrine worthy of the name must necessarily extend to all races. While Imes’s sermon employs universalist rhetoric to argue for the poet’s broad applicability on matters of racial justice, the tension between Shakespeare’s proprietary whiteness and his alleged ability to speak to a panoply of human experiences is often present even when his universality is not explicitly evoked. This dynamic can be seen in a 1956 sermon by James Hudson. Speaking at Howard University, Hudson employs language from Hamlet as a way to emphasize the transformational energy of the emerging movement. After arguing that ‘The world is in revolution and [that] we as a nation are at the crossroads of history’, Hudson turns to an oft-quoted moment from Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy as a means to advise his auditors of how best to adapt to tumultuous change (Hudson 2006: 189). ‘Speaking to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet’, Hudson recalls, ‘Polonius says, “This above all to thine ownself be true, and as it must follow as the night, the

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day, Thou canst not then be false to any man”’ (ibid.: 191). He goes on to adumbrate the maxim’s applicability, describing the context of Polonius’s contention thusly: ‘The son you know is about to go from Denmark to France. This new heaven of self-devotion to be the best is for Polonius the way to victory over life. O Polonius, thou giveth us a great lesson’ (ibid.). In citing the platitudinous dictates presented to Laertes before his impending departure to France, Hudson makes use of what was a common metaphor within civil rights discourse: the struggle as a journey. Of course, the metaphor of a pilgrimage has a long history within liberatory discourse, and the biblical narrative of the Jews’ journey from captivity in Exodus is foundational in the West. Yet in melding Shakespeare’s language with a well-known social justice trope, Hudson’s brief exegesis works powerfully to foist new meanings onto Shakespeare’s text. Indeed, it is significant that Hudson’s praise of Polonius, delivered as it is using a kind of faux-Elizabethan verbiage, argues against longstanding critical orthodoxies that view Polonius as a doddering old fool prone to boring his children into submission with stale aphorisms. Hudson’s strategic appropriation within the context of a discussion of the era’s increasingly revolutionary civil rights zeitgeist works to wrest Hamlet away from contemporary critics and cultural gate-keepers, denying conventional wisdom and thereby imparting new interpretative life into the text by claiming it for his own politically charged purposes. Just as illuminating is a 1961 speech by James MacBride Dabbs, a professor of English at South Carolina’s Coker College. Delivered as an address before the Southern Regional Council, an organization founded specifically to encourage white liberals to join American blacks in their struggle for racial equality, Dabbs, a white Presbyterian minister, begins his speech with an evocation from Othello’s wellknown, though thoroughly unconvincing, apologetic delivered directly prior to his public suicide. Dabbs says: Othello, on the verge of taking his own life, begged of his lieutenant Cassio ‘Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.’ I should like to speak of the South as it is. I don’t think it intends like Othello, to commit suicide, though some of its gestures are rather frantic. I do think in the modern world, into which it is rushing, it may lose its life without really having found it. (Dabbs 2006: 446–7) In contrast to Imes’s canny use of a decontextualized Shakespearean soundbite, Dabbs’s citation is interesting precisely because of its strategic inversion of the racial politics of its source text. While Othello is a play that forecloses the possibility of transracial love and takes an ultimately dim view of pluralism more broadly, Dabbs uses Othello’s dialogic contention for radically divergent ends. Indeed, in an address excoriating the South, evoking ‘the ultimate pathos of the Lost Cause’ and hypothesizing that, ‘if the present race pattern goes, the South is dead’, Dabbs effectively deconstructs the discriminatory logic of his Shakespearean antecedent (ibid.: 448). As an English professor, Dabbs would likely have been aware of the contextual significance of his evocation. He would know that, in the final scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy, what Othello requests of Cassio, Graziano and Lodovico, those few who remain to witness his bloody suicide, is that they

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do not misrepresent or inflate the General’s misdeeds in light of any personal malice they might feel  – that they do not forget the service he has done for his adopted nation and that they concede that this ultimate fault was to love too much, driving him to lose sight of the true value of what he should have most prized. Using Othello as a cautionary tale, Dabbs warns recalcitrant Southerners against adhering so firmly to a misplaced sense of Southern pride that they risk losing the very thing that they claim to cherish above all else: their Southern heritage. He reminds them of the increasing inevitability of federally enforced integration along with the inescapabilty of increased black enfranchisement, evoking the prodigious population of black Southerners whose votes would soon become a matter of no small consequence to the political future of the region. Following Othello’s dictate and attempting to speak of the South as it is, Dabbs does little to soften the sting of his rhetoric, excoriating the ‘nightmare’ of segregation and exposing the undemocratic underpinnings of what was popularly termed ‘the Southern way of life’ (ibid.: 448). In this instance of appropriation, Dabbs harnesses the authority of Shakespeare’s most resonant tragedy when it comes to questions of black and white division – Othello, a work that has so firmly woven itself into the fabric of the Western racial consciousness as to have become one of the culture’s original racial myths. Michael Neill, for example, has argued that Othello ‘has rightly come to be identified as a foundational text in the emergence of modern European racial consciousness’, and even a cursory survey of the play’s performance history makes clear the degree to which Shakespeare’s tragedy has both informed, and been informed by, contemporary mythologies of race (Neill 1988: 361).8 Dabbs thus appropriates material from a narrative fixated on the intrinsic dangers of cross-cultural desire – a threat portrayed as so acute within Othello that its breach is enough to incite deceit, treachery and murder – and employs it for ideologically antithetical ends. For Dabbs, it is not racial admixture but its antithesis that is seen to presage an inevitable cultural decomposition. Just as Othello and Desdemona’s socially proscribed union leads to a breakdown of the communal order culminating in the deaths of the play’s primary transgressors as well as a host of collateral victims, Dabbs repurposes Othello’s final speech to suggest a similar fate for the increasingly defiant Southern segregationists. The alleged universality of Othello’s memorable final speech is used to reject Shakespeare’s denial of the generative potential of transracial union, and Othello’s admonitions are made instead to deconstruct retrograde Southern segregationist practices. The rhetorical efficacy of Dabbs’s citation is persuasive precisely for the way it destabilizes conventional readings of the scene, repurposing what is often interpreted as a socially coercive warning against the dangers of transracial desire into a socially coercive warning against continued segregation. In matters of race in America, Dabbs is taking what we might well see within the play as a matter of Shakespearean social injustice – the argument against racial mixing demonstrated by Othello – and transforming it into a new advocacy for social justice in the form of desegregation in the American South. By now we have seen canny evocations as well as strategic inversions of Shakespeare’s work within a host of ecumenical civil rights contexts. Yet perhaps

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the most efficacious of these sermonic allusions to the poet comes from the white Methodist preacher Francis Gerald Ensley. Contrary to the numerous cases in which Shakespeare’s authority is marshalled in order to endorse a political position, Ensley engages in an alternative strategy, evoking the very ineffability of Shakespearean signification for rhetorical effect. Likening Christ’s empathy to that which a parent feels towards their children, Ensley explains the way that similar sensitivities are manifest within great artists. ‘Isn’t it interesting that we know so little about Shakespeare’s life and personality despite his voluminous writing’, he asks (Ensley 2006: 576). ‘He entered so skillfully into the mind of his every character, from Falstaff to Macbeth, that we do not know what his own philosophy was’ (ibid.). And this, it seems, is a fitting place at which to arrive when discussing Shakespeare’s rhetorical implementation within the sermons and speeches dedicated to the cause of civil rights. Clearly, Ensley’s view of Shakespeare’s universalism contradicts that which is generally put forth. His reference to Macbeth, a tyrannical regicide, and Falstaff, a drunken criminal, points most obviously to Shakespeare’s skill at capturing particular strains of human weakness and immorality. Rather than celebrating Shakespeare for his ability to embody some ill-defined set of attributes which all of humanity is imagined to share, Ensley disavows the universal and instead celebrates Shakespeare for his radical unknowability, and his subsequent evocation of Shakespeare’s ideological inscrutability productively reframes the Bard as a potential agent of empathy rather than reflexively reifying his status as an object of mandatory veneration.

‘THERE IS DIVINITY THAT SHAPES OUR ENDS’: MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR IN ELSINORE As we have seen, Shakespeare has been a frequent presence within American civil rights discourse. And no figure looms larger within the movement than the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Given King’s fame, it is no surprise that many of his speeches and sermons containing evocations of Shakespeare’s work and iconicity have survived. And among the works most frequently cited by King is Shakespeare’s famously deliberative tragedy, Hamlet. While the play’s seemingly endless quotability ensures its unique place within Western culture, so too does its intense concern with matters of redress, both personal and political, which seem to resonate especially within the context of the civil rights movement. As Arthur L. Little, Jr. makes clear in his chapter in this collection, it is for this reason that Fredrick Douglass quoted from Hamlet repeatedly and why the play continues to operate as a fertile site for discourses ‘by and about black folks’ (Chapter 2.3). Given its particular renown, it thus seems predictable that King would come to ruminate more than once upon the Danish prince’s famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy in 3.1. In ‘A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart’, a sermon from 1959, King uses Hamlet’s reflection on the uncertainty of death as a means of addressing the theretofore uncharted path of the developing civil rights movement:

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When Moses led the children of Israel from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land, he discovered that slaves do not always welcome their deliverers. They would rather bear those ills they have, as Shakespeare pointed out, than flee to the others that they know not of. They prefer the ‘fleshpots of Egypt’ to the ordeals of emancipation. (King 1981: 18) Notable as a glancing gesture towards Hamlet’s soliloquy, King assumes a significant level of audience familiarity as he neglects to contextualize his reference. For those shrewd enough to pick up on the subtext of King’s remark, however, its resonance is unmistakable. Hamlet’s choice in Shakespeare’s play is to continue to suffer ‘Th’ oppressor’s wrong[s]’ or to end his ‘heartache’ by committing suicide (3.1.70, 61); significantly, King seems to reject these choices. ‘This is not the way out’, he contends, warning that: There are hardhearted and bitter individuals among us who would combat the opponent with physical violence and corroding hatred. Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace. (Ibid.) In terms of both social politics and tragic aesthetics, King’s point is resonant. Given Hamlet’s position as Western culture’s foremost revenge tragedy, King’s condemnation of retaliatory violence is germane to the action of the play, which is similarly invested in examining the effects of retributive violence as perpetuated upon subsequent generations. It is, after all, no accident that Hamlet and Fortinbras are the names of both fathers and sons. Fortinbras’s abrupt ascension, along with his final exhortation – ‘take up the bodies. Such a sight as this / Becomes the field but here shows much amiss’ – portends a perpetuation of the chaos that has long suffused the kingdom of Elsinore (5.2.385–6). King’s rhetoric rejects the tragic narrative governing the conclusion of the revenge tragedy, urging auditors instead to embrace the uncertainties inherent in a movement aimed at the redistribution of political power. Thus, King draws upon Hamlet’s notorious indecisiveness while rejecting ultimately the revenge the Prince finally manages to enact. Here again, we see a famous Shakespearean moment used as a negative exemplar to the actions of social justice – as the way not to do things well for the coming age. King returns to Hamlet’s soliloquy in another sermon from the early 1960s entitled ‘Antidotes for Fear’. Here, a dour King ruminates on the existential threats posed to humankind in the midst of the nuclear era. ‘In these days of catastrophic change and calamitous uncertainty, is there any man who does not experience the depression and bewilderment of crippling fear’, he asks. After meditating upon the problems of ‘excessive drink’, ‘sexual promiscuity’ and the ‘capriciousness of the stock market’, he arrives at the core of his argument: The advent of the atomic age, which should have ushered in an era of plenty and of prosperity, has lifted the fear of death to morbid proportions. This terrifying

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spectacle of nuclear warfare has put Hamlet’s words, ‘To be or not to be,’ on millions of trembling lips. Witness our frenzied efforts to construct fallout shelters. As though even these offer sanctuary from an H-bomb attack. (King 1981: 116) Once again, King focuses attention on Hamlet’s impassioned plea for ontological certitude. Unlike Hamlet, however, King refuses to accept ‘the weari[ness] of life’, finding meaning by rejecting despair and hatred in favour of an essentially optimistic adherence to a broad doctrine of nonviolent resistance in the face of injustice (3.1.79). Significantly, King acknowledges the primal utility of fear, terming it ‘the elemental alarm system of the human organism’ (ibid.). And in what could easily be recast as a summation of Hamlet’s tragic dilemma, King concludes his sermon by reminding auditors that fear only becomes a problem, when it ‘paralyzes us … [by] poison[ing] and distort[ing] our inner lives’ (ibid.). While Shakespeare’s Hamlet is largely defined by his endless deferral of action, the core of King’s speech works explicitly to caution against such paralysis in the face of existential dread. King’s most innovative engagement with Hamlet comes in a 1956 sermon delivered to mark the second anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. A generally upbeat oration, King quotes Shakespeare as a means of marking how much progress the movement has already made. Hitting upon what would become a characteristic theme, he contends that there is ‘something in the very nature of the universe that assists goodness in its perennial struggle against evil’ (ibid.: 79). He uses the inherent justice he sees within the world to contend finally that ‘Something in this world justifies Shakespeare in saying: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will”’ (ibid.: 79–80). He moves then to adumbrate the movement’s successes in addition to admitting the distance that remains: The truth of the text is revealed in the contemporary struggle between good in the form of freedom and justice, and evil in the form of oppression and colonialism … But in spite of the resistance and recalcitrance of the colonial powers, the victory of the forces of justice and human dignity is gradually being achieved … In our own American struggle for freedom and justice, we are seeing the death of evil. (Ibid.: 80-1) Once again, King strips Shakespeare’s language of its context, repurposing the text’s fatalistic posturing to fashion instead a narrative celebrating the virtues of patient redemption. Indeed, much of King’s engagement with Shakespeare works to refute the dire fatalism inherent in the tragic form of many of Shakespeare’s plays. In his 1958 sermon ‘A Knock at Midnight’, for example, King argues against Macbeth’s famously nihilistic contention that life ‘is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’ (5.5.25–7). Contesting both the hopelessness of Schopenhauer (‘life is an endless pain with a painful end’), as well as Macbeth’s fatalistic sense that ‘life is a tragicomedy played over and over again with only slight changes in costume and scenery’, the indefatigable King concludes that ‘even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope’ (ibid.: 62). As before, King

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redirects the pessimism of the tragedies from which he quotes within the service of a broad and optimistic social justice agenda. Returning to the question of Shakespeare’s universality, then, it seems clear that King found Shakespeare’s work to be anything but broadly applicable. Indeed, Shakespeare’s tragedies functioned for King primarily as negative exemplars – as evocations of the worst that human nature has to offer. So while Shakespeare’s verse does not seem to endorse King’s political project overtly, the poet is nevertheless useful in providing iconic moments of cultural failure as a backdrop for King’s promotion of a new, antiracist social order. It matters not that Hamlet’s affirmation of divinity occurs mere moments before his bloody execution. What counts for King and other civil rights appropriators is the rhetorical efficacy of the soundbite and the cultural force of Shakespeare’s perceived universality.

CODA: MAKING NEW NATIONS By way of conclusion, I return briefly to President Carter’s memorial for Randolph, primarily because it represents one of the more unexpected civil rights appropriations. ‘I found a passage from Shakespeare that I think might be appropriate, and I’d like to read it’, says Carter, after reminding audiences of Randolph’s love of the Bard (Carter 1979). ‘It’s just two lines’ (sic), he continues: ‘Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine his honor and the greatness of his name shall be’ – and a very strange but pertinent ending – ‘and shall make new nations.’ It would not be appropriate to take away from many others, some in this church, credit for the achievements of the last few years or decades. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that A. Philip Randolph contributed to the making of a new nation; not a perfect nation, not a nation worthy of maintaining the status quo, but a nation of struggle which has observed progress. (Carter 1979) Here, Carter borrows material from the end of Henry VIII, a history play written by Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher. Occurring a mere twenty-five lines before the play’s conclusion, the allusion takes the form of a portentous prediction regarding the successful reign of King James I, nominally responsible for uniting Great Britain and the successor to Henry’s daughter Queen Elizabeth: Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror, That were the servants to this chosen infant, Shall then be his and like a vine, grow to him. Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, His honour and the greatness of his name Shall be, and make new nations. He shall flourish, And like a mountain cedar reaches his branches To all the plains about him. Our children’s children Shall see this and bless heaven.

(5.4.47–54)

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Irrespective of whether or not Carter was consciously aware of his parallel construction of Randolph and the seventeenth-century English monarch, the very fact that he finds the allusion apt is a testament to the rhetorical malleability of Shakespeare’s verse, as the poet’s colonialist rallying cry is refashioned in praise of one whose life was dedicated to the uplift of an African American citizenry whose very existence as such can be traced directly to the exploitative imperatives of European colonialism. What each of these civil rights citations suggests, finally, is the degree to which notions of Shakespeare’s universality can themselves be made instrumental in ameliorating the Bard’s hegemonic functionality within Western culture. That is, if universalism can effectively be turned against itself, being made to deconstruct Shakespeare’s proprietary whiteness by the marshalling of his authority within the service of a decidedly liberatory social politics, then the meanings embedded within Shakespeare’s texts are themselves revealed as unstable and ultimately contestable. In this way, these civil rights era citations deny a top-down interpretative model in which meaning is imparted to audience members from on high, pointing instead to the possibility, however unlikely its realization might be, of a truly democratic approach to Shakespeare and his plays. For it would seem to be the case that any claim Shakespeare might have to the status of universal poet would be most clearly felt when his work is taken up and used for purposes antithetical to those of any self-appointed custodians of his cultural legacy. True universality, if such a thing is to exist, must encompass all things up to and including dissent. It must allow for oppositional voices and must embrace ideological uncertainty. The examples above seek not to challenge the poet’s cultural dominance within the West, but rather to redirect these popular perceptions by using his image as a universal poet to foreclose outright the possibility of a racially exclusionary Shakespeare. They recognize, finally, that the poet’s ultimate value lies not in his perpetuation of a universalist fantasy in which all humans are essentially the same, but rather in the diversity of interpretations and meanings to which his work, in all of its glorious ambiguity, provides us access.

NOTES 1. Randolph is widely regarded for his leadership in 1941’s March on Washington Movement, which aimed at desegregating the American military and establishing broader protections against workforce discrimination against blacks. He is further remembered, along with Bayard Rustin, as an organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. 2. As a young adult living in Harlem, Randolph is known to have founded a Shakespearean society, Ye Friends of Shakespeare, and his enduring enthusiasm for the playwright is mentioned in numerous popular and scholarly treatments of his life. See Associated Press (1979: A1); Anderson (1973: 11, 18, 47, 59, 71); Bynum (2010: 58–9, 64); Kerston (2007: 3, 6); Miller (2005: 32); Pfeffer (1996: 8); and Taylor (2006: 222).

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3. A notable exception to this line of thinking can be found in Kiernan Ryan’s chapter in this collection and is developed in greater detail in his Shakespeare’s Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution (2015). While Ryan admits that Shakespeare’s universal image has been used frequently for oppressive ends, he looks to rehabilitate notions of Shakespeare’s ‘revolutionary universalism’ by emphasizing the ways that his drama can ‘reveal the potential of all human beings to live according to principles of freedom, equality, and justice’ (ibid.: 9). As my argument will attest, while I concede fully the possibility of Shakespeare’s work being employed for ideologically progressive ends, I differ markedly from Ryan in my scepticism that this potentiality lies in an essential ‘commitment to the universal human potential’ to live according to egalitarian ideals (ibid., emphasis in the original). In contrast, I argue that it is the ambiguities within Shakespeare’s texts that allow for his easy implementation across ideological lines. That is, Shakespeare’s universalism, insofar as it exists, is a product of the many perspectives represented within his corpus, rather than any essential commitment to justice or egalitarianism underpinning the work. Quite simply: because appropriators can so readily excerpt Shakespeare in defence of any number of perspectives, many of them contradictory to one another, Shakespeare’s work is seen as broadly applicable and therefore universal. While merely presenting an array of diverse perspectives within his work may itself be seen as indicative of a kind of pluralistic impulse, I am hesitant to concede, with Ryan, that Shakespeare’s plays spring from ‘a radical dissatisfaction with Shakespeare’s world … [that] propels Shakespeare’s plays beyond the horizon of his age to speak with more authority and power than ever to ours’ (ibid.). 4. Significantly, Shakespeare’s uncritical veneration from within the classroom appears to be deleterious to a social justice agenda even in cases where the instructors’ ideological aims are benign or seemingly well intentioned. Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi’s chapter in this volume explores how the poet’s frequent use of various slurs, slanders and insults, when combined with persistent notions of Shakespeare’s timelessness and universality can work to trigger in students perceived threats related to their group identities. As Turchi and Thompson note, while ‘the Shakespeare text may be nasty … the threat resides in the way that the nastiness of the text is subsumed under the cloak of universality’ (Chapter 2.1). 5. See Findlay (1993) for a sustained investigation of the relationship between mainstream Protestantism and the civil rights movement. 6. Houck and Dixon’s collection, Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement (2006) was invaluable in providing a wide selection of the sermons and speeches from the civil rights movement examined herein. 7. It is known that Lincoln read extensively from the King James translation of the Bible in particular (Trueblood 1973: 134; Szasz 2008: 54). See Elmore (2009) for a recent book-length treatment on the influence of the King James Bible on Lincoln’s writings and speeches. This translation would be similarly influential for Martin Luther King, Jr., and scriptural references within the reverend’s work invariably rely on verbiage particular to the King James Version. Significantly, US President Barack Obama used both Lincoln’s and King’s Bibles to affirm the oath of office for his second term. The so-called Lincoln Bible, which is now owned by the Library of Congress, is

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an 1853 King James edition, while King’s travelling bible, which family members say he ‘carried with him on the road and used for preparing sermons and speeches’, is a King James Bible bound in black leather (Associated Press 2013). 8. Daileader (2005) provides a compelling analysis of the play’s trans-historical resonance within Western racial consciousness, describing what she calls ‘Othellophilia’, or ‘the critical and cultural fixation on Shakespeare’s tragedy of interracial marriage to the exclusion of broader definitions, and more positive visions, of inter-racial eroticism’ (6). See Vaughan (1994) for a general examination of prevalent trends in performance and reception. While not focused primarily on the play’s racial politics, Vaughan’s contextual history of Othello exemplifies the degree to which the play has functioned as an object of racial contest from its earliest Jacobean staging through those in the late twentieth century.

REFERENCES Anderson, J. (1973), A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait, New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Associated Press (1979), ‘A. Philip Randolph is Dead; Pioneer in Civil Rights and Labor’, The New York Times, 17 May late edn.: A1. Associated Press (2013), ‘Obama to Use Lincoln’s and Martin Luther King’s Bibles for Swearing-in’, The Guardian, 10 January. Available online: https://www.theguardian. com/world/2013/jan/10/obama-inauguration-lincoln-martinlutherking-bibles (accessed 3 October 2015). Bynum, C. L. (2010), A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Carson, C. and K. Shepard (eds) (2001), A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., New York, NY: Warner Books. Carter, J. (1979), ‘A. Philip Randolph Remarks at Memorial Services for the Late Civil Rights Leader’, The American Presidency Project, University of Santa Barbara, n.d. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-memorial-services-for-civilrights-leader-philip-randolph (Accessed 15 Jan 2014). Dabbs, J. M. (2006), ‘Who Speaks for the South’, in D. W. Houck and D. R. Dixon (eds), Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement 1954–1965, 445–54, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Daileader, C. R. (2005), Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elmore, A. E. (2009), Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: Echoes of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Ensley, F. G. (2006), ‘On Loving One’s Neighbor as Oneself’, in D. W. Houck and D. R. Dixon (eds), Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement 1954–1965, 574–80, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. ‘Excerpts From Addresses at Lincoln Memorial During Capital Civil Rights March: on Washington’ (1963), The New York Times, 29 August: 21. Findlay, Jr, J. F. (1993), Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Gilroy, P. (2000), Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Houck, Davis W., and David E. Dixon (eds) (2006), Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Hudson, J. (2006), ‘Where to Look for Victory’, in D. W. Houck and D. R. Dixon (eds), Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement 1954–1965, 188–92, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Imes, W. L. (2006), ‘Abraham Then, and Now: Religion and the Pioneer’, in D. W. Houck and D. R. Dixon (eds), Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement 1954–1965, 87–93, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Jonson, B. (1996), ‘To the Memory of my Beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: And What He Hath Left Us’, in The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile: Based on Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library Collection, 9–10, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Kersten, A. E. (2007), A. Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. King, M. L., Jr (1981), Strength to Love, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Miller, C. C. (2005), A. Philip Randolph and the African American Labor Movement, Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds. Neill, M. (1998), “‘Mulattos,” “Blacks”, and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 49(4): 361–74. Pfeffer, P. F. (1996), A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Ryan, K. (2015), Shakespeare’s Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution, London: Bloomsbury. Sokol, J. (2006), There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Szasz, F. M. (2008), Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns: Connected Lives and Legends, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Taylor, C. (2006), A Philip Randolph: The Religious Journey of an African American Labor Leader, New York, NY: NYU Press. Thompson, A. (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America, Oxford, MA: Oxford University Press. Trueblood, E. (1973), Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish, New York, NY: Harper & Row. Vaughan, V. M. (1994), Othello: A Contextual History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2.5

Shakespeare’s Disabled, Disabled Shakespeare ADELLE HULSMEIER

INTRODUCTION Shakespeare’s subtle exploration of moral issues, analysis of human and social problems and his attempt to grapple with ‘timeless’ and ‘universal’ themes have for many years made his plays appear as ideal vehicles for artists concerned with raising public and political consciousness and promoting social justice amongst marginalized communities. Over 400 years after his death, Shakespeare’s plays still appeal to a wide range of projects concerned with social justice due to their opportunities to promote critical and collaborative reflection. Disabled theatre is an integrative form of theatre, which identifies with opportunities for social justice by ‘pursuing an activist perspective in dismantling stereotypes, challenging stigma, and re-imagining Disability as a valued human condition’ (Johnston 2012: 43). It is theatre that ensures that Disabled people are at the centre of the creative process, allowing Disability to influence that process. More precisely, it can be defined as theatre which involves a majority of Disabled people, explores a Disability aesthetic and mirrors in some way the lives of Disabled people. (Morrison 1992) There are a range of Disabled theatre projects that use Shakespeare in order to explore some level of social justice.1 Through various levels of active and integrative participation, the results are suggested to be transformative for those involved (Cox 1992; Linklater 1993; Hughes 1993; Cox and Thielgaard 1994; Jacobs 2008; Walsh 2012). Often, the justification behind selecting Shakespeare’s plays as a tool to aid social justice is founded in the promotion of a universalizing discourse. This discourse can afford an ‘unreflective affirmation’ of a range of ideals promoted through the engagement with Shakespeare’s plays. The implication is that complex and complicated profiles of characters found in Shakespeare’s plays can be promoted and explored by potentially vulnerable communities of people as a ‘blueprint’ for learning about social justice. The ideals promoted can often be assumptive and

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taken-for-granted beliefs about the work that often overrides the consideration of the political and cultural values embedded in Shakespeare’s own theatre. As a method of subverting the universalization of Shakespeare’s plays, this chapter suggests the use of new historicism and Brecht’s historicization. For demonstrative purposes, it applies a historical reading to the character of Richard/Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III and Henry VI Parts Two and Three (to alleviate confusion the character is simply referenced as Richard throughout). This method aims to demonstrate how, through new historicism and Brecht’s historicization, participants are able to find relevant and appropriate opportunities to consider social justice. The chapter recommends that a critical and historical reading of Shakespeare’s plays remains important to the practice of considering social justice and affords three main outcomes: 1) it offers the participants a safe distance when exploring opportunities for social justice; 2) it subverts the universalizing discourse to avoid assumptive and taken-for-granted beliefs about Shakespeare’s work; and 3) it challenges the concept of universal truth and demonstrates where differences and not similarities exist. Overall, this chapter argues that for any social justice to be understood in Shakespeare’s plays, there must be an understanding of what may have influenced Shakespeare’s own understanding and presentation of Disability. A Renaissance reading of Shakespeare’s Richard is offered in order to more carefully interrogate the use(s) of his plays in tackling social justice from the perspective of Disability.

METHODOLOGY: NEW HISTORICISM AND BRECHT’S HISTORICIZATION Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) is an important figure in understanding why one would benefit from reading Shakespeare’s works historically. His links to social justice are also acknowledged. Brecht recommends the technique of historicization, which is a device used to interpret the play as a product of historical development. It acknowledges that different points in history produce different values, behaviours and opinions. Brecht argues that because the present day differs (often substantially) from earlier periods there is a necessity to recognize the work in its original context. It is in relation to Brecht’s concept of verfremdungseffekt that the historical reading of Shakespeare’s work becomes coherent.2 The distancing effect offers attempts to create a cognitive change where the granted is no longer taken for granted. By distancing oneself from the issues of today and reading them through the lessons of yesterday the mind is concentrated on opportunities for social change. According to Brecht, ‘[a] representation that [estranges] is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar’ (Brecht and Willett 1992: 190). For Brecht, verfremdungseffekt used alongside historicization ‘keeps impermanence always before our eyes, so that our own period can be seen to be impermanent too’ (ibid.). By stressing the impermanence of social conditions, Brecht explains that change can happen and social justice can be achieved. Brecht explains that conditions are created by man and they can be changed by man, through learning and changing things based on looking back at similar things that have happened in history. Once conditions are no longer seen as universal or permanent, but as changeable, the

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audiences’ will say (in Brecht’s words), ‘[t]his person’s suffering shocks me, because there might be a way out for him’ (Martin and Bial 2000: 26). Complimentary of Brecht’s theatrical vision for Shakespeare’s work is the literary work of new historicists who are similarily concerned with reading Shakespeare’s work as a product of history. New historicists aim to understand Shakespeare’s work through the context of its own time, comparing this to how the plays have been used in English culture since the seventeenth century. Greenblatt (2000) who co-founded new historicism, offers a method of understanding literature by examining elements in history that ‘previous critics have ignored or deemed irrelevant’ (Bernstein 1991). New historicists are concerned with exploring opportunities to subvert and contain current understanding of early modern texts through a universalizing of the work, allowing for an interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays that construct closer relationships between the play text and history. It is important to establish that this chapter is not suggesting that Brecht’s recommendation of historicization should be captured in its entirety. That the theories of new historicists are the only ones through which to interpret Shakespeare’s plays. That modernizations of the works are not relevant, or that those using Shakespeare’s works need to present historically dogmatic versions of the plays. Instead it suggests that a historical understanding of Shakespeare’s plays is important in order to explore more thoroughly the considerations of social jusice captured within his work, ‘allowing the audience to view the events critically, [and to] not merely accept them’ (Rossi 1991: 57). It is acknowledged that an immediate limitation of a historical reading can be identified in Knights’s warnings that the attraction of the historical or reconstructive procedure is of course that it seems to approach something like a guaranteed meaning – the meaning in the minds of an ideal audience contemporary with the plays – and thereby to offer an escape from the uncertainty of merely personal interpretation and criticism. (1979: 226–7) However, what is not being suggested here is that we can determine for a fact how the plays were received or intended to be received. Instead, it is recommended that the value of historical scholarship in the study of literature is founded in accepting that different meanings for different generations do exist. That, generally, audiences have different histories and various baggage that may affect their readings of a play. All audience members do not respond the same way to a piece of theatre and this is recognized throughout this chapter and acknowledged when undertaking a historical reading of Shakespeare’s work.

A RENAISSANCE READING OF SHAKESPEARE AND DISABILITY (THROUGH THE PLAYS RICHARD III AND HENRY VI PARTS TWO AND THREE) To be able to ascertain society’s attitudes and reactions to Disability and Disabled people would be ‘almost impossible’ (Barnes 1991: 1). Among the many suggestions that have been made is the view that Renaissance ‘perceptions of impairment and Disability are coloured by a deep-rooted psychological fear of the unknown, the

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anomalous and the abnormal’ (Douglas 1966: 161) and ‘it is widely acknowledged that their perceptions of normality are partly if not wholly determined by […] the natural transmission of ideology and culture’ (Barnes 1991: 47). In developing this argument, Garland-Thomson suggests: Disability is a construct which means little outside of the age which makes meaning of its metaphor. We must, then, seek to understand [Disability] within the context of its age, by looking at religion, dramatic, social and political presumptions constructing Disability. It is only in this way that the formula which equates Disability and deviance can be understood in its time, rather than accepted, without question, in ours. (2003: 196) It is therefore important to explore the Renaissance ideology surrounding Disability to fully appreciate this particular point in history where ‘a communally accepted set of values and beliefs’ (Barnes 1991: 47) influenced Shakespeare’s audience and determined their reactions to the Disabled community. It is also important to acknowledge that examples of what we now call ‘Disability’ were not necessarily an operational identity in the Renaissance and the word itself ‘did not circulate in England until around 1545’ (Barnes 1991: 47). Even then, Wilson (1993) explains: It most often intimated something more about an individual’s general incapacity than the fact or state of having [ ….] a physical or mental condition that prompted said incapacity […] therefore the emergence of ‘Disability’ occurs later than the Renaissance and in tandem with a medical discourse that classifies, regulates, and constructs bodies as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’. (9) Disability was/is not a timeless universal. It was described and defined differently in the Renaissance and therefore it is important to look at historically specific ways in which the body was represented in the Renaissance. Whilst it should be acknowledged that individual perceptions and ideas vary slightly and there is no universal approach to Disability, historical and cultural concepts of and responses to what we now know to be Disability and/or Disabled are usually more rigid. It is therefore important to look to these concepts and responses for an indication as to potentially significant influences upon Shakespeare’s presentation of Disability (Oliver 1981 and 1990; Hanks and Hanks 1980). Until the seventeenth century, people with Disabilities were ‘rejected by their families, along with other disadvantaged groups such as the sick, the elderly and the poor, relying upon the ineffectual tradition of Christian charity for subsistence’ (Bloy 2002: 32). The seventeenth century represented vast developments in the views of people with Disabilities as, by this time, people with Disabilities were integrated into society and were allowed to marry, work and have children. Discrimination did not, however, disappear entirely during the Elizabethan period and often continued in the form of entertainment and ridicule: ‘every Disability from idiocy to insanity to diabetes and bad breath was a welcome source of amusement’ (Gray and Cox 2014: 65). In fact, Shakespeare’s first depiction of Disability ‘was also his funniest’ (Wilson 1993: 161) and arrives in Act 2 of Henry VI Part Two between Gloucester and Simpcox:

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king henry vi

How long hast thou been blind simpcox

O’, born so, master gloucester

Sayest thou me so? What colour is this cloak of? simpcox

Red, master; red as blood. gloucester

Why, that’s well said. What colour is my gown of? simpcox

Black, forsooth: coal-black as jet. gloucester

Then, Simon, sit there, the lyingest knave in Christendom. If thou hadst been born blind, thou mightest as well have known all our names as thus to name the several colours we do wear. Sight may distinguish of colours, but suddenly to nominate them all, it is impossible. My lords, Saint Alban here hath done a miracle; and would ye not think his cunning to be great, that could restore this cripple to his legs again? simpcox o

master, that you could!

gloucester

Well, sir, we must have you find your legs. Sirrah beadle, whip him till he leap over that same stool. [after the beadle hath hit him once, he leaps over the stool and runs away; and they follow and cry ‘A Miracle’] (2.1.95–145) The hostility and suspicion presented throughout this scene establishes an undesirable Renaissance tradition, despite the fact that Gloucester is correct in Simpcox’s forgery. Other Disabilities can be seen in the blindness of Old Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and Gloucester in King Lear. Physical deformities can be found in characters such as Richard (Henry VI Part Two and Three, Richard III), Thersites (Cymbeline) and Caliban (The Tempest). Physical illness is presented in the form of epilepsy or ‘the falling sickness’ in Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Othello, Macbeth and figuratively in King Lear. Whether or not Shakespeare presented this collection of characters as having a Disability in relation to the modern-day understanding of the word’s meaning, or whether the audience is simply attaching their modern-day understanding of Disability to the character through their own interpretation of the text and traits of the role is difficult to ascertain, what is clear is that Shakespeare had an awareness of difference. With clear and important reference to the historical implications and influences of the period in which Shakespeare was creating his work, the character of Richard

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will be explored through the lens of a modern-day interpretation of the language of Disability (as this is the only tool we have to achieve levels of understanding). The character of Richard ‘is often taken up as Shakespeare’s clearest foregrounding and interpreting of physical difference’ (Wilson 2017: 2) and, as such, Richard is an important character to explore in relation to the content of this work. The presentation of Disability will be assessed in relation to the presentation of Richard’s character and: 1) the historical views of disability; 2) Richard as a form of evil; 3) characters’ varied views of disability; 4) binaries presented throughout the play; 5) Richard’s own understanding of his Disability; and 6) Richard’s record of accomplishment throughout the play.

HISTORICAL VIEWS OF DISABILITY Throughout the plays, Richard’s physical deformity is an integral focus of physical challenge and difference to the ‘normative’ and there is no doubt that Richard’s presentation is purposefully as something ‘different’. ‘Deformity’ is often used to define the depiction of Richard’s body throughout the play. This term reiterates the representation of Richard as influenced in a place and space that is not only different to our own, but historically determined. Throughout the plays it is clear that Shakespeare asks the audience to pay attention to the ‘deformed’ body of Richard in order to explore the attitudes of those reacting to someone ‘born into a world which placed a high premium upon physical normality’ (Barnes 1991: 2). Metzler (2016: 5) helps to classify Richard as one of Shakespeare’s ‘Disabled’ characters, when she explains that he falls into the category of ‘extreme deformations or monstrosities; those whose physical forms did not match the most basic human, normative standards’. The inclusion of Richard’s hunchback and clubfoot places the character firmly within the Renaissance classification of Disabled. Historically, throughout the Middle-Ages ‘people with Disabilities were the subject of superstition, persecution and rejection with Disability known to be associated with witchcraft’ (Haffter 1968: 58). Richard III presents how ghosts, bad omens, curses and prophetic dreams are a constant feature in Richard’s life. Throughout the play there are even moments when Richard blames his Disability and physical deformity on the machinations of witches. He states: Then be your eyes the witness of their evil. Look how I am bewitch’d! Behold mine arm Is, like a blasted sapling, wither’d up; And this is Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch, Consorted with the harlot strumpet Shore, That by their witchcraft thus have marked me. (3.4.66–71) The supernatural is constantly present and even Richard’s downfall is the fulfilment of a prophecy of divine will. Richard’s Disabled body also works from representations of propaganda. Shakespeare’s play drew from sources that make a point of Richard’s appearance,

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for example Thomas More’s History of King Richard III which describes Richard as ‘little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favoured of visage’ (More qtd. in Logan 2005: 11). This text has political connotations because More needed to ‘deny Richard in keeping with the Tudor monarchy in power at the time, therefore the presentation of body is also politically driven’ (Williams 2009: 3). In modern literary studies, his body has been important in promoting a distinctive shape relative to a ‘fractured and turbulent English history, a monstrous political figure who usurps the throne’ (ibid: p. 3). Therefore, it is also difficult to separate Richard’s physical form from the representations of the body that work on levels of propaganda. It is also important to remember that Shakespeare is writing from a predominantly fictional perspective. Although influenced by the real King Richard III, Shakespeare is using theatricality to engage his audiences. For example, Henry VI Part Two is extremely unreliable as a source that may tell us something about historical events. One example is when Richard is shown killing the Duke of Somerset at the Battle of St Albans (1455), but Richard would have, historically, only been two years old. This highlights Shakespeare’s desire to promote theatrical fiction as more important than fact. Therefore, the historical representation of Disability in Shakespeare’s literature either places Richard as a theatrical tool, displayed as either a metaphor (see below for Richard as a form of evil), or as a trope (Richard as an arch-villain), despite neither truly representing actual people with Disabilities.

RICHARD AS A FORM OF EVIL For Williams (2016), ‘Richard III’s deformity is an attempt to conceptualise the Renaissance as a time that […] would have understood this body as evil’, and it is true that throughout the Middle Ages people with a Disability were associated with evil (Haffter 1968). Barnes advances this point of debate when explaining that Those that were deformed and Disabled were seen as ‘changelings’ or the Devil’s substitutes for humans. […] any form of physical or mental impairment was the result of divine judgement for wrongdoing pervasive throughout the British Isles in this period. And the association between Disability and evil was not limited to the layman. (1991: 2) Throughout the play, the presentation of Richard as ‘evil’ is evident in Richard’s actions. He successfully woos Anne after killing her husband, ‘he slanders the Queen, he detains her kin and eventually, he challenges the rightful succession to the throne […] Richard exhibits a shameless irreverence for family and for tradition and is cast immediately in opposition of good’ (Eyler 2010: 192). Even Richard synonymizes himself with words such as ‘false’, ‘treacherous’, he has ‘laid plots’ and has ‘inductions dangerous’. For the Renaissance audience, Richard’s Disability is the marker of this evil ‘because that is what lingering medieval perceptions of Disability had trained them to see’ (ibid.). Therefore, Richard’s bad actions meant that his body had to be deformed to visually reflect his moral corruption (Bromley 2013: 43).

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The insults used against Richard also reference the ‘outward manifestation of the inward malignity’ (Eyler 2010: 194) or inner evil. Quayson explains that Richard’s Disability is deformity operating in a moral register, the Disabled body is one in which physical difference is overlaid with negative implications because of what it suggests about the moral character of the person who displays bodily difference. (2012: 97) These bodily differences are captured throughout the play via a range of important and theatrical techniques and they go a long way in explaining medieval reactions to Disability and difference. Reading the play in its historical tradition demonstrates Shakespeare’s use of the unseen (evil) being depicted in the more visual clues of Disability and therefore Shakespeare’s audience are seen to need this metaphor to understand the characterization. As a historical metaphor, we accept this as part of the discourse of the time and the internal and external planes of Richard’s operations in relation to their historical implications which are reduced to the ‘demonstration of Renaissance beliefs about the continuity between inner morality and outward physical forms’ (Williams 2009: 2). However, Williams warns that ‘it should not be enough for today’s audiences to accept that Richard wields evil simply because he is deformed’ (ibid.: 7). Simultaneously, Shakespeare appears to question this Renaissance tradition and an alternative reading of Richard’s body would suggest that Shakespeare may provide an alternative vision as to how the Disabled body should be viewed. Williams’s account of the play in relation to Disability theory suggests that the play as a Renaissance version of late medieval attitudes toward deformity, focus attempts both to preserve Disability as an identity category that occurs later than the early modern period and to provide a trans-historical account of its emergence as an identity. (2009: 4) By the conclusion of Richard III and through the articulation of Richard by Buckingham and Richard himself, Richard’s Disability is no longer foundational to his character. Buckingham realizes the extent of Richard’s evil, but at no stage does Buckingham infer that this is due to Richard’s deformed body, suggesting that Shakespeare recognizes each person’s responsibility for their actions, that Richard is evil to his core and this is not because of his physical surface. Williams progresses this argument when writing that ‘the notion of deformity as physical lack is finally served from Richard’s body to exist instead as a metaphysical label attached to other objects to justify political ends’ (ibid.: 6). The text, Richard’s soliloquies, actions, interactions and machinations allow Shakespeare to eliminate pity and move the focus from body to motive.

CHARACTERS’ VARIED VIEWS OF DISABILITY The variety of negative ways in which others view (Richard’s) body and attempt to employ its associations in their own struggles for political agency are also important

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to consider. The play offers viewpoints that both anatomize and deprecate Richard’s form. The female characters in the play often suggest that Richard displays features of monstrosity. Anne and Elizabeth describe him as a ‘diffused infection of a man’, ‘hedgehog’, ‘bottled spider’ and ‘foul bunch-backed toad’, terms used to insult (1.3.227–32). Queen Margaret articulates Richard’s body in bestial terms when stating: Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog, Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity The slave of nature and the son of hell, Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb, Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins, Thou rag of honours, thou detested

(1.3.227–32) It is the ‘chorus of women who oppose [Richard]’ (West 2009: 118) that also provide the audience with an interpretation of Richard’s Disability that is founded in the idea that Richard’s ‘deformity’ is the result of a ‘failure to grow’ in the woman’s womb (‘thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb’). Hobgood considers this engagement (amongst many others found within the play) as an example of ‘medical discourse of its own moment, pointing out that characters repeatedly read Richard’s body according to emerging ideas of diagnosis and correction advanced by early modern physicians’ (qtd. in Williams 2009, p. 6.). The ‘failure to form’ concept suggests that Shakespeare may have had a level of medical understanding when presenting both character and narrative as a method to diagnose Richard’s difference as a matter of ‘failure to form’. The concept is also born from reflecting upon the reality of pressure Elizabethan women would have felt to reproduce and continue the male lineage. Producing healthy, preferably male, heirs is recurrent throughout Shakespeare’s work and it is a concept that would have been immediately understood by the Renaissance audience. Playing on the audience’s fears, Shakespeare presents in Richard’s form a disappointing outcome of conception and gestation. This further plays on the popular obsession with ‘monster births in medical treatises, folklore, sermons, and wonder books, but also the anxiety of society (and patriarchy) to secure viable succession from the top echelons to the most humble communities’ (Persec 2019: 7–8). Stories of monster births are read as cautionary tales and are often the result of women’s misbehaviour. Richard’s ‘failure to form’ therefore hints at a Renaissance preoccupation with a cultural anxiety about reproduction, maternal agency and the medically unknown.

BINARIES PRESENTED IN THE PLAY Binaries are a further device that Shakespeare utilizes to highlight Richard’s bodily difference. Richmond is a character not only used to overthrow Richard, but placed throughout the play in opposition to him characteristically. Richard is the evil to Richmond’s pure goodness, ‘when placed next to this hero, then, it is easy and exciting to see both the antagonist and protagonist on completely opposite terms;

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they both become binaries’ (Alexander 2011: 15). Richard’s body is marked as deficient and the play ends with the figure of Richmond as the fantasy of able body: he is the warrior who is properly integrated into his family structure and will produce rightful heirs for the throne […] his kingship will usher in a newly perfect body for the state. (Williams 2009: 6) This is most clearly depicted in Richmond’s speech in Act 5: O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth, The true succeeders of each royal house, By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together, And let their heirs, God, if Thy will be so, Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace, With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days, Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord, That would reduce these bloody days again And made poor England weep forth streams of blood.

(5.5.29–37) The combination of Richmond and Richard’s binaries of body and state are metaphorically important, however, as Williams argues: what Shakespeare does even further is suggest that Richard is powerful in alignment with modern concepts of what it means to be Disabled […] and instead Richard as a dismodern subject challenges a binary of able/Disabled bodies […] the subject sees that the metanarratives are only socially created and accepts them as that. (2009: 4)3 Therefore, the binary may work in highlighting good against evil, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Disability is essential in playing the binary. Alexander explains that although Richard is articulate, we don’t want Richmond to be bumbling […] Richard is cunning but Richmond should not be daffy […] equally as important, just because Richard has a Disability, should Richmond be able bodied? The answer is no. (2011: 120) These are moral not physical binaries and in all other manners the characters are demonstrated to compete on the same plane.

RICHARD’S UNDERSTANDING OF HIS DISABILITY Richard’s understanding of his Disability is important to explore in regards to presentation, consideration and understanding of the Disabled body and its connections to Renaissance ideologies and concepts. Richard’s awareness of his difference is acute. He states:

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[Love] did corrupt frail nature with some bribe, To shrink mine arm up like a wither’d shrub; To make an envious mountain on my back, Where sits deformity to mock my body; To shape my legs of an unequal size; To disproportion me in every part, Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp That carries no impression like the dam.

(3.2.155–62) From this speech and at surface level, Richard may be seen to despise his body. Other soliloquies describe that he ‘has no delight to pass away the time / unless to spy my shadow in the sun and descant on my own deformity’ (1.1.154), which again suggests that he hates his Disability. His language also suggests that he regards himself as unable to pursue any type of norm, when stating: ‘But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks / Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass’ (1.1.15–16). Medieval belief too would dictate that any one of Richard’s physical differences would impair him from participating in the ‘normal functions of every-day society’, however, the complexities of the character suggest that this is not at all the case and that ‘Richard is far more than just a character with physical impairment […] and is therefore a slippery character for Disability studies to tackle’ (Eyler 2010: 190–1). This is because Richard is successful not only in manipulating his fellow players, but also in manipulating the audience as to when to see his body associated with positive or negative rhetoric. In fact, one of the more significant aspects of Richard’s interactions with his Disability is that throughout the play he challenges the idea that people with Disabilities are lesser or more incapable beings. Furthermore, by cleverly presenting his Disabled form as an excuse for his actions, he not only presents an understanding of his form and its implications historically, but he is also able to use his deformed body as a distraction from his political manoeuvres. Williams states that Richard is aware of the negative associations of his body, wields his appearance as an excuse, claiming his deformity as evidence of inability [… however] there is not much Richard can’t do, and to do these things, he puts his body on view, using the multiple interpretations and expectations it prompts to achieve his ambition and the crown he desires. (2009: 7) Therefore, Richard’s ‘misshapen’ form affords him agency through manipulation and it seems that ‘Richard was more Disabled by religious, dramatic, social, and political constructs, then he was by his hunch back’. (Eyler 2010: 193).

RICHARD’S RECORD OF ACCOMPLISHMENT Richard can be seen to ‘play’ or ‘perform’ his Disability as a strategy for power and gain, and despite the contemporary reaction to Disability being one of pity, at no point do we have the sense that we are supposed to feel this for Richard. He frightens and intimidates and, in many ways, becomes the quintessential villain. Throughout

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the play, Richard is successful in wooing women, fulfils his duties as duke, serves as lord protector, becomes king and leads his army into battle – in which he also fights. Therefore, Shakespeare ‘forces the audience to question whether or not he even has a Disability: a hunchback, the text tells us, yes; but a Disability, the text tells us, no’ (Eyler 2010: 190). By the third act of Richard III, Buckingham is able to plead Richard’s cause without one reference to his body, and instead refers to the weight of history and Richard’s patriarchal lineage in shifting the focus from the body to political sovereignty. Williams writes: most significantly, any resonance of Richard’s deformed body is transferred to the nation of England as a whole, which is now situated as a precariously ailing body in need of virtuous intervention Richard himself will provide […] Buckingham re-inscribes Richard’s deformity upon the nation and casts Richard as the cure for its bodily lack. (2009: 7) Alongside his achievements as a fictional character within the context of the play, Richard continues to receive admiration from critics, actors and play-goers alike. Scholars reflect that they love his frankness, his wit, his daring and the fact that he invites his audiences to be complicit in his plans. Audiences are invited to admire his skills as an actor. He is also not straightforwardly Machiavellian, ‘he does not deny the existence of goodness or virtue or their superiority over evil, even though he eschews them in his own life’ (Keehan 2017: 28). Therefore, Richard is a more complex character than is often acknowledged. He can be seen as a champion and defender of Disability; someone who is recognized for their talents and achievements in power. This is a much more heroic reading of Richard, and one that invites a deeper opportunity to consider the possibilities of the Disabled body, relative to the considerations of social justice.

CONCLUSION Despite the limitations and liabilities of reading Richard through a Renaissance context of Disability, what this type of investigation affords is an opportunity to consider the multifarious ways in which we can speak about Disability when we encounter it in Shakespeare’s texts. This helps to promote greater opportunities to consider where social justice, from the perspective of Disability, can be captured. As Wilson (1993) explains, Shakespeare’s texts can be used to generate and support theories of Disability […] and Richard’s position in the trajectory of Disabled identity offers to Shakespeare studies a rich opportunity for new understanding about the power of the deformed body, even as careful attention to the play opens up new possibilities for thinking about Disability in the Renaissance. Richard is not limited and Shakespeare presents radical thinking about Disability (Alexander 2011). Jackson even goes so far as to imply that

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in presenting Shakespeare in alignment with modern concepts of what it means to be Disabled, Shakespeare appears somewhat ahead of his time or thinking; although he does not embrace Richard’s deformities, he does utilise them, and at times he appears to go so far as to understand them. (2014: 4) The historical differences in the meaning of Disability are of paramount importance for any consideration of social justice. Although the play provides a depiction of the absolute adversity that Richard must endure because of the reception of his Disability, Richard is, in the main, able to succeed with all of his endeavours. Through the character of Richard, Shakespeare is able to provide a dynamic consideration of social justice relative to Disability through an interaction with the body; its challenges, limitations and opportunities. The character of Richard offers opportunities to ‘think about Disabled identity in the Renaissance as a complex negotiation of discourses of deformity and monstrosity as well as in relation to bodily contingency that reveals the instability of all bodies’ (Williams 2009: 6). Through applying new historicism and Brecht’s historicization it becomes clear that Shakespeare’s plays, although not universal, still remain important to explore as they can help to indicate where social justice has and can take place. Through analytical tools of this nature, the mind can remain concentrated to view the material in its own context, to explore important social differences and be placed at a safe distance from the issues of the play. All help to understand the aspects of social justice that are being considered within Shakespeare’s work. The differences between then and now are key as they help to promote important lessons regarding social justice. As there are different forms of behaviour between then and now, it remains important to question what our contemporaries did, what we do now; and the relationship between the two, to provide a more encompassing consideration of social justice, helping to avoid copying surface details of the world as lived experiences. The reading of Richard highlights inherent historical implications in relation to the medical discourse and terminology that underpinned the idea of Disability in Renaissance England. Shakespeare presents a character who faces adversity; but who causes it too. In Richard we see an equal mix of Renaissance values and more modern and advanced thoughts surrounding Disability. Although advances have been made both medically and socially in regards to Disability, the plays still hold important interrogations to unpick in relation to the consideration of social justice specific to Disability and the presentation of the body as represented through a specific time in history. The play demonstrates where social justice has been achieved and what aspects of social justice are still to be achieved. Although this reading warns of the complexities when using modern interpretations to understand the historical cultural clues of Disability, it simultaneously highlights how the multifarious manner in which Shakespeare’s work discusses Disability is valuable to those inside and outside of this community, particularly when it is used to consider opportunities to achieve social justice. Ultimately, Shakespeare presents multiple viewpoints on Disability, and it is this multiplicity that affords opportunities to consider social justice.

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NOTES 1. Graeae Theatre, Side by Side Theatre, Taking Flight Theatre, Blue Apple Theatre. 2. Verfremdungseffekt: a technique used to make the audience critical about the issues being explored in the work. Distancing techniques are used to alienate the audience from becoming too absorbed in the narrative of the work and instead focus on the issue at the heart of the theatre performance. 3. Dismodern in reference to Lennard Davis’s term which is ‘the reading of Disability as a set of relations between the body and the world, relations in which physical difference may be aided by compensatory intervention and used for powerful effect’ (Davis, 2002).

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More, T. (1924), The History of King Richard the Third, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Morrison, E. (1992), Theatre and Disability Conference Report, England: Arts Council Arts & Disability. Oliver, M. (1981), ‘A New Model of the Social Work Role in Relation to Disability’, in J. Campling (ed.) The Handicapped Person: A New Perspective for Social Workers? London: RADAR. Available online: https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/ uploads/sites/40/library/Campling-handicppaed.pdf (accessed 26 February 2019). Oliver, M. (1990), The Politics of Disablement, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pesec, D. (2019), ‘Failed Mothers, Monster Sons. Reading Shakespeare’s Richard III as a Fairy Tale’, Romanian Journal of English Studies, 11(1). Available online: https://www. degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/rjes.2014.11.issue-1/rjes-2014-0013/rjes-2014-0013.pdf (accessed 1 October 2019). Quayson, A. (2012), Aesthetic Nervousness, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Rossi, D. (1991), Shakespeare and Brecht: A Study of Dialectic Structures in Shakespearean Drama and their Influence on Brecht’s Theatre and Dramatic Theory, London: University College London. Siemon, J., ed (2009), King Richard III, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, The Arden Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Walsh, F. (2012), Theatre and Therapy, London: Palgrave Macmillan. West, W. N. (2009), ‘What’s the Matter with Shakespeare? Physics, Identity, Playin’, Northwestern University South Central Review, 1(232): 103–26. Available online: http://www.yavanika.org/classes/reader/shakesmatter.pdf (accessed 18July 2017). Williams, K. S. (2009), ‘Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 29(4). Available online: https://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/997/1181 (accessed 5 January 2017). Williams, K. (2016), Richard III and the Staging of Disability. Discovering Literature, Shakespeare and Renaissance. Available online: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/ richard-iii-and-the-staging-of-disability (accessed 21/07/20). Wilson, J. R., (2017), ‘The Trouble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 2(37). Available online: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5430/4644 (accessed 21 October 2018). Wilson, R. (1993), ‘The Quality of Mercy: Discipline and Punishment in Shakespearean Comedy’, in R. Wilson (ed.), Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority, 118–57, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

CHAPTER 2.6

Social justice in the academy: Reflecting on Shakespeare’s royal women CHRISTIE CARSON

With a campus that is conveniently located twenty minutes away from London’s Heathrow airport, Royal Holloway is increasingly acknowledged for its global outlook. As a former women’s college in safe and leafy Surrey, it continues to recruit a high percentage of female students. In this environment, I had the privilege of teaching on a first-year Shakespeare course for over a decade. This course was compulsory for all single honours English students and for all first-year joint honours students taking either English and History or English and Film. It also became very popular with visiting students. As a result, over the twelve years I taught on the course, the classroom became an increasingly diverse environment which, to a large extent, reflected the changes that have happened in higher education (HE) in the UK, as well as the economic, political and social shifts that have taken place worldwide. Therefore, my experience teaching this single Shakespeare module can act as a social microcosm of the challenges faced in trying to incubate a diplomatic culture, which is essential if university humanities departments are to develop an environment that can cater to the needs of a socially just world. In order to tackle this large and diverse group of students, I increasingly relied on Shakespeare’s own techniques within the plays to challenge but also to support the students. By creating an atmosphere that allowed for debate about the serious issues that continue to face young people all over the world – gender identity, race and religious intolerance – I was able to create a space for an open discussion of the fundamental principles of social justice. As a woman, speaking largely to other young women, in an institution originally set up to educate the ‘fairer sex’, I worked to find examples of female authority in the plays to use as role models, and began to see the wealth of wisdom offered. A close analysis of Shakespeare’s displaced royal ladies provides a reflection on the rules and follies of the English court. In particular, Princess Katherine’s outside eye

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in Henry V, Hermione’s defence of her honour in The Winter’s Tale and Queen Katherine’s reassessment of her social and political situation after her banishment from the King’s side in Henry VIII all provide examples of women who look to a future of greater equality that will provide a kinder world for their children than the one in which these royal ladies live. These three powerful women offer a response to their challenging presents by imagining a socially just future and arguing for a patient and diplomatic approach to accomplish this end. In this argument I follow the lead of several eminent predecessors. First, Professor M. C. Bradbrook in her series of Clark Lectures from 1968, published as Shakespeare the Craftsman, points out how Shakespeare’s own work comes out of a tradition of craftsmanship.1 Then, in thinking about my own teaching experience, I have referred to a collection entitled Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On (Shand 2009). The editor of this volume, Skip Shand, has collected together ‘distinguished scholars, well known for their books and editions … but not so well known … for their undergraduate and graduate teaching’ (2009: 3).2 In following these two models, and adding to them a particular focus on the logic presented by Shakespeare’s women, I hope to show that the content and form of these plays provide the basis for a debate about collaborative learning, as well as diplomacy and democracy. During the twelve years that I taught on this course, its form was altered significantly, crafted to suit each new set of circumstances. The course was regularly taught to over 150 students and covered ten plays, moving from the comedies, to the histories, to the tragedies and ending with the romances. When it was first established it was taught over twenty weeks; more recently it has been taught over ten weeks. While the plays taught remained the same, the pedagogic approach was modified each year, so it has been accompanied by small seminar tutorials and by independent study groups. It has been taught through two contrasting lectures given back to back, and a large open discussion we called the ‘Leminar’ (a seminar in the lecture hall). During all of this time, the course has been taught collaboratively and, as a result, I have taught with both senior and junior colleagues, with current and former students and with visiting lecturers. My role slowly evolved from seminar tutor, to occasional lecturer, to co-convenor, to convenor. In a very real sense, my teaching was an apprenticeship that comes directly out of the early modern model of craftsmanship, as well as the tradition documented in Teaching Shakespeare in that it ‘invites the novice into the inner circle, accepts her or him as potential equals, shares the joy of the subject and the humanity of the professor’ (Shand 2009: 2). Throughout the changes to this course, the idea that both the teacher and the student could be seen as apprentices was at the heart of its development. In order to give some form to this analysis of my progressive journey I have divided my teaching experience into three stages of apprenticeship, each covering four years, to contemplate what constitutes ‘mastery’ in the discipline of English Literature in the twenty-first century. Teaching the same course, for over a decade, from different positions, provided me with a rare opportunity to analyse my own teaching, research and personal development. The three distinct time periods correspond to my increasing seniority within the classroom, but also highlight the fundamental shifts that were taking place in global capitalism, digital communications

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and the international environment for HE. In other words, I am telling a small and personal story in order to highlight the impact of political and social movements that are beyond my control, in order to articulate how a path towards social justice in the classroom can be imagined for the future. To my mind, the undergraduate degree is a time for exploration and individual development for newly independent adults. In the UK, the university, in its original form, is the direct descendant of the seminary. The polytechnic institute, a more recent development (akin to the community college in North America), was developed to teach technical skills and can be seen to have its roots in the craft guilds of the early modern period. What is essential to understand in order to follow this argument is that the after centuries of co-existence these two distinct traditions and institutions were suddenly, and somewhat disastrously, united by the Conservative government of John Major in 1992, when all polytechnic institutions were turned overnight into universities, at least in name.3 In reality, this shift brought the universities increasingly into the Conservative model of creating a skilled workforce for business, rather than the more open view of the university as a place to develop an informed citizenry. A subsequent Conservative government has completed this process with the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees, an impact agenda that measures the usefulness of academic research in business terms, and the shift of responsibility for regulation and funding for universities, first to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (2009), and then to the Office for Students (2017).4 Having experienced these changes in the classroom, I take this opportunity to question whether there is still room within an undergraduate degree in the humanities for the development of future citizens, as well as future business leaders, since I would argue that these two sets of skills are quite different. When a degree is dedicated to creating critical thinkers, who will become responsible citizens, then I believe that my role within that process is as a public servant with pastoral care as part of that obligation. However, within the business model, I become a boss or mentor who is responsible for my colleagues’ professional development, as well as customer care for the students. My academic training has prepared me for what Shand calls ‘engaged pleasure – pleasure taken in the subject itself, in pedagogical process, in the students with whom that process is shared’ (2009: 2). This is not the business model. I suggest that this sudden shift in approach led Mathew Lyons to write in an article published online in a free journal entitled History Today, ‘Poorly paid and treated with contempt, the plight of early career researchers in the humanities is the result of a systematic betrayal of a generation of academics’ (Lyons 2015).5 I would like to explore this claim and investigate my part in this ‘systematic betrayal’. I would also like to question whether there is anything that middle- or late-career scholars can do to provide social justice for our junior colleagues and for our students. The fact that this online article was brought to my attention by a junior colleague through a Facebook post demonstrates how entirely the circulation of information has changed over the period under discussion. In order to demonstrate both my experience and my own training, I provide an extended metaphor here to make several points simultaneously. The three phases of my teaching career in the English department at Royal Holloway can be divided quite discreetly and distinctly in terms

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of the ‘systematic betrayal’ described, and each one can be usefully mapped onto the position of one of Shakespeare’s royal wives. First, Princess Katherine from Henry V articulates my sense of displacement and anxiety following my move into the English department from the drama department at Royal Holloway and my work as a junior member of the first-year Shakespeare team from 2004–8. Next, from 2008–12, as the government set out to commercialize HE in the UK, the tripling of tuition fees placed a great many of us working in HE into a philosophical quandary, as the ideological underpinning of our position was altered without our consent and with no recourse to redress. During this phase, it is the falsely accused and deposed Hermione in The Winter’s Tale that best suits my purposes in trying to express the dismay felt. The final phase of this process, which spans from 2012–16, reflects a sense of resignation but also an awareness of the fact that it is impossible to judge any major historical and cultural shift from within it. For this phase of my development, I turn, finally, to Queen Katherine from Henry VIII, the deposed monarch who saw not only her own legacy undermined but the underpinning of her faith uprooted. This queen requires junior colleagues to help her recognize that the future is no longer within the realms of her imagination.

PRINCESS KATHERINE PONDERS HER NEW POSITION (2004–8) During this period, I ran four seminar groups for the first-year Shakespeare course that responded to the lectures being given by my senior (male) colleagues from the English department; this first phase of my development can be best likened to Princess Katherine at the end of Henry V. This royal lady is forced to learn a new language with very different laws and social expectations from her own. However, she does this with clear sightedness and insight, despite being in a position of seeming disadvantage. When I first moved to the English department from the drama department in 2004, my position teaching English students Shakespeare felt awkward in that, like Katherine, I was at least three removes from the expected authority on this great writer’s work. First, I am Canadian, not English; second, I am female; and third, I have a degree in drama and not in English literature. As Kiernan Ryan points out in this volume, Shakespeare’s writing is full of equivocation, ‘the ironic quotation marks around the word “justice” are as audible as those that flank the word “mercy” whenever Portia utters it’ (see p. 242). But the question I posed in my classroom was: Are these quotation marks equally audible to every reader/audience member? The process of the shifting meaning of the plays in different contexts is amply demonstrable through performance history. What providing access to various interpretations in class allowed me to illustrate was that while the plays employ the extensive use of rhetorical questions that place many words and ideas in quotation marks (‘honour’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘love’, ‘forgiveness’) it is often hard to read irony, sarcasm or mockery in another language. All of these forms of humour are understood in reception by an audience that has a common understanding of a ‘traditional’ meaning and a shared sense of value of these words and ideas.

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In the classroom, my pronunciation of the character and place names initially provoked questions, even laughter, but this provided me with an opportunity to raise the issues of original pronunciation and authority. When I turned the authority for the pronunciation of the British place names over to the students, they were forced to admit that they would be articulated very differently by English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh students, not to mention the many visiting students or new British immigrants in the room. Canada is a country where the majority of the population is descended from immigrants. With every accent comes different social customs and views of the world. I always took a moment to think through with my students what it means to give authority and priority to one accent, or gender, or race. Being female was also, for some students (and it was as often the young women as the young men), a barrier to the respect I should have been afforded. But the comedies provided ample opportunity to engage with the debate around gender and power, so again, what could have been a hurdle became an opportunity for more debate. Perhaps the largest prejudice that I faced, when I first entered the department, was my training in drama rather than in English literature. I tended to exacerbate this ‘problem’ by insisting on focusing my seminar discussions on specific performances, both in the past and in the present. Again, this was a problem that often began with the students faulting my penchant for audio-visual materials and ended with them indicating on their course evaluations the usefulness of these materials in understanding the current relevance of these plays, both socially and politically. So, like Shand, my classes often involved ‘disabusing [the students] of assumptions’, ‘unpicking bad habits’ and ‘challenging, perhaps even confiscating some of their assumptions’ (2009: 7). The interactive and kinetic approach of my drama department training allowed me to run engaging seminars in a very collaborative yet challenging way. What Katherine in Henry V points out is the need to learn the language and customs of the ‘other’ to appreciate a new culture, although without necessarily accepting its authority. Katherine, in her English lessons, preserves a sense of distance and assessment of the language she learns; ‘O Seigneur Dieu, ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user’ (3.4.47–9).6 Like Katherine, I took the opportunity provided by the classroom to look in detail at the language that was used by my students to challenge the barriers of fear and prejudice that hamper the development of a socially just environment. Rather than engaging in conflict, the future queen here demonstrates both her shock at the brutality of the words spoken and a desire to continue with her lessons in order to better understand and communicate. The quotation continues: ‘Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France pour tout le monde. Foh! De foot et de coun! Neanmoins, je reciterai une autre fois ma lecon ensemble’ (3.4.49–52).7 Katherine expresses her dismay about how the behaviour required in her new social environment would cause offence and embarrassment in her own social world. But, she perseveres nevertheless. The fact that I found the expectations and assumptions of some of my students uncomfortable did not stop me wanting to pursue the underlying cultural differences that led to these misunderstandings. As Miriam Gilbert writes in ‘A Test of Character’; ‘The more I listened to the student questions, and the more I encouraged students to help frame and organize the discussion through those questions, the easier discussion became’ (2009: 91).

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Ultimately, my three areas of distancing from the expected ‘norm’ of what an English professor ‘should’ look and sound like was an ideal starting point for the process of de-familiarizing the students from the comfortable Shakespeare they knew from their A level studies. Just as Hal learns from the people of Eastcheap how to speak to his men in a way that will raise their spirits in battle, Katherine challenges King Henry to speak truthfully and honestly because of her position of exclusion and lack of understanding. The exchange at the end of Henry V is telling in terms of the dynamic that developed in my seminar classroom: king harry

Katherine, break thy mind to me in broken English; wilt thou have me? katherine

Dat is as it sall please le roi mon pere. king harry 

Nay, it will please him well. Kate, it shall please him, Kate. katherine

Den it sall also content me. king harry

Upon that I kiss your hand, and I call you my Queen. katherine 

Laissez, mon seigneur, laissez, laissez! Ma foi, je ne veux point que vous abaissez votre grandeur en baisant la main d’une, de votre seigneurie, indigne serviteur. Excuse-moi, je vous supplie, mon tres-puissant seigneur.8

(Henry V 5.2.243–54) If I am Katherine in this analogy, and her language is substituted in my case with discipline (since we share the challenges of a different nationality and gender), then the interaction with the king/Shakespeare/the ideal English professor opens up an interesting conversation about who is in charge in this exchange. The insistence of the French princess that King Henry should not debase his own grandeur by kissing the hand of a subject indicates the extent to which it is her honouring of royal protocol that maintains the civility of the scene. Thinking about myself as a modern-day Katherine in the same position, it is worth noting how much pride the students felt in Shakespeare as their national poet. By questioning his work from outside the country/discipline, I became a physical manifestation of the power and pervasiveness of Shakespeare’s work internationally and highlighted the students’ sense of ownership. The coming together of England and France in the play and English and drama/Britain and North America in the classroom, demonstrated a civil process of accommodation and a modification of existing attitudes on this topic. The fact that the union between these two national approaches is expressed in the play in ‘broken English’ is symbolic of the halting nature of the process of combining two worldviews through diplomacy and debate. If I look to my own process of developing self-definition, as seen through the plays and the classroom, my first role, then, was as a scholar visiting from another place (discipline/country) where things were done differently, and, as a result, I was a kind of critic of the students’ position. Like King Henry, who is embarrassed when he must explain

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what to him seems obvious, the students were forced to lay out their own prejudices and social expectations when questioned by someone who did not immediately accept these preconditions as the norm. It seemed essential to me that I accepted, and even promoted, my alternative position of authority in the field of Shakespeare performance studies in order to preserve the dignity and validity of the critical inquiry that underpins the disciplines of both Drama and English. Katherine says to King Henry, ‘You majesty shall mock at me: I cannot speak your England’ (5.2.102–3), which truly was the position I found myself in when I first began to teach in the English department and tried to gain sympathy for, and understanding of, the critical tradition of Shakespeare in performance. However, now I see that it is through my critique and presentation of an alternative vision of the plays that the students were able to see both the literary and performance traditions more clearly and come to understand the complexity of each discipline, as well as the rewards that could be found in weaving the knowledge from these two perspectives together. King Henry is taken aback by Katherine’s clarity of vision when he discovers what she has said in French to her companion Alice – ‘What says she, fair one? That the tongues of men are full of deceits?’ (5.2.118–19) – but he also acknowledges the importance of this truth-telling outside eye: ‘The Princess is the better Englishwoman. I’faith’ (5.2.122). Henry finally says of their working together to reach an understanding, ‘But thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly-falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one’ (5.2.189–91). The fact that the play ends with halting speeches and diplomacy rather than rousing rhetorical flourishes and battles being won indicates to me the very real and important work of using Shakespeare’s own methods in a way that helps everyone in the room to move towards the utopian vision of social justice that Ryan identifies in the texts.9

HERMIONE BETRAYED (2008–12) To describe the second phase of teaching the first-year cohort, I turn to another foreign queen who helps a hot-headed monarch to understand the power of patience and forebearance in a rapidly changing world. In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione helps Leontes reconsider the destructiveness of jealousy, competition and vengeance. In this period, I was co-convenor of the first-year course and helped to introduce the model of a two-hour lecture block with contrasting positions being presented on each play. The first lecture each week was from an early modern literary perspective; the other, my own, looked at the ways that the plays have been adapted to speak more specifically to recent times and places. Then, student-led study groups and a large, open debate about each play (the ‘Leminar’), followed this initial two hour lecture session. So, in the middle period of my twelve years of teaching, both the world of HE and I were in the midst of a process of re-examination and change. The sudden rise in tuition fees (against the enormous opposition of the students and lecturers in the country), forced a re-evaluation of the value of a university degree.10 The underlying assumption of many of us teaching in the system, that HE was a right for students and a social good for all, was replaced by a business mindset that saw a degree primarily as a means to achieve gainful employment, which should be bought and paid for only by those who benefited directly.

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The financial collapse of 2008 indicated the interdependence of the world’s markets. This realization, which was greatly enhanced by the ever-expanding influence of a global online world, pushed HE in the UK into the high-pressure environment of international trade. A degree was suddenly seen as a commodity and, as a result, students became customers. In 2008, in an attempt to address what might be considered a way forward for ‘responsible criticism’ in the field of Shakespeare in performance, I wrote: Culturally, then, we are entering a period of self-examination after a decade of self-exposure. The Internet gives access to a world-wide audience, bypassing the traditional gate-keepers of publishers and television executives, but the result has been a cacophony of information that few users have been able to master fully. (Carson 2008: 275) While some of the developments of this model, through the interventions of online course delivery and freely available MOOCs,11 genuinely opened HE to areas that were excluded from it, much of the evidence points towards the steady erosion of the traditional residential undergraduate degree that was the training ground for most of the teaching staff in the current university system. This dramatic shift in the ideological underpinnings of the education system provoked a sense of betrayal and bewilderment for many of us working in HE in the UK. The public sector as a whole, but the academy in particular, was painted in the press as a drain on society, rather than a support mechanism for the country’s young adults. This sudden questioning of our social role was something we allowed into the classroom debate at this time to provide the students with the opportunity to examine the value of the humanities degree they themselves were taking. In The Winter’s Tale, when Hermione is brought before the court to defend herself against the false accusations of her husband, she states, ‘You speak a language that I understand not. / My life stands in the level of your dreams’ (3.2.78–9).12 It was this sense of dismay that characterized my own response to the shift away from a publicly funded education system. This move seemed to me a fundamental betrayal of the social contract that I had signed up to when I joined the college, a shift away from the aims of social justice. Rather than trying to prove my innocence, I chose Hermione’s approach and turned the question back to the students and to the institution. I felt a sense of outrage on behalf of my students that was hard to describe without Hermione’s help.13 Despite her innocence and the fundamental goodness of her intentions and activity throughout, she acknowledges the power of her husband (the state in my case) to take away her children, her reputation, and her life – but she shows no fear: ‘Sir, spare your threats. / The bug which you would fright me with I seek’ (3.2.89–90). Her speech is one that I used in class to indicate to the students the form of a perfect argument. She states her thesis, she does not fear death and then puts forward her three compelling reasons for this: she has lost her husband’s favour, her son has died and her daughter has been taken from her. Hermione then ends her rhetorically perfect speech with a devastating conclusion: ‘Tell me what blessings I have here alive, / That I should fear to die. Therefore proceed’ (3.2.105–6). By turning her death into a release from pain, she takes the power of Leontes’s sentence away and makes him look foolish and tyrannical,

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particularly when he refuses to observe the oracle that he asked for, putting himself above the gods. If Leontes here is the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who was responsible for these changes to HE, then like Hermione, I felt locked in prison for crimes I had not committed, left to bemoan my outcast state with ‘my women’14 (the students) who had the misfortune of following and believing in my worldview. For me, it was a fundamental blow to the sense that it was possible to make a difference to the creation of the socially just future that both HE and Shakespeare’s liberal humanism promise. Hermione asks for just one thing from her husband and recognizes the importance of his power in granting it: ‘But yet hear this: mistake me not; no life, / I prize it not a straw, but for mine honour’ (3.2.107–8). Hermione cares about her honour: The Emperor of Russia was my father. O that he were alive, and here beholding His daughter’s trial! That he did but see The flatness of my misery; yet with eyes Of pity, not revenge!

(3.2.117–21) In my extended metaphor, the English king becomes an earthly power (the UK government), and Shakespeare becomes the international father figure whose reputation has been soiled. But for this queen, much like Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, Hermione’s death and her dishonour are temporary – ‘She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived’ (Much Ado 5.4.66).15 On reflection, the trial of the residential undergraduate degree in the humanities and my role in defending it needed to happen in order to create a new debate about the role of HE in the twenty-first century. The shift to a customer-service culture has placed an enormous burden on academics working directly with students to provide support in areas far beyond our training, notably in terms of mental health and border control. David Cameron seemed to see academics as public employees who could be deployed as he saw fit, to cover areas of social control that were failing (largely due to cuts in other regions of the public sector). The misunderstanding of the specific nature of our training – and the training of civil servants – mirrors Leontes’s outrageous claims about Hermione. When Hermione does awake at the end of the play, she points out the absurdity of Leontes’ desire to turn her into an object of his will. It is, of course, important to remember that when Hermione recovers her voice she speaks only to her daughter and not to her husband, asking for blessing from the gods rather than an earthly power: ‘You gods, look down / And from your sacred vials pour your graces / Upon my daughter’s head!’ (5.3.121–3). Her approach was my guide during this period. I redoubled my efforts in teaching my students and shifted my research towards highlighting the changes I saw that were undermining the work that we do as a sector, the ‘systematic betrayal’ Lyons notes. At the end of the play Hermione poses a series of questions to Perdita: ‘Tell me, mine own. / Where has thou been preserved? Where lived? How found / Thy father’s court?’ (5.3.123–5). The power of posing questions rather than imposing sentences, asking rather than telling the younger generation about their future lives, is a model that

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reflects the position I took in the classroom during this testing time. Like Hermione, I turned to the wisdom of the next generation and relied on their resilience and loyalty in the face of destructive public accusations and policy changes to see the value of the humanities degree they had themselves chosen to take.

QUEEN KATHERINE COMES TO TERMS WITH HER POSITION (2012–16) Finally, then, it is another Queen Katherine, in Henry VIII, who is also cast off and condemned for actions that are the product of her husband’s imagination, who, with her ‘gentleman usher’ Griffith, has helped me to come to terms with my own position and aided my understanding of both the good and bad deeds of powerful men. This four-year period forced me to reassess the future of the undergraduate degree and, as convenor of the first-year Shakespeare module, I turned my attention to training the next generation of bright, dedicated, young academics in my charge. In this final phase of teaching, I wanted to directly contest Lyons’s assertion that ‘because many if not most academics disdain teaching themselves, these young [academics] receive little or no pedagogical training’ (Lyons 2015: 2). As a direct contrast to this, Frances E. Dolan reflects my own position when she writes: I think, worry, and talk about teaching constantly. Yet I feel at a loss when called upon to write about teaching because I do not possess what is too often required of those seeking jobs or promotions in US colleges and universities: a coherent ‘philosophy of teaching’. (2009: 181) The professionalization of teaching in the academy undermined the training, skills and experience of many of the scholars who had dedicated their lives to the profession. Turning my attention back to the apprenticeship model during this period I worked to create a cohort of young scholars who were able to take my place and carry on the work started by my predecessors. In the years between 2012 and 2016, the cultural Olympics in London and the 2014 and 2016 celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth and death showed that there can be positive outcomes to the international commercial culture that we now live in. The Globe to Globe Festival in 2012 provided an incredible showcase of international approaches to Shakespearean performance, and, in particular, provided a wide range of strong visions of female authority that challenged traditional British conventions of performance.16 The 2016 celebrations were the largest international festivities devoted to a single author ever seen, so the work of Shakespeare continued to reach an ever-growing audience. In the final phase of my teaching practice, I therefore turned towards openly demonstrating the benefits of the polyvocal nature of the plays by presenting the course material to students through the organization of a team of four tremendously talented younger scholars.17 Together we tackled the challenge of teaching the ever-expanding and diverse first-year cohort by presenting them with a microcosm of the vast array of critical approaches available to illuminate the plays. In addition to approaching

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the students as novices in the field, I set about creating formal training in marking, seminar delivery and dealing with student feedback for my junior colleagues. In fact, with the reintroduction of seminars (at the students’ request) the course returned to its original model of delivery from a decade earlier, but this time with a shift in terms of access to authority to speak at the front of the classroom. Therefore, at the end of this twelve-year process, I turned my energy, intellect and remaining optimism towards the local struggle to keep the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the humanities degree alive in the classroom in my own university. Perhaps my ‘mastery’ of the English discipline can be summed up by the idea that I continued to think globally but I acted locally. In Henry VIII, Queen Katherine and Griffith, her serving man, discuss Cardinal Wolsey’s death. They consider how this man, who undermined the Queen’s authority in order to curry favour with the King to obtain power, was equally revered and reviled by those around him. Katherine says of Wolsey: ‘He was a man / Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking / Himself with princes’ (4.2.33–5),18 and, perhaps more revealingly, ‘His own opinion was his law’ (4.2.37). But Griffith reminds the queen that: ‘Men’s evil manners live in brass, their virtues / We write in water’ (4.2.45–6). His description of Wolsey is quite different from the Queen’s. We have yet to see the full extent of the impact of the changes to HE, or of the Brexit process, both of which were instigated by former Prime Minister David Cameron, and therefore, I must concede that it is too early to tally the good deeds against the bad in our era. It may be some time before the effect of the new regiment can be measured in terms of local or global social justice, but I have come to see that meeting these changes with recriminations is counterproductive. Therefore, I will end with my own shift of perspective and put forward some reasons for it coming out of the experience of the outcast Queen Katherine. At the end of the play, Katherine is overwhelmed by Griffith’s sympathetic portrayal of the man she has condemned. She states: After my death I wish no other herald, No other speaker of my living actions, To keep mine honour from corruption, But such an honest chronicler as Griffith. Whom I most hated living, thou hast made me, With thy religious truth and modesty, Now in his ashes honour. Peace be with him.

(4.2.69–75) Despite the potential quotation marks that Ryan suggests around the words ‘honour’ and ‘honest’ in this passage, I suggest that my own conversion to the benefits of ‘truth and modesty’ has something to do with the fact that my work on this course has been a collaborative effort. Henry VIII’s subtitle All is True seems indicative of a move towards a more open and negotiated vision of the world that I now share with Katherine and perhaps even with Shakespeare at the end of his career. In allowing my own view of the plays, but also the students, to be altered by my young colleagues, I have come to see that the future may well produce scholars of unparalleled ability,

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given the access these students have to enormously rich resources online, combined with technical skills to interpret and manipulate them in unheard-of ways for a wide range of public audiences. The movement from mentee, to colleague, to mentor is a critical one that Jean Howard describes in some detail: the mentoring relationship can’t be all top-down and hierarchical, no matter how much I have skills to impart and experience to transmit. I have to hear as well as talk in order to be able to tease out from students the commitments and intuitions and insights that will be the decisive factors in their projects. (Howard 2009: 18) In other words, the key to becoming a good teacher is ‘Learning to Listen’ (Dolan 2009: 181). The opening up of universities to internal and external scrutiny means that the debate around the future of HE may ultimately become more transparent and this may make the academy a more robust, vital and just place.

CONCLUSIONS To end this rumination on the recent past, I consider who else might be to blame for the current erosion of the ‘traditional’ humanities degree, broadening out the view from the single authority in power at the time and my own experiences. Lyons, when looking to find a villain in his ‘systematic betrayal’, blames the university administrators and civil servants: To what end has such a system developed? No end. That is what is most contemptible about it. To save a little money, perhaps. More generally, to satisfy some well-paid administrators and civil servants that all is well, when all the evidence that cannot be fed into Excel spreadsheets suggests that the opposite is true. (Lyons 2015: 3) This blaming of ‘well-paid administrators’ is contrasted by Sharon O’Dair, who places the blame for the demise of the discipline more squarely on the shoulders of English academics themselves: The problem, both for English and for its ability to resist neoliberalism in the academy, is that over the past forty years or so, English has indulged perhaps more than any other field in a ‘disciplinary broadening and diversification of criteria of evaluation’, resulting in what sociologist Michele Lamont calls a ‘legitimation crisis’. We have slighted art and the literary, allowing others, including, at last, the mignons of neoliberalism and the digital, to slight them too, and our discipline has become a ‘sort of no-man’s land or an open field where everybody can be kind of a media expert’. (O’Dair 2014: 123) Incorporating these two opinions, I have shifted from angrily railing against the Conservative government/international big business/‘the man’ in general to seeing

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that the battle in hand is not just against the ‘king’ but also against his supporters and executioners, in this case the university leaders and civil service administrators (Cardinal Wolsey and his like) who seem to have taken up the business model with relish and without question. But the blame for the demise of the humanities degree must be shared. I agree with O’Dair when she writes: We have allowed our disciplinary lack of discipline to undermine the discipline, which, as Teskey suggests, focuses on the analysis and creation of powerfully styled writing. Such powerfully styled writing is an art, a matter of painstaking attention to detail and mastery; it might be called a craft. (O’Dair 2014: 124) Teaching with a range of colleagues in the first-year course but also writing collaboratively and editing collections19 with colleagues of different ages and backgrounds has helped me to hone my own craft. What this collaborative dialogue with the plays, with students and with other colleagues has taught me is that the acceptance of the truths and values of others must provide the first step in moving towards a world of greater social justice. If the undergraduate humanities university degree is to remain viable, it must face fierce criticism and redefine its purpose. A model that develops public and online communities may provide a better, more socially just education environment for all. The 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, just down the road from Royal Holloway, reminded me that no man is above the law of the people and that must then include the elevated position of Shakespeare, the university lecturer and even the Western dominance of education and twentieth-century online and commercial culture. Shakespeare’s royal women, and the men and women (both students and colleagues) of Royal Holloway, have taught me that ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey: / Speak what we feel not what we ought to say’ (King Lear 5.3.322– 3).20 Honest, engaged critical debate is always the best way to achieve greater understanding and move collaboratively towards a world of greater social justice. Seeing the plays not only as a source of wisdom on the subject of social justice, I have used their ability to frame and engage social arguments that speak to every age, fuelling my own teaching by bringing the drama of the plays into the lecture hall and the seminar classroom. My training in drama, which focuses attention on the dramatic structure of the plays and their current meaning for present audiences, when combined with the literary approaches of my colleagues that make clear the complexity of the language and issues being debated in Shakespeare’s own period, provided a powerful mixture of influences for my students. In this model, craftsmanship is combined with critical thinking through rigorous debate. It is my hope that this approach will help to bring about a more socially just society in the classroom than we have yet to create as a collaborative international community. To my mind there is, therefore, plenty of work for the humanities degree still to do in terms of developing young people’s potential as instigators of positive change through cooperative communication.

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NOTES This chapter was written before the COVID 19 pandemic shut down universities and forced a wholesale shift of teaching online. The economic impact of this period will add to the uncertainty of the future of the Humanities degree. 1. ‘Her purposes in the book … are twofold: to trace “the descent of Shakespeare’s art from the popular medieval tradition, especially from the religious drama of the Craft cycles”; and to indicate how his craftsmanship was often a response to some immediate demand – a new actor, a new stage or some specific occasion’ (Bradbrook 1968). https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/renaissance-andearly-modern-literature/shakespeare-craftsman-clark-lectures-1968-volume-5?format =PB&isbn=9780521295291 2. Shand points out that ‘the contributors have chalked up something close to five hundred years of experience in the Shakespeare classroom … but their idealism about the project continues undiminished; their engagement with student, text, and context seems unflagging’ (2009: 2). 3. ‘Post 1992 universities’ is a phrase used to referring to any of the former polytechnics, central institutions or HE colleges that were given university status by John Major’s government in 1992 (through the Further and Higher Education Act 1992). 4. The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) is a ministerial department of the United Kingdom Government created on 5 June 2009 by the merger of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR). The Office for Students is the independent regulator of HE in England which aims to fulfil the duties placed on it by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. 5. This post caused a flurry of responses on Twitter and other social media, in particular one blog post which was picked up by the Times Higher Education by Catherine Fletcher. 6. ‘O Lord God, they are words of evil sound, corrupting, gross and immodest, and not for ladies of honour to use.’ All quotations and translations are taken from King Henry V, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. 7. ‘I would not pronounce these words before the lords of France for all the world. Fie! De foot and de coun! Nonetheless, I shall repeat, one other time, my lesson all together.’ 8. ‘Let be, my lord, let be, let be! [By] my faith, I do not at all wish you to abase your greatness in kissing the hand of one [who is] your lordship’s unworthy servant; excuse me, I beg you, my most mighty lord.’ 9. It should be acknowledged that the colleague who developed this core course was, in fact, Professor Kiernan Ryan. 10. Tuition fees were introduced to the UK system by the Labour government in 1998 starting at £1,000 and then increasing to £3,000 in 2004. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government then introduced a bill that tripled fees to £9,000

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which was widely debated and disputed throughout 2010–11, but the new fees were universally adopted in England, Ireland and Wales (but not Scotland) in October 2012. 11

Massive Open Online Courses.

12. The Winter’s Tale, John Pritcher (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, Drama Online: https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/the-winters-tale-ardenshakespeare-third-series-iid-130725 (accessed 26 June 2020). 13. The fact that many of the students in the class at this point had grown up with another Hermione, the heroine of the Harry Potter books, was helpful and I believe, no coincidence. 14. ‘Who is’t that goes with me? Beseech your highness / My women may be with me, for you see / My plight requires it’ (2.1.116–18). 15. Much Ado About Nothing, Claire McEachern (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, Drama Online: https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/much-ado-aboutnothing-arden-shakespeare-third-series-iid-121323 (accessed 26 June 2020). 16. During the Globe to Globe Festival of 2012, the production of Henry V directed by Dominic Dromgoole cast the same actress as Katherine and the boy who is killed in battle. The Chorus was also played by a woman. In the Nigerian production of The Winter’s Tale, Hermione came to life to bless her daughter but then returned to stone, becoming the goddess of the whirlwind, at the end of the play. Queen Katherine was played as the central character in the Spanish production of Henry VIII, providing a role model and point of comparison for the many Spanish expats in the audience. 17. In the 2015/16 academic year, this teaching group was made up of one new lecturer in the department, Harry Newman and three PhD students, Jessica Chiba, Jennifer Edwards and Richard Ashby. 18. King Henry VIII, Gordon McMullan (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, Drama Online: https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/king-henry-viii-all-is-trueiid-157190 (accessed 26 June 2020). 19. Teaching with Ewan Fernie and Eric Langley and co-editing collections with Farah Karim-Cooper, Christine Dymkowski, Susan Bennett and Peter Kirwan for Cambridge University Press. 20. King Lear, R. A. Foakes (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, Drama Online: https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/king-lear-arden-shakespeare-third-seriesiid-130992 (accessed 26 June 2020).

FURTHER READING Addison Roberts, J. (2006), ‘Triple-threat Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare Set Free: An Innovative Performance-based Approach to Teaching Shakespeare, 3–7, Pullman, WA: Washington State Press. Banks, F. (2008), ‘Learning with the Globe’, in Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 155–65, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bergeron, D. (2010), ‘The King James Version of Macbeth’, in Shakespeare Set Free, 13–18, Pullman, WA: Washington State Press. Fletcher, C. (2015), ‘Have ‘Young Academics’ Been Betrayed?’ Times Higher Education, 25 August. Available online: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/have-youngacademics-been-betrayed (accessed 18 July 2016). Royal Shakespeare Company (2010), The RSC Shakespeare Toolkit for Teachers: An Active Approach to Bringing Shakespeare’s Plays Alive in the Classroom, London: Methuen Drama. Semler, L. (2016), ‘Prosperous Teaching and the Thing of Darkness: Raising a Tempest in the Classroom’, Cogent Arts and Humanities, 3: 1235862. Shand, S. (2009), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Smith, B. R. (2014), ‘Getting Back to the Library, Getting Back to the Body’, in Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (eds), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, 24–32, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, E. (2014), ‘Internal and External Shakespeare: Constructing the Twenty-first Century Classroom’, in Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (eds), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, 63–74, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

REFERENCES Bradbrook, M. C. (1979), Shakespeare the Craftsman: The Clark Lectures 1968, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carson, C. (2008), ‘eShakespeare and Performance’, Shakespeare, 4(3): 270–86. Dolan, F. E. (2009), ‘Learning to Listen: Shakespeare and Contexts’, in G. B. Shand (ed.), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On, 181–95, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gilbert, M. (2009), ‘A Test of Character’, in G. B. Shand (ed.), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On, 91–104, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Howard, J. (2009), ‘Teaching Shakespeare, Mentoring Shakespeareans’, in G. B. Shand (ed.), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On, 11–24, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Leggatt, A. (2009), ‘Questions That Have No Answers’, in G. B. Shand (ed.), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On, 61–72, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Lyons, M. (2015), ‘Young Academics: The Great Betrayal’, History Today, 24 August. Available online: https://www.historytoday.com/young-academics-great-betrayal (accessed 18 July 2016). O’Dair, S. (2014), ‘All’s Well That Ends Orwell’, in Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan (eds), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, 115–25, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shand, S. (2009), ‘Introduction: Passing it On’, in G. B. Shand (ed.), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On, 1–10, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

PART THREE

The performance of Shakespeare and social justice

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CHAPTER 3.1

William Shakespeare’s Enrique IV, primera parte: Common [battle]grounds between medieval England and Mexico’s present ALFREDO MICHEL MODENESSI AND PAULINA MORALES

Dedicated to the 43 that we are – yet again – missing Orgullosa de sí misma se levanta la ciudad de Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Aquí nadie teme la muerte en la guerra. Ésta es nuestra gloria.1 The production of 1 Henry IV by the National Theatre Company of Mexico (CNT), designed expressly for the 2012 Globe to Globe: 37 Plays 37 Languages festival, was largely praised by anglophone reviewers. Few failed to highlight its enticing and opportune music; the talent and vigour of the cast; the simplicity and efficiency of set design, props and costumes; the superb pace of the performance; the surehanded and engaged direction – even, at times the translation. Several reviewers perceived these aspects as relating to the national/cultural origins of the production, and some were keen on its political potential. Reviewers in Mexico, however, were less enthusiastic; more significantly, few reacted to its political edge. But the production of 1 Henry IV as Enrique IV, primera parte was not intended to be merely the pleasant outcome of an invitation to partake of a commendable initiative by the Globe in honour of England’s foremost dramatist within the context of London’s role as host of the 2012 Olympic Games – itself a ‘global’ event. Instead, although prompted by that invitation, the project was conceived and executed as a locally generated and politically inflected endeavour: it was meant to tap into the dire conditions of Mexico. Better still, for almost everyone involved, it could not be otherwise: the project’s real, ‘natural’, aim was to find and explore common grounds between Shakespeare’s fiction of an embattled medieval England and our country’s

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conflictive and volatile present. Underpinning this certainty was an unspoken belief that, in an era no longer ruled by old mandates of an ‘East–West’ binary, investments ‘in international cooperation and understanding will enhance social justice drama’ (Over 2001: 5). Much of the same certainty also stemmed from the fact that in Latin America ‘social and class relations were shaped by the violence of colonial reality’ in such ways that ‘the construction of cultural identities’, even to date, is guided by ‘the elaboration of loss (of entire populations, cultures, territories, and natural resources) and by the utopian myths that accompanied modernity’ (Moraña, Dussel and Jáuregui 2008: 3). Thus, the context, language, original venue and staging style for Enrique IV, primera parte, like much of the ensuing responses, perforce hinged around that single certainty and the tension between its sources. By looking at them throughout what follows, we will try not only to chronicle the life of this production – in both its ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ runs – but to locate it in a larger framework of theatre practices that are, indeed, ‘global’ but, at once, keenly attuned to social awareness and justice.

‘WISDOM CRIES OUT IN THE STREETS’ Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España famously describes the Spaniards’ awe at the sight of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Mexican Empire late in 1519. From a ‘cursed temple, so tall that it towered over all things in view’, the invaders beheld a valley and lake with broad ways leading from every direction to a magnificent isle, a city ‘of such harmonious layout and size, and filled with so many people’ as they had never contemplated (1960: 280–1).2 Standing, perhaps, at the top of the legendary Templo Mayor – whose ruins now lie north of Palacio Nacional (the site of the presidential office and now, also the president’s abode) – their gaze reached to the great market of Tlatelolco, the like of which men who had been to Rome and Constantinople could not recall seeing. But that was at the time of our epigraph, which betokens the defiant ethics of a stern religious/military society. The order reflected in the majestic geometry that the Spaniards found – and quickly dismantled – was largely due to the rigid, centralized authority of supreme monarchs with power over life and death and of their supportive religious/military elite. That world was radically transformed by the foremost absolute monarchy of Europe, but the foundation of central rule, likewise absolutist, remained deep in place. Ever since, Mexico’s political culture has been fatally plagued by the abuse of personal, feudal-like power by diversely entitled ‘lords’, and by opportunistic cohorts pursuing their favour. Contrasting with the wonders of Tenochtitlan, Mexico City’s Constitution Square today lies south of the ruins of the Templo Mayor. The square, better known as El Zócalo, is the heart of our country. With Palacio Nacional to the east, the Metropolitan Cathedral to the north, sundry shops, offices and hotels to the west and the mayor’s offices to the south, this bare, gigantic plate of concrete with an enormous pole dead centre flying an equally impressive flag, has been the main stage for Mexican history and politics since colonial times. No landmark better testifies

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to the conversion of an orderly pre-Columbian town, with ‘sweet water’ flowing in ‘from far under a clear horizon’ (Díaz del Castillo, 1960: 281), into a canvas of grey skies for a long time called México DF, and now simply Ciudad de México, a megalopolis spotted with unending, ugly billboards, whose streets overflow with hurrying pedestrians, loud vendors and panhandlers, and what feels like one single, ever expanding traffic jam. Despite its deterioration and tumultuous activity, El Zócalo remains the prized destination for official parades and self-serving massive government acts, as much as for demonstrators wishing to make their voices truly heard. The square can host hundreds of thousands, not only for official acts but also for protests: this space renders a long history of inequity and unrest, from the early Republic through the Revolution, to the brutally repressed social movement of 1968 and today’s promises of change. This is why, throughout the 2010s and even in the early 2020s, El Zócalo has recurrently hosted rallies concerning the troubling present, when the lines between criminality and power are worn so thin that one petty despot’s whim can mean death to six people, and then to forty-three, and so on to many more, without a true state to stand up effectively against such crimes, let alone prevent them – hence the lack of justice for the dead or the living. Whoever ‘takes’ El Zócalo, indeed, takes the centre stage of Mexico’s political life. It was a thrill, therefore, to learn that Enrique IV, primera parte would open at El Zócalo (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1  Gabriela Núñez (Mistress Quickly), Constantino Morán (Prince Hal), Enrique Arreola (Traveller 1), Roberto Soto (Falstaff) and Óscar Narváez (Bardolph). Photograph by Sergio Carreón Ireta. Courtesy of the artist.

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Apart from the official, commercial and touristic buildings around it, this area is home to thousands of people who, right behind Palacio Nacional, survive on various small or large-scale activities, whether legal or illegal. Hosting cheap joints around the corner from the government’s top offices, the neighbourhood made sense as a frame for Shakespeare’s chronicle of the contrast between war-lords who plot rebellion against a ruler around palatial tables and low-lifers lives who plot petty crimes with a ruler-to-be around tavern tables.3 Shakespeare would attract habitual theatregoers to El Zócalo and El Zócalo could bring its own quota of live-in and hanging-around non-theatregoers to an attractively free-of-charge show. El Zócalo is a thrilling set because it is the forum where every force in Mexican politics seeks to make a statement, by way of feast, march, meeting, parade or aggression. The play’s points, however, would be made by means of multiple artistic languages coexisting on a stage. This heteroglossia, a natural condition of the dramatic theatre, starts with the language of the text.

‘… ONE TONGUE FOR ALL THOSE WOUNDS’ The term ‘languages’ in ‘37 plays, 37 languages’ raises several politically edged questions, since inside such a framework, Shakespeare could not be ‘the only empowering agent to enable the subaltern to speak’ (Huang 2013: 283). Wittingly or not, by inviting three productions in Spanish under separate prefixes (Argentine, Castilian and Mexican) the Globe to Globe festival organizers endorsed a perceptible, politically relevant distinction that, significantly, has not been easy to perceive, even in Spanish-speaking regions: namely, how culturally and politically crucial such distinction is when translating Shakespeare. As the translator of Enrique IV, primera parte has insisted elsewhere (see Modenessi 2009, 2015), in Latin America it is imperative to stop rendering Shakespeare by mimicking verbal norms that are unmistakably Iberian, even though, at times, they are questionably called ‘neutral’ (see Zaro 2015: 221). Among other things, this blind and barren habit perpetuates the fallacy that the Iberian variety of Spanish (the Castilian language) is the most apt and superior. Announcing that the CNT production would feature ‘Mexican Spanish’, Globe to Globe also implicitly stressed an issue that was key to this project: that the Latin American–Spanish translator is ‘an/other, a third player in a supposedly symmetrical scenario for two’, because translating into Spanish ‘is different from translating in/to Spanish otherness, that is, in/to our Spanish’ (Modenessi 2004: 243). In the early stages of production, therefore, an important discussion concerning not only the play’s linguistic input but its stage semiosis addressed whether the text should be fully adapted to identifiably Mexican signifiers. But just as the ‘global circulation of Shakespeare … is connected to a degree of textual transparency that allows audiences to tell their own stories’ (Huang 2013: 284), the same transparency first allows the tellers themselves to tell those stories in their own ways. A decision was made in favour of telling the story in Shakespeare’s play ‘strictly as is’, but by locally significant means. This mandated two things. First, the play’s ‘medieval English’ signifiers would not be transformed into trite and pointless Mexican ‘equivalents’. Even though on the surface the show would convey a ‘medieval English’ narrative,

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it would also be told theatrically with a sufficient amount of corresponding, but not blatant reminders that its embedded political issues fit very well the distressed here and now of Mexico. A quick look at the opening moves and the first two scenes of the production reveals how right this policy was. To the beat of the superb band, which early on immersed audiences in locally inflected musical atmospheres, a simple but captivating introitus occurred, where the cast silently descended from the stage to make a circle of energy among the groundlings, thus establishing a bond with the audience that would remain strong and true to the end; then they went back up to announce the name of the play – and, after a pause of apparent neglect, that of the author, to great comic effect. At that point, all together signified the ascent of Henry Bolingbroke as king with the help of his soon-to-be enemies. The king delivered his crucial first speech with the recognizably hollow alternation of firm and compassionate gestures and tones usually attending the demagoguery of Mexican politicians. This started to reveal to native audiences how much this play would speak to us, and about us, but through them. Yet, as said, this would not happen blatantly, since Shakespeare’s verse infused and problematized the discursive hollowness with magnificently sharp truths, ironic reminders of the Mexican present behind the fictional medieval England: No more the thirsty entrance of this soil Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood …

(1.1.5–6) These lines were originally pronounced in demagogic cadences (and in Spanish, of course) in 2012, achieving their goals almost to perfection, and were repeated in 2013, 2014 and 2016, with similar effects. But if seen and heard even now, more than eight years and two national elections later, those lines would serve only too well as cruel reminders of what Enrique IV, primera parte was addressing by way of 1 Henry IV during its original run, as Mexico remains caught in the unspeakable reality of the forty-three (and many more) people that are still missing half a decade after their appalling ‘disappearance’; in the ever-increasing plight of nationals and migrants that find no answer to their needs, or even compassion; and in the mindless violence that continues to plague Mexico regardless of purported changes in politics and policies from either Right or Left. The second scene, taking the action to the tavern by the dynamic shifting of multiple small platforms on stage, reinforced the integration of the audience with the show. Falstaff and Hal, like the King and Westmoreland before, used the entire thrust stage, and the extensions on its sides, to reach further into the public’s space (Figure 2). Previously, Hal and Falstaff provided – with their talk and motion in sync to music suggesting the ebb and flow caused by the moon – a wonderful taste of how words, music and action would take the spectators on a journey to our realities via Shakespeare’s mind-enriching comedy. Before leaving the stage, Falstaff let everybody know that he was aware of who they were as much as they were aware of him – mostly by specifying ‘the poor abuses’ of Shakespeare’s original as ‘the abused poor’ in the adapted script and clearly pointing this phrase at his audience. He would employ this strategy throughout, culminating in his remarkably dialogic

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FIGURE 2  Constantino Morán (Prince Hal) and Roberto Soto (Falstaff). Photograph by Alma Curiel. Courtesy of the artist.

delivery of the ‘honour’ speech (5.1.127–40). Once this rapport got going, nothing stood in its way: the public saw the power play from inside the tavern, with the mischievous guidance of the provocatively ambiguous, but life-loving, noble rogue. The chronicle of internecine struggle, avarice, ruthlessness, and vanity that Shakespeare’s fictional medieval England would tell now had free passage to a world well acquainted with all that about itself, but willing to learn more; a world more eager to join in seeing what Shakespeare brought to it, as in a mirror, than to learn about the history pertaining to a dramatist who, nonetheless, in the end would be welcomed in that world as a live truth-teller, not a distant stranger. This is how the ‘transparency’ that Huang speaks of worked for this project. And that was, at starting, all that was needed for Mexican audiences to perceive, with sundry degrees of consciousness: the interplay between Mexico’s present tribulations – deeply rooted in quasi-feudal structures – and the ‘medieval’ story in Shakespeare’s play.

‘O, THOU HAST DAMNABLE ITERATION!’ But that perception could have hardly taken place had the linguistic platform of the play referred the audience to a distant, distancing and identifiably colonial fiction of Iberian Spanish. The sobriquet ‘Mexican Spanish’ cannot help being a generalization, of course; nonetheless, it’s a valid way to broadly distinguish a historically differentiated linguistic praxis by means of which a creative Mexican

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cast and crew could latch the ‘transparency of Shakespeare’ onto their resources, rather than on a hollow game of surrogate signifiers, so as to render the links with their reality clear and strong. It is a common error to think that the chief differences between Spanish varieties reside in lexis; on the contrary, more fundamental contrasts may be found in clearly different concepts of time–space – reflected in equally different uses of verbal tenses – and in rhythms of speech and inflections that are just as well differentiated. It would have been a huge mistake, then, to overload the language of the translation with colloquial terms or, worse, blatant slang – superficial matters. It was more important, instead, to stay true to the rhythmical patterns of Mexican speech while seasoning certain parts with a few, strategically used, exclusive markers, some of which are briefly discussed below. This matches a fundamental principle concerning translation and translated cultures, for, indeed, ‘it is the “inter” – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture’ (Bhabha 1994: 38). One example must suffice to illustrate, evincing some political tricks that may also be played when translating Shakespeare into ‘Mexican Spanish’. Apart from the understanding that ‘Mexican’ should not entail the excess of overt regional markers, the language of this translation had to be true to the idea that the Spanish of Latin America is the language of an ‘Other’ with respect to its European origins. This, in turn, implies that all translations from such origins are, and can only be, present-time, ‘real-time’, performative events. English-speaking audiences of a Shakespeare ‘History’, who have a ‘native’ connection to the play, may be presented with a choice to read ‘their own story’ with a mediating grip on historic awareness. Instead, an audience with a translated connection to the play will receive the event in present-time mode, unfiltered. In other words, a translated Shakespeare ‘History’ will only be significant as a demonstrative or reflective vehicle. Thus, the translation could use certain key sememes of an exclusive kind that, without interfering with the flow of the general intelligibility of Spanish, would still be directly and pointedly politicized to Mexican ears. The participle jodido, as employed in Mexico, illustrates this clearly. In its native sense, it comes from joder, a verb generally signifying, with commensurate profanity, ‘to fuck’. Yet that particular use, the primary one in Spain, may either separately or concomitantly convey ‘ruined’ or ‘miserable’, again with a foul undertone, implying that the act of power exercised against the ‘ruined’ party is as degrading as rape. The latter, however, is the predominant use in Mexico, where the ‘native’, general sense is practically non-existent. Thus, making Falstaff call his ‘ragamuffins’ (5.3.36) – and similar cases – jodidos achieves a double aim. On the one hand, it taps into the general and extended senses of the term, which are available to all Spanish users. But, on the other, to most Mexican ears, this term, used with expressly derogatory reference to human lives as being of negligible worth – as it was employed in Enrique IV, primera parte – can bring memories of a famously outrageous, racist and classist use by the pseudo-feudal owner of the most powerful television network in Latin America.4 During an interview that became nationally proverbial, this media despot classified the Mexican middle- and lower-classes as ‘jodidos’, who no matter what,

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could not help being jodidos and hence, constituted his target market: one made of unfortunate and needful people who, because of that, would never stop watching the trash he had to offer, and did not need or deserve any better. At the time, the term already locally designated the state of the economic and spiritual misery of millions, but this television dictator’s memorably matter-of-fact speech cemented the word as a nationally iconic term of contempt. Many who attended performances at El Zócalo were responsive to the term, as well as to other similar uses of presenttime items. This is how a ‘History’ may operate in translation and in consequential production: as a ‘real-time-History’ inviting present and actual historical subjects to directly access their present conditions, rather than as a ‘past-History’ narrative with only the potential to connect with the present of spectators. This, in turn, is in keeping with Augusto Boal’s views that ‘a spectator must be given his full capacity for action back’ (1980: 58). In other words, without avowedly resorting to Boal’s theories, one of the production’s celebrated features was its unceasing interaction with the audience, its quasi-street-theatre style, which nonetheless complied amply with Boal’s idea that the spectator is not ‘a passive victim’ of a spectacle, but a ‘liberated agent’ (ibid.: 59). Finally, the translation and production also sought to enable the present reading not only of the play’s politically relevant contents, but of its ‘human’-dramatic aspects, as the development of archetypal character relationships is crucial for the pursuit of their larger, social implications. In particular, attention was paid to the pervasive conflict between father and son. In this respect, it was unfortunate that the keen performance of the scene between the King and Hal (3.2), easy to appreciate in all its quality at the Globe, was often lost to Mexican audiences in the noisy atmosphere around El Zócalo. Conversely and ironically, an English reviewer who could hear it all at the Globe seemingly missed it too: although aware that the father/son drama ‘has a familiar domestic dynamic but with global implications’, he concluded that in its Mexican version ‘the famous scene with Hal and his dad lacked real-world stakes’ (Barclay 2012). Was this negative appraisal due to the fact that in his own admission, this reviewer is ‘not a native Spanish speaker’? Whatever the answer, there is still much to be explored about the limits of the Globe to Globe festival, especially pertaining to its languages’ proposition. The text by Shakespeare rendered in ‘Mexican Spanish’ expressly to be presented in London could not – and did not – fail to meet the requirements implicit in the very idea of this kind of festival: it was Shakespeare’s play, but in a variety of Spanish that, although identifiably Mexican, could reach all able listeners outside Mexico at the Globe. This was achieved by keeping four objectives in mind. First, that a Mexican company could effectively work with and off the text. Second, that a Mexican audience could thereby see beyond the surface of that text and extrapolate a close reading of ‘their own story’. Third, that the local aspects which nurtured the translation did not obliterate the reception of the artistic endeavour. And fourth and finally, that in turn, this endeavour would be recognizably Mexican but effectively ‘Shakespearean’, insofar as it were able to invite as many ‘readings’ as possible, particularly inasmuch as audiences anywhere interacted with the performance. The venue itself was happily conducive to this sort of interaction, of course.

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‘DO YOU THINK I KEEP THIEVES IN MY HOUSE?’ Enrique IV, primera parte opened on 12 April 2012 in La Corrala del Mitote (Figure 3), a movable playhouse partly modelled after the Globe, expressly devised to host this production for its short run prior to the London performances roughly a month later, and assembled on the northwest quarter of El Zócalo for this purpose. Its name  reverberates with performance history. Corrala evokes the corrales de comedias, the popular Spanish Golden Age open-air theatres. Although Mitote sounds like an augmentative of the Spanish word mito (myth), it is actually a word of Náhuatl origin describing a pre-Columbian dance. Currently, the word alludes to a great commotion or disturbance, but it can also refer to a party (Hernández 1996: 141). The allusion to the Spanish playhouses, together with the wordplay on ‘dance’, ‘feast’ and ‘big myth’ defines this theatre as ‘a place where big stories are performed in broad, Mexican fashion’. The creation of this movable playhouse is chiefly attached to the name of Luis de Tavira, the head of the CNT at the time, some of whose earlier initiatives – such as Teatro Rocinante, also a travelling stage – can be tracked down as antecedents (Perea 2012). La Corrala del Mitote is a semicircular, portable structure strongly resembling the aforementioned Spanish Golden Age playhouses or corrales. It is made of wooden planks supported and articulated by pipes with interconnecting joints that give the theatre an industrial feel (Figures 1 and 4). La Corrala features two galleries that can seat 300, while its yard can hold up to 170 groundlings. The semicircular structure includes a thrust stage with a small roof over the rear section. Although originally built with Enrique IV, primera parte in mind, La Corrala was also envisaged to suit other future productions to be taken

FIGURE 3  La Corrala del Mitote. Photograph by Alma Curiel. Courtesy of the artist.

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FIGURE 4  Roberto Soto (Falstaff). Photograph by Sergio Carreón Ireta. Courtesy of the artist.

around Mexico City and elsewhere in the country. In October 2012, for instance, it was assembled on El Zócalo once again, this time to host performances of what eventually became the Globe to Globe Hamlet. La Corrala is designed for public/ street theatre; access is free of charge, with tickets being distributed individually before each show, first come, first served. It is a true example of a stage where socially incisive theatre can thrive. The venue did not please everybody, however. As mentioned, many complained about the difficulty in hearing and being heard. Indeed, for all the wonders that playing at El Zócalo entailed, there was a major negative factor: the square is permanently and overwhelmingly deafening from more than its hourly toll of the cathedral bells. Half of it is often occupied by squatters from some picketing party, while more than a quarter is taken by some local government event, a massive concert or exhibit, or even a seasonal skating rink. Around and across it, visitors from all walks of life and every country, dealers of all sorts, and people who offer their skills at all kinds of crafts and services, stand or walk about and talk or shout or shout to talk. And closer to the site of the ancient temple and the museum that flanks it, the Concheros – self-defined heirs of the ancient natives – play their music and dance, while mimes and street musicians or acrobats lure passers-by into watching and rewarding their acts. Over the human bustle and din rage the loudest sources of noise: thousands of cars, honking at their own sweet will, and the dilapidated and savagely driven vehicles that in Mexico City double as a means of both public transportation and torture devices. But there were moments of theatre and chance magic, as once when the cathedral bells began to sound, inside a rare bubble of urban quiet, enriching the reconciliation scene. In a flash, the noises returned.

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Thus, a reviewer who bemoaned the trouble of queueing for tickets, sitting in an uncomfortable open theatre, and being unable to hear much, was somewhat justified. Unjustly, however – and perfectly representing the Mexican school of pretentious bardolatry – the same reviewer also deplored ‘the cheap vulgarity’ of the recognizably national aspects, viciously deriding the inclusion of ‘Mexican music and musicians dressed as Mexican inditos’ (Casillas 2012). Inditos means ‘little Indians’: a slur originally intended to belittle the native Mexican’s tastes and education. Notwithstanding, the general response of the Mexican press was not as negative – although only occasionally remarkable. Some reviews simply reproduced the official press releases. Two were careless enough to misidentify the title as Carlos IV. But the popular allure of La Corrala offset the aforementioned criticism and the lack of enthusiasm from the press. The queue for tickets was usually long before distribution started, and hence the theatre frequently brimmed with eager visitors. The unique venue and a free show attracted newcomers to the theatre: curious passers-by and street vendors; employees and house-employed, self-employed, and unemployed people; significantly, many youngsters, students and drop-outs alike – all mixed in with seasoned theatregoers. To date, the entire cast recall the energy inside, and the history beneath their provisional stage on El Zócalo, ‘the most vital and essential coordinates of our country’ (García 2014). Director Hugo Arrevillaga encouraged the actors to ‘converse with the chaos’, to draw strength from it, to try and ‘integrate the play to the beat of the heart of the nation’ (2014). Most actors concur that the extreme conditions offered a formidable impromptu training camp for the Globe. They vividly remember the joyful expressions of the audience, their easy laughter, their focus, the meaningful looks exchanged – all signs of full engagement. Marco Antonio García (King, Peto) celebrates ‘how easy it was to turn the spectators into accomplices’. Enrique Arreola (Worcester, traveller, sheriff, silent drunk), an outstanding and experienced actor, describes these shows as the most beautiful of his career: he wanted his work to reach out to a very wide audience, including the working and popular classes. Other than opening night, attended mainly by guest artists, officers and the press, the rest of the shows played before remarkably diverse audiences. The cast stressed that spectators were visibly and sincerely pleased with their frequent invitations to interact, excited to be part of a fiction that did not seem remote or irrelevant. Shakespeare’s tavern acquired the atmosphere of a Mexican cantina and audiences loved those scenes, their rowdy language and local feel. In particular, Arreola keenly remembers a homeless man loudly sharing his joy during one of them. He was a teporocho: a permanently intoxicated street-dweller surviving almost solely on cheap alcohol mixed with soda pop (a mix that in Mexico is commonly known as teporocha). Claudio Lafarga (Westmoreland, Poins, Mortimer, Vernon, servant) recalls noticing this man at almost every show. García and Arreola claim he watched every performance. The translator saw him twice, viewing from all possible angles, at times intensely following the music with eyes closed. Constantino Morán (Hal) remembers him toasting his fellow drunkard Falstaff (2014). Falstaff laid an instant, solid bridge between the audience and the play. The character’s vigour and his zest for life brought together Shakespeare’s comedy and

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the long-standing comedic tradition of street and vaudeville theatre in Mexico. With his great belly and lively eyes, Roberto Soto played Falstaff ‘brilliantly’ (Harmony 2012) and ‘masterfully’ (Agencia n22 2012). The audience rejoiced in his coarse indulgence and witty sense of humour. Even otherwise idle reviews celebrated his performance: ‘Falstaff made us laugh not only with his lies, but also with his cruel truths; he … ends up being the most memorable and fun character’ (Espinoza 2012). Most participants agree that the play’s key moment came when Falstaff sized-up honour in close exchange with the groundlings, who always showed how his heavy words resonated with Mexico’s ongoing hardship. This moment almost never failed to impact audiences, bringing to mind a failed administration ‘resulting in fifty or sixty thousand deaths due to a war on drugs’ waged solely on the basis of ideological truisms (Arrevillaga 2012). The pervasive corruption and dubious machinations of public power, the absurdity of war and the price that people end up paying seemed to unravel before their eyes. One reviewer catalogued some of the darkest echoes with our present: ‘deceit, lies, pride, misunderstandings, payments under the table, convenient silences and euphemisms, deaths, the end justifying the means’ (Zychlinkski 2012). For Mexican audiences, the cantina atmosphere added festive keys of familiarity to Enrique IV, primera parte, but the burning echoes continued to reverberate.

‘GO MERRILY TO LONDON’ Enrique IV, primera parte was staged at the Globe on 14 and 15 May 2012. In London, the most striking difference – to a degree foreseen – was how familiar the play was to the common people. Roberto Soto (Falstaff) remembers a policeman outside the underground who spotted his Globe ID and asked him what character he was playing (2014). He will never forget how the officer’s face lit up at the name of Falstaff. He was amazed at how people seemed to know the speech about honour by heart – as proven by the tape of the second show, where he visibly reacts to a spectator who actually answers ‘air’ when he asks ‘What is in that word “honour”?’ (5.1.134–5). Soto’s connection with the audience was much celebrated by anglophone reviewers: ‘The belly-first performer glowed under the audience’s cheerful gaze, playing out to us whenever possible’ (Barclay 2012). This reviewer, in fact, was very clear with regard to the value of the main building block of this production – audience involvement: especially in the Globe, with audience on almost all sides, we crave the direct address, the overt fat jokes, and the physical humor. This production proved that direct address is the opposite of a break from reality – it is the reality (ibid.). Whatever that ‘reality’ was to the audiences at the Globe, Barclay’s appreciation validates the Mexican reality that the play echoed before its original audience, as well as the value of the production outside its specific provenance. The Globe was practically full for the first show. There was a strong Latino presence among the audience. Lafarga was relieved to feel that about half of the large and active crowd had Spanish (2014). The performance quickly triggered a

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sense of communal celebration. The online magazine Ventana Latina celebrated thus: ‘In the UK, we seldom have an opportunity to enjoy Shakespeare in our own language and yesterday’s night was a great example … more alive and current than ever before’. They also highlighted the use of language, claiming it as their own: ‘For more than two hours, Shakespeare became Mexican and spoke our Spanish’ (Gorráez 2012). The language reached out to a community of which many had probably never been to the Globe. For the second show, most of the audience seemed to be English speakers. A couple of spectators followed the play with open books. However, as one review claims, the language barrier was overcome ‘with great facial expressions and a conscious focus on expression through movement’ (Melson (2012). Laura Barnett (2012) in The Guardian described it as ‘as good a Shakespeare production as I’ve ever seen on the Globe’s stage’. David Ruiter (2012) in Blogging Shakespeare underlined the success by numbers: ‘witness the no less than four curtain calls the company received for each performance’. Another review went as far as stating that it was not difficult to imagine Shakespeare intending this ‘History’ to be performed by a Spanish-speaking company (Barclay 2012). Thus, Huang seems right in saying that ‘Global Shakespeares matter because their concerns are inherently local even as they travel’ (2013: 279). The controlled environment of the Globe allowed the actors to nuance their performance and explore other themes in the play in greater depth, such as the conflict between father and son. The emotional intensity which flourished between García and Morán in these shows delved into the guilt, the disappointment, the selfishness and the irreconcilable expectations that kept them apart. Hotspur, the rebel’s son, performed by David Calderón, was ‘dashing and proud, intense and played with flair’ (Melson 2012). All the actors were thrilled at having had the opportunity to play at the Globe, cherishing the moments they were onstage. Several years later, they are still in awe at how fortunate they were to participate in this project. In London, where it could be clearly heard, the music was extensively praised. The score held subtle expressions of Mexican identity, such as the concert marimba. Four musicians (trumpet, tuba, clarinet and percussions) played live music that rooted the performance. Arrevillaga (2014) believes that the music was the ‘foundation the actors needed’. García (2014) described it as ‘a fluid that kept us afloat, a means to concentration’. Amidst the racket of El Zócalo the musical ensemble faced the same difficulties as the actors. The noise challenged them to become far more involved than usual with the players. Since they could not hear the other instruments, they relied on visual cues developed in rehearsals to play on time. The actors used the music as an aid; its clarity worked as a buffer for the loud chaos of the Mexican capital. The Globe’s acoustics, instead, allowed musicians to enrich the tones, add hues to the score and replicate each other. Side by side, they played music that was softer and more precise than ever. Again, Barclay (2012), with a musician’s ear on top of an actor’s experience, seemed to be the keener reviewer: ‘Dueling brass playing brought a distinctively Mexican flavor to this story, increasing my feeling that the play was a perfect fit for this company and culture.’

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Juan Ernesto Díaz, the composer, sought to reinforce the strong Mexican character of his score – already echoing different areas of our country: e.g. the son jarocho from Veracruz – with Latin rhythms from other regions, such as the Dominican bachata and the Colombian cumbia. Instead of making direct quotations, Díaz devised textures of interweaving Mexican accents (Tovar 2014). Arrevillaga originally requested a more abstract score, exclusively for percussion instruments. The final product turned out to be very concrete: Díaz conceived the music almost as the soundtrack to a film, recreating physical atmospheres with sounds. The permanent presence of the drums shaped the epic, dream-like pull of the battle, brought solemnity to the unstable court and lightened up the tavern with zesty and festive compositions. The main characters had a leitmotif of their own. The music did not overshadow  the actors, but added effective punctuation. Barclay (2012) praised its precision: ‘The most inspired moments of synergy between music and text … involved Falstaff moving through the yard or lumbering on from the tiring house to the puttering bass lines of the tuba.’ The set design, consisting mainly of a group of small wooden platforms, or tables, worked well in the large expanse of the Globe, showing principles some wondered about: all those unevenly standing and always precariously distributed surfaces were like the pieces of a puzzling topography in search of its lost shape; like chess pieces endlessly shifting their positions by the hands of many people, and because of many different interests that seldom concur for mutual benefit; like unstable fragments of a broad road that used to lead to a magnificent isle, but was torn to pieces long ago and is yet to find some way to be whole again.

‘A PLAY EXTEMPORE?’ Although restaged in Mexico in 2013, 2014 and 2016 thus far, Enrique IV, primera parte has played internationally only once again. On 19 July 2014, in the closed space of a proscenium stage, the play opened the second Bitola Shakespeare Festival in Macedonia. Nobody in the audience spoke Spanish, few were familiar with the play and all had to rely solely on the summary subtitles for each scene. Nevertheless, despite the daunting linguistic barrier and the lack of visible signs of comprehension during the show, the audience response was a standing ovation. This part of the afterlife of Enrique IV, primera parte indicated how the play was never intended solely as a circumstantial event for a festival. And so does its ‘national’ afterlife. One year after performing at the Globe, Enrique IV, primera parte had a short season in another area of Mexico City, starting on 21 August 2013. This time La Corrala was assembled on a small square of the Centro Cultural del Bosque, the largest performing arts complex in town, located far from El Zócalo. The place was much quieter, too. But even though admission was still free, the theatre was never full. The cast remembers seeing many young people among the audience, probably students. They noticed, too, some people who watched them at El Zócalo and came back for seconds. Rainy weather made the going rougher, although audiences still responded well.

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Maybe the most interesting and memorable moment in that season was created by Roberto Soto’s timely improvisation. Several members of the Mexican riot police were standing guard nearby. They looked fed up in their uniforms, peeking into the performance now and then. In one of the shows, Soto decided to make them part of the play, so Falstaff brought them marching in as part of his troop, as he remarked, ‘If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet’ (4.2.11–12). The spectators laughed heartily, delighted at the conjunction of fiction and reality. Yet the policemen did not take offence, they acknowledged and even enjoyed the direct irony of the moment. Their public figures momentarily became an embodiment of the urgency and relevance the play has for Mexicans. When recalling this moment, Arreola (2014) said that, under its festive quality, Enrique IV, primera parte ‘kindles [in our people] a profound resentment that is seldom heard’. The production ran again in an indoor venue in 2014 and once more on the Corrala in 2016 – the latter as part of a festival commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, with similar effects and greater box-office success.

‘THERE’S NOT THREE OF MY HUNDRED-AND-FIFTY LEFT ALIVE’ If ‘resentment’ felt somewhat extreme in 2013, seven years later, the country itself is proving Arreola’s word painfully right. There is no downplaying the brutal depth of impotence and outrage to which an entire nation has been taken by the overly long neglect of truly democratic life in favour of a system that looks and walks and talks like the bastard child of a medieval despot. Surely some of the people who earlier went to El Zócalo to see a play that invited them to join in the action, to play Falstaff’s ‘ragamuffins’ and to answer his rhetorical questions about honour with absolute conviction, have now returned to that symbolic square to make their voices more significantly heard above the noise of criminal violence and the disregard for life. Surely, too, Enrique IV, primera parte  cannot have much to do with that. But it will have contributed to social awareness, as it sought to, if some of those protesters recall that the dire reality unfolding live before our collective eyes was truthfully mirrored on a stage they visited there before, by a troupe of Mexican artists and a tale of fictional Englishmen who were much like us – maybe because the playwright who made it all possible in the first place was, indeed, not a stranger to us, or to who we are.

NOTES 1. From an untitled poem: ‘Proud of itself / The city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan rises. / Here no one fears to die in war. / This is our glory.’ (Our version from a translation into Spanish by Miguel León-Portilla.) 2. Henceforth, all translations into English are ours. 3. Tables were notably and purposefully at the heart of stage design and staging.

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4 This incident, in turn, stands at the core of one of Carlos Monsiváis’s iconic essays on Mexican television and popular culture (2000).

REFERENCES Agencia n22 (2012), ‘Se estrenó la obra Enrique IV, Primera Parte, de William Shakespeare’, Conaculta, 13 April. Available online: http://www.agencian22.mx/2012/ fse-estreno-la-obra-enrique-iv-primera.html (accessed 6 June 2014). Arreola, E. (2014), Personal Interview, 26 August. Arrevillaga, H. (2012), ‘Enrique IV en los tiempos del narco’, Mar Proud, 5 June. Available online: http://marproud.blogspot.mx/2012/06/enrique-iv-en-los-tiempos-del-narco. html (accessed 6 June 2014). Arrevillaga, H. (2014), Personal interview, 20 June. Barclay, B. (2012), ‘REVIEW: Henry IV Part 1 in Mexican Spanish at the Globe’, Shakespeare Aloud, 15 May. Available online: https://www.shakespearealoud.com/ uncategorized/review-henry-iv-part-1-in-mexican-spanish-at-the-globe/ (accessed 6 June 2014). Barnett, L. (2012), ‘Henry IV (Parts I and II)’, Review, The Guardian [London], 17 May, Culture sec.: n. p. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/may/17/ henry-iv-part-i-ii-review (accessed 6 June 2014). Bhabha, H. K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London and New York, NY: Routledge. Boal, A. (1980), Teatro del oprimido, teoría y práctica, Mexico: Nueva Imagen. Casillas, M. L. (2012) ‘A gritos en El Zócalo’, Juego De Espejos, 19 April. Available online: http://juegogeuj.blogspot.mx/2012/04/0-0-1-648-3567-martin-luis-casillas-de. html (accessed 6 June 2014). Díaz del Castillo, B. (1960). Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (Vol. 1), Mexico: Porrúa. Espinoza, P. (2012), ‘Enrique IV toma el Zócalo de la Ciudad de México’, Boleto en mano.com, 12 April. Available online: http://www.boletoenmano.com/obracompa%C3%B1ia-nacional-de-teatro-zocalo-shakespeare-enrique-IV-cuarto-worldfestival (accessed 6 June 2014). García, M. A. (2014), Personal Interview, 19 August. Gorráez, J. (2012), ‘Un Enrique IV inolvidable’, Ventana Latina. Revista Cultural. Latin American House, 15 May. Available online: http://www.ventanalatina.co.uk/2012/05/ henry-iv-compania-nacional-de-teatro-globe-to-globe/ (accessed 6 June 2014). Harmony, O. (2012), ‘Mutis de Shakespeare en El Zócalo’, La Jornada, Demos, 3 May. Available online: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2012/05/03/opinion/a07a1cul (accessed 6 June 2014). Hernández, E. (1996), ‘Vocabulario de indigenismos léxicos’, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana de Fray Alonso De Molina: Estudio de los indigenismos léxicos y registro de las voces españolas internas, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Huang, A. C. Y. (2013), ‘Global Shakespeares as Methodology’, Shakespeare 9(3): 273–90. Lafarga, C. (2014), Personal Interview, 9 September.

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León Portilla, M. (1983). De Teotihuacán a los aztecas. Antología de fuentes e interpretaciones históricas, 162, México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Melson, C. (2012), ‘Globe to Globe: Enrique IV is a Real Fiesta’, PlayShakespeare.com, 16 May. Available online: http://www.playshakespeare.com/henry-iv-part-i/321theatre-reviews/6054-globe-to-globe-enrique-iv-is-a-real-fiesta (accessed 6 June 2014). Modenessi, A. M. (2004), ‘“A double tongue within your mask”, Translating Shakespeare in/to Spanish-speaking Latin America’, in T. Hoenselaars (ed.), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, 240–54, London: Thomson. Modenessi, A. M. (2009), ‘Traducir la alteridad a la alteridad, español mediante. Posibles Shakespeares en Latinoamérica’, in V. Zondek and A. Ortiz de Zárate (eds), Escrituras de la traducción hispánica, 39–70, Valdivia: Universidad de Valdivia. Modenessi, A. M. (2015), ‘“Every like is not the same”: Translating Shakespeare in Spanish Today’, Shakespeare Survey, 68: 73–86. Monsiváis, C. (2000), ‘Lo entretenido y lo aburrido (La televisión y las tablas de la ley)’, Guaraguao 4(10): 71–83. Morán, C. (2014), Personal Interview, 12 September. Moraña, M., E. Dussel and C. A. Jáuregui (2008), ‘Colonialism and Its Replicants’, in M. Moraña, E. Dussel, and C. A. Jáuregui (eds), Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Over, W. (2001), Social Justice in World Cinema and Theatre, Westport and London: Ablex. Perea, R. (2012), ‘La Corrala Del Mitote’, Proceso, 19 April. Available online: http:// www.proceso.com.mx/?p=304762 (accessed 6 June 2014). Ruiter, D. (2012), ‘Year of Shakespeare: Henry IV Part One’, Blogging Shakespeare, 25 May. Available online: http://bloggingshakespeare.com/year-of-shakespeare-henryiv-part-one (accessed 6 June 2014). Soto, R. (2014), Telephone Interview, 25 September. Tovar, E.(2014), Personal Interview, 11 September. Zaro, J. J. (2015), ‘La traducción de Shakespeare en la América de lengua española: entre la tradición y la transculturación’, in A. Iciar, A. Páez y M. Samaniego (eds.), Traducción y representaciones del conflicto, 219– 40, Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Zychlinski, E. (2012), ‘Enrique IV de William Shakespeare en el Zócalo de la Ciudad de México’, Enlace Judío, 16 April. Available online: http://www.enlacejudio. com/2012/04/16/enrique-iv-de-william-shakespeare-en-el-zocalo-de-la-ciudad-demexico (accessed 6 June 2014).

CHAPTER 3.2

King Lear and gender justice in India PRETI TANEJA

When thinking about contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare plays in the context of social justice in India, the origins of Shakespeare’s proliferation across the subcontinent cannot go unremarked. In line with the colonial strategy to create, as the now infamous and widely quoted Minute Upon Indian Education of 1835 puts it, ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, opinions, morals and intellect’ (Macaulay 1835), Shakespeare’s works were imposed on Indians via the education programmes of the colonies (Trivedi 2010: 10). The trajectory of Indian responses to Shakespeare’s plays since then maps a changing sense of Indian identity and something of a redress via theatre of the injustice of colonization.1 When working in English, Indian actors also reclaim the space for their ancestors, who were excluded from English-language theatres as performers and audience members until 1831 (Brandon 2010: 48). In my critical and creative work, and most fully in my 2017 novel We That Are Young, I suggest that Indian Shakespeare appropriations have come to articulate the complexity of hybrid identities formed by a history of addressing subjugation, the independence struggle, the affirmation of nationalism and the shift from socialism to neoliberal capitalism in today’s India. Intimately connected to that is the rise of Right-wing religious fascism via the long project of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of which the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his antiwomen and anti-religious minority policies, are the full political expression. At the time of writing this chapter in late 2014, I had recently been awarded my doctorate in Creative Writing and had finished the draft of We That Are Young (it was then on submission to mainstream UK and Indian publishers). Modi’s party had yet to reveal its full hand. The #MeToo movement had yet to rise. This chapter therefore does not deal directly with responses made via Shakespeare to the violence of the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) policies of 2013–19; instead it deals with its moment of production and uses one student performance of King Lear, ten weeks after the rape and death of Jyoti Singh Pandey in December 2012, to show how an appropriation of Shakespeare dealt with that terrible crime and provided a call for gender justice in India. Though it should seem dated now, the chapter takes this small but telling example of how theatre can be mobilized towards ongoing calls for social change.

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To underline the radical potential of this production, I begin with a brief exposition of the anxiety over Shakespeare’s depiction of daughterly duty in the play that has concerned Indian appropriators over time. I go on to investigate the ways in which King Lear’s ‘poetical justice’2 exposes flawed ideas of gender relations and consider how this might provide impetus for female theatre-makers using their work to address the (sometimes) violent misogyny prevalent in India today. A brief outline of these attitudes in relation to Pandey’s ordeal discusses its framing in media via the deep-seated class, caste and economic binary of ‘Western’ (typified as Englishspeaking, made up of a rising middle and upper class) versus ‘Bharat’ (traditional India) (Burke 2013). Indian women are bound by this binary to uphold what Ratna Kapur has called ‘cultural nationalism’, where being known as ‘Westernized’ carries accusations of sexual promiscuity and the betrayal of ‘Indian’ culture (Kapur 2013: 124). As Mrilinalini Sinha writes, ‘the figure of the modern Indian woman, which emerged out of nationalist patriarchy, carried the burden of being the symbolic embodiment or cultural essence of the nation, modernised yet simultaneously true to the spiritual traditions of the nation’ (Sinha 2014: 8). Anuradha Roy notes that, ‘patriarchy in India is constituted along a complex ideological grid in which gender, race, class, religion, colonialism, nationalism all have a determining role’ (qtd. in Jackson 2010: 22). Women’s bodies, regardless of the multiplicities of caste, creed, or economic status, are policed and controlled via a collective culture of shame that acts to silence them when sexual violence occurs. Part of this shame is tied into a patriarchal capitalist and nationalist agenda as well as the hangover of a postcolonial paranoia about how ‘the natives’ are seen by outsiders. This overwrites Indian women’s bodies and encourages silence for the nation’s sake: thus, the divide between those whose voices are heard or not is widened. What happens, then, when young Indian women use Shakespeare (that synecdoche for Westernization) on the Indian stage to ‘speak’ up to the gendered injustices they face? In the all-female student appropriation3 of King Lear considered here, I find a response to the defining question for social justice and for feminist and postcolonial studies posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: ‘can the subaltern speak?’. Spivak reminds us that ‘Gender is not lived sexual difference. It is a sense of the collective social negotiation of sexual difference as the basis of action’ (Spivak 2005: 476). I take this statement as my starting point. Though Spivak’s subaltern can never access the theatre space as a player or audience member, I argue that appropriations of Shakespeare by women on the Indian stage have the potential to offer vital advocacy: they express a traumatic past and a hybrid present wrestling with issues of gender injustice on their own terms. Such performances present the possibility of a more equal future to elite, international audiences who have access to the power to effect real social change especially but not only within the academy. Though student drama is rarely the subject of academic critique, unfortunate, given its important political potential, this timely production took place in a specific moment of protest; and the writing about it furthers the potential for voices to be heard that are too often silenced. In as much as student women on the stage perform some aspect of themselves, and perform a protest that in the domain of, for example, student politics would be more difficult and dangerous, and (perhaps) less attended to than when student male voices (of caste) speak for social justice in India.

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KING LEAR IN INDIA In the Indian context, King Lear has challenged (mostly male) appropriators, firstly for its exposition of national and racial identity and of flawed kingship. A brief survey of the titles of appropriations over time reveals this, including an 1897 Malayalam translation, which was called Britanille Rajavu Lear, The British King4, emphasizing the national identity of the mad Lear as if to draw a clear distinction between this king, and the way a civilized Indian king would behave. Almost a hundred years later in 1989, a well-documented Kathakali production of the play directed by David McRuvie and Annette Leday caused consternation for Indian audiences. Phillip B. Zarrilli noted that Lear’s abdication asked too much in the suspension of disbelief for them: ‘In India, some audience members could not accept the character of Lear (when) he was portrayed through conventional (Indian) kingly makeup and costume; therefore it was unbelievable they felt that he would act as rashly, as naively as does Lear’ (Brandon 2010: 33). An Urdu production in 1906 was entitled Safed Khoon, a title that can be read two ways. It literally means ‘white blood’, encoding an interesting criticism of the racial ‘Other’ (whites); the phrase is also used to refer to ‘pure blood’ where white is a signifier of mourning and purity, and traditionally worn by Hindu widows. Thus, it underlines the opposition of race, as well as the purity of kingship. Poonam Trivedi further translates this title as Filial Treachery, setting the pure blood of Lear against the contaminated blood of his children, or perhaps implying that the negative connotations of ‘white blood’ belong to the younger generation contaminated by whiteness, giving them a reason for behaving as badly as they do (Trivedi 2010). Secondly, masculine ‘honour’ and female ‘shame’, particularly with reference to daughterly duty came increasingly into focus in the play’s iterations of the late twentieth century. A 1977 production in Hindi is entitled Raja Pagala Aur Teen Betiyaan, (The Mad King and His Three Daughters), while a 1982 Bengali version is simply called Teen Kanya (or Three Daughters).5 A 1984–5 Kannada version is perhaps the most explicit: Nandabhupati, which effectively means The Great King Bound by Women/Daughters or The Daughters Bind their Father the Great King (Trivedi 2010).6 Across a colonial to postcolonial chronology, then, Indian appropriations of the play have negotiated Indian identity against the colonizers, but these performances also largely held to the canonical, gendered Western readings of Lear’s majesty, Goneril and Regan’s evil natures and Cordelia’s absolute goodness to be found in the early twentieth-century criticism of A. C. Bradley and others (Bradley 1904). Possibly the only documented Indian appropriation that saw the play from the daughters’ perspective was a 1990s Kannada-language production simply titled Lear. It was written for two characters and was a female story, told in flashback.7

KING LEAR: WOMEN IN DARK TIMES The titles of the Indian translations above suggest daughterly aberration as the cause for male madness and the breakdown of society: a tale of (gendered) morality is

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being told here. The textual impetus for this interpretation lies in the following speech in which Lear becomes ever more unstable and outraged as he thinks about women’s bodies and the threat their sexual difference poses to masculine and civic rationality: Behold yon simp’ring dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow, That minces virtue and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name – The fitchew nor the soiled horse, goes to’t with a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle to the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s: there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination. There’s money for thee.

(4.6.116–27)8 As Eric C. Brown points out, Lear’s ‘denigration of female sexuality, aligning it not only with centaurs but devils, carries out a trend towards misogyny that [male] centaurs themselves so often pursued’ (Brown 1998: 183). Lear’s real fear is of a female sexuality more powerful than his own: one that cannot be ruled by social law or male dominance. This feeds his terror of being usurped as a king and as a man: as he is well aware, ‘that way madness lies’ (3.4.17–22). Indeed, the quoted speech erupts from a wider exchange about the nature of kings, social mores and men that occurs when Gloucester finds Lear after the storm. ‘The trick of voice I do well remember: / is’t not the King?’ he asks. Lear replies: ‘Ay, every inch a king’ (4.6.105–07). Lear then enacts his former position as monarch and forgives his male subjects’ adultery: When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die – die for adultery? No!

(4.6.108–10) As the rest of the passage makes clear, only women can be held responsible for the sin which forces a man to break the legally binding contract of marriage.9 Lear understands that the means to control women’s sexuality lies in the rule of law that enshrines economic power as male. Gender dictates that the terms on which Lear contextualizes the division of the kingdom is ‘dower’ (1.1.43).10 To gain it, his daughters must state their love for their father, effectively, as Cordelia implies, buying  into chaste marriage while silencing their emotional and sexual commitment to their husbands – something they cannot, rightly, do. Lear’s intention is sexualised as some have suggested:11 but also, in making his daughters his mothers and himself their child he is buying their ‘kind nursery’ (1.1.124). ‘Kind’ might here be taken to mean ‘in kind’ or in exchange: daughterly duty for the dowry of land. Via the transaction, Lear is circumventing ‘the stench’ (4.6.144) beneath women’s girdles, focusing instead on a different part of the female anatomy (breasts), whose purpose is, in the biological terms of motherhood, to give succour.12 In terms of social

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justice, women are therefore even less than slaves. It is ironic that, as Kiernan Ryan reminds us in ‘The empathetic imagination and the dream of equality: Shakespeare’s ‘poetical justice’’ in this volume,13 Shylock argues for the emancipation of slaves against his right to Antonio’s flesh. (I want to add that even so, Shylock is reported as elevating the loss of his ‘ducats’ over his ‘daughter’, when calling for justice to be served.)14 When Lear reductively rages against women’s sexual organs as synecdoche for women themselves, then cries ‘Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination. There’s money for thee’ (4.6.126–7), he reinforces the belief first articulated in the love test that just as women’s honour and kindness can be bought, only a bought cure – of perfume – can mask (or clothe) his own fear of the risk that women’s sexuality poses to his sense of self. However, Shakespeare’s poetical justice argues that the ramifications for gender relations under patriarchy are clear – men become pimps and women are made icons of purity or prostitutes – and both sexes suffer under its yoke. In the extremity of the curses above and the increasing hysteria of Lear’s voice, Shakespeare pushes the audience away from empathizing with Lear: we are offered a distance from which to understand that the play is moving towards a more profound vision of humanity than male versus female, one that is more equal in its worldview. Attire plays an important role here. Clothes signify gender and status; they bind us to social norms. In the above passage, a woman’s ‘girdle’ (4.6.122) divides her nurturing breasts from her disgusting sexual organs, which stink akin to hell itself. Take off the girdle? She is whole and merely human, not gendered. Lear’s use of the word ‘divest’ in shaking off his ‘rule / Interest of territory, cares of state’ (1.1.49– 50) and his cry ‘Off, off you lendings!’ (3.4.106) as he sheds the robes that signify majesty echo this – beneath the trappings of social norms, something more honest waits to be revealed without shame. Further, in Lear’s vision of ‘Unaccommodated man’ as ‘A poor bare forked animal’ (3.4.105), there is both male and female. It may be, as Coppélia Kahn has noted, that the play offers a vision of Lear’s progress ‘towards acceptance of the woman in himself’ (Kahn 1986: 36). It may be more crucial than that: for all the characters in the play, ‘Unaccommodated man’ suggests that the Other exists in all of us: clothes simply gender us to the world and bind us to the corresponding social mores of ‘modesty’. A new world in which people can be equal as they are, not as what they represent via their clothes is being ushered in. Keeping in mind Ryan’s exposition of the line in Titus Andronicus that ‘unjust societies are created by unjust rulers’,15 the extreme dichotomy of gendered power relations Shakespeare sets up in King Lear adds one more caveat: that the violence of subjugation breeds further violence. So from Regan – the woman who has deeply internalized her status as mere object to state, ‘I am made of that self mettle as my sister, / And prize me at her worth’ (1.1.69) – comes, ‘One shall mock the other, the other too’, as Gloucester’s eyes are put out. She expresses here a dark justice in which men and women are equals in pain. This further chimes with the central message of King Lear that ‘none does offend, none’ (4.5.164), a call to audiences to become attuned to the structural nature of repression and to ‘see it feelingly’ (4.6.145).

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Lear asks us to realize our own responsibility beyond fate, gods, nature or socially constructed laws in creating the social injustices that both implicate and bind us and in addressing our human relationships. Lear himself articulates this: ‘Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back. / Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind / For which thou whip’st her’ (4.5.144–7). Lust holds us equally (in contrast to the earlier sin of adultery) and in this realization, a new world of gender justice is being drawn, one that everyone is responsible for bringing about. This idea resonates with the worldwide protests, marches and vigils sparked by the violence that Pandey suffered. As Rebecca Solnit notes, the marches, particularly in India, expressed the potential for collective action to create change: They said: this is a civil rights issue, it’s a human rights issue; it’s everyone’s problem, it’s not isolated, and it’s never going to be acceptable again. It has to change. It’s your job to change it, and mine, and ours. (Solnit 2014: 38). In this, theatre has a role to play.

JYOTI SINGH PANDEY AND THE CALL FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE Considering Lear’s view of gender relations against the realities of contemporary India provides some striking juxtapositions for contemporary appropriations of the play to draw on. For example, for some, upholding the nation’s pride depends not on gender equality but on gender’s stable economy. Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley referred to Pandey’s attack as having negatively affected the Indian GDP, saying, ‘one small incident of rape advertised the world over is enough to cost us billions of dollars in terms of tourism’ (NDTV 2014). For Jaitley, India Inc. is the real victim, while women who ‘speak’ with their persons and voices against sexual violence are the perpetrators, unnaturally turning against the land they are meant to embody, and proving a bad ‘advertisement’ for global consumers of ‘India’. Following Pandey’s rape, Babulal Gaur, home minister for the state of Madhya Pradesh, and member of the BJP, said: ‘Sometimes it [rape] is right, sometimes it is wrong’ (Gottipati 2014). He was also reported as contesting the proposed introduction of the death penalty for gang rape cases, saying, ‘Boys commit mistakes: will they be hanged for rape?’ (ibid.). Though I do not equate adultery with rape here, men are excused for sexual deviance: the stain of sexual shame very much lies upon women. In public discourse following Pandey’s rape, arguments over dress and freedom of movement linked to sexual promiscuity and culpability were made. Abu Asim Azmi, state president of the Maharashtra Samajwadi Party, said, ‘I support death penalty for the Delhi rapists but there should also be a law that women should not wear less clothes and roam around with boys who are not their relatives’ (Hulinger 2013). Asha Mirge, a member of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra said,

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‘Did Nirbhaya16 really have go to watch a movie at 11 in the night with her friend?’ She added, ‘Rapes take place also because of a woman’s clothes, her behaviour and her being at inappropriate places’ (Ghosh 2014). Not that it should make a difference, but Pandey was returning home after watching a film in one of central New Delhi’s popular shopping malls. The film ended at 8.00 pm. Even Pandey’s attackers referenced their right to moral judgement as a gloss for their crime: police reports state that the question they asked her (male) companion Awindra Pratap Singh as they attacked him was, ‘What are you doing out roaming around with a girl on her own?’ (Burke 2013). The implied judgement (that Pratap’s intentions were bad, but also that Pandey was there for the taking) in the question mitigated the rapists’ actions to many: it springs from a deep-seated culture of gendered shame and the perception that women’s bodies are a natural site for male policing, silencing and control. All rape crimes demand legal redress. The viciousness perpetrated upon Pandey caused a global outcry and prompted actual policy change. This began with the  establishment of a commission, headed by the former Chief Justice of India, J. S. Verma, to make recommendations on amendments to criminal law with regard to the safety of women. The ‘Justice JS Verma Committee Report on Amendments to Criminal Law relating to Sexual Violence in India’ (known as the ‘Verma report’) ran to 630 pages and received over 80,000 responses to its call for submissions (Verma and Subramanium 2013). Following its recommendations, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance was promulgated on 3 February 2013 (Varma 2014) and changes were made to the Indian Penal Code, Indian Evidence Act and the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 on issues concerning sexual offences. For rape in certain cases, the maximum penalty of death was reiterated.17 However, the Verma report crucially recognizes that real change must happen in cultural as well as legislative terms, stating: Correction of the societal mindset of its gender bias depends more on social norms, and not merely on legal sanction. The deficiency in this behalf has to be overcome by the leaders in the society aided by the necessary systemic changes in education and societal behaviour. (Verma and Subramanian 2013: iii) Theatre inside the academy therefore offers one such forum for changes to be articulated. This is particularly possible via appropriation of texts, such as King Lear, that have political and historical weight in being used to speak to injustices that arise from identity-based inequality.

A PERFORMANCE OF KING LEAR INSIDE THE INDIAN ACADEMY Pandey died of her injuries in December 2012. By March 2013, the Verma report had made its recommendations, but on the ground little had changed, except for a brief increase in national and international media reporting of rapes against Indian minors and young women.18 On 7 March 2013, the eve of International

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Women’s Day, students at the all-female Indraprashtra College, University of Delhi (IP College), performed a devised theatre piece based on King Lear for Shakespeare scholars (including this author) attending the international conference Revisiting Shakespeare in Indian Literatures and Cultures, organized by the college and the Shakespeare Society of India. Over a darkened auditorium, a soundscape of young female voices crying all of the curses spoken against women in King Lear was projected of course, in Indian-accented English. To this ear (born in the UK to Indian parents, my accent identifies me as coming from the South East of England), this articulated its speakers’ hybridity, evoking the colonial history bound up with the presence of Shakespeare in India. The soundscape and its accents also emphasized just how many curses against women occur in King Lear and how a similarly overwhelming attitude in India creates what it purports to despise: shameful daughters who should remain silent or will be silenced for speaking truth. The amplification of the curses both battered and liberated the audience into the recognition of how unjust such attitudes are. Beneath this torrent of rage, the three ‘daughters’ were dressed as shadows of themselves in black T-shirts and leggings. They played with their dolls, sitting carefully apart from each other at the feet of their father, the king. Their only contact with each other came in a fight over which of them would get to sit in their father’s lap. There was no speech other than the soundscape, no other costuming except the king’s robe and crown and very few props, only a throne and the dolls. Beyond merely articulating an intercultural encounter between nations, or problematising Gary Taylor’s skewed belief that ‘theatre companies in former British  colonies perform Shakespeare … because English is the language of their governing classes, and by continually re-performing his works they assert their connection to a cultural legacy that makes them feel superior to other people’ (Taylor 2005), this production was a singular example of one meant to ‘produce the experience of difference’ (Chaudhuri 1991: 196) in its audience. It embodied and articulated a challenge to cultural chauvanism and patriarchy from the ground up, within the nation-state; in this sense it was ‘intracultural’ as Rustom Bharucha has defined the term (Bharucha 2000: 9). It also went further: against the political backdrop of the protests over Pandey’s rape and the International Women’s Day events, it set the bodies of young Indian women in resistance to the categories of ‘postcolonial subject’, ‘national subject’ or ‘daughterly subject’ that such women performing Shakespeare in English on the Indian stage can be simplistically read as. Nor did the women become the trope that white feminism locks them into, particularly after Pandey’s rape: as ‘India’s daughters’ in need of rescuing by a white saviour (Krishnan 2015). The performer/audience separation created by the Western-style proscenium arch of the IP College theatre mimicked and subverted the us/them dichotomy of postcolonial and gender power relations, even as the production gave voice to women’s experience of sexual violence. However, this cannot merely be labelled as an attempt to re-civilize the social world via Shakespeare in a simple reversal of colonial practice (Trivedi 2005: xxiv). Instead, the dramatic irony presented by the good behaviour of the performers under the storm of curses challenged such basic categories of identity, strikingly realizing Judith Butler’s assertion that ‘gender is real only to the extent it is performed’ (Butler 1988: 527). In its relation to the stage,

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the audience itself was cast into the (usually) female position of being silenced; in its silent witnessing, it was also implicated in the violence. Confronted in this way, those gathered could not help but hear the cry as a reconfiguration of the position of women and men under Indian patriarchy (which as I have noted is inseparable from its colonial history) that was so powerfully made.

CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK? That women are treated as subaltern under patriarchal, neo-feudal and capitalist societies is in a general sense true, and I include Indian women of difference castes and classes within this; although numerous individuals might refute the idea, it remains the case in an intersectional and structural sense. Even more so when one considers the representation of women’s sexuality outlined in this chapter in light of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s definition that the subaltern is ‘the figure of difference that governmentality all over the world has to subjugate and civilise’ (Chakrabarty 1993: 1094). In her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Spivak gives the example of a Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a young woman who hung herself as an act of protest against being charged to commit the assassination of another human being. However, rumour holds that she committed suicide due to shame at an unplanned pregnancy out of wedlock. Spivak uses this example to demonstrate how Bhaduri’s choice is civilized by speculation into mainstream gendered narratives, where once again, sexual difference is a cause for madness (this time female). Bhaduri’s act is rewritten by both women and men as ‘a case of delirium rather than sanity’ (Spivak 2005: 431); as a result, her real protest goes unheard. In Spivak’s example, the subaltern is defined as ‘the person removed from all lines of social mobility’ (Spivak 1988), existing ‘where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognisable basis of action’ (Spivak 2005: 431). In conversation with this author in Cambridge in March 2014, Spivak emphasized that theatre in India is for the elite and therefore remains a vastly circumscribed domain.19 Theatre performed by highly trained actors or the educated daughters of the Indian upper and middle class for a paying international audience cannot speak for the truly disenfranchised – those who have no access to education, equitable employment, electricity or running water – unless it is performed by those people and for an audience of all. Once theatre is performed in this way, those people cease to be subaltern, having claimed an agency of sorts. Furthermore, at the end of the play, the audience leaves the theatre. Some might ride the women’s carriage of the New Delhi metro, get into chauffeur-driven cars or taxis or drive themselves home, where a young female servant, trafficked at an even younger age is now ‘part of the family’, although she actually has almost nothing in common with the daughter of the house except the knowledge that if she were sexually assaulted, no one might listen to her truth and if they do, fewer still might act against the perpetrators. I absolutely acknowledge that the intersectional discrimination of caste, economics and gender witnessed in trafficking, generational prostitution, child-marriage, the

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reporting of crimes and the bringing to justice of perpetrators disproportionately affects women born into the lower end of India’s rigid caste system and socioeconomic hierarchy. However, when considering the culture in which gender violence takes place, including its aspects of silencing and shaming those who suffer it, crimes including rape, sexual abuse, dowry-related abuse and deaths happen at all levels of Indian life.20 I do not want to conflate the subaltern of imperialism with that of feminism, but as the IP college production so clearly articulated, in terms of gender violence, that dual subalternity fuses within the bodies of women. The question then becomes – can it be ethically represented on stage? Representation through culture (in Spivak’s case, oral storytelling; in this case, Shakespeare appropriation in India) and critical writing about such moments recognize that in the bodies represented, nuanced acts of political resistance are staged. I think it is because of the presentation of the performative doubleness of women’s experiences on the stage, and the way in which they challenge perceptions in the public and educational arena, that women do speak for gender justice, and their voices are heard by those with access to power. This is particularly the case when the moment of cultural production is International Women’s Day, which itself cannot escape its homogenizing Western construction. In using Shakespeare and King Lear to make their point in English, particularly in amassing the curses that form the worldview of women in the play, the women of IP College intervened with their voices and bodies in a culture formed from both East and West that would rather those bodies did not speak at all. The play itself was performed in a physical and epic space of dark bodies on a dark stage; the representation of time in this interpretation also had a role to play in erasing certain boundaries.

CONCLUSION On 15 August 2014, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi used his Independence Day speech to talk (perhaps for the first time and from such a platform) about violence against women in India. He acknowledged its endemic nature and evoked the asexual family structure of the ideal Indian nation to emphasize that crimes such as rape reflect badly on this construct, saying ‘Brothers and sisters, when we hear about the incidents of rape, we hang our heads in shame’ (Independence Day Address 2014). He called on parents ‘to impose as many restrictions on the sons as have been imposed on our daughters’ (ibid.). However progressive this might seem, it is deeply unlikely that a culture of ‘equal shaming’ would precipitate real positive change. Rather, Lear eventually reminds us that uprooting a culture of shame in favour of genuine equality is necessary. Postmodern appropriators might use the play not as homage to English Shakespeare’s greatness but to deconstruct a political identity and re-voice it on their own terms. Through theatre, a body might ‘speak’ in its own political voice and a subaltern might claim her agency and mobilize institutional infrastructure to support being heard. With specific reference to the IP College production, critical thinking about Shakespeare within the academy provides an afterlife for the players’ political action, as this chapter itself demonstrates.

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The quotation from the Verma report above emphasizes that the task of overcoming an ingrained social mindset about gender relations lies with the ‘leaders in society, aided by the necessary changes in education’ (Verma and Subramanian 2013). For Spivak, this means not merely teaching but learning from those most affected. When following the teaching of literature in the academy, theatre uses the language of dominant discourse to critique society, it forces actors and audiences alike to interrogate their own roles in the social status quo. The IP College production challenged its actors and audience to consider, ‘How am I implicated?’, ‘What can I change?’, ‘How is she me?’ The writer Saadat Hassan Manto, whose key subjects in his seminal short story ‘Khol Do’ (Open it) were the chaos of Partition, the terror of gender violence and the opportunism that gives rise to it, wrote, “Life aught to be presented as it is, not as it will be or should be” (Qasimi 1991: 58). The fate of King Lear’s characters demonstrates this philosophy also. All the daughters are dead: patriarchy at the end of the play seems to have re-established itself, we are left to imagine how the next act will unfold. The young women of IP College, in their student production speak their reality with and from within the play – they survive it by doing so. They offer an alternative vision of how we can perform the poetic justice of equality towards fully felt social change. In hearing and seeing them tell us what is, we can try to articulate through criticism, as through protest, what might one day be.

NOTES 1. For a full discussion of this, see Taneja (2014). 2. See Ryan’s chapter, ‘The empathetic imagination and the dream of equality: Shakespeare’s “poetical justice”’, in this volume. 3. James R. Brandon (2010) broadly defines three categories of Indian Shakespeare appropriation over time: the canonical, the indigenous and the intercultural. The first is a form of ‘empowering mimicry’, the second a mixing of localized traditions with Shakespeare’s plots and characters and the third, arising over the last four decades, is postmodern and postcolonial. In this category ‘a confrontation of local theatrical techniques and the global textual authority of Shakespeare takes place’. The production I consider here is a student one, in important ways postmodern, but also falling outside the conscious intentions Brandon ascribes to professional productions and therefore expanding the category. 4. My exegesis of titles in this section follows translations made by Dr Poonam Trivedi (2010), one of the pioneers of Indian Shakespeare as a field of enquiry. 5. Other translations of the word kanya could suggest an emphasis on Cordelia’s position as a prospective bride and her sexual honour at the start of the play. The word kanyadan denotes the practice of ‘the gift of the virgin daughter’ in marriage. See Jackson (2010: 59). 6. The 1605 quarto of the play also places the daughters on the title page: The True Historie of King Leir, and his Three Daughters, Gonorill, Regan and Cordella, while

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the 1608 text considered the first quarto as the True Chronicle of King Lear and His Three Daughters. 7. Little critical work exists on this production; however, it is concurrent with the publication of Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Thousand Acres, also the daughters’ story told from Goneril’s retrospective point of view. 8. King Lear, R. A. Foakes (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare Third Series (1997, 335–6). All further references are to this edition. 9. For a full discussion of the social and moral links between sex, adultery and marriage in the play’s context, see Weisner (2000). 10. For a full discussion on the differences between dowry and ‘dower’ – one given by a father to his son in law; one a portion of an estate left to a wife by her husband – terms sometimes used interchangeably as they are here by Shakespeare, see Sokol and Sokol (2003). In the case of King Lear, the conflation seems to align a father as a husband, or simply to cut out the distinction, making women’s bodies the conduit for the exchange of land/money between men. 11. See for example Quilligan (2005). 12. Lear also perversely expresses the desire to nurse, an inappropriately sexual image for a father. 13. Chapter supplied to the author by the editor, David Ruiter, to reference during the writing of this piece. 14 See Ryan’s chapter, ‘The empathetic imagination and the dream of equality: Shakespeare’s ‘poetical justice’’, in this volume. The lines from The Merchant of Venice read:



My daughter, O my ducats, O my daughter!

Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats! Justice, the law, my ducats, and my daughter, A sealèd bag, two sealèd bags of ducats, Of double ducats, stol’n from me by my daughter, And jewels – two stones, two rich and precious stones – Stol’n by my daughter! Justice! Find the girl! She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats. (2.8.15–23).

15. See Ryan’s chapter, ‘The empathetic imagination and the dream of equality: Shakespeare’s ‘poetical justice’’, in this volume. 16. Section 228-A of the Indian penal code holds that a rape victim’s name or any matter that could identify them, cannot be printed or made public on pain of imprisonment/a fine – hence ‘Nirbhaya’ the moniker given by the Times of India to Pandey. ‘Nirbhaya’ translates as Braveheart. The name has the effect of erasing Pandey as a real person and elevating her to a signifier of honour. It is often used without quotation marks as if it was her given name at birth.

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17. The author includes this example as evidence of changing attitudes towards rape and sexual violence in India, and does not condone the death penalty; a full discussion of this issue is also beyond the scope of this chapter. The penalty was already in place for ‘the rarest of rare cases’ according to a 1983 Supreme Court ruling. In 2013, it was strengthened to apply to rape cases where the victim dies or is left in a permanently vegetative state. 18. Criticism of this coverage was raised, as it seemed to privilege attacks against Indian women of the middle class. See for example, Thekaekara (2013). 19. Informal conversation between the author and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, following her address at The Juliet Mitchell Lecture, Cambridge, UK, 11 March 2014. 20. For fuller discussion of this, see, for example, Sen and Dréze (2013).

REFERENCES Bharucha, R. (2000), The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Bradley, A. C. (1904), Shakespearean Tragedy, London: Macmillan. Brandon, J. R. (2010), ‘Other Shakespeares in Asia’, in P. Trivedi and M. Ryuta (eds), Replaying Shakespeare in Asia, 47–55, New York, NY: Routledge. Brown, E. C. (1998), ‘Shakespeare’s Idea of the Centaur’, in S. Wells (ed.), Shakespeare Survey 51, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burke, J. (2013), ‘Delhi Rape: How India’s Other Half Lives’, Guardian, 10 September. Available online:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/10/delhi-gang-rapeindia-women (accessed 4 June 2014). Butler, J. (1988), ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay on Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40(4): 519–31. Chakrabarty, D. (1993), ‘Marx after Marxism: A Subaltern Historian’s Perspective’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28(22): 1094–6 Chaudhuri, U. (1991), ‘The Future of the Hyphen: Interculturalism, Textuality, and the Difference Within’, in B. Marranca and G. Dasgupta (eds), Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, 192–297, New York, NY: PAJ. Ferguson, M., M. Quilligan and N. Vickers, eds (1986), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fernandes, L., ed. (2014), Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, London: Routledge. Ghosh, D., ed. (2014), ‘Women’s Clothes and Behaviour Are Also Responsible for Rape’, NDTV, 29 January. Available online: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/womansclothes-behaviour-also-responsible-for-rapes-ncp-leaders-shocker-549155 (accessed 27 August 2014). Gottipati, S. (2014), ‘MP Minister Babualal Gaur Says Rape “Sometimes Right, Sometimes Wrong’”, Reuters, 5 June. Available online: https://in.reuters.com/article/ uk-india-rape/mp-minister-babulal-gaur-says-rape-sometimes-right-sometimes-wrongidINKBN0EG1EX20140605 (accessed 27 August 2014).

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Hulinger, J. (2013), ‘India’s Gang Rape: Six Troubling Attempts to Blame the Victim’, The Week, 9 January. Available online: https://theweek.com/articles/468926/indias-deadlygang-rape-6-troubling-attempts-blame-victim (accessed 25 October 2014). Independence Day Address (2014), Hindu, 22 August. Available online: https://www. thehindu.com/news/resources/prime-minister-narendra-modis-independence-dayaddress/article6338687.ece (accessed 27 August 2014). Jackson, E. (2010), Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kahn, C. (1986), ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’, in M. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, 33–49, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kapur, R. (2013), Erotic Justice, Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: Routledge. Krishnan, Kavita (2015), ‘Nirbhaya Film: Solidarity Is What We Want, Not a Civilising Mission’, Daily O, 3 March. Available online: https://www.dailyo.in/politics/kavitakrishnan-nirbhaya-december-16-indias-daughter-leslee-udwin-mukesh-singh-bbc/ story/1/2347.html (accessed 18 July 2016). Macaulay, T. B. ([1835], n.d.), Minute on Indian Education, Columbia University. Available online: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/ macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (accessed 18 July 2016). NDTV (2014), ‘“One Small Incident’’: Arun Jaitley’s Controversial Comment on Delhi Gang-rape’, YouTube, 21 August. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uFnG4zR3ivE (accessed 27 August 2014). Nelson, C. and L. Grossberg, eds (1988), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Qasimi, A. N., comp. (1991), Manto ke khutut, Nadeem ke naam, Lahore: Pakistan Books and Literary Sounds. Quilligan, M. (2005), Incest and Agency in Elizabethan England, Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press. Sen, A. and J. Dréze (2013), An Uncertain Glory, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1997), King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. Sinha, M. (2014), ‘Gendered Nationalisms’, in L. Fernandes (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, London: Routledge. Sokol, B. J. and M. Sokol (2003), Shakespeare, Law and Marriage. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Solnit, R. (2014), Men Explain Things to Me, London: Granta. Spivak, G. C. (1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271–313, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, G. C. (2005), ‘Scattered Reflections on the Subaltern and the Popular’, Postcolonial Studies, 8(4): 475–86. Taneja, P. (2014), We That Are Young: Reading King Lear as a Postcolonial Critique of Contemporary India, diss., Royal Holloway, University of London.

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Taneja, P. (2017), We That Are Young, Norwich: Galley Beggar Press. Taylor, G. (2005), ‘Welcome to Bardworld’, Guardian, 13 July. Available online: https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/jul/13/rsc.theatre (accessed 18 July 2016). Thekaekara, M. M. (2013), ‘Some Rapes are More Newsworthy than Others in India’, New Internationalist, 3 September. Available online: https://newint.org/ blog/2013/09/03/some-rapes-more-newsworthy-india (accessed 17 June 2014). Trivedi, P. (2005), ‘Introduction’, in P. Trivedi and D. Bartholomeusz (eds), India’s Shakespeares, Translation, Interpretation, Performance, xxiv, Newark: University of Delaware University Press. Trivedi, P. (2010), ‘Shakespeare in India: History of King Lear in India’, Global Shakespeare, 22 June. Available online: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/extra/ history-of-king-lear-in-india/ (accessed 18 July 2016). Trivedi, P. and D. Bartholomeusz,eds (2005), India’s Shakespeares, Translation, Interpretation, Performance, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Trivedi, P. and M. Ryuta, eds (2010), Re-Playing Shakespeare in Asia, New York, NY: Routledge. Varma, P. K. (2014), The New Indian Middle Class, New Delhi: Harper Collins. Verma, J. S., L. Seth and G. Subramanium (2013), Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law, Government of India, Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law. Available online: http://csrindia.org/images/download/Amendments-ToCriminal-Law.pdf (accessed 5 January 2014). Weisner, M. E. (2000), Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zarrilli, P. B. (2007), ‘“For Whom is a King a King?”: Issues of Intercultural Production, Performance and Reception in a Kathakali King Lear’, in J. G. Reinelt and J. R. Roach (eds), Critical Theory and Performance, 108–35, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

CHAPTER 3.3

Re-enacting Hamlet in Southern Africa MALCOLM COCKS

In his chapter in this volume, Kiernan Ryan suggests that Shakespeare’s plays may speak most fruitfully to global audiences in the world’s poorest countries – the ‘3.5 billion who constitute the poorest 50 per cent’ – those who, materially at least, seem to stand most in need of justice. Imagining a vital role for Shakespeare for the world’s poorer communities from a position of relative institutional and geoeconomic privilege might seem at best irrelevant to those communities and, at worst, to enshrine the politics of inequality whereby Shakespeare (who is often synonymous with the Western cultural canon) stands as the always privileged partner. But reading the plays through an explicitly Paterian lens, Ryan envisages a role for Shakespeare’s readers as active co-creators in a utopia where, if they cannot have justice on earth, they can glimpse its shape in the transfigured worlds created for them in Shakespeare’s drama. The enduring global appeal of the plays, Ryan argues, is predicated on an ethical project whose poetics presents justice ‘as yet imaginary, subjunctive’ – always just out of reach – but called into being through acts of ‘imaginative sympathy’. In what follows, I explore this Paterian dialectic of imaginative recreation in the context of Shakespearean performance in Southern Africa and put some pressure on the efficacy of the social justice it might help bring about for some of the communities Ryan argues might stand to benefit most from Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare’s appeal in Southern Africa is often credited to the ‘universal values’ embodied in his plays or to his comprehensive understanding of the ‘human condition’. Accounts of Shakespeare’s universalism persist as the dominant narratives through which audiences and practitioners articulate Africans’ relationship to Shakespeare.1 But when we ask what Shakespeare can do for ‘social justice’ in Southern Africa, the ideology of universalism is of little value in accounting for the social, economic and material conditions that make performing Shakespeare possible, or desirable, in the region. Indeed, writing about Shakespeare performance in Southern Africa requires paying painstaking attention to the ways that meanings are shaped by local cultures and practices in each community. But contemporary African performances also take place within a global circuit of exchange and are partly determined by their relationship to the shifting possibilities for Shakespeare worldwide. Performers,

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directors and global audiences have access to films, digital recordings and both formal and informal criticism of a growing body of both amateur and professional productions of the plays. The plays and their meanings are refracted across time, in multiple spaces, and through different actions and agents. The success of Shakespeare as a global brand in mass culture as well as in more traditional sites of cultural production further conflates ‘local’ and ‘global’ signifying  practices (Hodgdon 1998). As Sonia Massai has remarked, before we can speak meaningfully of any signifying practice as local, the ‘categories of “local” and “global,” which are increasingly invoked to define the current stage in the afterlife of Shakespeare’s works, need careful reconsideration’ (Massai 2006: 3). The complex imbrication of the ‘global’ and the ‘universal’ in Shakespeare reception in Africa has nonetheless created unique opportunities for local African practitioners. Precisely because Shakespeare is so entrenched in the global imaginary as an icon of ‘universal culture’, the plays have come to function as a kind of global currency. As this chapter argues, local African theatre companies have begun to exploit the ‘Shakespeare’ brand as a strategic tool to gain visibility both locally and nationally, to network with a global Shakespeare community and to secure their futures in fragile or precarious economic climates. While local Shakespeare performance continues to be shaped by divisive cultural, economic and institutional power relations, Shakespeare’s cultural purchase may provide better access to centres of power through partnership and collaboration and may function as a venue for social justice interventions. From the outset then, it is clear that Shakespeare performance by grassroots theatres for local audiences in Southern Africa raises a number of problematic questions that, at first glance, appear to undermine the claims of justice. What can such performances accomplish culturally and socially for such communities? How do they map local/global socio-cultural and political contexts, and what do they say about local politics and histories? How, if at all, do these performances improve the material and economic conditions for Southern African performers and their audiences? In its simplest form, this chapter asks of recent African adaptations, why Shakespeare, why now and why here? Drawing on oral history methodologies and a range of verbal accounts from actors, audiences and theatre practitioners in the region, my research explores the variety of modes and contexts in which Shakespeare is performed and consumed in the region. An examination of Shakespeare adaptation and spectatorship in theatre communities across Southern Africa reveals what most performance scholars already know in theory: dramatic meaning is culturally specific, diverse and highly plastic – fashioned by communities who perform or watch Shakespeare to reflect their lives and concerns, rather than encoding a body of core ‘universal’ truths. My research therefore belies the myth of ‘universal value’ in the plays. But it also underscores the value and importance of Shakespeare as a universal venue whose powerful cultural purchase can be exploited by grassroots theatre companies in communities who seek social justice by adapting, rewriting and refashioning the plays to suit local needs and agendas. The Kuwaiti playwright and theatre director Sulayman al-Bassam describes Shakespeare’s relevance to the Arab world

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in terms of a ‘playable surface’ – slippery, sometimes perilous, but eminently useful (Litvin, Walkling and Cormack 2016).2 In what follows I draw on this metaphor to describe the contradictions and opportunities that characterize Southern African Shakespeares. The discussion will focus on two adaptations of Hamlet: one South African – I Ophelia (2014) directed by Dorothy Anne Gould, written for and performed by Johannesburg Awakening Minds (JAM) in Johannesburg, and one Mozambican – Hamlet (2015) directed by Manuela Soeiro, written for and performed by Mutumbela Gogo in Maputo. I Ophelia is a radical adaptation of Hamlet that addresses the gender-based injustice endemic in South Africa, while Mutumbela’s Hamlet is a shrewd commentary on contemporary local politics. But both plays, I argue, serve broader social justice functions than their explicit political agendas might suggest. Much of the research was conducted in my capacity as an audience researcher working with global audiences for the Globe to Globe Hamlet which toured to almost every country in the world between 2014 to 2016. A global touring production of Hamlet from London is a very different kind of intercultural performance that implies quite different relationships between performers and audience members than a local production intended for a contextually specific audience. But these dynamic performances and the audience research carried out at these touring venues also engage spectators in the kind of imaginative recreation described by Ryan and highlight the contextual complexity of Shakespeare reception in the region. Individual accounts of responses to the women in the play provide a specific and detailed contextual understanding of gender politics in Southern Africa.

JOHANNESBURG AWAKENING MINDS Every Monday morning, a group of about eighteen all-male actors aged between twenty-three and sixty gather in a disused Edwardian building in Hillbrow, a densely populated inner city district of Johannesburg, still notorious for high levels of crime and poverty, to read and rehearse Shakespeare. Traumatized, discarded, invisible, poor and often criminalized, most of the members of Johannesburg Awakening Minds (JAM) are no strangers to violence. Most have lived on the streets, and most are only ever one or two nights away from homelessness. The rehearsal follows a familiar ritual: the actors share a basic breakfast and have the opportunity to discuss the various challenges the week has presented. Some members might describe the harassment they have experienced at the hands of the police. They shared stories of their possessions being frequently burned. Until recently, few of the men in this group possessed ID books, bank accounts or fixed addresses, and this left them particularly vulnerable to systematic harassment. Others may return to older traumas – the first time their mothers threw boiling water on them; the time their families turned them out because they were diagnosed with a highly stigmatized terminal illness; the experience of being expelled from university for taking drugs. Members revisit stories from their pasts, reshuffling their meanings from the perspective of the present. Not all the stories shared are grim. ‘I perform for people in my shelter and tell them about what I am learning and they give me food’, one of the actors reports.3

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On the morning of my first visit, the group is rehearsing a series of monologues from the plays to be performed in the garden space of a popular pizzeria. Each member has chosen his own monologue. The first monologue I hear is Edmund’s bastard speech from King Lear. Afterwards, the actor, whom we shall call Siswe, explains to me that his choice to prepare and perform this speech was deeply personal. His mother had been a sex worker, and a question always hovered over his paternity. He had dealt with, and continues to deal with, the stigma of being a bastard, and this is why he can identify with a man who decides to change the role scripted for himself despite his ambiguous moral status in the play: What I love about Edmund, who they call the bastard, is he grew up like me. My father never accepted me. I was never taken seriously by my father or my family. That’s what is happening to Edmund.4 Siswe makes clear that a lot more is at stake in such performances than forgetting, or even reconciling, one’s problems. ‘Shakespeare helps me to project [my plans] and to interact with life.’ He explains that performing the texts helps him to reimagine and shape alternative possibilities and outcomes for himself: ‘My aim is to be in a Shakespeare society’, he tells me. Rightly or wrongly, what Siswe partly hopes for from his affiliation with Shakespeare is legitimation and acceptance, if not from the social and legal establishment, then from the cultural establishment. For an illegitimate man on the margins of society, the Shakespeare Society represents legitimation. Siswe negotiates the trauma of his unknown paternity through a fictional character. In dialogue, with my camera rolling, he performs or imagines a life or a future that was as yet fictional. He outlines a series of possibilities in the subjunctive mode where he imagines his life as a legitimate actor with a sustainable and dynamic career. This reimagining is something Siswe shares with several members of the group. Their developing sense of self and society involves not only re-enacting the past through the fictions of drama but enacting imagined futures with economically sustainable careers on the national stage and the possibility of touring internationally. Siswe, and indeed the whole company and their director, state unanimously that the emotional and psychological benefits of working with Shakespeare far outweigh any economic benefits that have begun sporadically to accrue to them. I mean to honour this statement, and the importance they attach to Shakespeare’s plays. But I also want to tell the story of Shakespeare’s tentative – but significant role – in improving the material life of the company. While it may be possible to imagine other drama accomplishing the therapeutic work that seems to me so central to what JAM is and why they exist, no other playwright could enable them to make a somewhat sustainable living out of performance. Their ability to capitalize on Shakespeare’s global cultural stature is a significant part in the story of social justice intervention that Shakespeare might accomplish for grassroots theatre communities in some of the world’s poorer countries. As JAM’s director and coach Dorothy Anne Gould explains, JAM’s signature Shakespeare adaptations have helped transform the company from a largely unknown group of homeless actors to an amateur Shakespeare repertory company

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with greater visibility and influence within their community and with more hopeful economic prospects. Although JAM members do write and perform their own material, and although they also experiment with the plays of canonical South African playwrights (Athol Fugard is a personal friend and favourite playwright of Gould’s) – it is Shakespeare’s high cultural status that lends them a visibility and kudos among their paying audiences that they might not otherwise command. There is, for middleclass, educated South Africans who are the chief economic patrons (but not the only audience) of JAM’s work, an almost romantic fascination with JAM – what Edward Wilson-Lee somewhat problematically describes in the context of East African Shakespeares as the poignancy of ‘British culture … transplanted, like some exotic seedling’ into unexpected locations and contexts (Wilson-Lee 2016: xi). This fascination and its potential economic lucrativeness are illustrated by one anecdote told to me by one member of the group. Whereas he ‘used to beg from passing cars and feel bad …, I now recite Shakespeare’s poems at robots [traffic lights] and people are much happier giving me money for that’ (Amose). JAM’s economic model is simple. The group secures free venues or venues for which overheads are likely to be kept to a minimum. Rather than charging for tickets, they take donations at the end of the performance and the proceeds from the collection are shared among the cast members. Two adaptations—Bottom’s Dream and I Ophelia, both specifically adapted for JAM and performed at the Foxwood Theatre and the Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg respectively (where, incidentally, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre performed Hamlet during their world tour), mark a significant shift in their financial fortunes. Prior to these, the actors had become accustomed to earning between 35 and 100 rand (between £2 and £5.75 or $2.50 and $7 at the time of writing) each per show. A place at a homeless shelter, which provides a bed and shower (but no food) typically costs 15 rand per night. Earnings for their Shakespeare performances, however, have been as high as 1,400 rand (£80 or $100) per person per night and for commissioned projects, the members can sometimes command an additional 900 rand (£52 or $65) a day for rehearsals. Most of the group are now more or less off the streets. Although their income is sporadic and precarious, for the first time ever some members of the group have been able to open bank accounts and secure ID books. Including Shakespeare in their repertoire, along with the growing reputation of JAM as a Shakespeare repertory group, has made, and may continue to make, a significant difference to the material conditions of the actors’ lives. Since the group formed in 2012, some of the actors have appeared in short films and as extras on television. One has been accepted to train at the highly competitive Market Theatre Laboratory. JAM’s affiliation with the brand ‘Shakespeare’ and the cultural purchase this implies can be exploited to gain visibility and legitimacy, or to secure sustainability on a national and international stage. There are plans to tour the company around South Africa and Europe, using their brand as a Shakespeare repertory company – a plan that would have less chance of coming to fruition, according to Gould, if they were performing local new writing, or even canonical African drama. Shakespeare performance is the primary economic driver for JAM

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and, as such, facilitates and sponsors JAM’s experiments with new writing and enables their exploration of other local dramas. There is a cultural cost here in terms of the performance and promotion of local drama, and perhaps even in the way that JAM is seen to perpetuate and profit from the myth of Shakespeare’s ‘universalism’. As a ‘playable surface’, Shakespeare may function as a venue for interesting cultural work and even economic opportunity, but it also makes legible the continual process of compromise and negotiation that defines intercultural performance in the region. Indeed, JAM and its relationship to Shakespeare reflect in microcosm many of the divisions and inequalities – racial, historical and social – that continue to shape life for many South Africans. Sandra Young has remarked that whereas ‘irreverence, both towards Shakespeare and towards “Africa”’ in South African Shakespeare performance might be particularly timely in terms of persisting racial and economic tensions, performance post-apartheid has been surprisingly conservative. Postapartheid performance is characterized by its tendency to reproduce ‘the glib and feel-good’ image of a ‘rainbow Africa’ in order to ‘provide colour and reconciliatory affect for consumption by a privileged audience’ (Young 2014: 50).5 Shakespeare in South Africa is still about power and access to power. JAM exploits the ‘feel-good’ factor, even as it reveals its massive faultlines. Their story is seductive. They are often referred to locally as the ‘Homeless Shakespeare Company’, and in the context of middle-class fascination with the myth of Shakespeare as a universalizing and humanizing agent, the label is proving a fruitful one for them. Nonetheless, issues of access and power in the country are reflected in the group’s organizational structure. JAM are certainly fortunate in their coach and director. Gould is a worldrenowned stage and television actress who has been teaching voice and performance since 1972. At least since her role as Emilia in Janet Suzman’s groundbreaking apartheid era Othello, which debuted with John Kani in the title role at the Market Theatre Johannesburg in 1987, Gould’s contribution to progressive politics in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, by teaching drama to JAM and other marginalized groups or survivors of trauma, is important and significant.6 However, the economic and social structures governing cultural life in South Africa are such that a group of marginalized black South African men might not enjoy the same access to culture without the patronage of a liberal white South African who is part of the cultural establishment. To put this in perspective, a Johannesburg resident told me during an interview after one of our Globe to Globe Hamlet shows that, despite living in the South African city for a number of decades, he had never seen ‘black actors in leading roles on stage’ (Cocks 2015). Many audience members of all races in Johannesburg echoed his views, commenting on the uniqueness of the racial ‘ensemble’ of the Globe’s multiracial cast. While there are noteworthy exceptions, the structural model whereby an economically more privileged white African or European individual takes directorial control of African grassroots theatres is replicated throughout the region.7 There is a further sense in which this essential inequality (historical and economic) is visible in the relationship between ‘privileged’ centres (and the scholars and

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practitioners, myself included, who work from within them) and ‘Africa’ which all too often figures as the less-empowered partner. This inequality is perhaps the single greatest challenge for practitioners, scholars and theatre groups across the globe invested in ‘global’ or intercultural Shakespeares. But it is part of a larger complex of issues that informs African colonial and economic histories and characterizes globalization in all its forms. Given their continued use of Shakespeare, it is useful nonetheless to think about the ways that some theatre companies are able to turn Shakespeare’s entrenched cultural purchase to their advantage and to move towards reducing the social inequalities that are also partly reflected in their own organizational structures. Inclusiveness and issues of social equality are at the heart of what JAM aims to accomplish in their work for social justice. Shakespeare facilitates their cultural and social agenda in a unique way. This is highlighted by their 2014 production of I Ophelia, a bold retelling of Hamlet that addresses the physical and emotional abuse that women face within their community.

I OPHELIA Written and directed by Gould, the idea for I Ophelia germinated from a conversation with Janet Suzman and their shared recognition that ‘Gertrude and Ophelia are two of the most lonely women in Shakespeare’ (DG) and that this isolation was something that could be made to speak to the exclusion and injustice that women face across all social and racial groups in South Africa. During the colonial and apartheid era, rape and violence against women were used systematically as a means of ensuring control and obedience and maintaining submission to racial hierarchies. This culture of abuse has continued to thrive in a predominantly patriarchal society with a large migrant population of labourers (Brittan 2006: 145). Despite the efforts of government and the passing of several items of legislation over the last two decades to try to guarantee women their constitutional right to freedom from violence, the incidence and prevalence of rape and physical abuse of women in South Africa remains among the highest in the world.8 Part of the problem with gender-based violence in South Africa is the reluctance of both victims and perpetrators to speak about the issue, either because of shame or through a sense of defeat and resignation to a problem that appears socially ingrained. In a subculture that is often aggressively and violently macho, to inhabit and portray female subjectivity convincingly on stage presents its own challenges for the company. In the context of the pervasive threat of violence that women face and their own first-hand experience with domestic and gender-based violence, the company’s decision to perform I Ophelia was a way to negotiate their own immediate trauma and to address a form of trauma endemic in many urban communities in South Africa. ‘They come themselves from quite shocking backgrounds … Shakespeare is a way to process and articulate their own [violent] experiences’, explains Gould.9 I Ophelia brings into concentrated focus women’s issues and the specific hierarchies of power and patriarchy that shape women’s lives in Johannesburg. The performance unfolds as a series of scenes roughly based on Hamlet, but centres on

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the predicament of these two women. One such scene in Gould’s I Ophelia occurs almost offstage, behind a screen. Viewers watch as a silhouetted Polonius sjamboks (beats with a thick leather whip) Ophelia for the impropriety of her relationship with Hamlet. In the nunnery scene, Hamlet forcibly submerges Ophelia’s head under water in a basin. The audience laughs at the violence in both scenes. ‘It is a laughter which says this has happened to me but also a way of registering discomfort with a social issue that affects many’ explains Gould (DG). For an audience researcher, laughter is one of the key tools or indicators used to gauge or calibrate the cultural work that a given performance accomplishes and the extent to which the issues being refashioned on the stage are resonant for the audiences. The laughter, here as elsewhere, is a marker of recognition and unease. In their exploration of gender politics, JAM might well have chosen to perform new writing or to use some of the writing produced by the cast to workshop some of the issues facing women. Gould explains that she was also attracted to the depth and range of affective experiences for women presented in Shakespeare’s most famous play. But her decision to rework the original text had also to do with the play’s reputation and its cultural weight. An affiliation with Shakespeare and with the ‘original’ text allows the performance to accomplish more for the actors and their audiences than a piece of new writing about domestic abuse could do, partly because the text and its cultural reception already occupy a place in cultural debates about women and patriarchy, and partly because of the high cultural status of Shakespeare in the global imaginary. This is where the concept of Shakespeare as a ‘playable surface’ becomes useful. I Ophelia’s appeal and its hybridity as a ‘somewhat’ Shakespeare text are likely to draw a wider audience than a new, relatively unknown piece about gender-based violence, for a start. But writing and performing a play about gender-based violence in local African communities, under the aegis of perhaps the most iconic play in the Western canon, provide a useful emotional and cognitive buffer between a deeply sensitive and pervasive but largely repressed social ill and the performers and audiences whose complicity, as a community, either as witnesses, collateral victims or perpetrators of this violence, determines the play’s meaning. Gould’s adaptation engages the audience in a cognitive work that takes place in the interstices between the scenes presented in I Ophelia, the specific contexts of the audiences whose complicity is discovered by the play (in much the same way that Claudius’s guilt is ‘tent[ed] to the quick’ in The Mousetrap) and the narratives of injustice for women encoded by the ‘original’ Hamlet text. For a South African playgoer, the play is both Shakespeare and ‘not Shakespeare’: the issue being reenacted on stage is part of another narrative from another country and time, but it also represents ‘me’ and my complicity. And this interstitial negotiation is what makes it possible for the play to do its work. Reshaped for local audiences, I Ophelia/Hamlet becomes a Trojan horse of sorts: a story of abused women embedded in a familiar, indeed iconic, Western cultural form is used to infiltrate a community and bypass a wall of silence and resistance. The uneasy laughter of the audiences registers the relationship of recognition and distance crucial to its success as both Shakespeare and ‘not Shakespeare’: the

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complicity and foreignness allows this Shakespearean adaptation to perform a unique and specific kind of cultural work for the company and its audiences. The social justice intervention it accomplishes, I would suggest, is broadly therapeutic and directed towards communal self-understanding. Gender inequality and the question of the role of women in society was a lively issue for many audience members at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre’s touring production of Hamlet in sub-Saharan Africa. Possibly because the Globe’s production was largely received and consumed as a ‘foreign’ play, enacted by Western touring players, the testimonies of audience members register a similar sense of complicity with, and distance from, the issues being staged. Performance creates a safe emotional and cognitive distance from which to explore the play’s resonance for local audience communities. The accounts that Hamlet audiences provide of their laughter and of other responses to a range of issues which touch an emotional nerve for them as individuals or members of a community provide a wider context for understanding the question of social justice for women in Southern Africa.

GLOBE TO GLOBE HAMLET IN AFRICA In response to open-ended questions about themes and issues in the play, Hamlet audiences indicated that family relationships and the portrayal of women in the play were among the most resonant for them. It is interesting to compare their conceptions of the play both before the performance and after because this reveals how reception and meaning are bound up with local/global signifying practices and presents a strong counterpoint to the fantasy of Shakespeare as a conduit for a stable core of universal meanings.10 In their pre-performance interviews, people knew that Hamlet was a play about death and revenge and included a tragic love story. They knew it asked questions about life and mortality and ‘to be or not be’ was frequently quoted by audiences in pre-performance interviews. Some mentioned the famous image of the prince holding the skull. When asked in their pre-performance conversations if Shakespeare was relevant to them and why, most respondents repeated to me different versions of the mantra that Shakespeare was ‘universal’. In the pre-performance interviews, in other words, spectators’ expectations of the play and their understanding of its thematic significance were largely determined by popular and iconic representations of Hamlet and by critical trends in traditional humanist scholarship. Their views of what to expect tended to conform to a long-established history of humanist critical study or to what different film versions had emphasized and were broadly consistent with the responses of playgoers interviewed in parts of Europe and the Middle East.11 Although some of these ideas about universalism persisted in post-performance and interval interviews, an understanding of what the play meant for the same audience members was often very different post-performance. The post-performance interviews included much more specific analysis of the play and its concerns, and often these deviated considerably from its critical reception in the Western humanist tradition. They also differed considerably from venue to venue. Different communities saw in the play’s exploration of women’s

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roles as wives, lovers, daughters and mothers struggling to exercise autonomous choices, a reflection of their own concerns and social structures. But some of the meanings they attached to women’s lives in the play were very specific to discrete communities. Gertrude’s character is a case in point. African audiences were deeply invested in Gertrude’s personal quandary. Dromgoole’s production does not generally emphasize the mother–son incest that many interpretations have found implicit in the text. But depending on the cultural norms dominant in different regions, different communities responded differently to the explicit question of incest posed by Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius, a question that is now largely historical or of less emotional interest to contemporary Western spectators. For some ethnic groups in Kenya, marriage to a deceased husband’s brother is considered incest and is deeply taboo (Cocks 2015b), whereas for Shona people in Zimbabwe it continues to be common practice, particularly in rural areas where marriage to a deceased husband’s brother is a means of saving the widow and her family from destitution. In Kampala, a number of mostly middle-aged female spectators strongly identified with Gertrude and objected to her persecution at the hands of her son. In the postperformance and interval discussions, Gertrude became the focal point of debates about the right of women to remarry. As one woman told me, ‘I’m an advocate of a woman’s right to remarry after the death of their husbands … Men marry after their wives die, why not women?’ (Cocks 2015c). Local cultural norms and debates about women tended to influence the degree to which audience members indicated sympathy with, or connection to, Gertrude’s character. Many audience members also identified Ophelia’s predicament as one of the most affecting issues explored in the performance they saw. This was particularly true for African youth who reported that they ‘connected strongly’ with Ophelia’s storyline and what they saw as a dilemma between the loyalty and obedience due to her father and the loyalty she owed her lover. Younger Hamlet audience members in Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique reflected on the fact that for many people of their generation, marriage will be negotiated, or at least approved formally by the elders in each family. Marriage to someone not approved by the family for reasons of religion, ethnicity or class could lead to significant interfamilial strife. For audience members seeing the Globe’s World Hamlet, the violence directed towards Ophelia in the nunnery scene also provoked laughter. While some audience members explained this as a discomfort with what they recognized as the very real threat of domestic violence to women in their communities, other meanings emerged. Malawian audiences interpreted their laughter in this scene as a response to what they saw as a subversive ‘jab at Christianity’ in a society where Christian churches play a determining role in the daily decisions and actions of their congregations (Cocks 2015d). As with many playgoers in the West, the majority of spectators at the different African venues came to see Hamlet because of its iconic status in the canon of the most iconic playwright. They also wanted to see Shakespeare’s most famous play played by Shakespeare’s ‘original’ theatre company. They came armed with various

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preconceptions about the universal human condition that continue to be effective in propagating Shakespeare in pedagogy and which have helped to make ‘Shakespeare’ a successful global brand. These core ideas about why Shakespeare is important remained a persistent feature of their response. But they were overlaid with new meanings. Through the communal process of spectatorship, the audience shaped new meanings specific to their experiences and to their communities, which somewhat belied the myth of universalism, even as they reiterated the play’s universal qualities. Laughter, whether it expressed protest, discomfort or complicity, marked the communal role of the audience as the real arbiters of meaning in the auditorium. The range of responses suggests some of the complexity of Shakespeare reception globally. Shakespeare performance, even in this touring production, functioned as a venue for audiences to articulate a range of sociopolitical and cultural issues that mattered to them as a community. The research therefore highlights the role of performance and audience research in facilitating a social justice intervention by encouraging and soliciting acts of ‘imaginative sympathy’ among the audiences. These required audience members to identify, or not, with the predicaments of various characters and to articulate their response in terms of their own individual and communal experiences. For African, as for European, audiences, then, Shakespeare is a high cultural artefact and global icon whose meaning is determined by a specific history of reception and through relationships of power in which the Globe is also complicit. Whether performed by local performers or touring players, in each of the examples explored so far, Shakespeare’s plays function not as agents for social justice, but as unique venues where different groups work through a variety of cultural, social, psychological and economic issues. The parameters of this venue are slippery and constantly shifting, but this slipperiness is matched by the inventiveness of the groups who continue to play on it. In the final section of this chapter, I provide an account of the work of Mutumbela Gogo – a Mozambican theatre company whose recent turn to Shakespeare reflects, in the director’s choices, a sophisticated understanding of Shakespeare as a global cultural currency, a pliable, playable surface that is, nonetheless, not without its perils. Mutumbela’s Portuguese-language adaptation of Hamlet (2015) speaks to issues of power, corruption and familial strife in a local context, but also reflects the company’s desire for wider recognition on a global platform. It testifies to the growing networks of affiliation and collaboration that Shakespeare performance makes uniquely possible, and to a bold strategy to locate the theatre company both locally and globally.

MUTUMBELA GOGO’S HAMLET A month before the Globe to Globe company arrived to perform their Hamlet in Mozambique, Mutumbela Gogo had just completed a run of Hamlet at the Teatro Avenida, Maputo. Directed by the acclaimed Mozambican director Manuela Soeiro, Mutumbela’s Hamlet is a Portuguese adaptation, prepared and translated

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in collaboration with the Swedish playwright Henning Mankell. The director explains that it was important to adapt the play visually and contextually to suit local audiences. The story unfolds in an unspecified African chiefdom and draws upon local ideas of kingship. Sword fighting is replaced with choreographed dances and forms of combat that take on additional meaning in the context of Mozambican cultures. Company actor Adelino Branquinho recalls how in rehearsal and in preparing to present Claudius to African audiences, he tapped into the stories of inter-familial power struggles in Mozambican oral history and into the histories of archetypal African chiefs obsessed with power.12 In an extended interview, Soeiro explains to me that Shakespeare’s alleged universality and the play’s indictment of power, the corrosiveness of corruption and the resonance of revenge influenced her decision to play Hamlet at this juncture in Mozambican history.13 But Soeiro is also acutely aware of the play’s iconic status and Shakespeare’s brand value to a grassroots theatre company. She explains her company’s relatively new turn to Shakespeare, despite initial resistance from local stakeholders, in terms of the importance of helping to raise and maintain the profile of a theatre group now in its twenty-eighth year: Some say to me, Manuela, why [are] you stag[ing] Shakespeare? … I say, the actors are not baby actors. They have been [in the group] for twenty years. It is important for the actors to know Shakespeare. He is the father of theatre all over the world. Shakespeare is not only for Europe; it’s for every actor all over the world (MS). Mutumbela aims to be both fiercely nationalistic and international in its outlook. As Soeiro explains, the choice to play Hamlet and to work with Mankell is part of a strategy to locate the company both locally and globally. Whereas Maputo audiences can be ambivalent or even hostile to performances from the European canon, Hamlet’s reputation is such that ‘audiences consider this play, not a European play, but our play’ (MS). Branquinho makes an apposite point about performance in a globalized context: ‘Shakespeare is important for us in Mozambique because of the phenomenon of globalization. Globalization isn’t just economic. It should take cultural aspects of life into consideration. A play like Hamlet [performed in Mozambique] can absorb and incorporate many concepts to [engage] British or German audiences’ (AB). Branquinho evokes a paradigm of influence that imagines movement not just from a centre or origin to the periphery, but as a dynamic exchange within multiple centres whereby the reverberations of each performance transform or modify the range of meanings possible for subsequent performances. It was clear that a significant proportion of the audience at the Globe’s Hamlet in Maputo had come partly because they had seen the earlier run by the local theatre company. For those who had seen both, the post-performance discussions were shaped by comparative analysis of the respective plays and what each achieved for local audiences. African theatre practitioners and audience members engage with and are drawn to Shakespeare for a number of complex reasons in which ‘local’ imperatives overlap

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with ‘global’ trends. Shakespeare’s implication in colonial and neocolonial pedagogies and the success with which the brand has become a global exchange commodity have created unique economic and social opportunities for grassroots companies who tap into the capitalist logic of the ‘Shakespeare trade’. As with JAM’s use of Shakespeare, Mutumbela’s turn to Shakespeare indicates that ‘Shakespeare’ in Southern Africa offers unique political, economic, social and professional networking opportunities.

RE-ENACTMENT I want to conclude by returning to the Paterian ideal of imaginative sympathy championed by Ryan, and use it to think through some of the various kinds of imaginative work performed by the actors, audiences and spectators discussed in this chapter. The ‘subjunctive’/‘as if’ mode of response to the plays highlighted by Ryan is key to the kind of cultural work accomplished by re-enactment. Re-enactment refers to a species of performances (either on stage or in the ‘as if’ of the participant’s imagination) whose emotional, aesthetic, psychological or political resonances are so powerful they result in what Peter de Bolla, in a different context, has called a ‘fantasised encounter with the real’ (De Bolla 2003: 120). JAM’s I Ophelia and Mutumbela’s Hamlet are perhaps the most obvious instances of re-enactment. Both productions sought to address recent traumas or ambiguously resolved experiences that had opened fractious cultural faultlines in their respective communities in the hope of bringing some of these tensions to partial imaginative resolution. Siswe’s reimagining of his past through Edmund’s fictional experiences – his fantasized enactment of life as a legitimate actor and member of the Shakespeare Society – works towards recovering a more enabling sense of personal identity and social legitimacy. The various audience members at the Globe’s Hamlet who played an active role in shaping and reshaping the meanings of the play in an image of their own history and individual and cultural concerns were also engaged in a process of imaginative reenactment. Finally, a form of re-enactment is invoked by the Mozambican actor Branquinho when he describes how the meanings of texts are transformed through their circulation in the imaginations of globalized communities. In this sense, re-enactment might be thought of as a constant process of replaying in which a wide range of accreted cultural meanings can be used to refashion the plays for the purposes of various communities. Shakespearean re-enactment bears some conceptual resemblance to Pater’s ideal of ‘poetical justice’. Like Pater’s ‘poetical justice’, re-enactment derives its power from the subjunctive imagination of audiences and performers. Yet, it is distinguished from Pater’s model by its emphasis on the dynamic meanings that emerge in performance and, above all, by the importance it ascribes to the communal aspects of performance and the power of local practitioners to create meanings to suit their own psychological, political or social purposes. Shakespearean re-enactment affords a complex affective and cognitive space that performers and audiences inhabit to think through experiences that cannot easily be articulated in their everyday lives. This does not make Shakespeare a privileged site from which to understand non-Western subjectivities. But capitalism, globalization

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and Shakespeare’s role in the history of Western imperialism have fostered an appetite for ‘Shakespeare’ in global audiences and the possibilities for international collaboration and intercultural communication have helped to transform the plays into a usefully ‘playable surface’ in which affect and cognition also play an important role. If ‘Shakespeare’ has become a hybrid commodity that enjoys wide circulation among different centres in the world, then part of its value for local audiences is the space that it allows for reflection on their pasts, their futures and their relationships with a wider global community.

NOTES 1. Thurman (2014) offers some useful thinking on this issue. 2. I am grateful to Margaret Litvin for her beautifully succinct elaboration of alBassam’s metaphor during a symposium paper entitled ‘Why Make Political Theatre In Dark Times?: Arab/ic Shakespeare Reaches for Europe’ at the Globe Symposium on Intercultural Shakespeare Performance, 22 April 2016. 3. Interview with Malcolm Cocks, Johannesburg, 20 April 2015. Hereafter Amose (Amose is not the actor’s real name). 4. ‘Interview with Malcolm Cocks’, Johannesburg, 20 April 2015. Hereafter Siswe (Siswe is not the actor’s real name). 5. For a discussion of the Isango Ensemble’s ‘branding’ of South African Shakespeare for consumption by audiences in the West, see Cocks (2014). 6. Gould has been compared to Mother Teresa in a South African online newspaper article: de Beer (2015). 7. Mark Dornford-May’s directorship of the Isango Ensemble from Cape Town and Arne Polheimer’s directorial involvement with Two Gents from Zimbabwe are two obvious examples. Nanzikambe (Malawi) and the Theatre Company (Kenya), respectively, have a British and a white African director at their helms. 8. Significant legislation has included the Commission on Gender Equality Act (1996), The Domestic Violence Act (1998), The Sexual Offences Act (2007) and the muchcriticized Women Empowerment and Gender Equality Bill (2014). For rape statistics in South Africa in 2001, including comparison with other Interpol Members, see http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/Rape/Rape.pdf. 9. Interview with Malcolm Cocks, Johannesburg, March 2015. Hereafter (DG). 10. At the time of writing, approximately 600 audience members from eighteen African countries participated in the research project. Where possible, the same participants were interviewed briefly before the performance and then again at the interval or after the performance. 11. Dr Penelope Woods and I asked over 300 Globe to Globe Hamlet audience members in Israel, Turkey, Greece and London the same questions. Data from our Globe to Globe Hamlet audience research project in Oceania, Asia, and other parts of Europe

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is still being collated and the findings will be presented together with the data from Africa in our forthcoming book Guilty Creatures: Audiences of the Globe to Globe Hamlet Tour. 12. ‘Interview with Malcolm Cocks’, Maputo, 5 April 2015. Hereafter (AB). 13. ‘Interview with Malcolm Cocks’, Maputo, 5 April 2015. Hereafter (MS).

REFERENCES Beer, D. de (2015), ‘Arts Get the Poor out of JAM’, IOL, 10 March. Available online: https://www.iol.co.za/entertainment/celebrity-news/local/arts-get-the-poor-out-of-ajam-1829676 (accessed 3 August 2016). Bolla, P. de (2003), The Education of the Eye, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Brittan, H. (2006), ‘Organising Against Gender Violence in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 32(1): 145–63. Cocks, M. (2014), ‘“U Venas No Adonisi”: Grassroots Theatre or Market Branding in the Rainbow Nation’, in S. Bennett and C. Carson (eds), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, 29–31, London: Cambridge University Press. Cocks, M. (2015a), ‘Joburg Resident Discusses Multirace Casting’, Vimeo, 29 March. Cocks, M. (2015b), ‘Hugger Mugger’, Vimeo, 2 March. Cocks, M. (2015c), ‘I’m a Strong Advocate of Women’s Right to Remarry’, Vimeo, 2 March. Cocks, M. (2015d), ‘Malawi Audiences See Nunnery Scene as ‘‘a Small Jab at Christianity’’’, Vimeo, 8 April. Hodgdon, B. (1998), The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Litvin, M., S. Walkling and R. Cormack (2016), ‘Full of Noises: When “World Shakespeare” Met the “Arab Spring”’, Shakespeare 12(3): 300–15. Massai, S. (2006), World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, London: Routledge. Thurman, C. (2014), South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare, London: Routledge. Wilson-Lee, E. (2016), Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet, London: HarperCollins. Young, S. (2014), ‘Shakespeare without Borders’, in C. Thurman (ed.), African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare, London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3.4

‘Shakespeare in prison’: A South African social justice alternative KEVIN A. QUARMBY

That Shakespeare has emerged as posterboy for freeing the incarcerated from the shackles of ignorance and recidivism appears confirmed by academic gatherings like the Shakespeare in Prisons Conference (SIPC), first held at the University of Notre Dame in 2013, and biennially from 2016 onwards. Such conferences demonstrate how, in the US and elsewhere, prison education projects with names like Shakespeare Behind Bars (founded 1995), Rehabilitation Through the Arts (founded 1996) and The Shakespeare Prison Project (founded 2004) capture the imagination of academic institutions eager to associate themselves with educators, scholars and performance practitioners ‘who are passionately committed to humanizing education behind bars’, and whose socially aware, socially conscious engagements with a captive population manifest in a diverse array of prison initiatives (Shailor 2011: 250). Often inspired by the work of Augusto Boal, the founding father of Brazil’s Theatre of the Oppressed, these sparsely funded projects inevitably rely on the goodwill, dedication, hard toil and near evangelical fervour of their creators (Boal 1979). Led by people with an abundance of ‘curiosity, passion, and faith’, such projects might achieve significant success, but they frequently do so on an individualistic, isolated basis (Novek 2013: 214). Nevertheless, universities and colleges offer institutional support for many ‘Shakespeare in prison’ programmes, viewing them as high-risk, high-impact, potentially high-profile opportunities to display privileged social justice concern about educational, racial and economic inequity. By engaging in their ‘pedagogy of hope and empowerment’, these programmes speak specifically to the needs of the incarcerated and, by societal sanction, the undeniably under- or de-privileged (Hartnett 2011: 8). For some, ‘Shakespeare in prison’ now represents a ready passport to social justice funding opportunities. Academics can seek grants from their parent institutions that elevate the socially engaged status of all concerned. Practitioners can approach arts funding bodies and charities, as well as governmental and nongovernmental organizations to gain financial or practical aid in furthering their prison endeavours. Without question, it seems, Shakespeare is now a prime tool for

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educating, rehabilitating and thus intellectually (even if not actually) re-enfranchising an ever-growing prison population that, as Elizabeth A. Hull suggests, continues to suffer the consequences of political and societal fearmongering by those who see punishment and retributive justice as ill-served by such socially aware activities (Hull 2006: 129–37). ‘Shakespeare in prison’ now slips trippingly off the tongue. Few who read this Arden Research Handbook would question the validity of these ventures. Few would dare. This chapter, however, commits the ultimate heresy: it does question the validity of certain ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives. In so doing, it engages in ongoing criticism of arts outreach projects and their effectiveness, while highlighting the role of anti-mass-incarceration activists who denounce these well-meaning efforts as unwittingly abetting the ongoing commodification of detainees. It also offers an alternative South African ‘Shakespeare in prison’ educational experience, which consciously seeks to de-commodify the incarcerated by empowering inmates to confront their fear of Shakespeare, not as an intellectually superior literary or dramatic construct, but as a very real counter to the ‘fear’ of their violent day-to-day existence.

‘SALVING WITH THE BALM OF THE BARD’ The apparent success of traditional ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives is well documented, with publications offering insights into the evangelized imperative that spurs many of its practitioners. One only has to read the moving narratives of US prison educationalists like Laura Bates, Amy Scott-Douglass or Jean Trounstine to glimpse how and why Shakespeare has touched so many lives, which otherwise would be lost in a recidivist spiral of release and re-incarceration (Bates 2013; Scott-Douglass 2007; Trounstine 2001). As Scott-Douglass explains, apart from certain dubious examples of actors entering sites of incarceration (apparently ‘in preparation’ for their roles), and instances of politically active ‘imprisoned black Americans’ who, like their South African counterparts on Robben Island, educated themselves in Shakespeare, it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that a ‘remarkable … number of prison Shakespeare programs were initiated by professors and theatre directors’ across the US (Scott-Douglass 2007: 4). Innovators – including Trounstine in Massachusetts, Agnes Wilcox in Missouri and Bates in Indiana – created unilateral prison programmes that spawned a wealth of associated ventures. In the UK, similar projects emerged, notably Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor, which saw its conflation of psychotherapy, dramatherapy and Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) performance expertise employed in a high-security psychiatric prison; likewise, the London Shakespeare Workout, with its quest for ‘effective interaction’ between artists and offenders (Saunders 1992; Wall 1997). Many of these US- and UK-based programmes, Scott-Douglass argues, were ‘primarily educational, providing inmates with a venue for improving literacy and social skills, and cultivating artistic talent’ (Scott-Douglass 2007: 5). These educational programmes influenced other localized examples, such as the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble’s ‘Shakespeare Prison Project’, or Fabio Cavalli’s Compagnia

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dei Liberi Artisti Associati, working in Italy’s Rebibbia Prison, and the subject of the film Caesar Must Die (Pensalfini 2016; Taviani and Taviani 2012). Although the good intent of these educational programmes is undeniable, less convincing, perhaps (and especially for those of a more secular persuasion), appears the belief that Shakespeare could act as a ‘spiritual force’, capable of rehabilitating through revelatory introspection (Scott-Douglass 2007: 5). Quoting the theatre director Chris Johnston, Scott-Douglass notes how some ‘Shakespeare in prison’ programmes began setting up ‘a kind of parallel universe where the experiences as profound as those of both the offender and the victim [could] be explored’, thus permitting the incarcerated participants to achieve ‘victim empathy’ (Scott-Douglass 2007: 6; Johnston 1998: 134). Without mentioning how the profound effect of these ‘parallel universes’ could be measured, Scott-Douglass embarks on a less than circumspect description of prisoners speaking of Shakespeare ‘in the same kind of language that might be used to describe Jesus Christ’, with new ‘initiates’ to the programme becoming ‘zealous devouts [or] Shakespearean monks’, that quote from plays ‘as if they were scriptures’, and ‘witness’ to others in a ‘discourse of conversion’ (Scott-Douglass 2007: 19–20). The overt religiocentricity of this ‘discourse’ is also evident in comments regularly expressed by the ‘Shakespeare Behind Bars’ founder, Curt Tofteland, who states, ‘punishment doesn’t change behavior, but education does’: ‘I have an addiction issue – miracles. I see them every day, and it is habit forming’ (qtd. in Davidson 2013). The miraculous work of academics and practitioners who engage in prison education is often hailed, therefore, as inspiring Damascene moments of introspection, empathy and behavioural change, all mediated through the psychospiritual power of the ‘divine’ and ‘immortal’ Shakespeare (Scott-Douglass 2007: 19). As the many Shakespeare educational programmes suggest, prison inmates continue to benefit from the addictive miracles observed by their benign interveners. Unfortunately, the combination of academics and theatre practitioners seeking therapeutic, spiritual or empathetic release, as Ramona Wray suggests, involves reliance upon prisoner ‘statements’ that produce a ‘universalizing discourse’ that is ‘rarely interrogated’ and invariably ‘taken at face value’ (Wray 2011: 343). By focusing, as these well-intentioned individuals do, on what the cultural policy critic Eleonora Belfiore describes as ‘the alleged transformative powers of the arts and their consequent (presumed) positive social impacts’, ‘Shakespeare in prison’ interventionists construct and perpetuate a myth of social benefit and behavioural change that is as unwittingly incestuous as it is predictably positive in its outcomes (Belfiore 2009: 352). Belfiore’s broad contention is that the perceived efficacy of such arts-based projects is unsupported by any quantitative or qualitative data. Instead of evidence that can be interrogated, Belfiore describes how a rhetoric of ‘academic bullshit’ has emerged to explain and promote the benefits of arts interventionism (ibid.). Similarly, Dani Snyder-Young, in her 2013 study Theatre of Good Intentions, describes how the ‘public, published discourse’ of ‘Shakespeare in prison’ research, supported as it mostly is by universities from the ‘wealthy nations’, ensures that only the voices of those scholars who ‘can afford to write and distribute’ their narratives ‘globally’ are heard (Snyder-Young 2013: 14). For most ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives, globalized ‘academic bullshit’ is understandably (and, in the absence of stronger evidence, possibly rightly) employed

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to raise funds for projects, the necessity of which those less socially conscious, or more rabidly populist, seem more than willing to ignore. As Laura Bates notes when describing the ‘openly admitted’ views of her friends about prison education – ‘I think they should all be making license plates’, or the more comical, ‘Don’t make them read Shakespeare; they’re already in prison’ – an underlying unpopularity exists for these programmes, with education and punishment deemed incompatible bedfellows (Bates 2013: 16). More vociferous naysayers complain publicly about ‘inmates [that] should not receive free college education while incarcerated’: ‘They have obviously committed a crime or a series of crimes, and need to be punished for their actions’ (Henson 2009). Such public and private expressions of societal mistrust cannot help but force ‘Shakespeare in prison’ facilitators to fight their rear-guard action, armed only with goodwill and an equally odiferous rhetoric of transformative success. An overreliance on determinist academic rhetoric, employed to justify the introduction, development or perpetuation of ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives, nonetheless invites a dialogue with social policymakers that is both ‘honourable and dishonourable’ in its historical heritage (Belfiore and Bennett 2008: 10). In collaboration with Oliver Bennett, Belfiore explains this dichotomy when claiming, ‘it is probably fair to say that a belief in the power of the arts to transform lives for the better represents something close to orthodoxy amongst advocates of the arts around the world’ (ibid.: 4). This same orthodoxy shares part of its legacy, Belfiore and Bennett argue, with the theories of European Romantic cultural visionaries such as Goethe, Schiller and Matthew Arnold, juxtaposed with less savoury ‘experiments in social engineering pursued so relentlessly by the Nazi, Fascist and Communist states’ (Belfiore and Bennett 2008: 10; Bennett 2013: 15–18). Despite its uncomfortably suspect hybridity, the orthodoxy that promotes the transformative power and positive impact of arts intervention programmes ensures that ‘negative valuations of the arts [are] largely suppressed in contemporary public and political discourse’: Present-day cultural policy rhetoric in Europe and much of the West is still deeply embedded in notions of what the arts are, what effects they have on individuals, and what their role in society is, which are an inheritance of a debate that has engaged European thinkers for centuries. (Belfiore and Bennett 2008: 31) Belfiore and Bennett believe that such ‘Eurocentric’ intellectualizing not only ‘constitute[s] a reductive version of a much more complex intellectual dispute over the functions of art in society’, but also highlights the false orthodoxy of ‘underlying, unquestioned assumptions’ about arts projects that are ‘based on dubious principles and beliefs’ (ibid.). Rather than collaborative advocates for social justice, the academics and theatre practitioners who take their skills into the prison environment are seen to be perpetuating the Eurocentric supremacy of Shakespeare, while claiming with evangelical fervour, though with limited hard evidence, the playwright’s spiritual impact on those they seek to educate into social normalcy and reintegration. Whatever one’s opinion on the impact and effectiveness of ‘Shakespeare in prison’ programmes, it remains obvious that Shakespeare’s plays have acquired near mythical status as the perfect tools for curing the (anti-) social and educational ills of

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the English-speaking world’s prison population. For example, as Niels Herold notes when describing prison performances of Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale (or, in his opinion, any other text in the Shakespeare canon), the importance of each and any of these is not to provide ‘moral exempla for modern-day criminals (of behaviors that should or shouldn’t be imitated)’ (Herold 2014: 5). Instead, they invite the recognition, according to Herold, that ‘Shakespeare’s language and dramatic structure embody the performance codes and scripting for deep transformative change’ (ibid.). Such ‘deep transformative change’ implies an educative process more akin to medical interventionism. The perceived psycho-medical efficacy of Shakespeare’s plays – their unwavering capacity for beneficial change – is seemingly confirmed by Herold’s description of the ‘therapeutic meta-theatricality’ of prison performances, with prisoners being brought ‘closer still to what they crave most as the purpose of performance: forgiveness, redemption, respect’ (ibid.: 89). The ‘treatment’ implicit in Shakespeare’s ‘therapeutic meta-theatricality’ – what Monica Matei-Chesnoiu describes as prison Shakespeare’s ‘expected … psychotherapeutic effect’ – suggests not only the prisoners’ collective need for a cure to their criminal disease, but also Shakespeare’s status as a remedial agent for its healing (MateiChesnoiu 2013: 211). The interventionist’s glorification of Shakespeare as a healing remedial agent is indicative of what the South African actor, director and applied theatre facilitator Tauriq Jenkins describes as the overarching desire of ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives to ‘salve with the balm of the Bard’ (Jenkins 2014). Unfortunately, the act of applying this balm abets the unwitting, some might say insidious, commodification of incarceration by supporting the very penal systems that profit (financially and ideologically) from those they imprison. In the context of the US, this commodification of incarceration – referenced by PCARE (the Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education Collective) as inherent in the nation’s ‘prison-industrial complex’ – represents the principal threat to the democratic process (Hartnett, Novek, and Wood 2013: 1; PCARE 2017: 290–2). As the ‘global leader in mass incarceration’, the US seems set, so PCARE argues, on perpetuating its ‘mass-incarceration binge’, whereby a ‘startling amount of resources are poured into the machinery of punishment and the narratives utilized to justify such choices’ (Hartnett, Novek, and Wood 2013: 1–2). Like the ‘narratives’ that support many ‘Shakespeare in prison’ programmes, the ‘narratives’ that perpetuate mass incarceration are self-serving, but only to those ‘certain investors’ who see the ‘market-fueled’ exploitation of the ‘misery’, ‘alienation’, and ‘disempowerment’ of offenders as ‘a sure-fire way to make money’ (ibid.: 4). Since, as PCARE suggests, the ‘tail of corporate profit wags the dog of legislative, policing, and judicial reasoning’ in the US, the narrative discourse that reinforces the prison-industrial complex undeniably supports the commodification of incarceration on an unprecedented scale (ibid.). Indeed, as Kiernan Ryan notes in his discussion of The Merchant of Venice in this volume, when Shylock effectively argues that Christians unethically value slaves ‘as beasts to be abused and marketable commodities’, rather than ‘free, fellow human beings’, then the ‘systemic injustice of a society in which profit and rights of property ride roughshod over the innate human rights of

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everyone’ is brought starkly into focus (Ryan 241–243). Shakespeare might, as Ryan suggests, be commenting on the ‘blatant ubiquity and intolerable human cost of social injustice’ in early modern England, ‘astutely camouflaged’ in fictive narratives of other times, but his message appears unpleasantly and impotently prescient for twenty-first-century critics of the industrialized commodification of prisoners (Ryan 239). When, therefore, ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives smear the ‘balm of the Bard’ over the social injustice inherent in contemporary detention practices, they ‘do not resist hegemonic discourses, meanings, and dominant systems of power’, but instead, so Snyder-Young argues, select ‘tactics affirming rather than denying the status quo’, which only demonstrates ‘theatre’s limits to making social change’ (Snyder-Young 2013: 4). Even though practitioners and academics might earnestly believe that prison-based projects represent ‘radical’ sites of ‘cultural intervention’, which accords with an equally ‘radical hope’ that they can ‘nudge the direction of this change just a little towards social justice’, such hope seems credulously ignorant of the political and social realities that PCARE highlights (ibid.: 10). Snyder-Young’s comments echo Michael Balfour’s 2004 Theatre in Prison concern, that many prison theatre projects, while finding ‘their own small indices of hope’ nonetheless ‘risk naïve incorporation’ into the very ‘systems’ of mass incarceration they attempt to resist (Balfour 2004: 10). Equally damaging, in the context of Shakespeare’s twenty-first-century global impact, is James Thompson’s remark that prison educationalists the world over must recognize the delicacy and fragility of their ‘carefully negotiated’ positions, which require them to be ‘acutely sensitive in relation to the histories of colonialism and exploitation’ (Thompson 2005: 9). Such sensitivity is understandable when considered alongside postcolonial studies of Shakespeare, for instance Martin Orkin’s, which support the ‘powerful signifier of conservatism’ argument, while claiming that Shakespeare’s appropriation by ‘English-educated members of the ruling classes’ represented a ‘means of evidencing their affiliation with the imperial and colonial centres’ (Orkin 1991: 235). As Ania Loomba describes when exploring the genesis of colonial control, ‘“the English book” (the Western text, whether religious like the Bible, or literary like Shakespeare)’, was made to ‘symbolize English authority itself’ (Loomba 1998: 89). The purpose of this material manifestation of English authority – the ‘process by which Christianity is made available to heathens, or indeed Shakespeare made available to the uncultured’ – was ‘to assert the authority of these books, and through these books, the authority of European (or English) culture’, thus making those nonEnglish ‘uncultured’ others ‘feel like clowns in the boudoir’ (ibid.: 89–90). Nowhere was the humiliation of unculture more evident than in South Africa, where the Eurocentric ‘elevation’ of Shakespeare ‘as the epitome of literature’, so Ashwin Desai argues, was ‘part of the way in which [British] white supremacy’ exploited the nation by assigning excessive ‘value’ to this particular cultural artefact (Desai 2012: IX). The authority of Shakespeare was imposed upon the Union of South Africa, created as a self-governing dominion by the British in 1910, which brought ‘together a multiracial, multinational and polyglot population under a single state’ (Der Walt 2010: 38). The Union was not created, however, on ‘equal terms’, nor was it divided by skin colour alone (ibid.). Instead, it was predicated on poverty

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and lack of education, with ‘proletarianized’ rural Afrikaner whites forced to ‘speak the English of the conquering’ British imperial power, while ‘trekking to unfamiliar cities’ to compete for work with the ‘mass of cheap African labour, concentrated at the very bottom of society’ (ibid.: 40). The resulting racial discord, born of British oppression and the disenfranchisement of many Afrikaners in favour of ‘Africans and Coloureds’ who retained their right to vote, led inexorably to Afrikaner nationalism and the reprisal policies of apartheid (ibid.: 40–1). Apartheid cannot be blamed on Shakespeare, but neither can Shakespeare’s adoption by the prisoners of Robben Island be glamourized in the context of a literary construct that was associated in the minds of many white Afrikaners with a despised and rejected Anglo-imperial conquering regime. Revisionist historical narratives might highlight the sporadic voices of anti-whitesupremacist dissent, heard faintly during the forty-six years of apartheid misrule and manifesting in occasional stagings of multiracial Shakespeare productions that proved ‘deeply subversive of the dominant apartheid ideology’ (Quince 2000: 157). Nevertheless, as most postcolonial criticism implies, today’s ‘Shakespeare in prison’ programmes sidle uncomfortably close to an old imperial model, with the dual hypocrisies of colonialism and exploitation unwittingly feeding the quest for acceptance, access and funding. Naively incorporated into the systems they purport to interrogate, ‘Shakespeare in prison’ initiatives might thus stand accused of affirming, rather than subverting, the hegemonic monetization of the incarcerated as profit-dependent commodities, as the PCARE activists suggest. Indeed, the ‘embedded racism’ inherent in the US prison-industrial complex, and the ‘centuries of racism’ that make ‘mass incarceration’ the ‘civil rights issue of our day’, seems intimately associated with the very apartheidism we condemn in South Africa’s past and the colonialism we denounce in our present (Hartnett, Novek and Wood 2013: 2). Unless we are willing dispassionately to interrogate the idolization of ScottDouglass’s ‘Bard behind bars’ as the ultimate social justice educational construct, we risk perpetuating the commodification of prisoners, while we regurgitate the selfjustifying academic rhetoric that regulates them as currency. This is not to suggest that what follows offers a definitive answer to so complex a question, an answer that could deservedly be read as participating in the very academic rhetoric it condemns. It is to offer an alternative ‘Shakespeare in prison’ experiment, conducted in a South African penal system not dissimilar to the US’s, whose exponent, Tauriq Jenkins, self-consciously ‘checks in’ for signs of interventionist ‘hypocrisy’, and ‘comfortable’ complacency, to ensure the ‘interior architecture’ of his ‘life’s work’ is not olfactorily challenged by its own bovine excrement (Jenkins 2014).

South Africa’s ‘Shakespeare In Prison’: Gang violence, fear, and the de-commodification of African pain As director and driving force of the Cape Town ‘Shakespeare in Prison’ project, in association with the Independent Theatre Movement of South Africa (ITMSA) that he also founded, Tauriq Jenkins strives to distance his prison initiative from the orthodoxy of evangelized social benefit and behavioural change, while ‘constantly

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challenging an oppressive legacy of exclusivity characterized by apathy and a lack of cultural sensitivity’ (Jenkins 2008). His reasoning appears simple. South Africa’s prison population, like that of the US, is disproportionately swollen with socio-economically disadvantaged young black men, thus supporting the social construct that ‘only people of color commit crimes’ (Jenkins 2014). The inherent bias of such race-specific mass incarceration, which in the context of the US, Eleanor Novek argues, reproduces the ‘worst patterns of racial discrimination’ by guaranteeing that the prison population ‘is more than half black or Hispanic’ helps perpetuate this ‘people of color’ myth (Novek 2013: 203). As a ‘vicious behemoth that feeds on the worst kinds of race-, class- and gender-based discrimination’, to use Jonathan Shailor’s words, this monstrous organism is itself fed by systems (legal, political, economic), which appear as apartheid as South Africa’s disgraced old regime (Shailor 2013: 35). Nonetheless, Jenkins concludes that it is not simply racialized targeting that accounts for South Africa’s mass incarceration of young black men, but a very specific form of ‘squalor that feeds prison cells’ (Jenkins 2014). The everyday squalor of South Africa’s townships, which represent mere ‘variations of incarcerated space’, ensures that the transition from the ‘bigger prison’ of free society to the ‘legitimate confines’ of the nation’s penal system is obscenely seamless (ibid.). While in the US, as Novek suggests, the ‘African American child is still small when the street begins to beckon to him, and it is here that the society he was born into expects him to join the ranks of the violent, as victimizer, victim, or both’, in South Africa, it is the ‘incarcerated space’ of township poverty, decay and hardship that feeds the behemoth of the prisonindustrial complex (Novek 2013: 220). Like many African American children who face the hardship of becoming the ‘victimizer’ or ‘victim’ – an acknowledgement of the gang culture they must adopt or fall victim to in the ghettoized neighbourhoods of the US – young South Africans, when entering prison, must likewise face unprecedented levels of violence, most especially from fellow inmate gang members. As Heather Parker Lewis’s harrowing account of South African prison gang culture confirms, the power and vicious influence of these groups owes as much to the nation’s apartheid past, as to the deprivation of the present (Parker Lewis 2006: 115). Not addressed in Ashwin Desai’s discussion of the Robben Island Shakespeare, the fact that these gangs did not ‘take a stand’ against the apartheid regime that imposed state-sanctioned racism and militaristic control over its prison population, but instead colluded in apartheid by forming ‘brutally and rigorously enforced’ internal control networks of their own, guaranteed, Parker Lewis argues, that they were despised by their anti-apartheid political prisoner counterparts (Desai 2012; Parker Lewis 2006: 115). Unfortunately, and despite the nation’s rejection of apartheid in 1994, South Africa’s twenty-first-century prison inmates remain ‘as vulnerable as they have ever been’, having ‘little choice but to go along with the gangs’, or suffer ‘retribution’ that is ‘swift and brutal’ (Parker Lewis 2006: 116). The everyday brutality of the South African prison existence ensures that any consideration of Shakespeare as a universal instrument for evangelized social benefit and behavioural change seems, to Jenkins, exploitative and nauseatingly naïve. Shakespeare might, as Ryan

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contends, be ‘implicitly committed to the principle and the possibility of genuine social justice’ (Ryan 244). Even so, the ‘utopian ethics that underpins Shakespearean drama’ seems as alien and virtually distant today, in the racialized prisons of South Africa and in the US, as it did when Shakespeare first explored the ‘imaginary and subjunctive, fictional rather than factual’, potential of his politicized ‘poetical justice’ farsightedness (Ryan 245–6). Jenkins’s mistrust of those who eulogize over Shakespeare’s psycho-spiritual, psychotherapeutic power to heal the miscreant through prison education, with the accompanying colonial, racial and apartheid overtones such eulogizing invites, seems justified when considered alongside Natasha Distiller’s discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘universal authority’ as a cultural icon in post-apartheid South Africa (Distiller 2001: 66). Like Loomba’s ‘English book’ symbol of control, Shakespeare represents, for Distiller, an ongoing ‘double-edged’ tool in the South African prison context (ibid; Loomba 1998: 89). Although she acknowledges that Shakespeare ‘can be used effectively to protest the abuse of human rights’, Distiller also recognizes that this same ‘universal authority’ can be ‘invoked to overwrite difference even as it tries to oppose oppression based on the entrenchment of a hierarchy of difference’ (Distiller 2001: 66). Even though Shakespeare’s ‘universal humanity’ – his utopianized potential for ‘genuine social justice’ – seems well placed to encourage the ‘equal humanity of black South Africans’, argues Distiller, ‘the other side of propounding universality is the disavowal of the systemic construction, weighting, and concomitant experience of difference’ that maintains the hegemony of the nation’s post-apartheid, postcolonially exploitative prison system (ibid.). That the ‘systemic and ideological structures of apartheid remain’, not just as ghostly remnants, but fully ‘intact’ in the country’s education system, confirms elsewhere to Distiller that South Africa now represents not a post-apartheid but a ‘neo-apartheid’ state, willing to manipulate the ‘universal applicability’ of Shakespeare as an exploitative educational tool (Distiller 2005: 9, 230). If, as Jenkins claims, ‘the experience and the history of the prison can be felt outside its walls’ – with the ‘memory’ of apartheid perpetuated in high schools enclosed by barbed wire, and where janitors are constantly ‘unlocking and locking gates’ – it seems little wonder that an ‘extremely angry adult youth’ should find the transition to penal confinement so inevitable (Jenkins 2014). What the PCARE activists in the US call the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ appears, in South Africa, like an equally sinister conduit, channelling the disadvantaged, exploited and oppressed from the school yard to the prison yard (Hartnett, Novek and Wood 2013: 5). The exploitation of the disadvantaged, oppressed and inevitably incarcerated ‘angry adult youth’ is most evident, Jenkins complains, in those ‘volunteer-based’ Shakespeare education programmes that enjoy NGO-sector and ‘globally recognized’ academic institutional sponsorship (Jenkins 2014). International support for ‘practitioners and students moving into townships and prisons, with strong ideas of development and correcting the past’, requires that the ‘space’ these sites occupy is ‘opened up for observation’ (ibid.). Tied, as they appear, to First World foreign policy and an evangelical ‘sense of absolution’, these same initiatives, having disembarked

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from their racism and HIV/AIDS bandwagons, are now ‘prioritizing interventions dealing with incarceration’ (ibid.). Claiming that the ‘entire NGO sector is riddled [with] disdainful, disrespectful patronization’, Jenkins describes how the continued funding of these voyeuristic enterprises licenses scholars, teachers, students and theatre practitioners to enter and observe the socially alienated and segregated prison population like globetrotting tourists (ibid.). Social justice tourism, Jenkins complains, only serves to perpetuate, not counter ‘the commodification of African pain’ (ibid.). Because he feels ‘sordid and distasteful around the application and also the discourse’ of this commodification, Jenkins consciously strives to avoid the neo-liberal masturbatory appeal of traditional education projects, which represent an insidious ‘hijacking of prison performance’ by institutions and facilitators (ibid.). In their ‘scramble for the “Shakespeare” word’ to incorporate into their educational proposals, these projects supplant social justice with ‘Shakespeare’ as if his very name guarantees miraculous success (ibid.). Instead of perpetuating the voyeuristic ‘fascination over the cyclical decrepitude of the South African incarcerated’, which ‘creates a behavioral pattern of a particular kind of apathy that exacerbates the notion of the other’, Jenkins promotes a radically alternative route through which to achieve his results (Jenkins 2013a). Neither as a benign educational instrument for transformative, spiritually inspired ‘miracles’, nor a utopian ethical construct that envisions an ‘egalitarian … transfigured future’, Jenkins sees Shakespeare as an immediate, aggressive and impactful performance mechanism (Ryan 247). This alternative Shakespeare, a Shakespeare that represents a practical tool rather than a pseudo-spiritual, psychotherapeutic ideal for behavioural change, is best wielded as an instrument – some might say a weapon – of fear. In an environment that accords with Shailor’s US experiences with prison Shakespeare, in which ‘individual suffering is continuously projected and magnified, as prisoners and staff answer one another’s fear, indifference, pain, and anger with their own’, the wielding of an alternative fear represents a powerful counter to the day-to-day fear of gangland reprisal, rape and murder (Shailor 2013: 36–7). Fear of Shakespeare, not idolatrous love of Shakespeare and ‘salving with the balm of the Bard’, represents the identifiable benefit of a prison intervention programme that seeks to break the cycle of gang membership among young, vulnerable entrants to South Africa’s penal system. Fundamental to this foregrounding of fear as a tool for empowering the powerless is Jenkins’s insistence that the participants in his project eventually perform their Shakespeare play in its full early modern English entirety. Although different from the paraphrasing model employed by prison educators like Laura Bates, an early modern rendition might seem little changed from Tofteland’s own ‘unaltered, full-length Shakespearean plays as they appear in the First Folio’, as performed by inmates in Kentucky (Bates 2013: viii; Scott-Douglass 2007: 1). Nonetheless, as Jenkins argues, it is not the fear of archaic linguistic forms that South African prisoners confront when performing unmediated, non-paraphrased Shakespeare. It is the ability to overcome their fear of a far more alien cultural construct that bears little or no relevance to their lives or linguistic skill. As Jenkins explains:

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So, when someone with no front teeth, and who doesn’t speak English, and it’s their fourth language, will eventually perform a piece of Shakespeare in text without taking shortcuts, without having it patronized in a particular way because it’s a prison project. And having, in a very short space of time, been placed in a culture of a different kind of urgency, yet an urgency that matches the incredible stakes that are living within the prison, then … a culture begins to form. Because … to define the culture of prison is to survive under urgency – that is the culture. (Jenkins 2013a) Jenkins sees the ‘idea of the demystification of an English language’, which, through Shakespeare, ‘systemically engages the body in many ways’, as beneficial to the incarcerated actors for a profoundly different reason than his US counterparts (Jenkins 2013a). Rather than promote the tolerance, introspection, victim empathy and criminal responsibility of traditional ‘Shakespeare in prison’ projects, Jenkins sees his ‘demystification’ approach as potentially ‘correct[ing] the issues’ of South Africa’s apartheid past (ibid.). The Cape Town youth actors can ‘not only reevaluate [their] own sense of self with this past’, but also engage in a language which, ‘because of its … history and because of how [they] are tackling these various linguistic challenges in the moment’, offers a sense of pride, ownership and achievement that transcends apartheid sensitivity or colonially oppressed negativity (ibid.). Jenkins’s insistence, that only by employing the original ‘language of the oppressor’ in its Shakespearean form can a process of self-discovery, empowerment and remediation truly occur, seems refreshingly honest in its politicized simplicity (qtd. in Gordon 2012). The initial manifestation of this approach appeared in December 2011, when a Cape Town community centre played host to what Jenkins describes as the ‘first in [South Africa’s] history, where an incarcerated Hamlet [was] performed publicly’ by a group of youth offenders (StreetTalkSA 2012). The young males, from Cape Town’s Ottery Youth Care Centre – a youth detention centre that acts as a penal holding station for ‘sentenced youth, youth awaiting trial, and youth at risk’ – were chosen because, as Jenkins explains, they were the ‘“toughest” boys’ in each section (ibid.). The significance of choosing the ‘toughest’ from this environment is manifold. The youth awaiting trial sections in South African detention centres, says Jenkins, represent an ‘umbilical cord between South African mainstream society’ and the gangs that function inside and out: Gang culture in South Africa … is very powerful. It controls the informal transportation system, and its historical framework of power, as one will notice with the analogy of Robben Island, is extremely pertinent in South Africa as well. So, moving into that space, one is moving into power, not only within incarceration, but outside as well. (Jenkins 2013a) For a nation like South Africa, which has, as Jenkins reminds us, the ‘second highest incarceration rate’ to the US, and one ‘irrevocably the result of apartheid’, it is vital to intercept the umbilical cord linking the external and internal gangs (ibid.).

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Unlike the unidirectional ‘school-to-prison’ pipelines elsewhere in the world, which can only be intercepted, so PCARE argues, by destroying imprisonment’s status as a ‘generational inheritance’, countering functional illiteracy and investing more in the public school system, South Africa’s bidirectional umbilical cord requires far more invasive surgery (Hartnett, Novek and Wood 2013: 4–5). The umbilical link between South Africa’s violent society outside, and its prison counterpart inside, must, Jenkins demands, be severed. Shakespeare represents the scalpel blade. That the violence outside South Africa’s prison walls remains as frighteningly ever-present as within them is testament to the troubled politics of a country dominated by its pre-apartheid struggles and post-apartheid penal ineffectiveness. As a ‘democracy in transition’, South Africa’s ‘gloomy’ reality – its ‘highest hijacking statistics, … highest rape statistics, [and] the worst gender atrocities systemically engaged with the culture’ – represents, in Jenkins’s mind, ‘a mixture of a hangover from the apartheid’ past, ‘plus ingrained misogyny that works its way from a number of patriarchal systems’ in the present (Jenkins 2013a). Such concerns are echoed by Tsoaledi Daniel Thobejane, who blames the ‘tragedy’ of South Africa’s political development on the patriarchal system of an ‘elitist’ and corrupt professional officialdom (Thobejane 2013: 124). South Africa’s ‘administration by amateurs’ ultimately relies, however, on the ‘political apathy’ and ‘resignation’ of its populace to the ‘untouchable’ state of the nation’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, despite its many ‘political blunders’ (ibid.). Similarly, the South African cultural critic Chris Thurman confirms his nation’s collective political silence, which manifests in the ‘upper-middle-classness’ and ‘picnic-in-the-parkness’ of open-air Shakespeare performances in Cape Town’s Maynardville Park (Thurman 2012: 8, 70). South Africa’s apartheid past and #MeToo-dismissing misogynistic present, as well as its selectively collective blindness, unavoidably coalesce in the ‘very complex prison space’ that offers a site for youth offender ‘learning and initiation’ – for gangculture bad or, hopefully, social justice good (Associated Press 2018; Jenkins 2013a). Significant for our consideration of Jenkins as a viable alternative to traditional ‘Shakespeare in prison’ academic-practitioners is the generational heritage of his political involvement, and his deep understanding of, and opposition to, apartheid that stems from first-hand experience. Unlike those who invoke the name of the imprisoned and tortured Boal, but who, as Snyder-Young admits about herself, ‘have never been incarcerated, never been homeless, never been displaced by a natural disaster, and never lived under a dictatorship’, Jenkins and his family lived through South Africa’s transitional struggle (Snyder-Young 2013: 14; Boal 2001: 289–91). Jenkins might admit that his ‘undeniable sense of disillusionment is not unique’, but his ‘informed’ status nevertheless accords with a minority of ‘Shakespeare in prison’ advocates whose experience of incarceration comes ‘from the inside’ (Jenkins 2014). While educationalists like Laura Bates might commend their own fearlessness for entering ‘an environment where most people would be fearful’, and implicitly applaud ‘how her life was changed’, others share far more in common with the radicalized Jenkins (Bates 2013: 5, v). Tom Magill, for instance, the founder of the Belfast-based Educational Shakespeare Company and director of Mickey B, regularly references his own incarceration in the British

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prison system and his empathy for fellow inmates (Magill 2013). Magill may not have suffered the torture inflicted on the Theatre of the Oppressed founder, but his recognition as Boal’s official representative in Northern Ireland confirms the drama facilitator’s full engagement with his past. Jenkins, too, belonged to a family ‘heavily entrenched’ in ANC anti-apartheid activism, which resulted in their forced relocation to neighbouring Zimbabwe (Jenkins 2014). Born in exile, Jenkins grew up in a nation which, from 1987 onwards, was controlled by Robert Mugabe, only to return to South Africa with his family in the mid-1990s, thereby surviving ‘two massive socio-political transitions’: ‘Living in these grey zones of intersection have taught and influenced my consciousness considerably’ (Jenkins 2015). Jenkins remembers returning with his family to his newly democratized homeland, and his father’s dismay at discovering as much corruption and racial tension as under the old Afrikaner regime. That corruption has not abated, nor has South Africa’s neoapartheidism been addressed. As a result, Jenkins’s anger and frustration, as well as his family’s heritage in ANC political activism, inform the ‘Shakespeare in Prison’ programme he directs. Although Jenkins purposely avoids the voyeuristic exposure of his work, and its appropriation by the academic rhetoricians he openly derides, a 2012 Shakespeare Quarterly Forum blog interview by Colette Gordon (since removed though accessible  via an ITMSA archive) records his response to questions like, ‘Why Shakespeare?’ and ‘Why Hamlet?’. Jenkins, like his prison interventionist peers, opposes the idea of Shakespeare representing ‘classical’ drama that ‘belongs only in institutions of higher learning, or on well-funded mainstream stages’ (Gordon 2012). Nonetheless, with regards to Hamlet, Jenkins sees the ‘power of having classical theater’s blockbuster being performed by a group of so-called miscreants’ as significant, not least for the message it sends both within and without the prison (ibid.). Hamlet invites, indeed, requires, prisoners to express their vulnerability – a dangerous thing in a prison where ‘you need a façade to survive’ – while also embracing their ‘darkest demons and angels simultaneously’ (StreetTalkSA 2012). The fruits of this embrace can be viewed in a local Street Talk television news programme preserved on YouTube, which includes interviews with prisoner-actors and selected scenes from the Hamlet performance (ibid.). One senses the impact for a young man, whose life is one of abuse, childhood drug-taking and social exclusion of portraying an all-powerful Claudius advancing on a stage that, with each regal step, is created beneath his feet by chairs dutifully repositioned by his fellow actors: ‘When I’m walking, I feel like a king’ (ibid.). Or the liberating effect for another youth, voicing Hamlet’s self-doubt and revengeful anger, whose open vulnerability is juxtaposed with the arrogant swagger of a gangland challenge to his uncle. Jenkins comments in the accompanying interview that his Hamlet provides ‘a vehicle for a thorough intrinsic investigation, and heartfelt tugging and pulling’ on the ‘heartstrings’ of his actors, even though they still reside ‘within the same environment’ of prison fear (ibid.). For the first time, however, these actors experience a ‘response’ from those around them that ‘is not, “Hey, you know weakling, let me fuck you up.” The response is, “Man you’re a good actor, I didn’t expect that of you, that was an amazing thing that you’ve just done”’ (ibid.). We might observe these disadvantaged young prisoners

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empowered by Shakespeare, but we also see and hear a vitally new rendition of Hamlet, performed by socially hardened young actors, whose horrifically short life experiences (explored in cutaway interviews) inform the intensity and passion of their theatrical delivery. ‘Shakespeare in prison’ practitioners quite rightly cite intensity and passion as regular performance outcomes for their incarcerated charges. Two factors, however, seem different about the South African approach, one highlighted by the Street Talk actor interviews, and the other hinted at in Jenkins’s Shakespeare Quarterly Forum discussion. Firstly, the effect of Hamlet on the Cape Town actors appears far more than rehabilitation through introspection, victim empathy and miraculously psychotherapeutic behavioural change. As one actor-detainee describes it: ‘I like to act. I like to talk a lot. It feels like, when I’m in front of people, it feels like I want to be more than just that. I want to be something bigger than that’ (StreetTalkSA 2012). Similarly, another actor, admitting how life and prison are ‘very tough’, concedes that ‘everyone always get[s] the chance to change; I think for me this is the best place to get change and chances’ (ibid.). The ‘change and chances’, the ‘something bigger’ that these young people seek? Not the intellectualized, introspective soulsearching that traditionally accompanies the academic rhetoric of arts interventionist success. Instead, their Shakespeare experiences invite the life-changing, ‘something bigger’ chance of becoming – an ‘airplane engineer’, a ‘plumber’, or a ‘chef’ (ibid.). The umbilical cord of generational imprisonment and gang membership seems, from such reactions, irreparably severed. Although too early to interrogate any subsequent data, with Gordon elsewhere questioning Jenkins’s directorial power over his productions, the realization of these achievable dreams appears a far better long-term indicator for the de-commoditized interventional success of ‘Shakespeare in prison’ programmes like this, rather than the traditional reliance on recidivist number crunching and self-congratulatory evangelizing (Gordon 2017: 522–6). The second difference is likewise of long-term significance, most specifically for prison education projects the world over. As Jenkins suggests, the ‘bravery’ of the ‘kind of internal working, and working with the self’, that these young actors demonstrate in the violent confines of prison, ‘is rewarded’ not only by the empowering ‘change’ they experience when receiving the traditional ‘round of applause’ (StreetTalkSA 2012). Their ‘bravery’ is also rewarded by the subliminal ‘change’ experienced by the ‘audience witnessing’ the event – an audience ‘which includes warders, which includes the social workers, which includes the people that will be living and working in the spaces that would never have recognized these kinds of traits with these individuals’ (ibid.). Without pandering to the hierarchical condescension of well-meaning arts practitioners, who strive, through their educational projects, to demonstrate the psychotherapeutic impact of prisoners’ lives being changed by Shakespeare, the South African ‘Shakespeare in prison’ project, like its PCARE activist counterparts in the US, seeks instead to ‘change’ the attitudes of far more powerful groups: the prison authorities, local and national politicians and media communicators who influence public opinion. Only with the support of these people – whose political, societal or financial statuses offer effective power and authority – can society implement a recovery from its dangerous ‘addiction’ to, and ‘debilitating dependence’ on, mass incarceration (Hartnett, Novek and Wood

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2013: 5). Shakespeare’s ubiquitous and timeless message, that ‘everyone offends when inequality and injustice are structural, [and] when the entire society is constitutionally culpable’, seems crucial to this message of ‘change’ (Ryan 248). By demonstrating, through the performance of Shakespeare, the human potential of young men who share achievable, socially beneficial ambitions and dreams, Shakespeare’s ‘poetical justice’ message might at last be heard, especially by those with the power and will to enforce meaningful, long-term penal reform.

REFERENCES Associated Press (2018), ‘Not Every Country is Down with the #MeToo Movement’, New York Post, 6 March. Available online: https://nypost.com/2018/03/06/not-everycountry-is-down-with-the-metoo-movement/ (accessed 18 August 2019). Balfour, M. (2004), Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice, Bristol: Intellect Books. Bates, L. (2013), Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard, Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Inc. Belfiore, E. (2009), ‘On Bullshit in Cultural Policy Practice and Research: Notes from the British Case’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(3): 343–59. Belfiore, E. and O. Bennett (2008), The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bennett, O. (2013), ‘Intellectuals, Romantics and Cultural Policy’, in J. Ahearne and O. Bennett (eds), Intellectuals and Cultural Policy, 3–19, London: Routledge. Boal, A. (1979), Theatre of the Oppressed, C. A. McBride and M. Leal McBride (trans.), London: Pluto Press. Boal, A. (2001), Hamlet and the Baker’s Son: A Life in Theatre and Politics, A. Jackson and C. Blaker (trans), London: Routledge. Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire) (2012), [Film] Dir. P. Taviani, P. and V. Taviani, Palace Films. Centre for Conflict Resolution (2004), ‘Doing Time. From Punishment to Rehabilitation and Restoration’, in Michael Balfour (ed.), Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice, 161–75, Bristol and Portland, OR: Intellect Books. Davidson, K. (2013), ‘Shakespeare Behind Bars Founder Speaks at Jepson Leadership Forum’, The Collegian, 24 January. Available online: https://www.thecollegianur.com/ article/2013/01/shakespeare-behind-bars-an-act-of-rehabilitation (accessed 13 August 2019). Desai, A. (2012), Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island, Pretoria: Unisa Press. Distiller, N. (2001), Shakespeare and the Coconuts: On Post-Apartheid South African Culture, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Distiller, N. (2005), South Africa, Shakespeare, and Post-Colonial Culture, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. Gordon, C. (2012), ‘Taking “Shakespeare Inside Out”, Colette Gordon Talks to Tauriq Jenkins about Hamlet in Prison and a “First for South African Theater”’, Shakespeare Quarterly Forum, Folger Education Blog, 9 November. Available online: https://web. archive.org/web/20160318122617/http://southafricantheatre.org/content/interviewitmsa-artistic-director-tauriq-jenkins-dr-colette-gordan (accessed 18 July 2020).

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Gordon, C. (2017), ‘Open and Closed: Workshopping Shakespeare in South Africa’, in James C. Bulman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 512–30, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartnett, S. J. (2011), ‘Empowerment or Incarceration: Reclaiming Hope and Justice from a Punishing Democracy’, in S. J. Hartnett (ed.), Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex, 1–12, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hartnett, S. J., E. Novek and J. K. Wood (2013), ‘Introduction: Working for Justice in the Age of Mass Incarceration’, in S. J. Hartnett, E. Novek and J. K. Wood (eds), Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism, 1–9, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Henson, K. (2009), ‘Prison Inmates Shouldn’t Receive Free College Education’, The Round Table, 3 December. Available online: https://www.mhsroundtable.com/ archives/prison-inmates-receiving-free-college-education-invoke-controversy/ (accessed 13 August 2019). Herold, N. (2014), Prison Shakespeare and the Purpose of Performance: Repentance Rituals and the Early Modern, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hull, E. A. (2006), The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Jenkins, T. (2008), ITMSA: Independent Theatre Movement of South Africa. Available online: https://sites.google.com/site/theatreindependence/ (accessed 13 August 2019). Jenkins, T. (2013a), ‘Theatre Practice in Prisons: Strategies for Engagement’, Panel Session, Shakespeare in Prisons Conference, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA, 16 November. Jenkins, T. (2013b), Projects for Peace Grantees 2013, International House New York. Jenkins, T. (2014), Telephone Interview, 6 June. Jenkins, T. (2015), Email Interview, 4 June. Johnston, C. (1998), ‘Twisting Paradoxes’, in J. Thompson (ed.), Prison Theatre: Perspectives and Practice, 127–42, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Loomba, A. (1998), Colonialism/Postcolonialism, New York, NY: Routledge. Magill, T. (2013), ‘Tom Magill – the backstory’, esc films, Vimeo. Available online: https://vimeo.com/60446023 (accessed 13 August 2019). Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2013), “‘The Play’s the Thing”: Hamlet in a Romanian Wartime Political Prison’, in C. Dente and S. Concini (eds), Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective, 209–21, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Novek, E. (2013), “‘People Like Us”: A New Ethic of Prison Advocacy in Racialized America’, in S. J. Hartnett, E. Novek and J. K. Wood (eds), Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism, 203–20, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Orkin, M. (1991), Drama and the South African State, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Parker Lewis, H. (2006), God’s Gangsters?: The History, Language, Rituals, Secrets and Myths of South Africa’s Prison Gangs, Cape Town: Ihilihili Press. PCARE (2017), ‘PCARE @10: Reflecting on a Decade of Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education, While Looking Ahead to New Challenges and Opportunities’, Communication and Cultural/Critical Studies, 14(3): 288–310.

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Pensalfini, R. (2016), Prison Shakespeare: For These Deep Shames and Great Indignities, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Quince, R. (2000), Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Productions during the Apartheid Era, Studies in Shakespeare, Vol. 9, New York, NY: Peter Lang. Saunders, J. (1992), ‘Awakening the Voice Inside: Dramatherapy and Theatre Initiatives in Prison’, in M. Cox (ed.), Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor, 221–7, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Scott-Douglass, A. (2007), Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars, New York, NY: Continuum Books. Shailor, J. (2011), ‘Humanizing Education behind Bars: Shakespeare and the Theater of Empowerment’, in S. J. Hartnett (ed.), Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives, 229–51, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Shailor, J. (2013), ‘Kings, Warriors, Magicians, and Lovers: Prison Theater and Alternative Performances of Masculinity’, in S. J. Hartnett, E. Novek and J. K. Wood, Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism, 13–38, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. ‘Shakespeare in Prisons’ (2013), Conference Schedule, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA, 15–16 November. Snyder-Young, D. (2013), Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. StreetTalkSA (2012), ‘Street Talk Season 3 Episode 37: Hamlet’, YouTube. 28 February. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sufSrEf41fg (accessed 13 August 2019). Thobejane, T. D. (2013), The Fight for an Egalitarian South Africa/Azania: Towards Politics of Racial Harmony and Equity (rev. edn.), New York, NY: Nova Science Publishers Inc. Thompson, J. (2005), Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thurman, C. (2012), At Large: Reviewing the Arts in South Africa, Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing. Trounstine, J. (2001), Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison, New York, NY: St Martins. Wall, B. (1997) ‘London Shakespeare Workout (LSW)’. Available online: http://www. londonshakespeare.org.uk/ (accessed 18 August 2019). Walt, L. van der (2010), ‘Revolutionary Syndicalism, Communism and the National Question in South African Socialism’, in S. Hirsch and L. van der Walt (eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution, 33–94, Leiden: Brill. Wray, R. (2011), ‘The Morals of Macbeth and Peace as Process: Adapting Shakespeare in Northern Ireland’s Maximum Security Prison’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 62(3): 340–63.

CHAPTER 3.5

Romeo and Juliet with Chinese characteristics: Questions of usefulness and engagement in twenty-first-century China JULIE SANDERS AND LI JUN For Luo Yangluan

At the forty-second Hong Kong Arts Festival in March 2014, Beijing director Tian Qinxin presented her National Theatre of China production of Romeo and Juliet in Beijing dialect with Chinese and English subtitles. Starring television idols Li Guangjie and Yin Tao and with the action relocated to a fictional mainland Chinese rural town called Verona in a somewhat abstracted or ‘surreal’ time, this was very much an updated production.1 CCTV (the Chinese national broadcaster) described the production in the following terms: ‘Boxing, bicycles, guitars, baseball, and sunglasses are interwoven in this production. The nobility of Zhu Liye [Juliet] and Luo Miou [Romeo] changes into something of common people in this love story, shortening the distance between the Bard and Chinese audiences.’2 Despite the embedded Cultural Revolution allusions, which were commented on by critics and audience members alike, the stage picture in Tian’s Romeo and Juliet presented an image of Chinese young adults recognizable to any academic working in a Chinese or Sino-Foreign university at that time and one perhaps designed to appeal specifically to that younger cohort as spectators.3 But what might the mobilization of Shakespeare among new target audiences, both as a site for performance and spectatorship, mean for the relationship between Shakespeare, his texts and ideas of social justice in mainland China today? Building on Christy Desmet’s theory of ‘small-time Shakespeare’ to refer to those productions in China which are neither officially sanctioned nor heavily institutionalized, we aim Please note that all of the Chinese and Korean names in this chapter have been presented in the conventional order of last name, first name.

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to bring two very different ‘small-time’ productions of Romeo and Juliet into dialogue with each other in this chapter in order to question the ‘uses’ to which Shakespeare and Shakespearean drama are being put in these contexts. We will examine how what has sometimes been categorized as ‘small-time Shakespeare’ is represented by and reflected in two different productions of Romeo and Juliet: one directed by Jiang Zejin in 2006 and designed specifically to engage with migrant worker audiences in Beijing and the other, the already mentioned production directed by Tian Qinxin in 2014 and aimed at young adult audiences (Desmet 1999: 2–3).4 We will argue, in the process, that the most creative and potentially challenging work on Shakespeare in China is at present taking place less in the mainstream government-sponsored commercial theatres than in other kinds of public spaces, and not least on university campuses and in public squares well away from central government districts. While Tian’s production was in part an effort to re-harness some of the performative energy of Shakespeare adaptations, such as Jiang Zejin’s, in a commercial context, the end result said more about financial expediency and nationalist politics than questions of social justice.5 We argue, then, that there may be natural limits to academic claims for the operation of Shakespearean drama as a widespread tool for social justice in contemporary China, not least when these productions are government sponsored, and suggest instead that the story of Chinese engagement with Shakespeare is often as much about usefulness and the small-scale live experience as about pressing ideas of social and political change.6 We do, however, move towards a conclusion deploying Jiang Zejin’s 2006 production as a springboard that allows for grassroots theatre to offer a counter-balance to commercially or strategically ‘useful’ Shakespeare through the performance of theatre experiences that are actively designed to speak to and for marginalized and disenfranchised sectors of the population.

‘BIG-TIME’ ROMEO AND JULIET IN CHINA Tian Qinxin’s stated intention in her production of Romeo and Juliet – which also toured to Ningbo and Hangzhou in Zhejiang province in eastern China in April 2014 – was to make Shakespeare relevant to communities of young people, many of them the university students with whom the authors of this chapter work or have worked on a daily basis. She aimed to achieve the act of making it relevant through a blending of both British and Chinese cultures (with a pluralistic understanding of the latter) and via a conscious updating of Shakespeare to ‘talk like one of us’, which is to say to talk in a modern Chinese dialect spliced with idiom and contemporary references to hot topics such as corruption and air pollution.7 For example, the line ‘Boundless hazes, it serves you to love death!’ playfully adapted the Petrarchan language of the Shakespearean source to complain about wumai (霧霾), the hazy or smoggy days with soaring PM (particulate matter) 2.5 common at that time due to air pollution in Beijing. The re-characterization of Paris, Juliet’s suitor, as Mishu (secretary) Pan, a complacent secretary with obvious kinship to an influential official, also reminded people of corrupt government secretaries who had been implicated in their patrons’ downfall, which is far from uncommon in reality and fiction.

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A further example was found in the wedding scene, when Luo Miou and Zhu Liye are secretly married by the Father; the nurse, characterized by Tian as a comically cross-dressed male, nags Luo and Zhu, deploying some well-known clichés used by MCs when addressing newly-wed couples in Chinese marriage ceremonies8: in the future, you must love and respect each other, encourage and support each other, show respect to your superiors in work, be filial to your parents – coming back to see them often – make progress together, criticize and help each other, repay your families, repay the employers, repay the society … This sequence and the broader concerns of the play mapped onto very contemporary Chinese concerns about the role of parental expectation in marriage. Tian has suggested that the topic of unconditional love in contemporary China lacks literary precedents, prescribed as this space is with long-practiced traditions both of matchmaking and of matching family backgrounds to dowry requests.9 This comic scene, with phrases and situations all too familiar to mainland Chinese audiences, drew on Tian’s recent experience of wedding ceremonies.10 In all kinds of ways, then, this Romeo and Juliet was being locally contextualized to the moment and place of production, as well as to the real-life experiences of its target audience. Such localized adaptation also extended to the sets and props in this production. In addition to costumes that were obviously Chinese – for example, those of the two lovers in the initial performance in South Korea were reminiscent of Red Guards’ uniforms from the Cultural Revolution and were then adapted to hanliu (韩流/ Korean trend/style), popular with young people at the time for the Beijing performance – the famous balcony scene was set between two electricity poles. This was assumed to be a ‘very Chinese’ setting, albeit nostalgic in tone: in Tian’s words, ‘electricity poles have already disappeared, yet they remain fresh in our [Chinese people’s] memory’. The younger characters rode chic and colourful sifei (literally, deadly flying bicycle), fixed-gear bicycles or ‘fixies’ popular in many global urban centres at the time around the crowded stage. This simultaneously suggested ‘a bygone biking age’ (in urban China, bicycles have all but given way to cars and e-bikes) and ‘a fashionable ongoing China’ (sifei representing a current fad in Chinese youth culture).11 In the process, accompanied by a musical score heavily interlaced with contemporary rock and pop songs instantly familiar to a youth audience, Tian sought to challenge a tradition of overly deferential Shakespearean adaptations that in her view have come to dominate the ‘big-time’ state-sponsored Chinese theatre repertoire.12 ‘Shakespeare’s plays were introduced to China in the 1940s, but I think we are still at the stage of doing straight interpretations’, she says in an interview, adding, ‘I hope this time we can break the mould and embed the theme of young love within the Chinese context’ (Xu 2014). In responding to Tian’s conjectures, it is, of course, important not to accept overly neat binaries in understanding material of this kind. Is ‘big-time’ Shakespeare necessarily deferential? While it is true that ‘big-time’ Shakespearean productions in China may appear to be reverential, it is not uncommon to see beneath this surface appearance more utilitarian motivations that serve a more nationalistic self-interest. In Chinese scholar Shen Lin’s words, for many Chinese artists what really counts is

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not Shakespeare’s ‘intrinsic value’ but his ‘usefulness’ (Shen 2010: 222). Echoing this opinion, US scholar Murray Levith maintains that Chinese people and institutions, including ‘big-time’ theatres, have ‘happily’ ‘appropriated and expropriated the Bard to serve their own particular ends’ (Levith 2004: xv). Tian has somehow established this ‘deferential’ Shakespeare as a false target, perhaps as a viable contrast to a selfstyled image of her own work as ‘unconventional’ or ‘innovative’ Shakespeare. To make things even more complicated, Tian has adopted a different approach to exploiting the Bard’s ‘usefulness’ fluctuating between ‘big-time’ and ‘small-time’ methodologies. In fact, two of her Shakespearean adaptations, Ming (2008) and Romeo and Juliet (2014), prove that Chinese Shakespeare productions, ‘big-time’ and ‘small-time’ alike, carry more nuance and complexity than is usually assumed from a Western point of view. Ming, Tian’s debut in Shakespearean adaptation, bore some unmistakable ‘big-time’ traits. It was a high-budget and high-profile government-assigned and government-subsidized production for a major festival, the Third International Drama Season, held by the National Theatre of China in honour of Shakespeare in 2008.13 Despite the fact that it cites no more than thirty lines from Shakespeare’s 3,000-plus-lines tragedy, Ming claimed to be a Chinese version of King Lear. It relocated Shakespeare’s plot to the grand imperial court of the Ming dynasty, and told the story of how the old emperor solves the problem of abdicating the throne and passing it on to one of his three sons. Tian once laid bare the pragmatic starting point of this tianjia (astronomically priced) production:14 the National Theatre allotted a sum of money (for the 2008 Shakespearean festival) … What we needed was an appealing proposal … Then we thought of King Lear … To put it straightforwardly, the theatre was [willing] to spend a sum of money on a Shakespeare play, [and we wanted the money]. (Tian 2010: 224)15 It seems that this considerable sum of public money was spent by the National Theatre of China not only ‘in honour of Shakespeare’, but for the sake of playing the ‘main melody’16 as it is called in Chinese, performing work honouring the ruling regime, and adding glory to the Beijing Olympics. As manifested in publicity for Ming: in an age when China flexes her muscles to the world through the Beijing Olympics, Tian Qinxin will also render such a shengshi (盛世) view on the stage, expressing a director’s deep affections to her mother land and the flourishing age.17 Tian also demonstrates a shengshi sentiment (adopting an unquestioning approach to Chinese achievements) in an interview at the time: ‘The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was so spectacular that it exhibited a “grand nation’s air” (泱泱大國氣派). In Ming, we just want to re-exhibit such an air in China several centuries ago.’18 Driven by such a shengshi sentiment, it is not surprising to see Lear transformed from a serious and senile ‘foreign’ king in Shakespeare’s tragedy into a teasing and tactful Chinese emperor in Tian’s comedic revamp. Apparently,

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Shakespeare was ‘used’ here as a convenient medium for pragmatic political comment, financial expediency and nationalistic content. By comparison, Tian’s touring production of Romeo and Juliet seemed to be an attempt to fulfil a rather more ‘small-time’ metamorphosis of Shakespeare into the Chinese context. Paradoxically, Tian was not as subversive with her raw material in this production as she was in Ming. Endeavouring to make this production relevant to contemporary youth culture, she appeared more cautious, attempting to direct a play which ‘is Shakespearean in terms of structure, character relations, and portrayal of emotions’.19 In her touring production, the director opted for a much more modern parallel, retaining the initial ballroom encounter of the young lovers, but choosing to stage it instead within the recognizably Chinese architecture of a courtyard dwelling. Her version of the play focused on two low-wage families living in close proximity in traditional quadrangle courtyards in a rural community. The families have been feuding for generations, stealing each other’s bicycles and punning on each other’s names in order to provoke a reaction (the adaptor translated ‘Romeo’ to ‘Luo Miou’ (羅密歐) and ‘Juliet’ to ‘Zhu Liye’ (茱麗葉); ‘luo’ and ‘zhu’ are pronounced the same as the terms for mule（騾）and pig（豬）in Mandarin Chinese, so the families denigrate each other as ‘mules’ and ‘pigs’ throughout the action).20 Tian’s openness to ‘adaptability’ is also demonstrated in her manipulation of the social background in Romeo and Juliet. As already noted, the performance seen by most people in 2014 was itself adapted from a 2013 Korean co-production, in which Luo Miou was interpreted by some critics as explicitly representing a Red Guard soldier. He was a member of a fictional radical movement called the Workers’ Union, and Zhu Liye was a young propaganda dancer. Any Cultural Revolution context was, however, categorically denied by Tian, who claimed, as noted earlier, to have referenced North Korea in the production.21 In this way, Tian deftly engaged South Korean target audiences in the material of the production while preserving political impunity on the mainland. To make this production more relevant to youth audiences and secure its box-office grip, while simultaneously ensuring that it was palatable to the Chinese authorities, Tian adroitly redefined the 2014 version into a more mixed and deliberately dazzling setting, which, in her own words, was ‘abstract’ and ‘surreal’.22 Luo Miou and Zhu Liye’s ‘red star-crossed’ relationship, as one punning journalist termed it, was played out across courtyards and rooftops, and between and beneath those electricity poles which, if not redolent of a particular year or even decade, were still recognizable signifiers of a past era of rural life for contemporary audiences (Lee 2014). The two electricity poles are erected on Tian’s stage in place of the balcony in Shakespeare’s original play. A party is going on within the yard of Zhu Liye’s family and the light from the electricity pole in front of the yard is borrowed to illuminate the gathering. When something goes wrong with the bulb on the pole, Zhu Liye climbs up a ladder attempting to repair the problem. Luo Miou appears and offers to give her a hand. This is a creative setting decision: apart from its redolence for spectators in terms of the recent Chinese past, the two poles are set in front of, and in contrast to, the two enclosed and ‘dark’ yards of the feuding families – the poles in turn symbolize freedom and light. The moment when Luo Miou helps Zhu Liye

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fix the bulb on the electricity pole and the couple suddenly find themselves spotlit, achieves a version of the lightning power of love reminiscent of canonical stagings of the play and its various musical and cinematic adaptations, not least West Side Story (1961) and Baz Luhrmann’s influential 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.

ROMEO AND JULIET, CHINA AND YOUTH CULTURE While it is easily argued that there is a specific resonance in Romeo and Juliet as a play and a storyline for youth culture audiences in China, as elsewhere, there is a wider phenomenon to attest to here of young audiences for Shakespeare in modern China. Actor Michael Wagg, a member of the British TNT theatre company that has toured mainland China with productions of Romeo and Juliet and several other Shakespeare plays, has written of the frisson of playing packed performances in extempore venues in university halls and campus grounds: Every one of the 2,000 small plastic stools was occupied. More students stood behind and perched around the edges of the outdoor stage in front of the sports hall. Stars shone brightly over the South China Sea and there was a chill in the air. But the cold night was never going to deter these students from a night of Shakespeare at Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai. (Wagg 2014) Wagg writes of the ‘hunger’ of these ‘mostly youthful Chinese audiences’ both for Shakespeare and the British – indeed international – associations of these particular performances by travelling players. He notes that for many in the audience this was their first-ever experience of Shakespeare in a live performance. All of this clamour for engagement with Western cultural texts and experiences can and should be understood in a context of increased emphasis on international higher education in China, a policy that is focused both on the inward and outward mobility of students and their access to global cultural understanding.23 To what extent these encounters can be assumed to raise issues of social justice is debatable and the power of celebrity and commodification needs to be kept securely in view in examples such as the TNT tour. Nevertheless, it is important to ask where, if at all, opportunities for a more socially aware dialogue with Shakespeare might exist both on and off university campus sites. In China, as in the West, Romeo and Juliet seems to provide a particularly telling case study for engagement in youth culture contexts.24 Tian’s production reveals a specific and interesting phenomenon in contemporary theatre in China – staging zhuangche (撞車/collision of vehicles), a concept that refers to there being a plethora of the same play being performed and produced at around the same time, a cluster or zeitgeist effect. In the years immediately preceding Tian’s Romeo and Juliet, there had been numerous adaptations of the romantic tragedy in China, including Zhu Luo Ji (朱羅季 Juliet & Romeo Season)25 by Dream Workshop (2008); Romeo and Juliet, co-produced by the Central Academy of Drama (CAD) and the School  of Movie and Television at Jili College (2008); Fengkuang Shashibiya (瘋狂莎士比亞/

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Crazy Shakespeare) by Shanghai Off-Broadway Theatrical Experimental Base (2011); 2008 Romeo and Juliet by San Tuo Qi Troupe (2011, a physical theatre production); and even a vampire version directed by famous avant-garde Meng Jinghui (2011).26 All these Chinese Romeo and Juliets seem to be characterized by free creative expression rather than deference. They seemed not to care much about high culture Shakespeare, but rather valued playfulness and the generation of high adrenaline levels in performers and audiences alike. Almost without exception, these productions placed more stress on comic as opposed to tragic potential. This is yet another example of Shakespeare’s ‘usefulness’ and availability for adaptation in China being in part defined by commercial ends. This reorientation of a generic trajectory can of course be argued to be part of a larger attempt to attract contemporary Chinese youth to, and engage them with, Shakespearean drama, but it must be asked whether young theatre-goers feel engaged because they identify with the behaviour and characters they witness on stage rather than because of a deep connection with the Bard. Does this plethora of Romeo and Juliets in China alongside engagements in YouTube and Youku formats demonstrate anything more than popular culture’s appropriation of Shakespeare for its own (often commercial) ends, and if so, can claims to Shakespeare’s capacity to influence these generational communities with themes as complex as social justice really be entertained?27 At best, we should exercise caution and perhaps work with audience members over a sustained period of time to track questions of impact and influence beyond the fleeting and ephemeral act of watching a play.28

‘SMALL-TIME’ ROMEO AND JULIET IN CHINA Usefulness in commercial terms is not the whole story of twenty-first-century Chinese engagement with Shakespeare. In an effort to offer an alternative model, we will close by discussing a different type of ‘small-time’ Shakespeare, once again a production of Romeo and Juliet, but one which this time aimed to create broader accessibility to the Bard for ordinary people from different walks of life, asking in the process what ‘Shakespeare for the people’ might mean in contemporary China. Can Shakespeare serve as a tool in a people-centred theatre to promulgate a growing democratic awareness and dialogue? And what might that look like in an era of high student mobility, internet connectivity (despite government restrictions in mainland China), and widespread adoption of social media? The specific case study we advance here is of the 2006 production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Jiang Zejin and acted by students from the South (Nanjing) College of the Communication University of China (CUC). Originally created for the Chinese Universities Drama Festival that year, on three consecutive nights in August, the production was performed on a makeshift stage in front of the Chaoyang District Cultural Center, for local audiences made up largely of migrant workers. The performances were a huge success, attracting nearly a thousand spectators each night.29 Key moments in the production focused unsurprisingly on iconic scenes: the balcony meeting, the morning departure of the lovers and the climax in the tomb,

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our protagonists dying for love. This was a two-hour performance adapting Zhu Shenghao’s translation and refusing to ‘dumb down’ in any obvious ways for an audience consisting of people with low levels of literacy and formal education.30 The responses to the performance turned out to be inspiring. Over an hour before the performance began, the square in front of the Chaoyang District Cultural Center was crowded with hundreds of migrant workers eagerly waiting for the beginning. So many people had gathered that film projection was utilized to provide a clearer view for those spectators watching at a distance. According to anecdotal eye-witness accounts, very few people left during the performance and thundering applause broke out at the close. The 2006 Romeo and Juliet represents an almost unprecedented example of the collaboration between a social community, the Chaoyang District Cultural Center and a university – the Communication University of China (CUC), both of which embody the greatest potential for the development of what we are describing here as ‘small-time’ Shakespeare in China. The Chaoyang District Cultural Center played a remarkable role in this event. As one of the organizers and venue-providers of the 2006 Chinese Universities Drama Festival, the Center came up with the idea of taking the opportunity of this festival to present a Shakespearean live performance for migrant workers. This is unlikely to have been a mere propaganda gimmick, because the district cultural centre had long committed itself to improving the cultural life of migrant workers.31 Xu Wei, dean of the Chaoyang District Cultural Center, expressed their collective concern for the rights of migrant workers: Migrant workers are a marginal group in our society. Their cultural rights lack protection and guarantees. The [public] square performance of Romeo and Juliet set a good example to the whole society. People need to show more concern for the protection of cultural rights of migrant workers.32 Such concerns are urgent and far-reaching for China, where there are currently estimated to be over 200 million migrant workers – people from rural regions who go to urban and coastal regions to search for work and who represent about one fifth of the Gross National Product (GNP).33 Given these figures, the general inadequacy of provision for these communities in educational and cultural terms has drawn attention. According to one piece of research, about 67 per cent of migrant workers in Guangzhou complained about their cultural life (Fan 2005), describing it as ‘boring’ and ‘depressing’. In another survey, made by students from Beijing Normal University between 2003 and 2004, there was not a single television set among more than a dozen work sheds they visited, and the few books scattered in these spaces were mostly stories of martial arts or pornography (Fan 2005). Is Shakespeare in this context really ‘useful’ in any way as part of a broader drive towards cultural literacy? In another sense, this particular production represents a type of ‘anthropological small-time’ Shakespeare, an idea first coined by Li Jun (2016) by drawing upon the concept of ‘anthropological’ theatre used previously by Stephen Purcell in Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage (2009). Purcell defines ‘anthropological’ Shakespeare as ‘[being] of the people, speaking to them in their own idioms, voicing their own concerns, representing their own interests’ (Purcell

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2009: 10). Purcell also maintains that anthropological theatre is most concerned ‘with the widest reach of audience available at a given moment or place’ and therefore it is socially inclusive and encompassing rather than exclusive (ibid.: 10–11). The director Jiang Zejin adopted an ‘anthropological’ stance in the 2006 Romeo and Juliet. The venue of this production embodied his view that drama should return to its birthplace – the public square – instead of theatrical performances becoming restricted gatherings of certain limited groups of people, namely, ‘romance-fascinated students, white-collars in the pursuit of “taste”, class-conscious nouveau-riches, and self-entertaining drama practitioners’.34 Such an explicit ‘manifesto’ seems to draw a clear demarcating line between this Romeo and Juliet and Tian’s 2014 production, for all the pleasurable audience responses to the latter: the former aims to create accessibility for ‘the widest reach of audience’, while the latter aims to appeal to restricted audiences and tailors its content accordingly; the former is conscious of equal rights and social justice, while the latter seems to be more concerned with spectacular effects and box-office success. By stating this, we do not mean to imply that the 2006 Romeo and Juliet is somehow a model or faultless production, or indeed to downgrade the value of the 2014 Romeo and Juliet as a theatrical experience. Both of these theatre events are laudable in different ways. Nevertheless, in a discussion of social justice, the 2006 Romeo and Juliet undoubtedly warrants more critical attention, not only because it, to some degree, represents a more ‘innocent’ approach to Shakespeare (by which we mean it is less affected either by official systems or the demands of fashion and the commercial market), but, more significantly, because of its ‘anthropological’ traits (by which we refer to its accessibility to grassroots audiences and therefore potential for farther-reaching and more democratic impact). Combined, these elements demonstrate a burgeoning and dynamic new type of drama in today’s China, in which, in the words of critic Sun Bo: some dramatists, faced with the reality of a polarized society, cast an eye again at the bottom of the society; they share with us obvious humanistic concerns and choice of stance, [and] resume, to some extent, theatre’s function as a public forum, and call for social justice which has long since been missing in drama. (Sun 2008)35 Sun directly addresses here the ‘usefulness’ of theatre, but instead of joining a simplistic rallying call for theatre engaging with ‘political’ themes in a heavily commercialized and mainstream context, his thinking resonates with that of Jiang Zejin and his ‘small-time’ production of Romeo and Juliet in Beijing and in particular his previously quoted call for drama to ‘return to the public square’.36 The case made by Sun for theatre’s fundamental ‘function as a public forum’ reflects the increasing awareness in Chinese theatre contexts beyond the mainstream of the need for drama to represent the previously weak-voiced or even voiceless. While the portfolio of examples of Chinese Shakespeares in this mode is only emerging now, the production for migrant workers at the Chaoyang District Cultural Center nevertheless offers a genuine alternative and a counter-balance to more contained discussions about Shakespeare’s utility as a vehicle for discussions about social justice in the contemporary context.

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NOTES 1. Tian herself stated that her production, as performed at the forty-second Hong Kong Arts Festival, ‘happens in an ongoing China, with unspecific time and location.… It is a love story in an abstract Chinese environment’, paper.wenweipo. com/2014/02/28/OT1402280005.htm. Different from this adapted version, the original 2013 production, a result of Tian’s collaboration with the National Theatre of Korea, and first performed in Seoul, seemed to address a more specific social background: two Beijing workshop performances of the 2013 production (for invited audiences only) were described as taking place in ‘China in the 1970s’, douban. com/event/20183620; and Xu, Donghuan from the South China Morning Post presumed that Tian would repeat the ‘Cultural Revolution’ setting in Hong Kong, scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1416692/hong-kong-arts-festival-play-featuresmodern-chinese-setting-juliet. Tian, however, stated of that performance that ‘the costumes refer to North Korean clothes and colours, revealing its socialist image’, dfdaily.com/html/150/2013/11/13/1086614.shtml. These shifts of interpretation are a clue in themselves to the complexity of cultural engagement with social issues in contemporary theatre productions in China. 2. See ent.cntv.cn/2014/01/22/ARTI1390355145567638.shtml. 3. The initial production in Seoul was performed in Korean and when the production reverted to Mandarin Chinese for its Hong Kong and mainland China performances strong traces of Korean idiom were retained. Since Chinese students were avid fans of Korean television and pop culture at that time, this was a popular move with audiences who reacted with strong recognition to well-known Korean phrases and references to primetime soap operas such as Man from the Stars/My Love from the Stars which aired in 2013–14 and tells the tale of an alien who falls to earth during the Josean era and then falls in love 400 years later with a modern-day actress. 4. Her theory defined ‘small-time’ Shakespeare as acts of ‘re-vision’ from a local perspective. Li Jun has recently expanded that idea to argue that Shakespearean performances in mainland China have been undergoing a traceable journey from the ‘big time’ (official, institutionalized and centralized) to the ‘small time’ (non-official, non-institutionalized and decentralized) since the 1990s. See his paper delivered at the inaugural conference of the Asian Shakespeare Association in Taipei, Taiwan in May 2014, ‘The Bard’s Journey to the “Small Time” in Mainland China’ (Li 2014), and also Li (2016), in which he addresses the idea of the ‘small time’ via two types, the ‘autobiographical small time’ (adaptor/director-centred) and the ‘anthropological small time’ (audience-centred and accessibility-oriented) and demonstrates keen interest in the latter in his examination of ‘popular Shakespeare’. 5. Working within the official system – the National Theatre of China – Tian is an acute performer, able to shift between the official system and the commercial market, leveraging advantages from both spheres. She is described by some as a ‘winner within the [official] system’ (Nanfang Zhoumo/Southern Weekly, infzm.com/ content/98713). As a unique Chinese phenomenon, theatre workers like Tian bear a double identity, one belonging to the government and the other belonging to the

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market – in the words of producer Li Dong, ‘one foot standing within the [official] system, the other stepping outside’. 6. In this respect our argument differs substantially from Alfredo Michel Modenessi and Paulina Morales’s account of Shakespeare in contemporary Mexico in their chapter in this volume. 7. Julie Sanders would particularly like to thank Luo Yangluan (Carrie), then a second year student at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), who attended the Ningbo performance of the play and responded to a series of research questions on her behalf. On cultural proximation as an adaptational technique, see Sanders (2016), 89. 8. On the pressure and expectations surrounding wedding ceremonies in China, see, for example: Sun and Meidong (2014) and Meng (2011). 9. See infzm.com/content/98713 (Nanfang Zhoumo/Southern Weekly). 10. Ibid. Student audience members at the Ningbo performances confirmed that this section of the production resonated with them. 11. Ibid. See also Duggan (2013). 12. On ‘big-time Shakespeare’, see Bristol (1996). 13. The Third International Drama Season of the Grand National Theatre of China provides a helpful overall impression of Shakespeare in China in the period between 2000 and 2008. The organizers claimed to present ‘the best Shakespearian dramas [productions] from home and abroad, demonstrating the Chinese dramatists’ interpretation of Shakespeare’. Major productions staged in this season included not only Ming, the opening presentation at the National Centre for the Performing Arts and a self-claimed ‘adaptation’ of King Lear directed by Tian, but also three versions of Hamlet by Lin Zhaohua Theatre Workshop, People’s Art Theatre and an Israeli theatre respectively, a musical rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Tianjin People’s Art Theatre and several other plays by domestic and international theatre companies. 14. The term ‘tianjia 天價’ appears in an article entitled ‘Xin (Tian Qinxin) and Yue (Dangnian mingyue) joined hands with contemporary artists in creating a tianjia stage’ at yule.sohu.com/20080924/n259730639.shtml. The cost of sets and props were especially highlighted. For example, suspended from the movable rails above the stage, were enormous multi-layered plastic pieces of Chinese wash painting on expensive tailor-made fireproof plastic screens. The oil paints, which cost 60,000 yuan per barrel, were said to be imported (see Tian (2010: 240). Genuine antique wooden tables and chairs from the Ming dynasty, loaned by a well-known antique collector, were also used as props. 15. These remarks are selected from Tian’s interview with He, Dong from ifeng.com on 17 October 2008. 16. The Chinese term Zhu xuanlu (主旋律) refers to artistic works which deal with uplifting topics so as to inspire and educate people to praise the party and socialism. With the evolution of this concept over recent decades, since its coinage after 1989,

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this term is loosely used for any artistic work which reflects positively the history, achievements or culture of China. 17. See yule.sohu.com/20080916/n259587665.shtml. 18. See yule.baidu.com/show/2008-09-18/170308192820.html. 19. See infzm.com/content/98713 (Nanfang Zhoumo/Southern Weekly). Tian decided to adapt the Shakespearean work while on a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon which also suggests a performance at least of deference to the Shakespearean cultural inheritance. Cf. McLuskie and Rumbold (2014). 20. There is, of course, a knowing echo and remediation here in a Chinese context of the ‘Jets’ and ‘Sharks’ of an earlier Romeo and Juliet adaptation, West Side Story. As Stephen Purcell has observed: ‘A Romeo and Juliet today is a post-Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet, a post-Baz Luhrmann one, post-Dire Straits, post-West Side Story, postShakespeare in Love’ (Purcell 2009: 206). This is a very Anglocentric list and in an East and South East Asian context, we might alternatively reference film adaptations such as Chicken Rice Wars or 機緣巧合/Jiyuanqiaohe directed by Cheah Chee Kong, 2000 or A Time to Love (情人結/ Qingrenjie, directed by Huo Jianqi, 2005), but the point remains that Romeo and Juliet is a play that ‘has been splintered into pieces by images of finger-clicking gang members, of cartoon animals re-enacting the balcony scene, of quotations and misquotations in commercials, sketches, textbooks and sitcoms’ (ibid.). 21. See dfdaily.com/html/150/2013/11/13/1086614.shtml. 22. See Note 2 above. 23. According to British Council statistics, for example, over 80,000 students from China studied at UK universities in 2012: see British Council (n.d.). 24. See Purcell (2009) and O’Neill (2014), esp. loc. 110 where O’Neill noted that at over 86,000 results Romeo and Juliet was the most cited play on YouTube at time of publication. 25. This name sounds the same as 侏羅紀 (Jurassic Period). 26. See Li (2016) for more information. We discuss the San Tuo Qi (三拓旗) production of Romeo and Juliet in its 2014 revival in our ‘Shakespeare Going Out Here and Now: Travels in China on the 450th Anniversary’ (2016: 109–28). 27. Youku is a video hosting service, effectively China’s YouTube equivalent: 優酷 meaning literally, ‘excellent (and) cool’. 28. Some critics have expressed their doubts and worries about the Shakespearean content in this regard. Zhang Tong, for example, is concerned about a ‘laughterdependent symptom’ in productions such as Tian’s Romeo and Juliet (see cflac. org.cn/zgysb/dz/ysb/history/20140609/index.htm?page=/page_5/201406/ t20140609_258538.htm&pagenum=5 accessed 9 June 2014). 29. See a detailed description at xiju.net/view_con.asp?id=2927 and there were newspaper reports by People’s Daily and China Radio International at http://gb.cri. cn/1321/2006/08/28/[email protected]. See also Xia, Yupu and Du, Zhuangyi,

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‘Dang nongmingong yusheng Shashibiya’ (當農民工遇上莎士比亞/When migrant workers encounter Shakespeare), People’s Daily (overseas version), 25 August 2006, 13. Available online: http://finance.people.com.cn/nc/GB/4740925.html. 30. Li (2014). 31. It initiated the first open-air ‘migrant workers’ cinema’ in Beijing in 2004, showing free movies for migrant workers each week, and also sent mobile movie-projecting teams to construction sites and schools for migrant children. In 2005 and 2006, the film screenings developed into a regular programme at a fixed venue, an open cinema in the square in front of the main building of this centre; hundreds of screenings have taken place to date. 32. See http://gb.cri.cn/1321/2006/08/31/[email protected]. 33. The information is from the official CRI website: http://www.zgxxb.com.cn/ jqtt/201003240030.shtml, According to www.biztimes.com/news/2010/6/11, the statistics of the National Statistics Bureau (NBS) of China indicated that China had a total of 229.8 million rural migrant workers by the end of 2009. 34. See Jiang, Zejin. ‘Xiju yishu huigui guangchang de n ge liyou’ (戲劇藝術回歸廣場的N 個理由/Several reasons for dramatic art to return to the square), see https://xueshu. baidu.com/usercenter/paper/show?paperid=33d07f6b96b0fae3b9a7e8126511e780 &site=xueshu_se and https://ishare.iask.sina.com.cn/f/j2Lzuzt9TO-nbhh.html. For related discussions of public square performances in the context of civic engagement, see the essay on ‘William Shakespeare’s Enrque IV, primera parte: Common [battle] grounds between medieval England and Mexico’s present’ by Alfredo Michel Modenessi and Paulina Morales in this volume. 35. See douban.com/group/topic/20054267/ 36. As we were completing the research for this article, the then British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was on a government visit to China, during which he actively trumpeted the cultural and political value of the performance of a play such as Richard III for Chinese audiences. This rendered Shakespeare a somewhat blunt and unsubtle weapon in the armoury of diplomatic exchange. See Connor (2015).

REFERENCES Bristol, M. D. (1996), Big-Time Shakespeare, London: Routledge. British Council (n.d.), ‘Student Mobility’, British Council. Available online: https://www. britishcouncil.org/education/ihe/knowledge-centre/student-mobility (accessed 25 July 2014). Connor, N. (2015), ‘George Osborne Talks Up Growth on Visit to Beijing’, The Telegraph, 20 September. Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ economics/11878675/George-Osborne-talks-up-growth-on-visit-to-Beijing.html (accessed 15 July 2016). Desmet, C. (1999), ‘Introduction’, in C. Desmet and R. Sawyer (eds), Shakespeare and Appropriation, 2–3, London: Routledge.

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Duggan, J. (2013), ‘How China Fell in Love with Fixies’, The Guardian, 5 June. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2013/jun/05/how-chinalove-fixies-bikes (accessed: 16 August 2019). Fan, B. (2005), ‘Chengshihua jincheng yu diceng de zijue: mingong wenhua shenghuo he zhiyu wenyi toushi’ (城市化進程與底層的知覺：民工文化生活和自娛文藝透視/ Urbanization and self-consciousness of grass roots: a perspective of migrant workers’ cultural life and self-entertaining arts), Wenhua lilun he piping (Cultural Theories and Criticism) 2: 71–5. Jiang, Z. ‘Xiju yishu huigui guangchang de n ge liyou’ (戲劇藝術回歸廣場的N個理由/ Several reasons for dramatic art to return to square). Available online: https://xueshu. baidu.com/usercenter/paper/show?paperid=33d07f6b96b0fae3b9a7e8126511e780&si te=xueshu_se and https://ishare.iask.sina.com.cn/f/j2Lzuzt9TO-nbhh.html Lee, C. (2013), ‘Romeo and Juliet in China’, The Wall Street Journal, 7 November. Available online: https://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2013/11/07/red-star-crossed-loversromeo-and-juliet-in-china/ (accessed 10 July 2014). Levith, M. (2004), Shakespeare in China, New York, NY: Continuum. Li, J. (2014), ‘The Bard’s Journey to the ‘‘Small Time’’ in Mainland China’, Paper presented at Paper Session 8 ‘Relocating Shakespeare’ of The Inaugural ASA Conference, Taipei, National Taiwan University. National Taiwan Normal University, 15–18 May. Li, J. (2016), Popular Shakespeare in China: 1993-2008, Beijing: University of International Business & Economics Press. Li, J. and J. Sanders. (2016), ‘Shakespeare Going Out Here and Now: Travels in China on the 450th anniversary’, in S. Bennet (ed.), The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Special edition: Shakespeare on Site, 16: 109–28. McLuskie, K. and K. Rumbold (2014), Cultural Value in Twenty-First-Century England: The Case of Shakespeare, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Meng, J. (2011), ‘Wedding Website Hopes to Lure Chinese Couples’, China Daily, 15 August. Available online: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2011-08/15/ content_13115061.htm (accessed 25 July 2016). O’Neill, S. (2014), Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard, London: Arden/Methuen. Purcell, S. (2009), Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanders, J. (2016), Adaptation and Appropriation, 2nd edn., London: Routledge. Shen, L. (2010), ‘What Use Shakespeare?: China and Globalization’, in D. Kennedy and Y. Lan (eds), Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, 219–33, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sun, B. (2008), Renmin, minjian, minzhong—shinian lai juchang yundong de yitiao xiansuo (人民、民間、民眾——十年來劇場運動的一個線索/People, unofficial/folk, and populace: a line running through the theatre movement in the past ten years), ‘Drama Forum of the 1st Beijing Youth Drama Festival’, 28 September. Sun, L. and H. Meidong (2014), ‘The Price of Chinese Marriage’, China Daily, 13 July. Available at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-07/13/content_17748263.htm (accessed 25 July 2016).

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Tian, Q. (2010), Tian Qinxin de xiju chang (田沁鑫的戲劇場/Tian Qinxin’s Drama Field), Beijing: Peking University Press. Wagg, M. (2014), ‘How Playing Banquo in China Gave Me a New Love for Shakespeare’, The Guardian, 5 January. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2014/jan/05/why-shakespeare-is-popular-in-china (accessed: 10 July 2014). Xia, Y. and D. Zhuangyi (2006) ‘Dang nongminggong yushang Shashibiya’ (當農民工遇 上莎士比亞/When Migrant Workers Encounter Shakespeare), People’s Daily [overseas version]. http://finance.people.com.cn/nc/GB/4740925.html Xu, D. (2014), ‘Hong Kong Arts Festival Play Features a Modern Chinese Setting for Juliet and Her Romeo’, South China Morning Post, 6 February. Available online: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1416692/hong-kong-arts-festival-playfeatures-modern-chinese-setting-juliet (accessed 25 July 2016).

CHAPTER 3.6

Social justice, social order and political power in NTCC’s adaptation of Richard III CHEE KENG LEE

‘Why are they cheering?’ This question inevitably surfaces whenever I speak about National Theatre Company of China’s (NTCC) production of Richard III, directed by Wang Xiaoying, and screen a segment of the play in which Buckingham roused the audience to enthusiastically call out ‘wan sui’ (long live) as a show of their support for Gloucester to take the throne. The production, performed in Mandarin, premiered in London at the Globe to Globe Festival in 2012, and has since been performed in cities across the globe, including: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Taipei, Bitola, New York, Copenhagen, Craiova, Bucharest, Gyula, Tel Aviv and Seoul. It returned to perform in its entirety at the Globe in July 2015.1 The general reactions during my presentations mirrored those of my own when I first saw a video recording of its preview in Beijing prior to its departure for the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival. When I experienced the production live at its premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe, I was once again intrigued by the reactions and responses from the audience which were made up of a substantial proportion of Chinese, most likely international students as well as local Chinese residents, who were able to understand and interact with the performers in Mandarin. Those who did not understand Mandarin also gaily joined in the raucous enthusiasm. The audience laughed knowingly at the jokes cracked by the murderers deployed by Gloucester, whom Wang had cast in clown roles.2 The audience’s festive enjoyment of this Chinese spectacle of Shakespeare’s horrorshow of power and paranoia contrasted with the more serious-toned articles that reported on its premiere in London. Most reports, whether in London or Beijing, emphasized Wang’s infusion of Chinese elements into the play, with titles such as ‘Wang Xiaoying’s Richard III exhibits Chinese style’, while a few others hinted at the political aspects of the play with titles like ‘Wang Xiaoying’s Richard III premiered: Unscrupulous tyranny’. This chapter argues that by taking away his deformity and introducing three witches to set Gloucester into action, Wang’s production, consciously or otherwise, frames itself squarely as a story of political ambition and

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the struggle for power familiar to modern China and even Asian audiences. The production’s clowning murderers, the expanded role of an ever-cursing Margaret, the fluid loyalty and alliance, functioned as narrative elements that induce the knowing audience to recognize the production as a story of a political power struggle, and reflect on the relevance of justice and order to such political power games, even as the players of such games inevitably invoke notions of justice and order to legitimize their actions. Kiernan Ryan points out in the illuminating chapter he contributed to this collection that ‘Shakespeare’s plays are filled with characters crying out for justice or protesting at the injustice of their plight’ (see p. 235). Such appeals for justice, however, often prove fruitless ‘because for one reason or another, they are unfounded, misconceived, morally compromised and legally objectionable or … plainly futile’ (see p. 236). Seeking justice often serves as a motivation or an excuse for a character to take action, thus activating a series of reactions and future actions that would form the arc of the character’s fate within the play. Individuals hold ideas of justice and fairness in relation to themselves, and each individual evaluates his or her position within a perceived overall scheme of social order. In this way, social justice is a relative and relational equilibrium within the larger frame of social order. When one perceives injustice in relation to his position, he may be motivated to take action to improve it. If these actions destabilized the prevailing state of equilibrium and order, they could often be perceived as ‘morally compromised and legally objectionable’. Shakespeare’s Richard III opens with such a dramatic situation. A new equilibrium of social order has just been established: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York’ (1.1.1–2). These opening lines, delivered by Gloucester, the dramatic protagonist, quickly develop into a highly individual soliloquy that reveals the injustice he believes defines his nature. Shakespeare rooted Gloucester’s sense of injustice in nature, which has caused him to be an outsider, ‘deform’d, unfinish’d’, ‘scarce half made up’. Before the end of this opening speech, Gloucester declares his moral autonomy and announces his plan to seek justice from society: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determinèd to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

(1.1.29–32) In NTCC’s production of Richard III, however, Wang did not allow nature to provide any basis for Gloucester’s sense of injustice. One of Wang’s key directorial decisions was to have the lead actor play Gloucester without any physical deformities. A critic at the London premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe even described the Gloucester in NTCC’s production as ‘a physically imposing and attractive protagonist’ (Smith 2012). Wang’s decision necessitated changes to the opening scene of the play. NTCC’s Richard III opened with a précis of the War of the Roses: accompanied by live percussion, two actors, one who held a white flag and the other a red flag, encircled each other and engaged in a symbolic battle of strength using the flags. The white flag swiftly overcame the red. This was quickly followed by the slick entrance of King Edward VI, who delivered the first eight lines of the original opening soliloquy as his

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enthronement speech.3 At the end of his speech, all on stage pledged subservience to Edward by hailing him with ‘wan sui’ (long live). Edward coughed, signalling his ill health, and all on stage froze on cue while Gloucester turned to the audience with: Long live? No more marching troops, no more trumpets, no more battles. My brother has the throne, the power, the songs and dances, and the ladies in the chambers, while I, a warrior who has risked my life, who is feared by all the enemies, has nothing. Yet, I am forced to smile, call out long live, and hide my desires deep in my heart.4 At this point, three witches – a nod to Macbeth – entered and hailed him as Duke of Gloucester, Lord Protector and future King of England. The witches also told Gloucester someone whose name began with the letter ‘G’ would become the new king. When Gloucester asked if ‘G’ referred to Gloucester, the witches laughed, replied that ‘George’ also began with ‘G’ and made their exit as they chanted: ‘G will conspire to take the throne, G will become the new king.’ Alone again, Gloucester revealed he had long dreamt of taking the throne himself. He thanked the heavens above for the revelation and announced he would take action by poisoning the relationship between his brothers. The main plot of the play, Gloucester’s murderous path to the throne, was thus set into action. In an essay titled ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ included in a media package distributed to the press and theatre critics invited to attend a special preview of the production more than a month before it was scheduled to open in London, Wang explained his directorial concept by referring to the similarity between Richard III and Macbeth: The deeper similarity between these two plays is that both Richard and Macbeth possessed extraordinary mental strength but were driven by their ambition which caused them to become evil. They were both products and sacrifices of ambition and plot.5 While similarities exist between Richard III and Macbeth, I would argue that taking away Gloucester’s deformity coupled with the introduction of the witches, intentionally or not, grounded the reading of the performance as a story about a power grab undertaken by an able Gloucester, who felt injustice that he risked his life while his brother occupied the throne and enjoyed all of its trappings. Wang’s essay was subsequently republished in the NTCC journal, National Theatre Research Quarterly, with the new title: ‘Restoring Richard III to his unimpaired physicality’, indicating the weight he attached to this particular directorial decision. Wang explained: when one analyses Richard’s psychology, the emotional damage and character flaws caused by his physical deformity could be used as psychological basis to explain his evil doings … I have my reservations with such a reading. I believe, for someone who enjoys plots and politics, for someone who desires power and enjoys power, there is no need for any external reasons, including physiological reasons … Perhaps, Richard should be seen as physically sound but psychologically deformed. (Wang 2012: 15)

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Wang’s introduction of the witches might give the initial impression that Gloucester’s first step in his murderous path towards the throne was motivated by them. However, we must take note that after the witches’ exit, Gloucester immediately revealed he had long harboured hidden desires for the throne and announced that he would begin working towards his ambition by first poisoning the relationship between his two brothers. On stage, Gloucester immediately walked briskly towards the throne and whispered into King Edward’s ear. Once Gloucester finished, King Edward stormed off. An apparently pleased Gloucester commented that he believed Clarence would soon be imprisoned. As if on cue, Clarence entered as he was being led to the Tower of London. Gloucester greeted Clarence warmly, professed his deep concern for Clarence, and promised to help him get out of prison as soon as possible. Upon Clarence’s exit, Gloucester immediately revealed to the audience the real meaning of his promise: he would release Clarence by quickly ‘sending him to heaven’. Gloucester’s swift and effective actions after the witches’ exit highlighted the fact that he had long plotted and considered the chain of events. While it might initially have appeared that Wang had superficially substituted Gloucester’s deformity with the introduction of the witches, Gloucester’s soliloquy and actions attributed no significance to them. They could be understood as Gloucester’s selfinvented psychological justification to act on what he had long planned for. They disappeared once they fulfilled the function of affirming Gloucester’s ambition and plot, which he wasted no time in putting into swift action. The witches only appeared once more towards the end of the production, to intercept Richard before he set out with his troops.6 Without allowing Richard any opportunity to engage with them, they asked Richard for the whereabouts of those he had murdered, and chastised him for profaning the crown, before making their exit as they chanted ‘G’s infamy will spread far and wide’. Just as they seemed to appear out of thin air in the opening scene as Gloucester’s psychological selfjustification, they similarly seemed to have reappeared from the suppressed deeper recess of Richard’s psychology before he set out towards his inevitable end. A certain logic of fatality seems to pre-exist and link the witches’ two appearances. The first appearance provided Gloucester with an excuse to act on his long-hidden and suppressed desires and restricted his judgement and sense of justifiability. Once Gloucester obtained the ends he had proposed to himself, he became a victim of his own choices. The killing he undertook becomes somewhat automatic; from an agent of his own destiny, he became a prisoner of his own action. The second appearance of the witches hinted at Richard’s awareness of his own inevitable fate and foreshadowed his nightmare before his final battle. The charming and crafty Gloucester in Wang’s Richard III framed the production as a story about political ambition and power struggles. With the dominant presence of visual and performative elements that characterize and present the production as Chinese, it requires little effort to link the story to contemporary Chinese politics and society. British–Chinese writer and performer Anna Chen commented after the production’s premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe: Resisting the temptation to crowbar current Bo Xilai parallels into this review, let us merely report that the opening scene—where dissembling Richard, Duke

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of Gloucester (the charismatic Zhang Dongyu), lays out his villainous ambitions to rise to the top on a wave of havoc—has a familiar ring, building inexorably to the climax. (‘Richard III from China at the Globe: Theatre Review’ 2012) In the absence of institutionalized, transparent political leadership renewal and the election process, political ambition and power struggles often resemble dramatic narratives of mystical proportion. A look at recent political events and scandals involving high-level politicians in China, and other parts of Asia, substantiates the point. Observers of developments in Chinese politics in the recent decade will note how power players improve their political standing by working under the banner of improving social justice and social order. The downfalls of political players, on the other hand, are characterized by moral tales of illicit wealth and relationships with the opposite sex (Schiavenza 2013). Once Gloucester started to work on his long-hidden ambition and desires, he did not attempt to soften his transgression of social order and moral ethics. Whilst planning the death of his brother, Gloucester undertook to woo Lady Anne. He remarked, as Lady Anne made her entrance in deliberate, slow steps, ‘So what if I killed her husband and her father? The best way to make up for the girl’s losses is to become what she’s lost: a husband and a father.’ Shakespeare’s original elegiac spectacle was simplified and condensed. A lone Anne took small deliberate xiqu (Chinese traditional opera) steps and cast pieces of white ritual paper into the air, signifying a funeral procession, as she slowly made her entrance onto the stage. In a stretched-out melodic speech, Anne lamented the death of her husband and fatherin-law, and cursed Gloucester, the perpetrator of both murders. Her lengthier lamentation, curse and outburst at the sight of Gloucester in the original text was condensed to a few lines. Gloucester, who had been watching her entrance from the side, approached her and asked for time to explain himself. Anne immediately called him a murderer, and cursed him to be suitable only for hell, to which Gloucester replied there was one other suitable place for him: Anne’s bedchamber. Gloucester’s repartees, laden with straightforward sexual allusions, drew audible intrigue, laughter and applause from the audience. The suave and self-assured Gloucester went on to court Anne deliberately, consciously and strategically. He took time to observe her every action, enjoyed every little progress he made, utilized every possible opportunity to make eye contact with the audience, and invited them to share his delight in the progress he made with Anne. Step by step, he softened Anne with his declarations of love and proclaimed that all his deeds were motivated by her beauty. As if signalling a shift in her attitude towards Gloucester, Anne switched from the hitherto stretched-out melodic speech into naturalistic speaking and replied, ‘If it was true, I would take my nails and scratch that beauty right off my cheeks.’7 Henceforth, she delivered her lines in naturalistic speech, a symptomatic suggestion that her emotional grief might have given way to more realistic considerations. Towards the end of this scene, Gloucester knelt before Anne and launched into his only long speech in this wooing sequence. He theatrically offered Anne his sword and asked her to kill him. Anne took the sword. Gloucester turned to face the audience

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to allow her to thrust the sword into his back. Anne made several melodramatic attempts to plant the sword into Gloucester who managed to stop her each time with his shrewd, well-timed, diabolical proclamations that her beauty had motivated his every action. Anne clearly experienced a change of heart when she dropped the sword to the ground, to which the audience responded with loud, amused laughter and applause. Gloucester, who hitherto had been kneeling on the floor facing the audience, made knowing eye contact with them before standing up to corner Anne with, ‘Take up the sword again, or take me up.’ In the brief stichomythic dialogue that followed, Anne was clearly overcome by Richard: anne

I wish you were dead, but I’m not going to be the one to kill you. gloucester

Then tell me to kill myself, and I will do as you say. anne

I have already. gloucester

 ou said it when you were furious. Say it again, and my hand, which killed Y your lover out of love, will kill a far truer lover who loves you even more. anne

I wish I knew what was in your heart.

Gloucester then offered Anne a ring. Anne turned her face away while he held her outstretched hand to put on the ring, saying, ‘Put on this ring. See how my ring encircles your finger? That’s how your heart embraces my poor heart.’ Anne then made her exit as she said, ‘I’ll take the ring, but don’t assume I’m giving you anything.’ Once Anne exited and Richard was left alone with the audience, he let out a loud sigh of relief, activating another uproar of amused laughter from the audience. Anne is sometimes thought to be impressionable, and easily misled into believing in Richard’s affection. However, her last line hints that she might be well aware of the fact that she was but an element in some political game, and she consciously decided to play her part within the circumstances she had found herself in. Such a self-serving attitude seemed to be an accepted norm, so that even Queen Elizabeth and Rivers used it as a defence when Gloucester confronted them to complain that they had been spreading rumours about his loyalty, and challenged their loyalty by pointing out that he had fought and bled for Edward to become king while they were serving the Lancasters. Rivers replied: ‘In those busy days, which you’re bringing up now to prove we’re your enemies, we were simply following the lawful king. If you were king, we would do the same.’ Gloucester immediately denied any intention to become king. Anne appeared once more in an added monologue just before the king-making scene. She spoke about how she accepted her current husband while his hands were still warm with the blood of her previous husband, in a stretched-out melodic speech that represented the intensity of her emotions. She then revealed that she would ‘go to the grave’ before Richard inevitably deserted her. Her decision

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appeared considered, just like her earlier decision to accept Gloucester’s proposal. Margaret appeared just before Anne made her exit to curse Anne to suffer just as she did. Throughout the entire performance, even amidst the ironic comedy that underscored the first half, the audience were constantly reminded of an oppressive background of doom, for which Margaret was its principal mouthpiece. Margaret’s role was much expanded in the performance. When she made her first entrance in the performance, she was clearly established as a survivor from the past and a shadow of the former pride whom Gloucester called ‘a lunatic old hag’. Margaret made a total of ten entrances to provide choral emphasis on the pattern of doom that dominated the entire course of action. She made her first entrance when Gloucester confronted Elizabeth and Rivers for telling on him, and foretold the entire action of the play by warning Buckingham to stay away from or pay with his life for his associations with Gloucester, and proclaimed that Buckingham would one day appreciate her as a prophetess. Margaret, indeed, seemed to take on a certain supernatural quality. She mysteriously appeared after every death that occurred in the performance, linking each death to Richard, and highlighting the theme of murder and retribution by proclaiming in numerous variations of the refrain ‘What’s won in blood will be lost in blood’. Beside this dramatic function, it is also important to read Margaret in comparison to Anne. Margaret appeared to be a pathetic and pitiful shadow of former pride because she chose to live after being on the losing side of a previous power struggle. Anne, on the other hand, may attract sympathy, but not pity, in Wang’s production, for she represented the type of participant, like Richard, who accepted the hard realities of power games, and would rather die with dignity than live on as a shadow. Buckingham and Stanley represented yet another type of participant in such power games. The first instruction that Richard gave from the throne after his ascension was for Buckingham to kill the young princes. Buckingham hesitated, exited and returned shortly to ask for the earldom he had been promised earlier, only to be brushed off by Richard. Sensing he had fallen out of favour, Buckingham quickly decided to seek out Richmond, who had led an army against Richard. A brief sequence was added to the performance in which Stanley intercepted Buckingham before he left and asked him to convey his support to Richmond. Buckingham and Stanley were united in forsaking the power order commanded by Richard, as well as their intended pledge of allegiance to the figurehead of the potential new social order. Richard, having treated them both unjustly, was himself the cause of their actions, a symptom of Richard’s impending ruin – a typical medieval theme of the fall of the presumptuous from their high estate and retribution for past sin. What was also clear was that Buckingham and Stanley, like Elizabeth and Rivers, placed their alliance as bets for self-interest, and would shift their allegiance to whichever side they felt would provide better gains. Such fluid alliance and loyalty, motivated by self-interest, could be read as a mirror of political and social realities. Clarence and the young princes were, in comparison, naïve, over-trusting and perhaps even unmindful participants, who inevitably became the most obvious and  easiest targets and sacrifices in the game. Ironically, because of their lineage and blood relations, which put them in natural positions to make a justifiable claim

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to power, they became, in the eyes of those with ambition for power, obstacles or threats that had to be gotten rid of. When King Edward called everyone together to make peace, Gloucester broke the news of Clarence’s death, and triggered a deep sense of guilt in King Edward that further impacted his health. Buckingham and Gloucester, both of whom had just publicly made peace with Elizabeth and Rivers, and expressed loyalty to Edward, secretly came together and formed a covert alliance. Henceforth, Buckingham became Gloucester’s crucial ally and right-hand man who choreographed the kingmaking scene. Right in front of the audience, Buckingham walked Gloucester through the script of the king-making scene, handed him a rosary to be used as a prop for prayer and directed him to stand between two monks, ‘Act like a virgin girl, always answering “No”, but taking it all in the end.’ What followed was perhaps the most loaded scene of the performance. The audience burst into amused laughter and giggles when Gloucester, flanked by two monks, entered as he prayed, holding the rosary provided earlier by Buckingham. At the first instance that Buckingham roused them to call out ‘wan sui’ (long live) to show their support for Gloucester to take the throne, the audience responded in enthusiastic unison. Speaking with exaggerated coyness and deliberately poor acting, Gloucester refused. The crowd, once again, burst into amused laughter the moment Gloucester spoke. The waves of amused laughter continued as Buckingham moved into the audience and piled praise upon Gloucester to justify that he was the best person for the throne. The audience broke into applause and wolf whistles when Gloucester finally said, ‘Since you intend to force me to take responsibility for these changing times, whether I want to or not, I’m going to have to be brave and endure the load.’ The audience appeared to be in such celebratory spirits that the Lord Mayor had to gesture to them to calm down so that Gloucester could continue to say: But if this imposition you’ve put on me happens to result in dark scandal or ugly reproach, the fact that you forced me to accept this should clear me from blame. God knows, and you too know, I’m not eager to take on this job. Scattered laughter could be heard from the audience who obviously understood the full extent of the irony; the audience had literally gone through the script before they saw this king-making scene taking place before them. At this point, Buckingham jumped onstage from amongst the audience with, ‘Then I salute you with this royal title: King Richard wan sui! Worthy king wan sui! Wan sui!’, with the audience echoing each of his calls of wan sui. Buckingham then suggested that the coronation ceremony be held immediately, which Richard accepted. The first half of the performance ended with Richard’s coronation, to thunderous applause from the audience. The response of the audience to a production’s premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2012 intrigued me. I initially reasoned that the audience were playing to the festive atmosphere of the Globe to Globe Festival, but I became deeply interested when I learned that the Chinese audience at the earlier preview in Beijing had responded similarly. Li Longying, a renowned Chinese theatre critic, who was also vice-president of the Beijing Dramatist Association, wrote in his  blog:

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In this version [of Richard III], the drama concentrated around Richard. It also gave more weight to the few dukes and ministers who, out of their personal interests, helped Richard to seize the throne; some killed for Richard, while others provided him with ideas and suggestions. The most captivating scene in the entire performance was when Buckingham persuaded Gloucester to ascend the throne. I got the jitters at Buckingham’s exaggerated flattery of Gloucester. My flesh crept when Buckingham came into the audience to rouse them to shout in unison ‘King Richard wan sui.’ This was a familiar scene which I was once part of. It shocked me that I had done something similar before. (‘Interpreting the Eternal Theme of Classics’ 2012) Li was probably reflecting on his personal experience as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.8 It is significant that Li drew parallels between the response of the audience who were observers of and distant participants in the power game portrayed in the performance, and his own involvement in political movements. While most Chinese audiences might not have had as intense and as layered an experience as Li, who took a long, social–historical view, they were just as likely to read and respond to the performance by linking it to social–political situations in China. From such a vantage point, we can gain a deeper reading of the performance and Wang’s directorial decisions. Wang maintained and elaborated the parade of Richard’s victims’ ghosts in his dreams before his eventual battle with Richmond. Notably, the ghosts only spoke to Richard to remind him of his hitherto evil deeds but did not speak to Richmond to provide him with assurance and confidence, highlighting the theme of retribution while maintaining silence over the theme of instilling a new social order. Awakened from the terrifying dream, Richard launched into his last soliloquy in the play: Give me another horse! Bandage my wounds! Have mercy. Wait, I was only dreaming. Oh cowardly conscience, how you’re torturing me! The candles burn blue—it’s the dead of night. I’m sweating and trembling with fear. But what am I afraid of? Myself? There’s no one else here. Richard loves Richard. There’s just me and myself here. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. Then run away. What, from myself? Yes, to avoid taking revenge on myself. Unfortunately, I love myself. Why? Did I do anything good to myself? Oh, no. Alas, I hate myself because of the hateful deeds I’ve committed. I am a villain. My conscience condemns me with the thousand tongues it has, each pointing out a crime I have committed. Perjury in the highest degree. Murder in the direst degree. I do despair. No one loves me. If I die no one will pity me. Why should anyone pity me? The souls of all those I have killed have come to my tent to promise revenge tomorrow. Richard was determined to meet his end with courage. When Richard and Richmond finally crossed swords, Richard was soon thrown to the ground. Surrounded by Richmond’s soldiers, he called out, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’, then ran towards the throne situated upstage, and struggled to climb onto it. When he finally managed to stand on the throne, Richard held up his crown in one hand, turned around, and called out once again, ‘a horse, a horse, a horse for my kingdom’. Richmond’s army surrounded Richard while Richmond

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symbolically thrust his sword through Richard. The sequence of visual images encapsulated Richard’s fate in the entire play. Richard slowly laid onto the throne, held on to the crown, and died. Richmond pushed Richard off the throne; Richard rolled downstage, all the while holding the crown. One of the soldiers then took the crown from Richard and handed it to Richmond, who put it on himself before a yellow robe was put on him. Richmond then proceeded to sit on the throne, and all those around him hailed with him ‘wan sui’. Just as we thought order was once again restored, a hoarse female voice could be heard chanting, ‘G will conspire to take the throne’. Everyone surrounding Richmond turned around to look. Richard, who was dead on the ground suddenly spoke towards the sky for one last time, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’. There was a pause on stage that allowed Richard’s final words to reverberate and disappear into the air, before everyone exited and left Richard’s body lying on the floor. It is significant that, by the end of the performance, even though a new order was established, it was Richard who had the last line, and formed the last image in the performance, despite being dead. Richard’s famous line, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’, was given emphasis through repetition on a few occasions after his nightmare. Taken together with the hoarse female voice that came out of nowhere during Richmond’s coronation to chant ‘G will conspire to take the throne’, the production seemed to suggest that whatever new social order was established, ambition for political power would always exist and would someday spring into action. That Richard’s body remained onstage even after all the others had made their exit resonated with the social-political reality that even after several generations of orderly leadership renewal, it is the ambitious and, perhaps thus, charismatic leader who remains larger than life in the minds of the people. A cursory study of  the popular social–political narrative in China (and many parts of the world) would reveal ambitious and charismatic leaders who left strong marks on public memory long after they have exited the scene. The production also appeared to suggest, and the audience seemed to confirm, that the general populace appear to accept a certain amount of the suspension of social justice in political power struggles, as long as a certain level of social order is maintained.

NOTES 1. The containers delivering the production’s props and costumes for its world premiere at the Globe in 2012 did not arrive in time. The performers performed in basic standin props and costumes. 2. Wang applied various xiqu (traditional Chinese opera) elements in his directorial treatment of the play, one of which was to cast the murderers in comic clown roles. 3. In Chinese vocabulary, the investiture of an emperor is referred to as deng ji (enthronement). Using the term ‘jia mian’ (coronation) would give the impression that the ceremony being referred to happens in a Western context. In the NTCC performance, Edward enters in full royal ceremonial suit, walks up to the throne and sits down, cueing all onstage to kneel and hail him with ‘wan sui’ (long live).

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4. When quoting lines from the NTCC production of Richard III, I have translated from Chinese the lines spoken in the performance instead of using Shakespeare’s text. The production is based mainly on a translation by Liang Shiqiu, one of the authoritative Chinese translators of Shakespeare. 5. Wang, X, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’. Unpublished publicity material. Translation mine. 6. In Act 4, Scene 4 in Shakespeare’s original, the Duchess and Queen Elizabeth intercept Richard before he sets off with his troops. 7. In xiqu (Chinese traditional opera), performers deliver their lines either by singing or speaking. The sung manner of delivery usually connotes deep, intense or heightened emotions, while the naturalistic spoken manner of delivery is usually used for more daily or functional exchange. 8. The Cultural Revolution was a social–political movement that took place in the People’s Republic of China from 1966 until 1976. Set in motion by Mao Zedong, then chairman of the Communist Party of China, its stated goal was to preserve true communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society and to re-impose Maoist thought as the dominant ideology within the Party. The Revolution marked the return of Mao Zedong to a position of power after the Great Leap Forward, a previous social–political movement, initiated by Mao, which caused great suffering for the population and appeared to weaken Mao’s political standing.

REFERENCES ‘Interpreting the Eternal Theme of Classics: Watching Wang Xiaoying’s Richard III’ (2012), The Blog of a North-Eastern Free Man, 8 July. Available online: http://blog. sina.com.cn/s/blog_6cb9c92501011ggy.html (accessed 23 November 2015). ‘Richard III from China at the Globe: Theatre Review’ (2012), Madam Miaow Says, 3 May. Available online: https://madammiaow.blogspot.com/2012/05/richard-iii-fromchina-at-globe-theatre.html (accessed 14 March 2017). Schiavenza, M. (2013), ‘What Bo Xilai’s Rise and Fall Says About China’, The Atlantic, 23 September. Available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/09/ what-bo-xilais-rise-and-fall-says-about-china/279895/ (accessed23 November 2015). Smith P. J. (2012), ‘Richard III, National Theatre of China, dir. Wang Xiaoying, 29 April 2012 at The Globe, London’, Blogging Shakespeare. Available online: http:// bloggingshakespeare.com/year-of-shakespeare-richard-iii (accessed14 March 2017). Wang, X. (2012), ‘Restoring Richard III to his Unimpaired Physicality’, National Theatre Research Quarterly 2: 15–16. ‘Wang Xiaoying’s Richard III Premieres: Unscrupulous Tyranny’, (2012), Sina Entertainment, 15 March. Available online: https://www.pressreader.com/china/ beijing-english/20180920/281509342099264 (accessed 23 November 2015). ‘Wang Xiaoying’s Richard III exhibits Chinese Style’, (2012), Beijing Morning Post, 29 July. Available online: http://news.cntv.cn/20120729/100991.shtml (accessed 23 November 2015).

PART FOUR

The economies of Shakespeare and social justice

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CHAPTER 4.1

The empathetic imagination and the dream of equality: Shakespeare’s ‘poetical justice’ KIERNAN RYAN Shakespeare’s plays are filled with characters crying out for justice or protesting at the injustice of their plight. Outraged at the mental and physical abuse to which he has been subjected for no reason he can fathom, Antipholus of Ephesus appeals to the supreme civic authority at the climax of The Comedy of Errors: Justice, most gracious Duke, O grant me justice, Even for the service that long since I did thee, When I bestrid thee in the wars, and took Deep scars to save thy life; even for the blood That then I lost for thee, now grant me justice.

(5.1.190–4)1 Lady Capulet’s reaction to her nephew’s death at the hands of a Montague is to demand that Escalus, the Prince of Verona, exact an eye for an eye: ‘I beg for justice, which thou, Prince, must give: / Romeo slew Tybalt, Romeo must not live’ (3.1.182–3). When Jessica elopes with Lorenzo, taking ‘two sealed bags of ducats’ with her, Shylock enlists the Duke of Venice too late to track them down, and is left, according to Salanio, wailing inconsolably: ‘My daughter! O, my ducats! O, my daughter! / Fled with a Christian! O, my Christian ducats! / Justice, the law, my ducats and my daughter!’ (2.8.15–18); and when Antonio defaults on his debt, Salerio reports that Shylock ‘plies the Duke at morning and at night, / And doth impeach the freedom of the state / If they deny him justice’ (3.2.276–7). In the final scene of All’s Well That Ends Well, the King reads out Diana’s petition to have Bertram brought to book for breach of promise: ‘He stole from Florence, taking no leave, and I follow him to his country for justice. Grant it me, O King! In you it best lies. Otherwise a seducer flourishes, and a poor maid is undone’ (5.3.143–6). The petition confirms the King’s fear that ‘the life of Helen’, as he says to the Countess,

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‘Was foully snatched’ (5.3.153–4) at her son’s instigation, to which the Countess replies, as her son is led in to face these allegations: ‘Now, justice on the doers!’ (5.3.154). The denouement of Measure for Measure commences with Isabella’s public plea on her knees to Vincentio: Justice, O royal Duke! Vail your regard Upon a wrong’d ─ I would fain have said, a maid. O worthy prince, dishonour not your eye By throwing it on any other object, Till you have heard me in my true complaint, And given me justice! Justice! Justice! Justice!

(5.1.21–6) Once he has been found guilty of the charges laid against him, no one is keener than Angelo to have justice visited upon him: ‘Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death, / Is all the grace I beg’ (5.1.371–2). Believing himself to have procured the murder of his blameless wife, Innogen, Posthumous goes even further, passing sentence on himself and begging to serve as his own executioner: Ay me, most credulous fool, Egregious murderer, thief, anything That’s due to all the villains past, in being, To come. O, give me cord, or knife, or poison, Some upright justicer.

(Cymbeline 5.5.209–14) Unjustly arraigned on her husband’s authority, like Hermione before her in The Winter’s Tale, Queen Katherine enters the court and, kneeling at the feet of Henry VIII, requests that he treat her as equitably as she knows full well he will not: Sir, I desire you do me right and justice, And to bestow your pity on me, for I am a most poor woman and a stranger, Born out of your dominions, having here No judge indifferent nor no more assurance Of equal friendship and proceeding.

(King Henry VIII 2.4.11–16) Like Hermione’s superb speech rebutting the accusations levelled at her by Leontes, Katherine’s eloquent appeal is wasted on the man who, as her husband and her sovereign, wields absolute power over her. In fact, no matter how rhetorically or emotionally compelling such appeals for justice are in Shakespeare’s plays, they invariably prove fruitless. They prove fruitless because, for one reason or another, they are unfounded, misconceived, morally compromised, legally objectionable or, as is the case with Katherine and Hermione, plainly futile. The ‘gracious Duke’ to whom Antipholus of Ephesus addresses his plea may be a genuinely impartial ‘judge indifferent’, but the audience knows that

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the aggrieved twin’s demand for retribution is the product of a bizarre misprision for which no one can be blamed. That Romeo slew Tybalt, on the other hand, is an incontrovertible fact, but Lady Capulet’s insistence that the lex talionis be strictly enforced is tainted for the audience by the vindictiveness the ancient feud has bred in her, and fails to sway the Duke from commuting Romeo’s sentence to exile. As far as Shylock is concerned, not only are the grounds and terms on which he desires justice to be done contestable, but so are the grounds and terms on which justice is finally done to him. Diana’s petition to the King for justice in All’s Well is a brazen lie scripted by Helen to clinch her public triumph over the husband who abandoned her. Since Helen’s life has not been ‘foully snatched’, as the audience is aware, the Countess’s plea that her killers be brought to justice is equally unwarranted. Isabella’s ‘true complaint’ against Angelo is anything but true. Her lie is no less brazen than Diana’s, but made more disconcerting by the readiness with which this once stern epitome of ethical integrity is disposed to tell it openly at the Duke’s behest in his guise as a man of God. To carry out the death sentence that Angelo craves for crimes he has been duped into believing he has committed, would not be to mete out justice to the Duke’s ‘outward-sainted deputy’ (3.1.88), guilty though he is in thought and word. By the same token, justice would hardly be served if Posthumous were granted his request to execute himself for being a ‘most credulous fool’ and, unbeknownst to him, an ‘Egregious murderer’ manqué. In none of these instances of characters beseeching an actual or imaginary judicial authority for justice is justice seen or felt to be done. On the contrary, in every instance the audience is confronted with a situation that obliges them to examine every aspect of the question of justice it poses with extreme circumspection. Shakespeare’s critique of what passes for justice in the worlds his plays portray cuts much deeper, however, than these arresting appeals suggest, exposing a fundamental problem which extreme circumspection alone could never hope to solve. Just how deep it cuts becomes apparent as early in his career as the savagely satirical scene in Titus Andronicus that begins with the demented Titus bewailing the departure of the goddess of justice from the earth: Terras Astraea reliquit: be you remembered, Marcus, She’s gone, she’s fled. Sirs, take you to your tools. You, cousins, shall go sound the ocean And cast your nets: Happily you may catch her in the sea; Yet there’s as little justice as at land. No, Publius and Sempronius, you must do it, ’Tis you must dig with mattock and with spade, And pierce the inmost centre of the earth. Then, when you come to Pluto’s region, I pray you deliver him this petition. Tell him it is for justice and for aid, And that it comes from old Andronicus, Shaken with sorrows in ungrateful Rome.

(4.3.4–17)

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Humouring his frantic uncle, Publius reports that Pluto has no idea where Astraea is to be found: ‘Justice, she is so employed, / He thinks, with Jove in heaven or somewhere else’ (4.3.40–1). In that case, ‘sith there’s no justice in earth nor hell’, concludes Titus, ‘We will solicit heaven and move the gods / To send down Justice for to wreak our wrongs’ (4.3.50–2). With that, he hands his kinsmen arrows addressed to Jupiter, Apollo, Mars, Pallas, Mercury and Saturn, who is not, he cautions them, to be confused with the emperor Saturninus, since it would be ‘as good to shoot against the wind’ (4.3.58) as solicit him for justice. But Marcus overrides his brother’s admonition, directing his fellow archers to fire at the secular seat of power closer to hand: ‘Kinsmen, shoot all your shafts into the court; / We will afflict the emperor in his pride’ (4.3.62–3). The seditious effect of this sarcastic pantomime does not escape Saturninus, who vents his fury in the following scene, clutching the insolent arrows in his hand: Sweet scrolls to fly about the streets of Rome! What’s this but libelling against the senate And blazoning our injustice everywhere? A goodly humour, is it not, my lords? As who would say, in Rome no justice were.

(4.4.16–20) The whole surreal sequence dramatizes the absurdity of blaming fictitious divinities for the absence of justice from the world and places the responsibility for injustice squarely on the shoulders of the terrestrial ruler. This graphic demystification of justice and injustice, which are perceived as political rather than metaphysical matters, might be disqualified by the derangement of its architect, had Shakespeare not made a point of having the arrows turned towards the imperial court not by Titus but by Marcus. Besides, as far as Saturninus is concerned, the notion that ‘His sorrows have so overwhelmed his wits’ (4.4.10), which Saturninus doubts, does not excuse Titus’s assault on his authority: ‘But if I live, his feigned ecstasies / Shall be no shelter to these outrages’ (4.4.21–2). The emperor’s refusal to dismiss ‘these outrages’ as the grief-stricken ravings of a lunatic, whose ‘ecstasies’, he suspects, are merely the ruse of a sane revenger, serves only to underscore his culpability. Shakespeare takes equal pains to deter his Elizabethan audience from writing off the injustice Titus blazons everywhere as peculiar to the tyrannical regimes for which ancient Rome was a byword, and thus without any bearing on their lives as subjects of an absolute monarch in late sixteenth-century London. He does so by having ‘the Clown with a basket and two pigeons in it’ (4.3.76, s.d.) intrude anachronistically upon the mock bout of archery staged by Titus. As the bout concludes, the Clown steps straight out of the world of Shakespeare’s audience into the world of Titus Andronicus. Through the incongruous demotic prose in which he converses with the tragic Roman protagonist, and through the malapropisms that stamp him as a theatrical caricature as well as the baffled embodiment of the labouring class, the distant past is pulled into the orbit of the Elizabethan present. Titus hails the Clown in blank verse as a messenger arriving hotfoot from Olympus: ‘Sirrah, what tidings? Have you any letters? / Shall I have justice? What says Jupiter?’ To which the Clown,

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misconstruing and garbling the name ‘Jupiter’, replies: ‘Ho, the gibbet-maker? He says that he hath taken them down again, for the man must not be hanged till the next week’ (4.3.78–82). The Clown is one of Shakespeare’s unwitting wise fools, whose illiterate idiocy secretes sly subversion. His malapropism reduces the king of the gods, the supreme judicial authority from whom Titus craves justice, to a common ‘gibbet-maker’, a hangman’s henchman. From the plebeian point of view the dispenser of justice is synonymous with the dispenser of death, as the hapless Clown’s fate will shortly confirm. Far from being the bearer of a message for Titus from Jupiter, the Clown is carrying his pigeons, as he puts it in his mangled manner, ‘to the tribunal plebs to  take up a matter of brawl betwixt my uncle and one of the emperal’s men’ (4.3.91–3) – as a peace offering designed to achieve an amicable resolution of a legal dispute that has brought him indirectly into conflict with the imperial throne. The Clown’s homespun part in the exchange, which draws Titus away from lofty blank verse and onto his interlocutor’s prosaic terrain, debunks the portentous scenario into which he has stumbled by translating its exalted concerns into his own mundane terms. The humorous effect of the Clown’s artful naivety and irreverent ignorance is calculated to secure the audience’s empathy with this thinly veiled Elizabethan rustic stranded in ancient Rome during a reign of terror. But by his very presence in that alien universe, and by the nature of the fate he suffers, he also invites the inference that the despotic dystopia of Titus Andronicus might not be as alien as it seems. Titus’s conscription of the Clown to deliver his pigeons to the emperor instead, along with a letter from Titus, proves to be the poor dupe’s death warrant. The irony of Titus assuring the Clown, ‘By me thou shalt have justice at his hands’ and ‘deliver up your pigeons, and then look for your reward’ (4.3.103, 110–11) may be lost on Titus, but it is not lost on the audience when the Clown enters the court moments later with his pathetic brace of pigeons, and the response of Saturninus to the letter, in which Titus has enclosed a knife, is to reward its bearer with neither justice nor gratuity, but with summary execution: ‘Go, take him away and hang him presently!’ (4.4.44). The emperor’s dispatching of the innocent, amiable Clown to instant death is a chilling illustration of the vulnerability of ordinary citizens to the arbitrary malice of absolute power: a vulnerability of which Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience were acutely aware, and of which the callous hanging of the transplanted English Clown was likely to remind them. As Francis Barker demonstrates in gruesome detail, in an essay prompted by the flagrant injustice of the Clown’s execution, the staggering scale on which the condemned subjects of Elizabeth and James were routinely gibbeted throughout their reigns amounted to nothing less than systematic judicial slaughter (Barker 1993). Right from the start of his theatrical career, as Titus Andronicus attests, Shakespeare had no qualms about staging scenes in which the human cost and the ubiquity of social injustice were brought vividly alive, astutely camouflaged as woes of long ago and other lands. But the more he applied his mind and his imagination to the problem of social injustice, the more profound his grasp of its cause, and the source of its solution, became. In Titus Andronicus the blame for the plight that leads Titus to declare ‘Terras Astraea reliquit’ is pinned mainly on the autocratic sway of

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the corrupt, sadistic Saturninus. Titus remains oblivious of his own complicity in creating that plight, when he had the Goth queen’s son, Alarbus, ritually butchered in the play’s opening scene, thereby goading Alarbus’s mother and brothers into taking their bloodthirsty revenge on the Andronici. What Titus blames himself for is the decisive part he played in crowning Saturninus: ‘Ah, Rome! Well, well, I made thee miserable / What time I threw the people’s suffrages / On him that thus doth tyrannize o’er me’ (4.3.18–20). In other words, the chief source of the injustice that plagues Rome and unhinges Titus is seen as the morally defective individual unwisely elected to govern it and invested with absolute sovereignty over his subjects. The existence of the office of emperor or, by extension, any sovereign authority is not open to question; what is at issue is the calibre of the person who possesses absolute power, and whether that power is abused, not the fact that one person wields it. Although Saturninus is arguably just a particularly vile exemplar of the barbarism that is endemic to Rome, the whole carnival of horrors would not have occurred, the play implies, had Rome ‘let desert in pure election shine’ and chosen as its ruler Bassianus, for whom ‘The imperial seat’ is ‘to virtue consecrate, / To justice, continence and nobility’ (1.1.14–16). In Titus Andronicus the problem of social injustice and the means of solving it are still couched in personal, moral terms: unjust societies are created or countenanced by unjust rulers, and only a just ruler has the power to create and maintain a just society. But five years on and several plays later Shakespeare’s critique of injustice, and of what masquerades as justice, takes a quantum leap forward in the electrifying trial scene of The Merchant of Venice. From his first speech in the scene, Shylock is cast as the nemesis not only of Antonio, but also of the heartless, hypocritical ethos Antonio embodies. His blunt response to the Duke’s plea that he be ‘touched with humane gentleness and love’ is to insist that ‘the due and forfeit’ of his bond be paid in full (4.1.24, 36). What is riding on this case, Shylock reminds the Duke, is nothing less than the judicial integrity and political autonomy of Venice: ‘If you deny it, let the danger light / Upon your charter and your city’s freedom!’ (4.1.37–8). Undaunted by that caveat, the Duke renews his plea, asking Shylock, ‘How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?’ (4.1.87). The question is meant to be rhetorical, but Shylock answers it with his own rhetorical question, whose sardonic rationale is irrefutable: What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong? You have among you many a purchased slave, Which, like your asses, and your dogs and mules, You use in abject and in slavish parts, Because you bought them. Shall I say to you, ‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs. Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates Be seasoned with such viands’? You will answer: ‘The slaves are ours’. So do I answer you. The pound of flesh which I demand of him Is dearly bought; ’tis mine, and I will have it.

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If you deny me, fie upon your law: There is no force in the decrees of Venice. I stand for judgement: answer, shall I have it?

(4.1.88–102) The ‘harsh Jew’ (4.1.122), denounced by the Duke before the trial begins as ‘an inhumane wretch / Uncapable of pity’ (4.1.3–4), demonstrates that his ‘wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous’ conduct (4.1.137) is not only consistent with, but indistinguishable from, the institutionalized inhumanity that Venetian society is founded upon and that Venetian law upholds in the name of ‘justice’ (4.1.199). Portia repeatedly concedes that Shylock is legally entitled to the stipulated quantity of Antonio’s flesh: ‘the Venetian law / Cannot impugn you as you do proceed’ (4.1.174–5); ‘lawfully by this the Jew may claim / A pound of flesh’ (4.1.227–8). How could it be otherwise in a society where ‘A pound of man’s flesh, taken from a man, / Is not so estimable, profitable neither, / As flesh of muttons, beeves or goats’ (1.3.161–3), a society whose citizens enjoy the same legal right to purchase pounds of human flesh in the form of slaves? When you relinquish that legal right, Shylock argues in effect, when you treat your slaves with kindness and compassion as free, fellow human beings rather than as beasts to be abused and marketable commodities, then I shall relinquish my legal right to my pound of Antonio’s flesh. In condemning Shylock, therefore, the Christians condemn themselves. But the play is no more interested in absolving or vindicating Shylock than it is in conspiring with the Christians in his demonization. The point of the play is not to justify the Jew at the expense of the Christians, or the Christians at the expense of the Jew. Nor will it do to view both parties as equally culpable and unsympathetic, because that leaves one trapped in the moralistic mentality that blames the immorality of individuals for circumstances and constraints for which they cannot be held solely accountable. That is why Shylock’s irrefutable riposte to the Duke’s appeal for mercy on Antonio’s behalf is so crucial, for as John Middleton Murry observes: ‘It is the morality of a whole society, to which Antonio and his friends belong no less than Shylock, which Shylock challenges here, and by anticipation blunts the edge of Portia’s great plea for mercy’ (Murry 1936: 199). ‘The villainy you teach me I will execute’, Shylock had earlier warned the Christians goading him, ‘and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction’ (3.1.64–6). And that is precisely what he proceeds to do, by not just mirroring their villainy, but indicting their entire society as constitutionally villainous. Shylock’s adversaries remain, of course, as deaf to the instruction and the indictment as they are blind to their own hypocrisy. But through the revenge plot and the trial scene The Merchant of Venice reveals to the audience the systemic injustice of a society in which profit and the rights of property ride roughshod over the innate human rights of everyone who bleeds when they are pricked. Lest the true nature of that society, in which a cruel caricature of our own as well as Shakespeare’s is sadly still discernible, be left in any doubt, and Portia’s eloquent paean to mercy be taken at face value, Shakespeare puts the matter beyond dispute when Portia turns the tables on Shylock by matching his inflexible literalism in the application of the law. ‘For, as thou urgest justice’, she assures him, ‘Thou shalt have justice more than thou desir’st’ (4.1.311–12), and the ironic quotation

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marks around the word ‘justice’ are as audible as those that flank the word ‘mercy’ whenever Portia utters it. Not satisfied with thwarting the Jew’s plot, she sets about humiliating and destroying him, twice rejecting the opportunity to settle the case to the satisfaction of all parties and show Shylock genuine mercy. The Jew is not even permitted to leave the court empty-handed, as he endeavours to, but is detained on a trumped-up charge of attempted murder, which places his life at the mercy of the Duke and puts his wealth at the disposal of Antonio. When Portia orders Shylock to fall to his knees, saying ‘Down, therefore, and beg mercy of the Duke’ (4.1.359), her seductive contention that ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’ (4.1.180) stands exposed as grandiloquent cant. Shakespeare turns an equally ruthless gaze on the legitimacy of the law, and on what purport to be justice and mercy, in Measure for Measure. A less tenacious dramatist might have left the draconian absurdity of sentencing Claudio to death for getting his wife-to-be with child to speak for itself, but it gives Shakespeare an irresistible pretext to question the right of anyone in such a society to judge and sentence another human being on any grounds. The questioning commences with Escalus’s appeal to Angelo to probe his own conscience for evidence of his liability to commit the same crime as Claudio: Let but your honour know ─ Whom I believe to be most strait in virtue ─ That in the working of your own affections, Had time cohered with place, or place with wishing, Or that the resolute acting of your blood Could have attained th’effect of your own purpose ─ Whether you had not sometime in your life Erred in this point which now you censure him, And pulled the law upon you. (2.1.8–16) Angelo stops that line of argument in its tracks by observing ‘’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, / Another thing to fall’ (2.1.17–18), and stating that, if he were to fall like Claudio, he would deserve and incur the same penalty. But Angelo has a harder time refuting the same argument, when it is mounted far more forcefully by Isabella in the next scene: isabella

If he had been as you, and you as he, You would have slipped like him, but he like you Would not have been so stern. angelo

Pray you be gone. isabella

I would to heaven I had your potency, And you were Isabel! Should it then be thus? No; I would tell what ’twere to be a judge, And what a prisoner.

(2.2.64–70)

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The hypothetical situation Escalus had invited Angelo to consider suddenly becomes Angelo’s actual predicament. The thrust of Isabella’s plea is that if he had been like Claudio, Angelo would have acted exactly as Claudio did, and therefore should be merciful, because there but for the grace of God goes he. But Isabella’s adroit fusion of identities and reversal of roles prove more cogent than a plea for compassion, as becomes clear within a hundred lines:

Go to your bosom,

Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That’s like my brother’s fault. If it confess A natural guiltiness, such as is his, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother’s life.

(2.2.137–42) To which Angelo can only reply, once Isabella has gone, ‘O, let her brother live! / Thieves for their robbery have authority, / When judges steal themselves’ (2.2.175–7). The punchline of the exchange is driven by the same subversive logic as Shylock’s speech reminding the citizens of Venice that he is as legally entitled to his ‘dearly bought’ pound of human flesh as they are to the human beings whom they ‘use in abject and in slavish parts’ because they bought them. Like Shylock’s speech, the exchange between Angelo and Isabella is informed by Shakespeare’s recognition that there can be no true justice in an unjust society, whose basic purpose is to preserve the unequal distribution of wealth, power and status on which its survival depends. Neither character, needless to say, is aware of implying any such thing. But the implication is plain nonetheless, and the unspoken question it should prompt the audience to frame undermines the self-serving plot of ‘the old fantastical duke of dark corners’ (4.3.156) and puts mercy itself in the dock. How can a structurally immoral social order arraign anyone for transgressions of which it is the precondition, and which it needs to incite in order to legitimize itself and maintain its authority to incriminate and judge? In The Merchant of Venice the exaltation of mercy is unmasked as the sanctimonious resource of those who can afford the luxury of that virtue, because they have the power to bestow or withhold it. In Measure for Measure likewise, the mercy that Isabella begs Angelo to show her brother, and the Duke’s climactic public display of mercy to all those whom he has placed at his mercy, are diagnosed as symptoms of the disease for which they are alleged to be the cure. The author of Measure for Measure would have understood exactly what Blake meant in the opening stanza of ‘The Human Abstract’: Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody Poor; And mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we.

(Blake 1972: 217) Measure for Measure demystifies mercy, which feeds on the organized injustice that it secretly sanctions, and that produces the need for mercy in the first place.

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It can do so because, like The Merchant of Venice and, I would argue, most of Shakespeare’s plays, it is implicitly committed to the principle and the possibility of genuine social justice. Walter Pater surmised as much in his inspired essay on the play in Appreciations. He discerned in Measure for Measure ‘a profoundly designed beauty, the new body of a higher, though sometimes remote and difficult poetry’, in which might be traced ‘a still more imposing design’: For once we have in it a real example of that sort of writing which is sometimes described as suggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hints only, brings into distinct shape the reader’s own half-developed imaginings. Often the quality is attributed to writing merely vague and unrealised, but in Measure for Measure, quite certainly, Shakespeare has directed the attention of sympathetic readers along certain channels of meditation beyond the immediate scope of his work. (Pater 1889: 179) What our attention is being directed towards is an intimation of what Pater terms ‘poetical justice’: The action of the play, like the action of life itself for the keener observer, develops in us the conception of this poetical justice, and the yearning to realise it, the justice of which Angelo knows nothing, because it lies beyond the limits of any acknowledged law … It is for this finer justice, a justice based upon a true respect of persons in our estimate of action, that the people of Measure for Measure cry out as they pass before us; and as the poetry of this play is full of the peculiarities of Shakespeare’s poetry, so in its ethics it is an epitome of Shakespeare’s moral judgments. (Pater 1889: 190) What Pater means by this ulterior concept of ‘poetical justice’ is plainly something quite different from the familiar notion of ‘poetic justice’, whereby virtue is rewarded and vice punished as the established moral code of society dictates. It is a concept of justice which the sympathetic reader or spectator of Measure for Measure must be subtly induced to bring into imaginative focus, because it lies ‘beyond the limits of any acknowledged law’, and thus beyond the grasp of the characters immured in the intractably unjust world of the play. Moreover, this prospective, poetically articulated ‘finer justice’, which the characters in Measure for Measure cry out for in vain, and which we develop ‘the yearning to realise’ as we watch or read the play, ‘is an epitome of Shakespeare’s moral judgements’: it enshrines the utopian ethics that underpins Shakespearean drama in general. Why this concept of justice is aptly styled ‘poetical’, and what the Shakespearean ethics it epitomizes is predicated on, becomes clearer if we turn back to the speeches of Escalus and Isabella quoted above. Both characters base their appeals to Angelo for clemency on subjunctive scenarios (‘Had time cohered with place, or place with wishing’; ‘If he had been as you, and you as he’), which cast Angelo in the role of Claudio in order to persuade him that he would have acted in the same way in the same circumstances. They both harness, in other words, the power of the imagination to create a virtual scenario, whose aim is to excite the empathy of one

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person with the moral predicament of another. That imaginative empathy depends in turn on a recognition of the capacity of one person to feel, think and act in the same way as another person in the same circumstances (‘ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault’); it depends, that is, on the recognition of a faculty which human beings have in common, and by virtue of which they share the same universal right to the ‘finer justice’ on which the appeals of Escalus and Isabella tacitly rest. That idea of justice is ‘poetical’ because its status is as yet imaginary and subjunctive, fictional rather than factual, which detracts not a whit from its potency, as Measure for Measure makes plain. On the contrary, the creative imagination at full stretch in Shakespeare’s poetic drama transmutes what would otherwise remain a bloodless, intangible abstraction into a living, breathing possibility, forged in the heat of credible human conflict. Nowhere is it forged more effectively than in the speeches Shakespeare penned for More to deliver in the sixth scene of The Book of Sir Thomas More – speeches he was working on at the same time as he was writing Measure for Measure. In a scene whose resonance with one of the most urgent social problems of our own time scarcely needs spelling out, More confronts an armed London mob rioting in protest at the foreign immigrants (the ‘strangers’) who allegedly threaten their livelihoods, and whose expulsion from the country they demand, and invites them to suppose that their demand has been met: Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise Hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage, Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silenced by your brawl, And you in ruff of your opinions clothed: What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order should be quelled. And by this pattern Not one of you should live an aged man; For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right, Would shark on you, and men, like ravenous fishes, Would feed on one another.

(Sc. 6, 83–98) More concludes his speech to the rioters by asking them to entertain a further ‘supposition’ (Sc. 6, 102): to imagine not just that they ‘see the wretched strangers’ being banished in their mind’s eye, but that the roles are reversed and they find themselves suffering the same fate as the immigrants they hate:

Say now the King,

As he is clement if th’offender mourn, Should so much come too short of your great trespass

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As but to banish you: whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error, Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, Spain or Portugal, Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England: Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper That, breaking out in hideous violence, Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements Were not all appropriate to your comforts, But chartered unto them? What would you think To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case, And this your mountainish inhumanity.

(Sc. 6, 138–56) ‘Imagine that you see the wretched strangers’: the imagination is specifically enlisted in More’s speech as the means of making the insurgent citizens and the audience envisage in vivid detail not only the price in human pain of such ‘mountainish inhumanity’, but also how it would feel to be the victims of such ‘barbarous’ rage, such ‘hideous violence’ themselves, and what they would think if they ‘must needs be strangers’ and wound up in ‘the stranger’s case’. Although the speech never invokes an overt notion of justice, its argument presupposes, and is governed by, the same concept of justice that Measure for Measure prefigures: a concept grounded in the fundamental equality of all human beings, which is confirmed by the ability to identify imaginatively with someone else – to see oneself as the stranger and the stranger as oneself. Shakespeare had paid homage to the faculty that More enjoins his auditors onstage and offstage to employ in the speech he gave to Theseus a decade earlier: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.14–17) Shakespeare’s fellow poet John Donne understood, too, the kind of power they had at their command: ‘How empty a thing is Rhetorique?’ he wrote in one of his sermons,  ‘(and yet Rhetorique will make absent and remote things present to your understanding). How weak a thing is Poetry? (and yet Poetry is a counterfeit Creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were)’ (Donne 1953–62: 87). It is the dramatic and poetic power that enables Shakespeare to body forth on stage and in the theatre of the mind, through the speech and action of ‘a counterfeit Creation’, a concept of justice that still ‘lies beyond the limits of any acknowledged law’ today. More’s speech to the xenophobic London mob, like Isabella’s exchange with Angelo and Shylock’s retort to the Duke, is premised on the ‘finer justice’ that Pater calls

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‘poetical justice’, ‘a justice based upon a true respect of persons in our estimate of action’. It makes the authentic justice that is ‘absent and remote’ from reality – that would otherwise remain an ‘airy nothing’ – present to our understanding by anticipating its advent, by making ‘things that are not, as though they were’. Shakespeare’s art of imaginative implication empowers him to dramatize and judge the injustice of his world from a virtual standpoint in a possible future from which systemic injustice has been purged. And that potential future is all the more feasible for being implicit, because it is discovered in the course of grappling with the actual iniquities of Shakespeare’s age, which renders the prospect of its becoming a reality all the more realistic. As I have argued in Shakespeare’s Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution (Ryan 2015), the hallmark of Shakespeare’s drama, and the secret of its enduring global appeal, is his ability to dramatize the divisive world of his day from a revolutionary, universal, human perspective that points beyond the divisive world of our day too. It is an ability to envision the social, sexual and racial inequality of his early modern epoch, in diverse fictive disguises, from the egalitarian viewpoint of a transfigured future. Shakespeare’s profound estrangement from his world and time allows him not only to think and write about them as if he were a citizen of truly civilized centuries to come, but also to reveal utopian possibilities already taking root in the grim historical reality mere chance had obliged him to inhabit. What this means as far as Shakespeare’s conception of justice is concerned is encapsulated in a single extraordinary line in Macbeth. It occurs in Macbeth’s traumatized response to the first appearance of Banquo’s ghost: Blood hath been shed ere now, i’th’ olden time, Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal; Ay, and since too, murders have been performed Too terrible for the ear. The times have been That when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end. But now they rise again With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools.

(3.4.73–80) The line that jumps out is ‘Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal’, perhaps the most complex instance of prolepsis in what Harold Bloom rightly regards as a tragedy of the proleptic imagination (Bloom 1999: 517): Shakespeare’s unflinching meditation on the demonic aspect of the desire to be ‘transported’, as Lady Macbeth is by her husband’s letter, ‘beyond / This ignorant present’ in order to ‘feel now / The future in the instant’ (1.5.56–8). To take the full measure of the line it must be borne in mind that, when Shakespeare was writing, the word ‘humane’ had not yet split into two separate words with cognate but distinct meanings. So in Macbeth’s line it combines the descriptive sense of the word ‘human’, meaning characteristic of the genus homo, and the prescriptive sense of the word ‘humane’, meaning compassionate. The implication that being human entails by definition being humane is reinforced by the noun that ‘humane’ qualifies in Lady Macbeth’s anxious reflection that Macbeth is ‘too full o’th’ milk of humane kindness / To catch the nearest way’ (1.5.17–18);2 ‘kindness’ carries its full early modern import here: it

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denotes a benign, sympathetic disposition consistent with the fact of one’s belonging to the same kind as one’s fellow human beings. So when the horrified Macbeth is driven by the dreadful apparition of his murdered friend to soliloquise on its significance, he too finds himself propelled ‘beyond / This ignorant present’ and feels ‘The future in the instant’. For Macbeth speaks as if a ‘humane statute’ has already, indeed at some point in the distant past, purged the commonwealth of violence and made it peaceful, when that is manifestly not the case, as the play itself bloodily attests. The startling proleptic effect of the line is intensified by the phrase ‘the gentle weal’, which constitutes a prolepsis within a prolepsis, since ‘gentle’ describes the ‘weal’ not before but after it was purged by the passing of a ‘humane’ law, as William Empson notes in Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson 1953: 203). The era of bloodshed and of murders ‘Too terrible for the ear’ is the era in which Macbeth’s gory tragedy takes place and, as the daily news relentlessly reminds us, the era in which we have the misfortune to be still living. But for a moment in this time-warping speech, Macbeth talks as if he and we had long been dwelling in a peace-loving, civilized community, created by just, enlightened legislation, and the age of atrocities had been left far behind us ‘i’th’ olden time’. The line ‘Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal’ captures in a phrase the way Shakespeare’s drama enables the ‘poetical justice’ it foreshadows to pass judgement on the injustice of the present and the past. What else, after all, do we witness in the momentous encounter Shakespeare stages between the blind Earl of Gloucester and the deranged King Lear, whose searing diatribe against the evils over which he once presided is endorsed in an aside by Edgar as ‘Reason in madness’ (4.6.171)? Having been robbed of his royalty and the roof over his head, and forced not just to imagine, but to physically endure what the ‘Poor, naked wretches’ of his kingdom, with their ‘houseless heads and unfed sides’, their ‘looped and windowed raggedness’ (3.4.28, 30–1), must endure, Lear raves and rants until his gaze alights on the sightless eyes of the destitute peer: lear

O ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes. gloucester

I see it feelingly. lear

What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? gloucester

Ay, sir. lear

And the creature run from the cur ─ there thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.

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Thou, rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand; Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back, Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whipp’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener. Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it. None does offend, none, I say none.



(4.6.141–64)

Lear has left the sentimental moralism of his earlier prayer for the ‘Poor, naked wretches’, which culminated in the exhortation ‘Take physic, pomp’ (3.4.33), far behind. For what is an injunction to be charitable worth, when it comes from the lips of a king? How can the regeneration of those who own and rule provide the solution, when the problem springs from the fact of their existence? That Shakespeare felt compelled to write a speech in which ‘the great image of authority’, the sovereign himself, arrives at the conclusion that ‘A dog’s obeyed in office’ is remarkable enough. But in the last line quoted he has the disabused monarch draw an even more striking conclusion from the pervasive corruption and hypocrisy he excoriates. ‘None does offend’, because everyone offends, whether they like it or not, when inequality and injustice are structural, when the entire society is inherently culpable. The sources of the appalling cruelty and suffering the tragedy depicts lie deeper, the speech clearly implies, than the iniquity of individuals, which is inseparable from the system that creates the poor and subjects them to the powerful in the first place. Instead of institutionalized greed, exploitation and oppression, the play implicitly demands no less clearly that the wealth of society be shared equally between everyone, or as Gloucester puts it as he hands his purse to Poor Tom: ‘So distribution should undo excess / And each man have enough’ (4.1.73–4). There could be no plainer proof of the radical alienation of Shakespeare’s imagination from what passed for life in the early modern era, or of his obstinate faith in the boundless human potential unforgettably envisaged as ‘Unaccommodated man’ (3.4.105) in King Lear and as ‘a naked new-born babe’ (1.7.21) in Macbeth. Nor could there be stronger evidence of the increasing power of his plays to command our imaginations from a vantage point beyond the war-torn, famine-ravaged world in which we read and watch, study and teach them today: a world swarming with millions more houseless heads and unfed sides than even Shakespeare could have imagined; a world where the gulf that yawns between the rich and the poor grows wider every year, and the accumulated wealth of the twenty-six richest individuals on the planet is currently equal to that of the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest 50 per cent of its population.3 To such a world, the drama of Shakespeare, with its dream of the day ‘When earthly things made even / Atone together’ (As You Like It 5.4.106–8) and ‘justice always whirls in equal measure’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.3.358), has more to say than ever.

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NOTES 1. All quotations are taken from The Arden Shakespeare Third Series editions. 2. The quotation restores Shakespeare’s spelling of ‘humane’ here (as throughout the First Folio) in preference to the Arden edition’s ‘human’. 3. See the widely publicized Oxfam report Public Good or Private Wealth? (Oxfam 2019).

REFERENCES Barker, F. (1993), ‘A Wilderness of Tigers: Titus Andronicus, Anthropology and the Occlusion of Violence’, in The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History, 165–90, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blake, W. (1972), Complete Writing with Variant Readings, G. Keynes (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloom, H. (1999), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, London: Fourth Estate. Donne, J. (1953–62), The Sermons of John Donne, vol. 4, E. M. Simpson and G. R. Potter (eds), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Empson, W. (1953), Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd edn., London: Chatto & Windus. Murry, J. M. (1936), Shakespeare, London: Jonathan Cape. Oxfam (2019), Public Good or Private Wealth?, 21 January. Available online: https:// www.oxfam.org/en/research/public-good-or-private-wealth (accessed 5 November 2019). Pater, W. (1889), Appreciations, London: Macmillan. Ryan, K. (2015), Shakespeare’s Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution, London: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 4.2

The idea of communism in Shakespeare PETER HOLBROOK

We are born to do benefits, and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort ’tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another’s fortunes. (Timon of Athens 1.2.99–103) I might have entitled this chapter ‘Shakespeare and the idea of harmony’ or perhaps ‘Shakespeare and order’ – both of which titles would have been less immediately alarming. They might have conveyed my meaning more exactly, perhaps. But I wanted to get in the suggestion of ‘communism’ so as not to lose sight of the contemporary salience of the set of ideas I want to discuss. Communism is now pretty much unthinkable, unsayable, at least in respectable public speech. So the concepts presented in these pages may have only historical interest. Still, I think they are important, and especially now, in the no-longerquite-early years of the twenty-first century, when ‘competition’ is the default framework for understanding the economy. It is perhaps only in disregarded fields such as academic literary criticism that the social ideal might resurface – doing so precisely because it is deemed irrelevant to the larger culture; for, politically speaking, even the moderate state welfarism of the postwar period, as Tony Judt has shown, is virtually extinct.1 My hope here, then, is simply to remind us that different attitudes to the ultracapitalist doxa of today prevailed in Shakespeare’s time. I shall be talking about communistic beliefs in Shakespeare’s world, as real aspects of political and social thought, and as reflected in the plays. I hardly invoke the Marxist tradition at all: my concern rather is with the immemorial human demand for justice and solidarity, and the equally dateless hatred of exploitation and unfairness; and I suggest this solidaristic, co-operative vision is fundamental to Shakespeare’s imagination. We know Marx was an ardent Shakespearean, but, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, he and the early (‘large C’) Communist movement made little attempt to connect their project with ancient philosophical-religious communist traditions, which they tended to dismiss as utopian fantasies. Self-styled social scientists, they were keen to locate their own predecessors in the philosophical materialism of the Enlightenment

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(Hobsbawm 2012: 17–19). Hobsbawm, however, observes that those more venerable intellectual and spiritual communistic currents of thought have played a role in later criticism of capitalism, ‘because the revolutionary model of a liberal-economic society of unrestrained individualism conflicted with the social values of virtually every hitherto known community of men and women’ (ibid.: 18). If Hobsbawm is right on this, one can only wonder at the scale of what happened, sometime in what we call the ‘early modern’ period – for it must have taken a momentous, violent, utterly unprecedented economic and cultural revolution to begin to make capitalism and capitalistic attitudes look normal, let alone exemplary. Not the least strange among these normalized attitudes is the notion that one’s primary mode of being is that of an atomized individual, devoted to the satisfaction of private preferences. The past is indeed another country; to look back at it, and at its artistic and literary remains, is to discover a world that renders strange the economic and social system we have come to accept. (Yet another reason for studying past literature and culture.) But it takes not even that backward glance to remind us how odd it is to understand competitive acquisitive individualism as the most natural, let alone inevitable, of social arrangements. The activist anthropologist David Graeber (he of the Occupy Movement’s catchcry, ‘We are the 99%’) has invoked the idea of ‘everyday communism’ in order to describe a fundamental strand of social life in any social-economic system, since, it turns out, even the most brutally hierarchical and unequal society relies upon everyday practices of co-operation, simply in order to reproduce the system – if asked to assist a disabled or elderly person perform some action, one doesn’t generally first think, ‘What’s in it for me?’ Without very large such doses of trust and mutual help, Graeber argues, human life would be stopped in its tracks. For Graeber, the Communist principle, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’, is far more widely practised everywhere and at all times than we acknowledge.2 From this perspective, perhaps the family, despite and maybe even because of its hierarchical character, is the most perfect communist system of all: children, after all, are not expected to financially compensate their parents for the cost of their upbringing; most human groups take the view that incapacitated or elderly members of a family are to be cared for rather than discarded as rubbish. The kinds of spiritual and philosophic traditions to which Hobsbawm refers are well known. They include, of course, the social teaching of Jesus himself, which is consistently directed at alleviating poverty and suffering. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ is second only to the commandment of loving God: ‘On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’ (Matthew 22.34–40). The Bible tells us that ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mammon’ (Matthew 5.24); that ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’ (Matthew 7.12); and ‘He that hath two coats, let him share with him that hath none; and he that hath food, let him do likewise’ (Luke 3.11). Thomas More’s modern editor Edward Surtz has written: ‘There can be no doubt that Christ himself imposed upon his chosen band of apostles and disciples a strict and obligatory poverty and communism’ (Surtz 1957: 161). The example of the early Christians as recorded in Acts is especially inspiring, and a standing reproach to the selfish and heartless rich: the members of the primitive Church

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had all things in common … for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of these things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. (Acts 4.32–5) This line of Christian communism is extensively developed by the early Fathers of the Church. Chris Fitter, in his recent and important book Radical Shakespeare, which among other things reminds us of the numerous strands of radical social critique available to Shakespeare, cites John Chrysostom: ‘This is robbery: not to share one’s resources. Not only to rob others’ property, but also not to share your own with others, is robbery and greediness and theft’ (Fitter 2013: 15); Fitter notes there were numerous English translations of Chrysostom up to the mid-seventeenth century. He quotes Saint Basil excoriating the rich: ‘Are you not a robber? You who make your own the things which you have received to distribute? That bread which you keep belongs to the hungry; that coat which you preserve in your wardrobe, to the naked’ (ibid.). Saint Ambrose, too, rebuked the wealthy: ‘Why do you cast out the fellow sharers of nature, and claim it for yourselves? The earth was made in common for all’ (qtd. in ibid.: 15–16). The philosophical tradition supplied similar perspectives. In The Republic Plato prescribed that ‘none of [the guardians] should have any property beyond what is absolutely necessary’ and declared that ‘the best-ordered State’ is that ‘in which the greatest number of persons apply the terms “mine” and “not mine” in the same way to the same thing’. Plato’s harmonious polity threw into relief the ugly and violent political arrangements usually obtaining: ‘Any ordinary city, however small’, he writes in Book IV, ‘is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, at war with one another’ (Plato 1888, trans. Benjamin Jowett).3 Plato’s harmonious polity threw into relief the ugly and violent political arrangements usually obtaining: ‘Any ordinary city, however small’, he writes in Book IV, ‘is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, at war with one another’ (ibid.). Renaissance humanists, of course, were fully aware of these intellectual traditions. More ends his account of a communist society with a scathing denunciation of the rich; the law itself is a mere weapon of the well-to-do: [T]he rich constantly try to grind out of the poor part of their meagre wages, not only by private swindling but by public laws. Before, it appeared to be unjust that people who deserve most from the commonwealth should receive least; but now, by promulgating law, they have palmed injustice off as ‘legal’. A ‘dog’s obeyed in office’, as Lear said (4.5.151). And the close of the book contains the famous passage attacking contemporary political settlements: When I run over in my mind the various commonwealths flourishing today, so help me God, I can see nothing in them but a conspiracy of the rich, who are fattening up their own interests under the name and title of a commonwealth. (More 2011: 95)

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This social wisdom was fully available to Shakespeare. The very first of Erasmus’s Adages (which Baldwin thought Shakespeare would almost certainly have encountered during his education4) actually begins, quite deliberately, with ‘Amicorum communia omnia’ (Between friends all is common). As Erasmus observes: Since there is nothing more wholesome or generally accepted than this proverb, it seemed good to place it as a favourable omen at the head of this collection of adages. If only it were so fixed in men’s minds as it is frequent on everybody’s lips, most of the evils of our lives would promptly be removed. (Erasmus 1974: 29)5 He goes on to quote Euripides, Cicero, Aristotle and Plato, among other authorities. Of the last-named he writes that … it is extraordinary how Christians dislike this common ownership of Plato’s, how in fact they cast stones at it, although nothing was ever said by a pagan philosopher which comes closer to the mind of Christ. (Ibid.: 30) Erasmus’s second adage, it is worth noting, is ‘Amicitia aequalitas. Amicus alter ipse’ (Friendship is equality. A friend is another self). Here, he retreats somewhat from his first adage, pointing out that Plato, for example, did not suppose that ‘everything should be offered equally to young and old, learned and unlearned, stupid and wise, strong and weak, but that distribution should be made to each according to his worth’; this because ‘equality pushed to extremes becomes extreme inequality’ (ibid.: 31). Nonetheless, the essential emphasis remains with an ethic of solidarity, mutual care and social justice. Proverbial wisdom of the time continually recycles these notions. It is quite impossible that Shakespeare could have remained ignorant of them. If reluctant to pick up Erasmus’s own massive collection he could have encountered the first of these adages in Richard Taverner’s short abridgement of 1539, Proverbs or Adagies Gathered out of Erasmus, where it appears (in the 1569 edition) towards the end of the book, along with the second adage just discussed. Taverner translates Amicorum omnia sunt communia as ‘Amonges frendes al thynges be commune’, noting that: The author of this proverb is Pythagoras an ancient philosopher. Neither did he only speak it, but also brought in such a certain communion of life and goods, as Christ would have used among all Christians. For as many as were admitted of him into the fellowship and company of his doctrine, all the money and substance they had, they laid it together. (Taverner 1569: 66) Taverner goes on to distinguish this community’s practices from those of both ‘Monkry’ (Catholic monasticism) or from the outlook of the Anabaptists, who ‘go about to disturb the world with horrible confusion’. But Pythagoras’s rule did resemble, he says, the behaviour of ‘that communion used in the primitive church amonges the apostles’ (ibid.). Yet, as noted above, the tradition discussed here is as much classical as Christian or patristic. Erasmus had quoted from Book I of Cicero’s On Duties, to the effect that:

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The most widespread fellowship existing among men is that of all with all others. Here we must preserve the communal sharing of all the things that nature brings forth … as the Greek proverb has it: everything is common among friends. (Cicero 1.51) The key passages in Shakespeare to be invoked in this context are, perhaps, almost too familiar to be quoted; but their radicalism is, to my mind, still astonishing. Indeed, as time passes, and the forty-year global neoliberal revolution in economics and society becomes ever more normalized and difficult to think our way out of, they seem to become stranger and more difficult to understand. Here first is Lear:

Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.

(King Lear 3.4.33–6) And now Gloucester, who, having just given Edgar (as ‘Poor Tom’) his purse in reward for Tom’s agreeing to guide him to Dover Cliffs, reflects on this action of his as a salutary image of the same radical redistribution of wealth that Lear has called for. ‘Heavens’, he declares, ‘deal so still!’: Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he does not feel, feel your pow’r quickly! So distribution should undo excess And each man have enough.

(4.1.70–4) It is important to take in here that neither Lear nor Gloucester is making a purely social-political point: the language of both speeches is grandly religiose, philosophic, cosmological. Gloucester says the man who lives in luxury, corruptly indulging his lust for wealth and pleasure, has violated or enslaved divine law. The concept of order is central: the rule of the selfish rich is diabolical and chaotic (‘The prince of darkness is a gentleman’ [3.4.139]), an offence against the natural order of things. The implications of all this are highly significant for our understanding of the play as a whole: strange as it may sound, Lear does not describe a trajectory from harmony and order to division and chaos. There was in fact plenty of chaos and division in Lear’s kingdom beforehand. It was just that the well-to-do (‘these hard hearts’ [3.6.75]) took no notice of it – because it benefited them. ‘Order’, we know from Tillyard, was undoubtedly a pervasive concept of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and European culture.6 It was second nature for Christians of the period to think of the universe as a cosmos, an expression of the divine ordering and government of Creation. Tillyard has rightly been taken to task for assuming that an essentially Establishment world-picture, validating hierarchy and inequality, was simply unquestioningly accepted by the majority of English men and women, including Shakespeare. That is almost certainly untrue: indeed, the Elizabethan government’s feeling that it was necessary to insist upon the

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ideology of hierarchy and inequality is perhaps evidence that that set of ideas was under considerable strain. But Tillyard was right, I think, to find the notion of order, co-ordination, harmony significant for Shakespeare; and to point out the way that, in this understanding, harmony in the political, social and familial spheres mirrors a divine or cosmic unity. In the rest of this chapter, I want to focus not so much on the element of social critique in Shakespeare’s works as to tease out what we may suppose to be the positive background ideals governing his writing. This will involve indulging in some sketchy and frankly impressionistic generalizations – always dangerous with a writer as various and dynamic as Shakespeare. But I do not apologize for this: sometimes we need to step back from even the most complex of writers and try to find some unifying vision behind his or her works. In Shakespeare’s case, I think that vision is an idea of communism – or, if you prefer, friendship, solidarity, fellowship, sociability, mutual love, care, kindness. I will suggest that this vision is metaphysical, as much as social and political. At times I may appear to be evoking ‘airy nothings’, dreams of how life should, but never will, be. But I make no apology for that either: I think that Shakespeare took such dreams seriously, that they were a source of profound imaginative inspiration for him – as, indeed, they might be for us too, if we could think our way out of our present ideological impasse. Tillyard was on the mark to locate a regulative spiritual ideal of order in Shakespeare’s works. Where he went wrong was to see this as somehow a justification for inequality. Every reader knows that Shakespeare’s most exalted poetry takes up the notion of harmony. Think of Hippolyta’s wonderful memory of the hunting dogs in Crete in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: I was with Hercules and Cadmus once When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear With hounds of Sparta; never did I hear Such gallant chiding, for, besides the groves, The skies, the fountains, every region near Seem’d all one mutual cry. I never heard So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

(4.1.111–17) ‘One mutual cry’: this is a stunning, bravura piece of writing, but also a memorable vision of co-ordination and artistic unity. Notice that the dogs’ individual cries are preserved even as they are harmonized – the ‘discord’ is ‘musical’, ‘sweet’ and thunderous at the same time. But note too that the natural world itself seems to participate in and respond to this event – ‘skies’, ‘fountains’, ‘every region near’ unite in harmony. We get another famous paean to unity by Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, in which the heavens are imbued with ‘sweet harmony’, each ‘orb’ or heavenly body ‘choiring to the young-eyed cherubins’ (5.1.57, 60, 62). Music can reduce even a ‘wild and wanton herd, / Or race of youthful and unhandled colts’ to ‘a mutual stand’ and make ‘modest’ their ‘savage eyes’ (5.1.71–2, 77–8, my emphasis). In each case what is adumbrated is a kind of socio-aesthetic-cosmological statement, one valuing the co-ordination of variety into unity. This notion of coordination or co-operation is the antithesis of what Ulysses, in the ‘degree’ speech

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in Troilus and Cressida, calls ‘mere oppugnancy’, the breakdown of the whole into ruthless division and conflict, a scene of self-seeking chaos in which

everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite, And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself.

(1.3.111, 119–24) This is the apocalyptic vision of Albany in King Lear, in which ‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep’ (4.2.50–1). To emphasize the theme of co-operation in the plays is to suggest that Shakespeare sees nature (including vitally, human nature) as properly a mode of mutuality rather than competition. Albany’s monsters of the deep are horrifying because they are in some important sense unnatural. The early twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that ‘The collapse of the Middle Ages was, in one of its aspects, a revolt against co-ordination’ (Whitehead 1967: 31). Whitehead found this new Renaissance orthodoxy articulated by the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough in his satirical ‘The Latest Decalogue’: ‘Thou shalt not covet, but tradition / Approves all forms of competition.’ For Whitehead, the Platonic-Christian synthesis could be summed up as the ‘optimistic doctrine of harmony’, which opposed ‘the individualistic, competitive doctrine of strife’ (ibid.: 33). Whitehead’s whole philosophy was a deliberate attempt to revive, in the light of the new physics, preCartesian understandings of reality – that is, the cosmological vision prevailing before the fatal split between Body and Soul, Matter and Spirit (Whitehead 1968: 154). For Whitehead, the new physics has undermined the very notion of selfsufficient entities: … the passive substratum composed of self-identical enduring bits of matter has been abandoned, so far as concerns any fundamental description. Obviously this notion expresses an important derivative fact. But it has ceased to be the presupposed basis of theory. The modern point of view is expressed in terms of energy, activity, and the vibratory differentiations of space-time. Any local agitation shakes the whole universe. The distant effects are minute, but they are there. The concept of matter presupposed simple location. Each bit of matter was self-contained, localized in a region with a passive, static network of spatial relations …. But in the modern concept the group of agitations which we term matter is fused into its environment. There is no possibility of a detached, selfcontained local existence …. the notion of the self-contained particle of matter, self-sufficient within its local habitation, is an abstraction. (Ibid.: 137–8) Whitehead is not, primarily, a social philosopher, but rather a metaphysician, often an abstruse one. But his cosmology has a distinctly socialistic flavour. To put it in his own idiom, he sees the Universe in terms of ‘relativity’ and ‘essential relatedness’ rather than ‘absoluteness’ (Whitehead 1967: 43) – as illustrating modes

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of togetherness and co-operation rather than competition and atomization. In a forest, for example, he finds ‘the triumph of the organisation of mutually dependent species’: A single tree by itself is dependent upon all the adverse chances of shifting circumstances …. in nature, the normal way in which trees flourish is by their association in a forest. Each tree may lose something of its individual perfection of growth, but they mutually assist each other in preserving the conditions for survival. The soil is preserved and shaded; and the microbes necessary for its fertility are neither scorched, nor frozen, nor washed away. (Whitehead 2011: 257) Whitehead opposes this account of nature, with its emphasis on mutuality, to what he calls the ‘gospel of hate’, the Social Darwinist ‘struggle for existence’ (ibid.: 256). His philosophy, which is so often rather mystical, is profoundly opposed to what he sees as the mechanistic materialism of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, a worldview he associated with an emergent market individualism (Shakespeare’s ‘universal wolf’ of ‘appetite’ backed up by ‘will’ and ‘power’) and with materialism in the ordinary, base sense of the word. Are human beings simply self-contained, isolable combinations of matter, pursuing their own ends without reference to a larger whole, or are they part of a meaningful order of values? For Whitehead – and here again he is reviving older traditions of thought – the aim of philosophy was to disclose ‘the interfusion of modes of existence’ (1968: 71), a quest that required understanding how ‘mentality’ and its values (justice, love, beauty) are immanent in reality itself. As he put it: ‘We are in the world and the world is in us’ (ibid.:165). Whitehead is a curiously poetically-minded philosopher (and one, incidentally, with enormous esteem for Shakespeare). ‘[P]hilosophy is akin to poetry’, he wrote in the 1938 volume Modes of Thought (ibid.: 174) – so he is far more likely to have thought that Hippolyta rather than Theseus had the best of the argument over imagination and poetry in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In any case, my intuition is that Whitehead’s vision of reality as composed of modes of togetherness and mutuality is not far off from Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare does often seem to see something really real about modes of human solidarity. When Timon speaks of

Piety and fear,

Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth, Domestic awe, night-rest and neighbourhood, Instruction, manners, mysteries and trades, Degrees, observances, customs and laws

(Timon of Athens 4.1.15–19) or when Ulysses speaks of ‘communities, / Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities’ (Troilus and Cressida 1.3.103–04), these collective human practices and institutions – all of them phenomena of togetherness or organization – seem, if fragile, nevertheless a part of the primordial reality of the cosmos rather than secondary to it or artificial. Pace Margaret Thatcher, here, society really does exist.

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I want to conclude by focusing on the idea of ‘fellowship’–the word that Richard Taverner, translating Erasmus on communism, used to describe the community of the Pythagoreans and, by extension, that of the early Christians. The OED defines ‘fellow’ thus: ‘One who shares with another in a possession, official dignity, or in the performance of any work; a partner, colleague, co-worker. Also, one united with another in a covenant for common ends; an ally’. It is an interesting word in connection with Shakespeare. As Stanley Wells has observed, the wills of players, such as Shakespeare’s colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, or of a playerpoet such as Shakespeare himself, ‘bear … witness to the high degree of fellowship among the actors’ (Wells 2006: 49). Bequests, such as Condell’s to his ‘very loving friends’, or Augustine Phillips’s to his ‘fellows’ in the company, or Heminges’s (‘rings of rememberance’), bespeak strong ties of affection and common feeling (ibid.: 50–1). It is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare’s working environment was one of close mutual aid and teamwork, at least among the company itself. One thinks of the warmth that comes into Hamlet’s voice with the arrival of the Players: ‘You are welcome, masters, welcome, all …. Welcome, good friends.—O, my old friend!’ (2.2.405–06). But ‘fellowship’ has a political and social meaning too, at times shading into ‘commonwealth’. Fellowship is perhaps behind the single most rousing speech in the entirety of Shakespeare, Henry’s at the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V. I want to suggest that the speech sets forth a positive social ideal, one we can – and should – still identify with, one that can’t be reduced to a flatly nationalistic or bellicose fantasy. The speech is powerful, not to mention spine-tingling, because it adumbrates for us a model of what a genuinely egalitarian, united kind of society might look like. What the Agincourt oration does, I suggest, is remind us how far, ideologically speaking, Henry’s army has travelled by this point. It is no longer divided into ranks and classes: anyone who stays on to fight – and we must remember the king is very explicit, anyone who wishes to leave before this apparently hopeless battle is free to do so – is now equal with everyone else. All have become ‘brothers’ – all the emphasis is upon that extremely suggestive word of ‘fellowship’: … proclaim it, Westmorland, through my host, That he which has no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse. We would not die in that man’s company That fears his fellowship to die with us.

(Henry V 4.3.34–9) ‘Fellowship’ is very strong here, denoting a dissolution of markers of rank and class, all those signs that separate one human being from another, and that cause us to forget that, as Kiernan Ryan in his chapter in this volume sums up Shakespeare’s social philosophy, each of us ‘belong[s] to the same kind as [our] fellow human beings’.7 Admittedly, the word is used (in Act 4, Scene 8) of the snobbish French

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nobles – ‘a royal fellowship of death’ – though I don’t think that undermines my point (we might describe the bonding of the French as a sort of communism of the rich). It is anyway startling when Henry, who later calls himself the ‘best king of good fellows’ (5.2.240), says that ‘he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile / This day shall gentle his condition’ (4.3.61–3). In other words, all of Henry’s men who remain faithful to the cause will become gentlemen – which means that, in this new society of the army at least, there are no gentlemen, because there are no commoners. This is an extraordinarily levelling moment – and it contrasts powerfully with the French army, which is obsessed with social rank and aristocratic display. Notice how prominent aristocratic titles are included in the descriptions of the French (we get long lists of them, and they have a glittering, luxuriant sort of poetry about them); and recall how anxious Montjoy is, after the battle, to recover the French fallen nobles from the battleground, where their blood lies mingled with that of the common people: I come to thee [he says to Henry] for charitable licence That we may wander o’er this bloody field To look our dead; and then to bury them, To sort our nobles from the common men. For many of our princes—woe the while!— Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes …

(4.7.70–7) There is something else remarkable about Henry’s army: it is an army of the poor. The word ‘poor’, or similar terms such as ‘wretch’ and ‘wretched’, are used frequently both of Henry and his men. Of course, in context, it refers to their physical state: unlike the well-fed, well-equipped French nobles, who squabble absurdly over whose horse or armour is best, the English forces are worn down by hunger, fatigue and disease: for the French, they are little better than an army of ghosts. But this drives home the point that the English army is now quite literally an army of the poor – experiencing what it is like to be homeless, hungry, desperate, abandoned, driven from pillar to post. When, just prior to the battle, Montjoy comes vauntingly to demand Henry’s surrender, Henry exclaims ‘Good God, why should they mock poor fellows thus?’ Henry here is a ‘poor fellow’, just like his comrades. There is something inspiring in all this: Henry’s army has become an army of love. Witness the beautiful picture of the dead Suffolk and York on the field of battle: both are now ‘yoke-fellow[s]’ to each other, ‘espoused to death’ (4.6.9, 26). We see no such solidarity on the French side, let alone the egalitarianism that I have been attributing to the English. All this connects with another very important passage in the play, but one often, it seems to me, dismissed as a piece of politic glozing by a conniving hypocrite: I mean Canterbury’s description of the kingdom of the bees early on in the play. It is true that the speech describes a political world, conceived as a beehive, that illustrates the virtue of ‘obedience’:

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For so work the honey-bees,

Creatures that by a rule in nature teach The act of order to a peopled kingdom. They have a king and officers of sorts …

(1.2.187–90) But here I think it vital not to get fixated on what we might think of as constitutional details. From the point of view of the ‘poor’, one is probably better off in a wellordered commonwealth governed by a Christ-minded king than in (say) a plutocratic republic. Canterbury is not describing a democracy: the beehive has its ‘civil citizens kneading up the honey’, its ‘poor mechanic porters crowding in / Their heavy burdens’ at the Emperor’s ‘narrow gate’ (1.2.202–3) – though we should notice that everyone here has his set work, and what is stressed overall is the idea of mutual service; indeed, it is not entirely clear to me that the beehive is best described as a hierarchy at all, at least not in the sense in which we may use that word to indicate a society characterized by exploitation and injustice. Certainly the primary goal is the welfare of all; even the ‘emperor’ is ‘busied in his majesty’ (1.2.197). It is suggestive that the ‘sad-eyed justice’ is given the closing, emphatic couple of lines in this picture, just before Canterbury draws the moral: the judge is pictured as ‘Delivering o’er to executors pale / The lazy yawning drone’ (1.2.203–6). The paleness is an interesting touch: the decision to punish these parasitic non-workers is not taken lightly. At the centre of this vision of natural harmony and co-operation, then, is an image of stern lawful authority: a just and moral social order needs to be defended against those who would pervert or corrupt it. We might speculate on the types of figures Shakespeare had in mind when he conceived these guilty yawning drones. Are they Falstaff and his cronies, or perhaps the masterless men and sturdy beggars, the undeserving poor, of government propaganda – the sort of people, perhaps, Polonius takes the Players to be? Or are they the idle, grasping and ambitious rich, ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’, to use the phrase from Richard II? In fact, the only drones we actually see hauled away by pale-faced justice in Henry V are three aristocrats: Cambridge, Scroop and Grey, who are in the pay of the French and willing to sell out their own country and assassinate their king. It is significant that Henry points out that these noble traitors and parasites would have, had their plot succeeded, sold ‘His subjects to oppression and contempt’ (2.2.173); the poor would certainly not have done any better under these upper-class ‘English monsters’ than under Henry, probably a good deal worse. What I am suggesting is that, notwithstanding the emphasis on obedience in this passage, what we have is a focus on justice, social responsibility, co-operation, mutual welfare and the like. And this vision of give-and-take, as opposed to ‘mere oppugnancy’, is the kind of thing one might have expected the Elizabethan poor to be in favour of, had they ever been troubled for their opinion on the matter. What interests me about Canterbury’s speech is its image of harmonious varietyin-unity – so That many things, having full reference To one consent may work contrariously,

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As many arrows loosed several ways Come to one mark, As many several ways meet in one town, As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea, As many lines close in the dial’s centre. So may a thousand actions once afoot End in one purpose and be all well borne Without defeat.

(2.2.205–14) What is striking is how perfectly this chimes with what we see of Henry’s army, which is also a body unified in diversity (unlike the French army, in which the preening and rivalrous nobles are only out for themselves). It is not just that Henry’s army is egalitarian by contrast with the French; it is also that it is a realm of freedom and diversity while remaining unified. Notice that the Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish all have to get along with each other somehow in this army; mainly they do. Also remarkable is the degree to which free speech is permitted. When asked by the French ambassador early on in the play whether the ambassador can speak freely, Henry insists upon it: We are no tyrant but a Christian king, Unto whose grace our passion is as subject As is our wretches fettered in our prisons: Therefore with frank and with uncurbed plainness Tell us the Dauphin’s mind.

(1.2.242–6) Henry doesn’t punish Williams for questioning whether the king’s cause is just; and he doesn’t mind when Williams vigorously defends his striking of a superior officer, the Welshman Fluellen. Elsewhere, the king pardons a man who, when drunk, abused him: ‘Enlarge the man committed yesterday / That railed against our person …’ (2.2.40–1). There is a wonderful mood of exhilaration at the Battle of Agincourt, an atmosphere of recklessness and joy. It doesn’t seem to matter to Henry and his men whether they actually win the coming clash or lose it. Instead, it is as if the battle is already won, in the new kind of society of the army – a kind of ‘group-in-fusion’, to use Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase,8 in which hierarchy and inequality have dissolved and all work as one for a common end. The earlier history plays are infinitely darker – describing a world of relentless self-seeking, brutal dynastic conflict, civil war, politicking of the lowest kind, aristocratic competition, betrayal, chaos, anarchy, all of which results in the ruin of the nation. Those earlier history plays tell us what the political world is really like, perhaps. In Henry V, however, Shakespeare abandoned political realism for political romance, and chose instead to imagine (in Henry’s army) what a new kind of society might be like. In its focus on fellowship, Henry V perhaps anticipates Hamlet, which, as a number of commentators have shown, also has a particular investment in solidarity.9 It is remarkable to think of the common

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people at the Globe being able to imagine, with Shakespeare’s help, a new, more democratic, loving and co-operative type of society than the miserable, profoundly unequal one they had to endure. Shakespeare has given a local habitation and a name to what, alas, we too often think of as an airy nothing – I mean equality and fellowship – and it is this, in the end, that makes Henry V such a great and compelling work of art.

NOTES 1. See Judt (2010). 2. See Graeber (2013). As he writes: ‘all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually existing communism … Baseline communism might be considered the raw material of sociability, a recognition of our ultimate interdependence that is the ultimate substance of social peace’ (95, 99). 3. Republic, 416d, 462c, 422e–423a. For Plato’s ‘radical collectivism’ and ‘identification of individualism with egoism’, see the discussion by Karl Popper in vol.1 of Popper (1966), 104,106. The most prominent Marxist–Platonist of recent times has been Alain Badiou. See his rewriting of The Republic, in which Socrates declares that in the ideal society ‘Private property has to be abolished …. Everything will be collectivized’, for ‘Friends share everything in common’: Badiou (2012), 111. Plato cites approvingly the adage that ‘friends have all things in common’ at 424a. 4. See Baldwin (1944). 5. Compare Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613):

With friends there is not such a word as ‘debt’;



Where amity is tied with bond of truth, All benefits are there in common set. Then is the golden age with them renewed; All names of properties are banished quite; Division and distinction are eschewed; Each hath to what belongs to others right.



(2.2.15–20)

6. ‘The conception of world order was for the Elizabethans a principal matter’; see Tillyard (1963). 7. See Ryan’s insightful discussion of the concept of ‘kindness’ in Macbeth on pages 247–48 of his chapter: Shakespeare generally appears to ground the requirement to act ‘kindly’ (humanely) in relation to our fellow-creatures in the fact of our common ‘kind’, or nature. 8. Sartre (2006). 9. See for example Julia Reinhard Lupton’s discussion of the horizontal ties of friendship and mutuality in Hamlet as a discourse of citizenship that challenges the vertical relationships (Father–Son, King–Subject, etc.) apparent elsewhere in the play: Lupton (2011).

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REFERENCES Badiou, A. (2012), Platos’ Republic: A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters, with a Prologue and an Epilogue, trans. S. Spitzer, Cambridge: Polity Press. Baldwin, T. W. (1944), William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Cary, Elizabeth (2002), The Tragedy of Mariam, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et al. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Cicero (1991), On Duties, trans. E. M. Atkins, M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erasmus, D. (1974), Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 31, R. J. Schoeck and B. Corrigan (eds), Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fitter, C. (2013), Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career, New York, NY: Routledge. Graeber, D. (2013), Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York, NY: Melville House. Hobsbawm, E. (2012), How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Judt, T. (2010), Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents, London: Allen Lane. Lupton, J. R. (2011), Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. More, T. (2011), Utopia, ed. and trans. G. M. Logan, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Plato (1888), The Republic, 3rd edn., trans. B. Jowett, Oxford: Clarendon. Popper, K. (1966), The Open Society and its Enemies, London: Routledge. Sartre, J. (2006), Critique of Dialectical Reason: Theory of Practical Ensembles, vol. 1, trans. A. S. Smith, London: Verso. Surtz, E. (1957), The Praise of Pleasure: Philosophy, Education, and Communism in More’s Utopia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taverner, R. (1569), Proverbs or Adagies, Gathered out of The Chiliades of Erasmus by Richard Taverner. With New Additions as Well of Latin Proverbs as of English. Early English Books Online. Available online: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/ A68027.0001.001?view=toc (accessed 14 July 2016). Tillyard, E. M. (1963), The Elizabethan World Picture, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Wells, S. (2006), Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story, London: Penguin. Whitehead, A. N. (1967), Adventures in Ideas, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Whitehead, A. N. (1968), Modes of Thought, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Whitehead, A. N. (2011), Science and the Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 4.3

‘Leftward, ho!’: Shakespeare and Lenin in the tempest of class politics JEFFREY BUTCHER

SHAKESPEARE AND THE LEFT In 1929, a few months after he became the editor of the American communistaffiliated news organization the New Masses, Mike Gold wrote to enquire into the status of political commitment among left-wing writers: ‘The liberals have become disheartened and demoralized under the strain of American prosperity. Are there any liberals left in America?’ (Gold 1972a: 186). In his article ‘Go Left, Young Writers!’ Gold asked challenging questions and provided provocative answers. He claimed: There isn’t a centrist liberal party in our politics any more, or in our literature. There is an immense overwhelming, right wing, which accepts the American religion of ‘prosperity.’ The conservatives accept it joyfully, the liberals ‘soulfully.’ But both accept it [sic]. (Gold 1972a: 187) Representing the Marxist–Leninist Left, Gold criticized the liberals for submitting to right-wing dominance and asked whether or not the left-wing stood a chance against the right: ‘Can there be a battle of such unequal forces? Will it not rather be a massacre of a lion carelessly crushing the rabbit that has crossed his path?’ (ibid.). Gold maintained that American proletarian literature could make a social and political impact if the liberal intellectuals and writers with ‘the vigor and guts’ went ‘leftward’ (ibid.). For Leninists, reforming class politics is a necessary step in the vigorous efforts to obtain social justice. When Gold said ‘go leftward’, he demanded political commitment. He did not mean: the temperamental bohemian left, the stale old Paris positing, the professional poetizing, etc. No, [he meant] the real thing; a knowledge of working-class life in America gained from first-hand contacts, and a hard, precise philosophy of 1929 based on economics, not verbalisms. (Ibid.: 188)

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The lack of committed Leftist political perspectives likewise plagues Shakespeare studies today. Contributing more to an already diluted Marxist tradition, many scholars remain timid when approaching the topic of class politics. More than two decades removed from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, these ‘Marxist’ Shakespeareans still shy away from deep political class polemics. The absence of a firm left-wing political role for Shakespeare in Marxist contexts could be due, in part, to the spectre of Stalinism. In the introduction to Marxist Shakespeares, Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow maintain that Marxism did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet understandably they feel the need to make a distinction between Marxism and Stalinism: Marxism was used by repressive regimes; and there is no dodging that part of its complex history. But the sclerotic form of state socialism developed by the Soviet Union is not equivalent to the varied body of Marxist thought, an intellectual tradition that not only provides the most trenchant analysis of the operation of capital that we have, but also a highly developed body of work on issues such as the operation of ideology, the constitution of class societies, nationalism, historical periodization, and the historicity of literary forms and genres. (Howard and Shershow 2001: 5) I want to emphasize two crucial points from this passage. The first point is that Marxism does have a complex history. Howard and Shershow rightfully respond to critics that the Soviet Union is not a universal signifier for Marxism. The next point I want to make, which becomes somewhat problematic, is that they endorse a Marxism that has been reduced to an ‘intellectual tradition’. Howard and Shershow state: ‘The collapse of authoritarian communist regimes offers a perfect opportunity for a fresh examination of Marxist writings on a host of often neglected topics’ (ibid.). These topics, to name a few, include chapters on historicizing the early modern moment, discovering more about mercantilism and geography in Renaissance England, rewriting Marx into a textual representation of Hamlet, and illustrating women’s roles in material production during the early modern period. All of these are compelling analyses, useful to Shakespeare and early modern studies, and they do well to complement the intellectual tradition of Marxism. This intellectual tradition, however, does not stress the risks that neglecting class politics presents. Ultimately, while Marx once stood as a legitimate threat to capitalism, he has now been reified into multiple signifiers that assist in bolstering capitalist hegemony through his inclusion in cultural studies, classical literature and even business blueprints. As Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek argue, current manifestations of Marx, including ‘Marx of the postmodern sophists’ or ‘the “classical” author to whom a (marginal) place can be accorded in the academy’, deny ‘politics proper’ (Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek 2007: 2). It is Vladimir Lenin, according to Jean-Jacques Lecercle, who is ‘the embodiment of Marxism unrecycled’ (Lecercle 2007: 269). Lenin is Marx politicized; he is the link to revive a political Marx. This is why I agree with Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek that ‘the name “Lenin” is of urgent necessity for us now, precisely at a time when very few people seriously consider possible alternatives to capitalism any longer’, in a time when ‘it has …

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become easier to imagine the end of the world than a far more modest change in the mode of production’ (Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek 2007: 1). With the emergence of Shakespeare and social justice studies, we now have the opportunity to retrieve Lenin, to bring him back into the debates concerning human rights and (in)justices. The American proletarian moment gives us a valuable Leftist literary tradition – one that privileges class politics – to engage with Shakespeare in a manner that legitimately advocates social justice. By ‘class politics’, I mean social stratification based on how the economic mode of production affects commercial and monetary consumption – class hierarchy organized by economic conditions and income, not by other complex forms of discrimination towards specific disenfranchised groups. Aware that gender, race, queer and disability theorists among the New Left might argue that my emphasis on class is limited in scope, in that it does not provide due devotion to specific marginalized social groups, I agree with Lenin that we must ‘learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimates of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population’ (Lenin 1975a: 42). Factors such as race, gender, religion and disabilities are certainly all loci of inequality – even more so with the emergence of the populist alt-right. But rather than a cultural solution, I endorse a Marxist–Leninist politico-intellectual practice that demands that a true political class consciousness by means of Leftist partisanship is put into action – a unity of economic theory and political practice – inside and outside of academia to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression and abuse, no matter what class or group is affected. Although it was 1929 when Gold demanded writers ‘go left’, his trepidations are similar to those that are haunting society today despite the transformations of societies from epoch to epoch. Individual experiences differ from past ages; therefore, today’s social environment is not the same as society in the 1920s. However, the present and the past must not be scrutinized in exclusion to one another. Shakespeareans Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes explain: ‘[W]e can never, finally, evade the present. And if it’s always and only the present that makes the past speak, it speaks always and only to—and about—ourselves’; thus, we should acknowledge that ‘the questions we ask of any literary text will inevitably be shaped by our own concerns, even when these include what we call “the past”’ (Grady and Hawkes 2007: 5). In 1936, American proletarian writer Joseph Freeman, in his introduction to Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology, clarified a sort of presentist view of his own: Greeks of the slave-owning class, for all their differences, had more in common with each other than any of them has with the bourgeois poets of the Romantic school; the Romantics, for all their individual differences and conflicts, had more in common with each other than with individuals of similar temperament in Soviet letters or American fiction. (Freeman 1936: 10) ‘Yet nothing’, states Freeman, ‘is more obvious than the social, the class basis of fundamental differences’ (ibid.). Like the Wall Street collapse of 1929, the economic collapse of 2008 devastated social class relations. In addition, populist alt-right economics and international trade wars are widening class gaps. Class conditions

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are markers of time, and presentist analyses allow us to make connections between the past and present. Recognizing the fundamental class differences of the past, we can, and must, make the present speak for the past and the past speak for the present. To this end, I turn to proletarian Shakespeare narratives so as to delineate a Marxist–Leninist political tradition that emphasizes class politics. Proletarian writers demonstrated their support for social justice by using past and contemporary conceptions of Shakespeare to gain political support. We, too, ought to seek social justice by voicing our concerns about class struggles by introducing past and present conceptions of Shakespeare amidst a working-class literary tradition.

THE NON-ACCOMMODATED PROLETARIAT While the beginning of the twentieth century marked a radical shift in ownership of Shakespeare’s class authority, Shakespeare was well known by the masses and readily accessible to be pitted against his new elite inheritors.1 Shakespeare was frequently on the minds of proletarian writers. Describing what a Shakespeare in proletarian culture looks like, Daniel Aaron concludes that Gold and the other editors of the New Masses sought to create a ‘Shakespeare in overalls’ (Aaron 1992: 205). Aaron is most likely responding to Gold’s promise of a ‘proletarian Shakespeare’. In ‘Proletarian Realism’, Gold claims that bourgeois intellectuals criticized proletarian literature for being ‘mediocre’ and that they asked, ‘Where is your Shakespeare?’ Gold answered: ‘He is on his way. We gave you a Lenin; we will give you a proletarian Shakespeare, too; if that is so important … we promise you a hundred Shakespeares’ (Gold 1972b: 204).2 The allusion to a proletarian Shakespeare, or a Shakespeare in overalls, is not a reconstruction of Shakespeare, per se, but rather a post-1929 sentiment that ‘the new poetry would be increasingly penned by workers and reflect working-class experience from a Marxist perspective’ (Wald 2002: 16). Therefore, these proletarian Shakespeares did not necessarily manifest in the form of writers, especially because many Leftists – including Upton Sinclair – believed Shakespeare to be ‘a poet and propagandist for the [bourgeois] enemy; for the present, at any rate, a burden upon the race mind’ (Sinclair 1925: 96). Instead, to make Shakespeare a symbol of class politics in the 1920s and 1930s, the American Left adopted and adapted Shakespearean characters to symbolize the subjugated proletariat in a relatable manner.3 One such adaptation depicts a Shakespearean character as what I call the nonaccommodated proletariat. I use this term to make a distinction between the hopelessly innate plight of the proletariat and Shakespeare’s ‘unaccommodated man’. As Michael D. Bristol delineates, the literal definition of ‘unaccommodated man’ is ‘a man without commodities, without the barest minimum of social amenities or even basic needs’ (Bristol 2009: 23). But the unaccommodation of a character such as King Lear implies that to be un-accommodated one must have first been accommodated. Lear chooses to strip himself of his clothes and becomes ‘unaccommodated’, reduced to a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ (3.2.91–2).4 In contrast, the non-accommodated proletariat never has had accommodation;

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thus, the proletariat cannot become undone without ever being done. Whereas the unaccommodated man has been reduced to the basest form of human existence, the non-accommodated proletariat has been born as the basest form of human existence. Additionally, the non-accommodated proletariat is not unique; he or she is a part of an entirely broken social class. Consequently, proletarian characters in American Leftist literature of the 1920s and 1930s symbolize the hopeless quandary of being born with nothing, and the only real accommodation they are likely to receive is in death. Joining in a collective battle against capitalist oppression appears to be the proletariat’s only option for survival; hence, we see the proletarian literary character used as a means to teach a proletarian class-consciousness through literature. The American Left was especially interested in representing Caliban as a nonaccommodated proletariat because it found class discrimination inherent in The Tempest. As early as the 1930s, American Leftist Cumberland Clark provided an interpretation of The Tempest, which we now would identify as a postcolonialist reading.5 Such a reading reflects the American Left’s preoccupation with The Tempest. The Left observed The Tempest as a story of the social oppression that encapsulated Caliban and Ariel, making it a play readily accessible for proletarian writers to appropriate its characters so as to focus on class oppression. Examples of American proletarian literary depictions of the non-accommodated proletariat factor into literature and social justice; moreover, Leftist Shakespearean narratives provide a proletarian class-consciousness that remains relatable. To further make a distinction between the unaccommodated man and the nonaccommodated proletariat, I return to King Lear. Emily Sun states, ‘Lear seems to think … that he has discovered who or what he is—bare, unaccommodated man— and thus resolved the crisis of identity he has been suffering since his abdication’ (Sun 2012: 38). In a Marxist reading of King Lear, Marshall Berman argues: ‘Shakespeare is telling us that the dreadful naked reality of the “unaccommodated man” is the point from which accommodation must be made, the only ground on which real community can grow’ (Berman 1988: 108). Berman implies that Lear’s self-effacement should be viewed in a positive light – as a sign of social progress – because the individual is finally aware that he has ‘left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest’.6 In accordance with a Marxist– Leninist response to Berman’s claim, I suggest that proletarian literature shows that it is the dreadful reality of non-accommodation that is the point from which accommodation must be made. Social progress depends on our understanding of such non-accommodation. A prime example of a literary text with a non-accommodated proletariat character is Gold’s poem ‘Strange Funeral in Braddock’. The poem opens with chorus lines that are repeated after each verse: ‘Listen to the mournful drums of a strange funeral. / Listen to the story of a strange American funeral’ (Gold 1972c: 126–8).7 These lines are accentuated (the words are capitalized) as the poem moves forward. The protagonist of the poem is Jan Clepak and the strange funeral is for him. The chorus begins its song before Jan dies, which signifies that Jan is not a living, autonomous being. Therefore, the question to be asked is whether or not he was ever alive. Before death, he sweats ‘half-naked at his puddling trough’ and is

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constantly woken up by furnaces ‘roaring like tigers’. Jan dies, but the words ‘die’ and ‘death’ do not appear in the poem, once again suggesting that Jan never really lived. Rather, we see that the ‘steel has swallowed [Jan] forever’. Jan becomes a part of the ‘three tons of hard steel’ that ‘hold at their heart, the bones, flesh, nerves, the muscles, brains and heart of Jan Clepak’. Rather than becoming a part of life and nature, Jan remains a part of the factory that is his workplace, home and deathbed, and the capitalist machine erases his existence, both literally and figuratively. In the poem, Jan owns no property; rather, he is the property of the steel mill. He is not accommodated with clothing. And when he transforms into steel, he is put into a ‘steel coffin’, one that he presumably helped create at the mill. At the end of the poem, when Jan has transformed into steel, his wife says she will make bullets out of his body to ‘shoot them into a tyrant’s heart!’ (Gold 1972c: 128). Jan apparently has more use-value in this effort when he is dead than when he is alive. Dead, he is a martyr and a weapon for his wife; alive, he slaves away for the capitalist. We also know that he has not been undone because he has never had enough material goods to lose in order to become undone. His family has been born into this life by class affiliation. His wife makes this clear when she stresses her class status by stating she will become a ‘fifty-cent whore’ so that her children will not have to work in the steel mill. She is willing to commodify herself so that her children might have a chance to escape the lifeless world of the steel worker. Thus, Jan’s wife illustrates that even gender identity does not exist for the non-accommodated proletariat. With regard to Shakespeare, traces of The Tempest appear in ‘Strange Funeral in Braddock’. In fact, Alan M. Wald provides a compelling observation that Gold’s poem is a ‘proletarian reworking of Shakespeare’s song by Ariel in The Tempest of “sea change”’ (Wald 2002: 61). While referencing the song, Wald alludes to the message that Ariel relays to Ferdinand – that Ferdinand’s father has died at sea: Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange. Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.

(1.2.400–7) Wald compares Alonso’s transformation from human into coral to Jan’s transformation from worker ‘into molten steel’ (Wald 2002: 61). Wald’s argument might appear to be ambitious because it is difficult to make a clear connection between ‘Strange Funeral in Braddock’ and The Tempest, but Wald shows similarities so that we can see a proletarian reworking of Shakespeare. For example, both Alonso’s (presumed) death and Jan’s actual death transform the two into components of the respective forces that cause their deaths. There is, however, a major difference that illustrates the proletarian class struggle; Alonso becomes part of nature’s beauty, and Jan becomes a product of industrialism and, if his body is moulded into bullets, potentially an instrument of death against the oppressor.

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While Gold does not make it definitive that Jan is a proletarian reconstruction of Alonso, Wald’s claim is not overly far-fetched because Leftist Shakespearean narratives common in proletarian literature repeatedly turn to The Tempest as a source text. In his poem ‘Caliban in the Coal Mine’, Louis Untermeyer expresses the distress of a proletariat from the perspective of Caliban turned industrial worker. While he is stranded in the dark, Caliban describes nature’s pleasures: God, You don’t know what it is— You, in Your well-lighted sky, Watching the meteors whizz; Warm with the sun always be.

(Untermeyer 1921: 5–8) Outside of the coal mine is life and beauty. There are spectacular natural phenomena – meteors and the sun. For Untermeyer’s Caliban, however, there is ‘Nothing but blackness above’ (Untermeyer 1921: 13). In the coal mine, the non-accommodated proletariat is an object of his work environment, which is ‘cold and dark’ and ‘dark and damp’ (ibid.: 4, 12) – dark like the coal that he mines. He is destined to be a thing itself – just as steel identifies Jan. The depiction of the worker as a thing itself presents a proletarian literary trope that addresses the erasure of any hope or faith that the non-accommodated proletariat may overcome his or her class position. David C. Duke comments on the proletarian trend with which ‘Caliban in the Coal Mine’ fits: ‘Untermeyer’s “Caliban” anticipates other twentieth-century poets’ views of the mine as a dismal and uninviting place even for the radiance of the Almighty’ (Duke 2002: 147). The coalmine, however, is not just dismal and uninviting; it is a place of darkness and a place of unanswered prayer. The poem opens with Caliban speaking to God: ‘God, we don’t like to complain / We know that the mine is no lark’ (Untermeyer 1921: 1–2); and the poem ends with a prayer: ‘God, if You wish for our love, / Fling us a handful of stars’ (ibid.: 15–16). In the mine, Caliban fantasizes about watching meteors and feeling the warmth of the sun, luxuries to which he has no access. He apparently gets no reprieve from his boss, so he asks for God’s accommodation. God fails to provide reprieve as well.8 Hope and faith are as dismal and uninviting as the coal mine itself. The non-accommodation of Untermeyer’s Caliban is comparable to Caliban’s place in The Tempest. They both are workers – slaves – and are characterized by darkness. Shakespeare’s Caliban says that, if Prospero bids them, the spirits will lead him ‘like a firebrand in the dark’ (2.2.6) and Prospero refers to him as ‘this thing of darkness’ (5.1.278). Similarly, Untermeyer’s Caliban is defined by the dark mine in which he works. Untermeyer speaks through Shakespeare to become the voice of the proletariats. Untermeyer’s Caliban uses the plural pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ because he is the representative voice for all of the miners. Therefore, the nonaccommodated proletariat is not alone; rather, his or her predicament is shared by an entire social class. Like Untermeyer, Gold appropriates Caliban as a symbol of the non-accommodated proletariat. In ‘The American Famine’, Gold talks about ‘ignorant men whom the

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rich are killing and taming’ (Gold 1972d: 88). These men know no other way of life. They are ‘[t]housands of tired men and women, half asleep and bloodless … on their way to the factories’. One of these men is a ‘strange dark Caliban rushing on the errands of man’ (ibid.). In this passage, Caliban is the only worker given a name. He represents all who are ‘smouldering in gloom’. This Caliban has been tamed. In The Tempest, Stephano wants to ‘recover [Caliban] and keep him tame and get to Naples / with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s / leather’ (2.2.65–7). In both cases, Caliban is treated as a commodity. Like Untermeyer’s Caliban, Gold’s Caliban has no other option but to work – as he is ignorant and becomes smouldered in gloom like the factories and city in which he works. Gold’s Caliban crosses over into a different text as well. In Gold’s autobiographical novel Jews without Money, the narrator refers to the miser Fyfka as ‘this Caliban’. We could question whether this Caliban is a sympathetic character or not because we are introduced to Fyfka with the speaker saying: This miser watched women night after night until he could endure it no longer. He came to know some of them, stole contacts, groveled before them to be kind  … but was too stingy to pay the regular price of fifty cents. (Gold 1972e: 52) This correlates to Shakespeare’s Caliban’s lusty behaviour exemplified by his alleged attempt to rape Miranda. However, the narrator of the novel does not hold Fyfka culpable for all of his wrongdoings. The narrator says, ‘Poverty makes people insane’ and ‘[t]his Caliban was tortured, behind his low puckered brow, by a horrible conflict between body and mind’ (Gold 1972e: 51). Consequently, Fyfka’s avarice and criminal activity are products of the society in which he lives. It has been impressed upon him. Social stratification created ‘this yellow somnambulist, this nightmare bred of poverty; this maggot-yellow dark ape with twisted arm and bright, peering, melancholy eyes; human garbage can of horror; fevered Rothschild in a filth shirt; madman in an old derby hat’ (ibid.). Although Caliban as Fyfka is described as a monster, the images of him as a tortured individual invite a sympathetic reading, but we must consider his class position in society to sympathize with him. Leftist scholar James D. Bloom makes a noteworthy assessment of the differences between Caliban/Fyfka and Caliban in Shakespeare’s play. Bloom reminds us that, for quite some time, people have read Shakespeare’s Caliban as a colonized subject who curses those who have colonized him. To this end, Bloom draws attention to Caliban’s famous speech: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language’ (1.2.466–8). Bloom, referring to Gold’s novel, notes, ‘This Caliban … never speaks, unlike Shakespeare’s, who has warned or inspired centuries of cultivated readers as to the power of subjugated expression’ (Bloom 1992: 52). Like Bloom, I find the silence to be compelling and telling. Caliban/Fyfka represents the non-accommodated proletariat in the worst form because even his mind has gone. He is a type of impoverished victim. Bloom states: ‘[T]he imperative that introduces Caliban instructs readers simultaneously to rely on and to transcend

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what we think we know of social types’ (ibid.: 64). No matter what kind of a person Caliban/Fyfka was before, he has completely succumbed to capitalist culture and has adopted desperate avaricious practices. Simultaneously, he lives in poverty while the antagonizing forces between society and personhood make him go mad. The depictions of Caliban in Gold’s texts are derived from his Leftist convictions. Bloom even suggests that Gold’s Caliban is a self-characterization. Identifying Gold’s appropriations of Shakespeare, Bloom calls Gold a ‘Communist Caliban’ (ibid.: 12). Bloom asserts that Gold not only appropriates Caliban, but also appropriates Caliban’s cursing. While Caliban/Fyfka does not speak, Gold speaks for him and spews curses at society. To make his point, Bloom turns to one of Gold’s contemporaries, Lewis Mumford, who identified Gold’s rebellious nature as ‘the uprising of Caliban’ (qtd. in ibid.: 58). Bloom’s analysis of Gold’s proletarian leadership is thorough, if a bit presumptuous in his claim that Gold himself is Caliban (Gold himself was not, after all, born into the working class). Nonetheless, by incorporating the name Caliban, Gold is appropriating Shakespeare and changing the narrative in order to make it fit into the proletarian tradition. Additionally, Gold illustrates his own proletarian class-consciousness. And by silencing the outspoken Shakespearean character, Gold conveys the message that the proletarian readership needs to find its own voice so as to refrain from living as ‘a human garbage can’. In contrast to Gold’s Caliban, Freeman creates a Caliban of his own. In his ‘Sonnet 219’, Freeman makes Caliban the tyrant. Ariel is the one who takes on the role of the victim – the victimized spirit of the working class. To preface the poem, Freeman extracts lines from The Tempest and places them into an epigraph to the book in which this poem is included: ‘I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life’ (4.1.139–41). In Shakespeare’s play, Prospero speaks these lines when he remembers that Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano have threatened his life. When considering what we have seen from American Leftist appropriations of Caliban, we might assume that these lines would be used to adapt Caliban into a proto-revolutionary. This is not the case. Prospero’s speech serves an important purpose because it sets up Caliban as a murderer and a tyrant. Prospero knows that Caliban has made plans to murder him, but by not integrating Prospero into the poem, Freeman does not specify whose life is threatened in the epigraph. The poem begins as a sort of eulogy: ‘This is the memoir of the murdered man / Who did not know till it was far too late / That those he deified had murdered him’ (Freeman ‘Sonnet 219’: 1–3). Keeping the epigraph in mind, the speaker appears to have once been one of Caliban’s cronies; and it is not until he is in his ‘pillaged tomb’ that he sees the world ‘Surrender all it is to Caliban’ (ibid.: 5–6). Even when dead, the speaker still has a voice and at the end of the poem, he gives the proletarian readership a final message: Aware that in the doom of our time There is the key to doom and end of doom, Of murder, resurrection and the dream That opens every gate toward the sun.

(Ibid.: 11–14)

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Because of one worker’s death, the lives of others may be resurrected so that they may continue to battle in the class war. We do not know why the speaker chose to deify Caliban; we only know that Caliban turned on him. If we subscribe to the Leftist viewpoint of Freeman, we might suppose that the promises of capitalism inevitably fail the speaker. Not to be overlooked, Ariel’s role in the poem is also fascinating. From a spirit of the island in The Tempest, to the spirit of the working class in ‘Sonnet 219’, Ariel once again faces the fate of imprisonment. In the poem, he, not Caliban, is representative of the non-accommodated proletariat: While Ariel, blinded, begs to be immured And knows his fate is now the fate of all. All of him is dead except the mind, And this examines self and world anew.

(Freeman ‘Sonnet 219’: 7–10) By having the ‘fate of all’, Ariel represents the ‘we’ that we have seen in other proletarian literary texts. The fate for Ariel is imprisonment, presumably by capitalists. While all physical parts of Ariel are dead, he still has his mind. This is the one quality that the non-accommodated proletariat maintains – a mind needed to build a proletarian class-consciousness.

’LEFTWARD, HO!’ Ultimately, I affirm that a firm focus on class politics warrants more attention in Shakespeare studies. In her book Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars, Sharon O’Dair claims: Speaking practically or empirically, this is to say that in the thirty years since the Left has pursued the politics of race and gender, the admirable and important gains made there have been accompanied by serious losses in the politics of class. (O’Dair 2000: 118) O’Dair is referring to the New Left, the cultural Left, and makes a strong case that the New Left often dismisses crucial working-class economic struggles when prioritizing race, gender, sexuality and religion over economic class organization. Elsewhere, O’Dair explains that in North America, Marxism is a symbol ‘that has become almost infinitely malleable’, a symbol that often privileges culture over economics (O’Dair 2006: 355). Claiming that cultural Marxists are reluctant to ask serious questions about class and art, in a manner similar to that of Gold, O’Dair believes that: The reluctance of contemporary Shakespeareans to ‘ask questions about relations of class and art’ does not, however, prevent them from wishing to be perceived as progressives; they want to believe and have others believe that their scholarly work benefits the greater good. (Ibid.: 351)

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Conceivably, we need to redefine Marxism by either rethinking what it means to be progressive or making a clear distinction between progressivism and leftism, and the distinction lies in the willingness to speak out against classism. I have been warned by colleagues and scholars to tread carefully while applying Leftist political convictions to Shakespeare when applying for jobs in academia and writing essays for publication. This is not because these people necessarily oppose my positions, but because they are looking out for my best interests with regard to the job market. They are aware that, as O’Dair puts it, the cultural Left has thrown out the ‘class baby with Marxist bathwater’ (O’Dair 2014). And because of the removal of the class baby, Marxist–Leninist scholars are expected to submit to academia in a similar way that a proletarian Caliban is expected to submit to the capitalist system. Like Miranda, academia basically has said that it Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known.

(1.2.357–61) But, like Caliban, I feel it is time for us to take advantage of our ‘good fortune’ and use our inherited discourse to curse the hegemony via academia – making it a place from which we see class both outside and inside of the academy. Despite my real fears of unemployment due to a shrinking job market and the disastrous accumulation of my student loan debt, I would never dare to call myself a non-accommodated proletariat. Growing up in a middle-class suburban home, I was afforded financial and educational opportunities to which people born into subordinate classes have no access. I was fortunate to have accommodation. Therefore, one may ask how I, as one who has not grown up working class himself, would be able to relate to or speak about class oppression. This is a valid concern, and one for which I have found some reassurance in the views of Lenin and proletarian writers. Freeman claims that ‘War, unemployment, [and] a widespread social-economic crisis drive middle-class writers into the ranks of the proletariat’ (Freeman 1936: 13). While I may never experience the same oppression that the suffering workingclass individual experiences, I have been witness to social and economic calamity, and I continue to express my proletarian class-consciousness by carefully scrutinizing and questioning the disasters caused by capitalist class-stratification. The global war conflicts in the early twentieth century, along with international global crises led to a proletarian uprising – comprised of workers and Leftist intellectuals alike – in order to change the economic order. Twenty-first-century wars – whether wars started because of the desire for imperialistic domination or civil wars to change the social hierarchy of a people – and our major economic crises justify a renewed political Leftist campaign for a social and economic revolution. Without losing the gains resulting from the New Left’s advocacy of cultural justice, a Leninist theoretical lens – that is, a materialist approach that considers all forms of social and economic discrimination – will help Shakespeare studies to practice

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what Justin Philpot and Katie Sullivan Barak call an ‘intersectional approach’. They convincingly assert that the social construction of ‘academic privilege’ has removed the subject of working-class politics in academia: ‘the existence of working class academics is hardly given a second thought, if any thought at all’ (Philpot and Barak 2014). According to Philpot and Barak, academic privilege results in ‘the prioritization of one aspect of individual’s identity over another’ (Philpot and Barak 2014). Essentially, because they are white, their working-class roots have been eliminated from their identity which results in colleagues not taking Philpot and Barak seriously when they show their affinity for class identity. Their ‘intersectional approach’ includes addressing ‘the intersecting forces of race privilege and working class-ness’ (Philpot and Barak 2014). Put simply, class is considered secondary if it is considered at all. We can change this by examining the intersecting forces of all individual cultural privileges (and injustices) and working class-ness. A utopian vision of classless-ness inside the academy has not only kept scholars from seeing the realities of class differences inside the academic sphere, but it keeps scholars from recognizing real class problems outside of the academic sphere as well. Lenin claimed that ‘a class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without’ by way of a vanguard party (Lenin 1975a: 24). Given our positions in society, we academics have the means to join a vanguard that effectively addresses economic and social justice while campaigning for a proletarian class-consciousness. To this end, I re-emphasize that it is crucial to reintroduce a politicized Marxist– Leninist discourse in Shakespeare studies. In 1905, Lenin outlined his vision of literature: Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically-conscious vanguard of the entire working class. Literature must become a component of organised, planned and integrated Social-Democratic Party work. (Lenin 1975b: 149)9 Lenin and Leftist writers recognized the fact that literature – fiction, poetry, drama and theory – plays a major role in political discussions and political movements. Because of Shakespeare’s widespread popularity and cultural authority in America and abroad, the American Left found Shakespeare to be a valuable apparatus to voice a proletarian class-consciousness. These Leftist Shakespearean narratives of the non-accommodated proletariat provide a Marxist–Leninist method of political appropriation and adaptation from which we can learn, to better understand the past and present political climate. By uncovering and offering an analysis of these texts, and the politico-economic theory by which they were influenced, I urge scholars to address class politics in Shakespeare studies. Because without the existence of working-class discourses within academia, we Shakespeare scholars cannot truly discuss all personal inequalities when speaking and writing about our noble contributions to the value of humanity.

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NOTES 1. See Levine (1988). As Lawrence Levine has documented, during the early twentieth century Shakespeare ‘had been converted from a popular playwright whose dramas were the property of those who flocked to see them, into a sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences and overbearing actors threatening the integrity of his creations’ (72). 2. This article is excerpted from Gold’s ‘Notes of the Month’ published in the September 1930 issue of the New Masses. 3. See Butcher (2015). In this essay, I provide a fuller historical survey of Shakespeare’s role in the American proletarian literature movement. 4. Quotes from The Tempest come from Shakespeare, The Tempest, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (2011). 5. See Clark (1932). Clark, a proletarian literary critic, points to Caliban as an American native, ‘one of the redskin race’, often exhibited ‘for profit’ by colonizers (279, 278). 6. Berman comes to his conclusion by interpreting this quote from The Communist Manifesto. See Marx and Engels (2002). 7. In Wald (2002). Wald mentions that the poem first appeared in the June 1924 issue of the Liberator. The poem gained popularity and was occasionally recited to music. One version included a composition by Aaron Copeland. 8. An unanswered prayer is common in proletarian literature. One example appears in Freeman’s poem ‘Samson’, the speaker begins the poem saying:

GOD! … Are You there? Are You somewhere? O hark! They have taken my eyes and I cry in the dark: They have spit on me, trampled me, sported my name; They have broken my strength and have shouted my shame. (Freeman ‘Samson’: 1–4) 9. This article appeared in the October 1929 issue of the New Masses. See Lenin (1975b): 148–52.

REFERENCES Aaron, D. (1992), Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Berman, M. (1988), All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York, NY: Penguin Books. Bloom, J. D. (1992), Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, New York, NY: Columbia Press. Bristol, M. (2009), ‘Confusing Shakespeare’s Characters with Real People: Reflections on Reading in Four Questions’, in P. Yachnin and J. Slights (eds), Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Budgen, S., S. Kouvelakis and S. Žižek. (2007), ‘Introduction: Repeating Lenin’, in S. Budgen, S. Kouvelakis, and S. Žižek (eds), Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butcher, J. (2015), ‘Shakespeare’s American Proletarian Cultural Authority’, American Communist History, 14(1): 57–80. Clark, C. (1932), Shakespeare and National Character, New York, NY: Haskell House Publishers. Duke, D. C. (2002), Writers and Miners: Activism and Imagery in America, Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press. Freeman, J. (1936), ‘Introduction’, in Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology, New York, NY: International Publishers. Freeman, J. (n.d.), ‘Samson’, in Poems: 1915–1932, Collection of Joseph Freeman Papers, c. 1920–65, box 3, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. Freeman, J. (n.d.), ‘Sonnet 219’, in The Fire is Falling, Book Four: The Sun is New, Joseph Freeman Papers, c. 1920–65, box 4, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. Gold, M. (1972a), ‘Go Left, Young Writers!’ in M. Folsom (ed.), Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, New York, NY: International Publishers. Gold, M. (1972b), ‘Proletarian Realism’, in M. Folsom (ed.), Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, New York, NY: International Publishers. Gold, M. (1972c), ‘Strange Funeral in Braddock’, in M. Folsom (ed.), Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, New York, NY: International Publishers. Gold, M. (1972d), ‘The American Famine’, in M. Folsom (ed.), Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, New York, NY: International Publishers. Gold, M. (1972e), Jews without Money, New York, NY: Avon Books. Grady, H. and T. Hawkes (2007), ‘Introduction: Presenting Presentism’, in H. Grady and T. Hawkes (eds), Presentist Shakespeares, New York, NY: Routledge. Howard, J. E. and S. Cutler Shershow (2001), ‘Introduction: Marxism Now; Shakespeare Now’, in J. E. Howard and S. Cutler Shershow (eds), Marxist Shakespeares, New York, NY: Routledge. Lecercle, J. (2007), ‘Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled’, in S. Budgen, S. Kouvelakis and S. Žižek (eds), Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lenin, V. (1975a), What is to be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement, The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Lenin, V. (1975b), ‘The Party Organisation and Party Literature’, The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Levine, L. W. (1988), Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marx, K. and F. Engels (2002), The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore, New York, NY: Penguin Books. O’Dair, S. (2000), Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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O’Dair, S. (2006), ‘Marx Manqué: A Brief History of Marxist Shakespeare Criticism in North America, ca. 1980–ca. 2000’, in I. R. Makaryk and J. G. Price (eds), Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. O’Dair, S. (2014), ‘I was So Right about That: Social Class and the Academy’, Rizomes 27. Available online:http://rhizomes.net/issue27/odair.html (accessed 14 July 2016). Philpot, J. and K. S. Barak (2014), ‘As Long as You Think We Are White: Our Experience as Working Class Academics in the Humanities’, Rizomes 27. Available online: http:// rhizomes.net/issue27/philpotbarak.html (accessed14 July 2016). Sinclair, U. (1925), Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation, Westport, CT: Hyperion Press. Sun, E. (2012), Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics, Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press. Untermeyer, L. (1921), ‘Caliban in the Coal Mines’, Modern American Poetry, New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Wald, A. M. (2002), Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-TwentiethCentury Literary Left, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

CHAPTER 4.4

Social justice and the reign of Regan in Shakespeare’s King Lear GERALDO U. DE SOUSA

‘Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?’ (Lear, 4.6.150) In Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586), an emblem, titled Auaritia huius saeculi [the covetousness of these times], represents a palace with double doors.1 The door for the rich opens to sumptuous quarters; the companion door for the poor leads to ‘an emptie benche’ (Whitney 1967: 204). The rich ‘haue scope’; their field of influence can reach far and wide, surrounded as they are by ‘goulden giftes’ (ibid.). The extent of their field of vision is limited, however, for they cannot see the poor, who have retired to their ‘emptie bench’. The poor must make do with an empty bench and must not ‘presume’ to pass through that other gate and intrude into the sphere of the rich. Whitney’s palace with double doors serves as an emblem for Shakespeare’s representation of the proximity between the rich and the poor in King Lear and suggests that the question of social justice hinges on perception. In King Lear, characters dispose of or lose their material possessions and positions in society and descend into states of alienation and deprivation.2 Through this action, Shakespeare suggests that the question of social justice hinges on the interplay of the visible – ‘outward worth’ (Lear, 4.4.10) and material possessions – and the landscape of human suffering and deprivation, a realm rendered invisible by the wall that divides them. In this way, King Lear seems to offer competing concepts of social justice: on the one hand, the play suggests that, along with a general concept of justice, social justice serves to assign deserved reward or punishment, to give ‘due deserts’ (Oxford English Dictionary); on the other, that social justice depends on proximity and a perspective that breaks barriers and penetrates walls. In this way, social justice is presented as an opportunity to render visible the invisible and, therefore, to perform acts of kindness and charity. As Shakespeare localizes Lear’s action in its characters’

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living places and grounds the tragic experience in their material world, social justice depends on phenomena of perception of the provisional and unstable boundaries dividing rich from poor.3

SOCIAL JUSTICE The term ‘social justice’, first used by the Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, has acquired a range of meanings. In his seminal 1971 book, Justice As Fairness: A Restatement, John Rawls defines ‘social justice’ as ‘fairness’; but basically, for Rawls, to take roots and thrive, social justice needs an ideal democratic system based on a ‘fair system of social cooperation’ among citizens living together as ‘free and equal persons’ in ‘a well-ordered society’ (2001: 5).4 These ideal conditions are difficult, if not impossible, to find. In Principles of Social Justice, David Miller explains that social justice intertwines with ideas about ‘distribution according to desert’ (1999: 28),5 and that ‘Justice requires that many social resources be allocated to individuals on the basis of desert’ (ibid.: 248). The United Nations’ 2006 document, ‘Social Justice in an Open World’, offers yet another concept, proposing that social justice needs to be ‘broadly understood as the fair and compassionate distribution of the fruits of economic growth’ (7). The UN report adds words of caution: The idea of social justice has too often been associated with an excessively benevolent perception of human nature and a naively optimistic belief in the capacity of good ideas and institutions to transform the world into a secure and agreeable place. (2006: 8–9) The report invites us to ‘reflect more deeply on the nature and use of power within both the human and institutional contexts’: Individuals who hold power must be willing to submit to certain laws and regulations that limit their freedom to use their authority as they see fit. Those who are privileged to hold political and administrative power must understand that their legitimacy derives entirely from their capacity to serve the community. Social justice is impossible unless it is fully understood that power comes with the obligation of service. (United Nations 2006: 9) When the exercise of power and the obligation of service go hand in hand, they provide the foundation for a truly social justice that recognizes our shared humanity. That is a tall order, indeed. In recent decades, we have seen a movement in the opposite direction, with the widening of the gulf between the more prosperous and the poor;6 whereas the obligation to provide aid to the disenfranchised and migrant or refugee is being challenged. David Miller offers a compromise, suggesting that The pursuit of social justice requires a two-handed strategy. On the one hand, we have to look to new ways of promoting old principles, such as distribution according to desert, and in some cases we must look afresh at the principles themselves, to see whether they can be realistically followed. (1999: 264)7

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One of these old principles derived from early Christian teachings, as Bronislaw Geremek writes, saw that the mission of the Church was to help the poor, but Poverty itself, however, was not thought to have any intrinsic value or to confer sanctity: wealth and power are bestowed on some by the Grace of God, while others are fated to be weak and poor; man must accept his destined condition with humility. (1997: 17) Geremek refers to another old principle, ‘exaltation of charity’, which viewed alms-giving ‘as a way of redeeming one’s sins’; therefore, ‘the existence of the poor in Christian society is consequently a natural part of God’s plan of salvation’ (1997: 20). He concludes that, as a result of this belief, ‘the collective distribution of alms remained a widespread custom throughout the Middle Ages’ (ibid.: 36). Harsh Poor Laws rose both in England and on the Continent.8 These laws sought to punish impostors who could work but refused to by pretending to be poor, for whom poverty was but role playing, a ‘spectacle of begging’, and nothing but fake ‘ostentatious misery’ (ibid.: 51). Not knowing how to differentiate impostor from the genuinely needy and deserving complicates notions of charity. William Sloane Coffin, for example, argues that charity cannot be a substitute for justice: ‘Handouts to the needy individuals are genuine, necessary responses to injustice, but they do not necessarily face the reason for injustice’ (2008: 208).9 Likewise, alms-giving may be a starting point in the search for social justice, but alone it does not solve pervasive issues in a community. I suggest that Shakespeare was attuned not just to the necessity of alms-giving but also to systemic causes of injustice.10 Shakespeare seems aware of the fundamentals of social justice exemplified in The Several Corporal Works of Mercy, which became the gold standard for the individual and collective obligation placed on the faithful to attend to the basic bodily needs of others: to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to visit the sick, to visit the imprisoned and to bury the dead (Matthew 25.34–46 and Tobias 1.19–20).11 King Lear reveals echoes of The Several Corporal Acts of Mercy, the most frequent references to which are the need to provide shelter and food for the needy, but these also include an urgent call to temper displays of force and power with caring concern for others and the obligation of service. Kent, seeing Cordelia disowned and thrown out of her father’s affection, blesses her: ‘The gods to their dear shelter take thee, maid, / That justly think’st and has most rightly said’ (1.1.183–4).12 After being rebuffed by Goneril, Lear turns to Regan and demonstrates what he now seems required to do to secure the bare necessities of life: ‘On my knees I beg / That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food’ (2.2.344–5). The Earl of Gloucester risks his own life by, as he says, venturing forth and seeking the renegade king and cohorts, in order to bring them to where ‘both fire and food’ are ready for them (3.4.149). Numerous other passages in the play underscore the need for recognition of human interconnectedness and a call to service. For the purposes of this chapter, I propose to explore a phenomenon: the ‘appearing’ of poverty, and how poverty comes into view in Shakespeare’s play. To borrow Étienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra

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and Ranabir Samaddar’s words from another context, the play underscores ‘the complexities of justice that emerge from its “social embeddedness”’ (2011:1). Yet, the recognition of human interconnectedness only becomes visible in counterdistinction to what I will refer to as a rewilding of the kingdom.

HOUSELESS POVERTY AND DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH In his own family, King Lear puts to the test the principle of distribution of wealth according to desert. In Act 1, Scene 1, Lear announces his abdication; as he puts it, he wants ‘To shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburdened crawl toward death’ (1.1.38–40), inviting those closest to him to offer public displays of affection in exchange for a share of the kingdom. Lear intends this experiment to be a competition based on ‘merit’ (1.1.53): those who love him more get the ‘largest bounty’ (1.1.52). The experiment miscarries. Blinded by ego and rage, he disowns Cordelia, who refuses to offer expected words of affection, and Kent, her supporter and ally, who points out Lear’s mistake. In this early action, Lear permits no dissent and shows no concern for the poor. In fact, the test of love to which he submits his daughters does not reveal goodwill or generosity of spirit; rather it becomes but a display of power and leads to acts of injustice. He turns a blind eye to justice. He deprives Cordelia not only of her inheritance but also of his love, paternal care, ‘propinquity and property of blood’, and, in France’s words, ‘folds of favor’ (1.1.114–15, 219). In addition, in his wrath, he mocks her about ‘infirmities’ that she ‘owes’ (1.1.203) since she is now, by his estimation, without friends, hated, dowerless, estranged with a curse, deprived of ‘grace and favor’ (1.1.223), cast away, and potentially homeless if it were not for France’s charity. However, in this powerful redistributive process, Lear renders himself dispossessed and homeless. As such, the Wheel of Fortune has turned a full circle in a short period of time for Lear. He creates a political vacuum, and puts into motion a ‘rewilding’ of his kingdom, which undermines rules of civility, family ties, respect for one another and acts of kindness that he assumed would bind his family and subjects alike. By Act 2, Scene 2, Lear tells Regan and Goneril that he chose voluntary poverty: ‘I gave you all’ (2.2.439). The play does not explain why Lear chooses to become poor. He may harbour a wish similar to that of Timon of Athens: ‘Why, I have often wished myself poorer that I might come nearer to [his friends]’ (1.2.98–9). Timon tests his friends; Lear tests his daughters. However, Lear’s disposal of his material possessions echoes the Christian ethos that saw voluntary poverty as a way to achieve spiritual reward. Geremek points out that ‘both in the gospels and in patristic literature poverty is exalted as a spiritual value, accessible to rich and poor alike’ (1997: 19). In an ‘economics of salvation’, combining pauperitas and humilitas, however, it was believed that ‘the poverty of Christ was voluntary; it was a renunciation of his power as King and Son of God’ (ibid.). To renounce power and material possessions was ‘praiseworthy’; but those who did so were expected to adopt ‘external signs of humility’ and of ‘true poverty’, including ‘poor clothing, a life of

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austerity without possessions, an income or a home, a low social status (sometimes assimilated, significantly, to that of a foreigner) and the daily hardship and suffering of a life of want’ (ibid.). One might assume that in King Lear, Shakespeare is reflecting what the German philosopher and theologian Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) referred to as coincidentia oppositorum, ‘coincidence of opposites’.13 Significantly, in fact, Lear does not renounce his ‘power, / Pre-eminence and all the large effects / That troop with majesty’ (1.1.131–3); rather, he tells Regan and Goneril that he will also retain an army of ‘an hundred knights / By you to be sustained’ (1.1.134–5). Although he ends up poor and homeless, Lear has not chosen a life of poverty in imitation of Christ. He stumbles into it by misjudgment and miscalculation. Therefore, this ambiguous voluntary and yet involuntary state of homelessness and poverty becomes irreversible and traps Lear into the life of a pauper, with little apparent spiritual reward. Lear becomes the victim of his government’s policies, or lack of policies, to provide aid to the poor, disenfranchised and disabled. During his reign, Lear apparently made no effort, as a matter of state policy, to address the plight of the less fortunate by putting in place charitable institutions, such as the Misericords in Portugal,14 which were entrusted with the distribution of aid to the less fortunate. Lear does not even remember the poor in his will as he distributes his wealth. Ironically, Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that Shakespeare was no philanthropist, either: ‘He founded no scholarships or alms-rooms, and he set up no charitable foundations either for the poor of Stratford or for those of any parish in London’ (2001: xvi). But by the end of Act 2, as the storm in the mind and the storm of the elements approach, Regan asserts her own new strength and forces her father out of Gloucester’s house and shuts the door. This is a breach of hospitality, an act of blatant ingratitude, an unforgiveable example of injustice, a powerful symbol of division and separation. As Lear makes clear, homelessness raises questions of survival and the search for the necessities of life – food, clothing, shelter: ‘Age is unnecessary: On my knees I beg / That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food’ (2.2.344–5). What are the essential necessities of life, he wonders aloud to Regan: O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest things superfluous; Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, Which scarcely keeps the worm. But, for true need— (2.2.453–9) In this passage, Lear considers what is essential and what is superfluous, and ultimately, what is true need. These may be read as the angry ravings of a lunatic old man, but they are also essential questions of social justice, connecting what our bodies need for survival and what we need to maintain our human dignity. Lear uses the term ‘houseless poverty’ (3.4.26) to describe the kind of abject poverty he senses around him:

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Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? (3.4.28–32) These ‘houseless’ poor had been invisible; but now, unsheltered and stormstricken, Lear feels their presence and recognizes that his own government had done too little to alleviate their suffering: ‘O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this!’ (3.4.32–3). In fact, he knows that no one can know the suffering of the poor, unless one experiences such poverty: Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just (3.4.32–6) If one shares that experience, then one might enter into true communion with the less fortunate and achieve, perhaps, a new awareness that may lead to social justice. The insight that he has gained, that he feels in houseless extremity, comes too late in terms of his political leadership, as he can no longer shape, affect or implement public policy; but his example does nonetheless have the potential to ‘shake the superflux’ – the powerful and unthinking privilege of others – in that it might inspire a ‘feeling’ relationship between those who have and those who do not. Redistribution of material possessions takes different forms: from Lear to Goneril and Regan, from Cordelia to her sisters, from Edgar to Edmund, and from Gloucester to Edmund. Edgar, for example, illustrates the plight of the poor: he loses his identity as the heir to an earl, becomes anonymous and invisible, falls through the cracks of the social fabric and finds no institutions to attend to his needs. When Edmund deceives his father into disowning Edgar and bestowing on him the family wealth, title, and favour, he, like Lear, turns the world on its head. Edmund’s idea, which he attributes to Edgar in the forged letter, is simple enough: ‘sons at perfect age and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son and the son manage his revenue’ (1.2.72–4). Tricked by Edmund’s deceit, Edgar escapes from his father’s wrath and assumes the identity of the mad pauper. To safely move in this parallel world of abject poverty and mental illness, he grimes his face with ‘filth’, wraps a ‘blanket’ around his loins, and creates what he calls a ‘presented nakedness’ – an iconographic representation of a beggar: The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms,

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Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills, Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, Enforce their charity. (2.2.184–91) This, he adds, means to become ‘nothing’. The language of the passage suggests that ‘nothing’ signifies suffering, endurance, pain. A beggar must get used to being pelted, struck with a succession of blows, bruised by objects being hurled at him and to experiencing curses and abuse. He must also look like a beggar to blend in with beggars. Edgar becomes the iconographic representation of a beggar, like, for example, the sculpture of a beggar by Leonhard von Brixen, dated 1460–76, or the naked mendicant, with whom Saint Martin divides and shares his cloak, in El Greco’s Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597–9).15 Von Brixen’s dirty barefoot beggar wears a filthy torn blanket around his torso. Unlike Edgar, he has Saint Martin’s cloak draped over his shoulders, symbolizing promise of heavenly protection and care. But, without a Saint Martin, as the Fool comments, the poor are left to fend for themselves: ‘Fortune, that arrant whore, / Ne’er turns the key to the poor’ (2.2.242–3); in other words, the rich and powerful never open the door to the poor, leaving them out in the cold, unprotected, subject to the storms of fortune and weather. The policies of Lear’s government rendered invisible this kind of suffering to which Edgar alludes. Lear’s policies neglected the poor, the downtrodden, those with disabilities and those who become so. True, in adversity, Lear proposes to distribute the ‘superflux’, but he is no better off than Spenser’s Giant with the Scales in The Faerie Queene. In the Giant with the Scales, Spenser offers a critique of radical redistribution as a social and ethical experiment. When Artegall runs across the Giant with the Scales in Book V of The Faerie Queene, he confronts a logical and yet absurd system of social justice and of justice. The Giant proposes to rearrange all things by weighing them ‘equallie’: ‘Then would he ballaunce heauen and hell together, / And all that did within them containe’ (5.2.31), so that he ‘all things would reduce vnto equality’ (32).16 The Giant’s admiring throngs attest to the popularity of his ideas. Attacking the Giant’s enterprise, Artegall argues that things have their proper place and weight, and therefore ‘All change is perilous, and all chaunce vnsound’ (V.2.36). Spenser suggests that by erasing hierarchy, tradition, merit, and the difference between good and bad, the Giant turns the world upside down, and in fact does away not only with social justice but justice itself. When the Giant fails in his attempt to weigh true and false, for the false keeps sliding off the balance, Artegall drives the lesson home, just before the Giant, pushed over a cliff by Talus, drowns in the ocean below: But set the truth and set the right aside, For they with wrong or falshood will not fare; And put two wrongs together to be tride, Or else two falses, of each equal share; And then together doe them both compare.

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For truth is one, and right is euer one. So did he [giant], and then plaine it did appeare, Whether of them the greater were attone. But right sate in the middest of the beame alone. (V.2.45) Artegall believes that justice and truth are absolutes, and he counters the Giant’s belief that they are relative. Lear’s experiment differs from the Giant’s, however. Unlike the giant, Lear wants to invert his position. He will become poor; his daughters rich. If, like Spenser’s misguided Giant with the Scales, we place affection or love in one tray, what will counterbalance it in the other tray? Lear erroneously assumes that wealth and love of others constitute each other’s counterpart, that gratitude elicits reciprocity and generosity and that family bonds ensure that he would be taken care of for the rest of his life. In the process, shattered into irreconcilable fragments of his former self, Lear is a king who is a pauper, a father without daughters, a man unable to meet his own basic necessities of life. Lear’s actions open a chasm and precipitate a shift of perception of the world within and without him.17 In his study of heresy and heretics, Leonard George poses two most compelling questions: ‘What is happening right here, right now, that one’s attentional habits prevent one from perceiving? And what would remain of the certainties that anchor one’s daily life if these habits were altered?’ (1995: xvi).18 The experiment proves perilous for both Lear and Spenser’s Giant; yet, unlike the popular Giant, Lear is misguided in a different way. While he was in power, he apparently did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the poor and gave nothing to those in need. He undertook a distribution of his wealth and power, but not to bring rich and poor closer together; rather, he rewarded Goneril and Regan’s flattery and punished Cordelia for her honesty. Once homeless and powerless, however, Lear gains momentary insight into the suffering of the poor and advocates a distribution of wealth, but now without his former authority – which blinded him to poverty and homelessness – he has no means to act to advance social justice in the world. Lear gains a vision, but he can no longer change the kingdom. The scenes in the hovel offer the possibility that charity can provide a foundation for building a community based on mutual support, empathy and care. But at this point in the play, Lear no longer knows what his place in the kingdom is. The disguised Kent reintroduces himself as ‘a very honest-hearted fellow’, but underscores the paradox that he is ‘as poor as the King’ (1.4.19–20). Perhaps recognizing the irony of Kent’s remark, Lear ambiguously boasts: ‘If thou be’st as poor for a subject as he’s for a king, thou art poor enough’ (1.4.21–2). Events have brought king and pauper together in a strange coincidence of opposites. Lear does not explain what makes one ‘poor enough’ to join his royal retinue. Lear embraces a new ethic, where king and beggar are thrust together in the search for shelter from the storm. Yet, his chosen poverty through distribution of his wealth to his daughters still entails more show than substance, and the semblance of royalty but without a throne, a castle and all the trappings of office. Early on, the Fool proves Lear’s idea to be no less foolish than the Giant’s. He points out to Lear: ‘If I gave them [his daughters] all my living, I’d keep my coxcombs myself’ (1.4.106–7). He explains

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his philosophy of ‘having’, and offers a vision for how to attain a frugal, balanced, and – most significantly – an independent life: Have more than thou showest, Speak less than thou knowest, Lend less than thou owest, Ride more than thou goest, Learn more than thou trowest, Set less than thou throwest, Leave thy drink and thy whore And keep in-a-door, And thou shalt have more Than two tens to a score. (1.4.115–25) Were one to follow this advice, the Fool underscores, one could even turn a profit and ensure financial independence. Lear has, of course, already violated much of this advice, and the Fool knows that. To drive the lesson home, the Fool adds that the foolish Lord who advised Lear to ‘give away thy land’ illustrates ‘the difference between a bitter fool and a sweet one’ (1.4.134–5, 139). According to the Fool, the smart person keeps a ‘monopoly’ (146); whereas a dispossessed person becomes ‘nothing’: ‘I am a fool, thou art nothing’ (1.4.184–5). The Fool may be making a topical allusion to King James’s granting to his favorites such monopolies, lucrative ‘exclusive privilege of trading in a commodity, or with a particular country’, a practice that came under parliamentary attack in 1620–1.19 By ignoring commonsense and Jacobean practice, the Fool suggests, Lear has become his own ‘shadow’ (1.4.222). Whereas Goneril and Regan challenge Lear’s authority, the Fool questions his assumptions about how to live his life. Relatively early in the play, Lear has second thoughts and doubts not only about the state of poverty he has chosen but the authority he has surrendered. Lear’s 100 knights, later to be disbanded, do not at first come to Lear’s aid, although they are said to have followed Lear to Dover, and Lear apparently even considers using force to regain his position, ‘To take’t again perforce’ (1.5.37). Yet, once he becomes destitute, Lear recognizes his own plight reflected in the nothingness of the Bedlam beggar Edgar: ‘Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (3.4.104–6). He also arrives at a new vision of life: ‘The art of our necessities is strange, / And can make vile things precious’ (3.2.70–1). Beggars discover that the sporadic kindness of strangers does not equate with a reliable safety net of charitable support or bring about the kind of social justice that, as discussed above, John Rawls and David Miller propose. Alone, it cannot fix systemic problems in Lear’s kingdom. Redistribution of wealth or charity alone cannot carry the day. Yet some of the characters discover a new ability to feel, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to connect – to be truly sensate and embedded in the materiality of the world. Gloucester, for example, finds another way to see the world without eyes: ‘I see it feelingly’ (4.6.145). Lear agrees: ‘A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears’ (4.6.146–7). At least momentarily, both Lear, inspired by Edgar, and Gloucester, inspired by Lear’s

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desperate plight, see and hear the invisible and bridge the chasm that separates one human being from another.

THE REIGN OF REGAN: THE REWILDING OF THE KINGDOM In this play, social justice intertwines with acts of social injustice. In King Lear, poverty is a phenomenon associated with the outdoors; therefore, the characters must lose their homes in order to become poor, but poverty seems to be endemic in Lear’s kingdom, as Edgar suggests when he chooses ‘to take the basest and most poorest shape’ (2.1.78) of a human being ‘brought near to beast’ (2.2.180). Dwelling takes centre stage, not only in terms of the different modes and types of dwelling – palace, cave, someone else’s house, hovel, open air – but also the extent to which ‘dwelling’ defines for us concepts of inside (entering, belonging, being accepted) and outside (leaving, closing of doors, exile, not belonging).20 The play’s concerns are primarily with the rich who become poor and the housed who become houseless, not necessarily with those born into poverty who experience poverty all of their lives. Edmund anticipates a process of rewilding, which I will define later, the abandonment of established codes of civility and morality, and a reversal to ‘Nature’, when he invokes Nature as his ‘goddess’, to whom his ‘services are bound’ (1.2.1–2). He differentiates ‘Nature’ from ‘the plague of custom’ (1.2.3). He argues that ‘custom’ – the ‘customary usage or laws’ – has denied him ‘any share by inheritance of his father’s property’ (1.2.3, footnote). Björn Quiring aptly remarks that in King Lear, ‘the constellation of persons is fairy tale-like and pastoral rather than historical’; yet he makes a case to link Lear to the history plays, ‘at least as their vanishing point’ (2014: 167). He adds, ‘… Lear deals with the same themes of sovereignty and representation as the Histories, presupposes them, and is situated at their horizon’ (ibid.). Particularly interested in natural law, he argues that Lear seeks total ‘dominion through a natural eminence’, which in fact ‘absolves him of actually ruling’ (ibid.). As a consequence, Quiring concludes, Lear places his kingdom ‘under the rule of nature’, but ‘there is no consensus on the statutes of this order’ (ibid.: 183). Boundaries decay; ‘subjectivities’, associated with ‘the power of the state’, cannot be sustained (ibid.: 207). But such a return to nature has fundamental implications for social justice in the play. Shakespeare places the characters in a strange geography, progressively away from palaces and fortresses, into something wild, where the characters have not only to confront questions of survival but also what it means to be human. In this context, there is no place to go, except to wander in the vast expanses of the kingdom. In their different ways, Goneril, Regan, Edmund and their allies all take part in a debate as they challenge old assumptions and explore new frontiers and blaze new trails in the vision of how humans should relate to one another. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman argue that in the early modern period, ‘the human’ lacks ‘a sharp or evident frontier’ and requires for its very existence ‘contrasting border-figures, partly human—or, rather, intermittently human and inhuman according to their context’ (2002: 3). As they point out, several essays in At the Borders of the Human suggest that ‘the borders of the human’ remain ‘dangerously flexible and uncontrollable’:

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Sometimes the borders appear strong, well guarded, at other times fragile and porous. Sometimes one thing is human, whereas at other times and other places the same thing is not. The issue of what it is to be human is revealed as both problematic in itself, and made problematic by its others. (Ibid.: 5) Alan Stewart, for example, argues that in this period, ‘To be human means not only to be not a beast, but also to subscribe to a specific code of humanity’ (ibid.: 9). King Lear, however, blurs these boundaries, when humans are cast out of their homes and into the wilds of the kingdom. Edward Casey argues that ‘the wild can occur anywhere…while wilderness is presumed to exist only in undomesticated, although “natural” place, which presents itself to us as a wildscape’ (2009: 227). I borrow the term ‘rewilding’ from conservation biologists, but use it, of course, in other senses in the political, cultural and human landscape of the play. As Caroline Fraser explains, ‘rewilding has become a principal method for designing, connecting, and restoring protected areas’ (2009: 9), by reintroducing wildlife into areas where such wildlife is on the verge of extinction or has become extinct, but also by using other methods to ensure the preservation of entire ecosystems. In Lear, houses border on wild, stormy places, but something wild also pervades the domestic space, permeates the nature of characters such as Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Edmund, and spreads to the political sphere. To adapt Casey’s words to my exploration of social justice, I suggest that ‘to pursue nature into its own lair—its wild places’, Shakespeare creates a political order, which I will refer to as the Reign of Regan. Goneril and Regan never show concern for the homeless, the elderly and the dispossessed, nor do they perform acts of charity and kindness. Both are vicious and mean. Both express political ambition: Goneril, hampered by what she refers to as ‘milk-livered’ husband, whose good nature eventually shines through, resorts to entreating Edmund, in a letter, to kill Albany; whereas Regan, supported by her fiery-tempered and violent husband, gives full expression to her own violent nature. When Lear divides his kingdom, the boundaries between Goneril’s and Regan’s contiguous territories, though demarcated on a map, seem amorphous, with unclear lines of demarcation, as the two sisters at first form an alliance to defeat Lear and then to fight the invading French forces, which they justify in patriotic, nationalistic language, accusing opponents such as Kent, Gloucester and Lear himself as traitors to crown and country. More tellingly, after Cornwall’s death, Regan, free to pursue Edmund for herself, feels empowered to assert her political dominion. Regan sees herself as a warlord, with Edmund as her chosen consort, leading the British forces in a ruthless, violent game of thrones. Shakespeare grounds the representation of this new regime in the anonymous The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and His Three Daughters.21 The earlier Leir laments the death of his wife and her ‘good advice’: ‘For fathers best do know to governe sonnes’; whereas, daughters need their mothers’ ‘counsel’ (Sc.1, ll. 12, 19– 20). Like Shakespeare’s protagonist, Leir too, sets out ‘to try which of my daughters loves me best / Which till I know, I cannot be in rest’ (Sc. 1, ll. 79–80). Leir expects the three daughters to ‘exceed’ one another ‘in their love’ (Sc. 1, l. 82); however, he devises an additional test for Cordella: ‘Ile say, Then, daughter, graunt me one

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request, / To shew thou lovest me as thy sisters doe, / Accept a husband, whom my selfe will woo’ (Sc. 1, ll. 84–6). In Leir, Ragan resents Cordella’s ‘severall choyce of Suters’ (Sc. 2, l. 115) and, along with Gonorill, seeks to destroy her and, of course, their father. Further, the anonymous playwright associates ‘zeale of duty’ (Sc. 3, l. 258) with Ragan. When Gonorill complains of Leir’s ‘quips and peremptory taunts’ (Sc. 9, l. 775) and of his ill temper, despite the fact that, as she says, ‘I him keepe of almes’ because he is ‘not able for to keepe himselfe’ (Sc. 9, l. 777–8), Skalliger advises her to cut Leir’s ‘large allowance’ in half (Sc. 9, ll. 799–801). Whereas Gonorill reduces Leir’s pension and offers him nothing but ‘bread and cheese’ (Sc. 10, l. 834), Ragan makes clear that she is more interested in ruling. In a soliloquy, she claims to be favored by Fortune and, therefore, she feels entitled to rule her husband, the king of Cambria: How may I blesse the howre of my nativity, Which bodeth unto me such happy Starres! How may I thank kind fortune, that vouchsafes To all my actions, such desir’d event! I rule the King of Cambria as I please: The States are all obedient to my will; And looke what ere I say, it shall be so; Not any one, that dareth answere no. (Sc. 11, ll. 924–33) She claims absolute power and control over all those around her; she detects, however, a degree of power in Leir over Gonorill: ‘My father with her [Gonorill] is quarter-master still’ (Sc. 11, l. 938). She asks a murderer if he can ‘give a stabbe or two, if need require’ (Sc. 15, l. 1211); he confirms that, ‘If you will have your husband or your father, / Or both of them sent to another world, / Do but commaund me doo’t, it shall be done’ (Sc. 15, ll. 1217–19). In Scene 22, she receives the Gallian Ambassador, suspects the letters he bears to Leir to be seditious, calls him ‘saucy mate’, and strikes him: ‘For law of Armes shall not protect thy toung’ (ll. 1966-67). In upbraiding the ambassador, she claims absolute power befitting her ‘imperiall state’ (Sc. 22, l.1973). Although in Scene 23 she says she feels ‘a hell of conscience in [her] brest’ (l. 2356), her doubts are about trusting hired murderers, ‘white-liverd slaves’ (l. 2369), rather than killing. She indicates that she may lack the physical strength of a man but that she still possesses a stronger will: O God, that I had bin but made a man; Or that my strength were equall with my will! These foolish men are nothing but meere pity, And melt as butter doth against the Sun. (Sc. 25, ll. 2371–4) She does not even hesitate to grab a sword and threaten to fight. There is no room for ‘charity’ in her vision of rule: ‘I sweare, I am quite out of charity / With all the heartlesse men in Christendome’ (Sc. 25, ll. 2377–8). Ragan of Leir is an extraordinarily ruthless figure who cannot perform any act of kindness or of charity.

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Shakespeare’s Regan speaks of her ‘deed of love’ (1.1.71) in defending her right to a piece of the kingdom, challenges Goneril for coming ‘too short’ in protestations of love for their father (1.1.72); and like Ragan of the anonymous play, she warns Cordelia: ‘Prescribe not us our duty’ (1.1.278). Having found a true partner in her vicious husband, she and Cornwall go to Gloucester’s house. When Cornwall sentences Kent to the stocks until ‘noon’, she insists ‘till night’ (2.2.131, 132); she gives orders, and insists that Lear should allow himself to be ‘ruled’ (2.2.337). Most tellingly, she insists on a vision of single rule, when it suits her: ‘How in one house / Should many people, under two commands, / Hold amity? ‘Tis hard, almost impossible’ (2.2.429–31). She gives orders to close the door to Lear (2.2.494). During their torture, interrogation and mutilation of Gloucester, she pulls Gloucester’s beard, insists Cornwall pluck out Gloucester’s other eye, grabs the sword and kills the servant who wants to stop Cornwall. She ruthlessly and cruelly kicks Gloucester out of his own house and shuts the gate (3.7.92-3). Later, she refers to the British army as ‘our troops’ (4.5.18) and acts as a regnant queen, when she promotes Edmund to head of her own troops: ‘In my rights / By me invested; he compeers the best’ (5.3.69–70), adding ‘I create thee here / My Lord and master’ (5.3.78–9). The play associates Regan with doors, borders and threshold. She wants to exclude, cast out, throw out of the house and close doors. As Whitney’s emblem of the palace with the double doors discussed above suggests, a door can represent justice or injustice. Both Acts 2 and 3 end with the closing of doors. In keeping with her image as a border figure, Regan had pointed out to Lear that, being old, ‘Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of her confine’ (2.2.336–7), seemingly suggesting that her father stands ‘at the very edge’ of his allotted space in life. Lear responds by begging for life’s necessities, as quoted above. If in different ways, Goneril, Regan and Edmund conduct an experiment of their own in their defiance of customary assumptions about filial duty, Regan presides over the most glaring examples of cruelty. She participates in and enforces a rewilding of the kingdom she inherited from her father. She can set no one free or create a society that advances the cause of justice. In her tyrannical regime, there are no guardrails except the boundaries of her will; no vision but the rule of brute force; no gratitude but to reward her supporters; and no law except her voice calling for eyes to be poked out, heads to roll, stabbings to be carried out. She wants doors barred, borders closed to those who can bring aid to the poor and the downtrodden, comfort to those in pain and support to the lonely. No social justice can ever emerge during her reign.

DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY The closing of doors in King Lear serves to illustrate an extreme form of distancing and exclusion, and becomes an emblem of the opposite of social justice. Ironically, it results in what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben refers to as ‘relation of exception’, which he defines as ‘the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion’ (1998: 18). This gives rise to an ‘exclusive inclusion’, as Björn Quiring argues: ‘Consequently, the banished in Lear do not try to leave the country but rather work to integrate themselves into the events by taking on a

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new, self-contradictory mandate’ (2014: 182, 208). Echoing Agamben, he adds: ‘the excluded always remains embedded into what is included’ (ibid.: 211). At least in the case of Gloucester, Regan admits an error in allowing Gloucester to live because ‘Where he arrives he moves / All hearts against us’ (4.5.12–13). And indeed, at the news of Gloucester’s suffering, Albany vows to ‘revenge thine eyes’ (4.2.97). This parallel world of the exile, which Quiring refers to as ‘a mirage, a comprehensive simulacrum’ (2014: 208) becomes a contested ground, as war looms large, but it also allows a different model of social justice to emerge. The wild outdoors seems less threatening than the indoors. Anyone can enter the hovel; only the select few can be at the house. A profound sense of human proximity emerges in the outdoor scenes and in the hovel. There is no policymaker to articulate or implement this new vision of human proximity. To a large extent, this new vision depends on the solidarity among the down-trodden. If the rich and powerful have no interest in the distribution of food, offer no program to take care of the poor and build no hospitals, the refugees from life form a community of renegades and the rejected and seek a form of resistance to the new order, the reign of Regan and the ascendancy of Edmund. The pursuit of social justice goals, individually and corporately, necessitates reflection on the lesson offered in ‘Summer Clouds’, by Roger Rosenblatt, which was aired on the PBS McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, on 10 August 1990.22 In that segment, Rosenblatt argued that ‘Summer’ ‘reminds us of the body’s vitalities’, whereas ‘clouds’ remind us of weaknesses. Summer becomes a metaphor for the ‘burly environment’ of our ‘great energetic nation’, where ‘it is hard to think that there is a weaker, slower, less active life that exists alongside the displays of force’. Rosenblatt admonishes his audience, ‘help the weak who cry for help’, for ‘they become who we are when the weather changes’. When teaching the play, I often use Rosenblatt’s essay as a way of introducing some of the central concerns of King Lear. J. A. Indaimo suggests that ‘understanding human rights includes an understanding of human identity’ (2015: 1). If, as Indaimo argues, ‘pre-modern strict social hierarchy’ prevails in early modern notions of subjectivity (ibid.: 11), Lear provides a reconfiguration of identity. Here Lévinas helps us understand the power of ‘moral proximity’ and a sense of the ‘shared neighbourhood of proximity’ (ibid.: 159–60). By giving away his kingdom and becoming a beggar, Lear, paradoxically reorganizes the human landscape into clusters of proximity. As Indaimo summarizes, ‘In this way, Lévinas’s renewal identity lets go of its own self-interest for the interests of others’ (ibid.: 244). Desmond Manderson adds that, for Lévinas, ‘the idea of approaching another without appropriating or defining them was of critical importance’ (2007: 101). Shakespeare’s play resonates with biblical images, as for example the parable of the beggar Lazarus at the rich man’s gate. In Luke’s parable, as in Whitney’s emblem, a rich man, dressed in purple and fine linen, feasts sumptuously inside; meanwhile, Lazarus, starving and covered with sores, remains invisible and uncared for at the rich man’s gate. In the afterlife, the rich man and Lazarus switch places; the rich man, now tormented in Hades, begs Abraham to ‘send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue’ (Luke 16:24). But now ‘a great chasm has been fixed’, and one cannot cross from one side to the other (Luke 16:26). Lazarus

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and the rich man are physically separated from each other; the gate symbolizes the division between outside and inside. In life on earth, Lazarus reaches out for help; the rich man ignores his plea, indifferent to Lazarus’s hunger and the pain of his sores. Here we witness physical and spiritual separation, yet a visual connection remains. Lazarus will forever remain within the rich man’s field of vision. In fact, the play offers a fundamental critique of injustice that comes from the accumulation of material wealth without an obligation of service. In King Lear, Shakespeare offers his most sustained representation of poverty, exploring such topics as the material foundation of our lives, the stripping away of material possessions, the needs and the necessities of life and the redistribution of wealth and power. Shakespeare explores the dialogue of his characters with the world as they undertake a downward journey from a condition that celebrates ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘unashamed enthusiasm for belongings’ (Jardine 1996: 15).23 Later, Lear, Edgar and Gloucester are stripped of clothes, houses and other possessions. They come to embody what Lear himself terms ‘houseless poverty’, but discover a new sense of communion with the physical world. The question of social justice arises in a country, turned wild by violence, cruelty and indifference to the suffering of others, a kingdom torn apart by civil war and indifference to the poor, to the displaced, to the victims of displays of power. Social justice can only be pursued by the few, and at the borders of the monstrous, tyrannical reign that Regan envisions for herself. In his book, King Lear in Our Time, Maynard Mack explores the connection between ‘the perplexity and mystery of human action’ and ‘relation’. Existence becomes tragic in King Lear because, as Mack writes, it is ‘inseparable from relation’ in a seamless and unending web (1972: 110–11). Mack equates the tragic in Shakespeare’s play with an ‘entry into humanity’, an ‘entry into relatedness’ (ibid.: 111). This language brings to mind the need to recognize the ‘complexities of justice’ that arise from ‘social embeddedness’. Shakespeare’s play explores such complexities of justice through an entry into relatedness, into a network of relations and obligations of service. In King Lear, Shakespeare suggests that clusters of proximity may be the foundation for social justice. The invisible must become visible. There is no place for a palace with double doors.

NOTES 1. Whitney ([1586] 1967: 204). The emblem reads: With double dore this Pallace loe, doth ope; The one, vnto the gallant rooms doth shewe, Whereas the ritche with goulden giftes haue scope; The other, to an emptie benche doth goe, And there, the pore haue leauve for to resorte, But not presume vnto the other porte. 2. For a fuller discussion of home life in the play, see Chapter 1, ‘The Vanishing Castle in King Lear’, of my book At Home in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (2010: 23–63),

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upon which the argument presented here depends. In this essay, I veer off from the chapter’s focus on the representation of home to explore the specific topic of the representation of social justice. This paper was originally written for the 17th International Congress of the Mediterranean Studies Association, University of Málaga, Marbella, Spain, 28–31 May 2014. I thank my colleagues at the Congress for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Julie Fuller for her helpful insights and suggestions. 3. In Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice (Chazelle et al. 2012), the editors, Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz and Amy G. Remensnyder, write of a need for contemporary progressive thinkers and activists ‘to forge the world anew’, their desire ‘to look to history to elucidate “real world” problems and concerns’ and an ingrained reluctance on the part of historians ‘to invoke history to combat modern injustice’ (2). Although there is a long tradition of exploring the power of the theatre to reflect and comment on social and political issues, many historicist scholars resist the so-called ‘presentism’; yet the same scholars may be open to exploring Shakespeare’s afterlife and reception. A study of social justice in Shakespeare needs to bear in mind what the editors of Why the Middle Ages Matter conclude about their own field: ‘In recent years, though, a small but growing number of scholars have argued that precisely because genuine historical neutrality does not exist, historians can no longer claim that the remembrance of the past is ever dissociated from the present’ (3). In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare remained a fount of moral and ethical teaching for all walks of life. Numerous productions of Shakespeare have been motivated by a desire to reflect or bring about social and political change, such as the performance of Richard II on the eve of the Essex Rebellion. Recent examples include Shakespeare Behind Bars, a project and a documentary with a social justice goal: ‘Shakespeare Behind Bars offers theatrical encounters with personal and social issues to the incarcerated, allowing them to develop life skills that will ensure their successful reintegration into society’ (http:// www.shakespearebehindbars.org/ (accessed 15 May 2014)). In 2014, Syrian children in a refugee camp in Jordan rehearsed for months and put on a production of King Lear: ‘“The show is to bring back laughter, joy and humanity”, said its director, Nawar Bulbul, a 40-year-old Syrian actor known at home for his role in “Bab alHara”, an enormously popular historical drama that was broadcast throughout the Arab world’ (Hubbard, 2014). 4. See also Abbey (2013). Abbey writes that the consensus among early feminist writers was ‘that whereas Rawls failed to exploit the feminist potential of his theorizing; it was there for others to explicate’; she adds, ‘Feminist responses to Rawls’s work after his turn to political liberalism are more numerous and more polarized, with one side arguing that this turn has largely stripped justice as fairness of its feminist potential, and the other side finding political liberalism to be replete with resources for addressing feminist concerns’ (1–2). 5 . He writes that ‘social justice’, according to contemporary philosophers, constitutes ‘an aspect of distributive justice’, as opposed to ‘retributive justice, or the justice of punishments’ (Miller 1999: 2, 3). Reviewing the different approaches to social

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justice, Miller suggests that ‘social justice cannot only be an ideal that guides politicians and officials and voters at the ballot box. It must also constrain everyday behavior: people need not see themselves as acting in direct pursuit of social justice, but they do need to recognize that it sets limits on what they can do’ (ibid.: 13). 6. See, for example, Manduca (2019). 7. Miller adds a degree of caution and realism for the pursuit of social justice in our own time, arguing ‘that the principles we defend ought to be ones that do not fly directly in the face of the economic and social changes I have been considering; and that we will have to think much harder about questions of scope, about what the universe of social justice should be in a world in which economic, social, and political boundaries no longer neatly coincide’ (1999: 265). 8. Geremek provides an overview of poor laws in England (1997: 164–5). 9. See also Archer (2002). 10. See, for example, my argument in an interview published in an article by Maria Pena, of the newspaper, La Opinión: Pena (23 April 2014). 11. ‘Tobias daily went among all his kindred, and comforted them, and distributed to every one as he was able, out of his goods: He fed the hungry, and gave clothes to the naked, and was careful to bury the dead, and they that were slain’ (1.19–20). Available online: http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/dou/tob.htm (accessed 14 May 2014). 12. All quotations from King Lear, unless otherwise stated, are from The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. 13. Cousins observes that ‘The coincidence of opposites has had a long history in religion and philosophical thought’, as for example when Heraclitus (c. 540 BCE–c. 480 BCE) notes: ‘God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger; all opposites are in him’ (qtd. in Cousins 1978: 15). 14. See, for example, dos Guimarães Sanches e Sá (2000). 15. Von Brixen, L., ‘Beggar from a Saint Martin Group’, painted and gilded pine, 71 x 28 x 23 cm, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Available online: https:// artsandculture.google.com/asset/beggar-from-a-saint-martin-and-beggar-group/ jQF4Pu2ISfDBNA (accessed 16 August 2019), and https://www.nga.gov/collection/ art-object-page.1164.html (accessed 18 August 2019). 16. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. T. P. Roche, Jr (1987). All quotations from The Faerie Queene, unless indicated otherwise, will be from this edition. The OED defines ‘surquidry’ or ‘surquedry’ as arrogance, haughty pride, and presumption. An interesting analogue to the Giant of the Scales episode occurs in a sixteenthcentury Portuguese text, Contos e Hystorias de Proveyto e Exemplo, dirigido a Rainha nossa Senhora (1575), by Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso. Trancoso dedicated this collection of stories of moral edification to Queen D. Catarina de Austria (1507–78), grandmother of el-Rei D. Sebastião (1554–78), and regent of Portugal from 1557 to 1562. Three of the tales are reprinted in Cesarina Donati, Tre Racconti Proibiti di Trancoso (1983). The first Conto tells the story of a Portuguese man, who, having

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lost his fortune, convinced his future son-in-law to sell him into slavery to an African king to raise the money for his daughter’s dowry. The story is set in a North African country, where a Levantine, who claims to be a lapidary, offers the king a ring with what seems to be a very large cat’s-eye and extracts a promise from the king to give him the ring’s counter-balancing weight in crusadoes. A balance is brought out: the ring is placed in one pan of the balance and the crusadoes in the other. More and more gold coins are added to the heap, but no amount of gold suffices to counterbalance the ring. The king’s wise Portuguese slave, however, figures out that this was a scheme by which the Levantine had planned to trick the king out of his entire kingdom. He proves that the stone was not a cat’s-eye but rather a greedy human eye that cannot be satiated. Therefore, he spits and then throws dirt on the eye blinding it, so that the eye can no longer see its counterweight: ‘e o anel, com a terra no olho, se pesou em ũa pequena balança, e pesou oito ou dez cruzados, aquilo que na verdade tinha de peso natural’ (and the ring, with dirt in its eye, was weighed in a small balance, and it weighed eight or ten crusadoes, what was its natural weight), and therefore the king was spared the amount of over forty thousand crusadoes (99). In exchange for this and other favours, the Portuguese slave earns his manumission and is reunited with his daughter, son-in-law and, by then, a newborn grandson. 17. The phenomenon I have in mind resembles Leonard George’s profound argument in Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics about the power and effect of heresies that emerge to challenge religious orthodoxy: ‘Heresies form a reservoir of possibilities that float at the margins of acceptability. If dissent could be eliminated completely, cultures or individuals would have destroyed their ability to breathe fresh air into their visions’ (1995: xvii). 18. Other relevant literature on these questions includes James (1985), as well as Emanuel Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia and Heaven and Hell, which inspired a religious movement and also influenced writers such as William Blake in his visionary and mystical poetry; Ralph Waldo Emerson in his conception of life as ‘spiritual vision’ and in his philosophy of intuition as a portal to reality; and Sheridan Le Fanu in his representation of the world as a ‘habitation of symbols’, which is described in terms closest to those of Swedenborg at the end of Uncle Silas (1864): ‘This world is a parable—the habitation of symbols—the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape. May the blessed second-sight be mine—to recognize under these beautiful forms of earth the Angels who wear them; for I am sure we may walk with them if we will, and hear them speak’ (444). See Le Fanu, S. (2000), especially the Introduction, ix–xxxv. 19. R. A. Foakes explains monopoly as ‘exclusive privilege of trading in a commodity, or with a particularly country’ (1.4.146n). He also indicates that both Queen Elizabeth and King James granted such monopolies ‘as a means of rewarding courtiers’ (146n). 20. For a fuller discussion of this, see Sousa 2010), Chapter 1. 21. The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his three daughters (1605), in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrataive and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1973), 7: 337–402. All quotations from this anonymous play will be from this edition.

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22. Rosenblatt served as the editor of US New and World Report, and he made frequent appearances on the Newshour. 23. This is Lisa Jardine’s thesis about early modern European society in Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996).

REFERENCES Abbey, R., ed. (2013), Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and the Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Archer, I. W. (2002), ‘The Charity of Early Modern Londoners’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12: 223–44. Balibar, E., S. Mezzadra and R. Samaddar (2011), ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in É. Balibar, S. Mezzadra and R. Samaddar (eds), The Borders of Justice, 1, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Bullough, G. (1973), Narrataive and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Casey, E. S. (2009), Getting Back to Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the PlaceWorld, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Chazelle, Celia, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz and Amy G. Remensnyder, eds (2012), Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, London and New York: Routledge. Coffin, W. S. (2008), The Collected Sermons, The Riverside Years (vol. 2), Knoxville and London: Westminster John Knox Press. Cousins, E. H. (1978), Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites, Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press. dos Guimarães Sanches e Sá, I.C. (2000), ‘As Misericórdias no Império Português (1500–1800)’, in M. N. Correia Guedes (ed.), 500 Anos das Misericórdias Portuguesas, 101–32, Lisbon: Comissão para as Comemorações dos 500 Anos das Misericórdias. Donati, C. (1983), Tre Racconti Proibiti di Trancoso, Rome: Bulzoni editore Duncan-Jones, K. (2001), Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, London: Methuen Drama. Fraser, C. (2009), Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Fraser, New York: Henry Holt and Company. Fudge, E., R. Gilbert and S. Wiseman, eds (2002), At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan. George, L. (1995), Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, New York, NY: Paragon House. Geremek, B. (1997), Poverty: A History, trans. A. Kolakowska, Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Hubbard, B. (2014), ‘Behind Barbed Wire, Shakespeare Inspires a Cast of Young Syrians’, The New York Times, 31 March. Available online: http://www.nytimes. com/2014/04/01/world/middleeast/behind-barbed-wireshakespeare-inspires-a-cast-ofyoung-syrians.html?_r=0 (accessed 23 September).

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Indaimo, J. A. (2015), The Self, Ethics and Human Rights: Lacan, Lévinas & Alterity, London: Routledge. James, W. (1985), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jardine, L. (1996), Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, New York, NY: Doubleday. Le Fanu, S. (2000), Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh, ed. Victor Sage, London: Penguin Books. Mack, M. (1972), King Lear in Our Time, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Manderson, D. (2007), ‘Proximity, Proximité’, in Proximity, Lévinas and Ethics and the Soul of the Law, Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Manduca, R. A. (2019), ‘The Contribution of National Income Inequality to Regional Economic Divergence’, Social Forces, soz013. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1093/ sf/soz013 (accessed 21 September 2019). online: https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz013 (accessed 21 September). Miller, D. (1999), Principles of Social Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pena, M. (2014), ‘Reforma migratoria necesita un aliado como Shakespeare’, La Opinión, 23 April. Available online: https:// laopinion.com/2014/04/23/reforma-migratorianecesita-un-aliado-como-shakespeare/ (accessed 23 September 2019). Quiring, B. (2014), Shakespeare’s Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama, trans. M. Winkler and B. Quiring, London and New York: Routledge. Rawls, J. (2001), Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1997), King Lear, R.A. Foakes (ed.), Arden Shakespeare (Third Series), Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Shakespeare, W (2008), Timon of Athens, A. B. Dawson and G. E. Minton (eds), Arden Shakespeare (Third Series), Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons. ‘Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations’, (2006). Available online: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/ifsd/SocialJustice.pdf (accessed 23 September 2019). Sousa, G. (2010), At Home in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Spenser, E. (1987), The Faerie Queene, T. P. Roche, Jr (ed.), London and New York, NY: Penguin. Stewart, A. (2002), ‘Humanity at a Price: Erasmus, Budé, and the Poverty of Philology’, in E. Fudge, R. Gilbert and S. Wiseman (eds), At the Borders of the Human, Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan. The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his three daughters ([1605]1975), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (vol. 7), G. Bullough (ed.), New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Whitney, G. ([1586]1967), A Choice of Emblems, H. Green (ed.), New York, NY: Benjamin Bloom.

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SOCIAL JUSTICE Adams, M., W. Blumenberg, D. Chase, J. Catalano, et al. eds (2000), Readings for Diversity and Social Justice: An Anthology on Racism, Anti-Semitism, Sexism, Heterosexism, Ableism and Classism 4th edn., New York, NY: Routledge. Now in its fourth edition, this is the leading anthology for exploring ‘a wide range of social oppressions from a social justice standpoint’. This collection offers a thorough treatment of social justice issues, with essays divided into comprehensive sections on racism; religious oppression; classism; ableism; youth and elder oppression; and an integrative section on sexism, heterosexism and transgender oppression. By emphasizing the interrelated nature of social oppressions, this anthology promotes a holistic, intersectional approach to social justice scholarship and advocacy. Innovative features include a table of intersections highlighting connections to further readings. Crenshaw, K. (1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6): 1241–99. This influential article, published in 1991, establishes Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality in response to a problem within identity politics: the tendency to ‘conflate or ignore intragroup differences’. By analyzing the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of colour, Crenshaw demonstrates intersectionality’s value in locating and articulating the distinct experiences and needs of people with intersectional identities. In three parts, this article: 1) discusses structural intersectionality, revealing the need for intersectional nuance in intervention strategies through the examples of battered women’s shelters, domestic violence against immigrant women, and rape crisis centres; 2) analyses political intersectionality, demonstrating the marginalizing effects of being situated within distinct subordinated groups with conflicting political agendas; 3) and discusses representational intersectionality, arguing that sources of injustice and subordination, such as racism and sexism, are mutually reinforcing and must be fought in view of each other to avoid further marginalizing people with intersectional identities. Dean, J. (2019), Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, London: Verso. An inspiring book that emphasizes, among other things, the absolute necessity of solidarity and of party organization if the inhuman system of capitalism is to be overthrown. A necessary corrective to the divisive politics of ‘identity’ on the Left.

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Fisher, M. (2009), Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. This short, easy-to-read pamphlet is one of the most penetrating accounts of neoliberal capitalist culture and society now available. Many other writings by Fisher have been collected and republished as K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2004–2016, Darren Ambrose (ed.), Foreword by Simon Reynolds (London: Repeater, 2018); numerous lectures can can be accessed on the web. Fisher writes, brilliantly, not about canonical literature such as Shakespeare, but rather about recent music, film and popular culture. His work diagnoses the spiritual poverty of a world dominated by money, reminding us that it is unavoidably from this world that we engage with the authors and artists of the past. Geremek, B. (1994), Poverty: A History, A. Kolakowska (trans), Blackwell. This book, originally written in Polish in 1978 but published for the first time in an Italian translation in 1986, traces attitudes towards the poor throughout European history. Geremek reviews important questions about the different approaches to poverty as a religious, economic, social or historical topic of research. Wide-ranging and informative, the book explores topics such as the medieval idea of poverty, alms and beggars, the rural poor and the urban poor, poverty and economic expansion, repression, reform of charity and the Elizabethan Poor Laws, Luther’s attitude towards the poor, the Humanists’ role, the prison system during the Enlightenment and the situation in the late twentieth century. In his conclusion, Geremek wonders whether the time has come for a return to compassion as a value in how we are to address the question of poverty now. Harris, C. (1993), ‘Whiteness as Property’, Harvard Law Review, 106: 1707–91. Perhaps the most significant foundational study of whiteness in academia and outside it, Harris’ essay remains a rich generative source for scholars seeking to understand and theorize about the workings of whiteness both inside and outside formal and legal constructions of a racialized whiteness. Her study has been particularly informative for recent Shakespeare scholars interested in studying whiteness. While American jurisprudence is the expressed focus of her mammoth study, its insights as well as its critical praxis and its theoretical modelling have proven quite generative for Shakespeare and early modern critical race studies. In fact, Harris’s work, grounded as it is in critical race theory (CRT), which was founded in law schools in the 1980s, provides one of the key textual sites for Shakespeare and early modern scholars wishing to think about the intersection of scholarship and social- and racial-justice activism. Hobsbawm, E. (2012), How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. This book argues for the enduring relevance of Marx’s ideas in a modern world dominated by free-market extremes. In a wide-ranging series of essays, Hobsbawm presents an expansive intellectual history of Marx and Engels, and an incisive analysis of Marx’s impact, drawing clear distinctions between Marx’s thought and the totalitarian features of the Soviet regime. This book’s measured, meticulously researched examination of Marxism’s impact in the twentieth century provides the basis for reassessing Marxism’s value in understanding the social injustices of the twenty-first century.

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Houck, D. W. and D. R. Dixon, eds (2006–14), Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement 1954–1965, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Volume I of Davis W. Houck and David R. Dixon’s Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, an anthology of lesser-known civil rights speeches and sermons, was released to wide acclaim in 2006. A groundbreaking work of archival recovery, the collection reprints more than 100 primary texts associated with the ecumenical Christian wing of the African American Civil Rights Movement. Featuring heretofore neglected selections from well-known figures such as A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune and Martin Luther King, Jr, it is the collection’s inclusion of a wide variety of previously unknown figures from the movement that makes it an especially valuable resource. A second volume of the collection was published in 2014, adding another fifty selections to the historical record and expanding our understanding of the role that Christianity and black churches, in particular, played within the broader struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century. King, Jr, M. L. (1964), Why We Can’t Wait, New York, NY: Harper and Row. Martin Luther King, Jr’s classic Civil Rights text endures as an urgent call for racial equality and social justice. King’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning book provides unique insight into the process of revolutionary social change in its analysis of the 1963 Birmingham campaign, which demonstrated the power of nonviolent direct action. This book includes King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, which articulates a call for social justice that still resonates today: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Miller, D. (1999), Principles of Social Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. In this book, the political philosopher David Miller addresses the lack of a cohesive, widely representative theory of social justice. Miller seeks to illuminate the meaning of social justice by presenting a theory founded upon the contextual nature of justice. This theory is comprised of three central principles – desert, need and equality – with an emphasis on the practical complexities and political disagreements that nonetheless arise within this compact framework. By confronting these challenges, Miller demonstrates how a contextual approach to social justice offers a viable means for the increasingly difficult, complex tasks of defining and achieving justice within a globalized, multicultural world. Miller, D. (2013), Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book collects a series of essays written by the political philosopher David Miller between 2000 and 2010. Miller confronts the gap between rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected societies and abstract philosophical thought regarding social justice. In response to this problem, Miller advocates for ‘contextualism’, which emphasizes the relationship between ‘just distribution of resources of various kinds’ and the social contexts ‘in which the distribution is going to occur’. Significantly, Miller acknowledges the practical conflicts that arise between social justice and global justice, arguing that a theory of justice can clarify the nature of the choices presented by such conflicts. These

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essays illuminate complex issues of responsibility and equality of opportunity across national boundaries, responding to the urgent need for a practical theory of social justice that can inspire action within a complex, increasingly multicultural world. Sen, A. and J. Dreze (2013), An Uncertain Glory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. A study of contemporary social and economic realities in India which places into context the challenges that the country faces, including with regards to women’s rights. Taking a development economic approach, it considers corruption, the nature of democracy, media bias and freedom, and so called ‘achievements’ and how these narratives are suppressed or co-opted in forming ideas of the nation state. It focuses in on detailed case studies, such as when 600 million people were left without power/electricity in 2012, and, within that, 200 million had never had that provision at all. Its interdisciplinary approach brings pressing environmental concerns to the fore. It reconsiders the relationship between economic growth and human development and provides a strong argument that an understanding of and commitment to social justice is key to any sense of ‘progress’. It emphasizes interdependency and a focus on the less privileged as a means of achieving India’s dream of world superpower status; going against the current emphasis on the erosion of minority rights for development at any cost. Smith, S. (2018), Subterranean Fire (Updated Edition): A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Press. This invaluable text provides an in-depth look at the history of the evolution of the American working class as well as an accurate survey of working-class movements in the United States. From farmer strikes to union formations to neoliberal resistance, Smith retrieves crucial histories of social justice that have largely been forgotten, or ignored, in American history. The text also examines the struggles within the working class – such as gender, race and political conflict – that ultimately crushed working-class radical momentum that had built up during the early twentieth century. Smith provides context for the failures of such radicalism and delineates the political and economic power structures that disallow large class-based revolutionary movements from building and maintaining an influential status. United Nations (2006), Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations. Available online: https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/ifsd/SocialJustice.pdf. This United Nations report is arguably the most significant document on social justice in our times. In his foreword, Jacques Baudot writes that ‘the International Forum for Social Development’ was convened from November 2001 to November 2004 ‘for the purpose of promoting international cooperation for social development and supporting developing countries and social groups not benefiting from the globalization process’. This report synthesizes a range of concepts and values associated with social justice and provides a vision for nations and institutions to develop strong and coherent broad-based policies in fiscal, monetary, economic, trade, social, institutional and political areas, with a view to eradicating deprivation and economic inequality on a global scale. This forward-looking

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report recognizes that despite the numerous difficulties and uneven development in our world, ‘continued pursuit of these ideas is essential; even if Sisyphus is unhappy, he must fulfil his duty’. Willoughby, W. W. (1900), Social Justice: A Critical Essay, London: Macmillan. In this book, the political scientist Westel Willoughby presents lasting insights into emerging conceptions of social justice at the turn of the twentieth century. Willoughby seeks to identify ‘general principles of the right’ with the special purpose of determining ‘the absolute value of social institutions’. This book begins with an analysis of the abstract idea of justice, which serves as a foundation for Willoughby’s presentation of two central problems of social justice: ‘the proper distribution of economic goods; and the harmonizing of the principles of liberty and law, of freedom and coercion’. Žižek, S. (2017), Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through, Verso. In this book, Žižek focuses mostly on the post-1917 politics of Vladimir Lenin. Namely, Žižek looks at the last couple years of Lenin’s life and the ways that Lenin was learning from his own mistakes – the ways that Lenin was re-examining his failures. The text also shows Karl Marx in his original form, rather than the Marx who has been used more for cultural purposes than political and economic purposes. This text utilizes Lenin as a vehicle to show how failed attempts at social justice can be re-evaluated, but that one must look back to starting points and recognize failures; and, ultimately, one must ‘work through’ those failures in the current historical moment (rather than trying to recreate the past). In this book, Žižek has also compiled several important writings by, and pieces of correspondence from, Lenin.

SOCIAL JUSTICE THROUGH EDUCATION, LITERATURE AND THE ARTS Alarcón, F. X. et al. (2016), Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. This multicultural, multigenerational, bilingual anthology reflects on the cultural and political effects of Arizona’s passing of Senate Bill (SB) 1070 in 2010, which legalized racial profiling for the purposes of deportation and criminalization of undocumented immigrants. The anthology, comprised of work by emerging poets as well as renowned poets like Juan Felipe Herrera, Martín Espada and Lorna Dee Cervantes, stems from Francisco X Alarcón’s Facebook initiative, which called for poetry submissions that reacted to the arrest of nine Latino students who protested SB 1070 at the State Capitol, while advancing the conversation about racism in the US. Poetry of Resistance is a valuable example of the role of poetry in the teaching and practice of social justice. Belfiore, E. and O. Bennett (2008), The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. This book provides an intellectual history of the transformative power of the arts, examining diverse accounts of how the arts have come to occupy a position of

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prominence across a wide range of social institutions. Belfiore and Bennett seek ‘to trace historically the evolution of commonly held beliefs on the effects of the arts on society and individuals’. This intellectual history begins by examining negative views of the effects of the arts before engaging with diverse perspectives on the social function of the arts, including chapters on the arts as a means for education and self development, moral improvement and civilization, and social stratification and identity development. Bell, L. A. (2010), Storytelling for Social Justice: Connecting Narrative and the Arts in Antiracist Teaching, New York, NY: Routledge. This book reveals the unique power of storytelling for critically understanding and starting meaningful conversations about race and racism. Bell’s innovative, practical approach to storytelling is founded on a clear typology that defines four types of stories: stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories and emerging/transforming stories. Bell emphasizes the need for the arts to cultivate ‘counter-storytelling communities’ in order to confront the cultural and institutional narratives that perpetuate racism and social injustice. This book’s candid style is intended to help educators overcome silence about race and racism by facilitating critical, accessible dialogue founded in shared stories. This second edition expands the storytelling model beyond the arts through the addition of social science examples. Boal, A. (1979), Theatre of the Oppressed, C. A. McBride and M. Leal McBride (trans.), London: Pluto Press. This book represents an important theoretical contribution to theatre with wide relevance for engaging with social-justice issues through the arts. Influenced by Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal created an approach to theatre that subverts traditional theatrical forms, inviting the audience to participate as ‘spect-actors’ who play active roles in transforming oppressive realities. The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) movement has special relevance for social justice-driven theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare, as described by Quarmby in his chapter in this collection, ‘“Shakespeare in prison”: A South African social justice alternative’. Freire, P. (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Myra Bergman Ramos (trans.), New York, NY: Herder and Herder. Freire’s seminal book, first published in Portuguese in 1968 and translated to English in 1970, presents a vision of pedagogy as a revolutionary cultural action. Freire roots this critical pedagogy within the historical struggle of the oppressed for humanization and liberation. This educational philosophy can only be ‘forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples)’ through an examination of oppression and its causes. In order to transcend the oppressor–oppressed contradiction, Freire advocates for a participatory, co-intentional pedagogy, replacing the banking concept of education with a problem-posing method that casts teachers and students as active subjects. Freire’s revolutionary vision rejects the banking concept’s vertical structure, which reaffirms the oppressor–oppressed contradiction, offering in its stead a horizontal relationship built on critical dialogue and mutual trust between ‘teacher–student’ and ‘students–teachers’.

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hooks, b. (1994), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, New York, NY: Routledge. This book explores hooks’s concept of ‘engaged pedagogy’ whereby the practice of freedom through education is realized via anti-colonial, feminist pedagogies that view educators and students as equal players in ‘rethink[ing] teaching practices and constructive strategies to enhance learning’. Teaching to Transgress draws from hooks’s experiences as a child in an all-black grade school where learning was viewed as an act of resistance, to her high school, undergraduate and graduate years, when desegregation resulted in the reinforcement of racial stereotypes, professors acted as authoritarian figures (with the exception of hooks’s discovery of, and later meeting with, Paulo Freire) and active challenges to teaching practices were rarely welcome. hooks’s pedagogical practices are thus guidelines that can be tailored by educators to reclaim ‘the classroom … as the most radical space of possibility in the academy’. Howe, K., J. Boal and J. Soeiro, eds (2018), The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed, London & New York, NY: Routledge. This massive volume offers the most comprehensive study and account, to date, of Augusto Boal’s fundamental contribution to the theory and practice of a theatre expressly aiming to help bring about social consciousness, change and justice. By means of numerous texts from leading theatre scholars and practitioners, as well as testimonies from major artists and critics, the collection seamlessly and profitably traces the historical, theoretical and practical roots of Boal’s theatre; expounds its foundational concepts and experiences; examines its legacy, expressed in derivations and effects in traditions and collectives all over the world; and finally explores its sustained, present relevance and vigour towards the future. Macro, K. J., and M. Zoss, eds (2019), A Symphony of Possibilities: A Handbook for Arts Integration in Secondary English Language Arts, National Council of Teachers of English Press. Teachers, teacher-educators and researchers describe and detail arts-based approaches to literature, including Shakespeare plays. Active pedagogies focus on drama, music, poetry, public art and visual arts, with detailed suggestions for instruction and supporting student critical and creative expression. The chapters describe engaging students to enhance both comprehension and memory, and making opportunities to address issues of identity through culturally relevant pedagogies. A project of the Commission on Arts and Literature of ELATE (English Language Arts Teacher Educators). Metzler, I. (2016), Fools and Idiots? Intellectual Disability in the Middle Ages, Manchester: Manchester University Press. This book offers a history of ‘intellectual disability’ in the Middle Ages. Covering classical, biblical and geographical expanses; an overview of this topic serves as a helpful starting point for those interested in the historical presentation of the ‘intellectually disabled’. Metzler positions herself against those who have approached this topic as part of a wider study of mental health. Metzler asserts that ‘intellectual disability’ was something that would have been recognized by all levels of medieval society but importantly acknowledges the

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complexities of comparing modern and historical understandings of intellectual disability. She questions whether intellectual disabilities are biologically stable or whether they change over time, are socially constructed or are subject to cultural change. Narismulu, P. (2013), ‘A Heuristic for Analysing and Teaching Literature Dealing with the Challenges of Social Justice’, Teaching in Higher Education, 18(7): 784–96, doi:10. 1080/13562517.2013.836098. This article offers a heuristic tool designed to engage university students in the transformative work of confronting social injustice, with an emphasis on interrogating the ‘placement of value’ within postcolonial societies struggling with oppression. Narismulu frames social justice as a central challenge within higher education, whose potential is often frustrated by well-intentioned intellectuals’ failure to advance social justice ‘in their analyses and actions’. After a consideration of the complex challenges facing South Africa as a postcolonial state experiencing multiple societal revolutions, Narismulu emphasizes the importance of metacognitive tools in encouraging students’ agency and social engagement. Toward this purpose, Narismulu provides a metacognitive heuristic tool designed to create ‘dialogue across inherited wastelands of difference’. This heuristic can be adapted for interdisciplinary use at the undergraduate and graduate levels when engaging with socially relevant texts. Orwell, G. (1946), ‘Politics and the English Language’. Available online: http://www. orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit This is a classic, still powerful essay not just on good English prose style, but on the ways in which language is routinely distorted by the powerful to smother the truth and protect their interests. Orwell explicitly or implicitly skewers all forms of propaganda and spindoctoring, with which we are all too familiar today (political, corporate, management, mass media, etc.). Rankine, C. (2014), Citizen: An American Lyric, Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. In this multimodal, landmark collection of prose poetry and free verse, Rankine explores the fragility and inherent anger of African American memory ‘when thrown against a white sharp background’ through haunting, yet deceptively simple language that looks at acts of racial violence (physical and otherwise) against figures like Serena Williams, Zinedine Zidane and the countless victims of police brutality. In doing so, Rankine references Zora Neale Hurston, Judith Butler and James Baldwin (among others) to avoid both the erasure and hypervisibility of black and brown bodies by acknowledging their rightful place in American history. Citizen is thus an invaluable pedagogical tool that illustrates the power of language to achieve a tangible sense of social justice. Shire, W. (n.d.), ‘Home’, Facing History. Available online: https://www.facinghistory.org/ standing-up-hatred-intolerance/warsan-shire-home (accessed 14 July 2019). The first stanza of this poem – ‘no one leaves home unless/ home is the mouth of a shark’ – illustrates the psychological duress and physical perils that refugees and immigrants experience before and after escaping their country of origin’s poverty and/or violence.

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‘Home’, inspired by Shire’s visit to an abandoned Somali embassy in Rome where young refugees lived, has reached a global audience since its publication in 2009, and has been used widely to promote a better understanding of global refugee and immigration crises. Thomas, E. E. and A. Stornaiuolo (2016), ‘Restorying the Self: Bending Toward Textual Justice’, Harvard Educational Review, 86(3): 313–38. Thomas and Stornaiuolo discuss and explore the ways that reader-response approaches for teaching are changing in the digital age, building on Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading. The authors theorize re-storying, or bending texts through social media. In this, students use participatory textual practices with new media tools and can thus ‘inscribe themselves into existence’. Thomas and Stornaiuolo describe six ways of restorying, then focus on bending texts to emphasize how students express their realities and identities in fan communities. They illustrate with examples from ‘racebent fanwork’ that begins with texts for children and young adults, including books, movies and media. Students write themselves and their lived experiences into these texts, expressing their creative identities.

SHAKESPEARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Aebischer, P. (2016), ‘Performing Shakespeare through Social Media’, in D. Callaghan and S. Gossset (eds), Shakespeare in Our Time, 99–103, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare. This essay explores the two-dimensional, static barriers brought down between performers and audience through #Dream 40, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in conjunction with Google+. In this production – whereby viewers are invited to click on interactive links that might take them to non-Shakespearean content and therefore turn them into free-willed, active co-producers or even avatars – social media ‘enables the creation of a three-dimensional universe alive … [while] making the digital the prime site for the constructions and critique of Shakespearean plotlines and politics’. As such, this essay can serve as an outline for educators and scholars to discuss the limitations of traditional productions of Shakespeare’s work with their students, while inspiring them to utilize their social media literacy through student-led productions. Arango, A., L. Cano, J. Chabaud, J. M. Freidel, A. Liddell, D. Olguín, M. A. de la Parra, F. Rubiano and J. Sanchís Sinisterra (2012), Bordeando Shakespeare: Antología, México: Paso de Gato. This anthology, the only collection of its kind yet, contains nine plays, all in Spanish and all but one developed in the early twenty-first century, by playwrights from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Spain. Whether directly based on Shakespearean plots, themes and characters, or avowedly adapting or just referencing them, these texts constitute a small but remarkable sampler of the creative ways in which dramatists with a wide scope of discursive and stylistic interests have approached and transposed the Shakespeare legacy onto the Spanish-speaking stages, to tackle urgent political, social, gender and identity issues with a view towards change from a variety of critical stances.

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Bartels, E. C. (1990), ‘Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41(4): 433–54. Bartels’s influential essay examines the emergence of diverse representations of the Moor in Renaissance England. Through the contrasting examples of Aaron in Titus Andonicus and Othello, Bartels demonstrates the expansive, contradictory possibilities available within Renaissance depictions of the Moor. Bartels examines the indeterminacy and complexity of the Moor in Renaissance accounts, including the conflicted descriptions offered by Africanus in his Historie. In the characters of Aaron and Othello, Bartels analyses Shakespeare’s disparate contributions to a colonialist discourse that, while diverse in its treatment of the Moor, consistently seeks to justify the colonialist cause and secure the Moor’s rightful place as an acquiescent Other. Within this context, Othello highlights the visible, contested process that characterized the Renaissance Moor and demonstrates the presence of bold, subversive challenges to closed stereotypes of the Moor. Bohannan, L. (1996), ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’, Natural History Magazine 75, 28–33. Bohannan frames this widely anthologized article, about her experience of telling Hamlet to a group of elders from the Tiv Tribe in Nigeria, with a colleague’s insight about why Americans like herself have difficulty with Shakespeare: ‘You … misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.’ Bohannan’s refutation – Hamlet is ‘universally intelligible’ to any reader because human nature facilitates an understanding of ‘the general plot and motivation of greater tragedies’ – is put to the test when the elders rewrite the play according to their customs, and offer to instruct her of its ‘true meaning’. ‘Shakespeare in the Bush’ is a humourous yet profound glimpse into the limitations of rigid, ostensibly ‘universal’ interpretations of canonical literature, which occur when the reader’s particulars are not recognized. Callaghan, D., ed. (2016), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd edn., Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. This collection aims ‘to demonstrate feminist visibility’ and its integration into Shakespeare studies through an exploration of diverse issues vital to feminist inquiry. Callaghan, the volume’s editor, emphasizes this collection’s concern for encountering Shakespeare in view of new knowledge and noncanonical texts about the experiences of the women of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Contributors take up the ‘historically complex and intellectually demanding’ work of confronting and complicating the critiques of feminist Shakespeare studies. This volume’s essays are divided into eight parts, representing a comprehensive range of historical, textual, economic, racial, sexual and religious areas of feminist intervention in Shakespeare studies. Carson, C., and P. Kirwan, eds (2014), Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This collection of essays examines the way that digital resources for the study of Shakespeare have changed the way that scholars teach, research and publish. It also considers how academics form their identities online. Access to free, but unregulated,

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resources such as those on YouTube, alongside carefully curated resources, such as those which are available through subscription services developed by large publishers, puts scholars and students in a position to choose the resources they wish to use. However, this collection tries to point out where priorities and biases can be usefully articulated. The volume is divided into four parts: the first two sections look at current practices in research and pedagogy and the second two look to new models of publishing and communication. Drawing together an international group of scholars in the first half of the book and representatives of theatre companies, libraries, publishers and archives in the second half, this collection gives a very productive overview of the way that the digital world has had an impact on all aspects of Shakespeare studies. Chapman, M. (2017), Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama, London: Routledge. Chapman’s bold and generative study calls for Shakespeare and early modern critical race studies to engage with questions of race using more articulated theoretical frameworks. His own impressive study draws significantly on Afro-pessimism as an informing and galvanizing force. Chapman aims to show that anti-blackness cannot simply be collapsed into more generalized critiques of race or of people of colour. Blackness, i.e. anti-blackness, has its own unique history and requires interventions that work with its specificities. One of the contributions made by this study, which sees itself as attuned to questions of social justice as they pertain to black subjects, is the challenges it offers to both studies of race and blackness in the contexts of both England and America. Cox, M., ed. (1992), Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor: The Performance of Tragedy in a Secure Psychiatric Hospital, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. This book presents an account of the putative ‘healing’ nature of Shakespeare’s work, whilst documenting the use of Shakespeare’s plays in therapeutic settings. It provides a collection of essays by, or interviews with, the different departments concerned with the productions of Shakespeare at Broadmoor hospital between 1989 and 1991. The publication also documents the delivery of several after-show talks and workshops and reflections of psychotherapists, actors, directors and patients. The work presents substantial claims for the impact of Shakespeare’s use and suggests how his work can offer a considerable advantage to forensic psychotherapy’s endeavour. Shakespeare’s subject matter is held to be a means of identification and self-development for viewers and to provide an avenue into Broadmoor’s general psychotherapeutic mission. Cox, M., and A. Theilgaard (1994), Shakespeare as Prompter: The Amending Imagination and the Therapeutic Process, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. This book details the specific interrogation of Shakespeare and therapy and the assumed benefits therein. Cox presents Shakespeare’s value in relation to therapy as being able to prompt therapeutic engagement with ‘inaccessible’ patients, whilst enlarging the therapist’s options when formulating interpretations of the patient’s experiences. The imaginative precision of Shakespeare’s poetry is discussed as having the capacity to prompt clinical precision and stimulate a collision with ‘self’. Shakespeare’s language

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is regarded as key to developing views of human nature; it not only speaks directly to repressed areas of experience but enables us to discern and tolerate what integration demands of us. Shakespeare is constructed as having a considerable contribution to make to the general aim of psychotherapy, facilitating a process of engagement between the therapist and patient. Danby, J. F. (1966), Poets on Fortune’s Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press. An early, astute and sensitive sociology of the literature of Shakespeare’s age. Desmet, C. and R. Sawyer, eds (1999), Shakespeare and Appropriation, London: Routledge. In the Introduction to this influential essay collection, Christy Desmet coined the term ‘small-time Shakespeare’ responding to Michael Bristol’s earlier formulation of ‘Big-Time Shakespeare’ in his eponymous 1996 book on Shakespearean celebrity, to consider more localized and indigenized appropriations and uses of Shakespeare (both the man and his writings) for a range of conscious position-takings, postcolonial, popular, inter-cultural and political. Essays discuss topics as diverse as Shakespeare’s political deployments in nineteenth-century Calcutta, commercialized appropriations by multinational film and animation industry corporates such as Disney and 1990s US fictional rewritings of Shakespeare plays by women that embraced contemporary issues from civil rights, in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (a rethinking and a resistance to The Tempest); and exploitative behaviours, both in terms of land-use and pesticides and in terms of women’s bodies in contexts of domestic abuse, in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (a re-visioning of King Lear). Digital Theatre Plus (https://www.digitaltheatreplus.com/education), Cambridge University Press’s Shakespeare digital platform (http://cambridge.org/cambridgeshakespeare) and Bloomsbury’s Drama Online, (https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/). These three resources offer carefully curated collections of materials through a subscription service. Digital Theatre Plus brings together full recordings of productions of the plays in English from the UK, USA and Canada, both in video and audio formats. The site is also filled with teaching resources, interviews with practitioners and information about theatre practice. Shakespeare is presented as part of the contemporary theatre world. In the large digital resources produced by Cambridge University Press and Bloomsbury, the complete works of Shakespeare are offered in digital editions, alongside extensive critical material from the back catalogues of these two established publishers. New work is being commissioned for these sites, and Drama Online, in particular, has licensed video recordings of performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe and the BBC. These three resources offer structured access to quality materials to support traditional approaches to the plays but they are also adding more new, international perspectives as they develop. Eklund, H. and W. B. Hymans, eds (2019), Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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This collection of essays brings issues of Shakespeare and social justice directly into a classroom context, suggesting actionable ways in which teachers can use Shakespeare to open up creative space for considerations of social justice. The collection adopts an applied approach, following the teachings of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose 1968 Pedagogy of the Oppressed argued the need to position students as co-creators of their learning. The essays here focus on ‘multiple, multicultural, accessible Shakespeares’ and present early modern literature as a ‘common corpus’ that is relevant to debates about contemporary democracy. Essays cover subjects as diverse as decolonizing the curriculum, the teaching of environmental justice through early modern texts and the use of Shakespeare in community-based learning projects from prisons to refugee detention centres. They argue for the potential of ‘teaching through Shakespeare’ in contemporary real-world contexts where human rights are under pressure, from Singapore through to Hong Kong, to the US–Mexico border. Espinosa, R. (2016), ‘Stranger Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 67(1): 51–67. https:// doi.org/10.1353/shq.2016.0012. Espinosa investigates how the concepts of strangeness and cultural capital within Shakespeare’s work can be reimagined and updated if the identities of non-white, nonEnglish speaking readers – informed by their languages and cultures – are conscientiously incorporated into the teaching and study of Shakespeare. For this purpose, Espinosa discusses resistance to language assimilation in theatre by Colombian actor Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, the identity politics of Mexican–American students through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and a multicultural, studentproduced YouTube adaptation of Hamlet. Espinosa urges the Shakespeare academy to encourage students ‘to think about race, ethnicity, xenophobia, and difference not only in Shakespeare, but through Shakespeare’. Habib, I. (2008), Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible, London: Ashgate. No bibliography of Shakespeare and social justice could be complete without including Habib’s Black Lives. The painstaking work of this project alone, the collection of 448 records from the English archives, makes this a notable inclusion. However, this invaluable study (with a detailed appendix of the archival records) offers an even more meticulous demonstration of the meeting between archival study, historicism and activism, and how an uncompromising approach may yield not only data but pathways for scholars committed to socially and racially informed scholarship. Habib’s study stakes out the claim that indeed black lives mattered and matter whether we’re speaking about the records of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or speaking about our study of them in the twenty-first. No study does more to literally map out the presence of black people in early modern England, and no study does more to frame those ‘actual’ black people – from their place in courts to their abandonment on the streets – in rich theoretical frames driven by Habib’s scholarly commitments to social and racial justice.

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Hall, K. (1995), Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hall’s Things of Darkness (in addition to many of her other publications) has been foundational to the field of Shakespeare and early modern critical race studies. It has also played a significant role in increasing the number of scholars of colour who presently work in the field. The landmark study draws on a wealth of sources, including poetry, drama, narrative fictions and travel narratives, as well as a trove of visual and decorative materials. Drawing especially on tropes of fair and darkness, so key to the aesthetics of the period, Hall’s study insists on the centrality of race in the making of communities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. One of its most impressive accomplishments is its unapologetic marshalling of a black feminist theoretical framework as it calls for more social and racial ‘justice’ in our scholarship and in our classrooms. Hazlitt, W. (1817), Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. First published 1817; many editions available today. (This book should be read in conjunction with Hazlitt’s many other writings on society, culture and politics.) Hazlitt is one of the great critics of Shakespeare, indeed one of the finest writers of English prose of any period. Behind all his work is a powerful, stubborn commitment to justice and equality. His description of Henry V as a ‘very amiable monster’ – someone whom we admire on the stage but who, as a warmonger, is better off there than in real life, is a classic statement about how great art and good politics do not always coincide. Herold, N. (2014), Prison Shakespeare and the Purpose of Performance: Repentance Rituals and the Early Modern, London: Palgrave Macmillan. An obvious advocate for Curt Tofteland’s Shakespeare Behind Bars Kentucky prison project, Herold uses his platform to describe SBB’s ‘therapizing effects’ for ‘transforming’ inmates caught in the US mass incarceration system. Evident throughout is Herold’s fervent belief in the religious power of SBB, which creates a ‘surrogate penitentiary community’ for its prisoner – performers that mirrors, he argues, the spiritual schizophrenia of post-Reformation English society. Committed to the ‘religiously resonant language’ in Shakespeare plays, which he views as ‘sanctuary structures’, Herold praises both the ‘repentance’ prisoners can discover through SBB’s therapeutic approach, as well as the ‘evidence-based success’ of the project’s ‘inmate habilitation’. Huang, A. C. Y. (2009), Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Shakespeare arrived in China as a concept. Even before his writings were read, performed or translated in China, the Bard was being held up as a prime example of a strong national literature and, by extension, a strong national identity. In contrast to his classical status in the West, he was associated with modernity. This book argues that cultural exchange is transformative and leads to artistic innovation in both Shakespeare performances and Chinese theatre. The series of case studies examined dated from 1839 to the present time and covered a multiplicity of Chinese theatre forms and styles. This book provides an excellent map for understanding the reception and performance of Shakespeare in China, and windows of knowledge to help readers appreciate the diversity and beauty of Chinese theatre forms.

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Hunter, G. K. (1978), ‘Othello and Colour Prejudice’, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. A pioneering essay by a magnificent scholar of English Renaissance literature, showing how Othello challenged traditional stereotypes about blackness and Africans. Iyengar, S. (2016), ‘Woman-Crafted Shakespeares: Appropriation, Intermediality, and Woman Aesthetics’, in D. Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, 507–19, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. This essay explores theoretical questions that arise from the ‘engagements of African American women artists and writers’ with Shakespeare. Iyengar interrogates whether these adaptations and appropriations represent an invaluable engagement with continually relevant, dominant texts or a harmful perpetuation of cultural domination. By coining the term ‘woman-craft’, Iyengar provides a succinct means for acknowledging the power of feminist appropriations of Shakespeare to reshape institutional ‘mechanisms of exclusion’ through intermedia transformation of canonical texts. Iyengar demonstrates this power of appropriation through the examples of African American women artists and writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Toni Morrison, Rokia Traoré and Claudia Rankine. Their woman-crafted appropriations and adaptations speak to Iyengar’s vision of a Shakespeare ‘re-formed, recreated, and remade’. Kaul, M., ed. (1996), Othello: New Essays by Black Writers, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. More than twenty years since its publication, Mythili Kaul’s Othello: New Essays by Black Writers continues to be a vital resource for those interested in Shakespeare and social justice. Comprised of works by an ideologically varied constellation of authors, the anthology is broken into sections written by theatre practitioners, creative writers and academic critics respectively. Kaul’s collection is especially notable for the way it centres the identities and experiences of its contributors in the course of its investigation of race and racism in Othello. Featuring essays by Earle Hyman, James A. McPherson, Ishmael Reed, Jacquelyn Y. McLendon and others, the collection includes a provocative essay by Shelia Rose Bland in which – based on her reading of Othello as a ritual of heterosexual white-male bonding – the playwright proposes a confrontational production in which the titular role is performed by a white actor in blackface and staged in the mode of a grotesque fraternity skit. Kettle, A. C. (1988), ‘From Hamlet to Lear’, in G. Martin and W. R. Owens (eds), Literature and Liberation: Selected Essays, Manchester: Manchester University Press. A brilliant essay by a communist critic showing how these plays depict a vast, momentous and violent social transformation: the passage from feudal to capitalist society.

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Kilman, Be. W. and R. J. Santos, eds (2005), Latin American Shakespeares, Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. This collection of essays examines the reception of Shakespeare across a wide range of Latin American contexts. Kilman and Santos seek ‘to engage Latin America from a noncolonizing perspective’ by exploring ‘the extent to which Shakespeare has infiltrated high and low cultures in Latin America’. This collection, published in 2005, emphasizes the social relevance of Shakespeare’s reception in Latin America by analysing how ‘Shakespeare’s work has been used equally to support and to contest the establishment’. These essays are organized into three parts, each of which examines a medium (stage, page and screen) through which diverse Latin American audiences have encountered Shakespeare’s work. Kimbro, D., M. Noschka and G. Way (2019), ‘Lend us Your Earbuds’: Shakespeare/ Podcasting/Poesis. The authors of this article examine the value of public mediums for Shakespeare scholarship – stressing the importance of public access. They suggest that podcasts provide an opportunity for new audiences to engage in ‘high-minded’ art and scholarly discussions, those discussions that often are limited to academic speakers and audiences. By publishing this in an open-access journal, the authors practice the communal approach to Shakespeare studies for which they advocate. Taking Shakespeare studies out of a guarded arena and placing it in a public sphere, these authors contribute to social justice by endorsing access to ‘knowledge power’ for diverse communities. In these authors’ view, podcasting allows academics, practitioners and public audiences to engage in conversation with one another – breaking class divides and bringing more people into important conversations. Li, J. (2016), Popular Shakespeare in China: 1993–2008, Beijing: University of International Business & Economics Press. Through an overview of Shakespearean productions, mainstream and fringe, in mainland China during a specific time-period and via a detailed analysis of various types and genres of theatrical performance, this study, probing political, economic and cultural factors for productions, examines a form of ‘popular Shakespeare’ emerging and evolving in contemporary China. This popular engagement with Shakespeare in Chinese contexts is characterized by being focused on accessibility and inclusive approaches to audiences, as well as being a version of Shakespeare that is re-contextualized, carnivalesque and ‘anthropological’ (a term actively borrowed from Stephen Purcell’s study Popular Shakespeare in the UK [2009]), enabling discussion of contemporary social justice issues from migrant worker education and cultural access, to climate action concerns such as air pollution. Li, R. (2003), Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. This book offers insights into Shakespeare’s reception in the Chinese cultural landscape through an analysis of eleven Shakespeare productions/adaptations in China. The

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uniqueness of this book lies in Li’s endeavour to weave her account of Shakespeare’s journey on the Chinese stage with stories of theatre artists whose Chinese Cultural Revolution experiences have shaped their thematic and theatrical treatment of Shakespeare, thus offering us an account of Shakespeare’s adventure in China against the backdrop of the twists and turns of political life and its intervention in cultural practices. Lupton, J. (2011), Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. This book of essays ‘reads Shakespeare’s plays for scenes and moments’ that offer insight into politics and life. This approach is framed by an inclusive view of politics as that which ‘broaches the conditions of personhood, civic belonging, and human rights’. Drawing inspiration from Hannah Arendt, Lupton’s essays are guided by a concern ‘with the conditions of human action and its intimate relationship with both storytelling and drama’. This book is comprised of seven essays, six of which examine individual Shakespeare plays for modern insights into fundamental questions about the meaning of politics and life. Among this book’s essays are ‘The Hamlet Elections’, ‘Hospitality and Risk in The Winter’s Tale’, and ‘The Minority of Caliban’. Massai, S, ed. (2005), World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, New York, NY: Routledge. This collection explores ‘the appropriation of Shakespeare’s plays in film and performances around the world’. Massai seeks to reconsider the categories of ‘local’ and ‘global’ within ‘the current stage in the afterlife of Shakespeare’s works’. Toward this goal, this collection’s essays engage with the complex issues of cultural dominance versus interculturalism that characterize the global/local debate. By emphasizing the politics of appropriation in considering whether appropriations of Shakespeare can have a radical function, this collection offers insight into the nuanced position that Shakespeare holds within global/local studies. World-Wide Shakespeares has an international scope, highlighting and contrasting appropriations of Shakespeare across a wide range of localities, including postcolonial and post-communist contexts, post-Cultural Revolution China and Western Europe. Novy, M. (2017), ‘Between Women’, Shakespeare and Feminist Theory, 121–44, London: The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury. This book explores how various feminist theories ‘help analyze the dynamics of Shakespeare’s plays’. Deeply grounded in feminist Shakespeare criticism, this book examines Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of various feminist theoretical frameworks, including feminist psychoanalytic theory, materialist feminist theory and queer theory. Novy demonstrates the remarkable diversity of feminist critical interpretations of Shakespeare, even within shared theoretical frames. Chapter 6, ‘Between women’, provides a succinct, insightful analysis of the applications of feminist theory to the complex relationships among women in Shakespeare’s plays.

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317

Pensalfini, R. (2016), Prison Shakespeare: For These Deep Shames and Great Indignities, London: Palgrave Macmillan. In his analysis of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble’s Shakespeare Prison Project, Pensalfini explores the history of similar prison enterprises worldwide, and discusses the ‘wow’ factor that seems to associate prison programmes specifically with Shakespeare. Suggesting that they might share a common ‘facilitation style’, Pensalfini endeavours to interrogate the ‘claims’ of so many prison programmes, while asking, ‘What’s so special about Shakespeare?’ Cognizant of the need to question the benefit to individual prisoners (as well as the artist/practitioners), the impact on prison culture and the broader community, and the challenges and risks faced by such programmes, Pensalfini argues that there is ‘general consistency’ in the ‘reported outcomes’ for these various constituencies. All, Pensalfini suggests, reportedly experience some form of ‘life-changing’ transformation. Purcell, S. (2009), Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage, London: Palgrave Macmillan. In this book, Purcell focuses on what he declares to be a ‘relatively unexplored’ area: the ‘popular’ Shakespeare phenomenon, especially in live performances staged in mainstream and more fringe contexts since the 1990s. The author makes it clear that those who present a Shakespeare confined within the realm of high culture only betray their own elitism; he focuses instead on mass media circulations where Shakespeare can figure as a very different form of cultural capital. According to Purcell, ‘popular theatre’ can be interpreted as ‘anthropological’ in the sense that it is ‘a theatre of the people, speaking to them in their own idioms, voicing their own concerns, representing their own interests’. For him, therefore, popular theatre is inherently socially inclusive and encompassing rather than exclusive and therefore potentially serves as a tool for social justice activism. Refskou, A. S., M. Alvaro de Amorim and V. Mariano de Carvalho, eds (2019), Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology, London: Bloomsbury, The Arden Shakespeare. This collection of essays and interviews by leading international scholars and practitioners offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to studying the translations, adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s works around the world today, on the basis of the concept of ‘cultural anthropophagy’ originating in twentieth-century Brazilian modernism. As an original methodology within the field currently understood as ‘Global Shakespeare’, this approach demonstrates its value with reference to a broad range of examples in theatre, film, music and education. The book addresses a number of pressing political and ethical concerns within the field, including if and how we may come to an understanding of Shakespeare as truly global, rather than confined to a series of separate geographical and cultural ‘areas’. Rossi, D. (1991), Shakespeare and Brecht: A Study of Dialectic Structures in Shakespearean Drama and their Influence on Brecht’s Theatre and Dramatic Theory, London: University College London.

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This thesis explores Brecht’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, while focusing upon ‘alienating’ strategies that help to expose certain ideologies presented in said plays. Brecht’s theory is used in order to present new insights into how Shakespeare’s work can be used to achieve social justice and change. Comparisons between Brecht and Shakespeare are offered, and whilst acknowledging Brecht’s tumultuous relationship with Shakespeare, a revaluation of Brecht’s attitude towards Shakespeare, through the context of his criticism, is applied. Rossi’s intention is to offer the study of Brecht’s theory and practice against the background of Shakespeare’s drama, and Shakespeare’s plays against the background of Brecht’s theatre; in order to present new insights into each area of literary practice. Ryan, K. (2002), Shakespeare, 3rd edn., Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. In this book, as in his many other writings, Ryan brings to light the buried, perhaps unconscious, social hopes of Shakespeare’s works. He is one of the most scrupulous and brilliant Marxist critics of Shakespeare. Ryan, K. (2015), Shakespeare’s Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution, London: Bloomsbury. Part of the Shakespeare NOW! series, this book ‘sets out to reclaim the concept of Shakespeare’s timeless universality from reactionary and radical critics alike’. Ryan’s polemic confronts scholarly and critical efforts to undermine Shakespeare’s universality by historicizing his works. Ryan grapples with the contention that demolishing Shakespeare’s transcendent status represents a victory against social injustices perpetuated by it. By acknowledging the importance of historical context to understanding Shakespeare’s work, this book presents a nuanced claim for Shakespeare’s universality that is rooted in his drama’s ‘profound commitment … to the emancipation of humanity’. Through the development of this argument, Ryan emphasizes Shakespeare’s enduring power ‘to keep the dream of revolutionary transformation alive today’. Shailor, J. (2011), ‘Humanizing Education behind Bars: Shakespeare and the Theater of Empowerment’, in S. J. Hartnett (ed.), Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives, 229–51, Chicago, IL: The University of Illinois Press. Explaining his ‘replicable’ Wisconsin-based prison Shakespeare Project, Shailor offers a blueprint for negotiating the authority structures that determine its existence. Aware that his work relies on institutional approval, Shailor describes how his overtly stated pedagogical practice accords with penal establishment goals to create ‘positive change’ in prisoners, including ‘learning, growth and meaningful behavioral control’. Conscious that such ‘behavioral control’ seems counter to the prison Shakespeare activism he espouses, especially since entry into such spaces implies a complicit and co-opted acceptance of prison-industrial power, Shailor defends the pragmatic need to remain ‘cognizant and respectful’ of prison cultures and protocols. By establishing ‘professional relationships’ with those in authority, Shailor acknowledges his collaborative sensitivity, while facilitating his end goal: to create a ‘conduit’ of communication between prison and the outside community.

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319

Shand, G.B., ed. (2009), Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On, Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell. This collection of reflections on teaching, by some of the top scholars in the field of Shakespeare studies, provides an extraordinary wealth of candid advice from colleagues who have a passion for the work they do in the classroom. The collection includes chapters by Jean H. Howard, Russ MacDonald, David Bevington, Alexander Leggatt, Barbara Hodgdon, Kate McLuskie, to name just a few. The most important chapters on the topic of social justice are Ania Loomba’s ‘Teaching Shakespeare and Race in the New Empire’ and Frances E. Dolan’s ‘Learning to Listen: Shakespeare and Contexts’. Shand points out that ‘the contributors have chalked up something close to five hundred years of experience in the Shakespeare classroom […] but their idealism about the project continues undiminished; their engagement with student, text, and context seems unflagging’ (2). Singh, J. G. (2019), ‘Shakespeare, Decolonization, Postcolonial Theory’, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, 79–124, London: The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury. This book examines Shakespeare and postcolonial theory, arguing that postcolonial Shakespeare studies are more relevant and urgent than ever in light of ‘the growing ideological struggles for racial, gender, and social equality’. By recognizing colonialism ‘as a viable, ongoing historical category’, Singh demonstrates Shakespeare’s profound, ongoing relevance in considering issues of social justice within a complex world. Part 2, ‘Shakespeare, Decolonization, Postcolonial Theory’, is particularly relevant to social justice concerns in its examination of anti-colonial responses to Shakespeare’s work and its description of the formation of intersectional connections between Shakespeare’s plays and global struggles for justice and equity, providing insight into ‘how Shakespearean works can further pluralize and complicate these global struggles’. Tan, T. Y. et al. (2016), 1616. Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu’s China, London: Bloomsbury. 1616 is the year that Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu both died. This coincidence motivates a wide-ranging comparison of the two exemplary dramatists of England and China, which the editors of the volume hope will ‘help us understand the different yet interestingly comparable and equally vibrant worlds of theatre of China and England around the year 1616’. The two playwrights operated independently in parallel thriving theatrical traditions and were unaware of each other. The ten pairs of essays cover a variety of subjects including the dramatists’ lives, the historical circumstances surrounding the writing and production of their plays, the effects of business decisions on theatre, the audience reception of the performance and writing of the plays, the effects of dramatic texts on other forms of literary works, etc. The collection is an excellent resource for Tang, Ming dynasty theatre, early modern English theatre, Shakespeare and his times, as well as inspiration for future studies. Taneja, P. (2017), We That Are Young, Norwich: Galley Beggar Press. This debut novel translates Shakespeare’s King Lear to contemporary India, and tells the story from the perspectives of each of the five young people in the play. A modernist epic

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told in multiple languages, it places Shakespeare’s poetry and themes in conversation with Indian epics, ancient legal texts and history, including a critique of Empire and Partition, right to the present moment of a country in thrall to Hindu fascism. To map these changing fortunes, the book closely follows the plot of King Lear and begins with the division of a vast Indian company. Via a combined linear and circular narrative, it drives towards the ongoing trauma of Kashmir. In doing so it explores Indian settler-colonial tactics and predicts the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution which removed the Kashmiri right to self determination (among other provisions) in the summer of 2019. The novel was called a ‘masterpiece’ by critics. It was a Sunday Times, Guardian, Spectator, The Hindu, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal Book of the Year. It won and was nominated for several international literary awards including the Rathbones Folio Prize, The Desmond Elliot Prize and Europe’s most prestigious award for a work of world literature, the Prix Jan Michalski. The A|S|I|A Archive (http://a-s-i-a-web.org/en/home.php) and the MIT Global Shakespeares Archive (https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/). These two online archives of full video performances of Shakespeare’s plays in translation, and often in radical adaptation, provide a wealth of information for anyone wanting to teach Shakespeare from a position outside the traditional Anglo-American perspective. Both resources are sponsored by academic institutions and funded by public funding bodies and so are freely available to any legitimate user. Information about the performance practices employed in the adaptations, as well as contextual information, is offered for the productions offered up on the A|S|I|A website. This resource is also available in four languages – English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese – providing ease of access, as well as a model for multilingual presentation of resources. The Global Shakespeare Archive, while presented online only in English, hosts productions from Brazil, Taiwan, Mexico and Egypt, to name just a few of the hundred-plus full productions available. Together these archives can engage new audiences in the arts of translation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s work, as well as highlighting the social and political influence of this work in areas of conflict. Thompson, A, ed. (2006), Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, New York, NY: Routledge. This collection explores the history, possibilities and pitfalls of non-traditional, colourblind casting in the production of Shakespeare’s work in a theoretical and practical sense. In doing so, the larger definition of colour – the principal, though not sole, marker of racial identity – in colourblind productions of Shakespeare is addressed through complex questions such as the following: is the casting of black wo/men in roles meant for black characters a perpetuation of stereotypical, white representations of black wo/men? If colourblind casting is a way to push race aside in Shakespearean theatre, is blindness to difference and inequality a welcome consequence? Colorblind Shakespeare recognizes that ‘casting cannot by itself change the meaning of “color” or identity on the stage’, and that careful study of colourblind productions of Shakespeare should continue to interrogate performance and contemporary multiculturalism.

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321

Thompson, A. (2011), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson offers a wide-ranging group of contemporary texts and moments as she aims to speak to a wide-ranging audience, including scholars, teachers, theatre practitioners and an enthusiastic Shakespeare public. Thinking about everything from the Shakespeare text itself to big and regional theatrical productions to popular film and popular media sites, to classrooms and prisons, Thompson’s study makes salient the role that Shakespeare has been made to play in defining and redefining the ‘colour line’ (vis á vis W.E.B. Du Bois) in the United States. Her study works assiduously to keep its readers asking how America deploys Shakespeare to shape and sometimes obscure its commitments to social and racial justice. Thompson, A., and L. Turchi (2016), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A StudentCentred Approach, London: The Arden Shakespeare. Thompson and Turchi argue that teachers should be freed from the tyranny of expectations around Shakespeare plays: pressures to teach every detail, to justify the cultural baggage or to claim universal appeal. They provide approaches for studentcentred discovery of the plays. While demonstrating how Shakespeare’s plays can be excellent vehicles for many topics – history, socio-cultural norms and mores, vocabulary, rhetoric, literary tropes and terminology, performance history, performance strategies – Thompson and Turchi de-emphasize the teacher as expert. They provide approaches to Shakespeare’s works as vehicles for collaborative exploration, developing intentional frames for discovery and releasing the texts from over-determined interpretations. Chapters provide text-based opportunities for students to explore their identities and collaborate in meaning making. Trivedi, P., and D. Bartholomeusz, eds (2005), India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, Performance, Newark, NJ: Delaware University Press. This essay collection lays the foundation stone for contemporary scholars interested in theorizing translations, adaptations and appropriations made by Indian writers and translators of Shakespeare, who received the works as part of the British Empire’s cultural colonizing mission. It covers nuances of colonization and an intellectual approach to creating class via cultural dissemination. It also focuses on themes of language, colonial violence, the history of emotions and translation studies, and considers some of the first plays performed on the Indian stage in terms of production, reception and afterlife. Parsi Theatre and Calcutta Theatre form two important chapters which point scholars to the legacy of Shakespeare explored in Indian cinema, including, but not only in Bollywood. Trivedi, P., and M., Ryuta, eds (2012), Re-Playing Shakespeare in Asia, London: Routledge. This essay collection considers the re-writing and re-staging of Shakespeare in a number of distinctive Asian cultural and sociopolitical contexts, including China, Taiwan, India, Korea, Singapore and Japan. The emphasis is not just on how Shakespeare is deployed

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in these new geopolitical contexts but also how the plays are essentially re-made and re-configured by the alternative theatrical and indeed political traditions of the new performance location(s). Several of the essays focus on questions of local politics and social justice issues as they play out in the particular Shakespeare productions in focus, from critiquing the Westernized appropriations of Ariane Mnouchkine’s intercultural approaches to the history plays, to the deployment of Shakespeare to explore issues of national identity and political activism in postcolonial Korea. Williams, K. S. (2009), ‘Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 29(4): n.p. This article explores how disability was viewed during the Elizabethan period by relating both modern and medieval ideas of disability. By exploring the play Richard III, the article considers how the play’s performance history can complicate an understanding of the disabled body. The article considers the differences between reading the text for its presentations of disability, and staging the text for the performance of disability. It explores historical opinions surrounding monstrous and moral examples of the disabled body. The article considers the politics that set up the expectations of the disabled body, shaped by a specific time and history, and compares this to the implications bound to staging Richard III for a modern audience. Wray, R. (2011), ‘The Morals of Macbeth and Peace as Process: Adapting Shakespeare in Northern Ireland’s Maximum Security Prison,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 62(3): 340–63. Wray’s discussion of Tom Magill’s 2006 Educational Shakespeare Company film, Mickey B, performed by maximum security prisoners in Northern Ireland’s Maghaberry Prison, questions traditional ‘Shakespeare in Prison’ projects that prioritize such adaptations’ therapeutic value. Mickey B, Wray observes, offers additional documentary material that illustrates the developmental journey for the inmate actors and behind-camera creatives. In consequence, context and cultural specificity can be interrogated without recourse to the standard ‘universalizing discourses about Shakespeare’ that accompany many prison Shakespeare initiatives. With its focus on process and product, Wray argues, Mickey B consciously engages with the political and social implications of, and imperative for, penal reform.

INDEX

able-bodied 36 access 3, 7, 16, 27, 30, 36, 42–3, 51, 57, 66, 80, 95, 105, 128, 132, 135–6, 150, 152, 161, 168–9, 176, 180, 196, 212, 271 active-/performance-based pedagogy 51–2, 54 African American Civil Rights Movement 14, 61, 94–5, 97, 101 African diaspora 86 Africanness 82 Against Race 95 agency 31, 36, 43, 54, 116–17, 119, 168, 169 alienation 76, 194, 249, 280 Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts 56 America 26, 35, 39, 87, 94–5, 98–101, 103, 265, 267–68, 271, 273, 276 Americas 62 Améry, Jean 86 anagnorisis 86 Anthropological Shakespeare 214 antiracist 104 anti-Semitic South Africa 74 anti-Semitism 54, 74, 78, 81 anxiety 41–42, 70, 117, 128, 161 apartheid 14, 74, 76, 85, 87, 180–1, 196–8, 200–2 apart-hood 76, 78 April 1992 27 Arreola, Enrique 145, 153, 157 Arrevillaga, Hugo 153–6 assets 43, 68 audience 4–6, 16–17, 26, 30–3, 41–2, 44, 48, 51, 56, 65, 80, 102, 104–5, 111–20, 128, 132, 134, 136–7, 146, 148, 150, 153–6, 160–2, 164, 167–8, 170, 175–7, 179–180, 182–8, 203, 207–9, 211–15, 222–231, 236–9, 241, 243, 246, 292

banishment 29, 32, 126 Balfour, Michael 195 Barnett, Laura 155 Bates, Laura 191, 193, 199, 201 Bearden, Romare 68–9 Bedau, Dani 27 Belfiore, Eleonora 192–3 Bennett, Oliver 193 Berlin 78, 266 Berlin Wall 266 best regarded virgins 34 Beyoncé 4–5, 35 Bharatiya Janata Party 160 big-time Shakespeare 3, 16, 208–10 binaries 31, 76, 114, 117–8, 144, 161, 209 Bitola Shakespeare Festival 156 bitter questions 88 Black 7, 14, 26, 28, 34–6, 42, 44, 50–1, 55–6, 60–4, 66–9, 74–83, 85–8, 94–7, 99–101, 180, 191, 197–8 Black Atlantic 14, 60–70 Black Hamlet 74–88 Chavafambira, John 75, 77–87 Nesta 79, 84 Uncle Charlie 79, 81 Black History Month 48 Black humanness 81 Black social justice 74–5 Blogging Shakespeare 155 Boal, Augusto 150, 190, 201–2 body politic 9, 58 Brecht, Bertolt 110–11, 121 Brexit 39, 135 British Psycho-Analytical Society 78 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters 94 Brown v. Board of Education 36, 103

324

Calderón, David 155 Cameron, David 133, 135 canon 7, 70, 162, 175, 179–180, 182, 184, 186, 194, 212 Western cultural canon 175, 182, 186 capitalism 15, 126, 133, 187, 252, 266, 274, 300 global capitalism 126 neoliberal capitalism 160 careers 9, 28, 61, 78, 178, 237, 239 Carter, Jimmy 94–5, 104–5 cast/casting 26, 31–2, 42, 44, 56, 143, 147, 149, 153, 156, 179, 180, 182, 222 casting practices 56 blind casting 56 conscious casting 56 cross-cultural casting 56 China 9, 16, 28, 207–215, 222–31 Chinese immigration 28 Chinese Universities Drama Festival 213–214 Chronicle Historie 290–1 Cicero 254–5 city-making 39 civic engagement 36 civil unrest 27 Clinton, Hillary 39 colonialism 84, 103, 161, 195–6 anti-colonialism 88 european colonialism 105 colourblindness 47–50 communism 17, 251–3, 256, 259–260 community 29, 38, 49, 65, 68, 80, 82, 112, 121, 137, 155, 175, 179, 181–3, 185, 188, 200, 211, 214, 248, 252, 254, 259, 269, 281, 287, 292 community arts 27 community-building 39 community college 127 community development 27–8 community engagement 13 Global Shakespeare community 16, 176 construction 11, 14, 35, 57, 61, 65, 95, 105, 144, 169, 198, 276 contained 40, 215 self-contained 257–8

INDEX

Crewe, Jonathan 75, 80 cross-historical 14, 61, 70 cross-media 68–69 cultural intervention 195 Cultural Revolution 207, 209, 211, 230 Cultural Olympics (London) 134 culture-neutral practices 47 deformity / deformations 16, 114–17, 119–21, 222, 224–5 democracy / democratic 30, 39, 105, 126, 157, 194, 201–2, 213, 215, 261, 263, 281 undemocratic 100 Denmark 81, 99 deprivation 74, 197, 280 Dhlomo, H.I.E. 82 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal 144–5 Díaz, Juan Ernesto 156 difficulty 30, 40, 49, 60, 152 digital communications 126 disability 15, 109–21, 267 disabled theatre 109 discrimination 2, 74, 112, 197, 267, 269, 275 diversity 1–3, 9, 11, 14, 18, 30, 34, 39, 41–4, 47–8, 50–1, 53–8, 105, 126, 134, 153, 176, 190, 247, 262 Donne, John 246 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 78 Douglass, Frederick 70, 101 Dreyfus, Alfred 83–4, 86 early modern period 17, 116, 127, 252, 266, 289 Ellison, Ralph 1, 3 employment 27–9, 79, 131, 168 empowerment 43, 190, 200 English studies 38 enlightenment 80–1, 88, 251 Erasmus 254, 259 Escobar, Georgina 6 eurocentrism 193, 195 exclusion 30, 36, 40, 130, 132, 160, 181, 202, 267, 292 feminism 41, 161, 167, 169 First World 198 Fishwick, Karen 31

INDEX

Folger Shakespeare Library 53–4 freedom 14, 16, 39–40, 76–8, 80, 82, 85–6, 88, 102–3, 165, 181, 211, 235, 240, 262, 281 freedom movements 39 Freud, Sigmund 75, 77–8 García, Marco Antonio 153, 155 Garvey, Marcus 70 gay 28, 51, 56 Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services (GLASS) 28 gender 15, 30–4, 48, 51, 55–6, 125, 129–30, 160–1, 163–5, 166–170, 177, 182–183, 197, 201, 267, 270, 274 gender fluidity 32 gender identity 125, 270 gender justice 15, 160–1, 165, 169, 177, 183, 197 gender politics 177, 182 gender relations 161, 164–5, 167, 170 gender violence 169–170, 181–2 generational divide 32 Germany 87 Gestandnisazwang 82 Gill, Bally 32 Gilroy, Paul 88, 95 globalism 41 Globe to Globe Festival 15, 43, 134, 143, 146, 150, 222, 229 Globe to Globe Hamlet 152, 177, 180, 183 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang van 193 Gold, Mike 265, 267–74 Greenblatt, Stephen 74, 86–7, 111 Hamletic 8, 11, 75, 77, 81, 83, 85, 87 Harari, Yuval Noah 10–11 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 88 Hecuba 84 hegemony 105, 195–6, 198, 266, 275 Hellman, Ellen 78–9 hero 33–4, 83–4, 117 Herold, Niels 194 heterosexual body 26, 34 heterosexual class 36 heterosexual desire 35

325

hierarchy 169, 198, 256, 262, 267, 275, 286, 292 higher education in the UK 125 Hispanic Heritage Month 48 Hispanic-serving 28 Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España 144 historicization 110–11, 121 Hollywood 28 homeland 86, 202 homelessness 28–9, 153, 178–180, 201, 260, 282–4, 287, 289 Hong Kong Arts Festival 207 hospitality 44, 284 humanism 26, 39, 77–8, 80–1, 88, 95, 133 humanist / humanistic 79–80, 83, 86–7, 98, 183, 208, 253 Hunt, Maurice 40 I Ophelia 177, 179, 181–2, 187 Ian Charleson award 32 iconography 36 identity 14–15, 29, 42, 47, 49–50, 53, 55–8, 62, 64–6, 68, 95, 112, 116, 120–1, 125, 155, 160, 162, 166–7, 169, 187, 269–70, 276, 282, 292–3 national identity 29, 162 sexual identity 29, 53 imagination 10, 60, 62, 74, 88, 128, 134, 163, 187, 190, 239, 244–7, 249, 251, 258 empathetic imagination 17, 53, 164, 235 immigration 29 imprisonment 76, 174, 201, 203 inclusion 17, 56, 77, 114, 153,192, 266 India 9, 15, 53, 160–70 Independent Theater Movement of South Africa (ITMSA) 196 indigenous people 7 individualism 252, 258 Indraprashtra College, University of Delhi (IP College) 167, 169–70 industrial 38, 151 industrialism 270 inequality 97, 166, 180–81, 183, 204, 247, 249, 254, 256, 262, 267

326

injustice 11–12, 15, 33, 35, 49, 70, 100, 103, 160–1, 165–6, 177, 181–2, 194–5, 204, 223–4, 235, 238–41, 244, 247–9, 253, 261, 283–4, 288, 291, 293 integration 100, 147 interiority 78–80 International Women’s Day 166–7, 169 intersectionality 31–2, 202, 276 intolerance 41, 125 Jay-Z 4–5 Jenkins, Tauriq 194, 196–203 Jewish / Jews 14, 56, 74, 76, 78, 80–3, 85–8 Jewish circumcision 82 Jewish Diaspora 83 Lithuanian Jew 82 jobs 27, 134, 275 Johannesburg Awakening Minds (JAM) 177–182, 187 Jones, Ernest 75–6 Jonson, Ben 96 Josephine, Charlotte 31 kinesthetic learning 52, 56 King, Jr., Martin Luther 61, 71, 97, 101 Korea 28, 203, 209, 211 l’affaire Dreyfus 83, 86 La Corrala del Mitote 151 Lafarga, Claudio 153–4 Latinx 25, 28–9, 32 Latinx immigrant population 29 leftist 17, 266–9, 271–5 Lenin, Vladimir 17, 265–9, 275–6 Lincoln, Abraham 97–8 Los Angeles 3, 9, 13, 26–9, 34 Chinatown 28 Downtown Los Angeles 3, 28 Fairfax District 28 Historic Filipinotown 28 Jordan Downs 28 King Drew Medical Center 28 Koreatown 29 Miracle Mile 28 Olympic 28 Pico Union 29 South Los Angeles 27

INDEX

Staples Center 29 Watts 28 low-income students 28 madness 82, 162–3, 168 Magna Carta 137 man of action 84 Mandela, Nelson 74 Manyika / Manyikaland 78–9, 81–2, 84 march on Washington 94 Marxism / Marxist 251, 266, 274–5 Marxist-Leninist 265, 267–9, 276 mass incarceration 191, 194–7, 203 commodification of incarceration 191, 194–6, 199 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) 132 Medieval England 15, 143, 147–8 mental health 133 mental illness 285 MeToo Movement 160, 201 Mexico 9, 15, 28, 43, 143–58 Mexico City 9, 143–57 El Zócalo 9, 144–6, 150–3, 155–57 metropolitan cathedral 144 Palacio Nacional 144 Templo Mayor 144 Middle Ages 115, 257, 282 middle passage 63, 65–68 migrant workers 213–5 millennials 47–51, 54, 57–8 Miller, David 76, 281, 288 Miller, Paul D. 80 Millin, Sarah Gertrude 78 mirror 5–10, 12, 15, 31–2, 52, 81, 95, 109, 133, 148, 157, 228, 256 misogyny 54–5, 161, 163, 201 modern subjectivity 88, 292 modernity 14, 28, 32, 80, 85, 144 Modi, Narendra 160, 169 Morán, Constantino 145, 148, 153, 155 More, Thomas 115, 245, 252 Morrison, Toni 87 multiculturalism 14, 70, 98 National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) 27 National Theatre Company of China 16, 222–4

INDEX

National Theatre Company of Mexico (CNT) 15, 143 nationalism 160, 266 Afrikaner nationalism 196 cultural nationalism 161 New African 82 New Historicism 110–11, 121 New Left 267, 274–5 Nganga 75, 78, 81 NGO 198–9 normalization 35, 57–8, 76, 252, 255 Nuremberg Laws 87 Nussbaum, Martha 11–12 O’Dair, Sharon 136–7, 274–5 Obama administration 35 Obama, Barack 61 Oedipus complex 79 Olympic Games Beijing (2008) 210 London (2012) 15, 243 Olympic stadium (London) 4 Omi, Michael 48–9 ontogenetic interiority 79 oppression / oppressive systems 54, 78, 103, 196–8, 228, 261, 267, 269, 275 optimism 16, 42, 60, 79, 103–4, 135, 257, 281 Orkin, Martin 195 Pandey, Jyoti Singh 15, 160–1, 165–7 Parker, Theodore 60–1 patriarchy 117, 120, 161, 164, 167–8, 181–2, 201 personhood 26, 40, 77, 273 pipeline strategy 43 planetary humanism 95 Plato 254–5, 257 pluralism 38–9, 99, 208 pluralistic wholeness 39 poetical justice 16–17, 161, 164, 187, 198, 204, 244, 247 polytechnic institute 127 post-apartheid 180, 198, 201 postcolonialism 161, 165, 167, 195–6, 198, 269 post-industrial 38 poverty 2, 18, 28, 177, 195, 197, 252, 272–3, 282–5, 287–8, 293

327

Pretoria Mental Hospital 78 priority / priorities 28, 129, 199, 274, 276 Prison, Communication, Activism, Research and Education Collective (PCARE) 194–6, 198, 201, 203 prison-industrial complex 194, 196–7 program /programme 13, 15, 27–8, 30, 41, 54, 190–4, 196, 198–9, 202–3, 292 proletariat / proletarian 196, 265, 267–76 proposition 8, 36 protecting 35–6, 58, 65, 81, 86–7, 120, 214, 224, 286, 289–90 protest 35, 38, 75, 81, 84, 145, 157, 161, 165, 167–8, 185, 198, 223, 235, 245 psychoanalysis 75–80, 88 Psychoanalysis: Its Meaning and Practical Applications 76 Psychoneurological Institute, Saint Petersburg 78 queer studies 34, 267 race 14, 30, 32, 34–5, 41, 43, 47, 50–1, 55–8, 61, 76–8, 82, 86, 88, 96, 98–100, 125, 129, 161–2, 180, 197, 267–8, 274, 276 racial politics 76, 97, 99 racism 4, 14, 35, 47–50, 54–5, 74, 77, 79, 85, 149, 196–7, 199 radical 31, 33, 38, 57, 94–5, 97, 99, 101, 120, 144, 161, 177, 195, 199, 201, 211, 249, 253, 255, 268, 286, 288 Radical Shakespeare 253 Randolph, A. Philip 94–95, 104–5 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 160 realpolitik 77, 79, 87 recognition 32, 62–3, 69, 81, 85, 167, 182, 185, 194, 202, 245, 282 Rehabilitation Through the Arts 190 reintegration 193, 204 religious intolerance 125 relocation 29, 202, 207, 210 Renaissance 41, 110–18, 120–1, 253, 257, 266 Renaissance humanism 253

328

resource / resources 1, 17, 27, 53, 63, 65–6, 136, 144, 149, 194, 243, 253, 281 Revisiting Shakespeare in Indian Literatures and Cultures 167 rhetorical universalism 94–105 Rodney King riots 27, 29 Rooiyard 79 Rose, Jacqueline 75, 79, 81, 85–6 Royal Shakespeare Company / RSC 26, 30, 32, 52, 54, 191 Stand Up for Shakespeare 52 Sachs, Wulf 14, 74–88 Scott, Andrew 5–6 Scott-Douglas, Amy 191–2, 199 separation 29, 64, 68, 167, 284, 293 servility 85 Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles 26–7, 29 Shakespeare Festival 27, 127, 210 Shakespeare and Race Festival 13, 41, 43–4 Shakespeare in Prison 190–204 Shakespeare in Prison Project (Cape Town) 196 Shakespeare in Prison Project (Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble) 191 London Shakespeare Workout 191 Shakespeare Behind Bars 190, 192 Shakespeare in Prisons Conference (SIPC) 190–1 Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor 191 Shakespeare Prison Project, The 190 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 235–7 Book of Sir Thomas More, The 245–6 Comedy of Errors, The 235 Cymbeline 113, 236–7 Thersites 113 Enrique IV, primera parte 15, 143–7, 149, 151, 154, 156–7 First Folio, The 96 Hamlet 5–12, 15, 18, 31, 55, 74–88, 98–9, 101–3, 152, 175, 177, 179–187, 200, 202–3, 259–60, 266 Claudius 7, 9, 12, 79, 83, 182, 184, 186, 202 Fortinbras 102

INDEX

Gertrude 79, 181, 184 Hamlet 6–12, 18, 31, 55, 74–9, 81–8, 101–3, 182, 259 Horatio 18, 83 Laertes 79, 98–9 Ophelia 79, 81, 83, 181–2, 184 Polonius 83, 98–9, 182, 261 1 Henry IV 15, 143, 147 Earl of Westmoreland 147, 153 Falstaff 147, 149, 153–4, 157 Henry, Prince of Wales 147, 150, 153 Hotspur 155 King Henry IV 147, 150, 153 Mortimer 153 Peto 153 Poins 153 Servant 153 Sheriff 153 Silent drunk 153 Traveler 153 Vernon 153 Worcester 153 Henry IV 43, 57, 113 Henry V 44, 126, 128–30, 259, 261–3 Alice 131 King Henry V 44, 130–1, 135 Princess Katherine 125–6, 128–31 Henry VI Parts 2 and 3 15, 111–13, 115 Gloucester, Duke of 15, 112–13 Richard III/ Gloucester 110 Simpcox 112 Somerset, Duke of 115 Henry VIII 104, 126, 128, 134, 236 Cardinal Wolsey 135, 137 Griffith 134–5 King James I 104 Queen Elizabeth 104 Queen Katherine 126, 128, 134–5 Julius Caesar 57, 113 King Lear 15, 17, 53, 113, 137, 160–2, 164, 166–7, 169–70, 178, 210, 249, 255, 257, 269, 280, 282–3, 288–289, 292–3 Cordelia 162–3, 282–3, 285, 287, 291 Gloucester, Earl of 113, 163–4, 248–9, 255, 282, 284–5, 291–2 Goneril 162, 283–5, 287, 289, 291

INDEX

King Lear 162–4, 268, 283 Regan 162, 164, 282–5, 287, 289–93 Macbeth 113, 194, 224, 247, 249 Lady Macbeth 247 Macbeth 101, 103, 224, 247–8 Measure for Measure 33, 236, 242–6 Claudio 242–4 Merchant of Venice, The 35, 97, 194, 241, 243–4, 256 Antonio 63, 164, 240–2 Jessica 63, 236 Old Gobbo 113 Portia 34–5, 63, 128, 241–2 Prince of Morocco 34–5, 62 Shylock 9, 63, 74, 86–7, 97, 164, 194, 235, 237, 240–3, 246 Venice, Duke of 235 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 30, 246, 256, 258 Much Ado About Nothing 133 Hero 133 Othello 61–6, 70, 99–100, 113, 180 Brabantio 65 Cassio 62, 99 Desdemona 63–5 Graziano 99 Lodovico 99 Othello 9, 60–6, 99–100 Richard III 110–11, 113–16, 120, 222–30 Buckingham 116, 120, 228–30 Clarence 225, 228–9 Elizabeth 117, 228–9 King Edward IV 225, 229 Lady Anne 226 Queen Elizabeth 228–9 Queen Margaret 117, 228 Richard III / Gloucester 15–16, 110, 113, 222–30 Richmond 117–18, 228, 230–1 Rivers 227–9 Stanley 228 Romeo and Juliet 16, 207–15 Capulets 31 Juliet 31–3, 57, 207–8, 212 Lady Capulet 235, 237 Lady Montague 29 Mercutio 31

329

Montagues 31–2, 235 Romeo 57, 207, 211, 235, 237 Tybalt 31, 235, 237 Tempest, The 113, 269, 271–4 Ariel 269–74 Caliban 113, 269, 271–3 Prospero 271, 273 Timon of Athens 251, 258, 283 Timon of Athens 258, 283 Titus Andronicus 164, 237–40 Troilus and Cressida 257–8 Twelfth Night 29 Fabian 29 Winter’s Tale, The 126, 128, 131–2, 194, 236 Hermione 126, 128, 131–4, 236 Leontes 131–3, 236 Perdita 133 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 39 Shengshi 210 slavery 66, 98, 102 small-time Shakespeare 16, 207–8, 210, 213–14, 216 Snyder-Young, Dani 192, 195, 201 social action 39 social Darwinism 80, 258 Social-Democratic 276 socio-economic status 16–17, 29, 169, 197 Soto, Roberto 145, 148, 152, 154, 157 South Africa 9, 15–16, 74–88, 175–88, 190–204 South African Psychoanalytic Study Group 78 specialization 38, 41 Spenser, Edmund 39, 286–7 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 161, 168–70 status 16, 26, 29, 74, 76, 80, 95, 97, 105, 161, 164, 178–9, 184, 186, 190, 194, 201, 203, 243, 245, 270 status quo 16, 104, 170, 195 Steele, Claude 48, 50 stereotype 50–2, 109 stereotype threat 50–2 strategic forgetting 82 strategic universalism 95 target audience 51, 207, 209, 211 targeting 41, 85, 197 Tatum, Beverly 48–50, 55, 57

330

teenagers 27, 32 Theatre in Prison 195 Theatre of Good Intentions 192 Theatre of the Oppressed 190, 202 The Globe 9, 41–4, 53–4, 134, 143, 146, 150–6, 180, 183–7, 222, 226, 229, 263 The Mousetrap 6, 182 Third International Drama Festival 210 Tofteland, Curt 192, 199 token / tokenistic 42–3 transcultural education 14, 70 transference 86 trauma 41–2, 177–8, 180–1, 187 Tudor England 42, 115 tyranny 33, 86, 222, 267 unemployment 275 universality 16, 47, 51, 53, 56, 77, 84–95, 100, 104–5, 186, 198, 247 unraced unconscious 86 Untermeyer, Louis 271–2 Ventana Latina 155 Verfremdungseffekt 110 Verma Report 166, 170 violence 16, 29, 31, 50, 102, 144, 147, 157, 160–1, 164–70, 172, 177, 181–2, 184, 196–7, 201, 246, 293 vote 36, 67, 100, 196 vulnerability 27, 33, 109, 177, 197, 199, 202, 239 Walcott, Derek 68–9 wandering jew 83 Wang Xiaoying 222–5, 228 Wassermann, Jakob 78 We That Are Young 160

INDEX

white / whiteness 4, 34–6, 42, 48, 50–1, 64–5, 74, 76–81, 83, 85–8, 94–7, 99–101, 105, 162, 180, 196, 276 white supremacy 36, 96–7, 195 Whitney, Geffrey 280, 291, 293 wholeness 38–9, 68 Will Power to Youth 3, 13, 27–9 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 212 Willoughby, Westel 80 Wilson, August 14, 60–70 Gem of the Ocean 66–7 Citizen Barlow 66–7 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone 14, 61–2, 64, 66, 66–8 Bynum 65, 69 Herald Loomis 61–9 Joe Turner 64 Martha Pentecost 64 Mattie Campbell 64 Zonia 64 Radio Golf 61, 66–7 Aunt Ester 68 Harmond Wilks 66–7 Mame 67 Two Trains Running 67 Hambone 67 Sterling 67 Winant, Howard 48–9 World Zionist Organization 83 X, Malcolm 97 Young, Iris Marion 11 youth culture 209, 211–12 Zhuangche 212 Zimbabwe 78, 184, 202 Zionist 83, 86

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